Open Source philosophy as new PD

I had the pleasure of attending the tech@state open source conference on Friday Feb. 11^th and the “unconference” the following day, hosted by NDI. The event was organized by the Office of eDiplomacy, which I conducted a case study on in Fall 2010. As the “think/do” tank and implementation office for Alec Ross’ innovation office and the new 21^st Century Diplomacy, Richard Boly heads up this dynamic team with a Silicon Valley entrepreneurship style that is refreshing and forward thinking.

Other conferences run under “tech@state” include “Civil society 2.0”, which had a follow-up tech camp in Santiago, Chile where NGOs and private sector companies came together to problem solve technology solutions for development efforts.

The attitude of the eDiplomacy people I have met has been that State should simply act as a facilitator, in the background, bringing different sectors together in order to foster partnerships and dialogue to problem solve technology solutions that address issues pertinent to local communities. I would argue that this is a new form of PD. While the State Department does differentiate PD from these programs, calling them “21^st Century Statecraft”, I think they have the potential to bring changes that traditional PD programs may not be succeeding in. In addition, the Open source coders are themselves engaging in a form of collaborative PD, where coders from different countries not only share code, but also participate in the communities around specific languages (Python, PHP, Drupal). One of the women at the conference had spent a lot of time in Egypt, where she formed friendships with coders. She is a web developer and involved in several of these virtual communities, where ideas about coding and life philosophy are exchanged.

Here are some of the insightful comments I heard from speakers:

• We can share costs and create a hybrid ecosystem so that the open source gets more sophisticated and gets more specialized.
• You can build the economy around open source software (localized support)
• There is a link between open source and open government, where open source models encourage transparency and accountability

In my other life as a composer in California, I worked with a lot of computer programmers and did some programming with open source programs to create music. Some of the underlying philosophies in the open source community are very relevant to discussions about how to conduct PD.

1. COLLABORATE -- Share information and give back (don’t just take code and use it, improve on it and give it back to the community).
2. OPEN and TRANSPARENT - make your code accessible and understandable to everyone so that is it easy to build from it (know the standards and use them!)
3. Avoid Duplication of effort - don’t try to create code that is already out there. Be informed and involved in the community so that your efforts contribute to moving society forward.

How does this pertain to PD?

1. Collaborate in order to learn and share information for the benefit of everyone.

2. Transparency, as part of the new PD, will create more trust and openness.
3. Don’t duplicate efforts in PD programs- but also don’t be intimidated by what other creative people are doing. There is room for all the approaches and I don’t think that one should take over the other, but there should be communication between the different stakeholders to make sure that efforts aren’t duplicated and confused.

See this coverage of the conference by O’Reilly tech writer, Alex Howard.