Tag Archives: Free Software
What makes a movement? Users? (Mozilla) Local groups?
Last week, Mark Surman wrote a couple of articles about Join Mozilla initiative. I was not very surprised as probably other fellows, since I knew about this from Whistler Summit.
We talked during engagement sessions about different ways to make Mozilla more visible as a movement for the (open) Web and for the commons.
Indeed, this is something that Mozilla needs now, critical for the Web and for a healthy community of contributors and users. .
Bogo wrote in his last post wondering about the role of people who will join Mozilla and how they will connect with the community, how they will become advocates for the open web.
LUGs were an example of movements created around users and a software platform, which built a strong base of evangelists and open source advocates some time ago, including myself.
I was 16 when I first attended a first Linux Install Fest and started running the first Linux Users Group in my city with some friends, just for fun. I had no idea about free software, Commons, open source, etc. and I was able to only write 2 or 3 commands in the terminal.
LUGs were engaging, easy to join, and nobody asked you about your experience. City-based groups helped to arrange monthly or bi-weekly meet-ups. The main aim was getting people to use the operating system and helping beginners to fix their problems and offer support.
InstallFest-like events, with non-fixed agenda, no slides or presentations, helped to set up the dynamics, and make both experienced and unexperienced users to attend.
During the years, I organized myself a couple of InstallFests/Hackfests and other low or 0 budget events, connected with other users and LUGs across the country, revitalized the group from my faculty and extended it all around city, in hacking camps, workshops and open source conferences around the country, unified the forces faculty’s web group and start organizing more diverse events, wrote articles in community and school magazines.
Community centers, co-working spaces, Students house, laboratories, libraries and coffees or empty spaces in the underground Faculty’s building usually served for hosting the meet-ups and local events.
In a few years this movement brought new users, from power users to advocates of the platform and, indeed, influenced a lot its adoption on servers and embedded devices. But also, it formed advocates for other free software projects and kept the hacker culture alive.
LUGs offered you the freedom to choose, to stay as a simple user or go further. It also created this affinity between communities and people sharing the same principles, so connecting to people from outside your country became far easier.
I never became an active contributor in a Linux distribution, a localizer or package maintainer, because I wasn’t too comfortable with writing code, but that didn’t made me to not feel part of the movement or name myself a Linux Users group member.
So users are never “death souls” in the community, as far as they are engaged and empowered.
Hopefully, Join Mozilla! will offer all the support and material to turn Firefox users into platform advocates and a strong voice for the (open) Web. It is a chance for current Mozilla communities to build the user engagement efforts and start facilitating and supporting in a creative and participatory way Firefox users in all cities.
As LUG how-to says: “Computer user groups are not new. In fact, they were central to the personal computer’s history: Microcomputers arose in large part to satisfy demand for affordable, personal access to computing resources from electronics, ham radio, and other hobbyist user groups. Giants like IBM eventually discovered the PC to be a good and profitable thing, but initial impetus came from the grassroots.”
PS: Happy to see this open, so all Mozillians from community can contribute to build the program through Mozilla community marketing calls (and on #marketing IRC channel): http://wiki.mozilla.org/JoinMozilla .
Recreando el Bazar
Hemos llegado al punto que la tecnología y la gran variedad de elección nos está poniendo delante una imagen difusa de lo que llamamos ahora el Internet.
Y lo digo no porque lo que tenemos ahora esté mal; al contrario, hoy en día la tecnología de Internet nos ofrece las herramientas necesarias y la apertura para aprender, compartir y comunicar con gente de todo el mundo. Vivimos posiblemente una de las mejoras eras del Internet. Tenemos tantas tecnologías donde escoger que ya no sabemos cuál es la mejor. La red social está a punto de substituir la manera como recibimos noticias, comunicamos y compartimos nuestros pensamientos. El vídeo ya es uno de los formatos más conocidos con el que compartimos sentimientos y opiniones y, al mismo tiempo, el libro de papel ya se está moviendo a formatos digitales.
Sin duda, hoy en día, muchos de nosotros, sobretodo aquellos más jóvenes, estamos aprendiendo más cosas a través del Internet que, a veces, incluso en la propia escuela. O mejor dicho, la escuela incluso ya utiliza como plataforma para la enseñanza el Internet.
Hace 12 – 13 años ya pasaba lo mismo, el mundo tecnológico había llegado a su saturación, los proyectos transformándose ellos mismos en catedrales demasiado grandes para aguantar su propio peso.
Entonces, el navegador y el sistema operativo eran las únicas vías de acceso de la gente al Internet, dándoles de esta manera la oportunidad de encontrar nuevas experiencias en la Web; una Web que parecía la odisea de un nuevo mundo lleno de innovación.
Entonces el problema no era la gran variedad donde escoger, sino el propio modelo restringido de desarrollo, que tenia su fundaciones detrás del paradigma del «uno se come al otro».
Todo esto ha hecho a la gente construir el bazar*, a lo largo de varias reuniones ad-hoc, pero con un objetivo muy bien definido, todo por la necesidad de crear nuevas tecnologías: simples, ligeras y que permitieran crear nuevos modelos de colaboración, para poder ofrecer la posibilidad de innovar y dar vida a las ideas.
Y así, hemos llegado hoy a tener toda esa tecnología, y también, su multitud de variedades. Ya tenemos docenas de navegadores, sistemas operativos diferentes y todo tipo de dispositivo —grandes y chicos, móviles y encastados—, que nos permiten conectarnos a la red.
En una conversación qué tuve con un amigo, él me pregunto: «¿Pero para qué necesitamos más, si ya tenemos todo ésto?»
Aunque parezca difícil de imaginar, la idea del bazar no ha muerto y, sobretodo, cuando para muchos (incluso quienes fueran sus creadores en su tiempo) pueda parecerles hoy mucho más difícil darse cuenta.
Sí, todavía existe gente que puede crear: sí, todavía existe una tecnología que nos permite crear. Por lo tanto, el sueño de un nuevo modelo de bazar no es imposible. Y, sobretodo, cuando precisamente un nuevo modelo de bazar puede cambiar la dirección del futuro, dando libertad a la innovación social.
Parezca filosófico o no, ésta es la realidad. Una realidad que estoy descubriendo cada día más: una realidad que me vuelve más optimista cada día.
Desde hace 1 año estoy contribuyendo (a veces de forma más pasiva, y otras más activa) en el proyecto Drumbeat, de la Fundación Mozilla. La primera vez ha sido difícil entender qué pasa; pero, con el tiempo, viendo tantas ideas crecer y nuevas comunidades formándose, estoy vislumbrando un movimiento que puede dar vida a ideas simples, pero clave, e incluso, ser capaz de construir un modelo nuevo para la sociedad digital, la sociedad que ya es la de hoy.
Y, como una sociedad tiene como base la educación —desde donde se edifica el aprendizaje personal—, precisamente es ahí donde se tiene que empezar a ser rompedor y creativo: poder ofrecer alternativas a lo que ya hay; porque la catedral y el bazar siempre han coexistido.
Este inicio puede ser el Festival de Drumbeat, donde gente que ha creado la ola del Internet se reunirá junto con gente que viene a enseñar sus proyectos o simplemente quieren contribuir en el diseño de una nueva manera de colaborar. En definitiva, encontrar el equilibrio para que la (co)existencia del bazar y de la catedral sea posible también en las próximas décadas.
Continuará…
* En el texto se ha utilizado la terminología del bazar, refiriéndose al significado que le ha dado Enric S. Raymond en su libro «La Catedral y el Bazar». El bazar era una nueva manera de desarrollo que abría a los desarrolladores el camino hacía creación y la innovación.
Fuentes para consultar:
“The Paradox of Choice” – Barry Schwartz
“The Cathedral and The Bazaar” – Eric S. Raymond
A personal “Welcome!” to another community-driven organization
It is a big day for the Open Standards and Free Software movement. The community behind OpenOffice.org, decided today to announce the Document Foundation, a community driven organization.
I remember talking to friends, a few months ago, wondering about the future of Open Office. I stated then that OpenOffice.org would have a future when it will be completely open to the community and owned by a community-driven, independent organization. I can’t describe the excitement I have today.
I’ve been an OpenOffice.org user for years, despite the critics it received during for long (whether it’s slow, it crashes, than it less usable than other office suites etc.) But I continued to use it because of ethical and moral reasons (the same reasons that made me believe in Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Fedora Linux and other community-driven projects).
But this is something more than software, it is about the way we share and own our information, about the way we use technology and build it to serve the civil society. Documents, as other formats (video, audio and web standards) are key elements in our lives, assuming that through them people share, create and innovate.
A few years ago, when a community decided to create what is now Mozilla Foundation in order to support the Mozilla project (whose I am a proudly contributor), nobody realized how this would change the web and the way that millions of people are using it. In the same year, Red Hat (probably one of the most known businesses in Free Software) launched the community-driven project Fedora Core, which actually contributed to make desktop/server GNU/Linux what it is today.
Therefore, after many years was followed by other public benefits that have one common mission, let the technology be in control of people (users) and independent of one corporate interest.
Indeed, the technology we have today is thanks to such decisions which comes from people’s desire and based on people’s needs. In fact, that happened many times along history, despite all.
Having the conviction that this day will completely change the picture of document standards and the office software future, I will close by congratulating the founding members for taking this decision (which, probably, will positively affect millions of users in the near future) and wishing the community all the best in the efforts to develop what LibreOffice now is! And long life, Document Foundation!