closing thoughts on open source

We've come full circle and I find myself naturally led to review Christine's comments that were quoted in the second post on this blog.

... what I think is happening is an “open source” movement in public diplomacy – sort of like the open source software movement of the last decade, where developers decided to work together, on the Internet, voluntarily, to improve software (Linux OS resulted from open source software development).

Some things are just too important to leave in the hands of the experts, or the bureaucrats, or certainly the State Department. If, as Clausewitz said, “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means…” , then the asymmetric warfare being waged against Western civilization requires a countering asymmetric “politics” – an internet based, “open source” movement committed counter-attack against the internet based jihadist ideologues.

Unlike the current blogosphere, open source was highly disciplined, in a kind of milling-about, “wisdom of crowds” complex system way – they did have a final product they were working towards, and everyone just kept trying to improve it and use it at the same time.

While I don't think Christine specifically meant to contrast open source with 4gw, our conversations have led us to do so, particularly because of the fact that organizational choices have moral and social consequences. Compared to 4gw, open source feels wholesome and clean. Leadership in open source culture is strictly merit based, participation is always self selecting and self directed, and the basic organizational model is "follow me".

An open source political model would necessarily be transparent and, because of that, invite principled behavior among its participants. That's nothing like 4gw which, as we saw, excels to the extent that its participants exploit their host society. That should call to mind a few comparisons between government models. It also illustrates how easy it is to draw the practical distinctions that will keep projects on the better path, even though both styles share a lot of buzzwords like asymmetric, distributed and networked. None of these superficial similarities can make up for the huge differences in the underlying ethos of these two ideas.

Most open source projects never attract participation from anyone beyond the original creator. On the bright side, the effort to work up to public standards is a good excersize and there is always the hope that someone will show up later to extend the work. That's a familiar set of conditions for most academic work, not surprisingly.

In an open source work environment, work tends to speak for itself and people show up to do work rather than talk about it. It's like showing up at the gym instead of, say, a coffee shop. In many publicly viewable projects, you're lucky if you find much more than the code itself and an out of date readme file. In a political context, more chit chat is to be expected, but one can still hope to find more project tables than chat rooms in a community that is aiming to work along open source lines.

This post, low key as it is, wraps up what I'll call chapter 1 of this blog, so I want to finish by reemphasizing the idea that has dominated my thinking about The 910 Group. That idea, and I know I'm beating it to death but repetition is necessary in these things, is that the defenders of a culture inevitably shape that culture. Therefore all the choices that are made and all the habits that are cultivated have consequences beyond the group itself. In the same way that Michel Corleone could not protect his family from violence by embracing violence, The 910 Group can only protect the values of western society by fully embracing those values within itself.