Mark Guzdial's post Open Source Development: Not Very Open or Welcoming, in which he muses doubtfully over issues of usability and diversity in open source software and its communities, brought forth some comments in response, particularly from me. I'd say we pretty much exhausted that thread, but I'd like to reframe the issue somewhat with a hypothetical.
Let's say Mark Guzdial, member of and advocate for the open source software community, was concerned about usability and diversity within the open source community. He studied the problem and undertook a decisive course of action, developing and researching, in collaboration with a female colleague, a media computation curriculum designed to be accessible to students outside the stereotypical white male geek, publishing two books to support the curriculum, one using an open source programming language used by a high percentage of professional female programmers and an open source development environment focused on usability by novices, the second one using a well-regarded open source programming language developed from the ground up with the goal of clarity and ease of use by novices and professional programmers. This is on top of his years of work using what is widely regarded as the seminal open source educational technology project, Squeak. He is, in return, showered with accolades by the open source community.
What actually happened was this:
Mark Guzdial, a leading advocate for computer science education, was concerned about usability and diversity within computer science and the computing industry. He studied the problem and undertook a decisive course of action, including developing and researching, in collaboration with a female colleague, a media computation curriculum designed to be accessible to students outside the stereotypical white male geek, publishing two books to support the curriculum, one using an open source programming language used by a high percentage of professional female programmers and an open source development environment focused on usability by novices, the second one using a well-regarded open source programming language developed from the ground up with the goal of clarity and ease of use by novices and professional programmers. This is on top of his years of work using the seminal open source educational technology project, Squeak, which over the years has maintined a mutually frustrating arms-length distance from the rest of the open source community for a variety of technical, legal and social reasons. His work is not widely known among open source advocates.
And he publishes posts on his blog about how unusable open source software is and how anti-social its communities are.
The problem at this point is not working out who slighted whom first, or which "side" is right. The problem is that in 2010 the generic concept of the "open source community" obscures as much or more than it illuminates. If there is an "open source community," Mark Guzdial is much a part of it as the smelly, misogynistic hackers on IRC. Being an asshole is not required for admission. "Open source" was always amorphous because it was driven by voluntary self-organization, but it is even moreso now that it reaches into Java, Android, key parts of MacOS X, the entire web infrastructure, academic and government projects, etc., etc. There is no "other" here.
2 comments:
Not sure of the point you're making, but Mark Guzdial is clearly not only very bright, but he is a good guy who has contributed much on behalf of computer science education, women and educational progress.
He may be one of the handful of people in the open-source community who can not only cut code, but teach others to do it AND also understand the educational value in doing so for learners of all ages.
I suppose one way to try to summarize my point would be to say that Mark's rhetorical stance vis a vis open source actually undermines the potential value of his work connected to open source software. If you respect Mark Guzdial and didn't know much about open source and read his post you'd think "Oh, I'd better not get involved with open source; Mark has a pretty negative attitude toward it." Thus people sympathetic to his concerns would be less likely to get involved in making open source communities reflect Mark's values. AND, Mark actually seems to have no real problems working with, using, teaching, etc. with open source software.
The fact of the matter is I find the attitude toward open source by the "learning sciences" and academia in general to be incomprehensible, so I guess it isn't that surprising that my attempts to understand what they're trying to do.
The backstory here, which I don't want to open up full force because frankly, I've got other stuff I should be doing, is that Mark is complaining about "country club" projects when the most closed, clubby open source (licensed) projects are the academic ones, by far. Look at Scratch -- they wrote an NSF grant promising an open collaborative process, never made the source readily available, and generally made it clear that once they had the money they had no interest in taking contributions from outside their academic circle.
I don't have trouble with their process, but I do have trouble with them taking government money on false pretenses, and in that context I do have a problem with Mark, who was an advisor to Scratch and is aware of this issue, slamming volunteer projects which are at least trying to be open, but perhaps failing.
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