Freedom Respecting Technology: Next Generation Open Source and Open Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Freedom Respecting Technology: Next Generation Open Source and Open Knowledge

makesourcenotcode.github.io

I think the FAIR folks did a good job capturing what, to me, is the most core essence of this all: exposing the data at the heart.

It's important that we also reveal & spread light on the computing, on opening the source. But the data underneath is highly occluded, highly captured, and is the root thing we want empowerment over. The tools are good to open, but the key radical movement that feels like it just has to happen is opening the thing the tools work on, the data. Once we can start to actually grasp what's underneath interface, once the data itself is FAIR, we open up human agency. That's the first start for freedom respecting technology.

I think FAIR lights the fire of interest, re-opens the window for enlightenment to flow again. And that will be compelling for people.

FAIR: Findable, Addressable, Interoperable, Resuable. https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

Hat tip to one Dorian Taylor for the reference.

This is just one of a million angles, but it does make me think of the semantic web. There's a lot of business & data & research folks in this sector, but one of the core lessons is that things should have URLs; core axiomatics of the web itself (https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html). Even the littlest drop of rdfa or microdata often starts with marking up different elements of the page to give them their own URI/URLs, making it explicit that the page is made up of many different objects. This is a low key change, but sets the seeds to let the web be more than opaque pages, to let the web be a thing of many objects.

I've seen the future of the web (right now we're living it) and it's full of dead links and urls to paywalled content.

A very sad state of affairs

You have a failure to engage with your human heritage to dream about something that hasn't existed before while a new world crashes over us like the spring back of a rip tide. Dare to dream friend. The pigs need a committee. The world and how thoughts are communicated is wild west right fucking now. I'm not saying don't be realistically pessimistic, but seriously.... Nothing that we've known for the last 30 years is a given and we need optimistic thinkers saying fuck it to whoever is doing loser shit because not only are we all gonna die anyway, but we are gonna die faster if "a job is a job".

Hunt bliss friend. You contain multitudes and the world needs you. Not tomorrow but yesterday. Pigs will tell you you're wrong and your peers will argue for their jailers but your jailer will pretend to be you when talking to their jailer when you tell them they are fucked in a moment but don't make it a big deal. To solve... just really... we are all super fucked if hierarchies do not become more collaborative.

We are in a snow globe. The earth peoples like an apple tree apples. You do not have to accept a game of telephone to steal your will and your will is the ripple in the pond the world needs.

EDIT: Go to a local ham radio meetup. Everything is waves motherfucker. With or without you I'll bankrupt the phone companies in 5 years.

> With or without you, I'll bankrupt the phone companies in 5 years.

I hope you're at least 5 years into your mission because slaying that dragon will take at least 10. How can I find, contribute, or fund your work? (decimal before dev)

I have been saying this for years.

The contribution graph of most projects looks like a power law, this is a failure of open source. We need to lower the barrier to entry to flatten the contribution graph and to enable mass collaboration. And that goes through a focused effort on what they call open knowledge.

And I think that implies giving up on some agile principles for most open source projects. You cannot rely on people over documentation, for example, when the potential contributor pool has 1000s of developers and the knowledge is held by one guy in Wyoming who does it part time after work.

Frankly, I don't think flattening the contribution graph is possible unless you put a cap on how much people can contribute.

Most online communities of any kind follow a power law with a small number of heavy contributors and many more occasional contributors and "lurkers". This isn't a consequence of barriers to contributing but of human nature.

This is a good idea, a great thing to push for.

I feel immensely gratified. I already do this except for one thing.

That one thing that I don't do is breaking down the docs into subsets. The reason I haven't is because the docs are small enough for me to not care. (3MB total download each for releases of both major repos, and that includes everything, including source, tests, and docs.)

But otherwise, I do this. My docs are in a Markdown-like format (so you technically don't even have to build them), they contain everything you need to know, they are pre-built or need only FOSS tools to build (which I will actually replace with tools contained in the repo itself), they even include how to hack on my code: a braindump of design, implementation, and my mindset when I hack.

That doesn't mean I can't make an online version. I can. However, people who download the repos can still use it offline.

(Another thing I need to do is have a link from the online version to the source, probably in the footer.)

I highly suggest everyone do this. It has delighted my users.

I love a good manifesto. I'm excited to read it over the weekend. The initial pitch appears to be in line with my interests. Big fan of the minimalism in the pitch.

Here it is, the response to an over rattled cage

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