I often reference my admiration for ‘open source’, but I haven’t written much about it formally. This is that and will be accompanied in the coming days by another, more succinct post titled ‘Business Case for Open Source’.

What is open source? 

Technically open source is quite specific. The term originates from software development where ‘source’ refers to ‘source code’ which is available for other developers to use, modify, and contribute to. These days though the idea is applied in numerous places; hardware, software, data, science, etc, and in my opinion should be applied to many more. This is what we’ll focus on here, the idea of open source. I’m not going to get into the philosophies or freedoms stuff.

As such, let’s say something is open source if its source, its place of origin, is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and share. That means anyone can access the thing that is open and do what they want with it. 

How does open source work? 

For me open source revolves around the ideas of access and contribution. Anyone can see and use someone else’s work freely, and anyone is able to contribute modifications or improvements to the original. How this gets done depends on the use case but that’s the idea. 

So when building something like software, it’s easy to see why it works. A lot of people have coding skills and via platforms like GitHub and GitLab are able to contribute those skills really anywhere in the world to any project. For example if you start building a website in Timbuktu and reach your limit or get bored or get hit by a bus, if you make it ‘open source’ someone, somewhere, can pick up where you left off. 

Imagine if you were putting together a database of all of your favourite restaurants in London, if you publish it online and make it open source, other people can see and rate your recommendations, and they could contribute their own, or they could take your recommendations and build up their own list separately. 

Imagine someone was doing research into the best way to build a dam on a beach to stop the flow of a small river. They gather all of the research, conduct some experiments, and record the results. Eventually they build a damn that works. Now imagine there’s a river on a beach near you that you would like to dam too, but its a different size and the water flows more slowly. If the original research was open source you could copy the stuff that’s useful to you, and change it to fit your river damming purposes without having to start from scratch. Then if in your experiments you discover a better way to do something you can send your research to the original damn builder for them to read, and if they like, include it. 

There are many use cases for this stuff and these are very simple. The idea is you don’t have to start from scratch, you don’t have to reinvent any wheels, and you can collect contributions from interested others. It means more time can be put towards the next steps and into maintenance and quality control, rather than having different people, teams, or organisations doing the same thing in different places. 

If all information and projects were open source we would be able to make more progress more quickly. Imagine if instead of having to conduct your own research and surveys and censuses to collect data and draw conclusions, you could just use an open data set. Of course you would need to create your own for niche use cases, and people would need to test your data and make changes and contributions to avoid biases and errors, but the world would open up and more work could be done to ensure quality and progress, rather than reinventing the wheel all over the shop.

Limits of open source in the real world

All of this sounds lovely, but it comes with an awful lot of assumptions that don’t hold up very well in the real world.   

Trust

We don’t live in a perfect world, we live in a world where there’s war, and nationalism, and poverty, and evil do-ers. We live in a world where we can’t really just publish everything openly even if we wanted to. 

There are many places where closed data makes sense; like in the military, and in user data. If the military published all of their data and open sourced their projects, or every company out there published and or sold all of their user data then malicious people could very easily abuse it. This level of ‘openness’ would only even have a chance of working if everyone trusted each other. Which just isn’t going to happen. 

So open source isn’t a good idea for personal or confidential information, it would be too easy to abuse and would likely do more harm than good.  

Motivation

Everyone has ideas, ideas are a dime a dozen, you’ve probably had at least one idea since reading this if you’ve gotten this far, but not all ideas are good. In fact, most are dog shit. The same goes for projects, or data, or results, or anything you might want to open source. The idea of publishing something and fielding contributions from a community of people is romantic, but in the real world this doesn’t just happen. 

People need to get paid to live, and or people need to care about what they’re doing. In open source software specifically, funding is a big issue. There are technologies that hundreds of millions of people depend on that are maintained and worked on by people who see a total of zero money for it. They do it because they care about its existence.  

There is something more to be said about not-publishing data that is IP (intellectual property) too. If someone works really hard on something like say, an emission factor, then just giving it away openly, just publishing it completely for free doesn’t work in this capitalist society we live in. They end up working for nothing. 

Realistically for something to be open sourced it needs funding and it needs people to care about it. If there isn’t a clear way to do at least one of these things, it’s not going to work. In my mind this is a point in favour of more corporate organisations starting and maintaining open source projects with others, but maybe more on that later.    

Competition

I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago about their work. They work on diversity and inclusion policies and training for big organisations. They collect a lot of data and analyse it to advise companies on strategies for being more inclusive and equitable for their employees. Great. She was working on a report that would summarise the data and draw conclusions. Cool. They were thinking about how they could monetise their work while also sharing it so other people could benefit from it. 

I said, ‘why don’t you publish it for free and send it to other companies like yours or Universities so they can use, build on, and maybe contribute to it?’ They were getting paid by the companies they were working for anyway, as long as they properly anonymised the data, this would be fine. But she came back with the age old argument of competition. ‘What if we loose out to someone else by doing that? What if someone takes credit for it and sells it themselves without our permission?’ 

Okay, well ‘what about the raw data?’ I said, ‘publish that, then people can do their own research based on it. The value your customers get is in your conclusions and strategies, the data you used to come to them is just data, and could be useful for the industry.’ She thought for a while, I said I’d write something like this, and we moved on. 

In my, admittedly limited experience, the thing with competition is that in order for your competition to rip you off, you don’t just have to be very good, you have to be obviously very good. And if you are that good, the time it would take your competition to do what you did to reach this point would be enough time for you to pull ahead further. And if you’re that that good, no one’s going to copy you anyway. 

And, actually, who cares? If we’re paying attention to limitations 1 and 2; if your work isn’t going to hurt anyone, and you’re getting people to fund and care about it, if someone copies you and builds up on top of it, doesn’t that just further the thing you care about anyway?

You can copy them right back, and publish. Then they’ll copy you again, and publish, then you, then them, and then oh look, your’e contributing back and forth anyway. 

Yes this is an oversimplification but you see what I mean. 

Some benefits of open sourcing

By the above reasoning everything that doesn’t create real risk for people, that can get funded with people to care about it, and can be careful about what is open and what is not, could be open sourced without much issue. Now let’s talk about why I think it should be.

Wisdom of diversity

When you open a project to a global community, you invite diverse perspectives and talents. Imagine you're my friend working on reports on diversity and inclusion data. You have the data of the companies you work with, but that’s going to be less than ten organisations, probably from a similar region and a similar size.

In an open source world approach you could reach out and partner with other organisations and Universities with diverse takes, different kinds of data, and or more skills and insights that what you could accomplish singularly.

Quality Control and Iteration

Open source software doesn't stop at an initial release; it’s usually an ongoing process of continuous improvement. When you make any project open source, if you do it right, you can welcome a level of continuous feedback and contributions. This cycle of collaboration allows for rigorous quality control and iteration.

Let's say you've created a data analysis tool, and it's open source. Users from various backgrounds begin to employ it in their research. They discover bugs, propose enhancements, and provide valuable feedback. This community-driven approach ensures that your tool evolves, becoming more robust and effective with each iteration. Of course we’re assuming rule 2, motivation.

Building communities, not just projects

I have a friend who works in fitness. She’s part of a leadership collective community that talks about having strong values and motivations and chasing your ambitions and joined the place that she works now, a new age studio, because she believes in it.

When you or an organisation start a project how often is the motivation ‘to make money?’ Well, that’s probably part of the motivation, but usually there’s something more behind it, ‘to make fitness mindful’, ‘to usher in a more inclusive and equitable world’, ‘to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere’.

If there really is a motivation behind what you’re doing that’s not just cash then open source can become more than just contributors. You can bet that if you care about something a lot, especially if it’s something that effects you personally, that other people do too. When people from different backgrounds come together around a shared passion, something magical happens. They form connections, exchange ideas, and learn from each other.

Empowering innovation

Open source encourages innovation in unforeseen ways. When ideas are free to flow and combine, they can create entirely new concepts and solutions. Consider a scenario where a scientist publishes their research data openly. Researchers from diverse fields stumble upon it, leading to unexpected breakthroughs and interdisciplinary collaborations.

This openness to innovative cross-pollination can result in advancements that may not have occurred within the confines of proprietary systems. Innovation comes from analysing several different perspectives, different approaches, and working out how they can contribute to something new. Sound familiar?

Conclusion - a holistic approach

The idea behind all of this is to adopt a holistic approach and embrace openness wherever it can benefit society. Imagine a world where knowledge flows and ideas are met with colaboration rather than secrecy. In this utopian vision, open source principles are extended to areas such as healthcare, education, international development, and sustainability, accelerating progress and solving pressing global challenges.

I don’t have a suggestion for how to do this on a grand scale, but I’m thinking about it. I think a lot about how to make this kind of thing easier or at least more of a likely option. As I said in the beginning in the next few days I’ll lay out a business case in case anyone can see the value in what I’m saying and would like to try and make it happen in their orgs. If you do/can let me know, I’d love to help or to hear about it.