Scott Kveton

We’ve been having a rousing discussion on the POSSE list over the last couple of days spurred on by David Myers, the founder of openforest.org. He posted a great set of questions that I took the time to follow-up on. I’m posting the questions and my responses to them here as a chance to vet some of the ideas to a wider audience.

1. In his Open for Business column, Jon Perr writes “Much remains to be done, of course, to bring about Oregon’s success as an open source mecca.” What are some of the top items on that to-do list?

We have so many components in place right now; OSDL, OSL, OTBC, PSU, OSU, etc … More acronyms than you can shake a stick at. However, what we’re lacking are the new companies to take advantage of these assets.

During RecentChangesCamp, there was a group of students visiting from France that came to see about this “open technology cluster” here in Oregon. They had done quite a bit of research and were traveling around Oregon visiting all of the people/groups in the cluster. Their conclusion? “Where’s the beef?” There isn’t a cluster here because there are almost no startups. I actually had to concur with them; they were dead on.

I almost feel like we don’t have anybody thinking big enough (myself included). I’m not saying we need an uber huge company here or that we need to sacrifice what makes this Oregon. Just the opposite. I believe that our way of life here really melds with this always-connected, merit-based economy that is emerging on the Internet. If you could encapsulate the Oregon way of life in a web service, I think you’d have a gold mine. It would just suck if somebody did it in the bay area first …

So what’s on the todo list? Great question … But to me its finding where the rubber meets the road in Portland; connect the movers/shakers, stir it all together and get them to think big. We’ve got all of the pieces; now we just need to put it all together.

(I think I just answered your question with another question — sorry ’bout that)

2. Does the democratic-yet-meritocratic nature of the open source community make it an effective organizing principle for extending the development model beyond software? Like developing a grassroots-powered media network, for instance. Or perhaps writing legislation? Couldn’t the US Constitution be thought of as an early open source development project?

I saw a great presentation from Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu-fame) who talked about this specific issue. He said that the reason we had open source instead of open law or open medicine first was because of the tools. As soon as email, diff and patch revealed themselves on the Internet, we had the most rudimentary tools of collaboration. As these tools have matured over time, they are starting to have applicability to folks outside of the technology space. Its no longer just geeks writing code to help them write more code. Its becoming technology for the sake of X where X is democracy, music sharing and anything else you can imagine. Take 10 lawyers, put them in a room with a 200 page word document and say “collaborate”! No wonder lawyers are so miserable; the tools for collaboration for them stink. Imagine using a wiki instead of a word doc? Holy crap … Now we’re talkin’.

In Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat” (if you haven’t read this you really should — IMHO its one of the #1 drivers for open source adoption at the C-level right now) there is a quote (and I can’t remember it exactly) about how the industrial revolution was all about the innovations of single individuals. Take Henry Ford as an example. The knowledge revolution will be about the innovations of communities; people coming together to do great things. I think open source is just one great example of this. However, I believe the best is yet to come.

3. If Oregon attempts to pitch itself as an “open source” clone of the technology hubs in Silicon Valley or Redmond would we risk endangering the sort of collaborative, cooperative and sustainably-minded ethos seemingly indigenous to our corner of the country? Isn’t this the kind of sensibility that plays to the strengths of open source development?

I don’t think we want to pitch ourselves as a clone of anything. We’re too small of a State to just try and copy something or even to compare ourselves to Silicon Valley or Redmond. I think we have to play on our strengths you list above; its what got us here.