Hi everybody, I was thinking about the evolving of the FOSS movement in Egypt and my contribution to it. Not that I was thinking about how good I did, but about what wrong did I do. It then stroke me lots of mistakes that seemed small then, but combining them showed me that I was actually deviating the direction I should have followed. My only good thing that I was doing this not for my personal benefit, but with the intention of speeding it up in rough times in Egypt. Anyway this still doesn't seem to be a fair deal for the idea, or for the FOSS communities and believers. In this email I will try to show it up, for the sake of the things I violated.
FOSS is about collaboration, transparency, and equal opportunity. These are the real values that derives the four freedoms and the open source definition. These are what ensures users freedom through many implementation techniques in the models I am aware of, free software and open source software. I will start when I became one of the three admins in EGLUG, the LUG was pretty much dying then - and still is -. Though it had great legacy and even greater charter, but the effort needed for bringing it up was huge. I was more or less the main player then, everyone else was either busy or exhausted from the previous years. I was actually suggesting, modifying, and executing the activities and sometimes even the discussions. True that the LUG did some good activities at that time, but the outcome wasn't a sustainable entity. Symptoms were showing pretty obvious back then: all activities were in Alex were I lived, and I was in the heart of all of them. Tried to create a second line LUGgers, but I failed. What did I miss there? That was my first mistake, losing collaboration. That was something that the original creators of EGLUG focused on, and I failed to sustain. This didn't show up much cause the LUG was dying anyway and I gave it a last minute life kiss, and it worked for few years. So everyone was thankful and I didn't have enough criticism to stop me from what I was doing. My next encounter was creating my private company, where I made mistakes as well but let's keep this email focused about community work for now. Then it was the revolution, and the first meeting for me with the late Dr. Ali Shaath and the immediate support by Dr. Naglaa Rizk. That was when we decided to create the Egyptian Open Source Forum (EOSF) as suggested by Ali. Again he was seeing clearly it's about collaboration. Then the name changed, and it became OpenEgypt. At first few meetings, a governmental entity tried to claim credit for unifying the FOSS community in a public speech, two other NGOs tried to make OpenEgypt a subsidiary (I'm not questioning their intentions though). And we were expecting to be penetrated by all kind of entities soon, which partially happened later. After few meetings, it was clear that formulating a strategy in such big circle and trying to involve everyone including the ones who don't have strategic vision is more of a waste of time. We needed a small circle to draft, and the big crowd to feedback and evaluate. So it was decided to have a small number that play both roles, to work on the strategy and be the founders of the NGO. The idea of the NGO is to have an official entity that can address the government, deal with other Egyptian or international entities. It was chosen to be in the most opened legal form available, and planned for the founders to lose control quickly: half of them to be normal members after 3 years, and the rest after another 3 years. This is the quickest way in the Egyptian law. All of this planning was good IMHO, especially that there was a call for founders on the public mailing list. Anyway the mistakes started from then, the criteria of founders selection wasn't public, the names of the chosen founders were not declared in public. While the founders were trying to address ministries and other entities for FOSS directions, the community which we claim to work for its benefit didn't know anything about it. Another more major setback in transparency was forming MCIT's strategy group. MCIT called for a group to draft a strategy towards FOSS. Though it's logical that such choice is to be behind closed doors due to the government's nature - though we didn't make a better job in choosing OpenEgypt's founders -, but it wasn't logical not to tell the community about the forming of such consultancy group. The community knew after the protest of Micro$oft's deal with the Egyptian government. Moreover, we succeeded in convincing MCIT to involve the community, but such involvement kept with few who we knew personally and the leaders of the FOSS groups. Such failure in keeping effective horizontal flow of information was setting back our potential, if not worse. Even when we chose someone from the community to play the role of full time coordinator, we failed to communicate that clearly to the community as well. Though I was encouraging the community involvement in few situations, but I didn't do enough effort to make sure it happens. Such problems doesn't usually stay as is, either it grows exponentially or it fades away. Unfortunately the first one happened till it reached within the founders team. Let me quote some phrases from emails I got: - So I was out without even knowing? - I can't comment on something I haven't seen yet. - We'd better call this "Closed Egypt". - This isn't the professional - not even the ethical - way to do it. - Is OpenEgypt still alive? I thought it's dead already. I personally hold responsibility of the majority of this, as I'm the only one from the early founders who is still heavily involved with the FOSS communities. I should have known better how to do it the FOSS way. I was thrilled to work on strategies and big scale that I almost forgot how to do it right. The phrase that did actually hit me, was when I was talking with another respectable founder about creating a non-technical group (something not relevant to OpenEgypt) and I told him we need someone visionary who can drive this, his reply was "I thought you'd want to do it the FOSS way, by building bottom up". What hit me isn't the phrase, but it was that I actually believed that it shouldn't fly that way. Why I'm saying this? Cause I believe that sharing such criticism openly is a good thing to do. At least it can help someone not to make these mistakes. I do see that I was violating the concept for the sake of large scale implementation. This means that my compass is pointing the wrong way. So here's the deal: I will continue working on what I'm currently on, while committing to two things. First I will increase my verbosity level, mainly on the official OpenEgypt communication methods. Second is that I will try to delegate as much as I can to everyone, and what I can't delegate I will involve others. I'm not sure I can do this in 100% of what I do, but I'll try it to be the majority. What I'm asking in return is that you get involved, feedback me, criticize me, call me publicly to step back. I will be thankful for all that even if I don't show it. If anyone got feedback or suggestion, please tell me. If not just wish me luck and discard this email. Sorry for the extra long email. ---- Ahmed Mekkawy CTO | Founder Spirula Systems www.spirulasystems.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenEgypt" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
