Hey all! I've been playing with a project for the last few weeks and I'm at a point where I'd really love some feedback and/or help on it. As the subject implies, it's a manifesto that attempts to describe what the Open Future might look like. I'm creating it as a way to inspire a shared vision to use throughout the community as we develop technologies, software, protocols and business ideas. My dream is that once it's done (i.e., once we've managed to put it through the wringer as a community and come out with a document we can all more or less agree on, if that's possible), I can use it to guide the work that I do now and into the future, and perhaps others might find it useful for that as well. For example, when I look for jobs, I can look for companies that represent an opportunity for me to build a small piece of the open future, or when I look for education, I can look to cultivate skills that will better allow me to contribute to it.
The manifesto itself is an attempt to provide three elements: 1) convincing evidence that an open future is inevitable; 2) an image of what it might look like and how it might work; and 3) a set of concrete steps we can take now to hasten its arrival, including building certain pieces of infrastructure. I'm writing it in response to the frustration that I've felt in trying to drive open principles forward today. Many of these principles don't quite work yet because, personally, I don't believe we have realized quite where we're going with it all, or just how much infrastructure we'll need to get there. Just as a basic example, Quickbooks Online now pulls in $30,000,000 every month. If even 1/10th of the customers who pay for Quickbooks online instead put a single QBO payment into GNUCash instead, we'd have a product far better than Quickbooks, and the whole world would benefit from it -- not just those who paid. The ROI on this proposition is obvious enough that even a child could grasp the implications -- yet we don't have systems in place to leverage it. The action item, then, is to fortify our systems for linking payments to features (BountySource is an open-source start to that, but has a long way to go), and to start getting progressive businesses (probably starting with the ones we work at) to redirect their software budgets to open-source projects. There are a number of other concrete things like this that we can do to start moving in the direction of the Open Future, and I think having a manifesto in hand that helps us remember what that future looks like and what we can do to encourage it would be extremely useful. So, without further ado, here is the unfinished draft so far: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kael-shipman/Manifesto-for-an-Open-Future/master/Manifesto%20for%20an%20Open%20Future.fodt (you'll have to download it and open it in LibreOffice) And here's the full github repo: https://github.com/kael-shipman/Manifesto-for-an-Open-Future I look forward to hearing what people have to say! If anyone wants to help, please do shoot me a line. The irony of drafting a document like this alone is far from lost on me ;). Thanks for your time, Kael _______________________________________________ Osdc-list mailing list | This is a place for our readers, writers, moderators and artists to discuss matters concerning Opensource.com and otherwise do the work that makes this a community practicing the open source way. Sign-up for our weekly newsletter: http://opensource.com/email-newsletter Send a message: Osdc-list@redhat.com Change preferences: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/osdc-list Unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/options/osdc-list
