Community and Technology
I made much of my living as a software engineer. Meanwhile, I really don’t enjoy writing code. I did, at first. I thought it was “neat” that I could imagine things and then build them. Many of the other engineers I meet get extremely passionate about methodologies, languages, frameworks, and all the little details of building stuff. I really don’t care… at all… I just want to see new things come into being. I want to see thing form my imagination come into being.
Anyway, if you know me at all, you know how important open source software is to me. The irony is, I’ve contributed very little code to the open source world. Still, since I started working in the real world, I’ve pushed open source at every company. I was trying to use a Linux desktop in the MS dominated corporate environment some 8 years ago. The distro was Red Hat and my window manager was Window Maker. Anyway, I put a huge amount of energy into trying to communicate to everyone, “this software has potential…”
I’m not an engineer, I just play one on TV… I mean at the office. I only learned to build things because I saw things in my mind I wanted to share with other people. I don’t know how to communicate these things without just building them. I tell people about them and they say, “that’s a good idea” and it fades away. Sometimes I wonder if they’re just being kind and reinforcing me with positive comments. When your idea comes to life, you get a real chance to actually see it tested in reality.
I’ve also always been keenly interested in community. It took me a while to realize this. I can be terribly anti-social and I don’t really tend to identify with communities. I won’t associate with a political party. I love Burning Man but won’t call myself a burner. I love to liquid dance to good trance but hate to be called a raver. I have long hair and a liberal attitude, but I hate being called a hippy. Anyway, even though I don’t seem to want to be “part” of any particular community, I’m still hugely interested in community.
When I was 13, my family moved to California. In our little community (travel trailer park, actually), I developed a reputation that I wouldn’t learn about unti years after I left. It seems that before I got there, most of the ‘kids’ would play in little groups here and there. When my sister and I started to mingle with the group, it became a single big herd of kids roaming around together. My dear friend, Jana, explained this change to me a few years after I’d moved on. She said that as soon as we left, the entire group went back to being dispersed.
I started building communities on the Internet in 1994. Most of them weren’t particularly sticky. In 2003, I went to work at a game company as a community manager. In 2007, I moved to Colorado to help a company build a social network. At both of these companies, they dumped development work on me that I repeated tried to reject. I kept saying that I was not an engineer. Still, for whatever reason, they wanted me to write code.
So this morning I was talking to a friend about a community in Costa Rica that operates without money. If you understand what Burning Man is and caught my mention of it above, you might have realized that a community void of money would be pretty appealing to me. So that left me wondering what I would do for a community like that. I started off thinking about farming and ranching skills I learned as a kid. I can slaughter a chicken and grow squash. I can clear land, trim trees, till soil, and even catch a fish or two. I even love to work in the kitchen; it was my primary work duty at Burning Man. Still, it didn’t seem like the best gift I could contribute.
I started to think about what a community would look like without money. At first, I assume it would be void of technology. Somehow the notion of technology feels tied to money to me. After all, a little startup community isn’t going to start hand crafting silicon chips, right? But, why does a modern community have to immediately jump straight to a technology level akin to medievil times? We’ve been “improving” technology so long that we’ve got a glut of older hardware filling up landfills. Why waste?
Now I’m really interested how these communities approach technology. I would love to live in a community where my contribution was motivated by the good of the whole and not a pay check. Still, I don’t want to give up Wikipedia.
I feel like we’re going to leave money behind. Seriously, I think this whole concept of a financial system will eventually go away. However, it should be a step forward, not a step backwards. That means we’ll want to keep the intellectual pool strong. We will want to preserve and share knowledge.
Somehow, in the scope of all this, I sense there might be a place where I belong. Maybe.