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.