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.

Open-source software is really just the tip of the iceberg in changing the way the government works. We want to encourage you to find ways for states and agencies to collaborate together on solutions that ultimately are better than the sum of all the individual efforts combined and at much lower cost to each participant. Open-source software encourages this type of collaboration by making the results of previous successful efforts available to others with similar goals and needs.

All around the US, folks are collaborating on ideas for a better government. There are many themes running among some of the ideas. Consider the notion of publishing all government spending. From another related but unique perspective, consider the notion of putting law under a version control system. There’s a trend here, and as it slowly starts to come together, it smells like OSS.

Folks like Clay Shirkey are doing a fabulous job of recognizing what is happening to our global culture as a result of the powerful communication tools we have today. There’s an epic shift going on that is allowing us to collaborate on a level never before possible. The fact that projects like Wikipedia CAN exist is simply revolutionary.

The open source software movement could not exist without the Internet. The movement is tapping our global intellectual pool and producing innovative technology both directly (by creating software) and indirectly (by challenging commercial developers). The movement is complicated and organic. The idea of leadership is being redefined. Consider the current Pirate Bay Trial:

“This is one of hundreds of examples of our management. It is how we have been operating since the very start. People have a hard time grasping it. They ask us; Who’s in charge? Who are you representing? What is your goal? What is your agenda? Why? When? How? These questions are wrongly posed and I am afraid I cant give you the right ones, that’s up to scholars later…

There is no formal organisation. Only work with joy and no to full accountability. This is how we PWN U ROSWALL. The work that is being produced by the peers of the Spectrial is probably ‘worth’ six-seven figures. Thing is one could never buy it. It’s a brave new world here, we are making a huge experiment.”

The Pirate bay aside, the OSS community shows that, somehow, large numbers of diverse humans are able to work together for a common goal without the motivation of financial gain. The beauty of successful open source applications such as Firefox, Linux, Open Office, Gimp, Blender, Apache, and thousands of other applications illustrates that – somehow – something is working.

Can this be applied to government? To business? Is business even going to remain relevant?

The open source movement is not happening particularly rapidly. However, it’s progressing steadily. It’s a powerful force that is open to anyone who wants to get behind it. The movement is blind to color, race, and class. The movement serves all equally and it does so without holding anyone back from success.

So, back to the title of this blog post. There are two things about this title that were very intentional. The first one is a bit obvious, so you may have noticed it. I wrote the title as a confident prediction. It is not a “what if” title.

The second intentional thing I did was to say “Our” instead of “The”. So often, we say “the Government” as if it was this aspect of reality we, ourselves, are not part of. However, the time will come to stop saying “they should ___” and begin to say “we should ___”. After all, if it is not “our” government, then who does it belong to?

Who knows how long it will take, but it has already begun.