Meritocracy, Fate Or Anarchy

Many folks on a higher pay grade than mine tout that open source thrives as a Meritocracy. In this model, folks who are interested enough create a project and release the source under GPL/Whatever and if the project is "good" or "gooder" than other ones it has more merit and will advance to become more widely used etc. One interesting counter point to this made by Alain de Botton in his TED talk where if this rise due to merit, then things also sink due to it. Alain is not talking open source, but if we switch to that context, then if your project is not becoming successful, or you are struggling, then the Meritocracy eye balls would see that since you created the project, by implication you are scum.

During such talks of open source, I have to remove myself from the direct discussion. My hubris is not quite up to the task to extrapolate my situation, be it good or bad, to the larger context.

However, I have seen other people who have single handedly created fairly complex projects over many years only to have large corporate sponsorship arrive for other offshoot or fairly recently created projects. In this case I often wonder that it really doesn't seem that merit has much input into the funding decision. Of course, some will say that to talk about open source and funding is crass, if you like to do it then you will regardless of the open fingered gloves and dynamo powered netbook. But seriously, if a project gets 5-10 full time paid developers, are you confident you can "compete" with that, for 6 months, 3 years, 10 years? Or is it the case that more or less your project has been swept under the bridge by a corporate funding decision you were not even aware was happening?

Another good example of this is the Linux distributions who want a project for "Y" and decide to create a solution themselves rather than trying to adopt something that a committed developer has been working on for years. In some cases the "owning" the code can be more important than reuse, and most often the code is released under and open source license. But this be a fairly vicious demotivator for folks who were writing the existing "Y" solutions.

The specific examples of these sorts of things that I've seen over the years have led me to wonder what sort of model open source really follows. It does seem that Fate or Anarchy are most close to the process at times. Fate particularly coming into play when a developer is at a conference and happens to bump into the guy who works at a company who might be funding a project in a similar area soon. This angle has implications for open source conferences and CFPs in general. If you are not living in Europe or the USA then you will have a lesser exposure to conferences in those spheres and to some degree your project will have less chance of success, no matter what the code does or how well. While many conferences have a travel budget, where you are living will be a factor in whether your project Y or somebody else doing Y2 will get to talk.

Unfortunately these thoughts do not really have a strong conclusion. I thought I'd throw it out there a long with a few TED links to try to brighten up some a few folks who might have read about open source as a meritocracy and started to feel gloomy. Another interesting and related TED is by Dan Pink.
And all ya'll might like the metated which lets you grab talks from a single link source. Its really just an XML file with direct links and metadata, so if your downloader doesn't like it, emacs and wget are your friend.

Nepomuk & Social Networking: The Golden Opportunity

After reading an article on Boxee recently which described it's social network integration it occurred to me how wonderful this would be to have for KDE. Having tags and ratings on the desktop is a really nice thing, but having tags and ratings coming through for arbitrary pieces of information from your "friends" makes things quite interesting.

From the Boxee example, why can't I see that Fred has also scheduled to watch Program-X. At the moment such recommendations are handled by many folks through IM or email, which is quite kludgey to say the least. There is no simple click to record or accept a recommendation, you have to mentally context switch to the TV schedule and update.

One thing that makes this all come together is not thinking of tags or ratings as binary or a single 1-5 range. To quote my own code, if a tag is able to also record the thoughts of many actors as a range, say a double from 0-100, and each actor has a level of trust associated, then the system itself can infer that if Fred is watching something and it is rated SciFi then automatically I want to take a peek too. By allowing tags and ratings to capture more complexity behind the scenes, the computer can infer more for us, and part of that can be a traditional 1-5 rating or whatever... hey, I work on virtual filesystems, is it really that strange that I would want to virtualize file ratings too?

The big gain here is if KDE itself can provide the spine for this. In my own system I stopped short of being able to automatically distribute these tag and file ratings. Surely they can be sent to other libferris systems and integrated, but that process, and the one of tracking friends and assigning privileges to them is not 100%.

Combining RDF with the social network element is an interesting chance here IMHO. Perhaps a central server of sorts is only really needed for tracking the privileges and assigning friends, and a p2p protocol can then be used to actually transmit the RDF you have decided to share to your associates. Though a fully central server implementation would probably provide a quicker starting point. As an upside, this would allow syncing RDF between many of your own devices -- tags from the desktop appearing on mobile devices when the VPN is up.

Of course, information sharing would have to be explicitly condoned by the user, and public key crypto would be needed to ensure integrity, privacy, and authenticity etc.

This sort of thing extends nicely to audio and image apps like Amarok and KPA. If I give somebody a copy of some images I took of London, when I add tags, they should also trickle through the system to them. If they are looking at a photo of the Wigmore Hall I took, they might like to know more about that place, and perhaps which CDs I have of chamber music from that trip.

This is something I'd love to hack on when I get the chance. In the meantime I thought I'd drop the idea here in case there are other folks who are also interested and we can combine forces.