this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023

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should we start a community to announce and seek contributors for open source projects? (awful.systems)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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given the absolute fucking state of the open source community in general, and the fact that hacker news of all places is where the majority of new open source projects get discovered, is there any interest in starting a community here where folks can announce and solicit for help with their open source projects?

we could possibly use NotAwfulTech, but:

I kind of want to keep self-promotion out of that community
my code is probably awful for everyone else, that's why I'm seeking contributors

let me know if anyone's down for the new community or wants to expand the scope of NotAwfulTech to include stuff like this. if you're on team new community also feel free to suggest a name

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One potentially relevant idea I’ve thought about is starting a design collective with a focus on anti-capitalist/profitable design. We’d intentionally make designs that people can build from easily obtainable/reclaimable materials to take the place of products that you would normally buy instead. This is already a reality within the realm of programming/the open source community, but you don’t really see this for physical objects. Like you can fork the code for some open source project, but good luck building a computer from the component level up to run it on.

Again- just something I’ve been thinking about. Creating user-buildable designs for complex things like modern day computers or motor vehicles would be difficult. I guess I want to live in the past when you could buy DIY house/car kits??

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess I want to live in the past when you could buy DIY house/car kits??

If you haven’t you should read Victor Papanek’s Design For The Real World or How Things Don’t Work

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the rec!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Always happy to recommend his work. It’s a shame sometimes his ideas are considered silly or far-fetched because they go against scale-up thinking

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

this is, no shit, exactly the thread I’ve been chasing with a bunch of my projects. a lot of the hardware I use the most is either handmade or heavily modified with bespoke components, and that process has already produced so many things I’ll likely keep using forever that I’ve been looking at extending it to the rest of my computing environment

to that end, I’ve already got a static site generator and operating system distro/programming workbench that are both a little bit of polishing away from an initial public release, and I plan to release them under anti-commercial terms and form a collective to manage those projects (and maybe down the line reform it as a cooperative, if any of the projects get big enough that it makes sense)

organizing around these principles wouldn’t by any means be required to participate in the new community, but I feel like it’d be a good vibe to start on

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

+1 to interest.

Name wise: If you're willing to spend time thinking about this, I'd think of all the things you want the community to be, all the things you don't want it to be, and then move forward from there. Personally, I'd want the vibe to be in opposition to hacker culture, but that's just me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you've got exactly the right idea, especially with regards to the vibes I'd like the new community to have. hacker culture is an embarrassing, toxic, ultra-libertarian thing I've seen exclude many more people than it's welcomed, and as a set of organizing principles it's holding us back. collective effort can do fucking magical things, but all hacker culture does is insist its only utility is to the corporations using us for our output and only ever demanding more

[+] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Admittedly I used the label “hacker culture” without giving a definition, I definitely meant culture along the lines that @self mentioned. To reiterate, imo what’s more important is defining the vision, which this comment thread has begun the process of.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

that’s fair. I think mentally I’ve decoupled corporate and most online hacker culture from hackerspaces (and the friendlier online spaces); even though they share a name and theoretically a basic set of values, there’s such a wide gulf between the kind of hacker culture you’ll see on the orange site or the elitist bullshit you’ll run into if you try and contribute code to the Linux kernel (for example), vs the communal workshop and mentorship environment of a good hackerspace.

one thing I want to emphasize though is that you don’t need to be a hacker to make good and worthwhile contributions. as I talked about elsewhere in this thread, open source has a dire need for designers and other folks doing jobs that aren’t traditionally considered to be a part of hacker culture. also, I feel like modification should be normalized as something everyone does, even for things like operating systems and drivers. the lisp machines that the orange site fetishizes without knowing why got this right: computing environments should do everything they can to make the process of making improvements easy, whether that’s through accessible and complete documentation, better languages, or tooling that lets the user fuck around and find out

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty ignorant of it and haven't really looked into it too much,, but from the surface the "hacker culture" surrounding things like the Chaos Computer Club and whatnot seem much more palatable, seem skeptical of, or outright reject, capitalist influence and is less right-libertarian than hacker culture in the US.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'd be interested in this as a developer that does a lot of open source work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

definitely interested

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe dumb, maybe already happening. "Open source" refers to code, but it would be cool if open source was open to all kinds of contributions, like information architecture, ui design, strategy, etc. without the barrier of technical literacy. It's difficult because all of the infrastructure for managing the projects is focused on code contributions and issues are, generally, submitted in the context that they can be addressed by code.

I guess I'm saying open project instead of source

could be a governance hell, but that's life eh

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This project was in my mind when I wrote this https://openmovement.org/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

this is exactly the kind of project I’d love to collaborate on, even if it’s a bit out of my area of expertise! the first thing that came to mind when I opened the page was “huh I wonder how much of this I could make 3D printable” and now I’m tempted to try it and release STLs and nonprintable parts lists for folks to make their own watches.

the same thing applies to a wide variety of other designs — I’d love to grab a well-documented open source keyboard design and swap its circuit board out for an open source FPGA dev board and use that as a whole reconfigurable computing platform, for example

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’m using open source as more of a term of convenience than its strict OSI definition, but regardless I feel strongly that those types of contributions should be welcomed by open source projects. a contribution absolutely doesn’t have to be code to be worthwhile, and there’s so many open source projects just dying for any design attention at all. a lot of the projects that get that kind of attention get it from corporations, which then use their position as a lever to control the direction of the project as a whole. there’s no reason it should be like this, but the more toxic elements of hacker culture make open source projects unfriendly places for most designers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Go for it.