[Olpc-za] A Journey into Constructivism

Antoine van Gelder children at laptop.org.za
Sun Aug 26 06:02:58 EDT 2007


Leone Meyer wrote:
> There is so much in the last three postings from Jeff that needs to be 
> debated. It seems to me that unless olpcza knows exactly where it is 
> going and what it wants to achieve and unless it speaks with one voice 
> (or at least similar voices) it may come to a sticky end. You are all 
> busy people engaged in the daily grind. However, even if it is a 
> 'slow' debate it would be better than none. In fact doing things 
> 'slowly' is a new buzz word, not so?
>
> I am mulling over things and will do a posting as soon as things have 
> clarified  -slowly-  in my oap, ex-teacher's mind.

*grin*

You're making a valid criticism!

Welcome to the chaotic world of open source where we tend to make it up 
as we go along and pray that we don't code ourselves into a corner. :-P

I think the deeper problem is that evolving consensus on the 
philosophical underpinnings of what we're doing when we collaborate in 
large groups has never been easy.

This is probably one of the reasons why the dominant model in our public 
institutions is one where we assign steering responsibility and 
authority to either a leader or a committee. Which is not a bad strategy 
but it does suffer from scaling problems whenever new technology or 
social change threatens to disrupt our models of the world.

(OLPC is particularly fun because it involves both new technology _and_ 
social change!)

As an alternative (and very new, and itself still evolving) strategy 
open source does a lot to remove obstacles to collaboration in rapidly 
changing environments, including:

  * Flattening the permission hierarchy so that critical contributions
    don't have to waste years in bureaucracy hell.

  * The entire process is public and archived so it becomes possible
    to backtrack through mailing list archives and code repositories
    to figure out the rationales for decisions and strategies and
    challenge them in the light of changing circumstance. [1]

BUT

In and of itself open source does NOT offer the kind of guarantees as 
promised by more formal systems when it comes to getting the 
philosophical details right.

In fact, as a strategy which evolved in a technical environment where 
'making it work' often tends to be more important than 'how to make it 
work', the philosophical decisions tend to be made by whoever makes it 
work first and not necessarily by who makes it work best! [1]

This drove me nuts when I first climbed onto the Internet and discovered 
free software and open source in the early '90s and many a happy hour 
was spent in flame wars arguing one side or the other.

I think the lesson I learned at the end of the day was that while this 
strategy of collaboration did not guarantee the best possible decisions 
it certainly afforded the opportunity for anyone, who cared enough, to 
stand up when they disagreed with the direction things were going and 
add their own views and experiences to the conversation.

Which is not to say that my own views would always find a home!

Sometimes I just discovered that the things I wanted to do or see done 
were outside the scope of the community I was interacting with or that 
there were other problems we needed to solve before we had the means to 
solve the problems I cared about.

So yeah, let's send out for some slow food and kick off a slow debate!

--

[1] http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-za/ [3]

[2] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

[3] Thought for the day: There will always be children so even
    if we screw it up completely the next generation can read
    this and see where we went wrong. :-)

 - a




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