Open Source World

Some background

About two years ago I accidently became involvedi n the world of open source software.

What happened was that I had a website that I was running for my children's school. At some point it all became a bit much to manage, and the staff could never really understand how to add content. It happened that my web host at the time added a feature called Fantastico, and Fantastico made it easy to install something called a content management system.

Everything Fantastico offers is "free open source software." I had heard of open source before, but more because of the "philosphical" claims from Richard Stallman about information wanting to be free. Okay, I had also been forced to learn emacs, but honestly for me that was not particularly a strong argument in favor of the philosophy since that was painful, though I suppose a huge improvement over the cards I learned fortran and SPSS on in college.

So, I looked at the various options and read about them online, and eventually decided to use Mambo.

I quickly discovered a huge community of users and developers who would answer my questions and provide me--for free--with everything I needed to make a site that was not only a million times easier to run, but that was also looked a lot better and didn't break everytime someone breathed.

Of course, I didn't turn off my sociological eye while doing this, and I started to notice a lot of similarities between the Mambo world and other (for lack of a better word) communities I have studied over the years. Trust, belief, exchange, reputation and organization--all issues that have been central to my work--playing out right there on public forums, in private messages and other virtual venues and there I was, participant as observer in the classic sense, even though that usage has fallen out of favor.

I'm not much in general a practitioner who puts a lot of personal into the sociological, but I often love the work of people who do. As the drama of Mambo and Joomla! (more about that later) has played out over the last two years, I have not been able to put aside the idea that what was happening could be understood in sociological terms as well as personal ones. I've thought of writing about this for a while, but without being sure of in what way. Did I want to do go do systematic interviewing? No, not really. An analysis of posting patterns and themes? Again, interesting but to what end? So I thought I'd start this and see what I came up with. So here I am. We'll see if anything comes of it.