Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
While I agree that this is a great looking application and service, and I'd love to have it tonight for my neighborhood, I'm looking for more in the connection between this story and the open source way.
It is certainly a good application for the social aspects of practicing the open source way, but so can many other worthy tools - email to sidewalks. People working in the open source way are fundamentally a community of practice:
https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Communities_of_practice
So what is it about this application, or it's development, or it's interaction with the physical community that draws from these principles of the open source way? I'd like to hear more about how Blockboard really can help communities in the practice of becoming better neighborhoods.
I saw a hint of this in the answer about "empower(ing communities) ... to improve their neighborhoods." I'd like to hear more about their plans there. Do they have community outreach people who are coordinating feedback or even finding ways for people in the Mission to maybe more actively participate in the development of the application? It's those loops between the makers/vendors and the users/potential-makers, how are the loops being created, and so forth - that is the really interesting stuff beyond the business model.
Sometimes it makes me cry when I see a culture that really seems open - to itself - and works well - but you can only glimpse it from the outside. Just peeling back the layers of one of these onions is a tearjerker.
Google has long felt like such an organization. For that matter, so has Red Hat and others - being a public company has burdens of confidentiality that affect a commitment to openness. Since you brought Google up as an example, I'll continue suit, but we could easily apply these questions to other companies and organizations.
How do you think this view of Google as a case study of the open source way in upper management fits with other viewpoints about Google in the technology, privacy, open data, etc. communities?
I am not going to generalize nor pick out a single situation and wave it like a flag, but ... Google has been subject to a lot of <a href="http://brainoff.com/weblog/2011/04/11/1635">well-written and researched material</a> that shows it to be like a one-way-mirrored box - you can see outward from the inside, but on the outside light just reflects back.
What is the proper open source way-style manager to do there? Say something such as, "We use open source as a tactical and strategic solution to problems, but we don't think open source should be applied to every Google codebase. We may change our minds, but in the meantime, you get what you get and don't throw a fit."?
What is the authentic way to act when you've been saying for so long, "Open source is best, open source is great," but maybe that's not showing in how you make products or conduct your community work?