AdaCamp DC
Jul. 13th, 2012 23:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiI mentioned recently that I had received a travel grant to attend AdaCamp DC, a project of the Ada Initiative, and I have just returned from that trip. Short version: too short! I had a great time in which I learned a lot, and as other attendees mentioned, it was great to be among a group of people who, by and large, get it.
I traded shamelessly on my position as a committee chair for the Organization for Transformative Works in my application, and I was really grateful that the organizers decided to take the "open culture" part of open stuff seriously - they wound up accepting not only me but several other OTW staffers, as well as a number of fans, and one of the most interesting sessions I attended (it being an unconference, all programming is user-generated) discussed how to bring fandom into the open culture movement in the minds of fans themselves, as well as of open stuff people. I don't have any silver bullets for that problem, other than talking about each side to the other, which is part of what I tried to do at AdaCamp. But I do think that the open stuff (and particularly open source) movements have a lot to teach the OTW in particular, so here's a brief stab at trying to summarize what I learned, or what AdaCamp made me think about.
# "90% of open source is about communication, not about code." It's been common knowledge for about a year now that the OTW needs to move to a more sustainable, procedural organizational format. One of the things this means is writing documentation (and, for my part, acknowledging my part in the OTW's current lack of adequate documentation). Another is that, as another session reminded me, we need to…
# Destroy all silos. Open stuff is not served by people not communicating, or by people remaining in their (literal or metaphorical) bunkers and silos working solely on their own thing. That's pretty much the opposite of open stuff, and for that matter, the opposite of participatory fandom too (you're totally a part of fandom if you're a lurker!). Everything everyone contributes to a project should be viewable to the other people working on that project, who ideally should be empowered to check and make needed changes to those contributions.
# Being involved in open stuff is about motivation and staying power. Or, in other words, people may have high initial motivation, but open stuff needs to be set up so that they feel like they want to stay. This ties straight back into sustainability.
This is probably old hat to people who are more familiar with open source and technology than I am (or, for that matter, more used to thinking about open culture as such than I am), but one thing's for certain: AdaCamp was a fantastic experience in a supportive environment in which I was able to meet some really awesome and wonderful people. I generally find that whenever I go out among tech people I learn a ton of things and come back with new ways of thinking about the world, and this unconference was no exception. I really hope that there are more of them in the future, and that I can go again.
Also, I got an Ada Lovelace portrait sticker, and it is now on my iPad case. Win.
I traded shamelessly on my position as a committee chair for the Organization for Transformative Works in my application, and I was really grateful that the organizers decided to take the "open culture" part of open stuff seriously - they wound up accepting not only me but several other OTW staffers, as well as a number of fans, and one of the most interesting sessions I attended (it being an unconference, all programming is user-generated) discussed how to bring fandom into the open culture movement in the minds of fans themselves, as well as of open stuff people. I don't have any silver bullets for that problem, other than talking about each side to the other, which is part of what I tried to do at AdaCamp. But I do think that the open stuff (and particularly open source) movements have a lot to teach the OTW in particular, so here's a brief stab at trying to summarize what I learned, or what AdaCamp made me think about.
# "90% of open source is about communication, not about code." It's been common knowledge for about a year now that the OTW needs to move to a more sustainable, procedural organizational format. One of the things this means is writing documentation (and, for my part, acknowledging my part in the OTW's current lack of adequate documentation). Another is that, as another session reminded me, we need to…
# Destroy all silos. Open stuff is not served by people not communicating, or by people remaining in their (literal or metaphorical) bunkers and silos working solely on their own thing. That's pretty much the opposite of open stuff, and for that matter, the opposite of participatory fandom too (you're totally a part of fandom if you're a lurker!). Everything everyone contributes to a project should be viewable to the other people working on that project, who ideally should be empowered to check and make needed changes to those contributions.
# Being involved in open stuff is about motivation and staying power. Or, in other words, people may have high initial motivation, but open stuff needs to be set up so that they feel like they want to stay. This ties straight back into sustainability.
This is probably old hat to people who are more familiar with open source and technology than I am (or, for that matter, more used to thinking about open culture as such than I am), but one thing's for certain: AdaCamp was a fantastic experience in a supportive environment in which I was able to meet some really awesome and wonderful people. I generally find that whenever I go out among tech people I learn a ton of things and come back with new ways of thinking about the world, and this unconference was no exception. I really hope that there are more of them in the future, and that I can go again.
Also, I got an Ada Lovelace portrait sticker, and it is now on my iPad case. Win.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-16 18:40 (UTC)