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Title: Barn raising and musicians on the green - old ideas in a digital world


Short abstract: (5000 characters)

We like to give it a fancy term, "the open source way", but that's
really just riding the back of a strong and recognizable brand.  What
this is really about is learning from thousands of years of natural
law that describes what people do when they get together over a shared
field of endeavor.

For thousands of years, musicians gathered in the greens and commons
to play for all who would listen.  But they also did some other very
important things when together.  Important for themselves, their
families, and the communities who enjoy all the ways music enhances
their lives.  They shared.  They explored each others' music, learned
from each other, and built new music from that experience.  They
carried stories, songs, rhythms, chords, and musical performing
techniques around the world.

For hundreds of years, when your family needed a new barn, one great
option was a community barn building event.  You plan, prepare, and
organize a location.  You set the foundation, nail down the floor, and
prepare the walls for raising.  You organize the food and the dance
party, then you call everyone in for a single day to bang everything
together.

The musicians wouldn't stand it for long if someone only took of the
songs and never gave back.  They'd stop sharing with that person.

The community wouldn't stand for it if a family called everyone in for
a two week "work party" featuring a bare field, a pile of lumber and
concrete and nails and hammers and saws, and a well still to be dug.

In this presentation, you are introduced to why free and open source
software (FOSS) represent that barnraising and commons on a global
scale, with the same reach as folks in your local community.  How FOSS
is history's first worldwide barn building, complex and troublesome
and beautiful, and ultimately very useful.  Why people are
specifically using the open source brand to talk about how these
methods can be applied to other domains and endeavors.

You may discover something about these domains and endeavors who are
looking at using the open source way.  They either forgot their
sharing roots or grew up so recently that they haven't learned how
sharing freely and openly grows a better and stronger society.  At the
end of this presentation, you should understand why FOSS is not a fad
but rather is the inheritor of a long human tradition around
collaboration, openness, apprenticeship, and working respectfully
within the commons on matters of common good.

Presenting is Karsten Wade, who works on Red Hat's community
leadership team, and who calls himself a community gardener.  For the
last decade, Karsten has been helping people understand how to
apply the open source way to software projects and other domains.
Online Karsten is found at http://iquaid.org, and offline he spends
his time as an urban farmer at http://Fairy-TaleFarm.com.