Yesterday’s OKCon 2008 was great fun, if a long day! I’m still digesting the food for thought that the conference provided—many, small courses; over a dozen if you include the more open sessions after the keynotes, and each followed by a sorbet of questions and debate—so I don’t have a great deal to say about what I heard yet. The field of open knowledge, like that of open source ten or fifteen years ago, is still largely untilled and untidy, and many disparate groups are gradually but warily treading its boundaries, with only a few striking out into its wild heart.
Despite the argument of what constitutes openness being largely resolved in the open-source community, we still found rich pickings of our own. It’s trivial to define openness in, say, data, with its analogies to code; but it would be an error to equate data and knowledge or understanding thereof. The broad consensus was that open knowledge was a combination of both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but also free-as-in-educated and free-as-in-enfranchised. In this way, its analogies lie more in open computing, or open web-navigating, than in open source: a combination of freedom, autonomy and opportunity. Solutions will therefore need to be a complex, messy combination of social, political and technical: less like Python, but more like One Laptop Per Child.
Ben Spigel, who made the connection between OS-then and OK-now explicit, missed the mark a little when he likened the OK community to Linux’s. After this conference, I think we need to stretch even further back, to such early efforts as the FSF and GNU. There are still moral complexities to be resolved, difficult decisions about direction to be made, and occasionally vehement arguments to be had: only once all that is settled can we sit back and just worry about the OK equivalent of killer apps, whatever those might turn out to be.
