The importance of Changing the World
One thing that everyone can agree on is that the world has a lot of problems at the moment, problems which could potentially cause serious issues in our continued development as a species. However beside the obviously pressing issues related to climate change, peek oil, the ever rising population and the politics of global conflict are the fundamental dramas of life, the ageless need for food, water and shelter which dog such a large percentage of the human population even in this modern age. Unless we can begin to make inroads into these areas then our future is bleak, desperation looks to become the norm and with it desperation brings many distasteful and horrific things like brutality and selfishness - the freer the world is of these things the nicer it is to live in.
That should be our mission statement in life, to make the world nice to live in for all it's inhabitants - at the moment the system is struggling to support a small percentage of the population and even those of us lucky enough to live a relatively privileged life are restrained in many unfortunate ways. Much of the world is hostile to us, many things limited - it has been said if one wants to afford to live a modest life in today's world one must instead devote all their energies into wasting it with senseless toil and labour.
but If instead of wasting humanities vast potential on conflict and monopoly building we were instead to establish systems which allow everyone in the world to access, understand and afford the processes of self-betterment then we might just find that by the time we come to retire the world has become a much nicer place than the one we were born into.
That should be our mission statement in life, to make the world nice to live in for all it's inhabitants - at the moment the system is struggling to support a small percentage of the population and even those of us lucky enough to live a relatively privileged life are restrained in many unfortunate ways. Much of the world is hostile to us, many things limited - it has been said if one wants to afford to live a modest life in today's world one must instead devote all their energies into wasting it with senseless toil and labour.
but If instead of wasting humanities vast potential on conflict and monopoly building we were instead to establish systems which allow everyone in the world to access, understand and afford the processes of self-betterment then we might just find that by the time we come to retire the world has become a much nicer place than the one we were born into.
How to Change the World
Open Source development is an important tool in improving the world, when for example an office suite is created for linux that gives everyone in the world free access to letter writing facilities; this means that every single home and office has the option of lowering their overheads. When every single person in the world with access to a computer also has access to a full and effective array of software tools this means that all over the world people can afford to involve themselves in creating new media and also they can spend their money on the vital resources which will allow the creation of a better world locally - if switching to open source meant that the local corner-shop saved themselves 10% of their running costs that would mean they could charge 10% less while remaining competitive, or devote 10% more to purchasing better quality merchandise, expanding their business, or et cetera.
When high quality open source software is available everyone from the poorest child of an inner city crack addict to the king of the most distant rural enclave suddenly has access to the tools of self education and self expression which the new programs allow, be this the ability to record and edit a video or access to programming languages and compliers, everyone has a slightly better and cheaper access to a way of improving the world or simply improving themselves and their life-experience. This in turn naturally increases the amount of people able to forward the open source world while also increases the quality of tool available to them, thus we see the establishment of a positive feedback cycle within the open source community; positive action breeds positive action.
As open design helps lower the cost of running any and every business or enterprise this will also drive down the cost of everything from high technology to basic survival, it facilitates cottage industry and localised manufacture as well as increasing the choice available to the end user. When you add to the open source world you're doing more than just helping the one project, you're helping the project help other projects and through a tangled web of influence you're helping everyone and everything.
So it is vital to find the projects which are helping to improve the world and to help them grow, by carefully directing our resources we can have a huge impact on the future of the world.
When high quality open source software is available everyone from the poorest child of an inner city crack addict to the king of the most distant rural enclave suddenly has access to the tools of self education and self expression which the new programs allow, be this the ability to record and edit a video or access to programming languages and compliers, everyone has a slightly better and cheaper access to a way of improving the world or simply improving themselves and their life-experience. This in turn naturally increases the amount of people able to forward the open source world while also increases the quality of tool available to them, thus we see the establishment of a positive feedback cycle within the open source community; positive action breeds positive action.
As open design helps lower the cost of running any and every business or enterprise this will also drive down the cost of everything from high technology to basic survival, it facilitates cottage industry and localised manufacture as well as increasing the choice available to the end user. When you add to the open source world you're doing more than just helping the one project, you're helping the project help other projects and through a tangled web of influence you're helping everyone and everything.
So it is vital to find the projects which are helping to improve the world and to help them grow, by carefully directing our resources we can have a huge impact on the future of the world.
Personal strategies for getting involved
Beside the obvious and most important process of actually involving yourself in projects and working on them personally there are other ways we can help forward the movement, there are the vital steps of 'spreading the word' and helping to fund the projects we believe in.
It is first and foremost vital that new users discover the open source solutions which people are providing for them, a company like Apple for example can afford to spend large amounts of time and money in making their brands well known and their products widely available however an individual developer or small project simply can't spare the resources which would be much better spent towards improvement of the product - this means it is up to us to actively go and seek out positive and promising things and to tell other people about them, whether this means telling your best friend where they can get free video editing software, posting on the internet to inform strangers or handing out leaflets on the street - the more people who know about the existence of better options the more people will use them, learn about them and maybe somehow contribute to them.
It is important then to look out for times where you can offer an open source solution; to make a point of answering people who post on yahoo answers to ask where they can get a free video editor, to make a point of looking for people who could benefit from something and showing them the options which corporate controlled media simply isn't able or willing to mention because of the dire need they have of advertising money.
And this act of discovering new projects is also an important part of the next step - you need to support open and independent forms of media, that means not relying on mainstream sources for your tech news but seeking out sources which are, to quote stallman 'positive in the freedom dimension' - that is to say sources which are, like you, trying to be a positive force in the world, trying to improve the world and give people freedoms rather than simply trying to improve their personal bank balance.
So, once your friends know they have the choice of open source and you're well used to pointing people at positive and productive solutions to fulfil their needs then you should by now have a pretty good idea of what and who's important to you in the open source movement. Let's assume for a moment that you've found Archive.org to be very useful when offering people an insight into the availability of public domain film and you've found Kdenlive to be a great video editor, if you find that you've spent so much time remixing old videos that you've been too busy to buy the $35 dollar game you normally would have that month then maybe you could think about donating twenty dollars into helping those projects keep running?
if you want to help forward open source while keeping your full time job and normal way of life then I think one of the best ways you can do that is to become a micro-patron of open source projects. This means making an effort to donate small but regular sums of money to projects which are working on things which you believe are going to help open source and humanity in general (or just look cool).
It's of course important to consider who you're donating to and how your donation will be used, i'll go into detail later about various methods of funding a community project but for now lets consider the two most basic uses of donated money; running costs and living expenses. Even the simple task of hosting a website costs a lot of money in server charges, bandwidth, and et cetera - if a project can't afford to have a website or to host downloadable files then that project isn't going to be able to share what it does with the world. Projects like SourceForge and GitHub who host open source software projects and the related community have been created to bridge this gap and to make small projects easier to establish and maintain, it's important when considering which companies to add to your donation portfolio to remember not just the end-user projects but also the facilitators of the greater community. However of course even with the server side costs being greatly diminished working on an open source project still incurs many costs including electricity and internet connections as well as the unavoidable cost of living as a human, it's a simple fact of reality that without a certain amount of money coming in a person simply can't afford to pay their rent, to buy their shopping or in some cases to survive at all, this means they won't be able to devote time to open source projects!
Most open source contributors also have a job which supply's most of their income but also takes up most of their time, it's becoming ever more common though for a successful project to employ full or part time coders, researchers and documenters. Some projects have experimented with using donated money to put 'bounties' or rewards on certain tasks such as bug fixes or implementation of new features, this is a useful way to direct the development of projects and to get uninteresting of tough tasks completed while engaging and involving the entire community. Competitions and prize funds are also growing in popularity, these are often in the form of a challenge to make say the quickest png loading library or the best tutorial video, this again allows wide participation and creates a positive net gain to the community. It is of course the projects choice how they spend donations, but a canny investor will of course prefer to see their money put to good use.
The next question is, how to donate? A one time donation will help meet the basic running costs and maybe allow for the purchase of supplies and new equipment however relying on random and spontaneous donations brings with it a whole host of problems, it's hard to plan and predict income so monthly bills become much harder to organize and the constant pressure to get donations can divert time and effort from the important goal of producing a good product. This is why many projects now prefer recurring donations, if one thousand people sign up to pay two dollars a month then that project can be assured of four thousand dollars monthly; this should enable to them to employ a key player to work full time on the project, a professional hosting company to provide a high quality presence on the internet or etc.
Many of the great poets of old were able to devote their life to writing simply because some rich lord was their patron, he would allow them a wage of however many florins or duckets a year as long as they occasionally produced great works for the benefact of literature; it was seen as a important mark of social standing to be funding a great mind or two. Today, thanks to the internet, we have to ability to recreate that system in a democratic and crowd-sourced way. For little more than a few coins a month you can employ and fund people to actively work on making the future better for you! Yes, you can be the fatcat-aristocratic-lord-on-high who chooses which direction the world travels in; for ten dollars you can fund five people - assuming a thousand other people agree and do likewise... If you love robotics then you can ensure that there are people working to make your dream a reality, if you love animation you can ensure that blender keeps growing, whatever you love you can help it progress and grow, you can be the force that moves us into a better world.
It is first and foremost vital that new users discover the open source solutions which people are providing for them, a company like Apple for example can afford to spend large amounts of time and money in making their brands well known and their products widely available however an individual developer or small project simply can't spare the resources which would be much better spent towards improvement of the product - this means it is up to us to actively go and seek out positive and promising things and to tell other people about them, whether this means telling your best friend where they can get free video editing software, posting on the internet to inform strangers or handing out leaflets on the street - the more people who know about the existence of better options the more people will use them, learn about them and maybe somehow contribute to them.
It is important then to look out for times where you can offer an open source solution; to make a point of answering people who post on yahoo answers to ask where they can get a free video editor, to make a point of looking for people who could benefit from something and showing them the options which corporate controlled media simply isn't able or willing to mention because of the dire need they have of advertising money.
And this act of discovering new projects is also an important part of the next step - you need to support open and independent forms of media, that means not relying on mainstream sources for your tech news but seeking out sources which are, to quote stallman 'positive in the freedom dimension' - that is to say sources which are, like you, trying to be a positive force in the world, trying to improve the world and give people freedoms rather than simply trying to improve their personal bank balance.
So, once your friends know they have the choice of open source and you're well used to pointing people at positive and productive solutions to fulfil their needs then you should by now have a pretty good idea of what and who's important to you in the open source movement. Let's assume for a moment that you've found Archive.org to be very useful when offering people an insight into the availability of public domain film and you've found Kdenlive to be a great video editor, if you find that you've spent so much time remixing old videos that you've been too busy to buy the $35 dollar game you normally would have that month then maybe you could think about donating twenty dollars into helping those projects keep running?
if you want to help forward open source while keeping your full time job and normal way of life then I think one of the best ways you can do that is to become a micro-patron of open source projects. This means making an effort to donate small but regular sums of money to projects which are working on things which you believe are going to help open source and humanity in general (or just look cool).
It's of course important to consider who you're donating to and how your donation will be used, i'll go into detail later about various methods of funding a community project but for now lets consider the two most basic uses of donated money; running costs and living expenses. Even the simple task of hosting a website costs a lot of money in server charges, bandwidth, and et cetera - if a project can't afford to have a website or to host downloadable files then that project isn't going to be able to share what it does with the world. Projects like SourceForge and GitHub who host open source software projects and the related community have been created to bridge this gap and to make small projects easier to establish and maintain, it's important when considering which companies to add to your donation portfolio to remember not just the end-user projects but also the facilitators of the greater community. However of course even with the server side costs being greatly diminished working on an open source project still incurs many costs including electricity and internet connections as well as the unavoidable cost of living as a human, it's a simple fact of reality that without a certain amount of money coming in a person simply can't afford to pay their rent, to buy their shopping or in some cases to survive at all, this means they won't be able to devote time to open source projects!
Most open source contributors also have a job which supply's most of their income but also takes up most of their time, it's becoming ever more common though for a successful project to employ full or part time coders, researchers and documenters. Some projects have experimented with using donated money to put 'bounties' or rewards on certain tasks such as bug fixes or implementation of new features, this is a useful way to direct the development of projects and to get uninteresting of tough tasks completed while engaging and involving the entire community. Competitions and prize funds are also growing in popularity, these are often in the form of a challenge to make say the quickest png loading library or the best tutorial video, this again allows wide participation and creates a positive net gain to the community. It is of course the projects choice how they spend donations, but a canny investor will of course prefer to see their money put to good use.
The next question is, how to donate? A one time donation will help meet the basic running costs and maybe allow for the purchase of supplies and new equipment however relying on random and spontaneous donations brings with it a whole host of problems, it's hard to plan and predict income so monthly bills become much harder to organize and the constant pressure to get donations can divert time and effort from the important goal of producing a good product. This is why many projects now prefer recurring donations, if one thousand people sign up to pay two dollars a month then that project can be assured of four thousand dollars monthly; this should enable to them to employ a key player to work full time on the project, a professional hosting company to provide a high quality presence on the internet or etc.
Many of the great poets of old were able to devote their life to writing simply because some rich lord was their patron, he would allow them a wage of however many florins or duckets a year as long as they occasionally produced great works for the benefact of literature; it was seen as a important mark of social standing to be funding a great mind or two. Today, thanks to the internet, we have to ability to recreate that system in a democratic and crowd-sourced way. For little more than a few coins a month you can employ and fund people to actively work on making the future better for you! Yes, you can be the fatcat-aristocratic-lord-on-high who chooses which direction the world travels in; for ten dollars you can fund five people - assuming a thousand other people agree and do likewise... If you love robotics then you can ensure that there are people working to make your dream a reality, if you love animation you can ensure that blender keeps growing, whatever you love you can help it progress and grow, you can be the force that moves us into a better world.