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Laura Hilliger is a writer, educator and technologist. She’s a multimedia designer and developer, a technical liaison, a project manager, an open web advocate who is happiest in collaborative environments. She’s a co-founder of We Are Open Co-op, an Ambassador for Opensource.com, is working to help open up Greenpeace, and a Mozilla alum. Find her on Twitter and Mastodon as @epilepticrabbit
Authored Comments
Excellent post and lots to think about. I'm particularly interested in the big tension of "privilege".
Some phrasing:
"competitive excellence [...], the antithesis of privilege"
"Everyone has an equal chance to be heard"
These are the ideal, but not the reality. Which you start to address with:
"some voices count more than others"
I feel like the broad conversation around this governance structure leaves out the *reality* of privilege. If those who gain merit all started from the same place, the system would, indeed, reward those who show competitive excellence. But the issue of diversity and inclusion is that people don't start from the same starting line. Some voices count more than others before air has even passed the larynx.
In the iron rectangle this issue is loosely addressed, but as we further our discussions around meritocracy, we should try to find ways to level the playing field. I doubt there is an organization on the planet that wouldn't have some sort of trapezoid, and I'm interested in how we design structures and govern in a way that gets us closer to the ideal.
Thanks very much for having this conversation in the open. I'm eager to see where it goes from here!
This is an excellent point. It would be a wonderful article idea to talk a bit about the different open source personalities that are out there. I especially like the idea that your personality might match specifically because someone was "itching for someone like you". Having confidence that they were, indeed, waiting for YOU seems like a good way to facilitate a strong relationship. Thanks for commenting!