Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
Thanks for your response, it mirrors some of my thinking after reading <a href="https://opensource.com/education/10/4/can-professors-teach-open-source#comment-1271">Honey Mak's comments</a>. Because of the wild and natural roots of open source software, many of the pioneers there have that hardy, do-it-yourself attitude that doesn't understand people who are not like that. Those of us who followed these first pioneers have an affinity for that attitude, yet that attitude can be a barrier to a sizeable portion of the population of potential contributors.
> They can, as Honey suggests, tough it out and learn it on their
> own... But why can't we integrate this into formal education?
Singling this point out because it's about something that has been on my mind for the last few years. My friend and colleague <a href="http://blog.melchua.com/">Mel Chua</a> talks about "invisible segfaults" in community. Just as a bug in code might cause the software to silently break and quit, a bug in community interactions can cause that in an individual. Every time someone looks at a community with an eye to participate, and is repulsed either directly, indirecetly, because of an unintended barrier, by hitting an -ism (sexism, ageism, racism, newbieism, etc.), or just about anything, and if that person then goes away without anyone knowing why (or that they were even there and left), it's an invisible segfault.
Sadly, people seem wired to resist seeing, understanding, and changing the conditions that cause the community invisible segfault. Sexism is a good example of a tought problem, because it is more ingrained and less obvious to those being sexist than other discrimination, and many of us are sexist "without meaning it." In reality, it's about how we make people feel unwelcome by identifying and acting differently based on real or perceived differences between people. If I start talking in a fake/parody accent to mimic every person who comes to talk to me about my open source project, it is pretty clear that i) I'm not Robin Williams and it's not remotely funny, and ii) maybe I'm a bit racist or at least culturally clueless. But if I start talking to every woman or young/old person as if they don't understand technology, as if they are an object and not a person, as if they don't belong because they aren't one of the guys-like-me, people don't perceive that as inappropriate (not-Robin Williams) and sexist. Well, some people do, but just as many others don't, and they give the <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Excuses_for_sexist_incidents">usual list of arguments</a>.
It's an obligation of everyone to make our free and open world a welcoming and safe location for those who stop by. We'll find more of them stick around.
These new group of complainers about Facebook, who are first discovering the ugly side of their digital rights (and lack of after signing terms-of-service agreements), are the pool that gives rise to the next group of activists.
It's not the only way to come to see the value of free and open communities vs. walled gardens, but it is one way. This relates to Facebook because if they were an open source project, the real humans involved would have adjusted the bad privacy situation before it hit the wide world. When you develop in a closed fashion, your users suffer. Just look at the privacy mess-up around Google Buzz for another example.
You have a viewpoint on data and privacy that is informed by working at a relatively uncommon business. I recommend that you continue to teach the people who are feeling so heavily impacted and violated by Facebook. Use it as a chance to drive home these lessons instead of dismissing them as whiners who should know better.