No subject

opinion, to think about the above within the context of a spectrum of
reasons for forking. Oppositional forking is focused more on a core
motivation of "control". The emergence of OpenBSD is a good example of
an oppositional forking of a highly visible project, where the fork
was focused on control, and where the initiator was powerful enough to
sway enough people to follow.

A project like GNU/Linux, or Wikipedia simply do not encourage
forking. While the technical affordances exist, the will among
participants does not. Therefore, forking in these projects would tend
to be oppositional if they are to succeed.  The operational processes
in these successful monolithic projects are instead focusing energies
on tasks within the monolithic Significant numbers of people in these
projects are not operating on the fundamental assumption of the need
for "control"/"power".  These motivations are lining up more with what
Steven Weber discusses in "Success of Open Source". People have a
practical problem to solve, and see momentum and potential to solve
the problem in the monolithic project, and so align with the project
to "scratch an itch". (This is what I am doing now with Ubuntu,
Arduino, Drupal, Ruby on Rails etc etc)

Again, these monolithic projects tend to create an internal social
norm that *does not* encourage forking of any kind. Instead the
project encourages that people direct their energies towards
integrating their situational needs into the the monolithic project.
And, this can often work. Drupal is a really great example of this.
There are probably over 5000 modules in total in their repository.
There are basically 0 successful forks of Drupal, of any kind. What
happens with Drupal is what I brought up earlier: instead of people
exercising their "right to fork", they instead exercise their "right
to leave". If people feel overly constrained by the project, and the
project does not encourage amicable forking, people leave. This
leaving has not really hurt Drupal's momentum, in my opinion (although
there have been a few key people who's leaving was a blow to the core
development team). Mostly because in the case of Drupal, there are
many more new people arriving in the project to take the place of
those who leave.

The project makes deliberate,  successively-developed sets of
decisions on whether to create conditions that encourage or discourage
forking, I contend. The basic goal of the system, and the fundamental
worldview(s) of the people guiding the system, determine the
configuration of the system.

If I think my fundamental problem is that I need to make "one thing"
(GNU/Linux, or Wikipedia) then I am going to do my best to help guide
and direct energies towards the evolution and sustenance of that "one
thing". I will try to reshape the "many" into the "one".

However, if I think my fundamental problem is that I need to be able
to take many things, and reshape them into many things (perhaps
because I think that the problem I am solving a is a Situated Software
problem, for instance?
http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html ) then, I will
try to shape the simple rules of the system to leverage the energies
of contributors who agree with me. Amicable forking and
interoperability will be part of the simple basic rules of the system.



Nate writes:

"That is, the asymmetries in the original project
would carry over. For example, Larry Sanger might be able to fork Wikipedia,
but the chances that I would be able to do it are much smaller. I would say
zero! The chances of Jim Wales starting a fork might be greater again. The
point however, is that each person is in a different position in relation to
the project."


Well, what if a local library decided to do a local fork of certain
parts of wikipedia (like articles about local history, facts and
culture), maybe syncing up articles when they meet the local fork
standard?


If there is a utility among participants in the external copying and
recreation of part or all of the project, beyond trying to usurp and
replace wikipedia, then the forking can succeed by people without the
influence of someone like Larry Sanger.

The above could be large drift from what you are getting at, and does
not really negate anything you have said thus far, Nate. Just adding
another facet on to the perspective of how and why forks do not seem
to be happening very much in large and successful projects.





>
> Ok, I don't disagree with any of this. Although I think we need to be
> careful not let the language of web 2.0 - natural adaptation, innovation,
> community and so on -

An aside: (I contend that it is not just language, but actual
approaches and processes. And, really has less to do with "web 2.0",
and more to do with fundamental assumptions about existential problems
inherent in humans. But that is just my opinion.)

>blind us to the genuine antagonistic, political
> moments in so-called open and collaborative projects. There are important
> parallels here, I think, with what Jodi Dean writes about democracy in the
> journal Parallax, as well as Chantal Mouffe's earlier work on the
> post-political drive of neo-liberalism.



Agreed. Your discussion here is important. I guess I was reading it
and saying "let's not be blinded by those examples that are
oppositional, to the examples that are inherent to the system". But, I
don't want to hijack or derail the exchange, nor the discussion about
the emergence of connections among published work among participants.
Will be interested to know more about the parallels. So long as there
are huge amounts of people who are trying to solve problems by shaping
the "many" into "one" this discussion will be extremely important.


>
> Chris: the question of infrastructure is vital in all this and points to the
> material constraints of any so-called immaterial project. In short, scale
> and energy. I agree completely.
>
>>
> Best
>
> Nate
>
> --
> Nate Tkacz
>
> PhD Candidate
> School of Culture and Communication
> University of Melbourne
>
> mail: tkaczn at unimelb.edu.au
> twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__
> new blog: http://thesimplearrow.wordpress.com/
>
>



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