Diversity and community are two concepts that seem to have come of age in this new millennium. Globalization has made everyone aware no society is an island; that communal strength relies on interdependencies and interrelations. A strong community is one made up of many different people with many different skill sets. The question is how to open up OpenACS and encourage the participation of people who could complement the strengths of the existing development base. This is question, but the
challenge is how to open up OpenACS to the marginalized, to share the growth with everyone, to consciously recruit women, the disabled and more people who arent white and privileged. This is what diversity means. If we build communities, if we use our own community, if we care enough to nurture the development of a strong collection of people, lets build something for all of us. Lets take a look at ourselves and see where we want to be, and then move that way.
A step in the right direction for the community has definitely been the interest from the many Universities in Dot.lrn, the new product built on top of OpenACS. Universities have always been aware of their role in society, (usually because they have to keep justifying it to the private sector!) They act as the educators as well as increasing knowledge, at their best they challenge the status quo and allow for the empowerment of the underprivileged. The MIT strategy in creating Dot.LRN revolves around the crucial concept of intellectual commons. Strategical underpinnings for development that reach for such goals are altruistic, but the real life ramifications of carrying out these strategies are not ethereal. The real involvement of Universities in Dot.LRN and OpenACS means that we can discuss community as a real idea, and that this community need not be limited to those who can afford it.
Also, the involvement of well known non-profits, such as Greenpeace is also a step towards a solid commitment to community. Greenpeace has been involved in community building on its own site and has now built up knowledge capital on how to leverage those communities to enact social change.
Investment from these organizations in a diverse community and making products that support diversity, such as access for disabled people, would still be challenging. Frank N suggested that we could immediately open up OpenACS by involving existing communities with the OpenACS architecture. He suggested one such existing community that supports disabled people they need some way to track who they have to support and what the unique conditions for each person is, and OpenACS could provide the ground work to do that. The principle concern for actually getting disabled people to use any online system is accessibility, especially for blind people. Once the accessibility issues are solved youve have a greater reach that is you could create applications for PDAs and make templates that were easy to navigate. It was identified that fixing the templating of OpenACS was the first step, and that this wouldnt really impact the code base at all.
To make our user community at least more diverse we could try and involve existing communities. Existing communities that fall under the diversity umbrella are usually small collections of people with little money. Tallis idea of a Dot.NGO platform would be the perfect catch-all for such little communities. The crucial need for these smaller groups isnt designing the systems that they need, but maintaining them and hosting them. One thing we do need more of in the community as a whole is the service of competitive hosting, (although I understand that we do have some people doing this already)
After chatting for while we came to the point of acknowledging that we have to involve people from diverse backgrounds more. To do that we need to start threads that articulate big ideas and keep these threads from getting too technical. We need to share use cases, to show that many people might share situations (which would show opportunities for developers.) More people sharing requirements and proposals would result in wider collaboration. From within the community we need some key people to speak out more; especially amongst the women.
Bringing more people in is something we could do through advertising or by running training camps. In the past, free training camps were advertised in local linux journals, on NTK.org, and the OpenACS site. During a training session the learners would do problem sets, oriented towards learning how to develop on OpenACS. The benefits from running a boot camp was that the people running it could screen for future developers, it was a good way to sell ACS (the earlier form of OpenACS), and the feeling of giving back to the community. The training sessions were always very resource intensive and expensive, seeing as the training was free. However, now with the involvement of universities possibly the costs of running a new set of trainings could be less expensive, if we could share facilities for training days for example.
Despite the different approaches we might take towards encouraging participation, getting different groups to get involved would take different strategies. Non profits often share similar needs with other non-profits, but might not share the same needs as a womens collective for example. Female geeks might be more inspirational for women and play a greater part in encouraging more women to participate. For NGOs (non governmental organizations), the actual TCL language is a barrier its unknown and the fear factor is a reality. PHP on the other hand is easy to install, is extremely well documented, and provides a pretty and flexible admin interface. OpenACS needs to justify why people should get involved, as opposed to other communities.
To do more documentation aimed at pulling in a whole range of people seems like a good place to start. This documentation would have to underline the enterprise nature of OpenACS, and articulate the structural advantages of the system. As non-profits often start with a random quality product we could still make an impact in this market.
The reality of stronger community will be based on increasing the participation of many different people. OpenACS as a community has the potential to encourage and facilitate the involvement of diverse stakeholders. We should to set our sights not just on acquiring skillsets such as designers, writers and information architects, but on inspiring mindsets such as women, the disabled, and ethnically diverse people from all walks of life.
--- At Copenhagen a few of us gathered around a desk to chat about this idea. From memory these people were myself, Alex Sokoloff, Diana ben-Aaron, Frank N and Talli ---
