August 12, 2005
Open source
Leadership in politics, corporations and open source
Joi responding to Mitchell's post about open source leadership is prompting me to write up some thoughts that have been circling in my head for some time. Mitchell says:
... what does it take to guide a foundation, as Allison does? Well, it takes a sense of people, and good intuition for what sorts of seemingly simple topics are likely to generate giant tensions if not handled delicately. It takes knowing when to let an issue fade away and when to make sure it is completely resolved. It takes an ability to find a common ground, and enough presence (or trust, or reputation, or *something*) to get people to consider that common ground.
Spot on! Joi quotes "Leader-Follower essay by Dee Hock - the founder of VISA" and goes on to say:
What I saw in the leaders of open source projects and in the communities in general was a very strong sense of this kind of leadership. Open source projects have their share of politics and petty problems and clearly leaders of other types of organization do and should exhibit these sorts of leadership traits. However, I definitely saw something special in these open source leaders which reminded me of the leaders that Dee Hock described. They had strong ethics, were humble, were extremely sensitive of the needs of their community and lead more through coordination and management of processes than through exercise of authority. This was in stark contract to some of the conversations I have had at various CEO forums where people talked about "human resources" as if they were cogs and seemed to feel that the CEO had some divine right to more money and more power.
Well put Joi! For some time I had been lamenting that most of our politicians are no longer charismatic leaders, but lying crooks who are hungry for power. In today's political climate, being the honest, straight shooting person will leave you with precisely zero chances at being elected. The muckrakers will fling poo at you until the public laughs you off the stage.
I think that the true leaders have long since left politics for a less harrowing and more (legally) lucrative private sector. Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs -- would they have been good political leaders 50 or 100 years ago? Perhaps. Instead of seeing well run countries, we see well run private enterprise.
And now that Mitchell and Joi chime in about open source leadership, its starting to dawn on me that we're about to witness another shift from the private sector to the open source world. The words that were used to describe open source source leaders were the words I have read in text books, attributed to former leaders. Granted text books can sugar coat a whole number of things (e.g. Ronald Reagan), but the general acts of leaders from ages past seem so much more cognizant of their constituents than what we have today.
And open source leaders have a really challenging job cut out for them. Political leaders have a mandate (or used to) and taxes with which to run the government. Private enterprise has income and paychecks to motivate people. Open source has much more tenuous tools available at its disposal (crediting contributors, obscure fame, community standing, etc.), yet it can change the world through massive projects like Linux and the Mozilla Foundation.
Its clear that you are a true leader when you can coordinate tons of people to change the world, while being able to offer only tenous rewards to the people you lead. And with that, I thank all the open source leaders out there!
Posted by Mayhem at August 12, 2005 12:38 PM
The problem with trying to export open-source thinking to politics is that governmennt is, by definition, a local monopoly on the characteristic things in its domain (arbitration of justice, using force, etc.) In other words, it's what Microsoft dreams of being.
Occasionally there are attempts to crash the monopoly - either by upstart individuals (Lysander Spooner trying to start his own post office or his own currency), by adjacent monopolies (take that, Saddam), or by reformers (lets privatize the post office, or the prison system, or let Burt Rutan compete with NASA on an even playing field).
Open-sourcizing the government isn't going to come from picking the right people to be at the top of the current structure, but from changing that structure - making it more open, less monopolistic, more radically democratic. Basically the old 18th Century liberal dream of Paine, Jefferson & their crew.
For better or for worse, the U.S.A. has been a strong case against the feasability of that dream, much in the same way that the U.S.S.R. made communists look ridiculous.
Interesting point -- I hadn't thought of applying OSS principles to goverment -- I'm not sure if that would ever apply.
I merely wanted to point out that this shift in leadership had ocurred, with no suggestion as to how to fix it. I think we'd need to overthrow the whole government to make any serious changes, but its not time for that yet.
"most of our politicians are no longer charismatic leaders, but lying crooks who are hungry for power."
Replace "no longer" with "not" and you probably have a true statement. When were most policians not lying crooks hungry for power? The ones we remember tend to be the charismatic (among other things) ones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias), but if you look closely at most of them, they're still power hungry crooks.
"In today's political climate, being the honest, straight shooting person will leave you with precisely zero chances at being elected. The muckrakers will fling poo at you until the public laughs you off the stage.
Replace "today's" with "almost any". Sensationalists in the press have always been willing to fling poo. I don't have a reference now, but I gather that in the past (the article I'm thinking of may have focused on 1800s U.S. politics) the poo flinging was considerably wilder--pretty much anything went, including naming your opponent as the figure in goatse.cx, had that existed at the time. In the 1950s there was McCarthy. Etc.
Idealizing the past to criticize the present is pointless. The past sucked.
I also don't really know what "OSS principles in government" might mean, but hopefully it will become obvious one day. Who would've imagined that open source or wikipedia could work? The latter in particular seems impossible, but it works, including their governance system. I don't see anything recently posted of obvious relevance, but I think the vague concept of OSS applied to politics is near and dear to some of the contributors at http://www.ofbyandfor.org
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