How I came to care about open content

I started working for Consumer Reports in 2012 and just passed my five-year anniversary as their staff Wikipedia editor. I see five years as a milestone and I started thinking about how I came to be where I am.

I care about the concept called “open content” or “free culture“. I would say that modern cyberculture began in 1995 but even after all this time it is difficult to describe the common experiences that I and other people have had in trying to promote the sharing of information. I want people to be able to have access to information and media resources, and I want for people to be able to share creative works, scientific information, free and open source software, and open data online. As it has happened, these days I am developing Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is incidental to my actual wish for everyone in the world to have access to information. I feel that using Wikipedia is an efficient way to spend my time, but before I came to Wikipedia, I tried to share information in other ways and I failed. With Wikipedia, I have had more success and impact than I have had in trying other things. I want to share some of the experiences I have had as examples of how people like me come to feel strongly about Wikipedia or other open content activist causes.

When I was a teenager in high school I lived in West Orange, Texas, which was a town of population 4,000. I was fortunate that there was a public library not far from me – only three miles away. The library was considered to be in another town. There was a time in my teenage years when I became old enough to ride my bicycle to the library and read books there. I did not have a library card, which meant that I could not check books out from the library even though I could read them in the library. One day I asked the librarian if there was any discount on library cards for students or teenagers. The librarian told me that this was not possible, and that I would have to pay the full fee. That seemed right to me at the time, and I did not think more about the matter. On Saturdays sometimes I would go to the library in the morning, read what I liked, then go home without borrowing any books from the library because I could not afford to buy a membership with the library. Since I was not a resident of the town where the library was located, I would need to pay more than other people who paid tax in that town. Over the years, when I could afford library cards, I always asked about the price and the extra money that I had to pay for being from out of town. All of these experiences became more meaningful to me when I finally left my home town to attend college elsewhere. When I was 18 years old and I enrolled in college, I was surprised that the college had its own libraries in multiple buildings on campus. Each of them were larger than any other library I had seen to that point, and I was amazed that as a student I could visit it any time and borrow whatever books I liked. I felt that I had a privilege because I lived close enough to visit the library when I liked. Some years after that, I had more experiences with other libraries, and I came to realize that in larger cities of wealthier countries a major goal of many libraries was to invite people in and encourage them to use the library’s resources. In my home town the city management designed the library to create barriers to restrict its use to certain people who could pay for access. In some other places in the world the management might design libraries in a way that guides the staff to encourage local people to use the library resources as much as possible. I came to realize that the geographical location where a person lives is a major influence on the opportunities and privileges that a person has, and that people with access to urban infrastructure can do things that are impossible for people who live in smaller towns. I started to want to increase access to library services somehow.

When I was 21 years old I moved to Seattle. One of the early experiences that I had in Seattle was seeing restaurants that served Indian food. I asked other people if that meant that people from India lived in Seattle, because I was imagining that only people from India would eat at an Indian restaurant. At that time in my life, I could not imagine that people would want to eat food from a culture other than their own. I was told that anyone could eat at an Indian restaurant. I went to one with a friend, and I thought it was strange that I as a person from Texas could eat food of the sort eaten in India. I came to make Indian friends. In January 2007 I visited India for the first time. When I went to India I visited libraries, universities, and nonprofit organizations doing education and research. I came to realize that library access was not an option for typical people in India, and by extension, people in the world who live in places without a strong economy funding public infrastructure. I imagined that a way to increase access to information was to encourage local people to create websites and present their own information in their own publishing platforms, and I spent time on that first trip to India training people and organizations to set up websites and share information online. I had a few successes in this and many great failures. My successes included coming to understand how information sharing worked in a foreign culture, and in making like-minded friends who wanted to share information in India, and in quickly experiencing the pain and getting the insight from a lot of costly failed projects in a short time. Some of my failures included assuming that what works in one culture can work in another and in underestimating the importance of making available resources more accessible. My failed projects in India turned me toward Wikipedia, because in thinking about how people in India got information, I came to believe that Wikipedia was already a popular information resource and one that already was enjoying the benefit of popularity and attention. I started imagining that it would be easier to share information in Wikipedia than it would be to have less restrictive publishing and sharing models, but then also to have to develop advertising and outreach systems so that people could find that information if it were outside a popular publisher like Wikipedia already was.

Upon returning from India in 2007 I took a job doing clinical research. The experience led me to many ideas about open science, open data, and open content, but the most striking realization I had in the beginning was that the software that I was using to record research results was free software that was somewhat reskinned with branding details and had been marketed to my research organization as proprietary software. The managers of the research organization were totally unaware that they were paying for free software, and they only wanted out of the box use of a software solution. They wanted to pay for technical support in case anything went wrong with the software, but the reality was that they were licensing the software from a local vendor who knew next to nothing about our organization’s software needs and who was doing a blanket marketing campaign to provide office software at a premium price to the most clueless organizations. I was not terribly surprised that this happened at my local organization, but I was struck to realize that this was the contemporary state of software distribution. Clueless managers with no interest in software make purchase decisions for organizations, and the purchase decision which they are most likely to make is accepting a recommendation from a local vendor who knows little to nothing about an industry but who is willing to provide free software for a fee. I began to reflect on the great value that software vendors can provide when they offer technical support for using free software or when they develop free software on demand for clients. I also began to reflect upon how many organizations which use free software are unaware that they have made a choice to use free software, and that the marketplace is full of vendors offering low-quality choices, and that the people with the professional status to make decisions in this marketplace are often ignorant of how to make a thoughtful purchase decision. I began to poke around and see how much of the software being used for our research was proprietary forks of free software, and the answer was most of it. The research being done at my organization was also being done at more than 10 other research sites, and somehow for some reason, most of these sites were managing the research with different software. Not only was my one research site paying huge fees for free software and bad service, but also, all the other sites were doing the same thing with other vendors and all of the research organizations were using software which was incompatible for communicating the research among each other. I expected that in 2007 the world had embraced digital culture. Now in 2016 I know that is not true, and I expect that in many places software practices in research are still as they were in 2007. I perceive waste in the industry and wish that people would collectively invest in free, shared software to everyone’s mutual benefit. The budget from any two organizations could develop any piece of software immensely, but instead, thousands of organizations invest independently in proprietary software that hardly meets anyone’s needs and hardly improves the shared marketplace.

In 2007 after that trip to India I had gained several new interests. I took that job in clinical research, I joined a clinical research ethics board where I still serve today, I started learning about open culture, and I started to more intently edit Wikipedia when previously I only edited casually. Over time these and other experiences led me into the Wikipedia community. In Wikipedia, it is taken for granted that everyone is there to share information first and not to try to isolate resources as propriety or for the benefit of only certain individuals. There is no pretense of anyone taking public resources and saying that only certain people can use them, but instead, anyone can share and reuse whatever they find on Wikipedia. Anyone in Wikipedia can read the content, share their own contributions, talk with other people about market demand without discussing commercial marketability, and copy the software for any reason they like and reuse it as they like. Whatever other problems the Wikipedia community, it is a place where people can confidentially say together that the intent is to share the best available learning resources among whomever wishes to use them.