A buddy of mine mentioned some commentary by Alex Castellanos on CNN that I had missed. Castellanos mentioned Obama telling the public that he needs their help. He made a leap to an important essay of the open source software movement entitled the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.
The gist of the essay in terms of software was that Microsoft was out there building cathedrals — big, cumbersome, often very elaborate software with a central architect. In the meantime, open source software, notably Linux, was being developed in more of a bazaar style. People came and went, the development could be slapdash and disorganized at times, but it was vibrant and the product evolved organically.
Castellanos is suggesting that Obama’s governing style might look a little more like Linux than like Microsoft. We will see. Certainly there is a better chance of an active feedback loop between Obama and the citizenry than there was with Bush/Cheney. Bush and Cheney make Bill Gates look like Linus Torvalds.
Right now it’s easy to project all kinds of hopes and dreams on an Obama Presidency. And this is one of them. But there is reason for optimism on this score with the way he operated his campaign. It was organized, of course, but it also depended a great deal on initiative in the lower echelons of the organization. One of the great disappointments of the Bush administration came after 9/11. The country was united and ready for direction. I got the sense that we were ready to work together if someone would point the way in which we could be most useful. About all we got was a recommendation that we all go shopping or go to Disney World. I get the feeling that President Obama will enlist our aid in more substantial ways.
Some quotes from the Cathedral & the Bazaar that strike me as relevant:
When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.
. . .
I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others.
. . .
Fred Brooks observed that programmer time is not fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later. As we’ve seen previously, he argued that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. Brooks’s Law has been widely regarded as a truism. . . . [However,] the bazaar method, by harnessing the full power of the “egoless programming” effect, strongly mitigates the effect of Brooks’s Law. The principle behind Brooks’s Law is not repealed, but given a large developer population and cheap communications its effects can be swamped by competing nonlinearities that are not otherwise visible. This resembles the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics—the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosions or Linux.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Obama’s governing style looks like.
And the award for Nerdiest Comparison Ever goes to…
Yup.
Ok, but most of the Linux proponents I know are actually libertarians. They like the unregulated, voluntary participation of open source, as opposed to the fiercely regulated, zoning model of MS operating systems. Just saying.
Oh, and fantastic point about Bush & 9/11’s squandered opportunity to lead the ready masses. It was as though the President noticed the opportunity, recognized he should act upon it, and then glommed on the top item from his Wildest Dreams Wish List.
Obama will have free reign to do virtually anything in his first 100 days, just as Bush did post-9/11. With the economy as it is, Obama is expected to institute a sweeping change or two to address it. My hope is that he doesn’t repeat Bush’s mistake, doing something like glomming socialized health care onto the address-the-economy mandate.
While I think a stimulus package would be bad policy, it would be an appropriate response, in this light.
I think our health care system is part of what’s dragging down the economy. If businesses didn’t have to mess around with it in their compensation packages, and if workers weren’t tied to their jobs by their insurance packages, seems like the economy would be more flexible. It used to be that the drag of employer-based health care was sort of incidental, but it’s getting to be the 800 pound gorilla of labor-management negotiations.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I tend to think we’re already paying for universal health care, we’re just not getting it — the resources are getting sunk into paperwork and efforts to avoid claims and overhead, not into actual health care.
Another stimulus package just seems like wasted money to me. But then, I’m no economist.
I’ve thought about a ‘nuclear option’ to change health care provision in this country:
Make it illegal for an employer to provide health insurance to an employee.
Employers could raise salaries to compensate – and health care insurance would be tied to people directly, rather than tying them to a particular employer.
People would tend to make more considered decisions about health care, since it would be a direct expense.
Never happen, I’m sure – we’re too locked in to the legacy of WWII wage freezes that led to the expectation of employer-financed care.
And there’s probably a ton of reasonable objections to this – but that doesn’t make it different from what we have now…
I’d say that Obama’s new site on the transition would uphold the assertion — change.gov looks like the beginnings of a new way of communicating, and a new transparency of government.
And one quibble – there is no force known to modern physics, up to and including nuclear fusion, that can
Good one, Parker. ;)