Little Nadia Model Ala
Ranee Wates
Nadia Eghbal is uniquely positioned to write about open source having spent almost two years in developer relations at the Alexandrian library of open source, GitHub. She then spent two years continuing her quasi-anthropological study of open source at Protocol Labs, and now works in writer relations at Substack (host of this publication). Her new book is Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, which like her career trajectory, starts in open source software but ends up grappling with larger issues of creators in an unbundled digital economy. The Pull Request review is here.
NE: I think the tension in one of these stadium models is where you do have a lot of users. And then you have some of these casual contributors who are opening issues, making feature requests or just lost, and you are kind of sorting through all that volume from people that you don't know. In my view, it's kind of like, well, I don't understand why should that person have a say in your project, if they've never looked at it before, and they're just kind of coming in for the first time and you're the core developer of the project.
There is a set of rhetoric in open source that says every person is a contributor, and anyone who kind of comes in, you should treat them as a contributor and like invest in them and all this stuff, but I don't feel like we would do that for anything else. If you had a hobby meetup kind of group with you and your friends and someone came in once and then was like I think we should runs a group like this, you'd be like: Who are you? This is this is our thing. I think I want people to feel more comfortable saying that. And there's obvious parallels between that and the Internet at large right now.
AGM: Do you think the push on Facebook for content moderation, and Twitter, is a fool's errand? You know how Kevin Roose and Charles Warzel of The Times and that whole whiny mob that's constantly trying to get them to moderate everything. You think that's probably not the way forward?
AGM: I dislike looking always at the extreme example. But you know, Balaji [Srinivasan] had this whole dust-up with Taylor Lorenz and he's constantly getting into fights with these media people. And it's weird because he's often so right in so many ways, and he's good at getting attention. But somehow he hasn't parlayed into a mainstream following.
AGM: One valid critique of tech is that they should be doing this story-telling to the wider world. Other than a few people like Patrick [Collison], or pmarca, or even Paul Graham, to a certain extent, who are able to convey a vision that extends beyond the bounds of Hacker News, I think most of tech just doesn't do that. Part of the problem is that one of the necessary delusions of Silicon Valley is that we live in this eternal present of creation, and the thought of documenting current cultural artifacts, or pulling back for a moment and looking at our own culture is not desirable or important really. And it's just not part of the DNA.
NE: I guess maybe why 2016 was so shocking was like we finally got caught with our pants down because everyone's, like, oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. And then it was like wait now everyone else has shaped this narrative because we were too lazy or negligent to shape our own narrative and. which is fine that happened, but now I feel like we should be doing a much better job of that. We have to.
Talking to Stripe Press was a completely different experience. Brianna [Wolfson] (then editor at Stripe) was just immediately on her game, and got on the phone with me right away. I submitted a 60% version of my draft, at like 1AM or something on a Sunday night, and by noon on Monday she already responded. The process was just so much better and it was just like, yeah, we just need more Stripe Presses to tell our own stories.
NE: Yeah, it feels like there are digital frontiers of governance that are being built that are increasingly going to be at odds with our physical governance. It doesn't seem so crazy to me that we can kind of like cobble together our own stack, the way that you could do a tech stack. But we're gonna run into a bunch of conflicts when we try to do that. And then we have to sort those out and there'll be a bunch of little skirmishes which are already happening right now. But then maybe we shall prevail. Fingers crossed. I'm just prepared for sort of like a revolution that is kind of coming in slowly. I feel like it's happening more and more and and I don't know whether it's gonna explode, we'll find out. But I'm here for it. We'll see what happens.
NE: Part of the reason why I wrote this book was because I feel like we've had this communitarian kibbutz kind of model, which you've identified, is the prevailing model that people understand in open source and that gets frequently talked about. And I think that narrative has kind of been owned by the likes of [Richard] Stallman or Eric Raymond or anyone who kind of remembers those early days of open source. And that model definitely still exists within the matrix of different community models. The \u2018clubs\u2019 are kind of like that, where everyone is rolling up their sleeves and there's lots of different active contributors. And then we also have the \u2018federations\u2019 that are kinda like the really big open source projects that we're used to thinking about like Linux, but then there\u2019s the rise of the \u2018stadium\u2019 model that is, I think, much newer.
If you look at what's happened to open source for the past 20 years, at some point demand outpaced supply and the amount of context that anyone can really have around any one open source project\u2014because every developer is relying on like hundreds of different projects\u2014it's not really possible to become this roll-up-your-sleeves member of every single project. And so, yeah, I think the governance does look really different and it\u2019s specifically something that I didn't want to bang people over the head about it in the book. But I think a stadium model lends itself a little bit more to that kind authoritarian model and there\u2019s less the kind of governance issues that we see in like a federation where people are like this is a democracy! and everyone is gonna ask everyone for opinions and stuff even if you might only have one or a few contributors. The contributors [in a stadium] are kind of just making the decisions and I think they should feel comfortable leaning into that. Even though right now I think a lot of them feel uncomfortable doing that because they keep being told that open source is supposed to this super participatory thing.
AGM: You took the words right out of my mouth. In the book, you\u2019ve got a long riff on the tragedy of the commons. Not that I want to turn this interview into a Facebook thing, because having worked there and spent part of my career on it, it's like the last thing I want to talk about\u2026but I do think it's somewhat relevant in that, Twitter or Facebook, is it actually the public forum and a commons? Can Zuck or Jack run it as you suggest? Can they run it like [Guido] van Rossum does Python, as officially-titled Benevolent Dictator For Life? In some sense that\u2019s actually better?
NE: Yeah. Well, I don't think Facebook is a commons anymore, just by sheer size that we\u2019re dealing with. One of the things that I'm trying to do in the book is go back through Elinor Ostrom\u2019s definition of a commons and saying, okay, she makes the argument that we can avoid this tragedy of the commons by having people self govern. But she has very specific rules that she's laid out around what actually qualifies something as a commons, so we can self govern in a healthy way, assuming these conditions hold and a lot of those conditions have to do with having clear membership boundaries and very high context for your interactions with each other. And so if you think just about Facebook being 2.6 billion people or however many people are on Facebook now, it's impossible that literally multiple billions of people all have that kind of context for each other. I think of Facebook as being this substrate that fosters a bunch of smaller communities. You might have Facebook Messenger which resembles more like the group chats or the \u2018club\u2019-style communities. You might have the \u2018stadium\u2019 type situations that are more like one person broadcasting out to a group of people and you might have Facebook groups which could be like either \u2018clubs\u2019 or \u2018federations\u2019 depending how big they are. You actually have a permutation of lots of different types of communities that are across the entire platform. But I think having that kind of vocabulary can help us figure out, what does it actually mean to develop governance for any of these platforms? It's the same thing with Twitter also. I don't see a world where we have one policy or a certain set of guidelines.
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