2024-03-05 –, Monday: Workshop Room / Tuesday: Remote Stage
A speculative organizational-design workshop where participants will discover how the framework of Exit to Community can enable open-source projects to adopt more appropriate governance processes across a variety of software projects.
This workshop intends to help FOSS contributors and enthusiasts learn about Exit to Community (E2C), an economic justice strategy that empowers players in the digital economy to move towards ownership and governance by the users, workers, and other stakeholders who give platforms their value, ensuring long-term sustainability and benefits for all.
In this workshop, we’ll briefly introduce the notion of “Exit to Community” and explore how it resonates with the values of the free software movement. We will overview 3 case study “snapshots” that embody the values and practices of Exit to Community in the software world: Debian, Python, and BuyTwitter.org. (While the former two exemplify E2C’s resonance with open-source values, the latter imagines turning a proprietary platform into a public utility, demonstrating the imaginative potential unlocked by thinking between E2C and FOSS.) In approximately 5 minutes, each overview will map out 1) motivation to pursue community ownership/governance and 2) the practical path to achieving it. We will then guide participants through the design of a speculative Community Exit Strategy for a tech platform or utility that matters to them. This could be a FOSS project they are involved with as a contributor or user, or a proprietary platform that they fantasize about bringing into alignment with open-source values by taking it under collective ownership.
Whether participants choose to plot a new governance strategy for an existing FOSS project based on our case studies or speculatively re-envision a proprietary platform as an open-source project, we hope this workshop will catalyze conversations about the many forms community ownership of software can take, clarifying the idea of Exit to Community and building awareness of what it entails. By refining our collective understanding of how community ownership functions in practice, we’ll aim to define some lessons that can be applied to the organizational design of successful open-source software projects.
🛈 This workshop won't be recorded, participation is possible both online and onsite.
Writer, editor, and organizer interested in exploring alternative business models for the digital platform economy + studying how software can be cooperatively built, governed, and sustained.
Eli Zeger is a writer and editor based in Ridgewood, New York. His work has appeared in The Baffler, Current Affairs, Noema Magazine, Zora Zine, among numerous other publications.
Hazel (she/they) is a political theorist and technologist based in NYC. They are interested in political affects/ emotions, labour, and digital self governance.