Social participation in open source: what it means for designers

Can open source software save the world? Recently Brian Behlendorf, who helped found and develop the Apache Web server open source project and now sits on the Mozilla Foundation board, asked this question. He discussed how open source systems are being built to address some of the world's major problems: economic distress , natural-disaster responses, broken healthcare systems, education crises, and more. In July 2009 a group of open source advocates, some of them from large, high-profile open source projects and foundations , launched Open Source for America. Its mission is to serve as a " central advocate to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation in Open Source projects and technologies. " Another a recent project called iParticipate, spearheaded by Ben Shneiderman [1], aims to create a national initiative for participation that includes social and computer scientists and designers who build systems and study the successes and failures of citizen participation in social media. Shneiderman cites crowdsourc-ing innovation and open source as examples of social-media participation. In Mozilla's pursuit to change the way people interact with the Internet, it created Mozilla Labs, with the aim of bringing people together to innovate. One of its main projects is a series of " Design Challenges " aimed at designers and design students, tasked with innovating the way people interact with the Internet. Each challenge has a specific goal. One of the fall 2009 challenges summoned contestants to make use of browsing and search-history data and present that information to users in a useful way. Open source is important in the scope of the world, government , research, industry, and education and presents new trends in how to engage in social participation. Open Source for America, conversely, occurs on a local level that proposes open source technologies in our government and follows the rhetoric of openness, including open democracy and open standards. The iParticipate project likewise follows this rhetoric, but proposes ways to help support people in their endeavors to participate in an unfolding open society. One of Mozilla's core tenets is to preserve openness on the Internet. Socially meaningful participation isn't new—it happens in churches , neighborhood communities, professional organizations, and many other venues—but we've just begun to look at social participation on the Web. Of particular interest here is how designers can participate in socially meaningful ways in open source projects. Before we turn to this particular interest, …