Taking Back What and From Whom?: Imagined Communities and Role of WordPress in the Future of the Open Web

TAKING BACK WHAT, AND FROM WHOM?:
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, WORDPRESS, AND
THE OPEN WEB
WO R D C A M P F O R P U B L I S H E R S , C H I C AG O 2 0 1 8
https://www.deviantart.com/jaysimons/art/Map-of-the-Internet-1-0-427143215
John Eckman
@jeckman
#wcpub

John Eckman • @jeckman • #wcpub
https://2018-chicago.publishers.wordcamp.org/2018/04/26/your-challenge-taking-back-the-open-web/

TAKE BACK WHAT, NOW?
https://fotogosaurus.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/take-back-vermont-roxbury.jpg http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2015/26B5
https://vermontvolunteerism.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/from-the-trenches/http://labprolib.com/hillary-clinton-endorsement/

https://www.redbubble.com/people/politicalcircus/works/15722336-take-our-country-back-2016-donald-trump?p=sticker https://twitter.com/realjack/status/796191438694445056

FROM WHOM, EXACTLY?
https://www.scoopnest.com/user/theipaper/802479141312430094

We’re looking forward to speaker submissions that
touch on whether an open web actually ever truly
existed, what state it’s in now, consequences of a
closed web, and how publishers may protect and
encourage an open web.

https://dri.es/video-can-we-save-the-open-web
I'm waiting for the day when, if you
tell someone 'I'm from the
internet', instead of laughing they
just ask 'oh, what part?'
https://xkcd.com/256/ https://xkcd.com/802/
Best trivia I learned while working
on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge!
Do you realize it's the second-
biggest browser-based social-
networking-centered farming
game in the WORLD?' Then you
wait for the listener to do a
double-take.

“The very possibility of imagining the nation only
arose historically when, and where, three
fundamental cultural conceptions . . . lost their
axiomatic grip on men’s minds. The ﬁrst of these was
the idea that a particular script-language offered
privileged access to ontological truth. . . . Second
was the belief that society was naturally organized
around and under high centers - monarchs who were
persons apart from other human beings and who
ruled by some form of cosmological (divine)
dispensation. . . Third was a conception of
temporality in which cosmology and history were
indistinguishable.” (36)

“My point of departure is that nationality . . .[and]
nationalism are cultural artefacts of a particular
kind.” (4)
The Nation “is imagined because the members of
even the smallest nation will never know most of
their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear fo
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion. . . . In fact, all communities larger
than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and
perhaps even those) are imagined. Communities
are to be distinguished not be their falsity /
genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined” (6)

“Consider the two forms of imagining which ﬁrst
ﬂowered in Europe in the eighteenth century:
the novel and the newspaper. . . . these forms
provided the technical means for ‘re-
presenting’ the kind of imagined community
that is the nation.” (24-25)
In other words, this is also Gutenberg’s fault.

“In an age when it is so common for progressive,
cosmopolitan intellectuals . . . to insist on the near-
pathological character of nationalism, its roots in
fear and hatred of the Other, an its affinities with
racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations
inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacriﬁcing
love.” (141)

“. . . the Open Web is inclusive and encourages fair distribution of ideas with
no barrier to entry. It exists in opposition to proprietary systems created by
companies for the purposes of lock-in, control of user experience, or
requiring payment for entry”
“Do we want the experiences of the next billion web users to be deﬁned by
open values of transparency and choice, or by the siloed and opaque
convenience of the walled-garden giants dominating today?”

AG E N DA : TA K E B AC K T H E O P E N W E B
• The way the web used to be
• Open source / free software
• Dominant communities / walled gardens
• Transparency, privacy, control
• WordPress and the future of the open web
http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/wooden-tile/a/agenda.html

THE OPEN WEB AS THE WEB THAT USED TO BE
Photo by Felipe P. Lima Rizo on Unsplash
Jeremiad: a long, mournful complaint or
lamentation; a list of woes.
Nostalgia: a sentimental longing or wistful
affection for the past, typically for a period or
place with happy personal associations.
https://unsplash.com/photos/UNNAYh3sMOg

John Eckman • @jeckman • #wcpubhttps://dri.es/can-we-save-the-open-web
https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of
billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone
apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of
usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what
we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I ﬁnd that
younger folks may not even know how the web used to
be. . . . we’ve abandoned core values that used to be
fundamental to the web world. . . . today’s social networks . .
. haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it
deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed.
And they’ve now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an
entire generation of users who don’t realize how much
more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
The web felt very different ﬁfteen years ago, when I
founded Drupal. Just 7 percent of the population had internet
access, there were only around 20 million websites, and
Google was a small, private company. Facebook, Twitter, and
other household tech names were years away from being
founded. In these early days, the web felt like a free space
that belonged to everyone. No one company dominated as
an access point or controlled what users saw. This is what I
call the "open web".
https://dri.es/can-we-save-the-open-web

T H E W E B T H AT WAS
https://www.geekwire.com/2013/web-generation-link-unexpected/

T H E W E B T H AT WAS
https://www.vice.com/da/article/zn59z8/netstalgia-future-laboratory-trend-forecasting-aol-early-internet http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/internet_nostalgia

https://unsplash.com/photos/lD-xTvjCgJo
Photo by j on Unsplash
THE OPEN WEB AS FREE OPEN SOURCE
Photo by Jules Marchioni on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/Os7INYFe5d8

“Free software” means software that
respects users' freedom and
community. Roughly, it means
that the users have the freedom to
run, copy, distribute, study, change
and improve the software. Thus,
“free software” is a matter of liberty,
not price. To understand the concept,
you should think of “free” as in “free
speech,” not as in “free beer”.
https://opensource.org/osdhttps://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

In 1998, a part of the free software community
splintered off and began campaigning in the name
of “open source.” The term was originally
proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of
the term “free software,” but it soon became
associated with philosophical views quite
different from those of the free software
movement.
. . . Open source is a development methodology;
free software is a social movement. For the free
software movement, free software is an ethical
imperative, essential respect for the users'
freedom.
there’s no doubt that [the decision] to use
the term [open source] to label a
marketing programme for free
software was a crucial moment. From
that point onward, people who wanted to
promote software freedom in business
or wanted to identify their own approach
to doing business with free software had
a collectively-agreed term. . . . it became
easy to talk about open source projects,
open source business models, the
beneﬁts of open source and so on.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://opensource.org/node/942

F R E E , L I B R E , G R AT I S , O P E N
• Free as in Speech / Free as in Freedom (Libre)
• Free as in Beer / Free like a puppy (Gratis)
• Liberal software? Liberty software?
• Open as in what? Open Standards, Open
APIs, Open Admission?
Photo by Brianna Santellan on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/8s06eMPtJdU

F R E E D O M I N T H E AG E O F W E B A P P L I C AT I O N S
• The “ASP loophole”
• Is it time to be more speciﬁc about what “open” means?
• Is access to source code no longer the most important prerequisite?
• Do we need to expand “the four freedoms”?
• How do we ensure the kinds of freedom Free Software is designed to
ensure, for a user base that is primarily not source code literate?
Photo by michael podger on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/jpgRztEuaV4

I T ’ S N OT J U S T A B O U T C O D E
• The real value of an open source platform isn’t just the code
• The speciﬁc form of imagined community that is an open source project
attracts includes not just code contributors but thought leaders, designers,
end-users, and others
https://required.com/en/wordpress-community-summit-2017/

THE OPEN WEB AS WALLED GARDENS
Photo by Hector Argüello Canals on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/2x6vURol6cM

• Open:
• Closed:
https://dri.es/video-can-we-save-the-open-web

This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-
garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter
and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and
they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing
achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re
based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is
that user ﬂexibility and control necessarily lead to a user
experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second,
more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme
control over users is the best way to maximize the
proﬁtability and sustainability of their networks.
. . . people are using free and convenient services, often
without a clear understanding of how and where their
data is being used. Many times, this data is shared and
exchanged between services, to the point where people
don't know what's safe anymore. It's an unfair trade-off.
I believe that consumers should have some level
of control over how their data is shared with external
sites and services; in fact, they should be able to opt into
nearly everything they share if they want to. . . . Imagine
a way to manage how our information is used across the
entire web, not just within a single platform. That sort of
power in the hands of the people could help the open
web gain an edge on the hyper-personalized, easy-to-
use "closed" web.
In order for a consumer-based, opt-in data sharing
system described above to work, the entire web needs
to unite around a series of common standards. . . .
collaboration and open standards could be a great way
to decentralize power and control on the web.
https://dri.es/video-can-we-save-the-open-webhttps://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

“What makes something generative? There
are ﬁve principal factors at work:
(1) how extensively a system or technology
leverages a set of possible tasks;
(2) how well it can be adapted to a range of
tasks;
(3) how easily new contributors can master it;
(4) how accessible it is to those ready and
able to build on it; and
(5) how transferable any changes are to
others—including (and perhaps especially)
nonexperts.” (71)
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4455262

“It is easy for Internet users to see
themselves only as consumers whose
participation is limited to purchasing
decisions that together add up to a
market force pushing one way or
another. But with the right tools, users
can also see themselves as participants
in the shaping of generative space—as
netizens. ” (71)
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4455262

https://decentralizedweb.net/https://indieweb.org/

THE OPEN WEB AS PRIVACY, TRANSPARENCY
AND USER CHOICE
Photo by andrew jay on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/OdjhBf4Ar4I

– J O H N N Y A P P L E S E E D
“Type a quote here.”
http://gapingvoid.com/2006/05/09/if-you-talked-to-people/

– J O H N N Y A P P L E S E E D
“Type a quote here.”
https://www.betterads.org/

https://www.ampproject.org/

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/justice-and-fundamental-rights/data-protection/2018-
reform-eu-data-protection-rules_en
https://ec.europa.eu/justice/smedataprotect/index_en.htm

THE ROLE OF WORDPRESS IN THE FUTURE
OF THE OPEN WEB
Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/bq31L0jQAjU

https://wordpress.tv/2018/07/06/morten-rand-hendriksen-the-ethics-of-web-design/

– I M M A N U E L K A N T
“Act only according
to that maxim
whereby you can at
the same time will
that it should become
a universal law.”

FREE & OPEN
SOURCE, IN LETTER
AND IN SPIRIT
https://wordpress.org/about/

https://betternews.org/ https://coralproject.net/

OPEN PROTOCOLS, APIS, & STANDARDS

https://distributorplugin.com/

ACCESSIBILITY AS A
PERVASIVE FEATURE
https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/

PRIVACY, SECURITY,
AND TRANSPARENCYPhoto by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/fPxOowbR6ls

http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/about/ https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/

INCLUSIVITY AS A CORE PRINCIPLE
Photo by Artem Bali on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/Ig4UvpKDyMg

https://ma.tt/2018/07/my-recode-decode-interview-with-kara-swisher/

https://10up.com/about/ https://10up.com/careers/

Thank You!
Feedback Welcome: @jeckman or john.eckman@10up.com

Taking Back What and From Whom?: Imagined Communities and Role of WordPress in the Future of the Open Web

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