Episode 45: The Meaning of 'Tyranny of Openness' with Nathan Schneider

<center> <small>Sponsored by Linode</small> <a href="https://promo.linode.com/sustain/" target="_blank"><img src="https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/2/27729c65-f4a6-4496-8c86-820e7f13b285/DAsVtWUA.png" width="150px" heigh="58px"></a> </center> Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest Nathan Schneider University of Colorado Boulder Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have special guest, Nathan Schneider, a Professor of Media Studies at CU Boulder. He also runs a new little outfit called Media Enterprise Design Lab. In today’s episode, Nathan will tell us what he does, how he got to where he is today, and he explains what he means by, The Tyranny of Openness.” We will also discuss Democratic Mediums, Platform Cooperativism, and CommunityRule. Download this episode now! [00:01:24] Nathan tells us what he does at University of Colorado, Boulder and social.coop. He’s also running Zoom right now on a Linux machine and he tells us how he got to where he is today. [00:05:03] Richard wants Nathan to describe what he means by “The Tyranny of Openness.” [00:07:33] Justin has been thinking about the Linux Kernel, Python (up until recently), Ruby, and cURL. They’re all run by BDFL and installed on billions of devices, so why is that working and in the future, how should projects at that scale work? [00:11:10] Pia asks Nathan in his wildest dreams, what would a structure like he was talking about look like and what tools should we be building? Gunner is curious and asks if the notion of governance design patterns is something that’s part of Nathan’s Meta governance? Nathan talks about an attempt he made to collect patterns, a little directory called, Democratic Mediums, which was a forerunner to some of this work. [00:17:54] Richard is curious to know what’s the split in coders like on a normal GitHub project, because there are people who would be classified as doers versus people who’d be classified as decision maker