I have started objecting to the description of a contributor as a “volunteer”.

Volunteers are people who give their time/effort to an institution or group at some cost to them for little benefit in return. They usually do this as a labor of love, and therefor the argument can be made they receive some kind of emotional satisfaction from the exchange but it’s fundamentally categorized as a one way exchange where the volunteer is **giving** and the institution or group is **taking**.

Open source contributions are not market transactions. In a market there is a producer and a consumer, the transactions between them are to the benefit of either the producer or the consumer or both. Producer makes something, consumer evaluates the product and decides to give capital to the producer. Volunteer is a term used to describe an actor that is working for the benefit of the producer without reciprocal benefit to themselves to the extent that they benefit the producer.

Capital is the driving force in a market, it’s what enables the transactions. Workers are paid for contributions to product so that institutions can enable transactions where consumers are given a product in return for more capital. Capital is certainly a factor in open source, but it’s auxiliary. Capital may drive one side of the transaction, an actor paid to contribute to a product or consumption of a product used by the consumer to generate capital, but it does not drive each side of the transaction.

Contributors are not driven by a need to benefit a particular producer and are rarely driven by capital. In fact I can’t think of a way to describe open source contributions in terms of a market. In open source there is the **product**. The product exists almost as it’s own entity outside of the producers that created it or the consumers that use it. Because if it’s transparency and it’s ease of access and manipulation it cannot be viewed as a unit in a transaction within a market. Instead, all interactions need to be described in **relation to the product**. Contributors, institutions and individuals, that take part in production and those that take part in consumption take part in transactions with the **product**. This is an open source community, a group of actors taking part in transactions with a product.

The communities that thrive are the ones that remove barriers to these transactions and create tools that enable new transactions for more diverse contributions to the product. The transactions are not one-way, each transaction is two-way, benefiting both the product and the actor.

Rather than capital, mutual benefit seems to drive open source transactions. The product and the actor benefit from every transaction, with only a small portion of those transactions seeing capital as the benefit. The notion of a volunteer simply doesn’t exist in this model because there are rarely, if ever, transactions that only benefit a product at a cost to the actor. Actors **must** to be motivated and products are not “owned” in the traditional sense of ownership since their production is taken on by a community motivated by mutual benefit which tears down the relationship traditional market producers have with products.

Tools that are built to enable one sided transactions to a product usually fail because actors aren’t motivated by transactions that aren’t mutually beneficial.

A quick look at Firefox shows a very broad and diverse number of tools that enable mutually beneficial transactions. Although we often think about the new kinds of contributions that additions to Firefox itself will enable like [Personas](http://www.getpersonas.com/) or [Jetpack](https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/) we also have a variety of tools that enable non-code contributions. Everything from that little button that reports a crash (benefits the product’s stability and improves your browser experience) to [SUMO](http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/) (users seek resolution to support issues while providing the product with immeasurable usage feedback and bugs) are examples of tools that enable new transactions with the product that are mutually beneficial to the product and the actor.

One of my favorite things about working at Mozilla is being able to think about new kinds of contributions and how to enable them. There are few products with such a large and diverse ecosystem of users so the opportunities for new contribution is uniquely large so long as we create tools that are mutually beneficial.

We are now, at this very moment, witnessing the mass failure of traditional institutions. This isn’t unique in history, many societies and cultures have evolved to make the primary institutions of society irrelevant. This particular moment is probably only unique in the sheer number of institutions that seem to be failing all at once.

First the music industry, then newspapers, and now film and television all seem to be following the same pattern. They continue to produce the same quality and, in most cases, quantity of a familiar product which each in their own way help define and shape the majority of modern culture. But what was highly successful yesterday is today a failing business. This is not because of changes in their products but changes in the world around them. The social contract by which these institutions had flourished has changed, and only those able to change their institutions to fit the new social contract will continue to thrive in the new world.

One institution that seems to be relatively untouched in the new world is higher education. The free flow of information has changed so dramatically in such a short time it’s interesting that relatively small institutional changes have allowed higher education to maintain the same place and importance in society. Higher education is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of citizens, and it’s mired with barriers to entry that make it unattainable for many. These are the same kinds of barriers that destroyed the music and newspaper businesses when they were forced to compete with much lower barriers to entry and relatively free alternatives.

Objectively, there is nothing you can learn in higher education that you cannot learn on your own given enough motivation and access to information with the exception of some advanced scientific fields that require access to incredibly expensive equipment. So what is it that continues to proliferate higher education over individual initiative?

We can argue that the quality and prestige of professional educators is what continues to help institutions thrive, but we would have to ignore the reality of the newspaper industry which is failing under competition not from a new professional class but from mass amateurization. I have tried for a long time to find something that institutions of higher education are doing that separates them from any other institution or class of professionals that would account for their relative success today and found nothing. This makes me re-examine the social contract under which they operate and question whether it has really changed as much as I thought.

In the last 20 years, as information has become more accessible and the possibility for self education has increased, most fields have actually **increased** their formal education requirements. This means that at the same time higher education has become more expensive and more barriers have been placed to acceptance, the relative **importance** of a certification that states nothing more than the holder has completed no less than 4 years in a formal institution of education and spent tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars has increased. A college certification does not relate directly to the competency of the applicant in any way when compared to another applicant with related experience.

Higher education is aware of it’s relative inadequacy at vocational training compared to real world experience. The best schools all stress the importance of internships. The best computer science schools all **require** a certain amount of internship experience in order to complete their degree, mixing formal education along with real world experience. With this in mind, I don’t mean to say that a degree from a good school is not an indicator of competency, to do so I would have to ignore the high caliber of interns we enjoy at Mozilla. What I do mean to say is that formal education as a **requirement** of employment is to say that such a degree is of greater importance than comparative experience, which I have to disagree with.

Think about it this way; would you hire a candidate with a degree from a prestigious college over a candidate with experience in a prestigious open source project?

In open source we’re able to see the entirety of relevant experience if an applicant has previous experience in open source. We can see email conversations, IRC logs, and commits. We can evaluate an applicants communication skills as well as their practical programming experience. The rest of the computer industry has to hunt down references and go through very lengthy interviews in order to get a much smaller understanding of an applicant and it’s no surprise that they tend to rely much more often on formal education experience in selecting applicants. But looking towards the future, as more work becomes collaborative, more work becomes public, and the barriers to taking on previously professionalized tasks are removed, is it unreasonable to expect other fields to start to have the same advantages we have in open source?

If more people are able to learn whatever they want, make public their works, and improve over time through peer reviews in larger communities, employers will begin to rely more on relevant public work as an indicator of professional competency instead of formal degrees. In fact, it’s reasonable to expect higher education institutions to start to adapt to this **before** employers do, insuring that graduating students have a collection of impressive public works to make them look competitive compared to graduates of other competing schools. As this part of the social contract changes is it reasonable to expect higher education to being to suffer from the same challenges as the music, news, film and television industries?

Did Jon Stewart just kick every main stream journalist’s ass?

But seriously, why has this invasion been completely unchallenged in the main stream media?

Everyday I wake up and wonder why I own such a large car. Don’t get me wrong, I love my car, it’s a black 2008 touring edition Prius with the full geek package (bluetooth, GPS, wireless key). But I really don’t drive it much.

Most days I ride my bike and when I go to San Francisco it’s just easier to take the Bart most of the time. I rarely fill my car with any additional passengers unless you count my dog. All said and done I’d say the car only leaves it’s parking spot about 3 days a week, and most of the drives are less than 50 miles total. Sure, once a quarter we have an onsite at Mozilla and I drive to Mountain View 4 days in a row, but other than that I don’t take many long trips.

For the most part, my life doesn’t require such a large car. I do drive just a little too often to use a flex car, but almost all my driving is short distance and with only one or two people in the car. If I had to rethink my purchase it would have been sufficient to buy a smart car.

This is my transit story, but this is quickly becoming the transit story for many Americans. I know very few people that have decided to buy homes far from urban areas, and only one of them from my generation.

Thinking forward

The costs of commuting to work will only increase in the next 5 years. Gas prices seem lower now, but remember that there is only so much oil in the world and the closer we get to running out of it the more expensive it becomes.

My generation never seemed to think of employment as having much permanence which underlined the need to live in a more urban area with greater chance of finding new employment. The current economic crisis is obviously increasing the lack of confidence in holding on to any current employment so there is very little incentive to move away from employment centers.

The more people live in urban areas the less need they have for single commuter vehicles and the more fuel prices increase the smaller any single commuter vehicles will need to be.

American cars are notoriously larger than they need to be. Vehicle efficiency is about size and weight just as much as it is about the fuel source. Yet all the plans for more environmentally friendly vehicles from the American automakers seem to be identical cars to their current line with electric/hybrid/flex fuel engines for higher prices. Meanwhile, a new set of companies is making inroads in alternate vehicles that are a closer match to our new transit patterns.

Add to this the expansive transit plans of the Obama administration and you have far less need for vehicles even as large as a Japanese sedan. I know of only one small electric vehicle from a traditional automaker and that’s the Mini EV which is just now entering the public trial phase.

Being green only takes you so far

Morals are a distant second to economic necessities when making wide scale changes in human behavior. Thinking that environmentalism can change transportation behavior requires that the majority of people driving put their personal responsibility for future generations and the planet ahead of any social and economic realities they face. Not gonna happen.

Fortunately the social and economic realities are driving us towards more efficiency and sustainability in our transit patterns which, if we do this right, might just end up saving the planet.

We have to let them fail

Our problem is that we continue to turn to old institutions to create transformative products. Ford and GM can’t make a car that is efficient from the ground up, there are just too many incentives for them to do things the same way they always have even if forced to changes things a bit by congress.

These companies are going to fail, big time. It’s an inevitability. People can’t afford to buy what they are selling and they just can’t make what people need.

Transformational products are already coming from a bunch of new companies. Companies that, believe it or not, employ people. The more their products are bought and manufacturing of their vehicles increases the more workers they will need. In fact, medium sized business tend to be much better employers than large corporations, so a new movement of medium sized auto companies in the long term would be much better for workers than trying to save the current lot.

An yes, steel production will decrease, steel companies will fail and people will lose their jobs, because we need to use less steel. The suppliers of the big auto companies will also fail, because we don’t need their parts, we need new parts from new companies. All those jobs will be replaced by new companies and new jobs because you know what, people still need to get around.

So, what do you do after “your guy” wins the presidency.

First you have a drink, then you start holding them to task for all those campaign promises and poisitons they took. If you’re a good activist, you’re always attacking the guy who’s in power, no matter who they are.

Unfortunately, I don’t even have to wait for Obama to be president to start attacking him. Now, and even during his campaign, Obama took up one position in particular that is completely unacceptable under any circumstances; his position on gay marriage.

At this time in our history, nearly the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk, anything less than unequivocal and complete support of gay rights is unacceptable. There is no excuse.

I disagree with Obama on a variety of issues, but on most of them I can see why it isn’t politically feasible for him to take my position. For example; Obama does not share my position on fundamental Palestinian human rights. But that’s my fault, and the fault of the movement for Palentine, in not convincing enough of the american public of our position on Palestine rather than AIPAC’s.

But gay rights is very different. Within popular American culture homosexuality is now almost universally accepted. In the last ten years homosexual persons have gone from a few stereotypical sitcom characters to a series of incredibly popular talk show hosts, political pundits, and positive sitcom characters. Many of which do not conform to traditional gay stereotypes and are well accepted in popular American culture. I don’t wanna harp on television as a pop culture barometer but it’s a good metric to what is easily accepted by the public.

In this climate, at this time in our history, there is no excuse for those in power who do not support gay rights. There is no compromise. No “civil union”. This is not a negotiation. There is only one word for any position less than universal gay rights in the United States; “Unacceptable”.

Those that know me well know that I hold some fairly radical political beliefs. Regardless of what might be referred to as my “Utopian” beliefs suggest, I do partake regularly in main stream politics. But because I hold such radical beliefs I think of voting a little differently than most.

Most people think of their vote as a moral stake in the ground, declaring to the ballot machine that YOU BELIEVE IN THIS! It’s easy for me to detach myself from that because there isn’t a viable candidate that believes in all of my values. There are, however, candidates that will make things a little better than they are now. There are candidates that will be more malleable to social movements and changes in policy. And although I don’t believe that capitalism can ultimately provide equality to all people significantly less people would starve to death or die of preventable illnesses if we listened to Nobel prize winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz.

Ballot

I get an absentee ballot but I don’t mail it in. In California you can show up on election day and drop your absentee ballot in a locked box to be counted later. I do this so that I can fill out all of the local representatives and propositions from my home with all the information available on the internet about each issue. I don’t fill in some state representatives and the presidential pick until the day of the election for reasons that will be explained.

National

California is going to Obama, it’s 2pm on November 4th and it’s very clear I don’t have to worry about him winning my state. If I lived in Pennsylvania or Ohio I’d be concerned and I would be voting for Obama. On economic policy there are large differences between the candidates. These differences translate in to serious standard of living differences for poor and working people across the country.

I’m fortunate enough to live in a state where Obama doesn’t need my vote and I can easily support a third party. I’ve voted for Nadar in the past but I just can’t do it this year.

Nadar is a true American hero. Nadar did much more as a professional citizen than Obama can hope to accomplish as President. Just to name a few things; Safe Drinking Water Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environment Protection Agency (EPA), Consumer Product Safety Administration, the recall of millions of defective motor vehicles, seat belts and air bags, and last but not least the Freedom of Information Act of 1974. Unfortunately, Nadar’s presidential bids have done nothing but marginalize him in a time where he should have been the strongest citizen voice in the country. The unbelievable corporate greed and economic failures of the last 7 years are issues in which Ralph Nadar should have been the first voice you would hear on news and television but instead he was on the road raising money for another Presidential bid or paying down his debt from the last. It’s time to move on.

I’ll be voting for Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. The Green Party does a lot, and they are building a good third party from the ground up; a grass roots organization with lots of local representatives in seats of influence gaining momentum for better viability in higher electoral positions. The more votes they get this election the better for the Party and they need it more than Obama needs another California vote.

Propositions

I love California. California has the strongest ballot initiative program I know of in the country. I’m a strong believer in participatory democracy over representative democracy so the ability to take important issues directly to voters is a great thing to be a part of as a resident of this state.

As a resident of Seattle, Washington I voted NO on the building of 2 different sports stadiums in which I was in the majority. The elected representatives kindly told me and other majority voters that we can shove it up our ass and built the stadiums anyway. Certainly seems to have done a lot for those amazing Seattle sports teams everyone talks about

I always hear complaints about all the propositions on the ballot in California, mainly just complaints about the sheer number of them. And of course whenever there is an initiative you don’t agree you complain about it being an abuse of the process. This is what democracy looks like, and if you’re not in agreement with the majority of the electorate then you need to work towards a social movement that will change the minds of citizens, not complain about a more democratic process.

Prop 1A is a zero emissions rail line from SF to LA, a good idea at virtually any cost.

Prop 2 is a standard on confining farm animals, targeted mainly at chicken coops. Confining animals like this is a bad idea even if you don’t believe in animal rights, it’s not sanitary and leads to poor agricultural product and the spread of diseases among animals. It’s not rocket science why some free range chicken tests 0% for salmonella while Foster Farms tests 60%. The main argument against the proposition is primarily that agricultural standards like this don’t belong on the ballot, I disagree and think that direct democracy is a proper place for any law or standard.

Prop 3 is a bond for Children’s Hospital. Children’s Hospital is a for profit medical company and I don’t approve all the money I see for them on the ballot and in fact I voted against an Oakland initiative earlier in the year for construction of a new building. This measure is a bit different. 95% of Children’s Hospital patients are children on Medi-Cal (a wonderful state medical insurance program) of which all the poor children in Oakland are covered. The bond covers new equipment and what seems to be just enough money to keep things running at their current level. I’m voting YES.

Prop 4 is a waiting period and notification for parents of underage women who wish to have an abortion. I’m sorry but if a 16 year old girl gets pregnant I believe she has the right to her body and health and as such should be able to terminate the pregnancy even if her mother is Catholic.

Prop 5 is a measure championed by the Drug Policy Alliance. It’s a step toward further decriminalization of non-violent drug offenses. It has more money for treatment and limits court authority to incarcerate non-violent offenders. California already passed a measure like this before but the results haven’t been very good. In my opinion some of the previous measure’s failings were because courts were still allowed to incarcerate under a myriad of conditions and not only treatment was required of offenders but clean drug tests. We have atrocious drug policy in this country and an incarceration rate only rivaled by China. Non-Violent offenders shouldn’t be jailed by the hundreds of thousands and mandatory treatment will never immediately result in the recession of an addiction. Both my father and step-mother are chemical dependency counselors and happen to agree. I’m voting YES.

Prop 6 is one of two “tough on crime” propositions. I not only don’t agree with the premise of the bill (increased mandatory sentencing and the increase of certain offenses to new degrees) but it burdens California with a huge bill to pay for increased spending on the criminal system without a way to pay for it. Propositions that don’t dictate how they are paid for take money out of the general budget, which in California means decreases in federal employees and huge cuts to the already suffering California Public School system. Voting NO.

Prop 7 is an incredibly aggressive environmental proposition. It sets aside a bunch of money for renewable energy and more local production of energy as well as proposes some lofty emission goals. Critics have basically said that the targets aren’t reachable, which they probably aren’t. But it’s not like the voters will be throwing anyone in jail if the goals aren’t met, I actually find the aggressiveness of the goals a good thing and think the less the state relies on national energy conglomerates and foreign oil the better.

Obviously I’m voting NO on Prop 8, a California State Constitutional Amendment banning on gay marriage. The movement for Prop 8 has mostly consisted of a scare campaign that shows children being informed about the fact that gay people do in fact exist and start happy families together. The entire notion of children being informed about homosexuality as a moral slight is openly ignorant and I won’t dedicate too much time to arguing against it.

Prop 9 is the other “tough on crime” bill. It suffers from all the same problems Prop 6 suffers but this time in the name of “protecting victims” by making it more difficult for inmates to be released from prison.

Prop 10 is the first environmental measure I’ve ever voted AGAINST. It’s focused almost entirely on natural gas, and provides further state subsidy to buyers of low emission vehicles. At this point I think we can safely stop adding additional state giveaways for people who purchase hybrid vehicles, of which I am a member, there’s already enough of an incentive to buy one with current tax breaks and the cost of oil in general. Not to mention the obscene giveaways to natural gas companies, of which the promoter of the bill is a major owner.

Prop 11 is a no brainer. It takes away from elected officials one of the most undemocratic of privileges, the ability to redistrict voters based solely on improving electoral victories for oneself or party. Voting for the measure creates huge barriers to redistricting preventing things like…. Texas.

And finally, Prop 12 is a reinvestment in the Cal-Vet program in the form of a general bond. This program provides good money in to the right pockets helping veterans with rising costs and home foreclosures among other things.

I never thought this would be the kind of blog that talks about politics too much or posts funny videos, but this must be shared.