Welcome to the playground of my thoughts, a maze of ideas that’s been simmering in my mind, only now finding their way to the surface, and to you. This upcoming series of posts truly fits with the vision of the Mind the gap blog. We’ll be diving into a topic close to my heart, a complex puzzle made up of many pieces and deep reflections I’ve been nurturing for a while.
There is an issue with the modern society’s approach to Work and how it values —or, in my view, fails to appreciate— individual contributions adequately. This topic finds interesting parallels with recent debates and demonstrations over retirement policies in France —the country I love and live in.
My stance on this matter isn’t easily distilled into a single sentence, but if I were to attempt it, I’d say I envision a world where everyone can earn a living from their craft and contribute solely to causes they passionately believe in. Realizing this vision calls for a significant societal shift —a form of ‘de-alienation’— where people feel a real connection to the results of their work, possibly fostered through communities collaborating on projects.
In this context, I’ve been thinking of a market that shifts its focus from pure profit to societal benefit as a method to assess these projects’ value. This concept does not imply a specific governance model for individual projects or society overall. This ‘open market’—a concept I’ll elaborate on in future posts— could support democratic governance, steering individual contributions towards successful (or in other words, beneficial to society) products and services.
Open Source communities and projects provide encouraging examples of what this world could look like. Unfortunately, a sustainable business model to back these communities is yet to be found. As it stands, Open Source struggles to flourish beyond the umbrella of large corporations and their strategic open-sourced code repositories. I actually genuinely worry that free, libre, software (“Open Source”) might stand at the precipice of extinction.
My dream? Finding a systemic way to financially support an Open Source world —an open platform to sustainably invest in free software. Meanwhile, I’ll be writing a series of posts related to this subject, in the hopes of sparking stimulating discussions. Feel free to challenge me: I’m on Twitter!.
Upcoming posts of this Open Market series will fall in mostly four categories:
- Means of Production
- Markets
- Value
- Work
Looking forward to posting more and reading your thoughts.
… WORK IN PROGRESS …