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" a kind of semi-chaotic self-organizing behavior in which numerous small acts of repair with a common goal in mind can lead to quickly built, complex, and mass

by chippy 11y ago

" a kind of semi-chaotic self-organizing behavior in which numerous small acts of repair with a common goal in mind can lead to quickly built, complex, and massive creations. Mob software is different—it explores the space of possibilities. It includes users during design. It is highly incremental, focusing on repair rather than master planning. Mob software takes coding out of the closet and makes code literature. It is based on gifts. Mob artifacts include massive software, built by the multitudes. It never goes down, it is never totally stable but is stable in the aggregate. It is flexible in the extreme. Anyone can add to it. Mob-software artifacts adapt, evolve almost." When reading this section, all I could think about was OpenStreetMap. It is rather an open database rather than open software, it does seem to share all of the features. Massively collaborative, small, numerous acts. Mostly repair (these days), flexible, gifted acts, crowdsourcing. Complex, massive it can be quickly built with many eyes. Over half a million users have contributed to openstreetmap - he writes than thousands and tens of thousands would contribute to mob software, would the same idea apply with millions? The example he gives in the essay is the Oxford English Dictionary.

mbrock 11y ago
I like the metaphor that comes up when you think of OSM as software. Or Wikipedia. npm is also similar to OSM in a way, except somewhat clunkier. People are always building little adapters, fixing up compatibility issues, etc. Linux distributions like Arch or Nix are also kind of similar. Lots of eyeballs and fingertips, people patching up different things, rapid adaptation, etc. Random thought: In the next decade, AIs will start to contribute more to open source projects. All the work being done on testing, verification, proving, defining interfaces, automatic formal logic, and so on, combined with work on artificial creativity, combined with more and more machine power. Pretty fascinating to speculate about.

by chippy 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

I like the metaphor that comes up when you think of OSM as software. Or Wikipedia. npm is also similar to OSM in a way, except somewhat clunkier. People are always building little adapters, fixing up compatibility issues, etc. Linux distributions like Arch or Nix are also kind of similar. Lots of eyeballs and fingertips, people patching up different things, rapid adaptation, etc. Random thought: In the next decade, AIs will start to contribute more to open source projects. All the work being done on testing, verification, proving, defining interfaces, automatic formal logic, and so on, combined with work on artificial creativity, combined with more and more machine power. Pretty fascinating to speculate about.