Add reference to "Considering the Use of Walled Gardens for FLOSS Project Communication" by @megansquire

[pdurbin]

@megansquire has written a fabulous open access paper called "Considering the Use of Walled Gardens for FLOSS Project Communication" that can be read at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_1

Here's the abstract:

"At its core, free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) is defined by its adherence to a set of licenses that give various freedoms to the users of the software, for example the ability to use the software, to read or modify its source code, and to distribute the software to others. In addition, many FLOSS projects and developers also champion other values related to “freedom” and “openness”, such as transparency, for example in communication and decision-making, or community-orientedness, for example in broadening access, collaboration, and participation. This paper explores how one increasingly common software development practice - communicating inside non-archived, third-party “walled gardens” - puts these FLOSS values into conflict. If communities choose to use non-archived walled gardens for communication, they may be prioritizing one type of openness (broad participation) over another (transparency). We use 18 FLOSS projects as a sample to describe how walled gardens are currently being used for intra-project communication, as well as to determine whether or not these projects provide archives of these communications. Findings will be useful to the FLOSS community as a whole as it seeks to understand the evolution and impact of its communication choices."

This is a great piece of scholarship on SLOPI communication and a reference to it should be added.

[pdurbin]

Some feedback from @skilfullycurled originally posted to https://gitter.im/publiclab/publiclab?at=5cdc454bf52a23751638e961

"I read the walled garden article and I think one of the points it engages, I think not enough, is what one means by “openness”. Something can be “open” in the abstract, but not “accessible”. Wikipedia is an “open” project (and I actually think might fit all of the SLOPI requirements) but it can be difficult to get involved because using wiki’s (I find) are really difficult. Of course, not to mention “accessibility” in the more literal sense. My other critique of that article and maybe FOSS in general is the assumption that these are the ideal ways of working without making an argument for why. You’ve begun to address this a bit in terms of asking when SLOPI is not a good choice, but I think there are more occasions for this. A friend of mine once told me that design is along a spectrum, on the one hand you have Apple where they know best and on the other side you have complete participatory design. He’s a huge fan of participatory design, but he admitted (paraphrased), “look, Apple gets you an iPhone. Participatory design wouldn’t have.” My point here is that there are lots of other occasions when SLOPI may not be ideal and not because it would against values. For example, sometimes groups need to have private off the record conversations meetings so they can be free to express themselves. So I’m not sure it’s binary. Can I be a SLOPI organization but have moments where it is necessary to be less SLOPI than others?"

[pdurbin]

I thought I'd share a couple thoughts I shared with @megansquire in June 2018 via private email (which wasn't very SLOPI of me 😄 ):

"I just re-read your paper and I appreciate that you point out the Slack can be considered more "open" in the sense of being more usable than other systems. We already use Slack internally but I'm still generally in the camp that Slack isn't great for open source. I may even link to your paper on our Google Group, but technology moves so fast that it's already slightly out of date in a couple ways:

• Slack decommissioned their IRC gateway.
• slackarchive.io is gone, though the code has been open sourced."

Earlier in that thread I mentioned that I shared the walled garden paper at publiclab/plots2#2590 (comment) and I that I first heard of it at https://gwolf.org/node/4119 ("On the demise of Slack's IRC / XMPP gateways") after meeting @gwolf at LibrePlanet 2018. Nice guy. 😄

[pdurbin]

In pull request #28 I added the paper to the README but I think I have a bit more to think about for this issue before closing it.

[pdurbin]

I just merged pull request #29 where I tried to improve the reference I added previously. I re-read the paper today and I still like it a lot. I forgot how much she has to say about different definitions of "open" which I may write more about for #10. Closing.