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Enjoy things while they last (or hope for the best, prepare for the worst)

Note: it’s hot, this post might be be more ramble-y than usual…


Next to my bed I have one of these:

Glass paperweight with image of waves within it

It’s a glass paperweight that serves as a memento mori, a reminder that one day I will die. That might seem a bit morbid, but it reminds me to carpe diem (“seize the day”, to use another Latin phrase) and that things won’t be this way forever.

My kids will grow up and leave home.

My current state of calm will dissipate.

My possessions will stop working, get lost, or be stolen.

The list is long, for good and bad.


But my reason for writing this post is not a personal one, but a professional one. Right now, I’m more interested in talking about projects and initiatives ‘dying’ than me kicking the bucket. There have been multiple reasons over the past week where I’ve noticed that people expect things that start off great to continue to be so.

An OER repository was sold off to a company whose website is blacklisted by many educational institutions. A popular Android launcher was sold to an analytics company that’s often blacklisted by network blocking software. A project I’ve been involved with looks like it could be in danger of betraying its radical roots.

This is all very predictable, and is the reason for the popular phrase “hope for the best, prepare for the worst”. Especially in the kind of work I do at the intersection of learning, technology, and community, there are some amazing people collaborating on some fantastic things. It just takes a few bad actors (or people with ‘misaligned incentives’ shall we say) to spoil things.

That’s why setting up projects the right way from the beginning is so important. With MoodleNet, for example, we used the AGPL license, which meant that after I and the team resigned due to some internal drama, the Open Source code could form the basis of the project which has turned into Bonfire.

Even without specific licensing, just working openly can have the same effect. For example, there’s an archive of the work I did with a community that I helped grow at Mozilla around the Web Literacy Map. There’s no reference to it any more on the Mozilla site, but I can still reference it myself.

I’m not bitter about these things. (Well, not any more.) My point is rather than you should set up projects and initiatives in open ways, providing ways for awesome, talented people to get involved. But don’t be naive while doing so. Use defensive licenses, like the AGPL, and the wonderful Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA) license which forces derivative works to be shared under the same license.

The same is true of legal structure and governance. WAO is set up as a co-operative with a flat structure and Sociocratic decision-making. It’s not possible for one person to sell out our company from underneath us because of the legal structure we created, after taking advice from more senior members of the co-operative community. And we’ve learned that consent-based decision making allows us to make decisions in line with our values.

Processes (especially around decision-making) work… until they don’t. You have to be intentional about these things. Remember that contracts are for when things go wrong, so cover your back. Imagine the worst thing that could happen, and put in place safeguards. Come up with ways to make decisions in productive ways with other people. Share your work far and wide, but protect it using an appropriate license.

Remember that our time on this planet is short, so let’s be awesome to each other.


In case you’re wondering, I bought my memento mori from The School of Life, and while you can’t get this particular one any more, there are others which are great — if not quite as awesome.

Decentralising the description of skills with OSMT

Skills don’t exist. Not really. They’re a shorthand way of describing human attributes and potentials which break down if you analyse them too closely. That’s not to say that defining skills isn’t “useful in the way of belief” as Pragmatist philosophers such as William James would put it ⁠— but rather that they only exist, or represent some “truth”, in as much as they have cash value.


There’s a couple of video games I’ve played for over 20 years, on and off. They’re both football (“soccer”) games, one being EA Sports FIFA and the other Football Manager (these days actually Football Manager Mobile). Both games attempt to quantify various skills and attributes important to the sport.

Screenshot of Football Manager Mobile, taken from fmmvibe.com

The above skills or attributes are out of a maximum of 20, and they’ve been handily colour-coded so that those playing the game can see at a glance how strong or weak a footballer is in a particular area.


The example I gave above of a video game neglects other things that real-life football teams can and do look for in players they wish to sign. For example, how adept at are they at gaining a social media following? Can they speak to the press confidently? What are they like in the dressing room? Are they volatile?

When we talk about skills in an education or learning and development context, we’re often implicitly talking about them for reasons of employment. Like the footballer represented by colour-coded numbers each out of a maximum of 20, it would make the life of employers a lot easier if they could view job applicants in this way. That’s not to say that they should, it just feels a lot like that’s where we’re heading.

Whoever decides on and controls the numbers is therefore in a very powerful position. They get to decide what is important, provide ways of quantifying those things, and report on them in ways that have real-world outcomes. In this way, it’s very similar to the work I’ve done about digital literacies: whoever gets to decide who or what counts as ‘literate’ holds the power.

LinkedIn is an example of a company (now owned by Microsoft) that would love to provide this level of quantification of human skills. The screenshot below is from a video embedded in an article from last year announcing their ‘Learning Hub’.

Screenshot from LinkedIn video announcing their Learning Hub

Who defines these skills? Well… LinkedIn do. They control the taxonomy. We should be wary of this.


One of the things that really attracted me to Open Badges more than a decade ago was that it democratises the “means of production” of credentialing and recognition. Although there are always attempts at re-centralisation (this week it was announced that Pearson have bought Credly, one of the major players in the landscape) the whole thing, thankfully, is built on an open standard.

If skills are to be a currency with a cash value, then we need to ensure that the skills represented by badges and credentials are also democratically defined. All of which takes us finally talking about the Open Skills Management Tool:

The Open Skills Management Tool (OSMT, pronounced “oz-mit”) is a free, open-source instrument to facilitate the production of Rich Skill Descriptor (RSD) based open skills libraries. In short, it helps to create a common skills language by creating, managing, and organizing skills-related data. An open-source framework allows everyone to use the tool collaboratively to define the RSD, so that those skills are translatable and transferable across educational institutions and hiring organizations within programs, curricula, and job descriptions.

At the heart of OSMT’s functionality are Rich Skills Descriptors (RSDs): machine-readable, searchable data that include the context behind a skill, giving users a common definition for a particular skill. With the open source release of the OSMT, other organizations can now develop and collaborate on individual RSDs as well as on RSD collections.

The power here is in providing common definition for skills within a particular context. This definition, or standard, can then be referenced in the metadata of Open Badges in the AlignmentObject field.

I realise that this sounds rather technical and dry, so let’s look at an example given by Nate Otto during a meeting of the Open Recognition workgroup as part of the Open Skills Network yesterday.

Skills represented in human and machine readable ways

Just like Open Badges, these skills descriptors can be read by humans in words and machines as code (JSON). Let’s look at an example of a skill.

The 'Communicate Time Zones' skill

There’s a lot more I could say about this, as there’s a real balance to be struck here between the flexibility that allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and a level of complexity that could stymie innovation.

One of the reasons that I’m moderately excited about the possibilities is that it slots neatly into that AlignmentObject field I mentioned above which is part of the existing Open Badges 2.0 standard. This harks back to work I was doing while at the Mozilla Foundation, linking Web Literacy skills to Open Badges.

Another reason is that Nate and the good people at Badgr are behind it. Not only have they got great people with the best interests of the ecosystem there, but they’ve also got the technical expertise to make it a reality. The next step is to get many, many OSMTs in existence so that we can decentralise the means of skill description!

Free Software and two forms of liberty

Somehow, I missed a BBC Radio 4 series on A History of Ideas, both when it originally aired (2014-15) and then when it was repeated a couple of years ago. The ‘history of ideas’ is, of course, another name for the study of Philosophy, the subject of my first degree, and something which remains a lifelong interest of mine.

Starting with the beginning of the BBC series, I’ve begun listening to a philosopher, neuropsychologist, theologian, and lawyer debate what it means to be ‘free’.


There are fundamentally two types of freedom, as defined by great thinkers: freedom from and freedom to. Some people frame this as ‘negative’ liberty (i.e. freedom from) and ‘positive’ liberty (i.e. freedom to).

In general, I would say that it’s negative liberty that most of us mean when we talk about freedom. That’s the freedom from coercion, so that you can do what you like with your time, your body, or your possessions. This is different to positive liberty, which can be thought of as the freedom to participate in society on your own terms.


The question of technology is an interesting one to consider here, as I’ve always understood negative liberty to be the main driver behind the Free Software movement:

Free software (or libre software) is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price: all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed “free” if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

Wikipedia

Interestingly, although the Four Freedoms talk about ‘freedom to‘ they’re actually, to my mind at least, all couched in terms of negative liberty. For example, the first of these is “The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”. This could perhaps be more accurately be rendered: “The freedom from being prevented from running the program as you wish, for any purpose.”

In short, we in the Free Software community often miss the importance of positive liberty. While negative liberty frees us from the constraints of others, positive liberty allows us to act upon our free will, something that’s (sadly) often still a lot easier with well-designed proprietary services.


Ben Werdmuller, who has spent his career trying to push forward easy-to-use Free Software, said recently:

The only real way to avoid tracking and surveillance is to host things yourself, but that’s not an option because hosting things yourself is still too hard for most people and it’s easy to compromise on security. We need the iPhone of self-hosting.

Twitter

In other words, when it comes to technology, most people have the freedom to do things but not the freedom from some of consequences of using proprietary services. For example, it’s easy to express a controversial political opinion using Facebook, but not to avoid being tracked and surveilled on that platform.

I think we’re at a bit of an inflection point. There are those of us who have enough technical skills to be able to self-host and spin up a VPS to run Free Software. We can experiment and express ourselves however we wish. And then, sadly, there’s everyone else.

We Free Software enthusiasts value our negative liberty and use it to promote our positive liberty. Less technical people have only the amount of positive liberty allowed by proprietary services under capitalism. I believe we need to focus on enabling that positive liberty with Free Software under socialism, even if that means compromising a bit of negative liberty.


This post is Day 77 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

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