WritePoint Staff Blog

When I was in grade school I lived in a village in Pennsylvania. Ours was an old house, complete with a coal bin, chute, and well. In the basement was an electric pump to pump the well water into the house. The two main roads, the one I lived on and the “other” one, converged in the village center. There was no village square – just a few stores, a post office, and a gas station. The barber had a small store front near the grocery store. For 5 cents and a 5 cent bottle deposit I could buy slushy Orange Crush. It came out of one of those old fashioned bottle refrigerators, so cold the soda froze in the bottle. The deposit was on the honor system. I didn’t have to cough up the nickel if I drank it right there.

This village was, and still is, a historic site, part of the Underground Railroad System from pre-Civil War days. Being the kid that I was, I was quite disappointed to learn that the Underground Railroad was not a series of ancient subway systems. It was not tunnels filled with railway tracks. The underground railraod was a term used to describe the journey runaway slaves took, moving from safe house to safe house, running for their lives with their sole possessions being what they could carry. In the rare, very rare, case, a runner had some money.

The people who “manned” the safe houses were ordinary people with ordinary lives. They grew up, married, had children, worked at some profession (mostly farming in that area), and eventually died and were buried in the family plot. The people who maintained the underground railroad were people who walked about in public, with no distinguishing mark that identified them as someone willing to buck the system, willing to break the law, willing to sacrifice themselves and their families for a higher goal – that of saving human lives.
These people and their ideal of saving a human life I can understand. When I was much older and started my years of holocaust readings, I had a model to refer to. The people who broke the law, sacrificed themselves and their families, all had the higher ideal of saving human life.

Greatness like this is understandable. Don’t we all want to be part of the collective greater good? Isn’t that what Kant believed, that humans ultimately are good and want to do good – that evil is an aberration? This desire to do good is what people lean upon when they cut social services and benefits – that local organizations and charities will rise to the occasion and take care of the unfortunate. Altruism at its best saves lives.

Is this same desire to do good, to improve our “lot”, to make the world a better place, the same drive that leads people to volunteer in lesser roles – like dishing out meals on holidays, volunteering for religious organizations, volunteering for the local fire department?

A colleague and I were discussing Open Source software last week. Neither of us understands what drives a person to freely give of their time and profession, while maintaining the high level of professionalism needed to create and maintain software that is given away. The model contributor is a real geek – a guy in his 20-30’s, single, lives in his parent’s basement, no mortgage, no responsibility other than to pick up his dirty socks (some even have mothers who will do that). This guy works to make some money and spends the rest of his time playing with operating system software or some nifty software package that he created and maintains. He’s part of a virtual community of like minded people doing like minded things to supply the world with “free” software.

Why? It’s not saving a life. It’s not like “Doctors without Borders”. The amount of open source software available to the public is staggering. It is no small feat to maintain pieces of an operating system or complex software packages. These people not only do this in their spare time, they organize themselves into groups of developers and maintainers on an adhoc basis, and on a world-wide basis. And the end products are robust, well developed, and well tested.

While I was pondering this question I heard a story on the radio about “The Sloan Digital Sky Survey” (SDSS). Phases 1 and 2 collected photographs of a piece of the universe (8,000 square degrees of the sky) – yep. Using a “dedicated 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico, equipped with two powerful special-purpose instruments” the organization created 3D maps with more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars. The results of this study are open to the public for research and general edification. In July 2008 SDSS started a new program, phase 3, that is scheduled to end in 2014.

SDSS Telescope at Apache Point

The next step, after gathering all the images from a phase, is to classify the galaxies. As the speaker on the radio said, this would take more than a lifetime to categorize all the galaxies from a single segment in the universe. But there is an additional problem. The scientists know too much. When they look at a galaxy they are plagued with doubt – is it this kind or that? It has some of these characteristics and some of those. In short, the scientists were not much use classifying the galaxies.

Several studies were performed to see if average people, like you and me, even children, could classify galaxies. What they found was staggering and exciting. You, I, and Joe on the street are better at identifying galaxies than the scientists. Much better. Given a set of rules, the non-galaxy-by-profession person can do a better job.

The radio program was a commercial of sorts – an appeal if you will – to the public. They want people to visit their website at www.galaxyzoo.org, register, and go through the short training (about 15 minutes) program designed to effectively give over the galaxy classification rules. Even 15 minutes a week helps the organization.

The benefit to the volunteer is exposure to the universe, an extremely beautiful universe. The benefit to the organization is that the galaxies get classified.

SDSS Galaxy Mapping Phases

I found myself jumping in my seat, driving down the highway, as I listened to this. I want to participate. I want to be part of the collective good. Ok, I’m not saving lives, but I am pushing knowledge forward.
Hey – isn’t that what the open source people are doing?

You may ask, what in the world does all this have to do with technical communications? When I write next time I plan to delve into the open source community. I want to explore what open source has done to communications and publishing.

For now I’ll leave you with a question – did you ever become so excited by something, so overwhelmed by something, something that could have been a money maker, that you freely gave it away?

WP Staff Uncategorized geek, open source, slaves, underground railroad, volunteer