As per the Oxford English Dictionary, Innovation is defined as a new method, idea, product, etc. that has been introduced and created. In our contemporary world, Innovation has become synonymous with technology. Coming up with inventive methodologies is the bedrock that propels technology forward, and that too, at a rapid velocity. It is rightly said that “true progress happens when the highest level of technology reaches the lowest level of society.” To achieve that goal, we must engage in serious evaluation of what fuels innovation in the most efficient way. Countries, organizations, and governments lay out their policies and infrastructure based on these assessments.
As an earnest student of how innovation has historically worked and how this foundation has created a digitized world that we live in, I resort to books that draw commonalities between those great minds who made innovation happen. I also strive to engage in the study of those “developmental methodologies” that these “intellectual giants” adopt to create products and concepts that elevate the society we live in.
Forests have fallen writing books on innovation and technology. Searching on Amazon for books on this aforementioned genre will make us realize that there is no dearth of reading material that covers this intricate yet imperative subject. Some books stand out from others, and one such, in my opinion, is “The Innovators: How a group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson. It is one of the finest, and profoundly written books that traces the history of Innovations, the Innovators and the collaborative environment in which they worked. Going over this book, I realized that no chapter on innovation can be written without Open source. The adoption of an open source approach has propelled the rise of innovation. From Isaacson’s masterpiece book, I draw a conclusive conviction that open source based collaboration not only intersects with innovation but is inseparable from it and sits at the very center of our digital ecosystem.
Innovation and collaboration:
It is a universal adage that “The history of the world is nothing but the history of a few great men.” Well, while there is some merit attached to that saying, I think technological progression lies at the crossroads of the incessant toil of these few pioneers and the team of engineers who adopt and imbibe these ideas and inventions and execute them behind the scenes. In that regard, I think the more appropriate term is “collective progression” and not just progression.
Holding on to that thread, in his seminal work, Walter Isaacson states that when Grace Hopper, one of the torchbearers of programming, came up with the world’s first programming manual on Mark I, she gave credit to those individual inventors who played a role in the creation of Mark I. Shortly after, International Business Machines (IBM) released its own history of this digital computer system, where it gave credit to the organization instead of individuals. According to the historian Kurt Beyer, “The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental advancements.” IBM, in its version, included a long list of small innovations that were brought to fruition by those whose names are not well known.
In this, I am aligned with Isaacson’s stance that it is neither the individuals nor the teams that should be given one-sided credit in making these breakthroughs happen, and that there is an interplay between them that acts as an essential ingredient in marching forward in the right creative direction. It is this collaborative spirit, which is the true soul of open source methodology, that creates an effective, and more importantly, an empowering digital world. Nothing can prove this argument in a more convincing way than the story of Wikipedia.
The foremost name that comes to my mind when we talk about Wikipedia is that of Ward Cunningham. Ward is credited with modifying HyperCard, a superb product developed by Bill Atkinson at Apple. Since Apple was unsure as to what to do with this product, they gave it for free with their computer systems. HyperCard basically allowed the users to create links to cards that were stacked together. Since Cunningham found the process of doing it cumbersome, he created a simple way of creating those hyperlinks. He then released the internet version of it, and the result was a wiki-based web which became popular as wikiwikiweb (later WardWiki).
When Jimmy Wales came to know about WardWiki, he contacted Ward to discuss whether he could use the wiki software in his flagging project called Nupedia. Ward had decided not to patent his software and gladly permitted Wales to use it. What eventually resulted was Wikipedia. Not only are Wikipedia’s articles created collaboratively, the entire website is operated in a collaborative fashion without any top-down management approach.
People sometimes misunderstand that in the absence of a top down governance approach, anyone would be able to publish anything non-sensical to the Wikipedia website. As a reply, what comes to my mind is a famous aphorism from the same book “The Innovators” that “Wars have been fought with less intensity than the reversion battles on Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is like a wall where is it difficult to add graffiti to it than it is to remove it.
No wonder, Wikipedia spread like kudzu. Consider this – At the beginning of 2014, it was written in 287 languages, and the total number of articles was more than 30 million. As per the Isaacson, the “Encyclopaedia Britannica“, had eighty thousand articles in it, less than two per cent of the number in Wikipedia. With this collaborative approach of running an entity, people were able to not only give a neutral/unbiased view of the topic, but also able to debate and decide the reversion rules, rules as to who would act as an administrator, and rules regarding which individuals will be banned from publishing. The result – One of the the world’s biggest collaborative projects.
Open source based collaboration not only empowers people to act as agents of technological innovation and contribute to the existing knowledge base, it is a powerful methodology to develop products from an economical point of view. A case in point is the Debian Operating system version 5.0. The Operating system, with Linux at its core acting as a Kernel, has 320 million lines of code. Had it been built “behind the walls” and not with a collaborative open source methodology and a community based developmental approach, it would have costed U.S. dollars 8 billion. Now one can download it for free.
What open source has offered the world is a new line of thinking when it comes to innovation and software production. It democratizes the thought process which is imperative to both digital evolution and digital revolution.
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