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why Dynamicland Realtalk isn't open source

Transcribed from an interview with Toby Schachman and Paula Te on The Afrofuturist Podcast:

There's this notion of the open-source movement. There are a lot of things
that we totally resonate with that because it's about understanding how your
technology works. We're totally 100% on board with that.

But then there are other issues with the open-source community, where it's
very internet-based and so open-source ends up benefitting this group of
people who have really strong access to internet and understand how to use
these tools like git or how to program using traditional programming
languages—all these things.

So something that we're afraid of is that those kinds of forces could keep
the segregation that we have right now, where we have these developers who
have all this agency and then all these people who are not part of that
community because they've been excluded for various reasons.

So, we have a lot of hesitation about putting anything on the internet
basically, so we put most of our outreach into in-person things—getting
people to come in and actually be face to face with us. Learning from each
other face to face is so different from learning from each other on the
internet.

And that's been really hard for us because there are legitimate reasons to be
putting stuff on the internet. Like, it's totally a valid thing that someone
in North Carolina wants to open their own Dynamicland—why shouldn't they be
able to do it? It's true, but we have to go slow enough and focus on this one
physical location to really get it right in terms of "what is the community
dynamic that will ultimately be able to include everybody?"

Copied from Track Changes Podcast

We want to create a medium that works for all people. So growing our community, we’ve been pretty deliberate about reaching out to people who aren’t on Twitter and who aren’t traditionally advantaged by technology.

RZ Are you making something that someone can say, “I would like to have this in my home in Missouri.”

BV A lot of people say that and . . . it’ll be there eventually [RZ ok]. What we’re doing is incubating a new medium and that takes time [RZ sure] um and so one maybe analogy is the internet is not a product. The internet um runs on an infrastructure of hardware and software products, you know hundreds of them, but the internet itself was created in a non-profit context and have had to be for what it was.

RZ Right. So are you building a set of standards here?

BV Yeah, we’re building the technology but also a kind of culture . . . and that’s the part that can’t be rushed [RZ mm hmm]. So over the short term um growing very deliberately in that way. Over the medium term, in the same way there’s a public library and everybody kind of built in every populated area um, you know, we kind of want to have a Dynamicland that’s accessible to anybody no matter where they are and probably the public library themselves would probably just um incorporate what we’re doing. And then the long term — so that’s maybe 20 or 30 years out. Then the longer term, 40, 50 years out, is that it’s built into all infrastructure the way that electric light is today. So today you walk into a building and you just assume there’s electric lights in the ceiling and, in the same way, this’ll just be kind of a computational electric light that’s available everywhere. But it’s gonna take that amount of time to um do it right and do it safely.

...

PF So obviously if a large corporate funder’s out there going, “Hey, I’d like to be involved in the future of the technology substrative culture for the next 30 to 50 years,” they should send an email. Who else should send — like do you need people? Do you want people to learn about things? What — how do people help right now?

BV So Dynamicland is a community space. It’s intended to kind of um . . . it’s not just a research lab but it’s intended to actually eventually kind of have the presence of a respected public institution like a public library or a museum. Um but we’re growing it as a community space, a place where people come to kind of do their thing with these powerful tools. And so the process of growing a community is — it can be fraught if you kind of go with the default of, “We’re gonna tweet about this thing and then a bunch of people on Twitter are gonna see it and they wanna be involved.” Though they’re wonderful people, but you end up with a very homogenous community [PF right] and so we’re located in Oakland. Um Oakland, California which is uh — or was recently named the most diverse city in America of its size. You know with a certain set of diversity metrics. But that was deliberate. We have access to a community which — it can be a pretty wide cross section of — of people. And we want to create a medium that works for all people. And so um growing our community, we’ve been pretty deliberate about trying to reach out to groups of people who wouldn’t — who aren’t on Twitter and um who aren’t traditionally advantaged by technology.

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