i gave a talk about what it means to be "open". it's very important to me!! please enjoy.

There's a precedent to this interpretation of openness in academic research: Open Notebook Science. It's one of those ideas that everybody supports but that very few people turn into practice. "Our code/data is too messy to be shared" is a frequently quoted reason. The other one is more specific to academic habits: "others will take my material and publish before me."

"oh no someone will benefit from my work"

More like "people will obviously benefit from my work, but nobody shall benefit from it more than I do".

I should spell this out: If other people benefit from my work more than I benefit from it, then I would be monumentally happy. if someone took my data/findings and published, then I would be overwhelmingly delighted because it would mean I could do something else. It would be a great help

Maybe people should only work on ideas that they aren’t afraid of others stealing 😛 Whoever does the work doesn’t matter - it’s the idea that’s important.

In my experience the gap between “maybe people should” and “actually people do” seems to be rather large.

yes, we should normalise it to make it easier :)

I saw a great talk from Jude Pullen yesterday about encouraging the repairability mindset, and he was saying it’s like a 3 legged chair where you need govt (policy), consumers (behaviour changes) and companies (design and dev) to work together to make the idea work - but in the end, you need to “begin by beginning”, where ever you sit in that ecosystem ♻️ If you really believe in the idea, just do your part I suppose 🤷‍♂️

I have often thought "this could be a paper, but I'm never going to write it because writing papers is awful, and I don't have to." 😅

Ultimately this looks like finding the right balance between competition and collaboration. Most academics nowadays see their peers mainly as competitors. Which has lots of reasons, ranging from human nature via selection bias to explicit incentives defined by their sponsors. If you see yourself as a member of a huge open collaboration, you aim for your work being useful to that collaborative project. But with that attitude, it's difficult to get into an academic career that actually pays the bills. I am fortunate enough to have gotten to that point, but I see lots of people drop out rather early.

if academia promotes harmful competition in this way then that's a problem and maybe we should put it in the bin

Great talk @Lu Wilson, love a good origin story 😍 I'm all for being open and sharing scrappy fiddles, but how do you balance the logistics of sharing? I enjoy the sharing process and demoing work in progress - it even feels healthy to include, as part of the creative process as a whole...but I can't help but feel when I'm spending time on a talk, sharing on socials etc., I'm not spending time honing my craft or figuring out what it is I'm making. Sure, feedback is great to incorporate, but does it sometimes feel like noise? Esp when social media, by design, wants you to be on it and not escape to do something else 😬

Thank you!! i don't have these problems. adopting "scrappiness" is great because it means that sharing becomes very fast. and the more you do it, the quicker you get. posting something to masto/bluesky is a 10 second thing for me now. i find that most time wasted is from deciding what to share and cleaning it up. you don't need to do those things though. i don't use platforms that try to suck me in. i don't consume any algorithmic feeds. this makes my life a lot better. highly recommend it as an approach!

Thanks! Those are great tips. It feels like, not so much giving up on the sharing, but fine tuning the process (as with any other part of the creative process), to make it work for me. I can get behind that! 🙂

if academia promotes harmful competition in this way then that's a problem and maybe we should put it in the bin

Not sure we'd be better off. Academia promotes harmful competition because it's embedded into capitalism. Getting rid of academia while keeping capitalism is not going to help much. The void left by academia would be filled by some other capitalism-inspired institution. Note: My use of "capitalism" is a caricature, but I don't have a better word for now.

yes let's put capitalism in the bin too!

What if we’re stuck in the bin and need to climb out?

we get a smaller bin and put the smaller bin in the bin and then the bad things in the smaller bin and then transform our binworld into a trashless ex-bin paradise

Well... capitalism is the bin we are stuck in! Though I think a better image is addiction. We (collectively, as a society) are addicted to growth, i.e. ever increasing material wealth and ever increasing human populations. Capitalism (in the strict sense of the term) is merely the best technique we have found so far to ensure a steady supply of that drug. Soviet-style communism did exactly the same, but less efficiently, which is why capitalim "won". How to get rid of an addiction? I suspect it requires help from outside. Outside being marginal communities practicing different values. In the worst case, they can "take over" when capitalism crashes, which is inevitable in a finite world. Ideally, they will take over before. Open sharing of non-material wealth is an important aspect of doing better than capitalism, so this is actually related to the topic of this thread.

whether capitalism is here or not, we can still grow communities and practices that behave certain ways :) if capitalism or academia is blocking you from joining, i suggest you put it in the bin in your life as much as you possibly can, subvert or escape it as much as possible i don't accept the argument that "things are already bad (we're already in a bin) so there's no point trying to make things better (put things in a smaller bin)"

I certainly agree with that! You can mentally put it in the bin, as far as your life is concerned. At least for academia, it's a bit harder to escape from capitalism.

for sure. i mean i can't talk really, i work for a startup right now :)

Maybe we should think more like artists, and see capitalism/academia/etc. as tools and mediums to express ideas. Sometimes they are good/bad tools for the idea, or maybe sometimes subverting the medium is a better expression of the idea than finding any other medium. The fact that these ideas are popular and well understood is a property you can leverage, rather than just being in prisoned by them. Going back to basics 😛, I think that’s how the great polymath’s like Leonardo Da Vinci thought

Like the pragmatism here, and if that works for people, at least to stay motivated or not get frustrated so you can keep doing your thing, that’s great. But capitalism and academia aren’t tools to wield, but systems we are part of. Tools give you agency, but you can’t switch or dismantle a stable system by yourself, even if it’s obviously broken. For those of us who’ve been frustrated, or worse, burned out, I think it’s important to know the difference. Influencing systems is a different sport than just choosing a different tool or building a different product. It’s great if you preserve your ability to focus on what you can change and influence locally, as that for sure is a useful capacity, mainly to stay sane.