A lot of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from open web

Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month. IndieWeb Carnival is a monthly blogging event where one person chooses a topic and invites others to write about it.

For this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, Chris invited us to write about purpose and there’s been quite a few excellent entries so far. With my Python A to Z series finished, I finally have time to ponder this very deep topic.

I got access to internet (through one of those 56K modems that cried like it was tortured every time we connected to the high way of internet) when I was maybe 10 years old, back in the 1990s. I grew up with three excellent sources of open knowledge: school, library and the internet.

I’ve learned so much over the years from the internet, thanks to other people who shared that information in open, public websites and discussion forums. Finnish programming forums like Ohjelmointiputka and Mureakuha were instrumental in my early years of learning programming and later on, Stack Overflow and various blogs continued my learning journey.

I’ve been part of a lot of different forums and the blogosphere from the very early days of having access to the internet.

IRC was where I found other people outside the forums to chat about things I cared about and wanted to learn more. While it lost to more visually appealing and centralised solutions like Slack and Discord, its openness was crucial: I didn’t have to know someone to gain access to those discussions and that knowledge.

During my studies at the university, the computer science student organisation’s discussion moved from IRC to Discord and lots of smaller groups were formed in chat platforms like Whatsapp. This was a big shift in openness because now you needed a social connection with someone to be included in these discussions.

Over the years, the technology landscape has shifted a lot from open to closed. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and chat platforms like Slack and Discord are platforms that are not as discoverable (especially if you don’t have an account) and the information inside them disappears from the world — sometimes even for the people who are part of those chats.

This summer, I’ve been part of a newly formed community within which we had a long discussion about whether we should create a forum that’s open and public or closed and private (or a mix of the two). I wrote many passionate, long messages about the same things I’m sharing here: why openness matters to me.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that I’m starting place for people to discuss a craft that can have both personal and professional influence. I’m not a money person myself but let’s say it’s about trading in stock market as that can easily be seen as a thing where having access to information can have a big financial and influencial impact.

If I’d start this discussion platform as a closed, private platform (a private forum hidden from the world or a Slack group or something like that), it would severely limit the access to many demographics of people and skew who has an opportunity to benefit from it.

Someone would have to know me or another member, come into some sort of discussion about trading to even possibly learn about its existence. I know that my personal social circle is skewed towards highly educated, somewhat wealthy people with social capital. Without making a focused effort into reaching out to other groups, I would be perpetuating that demographic continuing to have more access to a community and knowledge that can increase their influence in society through wealth and social capital.

Next step towards openness could be that the community is public but the discussions are only for members. That way, if someone specifically is searching for a trading community, they might find the group and ask to join.

If I think back on my own life and learning journey, it’s a very rare occasion that I would be searching for such thing or asking about those from people I know. At least in comparison to times when I’ve been searching something specific: how to start trading, how to make better trades and so on (as you can see, I know absolutely nothing about trading).

Those kinds of searches have led me to a lot of great blogs and discussion forums which has led me to discover them and learn more and get to know people in there.

And I want to increase the amount of that kind of discovery and access in the world. I want to share myself but also build communities where we share with open doors and at least trying to do more to reach people in demographics that might not have access to that information and those social circles.

To me, doing the opposite often feels I would be pulling up the ladder after myself. I got a lot from this culture of open sharing but now I want to keep it to myself and the group I’m part of. Reality is somewhere in between of course.

I’m not perfect in that pursuit either: I’m part of dozens of Discord servers and Slack workspaces — some of which I’ve founded — where this discussion happens hidden from the public eye. More and more however, I want to be an active force in moving the needle to another direction.

Often, it’s the mundane, daily discussions about the craft that can be the important factor. Either in how people find more of the knowledge and people or by being the thing people were seeking and wanted to learn.

People talk about how forums are dead. Compared to early 2000s, sure. But for example, I’m somewhat active (either as daily reader of discussions or active participant in them) in a dozen or so forums on a weekly basis. The topics span from programming to blogging and websites to writing to social issues to sports to video games and more. I hope we’ll see even more in the future and I hope they remain open, public and accessible to people so that more people have the opportunity to learn and find people with similar interests.

There’s a strong purpose for open discussion forums.