The Github Generation

GitHub was intended to be an open software collaboration platform, but it’s become a platform for much, much more than code. It’s now being used by artists, builders, home owners, everyone in between, entire companies … and cities.
Wired.com

Mikael Rogers talks about the concept of Open Source, and how it’s changing radically with the introduction of Github. He compares the new standards with what happened to the publishing industry after The Internet became main stream.

Someone even published all of the laws in Germany on GitHub last year. (Perhaps not so surprisingly, he has about 17 open “pull” requests for changes.)

Open source is becoming accessible to regular people

Where open source used to mean operating systems and other overwhelming software projects, people are starting to think more and more of small jQuery plugins or Kickstarter projects like window farms.

The change is primarily happening at the sub conscious level. Open Source used to be for the top 0.5% in fields like software engineering or science. Today it’s much more accessible, because regular people are getting more connected and have much better tools for collaborating. GitHub being the most popular yet.

It seems obvious that crowd sourcing of funding goes hand in hand with the open source mindset. You come up with an idea that you need some help to realise financially. Then you invite those same people to collaborate with you, reshaping the idea into something even better than square one.

The best projects are run this way. People, from all over the world, with vastly different backgrounds and skill sets, passionate about solving the same problem, work together to make it happen.

I’m extremely excited to live in this era where ideas are truly democratized. It’s something no one before us has been able to do at this level.