home | GIS | musings | cartography
| aboutBefore this class, I associated the terms “open source” with software like QGIS that I knew I could download from the internet and use without having to pay any additional fees. However, this class has expanded my view of “open source” beyond that of freely available software. I’ve come to understand open source as more than just a means of accessing software but as part of a greater community of people who are working to make knowledge and code more accessible to a wider range of people and practitioners. It has been really cool in this class to be able to build upon already existing spatial analysis efforts and take someone’s final product and continue to push it forward. Academia and the way that knowledge currently gets produced feels very exclusive and final. I like the way that this class has encouraged me to think about spatial analysis as a continually evolving process that includes lots of revision and collaboration. It is also exciting to see the work that the open source community is doing to break down barriers in terms of accessing technology and re-defining who can be considered a “programmer” or “software developer.” Oftentimes, those roles are closed off to certain people with certain credentials, but the way that the open source movement has worked to make code, data, and information accessible to anyone who wants it has changed the way people can contribute to softwares and has changed the way that softwares get built and updated.
It has also been interesting to think about how the values of the open source community translate into a liberal arts college that operates under the Honor Code. The Honor Code is in place to protect individual ownership and hold students accountable for producing their own original material, which is in conflict with the open source spirit of collaboration and teamwork. Perhaps having the honor code here at Middlebury can encourage us to acknowledge the ways in which our success is predicated upon help and information sharing from others, which is also integral to the success of open source science. I think oftentimes, when people think of open source, they think of “free” which means that they can benefit freely from the work of others, but it is equally as important to acknowledge the people who have helped you get to where you are, and then continue to share your knowledge others so that people can benefit and build off of your work. The success of this kind of open and sharing relationship was really evident in our labs this semester, in the ways that each person in our class contributed bug fixes or insights and critiques that helped push the whole class to be more successful.