Emily Durham Bradshaw

In his keynote talk for RailsConf2021, David Hansson criticized the scarcity model of open sourcing. This is the model of both Gates and Stallman (Hansson, 2021) which operates on the idea that code must be licensed in order to protect the general coding world against freeloaders or stolen code.  This model is a scarcity model, and Hansson pointed out that there is no such thing as scarcity with open sourcing.  There is no limited amount of code, no boundaries for its use.  The tragedy of the commons is a misappropriated metaphor because in the commons, there is a scarcity of resources so there must be limitations and regulations in order to guide public use.  But this is not the case with open sourcing.  In fact, the result of this misapplication is that those engaged in start-ups who are working overtime for a decade to develop and guard code suffer from burnout, lose a sense of freedom and creativity, and give over their quality of life to extrinsic motivatio...

Although the internet has changed the publishing world, including academic publishing, standards for rank advancement for professors have not changed much since pre-internet days.  The Journal Impact Factor is a major metric for measuring success, quantifying professors’ involvement in academic journal publication, conference participation, and citation counts.  It leaves out newer forms of impact, such as open scholarship, community service, and new publication types and alt metrics (McKiernan et al, 2019). I was looking for a university model showing how some colleges set up rank advancement to include a broader, more modern view of rank advancement. Instead, I found a declaration of independence from the current system of research assessment.  The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a science-discipline declaration with thousands of signatures joining to protest the use of unfair, manipulable journal publishing matrices.  They call for a foc...