I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower.

After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has become clear: the projects that survive and grow almost always follow a simple pattern. I call this the #4opens. Other people describe similar ideas as open source development, open governance, or commons-based development. The label doesn’t matter – the practice does.

If you want to know which projects will flower and which will wither, look at the ground, not the words. The #4opens ask four very simple questions:

• Open data – can people access and reuse the information?

• Open source – can people read, modify, and share the code?

• Open process – can people see and participate in how decisions are made?

• Open standards – can different systems interoperate and grow a wider ecosystem?

Projects that are open in all four of these ways tend to build living ecosystems. Projects that are only partially open tend to stall or collapse. The two repeating problems, over the years two patterns constantly undermine good projects.

#geekproblem – A teenage mix of arrogance and ignorance that is surprisingly universal in tech culture. Developers assume technical elegance (and complexity) will automatically solve social problems. They underestimate governance, community, and messy human reality.

#dotcons – The opposite pressure: corporate platforms pushing business models that prioritise extraction and growth over human need. They happily wrap themselves in the language of “open” while building fundamentally closed systems.

Both pressures distort funding decisions. Both lead to projects that sound open but aren’t. Money is a dangerous subject, yes, funding matters, but money inside infrastructure projects to often distorts them quickly. For #openweb work, a useful rule of thumb is: Keep the core simple. Focus funding on maintaining the #4opens infrastructure. Let many different organisations, businesses, and NGOs build external services and applications on top.

This keeps the core commons stable while allowing diversity and experimentation around it. It’s the #KISS principle applied to digital commons. When funding pushes too many external agendas into the core, projects become heavy, political, and fragile.

Some uncomfortable truths, over the last decade we’ve been told several stories about security and scale that simply don’t hold up. There is no security in CLOSED systems, security emerges from open scrutiny and shared responsibility:

• There is no security in radical individualism, security emerges from community.

• There is no security in “trustless” systems, real resilience grows from social trust.

These ideas have been obscured by hype cycles and by the influence of #dotcons and their shadow allies, the #encryptionists who push purely technical “trustless” thinking. Both camps wrap themselves in the language of openness, but their systems remain structurally closed. Words are wind, look at the ground: #4opens.

The unspoken scaling problem, there is also an unspoken #geekproblem around how we think about scaling. When many developers talk about #p2p, they imagine data-to-data scaling, systems optimised to move information as efficiently as possible. From that perspective, human friction looks like a problem.

But if you see #p2p as human-to-human, the picture changes. Human scaling limits – smaller communities, slower processes, local trust networks – are not bugs, they are virtues, creating resilience and accountability. The data-first model is the one favoured by the #dotcons.
The human-first model is the one the #openweb actually needs. Funders should be aware of which philosophy a project is building around.

A simple test If you want a quick filter when looking at proposals, ask:

• Does this project genuinely follow the #4opens?

• Does it build community and governance, not just code?

• Is it resilient without permanent central funding?

• Does it strengthen the commons, rather than a future platform?

Projects that pass these tests are the ones most likely to flower, everything else tends to wither. Food for thought.

#EU #NLnet #NGI #funding

https://hamishcampbell.com/make-some-foss-compost/