Lessons from WikiLeaks: Decentralise, Decentralise, Decentralise

Whether or not Wikileaks turns out to be a watershed in politics, there's another question of more immediate interest to the open source world: can the latter learn a key lesson from the measures taken against the Wikileaks operation?

These have included booting it off Amazon's servers and stopping donations through MasterCard, Visa or PayPal. That this happened without warning serves as a timely reminder that such centralized services have absolute and largely arbitrary power over their users.

On The H Open.

Not All Chrome Glisters

The unveiling of Google's Chrome OS is rather extraordinary - not so much for what was announced, but how. After all, the first details of Chrome OS were revealed nearly 18 months ago:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

In the Blue Corner: Decentralisation...

Here's an interesting emergent meme:

An incoming Conservative government would decentralise health service computing and extend competition between suppliers, according to a plan released at its party conference.

The party's NHS Improvement Plan, released on 29 September 2008 by shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley, says the party will replace "Labour's centrally determined and unresponsive national IT system".

"Conservatives for decentralisation, Labour for centralisation": hmmm, might just work.

Decentralise Your Data - Or Lose It

Aside from the obvious one of not trusting the UK government with personal data, the other lesson to be learned from the catastrophic failure of "security" by the HMG is the obverse to one of free software's key strengths, decentralisation. When you do centralise, you make it easy for some twerp - or criminal - to download all your information onto a couple of discs and then lose them. A decentralised approach is not without its problems, but at least it puts a few barriers in the way of fools and knaves.

Thus Spake Yochai

I am still optimistic. It does seem that people have been opting for open systems when they have been available, and that has provided a strong market push against the efforts to close down the 'Net. Social practices, more prominently the widespread adoption of participation in peer production, social sites, and DIY media, are the strongest source of pushback. As people practice these freedoms, one hopes that they will continue to support them, politically, but most powerfully perhaps, with their buying power and the power to divert their attention to open platforms rather than closed. This, the fact that decentralized action innovates more quickly, and that people seem to crave the freedom and creativity that it gives them, is the most important force working in favor of our capturing and extending the value of an open network.

Sigh; my hero.

Requiem for a Failed Methodology

News that Granger is abandoning the sinking ship that is NHS Connecting for Health is hardly a surprise. The £12 billion project was doomed before it started, because it tried to apply an unworkable, 20th-century, closed-source software methodology - one that not only does not scale, but that actually gets worse the bigger the project (hello, Fred Brooks).

The only way to address these kind of mammoth undertakings is by using a lightly-coupled, decentralised approach. And that means open standards at a minimum, and ideally full-bore open source. The equation is simple: the more openness, the greater the scope for componentisation, the greater the flexibility - and the greater the chance the damn thing will actually work.

Sadly, NHS Connecting for Health will go down in history as the perfect demonstration of this fact. - Sadly, because I shall be paying for some of it.