werd.io
It's not enough to have better ideals.
Last week I was privileged to contribute to the PublicSpaces conference in Amsterdam, which discussed the impact of technology on democracy. I was there all-too-briefly, but I was reminded how wonderful Amsterdam really is as a city: both culturally rich and a reminder of how a city’s infrastructure can work if it receives the investment and thoughtful attention it deserves.
PublicSpaces itself is a marvel: a conference that dives into the underlying power dynamics behind tech and aims to create space to discuss alternatives. Robin Berjon’s __ We Build On Hope and Erin Kissane’s __ Holdfast were both standout talks that were both excellent in themselves and representative of the tone of the entire event.
On Friday, I participated in a panel that asked whether journalism can use the Open Social Web to strengthen democracy. I shared the stage with Catherine Tait, expert in residence at New_ Public and former president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Robert Amlung, the Senior Innovation Advisor at ZDF; and Björn Staschen, the founder of the European non-profit Save Social.
The conversation was spirited, taking in the rise of authoritarianism, what we are hopeful about, and generational shifts in how people seek out news and information. We did plan for one more question that we sadly didn’t get to. It’s a point that I think is important to make, so I thought I’d go into it here.
> As an early-stage investor in media startups at Matter, and Founder of Elgg and now in your role as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica you probably have had to balance ideals vs business. What would you advise us when we talk about ‘Technology for democracy’: what kind of strategies should we use / explore to combine our lofty ideals while still being able to earn a living?
If we have lofty ideals — and we should! — we probably want these three things:
* To build tools and networks with pro-social values
* To have lots of people use them
* To be able to keep doing it
The message I’d send to anyone who wants to build a pro-social tool or network is: we are not absolved from doing the complex product work of building something people need in a way that has the potential to be self-sustaining. But the good news is, doing that work is also how we reach more people and get to keep building.
In product, we sometimes talk about vitamins vs painkillers. Vitamins are always optional, but if you’re actively experiencing pain, you’re highly motivated to find something that will solve it. Painkillers are the products that truly drive value.
Although pro-social values are important, it’s never enough to build something that is _ideologically_ better. We need to build tools that are _practically_ better for people today, based on people’s actual needs. “Twitter but decentralized” is not a particularly useful idea. You need to figure out who you’re going to help first, get to know them, understand what is _painful_ for them, and solve that pain.
Extractive networks have literally brought down democracies and enabled genocides, so we know we need software that encodes better ideals — but to most _individuals_ , those ideals alone are vitamins at best. If your project has better ideals but the experience of using your software compared to the incumbents is the same or worse, you’ll only attract the most dedicated idealists. To attract more, you need to _both_ provide better ideals _and_ solve a real need better than the alternatives.
And you have to offer it sustainably. Sustainability isn’t a thing you think about after you’ve designed a product. Your product’s business model is _an integral part of it_ : whether your solution is valuable or not to a user depends in large part on the business model you use to provide it. Its cost, and the friction of using it, are a key part of the equation a user will use to determine whether your solution is worth using. If you’re doing something good, you need to be able to _keep doing it_ , so figuring this out very early is really important. You can’t hand-wave it away.
A lot of pro-social developers yearn to be paid for building something with great values and distributing it for free in the commons. I like that idea too! It sounds like a great gig. But in reality, that’s almost never how the value exchange actually works. Not to belabor the point, but people will pay you because doing so is an easier way to solve their pain than anything they might be able to do themselves.
_What about government grants?_ you might ask — but this harsh reality _includes_ grant funding. For example, the EU is highly motivated to build an alternative tech stack this year because it’s begun to see US tech as a security risk. But it’s only going to pay you if it sees your work as a plausible way to accelerate its path towards getting there in measurable ways. National security risk is certainly pain, but you have to be able to prove you can reduce it.
So you always need to understand who your customers will be; you need to know who your users will be (if they’re different); then you need to figure out what their needs are; and you need to serve them better than anyone else. Nobody gets to hunker down and just scratch their own itch or build something they believe in. Not in a vacuum.
Most idealists are not that excited to think about money. Me included! And we make all kinds of excuses to avoid having to think about it. Here are two fallacies I’ve seen over and over again:
1. Startups don’t need to consider sustainability from the beginning
2. Open source contributors do it for the love of it
First, the startups. Years ago, Twitter famously decided to grow as fast as possible and worry about a model for sustainability later. It spent years just building product without even so much as a word dedicated to how it would make money. That set the tone for a lot of idealistic founders — I’ve met many who want to do the same thing.
What they missed is that Twitter had Ev Williams, who had previously sold Blogger to Google. That gave him both the capital and the investor goodwill to experiment — he used his Blogger proceeds to buy Odeo, the startup that became Twitter, back from its investors. Even then, the lack of attention to business model meant that when Twitter eventually _did_ get serious, it pulled back on the open APIs and libraries that had built its ecosystem. So while many founders and builders find it distressing to think about money, I don’t think avoiding the topic is wise.
Meanwhile, we often look to the open source ecosystem as a beautiful ecology of people building things and releasing them for free. The entire internet is based on open source libraries, tools, and radical collaborations. Couldn’t we have a nice life doing the same?
It’s kind of an illusion. Over half of contributors are paid to write open source code directly, usually for larger corporations. In these cases, open source software solves infrastructure pain for these employers: the code is required for them to realize their strategies but isn’t a core part of their competitive advantage. Collaborating in the open lowers their costs and allows them to build better infrastructure more efficiently.
At the same time, Tidelift found that 60% of open source project maintainers aren’t paid at all. We’ve all heard stories of open source contributors building load-bearing infrastructure without any real compensation. Between the corporate backed contributors and open source’s deep bench of starving artists, there are very, very few people actually managing to find sustainability building open source code projects independently.
Despite these dynamics, if you release a project on an open source basis, you’ll find that lots of people celebrate your work. They’re very happy that you’ve done this, because they share your values and are excited to see more people build with them. Sometimes they’ll help spread the word in ways that help more people discover your product, and they’ll often have useful technical ideas.
But they’re almost never going to be your customers themselves. Some of them may even get angry if you choose to sell a service in order to achieve sustainability. “The community” is helpful in terms of figuring out shared values and connecting to other projects, but in terms of solving concrete needs and providing value, they’re rarely who you should optimize for. Pro-social developers often worry that they shouldn’t add a feature because “the community won’t like it”, without asking the wider group of people who have a real problem the software could solve whether they need it. Allies are not the same as customers.
To be clear: pro-social values matter. Open source matters. It’s just, if we want to build something with pro-social values that will reach a lot of people, and do it in such a way that it can continue to exist for as long as it needs to, they’re not the _only_ things that matter. Doing great product and business work is how you achieve those things.
And make no mistake: those things _are fully achievable_. I have so much hope. When we build something that solves a real problem better than anyone else and we do it with pro-social values, we further those values in a meaningful way. The values themselves give us a meaningful lift: nobody _wants_ to be locked in or to otherwise be at the mercy of big tech companies. They subject themselves to those things when they have a problem that can’t be solved any other way. They’re _actively looking for great solutions that aren’t in opposition to their values_. And we can meet them where they’re at.
We should all have hope. We also need to have discipline. The discipline is how the hope becomes reality.
Making a valuable product isn’t in opposition to having lofty ideals. It’s how we bring those ideals to the world.
