[Music]
uh our lock note presenter is kathy reed
kathy is a long time friend and former
president of linux australia and
participant in lca's past
kathy works at the intersection of open
source emerging technologies and the
technical community communities who
shape and are shaped by them
kathy will be speaking about communities
are systems what can systems thinking
teach us about creating curating and
concluding communities
i'll shall now hand over to kathy
so as miles mentioned i'm currently a
phd candidate at the school of
cybernetics at the australian national
university where i'm investigating voice
data used in machine learning and its
implications for systems that use
language technologies like voice
assistants and smart speakers so i have
a strong interest in computing systems
and the people who use them or are used
by them
and before i start the talk proper today
there are three things that i'd like to
do
first i'd like to acknowledge that i'm
presenting today from the unseated lands
of the wadarang people of the kulin
nation here in geelong which itself is a
guadalarang word and i pay my respects
to elders past and present and to
leaders emerging
secondly i'd like to acknowledge that
linux confer u is a community produced
event and i'd like to recognize the
organizers and volunteers for their time
and their labor
without you this conference and the
benefits it yields like connections
across communities and the spread of new
ideas and techniques wouldn't happen as
readily so thank you
finally i want to acknowledge the toll
that the last two years has taken on
everyone
since i last saw many of you on the gold
coast back in the before times of early
2020 many of us have been through
lengthy lockdowns and dealt with the
background anxiety of case numbers
testing shortages and upended economies
labor markets and supply chains
so i want to say thank you for choosing
to be here
at an online event
delivered over video
and i'm really looking forward to the
time when we can all see each other
again alive well and in person
so thank you for locking down for
wearing masks for homeschooling for
isolating for testing for getting
vaccinated
because those actions don't just help
keep us safe as individuals
they help safeguard us all as a
community
and that takes me to the keynote proper
many of us work with systems in our
professional lives
and when we think of systems we might
think of some variant of these
this the this is the guidi supercomputer
in canberra one of the top 500
supercomputers in the world
or we might think of something like this
that's a photo by jamie schmidt at the
dingo car from the open hardware mini
comfort lca 2020
or when we think of systems we might
think of something like this
that's a slide of the arpanet topology
the predecessor to today's internet
circa about 1976
probably fewer nodes than uh some of us
have on our home networks today
so when we think of systems we tend to
think of computing systems
cyberphysical systems
they can be as simple and as small as a
single led with a power source or at the
other extreme of scale have millions of
intangible and physical components
interconnected through different
networking protocols
running myriad pieces of intertwined and
interdependent software all across the
globe
these systems can be orchestrated
deliberately and carefully planned and
designed
or as we all know they can grow
organically as box after box is
provisioned for some prototype or pilot
project that never seems to be entirely
decommissioned
time these systems can grow in
complexity
intertangled intertwined until no one
person can really know the whole picture
they can exist for a brief period of
time
how many containers have you spun up and
down today
or for much longer
do we have any cobol programmers in the
house
then at their end of life they are
disassembled disaggregated and
decommissioned
and hopefully recycled
so many of us are conversant and
comfortable thinking about computing and
networking infrastructure
as systems and systems of systems that
have life cycles and connections and
components and characteristics
but at their most fundamental
systems are simply defined as a set of
elements in mutual interaction
and we can apply systems thinking to
many different fields
in his groundbreaking work on general
systems theory published in 1968 this
chap ludwig von burton landfi set up
principles for systems that apply to
fields as diverse as biology chemistry
ecology and sociology
you might have heard of some of these
principles before
hierarchy entropy complexity
von burton landfi held the view that the
world itself was an organization
comprised of many different systems
interacting and influencing each other
and he held the view that by thinking
about systems we would have better tools
to explore explain and predict various
phenomena
so systems and systems thinking is
widely applicable
and in fact communities like these
the excellent volunteers at lca 2016 in
geelong
communities like these
the incredible volunteer team at lca
2012 in ballarat
communities like these
i believe that's the unpdns in perth in
2014
communities like these
that's the 20 000 that's the 2008
melbourne penguin dinner at the bazaar
the night market
and communities like these our fabulous
lca christchurch 2019 volunteers
all of these communities
and the community that you're a part of
today by attending this conference
online
can be considered as systems too
so the key tenet of my talk today
is deceptively simple
communities are systems
communities are systems and the concepts
we use for thinking about computing
systems can also be used for thinking
about the communities who develop use
and are affected by them
that is by approaching the concept of
community through the lens of systems
thinking we have a different toolbox a
set of concepts and ways that help us to
create
care for
and conclude communities
and i don't think i need to make this
argument to this audience about how
vitally important communities are to
computing and to software systems
this entire conference is centered
around a set of software designed
developed distributed adopted
by a community of millions around the
world
that software and its world-changing
impact wouldn't exist without
communities
so i'll take that argument as assumed
however one more nuanced point that i
want to make that perhaps isn't so
readily evident
is that computing systems and community
systems
are closely coupled
they influence each other
sometimes when we design computing and
cyber physical systems we view people
and communities as distinct or separate
elements of those systems
in this view people or the community
provide inputs
such as instructions data code
contributions configurations programs
and the computing system provides
outputs
reports calculations predictions waves
hands
this type of interaction can be thought
of as primarily transactional
inputs go in the computer process the
computer system doesn't processing or
computation and outputs come out
another view for anyone who's done soft
systems methodology
sees communities as a key integral part
of an overall system
as one of many interconnected components
that make up a technology system
such as hardware software documentation
business models user experience and so
on
this component view based view is
primarily transactional again
the community is a part a component that
provides services or functionality to
other parts of the system
and in return receives benefits such as
easier to use products peer support and
so on
but instead of this transactional
approach
when we think about technical systems
and communities
i want us to start to think about
transformation
not just about inputs or outputs or
components that provide services and
functions
i want us to think about how by
interacting with each other
influencing each other reciprocally and
continually through design decisions
past dependencies competing drivers
emerging standards and many other
factors
technical systems and people systems
communities
transform each other
communities shape the computing systems
that are built and in turn those systems
influence and change the communities
they interact with
this view that people and communities
shape and are shaped by the systems they
interact with
is not surprisingly called an
interactionist view
and it's also the view taken in this
book
by bacha friedman and david g hendry
called value sensitive design
it's a fantastic read
and the overarching takeaway is that
technology is imbued with the values of
the people who create it
but that's not always a good thing
for example
we have facial recognition technology
used in ever-increasing contexts and
capabilities
that doesn't recognize people of color
and especially women of color as well as
white people
gender shades this work is the
incredible work of george bullenweeny
who earlier this week submitted her phd
thesis so please do congratulate her on
twitter she's drove your joy
and in gender shades she outlines how
common facial recognition models just
don't work for some people
and there are clear reasons for this
firstly we have far fewer women and
people of color working in artificial
intelligence to begin with
for example this report by the team at
ai now in 2009 found that just 18
percent of authors at conferences in the
field of artificial intelligence and
machine learning such as neurops are
women
and less than six percent of people in
large technical companies that's fewer
than 1 in 16 identify as black or
hispanic
if the people building systems are
predominantly white men
then there are a narrow
range of values represented in design
decisions in testing
fewer people to say
will this work for people like me
and we also need to think about the data
upon which our systems are built
there are fewer images and photographs
of people of color in the data sets on
which facial recognition models are
trained
again there's less representation from
women and communities of color in these
data sets
and we see this also in speech
recognition technology
that doesn't recognize the speech of
black people as well as white people
this this is the work of allison koenig
and her colleagues at stanford who
investigated cloud automatic speech
recognition algorithms showing that the
error rate in speech recognition a
measure of how well a model recognises
what someone is saying is nearly double
for black speakers compared to white
speakers
and when you think about where the data
that is used to train these models comes
from mobile phones voice assistants
generally expensive pieces of technology
then we start to see how communities who
can afford technology communities who
use that technology
shape how that community is built for
everyone
even when not everyone is part of that
community
but wait there's more
big data has become big business and
many of us will be familiar with the
work of shashana zubov and her concept
of surveillance capitalism
in which reality our everyday
interactions with data platforms are
commodified extracted
and sold to the highest bidder
and we see how technical platforms
exploit that
encouraging us to interact to post to
engage we do scroll while unseen bots
harvest our every click
and use every like to better target
advertising to us
because that's the way the system was
designed
and by creating a technical system that
values popularity
and impressions
to drive more engagement and to collect
more data about us
we feel inadequate if we don't get
enough likes or hearts or karma or
followers community and technology
systems shape each other
and if you thought surveillance
capitalism was just for giants like
facebook and cambridge analytica try
logging onto iview the streaming site of
the australian broadcasting corporation
our public tax payer funded broadcaster
by mandating that viewers must log into
eye view and then sharing or selling
we're not quite sure because the abc
won't tell us
sharing or selling that viewer data with
facebook and google by default
until the viewer explicitly opts out
our very own auntie is now a
surveillance capitalist
again technology systems shape
communities
if you or your kids watch lots of bluey
will you only ever be recommended
similar content
diminishing the agency you have to
choose what you consume
speaking of privacy and intelligence
sorry speaking of privacy and
surveillance capitalism
we also have doorbells that infringe the
privacy of neighbors by listening and
watching constantly
or at least when usc 1 is up
with the surveillance covering an area
greater than just that belonging to the
owner of the device
and we've frequently seen
requests from law enforcement to have
access to this data
so data surveillance used by an
individual or household being used to
police the community in which that
household is situated
that is the technical system's reach is
increased beyond the individual
purchaser to the broader community
and here in this article on gizmodo we
see how at least one of those neighbors
is reacting responding to this technical
system
by having it ruled illegal
technology systems shape communities and
community reaction
and speaking of things that have been
ruled illegal
we have governments who tried to match
income and social benefit databases
poorly and unlawfully
issuing debt notices to people who could
least afford to pay
and i think that hints at the values of
the government that created that system
on the flip side we also have a
community which fought and campaigned
and advocated and launched legal action
and eventually got robo debt overturned
people like asher wolf and lindsey
jackson who i think is speaking tomorrow
and several others
communities do have agency to shape
technical systems
there are also incredible examples of
technical systems imbued with exemplary
community focused values
i suspect many of us have used matt
hayward's find a rat site in recent days
it's not perfect crowd source data never
is but it's leveraged the power of the
community to provide a much needed
scarce resource
for all of those who aren't mates with
the ceo of chemist warehouse
and many of us are familiar with the
work of chris fryer and john oxa in
creating excessively controlled
wheelchairs that aim to give more
freedom and independence and agency to
wheelchair users
communities and their values help shape
technical systems
so if we take the view that communities
social systems
influence how technical systems are
designed developed directed and deployed
and in turn technical systems shape
communities then it's not too far of a
leap for me to argue that thinking about
communities or systems is vitally
important
if we shape communities for the better
we might just shape technical systems
for the better and in turn build better
communities and so on in a positive
feedback loop
so today i'm going to outline some
principles from system thinking
and apply these principles to open
source communities
what we're going to uncover is not
necessarily novel or groundbreaking
but my intent here is to present it
through an unexpected lens that have
connected complicated co-evolving
systems
and through this framing i want to
encourage all of us to reflect
on the suggestion that every commit
every design decision every choice
is part of shaping and reshaping both
communities and technical systems
and that we as individuals have some
agency
and power
to determine what that shape might be
so what can systems thinking teach us
about creating communities
and to start with i'm going to explore
the work of these folks
russell ackoff on the left there and
fred emery on the right
fred emery was an australian
psychologist
and for any psychology people watching
his work was particularly influential in
the area of organizational development
and russell ackoff was world renowned
for his expertise in management science
and operations research
in 1976 emery and akoff authored
this book
on purposeful systems
in it they explain human behavior as a
system of purposeful events
and their intent in outlining this view
was to help us understand how to build
not just better social systems but how
to understand social systems so that we
can build better social systems that had
machines in them
technical and cyber physical systems
and so in this book emory and akov cover
many different types of systems
but a key takeaway is that many systems
are purposeful or goal seeking systems
that is the system is structured around
a particular objective
the system might not have a lot of
agency about how it achieves this goal
such as say a flower whose goal is to be
pollinated by a bee or alternatively the
actors within a system might have a lot
of choice
a lot of agency about how they achieve
that goal that objective
for example in a game of chess
the goal of the system is to move such a
way that your opponent is forced into a
position of checkmate
and there are literally millions of ways
in which that goal can be achieved
and the implications for communities
people systems are clear
communities have purposes
they have objectives and goals a
sporting community exists to participate
and further the adoption of a particular
sport
an academic community exists to further
the body of knowledge around a
particular topic
the linux australia community
oh hi
has the purpose the objective of
fostering open source software open
hardware open data open content and open
culture
throughout australia and the broader
region
there are many ways in which this could
be achieved but typically the choice
that the community has made has been to
achieve this through linux user groups
and by all meaning face to face once a
year and wearing the t-shirts prove it
values are also important here
because the behaviour used to achieve
goals is an expression of the values of
the community and the people in it
for example the linux confe you
community could choose to write
manifestos and flame various mailing
lists or
choose to partner productively
constructively with other organizations
other systems to achieve shared goals
so in creating communities we need to be
very clear about the goals that the
community should seek and importantly
the values and the choices that will be
made in pursuit of those goals
we have choice and agency about how and
how not we pursue our goals
another concept from systems thinking
that is useful when we're creating
communities is that of boundaries that
is where does the system begin and end
what elements are considered inside or
outside of the system
where is that line drawn
and what might need to happen for the
boundary to be permeated to be crossed
that is how easy is it for new elements
to enter or to leave the system
and one of the key thinkers around
boundaries is this chap gerald midgley
who's written several books on systems
and intervening in systems but i've
highlighted one of his most famous books
here here
it's called uh systemic intervention
and in this book he makes the case for a
technique he calls boundary critique i
won't go into the details here they're a
little bit esoteric but in essence he
argues that we need to critically
evaluate where the boundaries of systems
are and where different interpretations
of boundaries might conflict
there are several questions he
recommends that we ask of systems and of
system boundaries so that we identify
where those boundaries
are and where they could be
such as who are the decision makers in a
system who is affected by a system
that is where does power lie within a
system and what mechanisms are there for
people within a system to express their
choice and their agency
and the key point that i want to make
here is the boundaries and barriers
around a community
may not be what we think they are
for example we have a newcomers session
for linux convey you and a huge shout
out to everyone who attended last night
and this provides an introduction on
what to expect the lingo the lay of the
land
it helps to make newcomers feel welcome
lca and pike on a u both have equity and
diversity programs to help with the cost
of attendance again reducing barriers to
participation
standards and norms of behavior such as
the code of conduct exist and are
explained and generally upheld helping
to reduce concerns people may have about
attending but i want you to consider
this example
imagine that you want to attend a watch
party for an awesome conference
and that the watch party is on a
university campus
imagine now that you use a wheelchair
and thanks to ride sharing companies
establishing in your city there is one
wheelchair accessible taxi available for
the whole of your city
thanks technical systems
you persist you choose use agency to
book the taxi in advance
and they surprisingly show up on time
but when they take you to the university
campus they can't actually drop you off
close to the building because the
university has tried to discourage
parking near buildings
here we hit another system
so they drop you off about 800 meters
from where you need to be on a 30 degree
plus day
thank goodness the watch party is on the
ground floor and there are accessible
toilets in the building
my point is this
sometimes we don't know what the
barriers are to entering and fully
participating in our community we don't
know what those boundaries really are
there is boundary conflict because of
the variety of needs in our community
so to build better communities we need
to get better at identifying where those
hidden boundaries lie
so we've explored how system thinking
principles like purposeful systems and
agency and choice can be useful for
creating communities but how about
systems thinking help us to curate and
care for an existing community
and here i want to draw on the work of
daniella meadows
a very famous systems thinker
this is an excellent book thinking in
systems and that outlines many different
ways to intervene and make a change in
systems
and i want to focus on one particular
concept that danella meadows uses which
he refers to as stocks and flows
we're all familiar with the concept of
stocks and flows
think of saying money in and money out
of your bank account each month
money in this case is a stock and where
it comes from and where it goes is
considered a flow
and you might have stores of this stock
such as savings
and thinking about finances in
communities and keeping communities
financially viable is important but
there are many other types of stocks and
flows in communities
consider for example volunteer labor
this is a finite resource a stock
and it can flow in different directions
flows enter the system when volunteers
feel energized and committed
and have free time to donate
and that stock of volunteer labor can be
consumed in many ways on productive
tasks on achieving the goals and
objectives of the community of the
system
alternatively they can be squandered and
misdirected in dealing with unnecessary
conflict and burning out the volunteer
consuming the stock of passion and
commitment and time
so to build stronger communities we need
to understand their stocks their
resources
and where they flow in and out and are
consumed in the community
another systems thinking tool that can
help us curate communities is that of
cardinality and connection
those of you from a networking or
database background will recognize this
concept straight away
cardinality refers to the strength or
the bonds of connections between
elements in a system
in a database context it refers to how
entities are related
in a network system it refers to how
many paths or edges there are between
nodes in a network
and it can be a measure of how tightly a
system is connected and how resilient it
is to nodes being removed or dropping
off the system
the parallels with communities are
obvious
if we think about cardinality and
connection
we can think about how closely our
community is bonded
for example what would a map of linux
australia members look like
well it just so happens that i prepared
this map earlier
bear with me one moment
and
it shows some really interesting
patterns
and i want to be very clear here that
this data is at the postcode level
so there's no actual
addresses mapped here i only have
addresses represented in postcode format
so for example if you live in 3000 you
have a data point in 3000 i don't have
your actual address
and what this shows as expected are that
we have some very dense clusters near
urban centres like melbourne
sydney there and we have some clusters
around cities where there have been
lcas and we can see ballarat there and
we can see geelong but there are also
some unexpected clusters here
so we have a cluster here in aubry
wodonga which is quite interesting and
we have a cluster here in northern
tasmania there in lonnie
and i think i also saw one in
mount gambier over here
so folks who may not have a local lug or
they may not have ways of getting to a
local meet-up and so it's harder for
these people to make and maintain
connections
and so the lessons here are again clear
sorry
the lessons here are again clear
understand the connections in your
community and what you might be able to
do to strengthen them and bring people
closer together
one last tool that i'm going to mention
for helping to curate communities is
that of requisite variety
remember how we met russell akov back in
the slide about purposeful systems and
how systems have goals and how we have
agency and choice about how we pursue
these goals
right well akov took that concept a step
further
and thought about how systems used
choice and agency to choose how to reach
those goals
and he thought about how systems adapted
to challenges to those goals
disturbances in the system
and one of the things he found about
systems through his research was the
more variety the systems had the greater
the range of values and dimensions that
the elements in a system took
the more resilient the system was to
shocks and challenges
and again the implications for
communities are clear
the greater the variety of people the
greater the variety of skills they bring
to bear the greater the range of
viewpoints and values the greater the
range of resources the better position
the community will be to withstand
shocks and unexpected occurrences
and a key example of this that many in
the room will be familiar with is from
pycon in the us back in 2020
pycon was scheduled for just after the
covert 19 pandemic started
and they had to cancel
that single event much like lca and
pycon au for linux australia was the key
source of revenue for the python
software foundation
and they were staring down a loss of
over 1 million us dollars
luckily donations flowed in to
ameliorate and to offset the size of the
loss but it's a good lesson
both for the psf and for linux australia
about the need for requisite variety and
revenue
and we also see the need for requisite
variety in achieving the goals and
objectives of communities
putting together a conference like lca
requires a wide range of skills
marketing communication audio visual
sponsor liaison treasury and finance
emceeing and project management
together all of us with our differences
our quirks our idiosyncrasies
help build rich resilient communities
with our combined superpowers
so we've looked at systems thinking
concepts for creating and for curating
communities
but how can systems thinking help us in
concluding communities
and although requisite variety gives us
a tool for thinking about how a system
can respond to unexpected shocks it's
less useful for helping us to combat a
characteristic of many systems
that of entropy
the concept of entropy has specific
meaning and fields such as physics and
thermodynamics but here i'm taking the
very broad general definition of entropy
to mean the general deterioration and
decline of a system
over time systems have a tendency to
move towards chaos and disorder
until they no longer exist
communities because they are systems are
similar
they will always need to deal with the
constant force of entropy
and when there are large stocks remember
stocks and flows of resources like
volunteer time and clear purpose and
objectives and clear ideas about how to
achieve those objectives
those forces will tend to outweigh the
force of entropy
but over time as those resources are
consumed and not replenished for example
if your volunteers are burnt out or if
you don't have the financial revenue to
continue operating
then the community will be dealing with
entropy
and there will come a time when the
community needs to make a very difficult
call
how much entropy how much disorder
how much inactivity is needed before the
community can be considered defunct
or can the entropy be recognized and a
decision made to gently end the
community in a managed and careful way
so building better communities also
means ending communities thoughtfully
and carefully
but i don't want to end my talk on that
note
yes systems decline and decay
over time and sometimes the right
decision is to gracefully end the
community
but remember how systems interact with
each other influence each other
the decline of one community can often
sow the seeds of rebirth or birth of
another
in a pattern of regeneration
without the australian unix users group
there would probably be no lca and no
linux australia
without logs like love and slug and
tesla and humbug
there would be no lca
and we can choose deliberately what we
bring from one community to another
because we have agency and we have
choice
so in conclusion my talk today started
out with a deceptively simple premise
communities are systems
and as i've unpacked this concept we've
seen how communities and technical
systems shape each other
for better and worse
and from this i've argued that if we
build better communities we will shape
better
we will shape better technical systems
and drawing from different authors i've
highlighted several systems thinking
concepts such as purpose and choice
boundaries cardinality and requisite
variety
that provide tools for thinking about
and improving communities
and the astute viewer will recognize
that along the way
i've created a reading list by stealth
because i sincerely hope to have piqued
your intellectual interest
and so on that note i would like to
leave you with one final note to ponder
communities shape technical systems
and technical systems shape communities
every contribution we make every code
commit every design decision
helps influence the communities we're
part of
and in turn the technical systems those
communities build
and we still have a long way to go
so
let's use our choice our agency and all
our available tools
to actively deliberately shape our
systems because otherwise those systems
will shape us
thank you very much
thanks kathy that was that was really
interesting i like the the comment about
org i was thinking oh yes i know what
you're talking about
that was really great
we will hopefully
i don't know if we our minions were able
to provide you with the
live illustration feed possibly here we
go
wow
that's incredible
and now we're all dumbstruck looking at
it
so we'll hopefully be able to get you a
hard copy of that you can
stick up on your wall or something oh
i'd love that thank you so much yeah
that's great um anyway so now this is
the end of the proceedings for the
afternoon um feel free to keep chatting
in the channels or do your own thing
we'll be making meeting back here at 9
00 am for our next keynote from jono
bacon you'll probably notice that the
other
stages have disappeared for the moment
they'll be back at nine don't worry
and i look forward to seeing the keynote
with everyone tomorrow
until then stay safe