Open by Default: Towards a Manifesto for May Day
- Jenn Roberts
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
This is intended to be a statement to our customers, our user and developer communities, and our staff. By writing down our intentions in using open source software we move towards aligning our actions with our values.
Artefactual began 25 years ago in part from a desire to provide the world with free, open source software to implement archival description standards.* It has expanded into our mission to empower collecting organizations around the world to care for cultural memory. From the very beginning, we believed that open source software can lower the cost and improve the quality of software for the entire cultural memory community. Open source makes it easier for collecting organizations to come together with individuals, service providers, and vendors to imagine, create, and maintain the tools (and processes) they need to care for collections of enduring value. Open source software offers the potential for all collecting organisations, from the smallest to the very largest, to seize the means of preservation and control the necessary and inevitable digital transformation within their organisations and across the cultural memory sector. We want service providers and vendors to start new businesses using the same open source software we use in our commercial offerings, extending the capacity of the world to care for cultural memory. Critically, as a company, we want to create more value than we capture.
We believe that the work of archival and digital preservation practice is a labour of love, a practice of care. On May 1st and every day we acknowledge and celebrate the labour of archivists, curators, conservators, and digital preservationists (and so many more!) around the world. We recognize that work doesn’t stop; it is ongoing, challenging and often undervalued.
May 1, May Day commemorates the struggles and victories of the labour movement. May is also recognized as Maintainer Month, highlighting the work of those who care for open source projects. Being open isn’t the only way to contribute to a practice of care but we think it is the best way. We want to ensure that Artefactual’s small contributions generate use and reuse over and over again without regard for national borders or language, or any other restriction.
Open source software is open to scrutiny. Anyone can evaluate, audit, use, improve, adapt, and share our code. This improves trust, reliability and transparency, between software developers and organisations, and between organisations and their users.
Working in the open allows us to accept and include community contributions. We strive to participate in a community ecosystem.
We favour collaboration over individual effort. Open source software allows people to collaborate in a way that is more difficult with proprietary code. This is vital for the cultural memory sector to govern its own domain.
Openness gives sovereign control to anyone who wants to manage collections or focus on the right to anonymity inherent in a truly open model.
We can still be successful without restricting the value of our work to only those who pay us.
As our company grows, openness becomes more important.
Join our AtoM and Archivematica user forums!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Van Garderen, Peter. "The ICA-AtoM Project and Technology." Presentation delivered at the Association of Brazilian Archivists' Third Meeting on Archival Information Databases, March 16-17 2009, Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
