Changing the culture of open source

A Q&A with Coraline Ada Ehmke 

What is the Organization for Ethical Source and its primary mission?

Our mission is to empower open source communities to ensure that their work is being used for social good and in service of human rights. We build tools to promote fair, ethical, and equitable protections and standards for everyone who contributes to, benefits from, or is impacted by open source technologies.

OES is a diverse and global community of over 250 open source software developers, academics, community management experts, legal specialists, NGO and non-profit leaders, activists, writers, social scientists, and human rights workers. Our members actively contribute to (or even lead) our projects, ensuring that the perspectives and needs of people from traditionally underrepresented or undervalued groups are centered in all the work that we do.

Coraline Ada Ehmke

Why is the concept of ethical source so important and why now?

The practice of open source involves working collaboratively and in the open, drawing on the expertise of contributors from around the globe to create innovative tools and technologies. Open source software is the foundation of the internet, and an estimated 78 percent of all businesses around the world leverage open source software in some form—from Adobe and Amazon, to Facebook and Netflix, to GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter, and more—as do nonprofit, humanitarian, and community-based organizations like Wikimedia, Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, and many others.

But its broad success has come with a price. Today, the same open source software that powers innovation is also being used to promote and sustain systemic inequity and oppression, playing a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racist policing, the deployment of cruel and inhumane weapons, and other human rights abuses all over the world.

Ethical source is a values-based alternative to the status quo of open source. We build tools designed to promote equitable and just outcomes for those who participate in, benefit from, or are impacted by open source.

How are marginalized communities impacted by the work you’re doing?

For too long, technology has been shaped by the interests of big tech and its white, Western, techno-libertarian ethos. Change can only come when those with influence and power yield meaningful agency to leaders and practitioners from cultures around the world, not just the US or Silicon Valley. We need to build practices and institutions that reflect this diversity, building on the values and aspirations we have in common, while recognizing and respecting what makes us unique.

Actively prioritizing safety and well-being of those impacted by the technologies we create starts with thinking beyond adopters, beyond users, all the way to the people that are impacted by the use of the technologies we create– often without their consent. We need to overcome the outdated and irresponsible notion that technology is neutral, and start taking responsibility for how– not if– our work will be abused to cause harm and sustain systems of colonialism, racism, inequity and oppression.

What is the Hippocratic License and how does it protect both technology creators and consumers?

The Hippocratic License is the premiere ethical open source license. Its ethical foundation is tied to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and developed in collaboration with a legal team from our partner organization, Corporate Accountability Lab. 

We released the 3.0 version of the license (HL3) in late 2021. The core license provides protections for universally recognized human rights, including specific provisions for Indigenous rights. A major innovation in HL3 is its modular construction, with a number of optional modules that focus on specific areas of ethical concern, such as environmental justice or labor rights. These modules empower adopters to customize the Hippocratic License to reflect the needs and challenges of their particular communities.

What can open source foundations and commercial companies do to ensure ethical source principles are being considered in their work?

We created the Ethical Source Principles as a core set of values for open source communities who recognize the importance of centering justice and equity in their work. These principles apply in multiple contexts, ranging from small projects to large open source communities. They’ve even influenced the work of organizations in the broader open movement, including the Internet Archive’s DWeb Principles and  Creative Commons’ new 5-year strategy.

OES is happy to collaborate with peer organizations and other institutions like these worldwide, to promote multicultural, human-focused, and pro-social outcomes across the broader digital commons ecosystem.

What’s next for the Organization for Ethical Source and how can people get involved?

OES has a lot of amazing projects in the works for 2022 and beyond. 

I created Contributor Covenant, the first and most popular code of conduct for open source communities, in 2014. Eight years and tens of thousands of adoptions later, Contributor Covenant remains a critical tool for maintaining and enforcing community values and norms to address barriers to participation by BIPOC, LGBTQ, and other contributors from undervalued and underrepresented groups. OES is organizing a working group of experts in open source community management and code of conduct enforcement to collaborate on the development of Contributor Covenant 3.0, a major revision intended to meet the evolving needs of global open source communities.

We’re also developing a new governance tool, the Open Social Contract, to articulate the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of participants in open source communities. The Open Social Contract will include a “priority of constituencies” component, inspired by the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to explicitly prioritize the safety and well-being of people who are most affected by our work.

We will continue the development of the Hippocratic License and other human-rights-based licenses through our Ethical Licensure Incubator program, providing another tool that open source communities can use to enforce ethical standards for the way that adopters use the technologies we create.

OES is building on these initiatives to promote the concept of an “ethical stack”— a comprehensive and layered strategy for promoting equity in open source through codes of conduct, explicit social contracts, transparent governance, and ethical licenses. You can learn more about our work and become a member at https://ethicalsource.dev.

If all the work you’re doing is successful, what does the future look like? What is your vision?

Prioritizing impact over intention is core to all the work that we do, and using this framing as a guide, we strive to empower technologists to radically change the way that open source is practiced and deployed around the world. 

OES believes that the true measure of the success of open source isn’t its adoption, but its impact— how the technologies we create can bring about positive social, cultural, and political change. This is key to leveraging the tremendous potential of open source to truly transform the world for the better.