Embedding Community Awareness: 'Do No Harm' Principle in Open Source

Open-source software utilizes collaborative practices to engage communities and enhance the diversity of knowledge and knowledge producers. Despite the diverse sets of goals and challenges across sectors and disciplines, open source helps provide equitable access to technology and aims to make knowledge freely available for global benefit. Despite the tremendous progress, many questions in open source remain: How to build an open culture where diverse stakeholders of society participate not just in accessing knowledge, but in its production, circulation, and societal benefit? How to embed the DEI principles? How to reduce and tackle the environmental harms of technology?
To answer these, I turn to the Do No Harm principle and apply it to open source/science work.

 

This talk was given at the State of OpenCon 2024 in London, and was featured in Diginomica.