What Do Online Communities and Global Politics Have in Common?
I got back from Redmond yesterday. I am getting old so couldn’t sleep well last night; luckily for me the BBC shows Our World during the night and I caught Danger - Democracy at Work. As usual it was a superb bit of journalism this time questioning Americas dogma to spread their own blend of “freedom” to other nations. I use double quotes as ironically America was the least “free” country I have lived in and I have lived in a fair few! Among other things they examine Dubai and Malaysia and question why anyone would have ever thought they can instil democracy in Iraq in a few months when it took 30 years in Malaysia. The documentary essentially puts forward key observations that non-democratic States don’t necessarily mean oppression (Dubai) and that history shows us that strong leadership is needed for a successful transition from one type of political model to another.
I checked my personal email account this morning (I rarely use it these days) to see a Thread “Top Web App Sec Vendors” on the Security Focus WebAppSec mailing list; a list I created back in 2000. Total chaos, vendors recommending their own firms without disclaimers, groups suggesting they are made up of a widespread membership, people recommending friends and so on. Many friends know about some nasty politics from the early days of OWASP where I made a decision about what people could and couldn’t do in an “open” project. In short I decided that unless a tool had an approved OSI license then any discussion or announcements was either an advert or highly likely to be hijacked into one. A group of people ( I still have their email which is funny) lobbied Security Focus to have me banned as moderator of WebAppSec. It never happened of course but lots of Internet bad mouthing started (some of which continues today).
It’s water of a ducks back for me. Looking back I know I did the right thing. As I watch how OWASP has blossomed today, I think it was in some small part due to those early tough decisions that setup the environment for a free and neutral exchange of ideas that OWASP is today. Of course you also really have to hand it to Aspect Security who have done an amazing job of running OWASP and avoiding it becoming their marketing arm or hijacked by vendors. I know they have seen the reward they deserve for the find balance they have trod.
Watching social communities evolve is much like watching global politics. It’s the Medici Effect again!
This entry was posted on April 13, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Information Security Economics, OWASP, Social Networking, open source. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
