Fork

What does it mean to fork sudo room?

Images

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  sudo fork logo (.svg)

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  sudo fork logo (.png)

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  sudo fork logo simplified (.svg)

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  sudo fork logo simplified (.png)

Decentralization

There is no clear answer, but decentralization affords many things, like resilience and parallelization, which remains consistent with a horizontalist structure.

Forking Paradox

From the world of corporate open source software, consider these "anti-patterns" described by Bryan Cantrill:

Forkaphobia:

Fear of folks taking the software, forking, and dividing up the community. But, there is a forking paradox that the easier a software is to fork, the more difficult it is to fork the community. Good experimentation happens with easy forks, safely downstream. When forking is difficult, only dissenters (few) bother to fork.

Sub-Anti-Pattern: Governance orgy (from Forkaphobia)

Difficult forking, especially exacerbated by forkaphobia, breeds focus on governance and formalism. This wastes times and encourages the formation of factions (thus winners, losers, politics, etc).

This paradox is really interesting applied to our case:

The easier a hackerspace is to fork, the more difficult it is to fork the community.

Solidarity

Perhaps what decentralization, the forking paradox, and forkaphobia may suggest about hackerspaces is that there is a great value and opportunity in making forking easy, and encouraging forking as experimentation and an opportunity for resilience, as long as a sense of solidarity can remain between forks. In principle, this should be possible with good-faith forks, both experimental and in (moral) dissent.