 Welcome to another session of Domains 21, Boone Gorgias worked at the City University of New York and he helped develop the platform CUNY Academic Commons and then has since then still working with CUNY gone on his own and started basically developing a wide range of tools but has been a core developer for WordPress. So I am actually going to have a chat with Boone about open source development. Thanks for actually joining us on Domains 21 and is it right? Am I am I wrong here that you are a core developer for WordPress? One of the biggest open source applications in the world. Is that true? It is true. I've been less involved in the last year or two than I was for a period. We can talk a little bit more about the history of that but there was a period where I was very heavily involved. Less so now. A little bit more on the emeritus end of things but that's a nice way to put it. The core developers are the people who are primarily responsible for making sure that the software itself gets released, that bugs get fixed, that security holes get plugged, that new features get built. You started as in higher ed at the City University of New York, how did you move into the world of development and particularly open source development? So I was getting a Ph.D. in philosophy and I had no real background in doing technology work aside from some GeoCities or AOL home site type coding back in the early 1990s. I needed a fellowship to pay the bills after my initial fellowship ran out. I managed to finagle one where there was a it was called the writing fellowship and my official task was to help faculty members work with writing intensive curriculum across CUNY schools. I was at Queens College in particular and at Queens College at that time a new blogging initiative was starting up. This is about 2006 or 2007. Blogging was fairly new. They were using the movable type platform. When the director found out that I knew a little bit of something about HTML, I was immediately put in charge of the blogging initiative and at first this was largely pedagogical work. I was talking a lot about how you use blogs for low stakes and unstructured writing for public engagements and peer engagements and the kinds of pedagogical tricks that we talk a lot about with Elfin Web or at least we used to back in the day. I really began doing this work for real when I sort of thrust myself into a Twitter conversation where my friend Matt Gold was asking questions about how to if I recall correctly it was a CSS trick in Internet Explorer 6. I could probably figure that out although of course I didn't like so many things over the course of my career. I didn't actually know how to figure it out but I said I can probably figure that out and so I jumped in and helped and it turned out that he was starting this project the CUNY Academic Commons which was using WordPress and the fledgling BuddyPress add-on as its platform. I jumped in and started helping you with some small technical issues and again I was really learning on the fly. I was really I was saying I could do that when in fact I couldn't do that but I knew that it was possible for me to teach myself. So I did a lot of learning on the job and little by little I started taking on more and more tasks more clients until I got to the point where I didn't need to be an instructional technologist anymore and eventually I decided I didn't really want to do academic work anymore because by the time I got by the time 2010-2011 rolled around I was doing enough open source work free software work that was being used by hundreds thousands tens of thousands of people that I kind of looked at that work and then I looked at the looked at the work that I should be doing for my thesis and how only three people would read that and at best only one of them would not read it on the metro north on the way to the defense. So I decided at that point that I was going to give that up and devote myself full-time to this kind of work. So in short I'm fully untrained relatively unqualified and really it's only out of hubris and really really egocentrism narcissism that I was able to rise to these peaks of power. What was the project like CUNY Academic Commons? How did you kind of really cut your teeth on becoming a core press developer as a result of that and you know where did that lead you and I'm thinking like we stole our name Reclaim Hosting from something you and Darcy did called Reclaim and does that have any link to your kind of becoming a full-fledged developer despite your hubris? I mean this really the whole thing stems from my being at CUNY and this is just a piece of good fortune for me. Before I came to CUNY I had never been in really public higher ed but when you spend time in a place like CUNY you begin to really live and breathe CUNY and sometimes even bleed CUNY. The ideals of CUNY, there's a strong history of progressivism, a strong history of real meaningful engagements with the city of New York, writ large, with the youth of the city of New York. There's a history of being in fact a free university for a large part of the history of CUNY so it was a as I spent more time at CUNY it became obvious to me especially as a writing fellow when I was out on the campuses instead of at the Graduate Center in Manhattan you start to see what the student body is like you start to understand a little bit about an institution and you start to sort of see the places where injustices are being done and for me in the places where I was it became clear that the points of injustice had to do with software because that's where I was working so CUNY was and is I believe a big customer of Blackboard so I don't mean to pick on Blackboard but Blackboard is a behemoth software service company. They have contracts with institutions like CUNY and the many millions of dollars to provide a piece of software that is in many ways critical to operations but also stifling and people don't like to use it and it has a deleterious effect on the kind of pedagogical work that actually happens in classrooms because of the sort of design decisions and really business decisions that have gone into building the software. So to have the good fortune to be there because if I had been at any other university none of these things ever would have come up but the CUNY Academic Commons grew out of a place where in this mammoth organization of CUNY and where there is a somewhat of a loose-knit yet top-down hierarchy of organization of things like IT resources where the IT resources at the very top level at CUNY Central had said we want to use X software at the time it was Microsoft SharePoints. We want to use this software to allow faculty and students at different campuses to collaborate and communicate with each other and they had their budgets and their VP behind this project but of course they didn't have any faculty they didn't have anyone from the academic side of the university who was interested in this particular software or even this project and so there was a parallel push coming from really you know you could call it guerrilla software you know it was people sort of coming out of the bush and saying oh well we're faculty we want to build something that does something similar but we want to build it with the faculty in mind with users in mind and this is people like Matt Gold he was really a visionary in this sense the idea that and George Audie who was his mentor on this project the idea that we would build so that faculty members could be at the forefront of building this piece of technology that would cater better to the actual needs of faculty and graduate students across CUNY instead of the business needs of a company like Microsoft or Blackboard now it's so happened that the way to do this was through free software was through WordPress but I'm not sure that the free software ideology you know the sort of Richard Stolman ideology behind the GPL was part of the discussion about why to use WordPress I think it was more we don't have any money we don't know what we're doing but we need to get from zero to a functional prototype within a certain number of days and this is 2008 2009 there simply weren't a lot of tools to do this the only tool that existed was WordPress for all intents and purposes in particular we want the goal of the academic commons was to build a social networking space for faculty staff graduate students within the very large CUNY system and if you wanted social networking tools in the open source space there really was no other option at the time you needed WordPress and you needed this new project BuddyPress it was built on top of it so WordPress provided all the sort of backbone for the application you know the database management the publishing tools that everybody knows the blogging tools what BuddyPress added on top of it was the ability to have things like friends and profiles and groups and communication between groups all of the the web 2.0 stuff that was really in the in vogue back in 2008 I think it was largely out of necessity that WordPress was chosen but it's really it was a good piece of luck because WordPress as a piece of software was cheap and it was relatively easy to stand up and it was available the best software is the one that I already exist so it was there and but it also had because it was built on top of the of free software principles and the GPL and other licenses that made it possible to look under the hood of the software and to adapt it for your own purposes this dovetailed really cleanly with some of the larger ideological goals that I talked about earlier that emerge when you're at a place like CUNY it allowed us to really build to build things the way that we wanted them so that was the number one thing when you buy an off the shelf project product there may be a certain amount of tweaking configuration that you can do and you may be able to pay a lot of money to do some amount of customization but you're really hamstrung by whatever architectural and business decisions have been made by the software architects but with a piece of software like WordPress especially and this isn't meant to disparage but especially given what a hot mess WordPress is and was you you kind of had a blank canvas and you had not only a blank canvas but the GPL the license under which WordPress is published gives you a blank check it actually says you may modify this for any purpose and you may redistribute those modifications so that was the first main advantage of using WordPress in this situation it was freely available free as in it didn't cost any money just a little bit of money for hosting then we were able to make modifications to make it do the things that we wanted to now where this begins to dovetail then with the with the progressive ideology at the public university was that we were then able to take some of those modifications that we had done and give them back to other people we knew that what we were building at the time was new and interesting and it's something that others in the higher education space would want to learn more about so we were able to take some of that work some of those WordPress plugins we built some just some general methodologies and some tricks that we had learned turn them around and give them to other people to other people either through blog posts through conference talks through the WordPress plugin repository and that was really of a piece with the ethos of CUNY engaging with the broader public engaging with the broader higher education community with New York City community I started to see that this was an opportunity to demonstrate this by this I mean the academic commons but more broadly this this kind of virtuous cycle where you have the money from the university going to a developer who then works closely with the university to build something which is then redistributed to the broader public I started to see this as a model of public engagement that stands alongside and really complements the larger goal of public engagement of the university you know universities are really big on having their public intellectuals they want them to write books and to give talks that are open to the public and to have do media appearances and this sort of thing we can take that same sort of model of the university kind of opening up the doors of the ivory tower so to speak and we can apply that to the infrastructure of the university as well in terms of the software that we build so instead of thinking of the software as plumbing that's hidden behind the walls instead we think of building software and conceptualizing software in a similar manner to the way that we do public intellectualism so we build it we share the processes behind behind the building and then we give it away and that creates a conversation around the tools that we build because I mean we all know that the tools especially now in 2021 we know that the tools that we build for communication these spaces are they underscore and to some extent they dictate the kinds of conversations we're allowed to have in the public intellectual sphere so this is not like a false connection here I mean they are very they're intrinsically linked we can't talk about oh what's it like to have a public discourse without talking about the tools that you know that facilitate the public discourse what I have preached to both inside and outside of academia in terms of sustainability is more along the lines of what I've called a patronage model so or you could call it the Robin Hood model although that makes it sound a little cynical the idea behind this patronage model is that you know CUNY has really been a patron not only to me but to the broader software development community through the development of these of these software tools comes in a box the individual plugins that we've built etc and then have been redistributed so other people get to reap the benefits of CUNY's large s this model then allows by CUNY giving the money to me and then I build this thing that benefits CUNY and then it costs CUNY a little bit of extra money probably you know let's say 20% more 30% more than it would just to build a bespoke tool to build something that is then distributable we can build it they get a little bit of pat on the back you know good job CUNY and they can say CUNY funded this or CUNY published this I can say I help build this thing that is now distributed to many people and then everybody else gets the software for free I have been able to cobble together my career of free software work through this model of patronage basically I have three four five six clients who pay me to do work for them but then that work is either directly redistributed to other people or indirectly so by directly I mean CUNY pays me to build widget x I build x and then I put it on the WordPress.org plugin repository and say this work was funded by CUNY or indirectly is more that I'm paid to build widget y for a different university and then I spend some of that money building the widget and some of that money let's say working on body press and some bugs that exist there so this is a model of kind of this is me taking the money that is sitting in big pots in universities and usually basically just has like a direct line that goes into like Microsoft's pockets so me siphoning off just a little bit of that and then taking some of it for myself obviously and then but then kind of redistributing it redistributing it in the form of the software that I produce both directly and in terms of the larger free software project like WordPress and body press contributions I've been able to make over the years they've been funded by this model so when I think about sustainability both for myself and for other people doing this kind of work it's this is the model that I like you know if you are a developer looking to you can actually burnish your your resume you can make yourself look more attractive to potential clients by saying I participate in these software projects you can help me do this by hiring me but also as a person in a hiring position if you have funding and you're looking for you're looking at two developers who are similarly skilled and could similarly develop develop deliver on your project if one of them says I regularly participate in open source well this is a good thing because it kind of helps you become part of that virtuous cycle that makes this sort of free software more sustainable over the long run there was a kind of a nucleus of time at a moment when from 2008 say the 2011 12 when a lot of this stuff was really kind of emerging and there was hopes that you know there would be truly a parallel possibility how have you seen that kind of develop and you know in line what does that mean for open source communities like WordPress I mean do we do you see that this is still sustainable and this is still kind of a way forward or are we in a different moment you know I think when I first started doing this work in 2008 2009 it was like it was a brave new world it felt that way to me at least that you know it was people the idea that you could go out there and have a blog and you could share your ideas the idea that from little pockets around in different universities we would be able to sort of muster together a group of folks who could usher in a revolution I mean I don't I don't know the right word for it right but to start something new and to push back against what we saw where the the tsunami over the horizon we saw a Facebook coming right in 2007 2008 we knew Microsoft was already sort of pouring over us but we saw ways that we could make smaller tools work it felt really really exciting you know we had news tools like Twitter where we were you know it felt like a small professional development and beer drinking community where we could really you know hash out these ideas and forge a real sense of shared purpose and camaraderie that felt you know there was a lot of hope then at the peak of my work in let's say 2013 2014 I was spending 60 70 percent of my time in a week doing work that I wasn't directly paid for and I was funding it through these other patronage work that I was discussing before and that to me was really meaningful because I felt like I was turning this work into something that was part of a larger project and pushing back against these behemoths I started to feel around that time that I mean there were personal reasons I kind of got burned out it's really hard doing free software development there's a broader sense that we were losing the war you know I think that smartphones were a really big part of this as soon as everybody had a phone in their pocket the and everybody started thinking about the world in terms of apps instead of thinking about the web and then over the course of just a couple of years people couldn't even imagine the possibility of not using a smartphone at all times it was really such a radical change and it really reoriented the way it put so much power in the hands of just a couple of companies google and apple and facebook that it's really really it became really difficult for me to see how the work that I could be doing you know the sisyphus doesn't even be good to describe it you know I just felt like I was being overwhelmed and I was I was fighting the good fight but for what and you combine this with the sort of increasing toxicity at the time of twitter as a platform you know I just felt like it turned from that camaraderie and shared purpose into a sort of performance space that I I didn't really like and so I started to withdraw at first I started to withdraw my assets the things like I stopped using gmail so much you know I've got my own email server I I stopped using I stopped using twitter you know these were this is the project we claim that you alluded to where you know with a couple of other people from this ed tech space we said we don't want our world to be controlled by the by a couple of corporate behemoths because it puts us really in their thrall and that's that has that for us maybe that's okay but there are certain people who are more vulnerable who that's not okay and we need to we as the people who sort of have the ability to be agile about this have the moral responsibility to be the vanguard in terms of pulling ourselves out so I spent a lot of time and thought you know let's say ditching my mac so that I could only use linux and free software and all my devices things like that so that was what project reclaim was all about and about the nuts and bolts of how that actually works in some ways that succeeded I mean like personally I don't use a smartphone because of that I mean I don't want to use those tools I don't you know all my computers around linux so I don't use twitter anymore so I think in some ways that's been a success but then you kind of get to a point where how can you avoid using amazon aws you can't I mean it it's undergirds the entire internet so you have to so for me the reclaim project moved more outside of the assets the things that I have online more into the attention space like I felt like you know twitter was this terrible place and facebook was this terrible place and really the internet was really becoming quite terrible just for reading the news all the time was really awful so I started reclaiming my own attention just saying this is not this is not where I want to live it's not the kind of life I want to live the kinds of authentic connections I felt like I had in the early days of twitter and but those things were really starting to fade away and so I kind of just started to reclaim my own attention and pull myself out of those spaces that included a lot of my free software work although you know I don't want to say I totally pulled out but I started started backing off so I mean I personally am not an optimist about these things you know we are we obviously this is 2014 2015 at the time I felt a little bit like a nut job now I feel like unfortunately I feel like I was a little bit of a profit and I don't like that feeling I mean it's not you know the last four or five years have borne these fears out and more you know it's been really a bad time and in some ways I feel like I have survivor's kills you know I've sort of pulled out of the space and you know instead of you know I've been you know all of you discovered baking bread in the last 10 months where I've been doing it for the last five years that's what I've been doing with my time I've been playing mandolin right so that's that's what I've been doing for fun so that's my quest for sort of something that's actually you know worth fighting for so but as so I don't really have a great great outlook on the way things are now but I will say that people have a way you know when you're young and impressionable you you have you you get set in your ways so you know how everybody's everybody dresses the same way that they dress when they were about 24 and they never change it so when you see your grandpa dress like a grandpa you say well that's what people dress like in the year 1945 so that it's a little bit like that with these sort of ideological technological things for a lot of people you know for me that felt like a sort of golden age for some people they felt like 10 years before that was the golden age maybe now it can be a new kind of golden age I just feel like I'm not really psychologically a part of that right now because in a lot of ways I've checked out the problem is a lot harder now I will say that for sure you know this the pandemic has really solidified a lot of these problems this microsoft the emergence of microsoft teams as a as an unstoppable behemoth is an example of that you know now it's not just that oh everybody wants to have an online component to their courses and we have a limited number of tools it's that oh crap we all have to go online all the time and then the vultures came down saying oh your pocketbook is open we will swoop this up so that that's what happened and now it's so entrenched that I think it's going to be really really hard to extract it feeds a lot of the worst aspects of universities things like you know slashing costs to look for efficiencies viewing technology as a tool for for shoring up the bottom line they're really pernicious and they've always been there the the pandemic I think is going to make it worse and make it harder to get out I do think that there's still a space for for individuals and for departments and for projects to keep doing this interesting guerrilla work and to use free software tools to to do it and I to be fair I do think that free software is accepted in the university and in you know corporate technology more broadly than in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago I was I remember being told in about 2011 by a CIO at CUNY we will never run a Linux box in this college we are a Microsoft team Linux will never make it basically and so but now then they switched over so now half of their team runs on Linux so the world is different and there is space at least for open source in these universities people understand what it is in a way that they didn't 10 years ago they're not so afraid of it and I think that that speaks that that speaks to a possible future for these things but I will say the landscape is much much different well boom I think you know in interest of time and just minds exploding with all that stuff will stop there but I just want to thank you for coming on for talking to us about your open source development your thoughts and the work you've done which I think has been spectacular over the last decade or so so thanks Jim thanks I appreciate it and it was a pleasure to be here because I've been inspired by a lot of the work that you and your community has done so thank you um um um