Tor Nørretranders delivered a highly entertaining keynote titled ‘Glow, Show, Flow & 2.0.’ You got the distinct feeling though that he would have preferred to call it something else. His story of how open source and peacocks are much about the same thing, was highly entertaining.

Tor started off by telling us about the Ultimatum Game, which seems to indicate that when interacting with humans we aren’t completely rational when it comes to accepting and giving rewards. If we feel someone is being unfair, then we will rebel even if we lose out in the process. We seem to have a notion of fairness, correlated with the hormone oxytocin. Our levels of oxytocin rise when we collaborate in fair environments.

Perhaps that’s why we participate in open source: we glow. [Another lesson here is that we don’t react in this way when interacting with computers.]

Tor then moved on to tell us about the peacock and its flamboyant tail. The tail is not functional, but ostentatious. Tor points out that the tail is there for sex, relating it to the handicap principle. To prove (to the peahens) that I have vast resources (and that I’m healthy), I have to waste them (build a useless tail) and take risks—and as a result they get more sex.

So perhaps folk work on open source for the same reason. Altruism is a burden, it’s doing something for others. But unconsciously we are also showing that we have enough resources (time and skill) to share them. In Tors words there are a number of implications to this: ‘Dare, care & share’ leads to ‘Attention’ leads to ’sex, jobs and recognition.’ Although we don’t all think about this explicitly, there is probably some truth in there somewhere!

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