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April 14, 2005
Ubuntu - Humanity to Others
Welcome,
This it the start of this yet to be named blog on Free and Open Source Software. I will be blogging here and writing some longer pieces on the 'official' SpikeSource blog.
I was at an event last night and the word Ubuntu was mentioned but not in the context of linux or software. Mark Barisch was speaking about compassion - he is on tour for his book - Field Notes on a Compassionate Life.
The quality of his whole being and his presentation was deeply resonant and helped me connect back to my heart and the reason that I began my quest into technology. He infact has a need for what I have spent 2+ years trying to figure out - how to use the power of online social networking tools to link spiritual activist leaders and their audiences together.
My little social enterprise - earned income nonprofit - Integrative Activism will be using CivicSpace/Drupal (a GPL code base) to develop sites for leaders like Mark. When I first talked about these ideas so long ago people looked at me a bit funny. The reception and willingness to explore what using these tools might do to support those drawn to the ideas in the book was very gratifying.
So it was fortuitous that he would use the word Ubuntu with its real meaning, I did not know what it meant until he defined it and I laughed out loud - for I understood the power of naming a linux distro after it.
UBUNTU - kindness: >humanity, compassion, and goodness, regarded as fundamental to the way Africans approach life
This longer explanation from Constant Connect.com
Ubuntu in Practice
Ubuntu has emerged as the new catchword of recent years; it has been adopted by various organisations to depict their culture and spirit. Borrowed from the Zulu dictionary, Augustine Shutte explains that Ubuntu encapsulates the Ancient African axiom of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which translates into "a person is a person through other persons". This dictum conveys the values of respect, compassion and humanity to others. Put in a nutshell, it is the idea of working together in order to progress. The co-operatives in Zululand are the epitome of Ubuntu, for me. It was only after being educated about the nature of these enterprises that I was able to grasp the true essence of Ubuntu
I discovered that a co-operative is a group of people that unite, by pooling their skills and resources, to provide a service or manufacture a product, which is marketed. The surplus of the sales is divided amongst the members, providing many families with their only source of income. I was further informed that co-operatives are based on values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. Co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others, which are similar to the values of Ubuntu. The concept of co-operatives and the location of them are unknown to many; co-operatives have existed for years, but tend to keep a low profile. As a result, there are few studies and very little information on them, especially in South Africa.
Clare O’Neill, a senior lecturer in Organisational Psychology at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, has initiated a project to address this issue by providing more information on co-operatives in Kwa-Zulu Natal. She aims to profile co-operative activity and evaluate its institutional structures while assessing the dynamics within these structures. The research will be used to identify factors affecting the success of co-operatives in the province. O’Neill will compare governance strategies and study the impact of the co-operatives on their communities.
It is in this cooperative connection to others that also represents to me the spirit of blogging. I hope to find a way to sucessfully bridge the spiritual activist world and technology world - Ubuntu seems like a good word to encompass this work too.
So with all of this love for cooperation and open source...you must be wondering why this blog is on MT...well...I originally went with Living Dot my hosting company because they offered WordPress hosting. BUT... after geeking out for a day while listening to presentations at the Business of Blogging Summit ... trying very hard to get the XML-RPC hooks to work... I gave up. I am very open to switching over but at this point Word Press is to challenging for me to install.
Posted by Kaliya at April 14, 2005 10:50 PM