Community Research
Why did we start the name of our Center with Community?
Technologies such as AI affect all strata of the society. But even before AI, Open-source Software (OSS), and before that, Free Software as pioneered by FSF, was advanced through inherently community-centric processes.
The reason is that such aspects of software as freedom of use is not a purely technical, but rather a social aspect. The combination of technology and a social process — habit, tradition, constraint, motivation, incentives, judgment surrounding its use — is a techno-social framework.
Computer programming has always been a pioneering activity, initially not taught at school. The current state of the art in AI is not taught at college either. Knowledge spread through computer clubs. Later there appeared meetups and conferences. OSS amplified the commons, creating standing online communities around software projects. SCMs like GitHub turned programming into social coding.
Advancing an OSS project requires a combination of hard and soft skills. Facing a difference of opinion outside of a corporate power structure, the leaders has do build consensus, gain support for a feature/directrion they consider advantageous, and setup a process to gauge community interest and support.
Such communication also shows clearly who has the leadership skills required to steward a project. Governance structures and nonprofit foundations housing them emerged, such as NumFOCUS and the Linux Foundation.
In our meetups, a decade ago, we found that real engineers command respect of the participants by their whole mien — from technical presentation to answering questions patiently and efficiently, from following up, defending their point of view amicably, and building bridges. If you put an engineering in front of an audience of peers, you very quickly see who’s real and who’s not. In the world of AI hype and marketing that is as important as ever. Community becomes a validator, a filter, and a lens through which the most promising efforts are focused, converging collective mind on the work needed to understand the lay of the land and advance to the next hill.
AI touches and transforms everything. We believe that a University is the most fertile ground to grow our Garden of Knowledge. Universities interact with every other constituency. As George Cybenko said, a university is a Time Machine. It’s set up to make the workers and leaders of tomorrow.
We believe that the ways to make AI Reliable for all will emerge in the community of all, convened at Northeastern, a global university, powered by Silicon Valley OSS AI energy, global AI enterprises and governments, aided by nonprofit foundations and driven by startups and private-public partnerships.
