Emerging Lutherans

Reposted from Kate’s personal blog - Living in the Questions:

I recently read an article at ZDNet about how the CEO of Red Hat Software has gone on record as saying Windows Vista will be the last “planned” software launch the industry will see, opting instead for more collaborative, open-sourced work (see the article here: http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-242593.html)

Now, I find this a very interesting corollary for the church as there has been much discussion among some in the church about structure and polity.  While much of what is seen in traditional, mainline congregations is a top-down hierarchy (at least as viewed from the outside… but that’s a whole other discussion), there is now a trend among many “emerging” congregations to eliminate all hierarchy in favor of a flat-structure.

The push in software development (as seen in the quoted text below) is the sheer number of bugs found in top-down, planned releases such as Vista compared with collaborative, open-source releases such as Linux.  Another reason is to be able to serve the needs of the community because the greater number of people working on the software puts them in touch with more of the community - and in many ways because they themselves have felt the same pain.  So what does this all mean for the church?  I think it is a great idea, and yet in some ways we in mainline denominations (regardless of whether we have clergy or not) are not as open to the idea of open-source theology… interesting to contemplate.

From the ZDNet article:

However, because of the modular development model and the number of parties checking for errors, open-source software comes out with fewer errors and is more organized, he explained. Whitehurst attempted to explain the appeal of open-source software’s participatory “community” model by likening open source to US reality TV competition American Idoland closed products to US pop star Britney Spears.

Of American Idol, he said the record studios were able to spend less to market the eventual winner because audience participation accurately showed which singer was preferred before the competition was over.

Britney Spears, on the other hand, as a “product of millions of dollars in investment” is not a sure bet when each record is released to the public, because the marketing surrounding her was pre-planned and excluded the public, he said.

Whitehurst said during his presentation that development through the open-source community is also faster and often more precise in terms of what customers need, because enterprises are able to contribute code that they have written for their pain points back to the community. He contrasted this with the traditional proprietary method of “listening to customers” and writing code based on that interpretation.

Filed under: Theological Ponderings on October 30th, 2008