Safety in open access

Having just finished William Tyndale's biography, I suppose I'm in an ecclesiastical mood. (Though I'm balancing this mood out with Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Moderation in all things, you know. :-)

What better, then, to read than Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History?. I've had it for some time, using it occasionally as a reference, but this morning was the first time I've actually cracked it open and started reading it, front to back. Roughly 100 pages into it, I came across an interesting chapter detailing which books/epistles/etc. are counted as scripture, and which are not.

The fascinating part of this is the role that authority plays in making such decisions. For instance, I've read a fair amount in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, as well as the New Testament Apocyrpha, but these are not considered "official" books of scripture. Centuries ago, a small group of experts determined what was official, and what was not. (An example of ongoing debate on the matter can be found here.)

I appreciate the role of experts as well as the next person, but I'd rather trust in numbers, in open access. This is, I suppose, a Wisdom of Crowds-type argument. But really it's more a testament to my personal faith in openness. I think rubbish generally outs itself over time, as does truth, scientific or otherwise. Give enough people access, and good things will prove themselves good, and bad will prove themselves bad.

This is not dissimilar from William James' Pragmatist philosophy - whatever works, when put to adequate tests, is "true," with the caveat that it may be proven untrue down the road after further experience. As Karl Popper writes, however, an open society is necessary to achieve the optimal forum in which to determine what works, and what doesn't.

Access is critical, both to those who look and to those who don't. As I've written before, the option of source code access in open source serves as a useful surrogate for actual exercise of that choice, just as an open process for choosing scripture over apocrypha, open voting, open/free market economies, etc. provide for (or, at worst, enable) better informed, optimal results.

No decision is best made blindly. No product is best defined, designed, and implemented in an information/feedback vacuum. Opening up source code means customers can place greater trust in the software they use even if they never read a single line of code, precisely because others can exercise this choice in their stead.

I need to spend more time thinking about how to implement this openness in one's business model. I'm hoping that you, along with I, will spend a great deal of time working this out in 2006.