Access Without Empowerment
summary
Claim: the movement wins distribution but not control — free software reaches billions (Linux on servers, Android majority of phones, supercomputers nearly 100%) and Wikipedia nears a billion readers a month, yet contributor rates fall (editor share per reader roughly halves) and active code contributors number only hundreds of thousands despite GitHub’s ~9 million users and SourceForge’s ~50M monthly downloads (2009). Concrete fixes: teach Python at scale (250 taught so far), fund Outreachy, embed view-source button in TurtleArt so kids supply many patches — access dominates empowerment.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:41The 4 freedoms
- 9:01Progress report
- 25:50Social compromise
- 29:20Technological compromise
- 32:50Secondorder digital divides
- 34:55Project life cycles
- 37:23Empowerment
- 40:50Compromise
- 42:31Remove systemic barriers
- 44:28Education
- 50:10Questions
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