Open Source Insurgencies

Interview

John Robb interviewed by TechCrunch:

'Q: Your writing deals extensively with “open-source insurgencies.” Can you give a couple of concrete example of those insurgencies, how they work, and how they’re enabled by modern technology?

We had a hot open source insurgency in Iraq. Lots of different groups: Baathists that supported Saddam, Baathists that didn’t, nationalists, different flavors of Jihadi, criminals, tribal groups. All of them came together to develop an open source project: to fight the US occupation and keep the Iraqi government in a state of disarray. It worked for years, despite incredible odds. One of the reasons it worked so well is that the rate of innovation in open source insurgencies is extremely fast. IEDs (improvised explosive devices) designs improved extremely quickly. They were able to defeat US counter-measures weeks after they were deployed.

Another example is Egypt (and the other insurgencies/protests of the Arab Spring). The reason the protest worked was that it used an open source framework. It didn’t have a fixed leadership cadre and its goals were extremely simple. The only people that were able to gain credibility as leaders were those people that moved the protest forward. If they tried to insert their own agenda, they were quickly discarded." (http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/28/interview-john-robb/)