The other day I came across a website called OpenHuman. OpenHuman is:

  •  … is a place to be as open as possible
  • Tell the most dicreet and interesting stuff about yourself without hurting anyone else
  • Put your naked pictures (not pornographic or erotic, just naked)
  • Confess how open you are
  • Don’t forget, no one expects you to be very open. Do it as much as you can.. You’ll get more open in time…

The founder, Emre Sokullu, even has his own page where he <a xhref=”http://openhuman.org/esokullu” target=blank>opens up</a> and offers his personal data.

Okay, so it’s not IT. But it’s an interesting twist on the open source concept. Why would you want to OpenHuman yourself? Well, according to the site:

  • openness is always good
  • helps us to understand that we are not alone
  • makes you stronger, don’t be shy
  • widens your vision, enlightens you
  • can be a place to make references about you
  • can help scientific researches (database dumps will be freely available)

So what is the connection? How could someone start a site like this and attach the “open” moniker to it? The connection could be made by OpenHuman’s list of inspirations:

The list could easily be read as a howto for the development of open source. But I think it goes beyond that, but in a very tangible way. Open source is about the freedom of information. Free data. Free source code. The free sharing of ideas and information. So why not take that to the next level? 

Oh sure we all do that on an ego-maniacal “look at me” level with our blogs and our myspace pages. But this type of information is of a different nature than the meat-market nature of myspace and mojo sites. Open Human is about truth and about the trust of open source. And this “movement” reminds me so much of what the open source movement was like when it first started. It was about a passion for keeping ideas alive by keeping them free. But now everyone lives in fear of DRMs and RIAAs and Copyrights and law suits. With the insanely confusing EULs (think Microsoft’s Vista EUL) people seem to have no idea where the idea of electronic freedom begins and where it ends. Intellectual property seems to be the very antithesis of open source.

The open source community started out as a small contingency of developers dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. It was and is a means to continue to push forward ideas in an open environment.

 

It’s about give and take.

It’s yin and yang.

And the OpenHuman idea, as odd as it may seem, typifies this ideology on a very human level. It’s human beings being open with their ideas, facts, and dreams. And it should remind us all what the open source (and FSF) ideology is all about.