The #4opens have many useful roles, but one that urgently needs highlighting is how they help protect grassroots tech projects from being pushed aside by the parasite class of #NGO and #fashernista projects that grow around them.
Over the last 20 years, in my direct experience, this pattern repeats again and again. Grassroots communities do the difficult early work of building trust, creating culture, seeding solving practical problems and growing real commons. Then, once this groundwork becomes valuable, layers of institutional actors arrive:
- NGOs looking for funding flows,
- consultants looking for careers,
- academics looking for prestige,
- and #fashernistas looking for visibility and branding opportunities.
The original social process gets buried under management culture, professionalisation, controlled messaging, and performative governance. The result is stagnation, fragmentation, and the slow death of the native project culture that created value in the first place. This is why open process matters so much, the #4opens make this #techshit visible:
- who is making decisions,
- who controls resources,
- who is blocking change,
- who is extracting value,
- and who is actually doing the work.
When process is visible, unhealthy behaviour can be challenged early and composted before it hardens into institutional power. Without transparency, these patterns stay hidden behind branding, polite language, and bureaucratic process. So yes, please use the #4opens in all grassroots tech projects, not just as technical principles, but as practical social tools for defending commons from enclosure.
Because if we do not make power visible, power will always hide itself.
