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Our friend Jeremy Del Rio (who also teaches in our Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program) is modeling what systemic approaches to justice are all about. An advocate for kids in his community and other communities across New York City, Jeremy and a collaborative team recently launched the 20/20 Vision for Schools movement. Then yesterday they released a detailed action plan and model with a lofty goal of helping every kid in New York City reach their full potential.
What’s incredible to me about this plan is that it’s based on “Open Source” theory and practice. Open source theory says basically that the best ideas often lay outside of your organizational boundaries. It calls for a radical kind of outsourcing that fuels creative energies by inviting a broad palette of collaborators to paint their own colors into a project. Take WordPress (WP) as an example-the content management system under-girding this website. WP is a classic open-source phenomenon. What WP has done is make their code fully accessible…to anyone. That means ingenious contributions are welcome from 15 year-olds or 55 year-olds who can design plug-ins that work effectively. Similarly, here’s what the New York team has proposed about developing strategies to overhaul public education:
Since the problems are too vast for one person, interest group, or community to overcome on its own, open sourcing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies, and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country. If it’s “about the kids,” we need to model how to share.
Brilliant. Rather than posturing for position in the political games that often drive education reform (or fail to drive it, as the case may be), this movement seeks to open source their process and radically model sharing to kids by sharing with one another. They, in turn, hope to be a model the whole country can follow.
There’s more than a little we can learn from this in youth ministry. After all, it’s a group of urban youth workers who got together and started this movement in New York City. What about your town? What about my neighborhood? How can we partner to advocate for the issues most pressing for kids around us? And what can we do to model open-sourcing in our ministries, sharing ideas and strategies with other youth workers who are not our competitors, but our partners in Kingdom work? If the best ideas really could be “out there”, why do we so stubbornly continually look “in here” for the answers-whatever the most pressing questions may be in our context?
I don’t have this figured out, but I’m inspired by what our friend in New York is doing. And I’m stirred to get better at what I continually ask my own young children to do: share.
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December 12th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[...] friend Brad Griffin at the Fuller Youth Institute wrote this in response to the recent release of the 20/20 Summary Report and Action Plan: What’s incredible [...]
December 13th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Thanks for writing about open source. I have been very interested in what Jeremy and friends are doing in NY, and this is an important piece.
December 15th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Not that this is the only reason by any means (our individualism certainly plays a part too). But I would argue that how we are trained in seminary plays a part in our resistance to this sort of thing. For example, our preaching classes train us to go through the entire exegetical process when putting together a sermon, with no exceptions. This is the model that we are taught to use throughout our career. The idea of taking someone else’s sermon is seen as plagiarism. Now, while there is certainly the need for always adapting any resource to fit your context, and while profiting from someone else’s work is morally suspect, isn’t there value in using someone else’s good teaching idea? If teaching (and by extension ministry) is really about building each other up then shouldn’t we use the best resources we can rather than trying to get by on our own brilliance?