On July 15th, my Data Platform MVP award was renewed for another year. I was first handed it in 2018, which means the ten-year mark is now close enough to see clearly. I should feel celebratory. Mostly I feel like I owe somebody money.
Because none of it was mine to begin with.
The first user group talk I gave because someone told me to just volunteer and send in an abstract. The conference circuit that followed. The blog you’re reading. The people who reviewed my abstracts, argued with my conclusions, let me sleep on the metaphorical couch of their session when mine fell flat. Every door that opened was opened by somebody who didn’t have to.
Last week I read Ben Kettner’s excellent post, Why community matters. He gets it exactly right. Community isn’t a nice-to-have you bolt onto a career — it’s infrastructure. As he puts it, your knowledge doesn’t shrink when you share it. It grows.
I built a career on believing precisely that. Give it away. Write the blog post nobody asked for. Answer the question on the forum. Document the workaround so the next person doesn’t lose the afternoon you lost. Because you can. Because you care. The whole thing ran on a simple, unspoken compact: I help you, you help the next person, and somewhere down the line it comes back around. Pay it forward. Attribution and reciprocity. That was the deal.
Here’s the thing: I’m no longer sure the deal still holds.
We built the library #
A while ago I read something from Surej Sharma that I haven’t been able to put down:
We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.
That lands because it’s true. The tutorials, the Stack Overflow answers, the GitHub repos, the decade of blog posts — all of it given freely, under the old compact, on the assumption that giving was how you participated. None of it was written to become training data for a product that would later be sold back to us by the token. But that’s where it went.
And reciprocity? Attribution? Both quietly severed. Stack Overflow is just about gone. The model doesn’t credit the person whose answer it learned from. It can’t. That’s not how it works.
The slop and the theft #
It gets worse, and this is the part that actually keeps me up.
Creating things used to cost something. Time, mostly. That cost was a filter — a crude one, but a filter. It meant that when someone published, they’d usually wrestled with the material first. Now that cost is gone, and two things rushed into the vacuum.
The first is slop. An ocean of plausible, frictionless, technically-correct-ish content that nobody really thought about, drowning out the work of people who did.
The second is uglier. Take someone’s idea — their framework, their post, their hard-won insight — run it through a model for a few cosmetic tweaks, and ship it under your own name. Laundering, basically. The community I started in had a word for that, and it sure wasn’t “remix.”
The compact assumed people gave in good faith and took in good faith. Strip out both ends and what’s left isn’t a community. It’s feedstock.
Nineteen twenty-six #
This year the Swedish Air Force turns one hundred years old. It was founded on the first of July, 1926 — by people who had no idea what they were building. Aviation was barely two decades old. They couldn’t have told you what air power would mean, what it would cost, or what it would become. They built it anyway, because they’d decided it mattered.
I keep coming back to that, because it’s the only honest position I can find right now.
I believe in fighting for what’s important. I think the community — the real one, the give-it-away one — is worth fighting for. But I’d be lying if I told you I know what it’s turning into. The thing that gave me everything is changing under my feet faster than I can describe it, and the comfortable narrative where openness always wins doesn’t obviously survive contact with an extraction machine that runs on exactly that openness.
So no neat ending this time. The people in 1926 didn’t get to know the outcome before they committed. Neither do we.
What I know is this: I was given everything I have. The compact worked for me. And the only way I know to honor that is to keep showing up, keep sharing under my own name, keep crediting the people I learn from, and keep betting that good faith still means something.
After 25 years in the community and almost ten years as an MVP, that’s the whole of my wisdom. Show up. Give it away. Sign your work.
I just hope there’s still a library on the other side.
Image from Wikipedia (Carsten Whimster): the interior of Bibliotecha Alexandrina