Reflections on AI from Wagtail Space
By Daniel Fairhead, Lead Developer at The Developer Society
“The ends never justify the means” - but our choice of technology is often directly opposed to that statement.
As charity / third-sector workers, we often don’t think much about the philosophy of the technologies that we use - we use computers, built by trillion-dollar companies, using components mined in environmentally disastrous ways, paying for software which directly funds people and causes that are violently opposing our own aims and values.
We try not to talk about it - or say it’s “the cost of doing business”, the tech-tax. You may not agree with the government in the country you live, but you still have to pay taxes - and the same is true for buying the technology we need to achieve our goals, right?
It doesn’t have to be that way - and wagtail, and django are prime examples of the direction we can choose to go.
I recently attended the Wagtail Space virtual conference, organised by Torchbox. There was, as you could expect, quite a lot of discussion and talks about AI - and how we work with it within wagtail.
I really appreciated the tone and the direction set by Thibaud Colas, President of the Django foundation, and core wagtail team member, a lot of his thoughts can be found in wagtail blog https://wagtail.org/blog/ai-in-the-cms-steering-the-ecosystem/ - it’s really worth a read!
The discussion about AI within the wagtail community is fascinating - as it shows a clear desire to build great products, a pragmatism in how we approach technology, but also a strong ethical current flowing through the whole process.
The whole free-software / open source movement is full of idealistic people who want to make the world a better place. There’s conflicts, disagreements, occasional drama - but it’s generally coming from a collaborative and engaged community.
Sometimes more focussed market-driven companies can build products faster and more immediately usable than the haggling, argumentative bazaar of the open source community - and we do all need to eat - and being paid for your work is a reasonable expectation!
But I think it’s something that we, charity folks should engage with more.
How can we encourage and make choices that build into this world of collaboration that we want to live in, rather than being mere froth on the wave of 21st century consumerism?
It’s messy - but I’m happy with our choices to base our sites on Django & Wagtail, our servers on Linux, our databases Postgres, and all the other open source tools that we build with. The more I engage with the community, the more certain I am that it’s the right choice for almost every charity too.