On Digital Mathematics and Drive-By Contributors
Posted by Mike Shulman
At the Joint Mathematics Meetings last week there was a special session entitled Mathematical Information in the Digital Age of Science (MIDAS), with talks about structures to organize, disseminate, and formalize mathematics using computers and the Internet. The organizer, Patrick Ion, had invited me to give a talk based on my experience with projects such as the nLab and the HoTT Coq and Book projects. I had a hard time deciding what the audience at the session would benefit most from hearing, and I ended up changing the talk around right up until the minute I stood up to give it. But people seemed to like it, so I thought I would post the final version of the slides:
Part of my difficulty was in trying to extract some coherent message that would be memorable and useful. What I ended up with was a call to embrace plurality: be it in software, organizational structure, project goals, contributor involvement, or even mathematical foundations.
One comment that seemed to particularly interest the audience was about “drive-by contributors”: people who come along and contribute a little something to a project, but then go on their way without getting seriously involved. Some drive-by contributors are experts who just want their subject to be treated correctly; others just have a particular itch to scratch; or just happen to be reading something and notice an error. For instance, most nLab contributors have only edited a handful of pages; and many of the “contributors” to the HoTT Book github repository are readers who just submitted a couple of pull requests to fix typos.
There can sometimes be a temptation to be sad about this phenomenon: to wish that more people would get more seriously involved, rather than just making a few edits and continuing on their way. But realistically, most drive-by contributors don’t have the time or interest to dedicate a significant amount of their life to a project that they have no reason to feel particularly attached to. Instead of being sad that they didn’t get more involved, we should be happy that they got involved at all! And we should celebrate the technology, like wikis and distributed version control, that allows people to contribute only a little bit, realizing that the alternative is their contributing nothing at all.
To be honest, when I wrote the talk I wasn’t consciously aware of having heard the phrase “drive-by contributor” before; it just seemed like a natural way to describe the concept. Afterwards, prompted by a comment from someone in the audience, I went and googled it. I found it being used occasionally in the open-source software community, in a casual way suggesting that it’s a well-known phrase; so probably I’d heard it before and had it sink into my subconscious. Does anyone know its first (or most influential) usage?
Re: On Digital Mathematics and Drive-By Contributors
I’d never heard it before. I presume it’s an outgrowth of ‘drive-by shooting’, a phrase that seems to have become widely used in the US during my lifetime… in the 1980s or 1990s, maybe?