Holding Onto An Open-Source Mindset Is More Important Now Than It's Ever Been

When we have the opportunity to speak about our agency’s twenty-plus-year history, whether to university students considering a career in digital marketing or to potential new clients, we often cite a few key pillars that strongly inform the work we do and the partnerships we strive to forge. One of those pillars is something we call “Open-Sourcery” (the spelling choice here is a feature, not a bug). In the world of software, open-source refers to code that is released under a license that states the user can use, study, change, and distribute that code to anyone for any purpose. Open-source tools are usually free of charge. WordPress is a popular open-source content management system for websites, Linux is an open-source operating system, and LLaMA is an open-source large language model from Meta.

Our embrace of Open-Sourcery doesn’t mean we don’t value the tools and technologies our team builds to serve the needs of our clients, but it means we’re always looking to bring together the right combination of tools and figure out how they can work together to pass data back and forth to maximum effect. Every great system is actually made up of many systems harmoniously working collaboratively in the background, trusting one another and counting on their counterparts to pull their weight. Kind of like the amazing set of talent it takes to put on a show.

During the pandemic, when everyone was scrambling to figure out how to rebuild the machine of Broadway to keep delivering some semblance of its former product, alliances and partnerships were formed between companies that had never happened before. Tickets were available on more platforms than they used to be, and new models were built to allow multiple institutions to promote virtual performances. The industry embraced an open-source mindset out of necessity. The challenge now is to not snap back to the way things were in the before-times. We challenge everyone who reads this to think of 3 ways to say ‘yes’ to a request for collaboration in our industry that you would have historically said ‘no’ to. Embrace your inner Open-Sourcerer, and let’s see what magic happens.

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