About
I gave this talk at the Openscapes Community Call Open Communities in the Age of AI on October 1, 2026. From the call’s topic description on the event page (CC BY 4.0):
We want to talk about the impact of AI on the growth and maintenance of communities, and the people in those communities. There are discussions happening in many Open Source communities about how to manage and use AI effectively and responsibly - discussions about increased burden on maintainers, policies for AI-written PRs, etc. Those are important conversations, however, the conversations about impacts of AI on communities are rare. Beyond providing a forum for technical help, open communities have a culture of shared & continued learning; prioritizing diversity, equity, and belonging. They help us connect on a human level around science and data and the things that we are passionate about. They change careers, they change lives. A core lesson in our Openscapes Champions Program is focused on helping people find open communities that resonate with them, where they can connect with others, continue to find and learn what they need, and become contributors.
But now, people are not necessarily finding their communities and getting the benefit of those communities in the way that they used to, because they’re more easily able to get help and answers by using AI. As a result, people are missing out on huge benefits from the communities that they don’t know exist, and the communities are missing out on bringing in new perspectives, new people, new ideas, and growing the open movement forward together. And one could argue that these connections and communities are more important than ever, as we need to find ways to support each other and ourselves as AI rapidly changes the landscape right under our feet.
Video
Slides
The slides are their own web page (they open in this tab) rather than an embedded frame, so they work with your browser’s zoom, screen readers, and keyboard:
- → / ← (or Space, Page Down / Page Up) move between slides; Home and End jump to the first and last.
- The slide counter is announced as you move.
- Printing the page (or Save as PDF) lays out one slide per page.
Resources
Works cited in the talk, in the order they appear in the slides:
- Sharon Traweek, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics,” chapter 3 of Beamtimes and Lifetimes (1988), on how communities renew themselves by training novices (the opening quote).
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), via Edouard Lagache’s diagram of participation in the community of scuba divers (1993) (the “rings” slides).
- My 2018 talk, Sustainers of the tidyverse, which the three “Vintage 2018” slides come from.
- Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring” (1990), and Joan Tronto, Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (2015), for the definition of care.
- Lydia Pintscher (ed.), Open Advice: FOSS: What We Wish We Had Known When We Started (2012), on what holds people back from contributing.
Also mentioned in the discussion:
- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1967).
- Charles H. Vogl, The Art of Community: 7 Principles for Belonging (2025).
I first reproduced the rings figure in AI and the invisible newcomer in open source on the stdlib blog.
References
Reuse
Citation
@online{averick2026,
author = {Averick, Mara},
title = {The Unnecessary Places — {Openscapes} {Community} {Call}},
date = {2026-10-01},
url = {https://dataand.me/talks/2026-10_the-unnecessary-places-openscapes/},
langid = {en-US}
}