Sister Linda Romey, a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, PA, addressed the delegates, prioresses, councilors, and visitors gathered at Annunciation Monastery for the 2018 General Chapter of our Federation.
Taking up the Chapter Theme of Tending the Benedictine Charism, she offered a new and creative model for creating the futures for our monasteries: the “open-source” process that grew up in the software development world. The analagy is apt, with clear and direct applications to our monastic futures.
Do you wonder what “open-source” means? Here’s how Sister Linda defines it:
“Open-source,” in the context of software development, is a specific approach to creating computer software. The idea is that making code openly available for developers will create better code, and making it freely available to end users will increase adoption, result in ongoing evaluation, more use cases and a continuous cycle of improvement, development and new releases.
Open-source is an attitude, a mindset, a pattern of action that shares, builds on what has been shared, and offers the results to the world.
Wonder what it would look like in real life? Sister Linda gave us a prime example: her presentation to our Federation was shared with the world as an article in the Global Sisters Report. Click on this link to her article and become part of the Benedictine open-source movement.
Websites mentioned
The Monastic Congregation of Saint Benedict 