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SOPA/PIPA protests on-message or artless?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Go Internet! Instantly message the U.S. Congress! (Tell them to kill the so-called Research Works Act too!)

Another, much bigger, tiresome rearguard action. I’m impressed by protesters’ nearly universal and exclusive focus on encouraging readers to contact U.S. Congresspeople. I hope it works. SOPA and PIPA really, really deserve to die.

But the protest also bums me out.

1) Self-censorship (in the case of sites completely blacked out, as opposed to those prominently displaying anti-SOPA messages) is not the Internet at its best. If that claim weren’t totally ridiculous, the net wouldn’t be worth defending. It isn’t even the net at its political best — that would be creating systems which disrupt and obviate power — long term offensives, not short-term defenses.

2) Near exclusive focus on supplication before 535 [Update: 536] ultra-powerful individuals is kinda disgusting. But it needs to be done, as effectively as possible.

3) I haven’t looked at a huge number of sites, but I haven’t seen much creativity in the protest. Next time it would be fun to see an appropriate site (Wikipedia? Internet Archive?) take what Flickr has done and add bidding for the “right” to darken particular articles or media as a fundraiser. Art would be nice too — I’d love to hear about anything really great (and preferably libre) from this round.

4) While some prominent bloggers have made the point that “piracy” is not a legitimate problem, overwhelmingly the protest has stuck to defense — SOPA and PIPA would do bad things to the net, and wouldn’t “work” anyway. Google goes much further, saying “End Piracy, Not Liberty” and “Fighting online piracy is important.” Not possible, wrong, and gives away the farm.

5) Nobody making the point that everyone can help with long-term offensives which will ultimately stop ratcheting protectionism, if it is to be stopped. Well, this nobody has attempted:

[I]magine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world dominationliberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.
…
I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

Also:

Bad legislation needs to be stopped now, but over the long term, we won’t stop getting new bad legislation until policymakers see broad support and amazing results from culture and other forms of knowledge that work with the Internet, rather than against it. Each work or project released under a CC license signals such support, and is an input for such results.

And:

Finally, remember that CC is crucial to keeping the Internet non-broken in the long term. The more free culture is, the less culture has an allergy to and deathwish for the Internet.

…

Of the five items I list above, the first three are admittedly peevish. Four and five represent not so much problems with the current protest as they do severe deficiencies in movements for intellectual freedom. Actually they are flipsides of the same deficiency: lack of compelling explanation that intellectual freedom, however constructed and protected, really matters, really works, and is really for the good. If such were well enough researched and explained so as to become conventional wisdom, rather than contentious and seemingly radical, net freedom activists could act much more proactively, provocatively, and powerfully, rather than as they do today: with supplication and genuflection.

I am not at all well read, but my weak understanding is that the withdrawal of economists from studying intellectual protectionism in the late 1800s was a great tragedy. To begin the encourage rectification of that century plus of relative neglect, today is a good day to start reading Against Intellectual Monopoly.

In the meantime, the actual and optimal counterfactual drift further apart, without any help from SOPA and PIPA.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | No Comments »

Namecheap’s savvy anti-SOPA marketing

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

I’m impressed by how much gratis publicity and advertising has gotten via its anti-SOPA marketing (including the Wikipedia article I linked to; it didn’t exist 3 days ago), and completely unimpressed by the failure of approximately every other company to take advantage of the opportunity, which strikes me as easy social media gold. Communications department heads ought roll.

* pro-SOPA marketing failures made Namecheap’s action straightforward relative to companies not directly competing with Go Daddy. However, there are lots of other domain name registrars, none of which has done anything with Namecheap’s marketing savvy. Another registrar, (which I’ve used and recommended for some time, and has supported Creative Commons and other good causes), like Namecheap is donating a portion of domain transfers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of it, and their anti-SOPA blog post is rather tepid. Compare to Namecheap’s anti-SOPA blog post, which isn’t all that much stronger in terms of substance (contains genuflection to “intellectual property”), it is much more strongly worded and simply more effectively written.

One other company has a support-EFF-against-SOPA tie-in. That company, Zopim, provides website chat services, and doesn’t seem to compete with Go Daddy at all. I’m not interested, but never would have heard of them otherwise. Any company could do that.

(I see that sometime today two other small domain registrars have added support-EFF-against-SOPA deals. Good for Suspicious Networks and Centuric.)

What inspired to me write this post is that Namecheap isn’t only taking gratis publicity. They’re also running presumably paid ads as part of their anti-SOPA marketing campaign:

While trying to get the above ad to load again (noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t register until sometime after — I’m oddly trying to recover from ad blindness), I noticed another Namecheap ad, which if you’re already really tuned in, illustrates nicely the imperfect options available from a software freedom perspective for domain registration and other nearly commodity services.

Check out more anti-SOPA and pro-freedom actions.

*Isn’t the name “Go Daddy” ridiculous? That, coupled with a super cheesy website and company logo led me to disregard them long before they started shooting sexy elephants at gladiator events, or whatever got people upset before they supported SOPA.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Mozilla $300m/year for freedom

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

More Mozilla ads by Henrik Moltke / CC BY

Congratulations to Mozilla on their $300m/year deal with Google, which will more than double current annual revenue. I’ve always thought people predicting doom for Mozilla if Google failed to renew were all wrong — others would be happy to pay for the default search position; probably less since Microsoft, Yahoo, and others make less than Google per ad view, but it’d still be a very substantial amount — and the link article hints that a Microsoft bid drove the price up.

There’s always a risk that Mozilla won’t spend the money well, but I’m pretty confident that they will. Firefox is excellent, and in 2011 has gotten more excellent, faster, and I think many of the other projects they’re doing are really important, and on the right track (insofar as I’m qualified to discern, which is not much), for example BrowserID. Even in small and hopelessly annoying things, like licensing, I think Mozilla is doing good. (Bias: Mozilla has donated to my employer.)

I’m no longer enthused about the possibility of huge resources for progress toward Wikimedia’s vision from advertising on Wikipedia. Since I was last on that bandwagon, it has become even less of a possibility in anything but the distant future: Wikimedia’s donation campaigns have gone very well, adequately funding its operating mission, and lack of advertising has become even more part of Wikimedia’s messaging; I’ve also become more concerned (not in particular to Wikimedia) about the institutional corruption risks previously blogged by Peter McCluskey and Timothy B. Lee. (Note these objections don’t apply to Mozilla: its significant revenue has always been advertising-based; very roughly its revenues are already 10x those of Wikimedia’s; and it is also building up an individual donor program, which I agree is often the healthiest revenue for a nonprofit.)

But I still very much think freedom needs massive, ongoing resource infusions, in the right institutional framework. I celebrate the tremendous benefits of the FLOSS community achieves without massive, concentrated, ongoing resource infusions, but I also admit that the web likely would be much worse, much less webby, and much less free without concentrated resources at Mozilla over the last several years.

Thank you Mozillians, and congratulations. I have very high expectations for your contributions over the next years to the web and society, in particular where more freedom and security are obviously needed such as mobile and software services. Such would be just a start. As computation permeates everything, and digital freedom becomes the most important political issue, the resources of many Mozillas are needed. More on that, soon.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

Encyclopedia of Original Research

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

As I’m prone to say that some free/libre/open projects ought strive to not merely recapitulate existing production methods and products (so as to sometimes create something much better), I have to support and critique such strivings.

A proposal for the Encyclopedia of Original Research, besides a name that I find most excellent, seems like just such a project. The idea, if I understand correctly, is to leverage Open Access literature and using both machine- and wiki-techniques, create always-up-to-date reviews of the state of research in any field, broad or narrow. If wildly successful, such a mechanism could nudge the end-product of research from usually instantly stale, inaccessible (multiple ways), unread, untested, singular, and generally useless dead-tree-oriented outputs toward more accessible, exploitable, testable, queryable, consensus outputs. In other words, explode the category of “scientific publication”.

Another name for the project is “Beethoven’s open repository of research” — watch the video.

The project is running a crowdfunding campaign right now. They only have a few hours left and far from their goal, but I’m pretty sure the platform they’re using does not require projects to meet a threshold in order to obtain pledges, and it looks like a small amount would help continue to work and apply for other funding (eminently doable in my estimation; if I can help I will). I encourage kicking in some funds if you read this in the next couple hours, and I’ll update this post with other ways to help in the future if you’re reading later, as in all probability you are.

EoOR is considerably more radical than (and probably complementary to and/or ought consume) AcaWiki, a project I’ve written about previously with the more limited aim to create human-readable summaries of academic papers and reviews. It also looks like, if realized, a platform that projects with more specific aims, like OpenCures, could leverage.

Somehow EoOR escaped my attention (or more likely, my memory) until now. It seems the proposal was developed as part of a class on getting your Creative Commons project funded, which I think I can claim credit for getting funded (Jonas Öberg was very convincing; the idea for and execution of the class are his).

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Public Domain, Public Goods, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | No Comments »

A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism: #13 (or #0?)

Monday, December 12th, 2011

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent checklist of 12 things you can do to fight the U.S. Congress’ attack on the Internet. Most of them are tiresome rearguard actions against this particular legislation (though most can have secondary long-term effects of educating policymakers and the public about the harm of attacking the Internet). All this is necessary, please take action now.

Action #12 is long-term: contribute financially to the EFF so they can continue “leading the fight to defend civil liberties online, so that future generations will enjoy an Internet free of censorship.” Indeed, please do this too. I’ve recommended becoming an EFF member in the past, and will continue to do so. Actually I’m even more enthusiastic about donating to the EFF in 2011 than I was in 2005. In addition to playing an absolutely critical role in fighting SOPA, PIPA, and their ilk, the EFF’s small technical staff is working on some of the most important technical challenges to keeping the Internet open and secure. They are awesome!

There’s one more item that needs to be in every responsible digital freedom activist’s toolkit: the digital commons, meaning free and open source software and their analogues in culture, knowledge, and beyond. Using and consuming free software and culture is crucial to maintaining a free society. There are many reasons, some of which I mentioned recently at OWF, and with a bit more focus in a FSCONS 2008 presentation (slideshare, .pdf, .odp), but here’s one: imagine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world dominationliberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.

Am I crazy? Seriously, I’d like to make the case for the commons as crucial to the future of free society more compellingly. Or, if I’m wrong, stop making it. Feedback wanted.

…

Relatedly, the English Wikipedia community is considering a blackout to protest SOPA. Here’s the comment I left at the request for comment:

Support doing something powerful. I blackout would be that. I do have some reticence though. Making the knowledge in English Wikipedia and maybe other sites inaccessible feels a bit like protestors who destroy their own neighborhood. Sometimes necessary to gain attention and perhaps justice in the long run, but always painful and with collateral victims. Sure, visitors to Wikipedia sites can come back later or find a mirror, but just as surely, the neighborhood will recover. Maybe. Admittedly the analogy is far from perfect, but I wish there were something the Wikimedia movement could do that would have power analogous to a mass physical action, but avoid costs analogous to the same. Long term, I think fulfilling the Wikimedia vision is exactly that. In the short term, maybe a total blackout is necessary, though if there’s a a way to equally powerfully present to viewers what SOPA means, then let them access the knowledge, I’d prefer that. UI challenge? Surely some A:B testing is in order for this important action. I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Commons experts to develop version 4.0 of the CC licenses

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

As described on the Creative Commons blog some initial discussions were had at the CC Global Summit about 6 weeks ago in Warsaw. I’m looking forward to the start of in depth discovery, analysis, and debate of pertinent issues on the cc-licenses list, the CC wiki, and elsewhere over the coming months. Please join in, commons experts.☺

I gave a brief presentation on one of those issues at the summit, on the “NonCommercial” term of some CC licenses (odp, pdf, slideshare). [Addendum 20111104: This talk was not recorded. Only slides are available. Don't watch the videos below if you're only looking for a talk on NC!]

More relevantly (to 4.0; yes, NC is pretty relevant, becoming less so, the commons is super relevant, indeed all important) though more abstractly, I also organized a session on “CC’s role in the global commons movement”. I’m very happy with how that turned out, but it is only a tentative beginning, about which I will write further. For now you can read Silke Helfrich’s summary post and slides, Tyng-Ruey Chuang’s presentation text, Leonhard Dobusch’s slides, and Kat Walsh’s presentation text and download or watch at archive.org or YouTube:

Because I may never get around to blogging it separately, I also gave a presentation on “what’s happened in Creative Commons and the open community over the last 3 years.” You may recognize one slide from an earlier post. View slides (odp, pdf, slideshare) or video at archive.org or YouTube:

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Almost Wikipedias and innovation in free collaboration projects

Friday, October 21st, 2011

I recently watched a presentation by Benjamin Mako Hill on Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action (audio and video at the link) — or some conjectures about why Wikipedia took off, while 7 older English language internet encyclopedia projects did not.

The presentation had some interesting bits of net history, at least to someone as poorly read as myself — I had only heard about Interpedia (1993) and The Distributed Encyclopedia Project (1997) recently via a timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals.

Through study of materials concerning the older projects and interviews with project founders, Hill arrived at 4 propositions…

  1. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was built around a familiar product.
  2. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was focused on substantive content development instead of technology.
  3. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it offered low transaction costs to participation.
  4. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it deemphasized attribution and “social ownership” of content.

…mapped on a grid reminiscent of many diagrams of “innovation quadrants” (example):

Or, as Dan O’Sullivan said with a broader stroke, ‘Everything is radical about Wikipedia except for the actual articles’.

At first blush this indicates that I should temper my enthusiasm for claiming that Wikipedia exploded the category of encyclopedias and that more free collaboration projects should aim to explode additional product categories.

Though early Wikipedians set out to create an , and I’m persuaded that presenting contributors with a familiar product to build helped it succeed, I think it is clear that Wikipedia, or more properly 845 language Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects, have created a “product” that is much more useful and different from previous encyclopedias in ways that justify saying it has “exploded” the category. Yes, individual articles read more or less like previous encyclopedia articles, but then emails read more or less like letters. One approach to thinking about how big of an impact Wikipedia may have made so far would be to compare Wikipedia to surviving proprietary online encyclopedias (or perhaps hypothetical ones, had Wikipedia or similar never happened). I suspect the comparison would be akin to AOL and near peers vs. the internet.

One remain hopeful about free collaboration exploding further categories is that Wikipedia, and of course free and open source software projects, have innovated on process. There’s a huge amount of knowledge diffusion to be done, and further development of free collaboration processes, but a now new free collaboration project doesn’t automatically start out in a dead zone of innovating in too many dimensions if it attempts to include product innovation, as might have been the case in the past, as free collaboration equaled process innovation.

One small thing that we’ve mostly figured out that we mostly hadn’t figured out 10+ years ago (or 20+ years ago for software) is appropriate copyright licensing. I dimly recall from the past reading about copyright issues with keeping h2g2 going, and limitations for everything2 (no license is required, so entries are mostly solo-contributor), but I quickly looked at a few of the other projects Hill mentioned and found some curiosities. Interpedia’s FAQ on copyright doesn’t say what the project’s copyright policy is, but does express fear of an infamous patent. The Distributed Encyclopedia Project used what would now be recognized as an onerous and impractical license that at a glance I’m not sure agrees with the brief statement found at the bottom of an example article. The very first archive.org capture of theinfo.org states “All of the content is released under the Anti-Copyright License”, which sounds hopeful, though subsequent captures don’t have that statement, and the text of said license is not captured.

I’m really looking forward to Hill’s publication, as well as the further development of his research program concerning mass collaboration and social movements. Also, check out his reading list on AcaWiki.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Source, Wikipedia | 8 Comments »

Notability, deletionism, inclusionism, ∞³

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

For the past couple years there has been an in English Wikipedia (archived version). It is an ok article. Some that I’d include isn’t, and some of what is seems kind of tangential, e.g., talking at a NASA event, that besides a citation, netted spending the day with an unholy mix of the usual social media suspects and entirely retrograde “we gotta put man humans into space because it makes me feel proud to be an American and my daughter might do her math homework!!!” boosters (get real: go robots!) and a sketch. However, overall it is fairly evocative, even the NASA event part. It would be uncool of me to edit it directly, and I’ve been curious to see how it would be improved, translated, vandalized, or deleted, so I haven’t made suggestions. It has mostly just sat there, though it has been curious to see the content copied in various places where Wikipedia content gets copied, and that a fair proportion of the people I meet note that I “have a Wikipedia page” — that’s kind of the wrong way to think about it (Wikipedia articles have subjects, not owners), but good to know that people can use web search (and that I can tend toward the pedantic).

!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
– http://memesteading.com/2010/03/15/dialectical-inclusionism/

The one thing that I have said about the article about me on English Wikipedia, until now, has been this, on my (not precisely, but moreso “mine”) user page on English Wikipedia: “I am the subject of Mike Linksvayer, which I would strongly advocate deleting if I were a deletionist (be my guest).” I’ve thought about pulling some kind of stunt around this, for example, setting up a prediction market contract on whether the article about me would be deleted in a given timeframe, but never got around to it. Anyway, last week someone finally added an Articles for Deletion notice to the article, which sets up a process involving discussion of whether the article ought be deleted (crickets so far). When rough consensus is reached, an admin will delete the article, or the notice will be removed.

I’m not a fan of deletionism (more below), but given the current rules around notability, I am either somewhat questionable as an English Wikipedia article subject (using the general, easy to interpret charitably summary of notability: “A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.”) to unquestionably non-notable (any less charitable interpretation, which presumably any “deletionist” would use, thus my user page statement). The person who added the Articles for Deletion notice may not have done any research beyond what is already linked in the article (more on that general case below), but I must admit, his critique of the citations in the article, are fairly evocative, just as the article is:

We have three sources from Creative Commons (primary), a paragraph in a CNET news article where he does his job and encourages scientists to use CC licenses, one IHT article about veganism that mentions him for a couple of paragraphs, and a link to his Wikipedia userpage. That is not enough for notability, in my opinion.

The IHT (actually first in the NYT) article was about calorie restriction, not veganism, but that’s a nitpick. Most of the “media” items my name has appeared in are indeed about Creative Commons, i.e., me doing my job, not me as primary subject, or in a few cases, about calorie restriction, with me as a prop. Or they’re blogs — ok that one is even less notable than most blogs, but at least it’s funny, and relevant — and podcasts. The only item (apart from silly blog posts) that I’ve appeared in that I’m fond of and would be tickled if added as a reference if the current article about me squeaks by or some future article in the event I as a subject become a no-brainer (clearly I aim to, e.g., “[make] a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field”, but even more clearly I haven’t achieved this) is in Swedish (and is still about me doing my job, though perhaps going off-message): check out an English machine translation.

…

I’m not a fan of deletionism, largely because, as I’ve stated many times, thinking of Wikipedias as encyclopedias doesn’t do the former justice — Wikipedia has exploded the “encyclopedia” category, and that’s a wonderful thing. Wikipedias (and other Wikimedia projects, and projects elsewhere with WikiNature) need to go much further if freedom is to win — but I’m partisan in this, and can appreciate that others appreciate the idea that Wikipedias stick close to the category defined by print encyclopedias, including strong limits on what might be considered encyclopedic.

It also strikes me that if Wikimedia movement priorities include increasing readership and participation that inclusionism is the way to go — greatly increase the scope of material people can find and participate in building. However, I’m not saying anything remotely new — see Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia.

Although I’m “not a fan” I don’t really know how big of a problem deletionism is. In my limited experience, dealing with an Articles for Deletion notice on an article I’ve contributed to is a pain, sometimes motivates substantially improving the article in question, and is generally a bummer when a useful, factual article is deleted — but it isn’t a huge part of the English Wikipedia editing experience.

Furthermore, reading guidelines on notability closely again, they’re more reasonable than I recall — that is, very reasonable, just not the radical inclusionism I prefer. To the extent that deletionism is a problem, my guess now is that it could be mitigated by following the guidelines more closely, not loosening them — start with adding a {{notability}} tag, not an Articles for Deletion notice, ask for advice on finding good sources, and make a good faith effort to find good sources — especially for contemporary subjects, it’s really simple with news/web/scholar/book/video search from Google and near peers. I’m sure this is done in the vast majority of cases — still, in the occasional case when it isn’t done, and initial attempts to find sources and improve an article are being made during an Articles for Deletion discussion, is kind of annoying.

…

I also wrote some time ago when thinking about notability the not-to-be-taken-very-seriously Article of the Unknown Notable, which I should probably move elsewhere.

…

The delicious “dialectical inclusionism” quote above is from Gordon Mohr. Coincidentally, today he announced ∞³, a project “to create an avowedly inclusionist complement to Wikipedia”. There’s much smartness in his post, and this one is already long, so I’m going to quote the entire thing:

Introducing Infinithree (“∞³”)

Wikipedia deletionism is like the weather: people complain, but nobody is doing anything about it. 

I’d like to change that, working with others to create an avowedly inclusionist complement to Wikipedia, launching in 2011. My code name for this project is ‘Infinithree’ (‘∞³’), and this blog exists to collaborate on its creation.

Why, you may ask?

I’ll explain more in future posts – but in a nutshell, I believe deletionism erases true & useful reference knowledge, drives away contributors, and surrenders key topics to cynical spammy web content mills.

If you can already appreciate the value and urgency of this sort of project, I’m looking for you. Here are the broad outlines of my working assumptions:

Infinithree will use the same open license and a similar anyone-can-edit wiki model as Wikipedia, but will discard ‘notability’ and other ‘encyclopedic’ standards in favor of ‘true and useful’.

Infinithree is not a fork and won’t simply redeploy MediaWiki software with inclusionist groundrules. That’s been tried a few times, and has been moribund each time. Negative allelopathy from Wikipedia itself dooms any almost-but-not-quite-Wikipedia; a new effort must set down its roots farther afield.

Infinithree will use participatory designs from the social web, rather than wikibureacracy, to accrete reliable knowledge. Think StackOverflow or Quora, but creating declarative reference content, rather than interrogative transcripts.

Sound interesting? Can you help? Please let me know what you think, retweet liberally, and refer others who may be interested.

For updates, follow @_infinithree on Twitter (note the leading underscore) or @infinithree on Identi.ca.

Infinithree is already very interesting as a concept, and I’m confident in Gordon’s ability to make it non-vapor and extremely interesting (I was one of his co-founders at the early open content/data/mass collaboration service Bitzi — 10 years ago, hard to believe). There is ample opportunity to try different mass collaboration arrangements to create free knowledge. Many have thought about how to tweak Wikipedia culture or software to produce different outcomes, or merely to experiment (I admit that too much of my plodding pondering on the matter involves the public domain↔strong copyleft dimension). I’m glad that Gordon intends ∞³ to be different enough from Wikipedia such that more of the vast unexplored terrain gets mapped, and hopefully exploited. As far as I know is probably the most relevant attempt so far. May there be many more.

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, Health, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Dear Jean Quan,

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Congratulations on your election and tomorrow’s inauguration as Oakland mayor.

I ranked ahead of you, but in truth my expressive rationale for doing so could just as well have favored you: a progressive Asian American woman represents a defining characteristic of what makes Oakland special and its future just as much as does a green lesbian (who is also an American and a woman, but such is identity politics).

Expressiveness aside, expectations for positive outcomes from your term as mayor are pretty low (note emphasis on outcomes; everyone knows you’ll put in more hours than recent Oakland mayors). Oakland still has a terrible crime problem, and city finances are beyond terrible. I suspect if there were betting markets on outcomes related to these problems, current prices would predict that under your leadership crime will get worse (relative to comparable cities; of course national trends may determine absolute direction of change), chief police will quit, the city will teeter on bankruptcy, your response will be to ‘social program us to death’, and you will be a one term mayor, succeeded by Kaplan, Joe Tauman, or .

Low expectations can be a blessing, if you’re willing to take steps to smash them and secure your re-election and legacy as Oakland’s most successful mayor in decades.

First, crime. Blaming the problem on poverty, racism, poor schools, unemployment, etc., isn’t going to cut it, neither as discourse nor as the stereotypical actions resulting, loosely characterized as “building youth centers”. Most voters aren’t that stupid (well, they are, but in other directions when it comes to crime). Fortunately, one can be a good progressive, acknowledge that crime is a major problem, especially for the disadvantaged, and take smart, progressive-compatible steps to smash crime. Check out Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Aaron Swartz’s essay on crime:

Such things are a frustration for white suburbanites, but for poor people stuck in the ghetto, they’re a nightmare. Crime is yet another disadvantage and a particularly noxious one at that. Even aside from all the other indignities suffered by the poor, just imagining life in a crime-ridden neighborhood is enough to make your skin crawl.
…
So there’s the question: How can we have less crime with less punishment?

Here are the no-brainer steps you can take on crime:

  • Do not get caught saying anything that could be construed as “blaming society” for the problem or that the solution consists of “building youth centers”.
  • Work with Batts to actually fight crime; defer to his expertise at every opportunity.
  • Provide high-minded leadership on protecting civil liberties; on this defer to nobody. However, limit riot-bait to national and global issues. For example, city proclamations calling for bringing George W. Bush to justice and the like will only cause rioting on right-wing talk radio, leaving Oakland neighborhoods and businesses unscathed.

Next, finances. Similarly no-brainer suggestions:

  • Repeat early, loudly, and clearly that Oakland has an unsustainable spending problem, and everyone, especially your loyal allies in and funded by city government, are going to feel immediate pain.
  • Immediately push through cuts, primarily to areas you favor politically, sparing police and maintenance as much as possible.
  • Immediately push through revenue increases, e.g., tackle mis- and under-priced parking.

Beyond the above mandatory issues, a few less pressing but visionary actions for you to consider adding to your mayoral legacy:

  • Do everything you can to signal (and perhaps do a little of substance too) that you believe Oakland is the eco-city of the future, urban permaculture doers are heroes, and Oakland should be the world leader in marijuana business and education. Each of these increases Oakland’s specialness, and eliminates any future challenge from Kaplan. (If you’re moderately successful on the two major issues above, you also eliminate any traction Tauman or Russo might otherwise gain during your first term.)
  • Make Oakland the leader in “open” policy. There are obvious opportunities around city data, software procurement, and open licensing of city publications. The last would even help improve the article about you on Wikipedia. ☺ I and many other technology professionals and advocates of openness who live in Oakland would love to help. Some of us work for Creative Commons and other organizations with deep expertise in this area.
  • In another decade, autonomous vehicles will reshape cities. Establish some kind of an unpaid citizens committee to investigate how Oakland can prepare.

Here’s to great outcomes for Oakland, and your incredible success as mayor!

Mike Linksvayer
Golden Gate District, Oakland

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Oakland, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

Collaborative-Futures.org

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

The 2nd edition of Collaborative Futures is now available, and the book has its own site and mailing list–there will be future editions, and you can help write them.

I did a series of posts (also see one on the Creative Commons blog) on the book sprint that produced the 1st edition. The 1st edition a highly successful experiment, but unpolished. The 2nd edition benefited from contributions by all of the 1st edition’s main collaborators, successfully incorporated new collaborators, and is far more polished. Also see I think the whole team is justifiably proud of the result. Please check it out and subject to harsh criticism, help with the next edition, or both.

You can also republish verbatim, translated, format-shifted, or modified versions, or incorporate into your own materials (e.g., for a class)–the book and all related assets are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license — the same as Wikipedia. I don’t think we took advantage of this by incorporating any content from Wikipedia, but as I’m writing this it occurs to me that it would be fairly simple to create a supplement for the book mostly or even entirely consisting of a collection of relevant Wikipedia articles — see examples of such books created using PediaPress; another approach would be to add a feature to Booki (the software used to create Collaborative Futures) to facilitate importing chapters from Wikipedia.

Here’s a copy of my testimonial currently on the Booki site:

I was involved in the Collaborative Futures book sprint, the first book written using Booki, and the first FLOSS Manuals project that isn’t software documentation. I was amazed by the results materially and socially, and even more so by the just completed 2nd edition of Collaborative Futures, which successfully incorporated several new contributors and benefited from new Booki features.

I am inspired by the potential for book sprints and the Booki software to expand the scope of collaborative production in a wide variety of contexts, especially education. Booki is an exciting new innovative platform that is bringing book production online and is an important new form of free culture / free knowledge production. Platforms that expand the categories of works that can be radically improved through free collaboration (beyond software and encyclopedias) are absolutely essential to building a good future. I enthusiastically endorse Booki and encourage all to use and support it.

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

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