I’ll post a review in the fullness of time, but for now I recommend reading the 73 essays in the book (mine is not the essay I’d contribute today, but think it useful anyway) not primarily as critiques of market, state, their combination, or economics — it’s very difficult to say anything new concerning these dominant institutions. Instead read the essays as meditations, explorations, and provocations for expanding the spaces in human society — across a huge range of activity — which are ruled not via exclusivity (of property or state control) but are nonetheless governed to the extent needed to prevent depredation.

The benefits of moving to commons regimes might be characterized any number of ways, e.g., reducing transaction costs, decreasing alienation and rent seeking, increasing autonomy and solidarity. Although a nobel prize in economics has been awarded for research on certain kinds of commons, my feeling is that the class is severely under-characterized and under-valued by social scientists, and thus by almost everyone else. At the extreme we might consider all of civilization and nature as commons upon which our seemingly dominant institutions are merely froth.

Another thing to keep in mind when reading the book’s diverse essays is that the commons “paradigm” is pluralistic. I wonder the extent to which reform of any institution, dominant or otherwise, away from capture and enclosure, toward the benefit and participation of all its constituents, might be characterized as commoning?

Whatever the scope of commoning, we don’t know how to do it very well. How to provision and govern resources, even knowledge, without exclusivity and control, can boggle the mind. I suspect there is tremendous room to increase the freedom and equality of all humans through learning-by-doing (and researching) more activities in a commons-orientated way. One might say our lack of knowledge about the commons is a tragedy.

…

Later this month the Economics and the Commons Conference, organized by Wealth of the Commons editors David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, with Michel Bauwens, will bring together 240 researchers, practitioners, and advocates deeply enmeshed in various commons efforts. There will be overlapping streams on nature, work, money, infrastructure, and the one I’m coordinator for, knowledge.

I agreed to coordinate the stream because I found exchanges with Bollier and Helfrich stimulating (concerning my book essay, a panel on the problematic relationship of Creative Commons and commons, and subsequently), and because I’m eager to consider knowledge commoning (e.g., free software, culture, open access, copyright reform) outside of their usual venues and endlessly repeated debates, and because I feel that knowledge commons movements have failed dismally to communicate their pertinence to each other and with the rest of the world — thus I welcome the challenge and test case to communicate the pertinence of all knowledge commons movements to other self-described commoners — and finally, to learn from them.

Here are the key themes I hope we can explore in the stream:

• All commons as knowledge commons, e.g., the shared knowledge necessary to do anything in a commons-oriented way, easily forgotten once exclusivity and control take hold.
• Knowledge enclosure and commoning throughout history, pre-dating copyright and patent, let alone computers.
• How to think about and collaborate with contemporary knowledge commoners outside of the contractually constructed and legal reform paradigms, eg transparency and filesharing activists.
• How can we characterize the value of knowledge commons in ways that can be critiqued and thus are possibly convincing? What would a knowledge commons research agenda look like?
• If we accept moving the provisioning of almost all knowledge to the commons as an achievable and necessary goal, what strategies and controversies of existing knowledge commons movements (tuned to react against burgeoning enclosure and make incremental progress, while mostly accepting the dominant “intellectual property” discourse) might be reconsidered?

This may appear vastly too much material to cover in approximately 5 hours of dedicated stream sessions, but the methodology consists of brief interventions and debates, not long presentations, and the goal is provocation of new, more commons-oriented, and more cross-cutting strategies and collaborations among knowledge commoners and others, not firm conclusions.

I aim for plenty of stream documentation and followup, but to start the public conversation (the conference has not been publicized thus far due to a hard limit on attendees; now those are settled) by asking each of the “knowledge commoner” participants to recommend a resource (article, blog post, presentation, book, website…) that will inform the conversation on one or more of the themes above. Suggestions are welcome from everyone, attending or not; leave a comment or add to the wiki. Critiques of any of the above also wanted!

But an even higher proportion of the most compensated CEOs are dependent on intellectual protectionism than is accounted for by the media category. #1 is the CEO of Oracle, #6 is the CEO of Nike (I’m guessing that suppression of counterfeiting is significant), and would-be (due to late filing) #2 is the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, a gaming software company.

Why are IP CEOs unusually highly compensated (thus unusually contributing to inequality)? Why? The article cites concentrated ownership and weak governance of media companies (which begs another question) and concludes:

For the time being, traditional media business models are prospering and the leaders of the incumbents are fat and happy. But that might make them bigger, slower targets and in the end, easier to overtake.

I wouldn’t count on it. If you think inequality is a problem (inherently or because it leads to inequality of power, then law) then intellectual protectionism must be attacked on policy and product fronts.

I suspect many of these proposals might be interesting reading for anyone generally curious about possible futures of Wikipedia and related, similar, and complementary projects, but not following any of these things closely.

• A Gateway to Peer Review Science: Wikipedia and Young Researchers
• Ask Us Anything About Wikidata
• Beyond Wikimedia projects: The rise of public wikis
• Bring On “WikiSearchia” – A Collaboratively Built Search Engine
• Britannica to Wikipedia to ? Technology disruption and how we organize for the future
• Creating a new sister project, the re-birth of Wikivoyage
• Empire: Another look at Wikipedia
• Flow: The future of collaboration
• Flow Funding – power to the movement
• Free Software to Free Culture: Lessons for Wikimedia
• GFDL, CC-BY-SA, what does data expose about which is better?
• Ghosts of Wikis Yet to Come: Three Stories of Wikimedia’s Future
• Government Generated Content and an opportunity to fix copyright
• How Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap can help us build an alternative to commercial Web 2.0 services
• Improve-an-artist
• Indigenous knowledge for Wikipedia: Bending the rules?
• Integrating Wikipedia content into an expert-written peer-reviewed encyclopedia
• Multilingual Wikimedia Commons – What can we do about it
• Open Access & Wikipedia: Opening the world’s academic research to improve the world’s most popular reference source
• Open Access Media Importer
• Open Culture, Open Data, Open Source
• Promoting Commons to publishing houses
• Semanticpedia: why a semantic extraction of the Wikimedia projects still make sense in the Wikidata era
• State of Wikidata
• The Nightmare of Licencing: Image Patrolling Issues on The Hungarian Wikipedia
• The Public Domain Project – a community project to preserve historical audio records
• The Technology Behind Wikidata
• The rebirth of Uncyclopedia – the story of a community that decided to take its hosting into its own hands
• Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering
• WMF Grantmaking Panel: The Impact of Wikimedia Grantees, Offline, Online, and On-wiki
• Wikifying academia
• Wikimedia and Open Access

Recently I wrote in Why DRM in HTML5 and what to do about it:

Long term, the only way the DRM threat is going to be put to rest is for free cultural works to become culturally relevant.

I’ve complained many a time that rearguard clicktivism against bad policy is not a winning strategy — especially when such campaigns don’t also promote free-as-in-freedom software and cultural works — because as I put it one of those times:

In a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet (apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies)

But I’m at fault too for not laying out a specific plan for making some free works culturally relevant, let alone carrying out such a plan.

OK, here’s one plan I recently mentioned offhandedly:

Good idea? Run with it, or if you’d like to subscribe or otherwise help create it in any way, fill out this 3 question survey. Bad idea, but still care? Let me know via the survey. Or mail ml@gondwanaland.com or contact user mlinksva on some other usual channel.

…

“Kill Hollyweb” is in part a reference to the Y Combinator Request For Startups 9: Kill Hollywood. The plan above isn’t really a Kill Hollywood plan as it isn’t about replacing movies with some other form of entertainment.

Developing products that embody openness is the most powerful way to shape the policy conversation. Back those products with hundreds of millions of users and you have a game-changing social movement.

I completely agree, at least when “product” and “policy” are construed broadly — both include, e.g., marketing and adoption/use/joining of products, communities, ethics, ideas, etc. Raskin’s phrasing also (understandably, as he’s working for Mozilla) emphasizes central organizations as the actor (which backs products with users, rather than users adopting the product, and participating in its development) more than I’d like, but that’s nuance.

This is why I complain about rearguard clicktivism against bad policy that totally fails to leverage the communication opportunity to also promote good policy and especially products that embody good policy, and even campaigns for good policy concepts that fail to also promote products which embody the promoted policy.

To summarize, there’s product competition and policy competition, and I think the former is hugely undersold as potently changing the latter. (There’s also beating-of-the-bounds, perhaps with filesharing and wikileaks as examples, which has product and policy competition aspects, but seems a distinct kind of action; which ought to be brought into closer conversation with the formal sector.)

…

The main point of Raskin’s post is that Mozilla is a second-mover, taking proven product segments and developing products for them which embody openness, and that it could do that in more segments, various web applications in particular. I look forward to more Mozilla services.

A lot of what Wikipedia and Public Library of Science have done very successfully could also be considered “second mover”, injecting freedom into existing categories — sometimes leading to exploding the a category with something qualitatively and quantitatively huger.

…

I admit that the phrase I pulled from Raskin’s post merely confirms (and this by authority!) a strongly held bias of mine. How to test? Failing that, what are the best arguments against?

Software Freedom Conservancy has a plan to help all non-profit organizations (NPOs) by creating an Open Source and Free Software accounting system usable by non-technical bookkeepers, accountants, and non-profit managers. You can help us do it by donating now.

To keep their books and produce annual government filings, most NPOs rely on proprietary software, paying exorbitant licensing fees. This is fundamentally at cross purposes with their underlying missions of charity, equality, democracy, and sharing.

You can help Conservancy fix this problem by donating now. We seek to
raise $75,000 to employ a developer for one year to make substantial progress on this project.

This project has the potential to save the non-profit sector millions in licensing fees every year. Even non-profits that continue to use proprietary accounting software will benefit, since the existence of quality Open Source and Free Software for a particular task curtails predatory behavior by proprietary software companies, and creates a new standard of comparison.

But, more powerfully, this project’s realization will increase the agility and collaborative potential for the non-profit sector — a boon to funders, boards, and employees — bringing the Free Software and general NPO communities into closer collaboration and understanding.

I contributed to the above blurb (and would love to hear critiques of the broad claims therein about free software and non-profit missions), but not to my favorite part of the plan: phase 0, in which existing free software accounting software will be evaluated, with expert input from non-profit organizations currently using various packages, in order to choose a base for further development. How many funding campaigns propose to build something without any understanding of what already exists? Almost all as far as I can tell, and almost always a suboptimal move, is my hunch.

This move is in line with one way of looking at Software Freedom Conservancy’s role: to save free software projects from the suboptimality of another kind of NIH — starting an independent non-profit organization — projects (about 30 so far, git probably the best known) join Software Freedom Conservancy, which takes care of administration such as accounting and provides other services.

I’m generally impressed by Software Freedom Conservancy’s work (read the annual report, pretty and informative) and have served on its project evaluation committee (i.e., intake; applying to join Software Freedom Conservancy is a good motivator to get a lot of best practices in place) for about a year and joined its board the beginning of this year, recently announced.

Please donate to the campaign to improve free software accounting for non-profits. In a past role as non-profit manager at Creative Commons, I absolutely hated the internal non-transparency and dependency of our accountants using a proprietary accounting package tied to a particular Windows server. Doing anything about it was nowhere near the top of my list of things I would’ve or could’ve done given more time or hindsight, but I would’ve been really, really happy if someone else had fixed it, much like I was really happy that CiviCRM became a viable free software customer/donor/constituent/funder relationship management system at the right time for us to scrap a very simple in-house system and not become locked into one of the awful proprietary packages (not soon enough to avoid listening to sales pitches in which the salespeople blatantly lied about implementation costs and product capabilities). Now is the time for someone else to take care of the accounting situation — please help by donating — as I just did.

Oh, and even if you don’t care about non-profits at all, I’m pretty confident that this project will help free software accounting in general, and help is badly needed — LWN’s series on the subject last year is gripping reading. Seriously, it is ridiculous that such fundamental infrastructure for running organizations of all kinds and thus society is itself non-auditable.

Innovation Fellows come from a variety of backgrounds but share several common characteristics:

• Experience working across sectors, with multiple stakeholders
• Passion and propensity for innovation
• Impeccable communication and presentation skills
• Unshakable belief in the power of technology

Too bad this is probably not a parody of critiques of strawmen who supposedly have total faith in technology to make the world an excellent place in the next ten minutes. More likely, they are in true objective Public Relations positions, or perhaps Internal Relations.

I wonder if “Give me three examples demonstrating your unshakable belief in the power of technology” will be asked during interviews? I suppose the joke answers write themselves, e.g., “I took MUNI to this interview”, “I bought a computer with Windows pre-installed”; you can do much better.

Seriously though, this might be a good opportunity for someone interested in open policy and local government. Don’t tell them I sent you.☻

Oracle lost in their attempt to protect their position using patents. They lost in their attempt to claim Google copied anything but a few lines of code. If they succeed in claiming you need their permission to use the Java APIs that they pushed as a community standard, software developers and innovation will be the losers. Learning the Java language is relatively simple, but mastering its APIs is a major investment you make as a Java developer. What Android did for Java developers is to allow them to make use of their individual career and professional investment to engage in a mobile marketplace that Sun failed to properly engage in.

Johan Söderberg, Hackers GNUnited! (2008; appeared as chapter in book I also contributed to; Söderberg’s text stuck with me, as I’ve quoted an extended bit of it before):

Intellectual property rights prevent mobility of employees in so forth that their knowledge are locked in in a proprietary standard that is owned by the employer. This factor is all the more important since most of the tools that programmers are working with are available as cheap consumer goods (computers, etc.). The company holds no advantage over the worker in providing these facilities (in comparison to the blue-collar operator referred to above whose knowledge is bound to the Fordist machine park). When the source code is closed behind copyrights and patents, however, large sums of money is required to access the software tools. In this way, the owner/firm gains the edge back over the labourer/programmer.

These kinds of critiques of intellectual protectionism from the perspective of developer freedom to do their trade, in addition to developer freedom to modify and control their computing environment, to tinker, are too rare. I’m also reminded of the fun title Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital. So are copyright and patent.

Back to Developer Freedom At Stake…:

Will our economy thrive and be more competitive because companies can easily switch from one service provider to the other by leveraging identical APIs? Or will our economy be throttled by allowing vendors to inhibit competition through API lock-in? And should this happen only because a handful of legacy software vendors wanted to protect their franchises for a few more years?

Clearly this isn’t just about developer freedom. Nor is it just about user freedom — non-users are affected by anti-competitive practices — and the freedom of all is put at risk.

Bonus: What do APIs have in common with advertising?

Some excerpts from Italy’s first black minister attacked by Northern League:

Matteo Salvini, secretary of the League in Lombardy, called the 48-year-old Kyenge “the symbol of a hypocritical, do-gooding left that would like to abolish the crime of illegal immigration and only thinks about immigrants’ rights and not their duties”.

Sadly I doubt much of the left would really like to abolish the “crime of illegal immigration”, but it should, indeed all should be totally opposed to apartheid, which is precisely what restrictions on movement, working, and residence are.

Immigrants’ rights and duties should be no different than non-immigrants. Putting people in different moral categories due to their birth is an outrage.

The AC Milan and Italy striker, Mario Balotelli, called her appointment “a further, big step towards a more civilised and responsible Italian society”. Kyenge said her top priorities included changing Italy’s citizenship laws, which are based on descent rather than place of birth.

An indictment of Italy and the world that this is correctly characterized as a big step, but it is a positive step in any case.

The Northern League denies it is xenophobic, insisting it is only opposed to illegal immigration. Kyenge came to Italy to study at university and married an Italian.

No, laws making immigration illegal are xenophobic as is supporting such laws and using such laws to persecute some people. More bluntly, opposing “illegal immigration” is advocating for apartheid “because it’s the law.”

Shame on all who oppose the immediate destruction of the international apartheid regime, keeping billions in poverty and oppression (or put another way, massively squandering human capital) out of fear and racism.

I offer you amnesty.

Agreed, but what to do about it?

In the short term, the solution is to convince W3C that moving forward will be an embarrassing disaster, nevermind what some of its for-profit members want. This has been accomplished before, in particular 2001 when many wanted W3C to have a RAND (allowing so-called Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory fees to be required for implementing a standard) patent policy, but they were embarrassed into finally doing the right thing, mandating RF (Royalty Free) patent licensing by participants in W3C standards.

One small way to help convince the W3C is to follow Kẏra’s recommendation to sign the Free Software Foundation’s No DRM in HTML5 petition.

Long term, the only way the DRM threat is going to be put to rest is for free cultural works to become culturally relevant, if not dominant (the only unambiguous example of such as yet is Wikipedia exploding the category known as “encyclopedia”). One of Kẏra’s points is “The Web doesn’t need big media; big media needs the Web.” True, but individual web companies do fear big media and hope for an advantage over competitors by doing deals with big media, including deals selling out The Web writ large (that’s the “Why” in this post’s title).

To put it another way, agitation for “Hollyweb” will continue until Hollywood is no longer viewed as the peak of culture. I don’t mean just, and perhaps not even, “Hollywood movies”, but also the economic, ethical, social and other assumptions that lead us to demand delivery of more pyramids over protecting and promoting freedom and equality.

I don’t have a petition to recommend signing in order to help increase the relevance and dominance and hence unleash the liberation potential of knowledge commons. Every bit of using, recommending, building, advocating for as policy, and shifting the conversation toward intellectual freedom helps.

Waiting out DRM (and intellectual protectionism in general) is not a winning strategy. There is no deterministic path for other media to follow music away from DRM, and indeed there is a threat that a faux-standard as proposed will mean that DRM becomes the expectation and demand of/by record companies, again. In general bad policy abets bad policy and monopoly abets monopoly. The reverse of each is also true. If you aren’t helping make freedom real and real popular, you hate freedom!☻