Archive for July, 2014

Generative acknowledgement

Thursday, July 31st, 2014

Robin Sloan, The secret of Minecraft: And its challenge to the rest of us

In the 2010s and beyond, it is not the case that every cultural product ought to be a generative, networked system.

It is, I believe, the case that all the really important ones will be.

Nathan Matias, Designing Acknowledgement on the Web:

A system which acknowledges the beauty of cooperative relationships can’t be based on the impersonal idea of hypertext or the egocentric notion of authorship. It can’t rely on licenses to threaten people into acknowledging each other.

Via 1 2 3 and confirmation bias about which I can’t think of anything smart to say, so I’ll include a fun word: contextomy. Neither of the above reaches that bar, but I’ll try harder next time.

Posts on the ought of generative, networked production and intellectual parasite debasement of acknowledgement.

LegacyOffice?

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

LibreOffice 4.3 announcement, release notes with new feature screenshots, developer perspective. Perhaps most useful, a feature comparison of LibreOffice 4.3 and Microsoft Office 2013.

Overall a great six month release. Coming early next year: 4.4.

Steady progress is also being made on policy. “The default format for saving [UK] government documents must be Open Document Format (ODF)” — the genuinely open standard used by LibreOffice; Glyn Moody has a good writeup. I occasionally see news of large organizations migrating to LibreOffice, most recently the city of Tolouse. Hopefully many more will manage to escape “effective captivity” to a single vendor (Glyn Moody for that story too).

(My take on the broad importance of open policy and software adoption.)

Also, recent news of work on a version of LibreOffice for Android. But nothing on LibreOffice Online (in a web browser) which as far as I can tell remains a prototype. WebODF is an independent implementation of ODF viewing and editing in browser. Any of these probably require lots of work to be as effective of a collaboration solution as Google Docs — much of the work outside the editing software, e.g. integration with “sharing” mechanisms (e.g., WebODF and ownCloud) and ready availability of deployments of those mechanisms (Sandstorm is promising recent work on deployment, especially security).

From what I observe, Google Docs has largely displaced (except for large or heavily formatted for print or facsimile) Microsoft Office, though I guess that’s not the case in large organizations with internal sharing mechanisms. I suspect Google Docs (especially spreadsheets) has also expanded the use of “office” software, in part replacing wiki use cases. Is there any reason to think that free/open source software isn’t as far behind now as it was in 2000 before the open source release of OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice’s predecessor?

Still, I consider LibreOffice one of the most important free software projects. I expect it will continue to be developed and used on millions of “legacy” desktops for decades after captivity to Microsoft is long past, indeed after desktop versions of Microsoft Office long EoL’d. Hopefully LibreOffice’s strong community, development, governance, and momentum (all vastly improved over OpenOffice.org) in combination with open policy work (almost non-existent in 2000) and other projects will obtain much better than even this valuable result.

Edit Oakland wiki events

Wednesday, July 9th, 2014

Saturday, July 12, there’s a big open streets event in my obscure flats neighborhood where Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley meet. A small stretch of San Pablo Avenue will be closed to cars (sadly not only human-driven cars, which would momentarily meet my suggestion). E’ville Eye has a comprehensive post about the event and its origins.

There will be an Oakland Urban Paths walk in the neighborhood during the event, during which obscurities will be related. Usually these walks are in locations with more obvious scenery (hills/stairs) and historical landmarks; I’m looking forward to seeing how they address Golden Gate. Last month they walked between West Oakland and downtown, a historic and potentially beautiful route that currently crosses 980 twice — edit it out!

Monday, July 14 18:00-19:30 there’s a follow-on event at the Golden Gate Branch Library — an OaklandWiki edit party. I haven’t edited Oakland Wiki much yet, but I like the concept. It is one of many LocalWikis, which relative to MediaWiki and Wikipedia have very few features or rules. This ought greatly lower the barrier to many more people contributing information pertinent to their local situation; perhaps someone is researching that? I’ve used the OaklandWiki to look up sources for Wikipedia articles related to Oakland and have noticed several free images uploaded to OaklandWiki that would be useful on Wikipedia.

Saturday, July 19 11:00-16:00 there’s a Wikipedia edit event at Impact Hub in Oakland and online: WikiProject Open Barn Raising 2014 which aims to improve Wikipedia articles about open education — a very broad and somewhat recursive (Wikipedia is an “open educational resource”, though singular doesn’t do it justice, unless perhaps made singular the open educational resource, but that would be an overstatement). If you’re interested in OER, Open Access, open policy and related tools and organizations, or would like to learn about those things and about editing Wikipedia, please participate!

Tangentially, OpenHatch (my endorsement) got a nice writeup of its Open Source Comes to Campus events at WIRED. I view these as conceptually similar to introduction to Wiki[pedia] editing events — all aim to create a welcoming space for newcomers to dive into participating in commons-based peer production — good for learning, careers, communities, and society.

Let US join EU

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Enough past symbolism. U.S. Independence Day is also a good day to reflect on the paramount governance challenges of the present and near future. The U.S. War of Independence helped usher out the era of kings. Now is time to hasten the demise of the nation-state, born of the previous era.

One non-revolutionary (violent revolution, of whatever intention, is bad as it enables trolls) path forward is the creation and expansion of legitimately democratic super-states which submerge joining nation-states: the legitimate constituents are individual citizens, not the states themselves (contrast with the United Nations). The European Union is the only such super-state, and perhaps should be the only one, eventually submerging all current nation-states.

Independence′ Day

Thursday, July 3rd, 2014

Whenever there’s a new disturbance in the former USSR territory that has people bringing down statues of Stalin, I’m mildly surprised that there are (or possibly were; I expect to be mildly surprised anew for a long time) still statues honoring Stalin in public. But my mild surprise at the continued honor of the quintessential 20th century Eurasian state tyrant always quickly gives way to mild lack of surprise that practitioners of the quintessential pre-20th century American private tyranny are not only still honored, but revered, their statues never toppled, and at worst their tyranny seen as blemishes on their records.

After 238 years, isn’t it about time to renew US Independence Day? I suggest terminating all honoring of slave owners, including the so-called discoverer of the Americas, all pre-Civil War presidents except John and John Quincy Adams, the first two post-Civil War presidents, the most famous non-president “founding father”, and a real estate entrepreneur whose name graces a commonwealth. Currency, the names of said commonwealth and one state, many counties and municipalities, thousands of streets, buildings and other public places, statues, and two faces on Mount Rushmore, all should change.

This change would be a bit annoying and expressive, but in that sense is traditional: US Independence Day firecrackers, parades, and speeches mark the height of mid-calendar year annoying expression.

(I’ve intended to post this on US Presidents’ Day since before I had a blog, and started several times, but each time lost focus through condemnation of almost every U.S. President for their public crimes. It occurred to me last year that July 4 would work, so long as I could suppress condemnation of the US War of Independence and all violent revolutions. Too big a topic for this parenthetical.)