Post Wikipedia

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 Access, Open Source, Public Domain, Public Goods, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

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 | 13 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 Commons, Creative Commons, Economics, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 9 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, Patents, Wikipedia | 11 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 | 3 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 Tuman, 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 | 4 Comments »

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 »

FundingXBorders

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Today is the last day of a one month Creative Commons fundraising campaign in which all donations go to funding projects proposed by CC affiliates and other organizations — projects that address a particular bottleneck to CC adoption or build capacity in the global CC movement (e.g., capacity to raise local funds). Please help.

I’m currently at the COMMUNIA network’s 2010 conference, University and Cyberspace: Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age, where many project leads of CC affiliates in Europe have gathered. It is very good, and very productive, to spend time with so many long-term and long-distance colleagues.

The end of next week Alek Tarkowski, Michelle Thorne and I will hold a session at Wikimania on the CC affiliate network’s origin, role, future, including collaboration and shared learnings with Wikimedia chapters. One of the things we’ll discuss is the grants program mentioned at the top of this post — which was largely inspired by Wikimedia chapter grants and secondarily by Global Voices’ Rising Voices.

There are many interesting challenges and opportunities in building a transnational network, funding and governance among them. For a high-minded perspective, see Epistemic Communities and Social Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons by Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack. I also highly recommend their blog, GovernanceXBorders.

Posted in Creative Commons, Wikipedia | No Comments »

Collaborative Futures 2

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Day 2 of the Collaborative Futures book sprint saw the writing of a number of chapters and the creation of a much more fleshed out table of contents. I spent too much time interrupted by other work and threading together a chapter (feels more like a long blog post) on “Other People’s Computers” from old sources and the theme of supporting collaboration. The current draft is pasted below because that’s easier than extracting links to sources.

Another tangential observation about the group: I noted a fair amount of hostility toward Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Mediawiki on the notion that they have effectively sucked the air out of other potential projects and models of collaboration, even other wiki software. Of course I am a huge fan of Wikipedia — I think its centralization has allowed it to scale in a way not possible otherwise — it has made the community-centric collaboration pie bigger — and we are very fortunate that such a dominant service has gotten so much right, at least from a freedom perspective. However, the underlying criticism is not without merit, and I tried to incorporate a productive and very brief version of it into the draft.

Also see Mushon Zer-Aviv’s entertaining post on day 2.

Other People’s Computers

Partly because they’re location-transparent and web-integrated, browser apps support social interaction more easily than desktop apps.

Kragen Sitaker, “What’s wrong with HTTP”, http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html

Much of what we call collaboration occurs on web sites (more generally, software services), particularly collaboration among many distributed users. Direct support for collaboration, and more broadly for social features, is simply easier in a centralized context. It is possible to imagine a decentralized Wikipedia or Facebook, but building such services with sufficient ease of use, features, and robustness to challenge centralized web sites is a very difficult challenge.

Why does this matter? The web is great for collaboration, let’s celebrate that! However, making it relatively easy for people to work together in the specific way offered by a web site owner is a rather impoverished vision of what the web (or more generally, digital networks) could enable, just as merely allowing people to run programs on their computers in the way program authors intended is an impoverished vision of personal computing.

Free software allows users control their own computing and to help other users by retaining the ability to run, modify, and share software for any purpose. Whether the value of this autonomy is primarily ethical, as often framed by advocates of the term free software, or primarily practical, as often framed by advocates of the term open source, any threat to these freedoms has to be of deep concern to anyone interested in the future of collaboration, both in terms what collaborations are possible and what interests control and benefit from those collaborations.

Web sites and special-purpose hardware […] do not give me the same freedoms general-purpose computers do. If the trend were to continue to the extent the pundits project, more and more of what I do today with my computer will be done by special-purpose things and remote servers.

What does freedom of software mean in such an environment? Surely it’s not wrong to run a Web site without offering my software and databases for download. (Even if it were, it might not be feasible for most people to download them. IBM’s patent server has a many-terabyte database behind it.)

I believe that software — open-source software, in particular — has the potential to give individuals significantly more control over their own lives, because it consists of ideas, not people, places, or things. The trend toward special-purpose devices and remote servers could reverse that.

Kragen Sitaker, “people, places, things, and ideas “, http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html

What are the prospects and strategies for keeping the benefits of free software in an age of collaboration mediated by software services? One strategy, argued for in “The equivalent of free software for online services” by Kragen Sitaker (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-July/000818.html), is that centralized services need to be re-implemented as peer-to-peer services that can be run as free software on computers under users’ control. This is an extremely interesting strategy, but a very long term one, for it is hard, being at least both a computer science and a social challenge.

Abstinence from software services may be a naive and losing strategy in both the short and long term. Instead, we can both work on decentralization as well as attempt to build services that respect user’s autonomy:

Going places I don’t individually control — restaurants, museums, retail stores, public parks — enriches my life immeasurably. A definition of “freedom” where I couldn’t leave my own house because it was the only space I had absolute control over would not feel very free to me at all. At the same time, I think there are some places I just don’t want to go — my freedom and physical well-being wouldn’t be protected or respected there.

Similarly, I think that using network services makes my computing life fuller and more satisfying. I can do more things and be a more effective person by spring-boarding off the software on other peoples’ computers than just with my own. I may not control your email server, but I enjoy sending you email, and I think it makes both of our lives better.

And I think that just as we can define a level of personal autonomy that we expect in places that belong to other people or groups, we should be able to define a level of autonomy that we can expect when using software on other people’s computers. Can we make working on network services more like visiting a friends’ house than like being locked in a jail?

We’ve made a balance between the absolute don’t-use-other-people’s-computers argument and the maybe-it’s-OK-sometimes argument in the Franklin Street Statement. Time will tell whether we can craft a culture around Free Network Services that is respectful of users’ autonomy, such that we can use other computers with some measure of confidence.

Evan Prodromou, “RMS on Cloud Computing: “Stupidity””, CC BY-SA, http://autonomo.us/2008/09/rms-on-cloud-computing-stupidity/

The Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services is a beginning group attempt to distill actions users, service providers (the “other people” here), and developers should take to retain the benefits of free software in an era of software services:

The current generation of network services or Software as a Service can provide advantages over traditional, locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations. This move toward centralization has powerful effects on software freedom and user autonomy.

On March 16, 2008, a workgroup convened at the Free Software Foundation to discuss issues of freedom for users given the rise of network services. We considered a number of issues, among them what impacts these services have on user freedom, and how implementers of network services can help or harm users. We believe this will be an ongoing conversation, potentially spanning many years. Our hope is that free software and open source communities will embrace and adopt these values when thinking about user freedom and network services. We hope to work with organizations including the FSF to provide moral and technical leadership on this issue.

We consider network services that are Free Software and which share Free Data as a good starting-point for ensuring users’ freedom. Although we have not yet formally defined what might constitute a ‘Free Service’, we do have suggestions that developers, service providers, and users should consider:

Developers of network service software are encouraged to:

  • Use the GNU Affero GPL, a license designed specifically for network service software, to ensure that users of services have the ability to examine the source or implement their own service.
  • Develop freely-licensed alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.
  • Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.

Service providers are encouraged to:

  • Choose Free Software for their service.
  • Release customizations to their software under a Free Software license.
  • Make data and works of authorship available to their service’s users under legal terms and in formats that enable the users to move and use their data outside of the service. This means:
    • Users should control their private data.
    • Data available to all users of the service should be available under terms approved for Free Cultural Works or Open Knowledge.

Users are encouraged to:

  • Consider carefully whether to use software on someone else’s computer at all. Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer. Services may have substantial benefits, but they represent a loss of control for users and introduce several problems of freedom.
  • When deciding whether to use a network service, look for services that follow the guidelines listed above, so that, when necessary, they still have the freedom to modify or replicate the service without losing their own data.

Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services, CC BY-SA, http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

As challenging as the Franklin Street Statement appears, additional issues must be addressed for maximum autonomy, including portable identifiers:

A Free Software Definition for the next decade should focus on the user’s overall autonomy- their ability not just to use and modify a particular piece of software, but their ability to bring their data and identity with them to new, modified software.

Such a definition would need to contain something like the following minimal principles:

  1. data should be available to the users who created it without legal restrictions or technological difficulty.
  2. any data tied to a particular user should be available to that user without technological difficulty, and available for redistribution under legal terms no more restrictive than the original terms.
  3. source code which can meaningfully manipulate the data provided under 1 and 2 should be freely available.
  4. if the service provider intends to cease providing data in a manner compliant with the first three terms, they should notify the user of this intent and provide a mechanism for users to obtain the data.
  5. a user’s identity should be transparent; that is, where the software exposes a user’s identity to other users, the software should allow forwarding to new or replacement identities hosted by other software.

Luis Villia, “Voting With Your Feet and Other Freedoms”, CC BY-SA, http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/12/06/voting-with-your-feet-and-other-freedoms/

Fortunately the oldest and at least until recently most ubiqitous network service — email — accomodates portable identifiers. (Not to mention that email is the lowest common denominator for much collaboration — sending attachments back and forth.) Users of a centralized email service like Gmail can retain a great deal of autonomy if they use an email address at a domain they control and merely route delivery to the service — though of course most users use the centralized provier’s domain.

It is worth noting that the more recent and widely used if not ubiquitous instant messaging protocol XMPP as well as the brand new and little used Wave protocol are architected similar to email, though use of non-provider domains seems even less common, and in the case of Wave, Google is currently the only service provider.

It may be valuable to assess software services from the respect of community autonomy as well as user autonomy. The former may explicitly note  requirements for the product of collaboration — non-private data, roughly — as well as service governance:

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

  • All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
  • All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
  • All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
  • In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Mike Linksvayer, “Constitutionally open services”, CC0, https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2006/07/06/constitutionally-open-services/

Software services are rapidly developing and subject to much hype — referred to by buzzwords such as cloud computing. However, some of the most potent means of encouraing autonomy may be relatively boring — for example, making it easier to maintain one’s own computer and deploy slightly customized software in a secure and foolproof fashion. Any such development helps traditional users of free software as well as makes doing computing on one’s own computer (which may be a “personal server” or virtual machine that one controls) more attractive.

Perhaps one of the most hopeful trends is relatively widespead deployment by end users of free software web applications like WordPress and MediaWiki. StatusNet, free software for microblogging, is attempting to replicate this adoption success, but also includes technical support for a form of decentralization (remote subscription) and a legal requirement for service providers to release modifications as free software via the AGPL.

This section barely scratches the surface of the technical and social issues raised by the convergence of so much of our computing, in particular computing that facilitates collaboration, to servers controlled by “other people”, in particular a few large service providers. The challenges of creating autonomy-respecting alternatives should not be understated.

One of those challenges is only indirectly technical: decentralization can make community formation more difficult. To the extent the collaboration we are interested in requires community, this is a challenge. However, easily formed but inauthentic and controlled community also will not produce the kind of collaboration we are interested in.

We should not limit our imagination to the collaboration faciliated by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, Twitter, or other “Web 2.0” services. These are impressive, but then so was AOL two decades ago. We should not accept a future of collaboration mediated by centralized giants now, any more than we should have been, with hindsight, happy to accept information services dominated by AOL and its near peers. 

Wikipedia is both held up as an exemplar of collaboration and is a free-as-in-freedom service: both the code and the content of the service are accessible under free terms. It is also a huge example of community governance in many respects. And it is undeniably a category-exploding success: vastly bigger and useful in many more ways than any previous encyclopedia. Other software and services enabling autonomous collaboration should set their sites no lower — not to merely replace an old category, but to explode it.

However, Wikipedia (and its MediaWiki software) are not the end of the story. Merely using MediaWiki for a new project, while appropriate in many cases, is not magic pixie dust for enabling collaboration. Affordances for collaboration need to be built into many different types of software and services. Following Wikipedia’s lead in autonomy is a good idea, but many experiments should be encouraged in every other respect. One example could be the young and relatively domain-specific collaboration software that this book is being written with, Booki.

Software services have made “installation” of new software as simple as visiting a web page, social features a click, and provide an easy ladder of adoption for mass collaboration. They also threaten autonomy at the individual and community level. While there are daunting challenges, meeting them means achieving “world domination” for freedom in the most important means of production — computer-mediated collaboration — something the free software movement failed to approach in the era of desktop office software.

Posted in Books, Open Services, Open Source, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

AcaWiki

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

AcaWiki† officiously launches tomorrow. The goal is to make academic knowledge more accessible through wiki community curated article “summaries” — something like long abstracts aimed at a general audience rather than specialists.

This could be seen as an end-run around access and copyright restrictions (the Open Access movement has made tremendous progress though there is still much to be done), but AcaWiki is a very partial solution to that problem — sometimes an article summary (assuming AcaWiki has one) would be enough, though often a researcher would still need access to the full paper (and the full dataset, but that’s another battle).

More interesting to me is the potential for AcaWiki summaries to increase the impact of research by making it more accessible in another way — comprehensible to non-specialists and approachable by non-speedreaders. I read a fair number of academic papers and many more get left on my reading queue unread. A “human readable” distillation of the key points of articles (abstracts typically convey next to nothing or are filled with jargon) would really let me ingest more.

Probably the closest things to AcaWiki summaries are Research Blogging and the idea that journal authors should contribute to Wikipedia. While both of these are great, blog posts don’t obtain the benefits (and costs) of distributed authoring and maintenance and direct contribution of research to Wikipedia has very limited applicability. So I think AcaWiki can make a big contribution. It could turn out that some granularity other than individual article summary is the sweet spot for community curation of academic knowledge — one could imagine field and sub-field and sub-sub-field surveys organized in WikiProject†† fashion as that — but article summaries are a very concrete place to begin, and more should naturally grow out of the AcaWiki community’s efforts to figure out the best ways to create and organize article summaries.

I’ve written a summary of Steven Levitt’s Why are Gambling Markets Organised So Differently from Financial Markets? I’d be really appreciative of article summaries in the following categories:

†I’ve been somewhat involved in AcaWiki over the past year — I’m on its board and Creative Commons has done some technology consulting on the project, credit to Nathan and bits from Steren, Nathan K, Alex and Parker — and note that Neeru Paharia, AcaWiki’s founder, was one of CC’s earliest employees. AcaWiki summaries are of course contributed under a CC Attribution license, so you can do anything you want with them so long as you link back to the summary.

††I urge anyone not already impressed by the contribution of WikiProjects on Wikipedia or generally interested in community curation and quality to check out Martin Walker’s WikiProjects: Improving Wikipedia by organising and assessing articles presented at Wikimania 2009.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Access, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 9 Comments »

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