Articles by admin

dreamhost one-click install; uploaded theme and plugin folders by ftp; exported Dose xml file; imported dose xml file. a couple of tweaks left, and bob, as they say, is your uncle.

for whatever faults wordpress has, it’s a pretty fantastic tool.

welcome to my new and final abode, everybody!

UPDATE: jeeze-bazeeze: opened the doors here 2 hrs ago, and already 81 spam messages caught by Askimet. wtf??? (oh, maybe those were imported from dose? hope so).

WordwebPro is, apparently a good dictionary/thesaurus ap for Windows, and it’s free, which is not all that interesting. What is interesting is this provision in their free license:

WordWeb may be freely used only by people who meet the conditions below.

Global greenhouse gas emissions are currently around 1 tonne per person per year, and need to be greatly reduced to avoid catastrophic warming this century. Most computer users are responsible for far more emissions than is sustainable. For example one medium distance return flight can be warming-equivalent to over 1 tonne of emissions: more than an average person should be emitting in an entire year. A typical SUV causes about twice as much warming per mile as a typical normal European car: 10,000 miles of travel in an SUV is responsible for about 5 tonnes of emissions. Offsetting emissions is no substitute for direct cuts.

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if
* You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period
* AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

Surely not effective on its own as a way of making a difference, but it is a curious and interesting extension of the copyleft mechanisms developed in the free software movement: to stipulate legal/moral obligations to use a particular piece of code, but extending those obligations beyond the normal provisions of software licenses.

I don’t know how legal such things are, but it’s very very interesting, and very creative.

Jargony text & talk drives me crazy. I wrote previously pleading with you, dear readers, never to use the word “utilize” when all you mean is “use.” This stuff infects the pages and html of techies, marketing people and academics, and unsuspecting citizens as well. It’s contagious and dangerous.

I am going to do my part. I’ve decided to take a no-jargon pledge.

Because I value clear concise prose, I promise never to use the following 10 words or phrases when I write:

1. concretize
2. modality
3. paradigm
4. stake out (a/its/your/my) position
5. drill down
6. leverage (unless I am talking about moving rocks)
7. utilize
8. empowerment
9. is informed by
10. flesh out

This list can be lengthened, please suggest words and phrases to add.

I have a job for a good photographer, easy work (I think), a pretty good sized check (USD) for an hour or two (or less) of work, and in exchange you have to buy me lunch or something.

Let me know if you are interested, or if you know anyone who might be. Send me a link to some photography work too – so I can check it out.

NOTE: I was in a bit of a conundrum about what to do with TextoSolvo vs. dose, and decided to just cross-post TextoSolvo articles (which are mostly about LibriVox) here.

This is a cross-post.

In the rough project outline I gave a long list of some of the reasons I think LibriVox has been successful. I’m going to try to write about each one separately, and in no particular order. This post is about Clarity, in my opinion the most important pragmatic (rather than thematic) reasons for success of LibriVox. Clarity comes in a variety of guises, all of them important and I’ll touch on each of them individually:

1. Clarity of Purpose – what are you doing?
2. Clarity of Language – use plain, exact English (or whatever language you are using)
3. Clarity of Participation – give people an action they can do right away to participate
4. Clarity of Process – how does it work? make barriers for entry low. make it clear how it works.
5. Clarity of Policies – as the project evolves, you need simple, clear policies (less important in the early days)

Clarity is important in any enterprise (hence the 80s/90s/00s fetish for mission statements etc), but that’s especially true in an open web project. If you want to get volunteers involved in what you are doing you need to immeditately let them know:

a) what you are doing
b) how they can contribute

If someone comes to a website and has to read through long texts explaining who started a project, why it was started, what tools are used (technological, management, back-end etc), what influenced the project, what inspired it, or other extraneous information, you will quickly lose the majority of your potential volunteers. Some will read through, but the majority will not. And once “inside” the project, clarity is no less important.

Clarity of Purpose
This is probably the most important of all. Being clear about your purpose is so important because it helps a new web visitor decide whether what you are doing is interesting or not. By purpose, the focus should be: “What are we trying to do?” Leave the politics, ideals etc. out of it. If your purpose is clear, people can make their own decisions about whether or not they want to join you. Consider the most successful of the non-software open projects, Wikipedia. Here’s their purpose:

Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Contained in that purpose is everything you need to know about the project:

1. it is an encyclopedia
2. it is free
3. you can edit it

Note that you can be interested in 1 & 2, without being concerned by 3. And that’s another thing about open projects – they should be useful no matter what your participation level. The wiki reader:editor ration is, I am told, 50:1 … meaning there are 50 people who use Wikipedia as an information source for every one person who edits.

The beauty of that purpose tho is how clear it is.

Clarity of Language
Turning to LibriVox, compare this slightly baffling introduction text I started with on project launch in August 2005:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

Good: It tells you what you need to know.
Bad: It’s wordy, and filled with jargon that only certain tech-heads would understand (podcasting, open source, audio-literary).

Luckily the original “market” for volunteers could decipher those jargony words – in fact it was just that group of sophisticated techies interested in Creative Commons, podcasting, copyright issues, open source that would be able to figure out what LibriVox was all about. But as the project got a bit bigger, the early group of volunteers pared things down and now the “About” text says:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Maybe still a bit long compared to Wikipedia, but everything you need to know is there, in plain English. The jargon is at the end, which isn’t great, but it’s still important info.
The tag-line, however is still pretty high-falutin:

accoustical liberation of books in the public domain

Which should probably be changed to:

free public domain audio books

Still, I’m a bit of a sucker for lofty ideals, and the high-falutin one maybe does a better job of articulating the dream behind the project, rather than the nuts-and-bolts.

Clarity of Participation
So now you’ve described what you’re about; your visitor has decided whether or not she is interested in your project. Now you have to tell her what she can do to participate. There is a famous website from the US Department of Agriculture that was developed to help the market for buying and selling hay (Haynet … defunct, but the wayback machine provides the preceding link). The site is so simple, not flashy, and lets users decide what they want to do in clear simple English. Need Hay? click here. Have Hay? click here.

Since LibriVox has two potential “markets” – listeners, and volunteers – we used this model, and split the screen into two options: Read/Listen.

And crucially we provided actions for either one: buttons to press to take you where you want to go. That’s important too – if you want people to participate in something, you have to give them a call to action. Read? Listen? You decide, and by deciding you’re already on your way to doing whatever it is you’d like to do. You can abandon ship if you like, but most people who click through to one or the other option are likely to keep going.

Clarity of Process
You’ve hooked people in this far, and this is where, truth be told, things get more complicated. The LibriVox process is “simple,” in a way, but it does require some thinking. The important thing here is to make sure your volunteers understand the bare essentials of how things work, and that they not be frightened by how complicated it is. In the case of LibriVox, our process doc looks like this:

1. a book coordinator posts a book (with chapter info) in the Readers Wanted Section.
2. volunteers “claim” chapters to read
3. the readers record their chapters in digital format
4. the book coordinator collects all the files of all the chapters
5. the book coordinator sends the collected files to a “metadata coordinator”
6. we check the files for technical problems in the Listeners Wanted section
7. the metadata coordinator uploads and catalogs the files… working their secret magic
8. yet another public domain audiobook is made available for free!

In fact it’s a bit more complicated, but that gives an interested reader a sense of how things happen. The important thing is that they can get a snapshot of what goes on, see that the process is relatively straightforward, and understand that their participation is a manageable chunk. Thats a hugely imporant issue, for another post, that you want your first-time contributors to feel that participating is easy, and small, that they will not get roped into a complicated project they are not prepared for. Some LV contributors record one mp3 for us and that’s it. Others do many. And some get obsessed and end up running the project. You need all three types of contributors to succeed, and you have to make sure you take care of all of them.

Clarity of Policies
This last issue is really important as the project gets bigger. In the early days of LibriVox, we had a small group of dedicated participants who all had a shared understanding of what we were doing and why. But as it gets bigger, more people come, more questions get asked and some controversies come up. It really saves a lot of headache if you can define you base policies right away. In the case of LibriVox, here’s what we came to as fundamental principles:

• Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project
• Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain
• Librivox is powered by volunteers
• Librivox maintains a loose and open structure
• Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe

The most important principles there are: no ads; all recordings in public domain (not creative commons); no one is getting paid; we’ll take any language; and the project is open. In addition to these principles, we’ve developed a few policies that help guide what we are doing:

• we only accept published texts in the public domain (no self-published, creative commons stuff)
• everything done for LibriVox is public domain – audio, images, text etc… this just makes life so much easier
• no criticism of reading styles allowed on the forum (unless requested by the reader) – this one is controversial, and I’ll address it separately later
• be nice – we have a pretty stringent non-flaming policy on the forum which has come under some fire, but the result is that we have among the friendliest forums you’ll find on the net – which helps keep volunteers around

The policies cover a number of things, but it’s been helpful to limit what texts we can take. And on the other issues we tend to make policies that help make volunteers comfortable about participating. That’s been such a huge part of our success, I think, cultivating that sense of a supportive community of volunteers – rather than the more critical communities that are elsewhere.

Conclusion

Clarity in what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how people can participate is of utmost importance if you want to compete for eyeballs, and more importantly participants in this busy web world. If you feel passionate about something, chances are others will too. Trust that passion, but be careful to articulate exactly what it is you are trying to do. Leave out the politics, the ideals, the history, or at least leave it off the front page. All those things might be important to you, but they might be less important to others. Focus on exactly what you want to do. Tell people in clear English. Give them a clear path to participation. And as things develop, make sure you head off complicated conundrums by making your policies clear.

If you do all that, and if you manage to pave a way for others who share your passion to easily participate, you’re on your way.

Welcome to the new dosemagazine … I moved from the old one, for a number of reasons: mainly, I am an adult now and thought it was about time I got my own server space, and officially launched the domain name I bought in 2002. Blogsome was a fine home for a long while, but I was constrained by the version of wordpress they are running, the available themes, and especially their limited number of plugins. On the other hand, if things go pear-shaped here, I am on my own, so I better figure out how to back-up my posts.

I’m still fiddling a bit, but things are more or less how I want them. I don’t like the way the header graphic looks here tho, so I’ll have to figure out what to do about that. I’ll likely be testing a few options.

Anyway, comments welcome etc.

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a tool that will let me get all the info out of my old blogsome.com blog, please let me know.

Technorati Profile

we have mice. they have started to make squeaky noises. when it was the odd rustle in far the pantry, or the much less common skitter across the floor, it was OK. but when they start sqeaking in the walls, that’s really too much.

This is the new & improved (?) dose. I am fiddling, tweaking, playing and trying to get it all to work properly. Comments welcome.

Robin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I think I posted already, but I met Freddy last night. He’s making a fantastic graphic novel of Orwell’s 1984 (see: gutenberg australia’s ebook).

Freddy is selling these posters for $12 a pop:

And here is the opening scene (you can get it in B&W or colour):

Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:

We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not – as some suggest – about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.

Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:

Conservatives:

Dear Mr. McGuire:

The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.

The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.

The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.

I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.

Yours very truly,

Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch

Parti-Quebecois:

Monsieur McGuire,

Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.

Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.

Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.

Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca

The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.

(tip to patrick)

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)

from patrick, chalk one up for the good guys.

UPDATE:
says mayor tremblay on the radio this morning: “I have learned that the opinion of citizens is important.”

glad to know such important lessons are in the process of being absorbed by our leading politicians.

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa

Panelists:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.

For the hardcore info junkie, there was no better feed for your veins than diggdot.us: a feed of the purest quality, distilled from a mix of digg.com, del.icio.us/popular, and slashdot.org.

Cease and desist letters sent. diggdot.us is now doggdot.us. No harm done I guess, but digg are jerks.

We seem to have reached a tipping point in public and policy opinion on climate change, which is something of a relief, but also very scary. Up until even the last few weeks, I felt that my tiny contribution to the debate was through occasional posts here, addressing some of the science as we know it, mostly in an attempt to make known the state of science. (In a previous life, I spent a few years working more directly on climate change issues, in policy, finance, and technology development).

But now that, in Canada at least, it has become politically untenable to deny climate change – the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are all climate believers; the Conservatives have just converted, either for political expediency, or after finally coming to terms with the science. There is no going back, unless the science changes. So the question is no longer: Is it a problem? or Should we do anything? but: What (the hell) do we do now?

The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have all come out demanding that the Conservative inplement policy to make Canada “meet Kyoto’s targets.” This is inane political posturing, and on the part of the Liberals, a little hard to stomach. The Liberals presided over the entire Kyoto era, and agreed in 1998 to GHG emissions reductions to 6% below 1990 levels; and in 2002 ratified the Kyoto Protocol (meaning those reductions became “binding”). As the Conservatives keep telling us (rightly) the Liberals signed and ratified the Protocol without putting in (or even proposing) one shred of binding policy, or any kind of serious plan to meet those targets. Under their dismal environmental stewardship, Canada emissions grew to something like 30% higher than the targets they agreed to as ratified (and is, by the way, twice as bad as the US that signed, but never ratified Kyoto). Stephane Dion may have a dog named Kyoto; and he may be serious about the environment, but his party sure as hell has not demonstrated any leadership on climate change in the past, except for ratifying an international treaty that binds Canada to reductions without giving any thought to how those reductions would be met. Which has one positive impact: it highlights in glaring blod face how much work we have to do.

Which is why the Libs/NDP/Bloc calling for the Conservatives to meet Kyoto targets is dishonest and laughable, though it does put the pressure on to come up with concrete policies (which, to their credit, the Conservatives have started to do, for all the criticisms heaped on their Clean Air Act).

To put it in context, to meet our Kyoto targets we would have to do several things (based on 2003 numbers):
1. make all Canadian houses 30% more energy efficient
2. make all Canadian cars 30% more efficient (or, say, make every Canadian take a bike to work two days a week)
3. make every business (including industrial manufacturing, mining, and oil production) 30% more energy efficient (or close them down for 2 days of the week).
4. shut down all thermal power plants (about 30% of electricty production in Canada, the balance being hydro 60% and 12% nuclear) and replace with nukes, or some other renewables, equalling a 4x increase in nukes, or a 2000% increase in renewable contributions, going from roughly 500 MW of wind to 10,000 MW of wind, an investment on the order of 10 billion dollars).

We should be doing these things, but the scale of change to our society needed is truly massive. All areas of energy use must change: housing, transport, food production, manufacturing, urban planning, oil and gas production. To make that happen the empty posturing of the Liberals and NDP and Bloc is perhaps politically useful (if disingenuous), but it does nothing to solve the problem, which transcends party lines.

What IS needed is a massive investment in time and energy to come up with some concrete and serious ways that we can address the issue in a reasonable way without throwing the country on its ear. The sooner we start the better. It would have been nice to start in 1998 when we first signed Kyoto, but for whatever reason – political or practical – that hasn’t happened.

I’m no great fan of the Conservatives, but they are in theory the hard-nosed pragmatic doers, not the political dreamers we lefties are supposed to be. That’s encouraging (though I said the same thing when Bush won the presidency on a CO2-regulation platform in 2000, and look where that got us). So: do the Conservatives have the political will to do something about climate change? Or are they just shifting their rhetoric in response to polls? We’ll find out.

Also, just an asside. What can the world of the web do to help address this problem in a serious, significant way? Anyone have any ideas?

Explains what the hell is going on on the web in a pretty compelling way. If you know all this, its fun to watch. If you don’t know all this, it might be too fast to follow. But entertaining nonetheless.

So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/

VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.

A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…

The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).

OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)

According to a recent Globe & Mail poll, suddenly, strangely, climate change has become the most important issue for the majority of Canadians (climate change topped the list for 26% of Canadians, followed by health & security). A curious and surprising event, perhaps an interesting result of the democratic system.

When the Liberals (as a centrist/left party, theoretically more enviromentally friendly than the right wing Conservatives) were in power, they did NOTHING on climate change. No policy, no effective strategy, no concrete action, and no results, except a 30% increase in CO2 emissions. But when the Liberals were in power, the official oposition was the Conservatives, right wing, oil-based, and hostile to policies addressing climate change (which will have a big impact on the oil industry and energy-intensive business). So agressive climate action on the part of the Libs would have resulted in strong opposition from the Conservatives. So the Libs did nothing.

Now, the Conservatives are in power, and they just got slaughtered (by the Libs, Bloc and NDP, and public opinion) for their weak stand on climate change in their recent Clean Air Bill (tho, in their defense, at least they tabled serious policies/laws with actual impacts on industry: the Libs never did). Stephane Dion is leading the charge, and in all the hooplah, climate change lands at the forefront of issues in the mind of Canadians. Harper shuffles his deck, and climate change becomes the Conservatives shiny new focus.

So, strike one up for Minority government as a good way to get things done that people actually want: those who pull the strings in power (the Conservatives) are forced to adjust their policies according to pressures from the other side of the spectrum. Which, theoretically at least, is a good way to ensure balanced government…And one hopes, a step in the direction of taking climate change seriously as a problem.

Hopping from government to media, interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend too. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:

“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”

And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.

Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.

In an article in this Saturday’s Globe, Wente finally, finally, finally actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).

In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …

And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.

(Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”)

But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.

Another interesting thing: Wente and some of her pals at the Globe (the paper probably has had a 50-50 split on the issue) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.

I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.

It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.

I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But hark: that’s the sound of Wente and Murphy reevaluating climate change. A good sign.

Splitting my previous climate post into 3 (since it was 3 separate ideas):

Interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:

“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”

And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.

Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.

Wente finally, finally, actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).

In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …

And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.

Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”

But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.

Another interesting thing: Wente and her pals at the Globe (the columnists are probably 50-50 split on climate) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.

I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.

It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.

I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But his point, that something must be done, is starting to sound reasonable even to the Wente’s & Murphys of the world.

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Veeeerrrry interesting. I wrote a little post on Climate Change (a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail regarding Rex Murphy’s latest bit of climate idiocy). And I got two comments from people who have certainly never been to this site before. I presume there is a concerted blog/commenting effort, probably funded by PR companies, to troll through the blogosphere and make “grassroots” comments. I noted this kind of thing before on my Zune post a while back, and if I were a PR company, I would be doing this too. Good, cheap, and very direct way to get your message out. Even if you don’t reach the writer (in this case me) you might sow some doubt in other readers of the post.

I was going to answer these fellows in the comments, but it’ll take some links etc, so I’ll do it here instead.

First, Ken Ring from predictweather.com has explaned his position onglobal warming: here. He’s from New Zealand and predicts weather partterns using moon cycle analysis. Here is his comment, and my response below:

Instead of berating Murphy, how about listing the ACTUAL evidence that the world is warming. By the world I don’t just mean the tiny areas occupied by the cities, I mean the oceans, icecaps, swamps, craggy monutain ranges, deserts etc that comprise, without human habitation, 98.4% of the Earth’s surface. Oh bother, there aren’t any thermometers in those places. (Now aint that the inconvenient truth..)

Evidence coming, but first some propositions:
1. earth’s climate is a complex system
2. human civilization has developed in a period of relative warmth & climate stability (allowing for agricultural food production)
3. global temperature is directly correlated with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere
4. if CO2 concentrations rise, there is a good chance that temperature will rise too
5. if the temperature rises significantly, the complex system of the climate will be destabilized
6. if the climate system is destabilized, our ability to manage a global agricultural system will be destroyed
7. if we cannot manage a global agricultural system, human civilization as we know it is finished.
8. CO2 is rising, partly due to human emissions of CO2

Now for some evidence, the most powerful piece of data I have seen in climate change science, from the Vostok ice core:

Note CO2 concentrations follow temperature. Note also that the past 10,000 years (far right of graph, blue) have seen something extraordinary: relatively warm, stable temperature, also the period when human civilization developed.

Now perhaps doubling or tripling or quintupling C02 concentrations is fine. But if I were a betting man, given a graph like that, I would say there is 50% chance that rising CO2 will raise the temperature. And knowing a little about the history of the earth, I would say we don’t want temperatures to go up, and we should do what we can to make sure they don’t.

If you want some more evidence, in counterpoint to climate-denial, a good place to start is this article from Realclimate.org: Wall Street Journal vs. Scientific Consensus.

Regarding Ken’s other comment about measurement of temperatures out of cities, I’m not sure that’s even worth responding to, but satelite data, and the Vostok ice core (from Antarctica) are a good start. For more reading, see: NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. For less theoretical evidence (ie. the kind you can feel in your cold, wet toes) here’s an article about the melting Arctic.

I think that’s all for Ken.

Now for the other commenter, Jeff Jones, no URL. Here’s what he had to say:

Notice how the doomsayers claim, as the host does, that each year the scientific community gets more certain. Which scientific community? Certainly not the 19,000 who signed the Oregon petition.

It’s the kind of dishonest device that the Church used to deny Copernicus and Galileo.

Maybe you mean the scientific community made up of political scientists like David Suzuki whose goal is to destroy the corporate basis of Western democracy.

So, the famous Oregon Petition is widely regarded as bunk. There was no control on petition signers, no required proof of academic creditials, no stated affiliation with academic institutions. I did a cursory search through the signatories, and of 15 names I checked I was able to find three academics: Earl Aagaard, professor of biology at Christian creationist university; Arthur Ballato, an Electrical Engineer with the US Army; and Daniel J Cantliffe, a biologist at University of Florida. None of whom has any direct experience with climate science, as far as I can tell.

But rather than spend time on the discredited Oregon Petition, better to answer the question directly: Which scientific community does get more certain? Well, for one (sorry, for eleven) the National Academies of Science of the following countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and the USA.

Say these Academies, in the following document (Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change-pdf):

We urge all nations, in the line with the UNFCCC principles, to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change, adapt to its impacts and ensure that the issue is included in all relevant national and international strategies.

As for scientific literature, Naomi Orseskes did a random study of 928 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, with the key-words “climate change.” Of the articles, about 75% of them deal with the question of causes of climate change, 100% support the view that a significant fraction of recent climate change is due to human activities.

And what exactly is the consensus? According to realclimate.org, the consensus is:

1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years)
2. People are causing this
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)

So … as they say: who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

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I just sent this to the Globe and Mail:

To The Editor,

I have read Rex Murphy’s climate articles with a sort of wonder for ten years now. Each year the science gets more sophisticated; each year the scientific community gets more certain; and each year more effects predicted in climate models are coming to pass (demonstrating the robustness of the models, while also showing that we are moving faster along a dangerous path than anyone expected).

Yet each year Rex Murphy’s climate articles remain exactly the same: the thousands of scientists who study this issue are alarmists and politically motivated; and those who disagree with overwhelming scientific evidence (like Mr. Murphy himself), are oppressed, unjustly attacked, and deserve to be heard with the same seriousness as the people who actually spend their careers studying climate change.

So my question, for Mr. Murphy, columnist, pundint and human: could you please list for us the evidence that *will* convince you that climate change is real, and worrisome? So that when, in a year or two, we have crossed those markers, we can all agree that it’s time for you to stop berating us with these inane columns on scientific issues, where you display total lack of interest in science?

What, I wonder, did Mr. Murphy, Newfoundlander, have to say about warnings that the cod fishery would collapse?

If you are interested what Rex Murphy did have to say about the cod fisheries, watch this wonderful video from the CBC archives, 1994.

I haven’t written a ramble in a while. Here’s one:

I had an impromptu drink with Boris the other night – unfortunately the other brain I seem to be feeding off of a lot lately wasn’t there.

We rambled about art, data, open source, society, flexibility, stability, evolution to touch on a few things.

My experience with the open project LibriVox has been very interesting, and has influenced my thinking about a lot of what we talked about: it started small, and grew and grew; in about four places it encountered major environmental challenges – mainly having to do with putting together the structures to let the project accomodate more volunteers, and more projects. At 10 people and a couple of projects it was OK with me running the thing, and some help on the website design; then it went up to 50 volunteers and 10 projects, and I needed help, and a new mode of managing people and projects; the help appeared. It cranked up to 250 volunteers, and 40 projects; more help & organization was needed; it appeared. We’re now up to 1000+ volunteers and something like 150 active projects. Needing more structure and more support. It came.

Because the project was open everytime a major problem presented itself, someone seemed to be there who had just the skills needed (designing the site for clarity, setting up a forum, cataloging, documenting, setting up a wiki, a promo poster, catalog software). Like an organism encountering environmental challenges, LibriVox was flexible and open enough to easily evolve into something able to handle the new demands. One hopes it will continue to do so.

Is there anything in the little microcosm of LibriVox worth thinking about in a bigger context?

Boris gave this interesting visualization about society. (Boris can you draw it so I can link to a pic?) Imagine a bell curve, moving from left to right along a time axis. Stick a couple of wheels under the middle of the curve: the wheels are industry – driving things forward; the big hump is regular society who go along with things; and the front angle part of the bell-curve/snowplow are the out-there artists at the far tip, and then creative types who interact with industry making up the rest of the angle. There’s some interaction between the two. The artists are at the forefront, are misunderstood, and suffer the greatest amount of attrition because they are battling directly against the universe – in a way they both lead the way for the rest of society, and introduce us to, and protect us from, the new. You can go on about this metaphor, but probably there’s an optimal steepness of the curve – steeper meaning more arty & creative types.

I’ve seen two arty shows recently: Marie Chouinard’s dance show Body Remix/Goldberg Variations; and Anslem Kiefer’s Heaven & Earth. Neither was “beautiful” in any standard sense, but in both cases my mind was flying the whole time I was experiencing them. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but these two big shows — both very intellectual, and very abstract — had my mind whirrling around at top speed. There was something about the depth of the data transfer to me — chaotic and not really articulable by me — that influenced me in profound ways both times. And I think this is what Boris was talking about, about art, especiallly challenging art, communicating information about the universe that we are not really able to comprehend in any systematic way: we can take a bash at it, we can define & systematize, but the chaotic and big nature of out-there art is precisely powerful because we can’t describe it properly. By it’s nature it’s beyond a complete intellectual definition; so much data referring to so much, interacting with our own particular data processing systems. But somehow there is great value in that process, because it forces me to *try* (we are, after all, so earnest we humans) to process the data, and in doing so I reform my brain paths, and evolve my brain to try to cope with a changing universe.

And this, maybe, is why the free software/open source and open data movement is actually of huge importance. An open source approach to problems, along with an open data approach to the world will allow “us” to a) have access to the data we need to solve problems and b) allow all of us to contribute to the solving of these problems in open source projects.

I have a feeling that the world will become more chaotic soon. Two things in particular make me worried: climate change, and oil supplies. Those two issues are catastrophic in ways that most people aren’t willing to admit: human civilization has developed over a small band of time, the last 10,000 years, with relatively warm & relatively stable climate (scroll down to chart: “Temperature of Lower Atmosphere Last 400,000 years“). If things get unstable, we’ll be in trouble. As for oil everything in our modern world is based on cheap available oil, particularly our food-supply system. Without cheap fuel for farm equipment, and food transport, we’re in big trouble.

So if you consider that:
a) major environmental challenges (ie. global upheaval) are on the way
b) successful organisms are those that best adapt to environmental challenges
c) providing the maximum amount of data to maximum number of people will allow maximum adaptibility
d) and supporting open source solutions to problems is the most flexible & adaptable approach

Then any society that does not support open access to civic data; and open source solutions to problems … is likely to have major troubles soon. This is the next level of democracy … data democracy, and is I think crucial for our survival. Maybe that’s too much; but a country (say Canada) that embraces data democracy, will inevitably become more flexible, more nimble and more innovative in its solutions.

Do you think our politicians are at all ready to think about this? There’s a new, not yet public project, called civicaccess.ca, that will try to convince governments to start. Good work Mike.

From Seed: Reinvention of the Self:

To understand how neurogenesis “the process of creating new brain cells” works, Gould’s lab studies the effect of two separate variables: stress and enriched environments. Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.”

On the other hand, enriched animal environments “enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat” lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.

This applies to my post about open data too, I think. A brain becomes more sophisticated in a situation when faced with “enriched environments” … chronic stress stops things. Note there’s a big difference between chronic stress – which puts you in constant survival mode; and discrete stress, which forces you to find a solution to a specific problem. I would argue that having a complex brain, stimulated by “enriched environments,” allows you to overcome discrete stress (call that environmental challenges) in more creative and effective ways.

As this applies to society: we will be best able to meet complex challenges if we expose society to “enriched environments.” Enriched environments mean, I think, access to maximum amounts of data; and public domain, open data movements mean just that. A vibrant public domain (free software, art, civic data, scientific information, agriculture) will mean a more vibrant and innovative society, better able to meet major challenges (say: climate change, peak oil, avian flu). The connections between art & software & science & civic acess are not yet clear to the world at large. But some are working hard to forge these links, across a spectrum of areas, seeking to increase data exchange, and give the tools of data production to new people. Others don’t quite get it yet. Still others seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot, by fighting the obvious. That’s OK. You can’t expect everyone to get it. But you can keep pushing.

(tip to: Tech Monk & mtl3p)

So a few Montreal geeky types convened at the Office (aka Laika) for a sort-of impromptu discussion to try to figure out what the hell is going on in the world, and specifically what this “Open Movent” might be, and what connections we can draw (if any) between it’s various strands: that is, are there any connection between:

• Software: Free Software/Open Source (eg. FSF)
• Data: Access to Government/Civic Data (eg. Howtheyvote)
• Art/Media (eg. Creative Commons, LibriVox)
• Infrastructure (eg. ilesansfil.org)
• Hardware (eg. $100 laptop)
• Information (eg. wikipedia)
• Scientific Research (eg. open journals)
• Education (eg. UC Berkley podcasts, MIT OpenCourseWare)
• Patents on Life – and those opposing it (eg. GRAIN)
• What else should I add here?

The group was mainly geeks, and unfortunately Devlin couldn’t make it. That’s too bad because Devlin isn’t a geek, and works in agricultural IP issues, mostly in the South (ie developing countries) and his take on things might have helped us find the root we couldn’t grasp: biotech/IP issues are important in those countries because they have a direct impact on farmers’ choices about how they feed their families, how they live – if they can feed their families – and so are, in some sense, more critical than what we were talking about.

But I feel that there is an important link between all these things, a link that is very difficult to articulate because all these “sectors” talk in very different words, and are motivated by very different things. The hard-core geeks and the creative commons artistic freedom fighters are not necessarily talking about the same things, and probably wouldn’t agree on much.

Julien assigned me the task of summarizing the 1.5 hr discussion, but I don’t think I’ll do that. It would be a disservice, and I’m much more interested in what those attending have to say themselves (get writing!) than trying to interpret what they had to say, and butchering their thoughts in the process. Still, what I’ll try to do is summarize my perspective of things, after trying to absorb the discussions. I’ll probably leave out things like “I think” and “in my opinion” and “as steve said” etc…Take what comes below as an open reflection that could encourage comment & discussion, and not exactly my categorical statement of Reality in the Universe (although it might sound like that).

To start with, there are links, they are important, and figuring out what those links are is important. But all these “new movements” are in fact not new at all: the various principles the intellectual movements are built on (say: freedom, equality, access to data/information) are all old successful ideas. Ideas that are compelling because they appeal to successful and enduring notions in many cultures. For instance: sharing is good (kindergarten class #1), everyone should have access to knowledge (public libraries, public schools), a society should try to give everyone the same opportunities – ie you shouldn’t be explicitly barred from doing something because of race, creed, colour; but we might not do too much to help you.

These ideas are not at all universal, but just happen to be prevailing ideas of our particularly successful (ie good at economic & military dominance) western liberal democracies. We happen to be at the top of the heap right now. Meaning we’ve been successful, but not necessarily meaning that the Universe has designated us Kings of the Planet.

Note also: Not everyone is motivated by such abstract ideas. This is something that Mike speaks of with great passion from his experience at ISF: many people are involved because they like coding, they like wires & antennae, they like fiddling with projects, tinkering, building. That they’re doing something for the “good of humanity” (freedom etc) might be important to some, but it’s certainly not the universal motivator. Some couldn’t care less.

So here’s what I think: Humans are programmed to find ways to overcome environmental challenges, and to get pleasure from overcoming them (which encourages them to overcome them). If you look at the history of human civilization, you could look at it as a series of problems: access to water, access to food, access to heat/energy, access to clothing, access to shelter, access to mates. “Civilization” is an evolving process which morphs based on a lack of any combination of those, and cultures develop as codified ways to meet those needs, in more and more complex ways, generally for more people. Wars start when one culture’s need for one thing rams up against another culture’s need for another; successful cultures are the ones that win wars, and gain access to what they need; or cultures that succeed in negotiating in some non-war way. Unsuccessful cultures don’t win the wars, and get denied access to varying degrees. Similarly within a culture you’ve got warring factions all fighting for bits of the stuff that satisfies those needs. And the drive for wealth, the drive for power etc. is a sensible thing to have within the system of a culture because it means that the culture, as a system, will be driven to maintain access to the things which fulfil those base needs. As the world & it’s cultures get more complex, this need is abstracted out to other things. So you get art, computer games, religion etc. But in a way that’s just a fetishized expression of the same thing. (That guy’s pyramid, whatever his name is). Even when you have all the water, food, mates etc you could possibly want, your drive to solve those problems is still there; your drive to solve problems full-stop is still there. Otherwise you would fade away. That drive to solve problems manifests itself in art, in the joy of coding, in building bookshelves…anytime you “do” something, accomplish something, build something, and you feel good about it, you’ve filling that need; and the pleasure you get out of it is a genetic signal that you’re a functioning human. There are of course exceptions, but bear with me.

So: Humans are happiest when they build things (whether that’s a poem, a bridge, a printer driver code, or a field of corn, a new way to generate energy, a library, a community of freedom-fighting geeks). Let’s say we are genetically (culturally?) programmed to get satisfaction from completing tasks, making something. Some tasks are more fulfilling than others, but in general even completing excruciatingly boring tasks results in a pleasing feeling. You can describe this in many different ways, but we generally feel pride and happiness about accomplishments.

We use various tools to accomplish these tasks, to build things & do things. Hammers and ibooks, and apple scripts, paintbrushes, shovels, encyclopedias, calculators. And people who are driven to build things (say, the tinkerers, the programmers, the car buffs and the CEOs, the politicians & the activists) are pretty pissed when they are told that they cannot make the tools they use better. So when, for instance, a software company gives you a tool to do a job, and you say to yourself, this is OK but what I really want is THIS; but the software company says: you cannot change the tool to do THIS, you can only do THAT. Well that pisses off someone who has a job to do, an inefficient tool, the means to make that bad tool into a good tool; but gets artificially prevented from improving that tool by IP protections. That, I think, is the root of the Free Software movement. That a non-free software system that doesn’t allow tool users to use tools the way they want, and to improve those tools offends their general desire to build things and do things. If you have a bad tool and the means to make it a good tool, it’s really shitty not to be able to make it a good tool.

Now you can abstract THAT out to everything else related. Art, data, scientific research, education, seeds etc. are all tools used to solve problems. Those problems could be very base & important (how do I feed my family), or very trivial (how do I make a better songlist in iTunes), but we are driven to DO these things and build these things and solve problems; and that we are driven this way means that we as a species are good at overcoming environmental challenges. ie It has been essential for our survival that this be the case.

So I *think* this open movement is about something very fundamental to the survival of the human species, that is: we want the ability to get and use tools to solve whatever problems we deem worth solving.

The free movement is about defending this fundemental need of humans to use tools as they wish, for purposes they wish, and with whatever modifications they wish. And the different strands grow out of different people’s interest in different tools (encyclopedias or bits of code, or music samples). So we are against:

• DRM that says you can use this piece of art only like this
• proprietary software that says you can only use this software the way we want you to use it, and you cannot make it better to do what you need
• closed government data systems that say, we will manage & interpret the data for you, the way we decide to do it
• IP protected seeds, that say you may plant these seeds only as we tell you, and if you pay us
• closed scientific journals that say: you can get access to this scientific knowledge only if you pay us this much money
• information/education systems that say: you can only have this knowledge under these conditions
• communiction infrastructure that says: you may exchange data and information like this, and with these charges associated

And we are for: Allowing humans to use their tools as they see fit, and to modify their tools if they want to modify them so that they are better at solving problems. By “opening” this stuff up, we give humans access to more data and more ability to solve problems (trivial, critical) in creative ways. The Open movement has huge implications for the future survival of cultures, and perhaps the species.

NOTE about participants (ie people who happened to be there): brett (videoblogger & film maker), mike (isf founder & general free movement spitter), robin (anarchist software developer), steve (builder of opensource tools for scientific collaboration), julien (ace podcaster), and me (in my LibriVox hat, I guess). Ella, an artist & blogger and non-boy popped over to our table a couple of times, but I think we were stupidly much less welcoming than we should have been – more out of intentness of our conversation than anything conscious – and I would like to personally apologize for that.

Brett issued a challenge in his last vlog, which was a response to the recent intense discussion we had at Laika about the open movement, what’s going on and what it all might mean. I wrote a long post about that discussion below, and here is my effort to make a vlog about my thoughts. Some notes:

• I ripped off Brett’s walking & video style
• I am as long-winded in video as in writing – it clocks in at 15 minutes & about 30 MB
• I should have edited one more time to cut it down a bit more – but crashed half-way thru first edit & couldn’t stomach another run-thru
• The sound is crap
• When I am talking about torture, I am not saying that I think current torture practices are legitimate, but rather that if your suvival is at stake, then questions of morality fall by the wayside. You will do whatever it takes to survive, and morality seems like a luxury for other people. In the case of the current US policy on torture, I a) don’t think US suvival is at stake, and b) think that torture is hurting their long-term security and not helping (that’s just my opinion).

Recorded Sunday March 26, 2006 at 8:15-8:45am while walking around my home at de Bullion & Pins in Montreal. It was a bit wierd talking to myself while walking around with a camera in my hand.

In this video I refer to this post about our Laika meeting here; and my description of Boris’s snowplow analogy here.
And, here is my first vlog:
openmovement-hugh.mov

Posted on the LivriVox forum, but I thought it was worth repeating here on dose.

One of the things I (personally) like about many podcasts is how … crappy! … they are. I don’t mean the facetiously, I mean that very honestly. I like that people cough and you hear the trucks roll by, and things are messy and badly-produced etc. It is like real life, unlike the polished stuff you get on TV and Radio & movies, which is fantasy.

And this is something I love about LibriVox. It is a bit of a revolutionary act to say: I wish to listen to a book recorded by a bunch of people, only some of whom are good readers! I want to listen to the words, and to the voices of these average joes & janes reading, the same as I remember my mother reading to me as a kid, and the librarian who used to read to us in school. It’s a rejection of the need for polish, for perfection, for style; choosing instead the substance of the text, and the reality of a real real flawed person like me doing their best to read something they love.

And I think this notion is not so easy to understand – why would I want to listen to something imperfect? Well, for me, because that perfectiion is a sham, and it’s unnecessary and it distracts from the text in a way.

I have a friend here who is a improvisational jazz violinist, Malcolm Goldstein.

the first time I head him play I thought “what the HELLL is this? It’s noise!” But what he’s asking you to do is listen to OTHER things, not the melody & harmony and all the easy things we associate with music, but something else, the underpinnings of the sound, the textures of the noises, the surprise, different cadence. And this is tied in with what the world is really like: it is not so ordered, so clean…it’s very messy and chaotic, but we are trained not to like this aspect of the world, not to like the flaws and imperfection. One reason we are taught to want perfection is that if we don,t like flaws we are easier targets for corporate marketers who sell perfection. Yet there is such beauty in that mess, if you pay attention to it in a different way, there is so much to be learned from chaos and flaws and mistakes. But you have to unlearn how to listen for it.

In the same way, I think (and this is just my personal take) LibriVox is a place that celebrates the flaws, the beauty in chaos, the messiness of life, but interpreted through the great works of literature of the world. we take raw materials and build with our voices something different, but I think something revolutionary, and we say: because it sounds like THAT over there, does not mean it has to sound like that here. We give you something different, and you can give something different too.

Some other general political thoughts – and a reference to open source & computer networks at the end. There has been a general tendency recently in the developing world to elect what could be called “anti-US” governments: Hamas in Palestine, and, say the sweeping leftism in South America: Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Bachelet in Chile, Lulu in Brazil, Vázquez in Uruguay, and maybe Kirchner in Argentina. There are likely more, elsewhere.

All of these are considered “worrying” by the policy-makers in USA; yet most of these elections were considered fair. The question worth asking is, why do countries in the South keep electing governments that the US is opposed to (publicly and privately)?

And I suggest that the answer is this: the policies that the US exports, and the governments they support, have not done a very good job of providing for their populations. So the global status quo (as defined by US and its allies) is not a very stable system – or at least it won’t be unless the Northern policies are adapted to accomodate the shifts in the south.

Something similar happened during and after the 1929-39 Depression in North America. The late 1800s to late teens of the 20th C saw a radical shift in industrialization; huge production, technological advances, etc twinned with terrible conditions for workers. To avoid revolution, and total chaos in our governing and social systems, we built a social safety net, worker safety conditions, worker rights etc. Which in fact either brought on, or at least paralleled the most prosperous era in the history of humanity. Is that a coincidence?

Capitalism, unfettered, leans towards massive exploitation – of workers and consumers – monopolies, and destruction. Unattended capitalism will tend to be very lucrative for a few, and very destructive for the rest.

Socialism, unfettered, leans towards inefficiency and unnecessary government intervention.

Somewhere between the two is a balance that’s probably the optimum for the global system (though the variables are changing: oil prices, and climate change being the two biggies, I think, which are likely to throw everything out of whack in the near future). We’ve seen a massive shift to the right in the US; and much of the rest of the world is shifting in the other direction. And I suggest that if the US starts creeping towards the centre the balances on the other side will too; but the US – being the powerful beast – needs to examine why the rest of the world is reacting the way it is, and where they need to change their policies, not just their communication strategies.

All this makes me think about (much less complex) open source systems – like LibriVox, or more obviously wikipedia – that are self-stabilizing through open input; and also extremely efficient at producing “useful work” from idle hours. I’m not sure what the connection is exactly, but I keep thinking about politics from an open source perspective: how to bring the efficiencies and stability inherent in open source systems to our political structures?

Anyone know the answer?

Repost from librivox.org:

Below is a paraphrased sample of an email we occasionally get from librarians and teachers, as well as my response to the email. I have paraphrased the email.

***

To LibriVox,

LibriVox is a great web site. I hope to help my students to use the audiobooks. However I am concerened by the link to Wikipedia you have on your site. We teach our students that Wikipedia is not the best source of information, since anyone can edit it, and we suggest they critically evaluate the site (just as we suggest they evaluate any web site). Wikipedia markets itself as an encyclopedia and many people think it is “tried and true” as a source of information. This is especially a problem in yourger people who have not developed the skills to properly evaluate. I suggest that you should consider taking the link to wikipedia off of your. There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead. Thank you.

XYZ,
Librarian
XYZ Secondary School

Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:47:46 -0500 (EST)
From: librivox Subject: Re: Wikipedia link

Hello XYZ,

Thanks for the note, and your feedback much is appreciated. I hope you enjoy the LibriVox audiobooks, and perhaps your school would like to do a recording project for librivox?

re: Wikipedia, I am about to launch into a (long) defence of wikipedia, so be warned! No offense meant. But I would be very happy if you take the time to read my thoughts on wikipedia itself, and its relationship to LibriVox. I would be curious, if you have the time, to hear your response to mine. Again, please don’t be offended, but I am passionate about this issue.

BEGIN DEFENSE OF WIKIPEDIA
I must say that I could not disagree more with your evaluation of wikipedia, and I think you are making a grave error in warning your students away from this wonderful educational resource. Here are some reasons why:

-the wikipedia does not claim to be “tried and true,” in fact just the opposite: it recognizes that it will have errors, and asks that users edit them, whenever they see them. So it is certainly not tried and true, and this is a very important thing to learn about *any* single source of information – especially on the internet. *Nothing* is tried and true, and wikipedia encourages users (student or otherwise) to be careful and critical about the information they find there. It is recognized as an excellent first source, that should be checked. Perhaps that would be a good thing to teach your students: use wikipedia first, check elsewhere, and then make corrections if there are any mistakes in wikipedia!

-the wikipedia is very often the best first source for any topic on the internet. For instance, I wrote much of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

I challenge you to find another source of information on the internet that has as much detailed accurate information on the topic as this article. And I double-tripple challenge you to find another FREE source. It is not my experience that, “There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead.” Which ones? Are they free? If you can find me another resource that has the breadth of detailed information that wikipedia has, for free, I would be very excited indeed! And I wrote large chunks of the article above for precisely this reason: I could not find a single source on the internet that had all the information. It seemed to me that since I had hunted down and found the information from various sources, and since I had used wikipedia previously, that I should give back. It was easy. I just wrote what I had learned, and presto! Now there’s a nice accurate article about feathered dinosaurs, that anyone can read for free, where before there was none. (I note there’s a repeated section in there, which I should edit, unless someone beats me to it).

Note also that lack of of information in a single place is a particular problem for the topics of Authors and Literature, our bread and butter at LibriVox. It is just not true (in my experience) that there is another single source of information on the internet about Authors and Literature with as much accurate information (can you show me one that is free?). And I offer another challenge: can you find a single error in ANY literature articles on wikipedia? If you can I will send you a DVD with all LibriVox books for free … and then I will go correct the error! But I bet you will not find an error.

-wikiepdia also encourages your students to share their knowledge in an open way, to participate in bringing more knowledge to the world. The principle of wikipedia is much like a library, where the idea is that everyone should have access to books. Wikipedians believe that everyone should have free access to knowledge, and they participate in bringing knowledge to the world every time they make an edit, or add a new page. So as a librarian, some of the questions you should ask yourself (among others), are: do you think that knowledge should be free or owned? Should people be encouraged to share knowledge? If you think it should be free, what is the best way to help knowledge be free? What do you think are the effects of discouraging your students from using a source of information, created by volunteers all over the world, who share their time and expertise with the lofty aim of providing a free encyclopedia to the world? If I were one of your students, I would think you were telling me: volunteering to share my knowledge is bad; promoting free access to knowledge is bad; and that I should not contribute to increasing knowledge in the world.

-sometimes articles in wikipedia have incorrect or misleading information – sometimes even hurtful information. This cannot be denied, nor is it denied by anyone. But the amazing thing is how quickly most errors are caught, and edited. The average time between, for instance, “vandalization” (making nonsense, or derogatory edits) and restoration to accuracy is in the SECONDS. Some errors stay longer-usually because no one is reading them. But there is an army of volunteers who care passionately about the objectives of wikipedia — free information for all — and they are incredibly vigilant. Still, they don’t catch everything. But neither does the New York Times.

-errors: Britannica v Wikipedia: although this is, to me, beside the point, an analysis done by Nature magazine found that on scientific topics, Wikipedia has slightly more errors than Britannica, but not significantly more. This despite the wikipedia articles being on average TWICE as long as their Britannica counterparts.

Finally, to wikipedia and LibriVox: wikipedia was one of the prime inspirations for LibriVox. The idea that a group of volunteers could take on a project so useful, so wonderful, so ambitious, and so good for the world – and do it so successfully made me think: maybe people could do the same with audiobooks? Like wikipedia’s editing policy, we accept anyone as a reader, and we make no judgments about the quality of their recordings. And like wikipedia, we say to our listeners: if you do not like how a recording is done, please, make another one, and we will be happy to include it in our catalog.

Finally, and, again, just a silly aside: every time we complete a LibriVox book, we go to wikipedia to add a link to our recording, so that people will know that not only can they go to their library, take out the book for free, but they can also listen for free with LibriVox recordings. We get many hits a day from people who have come from wikipedia. Do you think Britannica, or any other resource would let us link so easily? I bet not.

I hope you did not fall asleep reading that long-winded essay, but I was saddened to get such an email from a Librarian. I have always thought of librarians as defenders of everyone’s right to free information … which is exactly what wikipedia is trying, with all its flaws, to deliver.

In short, we won’t be taking down those link to wikipedia!

Best regards,

Hugh McGuire, Founder

http://LibriVox.org

Why do so many of my posts start with: Mike from ISF was talking about … anyway:

Mike from ISF was talking about micropayments, so I throw out this thought to the wind: PayPal’s sort of annoying and I don’t really trust them. I don’t know why. I just don’t. But having some form of super-easy, co-op micropayment scheme, geared to the diy net crowd, could be a really neat thing for podcasters and vidcasters, and musicians too. OK and bloggers.

Here’s how it would work:
-any website (podcast, blog, vidcast, music band) is allowed to join the micro-coop, which creates a free “account” and gives them a button for their site that says: “micro-pay-me!” or something.
-surfers can get a free account with micro-coop …
-it’s a pre-paid thing, or it could be linked to credit card like paypal, maybe
-so I put in say, $20 – which I can disperse as I wish to any member of the coop
-as I wander around the net, I listen to podcasts and watch vids, and say, wow I’d like to support podcastbob!
-I click on the “micro-pay-me” button on podcastbob’s site, and an easy dialog comes up
-I log in
-the system says: how much do you want to pay podcastbob?
-I put $0.02 or $0.25 or $5 or $100 or whatever I feel like paying
-the amount is transferred from my account to podcastbob
-podcastbob gets a monthly statement, which can be transferred to a bank account if/when he wishes – or transfered to his own micro-coop (paying) account.
-some percentage is taken from the transaction, to pay for server space & management etc.
-micro-coop could be a non-profit coop, (or a for-profit company?) – but not like paypal.

Now why not paypal? Because no one likes it, and no one is inspired to use it. microcoop would be nicely-designed, easy to use, and really be targeted to this do it yourself internet media market, unlike the flashy e-commerce crap you usually see.

Anyone interested in hleping me build microcoop? I seem to be overflowing with ideas these days, unfortunately I have not the skills nor the time to implement them all.

I was asked to write an article in Reading Montreal. Go check out the site. But here’s the text, and a photo (by Nika Vee):

In the mid 1840s, Sir James Alexander proposed that Mount Royal should be turned into a park, and twenty-five years later, 1869, the City of Montreal amended its charter to approve a $350,000 loan to purchase the land. At the time Montreal, population 112,000, was confined to ten city blocks by the river, and many city councilors argued that the Park was too far from the border of the city to be useful. But Mayor Aldis Bernard pushed for the project (as well as Ile St-Helene, and Parc Lafontaine), and the land was purchased, with a final bill of $1 million, an extraordinarily hefty sum for the time. The park wasn’t inaugurated until 1876, by which time the city had expanded significantly. A few decades later, the park was surrounded by houses and development: if the city had waited, the land would have been too expensive to buy. If Montreal had waited, Mount Royal would be a condo development, and not a park.

Yet the value of the Park, however you want to define the word value, is incalculable. The value to ordinary citizens, the values of properties near the park, the value to the city as a tourist draw, as a hallmark of world-class status. If you could quantify the economic returns from the park, I’m certain you would find it had paid for itself many times over. And if you just measured its value as benefit to the people of the city, that million bucks would be a trivial steal.

We are currently at a turning point in the history of human knowledge, and clear battle lines have been drawn. On one side (let’s call it EVIL) you have those who think information should be controlled and parceled out based on various criteria: money, for instance, and the ability to pass entrance exams at certain universities. On the other side (we’ll call this side GOOD), you have the people who think information should be available to anyone who wants it: the wikipedians, the audiobook makers (disclosure: I am one) and their text-based ancestors, the creative commoners, and the free software crusaders who did much of the philosophical and legal thinking behind this exploding movement of internet do-gooders.

Web2.0 is one of those marketing-phrases that doesn’t mean all that much, and annoys those who have been citizens of the net – not just consumers, but creators – for years. But fundamental things have changed: everything got easy, everything got free, bandwidth all of a sudden got cheap, and kind folks made hosting space available for those who wanted to give their content away. All of a sudden we have blogs, and wikis, podcasts, vidcasts, and scanned books. We have universities committing to put everything online; we have scientists dedicated to explaining complicated issues properly, in public; we have communities writing text-books; academic journals opening themselves up to the world. Among thousands if not millions of other wonderful projects.

What had been the internet mall (or you could call it Web1.0) was opened up to the people, and they said: we want a vibrant city (Web2.0). And this isn’t just about the internet, it’s about all the sources of information you might imagine. It’s about Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. We’re just starting to see what this new city might look like, but certainly it will be a vibrant place, because, so far anyway, it’s got a big park in the middle of it. And the value that creates – economic or otherwise – will be, like Mount Royal, incalculable.

Yet there are forces pushing in the other direction. Forces who wish to influence our governments away from letting the internet be a park, and a market, and a sidewalk, and a home, and everything else a vibrant city is. There are forces who want to keep it as a mall.

London and Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Sydney Australia, New York, and certainly Montreal, offer a mix of commerce, food, art, parks, public space, business, transport, relaxation, all in one place. The components of one add to the others, and make an integrated whole. Each of those cities have their own particularities (the pubs and pin-stripes of London, the Bistros and buildings of Paris, the cafes and churches of Rome, the butchers and chaos of Hong Kong, the taxis and galleries of New York, the terasses and staircases of Montreal). But all these cities give the sense that life is happpening, before your eyes, that you are in the midst of a place alive. Either by design or history, life is encouraged to happen in public.

In his book, The City After the Automobile, Moishe Safdie writes at length about Le Corbusier and other architects of the 20th century city, who laid the foundations for our lifeless, particularly North American cities, designed for cars, not people; arranged around unusable and unused public space, parking lots, highways, and commerce; the desire to close the formerly public within private walls; and the separation of the different bits of life into their component parts. That is, confine big commerce within malls (with no natural light to distort things!), with few controllable entrances, and no life to speak of outside; keep the schools over there and the churches over here, the business parks isolated, and the housing developments somewhere else altogether. And certainly no small shops anywhere near where people live.

In other words, among other things, the design of these cities took all the component bits of life, separated them, removed the “need” for public space, and sterilized everything, killed everything. The result everyone knows: cities no one likes, but which provide relatively large yards.

Public Space, and Public Domain improves life for everyone — even the rich who can afford to finance their own, sterile versions of life as they wish it. This is why vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods (such as Montreal’s Mile End) attract artists and students, and subsequently the rich. People like to live in places where life is happening. And life happens where there is public space for all the elements of life to intersect. New York’s East Village, for instance, is an astounding place (increasingly less-so, it’s being mallified slowly), and nothing is more wonderful than the those spaces squeezed between two tenement buildings that have been transformed into tiny community gardens, some of which have become the home to chickens! In downtown Manhattan.

The planners of Montreal were smart enough to buy Mount Royal when they still could. It was a fantastic amount of money at the time, yet Montreal is unimaginable without Mount Royal – just as New York is unimaginable without Central Park. These public spaces are the foundations on which the wealth of these cities is built. Today, we all need to be vigilant with our politicians, our governments, and with ourselves, to make sure we keep the internet a vibrant city, and not let it become a strip mall. Again.

I have been doing a fair bit of bitching about the CBC recently (see: here, here, and here, and here for examples), including my digs during a small presentation on podcasting I did at Concordia — audio: here. This has been in conjunction with some back and forths with the folks at publicbroadcasting.ca, some of whom are CBC employees with insights into the strange world of the Crown Corporation. It occurs to me that I should try to articulate not just criticsms, but outline what I think a public broadcaster, and CBC in particular, should be doing in this dawning age of distributed media.

This post, I hope, might grow (or shrink) into some kind of digital manifesto to publicly present to the CBC — a statement from Canadians involved in digital media one way or another (consumers of or creators of) about what the CBC could/should become. Again, this is just a first step at getting some thoughts down. Please let me know if you think this is worthwhile.

Firstly, I’ll just list some of my major frustrations with CBC:

1. please, please podcast more
2. communicate with your frustrated listeners
3. look at what other public broadcasters are doing (BBC, Australian Broadcast Corp, NPR & PBS)
4. don’t dumb everything down
5. be a leader in digital media

Now I’ll give some thoughts on these issues:

1. podcasting
Tod Maffin, responsible for CBC’s podcasting strategy, is on a cross-Canada tour: he invited Montreal podcasters to have their say. It was an informative evening, mainly for learning why CBC does not podcast much. Dear CBC: please put this info on your website. I thought they were just lost, but there are some reasons, to whit:

a. copyright
Canada has different, and in some cases more stringent, copyright laws than Australia, USA, and UK. In those countries, public broadcasters appear to have priviledged positions with respect to copyrights, and so are able to broadcast content with music without much worry/cost associated with copyright. CBC’s case is different, and they must negotiate with SOCAN and the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) in order to put audio on the air, and online. The negotiation on internet archiving rights (ie rights to allow mp3s for podcast, rather than streaming) are, apparently, going slowly.

I’m not clear on this process, so if anyone can illuminate me, please do. But my question is this: to whom do I, as a Canadian and digital citizen, address my complaints? Who do I lobby? Is it CBC? SOCAN? CMRRA? The federal government? The federal government, different department? If you know the answer, please let me know. If you are the CBC please put this info on your site.

So, essentially we cannot get podcasts because the music on the show — not the actual content — is copyright, and cannot be podcast. (Apparently the producer of Quirks and Quarks actually strips out all the music to allow podcasting…kudos). Now this copyright problem makes sense for music-heavy shows, such as Brave New Waves, but what about Ideas, for instance, unavailable because the music in the show?

What is the purpose of a show like Ideas? Or, Eleanore Wachtel’s Writers and Company? etc. … Presumably the objective is to provide Canadians (and increasingly the world) important audio content. Surely writers and company’s objective is not to finance SOCAN musicians. The music may be important, but the content is why I listen. So, if you are a producer of Ideas, why not make a podsafe-music-only policy? Why don’t you say to SOCAN etc: if you do not lighten up, then we’ll just stop playing your music in our shows. See how happy your artists will be then.

If you are the producer of Ideas would you prefer to:

a) have more listeners, or
b) have fewer listeners.

The answer I hope is a). And podcasting will equal more listeners.

See below for more on this.

b) bandwidth
Another “problem” cited by Maffin is this: CBC podcasts are just too darn popular. And the bandwidth costs are high. Well, for a public broadcaster struggling for ratings and relevance, you would think the reaction would be: there are many thousands of Canadians who wish to get CBC podcasts – that’s wonderful! How do we make more of it available? iTune’s most popular podcast week after week is CBCRadio3.

This reminds me a little of a story I heard about Hudson’s Bay Company, who apparently used to sell boxes of cookies, a popular item. After weeks of buying these cookies at a particular store, a customer was shocked to find the boxes not available one week, and then not available the next week. He asked the manager why the cookies weren’t in stock, and the manager replied: “Oh we kept selling out, and it was just too much bother to keep them in stock.”

There’s a bit of a difference here, since there’s real cost to podcast bandwidth & no monetary return … but if I understand right, streaming is the real bandwidth hog. Why not kill the streaming project, and focus resources on the much more useful podcast/archive service?

c) Revenues
This one gets me steamed. CBC apparently makes lots (how much?) of money from selling tapes, CD’s, transcripts, and books of radio programs …so offering free mp3s for download will kill that revenue stream. This is the real problem with the CBC approach. The CBC priority should be increasing listenership, which will put them in a much stronger position in negotiating for funding – what a public broadcaster should argue for.

Instead the CBC is more focused on ways to turn itself into a business – see their worrying announcement of a partnership with America Online.

The CBC’s biggest problem is chronic underfunding from the government – so you can make that up 3 ways: get more govt funding, advertising, or charge for services. I would argue that as a crown corporation, funded by my tax money, CBC should not have the right even to sell me content which I have already paid for… But I may be in the minority. Still what is CBC management position on this? If they are not on my side here, then I would say we are in big trouble.

Podcasting will quickly become the main source of audio in the world – that’s my opinion. Perhaps in 5 years. If CBC management does not recognize this, and does not articulate a clear strategy on how they will provide this content – rather than becoming a commercial broadcaster — then I will withdraw my support.

2. Communication
First: I got much good information about CBC’s podcasting strategy talking to Tod Maffin. It turns out CBC isn’t totally clueless – which is what I told the class at Concordia, and I have written many times on my blog, because that’s all the information I had. Here is what CBC writes on their podcast page:

Podcasting Trial
This is a pilot project.
CBC hopes to explore the potential for podcasting and has chosen the shows listed as test subjects. Your feedback on this process is much appreciated.
If you have any questions or concerns about CBC Radio’s podcasting trial, please contact us at CBC Audience Relations

Now, why doesn’t CBC tell me their strategy and some of the problems with copyright issues on this page? That would go a long way to dispelling my still-bitter impression that CBC (unlike their public broadcasting bretheren BBC, ABC and NPR) are podcast idiots.

And note that CBC’s “appreciation” of my feedback has been demonstrated by NOT answering emails. This is unacceptable. ABC and BBC have both responded to my emails, and here’s what the Australain National Radio had to say:

Dear Hugh,

Thanks for your email, and your kind comments. Hope you continue to enjoy Radio National’s podcasts; more programs will become available for downloading soon. I’m sure the CBC will get on board sometime … maybe you can start a one-man campaign?!

Best wishes,
Kate Leavey
RN Listener Enquiries

3. Other Public Broadcasters
Look at what other public broadcasters are doing. Check BBC’s 19 podcasts, and look too here, and here, and here. NPR = 46 podcasts. ABC = 17 podcasts .

These public broadcasters are leading the charge and defining what a public broadcaster will become in the new digital age. There is no indication that CBC has any idea how they will become more relevant to Canadians through digital media. They seem to be going the opposite direction: How can we become less relevant. Take a look at CBC’s strategies & priorities, and see if you can detect anything remotely forward-looking.

4. CBC dumb content.
This is a more nebulous area, and perhaps the least important point. They are chasing ratings, and think dumb content and EZ listening is the way to go to get it. Essentially replicating crapy commercial radio. There’s no reason to fund a public broadcaster who provides the same content (worse) than commercial radio. It makes no sense at all. However, I am willing to let the CBC shoot itself in the foot by wasting my tax dollars on crap, as long as I can listen to their good content. But I can only do this if they podcast so I can listen to good mp3s while Freestyle is on the radiowaves. As it is, I listen to BBC and NPR instead. So CBC is in the process of making themselves irrelevant to me, and I am a huge defender of the cause. I assume there are others like me who will not defend CBC if it means I have to listen to Freestyle-type programming all the time. But I will let CBC have their Freestyle if they can give me wiretap mp3s that I can listen to when I want.

5. Call for Some Proposals
CBC could become an important enabler of so much wonderful Canadian content – through finding ways to promote & support podcasting, vlogging, and encouraging distributed media. This stuff is so cheap now, and CBC could have a huge impact in helping to spread these technologies throughout the country – to hear voices we don’t normally hear – what about podcasts of interviews with aboriginal elders? what about interviews with street kids? sask farmers? what about a CBC podcasting program aimed at getting seniors in senior homes to tell their stories? what about interviews with university professors? ie. what if CBC committed itself to training thousands of people to make podcasts? CBC would then be enabling Canadians to tell their stories rather than being this big old heavy filter ? Or in addition to that?

These are just a couple of ideas. Maybe CBC’s not the right group to do this. But they’re also not the right group to give forcefeed me EZ listening, but they don’t seem to have any problems doing that.

Comments? Questions?

OK, I’ve just launched a little experimental project, let’s see how it goes. It’s called LibriVox:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

There some more info here.

So if you know any podcasters, literature buffs, actors, librarians, teachers, readers, writers, radio announcers, or anyone at all who might be interested in donating some time to read a chapter of a public domain book and record it to the net, please send them to LibriVox. If you want to get directly in touch, try: librivox(at]yahoo(dot]ca.

So this is for all you bloggers who read and comment on this site occasionally: (eponym, fling, andre, mike l, martine, seb, wirearchy, danielle and the rest)…

let’s see where it all goes!

rms @ copyright2005
flickr pic by francois@edito.qc.ca

Somewhere I’ve read that waiting for the interesting post too gestate into something truly gem-like usually means you won’t post about it. So, I was “planning to write a longer post later” (ha! I’ve heard that before); instead I’ll just jot down some thoughts about the copyright2005 conference I attended last night in Montreal, where Richard Stallman gave the keynote, followed by a pannel discussion with rms, russell mcormond of digital copyright canada, and Marcus Bornfreund of Creative Commons Canada, and a few others.

RMS’s speech was done in (somewhat faltering) french, and covered tghe general issues of free software and patent/artistic issues. The Q&A and pannel discussions were much more interesting, mainly for the rather viscious debate between rms and marcus bornfreund of Creative Commons Canada.

rms has withdrawn explicit support for the Creative Commons project (though he recognizes it is a “better” option than the mainstream) because CC has added several new licence options (to the original six), at least one of which, in rms’s view, do not do an adequate job of protecting freedom. (Here is the full list of CC licenses). rms argues that, like the GPL, the creative commons licences should insist on a certain number of core freedoms. Apparently in conversations with CC founder Larry Lessig, Lessig said that those freedoms were “empty” in the CC format.

This criticism of Creative Commons set off the litigator instinct in lawyer-Marcus Bornfreund, who attacked Stallman’s position (and Stallman himself) as a “fascist leader,” forcing his “ideology” on his “followers,” and denying people “choice,” after all doesn’t “choice mean freedom? Yet your leader wants to deny you choice.” It was a pretty intense attack, and a little awkward, but raises a very good question that people need to be able to answer. Is choice freedom?

Bornfreund’s view, as I understood it, is that the author (of art, of software) should be able to choose between a full spectrum of licences, presumably from the freest to the most restricting (if his claim that choice means freedom is valid, then in this case the choice should go all the way to the most restrictive patent/copyright now available). Bornfreund is arguing to give the author the ability to allow users of his/her work to share, if the author wishes. Freedom to share is something the author has the right to grant, or not.

Stallman claims that certain freedoms must be essential for everyone, such as the right to make unlimited non-commercial copies of works. Stallman is arguing that the right to share should be an essential freedom for people regardless of what the author thinks. (Note this is in non-commercial cases). Freedom to share is an inalienable right for all of society.

In other words, Stallman argues for freedom in society, whereas Bornfreund argues for freedom of the author.

It’s too bad the debate was so acrimonious, with, I think it’s fair to say, Bornfreund crossing the line from reasoned argument to show-boaty attack, and not coming off too well in the process. His fascist comments were over the top, and his views of freedom rather childish (if you think freedom is so great, then I am free to punch you in the nose and there’s nothing you can do about it), still if you don’t have time to think about it they sell well, especially since you hear this kind of view of freedom so often (eg free markets = democracy etc).

I guess Stallman has seen this kind of attack before, in the Open Source split from the Free Software movement, where his insistence that there is a philosophical reason for making source code available was made a secondary concern to the pragmatic advantages to open source coding methods. That is, the ethical principle of Free Software was replaced with pragmatic principle in open source. An improved means of production is not the goal of the free Software movement, though it’s a nice fringe benefit.

To be a principled person in the face of competing practical concerns is not easy, and Stallman just seems to shrug off accusations of utopian dreaming and evangelism. He has a belief about what is right, a goal for what right would look like, and refuses to bend from these pillars. He’ll continue taking lumps for that cause, I’m sure.

indymeda.quebec recorded (audio & visual) the event and it should be available here, soon.

and congrats to Robin Millette and the rest of the organizers and volunteers for putting together such a successful event.

Wonderful. CanWest, the media giant that owns 11 major Canadian daily newspapers, including the horrendous Montreal Gazette, the right-wing National Post, as well as the Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald; and the Global Television Network has launched a new magazine/website/portal aimed at “urban, intelligent, and fun 18-34 year-olds.”

Title?? Yes: Dose.

Quoth my (upstart) doppelganger, Noah Godfrey, Publisher of Dose (v2):

“Built by young Canadians, Dose is designed specifically to serve the unique needs and enhance the lifestyle of this media-savvy demographic.”

“Through multiple touch points, Dose will provide information and services from the perspective of our peers. We will empower our audience with ideas that will engage them in thought, conversation, and activity, all packaged in relevant formats that are free and convenient. Our objective is to make Dose a media brand by which our peers define themselves.”

Sounds delish.

You know it would have been cool if this had been in the UK or something, but what are the odds of seeing these guys pop up in Canada? For now they do not plan to spread their magazine anywhere east of Ottawa (much to my relief).

Well what can you do? Let’s hope there are no lawyers letters in the mail telling me to change the name of my weblog. (Speaking of which I noticed a recent uptick in hits, coinciding strangely with no posts from me. An explanation I guess).

For some reactions, here’s UBC’s Thunderbird once and twice.

I suppose I shouldn’t be such a skeptic (after all they are planning to offer ring tones on their site!), but I must admit I feel a little violated. Maybe I can make a few thou off of dosemagazine.com now though?

IT conversations, a site that broacasts talks by leading thinkers on all things informational-technology-y, brings this (awe)-inspiring talk which argues that everything, every book and every song & movie, every recorded lecture, everything ought to be, and can feasibly (!) be put online, for anyone to access.

Brewster Kahle, currently leads the Internet Archive (and various previous successes), a repository of everything media, which, among all sorts of amazing things, offers stogage space, for free, for life, for anything published under a Creative Commons license. Among the many many great things in this very brief talk, Kahle mentions, the IA’s collection of lego movies.

If you worry about your ideals, and think the Machine is too big to fight against, listen to this and have some hope. Universal Access to All Human Knowlegde. A worthy, and you will be convinced, possible goal. The question is how many of you will help push for it? (Me included).

The amazing thing, though, is imagining how anyone could argue against this project…but I am sure the lawyers are lining up.

Kahle gets extra points for suing the US goverment to allow out-of-print (but copyrighted) books to be scanned and put online, but even without extra points, he makes it to the top of my “most exciting audio streams” list for 2005.

this is just one of those cool things that the universe likes to throw out at us to remind us that everything, in the end, is related to everything else: Flickr Tokyo Photo Surpise.

Update: O! Ye non-believers, with hearts of cold and minds closed to the Truth, behold: Evidence.

Says one fella in the thread, eloquently and with a hint of the pargmatic philosopher about him:

Whatever your thoughts about coincidences, there appears to be a broad consensus that they occur more frequently on Flickr than they do in our day-to-day lives. I think that says something very interesting about the structure of Flickr, the way it allows those connections to happen. And it has potentially profound implications for Flickr-like systems in general.

It may just be that flickr helps us notice coincidences more often — but that doesn’t make them any less coincidental, now, does it? and maybe it even makes flickr interesting for new and different reasons.

I posted a while ago about nietzsche and blogging, and then after a reminder from sen no sen, I dug up some more nietzsche, all of which amounted to a few observations, summarized a bit crassly here:
1. blogging can be a way to transform ones life into something more (art)
2. seeing ones life as art is a means to transform suffering into something meaningful and positive
3. if one is driven by art, one should strive for art
and finally
4. one should equate ones life to fate, and love that fate, whatever it might be

You may have seen this intense video by Justin Hall (via i never knew). Hall has chronicled the last 11 yrs of his personal life online. The video, titled aptly, “I sort of had a breakdown in January 2005″ is a cringe-inducing or gut-wrenching 10-minute peek into the soul of a blogger mid-meltdown, a very strange place to peek. Commenters are split between: “I feel your pain,” and “Wait wait wait WAIT ONE FUCKING SECOND, You’re 30 years old? What the fuck, dude!” Anyway, Justin Hall’s dilemma: his meaningful relationships are with that wide web of the internet, his writing (and his camera!); and his candid online writing about personal life taints his personal relationships. So he’s alone. Blogging and art, or or real connection; he thinks he can’t have both.

The video makes painful watching–it’s not the sort of stuff you see too often, but it’s fascinating are really weird, and you can watch real-time as Hall consciously translates this breakdown into a video. At one point Hall, with a wry chuckle, choked in tears, says something like: “If I’m going to go through this crap, I might as well make some good media with it.” I laughed out loud when I head that, but he’s right. Isn’t that, really, what art does? It transforms our lives, experience and our (possibly self-absorbed) torment into something more, something wider, something that other people can connect with? (I used to have a prof in university who constantly quoted CS Lewis: “We read to know we are not alone.”) Whatever you think of Justin Hall’s misery, he took it and transformed it into something for the rest of us to consider, and it probably did him some good. Nietzsche:

Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

Blogging as problem and solution, maybe.

I was thinking about Justin Hall as I hopped into a taxi tonight. It’s rare to find a cab driver in Montreal who isn’t mid-argument, or mid-plea with some friend or lover on his mobile while driving you from place to place. A good thing, probably, at least for taxi drivers: talking makes their shifts pass faster, and you hope it helps them better develop their own relationships. But that technology cuts completely my interaction with the driver: I give my destination, and pay my bill. In the past you could count on every fouth taxi ride providing some entertaining conversation–rants about the mayor and bicycles, or just pleasant weather-talk–and sometimes some great human interaction. Now it’s one out of ten, because of mobile phone technology, which occupies the driver with other things. So the crazy taxi conversation fades from our world; what was once a social and commercial transaction becomes nothing but a commercial transaction. I don’t begrudge taxi drivers their mobile converations, but I miss the crazy-talk. I’ve lost out a bit, and I think society has lost out a bit too – though probably the taxi drivers have gained, which is fair-enough as far as trades go.

Blogging’s got some of that calculus as well: you gain in interaction with a community of like-minded individuals spread through the ether of the net, but your flesh n blood interactions can suffer. I notice this in a very small way with myself and others. The trade off. Maybe it’s a bit much to call blogging art, and maybe recording a tantrum isn’t art either; but it’s engaging, I was drawn in, fascinated, and decided to write about it, which gives it some more value, at least to me.

I am slow to get used to blogging, where I should probably be putting out more thoughts, half-cocked if need be, rather than just letting them simmer, trying to get them right. Well, here are some neither fully-formed, nor coherent, but what follows is the begining of some thoughts on Nietzsche and Art and blogging:

Friedrich Nietzsche in Will to Power, fragment 853, outlines the importance of Art in an existence that Neitzsche calls “frightening,” where Truth (God is dead) has been toppled, and we struggle comprehend what it means to live in a world where we have no objective (God) to appeal to in questions of consequence. Says Nietzsche:

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life….
Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge–of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge.
Art as the redemption of the man of action–of those who not only see the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live it, want to live it, the tragic war-like men, then hero.
Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

OK now all this has something to do with blogging, I think. Nietzsche’s general gist is that with the loss of faith in anything beyond human consciousness, humans can go down two paths: one is pessimist, and sees disaster (chaos will result); the other optimist (sort of), the path of the overman (Übermensch), who sees this loss of objective Truth as liberating… a realization of the creative power of humans to form truth (small-T) around principles of their making. He sees this as a sort of Art — not just artistic art, but life as art, where forming the principles of one’s own morality becomes a creative exercise, and living itself becomes Art. So if you live your own life as a kind of artistic creation, then you manage to acheive a life Nietzsche would be proud of (well probably not, since he was Nietzsche…).

This process of transforming life into art is a magical sort of thing: anyone who has written a brilliant poem after being spurned by that cute girl in calculus class–no matter how poorly the stanzas stand-up to time–can attest to the power of that creation. In producing Art we transform our own existence into something more, and somehow that enables us to turn “suffering into great delight.”

And more, we take even greater pleasure in sharing that with others. I was discussing capital-A Art with with a writer friend over coffee, and he said, more or less, “Art just is, don’t worry about whether it’s important or not. Birds sing, people paint and write and make art. We are creatures who make art, so don’t spend time humming about why that is important.” I agree, though I think Art is important for specific reasons (another post sometime) … but the relevant thing is that humans like to create, we derive benefits from creating, and we like to share our creations with the world. Anyone who has built something, anything–a bookcase, a great script to track who’s bookmarking urls in del.icio.us, a newly landscaped garden, or a novel–can attest to the pleasure not just in looking at one’s own work, but having a close friend admire it as well. Strangers are even better.

Blogging is particularly important because it allows, and encourages, anyone–as long as they have access to technology, never guaranteed–to easily transform bits of their lives into Art which they can share with others, a life-affirming sort of thing that Nietzsche might be happy about. Particularly since blogging by its nature tends to diffract the capital-T Truth that other forms of controlled media try to sell us. (The subject of a future post).

All this is just more rambling, except that it provides some context for a couple of specific projects I am developing, and I encourage any blogger to consider as well: working with groups of people who are often marginalized to help them find the pleasures, and the Nietzschean benefits of blogging, of finding Art in their lives, and finding an audience for their Art in blogging. More on these projects later.

As part of the evolution of the mycomment blogging discussions started by Mike L, here is a quick how-to post your comments on other blogs, back to your own site, using an rss feed of:
del.icio.us/YOURNAME/mycomments

(scroll down on this page, in sidebar on the rt to see what that looks like, a dynamic blogroll of blogs you’re commenting on, and your comments).

There are probably more elegant ways to do this, but here’s how I did it:

-create del.icio.us tag mycomments
-whenever you comment on someone else’s blog, post it to del.icio.us and tag it mycomments … cut&paste a bit of it into “extended” field if you want some of the content to come up on your page in the rss feed you create
-to generate javascript of your rss feed goto rss-to-javascrip
-in the URL box put “http://del.icio.us/rss/YOURNAME/mycomments”
-if you want to show content, click “yes” to “show descriptions”
-generate javascript
-now post the script into your blog twemplate, in the sidebar section and voila, you have your comments elsewhere appearing on your own blog.

To refine the hack, you can tag all your comments mycomments, and the ones you want to post to your site mycomments + public.

Also, if you would like to help keep track of the spread of this tool, salp a commentblogger delicious tag on any blogs (including your own) that do this.

also props must go out to fling93 for being the first known species of mycomment poster found in the del.icio.us habitat.

I have been thinking about Free Software as a uniquely successful anarchist project, and one which may well–through its success–have impacts beyond the tools we use on our computers.

By “anarchist” I mean of course the actual definition, rather than reference to black-masked Molotov-cocktail-throwers, namely: a project based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals, without hierarchy or imposed authority.

What makes Free Software exciting is its ability to propagate itself: that is, if you intend to make use of Free Software, you must agree to play by the rules of Free Software. You may use it, change it, copy it and share it as you like… but whatever you do with it, you must provide to the world on the same terms. The rest of the world must be free to use, change, copy and share. This is the beauty of the GNU General Public License. The ideal of the Free Software (anarchist) project is spread each time it is used.

One of my most infuriating reads as an undergrad was Robert Nozick. His 1974 philosophical text, Anarchy, State and Utopia underpins much of the right-wing movement of the past 30 years, along with work by free-marketeering economist Milton Friedman and the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Nozick argued strenuously that redistribution of wealth (the basis of the welfare state) is fundamentally unjust: taxation and redistribution of wealth (through, for instance, social programs) is on par with forced slave labour. No one, he claimed, has the right to take from a person goods which they have acquired or produced justly through their own work.

Nozick’s main premise is that justice can be defined through three actions:

1. how things not previously possessed by anyone may be acquired;
2. how possession may be transferred from one person to another; and
3. what must be done to rectify injustices arising from violations of (1) and (2).

His argument is that as long as 1 happens justly, 2 can only be achieved justly if the owner agrees – so no forced redistribution can be just.

I was looking over some of Nozick’s work (not much is available online, by the way) for other purposes, but was struck by how pleased Nozick would have been (I think) to see the Free Software movement emerge. While I have been interested in FS mainly for reasons from the left (an alternate way of organizing innovation and collaboration, outside of the traditional commercial framework), I realized that the FS movement is classic Nozick in its definition, and provides a true, real-life “test” of the justice principle. (This is often a failing in political philosophies of distribution, since in many require thought experiments to “test” a moral hypothesis, such as Hobbes‘ imagining the “social contract” development, one must to postulate a time before any civic rigths and resposibilities existed, and see what reasonable ageements may have been made).

In any case, FS offers a starting point to watch as a free system, based on a set of ethical principles, develops in real-time. Ownership here is completely redefined, through the GPL, and one can only claim ownership of free software if one relinquishes the traditional rights associated with that ownership. No government is needed to redistribute, since FS ingeniously makes redistribution a necessary condition of any FS transaction between two “agents”: the commons, which “owns” in a sense Free Software, and someone who wants to use and or modify the FS. That is, if you wish to use FS to build something new, whatever you build, you must allow to be redistributed freely in the same way the original FS was.

Here is a commons that is unlimited, and so far looks to be very far from tragedy. The thing to watch is how nervous the big corporations get, and how our apparent freed trade-loving governments move when it becomes clear that the world of proprietary software is feeling real pressure from the proliferation of FS.

So proponents of FS must be vigilant to watch what our governments are doing to find unjust ways of limiting the growth of this most innovative, and so far enromously successful, social and technological experiment.

This is the start of my thoughts on copyrigh/left, IP and free software.

My pal devlin who works on biotech/agriculture IP issues, sent me a Globe and Mail story about Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. M$ of course is leading the charge, worried about pirate copies of Window XP funding terrorism (etc.).

My response was: “Rats scurrying on a sinking ship.”

To which Devlin, the consumate marxist, replied that one would have thought the same about corrupt capitalists in the 20th Century but look how well they’ve done. My answer to that, which is the seed to a longer (planned) article, was:

The difference is that in the beginning of the 20th C, capital was concerened mainly with producing objects (you can include food in there), and in the end the capitalist system is very rational (except that it is incompatible with physical limits of the world/environment): the objective is to make enough people rich enough to want to preserve the system. In that way, organized labour was a useful tool to keep the system going, because it ensured that enough people were content with the system. That’s why people didn’t rebel (draconian laws and police-state tactics were used in US & Canada in the teens and 20s, but it was New Deal policies that saved capitalism from itself). For the most part, for the majority of people the system seemed to give them a life comfortable enough not to rise up & overthrow the Man.

But back to the question, 20th C capitalism, and its laws, governed things which cost money for good reason: You need to produce raw materials, transport them, reshape them, and sell them again. At each stage there is work that needs to be done, and most agree that that work should be rewarded; furthere there is a built-in mechanism to keep it functioning that way — if someone fails to get paid somewhere in the line, then the system breaks down.

IP is a different kettle of fish. Music companies want to get paid for things they don’t have to do anymore (because of technology): distribution. And software companies want to protect monoplolies on their software, but what they can’t fight is BETTER, free software. Windows controls the market now because they cornered the distribion market early on, and they produced products that became the standard, and tho people complained, there was no real reason to fight it cause the other products weren’t necessarily much better (wordperfect was just as annoying as M$ word). But now it turns out that there are better opensource operating systems (GNU/Linux), and better opensource office software (openoffice.org) and better email clients and browsers (thunderbird and firefox), plus all sorts of amazing new technologies that are making the power of the internet open to all in ways it never was (wiki, blogging, collaborative bookmarking del.icio.us, php, etc.). As time goes on the tools will become more powerful and more and more accessible to the average joe.

So for the majority of work people do, there are better technologies available, free, and developed in a collaborative open format, easily available to anyone with an internet connection. How do you fight against that? Boo hoo that there are pirated versions of Wiindows XP everywhere. The product is shit, and soon there will be just as many computers with GNU/Linux instead. why priate a crappy product when a free version of a better product is available?

the beauty of the hacker culture is that it is: 1. egalitarian (quality of work is arbiter), 2. collaborative (the idea of sharing is wide-spread) 3. anti-establishment (coonstraints on 1 & 2 are viewed with hostility), and 4. superior in product to other modalities.

as for music & movies, I think as the “means of production” become cheaper and more accessible, and same with means of distribution (internet radio taking place of blogs) no one will cry if britney spears’ albums cost $50 while many new innovative bands take new approaches to making a living. again boo hoo if Sony and U2 sue everyone in sight, I think more and more people will turn to creative commons approaches to art & its distribution, and just cut out the cob-webby middle men, who do nothing but cut out a huge slice of pie, now doing an irrelevant thing: marketing stars. If the new system is separated and parallel to the Hollywood productions of Pearl Harbour and Master and Commander, well so much the better for the people who chose the other route. If people want to pay lots of money for crap that’s their perogative, but we are coming to a time when art and culture will be disseminated free by people who think that ideas should belong to the people, not the corporations that own the rights.

This means, in my view, that these companies (M$, Sony-Universal, MegaArtProduct Inc and Mega Software Giant Inc) are fighting irrelevancy, because the means of production are being put into the hands of the collective masses, and the means of free distribution already exists.

This is the kernel of the story I am planning to write on Free Software and the coming anarchist technolution.

COMMENTS FROM DEVLIN:

I don’t see IP as a different kettle of fish. I don’t think capitalism has survived because it is the most efficient system or because it has distributed the world’s resources in a fair way. Look at the world– would you say that there are enough people living comfortably from capitalism? Most people are surviving despite capitalism not because of it. It was a very small minority from the working class that was able to secure some comfort for itself and this is and will always be precarious for that minority– and for the world since the model is entirely unsustainable.

Capitalism began with a brutal enclosure of the commons and the brutal destruction of alternative economic systems and cultures. There is no reason to believe that these alternative systems could not have developed to be much more comfortable for a much larger number of people than what capitalism has offered. Just look at the industrialisation of agriculture, which is still progressing and which therefore gives us a clearer sense of how things could have evolved much differently.

Capitalism has never been about “free markets” or about rewarding work. Sure there are elements of both, but this is not its essence and there could easily be more of both in other systems. Capitalism is fundamentally about property rights (ever expanding privatisation) and accumulation (ever expanding commodification). Capitalists are always trying to make more profit while doing less. This is the whole point of owning or monopolising the means of productiuon– it allows you to exploit labour (and nature) as much as possible. IPRs are a means to expand commodification and privatisation– whether its seeds, software or music.

David Harvey, in his book New Imperialism (which you really must read), explains how capitalism has really always functioned by way of accumulation by dispossession. With the system now in a crisis (that got going in the 1970s) capital will look for more ways to accumulate (i.e. Make profit) by increasingly dispossessing people of any non-capitalist forms of wealth.

I think it is very dangerous for the potential movement to try and separate what’s happening today from the more general exploitation that capitalism has wrought and continues to wreak on people everywhere (but particularly in the South). Look at the struggles of indigenous peoples. Look at the struggles of peasants. These are long-standing struggles by people against the imposition of a capitalist model that is not defeating them because it offers something better. So, while I think it is very important to foster and encourage the hacker/free software movement, I think that it is very important to see how this struggle is intimately connected to other struggles.

MY RESPONSE TO DEVLIN COMMENTS

IP is a differenet kettle of fish in that it represents commodification, and privatization, of limitless and non-tangible “goods,” ideas. This compares with commodification of tangible “goods” such as land, sheep, oil and monkey wrenches. More on this distinction in a moment.

You are right on many points about capitalism, its approach to alternatives, and especially the North/South dichotomy, which I skirted on purpose… I am talking about mature capitalism in say North Amercia, but yes there is brutal (armed) maintenance of exploitative relationships between North and South, but this is acheived (more or less consciously) with the support of a relatively comfortable western population. while there is poverty here, most people think the system is “fair” in that the majority of people think they have access to affluence, at least enough to keep them from rising up. This does not discount the extereme poverty, and repression, of certain populations here (first nations, for example, and to a large degree the black population in the US). But generally people are happy with the system (as they imagine it). But things ARE changing (mostly for the worse not better).

Also I realize that the economist’s view of capitalism (free markets and managed employment stats) have nothing to do with the real tools used, but the concepts are not empty. Capitalism, or rather commerce, is generally a decent way to exchange goods and services; the problem is abuse of the system (which is inherent in the system itself). Yes it tends to monopoly and control and brutality, in order to maintain its unsustainable aims: constant increasing profits.

And YES the free software movement should see itself in the context of other struggles. Certainly. And, we need to put these different movements together (alternative software, alternative agriculture, alternative commerce, alternative art … need alternative energy and we’ll be all set).

The difference between IP and traditional goods is the cost of production and the means of distribution. A monopoly capitalist can control all the pineapples by buying all the orchards. But he can’t control all the ideas of the hungry pineappleless people. Writers do not need publishers to decide what to publish, musicians do not need Sony to package and sell their discs.

What I see is a ballooning movement, which is in fact held together by the success of the free-software movement, and the potential it provides for open inforamtion exchange, open exchange of goods and services OUTSIDE the mainstream. For instance: Knowledge is controlled to a certain extent by universities. why? because you had to go there to hear professors speak on a topic. were they the best speakers? the smartest people? prob not… but what if you had access to the smartest speakers on a topic, over the web? access to all thieir books free over the web? access to textbooks etc. (see wikibooks.org to imagine how it might be possible). Ditto with radio waves. Enter internet radio (yes they are getting hammered by royalty fees, but what if 5%, 10%, 50% of musicians start publishing their music on their own, outside of Sony?).

Anyway there is much work to do, and unifying these movements (say labour(?) free software, agriculture, culture, energy) is the grand anarchist project of the future, and one that to me, for the first time, seems possible due to advances, and the incredible SUCCESS of free software.