librivox

Dante’s Inferno: Cori reads; Gustave Doré illustrates; and lucid videoifies.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, and the question comes up often enough: why not license the recordings as creative commons/non-commercial instead? The question came up recently and here was my answer:

So, why should LibriVox recordings be in the public domain, rather than a creative commons license?

LibriVox comes out of a number of ideas: the idealism & pragmatic successes of the free software movement, the collaborative methodology (+ “it needn’t be perfect to be useful”) of wikipedia, lessig’s defense of the commons, and the alternative licensing of creative commons works, the podcasting platform which democratized distribution of media, the astoundingly useful work of project gutenberg, that has been toiling away since 1971 making public domain texts available to anyone for free, and finally brewster kahle’s internet archive and the vision of universal access to all human knowledge.

one of the important ideas behind LibriVox was this: a vibrant public domain is essential for a healthy society, and is essential for innovation - which can also be expressed as: “finding solutions to problems.” having a wide and vibrant public domain - of ideas, texts, learning, science, open source code, audio recordings, art etc. - means that as we face problems of one kind or another, we have at our disposal a whole host of tools and information and building blocks that will help us find solutions. we’ve seen in the past few decades, however, a move against this idea of public intellectual space - broadly the the movement towards protection of “intellectual property.” we’ve seen this across all sectors of society, from how universities treat their scientific research, to patenting of life, patents on processes, the abusive and self-destructive suing of fans by music companies and hollywood. I oppose much of this stuff on a number of grounds: one is a moral objection to the greed of companies who wish to extend their ownership beyond where it had ever been imagined previously. The other objection is more pragmatic: that allowing companies to do this will stifle innovation, and in the long run will be very damaging to our societies.

so LibriVox - besides being a project about making audiobooks - was originally conceived of as a small bulwark in a larger moral, intellectual and political battle around the value of the “public domain” broadly defined. And part of that defense is this idea that people can and will and should build on the public domain to make new things and provide new more innovative solutions to problems. LibriVox would make the audio recordings, make them available, and the hope has always been that others would find great things to do with them. The ebay cottage industry, which annoys some people, is a good example: we have not figured out how to provide CDs of recordings to people, yet people want them. it would take more work and organization, and it would be nice if we could do that for free. but we can’t. so these other people download our files, burn CDs and sell them to people who want them. The end result is that more people get to listen to (inexpensive) public domain literature they wish to listen to (and wish to pay for), some ebayers have some added revenue generated from spreading great literature throughout the world, maybe more people hear about LibriVox (but maybe not). some people see that as a problem, but I certainly don’t.

But I hope people will come up with even more useful things to do with LibriVox recordings, and if they are commercial, I just can’t see any problem with that. the “thing” that they will be doing may be using LV recordings, but it certainly won’t be replicating what LV does already. they will be doing something new and hopefully interesting, probably educationally useful, and even if it IS nike selling sneakers with gord’s recording of Walden, well, at least more people might get turned on to Walden (though I assure you Nike can afford to hire someone to record a chunk of Walden).

so the question around licensing became this: do we want to limit how people use librivox recordings? what is *wrong* with commercial uses? as long as the audio remains accessible, and free for all to use forever, then I saw no reason why we should limit anything - limiting would just mean that in the scheme of things, fewer people would listen to the recordings we have made. and in my calculus of the universe, that’s a bad thing: I think the universe will be a better place the more people listen to LibriVox recordings.

But beyond that sort of pragmatic thinking, there is a wider philosophical question about ownership, control, and the act of truly giving something away. I think creative commons is a wonderful tool, and it changed the way I thought about art. but it maintains this idea: I own this work and you may do with it just what I say you may do. now that’s fine: I license, for instance, my personal blog writing like this. but LibriVox is more radical than this. LibriVox says: we make these recordings, and we give them away, no strings attached. use them as you like: you don’t have to ask permission or tell us about it, or do anything, just use them as you like. they are yours as much as they are ours now. we have gifted them to the universe.

That’s a pretty radical idea, far more radical than CC which says: here are the terms under which I allow you to use my work.

It’s radical and it’s liberating as well, because in some sense one’s ownership of things is a two way street, and the things you own in some sense own you too - ownership means you have certain responsibilities to that thing, including monitoring how other people use it. breaking that ownership bond is a powerful sort of experiment.

There are of course some very important pragmatic reasons for a public domain license rather than creative commons: public domain means we just don’t have to worry about it. we don’t have to chase anyone, or ask for checks or tell them they can’t use such and such to do so and so, we don’t have to hirer lawyers and sue our fans or anyone else. The files are there for all to use, and all we have to do is concern ourselves with our objective which is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

Along those lines, we didn’t want anyone to ever have to question which LibriVox license a certain audio falls under. it’s all the same, all public domain, and anyone can use it for whatever they like. period. answering questions is easy. having multiple licenses would have made that a headache for people, including us.

There is one final very important point, which I had not really thought about until Michael Hart of Gutenberg told me about it recently. US copyright law has extended and extended again the term of copyright, currently 95 years after publication date. this means that nothing has gone into the public in a very long time. and if copyright law-making continues on like this, there will be another extension when the next batch of public domain stuff is currently scheduled to click over. so, possibly, nothing new will ever go into the public domain again.

In the old days, there was about a 50-50 split: 50% of texts were in the public domain, 50% under copyright. every year more and more texts came into being, but a whole swath of things went into the public domain, and the ratio kept more or less the same. that was a healthy for society because people had much easier access to those texts that went into the public domain.

That’s not happening anymore. so the public domain is shrinking as a ratio of available knowledge.

Which brings another point: creative commons does not, in fact, make any contribution to the public domain, because the term of creative commons licenses is the same as for copyright (i think, that is: 95 years after publication). So creative commons in fact does NOTHING to protect or enhance the public domain - it only creates a new class of copyright protection that is much more liberal than previous incarnations.

So LibriVox is a small beacon of light in this policy question, slowly adding to the public domain while all around the public domain is shrinking. this is important in some broad sense beyond anything particular we do at librivox. at least I think it is.

Having said all that, I understand why some people don’t want their recordings in the public domain. but that’s fine, there are many other places to put audio up on the web. people don’t need LirbiVox to add recordings to the web. we represent just one little corner of the audio world. our corner is this: we make free public domain audio versions of public domain texts. if people want to help (many have) that’s great. if they don’t, then that’s OK too, there’s no reason people ought to be forced to make public domain recordings …

But that’s what LibriVox is for, making public domain audio recordings, and giving them away to the world.

This is an audio interview with Janne Vainio, an audio engineer at Nokia, who put together the Audiobooks project at Nokia’s BetaLabs. The project features LibriVox books as the first test books for download, in a special optimized format. From the about of the project:

Nokia Audiobooks is a beta concept that enables you to enjoy audiobooks while on the go. It includes a highly efficient audio compression technology optimized for voice (AMR-WB), a player application for S60 (Nokia Audiobook Player), and an audio converter tool for PC (Nokia Audiobook Manager). Whereas traditional music player applications are optimized for music, Nokia Audiobook Player is optimized for audiobooks, enabling you to browse chapters, set bookmarks, and automatically continue from where you stopped listening last time.

This is a segment from a longer LibriVox community podcast #74, that you can find here.

And here is the interview on its own: http://librivox.hughmcguire.net/communitypodcast/nokiaaudiobooks.mp3

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star about Canadian book 2.0 projects. The two projects cited are Evan’s Wikitravel Press, and LibriVox.

About Wikitravel Press, says he:

For example, Wikitravel, one of the Internet’s most acclaimed travel websites, was launched in 2003 by Montreal residents Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Using the same wiki collaborative technology that has proven so successful for Wikipedia, the Wikitravel site invited travelers to post their comments and experiences about places around the world in an effort to build a community-generated travel guide.

In less than five years, the site has accumulated more than 30,000 online travel guides in 18 languages, with more than 10,000 editorial contributions each week. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons licence that allows the public to use, copy or edit the guides.

Building on Wikitravel’s success, Prodromou and Jenkins recently established Wikitravel Press, which introduced its first two titles earlier this month. Wikitravel Press represents a new approach to travel book publishing based on Internet collaborative tools and print-on-demand technologies that should capture the attention of the industry for several reasons…

[there’s more]
And on LibriVox:

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

He finishes:

New technologies are rapidly reshaping the book industry and it is exciting to see how Canadians are quietly playing a leading role in the re-imagining of how books are created and distributed.

Been a while since I wrote a longish piece on LibriVox. Peter Kerry Powers, a Professor of English and chair of the English department at Messiah College, wrote a piece about audio books, and LibriVox, here. I commented on that post, Peter answered here, and this was my comment to on his second piece (i’ve edited it slightly, some of it is in direct answer to Peter’s stuff, so you might want to check out what he had to say, but I think it all should make sense on its own):

i’ll defer to your analysis of dickens, but the wider point is that the roots - some ancient, some more recent - of text literature is oral. so “reading” is a particular type of experience of literature, but not the only one, not the oldest one. as to the value of these different experiences of literature, I think that’s up to those who experience it to decide and describe. Certainly reading text and listening are not the same thing, but how one values one or the other is surely a matter for the individual to assess. If audio books *result* in a decrease in (paper)text reading, then I will be with you in decrying the loss of a certain type of skill and experience, one that cannot be replaced by listening (or by reading online for that matter). But I don’t think it’s the case that audio books result in less reading; I suspect the opposite, but I have no proof of that.

As for myself, some of my own most formative experiences of literature involved my mother reading to me: RLS’s Kidnapped; The Trumpeter Swan; Stuart Little; The Hobbit; and countless others. It never occurred to me to criticize my mother for stumbles, substandard reading or non-NPR intonations. Some of the philosophy behind LibriVox is a recreation of that interaction: not a professional performance of a text (there are plenty of those available), but instead an intimate experience of someone reading to you - with all the little warts and idiosyncrasies that come with intimate readings.

For someone who aggressively promotes this philosophy, check out Miette, an occasional LibriVox volunteer, and one of the first audiolit podcasters in the universe. She is at once “professional” in sound and approach, and also intimate and personal. Her stuff is very much: Miette reading to you; rather than Miette performing a text. See:
http://www.miettecast.com/

The other issues you’ve raise all relate to a common problem - this is true of much of the web in general - which is a misunderstanding of what LibriVox is for. Mainly, you are looking at LibriVox as “provider of audio books,” in the model of a traditional publisher whose job (at least as it is usually understood) is to produce books that readers want to purchase.

It might be easier to consider LibriVox not as a publisher, but rather as a library, at least as far as our relations to the listeners are concerned. That is, you would not go into a library, pull out five random books, and say, “I didn’t like these books, this library is no good, the books here are all crap.” This is the same impulse people have when they say: “bloggers are self-obsessed, they rant and rave and have bad grammar, and I will never waste my time reading blogs because they are stupid.” … It’s true that some blogs are stupid, but not true of any I read, not true of this blog. So the problem is not “blogs”; the problem, among others, is that people don’t know how to find blogs that they like reading. And they are faced with a similar problem you express about LibriVox, because they say: “Well, you say there is good stuff on blogs, but how do I find it in the sea of crap?” You and I know the answer, but it’s not so clear how to express the ways to “find” good blogs to read in a general sense. In the non-web world, when you open a newspaper, you are guaranteed a certain quality/type of writing by the masthead; ditto when you open a Penguin Classic or a Vintage Paperback or when you walk into a certain section of the books store. The web world works differently, and the “guarantee” is delivered differently, in my case from something like “network authority.”

But getting back to LibriVox, our objective is:
“To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

So we evaluate how we do things based on that objective. And partly for reasons of various kinds of idealism, but also in large part for pragmatic reasons, we’ve decided (rightly, I think), that criticism, ratings, particularly bad ratings are a hindrance to our objective, not a help. The main reason is that recording texts is difficult, and putting them out into public is a traumatic and sensitive thing for many people to do. Criticism, especially unsolicited negative criticism, turns people off from recording. But, we have an objective, stated above, and that objective is not: “To make the best audio …” or “BBC-quality audio …” Rather our objective is to record “all public domain texts.” We need all the help we can get, and we do what we can to “protect” our readers from harsh criticism that will stop them from participating.

So in fact, I think it is entirely fair for you to say that (some) LibriVox recordings are dull. Or annoying. Or both. I agree with you, or rather, that has been my experience of some LibriVox recordings. But I have the same experience with any random collection of text or audio books or music or art. And that’s what LibriVox is, a random collection. If fact, I personally find random collections of professionally-read audio books have a much higher quotient of dull and annoying than a random collection from LibriVox, but that’s my personal preference about style: humanity over professional performance. And certainly for me, it is totally incorrect to say *most* LV recordings are dull or annoying.

A few points of interest come out of this:
a) there are plenty of professional, “high-quality” audiobooks available for a price; our books are free if anyone wants them (and if they don’t, no matter)
b) if you compare our catalog to older “free” audio lit projects, projects that DO have high “standards” (eg literalsystems.org), our catalog is much bigger … which means that we have provided a resource, that would not be there otherwise, for those who want it. whether people like or use the resource or not is another question.
c) in our large catalog, there is an impressive amount of beautifully-read stuff, searchable by reader, some great ones include: david barnes, andy minter, karen savage, gord mackenzie, kara shallenberg … the list is much longer.

So the *result* of our fundamental policy to take all comers, and turn away no one, results in a strange catalog filled with lots of stuff that sometimes *is* dull, or “badly” read, or hard to listen to, for some people, especially if you are expecting a certain style of audio. But that does not mean that these more idiosyncratic readings don’t have any value. And our approach also results in a large number of good recordings (mine, for instance, I think fall somewhere between badly-read and good … they seem worth doing to me; certainly my more recent ones are “better” than older ones); and a surprising number of extraordinary recordings, that I would put toe to toe with any professional recordings.

Now your problem is finding the good stuff, and I sympathize with it. I think we could/should probably do something like an informal “recommendation” page. But again, if you look at our objective, helping people find good LibriVox stuff is not our “job.” …Our job is to make the audio, and make it available for free. .

It’s the “job” of the rest of the web to start sorting out this resource we are providing, and sorting the good stuff. Metafilter is a work-around starting point, but eventually someone will put up a site that sifts thru librivox audio and finds the really good stuff. And if you follow links from our catalog page, you’ll get to the Internet Archive, where our audio is hosted, and there you will find some ratings. But we don’t publicize that.

There is more to write on the relationship between ratings & an open project like LibriVox, but the ink in my pen is running out, and I wanted to touch on a couple more of your points.

In particular: “To some degree I think he’s suggesting that Librivox is really more like a blog service where readers can express themselves via recording.”
This is another misreading of what we are up to. LibriVox has a particular objective (quoted above). It is not for self-expression, etc., tho that might motivate some people. It’s got a very particular purpose, to provide a complete library of public domain books, in audio format. So, people are motivated to pitch in for lots of different reasons, but our decision-making about how or why we do things always has to answer to our objective.

“It’s also the case that in reading a published work, the reader puts himself/herself in the position of performer/artist who is interpreting the work of another artist.”
That is one way to look at it. You could also say, “the reader puts him/herself in the position of human who is doing their best to make a public domain text available in audio format.”

Now I know you’ll probably say I am picking at semantic bones there, but the first motivation/role is not the same as the second, and they will result in different approaches to recording, and different results. And you can argue with me about the “value” of the first or second motivation, but in the end it doesn’t matter because I (and, generally, people who buy into what LibriVox is trying to do) disagree with you. And you might further say I (and the rest of the gang) are wasting our time, but it is our time to waste.

Now if *everyone* said: “you’re wasting your time,” I and others might start scratching our heads, and wondering if this open project idea was kind of stupid after all. But we get enough emails & blog comments from people saying: “wow, what wonderful work you are doing,” that it’s easy enough to shrug the shoulders at those who say otherwise. And, amazingly to me, our audio books get downloaded thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of times. For instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan, published by us 2 days ago, has been downloaded 1,671 times! In 2 days! … Which, you, as a writer of books will recognize is the kind of number that DOES appeal to the ego and excitement of the people who participate in LibriVox, for all sorts of non-altruistic reasons. Which is fine, because that kind of excitement helps us with our objective.

Finally, to Puccini and Pavarotti, if I were them, I would be horrified to know that someone was telling people to stop singing in my name. That doesn’t mean I want to listen to bad opera, but there are so many reasons people don’t sing opera any more, so many reasons people don’t read any more, so many reasons people don’t celebrate literature, and I don’t want to be another contributor to all the things that discourage reading (or opera). I would much prefer to find ways to help encourage people to share literature, to discover great books - and mediocre books too - and to spread literature, to get closer to text, to reading, to the sounds of words and the ideas behind them; in the case of LirbiVox those people are behind the microphone, and on the other side of earphones…

And in its essence, LibriVox is not about audio books, it is about people, of all types and all skills, reading and recording public domain texts, and making them available for free for anyone who wants to listen. We work hard to help that happen, and whatever happens next is something we spend much less time worrying about..

News from the commercial side of audiobooks, amazon dishes out 300 smackers for audible.com.

quick calculation:
-the article indicates that audible’s catalog is roughly 90,000 works
-@$300M for the kit, that’s about 3k/title
-so that makes librivox’s donation to the universe roughly worth (in grubby capitalist terms): 1200*3000 = $3.6 million.

let’s discount by 50% for our quirks, and, which puts us at $1.8 million, which sounds very low to me.

We’re adding about 70 books a month now to our catalog, so next year we should we “worth” twice that!

Not that we’re for sale (now or ever) but it’s … kinda interesting.

*LibriVox top 10 books result in about 190,000 downloads per month.
*The zip files for those 10 books add up to 3.8 GB
*Or an average of 380 MB/download
*meaning, per month, our top 10 books alone represent 190,000 * 380MB = 72 TeraBytes

BUT: a download might be just one file, or a whole zip. so let’s say that only half those downloads are a whole zip, meaning monthly downloads for top 10, of 36 TB.

Those 10 books are 10 out of 1,200 books, or 0.8% of the catalog. But assuming that that 0.8% of the catalog = 33% of the downloads, then that makes our monthly bandwidth something like:

108TB/month.

Rough calc, but: Holy Shit.

Sorta taken aback by this, though I guess with the thousands of people who come thru LibriVox, it was going to happen eventually. A member of our little world (tho he never recorded), and a busy volunteer in Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders, Robert Marquardt died this morning. (Cancer).

I had a couple of exchanges with Robert in the past year …

As far as I know, this is the first youtube vid using LibriVox audio. This is DE. Wittkower reading Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism. Music is Richard Wagner’s Rheingold. I’m not sure the providence of the images.

I love when I discover richer and more varied uses for podcasts. Jim Mowatt, a long-time LibriVox guy, and a retired force behind the LibriVox community podcast, has just launched a podcast about history. He did wonderful work on the LV podcast, so I’ll bet this one will be a goodie, for you History buffs. Have not listened yet, but just queuing it up.

Check out: historyzine.com … or:
* Subscribe by RSS
* Subscribe in iTunes

LibriVox is doing another national novel writing month (nanowrimo) novel … why not sign up for a chapter here.

background:

During the month of November 2007, LibriVox volunteers write the serial novel The Yellow Sheet together, based on the guidelines of the National Novel Writing Month. Each volunteer writes one or more chapter (we do one chapter per day, so 30 chapters in total), and authors record their own chapters (on the day after they’ve written the chapter). At the end of the project, a novel of at least 50,000 words is released in text and audio form on the LibriVox catalogue. Please remember that both your writing and the recording wll be in the public domain.

Well, we did it. We just cataloged our 1,000th book, and for that a huge thank you must go out to everyone who has ever said or written the word LibriVox. Thank you first to the readers for lending their voices to something wonderful; to the Book Coordinators who pull things together; to the Meta Coordinators who get all this audio up on the net; to the Moderators who keep things running smoothly on our forum. And of course the other people: the proof listeners, the catalog development team, the web site designers and fixers, and all the forum volunteers of every stripe.

And more: to our listeners, and supporters, to Dan for keeping the servers running; to the Internet Archive for providing hosting for all our media, which makes it all possible; to Project Gutenberg (and other public domain projects) for liberating all this wonderful text onto the web.

And of course a big thank you to all our families and friends who live with our varying levels of LibriVox addiction.

Thank you thank you thank you…

And below is the “official press release” (or whatever it’s called) …

***

LibriVox makes it to 1,000!

LibriVox, the free audio book project has just cataloged its 1,000th book: “http://librivox.org/the-murders-in-the-rue-morgue-by-edgar-allen-poe/”, by Edgar Allan Poe (read by Reynard T. Fox).

LibriVox.org started in August 2005 with a simple objective: “to make all public domain books available as free audio books.” Thirteen people collaborated to make the first recording, Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Agent.”

Two years later, LibriVox has become the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world - we are now putting out 60-70 books a month, we have a catalog of 1,000 works, which represents a little over 6 months of *continuous* audio; we have some 1,500 volunteers who have contributed audio to the project; and a catalog that includes Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” “Moby Dick,” Darwin’s “Origin of the Species,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Einstein’s “Relativity: The Special and General Theory,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and other less well-known gems such as “Romance of Rubber” edited by John Martin. We have recordings in 21 languages, and about half of our recordings are solo efforts by one reader, while the other half are collaborations among many readers.

We are always looking for new volunteers! Come join us.

LibriVox is closing in on 1,000 books in our catalog (we’re at 997 as of a few minutes ago, thanks to Kara’s latest, This Country of Ours).

For your interest, here are a few (not all) of the books we published this October:

The Shortstop - Zane Grey
This Country of Ours, Part 1 - H.E. Marshall
On the Elementary Electrical Charge - Robert Millikan
The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters - Logan Marshall
The Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow - Augusta Groner
Miscellaneous Essays - Thomas de Quincey
The Goody-Naughty Book - Sarah Cory Rippey
Rudder Grange - Frank Stockton
Short Poetry Collection 051
Greylorn - Keith Laumer
LibriVox Short Story Collection Vol. 019
The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman - Fay Inchfawn
In a Garden - Amy Lowell
Kim - Rudyard Kipling
In Memoriam A.H.H. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
An Antarctic Mystery or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields - Jules Verne
In the Field (1914-1915) - Marcel Dupont
The Second Latchkey - Charles Norris and Alice Muriel Williamson
Götzendämmerung - Friedrich Nietzsche
Squirrels and other Fur-Bearers - John Burroughs
The Gospel According to St. Matthew - American Standard Version
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver - Edna St. Vincent Millay
October - Paul Laurence Dunbar
Van Oude Menschen de Dingen, die Voorbij Gaan - Louis Couperus
Fables de La Fontaine, livre 7 - Jean de La Fontaine
Short Poetry Collection 050
Seven Wives and Seven Prisons; Or, Experiences in the Life of a Matrimonial Monomaniac - L.A. Abbott
Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt - R. Talbot Kelly
Eleven Theses on Feuerbach - Karl Marx
The Fighting Governor : A Chronicle of Frontenac - Charles William Colby
The House that Jack Built - Unknown
The Burgess Bird Book for Children - Thornton W. Burgess
Short Poetry Collection 049
The Children of the New Forest - Frederick Marryat
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
The Insurrection in Dublin - James Stephens
Short Poetry Collection 048
The House on the Hill - Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Dead - James Joyce
A Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy - Ida Laura Pfeiffer
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Shakespeare Monologues, Volume 4 - William Shakespeare
The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Lawrence Beesley
Molly Make-Believe - Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
Holy Sonnets - John Donne
Howards End - E.M. Forster
Little Eve Edgarton - Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
LibriVox Short Story Collection Vol. 018
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein

i participated a while ago on Michel Dumais’ Citoyen Numerique. you have to listen through the little player, it’s:

2007 10 11 01citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 02citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 03citoyennumnerique-ballado

the main librivox part is 03, at minute: 15:15ish. the rest is about podcasting, podcasting in quebec, digital music downloads etc … i make a couple of comments in those parts but not much.

other participants are my montreal podmates: bob goyetche & sylvain grand’maison, as well as journalist Tristan Péloquin.

from librivox forum:

After years of listening to Libri Vox works I have now felt the need to post a call to do up a book and am even ready to record chapters if needed….

…After years of listening to LibriVox works … ??? wow. I guess we have been around for a while now.

First: you can get updated about new releases via twitter, by following http://twitter.com/librivox (seems not to have updated today?)

Next: The last few LibriVox releases are all pretty cool.

South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917
by Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton’s most famous expedition was planned to be an attempt to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic, to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, by way of the Pole. It set out from London on 1 August 1914, and reached the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915, where the pack ice closed in on the Endurance. The ship was broken by the ice on 27 October 1915. The 28 crew members managed to flee to Elephant Island, bringing three small boats with them. Shackleton and five other men managed to reach the southern coast of South Georgia in one of the small boats (in a real epic journey). Shackleton managed to rescue all of the stranded crew from Elephant Island without loss in the Chilean’s navy seagoing steam tug Yelcho, on August 30, 1916, in the middle of the Antarctic winter. (Summary from Wikipedia)

As the last section of this project we include a short original recording by Ernest Shackleton about the expedition.

Democracy in America Vol. I
by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he found a thriving democracy of a kind he had not seen anywhere else. Many of his insightful observations American society and political system, found in the two volume book he published after his visit, still remain surprisingly relevant today.

Star Born
by Andre Norton

Andre Norton’s “Star Born” pictures a human colony in another galaxy, driven away from Earth generations ago by a repressive government. Considered outlaws, the colonists are in permanent hiding.

They have developed friendship and cooperation with a local race of “mermen” who are equally at home on land or sea. But that race only took to the sea to escape a malevolent power that hunted them and killed them violently for sport - Those Others.

With a global decline in the population and reach of Those Others, contacts are few and the humans have no direct knowlege of them. So it is a major surprise when Dalgard, a human scout on his coming-of-age expedition, along with his “knife-brother” Sssuri of the mermen, run into a party of Those Others who are bent on reclaiming hideous weaponries left behind in one of their abandoned cities… and find that they are being aided by new arrivals from Earth!

Every year there is a big digital/social/web etc conference in austin called south by south west interactive.

I have proposed a LibriVox talk, based on the presentation will I did at Podcasters Across Borders (slides and audio + transcript )

I think panel selections get made by votes from interested people like you. so… it’d be appreciated if anyone who feels inclined could vote for the panel, here.

Austin, a founder of the top-secret start-up Akoha.org, has a post about gift economies, which I commented on. He got me thinking and, I left a long rambly comment, which I’d like to expand on… soon ;-) … anyway, here is my comment:

one crucial point about online gift economies (and perhaps other gift economies too): the reciprocation is rarely one-to-one. this i think is why we are able to be accomplish so much in online free projects. you give your bit to a sense of collective benefit, in part in the expectation that others (but certainly not everyone) will do the same, making the whole project better.

so for wikipedia, people contribute without any expectation that any particular reader will contribute back. i don’t know what the editor/reader ratios are (for wikitravel it’s 1:50, i imagine much bigger for wikipedia). still, in a sense I receive from wikipedia, gain benefit, recognize that benefit, and *maybe* I contribute back, to wikipedia…but i don’t expect everyone to do that.

this is certainly the case for LibriVox, where there is no expectation that any particular listener will record. however that is really the key to our success: any listener *can* record, and we actively hope that they do…not because we want our efforts reciprocated, but more importantly because every new contributor/book adds to our collective achievement, each new recording reflects well on all our other efforts.

“i have listened, i have appreciated your effort, and i have appreciated so much, that i am willing to put the effort into recording as well.”

and all of us get the joy of participating in a project that is getting bigger, and better …something that reflects back on each of us as volunteers.

hmm. so for librivox, every new volunteer/recording is an explicit “validation” (not sure what that meaningless word means…) of what we are doing. not payment as such, but that the effort all of us have put in is reciprocated by efforts that others are willing to make, we can measure in some concrete way the “value” of the effort that has been made to date. that is, it is “worth” the effort that will be made in the future. interesting… which again is why we spend so much time defending/protecting the readers, and little time worrying about what the listener has to say. because for us the true measure of value associated with librivox is not at all how many people listen, but how many people record.

and that is the difference between us and a commercial company. our value is defined by participation; while a commercial approach measures value by use.

sorry, this is a ramble, just thinking thru these ideas as i write…. i’ll have to write this up in some more detail.

This presentation is not actually about podcasting, it’s about data…but it was presented at podcastersacrossborders, and LibriVox is the inspiration for these thoughts.

In celebration of Bloomsday, 2007, LibriVox is releasing the long-awaited audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses

The work comprises more than 32 hours of audio, and the project took a year-and-a-half to complete, with scores of volunteer participants. Started in November 2005, it is one of LibriVox’s longest-running projects, and is also the longest text we have recorded.

The LibriVox Ulysses project had a few special rules: readers were encouraged to read in groups, in public places, and no editing was required. And yet some of the sections (notably, sections 15 c,d,e,f and 18) have been done with extraordinary attention to detail and creativity. The audiobook can be downloaded here.

Bloomsday also sees the release of another Joyce novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

There is some rumbling within the LibriVox community about trying to produce a new audio version of Ulysses every two years.

Matt grabbed some audio from me yakking at Podcamp Toronto, talking about:

• LibriVox, and
• Atwater Digital Literacy Project

I like the informal, trip-hoppy format. Nicely done. (But what did I mean by “audio nirvana” I wonder??).

… LibriVox began in a vibrant section of Montreal called the Plateau, where 32-year-old Hugh McGuire lives with his wife…McGuire hangs out at Laika, a café and bar around the corner from his house that is popular with Montreal techies. At Laika, open source gurus, community WiFi evangelists, and A-list Web designers drink coffee, eat brunch, work on their laptops, and swap ideas…

Apparently in the print version of the mag, there’s a big pic of Laika - I’ll scan & post it when I get it (coming in the mail). See:

The Wealth of LibriVox:
Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production
by Michael Erard

(thanks to Heri for the heads up).

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon Udell’s stuff - he writes not just about tech things that interest me, but he’s also got a great sense that web technology ought to be good for society as well. Jon was one of the first “famous” people I contacted when I started LibriVox, and he’s been a fan, and written about the project a number of times. So I was really happy when he asked me to join him on his IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators (you might need to register to see that page). This was a long (47 mins) and great interview, really getting into the meat and bones of how and why LibriVox works, but also touching on much other interesting stuff as well.

Here’s the page.

Listen here:

***

In other exciting news, Jon whipped up a script (tweaked and built on by the ever-effective Chris), that allows you to add a LibriVox book directly to iTunes. Here’s how Kri describes the new addition to the site:

Thanks to Jon Udell and our resident catalog development guru tis (Chris Goringe) we have a new feature that has been added to all catalog pages. Check out the most recent Short Poetry Collection to see an example of the following…

1. A “Subscribe in iTunes” link. If you regularly use iTunes for podcasts, or would like to, this link will be very helpful to you. Just click on the link, and allow it to launch the external application (iTunes) if it asks

2. An RSS feed for the 64kbps files. What’s the point of this? For some this makes it easier to download all of the 64kbps MP3 files at once. For example, if you listen to podcasts and have a podcatcher, use this link to download them all more easily.

I did a podcast interview with Jon Udell about LibriVox, for ITConversations (I’ll let you know when it’s available). Was a great talk, and part of our discussions were about the still-significant barriers to accessing good audio on the net. There is great stuff out there, but for many not-so-net-savvy people there exist many problems with knowing about audio, finding it, choosing it, downloading it, getting it into a media player (and then getting it into a portable media device).

all of these processes are harder than they should be still (collectik is an effort to solve some of them), and I’d wager that the main audience for audio (especially the LibriVox, public interest, public radio type) is not as tech savvy as most net video watchers. Yet this is an important market - in part because of the value of the information available this way. This is a new sphere for public discourse, and should be made as simple as possible.

With LibriVox we often get people wondering how to get the mp3s they have downloaded into their ipod. A simple task for most of you, but not obvious to many people who would like to listen to LibriVox books. There’s an easy solution to this problem: generate an xml file of our catalog pages, that will be read as a podcast feed by iTunes, and allow for the one-click iTunes “subscription” to that book.

So Jon whipped up a python script that can do the job, eg. click on this:
itpc://jonudell.net/librivox/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-by-arthur-conan-doyle.xml

iTunes will open, & you’ll get subscribed to this book - you may have to “get” all the files to download them. This eliminates some complication for people.

We’ll have to figure out how to integrate this - ideally the script could work in tandem with a wordpress plugin, that would work in our catalog page template. So that each page would generate the right link.

Evan did something similar a while back, with his PodPager… but the tool seems to be disabled.

Touch, Listen (2007)
Dennis Yuen & Morry Galonoy
Bookcloths, Davey board, decorative paper, linen threads, ink, long-stitch binding, voice XML, PHP, syndication from [b]LibriVox’s [/b]public domain podcast stream of audio poetry

Books are meant to be touched.

Poetry is meant to be listened to. Tel: (617) 850 9366

Each is an art form that should be experienced intimately and personally through our senses.

Touch, Listen explores the book as a tactile art object meant to be held, touched and physically interacted with, and its hypothetical content, in this case, poetry, meant to be performed and listened to. Separating the forms allows us to experience each one as an extension of our ideas, thoughts and feelings, as well as content to its own form.

April is national poetry month.

see: Touch, Listen (2007)

Nice interview about LibriVox with Donna Papacosta, on the trafcom podcast.

Matt asked me for some LibriVox recommendations for a long drive to Toronto. I whipped up this list, and, well … it’s not authoratative or anything, but if you know about LibriVox and are wondering what to listen to, here are some that I have enjoyed (I’ll update the list periodically):

NON-FICTION

• God and State, Mikhail Bakunin (solo)
  seminal anarchist text, v well-read.
• China and the Chinese, Herbert Allen Giles (solo)
  Wonderful exploration of Chinese culture, beautifully read.
• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  classic political text, still relevant.
• Poetics, by Aristotle (solo)
  the great Greek gives you the low-down on how to write a story. Wonderful idiosyncratic reading.
• Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo (solo)
  a meditative book on tea, flower arranging, art, life, zen, and more. published in 1906. beautiful.

FICTION

• The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells (solo)
  Alex Foster’s great rendition of curious Wells tale of the nasty man who disappears.
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (solo)
  RLS’s cautionary story of scientific hubris.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (solo)
  dashing adventure in the age of the French Revolution.
• Parenticide Clube, Ambrose Bierce (solo)
  very funny, but very very dark.
• Heart of Darkness (solo)
  conrad’s tale read by a young woman w american accent. odd but it works, somehow.
• Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland
  very saucy Victorian pornography.
• War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (solo)
  the great sci-fi adventure.

NOTE: I love the collaborative projects (read by many different people) but a well-read solo book is probably a good place to start with LibriVox.

Stephan, a hard-core LibriVox volunteer/admin (maker of the LV poster), has launched a new exciting project: pdsounds.org …(pd for “public domain”). About:

With recording devices and microphones pdsounds volunteers acoustically discover the beauty of the world. From the million sounds of things to the pure waves of sinus. Our goal is to record it all and make it available for free.

The project looks great (and the design looks familiar! ;-) ) … and it should be a welcome addition to the free audio world. There are a few other such libraries around, notably freesounds …but the main difference here is license: while freesound uses a creative commons license, pdsounds is all public domain - that is, can be used for whatever reason with no attribution, no worries about commercial/non-commercial etc. There might be some other differences.

Anway, I have contributed my first sound (thanks to Jer’s coffee making skills).

(cross-posted at TextoSolvo)

One of the problems in the Western world right now, in my estimation, is that we see “freedom” as an artificially good thing in an abstract & idealized sense. humans, whatever else we are, are animals, and we have developed biological and cultural systems to deal with the universe. and nothing is “free” in the universe. you must obey the laws of physics: when you get punched in the nose it hurts, and when you eat rocks, they taste bad and make you sick, and break your teeth. that they are painful helps you try to avoid getting punched in the nose, and discourages you from eating rocks instead of apples, both of which are helpful if you wish to survive in the world. that is what the universe is “like,” yet in the western world we have abstracted out “freedom” as some kind of thing which is good in itself. I too think freedom is good, but not “in itself.” i think it is good because increased freedom for a larger number of people results in a better ability to solve important problems (firstly, how do we feed and clothe ourselves, and protect our families, and then other more complex, but less important issues).

so librivox is a kind of demonstration that says: here are the rules. everything *else* is free, but the rules are not negotiable. and they are not negotiabale BECAUSE librivox has an objective that defines everything we do: “to make all public domain books available in audio for free.” the rules have been/are set in order to help us achieve that objective. everything is weighed against the objective, not against some abastract “freedom.”

that is very powerful. i believe one of the driving evolutionary forces that has made humans successful is our desire to build and pleasure at building things.

but building things takes discipline and dedication. it is always easier to sit on your ass and do nothing. and you are - in our very rich, and very easy world, “free” to sit on your ass and do nothing, but I don’t believe you will ever be happy if you take that approach. In order to be a happy human, I believe, you must build things.

and *that*, to me, is what freedom means: the freedom to build the things you want to build. not freedom to do whatever you want, wherever you want, because “freedom” per se is sacred, but the freedom to pursue objectives you believe in.

we have lost our sense of discipline, and I think that makes people very unhappy. I don’t mean that in any draconican sense, I just mean that in western world, we are told (by psychologists, parents, media, etc) that we can do whatever we want, that we are the centre of the universe, that our freedom is the most important thing and we have a *right* to it, that just believing in ourselves is enough to succeed. all of which is, frankly, bullshit.

and that kind of thinking makes, I think, for unhappy people, and a disfunctional society, because we are NOT the centre of the universe able to influence it with our belief in how important we are; we are just a little part of it, subject to its laws. among which is, not much ever gets done without work.

A few people have gotten involved with LibriVox, been impressed by the anarchist underpinnings, and argued that we needed to allow full freedom (ie to rant, to be disruptive etc). but librivox as a system works in part because of the laws of our little universe, some of which we understand, some of which are mysterious. I’ve been careful to try to defend and protect those mysterious things - even if I do not totally understand them (hence my defense of the “disclaimer” - I don’t want to mess with something that’s worked unless it is very clear that messing will make LV work better).

I read recently somewhere that real freedom only comes from the pleasure of succeeding within constraints. Which seems to me to be about right.

Here is a list of free audio books released by LibriVox … in the Month of March!!!! (books of particular interest are in bold):

1.Lines Written in Early Spring by Wordsworth, William
2.Byways Around San Francisco Bay by Hutchinson, W. E.
3.Clue of the Twisted Candle, The by Wallace, Edgar
4.Twilight of the Idols, The by Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ludovici, Anthony M.
5.Pollyanna by Porter, Eleanor H.
6.Contes en vers by Perrault, Charles
7.Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers by Lea, Elizabeth E.8.Ideal Bartender, The by Bullock, Tom
9.Sense and Sensibility by Austen, Jane
10.Otto of the Silver Hand by Pyle, Howard
11.Ballads of a Bohemian by Service, Robert W.
12.Legend Land V 1 & 2 by Various, LYONESSE
13.Épîtres de Pierre by Anonyme
14.Plague Ship by Norton, Andre
15.Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush by Moodie, Susanna
16.Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome, Jerome K.
17.Story of the Middle Ages, The by Harding, Samuel B.
18.Hound of the Baskervilles, The by Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
19.Hollow Needle, The by Leblanc, Maurice
20.Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Einstein, Albert
21.Master Key, The by Baum, L. Frank
22.West African Folk Tales by Barker, William H.
23.On the Popular Judgment: That may be Right in Theory, but does not Hold Good in the Praxis by Immanuel Kant, D.E. Wittkower, ed.
24.Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books by Kant, Immanuel
25.Ring o’ Roses: A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book by Brooke, L. Leslie
26.At the Back of the North Wind by MacDonald, George
27.Ghost Story Collection 003
28.Familiar Letters on Chemistry by Liebig, Justus, Gardner, John (ed)
29.Letter Concerning Toleration, A by Locke, John
30.I’m Nobody - Emily Dickinson
31.Jack and Jill - Alcott , Louisa May
32.Omnilingual - H. Beam Piper
33.The Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
34.The Iliad for Boys and Girls - Alfred J. Church
35.Short Poetry Collection 026
36.The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
37.The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
38.Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges - Gerard Manley Hopkins (Robert Bridges, ed.)
39.Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. - Edith Oenone Somerville
40.Fables de La Fontaine, livre 02 - La Fontaine, Jean de
41.The Devil’s Pool - George Sand
42.O, it was out by Donnycarney - James Joyce
43.The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy
44.Collected Works of Saint Patrick - Saint Patrick
45.The Spinster Book - Myrtle Reed
46.The Glugs of Gosh - C. J. Dennis
47.Thurley Ruxton - Philip Verrill Mighels
48.Miracles - Walt Whitman
49.Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
50.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
51.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
52.On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
53.Candide - Voltaire
54.The King in Yellow (part 2) - Robert W. Chambers
55.The Autobiography of Mother Jones - Mary Harris Jones
56.Short Poetry Collection 025
57.The Story of My Life - Helen Keller
58.Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
59.Moby Dick, or the Whale - Herman Melville
60.Ophelia - Walter de la Mare
61.Bohemian San Francisco - Clarence Edwords
62.The Sayings of Confucius - Confucius
63.The Monkey’s Paw - W. W. Jacobs
64.Librivox’s Short Story Collection Vol. 011
65.The Island of Dr. Moreau - H. G. Wells
66. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, by Immanuel Kant
67. Oomphel in the Sky, by H. Beam Piper
68. ?
69. ?
70. ?
71.The Junior Classics (Technically April 1, but it was ready March 31 and the servers weren’t cooperating)

and here is the catalog.

LibriVox had a March Madness campaign - a concerted effort to finish as many public domain books as we could in the month of March.

We finished SEVENTY!

Yes, 7-0 works of great literature. That’s pretty crazy. I didn’t do much to contribute, I must say, but I am proud as punch.

Boing Boing reports that LibriVox just released an audio version of:

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
by Charles Darwin

Twenty-four hours of audio/biology/history goodness. This project was a real battle to get finished (I’ve got a chapter in there), so congrats to the many hands that made it happen.

…fantastic organization, kudos to the putters-togetherers, and I’ll point out some cool projects shortly.

But please, please, please make this phrase disappear.

(PS, thanks for the ride home Bob).

UPDATE: you can see vids of the event, including some footage of me, here.

I’ve been thinking lately about evolution and politics. All this comes out of a revelation I had in the early days of LibriVox, that as an open project, the whole thing - the system - evolved like an organism, getting more complex in response to environmental challenges. More readers, more books, more languages, more projects required a slow evolution of a management from “Hugh collects the files and then uploads” to something very different. We currently have 338 active projects, representing probably 5,000 or more individual audio files - all of which must be collected, checked, named, assigned metadata, and eventually uploaded, and cataloged. That’s a lot of work. Point is that the management system, is very complex, and it evolved in a way that I expect looks a lot (on a small/sped-up scale) like how political systems evolve.

On the conservative/progressive split, there’s an old saw in US politics that the left thinks the right is evil, and the right thinks the left is stupid. Neither is true, of course, or not entirely true, and I think there’s an unwillingness, and sometimes just an inability to understand where the other side comes from. Maybe evolution is useful model to explain things.

Conservatives, generally, appeal to how things have been and claim that we shouldn’t change what’s worked in the past. There’s a sense to that, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Progressives, on the other hand, appeal to how things ought to be and claim we should change things to make it work better or differently. There’s a sense to that, that changing environments call for changed response.

By this nomenclature the Bush White House was filled with Progressives, in the sense that they decided to junk the past 50 years of diplomatic standards and wisdom - rule of law, international agreement, importance of history and understanding of the enemy, experience of occupying forces etc - in exchange for a bold new vision of transforming democracy. They thought the purity of the ideal would be enough to carry the day. While the liberals [what was left of them] argued for, essentially, a realist foreign policy approach, more cautionary, and more tied to past experience. The Bush Progressives were shown to be naive at best. And many other things at worst.

I am a temperamental conservative, and an intellectual progressive. Even within LibriVox (a progressive project, I guess), now that we have a system that works pretty well, I am always loathe to change many things substantially, since I worry about the unforeseen impacts changes might have. Because the system evolved through an unknowable cocktail of influences and reactions, I don’t like tinkering with certain of the intangibles, especially the ones whose influence is uncalculable. For instance, there has been a movement to change the disclaimer that comes at the start of our recordings (This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, to find out more or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org); I have resisted in part because I have an intuition that this disclaimer has had some kind of impact on the creation of the community that makes LibriVox succeed. Reciting it, in some sense, joins us all into a common cause, and that makes for a tighter-kint group - actually, some call us a cult!).

Slipping back to the evolutionary model: as the environment changes radically (say, political, economic, or ecological) there is tension between the conservatives and progressives. Conservatives look back and say: it worked before, it’ll keep working. While the progressives look forward and say, we must change! Without having much idea if it will work.

So I’d argue that a healthy society will allow for strong interplay between the two tendencies, the stabilizing force of conservatism, and the evolving force of progressivism. Balanced against the uncertainty of progressive solutions and the rigid inability of conservatives to change with changing circumstances.

Which is one of the reasons I think we need to find new ways to make democracy work. We need to open the process more, to put more of the decision-making process (and the data behind it) into the hands of the people. Our democratic system is very rigid, and does not change easily. One way to change that is to get the data out, to let people find solutions that might be better than the ones the paid beurocrats dream up.

Because I have a feeling - with peak oil, climate change, population growth, the rising power of china and india, political instability in the Middle East, and the newish digital universe - that we are in for a rocky road in the coming decades, and we’ll need to marshall new tools for addressing those problems. Open democracy, open data, is one way to spread the decision-making ability to a bigger, more complex, and more nimble system.

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.

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