openmovement

For the price of a beer (or a pitcher, or a round), you can support VisibleGovernment.ca … the non-profit that promotes online tools for government transparency, openness and accessibility around government and civic data (yay!).

They’ve got a little fundraiser going, in celebration of Canada Day: Beers for Canada …

How we’ll spend your money

We work on several aspects of transparency:

Creating new tools: We work with developers and designers to build websites that encourage citizens and governments to communicate openly.
Encouraging government openness: We show elected officials the benefits of open, two-way discourse, highlighting places where information is lacking and celebrating the efforts of those who want to be more transparent.
Public awareness: We emphasize the civic importance of transparency and open government.
Working with other organizations: We share and collaborate with organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, MySociety and Changecamp.

We’re also organizing Code For Canada, an application design competition that awards prizes to people who build web, facebook, and iPhone apps that provide visualization, analysis, and access to federal government data sets.

So, go support a worthy cause.

[x-posted at Book Oven & Huffpo]

As the death watch continues for the publishing business and perhaps even the book itself, a group of writers, technologists, publishers, agents, designers, booksellers, and social architects convened in London for BookCamp, a one-day thinking session (bookish experimentation) about what the future of the written word might be.

The event was organized by Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin UK; James Bridle, of BookTwo, and Bookkake; and Russel Davies.

Thinking about books

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless. That’s my projection anyway.

An open slate

If you’ve never been to a “camp” or “unconference,” you should find the next one near you, show up and dive in. These un/conferences vary from place to place and event to event, but tend to share a few characteristics: they are free, they are open, and the sessions are not formally presented by the organizers, but rather decided by participants. Everyone is supposed to contribute. The result is that you get a much wider mix of people and perspectives than at industry conferences.

BookCamp London started with a blank grid: 6 timeslots and 5 spaces (or 5 spaces, 6 timeslots?), with participants asked to fill in the grid, adding sessions they’d like to discuss. (For some reason I didn’t write anything in. First time I’ve ducked that responsibility at a camp.)

The sessions

Sessions included (paraphrasing titles): Talking to Terrified Writers about the Web, the Book as Social Object/What Happens When Books Are Free?, EBook Gadgets, Is the Web Making Writing More Oral?, Social Networks and the Book, Encouraging Kids to Read. And more.

Fellow-BookOvener Suw Charman-Anderson lead a session about the Book as Social Object; or, What happens when all books are free? The group struggled with this difficult question: what happens if writers can no longer make their money from just selling books? The answer wasn’t so clear, but several things are certain: ebooks are coming; DRM won’t stop infinite reproduction on the web; no one likes DRM; and no one really knows how the business is going to work in a decade. But music, for all the worries about the industry at the corporate level, is thriving. How will writing evolve?

The next session I attended was Bookkake: How to Start a Publishing Company in Your Bedroom. James Bridle,Bookkake founder & BookTwo writer, has published new editions of five public domain titles, using ebooks, print-on-demand, and covers designed from photos on Flickr. An inspiring view of indie publishing’s future.

Michael Bhaskar of Pan Macmillan hosted a session on the web and the increasing orality of text, how text is taking on characteristics that we once associated with oral communications: quick feedback, ephemeral, linear, disposable ; Mark Johnson and Kate Hyde of HarperCollins (and Authonomy and BookArmy) lead a discussion of social networks and the book, that the successes and challenges they’ve had with their initiatives.

Speaking of books ….

In addition to enjoying talking with these smart people, I had great conversations with too many more to list, but some particularly good ones with Peter Collinridge of Apt Studio, Anthony Topping, of lit agents Greene & Heaton, Lucy Crichton, Alex Ingram, digital buyer at UK bookseller Waterstones, Naomi Alderman, and Adrian Hon. It was also nice to see some familiar faces, Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr, and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, as well as Cory Doctorow, who I’ve crossed paths with numerous times online, but never met in person.

It was a great event, and I am very happy I decided to make the trip to the UK. Well worth it, and a real encouragement that what we’re up to at the Book Oven, behind the curtain, is on the right track. My only complaint was that it lasted one day, and not a week.

Can you see the future?

While there are nerves about the future of the book business, the overwhelming sensation I had leaving bookcamp was optimism. What else could be the result of spending a full day with so many bright people, excited about books, and actively shaping their future?

For some other thoughts on bookcamp (I’ll try to keep this up to date, as I see links) see:

• PenguinBlog
• Chocolate and Vodka: here, here and here.
• The Rosemoirs
• Going Underground’s Blog

[Photos by: Matt Biddulph, Annie Mole, and Russell Davies]

From Michael Geist:

The Smithsonian is putting a collection of public domain photos on Flickr, part of the Flickr Commons project.

Here’s an example, with this curious description:

After parcel post service was introduced [in the US] in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Cool:

GridRepublic members run a screensaver that allows their computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use. This screensaver does not affect performance of the host computer any more than an ordinary screensaver does.

By aggregating idle resources from users around the world, we create a massive supercomputer.

Gridrepublic is built on the system that started as SETI@home, which was turned into a general distributed computing platform BOINC. Gridrepublic is a central place for all projects using this distributed platform, where you can dowload & install the system and even better, choose which projects your computer’s idle time will be supporting, including:

Einstein@home: you can contribute your computer’s idle time to a search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

Climateprediction.net: computing a massive environmental model intended to forecast climate conditions in the 21st century.

Proteins@Home: investigating the “Inverse Protein Folding Problem”: Whereas “Protein Folding” seeks to determine a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence, “Inverse Protein Folding” begins with a protein of known shape and seeks to “work backwards” to determine the amino acid sequence from which it is generated.

Donate here.

In the fall of 2004, I quit my job consulting in the renewable energy industry in order to focus on writing. In addition to fiction-writing, I worked on a research/writing contract to develop an exhibit on dinosaurs (part of which is still online) for the Canadian Museum of Nature.

I’d never used Wikipedia much before, but I used it frequently on that project as a starting point for research. It was an excellent resource (to be backed up with others, of course), and since it was so useful, I thought I should contribute. I got hooked.

So it’s nice to see, three-and-a-half years later, that the article on feathered dinosaurs, for which I was the second editor, still contains a pretty good summary, I think, that I wrote about the history of these peculiar fossils:

Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, British biologist and evolution-defender Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He cited skeletal similarities, particularly among some saurischian dinosaurs, fossils of the ‘first bird’ Archaeopteryx and modern birds. In 1868 he published On the Animals which are Most Nearly Intermediate between Birds and Reptiles, making the case. The leading dinosaur expert of the time, Richard Owen, disagreed, claiming Archaeopteryx as the first bird outside dinosaur lineage. For the next century, claims that birds were dinosaur descendants faded, with more popular bird-ancestry hypotheses including ‘crocodylomorph’ and ‘thecodont’ ancestors, rather than dinosaurs or other archosaurs.

In 1964, John Ostrom described Deinonychus antirrhopus, a theropod whose skeletal resemblance to birds seemed unmistakable. Ostrom has since become a leading proponent of the theory that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. Further comparisons of bird and dinosaur skeletons, as well as cladistic analysis strengthened the case for the link, particularly for a branch of theropods called maniraptors. Skeletal similarities include the neck, the pubis, the wrists (semi-lunate carpal), the ‘arms’ and pectoral girdle, the shoulder blade, the clavicle and the breast bone. In all, over a hundred distinct anatomical features are shared by birds and theropod dinosaurs.

Other researchers drew on these shared features and other aspects of dinosaur biology and began to suggest that at least some theropod dinosaurs were feathered. The first restoration of a feathered dinosaur was Sarah Landry’s depiction of a feathered “Syntarsus” (now renamed Megapnosaurus or considered a synonym of Coelophysis), in Robert T. Bakker’s 1975 publication Dinosaur Renaissance.[2] Gregory S. Paul was probably the first paleoartist to depict maniraptoran dinosaurs with feathers and protofeathers, starting in the late 1980s.

By the 1990s, most paleontologists considered birds to be surviving dinosaurs and referred to ‘non-avian dinosaurs’ (those that went extinct), to distinguish them from birds (aves or avian dinosaurs). Direct evidence to support the theory was missing, however. Some mainstream ornithologists, including Smithsonian Institution curator Storrs L. Olson, disputed the links, citing the lack of fossil evidence for feathered dinosaurs.

Fossil evidence

After a century of hypotheses without hard evidence, particularly well-preserved (and legitimate) fossils of feathered dinosaurs were discovered during the 1990s and 2000s. The fossils were preserved in a Lagerstätte — a sedimentary deposit exhibiting remarkable richness and completeness in its fossils — in Liaoning, China. The area had repeatedly been smothered in volcanic ash produced by eruptions in Inner Mongolia 124 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period. The fine-grained ash preserved the living organisms that it buried in fine detail. The area was teeming with life, with millions of leaves and the oldest known angiosperms, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, mammals, turtles, lizards and crocodilians discovered to date.

The most important discoveries at Liaoning have been a host of feathered dinosaur fossils, with a steady stream of new finds filling in the picture of the dinosaur-bird connection and adding more to theories of the evolutionary development of feathers and flight.

To improve the article, head on over to wikipedia. Kinda nice to know that for 95% (50%? 80%?) of the young, English-speaking, students of paleontology in the world, it’s my text that might first introduce them to feathered dinosaurs.

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 and pragmatic successes of the free software movement, the collaborative methodology (and “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 I think 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, or have not been able to. 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. 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 hire 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.

From the New Scientist:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.

[more...]

Leaving aside the problem that posting about your own work on Wikipedia, violates two policies (no original research, and don’t edit articles about yourself or your work) … this is an interesting showdown.

Open Access journals, free and open to web linking, is the way science publishing has to go, for the same reasons NYTimes can’t keep its articles behind registration walls. Value is increasingly defined by network authority (is there an agreed term for this, or can I claim coinage of “network authority”?), aka google juice; and if you are out of the network, you are out of the authority. Scientists realize this – hence the desire to get their stuff on Wikipedia … Journals realize that it chips into their control of information, which it does. But like all other businesses, fighting it won’t make it go away, and the sooner they rejig their business models, the better.

Which opens the question: with the web as publishing platform, is there really a need to have academic journals running as businesses? Or is there a better way?

Good writing is such as pleasure, especially when it’s about something you care about:

Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.

Kids in a school start building Legotown. Eventually, powerful Legotown figures emerge, and inequalities surface. Some kids are excluded from Legotown, some control the enterprise, some struggle against each other; trading markets develop for various pieces. Teachers get nervous. Eventually, Legotown gets destroyed by external forces, and teachers ponder what they’ve wrought, and start a number of “experiments” to see how the kids react to changing rules.

Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom, by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. A wonderful and thought-provoking essay/report.

[I should note that I am glad I was not in this class as a kid, with these somehow-creepy-social-engineering teachers]

All of it applies somehow to the “open” world of the web, in some ways I have not quite figured out yet. Here are some choice paras:

The nature of power:

During the boom days of Legotown, we’d suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like “Some-body’s got to be in charge or there would be chaos,” and “The little kids ask me because I’m good at Legos.” They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

What does power look like?:

We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

On being powerless (in one of the post-Legotown trading games):

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, “I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up.” In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

On system unfairness vs. individual unfairness:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

On ownership (which, by the way, illustrates the radical and difficult departure that projects like LibriVox force us to confront, and why public domain – renouncing ownership – is so much more radical than creative commons – which just defines new rules of ownership):

In their reflections, the children articulated several shared theories about how ownership is conferred.

* If I buy it, I own it:

Sophia: “She owns the lavender balls because she makes them, but if I buy it, then it’s mine.”

* If I receive it as a gift, I own it:

Marlowe: “My mom bought this book for me because she thought it would be a good reading book for me. I know I own it because my mom bought it and she’s my mom and she gave it to me.”

* If I make it myself, I own it:

Sophie: “I sewed this pillow myself with things that my teacher gave me, like stuffing and fabric. I sewed it and it turned into my pillow because it’s something I made instead of something I got at the store.”

* If it has my name on it, I own it:

Alex: “My teacher made this pillow for me and it has my name on it.”

Kendra: “If I put my name on it, would I own it?”

Alex: “Well, Miss S. made it for me… but if your name was on it, then you would own it.”

Sophie: “Kendra, don’t put your name on it, OK?”

* If I own it, I make the rules about it:

Alejandro: “I own this computer, because my grandpa gave it to me. I lend it to my friends so that they can play with it. But I make the rules about it.”

Teachers impose the Bolshevik Revolution, to build New Legotown:

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we’d been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

Kids start sounding like zombie-versions of Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare:

From our conversations, several themes emerged.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Teachers get excited by the raw clay of Hobbesian childhood they have molded, through idealism and power structure management, into paragons of Rawlsian enlightenment:

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants.

Paradise, built and achieved:

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

*All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
*Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
*All structures will be standard sizes.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

A fascinating story, and one I need to think about more. It’s very relevant to life in places like LibriVox, I think, and I’m not sure why I am reacting with at least some negative cynicism. Maybe because one power-structures not examined is the relationship between kids and teachers? Maybe because the kids didn’t choose to participate in this experiment? Anyway, why do I not celebrate this experience, which mirrors in some ways the collectivist-do-goodness that underlies a project like LibriVox? To ponder more.

Hmm, maybe I am just having a bad day? Any thoughts on this from yon readers?

[this comes via mike migurski]

This looks like a tide-turning event: National Post’s editorial on copyright reads:

For Canada to introduce DMCA-style legislation now would do nothing but encourage nuisance lawsuits. There is nothing wrong with tough rules against copyright infringement, but criminalizing behaviour that might facilitate copyright infringement only incidentally is the wrong approach. If that road had been taken when household videotape machines came onto the market – and the movie industry tried very hard in the courts to steer the law in that direction – no one would be allowed to own a VCR.

There’s more…

[via: Michael Geist]

I’m supposed to be doing a radio piece for Nora Young’s CBC show, spark. I’m supposed to come up with a sort of mission statement for the piece, maybe you can help.

it’s a problem because I have been struggling with just that since I started getting interested in it a couple of years ago. so, dear internet, what is the thread that ties these together?:
-mass collaboration (open source method)
-giving stuff away (commons, gpl, public domain)
-free access to information (universal access to all human knowledge)

wikipedia, free software, open source, universal access to all human knowledge, the commons… these are all strands of something that’s not quite unified, but comes from the same impulse … so what is that? I call it the “open movement” but that’s not quite right. the free and open movement is clunky, and still not right.

[note, i've been thinking more and more about the negatives that come with this. each step of "liberation" in parts of human society, is usually accompanied by restrictions elsewhere. what are the implications for freeing information and enabling mass collaboration?]

how about: what happens when the network frees information and allows us all to collaborate together? how will this change the way the world looks?

ach. just writing to spur some thoughts. anyone have some thoughts for me?

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

I had dinner with one of my favourite web writers last week, Jon Udell (along with a collection of other Montreal datahounds and web citizens). I like Jon’s stuff because he writes not about exploring the outer edge of the snowplow; but rather taking things from the snowplow blade and figuring out how they might make our lives and societies better. I think so much in the world of tech is about making the technology better, and we don’t spend nearly enough time wondering about the impacts or how we can really use these things to imporve lives. He gave a talk, while in Montreal, that I missed, but luckily he put the whole thing up on the web.

Coincidently, Jon’s talk starts with reference to Teilhard de Chardin, who I have been (re)reading about in Annie Dillard’s extraordinary book, For the Time Being (seems to be unavailable in Canada).

In any case, here’s an interesting anecdote from Doug Engelbart, that forms the centre of Jon’s great talk:

On that day, as a young engineer, [Doug Engelbart] suddenly stopped what he was doing and asked himself: Why am I doing this? What is the purpose of this technology that fascinates and compels me?

After wandering around in a kind of revelatory trance for a couple of hours, the answer came to him. He realized that, as a species and a civilization, we were facing serious challenges to our survival.

Now that was sixty years ago, during an era of post World War II optimism, when the limits we’re facing today weren’t so apparent to most people.

Those limits are a lot more evident nowadays, and our political and economic systems are poorly adapted to deal with them. We need to reengineer those systems, in dramatic ways.

To do that, we’ll need to mobilize the collective intelligence necessary to figure out what needs to be done, and the collective will necessary to accomplish it.

So, how do we do that?

Engelbart’s vision is crystal clear. It’s a vision of human augmentation. We need to augment human capability in certain ways. In particular, we need to create — and project our minds into — a shared information space that works like a planetary associative memory.

And we need to populate that shared space with tools that support and amplify and extend our natural ability to analyze, visualize, simulate, decide, and act.

Fifteen years ago that would have sounded nearly as fantastic as Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. Today, if we look sideways at the web and squint, we can see the picture coming into focus.

But as William Gibson famously said, the future is unevenly distributed. In this case, what mostly isn’t here is the part where we come together in shared online spaces, with shared tools and information, to analyze, visualize, simulate, decide, and act — on a planetary scale.

The good news is that we can hack this problem. I absolutely believe that we can. But we’re going to have to hack it at a different level than the one at which the computer and information sciences have historically tended to operate.

And:

Unfortunately we do have a tendency to hack the wrong things. I guess because we tend to think first, and best, about the protocols that enable machines and applications and services to work together, instead of about the protocols that enable people to work together — in a context that is defined, but only partly defined, by machines and applications and services.

Ultimately, the right hacks are the ones that help people make sense of their world, and collectively improve it. And the right level is the level of human cognition, attention, intention, and desire.

And (heh) I just finished reading Jon’s talk, and lo, there was a nice reference to LibriVox and me …

Another example, one that happens to be Montreal-based, is LibriVox, the collaborative project to make audio recordings of public domain books. For quite a while the whole project ran on nothing fancier than an online bulletin board. A lot of us here, me included, would have been tempted to write a soup-to-nuts database-backed application to support that project, because that’s what we’re good at, and that’s what we like to do.

But when I saw how the project really works, I realized that would have been a mistake. Like Wikipedia, LibriVox is actually powered by a set of agreements and protocols and traditions. You can imagine encoding those in software, and the project’s founder — Hugh McGuire — might have wanted to, if he’d had access to the right kind of software talent. But he didn’t, which was almost certainly a good thing. Because the agreements and protocols and traditions weren’t known ahead of time, they had to emerge from the collective. As it turned out, a bulletin board — with its weak structure and loose coupling — was exactly the right way to nurture that emergence.

Over time, those loose structures have begun to coalesce. There’s a database behind LibriVox now, but the project still doesn’t feel like a database application, it’s more like a bulletin board that’s been enhanced with some database features. The real innovation continues to be in the agreements and protocols and traditions that attract, reward, and sustain contributors. LibriVox is a success not because of any particular bit of technical hackery, but because of Hugh McGuire’s inspired social hackery.

Which requires a couple of notes, LibriVox is not really Montreal-based … it lives independently on the web, and almost it’s only Montrealness is me, and the odd chapter read by other Montrealers. Also, while I may have had some inspired social hackery, there sure were a lot of people who were just as inspired.

Have a read of the whole thing here.

From the economist:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Jimmy Wales got hammered by Arrington for the launch of Wikia Search.

Jimmy Wales comments on the techcrunch thread, with a salient point:

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

Aka: To build a community-driven tool, you have to have a platform to build. They’ve released the platform, and don’t really have the tool yet. Here’s what the about page says:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

Whether it’ll work or not, I don’t know, but google needs a good competitor. Though I think wikia’s really competing against del.icio.us and stumbleupon… so we’ll see how it goes.

Also, pls: openid. Just gives me less of a headache. I don’t want to register for another site.

Tracey posted this over at Datalibre.ca …:

There is an excellent article in the Toronto Star about why we have little understanding about the social demographic situation in Canada! Bref! No one can afford the research! In the article Truth carries a painful user fee; Carol Goar tells it like it is right now in Canada when it comes to access to our public data:

The United Way of Greater Toronto had to pay the agency $28,000 for government data showing that family poverty deepened in Toronto between 2000 and 2005, while low-income households made modest gains everywhere else.

It had to spend its donors’ money to prove that Toronto has the lowest median income of any major urban centre in the country.

It had to dip into its charitable givings to marshal evidence – already collected at taxpayers’ expense – that a one-size-fits-all poverty strategy won’t work for Toronto.

Quoi?
BarCamp Montréal, édition #3

Où?
Société des Arts Technologiques, 1195 blvd St. Laurent, Montréal.

Quand?
Samedi, 3 novembre 2007, de 9h00 à 18h00.

C’est quoi ça?
C’est expliqué ici. Mais en gros, voici le résumé:

Un BarCamp, c’est un rassemblement ad-hoc né du désir de permettre à des personnes de partager et apprendre dans un environnement ouvert. C’est un évènement intense comportant des discussions, des démonstrations et des interactions riches entre les participants.

[thanks for the copy, martine]

From the Telegraph:

All the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize could be made available online in a radical move being considered by publishers, it was reported today…

Negotiations are said to be in progress with the British Council to digitise the six shortlisted novels so they can be downloaded in full, all over the world.

It is hoped the initiative will capture new audiences – particularly in Asia and Africa – who may be unable to access the actual books….

Those behind the venture hope it will boost, rather than detract from sales of the hard copy as readers who download the novel online, may be inspired to buy a paper version for themselves.

More than 10,000 publishers have already signed up to Google’s book-scanning project, which makes part of selected books available online. Initial results from the programme have suggested that publishing the tasters has increased sales of the books.

Note: emphasis added.
Questions/comments:
-does that mean online for free?
-hey, googlebooks (maybe) proves the point that giving it away might sell more (will be nice to have more than doctorow’s anecdotal evidence)
-I was just saying the other night that the open movement is not/will not be successful for any moral reasons, but because it will be better at doing certain things.

(vie michael geist)

I was on a panel about copyright at the media and democracy conference, with Tina Piper and Owen Chapman. Someone asked about Public Domain music, and I said, yes there is a site, but I can’t remember what.

Well, via Geist, it appears the International Music Score Library Project, a volunteer, non-profit public domain music score project (canadian too), has been shut down, we hope temporarily because of nasty letters from a Toronto Law firm, engaged by an Austrian music publisher, Universal AG.

The substance of the claim is that while much of the music *is* public domain in Canada, it is not public domain in the EU, and because IMSLP.org is a web site that does not restrict where downloaders are coming from, then it is in violation of copyright law. Essentially this would mean that wherever in the world the longest copyright term exists, that term must be applied in all countries, regardless of the copyright laws in host country. Which, as Geist and Boing Boing point out, means that the concept of public domain online would ultimately disappear (as there could always be another country with a longer copyright term). Says Geist:

As for a European infringement, if UE is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest single copyright term applying on a global basis. That can’t possibly be right. Canada has chosen a copyright term that complies with its international obligations and attempts to import longer terms – as is the case here – should not only be rejected but treated as copyright misuse.

LibriVox has had similar claims from copyright lawyers over the past couple of years, and we pushed back (with the help of Project Gutenberg), with our most compelling claim being:

Project Gutenberg has done exhaustive research over the years on this subject, and has not found any indication that the copyright laws of one country will have any force in any other country, even in cases of publishing materials on the Internet or the World Wide Web…

However, if you do come across any new case law or rulings that might effect some change, please let us know and we will discuss with our informal advisers at Project Gutenberg, so that they can update their research concerning such cases. As always, we will follow the legal standard that Project Gutenberg uses.

I’ve contacted IMSLP.org to offer moral and any other support I can, on behalf of LibriVox.

UPDATE1: Howard Knopf has significant commentary over at Excess Copyright.

UPDATE2:Heather Morrison comments on Geist’s blog with this little bit of brilliance:

If IP filters are the way to go, then it should be the country with the extended copyright laws that should take the responsibility for filtering out!

Then, when their citizens figure out that they have access to much less than everyone else in the world, they can take their own government to task and demand better laws!

Michael Geist on HMV’s decision to drop the price on back-catalog CDs:

This week, HMV announced that it was reducing the price on hundreds of back-catalog CDs generating a surprising amount of news coverage (Post, CBC). The move is good for everyone – the recording industry gets an important retail outlet to reduce prices on increasingly hard-to-find CDs (their largest retail outlets such as Wal-Mart do not carry many older titles), HMV gives a boost to music sales at a time when digital downloads, DVDs and video games command a growing share of the market, and consumers may find that the $20 sticker shock on some older CDs disappears. Yet leave it to CRIA to use the opportunity to spin this as a copyright reform story. HMV said absolutely nothing about the issue, because high-priced, older CDs have little to do with P2P file sharing or copyright law. CRIA’s Graham Henderson claims, however, that “it’s an effort to stem the tide of illegal downloading that threatens retailers and everyone else in the recording industry” and argues that other countries have reduced P2P through copyright reform while “a succession of Canadian governments have sat on their hands and done nothing.”

[more...]

So from a Canadian perspective in all this music biz debate about P2P/copyright/downloading, the real question ought to be not: how much money are record companies making/losing? but rather: how many active “professional” music artists are there in Canada now? Is that number increasing or decreasing? If it’s increasing (which I think it must be) then we should ask why? As in: does rampant P2P have a positive or negative impact on the number of professional musicians in Canada? And if it’s positive, then you’d have to conclude that there is an overall benefit to P2P, regardless of what the CRIA and others on the business end have to say, since really copyrights are theoretically about creating incentives to make art. Negative, and you’d have the opposite conclusion. (Assuming you could get the “right” conclusions out of your data).

I have no idea what the stats are on professional musicians (do any of you?). And how would you define that? The number of musicians who make money from their work (many)? Or the number who live off their work (fewer)? Or the number of millionaires (very few)? It would be interesting to see these stats.

Does anyone know of such stats?

I did a quick text interview with Jon Udell about public data, over at datalibre.ca.

Says da boing:

The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print any of over 200,000 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron.

[more...]

from montreal pals evan and niko, comes vinismo.com:

Vinismo is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable guide of all wines in the world. It uses the Wiki technology that lets people like you freely create and modify its pages.

Two comments:
-this is graphically the best looking wiki i’ve ever seen (meaning it doesn’t look like a wiki).
-this is the kind of targeted use of wiki technology that just makes good sense (bite sized info about a topic that people are passionate about, in a format that is useful).

Third comment: go play … they have doine a great job, but as with all open projects they need users to help it evolve into a useful tool.

Fourth: go vote for it on digg if you’re into that sort of thing.

From the Globe (registration/fees required) comes an article by Elizabeth Church about the price of academic journals, and the emerging movement towards open access academic journals:

This year, the University of Toronto’s library system will spend $20-million on acquisitions. But less than one-third of that money will go to books. The majority will pay for the rising subscription costs of academic journals…

(Too bad, and nicely ironic, that the Globe stuck the article behind a subscription fee).

Anyway, good article, the main point being that U of T spends $13 million on journals every year. Leaving $7 million for books. Jesus.

I recently had a brief exchange about some of these issues with Alexandre in the comment thread of one of Austin’s posts… talking about just this issue, more or less: that anthropolists have much to tell us/much to research about the the evolution of online and real world communities. And yet: a) they are mostly not doing it and b) when they do do it, their findings are published in unavailable academic journals.

It’s very funny the way this is discussed though: peer review is expensive, academic reputations are based on publishing in prestigious journals etc. And yet, academics are not paid for their contributions (or are paid pennies), I don’t know (but I doubt) whether peer reviewers are paid either (can anyone confirm that?).

So journals get their content for free, and charge exorbitant fees for the providing:
a) a ranking/authority service
b) a distribution service

But they in fact are not legitimately charging for content, since they do not pay for the content.

Evan writes an excellent piece on why you shouldn’t pay wiki contributors (hint, it has nothing to do with keeping all the millions for yourself). He’s got seven points and a main conclusion:

If you think you need to pay people to work on your wiki, then you’re doing something wrong. Instead of trying to force your users to align with your business interests, by paying them, you should re-align your business interests to be more in tune with what potential contributors want and need. You shouldn’t have to pay for friends, and you shouldn’t have to pay for wiki contributors.

[more...]

He also offers good alternatives to paying contributors.

UPDATE: it goes without saying, maybe, that this applies to any open project.

[ramble]

This is probably old hat for many, but it occurs to me that what LibriVox and many of the other successful web aps and projects out there are about is helping people do things, rather than helping people get things. The best web providers (say google, flickr, wikipedia) these days all help you do the things you want to do, rather than help you buy the things you want to buy (an older model of what “commercial” means). In the case of LibriVox, providing audio books to the public is almost an incidental fringe benefit to the real thing we do, which is help people record audio books. And that’s one of the reasons LibriVox has been successful, our focus is on the readers not the listeners; and if you want to measure the value of what we have done to date, measure it not by numbers of downloads, but rather by the number of hours of audiobooks that are planned, but not yet recorded. That’s the true measure of the success of our efforts: efforts other people will make in the future.

So as you are contemplating your next big business venture, try thinking about it this way.

not: how can i sell more widgets?
but instread: what kind of widget can i build to help people do X better?

(NOTE: why is there a word for “widget” but not for the X?).

I guess this is what software, and shovels, and innovation has always been about in many ways… still, the language we use if so often skewed in the direction of selling things rather than doing things. Even those “things” are different: amazon provides books. engineering schools provide the ability to build bridges. would you rather provide a widget or an ability? which do you think is more valuable?

For instance, the old saw about bad inventions is: “tried to build a better mousetrap” (suggesting that the old-fashioned ones work as well as any new ones, so you’re wasting your time). But you could also say, “tried to help people catch more mice.” OK, so it doesn’t sound as good, but the point is that increasingly with the web, we need to focus less on the tools and more on what people can do with them. The shovel does not really matter; it’s the hole that is important.

This came up in as I was applying, on behalf of LibriVox, for the Stockholm Challenge Awards … there was a section in the application for Impacts. In some email exchanges with one of the organizers, he said to me, in reference to a badly-filled out section (I hope it’s OK that I am quoting him):

Impact is more about the effects in the wider world. So downloads are good, but instead of a broad measure, I would aim to get data on what is being downloaded (top 50 list perhaps) and who is downloading (geographic distribution by domain and whether it is institutional or private) but also providing the jury with some feedback about teachers using the resource in class because they can’t afford hard copies, or students, researchers etc who can get searchable access to the content of a book for reviews etc etc.

Think of impact in terms of a new drug. The company meets its objectives if it sells millions of doses, but the impact is whether it changes the rate of cure, life extension or quality etc in the patient. That’s what we want to see.

and I kept thinking, and ended up writing, that the real impact of LibriVox is not about who downloads our books, but that we have enabled thousands of people across the globe to participate in a project together that does something important. we have provided a platform to let people read audiobooks (something, it turns out, a number of people wish to do). our most important impact is not about how many people downloaded our free books (after all if that was the criteria, bit torrents would beat us out by a landslide), but about the construction of the project itself, and how we have built a platform that helps people do things they want to do, and do them for others.

this might be a good definition for that term I promised never to use again: web 1.0 helps you get things; web 2.0 helps you do things.
[/ramble]

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.

You should go check out a group project I am involved in, datalibre.ca (so it’s a group blog, currently consisting of a group of two, one of them not me).

Tons of neat stuff going on in this space internationally, and in Canada. In particular, I just posted about the Istanbul Declaration from the OECD, which states that governments should provide data, for free, as a public good.

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.

Radio Open Source is one of my favourite shows available by podcast. They talk about anything, in depth, ranging from arts to politics, boxing, and countless other wonderful subjects. They are in some financial trouble, and need your help.

screw it, I’ve been humming about this post for a while, so I’m just going to sketch it out here.

Barcamp, Boys and Girls
I wanted to address Martine’s great talk on women at conferences, and I have a few comments:

• remember that barcamp is different from other conferences in that no one really gets invited to attend or speak – it’s free, everyone should come.
• 50% of the human species is female; the other 50% is male … so whatever you are doing, on the net or elsewhere, it’s worthwhile to remember that 50% of people that might use the thing you are building will be of a sex different than your own. So getting their input is of great value.
• in the context of barcamp at least, this isn’t anyone’s “fault” … not the boys, not the girls. the important thing (if you think it’s important) is that we (all of us) do what we can to attract interesting people who can contribute interesting things to barcamps and similar events. so don’t worry so much about why things are not as good as they could be, think rather about how they might be better, and act to make them so.

Barcamp, in general

For barcamp to be useful we need to attract interesting people to talk about different things. Everyone’s new web 2.0 social network is all fine and dandy, but that fixes a low bar on level of discourse. So the challenge I put out to all you naysayers, is come along, and bring someone who has something interesting to say on topics other than what we’ve seen so far. While the travel talk was interesting, I think it should all relate back to technology one way or another. Let’s get openmedicine.ca to talk about medicine, the web, and the open movement. Or, Thomas Homer-Dixon to come talk about the major challenges he sees humanity facing, and start a conversation about how we community-minded geeks might start addressing some of these major problems. Let’s invite people from political parties, and have a discussion about how the web can positively impact the democratic process, and some small projects that might be undertaken in that direction. Or, some teachers working with kids and blogs/podcasts/video. Or get Tracey or Daniel or Mike or Jon Udell or Hans Rossling (hell, I’ll even talk about it…in fact I will) to muse on open access to government data, and how citizens might start using that data. Etc.

That is, let’s not let barcamp become “your social web application camp.” Let’s make it something much more.

Rococo Camp
I have a little less to say about Rococo camp, since I missed much of it (see here for a good run-down). I was there Friday, but had another engagement all of Saturday, and by the time Sunday came around I was out of it. But I enjoyed the Open Agenda/Spaces concept (though there seemed to be too much yakking in the morning about Open Spaces, and not enough actual jazzing on topics). I had some great talks about semantic web & wikis, as well as the always-delicate issue of community building & difficult people (something we’ve been very successful dealing with at LibriVox). One person came my discussion of Data & Evolution, but we had a good chat.

Another semi-aside, to all wiki-enthusiasts: wikis are ugly and hard to read to most eyeballs, and if you want non-wiki people to come to your events, you need to at the very least have a web presence that is legible to non-wikiers.

But all in all, Evan and gang did a great job (bagels were good).

In a brilliant use of wiki technology, evan has launched the wiki clock, which uses the wisdom of the crowd to maintain an up-to-date, anyone-can-edit, clock. I just checked the clock, and the time was wrong. In the old days, I would have just moved along, thinking “what a crappy clock.” But, because it is a wikiclock, I was able to easily edit the time so that it was correct. Anyone can do the same.

Some will say: “But this clock will often be inaccurate.” But the point is, 1. it is free, and 2. eventually, with enough editors, this clock will, on balance, often have the correct time.

I’m finally getting excited again about web tech. i dipped my toes in this new world in the fall of 2004, when I started reading about free software, discovered wikipedia, figured out I could write stuff on the web. Then came a couple of years of really exciting stuff … LibriVox and collectik being two results, but also figuring out podcasting and RSS etc.

But I’ve always maintained that the tools are not interesting, it’s what happens with the tools.

The past few months I’ve felt a bit blase about the whole thing: it seems like we’ve got it all figured out, OK, wikis, sure, open movement, great, blogging, video, OK OK I get it. Great. We know what it’s all about. Twitter – fun, and useful, but not going to change the world. Facebook, linked-in…OK! Leave me alone.

But lately there’s been some rippling, and it feels as if all this stuff is starting to leak into more interesting areas. Freebase, for instance, will be a hugely useful tool, I am sure. I already have a couple of ideas, but there will be many exciting things to come out of that. Think google maps for data, maybe, and hence far more useful. The Encyclopedia of Life, a wiki-style project, focused on biology, will be fantastic. Such targeted wiki-style projects will sprout all over soon, since wikipedia has convinced people of the feasibility of this mode of information organization. We need this for politics, and health, among other things. Many other things. Openmedicine.ca is fantastic. So more and more is starting to roll out. Pushed not by geeks but by other people. Wonderful.

It occurred to me, as I listened [mp3] to E.O. Wilson talk about the Encyclopedia of Life that there’s still the old problem of human nature, power and the spread of info. It’s one thing to have every bit of information you could want at the tip of your fingers – another thing altogether to make sure that benefits more than just you and your buddies.

Any ideas anyone?

I really dropped the ball helping out Evan and Robin (and the rest of the team) on Rococo Camp … But I will be there!

What: Rococo Camp
When: Friday May 2007 18th to Sunday the 20th
Where: SAT, 1195 St-Laurent, Montréal (Métro St-Laurent)

What is it? Well, nominally it’s about wiki, but it’s really an unconference, whose agenda is set on the day, based on hallway conversations, using the Open Space conference model. Or:

To all wikiers, bloggers, users, developers, artists, academics, activists, inventors, video editors, and other creators which are interested in Collaboration, Creativity and Self-Management….the Rococo Barcamp is for you !

I just signed up to give a talk called:

why an open movement? data and evolutionary advantage

One of the problems with the open movement, and projects like Rococo camp, is explaining what they are – and attracting a diverse audience (not just girl boy etc, but architects, urban planners, energy companies, environmentalists, doctors etc). Reading the site, I still have not figured out what Rococo is about, and I am a member of the “community” that is organizing it! We really need to think about getting the language less dense. How can we get more non-geeks involved in these events? After all, if geeks are to be useful, we have to build tools that non-geeks can use. There is so much cross-pollination we need to foment in order to do more exciting things than build another social network or another wordpress widget. The world has big, very real problems that we can help with, but geeks don’t necessarily understand the problems, and non-geeks don’t understand the tools. So we have to bring people together.

I kick myself for not helping Evan et al on Rococo camp, especially on this issue which we discussed: getting non-geeks involved. But what can you do? Anyway, I’ll be there. I’ll be the guy with the glasses & the mac.

Excellent: Open Medicine: A peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal, Canadian to boot.

The mission of Open Medicine is to facilitate the equitable, global dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care.

I should invite the McGill guy to RoCoCo.

I think I’d better do a post on something other than US generals, so: I got an invite to Freebase.com, which looks to be a very cool project:

Free + Database = Freebase
It’s about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. It’s a big job and we’re just getting started.

and:

Share, reuse, remix.
We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.

It seems to be a commercial operation, run by Danny Hillis of MetaWeb.

I’ve got a couple of invites if anyone wants.

I started writing about this ages ago, but have not finished yet… but in a discussion with Michael, the idea came up again, and I wrote a long comment there, which I’ll reproduce here (slightly redacted):

***
my theory of morality is this: moral ideas are cultural constructs that sink or swim based on their ability to “improve” lives & societies, where improve means: makes it easier for a bigger number of people to be well-provided-for, to solve problems they want to solve, and generally to be more happy.

here is a thought experiment: what if increasing individual liberty, abolishing slavery, providing public education (etc) resulted in: mass pandemics, death, misery, and a collapse in the economy. would we see liberty & public education etc as morally good? i’d argue no.

if you read the bible (and, I presume most religious texts), you realize that much of it concerns very practical rules of life (how to build things, how to eat things etc), in addition to more abstract spiritual things … those “rules” are helpful for keeping a society functioning smoothly, and well, and helps us continue to solve problems we want to solve.

so while making “moral” choices is important, to me the compelling argument (in politics) is that “moral” choices are actually ones that tend to improve lives, and be effective. (i think this is part of why the religious right is so strong in the USA: our “free” (and empty) society has resulted in people being unhappy … and a set of moral rules (work hard, be honest, help others, be true to your wife etc) helps you get better at doing the things that, over the past 3000 years, have proven to help make people happier, on balance).

Much of this theory comes out of watching LibriVox evolve, where free-form anarchy is employed only to the extent that it helps us make audiobooks, and not for abstract reasons. so when we decide on issues, we measure against making audiobooks, and not against abstract notions of freedom etc. This, i believe, is how societies and morality develop over time…rules of behaviour that are “helpful” become codified as morally preferable traits: honesty, courage, kindness etc.

regarding democracy & political engagement, my personal feeling is that i can accomplish much more outside of the political system right now. the political system is very rigid (like academia). it’s “better” than fascism, but it could/should become even more responsive to people’s needs, i think, by adopting more small-a-anarchist approaches to problems. i believe eventually i might become re-engaged in the system, i hope in ways that help the democratic system start playing with some of these ideas, to see what could be helpful, and what not. that is, i do not believe anarchist projects are good because they are anarchist, but only if they can be proven to help people do things they want to do (manage a health system, education system, environment etc).

civicaccess.ca is a perfect example of this: idea is: big groups of people with access to data over the net may be better at solving some problems than the government is, and the government should be responsive to exploring where these areas might be, and supporting movements/technologies/ideas that help bring decision-making tools into the hands of citizens, rather than keeping them in the rigid and compromised government systems as they exist now.

as for representative over direct democracy, again, i have no particular preference, except to the extent that one or the other can better address problems I see with the world; which includes protecting small groups from the abuse of big groups.

… 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: mp3 link.

***

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.

Brett Gaylor, Montreal film-maker, vlogger, Homeless Nation guy, and Atwater Digital Project Advisory Committee member (and pal) is making a documentary film about music, copyright, and remix culture, with funding from the National Film Board. Part of the idea behind the film is to get people (that means you!) to provide content (audio, video, and photos), and to help edit, mix, mash, and remix bits of the film.

He’s just (re)launched a site, opensourcecinema.org, to get people to contribute.

So go try it out.

(Sylvain, Josh and I hung out last week, cleaning up the site & getting the look, feel and text right, and Patrick did the redesign).

Sylvain has launched the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur $100 Challenge. He’s calling on Montreall tech entrepreneurs to donate $100 to the Atwater Digital Literacy Project (name change coming, I think):

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

If you are interested, you can find out how to donate here. $100 would be great. $10 would be great too. You can also help out in outher ways.

I’m on the board at the Atwater Library, and I’ve been pushing for this digital project for a couple of years (Sylvain was around in the early days).

We should make this a quarterly thing: 4 times a year get the Montreal Tech community to ralley around a particular cause and try to raise some money for something.

I was at podcamp in Toronto last weekend (check out the archive of videos of the presentations), and ran into a number of people doing great things. From the start I was excited by podcasting not because of the obvious things it would do, but the things that aren’t so obvious. The obvious thing is to create an army of radio hosts who imitate other radio hosts. The non-obvious things are happening and more and more is going to be rolling out in the coming years. Such an exciting time if you think that communicating ideas is an important thing for humans to do. So, here are a few people who were at the unconference whose projects impressed me:

• Sonya Buyting: Sonya is the Sassy Scientist, a science journalist and newly-minted podcaster she’s worked as a broadcaster for Discovery Channel among other things. I personally like my science podcasting dry and academic, or at least in the sober public radio mode. Sonya’s stuff is a lot more bouncy (music + science = sassy) … so I think her market is not so much stuffy 32-year-old grouches like me, but a younger audience. Which is laudable, considering the questionable state of science education, and declining interest among the young in that stuff that happens to allow us to live the way we do. In any case this is a sharp and professionally-produced podcast, and you’ve got to hand it to her: the first episode includes an interview with Sir Richard Branson, playboy billionaire owner of Virgin Airlines and recently announced climate-philantropist; and, even better, an interview with Seth Lloyd, writer of the best book I’ve read so far in 2007, Programming the Universe. Sonya is not a Montrealer. But she IS from New Brunswick, which gets her some extra points.
• Casey McKinnon & Rudy Jahchan: Galacticast is one of the most-watched vidcasts, certainly the top in Canada. Their take on making it in mainstream was pretty great: basically, bring it on, but we’re keeping all the rights to our stuff. That represents such a huge shift in the way broadcasting is going – and why music cos, and mainstream broadcasters are worried. Because the mainstream disseminators have less and less of a role to play: distribution channels aren’t limited anymore, so broadcasters and music companies haven’t figured out what they’ll be good for when art and media can sell itself. In the mean time, people like Rudy and Casey are out on the edge figuring out how this will work. Rudy and Casey are Montrealers.
• Julien Smith: Julian is a good friend and I see him pretty regularly, and I’ve probably posted about him a fair bit here. But still: I am always impressed by how well he understands the back-end of the net and how net-relationships are changing the way we do things. I understand all these things, but he lives them in a way that I don’t. He’s the longest-running and most popular podcaster in Canada, not by accident. It’s been interesting, too, to listen to his stuff evolve over the past year or so, and get more heavy, but still stay raw, and somehow fun. It’s an odd and compelling mix. He bares his soul online as a matter of course, which has some interesting by-products. He’s also got this other fantastic project that he’s nudging along to success, Listen to Your Kids. It hasn’t quite picked up yet with the kids, but it will. It’s just too cool an idea, and the sort of thing that makes me smile about podcasting. Julien is a Montrealer.
• jim milles: jim runs the really great UB Law Podcast, that “features conversations with University at Buffalo Law School faculty and other prominent scholars on cutting-edge research and important ideas in law and society.” This is such an obvious use of podcasting, and every university should have something similar. UC Berkeley, and many other universities, podcast course lectures, but that format doesn’t quite work for the general public (I’ve tried a number of lectures and though I’ve liked them, they don’t quite grab me). Better to do as Jim has done, get scholars to talk about their areas of expertise, in a conversational format, and record it. A perfect way to get this knowledge outside the walled world of academia, and to the rest of us. Jim is not a Montrealer.
• Matt Forsythe: Matt is an artist who works at the National Film Board, on a number of things including the almost-excellent CitizenShift. He’s also involved with the Schwartz movie, (check the fantastic trailer on Youtube). We had a long talk about digital media and analog institutions like the NFB. There seems to be such resistance to freeing all this content that sits collecting dust in the basement, watched by no one. It’s very puzzling to me that makers of media — especially non-commercial, publicly-funded media makers – are not clamouring to get all their media out to the wold in digital format. Any worries they might have had about bandwidth etc in the old days has been killed by all the vid services out there: blip.tv, googlevideo, youtube, not to mention the non-commercial options like Internet Archive and iBiblio. Yet all the wonderful wonderful work done by the NFB is inaccessible to me because so little of it is online. How great would it be for everyone – NFB included – if everything they made was available online. Matt is a Montrealer.
• mitch joel: I kept hearing about Mitch from different directions, and we kept missing each other at events. He works for digital marketing/branding company Twist Image, but it was funny, the thing that won me over was when he told me he worked for fifteen years writing music columns for Hour. I guess I have a natural mistrust for the corporate world, but when I hear that someone has put so much energy into something like writing music for a small community paper, it puts me at ease. Anyway, Mitch gave what was the slickest and most impressive presentation(.mov) I saw at podcamp. maybe I say that because the topic – more or less, branding you – is something i have been scratching my head over for the past month or so. I have been circling around doing so many things, and I need to start thinking about focusing my professional life better, and sorting out just what the hell I am going to do when I grow up. Mitch is a Montrealer.

I’m going to toss LibriVox into the ring, and suggest there is some hot stuff happening in Montreal.

But the million-dollar question I had coming out of podcamp was: how do I monetize my grouchiness?

(for those counting: 2 women, 5 men.)

A couple of events to attend:

• democamp: local techies show off their alpha software … Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent, Tuesday February 27th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.
• beercamp: a beer-fueled collective programming party, to help Brett get his opensourcecinema.com site firing on all cylinders before the SXSW conference in March. Objective: “A quick hack of a Drupal 5.1 install to create an Open Source documentary website (for Brett’s upcoming OpenSourceCinema movie).” Needed: CSS/html hackers, some php stuff, designers, UI peeps, text writers, and alpha testers, etc. Come along, have a drink and help Brett build his site. Karma points like crazy… and the film is going to be a famous feature-length documentary about remix culture, creative commons and the like, so the medium here is the message. see Sylvain’s post for more info.

  Oh, it’s Thursday, here: 4475 St Laurent, #202 (coin Mt, Royal) … not sure what time.

…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.

Moons ago, Sylvain & I were talking about building a digital media school for kids-at-risk at the Atwater Library. Well, a couple of years later, we’ve got some funding from Heritage Canada, a fantastic project co-ordinator, a bunch of very keen partner groups; and a gaggle of great volunteers and organizers. The plan in this pilot phase is a series workshops, tailored for each partner group, from late February to April 2007.

Here is the project blurb:

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets at-risk kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to help them express themselves, find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

We need some more cash for digital equipment (about $5000). Here’s how you can donate some money (can you spare $25? $100?), or some working equipment:

SUPPORT THE ATWATER DIGITAL LITERACY PROJECT.

You can also help by blogging about this, by sending out some emails, or by volunteering. If you work for a company, especially a tech or media company, maybe you can ask them to sponsor the project? If you want more info, shoot me an email.

And thanks to all who have helped with this project, of course Mir who has done the lions share of the work, the organizers, coordinators, and volunteers, and the great Advisory Committee: Julien Smith, Jen Schultes, Austin Hill, Brett Gaylor, Anuradha Dugal, Sylvain Carle, Paul Shore.

I love wikipedia, but there’s a glaring problem, something I’ve noticed more of late: the writing is often terrible. If you wanted to learn how to write good clear prose, Britannica is as good a model as any. Wikipedia is … not. Or, usually not. On the surface that doesn’t matter, since the primary objective of both Wikipedia and Britannica is to deliver information. As an information-delivery system, wikipedia wins out for me, because it is free and accessible. Britannica loses because it is not free, and therefore inaccessible. And for my purposes, Wikipedia is usually a good place to get what I want, or at least to find out where to get what I want.

But as a model for good clear writing it is a miss, with the occasional hit. To some degree this is true on the net in general. I am certainly more sloppy in a blog post, a forum post, an email than I would be with a document that will be printed. I let mistakes go that I would never consider letting go in physical writing.

I wonder if this matters? Does “writing well” matter? Yes, I think that it does. In my life experience, in engineering, in corporate policy, in finance, in fund-raising, in project management, and of course in writing, one skill I think I have is the ability to express ideas clearly and well. That still has great value, and that, I think, is why good writing is important, even if it is not really valued as such by our market society. Most writers, for instance, get paid pennies. But probably people who can express ideas clearly often move beyond “mere” writing, to use that skill for other things.

So this is one area where Wikipedia might cause harm: it is a bad model for how to write.

Still, the blogs I read – the very few professional ones, and the handful of blogs by friends of mine – tend to be well-written and clear. Mistakes are rare. Is that because their writers are products of a time when books were important? Or is the value of good writing inherent in the net where, despite the technology used, we’re still mostly writing words for people to read? Will the grown-up MySpace & Wikipedia generation pay as much attention to grammar and (yikes) spelling, as us older folk? (Even if we are often, like me, more careless on the net than we would be elsewhere? especially with spelling).

These thoughts were spurred on by some bad writing in wikipedia, not sure what, but there is much to choose froml; and by this curious video, which I loved, and which was in response to the now famous: the machine is us/ing us.

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.

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.