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August 31, 2006
Almost Ready to Leave Boston
Posted by acarvin at 11:00 PM
Packing
Posted by acarvin at 10:50 PM
August 30, 2006
Wolfmother Rocks the House
Right now I'm at the Virgin Mobile Festival in Baltimore and Wolfmother is rocking the house. By far the heaviest power trio in 30 years, these guy have become my favorite band. I shot some pics and video during the first two songs but there's no broadband to upload them. Oh well better enjoy them while they're still on stage..... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:28 PM
Still Packing....
Still packing like mad this morning. If we're lucky we'll be able to hit the road in three or four hours. Maybe.
Anyone want to place bets as to how far we'll get today? I'm hoping we'll make it to at least Bridgeport, CT. At this rate, though, we may be spending the night in Massachusetts.
Posted by acarvin at 10:50 AM
August 29, 2006
Andy's Apartment Layout Meme
Here's the layout of our new apartment. Wanna help us figure out where to put stuff? Upload a new copy of this picture to Flickr, tag it apartmentmeme so we can all follow along, and add some notes to the picture to identify where everything should go. Consider it a Web 2.0 experiment in Open Interior Decorating!
Among the key items:
- Desk (5'x3')
- TV and entertainment center (4'x3')
- Coffee table (5'x2')
- Couch (6'x3')
- Cat Condo (2' square)
- Small dining room table (4'x4')
- Treadmill (7'x3)
- Cats (1' square and 1.5' square)
- Kayleigh's crib (4'x2')
Feel free to add some new items we may not already own if you think we should. Have fun! -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:06 PM
Kayleigh & Susanne Are Ready to Move
Posted by acarvin at 2:50 PM
Sitting at the VW Dealership
Right now I'm hanging out at the Boston VW dealership waiting to get Kayleigh's infant safety seat inspected - figured it was worth getting a pro to look at it before we hit the road tomorrow.
Susanne is overseeing the packers, who started filling boxes around 8am. Winston is riveted by them, as he always is when people come to the apartment, while Dizzy has retreated to the solitude of the sun room. They won't pack the mattress til tomorrow, so at least we won't need a hotel for tonight.
Our dsl and cable are shutting off today, so if I can't piggyback on a neighbor's wifi, I'll just have to use my phone, like I am right now. This particular post is being posted thru Dave Winer's experimental YoMoBlog service, for which I'm serving as a volunteer beta tester. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:35 AM
August 28, 2006
Moving Sooner Than Expected
Due to an apparent miscommunication with our moving company, it seems we'll be moving a bit sooner than expected - this Wednesday to be exact. The movers are coming tomorrow to help us pack our things, at least, so it's not a total mad dash, but it's pretty darn close. We spent the entire day running errands, sacking our closets and making lists. I think I threw out more industrial-size bags of garbage than I have in the last two years.
Currently we're piling up all the various baby and feline-related sundries that need to accompany us in the car ride to DC. Our dining room table has turned into a mound of diapers, nursing pads, cat medicines, toy mice and the occasional five-megapixel camera. We may have to put yellow police tape around the pile to ward off overzealous packers. I just feel bad for the cats because they see their carriers and clearly think that they're about to go to the vet.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:04 PM
Audio of Babies Crying
Okay, some of you may wonder why I would post a podcast of babies crying, but there's a good reason for it. Before Kayleigh was born, our veterinarian had recommended that we get an audio recording of crying babies to help our cats adjust to the cacophany before we brought our baby home from the hospital. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find a recording anywhere that suited our purposes, so we brought Kayleigh home without prepping Winston and Dizzy. Thankfully they've been great with her, but it's pretty obvious that they don't like the crying.
Since we have several friends with pets who are expecting soon, we decided to record a podcast of Kayleigh crying. The audio is about a minute long, and actually features three separate crying tracks for maximum noise effect. So if you happen to be expecting a baby and are wondering how your pets may react to the sudden racket, play this podcast nice and loud for them. If you don't have stereo speakers for your computer, I encourage you to burn the podcast to a CD and play it on a stereo. It'll also help you get used to babies crying as well. :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:19 PM
August 26, 2006
Art Mob at the Public Garden
Posted by acarvin at 9:50 PM
Testing Dave Winer's New Mobile Blogging Tool
This is just an attempt to post a blog entry from my phone using Dave Winer's experimental mobile blogging tool. More later.... andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:37 AM
August 22, 2006
My New Job at NPR
Some of you have commented to me that my blog has been unusually quiet the last couple of weeks. I suppose this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as it's the middle of August, not to mention the fact that I've been thoroughly enjoying my time with Kayleigh watching her learn how to smile.
But the main reason I haven't been posting is because I've just accepted a new job. Starting in just a few weeks, I'll be working at National Public Radio in Washington DC, serving as senior product manager for online communities. In this role, I'll essentially act as a Web 2.0 strategist for NPR, helping them develop new initiatives that encourage greater public involvement in NPR's online activities. These activities could take a variety of forms: online social networks, wikis, blogs, mobcasting, citizen journalism, original content sharing. The NPR digital media team is very excited about the possibilities, and I'm honored that they've turned to me to work with them on this endeavor.
Now some of you may find it a bit odd that I've gone from digital divide work to NPR, but it seems quite natural for me. For many years now, I've argued that one of the main reasons we should bridge the digital divide is to provide the public with new outlets for civic participation, encouraging them to become producers of knowledge rather than mere consumers of it. Just giving people Internet access isn't very profound unless they also have platforms for dialogue and debate - platforms where they can have a voice in the public sphere. This new job at NPR will give me the chance to help develop platforms that I hope will do just that. Additionally, I'll continue to serve as one of PBS Online's three bloggers, focusing on education technology at PBS learning.now. So it seems like I'll be spending my waking hours covering the entire public broadcasting spectrum in one way or another. :-)
In the coming weeks I'll try to write more about the new job. For starters, I'll be spending a lot of time analyzing the Web 2.0 universe, with particular interest towards things like online social networks, citizen journalism and networked journalism. I can't predict where all of this will lead, but I'm very excited that NPR has asked me to help them blaze new trails with them.
Meanwhile, I'll also have to focus on the move itself. We're planning to head to the DC area during the first week of September, living in Silver Spring, MD. I'm really looking forward to being back in the DC area, too. While Boston has been good to us (read: Kayleigh), I feel like we're now getting ready to go back home.
See you soon, Washington. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:05 PM
August 21, 2006
All Smiles
Hanging out with Kayleigh in Brookline this afternoon. She started smiling a couple of weeks ago.
Posted by acarvin at 9:28 PM
August 7, 2006
A Lesson Learned the Hard Way
"Before I got sued I thought you had to do something wrong to get sued."
- MaineWebReport blogger Lance Dutson at the Citizen Media unconference, talking about how he was sued unsuccessfully for posting a copy of a Maine tourism ad that accidentally contained a adult-oriented phone service as its phone number. The advertiser filed the suit because he was publicizing their typo and mocking their mistake, and was one of the first bloggers to experience the wrath of corporate lawsuits.
Posted by acarvin at 2:55 PM
What's the Ideal Toolset for Citizen Journalism?
At Dan Gillmor's citizen media unconference here at Harvard, Hong Kong University professor Andrew Lih led a discussion about the ideal toolset for fostering, editing and distributing citizen journalism. I recorded a podcast of the session; it's just under an hour and 45 megabytes. Sorry about the static during the first 10 seconds - I promise it gets better.... -andy
Tags: Andrew Lih | citizen journalism | citizen media | Harvard | speeches. Berkman | unconference
Posted by acarvin at 1:42 PM
Lisa Williams Discusses Placeblogging
Here's a podcast of Lisa Williams of H2Otown talking about "placeblogging" - blogs focused on hyperlocal community journalism. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:36 AM
August 6, 2006
Mitch Kapor: The Case for Wikifying Politics
Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gave a great presentation this morning at the last day of the Wikimania conference about the potential of using wikis to transform political discourse and reaching greater consensus. I've put his direct quotes in quotes, though a large amount of the rest of the notes are close to verbatim, because Mitch speaks at a perfect pace for liveblogging. :-) -andy
Mitch's training started as a 1960s flower child - a disc jockey and a teacher of meditation, along with being a mental health worker. He bought an Apple II in 1978, and it changed his life - "My first experience with a disruptive technology."The technology adoption curve - showed the famous bell curve of early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives and laggards. He shows himself as several places to the left of early adopters, being very early in using disruptive technologies, from PCs to the Net to Second Life and social production, like Wikipedia. "Massively distributed collaboration... has enormous implications that go far beyond the current set of projects" out there.
"Wikipedia is too interesting to not be involved in it." He's be evangelizing it among nonprofit organizations like the World Resource Institute - why aren't these groups editing articles that represent their areas of expertise? At the Level Playing Institute, founded by his wife, he's been asking them the same thing. They then created a weekly (wikly?) meeting in which they add to articles, from homophobia to affirmative action. They're non-technical people, but they care about these issues passionately.
People tell him all the time that Wikipedia cannot possibly work - but it does. Then they get skeptical again. They keep changing their minds, like it's a zen koan, an insolvable riddle, which they have to answer not in a literal fashion, but use it to examine their way of thinking. It challenges a fundamental set of assumptions that in order to have useful information you need somebody "in charge," people who are experts and certified by a higher authority. They come to realize that the view they had of how the world has to work is just wrong.
It's not that odd that people would find Wikipedia unbelievable. We're products of the cultural condition we grew up with, and we don't even know what are implicit assumptions are. Take urban graffiti. One thing we know about it is that it's difficult to remove - takes specialized equipment. It's an instance where instant vandalism has long-term effects. They take this idea and apply it to Wikipedia - if someone writes something wrong, it's like permanent vandalism, rather than something that can be corrected easily by the community. So some of the strangeness is a transitory effect.
Let's talk about blogs vs. wikis. What's special about a wiki? Blogs are hailed as a very, very big deal initially. They've become an important medium for personal expression, and some bloggers are now very influential. But I find blogs, especially political blogs, disappointing. They're the talk radio of the Internet. They're a series of individual ideas one after another, like billiard balls bouncing around. The culture of blogs focus on individual expression. They reinforce the partisanship that people already have, so it's hard to turn to them for thoughtful deliberation - it's a fundamental limitation.
Wikis, on the other hand, are fundamentally collaborative. Rather than producing a series of 100 comments, a wiki will have a series of 100 edits that improves the content. This is something appreciated by Wikipedians, but others don't see this difference. There really is a secret sauce to Wikipedia. I've learned this from Jimmy Wales. As a techie, I had some unlearning to do when it came to Wikipedia. I didn't like these tools very much. Then I heard Jimmy talk. It's not about the technology - we could almost do this on bits of paper. The secret sauce is the community that's bound together by shared values and practices. It's the unity that comes from the sharing of values and practices that keeps the community together, like "We believe in neutral point of view," or "we believe in being bold."
I really thought that it was heartening to hear Jimmy talk about Wikipedia's challenges and opportunities. This turn towards quality is important - it's not just about the number of articles. More quality would be good. The drive to linguistic diversity is very important.
Hobbit vs. Africa. During Wikipedia's early years, there was more content about Lord of the Rings than all of Africa combined. That's because the early community knew more about Tolkein than the Transvaal. (my words, not his.) So Wikipedia does need to make active efforts to recruit editors that represent a broader, more diverse view. That's why we're able to brag about the Nature article - Wikipedia does well with science, but probably would have lost a matchup if it were comparing humanities.
Right now I'm working with a group that's creating an online social network for African American professionals. We were having a meeting, and it happened to be on a day when we had some high school students in the office working on a project. We invited one of the students to join the meeting, to meet some potential role models. He came to the meeting and he sent an email afterwards. He said, he understands that the business targets the black middle class, and that they should expand the business to help less successful black families as well. Content about scholarships, learning opportunities, etc. If he hadn't been at the table, this idea would have never come up. If you're not inclusive, the realm of possibilities is limited by who you have at the table.
Mitch then showed two edits two the entry about him on Wikipedia. People who spend a lot of time working with Wikipedia's markup codes, but aren't necessarily good writers. Wikipedia needs to lower barriers to entry so people with other skills can participate. But this may have some pushback by current Wikipedians. "No, that's not right. Mark my words about inclusion. If you want Wikipedia to success, we must find ways to lower barriers to participation, and improving user interaction at all levels is important.... We have to step it up, step up the game, and if it were up to me, I'd make it a major priority... Sometimes change is painful, but we need to step up."
Let's talk politics. What does this have to do with politics? He shows a poster for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. People who see the movie come out transformed because they see the world isn't in great shape, and it's not a partisan issue. The scientific consensus is clear. Meanwhile, we have growing economic inequities. We've gone tragically off-course in terms of America's role in the world. We really are leaving the world a worse place for our children, and that's not the legacy I want to leave behind.
Politics here in the US is broken. What's the problem? Partisanship and negativity are high, from Ann Coulter to the Daily Kos. There aren't many opportunities for finding consensus, and ordinary people don't like the political choices they see. This is actually really serious, like having serious disease but being in denial about it. We're in one hell of a mess. Democracy is a grand concept, and it's at risk.
Wikipedia is a kind of existence truth of the power of a self-governed, decentralized community making a positive impact. And it's an inspiration for doing something like it in politics. It has certain key attributes. It needs to be participatory and hands-on - nothing happens on Wikipedia unless it's like this. The product - Wikipedia - and the process of creating it are inextricably entwined, and it can't be separated. It's a wiki that uses itself to produce itself. The same mechanisms of transparency and accountability about article develop apply evenly to the authors of those changes. People are known for what they do and don't do. Any movement for democratic reform would have to operate by the values and processes it seeks to achieve in society. It has to be the thing it's trying to bring about. In every stage, Wikipedia aspires to practice what it preaches. This could be a pretty bold thing for a political movement.
There has to be a high aspiration for respectful dialogue that brings out our best selves, not our worse selves like blogs. And we don't have to turn over our fates and destinies to experts. Any person can participate as an equal - in the case of a politics wiki, formulating policies to help improve the world.
Is this absurd? I guarantee that in 99 percent of the audiences I speak to as completely absurd. But the PC was absurd in the 70s, the commercial Internet absurd in the 80s. Politics is not known for respectful collaboration. "We need a political movement that doesn't practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia doesn't practice Britannica as usual." "It's not going to be about talking - it's going to be about doing."
I do think that some new tools will be very helpful. "If I had one idea to offer, I think we need to have tools and software that help us argue better." I think it as an extension of Wikipedia culture. A fair idea is central, and you don't want to use unfair tactics to make you point. You don't hide info, you don't use selective evidence. Having fair arguments and having communities where people can constructively disagree is really important.
The final point I want to make is this. There are no panaceas or easy solutions. Trying not to be naïve, I don't want to suggest any technodeterminism, or that Wikis will save the world. But sometimes difficult decisions have to be made, and facts alone aren't enough to make those decisions. Wikipedia's best article on the war in Iraq doesn't make a conclusion about whether the US should withdraw. Wikipedia goes out of its way to avoid being drag down by arguments about what we should or shouldn't do. Facts alone aren't sufficient to guide decisions. So what would this political movement stand for? It'll only work if people come together around commons values. You could apply wikipedia to a particular ideology, but what about for reaching consensus. So I wanted to share my thinking and my struggle for solving this. I think Wikipedia can be a key inspiration, though, and there's much we can learn from it. "There's so much work to be done from that inspiration to make the world a better place."
Posted by acarvin at 10:16 AM
August 5, 2006
The Benkler-Calacanis Smackdown Over Digg
During his talk at the Wikimania conference this morning, Yochai Benkler criticized Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis, saying he didn't get it because he's been hiring away peer producers participating in Digg, making them instantaneous elites and changing the dynamic of the community. When he said this, Yochai probably didn't know that Jason was listening in the audience. During the questions period, Jason got up and introduced himself, referring to himself as a fan of Benkler's work and noting that there really wasn't as much of a gap between them as Benkler might think. Jason then said that projects like Wikipedia even have some paid staff - often people who were previously volunteers. This is just a reality of today's online business world, he explained, just like there are paid firefighters and volunteer ones, yet both classes of firefighters do great work, regardless of getting paid or not.
Yochai vs. Jason, united via Photoshop. Jason Calacanis photo by Electric Sheep. Jochai Benkler photo by Kittens Toe.
Used in accordance with their Creative Commons licenses.
Benkler acknowledged that this was all "tricky business." But what he disliked about Jason's actions was that he interpreted Jason's "attack" on Digg as generating a split between those who might be perceived as "the really useful people" (ie, those who get paid) and everyone else who participates as a volunteer. This split ends up hurting the community. He described this dilemma as "the major challenge for business today" as they figured out how to "wrap themselves" around peer-content production culture.
Jason then wanted to respond but the session organizer cut it off, told him to "take it offline," and wouldn't let him speak. One person clapped; many others in the audience looked really disappointed the conversation had been quashed. I'll watch and see if anything transpires after the session. -andy
digg it
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 11:03 AM
Yochai Benkler on Commons-Based Peer Production
Here are my notes from Yochai Benkler's talk at Wikimedia. I managed to capture just a fraction of his ideas - he's a fast talker who spews interesting, insightful thoughts - certainly one of the hardest people I've ever liveblogged. -andy
Wikipedia is a salient cultural example of a phenomenon that's much broader, and tied to the particular econ transformation that comes from networked computers. When you have the kind of cultural production system like wikipedia injected into a modern democracy, you can see improvements in democracy and social justice.Between 1840 to and 1850, the cost of launching a newspaper jumped from around 10,000 dollars to over $2 million in current dollars. There was a stark bifurcation between producers and consumers - passive, large audiences and professional commercial producers.
The biggest supercomputers in the world have the equivalent speed of projects like seti@home, which uses decentralized home computers working together.
The networked information economy: radically decentralized, everyone can contribute to it. The most important inputs are widely distributed in the population, from computational resources to human creativity, intuition, experience and motivation. Behaviors that were once on the outside - cooperation, friendship, social motivations, move to the very core of economic life in the most technically and economically advanced societies.
Commons-based production: production without exclusion. Products freely available to everyone, individually or collectively, commercially or noncommercially, going in and going out.
Peer production. Large scale cooperation among people without price signals or managerial commands. They share material resources, like distributed computing, wireless mesh networks, distributed storage, or mixes of these things (like Skype and other P2P tools).
Free and open source software. He shows a chart of Apache web server's share of the market, growing from almost nothing in 1995 to 70 percent in July 2005. Software is a special case of a wider phenomenon of peer-production culture. Wikipedia is the leading representation of this culture. The first time I logged on, I was amazed that 2000 people could manage all this content with no official governance rules. But now it's even bigger, and faces various problems and threats. That's because it's grown beyond the small interest group that created it, and now has people with different interests affecting it, including people who don't like what it represents.
On the Nature wikipedia article. It showed that Wikipedia is a threat to traditional business models, no only because it's a competitor. For Britannica, there's a more fundamental challenge: the very concept that knowledge production isn't in the hands of the very few any more.
There are other peer production communities - flickr, delicious, myspace, Slashdot, etc. All of these are sites that have captured large cultural visibility that something big is happening. You may not be able to get together with friends on a Saturday night to build a car from scratch, but you can begin to build an encyclopedia. We're seeing the emergence of social sharing and exchange as a new model alongside the old model. It used to be outside the economy, now it's a part of it. It's radically decentralized authority and the authority to act. Self selection to tap diverse motivations, insights, capability, availability, attention. Crowding out creates a complex relationship with systems based on money and/or management.
We're seeing diverse cooperation platforms. Humanization is important, both face-to-face, but also just letting people have their say. This leads to the creation of community norms, trust construction, transparency, peer review, a sense of fairness. Fairness is often reciprocity based, but others, like Creative Commons, have no expectation of reciprocity.
This has all led to new opportunities for electronics manufacturers. People who once made TVs and other appliances now have to address the reality of a peer-produced content culture.
Social production is a fact, not a fad; it's the critical long term shift caused by the internet. But it's a threat to, and threatened by, incumbent business models: intellectual property, telecom policy, etc.
Autonomy, democracy, justice and development can all be improved with peer production. You see a shift from consumers to users, doing more for and by ourselves, and in a loose association with others. Search for Vikings in Google and you'll get a great site created by a single teacher. Just one person, not a publisher.
Democracy: our experience is purely with a mass-mediated public sphere. We will begin to learn what it means to have social production of the public sphere. Think Pentagon Papers: Ellsberg could only get it published by going back and forth with the Times, the Post, with the courts intervening. Modern day: when Diebold's voting machines had problems, there was little mass media coverage. One activist got the source code, put them online. You could read it for yourself. Make copies and distribute them. Use these online tools to help you. The code gets passed around to people with some expertise, identifying problems in the code. Diebold tries to fix it, but more people leak the latest problems and share them. Diebold try to use the DMCA to get the content removed from a university server. But it was too late - the cat was out of the bag. Knowledge can't be re-suppressed once it's exposed to the light of day. In the end, the voting machines get de-certified. This is a new way in which the public sphere distributes and produces knowledge.
Everyone is a pamphleteer, they often say. But who will help insure accuracy, quality? What role do citizen journalists play? No, not everyone is a pamphleteer, but we aren't intellectual lemmings, either.
Remix culture is the emergence of a new folk culture. Embracing of parodies, based on active participation. Critical evaluation is moving from academic seminars to blogs to Wikipedia. Look at the Wikipedia entry for Barbie Doll to see the critical analysis of the doll's roll in culture.
Justice. More of what makes for human welfare and development depends on information, knowledge and culture. If you look at things like health, literacy, life expectancy, GDP, etc, it all depends on access to knowledge. Commons-based peer production is beginning to help, though it won't necessarily make water any cleaner. But it still plays a role in development. Open source academic publishing, open content initiatives in developing countries, etc. Through peer production we'll be able to fill some of the needs untouched by the market in the developing world.
Technological threshold conditions enable greater individual human agency. Social sharing and exchange emerge as a major modality. (For some reason he shut off his slide before I could read any more of it.)
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 9:52 AM
August 4, 2006
Larry Lessig: Fighting for Free Culture
Here are my notes from Larry Lessig's talk at wikimania2006. These notes aren't verbatim; please listen to the podcast for the whole megillah. -andy
Lessig hass spent the last nine months talking about read-only cultures vs. read-write cultures. In 1906, John Philip Sousa went to Congress to talk about "talking machines." These talking machines - record players and the like - were going to ruin artistic culture because they will discourage people getting together in person to make music.Read-write culture is where people participate in the creation and re-creation of culture. Sousa feared that recording devices would take away from the creative process - a world of consumers only.
Looking back at the 20th century, it's hard not to conclude that Sousa was right. The production of culture became concentrated and professionalized.
Historically there are lots of aspects of culture where we've stopped being read-write. The free labor movement is an example. Free as in free to engage your capacities as a laborer. Autonomy - the capacity to use the means of production to own and create content.
The 21st century is seeing this idea return. Read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. It's the lesson of the free software movement. They are empowered to produce - doing it because they want to and love it. Read-write labor, just like Wikipedia.
19th century federalists were elitist aristocrats. They didn't really like democracy. That elitism was killed by Jefferson's Republicans, that got people participating in civic dialogue. This was then killed by broadcast politics - the 30-second commercial. Now the 21st century is giving us a chance to revive Jefferson's ideas.
Political blogs - places where people are forced to explain their reasoning, transforming them from couch potatoes to activists. Read-write politics.
All of this shows how the 20th century was weird, totalitarian. Centralizing institutions controlling how culture, labor and politics developed. (Shows pics of Stalin and Bill Gates - big laugh). Read-only society - profoundly weird.
That century is now over - it's passed. The 21st is the revival of the old way to organize and participate - freer, read-write.
Read-write culture and free culture - demanding freedom in what we create, like Richard Stallman. The internet has enabled this new read-write culture. It's not just one culture, but two, both very different. One is a new version of read-only - massively efficient to sell and consume mass culture created elsewhere. Apple is the poster child for this: iTunes only lets you play stuff you buy from Apple, only for the iPod. Trying to perfect the copyright of content being consumed at a mass scale. Then there are those companies that exist to empower people to share their own content.
He shows anime clips edited to music - mashups of anime films to new music, including anime muppet hunter D- mahna mahna. Brilliant examples of remix culture - (I've got to find that).
White album inspires Jay-Z's Black album, mixed together by Danger Mouse as Grey Album.
Remixing religion - Jesus Christ, the Musical. Jesus video of "I Will Survive."
Remixing politics: atmo.se video of George Bush and Tony Blair performing "Endless Love."
We need to recognize that writing words is the Latin of our modern times. Video and sound are the vulgar languages of the common people, tools for speaking with power - a new potential to speak, learn, a new literacy that's reviving the read-write culture.
Two cultures, both products of the Internet, both different. The law's attitude towards them is different. Copyright law loves read-only, hates read-write, weakens it, in the current way it's architected. Using content digitally creates new copies of it, and that requires permission from the owners, so say the law. That conflict would be bad enough, but it's exacerbated by the war to protect the read-only business model. It could kill the potential of read-write culture. That's why many of us are resisting this, fighting this.
How do you resist? Let's litigate, file lawsuits. Tried that, but congress can do what it wants, so going to court to defend free culture was just simply wrong. Instead, we needed to incite a public movement to cause justices to understand the value of free culture, so the political system will wake up to it.
Two steps:
Practice free culture, show its value in 1000 different contexts;
Enable free culture, make it possible everywhere, beyond the hacker world.The practice of free culture is what Wikipedia is all about. This would have been impossible to do in a 20th century mindset. There are lessons that we should learn about how this is all made possible. If you look over the last 50 years, there's a repeated pattern. Look at interoperability - a proprietary instinct is natural, but freedom is a more important value. Consumers reject the idea of control. It's much better for society and innovation that there's interoperability and free standards encouraging the widest range of competition and the widest number of participants. That's the lesson of the last generation.
But we also need to enable a platform of free culture. We have to make it possible for this infrastructure to grow, and there's a threat to this freedom, a clear and present danger. Jack Valenti calls it a terrorist war - except the terrorists are kids remixing media. When they build the locks to protect the read-only internet, that will lock out the potential of the read-write internet. So we need to join Free Software Foundation to fight DRM, support free culture and free software, because they enable each other. There as important steps that all of us should take to facilitate free culture.
We need to enable a legal platform that protects free culture. We came up with the Creative Commons movement, stealing the ideas of Richard Stallman to use copyright law to carve out a space for freedom. Shift the default from all rights reserved to some rights reserved. They have a human element - a simple common deed, a legal element for lawyers, and a machine-readable element that computers can understand. Google and Yahoo use this machine-readable element to integrate CC into search engines. Now we're porting the legal layer for different jurisdictions around the world. There are now 140 million linkbacks to CC licenses as of last June. Content that explicitly says, We're free for you to use - and protects it in the legal code.
But the legal code is not free culture - you are free culture. The legal code is just plumbing, like tcp/ip. The culture is built on top of it, taking real work by real people. Licenses are nothing more than tools to minimize the harm of outdated legal systems. We need to make it seamless for people to do what they want to do in a simple way and make the lawyers as small as possible. You have ignited the imagination of the possibilities more than anyone in the world. Yochai's book pours all sorts of praise on Wikipedia. He's not a guy who gets obsessed but he's obsessed with you, in how the network is enabling creativity. You should feel his praise and feel proud of. That's why I'm here too.
But I'm also here to plea with you to see what power you have and use it to do good, to enable free culture. Help others spread the practice that Wikipedia exemplifies. PD-Wiki project is doing this. It'll launch in Canada, where the company with the database of all public domain Canadian content, then invite the community to build content around it - critiques, bios, lesson plans, etc. On top of this Wiki, there will be an API to let anyone figure out what's in the public domain and what's not. It'll excite more people to the idea of free culture.
Then, demand a useable platform for freedom. I was talking with Jimbo Wales over bad coffee, walking in a park, about the lack of interoperability between free culture projects - islands of freedom. But they can't talk to each other. They can't interact. You can't take Wikipedia and mix it with a CC sharealike license. It's bad design. My first instinct was control - convert everyone to a CC license. But as I listened to Jimbo and his ethic, I realized that was a mistake. You don't need a monopoly. You need a layer, like the tcp/ip layer, that allows content to move to and fro, find equivalents of similar licenses. Connect the FDL license with CC-BY-SA license. Derivatives from one license currently can't be used under another license. But a solution would be to facilitate an infrastructure where content licensed under one license can be distributed under another license in derivative form. An ecology of legal code to facilitate the functionality of different licenses. No one architecture would control everything, no single point of failure if a license is overturned by a court. And it would create a market signal of what licenses are valued by people. That signal is a discipline to the people who provide this plumbing to make it as good as it can be. A legal layer that would allow people to do what they want.
Creative Commons isn't the entity to run this structure. Instead, invite license authors to add a clause to allow derivatives under equivalent licenses. Someone like the software freedom law center could be the ones to do it.
Sometimes I'm optimistic, sometimes I'm not. But you have influence over this. You can help decide what's the best system and demand it. It's not just good for you, but good for all people who want to support free culture. The good you could do here is extraordinary. If we don't solve this soon, it's an environmental problem we'll face in the near future, where islands of creativity can't interact. You could do good here; you should do good here.
Tom Brokaw says my parents generation was the greatest generation, but they lived in the weirdest century. But there were a few people who got it. David Clark said "we reject kings, presidents and voting- we believe in rough consensus and running code." Richard Stallman then said, "If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes, that a good citizen is one who wants to cooperate when it's appropriate."
It's an honor to address you, but I plead with you to use your power to do good beyond Wikipedia in the name of free culture.
Posted by acarvin at 2:56 PM
Rocketboomer
Andrew Baron of Rocketboom hanging out at the Wikimania conference after Jimmy Wales' opening remarks.
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 11:09 AM
Podcast of Jimmy Wales Talk at Wikimania
Here's the podcast of Jimmy Wales' talk at the Wikimania conference. It's about 30 megs, so it may take a while to download depending on your connection. -andy
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 10:18 AM
Notes From Jimmy Wales' Wikimania Talk
Jimmy Wales notes from the Wikimania conference:
Shows a Stephen Colbert clip: "Any website that has a longer entry on truthiness than Lutheranism has got its priorities straight." Colbert then logged in, saying "Idaho is Oregon's Portugal."
Wikiality. "I'm a fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias."
Wales: Talking about the Wikipedia movement, past present and future.
This is the one talk I give each year where the audience knows everything I know plus more.
Wikipedia's radical idea: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
2005 Milestones: Swedish site passed 100,000 entries, English surpass one million, German 400,000 etc, etc.
Lots of news this year, including the Siegenthaler controversy. "Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia. Who knew?" "I will say that it was a really bad error and a terrible thing." He then showed a chart of site traffic - traffic tripled because of the controversy.
When this was going on, Nature magazine showed him the article they were working on, but it was under embargo, so he couldn't talk about it on CNN and other outlets. The article showed that Wikipedia had four errors per page compared to Britannica's three errors, when comparing a select group of science articles. Wikipedia "isn't complete rubbish; it's pretty good. We as Wikipedians working day to do know how hard it is to get things right...."
"We actually, in my opinion, got pretty lucky... because we're stronger in science than other areas... If we'd done a similar study in an area like poets... we probably wouldn't have done as well.... We know we have systemic biases - the articles in humanities aren't as good as they ought to be."
The Nature study focused on error, not style. In some cases, Wikipedia articles "are a complete wreck of style... That is something that also gets better over time." After we achieve consensus, someone who's a good writer can come in and smooth things out."
"We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn't even heard of - but I'm just teasing there."
"We're not there yet. We're not as good as Britannica - yet.... So in the coming years we're going to see a turn towards quality."
"We also need to be very interested to focusing our attention on the quality of the core topics" and working to make these things better.
Wikimedia projects are always far ahead of the foundation's organizational capacity. But the foundation is maturing as an org, and this'll be important to its future success. "We're becoming a better run organization... and we're finally getting to the point where we can actually apply for grants... and undertake new projects."
Met Jimmy Carter last week, talked about African aid. Many African countries only get 20 percent of the aid they're eligible for because the process is so confusing. Sounds like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sept 2005 - got an email from Brad Patrick. He's now Wikimedia's legal consul. "We were at a point where we were getting overwhelmed with legal complaints" and we needed to take them seriously. He's also serving as the interim CEO.
Wikia, Inc has also received funding for building for-profit wiki communities. We managed to raise venture capital. They're hiring full-time engineers to work on the MediaWiki software. Wikia has "a total commitment to free knowledge and respect for communities."
Unlike any other medium, wiki seem to people to build a consensus view.
Campaigns Wikia: project to improve political discourse.
Some announcements (the news for today):
We're announcing that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)
Wikiversity: A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research baed in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing.
The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.
Final thoughts:
Wikipedia. More than 100 languages have 1000+ articles. But we need to do more for countries in the developing world. So the foundation will seek funding to hire coordinators to represent under-represented languages. "My view is we should be looking to hire some people... in order to be an advocate and a coach... to actually reach out to volunteers."
WiktionaryZ incorporates the ability for users to edit an entry in multiple languages using a single interface. It'll probably be functional later this year.
Wikiversity. They want to work with free universities like Cida City Campus in South Africa to learn what they need, try to help provide it.
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 10:11 AM
Jimmy Wales Announces $100 Laptop Partnership, Wikiversity, Wikiwyg
A few minutes ago here at the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as one of the first elements in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)
He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing. The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.
UPDATE: My notes from Jimmy's talk can be found here; meanwhile, here is the podcast I recorded. -andy
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 9:46 AM
At Wikimania this Weekend
Hi everyone,
I'm at the Wikimania conference in Boston right now - Jimmy Wales is getting ready to speak. Lots of other great speakers, too, so there should be a lot to blog about... -andy
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM
August 3, 2006
Rocketboom: Apply Directly to the Forehead
Posted by acarvin at 7:22 PM
August 2, 2006
Video Blogger Jailed for Contempt
Yesterday, video blogger Josh Wolf was jailed by a federal court for refusing to turn over video tapes he shot last summer during a San Francisco anarchist protest.
In July 2005, Wolf shot footage of the protest, which resulted in a police car being burned. Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury to see if arson charges were warranted, and issued a subpoena to Wolf this February to turn over all footage he shot during the incident. Wolf refused, arguing that turning over the footage would make it less likely for sources to cooperate with journalists. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the judge didn't buy that argument:
The case is "a slam dunk for the government,'' the judge said at the end of a 2 1/2 - hour hearing. Noting that the events Wolf photographed took place in public and involved no confidential sources, Alsup said there was a "legitimate need for law enforcement to have direct images of who was doing what to that police car.''"Every person, from the president of the United States down to you and me, has to give information to the grand jury if the grand jury wants it,'' Alsup said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan told the judge that Wolf was "placing himself above every other citizen in our society'' by defying the grand jury. Finigan said the subpoena had been approved by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as provided by Justice Department guidelines in cases against journalists.
Theoretically, Josh could remain in jail until next July, when the grand jury ends its term. Josh's mother, Liz Wolf-Spada, managed to post a note about the situation on his blog:
Although the July 20th hearing seemed promising, today the judge, Judge Alsop ruled against all motions including 5th amendment rights, rights coming under freedom of the press, against bail or a stay. Josh is in Dublin federal prison, in the East Bay area of the San Francisco Bay. I don't have any other information at this time, but his lawyer is planning to file an appeal to the federal 9th circuit court. That filing alone costs almost $500, so if you can donate any little bit helps with the expenses of legal counsel and money for Josh while in jail. If you believe in prayer or good thoughts please send them to Josh.
Having video blogged anarchist protests myself, I can sympathize with Josh's plight. I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable handing over footage of protestors either. Yet I can see the judge's point of view: Josh isn't protecting an anonymous source, nor was the footage shot in private. I wish I had a stronger legal perspective on the situation, but I have a feeling the judge may be right on this one, whether I like it or not. I just hope Josh doesn't have to spend the next year in jail. More power to him for standing up to defend his principles, though.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:58 AM
August 1, 2006
Catching Up on Some Old Photo Albums
Since yesterday was the last day of the month, I decided to max out the remaining bandwidth in my two-gigs-a-month allotment from Flickr by uploading some photos from my previous travels. Before switching to a digital camera, I used to have my 35mm photos burned to a CD when I got them developed, leaving me with a batch of CDs just asking to be uploaded. So I've uploaded three new sets to Flickr:
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Rajasthan 2001: Our second trip to India, including Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, the Pushkar Camel Fair, Udaipur and Chittorgarh. |
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Russia & Estonia: My February 2002 trip to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tallinn. |
This brings my Flickr collection to 10,364 photos. Wonder how long it'll take me to reach 20,000. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 6:00 PM
Birthday Greetings from Brenda
A birthday voicemail from my Aunt Brenda on Sunday.
Don't ask me why the voicemail timestamp says Saturday; I swear my birthday was Sunday. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:46 PM
