Video Campaigns and Responses

Starbucks and the government of Ethiopia have been discussing the trademark rights to some of the finest coffee in the world. The root of the conflict is that Starbucks has not recognised Ethiopia’s ownership of the Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe names. (BBC News 26 October & 30 November 2006).

Oxfam began a campaign against Starbucks in order to help the Ethiopian coffee farmers. The idea is that if Starbucks signs the agreement with the Ethiopian intellectual property office the Ethiopian farmers will have more control over their products and this will result in better prices.

The Oxfam campaign is a typical online/offline mix with physical demonstrations being augmented with an information website containing documentation, photographs etc, and an â??act nowâ?? part where individuals can get involved on their own. A textbook example of an information campaign.

Oxfam have also created a video shot from their â??The Starbucks Day of Actionâ?? on December 16. The most natural place to leave a video on the Internet today is on the site YouTube so naturally Oxfam posted their video on YouTube (Watch it here). The video features demonstrators explaining their views and the positive reactions of people they meet.

What is interesting is not that the Internet is being used in this way but rather the Starbucks response. Starbucks created their own video response on December 20th  featuring the Head of Starbucks Coffee team answering questions. They too posted their video on YouTube (watch the Starbucks response on YouTube).

What is unique about the whole story is the way in which Starbucks as a corporation reacted to the unconventional protest use of YouTube. By responding in kind they showed that they understand the way in which information is created and consumed on the Internet.

Digital video cameras – and in particular mobile phone video cameras – have made the documentation of resistance a necessity. Websites such as YouTube and Google video have created an infrastructure for sharing of the results. By removing the need for camera crews, production teams and broadcast capabilities the creation and distribution of film has fallen into the hands of the creative amateur. The implications of this is that both the protesters and their corporate targets need to quickly master and use this medium of communication.

Whatever the outcome of the Oxfam campaign â?? this is the future of resistance information warfare.

Anonymous Online

Most people have heard of the Zen koan “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The purpose of the koan is not to have an answer but rather to be a point of departure for deeper reflection. Unfortunately for most of us with a western education we tend to attempt to answer the question with a yes or no – therefore defeating the purpose. My question of the day is a variation of the koan: If a protest is not heard – does it make a sound?

The ability to communicate in particular mass communicate is becoming easier. With all due respect to the numerous digital divides (age, knowledge, access, infrastructure etc) the ability to communicate via the internet is still growing. The question is whether this technology will serve the purpose of those attempting to conduct resistance or protest actions. The drawback with mass communication is that the communicator is all too easily identified and can be punished by those she is protesting or communicating against.

So there is a need to both be able to conduct mass communication via the internet and to remain anonymous. There is (thankfully) a growing number of relatively user friendly methods, in addition to tips and tricks, which the anonymous protester can use.

Many of these are to be found in the following guides:

Walking on the wild side

If I was in Singapore I would be facing a prison sentence for doing what I am doing now. (Explanation). The hotel has free wifi for its guests and the receptionist gave me the codes but I chose the wrong (?) wireless and the neighbors let me in.  Many swedes leave their wifi networks open and I must say that I have a hard time figuring why this should be wrong. Additionally I also have a hard time figuring out why people in cities who have open networks
should be annoyed that others surf on their infrastructure.

If you don’t want to let others surf the close the network. But unless you experience serious lag due to all you neighbors surfing via your net then why bother?

Actually allowing neighbors to surf your wifi may be in violation of the service agreement between you and your broadband provider. But lets not go there. Just let me mangle Blanche’s line in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire”: I must say I am grateful for the kindness of strangers.*

* Real line should be: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” but somehow this does not really apply to wifi…

10 Arguments Against DRM

Learn Out Loud presents ten arguments against DRM. This is a good way to quickly get up to speed with the issue of digital restrictions management (DRM). The most important is that DRM changes the who controls our media and infrastructure. In the long run this control may also begin to control the way in which we think.

Internet Days

Today I am in Stockholm for the IIS (Internet Infrastructure Foundation) Internet Days. Two days of presentations concerning issues of interest for the Internet. In addition to this they also present the list of stipends for the projects they will support. This year both Jonas Ã?berg (Free Software education project) and Henrik Sandklef (PGP project) both from FSFE have received money for individual projects. So we are all here in Stockholm to exhibit and present FSFE and they are here to accept their funding â?? Congratulations guys!

The FSFE stand at the IIS Internet Days

Make a Toaster

Some friends and I are kicking around the idea to build a Freedom Toaster. What?, you may ask, is a Freedom Toaster? And why on earth build one? So, first things first.

The Freedom Toaster is like a vending machine. It stands in a central location waiting for customers. But what does it sell? You ask impatiently? Nothing.

The Freedom Toaster is preloaded to dispense free digital products, including software, photography, music and literature. The idea is to bring together a compilation of Free Software based on the GNU/Linux operating system and combine this with music and literature taken either from the public domain or licensed via Creative Commons.

The point is to create a showpiece comprised of an easy to use system which allows users to pick up their own copy of such a CD.

Again, Why?

Well those of us who feel comfortable with Free Software use the Internet as our primary infrastructure of distribution. But to those who are unfamiliar with Free Software finding a site, and deciding which software is needed, downloading it and finally installing it is a process filled with a number of barriers.

The Freedom Toaster is a way to circumvent some of those barriers and will hopefully make people feel more comfortable with the selecting and downloading process. One far reaching goal is to show that Free Software is in the reach of everybody.

Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

14th European Conference on Information Systems

Tomorrow the 14th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) begins. This is the biggest annual European IS conference and this time it has the additional bonus of being in my hometown. I have been accepted to the track on â??Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Societyâ?? with a paper entitled â??Informational Commonsâ??.

The venue: The School of Economics and Law

The conference tracks include: Communities and New Forms of Organizations – eBusiness – eGovernment – Enterprise Systems – Grand Challenges of System Development – Human Computer Interaction – Information and Knowledge Management – IS and Organizational Change – IT in Tourism and Travel – Living in, and Coping with, the society – Mobile Communication, Telematics and Ubiquitous Computing – New Technologies, Innovation and Infrastructure Development – Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Society – Philosophy and Epistemology of IS Research – Strategic Management of IS and IT – The Economics of IS

A harbour view near the opera

The programme (including a list of all papers) can be found here.

Agony of choice

Naturally I had heard of the saying â?? never judge a book by its cover but as most people know: this is exactly what we always do. When reaching the point when I could realistically design the cover for my own PhD thesis I set about the task with a large amount of enthusiasm. In part this comes from the desire to be creative and in part (I must confess) this comes from the joy of procrastination.

What I ideally wanted was a cover which said it all: a metaphor for the work, a eye-catcher, mysterious, unconventional, artsy, deep, filled with meaning, simple, elegant, awaking curiosity, striking etc etc and also with a little humour thrown in. In other words, like most people I wanted everything.

It is difficult to generalise about art but an example of my favourite book cover might sort of give an example of what I mean.

My own design efforts consist manly of what can be considered the Magpie approach. I steal and adapt. Usually this can be legitimised by the words of Pablo Picasso: â??Bad artists copy. Great artists stealâ??, the problem is – which am I? The result of my work was this:

It is part of a Russian film poster from a film called the Eleventh (1923) (original can be seen here) created by the Stenberg Brothers.

Then I realised that I should be using the technology I write about to see if I could be helped by others who know more than I about the art of book covers. So I issued a call for help which generated a lot of comments (both positive and negative). It also generated book covers which were presented here.

The covers generated more discussion. The majority picked nr 8. It was a landslide victory. However as has been pointed out to me â?? art is not a democratic process. So it comes down to the dilemma and anguish of choice. This was a terribly hard decision since the covers were all exiting.

More than this many of the submissions came with explanations and details which helped me realise the art behind the art work. This whole process of choosing a book cover â?? which could have been a simple process of choosing a background colour and adding the title of the book (this is not unusual for a PhD thesis) became a major learning experience. For your artistic efforts and for taking the time to educate me I thank you all.

The choice for my thesis is nr 8. It represents the interruption of communication. The vulnerability of relying on a technical infrastructure upon which we build society. The cartoon nature is a interesting form of â??false marketingâ?? since the contents of the book are really dry! Thank you all.

Nr 8.

Chernobyl twenty years later

Its today twenty years since the accident at Chernobyl (Uranium Information Centre briefing paper #22 & IAEA Chernobyl FAQ) an example of how our reliance on technology can go wrong. The accident was brought about by the mixture of over-confidence in technology, fear of criticising the own organisation and the desire to increase production by conducting dangerous of questionable value.

According to the IAEA Chernobyl FAQ the disaster was the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima size bombs but they also add

However, the atomic bomb testing conducted by several countries around the world during the 1960s and 1970s contributed 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material to the environment than Chernobyl.

Comforting news.

Caesium-137 fallout. Source: J.Smith and N.A. Beresford, “Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences” (Praxis, Chichester, 2005) (via wikipedia).

While Chernobyl is the icon of technological disasters it is important not to forget many â??smallerâ?? disasters that have occurred (and will continue to do so). There is a need to be vigilant of technology rather than to believe the infallibility of technical experts. The failure of Chernobyl did not occur because of a lack of experts but rather through the hubris of the experts in place and the lack of infrastructure available for â??lesserâ?? experts (or laymen if there had been any) to point out the dangers of the actions leading up to the steam explosion that destroyed the reactor core (Chernobyl sequence of events).

Since the disaster a 30km zone around the reactor has been evacuated. A side effect of this has been a resurgence of wildlife in the area (BBC story)

In a macabre form of tourism a motorcyclist has travelled within this zone and put a photojournal online this is part of a growing tourism into the dead zone to visit the abandoned towns.