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Creative Commons Launch Colombia

If you happen to be in Colombia on the 22 August then you are invited to go to the Creative Commons launch party in Bogota.

There will be two separate events, in the morning at the Polictecnico Grancolombiano University we will present several speakers that will include: Proffesor Laurence Lessig, the ccColombia team, SIB (Colombian Biodiversity Information System), Eltiempo.com (an important nationwide newspaper that will begin to offer their citizen journalists the opportunity to use Creative Commons licenses in its online portal) and The Free Software Community.

This venue will be webcast here and here at 14:30 GMT.

In the afternoon we will be having an open content session in one of Bogota’s most vibrant public space: The Biblioteca Publica Virgilio Barco with a live performance by Silvia O and several DJs, VJs and Bloggers that will be displaying their CC work. This venue will be webcast here at 23:00 GMT.

Be sure the check the visual memories of the launch by searching the tag: cccolanzamiento on flickr.

If you do go please say Hi from CC-Sweden to your host – Jaime Rojas

Posted on by mklang

Social Innovation

It’s a sad truth that most of the world needs technology to resolve immediate serious mundane problems. But most technology development is focused on gadgets.

John Voelcker has chosen 10 innovative technologies which are aimed at solving chronic problems. The article Creating Social Change – 10 Innovative Technologies appears in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2006)

  1. A self-contained toilet that treats waste without water or chemicals, protecting precious drinking water from contamination. www.eloo.co.za
  2. An inexpensive kit that turns smog-belching two-stroke engines into cleaner-burning, fuel-efficient sources of power. www.envirofit.org
  3. Small-scale solar power systems that not only produce electric power, but also generate cash by enabling people to set up their own home-based businesses. www.selco-india.com
  4. An electricity-free food preservation system. www.malnutrition.org
  5. A prestigious U.S. university is making many of its academic courses available on the Internet where users can learn from them â?? free. www.ocw.mit.edu
  6. Volunteers have developed a solar-powered microfilm projector that will help tens of thousands of Africans learn to read this year. www.designthatmatters.org/k2
  7. A team of Cuban and Canadian scientists has invented an inexpensive vaccine that could save the lives of half a million infants each year. gndp.cigb.edu.cu/
  8. Low-cost eyeglasses that wearers can tune without the aid
    of an optometrist. www.adaptive-eyecare.com
  9. A Pakistani organization is selling ergonomically correct weaving looms that let adults create the same intricate rugs that children now make. www.ciwce.org.pk
  10. A Brazilian nonprofit is rolling out telecenters that provide Internet access, telephone service, computer training, and other technology-based services to the poor and working class. www.cemina.org.br, www.radiofalamulher.com

This is a good list. I disagree with nr 5 since there are several universities offering similar schemes. In addition I do not believe that it has the same impact and importance as the rest of the list. This is becuase I do not think that by making learning material available people will automatically learn.

Don’t get me wrong – I am sure that these kinds of material are of great value to teachers at other universities since they can take the ideas and adapt them to fit their own classrooms. It’s just that I don’t see that this is on par with clean water, waste disposal and helping poor people access technology.
Despite my complaints – lists such as these are important since they help us open our eyes to the fact that we could all be thinking about solving important everyday problems.
(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

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.

Posted on by mklang

Internet Filtering Vietnam

A new country report has been released by the Open Net Initiative (ONI) Internet Filtering in Vietnam in 2005-2006: A Country Study (PDF Version)

About the ONI:

The ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices. Our approach applies methodological rigor to the study of filtration and surveillance blending empirical case studies with sophisticated means for technical verification. Our aim is to generate a credible picture of these practices at a national, regional and corporate level, and to excavate their impact on state sovereignty, security, human rights, international law, and global governance.

Earlier reports from the ONI include:

Posted on by mklang

CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

Posted on by mklang

Evolution of a Social Contract (the GPLv3 process)

OK so the GPL is a copyright license. But in part it has also evolved into something larger than life. It has become one of those rare things among legal documents – an icon.

Naturally it is not alone in this position. But what is interesting is that other icons tend to be “larger”. The US constitution is an icon, the declaration of rights is an icon. Very few contracts and licenses can be called iconic since few or none ever make it outside their small community. So what happens when the process of technological development forces the “evolution” of a license?

Unlike nature we cannot expect a natural selection. The development must be moved by an outside force. It can be done either dictatorially or democratically. In one way dictatorially is easier – you don’t have to ask all the people what they think. But using this process does not work with software licenses since the dissatisfaction of users will only lead to the demise of the license. Democracy also has its advantages. It allows for participation and the ability of smart people to bring forward comments and ideas that the dictator may not have recognised. The GPL has chosen a democratic process.
The formal system can best be seen in the overview of the process, which begins with the initial release and presentation of the draft of the GPLv3 with additional documentation such as the overview of the review system and the explanatory documents. In addition to the more formal structure the information needs to be communicated out to the users and to ensure an equality of information transfers was established. The latter was accomplished primarily through the use of the Internet as a distribution method of all texts and additional audio and video material.

The essence of the drafting process here described is to make it possible for the Free Software Foundation to decide the contents of the GPL through the fullest possible discussion with the most diverse possible community of drafters and users. Ideally, we would identify every issue affecting every user of the license and resolve these issues with a full consideration of their risks and benefits. In order to accomplish such a large task, the discussion process involves individual community members and Discussion Committees that represent different types of users and distributors.

The process was formally commenced with the release of the first Discussion Draft of version 3 of the GPL (including additional explanatory material) at the first International Public Conference in January 2006, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two day event at MIT was recorded and the audio video material was also made available online. The second draft has recently been released.

To ensure that comments on the GPL are collected and dealt with Discussion Committees have been formed. The members of the committees were chosen to represent diverse users groups such as â??â?¦large and small enterprises, both public and private; vendors, commercial and noncommercial redistributors; development projects that use the GPL as a license for their programs; development projects that use other free software licenses, but are invested in the contents of the GPL; and unaffiliated individual developers and people who use softwareâ??. The role of these committees is to organise and analyse the received comments and propose solutions.

The FSF invited the initial members of the Discussion Committees but granted the committees the power to invite further members and to autonomously organise their work process. The committees work to encourage commentary on the license from the sectors they represent. Once the comments have been collected, organised and analysed the committee is responsible for presenting its results of the deliberations to the FSF.

Aside from this organisational method of soliciting and analysing comments from a wider public the FSF have created an online method of allowing anyone to comment directly on the license draft. This is done by creating a software based commenting system, which works in this way. The draft text of the GPLv3 is online and users can mark a section of text, which they wish to comment, and then type â??câ??. Doing this opens a comment box, which allows the user to add a comment.

Once a user has commented on a section of text that section becomes highlighted. If no-one has commented on the text the background colour is white. After a comment the background is light yellow. The colour of the background becomes progressively darker for each comment added. This colour system allows users to see at a glance which sections of the draft are the most commented.

By holding the cursor over highlighted text the user is informed how many comments have been made on that section. By clicking on highlighted text the comments that have been made appear and can be read. The latter feature has the added benefit of reducing the amount of duplicated comments since the commentator can see the commentary of others.
So what are you waiting for? Participate in the democracy!

Posted on by mklang

Web 2.0 Licentiate thesis

Does the term Web 2.0 confuse or annoy you? Is there anything beyond the flashy buzzword? Well I guess the best way to begin to understand Web 2.0 is to experience it (insert your Matrix jokes here!) but if you prefer to be guided by someone else then I can recommend Peter Gigerâ??s (2006) Licentiate Thesis on the topic. The title is â??Participation Literacyâ?? and it is an interesting exploration in the termâ??s growth and meaning.

From the abstract:

The thesis concerns the Web 2.0 concept construction. Web 2.0 is a new mindset on the Internet. The main characteristics include â??Web as a Platformâ??, Collective Intelligence, Folksonomy and interfaces build with lightweight technologiesâ?¦Web 2.0 is not only a technique, but also an ideology â?? an ideology of participation. A Web 2.0 service is completely web based and generally draws on open access. It includes tools for people to interact within areas such as encyclopaedias, bookmarks, photos, books or research articles. All Web 2.0 services are web communities. A web community is a group of individuals, linked together by a network of social relations with some degree of continuity. Community members learn from each other and the knowledge base of the community grows for every interaction. The core values of Web 2.0 are democracy and participation.

Download it here or visit Peter’s research blog.

Posted on by mklang

Serendipity

Serendipity is making fortunate discoveries by accident. It is also one of those words that both sounds good and denotes a good thing.

While looking for the bibliographic data on Lawrence Rosenâ??s book â??Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Lawâ?? (itâ??s the best on FOSS licensing and it’s also online here), I came across another Lawrence Rosen and his new book â??Law as Cultureâ??. The title was enough â?? I bought it.

Now that I have the book I read the front flap of the dust jacket:

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually a part of a cultureâ??s way of expressing its sense of the order of things.

Rosen is a legal anthropologist and he presents a nice intro to the area of law and culture. All this is good stuff and I am looking forward to reading the rest. How did this book end up in my library and on my â??must readâ?? list? A case of mixed identity, two authors with the same name, an interest in software licensingâ?¦

Serendipity isnâ??t it great?

Posted on by mklang

Are we losing the right to dissent?

Most of us have been in the position where we wanted to ask a stupid question â?? but did not ask it for fear of being seen to be stupid. We practice the noble art of silence. That this is common can be seen when someone else asks the stupid question and immediately a group of people in the audience gratefully acknowledge the importance of the question. Fear of standing out from the group is a powerful force of censorship.

The main problem with consensus is that anyone who disagrees is in the unfortunate position of being abnormal. The group is the norm â?? therefore disagreement with the group is abnormal. This is why censorship is dangerous. It creates the impression that anyone with a dissenting voice is abnormal. Fear of being considered outside the group leads most people to conform with the group and practice self-censorship â?? which in turn reinforces the illusion of consensus and the oddity of the dissenter.

Therefore to ensure that social discussions are not limited or quashed voicing dissent is important since it may encourage others to think and participate. Naturally the object of criticism would prefer not to be criticised and may work to prevent the voicing of criticism. This is, in most cases, not taken to extremes. But in the recent years the limitation of dissent has become a legitimate form of government activity.

Since government has a legitimate interesting in protecting all citizens it can be forced to prevent the actions of some citizens to ensure the safety of all. But this principle is being perverted. By identifying themselves as the nation, politicians are beginning to protect themselves from open criticism. Through the use of the extended public defence argument politicians now argue that it is wrong to criticise them since they are acting in the best interests of the nation.

In 2003 Stephen Downs was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the text â??Give Peace a Chanceâ??.

In 2004 Nicole and Jeff Rank were removed from the event at the West Virginia Capitol in handcuffs after revealing T-shirts with President Bushâ??s name crossed out on the front. Nicole Rankâ??s shirt had the words â??Love America, Hate Bushâ?? on the back and Jeff Rankâ??s said â??Regime change starts at home.â??

In 2005 Charlotte Denis was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the text â??Bollocks to Blairâ??.

In 2006 Cindy Sheehan was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the text â??2,245 Dead. How many more?â??

In 2006 Mike Ferner was arrested for drinking coffee while wearing a T-shirt with the text â??Veterans for Peaceâ??.

Another example is the UK law that prevents ANY demonstrations within a mile radius of parliament. This has led demonstrators to meet and conduct an extremely civilised form of protest â?? a tea party at the Winston Churchill statue. On occasion police arrest these demonstrators.

Posted on by mklang

The missing ideology of Creative Commons

In the continuing discussion on the governance of the iCommons (the international Creative Commons) we have seen warnings raised by some (for example Tomâ??s article) about the loss of the grassroots. Attempting to address these concerns writers are attempting to explain why the iCommons works and therefore criticism of it is unjustified. For example Golden Swamp writes that the iCommons is a network joining up the nodes. While the network is a nice metaphor vague enough to incorporate almost all fuzzy feelgood thoughts on the virtual organisation and loose alliances working towards common goals â?? what does the network really mean?

If the Commons was a network power would be evenly (more or less) spread over the network â?? this is not so. The power of the Commons emanates clearly from the central point of San Francisco. The closer you are to the epicentre the greater the power.

After experiencing the presence of Microsoft and the Soros Foundation at the iCommons summit Becky Hogge at Open Democracy writes a post with the title that says it all â??Who owns a movement?â??

The Creative Commons is a great idea. It is a set of licenses which people can use. It helps â??ordinaryâ?? people participate in the copyright discourse by visualising the fact that the binary situation of all or nothing copyright is not enough. But the Commons is not a movement in the sense of the Free Software Foundation whose basis is on ideology â?? the Copyleft ideology.

By being pragmatic the Commons has grown faster than many contemporary movements. However this pragmatism is also part of the problem. The emptiness of its ideology means that many of the participants in this movement fill it with what they think it represents. The shock (?) then of seeing Microsoft at â??theirâ?? summit shows the effects of pragmatism. Those who want to see the Commons as being based upon a Copyleft ideology quickly must realise that this is not going to happen.

Does ideology matter?

Yes! If the Commons is to be seen as a movement. Without a central ideology the movement (can it be a movement without an ideology?) cannot define its core values and eventually will splinter.

No! The licenses are simple, standard licenses and nothing else. Naturally even licenses reflect ideologies but they are not in themselves ideologies.

If the iCommons wants to become more than a set of licenses (which it seems to want) it must then discard its all to pragmatic position and be prepared to make some people unhappy. Without taking a stance, setting up a camp somewhere, attempting to please everyone â?? it cannot grow.

Posted on by mklang