open

Red Herring Blog: If you've got a day job…

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that there are 4 reasons why academics should blog!

Excerpt:

The virtual subway. For journalists and writers, blogs are a place to practice and refine their craft. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it, writers don’t write because they want to; they write because they can’t imagine doing anything else. For writers, blogs are to publishing as speed chess is to a formal tournament: the same basic game, but faster, edgier, and rougher in an interesting way. To invoke another metaphor, for many writers blogs are less like op-ed columns than virtual subways, a place to play for a couple hours and maybe pick up a little extra money.

Credibility = transparency. Some professionals who blog have realized that the very fact that they’re blogging will impress readers. If you’re willing to be so open about what you do, the logic goes, you must be good. And it’s not bad reasoning. We all know that jargon and obscurity are crutches for marginal performers, and that professional poses can obscure as much as they assure. Transparency, on the other hand, is easy to understand, and easy to trust.

New court, old game. Then there are professionals– academics and scientists, most notably– for whom blogging is a natural extension of what they already do: network, cite each other, and argue. There are a number of high-energy physicists, string theorists, and cosmologists who are bloggers; they all seem to post extensively on each other’s blogs, taking online arguments they’ve been having for years, or that start at a conference or colloquium and just jump to cyberspace. Charles Darwin called his Origin of Species “one long argument;” the same phrase could apply to most science. Blogs turn out to be hot-houses for disputation. If e-mail encouraged flame wars, blogs encourage intellectual feuds– which figure prominently in academic life.

The brand of me. Finally, some use blogs to build their personal brand: to widen the reach of their ideas, to increase name familiarity, whatever you want to call it.

Red Herring Blog: If you’ve got a day job…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

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Open Standards & Open Source Norway

Norway is working to understand the importance of open standards and open source in the public sector.

A working group within the Ministry of Modernisation has produced a report on the use of open IT standards and open source code in the public sector. Report PDF.

The Minister of Modernisation (now that is a cool title!) Morten Andreas Meyer adopted an open source priority approach in the eNorge 2009 plan. Norway will be holding a hearing on the topic on the 15 September. Høring – Bruk av Ã¥pne standarder og Ã¥pen kildekode i offentlig sektor.

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Swedish Radio, Public Service & Internet Technology

Swedish Radio (Sveriges Radio – www.sr.se) is the public service radio broadcaster in Sweden. The company is owned by a foundation and is entirely funded by licence fees. Advertising is not permitted. Swedish Radio is proud of its public service tradition. One of the goals of Swedish Radio is that the programs shall be of interest for a wide audience across the country and made available to listeners in the whole country.

(Programmen skall rikta sig till och vara tillgängliga för publiken i hela landet samt i skälig omfattning tillgodose skiftande behov och intressen hos landets befolkning.)

The purpose of Public Service Radio, as defined by SR themselves is that everyone, independent of sex, age, geographical residence or cultural background should be able to find something of value among SRâ??s programming.

To further fulfil these goals SR has adopted digital technology and the Internet as a mode of infrastructure. It is possible to listen to the radio online and to find and download recent programs, as well as programs from the archives.

Unfortunately SR fallen (inadvertently?) into the trap of using proprietary software. To be able to listen to SRâ??s audio files the user must have Realplayer version 7 (or later) installed on her computer. The user has a choice between using either the free version or buying the program.

However using Realplayer presents the user with something of a dilemma. The first problem arises from the fact that the free version of the software is not entirely easy to find. For those who are unaware that the free version exists the alternative is to purchase the software.

The second problem is that Realplayer has serious integrity issues. They have been sued for privacy violations more than once. For those users who wish to protect their integrity Realplayer is not a viable alternative.

The third problem arises if the user wishes not to support or use proprietary software. Free Software, the alternative approach presented by the Free Software Foundation is an important part of an open technological infrastructure and many who support the need for Free Software alternatives are not able to listen to SRâ??s audio files since they are not available in non-proprietary alternatives.

Audio compression formats based upon non-patented, open source solutions (Such as ogg vorbis – www.vorbis.com) should be the format of choice for large publicly funded radio stations such as Sveriges Radio.

Using such formats Swedish Radio will promote open formats for listening and become part of an open society instead of providing support for a private corporation lock-in.

This post therefore argues:

1. Swedish Radio should not be promoting the product of a single manufacturer.
2. Swedish Radio should not be promoting products which are used to gather data about the user.
3. Swedish Radio should be supporting free and open formats.

Posted on by mklang

We need the GPL

During his keynote speech at FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre) in Brazil, Eric Raymond said, “We don’t need the GPL anymore. It’s based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn’t make lots of people nervous about adopting it.” (Quote found here)

The purpose of ther GPL is not to make people accept open source software – the GPL is about Free Software. Open Source software is in a legally and morally weaker position than Free Software. In addition to this the GPL contains within it a fundamental social goal which Open Source does not.

Open source is a method of production – Free Software is creating a social infrastructure which is not the property of anyone and therefore can be used freely by those who need or want it.

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Forska – en tidning från vetenskapsrådet

Tack vare boktryckarkonsten, som tillät spridning av vetenskapliga skrifter över den europeiska kontinenten, möjliggjordes den vetenskapliga revolutionen på 1600-talet. Många hoppas att Internet kommer att innebära en lika stor revolution, och att det så kallade open accessparadigmet på sikt ska medföra att dagens system med dyra tidskriftsprenumerationer går i graven.

Senaste numret

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Open Access och Vetenskapsrådet

Målet är fri tillgång till vetenskaplig information på Internet – eller uttryckt med en engelsk term: open access.
Vetenskapsrådet ställer sig nu formellt bakom denna vision genom att skriva under en internationell deklaration för open access.
– Resultat från forskning som finansierats med statliga medel ska vara tillgängliga för alla, inte bara de som har råd att betala, menar Pär Omling, generaldirektör för Vetenskapsrådet.

En grundläggande princip inom forskningen är ett fritt informationsutbyte och en maximal spridning av forskningsresultat. Med detta som bakgrund tillsammans med den allt snabbare utvecklingen av Internet formulerades för snart två år sedan Berlindeklarationen.
Hittills har ett femtiotal organisationer, de flesta europeiska, med universitets- och forskningsanknytning skrivit under. Vetenskapsrådet blir den andra svenska organisationen efter Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, SUHF, som undertecknar deklarationen.
Undertecknarna åtar sig bl a att uppmuntra forskare att publicera sina resultat fritt tillgängligt på Internet, att utveckla metoder för att kvalitetssäkra online-publicering samt att verka för att öppen publicering blir meriterande vid utvärdering och tjänstetillsättning.

Öppnare och snabbare
Förutom den demokratiska aspekten är en stor fördel med open access att den s k publiceringsprocessen kan gå fortare. I dag kan det ta år från det att första versionen av en forskningsartikel är färdig tills den slutligen är färdiggranskad och publiceras i någon av de vetenskapliga tidskrifterna.
Frågetecken finns dock: hur ska forskarnas rättigheter till sina egna texter hanteras? Och kanske viktigast: hur ska den vetenskapliga kvaliteten garanteras? Det vetenskapliga redaktörssystem som dagens tidskrifter använder betyder bl a att forskningsartiklarna genomgår en omfattande kvalitetsgranskning.

Handlingsplan i höst
På Vetenskapsrådet inleds nu ett arbete med att se hur man som finansiär konkret kan arbeta för open access. Till hösten, inför nästa års utlysning av forskningsmedel vill generaldirektör Pär Omling att det ska finnas en konkret handlingsplan.
– Vi som finansiär skulle ju kunna ändra policyn när vi tittar på meritvärdering, samtidigt ska inte kvaliteten på forskningen som finansieras kunna ifrågasättas. Det här är en diskussion vi måste föra tillsammans i forskarsamfundet, i ett internationellt sammanhang.

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Open Access – Dutch Research Open to All

DAREnet was launched to demonstrate the network of the local collections of digital documentation held by all the Dutch universities and several related institutions, presenting them to the user in a consistent form. This also makes it possible to search one or more of the repositories concerned. DAREnet is unique. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form.

DAREnet

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Free Software/Open Source: Political Science Course

The deadline for applying to the Free Software/Open Source: Political Science Course has now passed and with almost 200 students from all over the world the course promises to be an exiting example of collaborative distance learning.

Here is the blurb on the course:
The purpose of this course will be to study the effects of technology on the political process by studying how the free software/open source movements organises itself and acts to lobby and affect political decisions in favour for the fundamental messages and ideologies. The course has the intention to help the participant to achieve a greater understanding of the political goals of the free software/open source movements. In addition the course will look at the political and economic conditions for the development of open source and free software.

The course will study the development of politics, policy and law in relation to the role of software in society. Subjects which will be treated in depth are the role of free software/open source in relation to property theory, the politics of technology, community governance and the economic foundations for the assessment of free software/open source development.

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