negative
that article criticizing open source in the economist just shows a deep lack of understanding of floss. failed projects are a good thing. not a bad thing. and organization doesn’t mean “capitalism”.
stupid.
and I finally read that article by willinksy in firstmonday.
“Abstract
A number of open initiatives are actively resisting the extension of intellectual property rights. Among these developments, three prominent instances — open source software, open access to research and scholarship, and open science — share not only a commitment to the unrestricted exchange of information and ideas, but economic principles based on (1) the efficacy of free software and research; (2) the reputation–building afforded by public access and patronage; and, (3) the emergence of a free–or–subscribe access model. Still, with this much in common, the strong sense of convergence among these open initiatives has yet to be fully realized, to the detriment of the larger, common issue. By drawing on David’s (2004; 2003; 2000; 1998) economic work on open science and Weber’s (2004) analysis of open source, this paper seeks to make that convergence all the more apparent, as well as worth pursuing, by those interested in furthering this alternative approach, which would treat intellectual properties as public goods.”
and
“What is currently missing among these open movements, whether in software development, scholarly publishing, or science more generally, is what was missing a few decades ago, Peter Suber recently pointed out to me, from the environmental movement. In those days, people were deeply concerned with local issues, or with particular aspects of the environment, be that water quality or air pollution, or with specific approaches to conservation issues, such as recycling. With time many of those involved in what we now call the environmental movement come to realize the common cause among all of their different efforts. Through such a realization, they were able to build make environmentalism into a popular movement and an everyday reality, and this served, of course, to further all of the original goals.”
1) convergence is obviously the wrong word. you can’t say convergence when all these things are coming from the same source.
2) i’m just peeved to read these things when I’ve been saying them for awhile without any takeup. from my email to the organizers of WSFII.
“A) I tried to talk to a lot of people during the conference and I don’t know if anyone there could really comfortable articulate what free information infrastructures are. That’s a problem - not least of which because it makes it difficult to attract allies. But also it’s a problem because it means we don’t really know what we’re working towards.
Why are projects like: Munich adopting open source, theyworkforyou, mesh networks, ipod linux, google mashups, and creative commons similar? I can *feel* the answer, but I have a lot of trouble articulating it. I think the organizers were geniuses in their vision of bringing these people together, but they failed to supply a political argument for the overlap of players that they assembled.
B) Because of that absence of a political vision/argument, we haven’t really identified what we’re working towards (and against). Until we know more precisely what we’re trying to do, we’re going to make mistakes because we can’t see the situation clearly.
that being said, i’m don’t only celebrate this “open movement”. i think it’s too driven by a non-representative personality type, and it’s possibly too young male to be trusted to come up with appropriate goals.
March 19th, 2006 at 10:32 am
just keep building mike. you are at the edge, and you can’t expect the mainstream to get it until the examples are so obvious & pervasive that there’s no fighting it.
March 19th, 2006 at 11:37 am
that’s the nice way of saying it. the other thing you could say is that if I were a phd and head of a university department, people might listen to me ;-)
but this motivates me to get published somewhere all “academic-like”
March 19th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Why? The problem with this movement, in my opinion, is that its only people with PhDs talking about it amongst themselves. I would be worried to think that you’re trying to get deep into those structures, rather than working at a way to make people understand this stuff at the bar.
And people are frankly too polite about these issues and unwilling to group them together. When I went to the Supreme Court hearings in MGM vs Grokster, everyone outside who stayed up all night to get a chance to hear the oral arguments (ie all the geeks) refused to link lawsuits against p2p with other issues, ie cease and desist letters sent to Dangermouse. If we want people to get pissed off about this stuff (which we do), we have to use examples that resonate with them and explain it in ways that they care about. This doesn’t mean dumbing it down, it means extending it beyond things that only geeks care about (ie running linux on your ipod). Think of James Boyle’s “Cultural Environmentalism”, not St. Ignucius.
And then, put things into practice in ways that people want to interface with, and people will listen, and things will happen.
March 19th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
my view is that “we” - whoever we are - just must keep doing and building and making and sharing. “they” control data because they’ve got the data. wrt media that means: artists are using Big Media to distribute their wares. why? mainly becuase that *appears* to be the only feasible way to make a living at it. can we come up with parallel structures so that artists can get a better deal while freeing their art? interesting question. it’s working with floss.
i subscribe to the “if you build it” philosophy. build the platforms, build the mechanisms. people *are* listening - academia is important in some ways, but it is sure as hell *not* where innovation will come from on this front. Innovation will come from people like mtl3p spitting on people and shaking them by the collars and saying: “check this! we gotta do it! come on!” That’s a talent & a service, to me SO much more important than the reams of papers that will be written *about* the resulting projects.
Having the academic stamp of approval will help in getting funding, sure, and that is important. But I urge you mike not to make aceptance in academia to become the main focus. you are much more valuable as a spitter.
brett, mike we should have coffee together sometime soon.
March 19th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
pthbbtt!
(i knew I shouldn’t have made that comment about jo being smart and me being a spitter. hehe)
March 19th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
i erased tracey’s comment by mistake when I was de-spamming.
—-
“Translators? Cultural Mediators? Bridge Scientists? Popularizers? Transdisciplinary agents? Edge dwellers? Generalizers?
I think there needs to be some Code/Geek/Open Source popularizers - translaters.
For example: I have a friend, who essentially goes to super genious scientists, talks to them about what they do, translates the interview, positions the work into a science context, and highlights its significance in a variety of other contexts. Her objective is to demonstrate the virtues & relevance of that research to convince philanthropists to put their money in far out medical research. And it works!
That does not mean dumbing down the work, it means repackaging it in a language the rest of us rascals outside the inner sanctum speak. Also she is out of the group think of that particular community of practice and can ask seemingly obvious questions to them which yield great copy for us!
In effect, it is a cultural translation of the work, a cultural mediation of a phenomena and in this discussion i think it might be something like - a discussion of comtemporary geekdom and the world of open source - with a cool tagline like - how the world of code reshaped the way we see the world (or sometin’). Ideally, it needs to be done by someone who has their feet in both camps or living on the edge looking in and asking lots of really mindnumbingly dumb questions to someone/s who will have the patience to answer them knowing it will be for the greater good! Alternatively, someone with unlimited money to pay for huge bar tabs!
It is nice to have an enlightenment project for the diehard/hardcore coders, however, the people who are in the trenches do not always see the significance of what they are doing (sadly or not!), or they just do it, or don’t care. Many musicians just play and sometimes they take it to another level, they however rarely speak of the significance of what they do in a historical or political context as well - they are busy living it. Same thing goes for many activitists, or many social phenomena in general. Urban garderners just want good tasting tomatoes. The ladies putting up telephone shacks in bangladesh and getting grameen bank loans to purchase the cell phone for a small tele-cottage industry are not comtemplating the leap frogging implications of bypassing the landline infrastructure! Nor did the geeks who invented the thing think of its unintended uses. They are just eeking out a meagre living and the engineers are just inventing stuff.
I soooo wish we could all think through the political implications of our work (e.g. bombs and such!), but alas, we do not mostly, and most of the great discoveries of the world occured serendipityously sorta accidently on purpose did they not?
My question is - who are/is the bridge person to write the thing / say the thing / make the movie about the thing? Cuz dang, i think it will be great once it gets out there!
Below are some of the books that translated some really complex concepts for me or that are popularizing important stuff (by no means dumbing down!):
Guns Germs and Steel, Pi in the Sky, A Short History of Nearly Everything, the elegant universe, freakanomics, The Little Book of Scientific Principles, Theories and Things; The Selfish Gene; The Tipping Point, the New Internationalist no nonsese guides, Blink, A Briefer History of Time, The Code Book, Smart Mobs, Pills Pesticides and Profit, 50 great philophers of our time, 1421 and so on.
Shows: Ideas and Par quatre chemin
We need dreamers who can come up with ways to heard cats and write some good stuff about them doing so! So get to it!
My most important question though is: If i get a phd in 2 years will that put me in the baaaad category and by not having one does that put me in the gooood category or does having one with a friggin’ huge student loan give me cred or even better if i was an activists 1st and using a phd as a key to move some ideas into other circles goood or baaaad! Or does that make me a sellout? Enquiring minds need to know ;)”
March 19th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
hey tracey, there’s nothing *wrong* with academia, in my opinion, it’s just that right now academia is not the place where much interesting stuff is coming from (in my opinion). I would LOVE, for instance, to see academia embrace open data and push it - open up academic journals, podcast courses (like berkely), study & publish research about the efficiency of open source solutions, study the “economic value” of an expanded (rather than restricted) public domain, etc etc. There is TONS of great work to be done. in general academia is not doing it.
In general, I see academia as part of the structures of information control (=bad), rather than information freedom (=good). try for instance talking to your colleagues about the examples above: open journals and free podcasts of courses. see how quick they are to list reasons NOT to do it. so the institutions of academia are, at the moment, in general opposed to my vision of where society should go, where data freedom should go.
and so i view the institutions with some suspicion, even if individual academics (say geist, for instance) are doing & writing interesting & important things.
academia is not an institution built to effect change. which is what, i think, we need.
March 19th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
hugh,
i completely understand your pov re: academia not being the most hip and happening place for cutting edge discussions to take place, or for change to be enacted. :-) but i would protest that academia has been instrumental in facilitating, inspiring and giving structure to some key debates in this field. and some academics straddle the divide very nicely, and manage to _do_ and _say_ interesting things. (which, i know, you already concede… but i felt obligated to reiterate that ;-)
a few misc. examples that come to mind re: open source are Firstmonday, Steven Weber, & Beth Simone Novack (who is cited in that Economist article, btw)
as for brett’s comment, “If we want people to get pissed off about this stuff (which we do), we have to use examples that resonate with them and explain it in ways that they care about.” i agree, and would add, that we also need to recognize that what many people don’t grasp is how to understand that they can hold many different political beliefs and positions, and productively ally with seemingly incongruent ’causes’.
as a result, it’s important to suss out and help identify exactly where their interests intersect and how they are interlocking. so yes, ‘convergence’ is the wrong word, bc it implies that by agreeing that we’re after the same broad goals, we have to occupy the same ’square’ on the chessboard. instead, we should be striving to figure out which squares touch, are neighboring etc. as to coordinate more strategically ally.
so, the lesson here would be that inasmuch that (feminist, FOSS, what have you) identity politics urges mobilization around a single axis, it also (dangerously) pushes participants to identify that axis as their defining feature, when in fact people usually understand themselves as heterogeneous selves with multiple identities and political interests. Most people don’t always see that, and its important to remind them that political action isn’t a zero-sum game.
I don’t know how that really clarifies anything, but i have always found the intersectional/interlocking perspective useful, and felt compelled to chime in on this one.
March 20th, 2006 at 9:58 am
hey hanna, point well-taken. to be honest what frustrates me most about academia is that they SHOULD be at the forefront of this movement, but (save a few, geeky, plugged in types) they don’t seem to be. ie the historical tradition of university was (partly) open exchange of information etc. It was also control of info flow. More and more uni administrations are - like governments, like everybody - looking at themselves as business units. how to generate investment, how to generate funding from private sector, how to turn departments into consulting houses. further, there is this idea that uni research should be considered private IP, rather than public domain, even though the vast majority of funding for uni budgets comes from the public purse.
so the current trend in academia goes counter to *my* (personal) vision of what a university should be. which is most certainly not a for-profit business unit.
however, I do see an important role for academia in this movement; and I do see good work coming from some academics. I also see the importance of engaging with academics who ARE doing interesting work.
But what I worry about is equating attention from academia as the measure of success. I would much prefer to see people (mike) build the projects.
Though mike’s point of course is that getting academic attention means more ability to attract funding to help build the projects.
so i don’t know what i’m going on and on about ;)
March 20th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Good Hugh!
So you meant you are against:
1. The archaic publish or perish merit system of the university system.
2. The current publishing industry in general and that of academic journals in particular (which are suffering financially btw).
3. The university administrations that embraced neo-liberal fiscal conservatism brought to us by Thatcher and her Canadian Counterpart cronies in the 80s (the tor..s), which introduced the belief that - everything has to be based on a business model - resulting in the abolishment of philosophy and languages in campuses across the country and crazy tuition fees!
4. You mean the unions and faculty associations who are trying to figure out how to ensure that profs have job security, namely, if all is offered on the web for free, then you no longer need profs to teach right! VS profs are people who need jobs and also have a place in our society (and who sometimes forget their role!).
5. You also mean the system that burns-out new young profs who teach classes of 500-1000 students and are tooooo tired to be innovative.
You did not mean:
1. the older tenure track profs who refuse to publish unless journals to adopt CC licenses. Helping out us newcomers who do not have that clout.
2. the academics who brought us the data liberation initiative.
3. nor the profs that brought us the net, space research, satellites, radio frequency research, open source, geomatics, 100$ wifi enabled laptop computers, remote sensing,etc.
4. nor the law profs who brought us eff, cc, and cria,
5. nor the feminist profs who put womyn on the map
6. or the profs that brought us medical cures, social policy, human rights policies, ecology, cultural mediation, environmental science, GIS, new media centres, industrial design, open source mapping, solar energy, climate change research, political activism, etc.
Michael the intrepid is bringing the whole gang together. We need to recognize our roles within our particular communities, society, institutioins and homes, and find a way to incorporate new ideas, tweak the systems, leverage our resources and adopt new roles soz we can move & shake in new and innovative ways together.
Cuz it takes a diverse village to collectively make the world a better place to live!
Nice discussion thx.
btw-is this how comments in blogs work - this is my 3rd comment ever sooooo…
March 21st, 2006 at 8:39 am
ha! tracey, that’s about right.