Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Web of Verbs

Yesterday Alex Pang held a fascinating conversation at an IFTF open space meeting on the use of the term Cyberspace. The notion of the internet as a place seems to be degrading. Alex will probably produce a far more articulate piece about this and I should have channeled in the Doc or David Weinberger (thus so), but wanted to get out some thoughts.

Clay Shirky coined Social Software when he found that groupware didn't account for the group forming activity both in the consumer and enterprise space and augmenting in-room interaction (e.g. Meetups). I use the word augment very purposely, as the Web's greater innovation over the past couple of years has not been about technology or personal personal productivity, but enhancing our capabilities to act with groups.

NetGens think of the computer as a door, not a box. When they are on, they have 5-7 IM windows open and multiple tabs into different communities. Each community provides a way of being, to express facets of their identity while engaging in an activity. Most activities are centered around objects to spin stories and hold conversations. They don't go to places, it's more likely they augment plazes in the real world. With increasing mobility they tap groups for what they need to get done no matter where they are and make where they are matter. They Google, Flickr, Blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate and above all share. In other words, the web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.

Kid Camp

Had a wonderful weekend helping my daughter celebrate her birthday with a backyard camp-out party. Far more exhausting than the preceding camps. The other reason I haven't been blogging is I got her World of Warcraft and am doing, uh, research.

Barcamp Video

Dorrian Porter put together a classic video of barcamp (55Mb .mov [via Laughing Squid).

Photo from the Wired News piece

Cheaper to Host than Attend

It's becoming cheaper to host your own event than attend one. And it's really cheap not to host or attend with all the remote participation and podcasting options out there.

With the right social software, you can promote, coordinate and self-organize events with near zero cost. Location does matter, but not for everything. Now cost can be a good thing, as some events are better with a little exclusivity, but inclusive options provide alternatives that help the ecosystem as a whole.

A more wild thought is that event models almost correspond to the three modes of production identified by Benkler:
* Firms and contracts: invitation is the barrier to participation
* Markets and prices: price is the barrier to participation
* Commons-based peer: reputation is the barrier to participation

Think about this for a minute, even if you are not in the conference business, and expect an explosion in events and venues. Easy group forming is creating the same disruption for the event market as personal publishing has for media.

The Camp Where Everyone is a Quartermaster

Any event takes time to gestate and intermingle with what you encounter next.  It will be a bit until I figure out the wonderful thing that emerged this weekend, and document it with others for others.

From my last event, Wikimania, two statements stand out:

• Leadership in Wikipedia is knowing where information is
• The more Wikipedia fails, the more money it attracts

Somehow these points apply to Bar Camp.

When someone walked in the door, 300 people perhaps in total, over 100 at peak, usually Kit would be there to guide them.  People insisted on handing out cash and it would make it's way to the guy with the PayPal account (Chris).  A collective sense of who was doing what was achieved before the event in a lively IRC channel (remember Happenings?).  If you had an idea, like a sponsored sub-party, it could simply get done.

BarCamp happened where it did because of location awareness.  About a week before, after we moved into the neighborhood, I met the Flock guys (knew Termie only through time based media) through Plazes.  We chatted a bit.  Then I got pinged with this crazy ass idea asking if I had suggestions for space and bandwidth.  A wiki was thrown up, the rest is increasingly well recorded history.

About 3 hours before the event, I started to panic. 100 people signed up on the wiki and we only had so much room and one DSL line.  A little chatter in the IRC channel and David Weekly (who was working on mirroring the Kwiki off of Andy's humble server) who called someone he knew at Etheric.  Within 10 minutes a guy showed up and got on the roof looking for line of sight.  No clear view and he headed off. 

Thinking of elephants and keyholes, I stared at the building in the way across the street.  Walked over to the IDEO receptionist who must have thought I was in creative plight who summoned the infrastructure guy.  He agreed to give roof and electricity access, called Alex at Etheric, who bridged in Tomas and he happily got back and on the roof -- but note the IDEO guy held off on his weekend for 3 hours to let it all happen.  Great neighborhood. 

I probably should have been panicking about the need for showers, but instead kept thinking about sweaty happy fun.  David Sifry and Stewart Butterfield were both reached by cell on their way to Foo and happily sponsored the bar and brunch tabs.  Marten Mickos from MySQL and others offered to sponsor on their own and we held off to keep the budget replicable.  We did get a burst at the Gordon Biersche party Technorati sponsored from the expected 40 to 100 people, which will work it's self out.

After putting in deserved family time, I locked the doors at 7 pm on Sunday.  48 hours of what you would expect to be chaos and shit that goes down on your permanent record.  But there was Tantek literally picking up lint, spotless facilities, only one damaged participant laptop, and nothing left to do except record learnings and give thanks (especially to Tim O'Reilly).

Guessing from my last two years at Foo, a lot got done there.  At Bar, save a few initatives and enlightenments, we had good time chatter.  The kind in which the PC revolution was started with hobbyist computer clubs, but now it's SC's turn (viva wikiwyg!.  A seriously powerful thing when the social network gets activated, and in a way, how this all got started.
 

Open as in door is simply magical.

Google SkypePO

I've held back on this thought, but could Google's Secondary Public Offering (SPO) be to buy Skype?

Nah, they are too into build over buy these days. I just wanted to say SkypePO.

ThankYouLetters

ThankYouLetters is a great way to praise people who pitched in for BarCamp.

Wikiwyg

This weekend we put something cool out into the world. Wikiwyg is what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor for wikis, or pretty much any other text area on the web. It's open source licensed, available for download and demo. Jeff Jarvis said wikiwyg is "the way wikis are supposed to be."

Our hope is this makes the two-way web usable. You can see the genius of Socialtext lead developer Brian Ingerson in something that is almost a bug, but might be a feature: double click anywhere to edit. Then you will notice it snaps into edit mode, as the editor was already loaded with the page -- reducing, but keeping, the distinction between display and edit mode. You can toggle between wysiwyg and wiki text (more efficient when you know it). Sexy Ajax pixie dust lets you edit without touching the server until you are ready to save. Always remember that Wiki Wiki is Very Quick in Hawaiian.

Here's some wikis running it:

* http://wiki.oreillynet.com/foocamp05/
* http://www.kwiki.org/
* http://wiki.wikiwyg.net/
* http://barcamp.org/

One of the benefits of being based on open source is not only that we can share, but innovate openly. We still have some work to do (IE support, ugh) until it's ready for Socialtext production and would appreciate feedback and participation.

ForkCamp

Unfortunately, Om's post about Foo vs. Bar got Slashdotted, perpetuating the myth of conflict.  This Slashdot comment put it nicely:

This is open source... its just a branch from the original idea, re-packaged by someone new for the problem that they want to solve.

Sure forks in the code/idea base aren't always good but I'm sure if Bar gets some good ideas that they will be incorporated back into the Foo release.

--
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi

On the big upside, I just saw the FlockDemo.  Flock is a Social Browser built on Mozilla that gets people sharing.  Can't wait to play with it. 

Dial Into Barcamp

I set up a conference bridge so people can listen and maybe chime in for the sessions in the main room at Barcamp:

+1-702-851-4040 passcode "barcamp" (#2272267)

Right now: IndustryDarlingsTalk

Unconventional Conventionalists

  BAR Camp kicks off tonight at 7pm.  While I'm crossing my fingers that there is enough bandwidth and space (100 people signed up, it's in the press, and there is only 2,500 sq. ft., need FunctionalSpillover, especially showers IMHO) -- some really great things are coming together thanks in part to last minute sponsors:

• There is a guy on the roof across the street (thanks IDEO!) right now setting up an 80 Mbps microwave connection (thanks etheric via David Weekly!), from there it's 802.11g across the street to a self organizing mesh and puppies and kittens.
• Technorati is cool enough to sponsor a party tomorrow night at Gordon Biersche!
• The good folks at Flickr are covering breakfast
• SimplyHired, LaughingSquid and SourceLabs sprung for beer
• Wordpress paid for the t-shirts
• Looks like we are streaming video, over here

Beyond that, there are two things I really hope happens -- a shared experience and memory.

Most self-organizing events only excel at what happens in the room.  If a FooBarLink gets established between FOO and BAR, as well as remote participants like in DC, it provides a model for sharing and scaling.  BAR Camp should be something that remote participants both enjoy and get, even when it happens at such a late notice they can't guarantee a real-time commitment for the whole event.  They need to participate in shared experience, even if part of it has to be compelled by revisiting the archives.  The most important thing is how participants contribute to memory: sharing notes on the process of how this occurred, notes on the wiki for what has been said, and a stream of tags and images for a rich experience.

BAND Camp

As the BAR Camp janitor, I guess I need to help clean up this mess. Some people got miffed about not going to FOO Camp, especially those who had the experience before (the last two years were some of the best events I've been to, ever) -- and are now are wining like teenagers at a band camp who didn't make first fiddle.

To be clear, Bar Camp is not anti-FOO, quite the opposite. You can see from Tim's post that he has opened the concept for others to extend, others have before, and that's all this is. The only difference -- open as in door -- is really an experiment that could go either way. I hope something magical happens that connects the two camps during the event, prototyping a model for scaling.

Carefully picking participants is a tried and true facilitation technique that O'Reilly does masterfully (Tim says how, in comments), it sets the stage for self-organization. Unfortunately this creates a tension, healthy sometimes, between an in-group and an out-group. It was hard for me to think about not having the FOO experience again, but recognized the need to clear the cache. FOO will be fantastic and I hope my friends (hi ingy!) come home with wonderful tales and new initiatives.

But you need to remember what has changed -- the cost of group forming has fallen -- so anyone create one of their own, almost instantly. This will not lead to more competition between groups, but understanding across them.

BarCamp

Couldn't make it to FooCamp this year? Well, some cool folks are organizing BarCamp in Palo Alto this weekend. Socialtext is donating the use of it's office and wifi. They set up a wiki, you know what to do.

I am 344, hear me roar

Feedster launched the Feedster Top 500 setting a new standard for length, the first salvo in the size matters war of microcontent.

Kidding, but they should be commended for providing an inclusive process for otherwise exclusive outcome, by both opening the algorthim and being open for feedback on a wiki page.  An index is a reflection of a community, and the more inclusive and open the process for it's creation, the more we trust it and grant it authority.

Mary Hodder's latest activist wiki, topicindex, is a Community Algorithm project to open the engine of attention.  Given the importance of rankism, it's worth paying attention to.  My hope is this does more than shift the debate from ranks to clouds (see also: conversational clouds), but gives us the tools to seed our own.

Governance, Scaling and Anonymity in Wikipedia.

I'm sitting in Jimmy Wales' talk at OSAF, as though I am his roadie these days, and reminded about anonymity in Wikipedia.  Anonymity is not something commonly valued in the blog world, where it is largely a strong expression of identity, but seems to be an essential attribute within the Wikipedia community.  Maybe it's just the difference of people working together vs. having conversations.  Perhaps it's the initial user experience of being able to edit without logging in, or strong enough social bonds and extreme cases for widespread support for maintaining anonymity.

Jimmy describes the basics of Wikipedia, and then gets on his self-acknowledged soap box. Most social software is designed in away that makes no sense.  If you think about it resurant, serving steak, you need knives, because the customers might stab each other, so, no knives.  This creates a culture without trust, with comunity.  Most software is too complex from trying to keep people from being bad.  Leave things open when you know people can do bad things.  Instead of locking pages, leave a note asking them not to damage it -- an opportunity to build trust.  When they haven't done any damage in a while, I know Stewart, for example, has not vandalized this page, so I trust him more.

Governance in Wikipedia is a confusing but workable mix of consensus (0.5% of users generate 50% of the edits, a little over 500 people -- IMHO, the big scaling and usability issue to be tested), democracy (Vote for Deletion), aristocracy (closer to the statement, "leadership in Wikipedia is knowing where information is) and monarchy (Jimbo as benevolent dictator of all human knowledge, for now).  They are "flexible over methodology and value results over process."

On Wikimania: 50 countries, fascinating experience where he met a lot of them before from traveling and online, the social introductions  The goal was increasing cooperation and coordination (it seemed to work from an outsider's point of view, as F2F often does).  Italians found a public domain source of every small town in Italy, created thousands of articles, but the work hasn't been done in other languages, a big topic of the event.

Stuart Brand asks what the scaling and rule set issues are.  The Burning Man organization realized they had a scaling issue when they had to institute a rule of no dogs.  Is there a pattern over time?  Jimmy responds that communities are inherently scalable from village to town to city to metropolis -- but new problems arise.  The Soviet top-down method of scaling communities does not scale, but market interaction does.  People watch each other.  More rules are necessary over time, but they encourage not making rules until they are absolutely necessary.  Small languages haven't made the same rules as large ones. The 3 revert law (in one day) in English version was created to prevent revert wars.  But in small languages it's okay to do 10.  What I do varies in many languages, I can't work on the Chinese Wikipedia in the same way as English, so they vote a lot.  Dutch Wikipedia had a civil war, 500 users quit. Problems people think we have are not problems, every one agrees on how to deal with bad users.  Dealing with good and bad users is tough.  i talk to people to figure out the people and talk to them, id the dutch offender and banned him for 72 hours which shocked some, then the community adapted.  Dutch people fight a lot, they become tolerant by arguing.

All we can do is communicate the values that have worked. People are surprisingly good. 

Mitch Kapor points out how interesting that there is a back and forth between Jimmy and Stuart, who founded the Well, which had the village model, even with 5-8k people.  Wikipedia is a megaopolis.  Jimmy notes that conversations still take place around the viliage pump (what a quaint, but civil unlike a hole, notion of a water cooler).  Mitch recalls that at one point there were more articles on Tolkien's Middle Earth than Africa.  Jimmy recalls that there were more words about the war on Deep Space 9 than the Congo war and how old time Wikipedians saw that africa was a red link, then someone wrote that africa is a continent.

The Wikipedia community is deeply interested in the systemic bias, that may come with the typical Wikipedia definition.  The definers are similar to this room, male dominated (not as bad as free software), tech and broadband access enabled.  This used to be worse as it came from the free software world (the first traffic boost was from Slashdot).  There are things we need to do to make it more accessible, notably wysiwyg, outeach and keeping the community friendly -- something we are good at.  Some times the programmer want to automate everything, say give a welcome message after the 10th edit, but what you want is people saying hey, welcome!  Something personal.

I asked about anonymity and the great debate on making reputation explicit to aid scaling.  Jimmy clearly values keeping reputation implicit and he noted that that works in more market-oriented systems like eBay (huge nod, social capital isn't fungible and explicit reputation is a barrier to community formation).  Notes subcultures on topical areas arise which help scale.

When asked about the early days, a question that alludes positioning for scale, Neupedia had the start of the right community.  He personally published paper in option pricing theory, so he tried to write a biography on Robert Myrton, but found the process frustrating, which opened him to the idea.  Neupedia had 5k people on the mailing lists, fairly academic, to tap.  But software and social model (7 step workflow for publishing), was staying in the way.  In  the first two weeks 2 weeks they did more work than in 2 years

Don't have enough academic studies about it, but anecdotally, articles across languages are similar.  But there are exceptions.  The English Wikipedia said the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, French said otherwise.  Now there is a wonderful and detailed article on definitions and a discussion of the issue.  Korean and Japanese Wikipedias differ on disputed islands.  In the Japanese Wikipedia, incidentally, they use the discussion page for a long time before they make the article.

One thing we haven't tried is Wikitorials.  Skeptical it could work. With the LA Times they couldn't stand to see a wiki down, so they tried to step in, although they were questioning why they were helping what might be a competitor.  they turned off recent changes, a tool for a community to monitor itself, they forked the edit conflict, but a fork is not enough, there are many views. 

Someone asks about if SEO gained them a position of being one of the top 50 sites on the web (no) and if a mainstream competitor could create something better,  Encarta could open, but it is hardly likely people would contribute, people wouldn't trust them and a community would be hard to form.  Couldn't say if traditional encyclopedias could come up with a better approach and go all the way.  But in the end, there is no such thing as competition for Wikipedia.

Hi Robert Scoble!

Ping. Yeah, I uncharacteristically dropped the f-bomb. For intended effect, as my point is this:

When a mainstream network launches a service and plays buzzword bingo to promote it -- you are insulting our intelligence.

It's a micropub like Denton and Calacanis! People can add comments, so it's like a Wiki! It's like Flickr meets del.icio.us meets Google meets Plazes with Ajax pixy dust with Web 2.0 goodness and a Long Tail business model for user-generated content!

And if you say it's one of those things, you are competing against our friends and we do not trust convicted monopolists (maybe one day, no fault to the good people there, the problem is systemic).

More specifically, if you provide a service that people can use to blog for profit while blogging for profit (even in a small initial scale), that is competing against your customers. Odds are, you will give more attention to your paid bloggers than your members. I don't see other blog service providers doing this, save AOL (and they don't have the same negative connotation with the word Filter), do you?

Hope this helps, it's not meant to hurt.

Where is?

The more I move around, the more I'm digging Plazes.  Now they have a feature that let's you create a Where is? page with Google Maps integration.  For example:

• Where is Ross?
• Where is Joi?
• Where is Stowe?

Using this is an admission of all the bread crumbs I'm scattering.  But you can be selective about when revealing spatial presence.

MSN Blogs Against it's Customers

Honestly, I couldn't give a crap about MSN. Anyone who blogs there, or reads them, doesn't know the whole story.

But now, with MSN Filter, the convicted monopolist, is creating their own nanopublishing venture -- competing against it's customers. That's OK in monopoly land. Where profit is a function of property, and eminent domain falsely considered a right. Microsoft Watch:

MSN Filter appears to be a cross between a traditional Web log, where writers have full editorial control, and a wiki model, embracing user contributions.

Adam Sheppard, lead product manager for MSN Filter, said MSN's model " is essentially Nanopublishing as originally championed by Nick Denton at Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. Both are great blog networks with their own audiences that they'll continue to be successful with."

Push-ah. And this is supposedly a wiki model because it embraces user contributions. The article continues:

The paid bloggers are area-experts, notable bloggers and journalists. In the initial stages of MSN Filter, we expect them to share their expertise, thoughts and content..." Adam Sohn, director of MSN public relations added.

Yeah, the wiki model is paid experts blogging anonymously. You even have to log in with Passport to comment, and everything is Microsoft copyright. Sure, wiki is a buzzword, but give us some respect.

How fucked up is the branding of a blog service provider calls their blog micropub a filter and then claims the wiki model when paying people to produce property? Seriously.

[via Loic]

Wikimaniacs or Wikirealists?

Wiki maniacs were in full attendance at Wikimania last week.  Not just the participants in the Wikipedia community, but users and developers of open source wiki.  Seventy of 400 attendees were members of the press, which served to amplify the impact of the event, but also highlight the changing of the guard. 

Jimmy Wales was busy doing more than putting a face on a community with back to back interviews throughout the conference.  One interview with a German daily, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, was poorly translated into a Reuters story that ran with the false lead that Wikipedia was going to tighten editorial controls and consequently Slashdotted.  Really, Jimmy was talking about Wikipedia 1.0, an effort to develop a print version.  Refutations here and here.  When we were laughing about the episode, Jimmy said, "why would we *ever* do that, it's not like a document is ever finished!"  If only the story broke on Wikinews.

Back in the trenches, real progress was made.  This was the first time much of the virtual community came together face-to-face.  The experience was more than meeting someone whose' blog you have read -- but someone you have worked with.  Eugene Kim's blog will give you a sense of all the micro-meetings that took place. When you gather enough wiki developers around a table, something good is bound to happen, such as a anti-spam initiative.  The event was extremely diverse and full of surprises like none other than Mitch Kapor:

"I've seen things like this happen once or twice before," observed Mitch Kapor, software pioneer and head of the Open Source Foundation. "We're at the Big Bang of the next information revolution."

Mitch isn't overstating it.  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales gave his keynote on 10 Things that Will be Free, perhaps because once you have realized freedom, it extends itself:

1. Free the Encyclopedia!
2. Free the Dictionary!
3. Free the Curriculum!
4. Free the Music!
5. Free the Art!
6. Free the File Formats!
7. Free the Maps!
8. Free the Product Identifiers!
9. Free the TV Listings!
10. Free the Communities!

I focused my keynote on enterprise wiki case studies, but noted what should be an obvious extension -- the freedom to share will be free, as in beer.  Stay with me on this... 

Recall that commons-based peer production provides a framework for understanding the difference between production models driven by price (market), contract (firm) or sharing (commons). Philip Evans provides a hint at why production may be shifting from markets to the commons:

One of the simplest arguments I've used to get people out of a traditional mindset is to point out a statistic -- the cost of transactions in the U.S. More than 50% of the non-government GDP in the U.S. is based on transaction costs.

Supposedly, price should be an efficient signal for communicating what to produce.  However, when you have price, so to follows a panoply of middlemen from accountants to lawyers.  When you take price out of the equation, particularly in small groups and with network distribution, you reduce market friction.  Wikipedia is demonstrating a model of content production based upon open licensing with collaboration at scale.  Whereas open source software development pioneered this model, they are scaling it even further, if for no other reason than content does not have the interdependency that constrains the development of code.  When you look at Jimmy's list, note that each are ripe for models of scaled open production. 

Our freedom to share is clearly under attack by prior property regimes and new ones such as DRM.  As producers, we have discovered our own power to share under new regimes such as Creative Commons licensing or production and distribution models such as open source and open content.  As consumers, most of us have yet to recognize the limitations we face or the new ones being constructed around us.  As either a consumer or producer, the shift from markets to commons is one of freedom -- and economic benefit.

If you wonder if there is a business in all this, let me make a simple argument.  The disruption of open models of production is the greatest arbitrage opportunity in modern industry.  We do not yet know what value will remain from the 50% of GDP that is transaction costs. Steven Weber noted that unlike transaction cost analysis to inform buy vs. build decisions -- we do not have a framework for when to open property, but many companies are taking the risk. Craigslist, for example, generated $10 million in revenue while cannibalizing $50-65 million from Bay Area newspapers.  This is not just because the net decreased distribution and search costs to unlock latent demand in long tail-esque fashion.  Strangers are trusting one another to build a common resource and community -- with a network enabled structure that has decreased coordination costs and greater social incentives. The chasm of the long tail is peer production, and we are just beginning to understand it.  We are driving transaction costs out of the equation so we can reinvest and create higher order value.

Hopefully that help clarify the shift from markets to commons, but what about the shift from firms to the commons?  Again, transaction costs come into play, but beyond Coase's argument that decreased transaction costs lead to vertical disintegration of the firm.  Thomas Malone has argued the trend of decentralization as an inevitability because decreasing transaction and coordination costs make it possible while providing greater social incentives for employees and better decision making at scale.  John Seely Brown and John Hagel also point to the increasingly distributed nature of business, but they make a more profound argument for the value of social networks within the enterprise to provide a sustainable edge through innovation.  Enterprises have sought to drive down costs through business process automation and outsourcing as a competitive advantage.  But only putting people back in the process to handle exceptions with the freedom to innovate provides a sustainable advancement.    The only thing is, to unleash the creative capability of employees requires sharing control.

Which brings me back to sharing will be free, as in beer.  Under the construct of a firm, employees are contracted to produce and the firm gains property.  They largely have the freedom to share ideas and they have the right to break the contract at-will in many jurisdictions.  But while under contract, they do not have the right to share, that is owned by the employer for the purpose of exclusive sharing with the firm itself. 

But what happens when an employee wishes to contribute to the commons?  Contribute to an open source project? Or blog?  Or contribute to Wikipedia?  In many companies the employee does not have the right to engage in external productive communities without pre-approval.  So they do so anonymously, or on their own time, without support from their firm.  My suggestion, is that as companies open they will learn that they are loosing value by not letting employees own the right to share. 

The right to share is different from the freedom to share, because when you own the right you can contribute property to the commons at your best discretion.  When a developer has a great idea at two in the morning for an open source project, having to seek permission from an employer before engaging hinders the creative process.  When you look at commercial open source companies, you may see new frameworks arise that grant this right to employees.   

The frontier of decentralized organization is granting employees the right to decide how to share, not just the freedom to share in condoned mechanisms, in areas they are not paid to do so.  I think we just beginning to understand how to enable self-organization so we can innovate at scale.  I'm sharing this thought in hopes we might learn where we are going.

Jimbo's Problems: A Free Culture Manifesto

Jimmy has been warming up for his Wikimania Keynote on Larry Lessig's blog, talking about 10 things that should be free.  The idea for this list comes from Hilbert's problems.  In 1900s Mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems, 10 were announced at a conference, the full list published later, very influential.  He notes that all of these things were obvious, suggested or proposed by others.

10 Challenges for thee Free Culture Movement

1. Free the Encyclopedia!

Mission is to create a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language.  For English and German, this work is done (of course there could be be quality control, etc.).    French and Japanese in a year or so, ton of work to be done globally.  Will be done in 10 years time, an amazing thing when you consider minority languages that have never had an encylopedia.

2. Free the Dictionary!

Not as far along, but picking up speed.  A dictionary is only useful when it's full of words you don't know, unlike an encyclopedia.  Needs software development, such as WikiData.  It is structured information, for cross reference and search.

3. Free the Curriculum!

There should be a complete curriculum in every language. A much bigger task than the encyclopedia.  Need not just one article about the Moon, but one for every grade level.  WikiBooks isn't the only one working on this project.  The price of university textbooks is a real burden for students.  The book market doesn't take advantage of potential supply of expertise.  Not hard to imagine 500 economics professors writing instead of one or two to create a better offering than the traditional model.

4. Free the Music!

The most amazing works in history are public domain but not many public domain recordings exist (even in classical music).  Proper scores are often proprietary derivative works (such as arrangements for a modern orchestra).  Volunteer orchestras, student orchestras could provide the music for free.

5. Free the Art!

Show two 400 year old paintings.  Routinely get complaints from museums saying there is copyright infringements.  National Portrait Gallery of England threatens to sue, a chilling effect, but they have no grounds.  Controlling physical access keeps people from getting high quality images "I wouldn't encourage you to break the law, but if you accidentally take a photo of these works it would be great to put it on Wikipedia for the public domain.

6. Free the File Formats!

Proprietary file formats are worse than proprietary software because they leave you with no ability to switch at a later time.  Your data is controlled.  If all of your personal documents are in an open file format, then free software could serve you in the future.  Need to educate the public on lock-in.  There is considerable progress here and continued European rejection of software patents is critical. 

7. Free the Maps!

"What could be more public domain than basic information about location on the planet?" -- Stefan Magdalinksi.  FreeGIS software, Free GeoData.  This will become increasingly important for open competition in mobile data services.

8. Free the Product Identifiers!

Hobby Princess blog  Huge subculture of people making crafts, selling them on eBay, but need competition from distributors.

Increasingly, small producers can have a global market.  Such producers need a clobal identifiers.  Similar to ISBN, not ASIN (proprietary to Amazon).  Suggests the "LTIN: Long Tail Identification Numbers" would be cheap or inexpensive to obtain (has to have some cost to fend off spam).  Extensive database freely licensed and easly downloadable to empower multiple rating systems, e-commerc, etc.  The alternative is proprietary eBay and Amazon.  Small craft producers should be able to get a number and immediately gain distribution across them.

9. Free the TV Listings!

A smaller issue, it may seem.  But development of free software digital PVRs is going on.  Free-as-in-beer listings exist, but this is tenuous.  Free listings could be used to power many different innovations in this area.  Otherwise we will be in a world where everything you watch will be DRM'ed -- so this is important.

10.  Free the Communities!

Wikipedia demonstrates the power of a free community.  Consumers of web forum and wiki services should demand a free license.  Otherwise, the company controls the community.  Similar to a feudal serf, company maintained communities have a hold on communities.  Are you a serf living on your master's estate, or free to move?  Social compact: need to have Open Data and Openly Licensed software for communities to truly be free.  Wikicities - for profit, free communities - founded by Jimmy and Angela.  Free licensing attracts contributors. 

He will be adding more on Larry Lessig's blog over the coming weeks. 

Q&A:

He also highlighted the Frankfurt Wikireader, a nicely bound collection of Wikipedia pages about Frankfurt, donated by Qoop.com that provides on demand printing. They are also talking to Lulu.com. 80% of the remaining format errors in this version have already been fixed. Books can be constructed on the site for re-use or constructed on the fly. Open standards to allow multiple vendors.

Call for #11 to be: Free the Search Engine!  Agrees, says he will move it to #4.  There are efforts, but it's a huge challenge.

Call for #12: Free the Science!  Jimmy says the data itself should be under a license, says it could be #7.

On #9, can't ignore the fact that most people are locked into mainstream media -- not just by offering an alternative model, but engaging the mainstream model and reforming it.

One commentator suggested that work needs to be done to simply unlock existing public domain archives (e.g. Geneology) and bring it together in one place.  Jimmy says that this could be accelerated through community effort and some software development.

One great question: where do you get money for it?  I'm talking free as in speech, not as in beer.  People said the same about Free Software, but the business model emerged.  Answers.com has a business that leverages Wikipedia information and is in line with their goals.  It's not up to us to answer the question of what happens to the candle makers with the invention of electric lighting.

Not a big advocate of increasing government spending on free software, because of the risk of control.  On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of software development by governments that we can't leverage.  European Space Agency can't release images under free license, unlike NASA, which makes no sense at all (they are talking).

If we had 1 million pounds a year as a budget, what would we do?

Someone gives the example of Andrew Rasjei running for NY Public Advocate and his support of municipal wireless.  He notes that he is speaking as an individual in commenting on a political issue:  He thinks that municipal wireless is a really bad idea.  Could be free as in speech, not controlled by the municiple provider.  He does support opening more spectrum.  Thinks it will kill innovation.  (Ross' off the cuff scoff: Jimmy, this is simply wrong, the lack of competition without muni wireless and the level of innovation built upon the infrastructure far outweights the risk -- bring communications back to the public trust).

Someone from the human rights activist community suggests that many of these constructs are either US or European or a developed Japan.  But these freedoms are not so free in places like China.  Jimmy says that while Chinese Wikipedia is growing.  Have a tension between our radical openness and the need that some people have for privacy.  Some people want to edit anonymously, a difficult issue because such open proxy anonymous editing can also be used for damage.

Mitch Kapor: Two kinds of open source licenses: GPL or BSD, which results in different ecologies.  Wikipedia is a GPL license, which prohibits certain activities. If all open source was GPL, it was 1/10th or 1/100th of what is now.  How could the ecology evolve?  Jimmy: They made the decision early without too much thought.  Not clear to me what business models are being precluded by our license. 

On media models... Everybody tells jokes, but we still have professional comedians.  Will see hybrid models, but I can't predict them. People thought that IBM would die with the PC revolution, but they adapted and made most of their revenue from it.  Some won't adapt, some will get involved with community models (e.g. OhMyNews as a for profit community media model).  Will be harder to control information as the means for leaking is expanding.

Someone wants to do an Emergency Medicine Handbook, there are tough problems with medical reference information that suggests a specific action.  A much higher ethical responsibility. With an article about Thomas Jefferson, if we get it wrong, nobody dies.  But this is the same issue as textbooks, there are many experts who would like to share if they had a platform.  Physicians do things differently in different hospitals, implicit and localized knowledge, but could be shared with the right mechanism. 

Someone challenges the Jefferson comment saying Jefferson had a black mistress and it was publicized a few years ago that the offspring sued the family.  With a Tsunami happens, the water rushes out before it comes in.  So people rush out to see it, but one little girl could say "wait a minute, I read somewhere that this could be a Tsunami," and save the village.  You never know where life-saving information could come from.

Catching Wikimania

The first thing that struck me when I arrived at Wikimania was how diverse the group was. Far more international than even blogger events these days. As a result, you have to admire the volunteers grappling with multiple languages and cultures. But then again, they do this all the time, just not in person. There is a ripe sense of empowerment like many blogger conferences, but a different set of issues and constructs for sharing and producing.

The first session I attended was on Wikipedia as a Learning Community (link to paper), by Cormac Lawler. He put forth an argument that we are all experts, but we are learning the practice of Wikipedia by doing it -- creating a network of experts of the future. Shared learning and shared expertise. People who are self-directed and motivated, open to debate but all framed through neutral discourse.

He provided a number of examples that highlight community management issues: ex-wikipedian complaints, conflict, issues of governance, written and unwritten social contracts. One slide quoted Chris Allen:

Wiki Editing Dichotomy -- One interesting possible barrier of entry to active participation in a wiki is what I call the "wiki editing dichotomy". You have to be proud enough to believe what you are contributing is generally worthwhile to others (or at least worth your effort), but you also have to be humble enough to understand that others can improve it. I don't know of many other collaborative media that requires both pride and humility.

He believes that as long as we are self-critical and share our experiences -- Wikipedia can be a learning organization. Suggests creating Lessons learnt pages (on Meta) as one possible step. One person suggests creating a balance between strife and joy. One person says the mark between the learner and the teacher is blurred with the Internet, unlike Gutenberg style one-way communication. One person points out that you can bend a wiki to reflect a hierarchy with rules and permissions so it doesn't function as an open system. Someone points out how tools can change culture, such as in Japan how kids point with their thumbs (trained from SMSing). But in the the middle of the conversation, Cormac made a significant point on the need to shift from rules to discourse. He points out that "a large part of leadership in Wikipedia is knowing where information is," and stresses the need to document community processes.

Mile High Club

Live blogging from a 30,000 feet, somewhere over middle america with Lufthansa's Flynet service.  So now what?  Had a nice Skype with hushed tones on my side with my wife, my daughter is playing with the emoticons she just discovered. Polling my Skype contacts to see if anyone else is airbound.  Soon the jollies will wear off and I'll get some work done I guess.

UPDATE: To sleep or not to sleep, Joi had the same question.  I'm in economy class on LH 459, so significantly paranoid about battery life.  Checked into a few IRC channels, no sign that anyone else is in the air for my first in flight follies.  Couldn't exactly tag a moving object as a Plaze, so put it at 0,0:

Wikimania!

Tomorrow night I fly to Frankfurt for Wikimania, the first international Wikipedia conference.  I'm keynoting on Enterprise Wikis.  The other keynotes are the guy who started free software (open source), the guy who started wikis and the guy who started Wikipedia.  I am truly humbled, and will redouble my efforts to change the world.

Turned out to be cheaper to take indirect but internet access enabled flights.  I guess I'll do the mile high virgin act, but so many bloggers have been connexed, it's no big deal.  What would be cool is if I could Skype and wiki with a friend who happens to be on another flight at the same time.  Then we will know we have arrived.

Speaker's Wiki

One of the better outcomes of BlogHer was the creation of a Speaker's Wiki.  Mary Hodder:

...It was there that I suggested that we make a speakers list. Then when conference organizers say they have mostly male speakers because they can't think of anyone else, or that male speakers lists are due to a lack of interesting others to invite, we can point them to the wiki and say, there are women who are experts in their fields do interesting things and they should be here speaking! Now, there really is no excuse...

And it's one heck of a list so far.  Mary has more...