Sweet! Posted Thu, 23 Aug 2007

With the help of open clipart, I made my first webcomic!

/copyrighteous/images/mead_market.png

On a related note, Mika and I will be holding something of a mead market this Saturday to celebrate moving into our new place and the grand opening of the Acetarium 2.0 (and its new Web 2.0 webpage). We'll also be celebrating my finishing up my degree at MIT and the end of Mika's first semester at HSPH. If you know us, are local to Boston/Camberville, and haven't been invited yet, it's probably an oversight. Contact me first and we'll work it out.

Animals That Are Also Verbs Posted Tue, 14 Aug 2007

I recently met the wonderful Laura Norris. Inspired by that delightful sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, one of Laura's many worthy endeavors is the creation of a comprehensive list of animals that are also verbs. With help from Daf and a few other folks at Debconf, I've expanded the list considerably and put it into my user space in Wikipedia.

You might want to help out with wiki formatting, links to relevant articles or, of course, additions of animals that are also verbs that we have missed. When it's done, I'll make a (foolhardy?) attempt to move it into the article namespace.

The list has a temporary wiki-home here:

User:Benjamin Mako Hill/List of animals that are also verbs
Ubuntu Book Translations Posted Mon, 13 Aug 2007

It's been fun to see a stream of translations of the The Official Ubuntu Book coming in. I now have copies of El Libro Oficial de Ubuntu and Das Offizielle Ubuntu-Buch on my bookshelf. I'm particularly happy about Ubuntu徹底入門 The Official Ubuntu Book日本語版, the Japanese translation. It was coordinated by the Ubuntu Japan community, looks great, and has won me all kinds of brownie points -- and a congratulatory bottle of top shelf shōchū -- from Mika's family members.

Stumping for Free Culture Posted Thu, 09 Aug 2007

I've let my talks page fall badly out of date in the last year. As a first stab toward updating it, I've uploaded all of the notes for all of talks I've given calling for a free culture movement built around a standard of freedom and for adoption of the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

There are notes posted for talks at the following conferences and meetings:

The talks and notes are not the same, but they are often very similar and they share a lot of text.

The only recording I have is the one from the FSF Members meeting which I posted here before. It's still available online here:

Perhaps a couple other recordings will surface.

The good news is that I think that those of us involved with the definition have begun to make real progress in getting the message out and I think that, in several real ways, we've changed the nature of the conversation around free culture.

I hope so, because I think that, looking at the list above, it's probably time to move on and to think about helping the definition and the movement in new innovative ways and with new compelling arguments.

Wikimania 2007 Posted Thu, 02 Aug 2007

I'm in Taipei this week whole week for Wikimania 2007. I'm here for two days for a retreat of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors and advisory board. I'm also going to be giving two and a half talks in the conference itself, attending a Debian birthday party, and perhaps giving a talk on Ubuntu at ITRI.

Here are the overviews of my talks at Wikimania:

  • Freedom's Standard Advanced (2007/08/03 10:30): Mostly a reprise of a couple talks I've given recently that make the case for a definition of freedom and for the Free Cultural Works Definition in particular.
  • Supporting Collaboration in Branched Articles (2007/08/05 13:15): I'll be unveiling my thesis work: a wiki that allows for branching and merging. It is built on distributed revision control concepts and tools (i.e., Bazaar) and includes a text-specific merge/conflict resolution system designed for writers. The tool has important potential for offline wiki work, stable versions, and collaboration among forked articles within and between wikis. Think ikiwiki but with distributed revision control and all the branching and merging that goes along with it. I'll be posting lots more information and source here in the coming month.
  • Election Committee (2007/08/04 14:30): I'll be joining the rest of the Wikimedia Election Committee and talking a bit about the last board elections and about how we might handle things like election methods in the next election.

Details on Debian's birthday party are online too which will have talks, food, beer, and more.

As always, get in contact if you want to meet up or just find me at the conference.