Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

Rebel with rather too many causes. And your host!
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Italian Travel Update

Due to a variety of people and places we want to see, Mika and I have regrouped around a more ambitious travel schedule in Italy for the next week or so. Our new plan is:

  • August 23-27: Florence
  • August 27-29: Verona
  • August 29-31: Bologna
  • August 31-September 1: Siena
  • September 1-3: Rome

I know we’ll have an organized LUG meeting in Siena. The rest of the period is a little more open. As always, if other free software, wikimedian, or like-minded folks are around and would like to meet up in any of those places, don’t hesitate to get in contact.

In related news, inspired by Florence and by Mika’s domo-kun purse, I made a duomo-kun today.

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My August

I’ve got a pretty packed August.

I just wrapped the Open and User Innovation Conference at MIT — the academic conference on user and open innovation connected to my research. I organized the program and was MC for the 120+(!) talks and research updates on the program so it’s a huge relief to see it come off successfully.

On Thursday, August 5th (at 14:30 UTC) I’ll be giving a talk on antifeatures at DebConf (the Annual Debian conference). It was accidentally listed as "Revealing Errors" until a few minutes ago — sorry about that! It will be streamed live (details on the DC site) for those outside of New York City who might want to follow it.

As soon as DebConf is done on August 8th, I’m going to head to Korčula in Croatia to relax, read, and hopefully get a bit of research done, before I head off to Outlaws and Inlaws in Split on the 19th, a sort of piracy and (vs?) free software summit put on by mi2 connected to the recurring Nothing Will Happen where, from what I hear, quite a lot does.

I’m going to have to leave Nothing Will Happen a little early to head to FrOSCon on the 21st where I’ll be doing an antifeatures keynote again on the 22nd. I tend not to like to do the same talk too many times, or for more than a year, so this might be one of the last times I present on antifeatures in this form.

After that, I’m going to head to Italy where I’ll be between the 23rd and the 3rd of September. I’ll fly and in and out of Rome and plan to spend some time in Rome, Tuscany, and Florence, but don’t have a lot of set plans and might travel to Bologna or elsewhere.

My schedule is pretty open. As always, I’m interested in meeting up for coffee or a drink with like-minded hackers, Wikipedians, researchers, activists, etc. If folks are interested in organizing talks or presentations, that sounds fun too. I’m keeping a brief description of my schedule updated alongside a bunch of ways to get in touch with me on my contact page. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

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Grades

Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes.

I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students’ assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however — at my school at least — there’s always a grade.

For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there’s a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.

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Memory

Today I started to tell a friend about something from dinner the night before. Except that she was at the dinner. And sitting at the same table! Even when prompted, I couldn’t really remember!

This does not warrant a blog post. Anybody who knows me well knows that my memory for these kinds of more mundane details is pretty porous. This kind of thing happens all the time.

I’m writing this so that when I’m much older, and still forgetting things all the time, folks can use this as a reference point before concluding that senility is setting in.

I’m afraid that everyone else will forget my forgetfulness!

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Wikimedia Scholarship 2009-2010

Folks at last year’s Wikimania may remember the presentation I gave there. It was essentially a literature review of Wikipedia and Wikimedia scholarship from the previous year. The idea was to give a bird’s-eye-view as well a series of highlights — all aimed at Wikimedians.

Apparently somebody found it useful because I’ve been asked to do it again! I’m going to be paired up in a longer session with Felipe Ortega — whose excellent dissertation I summarized as part of my talk last year — and Mayo Fuster Morell has also agreed to help out. Felipe is program chair for WikiSym this year and will be focusing on providing folks with a summary of the papers published at that conference. It will be held immediately before Wikimania in Gdansk. For my part, I’m going to be focusing more broadly and talking about papers published, well, anywhere else.

And this is where you come in!

With search engines and all, I’ve got a pretty good idea of breadth of the work that’s out there. I also "just know" stuff from my own areas of interest and study. That said, I don’t have as strong of an idea of what’s good and what’s relevant beyond what I can grok from citation counts. And after one year (or less!), that’s clearly not very much information.

As a result, I’m looking for suggestions or recommendations from anybody on interesting, useful, important, or otherwise noteworthy scholarly papers on or about Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects published in the last year. Feel free to leave a comment, email mako@atdot.cc, or edit this page.

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“Lance!”

On probably a dozen occasions, I’ve had people in cars taunt me by yelling some version of "Lance!", "Hey Lance!" or "Go Lance!" at me while I am riding my bike. It seems to be particularly likely if I’m wearing spandex.

Indeed, the "verb" to Lance has an Urban Dictionary entry and there is a Facebook group for Yelling "Hey Lance!" when you see someone riding their bike.

My friend Seth pointed out — after we were (collectively?) called "Lance" in California — that it’s pretty strange to insult somebody by comparing them to a man who is nearly guaranteed to be on any list of greatest living athletes, in any sport.

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Antifeatures Talk

The recordings for Linux Conf Australia 2010, held this year in Wellington, are finally online. The recordings include a video of my keynote on Antifeatures.

I was deeply honored to be invited to give a keynote at LCA and, as a result, felt more pressure than usual to put together something that was novel, relevant and entertaining and that spoke to core issues and problems facing free software.

Although it’s always hard for me to watch myself speaking, I’ve made it through the video and am reasonably happy with the result. Although perhaps it’s a minor distinction, I think this lecture is probably the best talk I’ve given given to date! I hope to give the talk again so, as always, I welcome comments and feedback.

If you’d like to watch it, the talk is available in a number of free and non-free formats:

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Annual Free Software Foundation Membership Drive Appeal

I wrote this for the FSF’s annual membership drive where it was originally published. I am reposting it here.

At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.

Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it’s about bringing freedom to users through software.

In free software’s incredible success over the last two decades, many people have lost sight of this simple fact. We have created an incredible array of applications, libraries, and tools. We have created vibrant development and support communities. We have created new development methodologies, powerful copyleft licenses, and massive collaborative projects. But these are all how we give users freedom. They are not freedom itself. They are not what we were trying to achieve. They are our instruments, not our goal.

This distinction becomes central in a world where technology is in flux. Indeed, we live in such a world. We can see signs of this in how, as most users’ primary computers become mobile phones and new types of network services make up most of many users’ interactions with computers, the free software movement’s old applications, communities, development methodologies, and licenses can become ill-suited to, or ineffective at, protecting user freedoms.

And indeed, in the next few years, bringing freedom to computer users will need to involve new software and new forms of advocacy. It will need to involve new licenses and new techniques for their enforcement. It will need to involve new forms of collaboration and organization. If the free software movement is to succeed, it must stay focused on computer users’ freedom — on the question of why we do what we do — and then work creatively on how to best respect and protect the freedom we are working toward. If we are overly focused on how we’ve done things in the past, we may lose sight of the most fundamental goal of supporting users’ control over their technology in general.

There are many organizations that support the how of today’s free software in various ways — they are law firms and companies and nonprofit organizations supporting various free software projects.

The Free Software Foundation is, by far, the most important organization focused on why — on the underlying principle of software freedom. As such, it plays an essential role in keeping our broader community focused on the key issues, threats, and challenges that will affect the success of every free software project, and every computer user, in the present and in the future. In this period of rapid change in computer technology, its role is more vital than ever. The consequence of any failure is more dire.

Here are some of the ways that I will be encouraging the FSF to serve the free software movement in the coming year:

Mobile Phones

In a short essay I wrote earlier this year, I pointed out that there are now billions of mobile phones and that, although these phones are increasingly powerful computers, they represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and “unfree” technologies in wide use. The implications of this fact for users’ control over their technology are dire. Although some widely used phones make extensive use of free software, most “free” phones are locked down and Tivoized and their users remain fettered, divided, and helpless.

We must raise awareness of free software issues among users of phones, communicate to users that phones are powerful general purpose computers, and explain that control over these devices has critical implications for individual autonomy in the future. Toward this end, the FSF staff will launch an advocacy campaign around mobile phones and software freedom in the coming year.

Network Services

As network services — like those built by Facebook, Google, and others — have continued to grow both in scope and penetration over the last year, the importance of a meaningful free software responses grows as well. The launch of products like Google’s network-centric ChromeOS offers one glimpse of what a future computing platform may look like. The implications for user freedom, and for the effectiveness of traditional free software approaches, are frightening. The fact that many network services are built using free software does not make the effect of these services on users’ autonomy and freedom any less catastrophic.

In the next year, the FSF is planning to release the first of what I hope will be several statements on software freedom and network services. Building off the work of the FSF-supported group Autonomous, the Foundation will help provide guidelines for those implementing network services, for users deciding whether to use services, and for developers trying to build services that go further to respect their users’ freedom.

Reaching beyond our traditional communities

Successfully fighting for user freedom is going to mean successfully reaching out to users outside the FSF’s historical “base”. The FSF continues to do so with its Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign and its End Software Patents work. In the last year, the FSF has also reached out to younger users through its “GNU Generation” campaign run by and for high school students. Additionally, the FSF convened a summit this year on women in free software. The FSF plans to build on these successes in the coming year and to expand similar outreach projects.

Of course, fighting for and promoting software freedom is more work than today’s FSF has the resources to accomplish. Each of my three points above represents an ambitious undertaking, and yet just a portion of the items on the plate of the FSF’s small but dedicated staff. Even just continuing its existing projects will require that the FSF adds hundreds of new members by the end of this period. Your membership and donations help make goals like this possible.

A strong free software movement focused on the principled issues of software freedom — and a strong FSF in particular — will determine what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy. At stake is no less than that next generation’s autonomy.

I know that this is not the first fundraising appeal you’ve read this season and I know that the weakened economy makes giving difficult for many. I understand that the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year. But we also cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important point of technological transition.

If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you’ve read my appeal the last two years and decided to wait, now is the time to take the plunge. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation, or encourage a friend to sign up. The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom. I’ve seen firsthand that even small gifts
make a difference.

Join now with a $10 monthly donation

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What’s in a name?

Over the summer, there was a bit of a tussle at the highest level of Ubuntu governance over whether or not Canonical Ltd., the company that funds the majority of work done directly in Ubuntu, should name its file syncing and backup service Ubuntu One.

Canonical’s service involved a freely licensed client included in the Ubuntu distribution but, as a network service running on Canonical servers, it was not clearly a part of Ubuntu (the GNU/Linux distribution) or Ubuntu (the community) in the way the term was usually used within the community. Although the network service itself was not Franklin Street Statement free, this was not the most important issue for everyone who objected to the name. The major issue for many seemed to boil down to the fact that, free or not, Ubuntu One is a service run entirely by Canonical outside the reaches of the Ubuntu governance structures.

Decisions were made and not everybody — and maybe not anybody — was absolutely happy with the outcome. My goal is not try to revive old arguments here. As far as I’m concerned, the issues are settled and the service is called Ubuntu One. That said, the questions raised during the episode are fundamental to Ubuntu and to other firm-sponsored FLOSS projects. Now that the dust has settled, they are worth reflecting on.

From a legal perspective, there never was any ambiguity. Canonical "owns" the Ubuntu trademark. In this important sense, "Ubuntu" means whatever Canonical says it means. This is hardly new. As just one example, the Official Ubuntu Book (of which I am an author) was written by community members but became official because Canonical blessed it. But despite the fact that they don’t need to, Canonical has often consulted with the community and its governance structures about trademark licensing policy.

This was also not a case of Canonical not listening to the community. Canonical employees approached the Ubuntu Community Council (Ubuntu’s highest governance board of which I am a member), listened carefully to concerns, and responded thoughtfully.

The question was not even about a clash between what Canonical and the CC thought about the issue. An unambiguous majority of the board, including all the Canonical employees and several of the community members, supported the idea of Canonical using the trademark.

The question was one about who gets to make the decisions about the Ubuntu name and about what role the community and Canonical would each play. Despite the fact that a majority of the Ubuntu community council was likely to support the proposed name, the CC was told by Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth that a vote was irrelevant. Canonical made it clear that decisions about the Ubuntu trademark were simply not in the CC’s purview. The decision on how the name was to be used was something that Canonical was not willing to delegate to an "outside" (the firm) governance body. Few businesses would. And although I don’t agree with the decision as a community representative, I might have even made the same call from Canonical’s shoes.

In traditional firms, it’s usually pretty clear where the organization’s boundary lies. In FLOSS projects — and especially in FLOSS project like Ubuntu who are sponsored in very large part by a single for-profit company — boundaries are fuzzier. The conversation about "Ubuntu One" can be seen as a fight over what "Ubuntu" refers to, and, more importantly, who gets to answer that question. In deciding whether to call a service "Ubuntu", a decision is made on what Ubuntu is. Names are powerful.

Is Ubuntu just a Canonical project? Are Ubuntu’s contributors really just Canonical contributors by proxy? I think the answer to both questions is "no" but the boundary issues involved are complicated and under constant negotiation. Every time Canonical uses the Ubuntu name itself or grants others the ability to do so, these boundary issues are negotiated, one way or another.

This boundary setting work reveals an important tension that firms releasing FLOSS must all struggle with. To what extent and in what ways do communities get to decide what a FLOSS project is and to what extent do sponsoring firms get to do so? How should projects and firms do this most effectively? What should we even be optimizing for?

I think that any resulting balance has a huge effect on whether a FLOSS project is, on one hand, released under a free license but run like any old corporate project or, on the other, a true "bazaar" style project where no single firm dominates — or where they fall on that spectrum. Names and trademarks are one way that projects define their own identities and act as an important frontier in this balancing act. As every firm/project negotiates their own answers to questions of names and boundaries, there are important implications for the project’s ability to attract volunteers, solicit contributions from other firms, and more. The confusion around conversations about Ubuntu One shows that we still have a lot to learn.

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Center for Future Names of Media Lab Centers

A few years ago, the MIT Media Lab, working with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, created the Center for Future Civic Media. It’s a great project and one I’ve been involved in since the beginning.

Not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Banking through a partnership with Bank of America. One couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the names. The meme became further entrenched when, not too long after, the lab announced the Center for Future Storytelling in collaboration with Plymouth Rock Studios.

But perhaps the very first in the pattern is the the Okawa Center for Future Children announced in 1998 as a way of bringing together and supporting the labs work with kids. And no, it has nothing to do with zygotes.

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Upcoming Travel

As is becoming my custom, I’m planning to spend much of December and January on the road. This time I’ll be in Seattle, Japan and Wellington, New Zealand. Here’s the rough schedule:

  • December 18-28: Seattle
  • December 28-January 2: Tokyo
  • January 2-14: Traveling in Japan
  • January 15-17: Boston to compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt
  • January 19-24: Wellington, New Zealand to give a talk at LCA

Mika will also be around for everything but the NZ leg and SJ seems likely to make an appearance in Japan during the first week of January.

Feel free to get in contact if you’d like to meet up in any of the places above for a coffee or beer. I’m also open to hanging out with giving talks at LUGs, GLUGs, Wikipedia groups, free culture groups, colleges or Universities along the way. Most of my time in Japan is still basically unstructured so I’m quite open to suggestions during the first couple weeks of January.

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FLOSS Wins

Very often, folks want to refer to both the free and open source software communities in a way that is inclusive of and respectful of groups who identify with either term. Saying "free and open source software" is a mouthful. That said, there was no been consensus on what we should do instead.

The Wikipedia article on alternative terms for free software suggests that FOSS, F/OSS, FLOSS, and "software libre" are contenders. I’ve heard all. Of course, the choice of 4+ competing alternative terms is probably worse than the problem we were seeking to solve.

In academic circles, the big debate seems to be between FOSS and FLOSS. I was always a FOSS partisan. But I’ve seen increased momentum on the FLOSS side and I’m ready to declare that FLOSS has won.

I know it makes you think of dental hygiene and I agree that it is unfortunate. It wasn’t my first choice either. But I can see where things are going. FLOSS Manuals and the folks at the FLOSS Research Group at Syracuse who launched the FLOSSHub and the associated FLOSS Papers deserve some of the credit.

If we can get over the irony of having spent so much time arguing over what was intended to be compromise terminology in the first place, lets see if we actually start talking to each other.

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Introducing Between the Bars

I’ve been working with Charlie DeTar and the Center for Future Civic Media on a project called Between the Bars which is a blogging platform for prisoners. The current platform is essentially a snail-mail to web gateway: prisoners send letters which semi-automatically scanned and posted to the site; comments are printed and mailed back.

As we plan the launch of the project, we are trying to talk to as many stakeholders as possible — this includes ex-prisoners, families and friends of people who are or have been in prison, non-profits working with prisoners, victims of people in prison, people who work in prisons or in corrections, probation officers, or almost anyone else with a perspective or set of experience that might help us understand the difficult space our project is trying to negotiate and who might be able to help influence the design. At the moment, we’re not talking to current prisoners due to rules regulating research involving prisoners, but almost anyone else would be someone we’d love to connect with. We’re interested in hearing from people about their experience with prisons or prisoners, about staying connected to families and friends while behind bars, and, ultimately, about how we might design, deploy, and support technology to help folks out.

If you or someone you know are stakeholders and would be willing to talk about your experience and opinions with prisons, communication, and technology, please drop us a line at betweenthebars@mit.edu.

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Principles, Social Science, and Free Software

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source — "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI’s words — are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors.

Over the last year, I’ve been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I’m now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities.

With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed.

After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF’s position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong — only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share.

Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom.

My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS’s success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI’s terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS’s shortcomings!

I am no more biased — which is not to say completely unbiased — than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society.

To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.