Tag: planetwikimedia

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Wikireaders

My friend Sean from OpenMoko recently gave me one of OM’s new WikiReaders. It’s essentially a touchscreen-based device dedicated to displaying Wikipedia articles offline.

And while I’ll never forgive the thing for not having an Edit button, I’ve got to admit the device is pretty cool. Not only does it make it possible to bring WP to a bunch of places that are otherwise impossible or impractical, the thing is built entirely with free software. One of my colleagues at the Center for Future Civic Media suggested we should put one in every bar to help settle drunken arguments. Think of the lives we might save!

I hope the device becomes successful but I’m worried about what success will mean for the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia. After all, the ability to change and contribute is the thing that makes Wikipedia interesting, empowering, and successful; cutting this functionality out kind of misses much of the point.

I think it is important to start implementing a simple method to allow users of these types of devices to contribute back. Over the last few years, Sj and I have talked repeatedly about a simple method for contributing back from offline devices that would even be possible from devices like the Om Wikireader where editing the articles is probably impractical. Perhaps the device could be extended so that people could write short comments about articles from their reader — there’s an on screen keyboard after all — which could be saved to a log on the SD card. When the data on the card is updated, messages from this log could be uploaded somewhere — perhaps the talk pages of the articles in question or some dedicated page or ticketing queue. Editors could help merge these changes back into the articles.

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Election Season

Two organizations I care deeply about are having elections this month. The first is the Wikimedia Foundation who is electing three community representatives to their board of directors. The second is Ubuntu who will soon be electing a new Community Council.

The Wikimedia Foundation is perhaps the most important organization working on issues related to free culture. Wikimedia elections are currently ongoing and will close on August 10th. Editors who have more than 600 edits to their name across all Wikimedia wikis and 50 edits in 2009 made before July 1st are eligible to vote. The vast majority of eligible contributors to Wikimedia projects have not voted in previous elections.

Ubuntu will be electing all members in a new — larger — Community Council. I have been a member of the council since it was created and I will be standing for election once again — the last time I plan to do so. Work in setting up the election is being finalized and all Ubuntu Members will be able to vote in the election.

Both Wikimedia and Ubuntu are struggling to find the right relationship between the communities who produce most of the value at the heart of their projects and the organizations and leadership structures that try to support and, from time to time, direct it. Ubuntu and Wikimedia are very different. What’s at state at these elections is different too. But both elections are are extremely important and at pivotal times in their communities’ growth. Both elections will have an important impact on the process of creating new organizational forms.

My message in regards to both elections is also the same: If you are eligible to vote, please do. No governance system I’ve seen has as healthy and close relationship to the community it serves as it should. Wikimedia and Ubuntu are not exceptions. The result is a strange, and unhealthy, relationship between governance systems and the organizations at the heart of our community-driven projects and the communities themselves. We can all do better. There are not enough opportunities for community members to help push this balance in a better direction. These elections are one. I urge everyone who can to vote and to become involved.

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San Francisco

This last week, I gave a couple talks at OSCON including a fun talk on Antifeatures I hope to give a few in some form a more times in the next year.

After a weekend bike tour, the plan is to stick around San Francisco for another week. If you are around and want to get together to talk wikis, free software, or free culture, to have a keysigning, or to share a drink, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

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el D.F.

Mika is at the Mexican Secretaría de Salud doing research on H1N1 this whole summer. I got into Mexico City yesterday to visit. I’ll be here for the next 10 days or so before I’m off to San Francisco for OSCON and related festivities.

Since I’m just here to visit, I’ve got very little else planned. If folks in or around Mexico City are interested in meeting up for dinner, drinks, a key signing, or to talk about free software, free culture, Debian, Ubuntu, Wikimedia, or whatever, don’t hesitate to get in contact.

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American Gothic and the Free Culture Imperative

About a year ago, I read American Gothic by Steven Biel and the book has left a surprising lasting impression on me. The book describes the background, history, and life of "American Gothic: America’s most famous painting" by Grant Wood. Even if you don’t recognize the name "American Gothic", you are likely to recognize the picture or the scene. The book is a serious and — as far as I can tell — reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject that is interesting, insightful at points, and a breeze to read.

Thumbnail of the American Gothic Painting

Of course, the book is not actually about the painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago — although it will certainly teach you more than you probably ever wanted to know about that painting, its subjects, its settings, etc. The book is really the story of how that paining has been received, understood, and used. Nearly half of the book focuses on examples of people who have remixed, reworked, reimagined, and reproduced the painting in myriad forms, formats, settings, and ways. The book contains scores of photographs of celebrities posing in American Gothic style settings, dozens of political cartoons based on the paintings, images of talk shows, magazine covers, Broadway plays, product advertisements, toys, gifts, kitch, and more, done up in recognizeable representations of the basic American Gothic form. There is a very incomplete of references to American Gothic in popular culture at Wikipedia that can give a tiny taste of what is out there.

The last chapter of the book is devoted to these "parodies" and there’s some brief talk of issues around copyright and control of the image. Wood’s sister Nan was the owner of the copyright for much of the second half of the twentieth century and is also the woman in the painting. She famously charged several makers of more lurid take-offs with defamation and successfully blocked a number of remixes. In 1988, Nan transferred ownership to the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) which will hold the copyright until 2025. VAGA also claims "rights of publicity" in Nan’s image which will last until 2060. VAGA takes a very expansive view of its copyright claims and argues that it has both veto power and royalty rights to any recognizably similar work. For example, VAGA does not want the American Gothic image used in alcohol advertisements and has successfully had such ads pulled. Biel’s book contains no reference to the amount of money made from licensing the work but one can only conclude that it must be massive. VAGA blocked a plan by Iowa to use the picture on the back of the Iowa state quarter due to licensing disagreements; instead Iowa used a different Wood painting that was clearly in the public domain.

What struck me most about Biel’s book is related to just how deeply ingrained in American culture the American Gothic image has become. The book cites simple surveys that show that almost every American recognizes the painting (although only a small fraction know the painting’s name or who painted it). The thousands of parodies that the book documents are testament to the fact that the painting has become a way of representing something essential about American culture and its values. But in a strange way, the painting’s popularity and incessant reuse has also made it part of the culture that it so effectively captured.

We can think of culture as a set of shared values and references that help us related to each other and to communicate. Just like idioms in language, culture helps us communicate more effectively, certainly, but also lets us communicate messages that would not be communicable otherwise. When Out Magazine, Coors, or any of several dozen others replace the figures in American Gothic with a gay or lesbian couple, they are succinctly sending a message about homosexual relationships and American traditional values that could not be made any other way. In this way, American Gothic — both the painting and Biel’s book — represent a strong argument for free culture.

If American Society has infused American Gothic with so much value, how can it be fair to let one person or organization own it? Are they not owning an essential mode through which a society can relate, experience, and communicate? I can’t help but conclude that it shouldn’t matter if VAGA does not like alcohol, advertisements, homosexuality, or wants to make a some money every time someone makes a cartoon parody. These are trivial concerns next to the importance of our society’s need to communicate about these issues. If doing so requires the use of a shared cultural reference in VAGA’s painting, I find it hard to justify VAGA’s position of control.

We need to be able to reproduce and reimagine American Gothic because it has become part of us. It’s a striking example of the way that art becomes culture and the reason that truly free culture is the only appropriate response. We can’t afford to let our experience of the world and each other — to let ourselves at a very fundamental level — be owned and controlled.

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LibrePlanet 2009

If you’re interested in free software — and free network services in particular — and should try to join me in Boston for the weekend of March 21st and 22nd.

The FSF is organizing its annual members meeting again. This year the model is very different. For a start, the audience isn’t limited to FSF members and the conference is not just about FSF projects and work.

Instead, the meeting has been rebranded LibrePlanet and has been broken up into a two-day event that is going to talk about and then try to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the world of free and open source software. Saturday March 21st will feature a series of talks about major issues facing free software. Sunday March 22nd will be focused on an unconference attempt to tackle and explore several of the key themes or tracks: network services, high priority projects, and the nascent LibrePlanet activism network.

I’ll be focused on the track around free network services which I’m helping organize in part through Autonomo.us. For more information on that angle, please take a look at my blog post over at Autonomo.us. We’re going to have a great group of people at the track and I’m excited by the idea that that we’ll be able to make some real progress on the issues.

I encourage anyone who thinks they might be able to make it to consider doing so. There are details including travel, location, hotel information and much more on the event web page and wiki (login is required to RSVP). Please spread the word!

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Annual Free Software Foundation Fundraiser

When I explain the importance of free software, I often use some variation of the following example:

Suppose I see a beautiful sunset and I want to describe it to a loved one on the other side of the world. Today’s communication technology makes this possible. In the process, however, the technology in question puts constraints on message communicated. For example, if I pick up my cellphone, my description of the sunset will be limited to words and sounds that can be transmitted by phone. If I happen to have a camera phone and the ability to send a picture message, I will be able to communicate a very different type of description. If I’m limited to 150 characters in an SMS message, my message will be constrained differently again.

The point of the example is this: the technology I use to communicate puts limits and constraints on my communication. Technology defines what I can say, how I can say it, when I can say it, and even who I can say it to.

This is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of technology. But it means that those who control our technology control us, to some degree. As information technology becomes increasingly central to our lives, the way we experience, understand, and act in the world is increasingly controlled by technology and, by extension, by those who control technology.

I believe that the single most important struggle for freedom in the twenty first century is over the question of who will set these terms. Who will control the technology that controls our lives?

Free software can be understood as an answer to this question: An answer in the form of an unambiguous statement that technology must be under the control of its users. When free software triumphs, we will live in a world where users control their technological destiny. We simply cannot afford to fail.

The Free Software Foundation is the most important organization fighting for the rights of users in this struggle. Here are some of the ways that I plan to direct the FSF to support software freedom in the coming year:

Network Services

Last year, the FSF organized a meeting on software freedom and network services that lead to the creation of the Autonomo.us group and the release of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. As network services — like those built by Facebook, Google, and others — continue rise in popularity, progress in this conversation is of increasing importance.

This year, I will direct the FSF to build on the work of Autonomo.us to launch the first of what I hope will be several FSF position statements on software freedom and network services. More importantly, the FSF will begin to provide support and planning for solutions — technologies, social campaigns, and legal steps — that will protect computer users whose freedom is currently threatened by network services.

Enforcing free software licenses

Early on, people who decided to work on free software did so because they agreed with — or, at the very least, were willing to abide by — the principles and rules laid out in our licenses. In our push for software freedom, we have created software of immense value and attracted companies and individuals to our community who are less willing, or simply less interested, in protecting users’ freedom.

In December 2008, the FSF went to court for the first time in the organization’s history to force Cisco to uphold the freedom of the users of FSF copyrighted software. This lawsuit asks Cisco to live up to its obligations under the GPL and to ensure that it does so in the future. The FSF needs the support of its community in this and in future enforcement actions.

The FSF has operated a compliance lab for several years and has ensured software freedom for countless users. As free software becomes more successful in the next year, the FSF will be playing an increased role in protecting software freedom from those who do not share its principles.

Continuing the fight against software patents

As I said last year, one cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patent minefield we’ve found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we’ve already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now. The FSF will continue its work toward this end.

The FSF’s End Software Patents project’s major contribution this year was a brief submitted in the In Re Bilski case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Recently, an opinion was issued which seems to mark an important shift away from broad protection for software patents. With this victory, now is the time to keep up this momentum. The FSF is drawing up a strategy to do just this and will be announcing the relaunch of its campaign on February 9,2009 led by Ciaran O’Riordan.

Every recent fundraising appeal seems to mention the difficult economic climate and it seems to cliche to do so here. That said, the effect of a bad economy is, in fact, felt most strongly in non-profits dependent on donations. The FSF is not immune.

The FSF’s work is essential for success on the issues I’ve described here and on all of its other campaigns and projects. Although the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year for many of you, the free software movement cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important moment.

If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every single gift makes a difference.

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European Tour

Mika and I are going to be in Europe for the next few weeks. The tentative plan seems to include these stops:

  • Berlin (December 24-31) – Attending the CCC
  • Stuttgart (December 31-January 3) – At/around Akademie Schloss Solitude
  • Undetermined location in Slovenia (January 3)
  • Belgrade (January 3-8)
  • Zagreb (January 9-11)
  • Amsterdam (January 11-13)
  • Cambridge (and|or) London (13-15)

I’ve got very little planned in the ways of talks or meetings with free software folks and would, as always, be open to arranging these. If you are in or near any of these places and want to plan a dinner, drinks, keysigning, talk, etc., don’t hesitate to get in contact with me.

I’ll try to keep this wiki page updated with details on the latest plans.

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Wikimedia and GFDL 1.3

I spent more time than I would like to admit massaging the process that ultimately led to the release of the the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 (GFDL) by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Hours counted, it was probably one of my biggest personal projects this year.

The effect is to allow wikis under the GFDL to migrate to the Creative Commons BY-SA license or, as Wikimedia’s Erik Möller has proposed, to some sort of dual-license arrangement.

There are many reasons for this change but the most important is that the move reduces very real barriers to collaboration between wikis and free culture projects due to license compatibility. BY-SA has become the GPL of the free culture world and Wikimedia wikis were basically locked out from sharing with a larger community, and vice-versa; projects will no longer have to choose between sharing with Wikipedia and sharing with essentially everyone else. The GFDL has done a wonderful job of helping get Wikimedia projects to where they are today and Möller’s proposed switch seems, in my opinion, the best option to continue that work going forward.

The FSF gets a lot of credit (and a lot of flack) for what it does. Offering to "let go" of Wikipedia — without question the crown jewel of the free culture world — represents a real relinquishing of a type of political control and power for the FSF. Doing so was not done lightly. But giving communities the choice to increase compatibility and collaboration by switching to a fundamentally similar license was and is, in my opinion, the right thing to do.

Everyone who has worked hard to make this happen deserves the free culture movement’s thanks. This list includes Richard Stallman, Brett Smith and Peter Brown of the FSF; James Vasile and Eben Moglen of the SFLC; Erik Möller, Mike Godwin and Shunling Chen of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The FSF in general, and RMS in particular, deserves a huge amount of credit for what it has decided to not do in this case and for giving up control in a way that was responsible and accountable to its principles and to GFDL authors and in the interest of free culture movement more generally. It has not been easy or quick. If you support or appreciate work like this, please support the FSF and express this while doing so. Doing so is an important way to support these essential and almost inherently underappreciated efforts.

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Making Wiki Images More Wiki

One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image, you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost. Basically, I’m annoyed because images in wikis aren’t very "wiki."

I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser — even if it is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr’s wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick to do the actual image manipulation.

It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I’ve called EditImage. It’s an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it’s nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have it installed.

I’m certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact, some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I’m not even the first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr’s code to do image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.

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I Will Revise

Once again, Wikimania was wonderful. I gave my scheduled talk on Autonomo.us and network freedom and network services. I also filled in for a few speakers to give a "Zotero for Wikipedians" demo and to say a few words about the BY-SA/FDL work as part of a Creative Commons panel.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the conference was the writing and performance of I Will Revise. A couple days before the conference, a small group of Wikipedians — The Difftones — wrote the song at a karaoke bar in Alexandria. We had a wonderful time leading a room full of lightning talk attendees in song and a final rendition by a massive, fully-packed, stage at the party on the final night!

It’s online on meta.wikimedia.org. You should feel free to revise it, add verses, and improve it!

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Ending Software Patents

Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project’s name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center.

There are several organizations who are taking on specific bad patents but ESP is unique in that it is activitely working toward the abolition of software patents in the United States. While the organization is focused on work in the US, it’s deeply important globally — much of the world’s patent law is "exported" from the US.

The FSF is stretching extremely limited resources in backing ESP to help it get off the ground because we believe two things:

  • First, software patents are a fundamental threat to free and open source software (but not just to free and open source software). The FSF must oppose software patents because they provide a fundamental threat to free software’s continued success. That sounds like hyperbole but is unfortunately not.
  • Second, we can win this fight. For a whole set of reasons, the successful abolition of software patents is a goal that, while extremely ambitious, is also within grasp. These issues, of course, are much bigger than free software. Companies spend billions of dollars in litigation over software patents that are not novel and that should not exist. ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community.

Please read the new ESP report on the state of software patents written by the ESP Executive Director Ben Klemens to understand why we are optimistic. And please, support ESP financially in this fight. ESP’s continued work is not ensured past the immediate future. Your support will help endow a bright future for the next generation of software developers and users.

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Creative Commons and the Freedom Definition

Creative Common Seal for Free Cultural Works

Yesterday witnessed the most important step forward for the Definition of Free Cultural Works (DFCW) since its adoption and endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation a year ago.

Although I might have wished things otherwise, Creative Commons is not a social movement fighting for essential freedom or the essential freedoms at the core of the DFCW in particular. From the movement’s perspective, CC is more like a law and advocacy firm that works for us — a very sympathetic one. CC writes, hosts, and supports a variety of licenses. Some are free. Some are not. Last year they took steps to explicitly limit the extent of restrictions they are willing to tolerate in their licenses.

Yet, while CC has resisted taking a stand in favor of the Definition of Free Cultural Works, they continue to produce some of the best free licenses, tools, and metadata available and they seem honestly interested in helping users interested in social movements based around these definitions organize more effectively.

In perhaps its most important move to date in this area, Creative Commons announced yesterday that it was placing a seal on each of its licenses that provide the essential freedoms laid out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. The seal links to the definition over at freedomdefined.org. In Creative Commons’ words:

This seal and approval signals an important delineation between less and more restrictive licenses, one that creators and users of content should be aware of.

A very practical reason users should be aware of these distinctions is that some important projects accept only freely (as defined) licensed or public domain content, in particular Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, which use the Definition of Free Cultural Works in their licensing guidelines.

The seal is currently on two CC licenses that provide for essential freedom (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) and their public domain dedication. Thanks go to Erik Moeller at the Wikimedia Foundation and everyone at Creative Commons to helped make this happen.

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Annual Free Software Foundation Fundraiser

It’s an end of year tradition for non-profit organizations to do big fund-raising and membership pushes. As I mentioned several days ago, I am personally giving to two organizations this year: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation.

The FSF has a goal of 500 associate members by year-end and it’s an important goal that will sustain the foundation’s activities. While membership dues keep the lights on, the fact that the foundation has a robust and growing membership is equally, if not more, important.

FSF executive director Peter Brown put an appeal online in both video and text versions. In it, he lays out some of the most important issues for the next year. You should watch the video version in OGG Theora or this YouTube version (requires Gnash or non-free Flash). The appeal briefly lays out the FSF’s plans for next year. My partner Mika Matsuzaki and my friend Oliver Day shot and edited the video. Please pass the link around to those you feel might be interested.

Here’s my appeal:

Now is the time to join and give to Free Software Foundation. 2008 is going to be extraordinarily important year for free software.

Eben Moglen likes to quote Gandhi’s "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression when describing the free software movement. As I pointed out when I joined the FSF board, we’re beginning to see powerful interests fighting free software. It’s going to increase in the next few years. Things will probably get a lot uglier for free software before they get better. We can win but things are far from settled. The FSF is the front-line organization in this fight and we need a robust and proactive foundation, and an active and involved membership, if we’re going to win.

Here are the issues that I’m going to pushing the FSF to pursue in the next year.

Expanding activism outside our traditional technologist communities:

In part through the work of projects like Defective By Design, we’ve seen the tide turn for DRM on music in what what may be the FSF’s greatest success last year. I’m going to push the FSF to continue the campaign to attack DRM for video, eBooks, and the other places it is cropping up.

The most remarkable thing to me about Defective By Design is that its participants and supporters are not, for the most part, people who develop or use GNU/Linux or even know what GNU is! If advocacy for software freedom involves a conversation we can only have with people who understand what POSIX is and how one uses it, we’ve already lost. Through DbD, BadVista, and other projects, the FSF has made major strides in the last year. It need to do much more and needs your support to do so.

Get proactive about software patents:

As a community, we’ve had our head in the sand about software patents for far too long. There are companies and patent trolls sitting on massive, growing piles of software patents. They are not our friends and they do not mean us well.

One cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patents minefield we’ve found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we’ve already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now.

The US is very important in this fight (much patent law is "exported" from the US) and almost no organization is working on software patent elimination there. Not enough people are thinking and acting strategically on this issue. The FSF is planning to make major steps in this fight in the coming year and we need your support to do so.

Web services and the changing face of software:

This last year, I worked to help launch the new version the AGPLv3. The license addresses the role of copyleft for software like web-services which, due to the legal particulars of the GPL, did not extend to the purveyors of web services. Of course, access to source code does not make the users of all web-services free (e.g., the GMails and the Facebooks).

Nobody seems to know what freedom for webserver entails. There might not even be good answers. In the next year, I’m going to push the FSF to help start several conversation and to begin to follow up on what I think was an important first step with the AGPLv3. While this is not a major organizational priority yet, it’s a major action item that I will be pursuing through the FSF. If you feel strongly about this issue, whatever your position, become a member, stay involved as these projects develop, and have your voice be heard. We don’t know the answers yet and we need your input as much as we need your action.

Please, support the FSF in the efforts listed above, and in others, by giving generously.

If you’re not a member, please join the FSF as an associate member. If you are already a member, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every little bit helps.

Members pays USD $120 ($10/month) and student members pay half that. FSF has members across the world — where a weak dollar often makes it even cheaper. Member support and participation builds capacity and credibility for the foundation and keep the organization responsible, responsive, and in tune with our community.

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SPARC Innovator

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition — a large alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations working on open access scholarly publishing issues — just recognized me as a SPARC Innovator.

The award/recognition is given semi-annually to honor contributions to the open access movement. I’m being singled out in part for my work on Overpriced Tags and for other OA work and advocacy. I’m sharing the stage with several friends — all of whom are students active in the Free Culture movement. SPARC seems to see this set of innovator awards as an opportunity to recognize the contributions of the next generation of activists. I’m honored to be counted among them!