Tag: projects

Last Thursday (February 15, 2007) was declared National Day of Action for Open Access. To help raise awareness of the movement for open access in scholarly publications at MIT, I got together with a number of other MIT students and placed price tags — we called them overprice tags — onto the 100 journals that MIT subscribes to at a cost of more than $5,000 USD per annum.

The project, inspired by a similar project called Seeing Red carried out by a Brown librarian a few years back, was a huge success. You can find information about the project, motivation and experience, see pictures, and find out how you might run a similar event at your institution on the Overprice Tags homepage.

Last year, I announced a project to bring together artists, content creators, and others who care about freedom to come up with a clear set of goals around which a social movement for essential freedoms around culture might be based. There has been a lot of discussion and a number of important changes to the document over the last year. A few days ago, we finally released "1.0" of our definition with this announcement:

A diverse group of writers has released the first version of the "Definition of Free Cultural Works." The authors have identified a minimum set of freedoms which they believe should be granted to all users of copyrighted materials. Created on a wiki with the feedback of Wikipedia users, open source hackers, artists, scientists, and lawyers, the definition lists the following core freedoms:

• The freedom to use and perform the work
• The freedom to study the work and apply the information
• The freedom to redistribute copies
• The freedom to distribute derivative works.

Inspired by the Free Software Definition and the ideals of the free software and open source movements, these conditions are meant to apply to any conceivable work. In reality, these freedoms must be granted explicitly by authors, through the use of licenses which confer them. On the website of the definition a list of these licenses can be found. Furthermore, authors are encouraged to identify their works as Free Cultural Works using a set of logos and buttons.

The definition was initiated by Benjamin Mako Hill, a Debian GNU/Linux developer, and Erik Möller, an author and long-time Wikipedia user. Wikipedia already follows similar principles to those established by the definition. Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Advisory Board Chair and co-founder of Wikia.com; Mia Garlick, general counsel of Creative Commons; and Elizabeth Stark of the Free Culture Student Movement acted as moderators, while Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons provided helpful feedback.

As more and more people recognize that there are alternatives to traditional copyright, phrases like "open source," "open access," "open content," "free content," and "commons" are increasingly used. But many of these phrases are ambiguous when it comes to distinguishing works and licenses which grant all the above freedoms, and those which only confer limited rights. For example, a popular license restricts the commercial use of works, whereas the authors believe that such use must be permitted for a work to be considered Free. Instead of limiting commercial use, they recommend using a clever legal trick called "copyleft:" requiring all users of the work to make their combined and derivative works freely available.

Möller and Hill encourage authors to rethink copyright law and use one of the Free Culture Licenses to help build a genuine free and open culture.

If you haven’t yet, please check out the project at freedomdefined.org. If you’re still curious feel free to read about my motivation and why I think that everyone should stand up for what they feel are essential freedoms.

The Digital Disobedience event that I helped organize on December 1st went (IMHO) very well. If you missed it, you can check out this video (MP4) that the Berkman Center has recently posted.

I was particularly impressed with Stanford’s Fred Turner whose work I was not familiar with before. I haven’t had a chance to check out From Counterculture to Cyberculture but I am looking forward to doing so soon.

I am helping to organize and host an event called Digital Disobedience on cyberactivism and culture jamming this Friday with Harvard Free Culture. The event will explore the interplay between technology, activism, and cultural critique. Here are the details if you are local to Cambridge/Boston and would like to drop by:

Digital Disobedience

Cyberactivism and Culture Jamming

Friday, December 1, 18:00

Science Center 110, Harvard University

(One block north of Harvard Square T)

The event will feature talks by:

• Ji Lee, Artist and Creator of the Bubble Project
• J. Salvatore Testa, Defender of Truth and Liberty, Hacktivismo
• Prof. Fred Turner, Stanford University and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture
• Prof. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Harvard VES Department, teaching Art and Activism since 1989: Culture Jam

The format will be interactive with short presentations from the speakers and then break-out groups to discuss thoughts and questions with the presenters. A few people have voiced a desire to do some culture jamming of our own afterward. My birthday is the next day so maybe we can have that turn into a little bit of a celebration.

In my blog post yesterday I described iRony, an install party I helped organize for iPods. In the post, I pointed folks to some resources for holding similar parties.

To help with mass installs at our party, I wrote a simple installer for RockBox in Python that would run on GNU/Linux. With a few modifications, the script could be relatively easily converted to also run on Mac OS X.

While an unofficial installer exists for Windows, my installer, simply called the iRony RockBox Installer, seems to be the first installer for GNU/Linux.

Of course, the installer is still largely rough and untested and is definitely unsupported by the RockBox team. If you get around to trying it, please send me feedback, advice, or and patches. You can grab it (and future version) here: http://mako.cc/projects/irony/

About a month ago, I announced an iPod liberation party (i.e., an install-fest for free/open source software onto iPods). The summary, now several weeks after the fact, was that the party was a total success. More than fifty people attended and several dozens iPods were liberated. Pictures and information on the event are now online.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been polishing a RockBox installer that I wrote for the event, writing up an article published on NewsForge today, and documenting the process for those that want to hold their own similar events.

If you are unconvinced on the subject of iPod liberation, read the NewsForge article written with others from my research group and Harvard Free Culture. Most of the rest of the information on our party and information on throwing your own party exists in sub-pages from the iPod Liberation page in the Free Culture wiki.

I’m looking forward to seeing a whole string of similar parties run by LUGs and other interested groups. It’s a great way to get out a message about software freedom, DRM and about freedom on devices other than computers.

About a year ago, I was working on OLPC during most of the time and thinking a lot about software freedom in the context of the project. My blog post on OLPC and Charges of Technological and Cultural Imperialism from last December is a great example of my thinking out loud about some of the issues.

The attractive thing to me about OLPC was the idea of students getting a real, free software, free hardware, truly open platform unlike phones, calculators, and eBooks: closed paternalist platforms that seem to be the only real alternatives. This is a goal that OLPC has not achieved yet but has already come quite close to.

People say that because modifying technology is often difficult, only a small percentage of users — especially young users — will take advantage of the malleability or "hackability" of a product. They are probably right. But part of why this happens is because when computers are employed in education, we use them as tools to accomplish predefined and preprogrammed tasks. Even when students learn to program, it’s in a window (quite literally in a box) separate from the rest of the things that the computer does.

And for someone working on a project in part so that they can spread technological freedom, this is a problem. Consider the fact that with only a small number of exceptions, the only advocates of software freedom I know are programmers or hackers. I don’t think that this is because of some "programmer’s sensibility" but rather because programmers understand a set of things about the malleability of software and the nature, effect, and context of computation that gives them perspective to understand how a concept like freedom might apply to something like software. In other words, to understand software freedom, you must first understand — really understand — what software is and what it is not, how it makes things possible and impossible, and how changing it can have important effects.

The mentality I’ve described is currently a "hacker’s sensibility" but I don’t believe that you need to be a hacker to understand why software freedom is important. Proof, I think, is the fact that people think that a free press is important even if they don’t publish or write very well.

As an exercise, I took it on myself to write the beginning of a curriculum that teachers could use to teach students about software freedom and the concepts that I think are key to understanding it. It tries to come up with models for framing discussions and a series of activities to help teachers teach relatively young (i.e., middle school students) about issues of computation, information goods, and ultimately about software freedom.

I wrote the curriculum about a year ago, showed it to a few teachers and colleagues, and then sat on it because I wasn’t sure what to do with it and because I was concerned by my own lack of experience teaching outside of Universities. I’m still not entirely sure about incredibly basic things like what form a curriculum should take for this age group.

I noticed recently that Wikiversity launched in August and it seems like the perfect place to put my curriculum for consumption by the world and for collaboration, discussion, and further development. You can see what I’ve got from this page and the pages linked from it:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Software_Freedom

The project still needs lots of work. It needs to be threshed out on its own terms and it needs to be broken down and integrated into Wikiversity as a series of learning projects, learning activities, etc. I’ve looked at the documentation around Wikiversity and I can neither understand how to do this nor find examples of large curricula in Wikiversity to which this has already been done. If you have experience on Wikiversity, your help would be welcome.

If you are interested in using part of the curriculum, I would love to hear from you and to see your edits on the wiki.

Any Day Now, The Official Ubuntu Book will show up in stores. I have a rubber-banded-together copy of the folded and gathered sheets and the the first batch of books should be bound (or being bound) right now. Those who have pre-ordered it from Amazon or elsewhere should have it in their hands quickly.

In addition to my own name on the author page is (future Ubuntu Community Manager) Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, and Ivan Krstić. Many more members of the Ubuntu community and many editors at Prentice Hall deserve credit as well.

I’m proud of the book. I sense that it’s more consistent, better organized, and of a higher overall quality than my last book. Even better though, is the fact that the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Several chapters are already being shipped by default on the Ubuntu desktop and several translations are underway.

You can read more about the book on the publishers site and order it from any number of places online. Books under such licenses are economically risky for publishers so please support the project by buying it if you end up finding the text useful!

My friends Marcell and Tomislav organized a show called System.hack() that aimed to highlight many of the last half-centuries greatest "hacks" as a means of celebrating the hacks themselves while exposing them, and the idea of hacking and hackers, to a larger audience.

As part of their show, I procured an original circa-1960’s Cap’n Crunch whistle (the one that emits 2600 Hz when one hole is covered) and wrote a short essay for a book published along with the show. You’ll have to track down Tomi and Marcell in Zagreb if you want to find my whistle but you can read about the hack in either English or Croatian on the exhibit’s wiki. You should also check out the whole System.hack() wiki because there’s some other good stuff up there from other contributors.

(This is mostly reposted from an Advogato article I just submitted).

About a year ago, I posted an article on Advogato entitled, Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement. In it, I argued that Creative Commons and the free culture movement were struggling to build a cohesive freedom movement in the way that free and open source software had succeeded in doing by never stopping to define the ground rules of the commons movement.

I argued that Free Software built a movement around calls for essential freedoms and against the actions of software producers who failed to live up to this standard. On the other hand, Creative Commons has argued for "some rights reserved" but never explained which rights were unreservable. In the process, they’ve done the invaluable service of creating a stable of powerful, internationalized licenses. But they failed to build the type social movement that some of us wanted. While this was never their goal, it left some people unsatisfied.

In a later version of the essay published in Mute Magazine, I concluded by stating:

Whether in unison or cooperating in separate groups, it is time for those those of us that feel strongly about freedom to discuss, decide, and move forward with our own free information movement built upon a standard of freedom. When we have defined free information in terms of essential freedoms, a subset of Creative Commons works and a subset of Creative Commons licenses will provide tools and texts through which a social movement can be built.

I’m thrilled to say that that day is now within sight.

A few weeks ago, Larry Lessig introduced me to Erik Möller, a Wikipedian who had read my article and was planning on launching the same project that I had been planning. It only seemed sensible to collaborate.

Today, we have launched a draft of a Free Content and Expression Definition online at freedomdefined.org. The website is a wiki and we welcome feedback, suggestions, and alternative versions of the document.

So far, we’ve have decided to stick closely to the freedoms of free software but are actively interested in updating these to be more relevant for other types of creative works. Of course, anything, even the name, can be changed at this point.

To guide us through the project of debating and further refining a definition are four moderators who will ultimately be called upon to resolve disputes and disagreements about what the definition should and will say. These moderators are myself, Erik Möller, Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick, and Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Angela Beesley.

You can view the announcement of the definition, please take a look at:

• http://freedomdefined.org/Announcement

To view the definition itself, please visit:

• http://freedomdefined.org

This article from Access North Georgia’s Newsroom describes how there is a investigation in Cobb County into allegations that, "the bidding process for the 100 million dollar laptop program was slanted in favor of apple."

Making a laptop for 100 million dollar hardly seems that difficult. Some of us are more ambitious.

If you haven’t seen it, the first demo of the laptop was unveiled in Tunis and is totally green. Congratulations to everyone else who put in long days (and nights) on making this demo shine.