Tag: talks

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Wikimania 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.

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European Tour

I’m off on a short European tour for the next weeks — in all likelihood my only trip to Europe this summer. I’ll be visiting three conferences where I have planned talks. These include:

Between 23-26 June, I’ll be traveling through the UK from Edinburgh. I have tentative stops planned for a variety of places along the way including Manchester, Cambridge, and London. I suppose there will be pub nights or something similar in each place. Get in contact if you want to meet up along the way.

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National Free Culture Conference

Harvard Free Culture is helping to organize this years’ National Free Culture Conference — the meeting for North American Free Culture student groups. The whole shindig is planned for May 26, 2007 at Harvard University here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The schedule is solidifying and I will presenting and arguing for adoption or support of the Free Cultural Works Definition within the FC student movement and probably also be talking about community building and advocacy in some free software groups I’ve worked with.

Housing is available and the event is open to the public. If you’d like to attend, speak, or help out with the conference, please email freeculture@hcs.harvard.edu or check out the Facebook event.

If you’re on the fence about attending, you can read this glowing endorsement of the conference by high protectionist James DeLong at IP Central.

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Free Culture Talk Recording

As I mentioned previously, I was graciously given the opportunity to speak the crowd at the Free Software Foundation’s Members Meeting in March about some of my work and activism around Free Culture. In front of what was probably the friendliest audience possible, I compared the free software and free culture movements and explained why I think that free culture movement may be off track — and, of course, what we as a community might be able to do about it.

If you listen to it, please try to forgive my faults as a speaker. The message I tried to convey is what I think is one the most important tactical issues facing free culture. If this talk dwells a little too long on free software and the lessons we might take from that world, please consider my audience.

You can listen to the talk here:

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Reflections on the War on Share

I’m giving a talk today as part of Media in Transition 5 (MiT5) conference organized by the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. The topic this year year is right up my alley: "creativity, ownership, and collaboration in the digital age.

Everyone else is talking about free culture issues so I’m branching out a bit and delivering a paper I wrote with Harvard Law School and Harvard Free Culture’s Elizabeth Stark on "the politics of piracy" with a focus on political action around P2P filesharing. We’ll have a paper in the proceedings which I’ll post with our talk notes and slides.

You can find information on our talk on how to attend on the conference website.

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Free Culture at FSF Members Meeting

While I’ve been making an effort in the recent past to cut down on talks — so that I can focus on getting work done that will give me something to talk about in the future — I’m thrilled to be giving a presentation at the upcoming Free Software Foundation Members Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While normally the members meetings are reserved for talks by the FSF board and staff, I’ve been invited to give a talk on my work around movement and definition building for free culture as part of a short members forum at the end of the day. I’ll also be running a mini RockBox install party over lunch.

You need to RSVP for the meeting by this coming Friday (2007/3/17) and, in order to do so, you need to be an FSF member. Fortunately, joining is easy to do. I won’t lie and suggest that my talk could possibly be worth the membership price. Luckily, I don’t have to lie to suggest that rest of the things that the FSF does are more than worth supporting with membership dues.

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Ubucon NYC

I had a great time at Ubucon a couple of weeks ago. I ended up running two sessions.

After an initial opening, I opened the conference with a talk on how folks can participate in Ubuntu. The talk was roughly based on Andreas Lloyd’s absolutely wonderful Contribute To Ubuntu page in the Ubuntu wiki. His page was, in turn, based on my own Participate In Ubuntu page. The talk tried to provide a solution to the common question of, "I love Ubuntu and want to give back! How can I?" — when I was answering info@ubuntu.com (for my sins), I would get this question several times each day.

The talk was a relatively straight forward walk through the different teams and group working in Ubuntu along with examples of their projects and fun anecdotes from my experience in the community along the way. I worked in a bit of talking about different community governance structures and issues and the membership process. Trying to cram an overview of the community and its different subsections into an hour is a pretty sobering experience. There’s a lot going on and I barely had a chance to give a poor description of the most visible things going on.

In the afternoon, I reminded folks (and myself) that I know a little of this tech stuff too by walking folks through a quick introduction to building and modifying Debian or Ubuntu packages. It was a quick variant on the "Debian Packaging for Sysadmins" talks that I’ve given in the past.

Of course, the best part was getting to hang out with some folks I know from the community and to meet a bunch of new people. It was a blast and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.

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Wizards of OS Wrap-up

My joint workshop with Lawrence Lessig at Wizards of OS went, in my opinion, extremely well. The worst hitch was an unfortunate series of events that conspired to keep Vera Franz from attending and moderating the session as planned. Paul Keller, who was supposed to participate in the panel, graciously (and capably) moderated in her place.

The panel allowed Lessig and I to talk openly and publicly about about our disagreements for the first time while also highlighting the many places where we speak with one voice. The conversation managed to be both positive and productive without papering over issues.

I usually like to post talk notes and slides after each speaking engagement. However, our WOS meeting was a "workshop" so I have nothing prepared to present here. I have, however, seen two write-ups in the press:

If someone has a recording, tell me how I might get a copy.

One small note: I am quoted in IP watch as saying that most CC works are under the most restrictive licenses and that there has been no shift toward less restrictive licenses with time. Mia Garlick has pointed out that the latest license usage statistics, based on admittedly imprecise linkback data, show a several percentage point decrease in the usage of licenses that block commercial use and derivatives — when expressed as a fraction of the total number of works under CC licenses. The restrictive licenses are still the most popular but it was incorrect to say that there is no evidence of any progress whatsoever toward more free licenses.

Tomorrow, I will post a summary and response to one of the points that Lessig and I talked most about.

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Wizards of OS 4

I’m in Berlin for just over 48 hours to give a workshop at Wizards of OS 4.

The workshop is Free Content Licensing: Success, Challenges and the Way Forward and will be a conversation between myself, Lawrence Lessig, and Paul Keller from Waag Society and Creative Commons Netherlands.

When I first published Toward a Standard of Freedom (my first article that was critical of Creative Commons) a couple years ago, I received an email from someone at Creative Commons within two hours of posting the note. The email pointed out that I had incorrectly licensed my work as the CC license I applied to my essay had the old mailing address for CC. I thanked the mail’s author for pointing out my mistake but asked if, perhaps, she or someone else at CC had anything to say about the content of the article itself which was, after all, about her organization’s work. I never received a reply.

To date, I have not been able to engage in meaningful public discussion of my criticism of CC with CC, although I have tried several times.

I’m thrilled that Volker Grassmuck and the Wizards of OS organizers have been able to put together this opportunity to start what I hope will be a longer conversation with people at CC about some of what some of us perceive as tactical shortcomings of the CC approach. It can only make our movements stronger.

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Upcoming Talk at CEOS

In a few weeks, I’m going to be giving the keynote address at the the Conference on Engaging in Open Source at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The conference is organized by the student chapter of the ACM at Dalhousie and looks like a unique, and very interesting, gathering. My talk will build on some of my previous critical analyses of the unique process of principle-setting in the free and open source software communities and will try to introduce some new and challenging concepts while framing the broader discussion that will continue in the rest of the conference.

The conference will be held on June 1 & 2, 2006. Ping me if you’re in the area and would like to meet up.

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Recent (And Not So Recent) Talks

I gave a talk last week at a gathering at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The gathering was called Come Together and the theme was technology, social movements, and social change. The line-up included 8 people in addition to myself and ended with a talk by Noam Chomsky.

The talk focused on introducing folks to the idea of social movements around information freedom by introducing a big picture view of problems introduced by contemporary IP and a quick breakdown of some of the types of ways that people are attempting to resist, provide alternatives to, or change the system for the better. I did not use slides but I have (very rough) notes available for those that are interested.

Information Freedom talk notes:

While adding the notes to my website, I noticed that I never uploaded the slides or notes from the longer (better) version of a talk on a similar topic that I gave at the Darklight Film Festival’s annual symposium last year. The talk was titled, Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs.

Aimed a non-technical audience, the talk began by introducing intellectual property and tries to describe the history of the current problems created by modern IP policy. Like the Come Together talk, it continued by offering the same rough classification of the types of "solutions" being offered. Unlike the Come Together talk, I then went into much more depth on the reasons Free Software has succeeded in the information technology realm and tried to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying the "open source" model to the production of other types of creative works. I gave the talk on October 28, 2005 in Dublin, Ireland. Slides and talk notes are available.

Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs slides:

Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs talk notes:

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Debian: A Force To Be Reckoned With

I submitted the following proposal for a talk at Debconf6:

This talk offers a "Debian Themed" quick tour through the academic, legal, and business worlds. It overs insight into what everyone outside of Debian is saying about, doing with, and learning from the Debian project.

In doing so, it hopes to give Debian participants some insight into fields and areas that they are largely unfamiliar with (e.g., management, sociology, anthropology, economics, computer supported collaborative work, etc.). It illuminates what others — especially academics — find useful or inspiring about the project and to facilitate self-reflection and self-improvement within Debian. It reflects on the impact that Debian has had in the world beyond the Debian project and, in particular, in those areas that many Debian developers may not be familiar with.

The good news is that the proposal was accepted. The bad news is that this means I actually have to finish doing the research to make the talk happen.

To make the talk excellent, I wanted to solicit examples from you, great Debian community. I’ve already got my own list but I’d like to hear what you think I should talk about?

What I’m not looking for is examples of people or organizations that use Debian. This talk is not about people who use the OS or the people who build it. This is about people who have learned from Debian as a community.

Primarily, I’m looking for academic publications on Debian. However, anyone who has learned and designed a system or community based on such a paper or from observation would be good as well. People who use or have learned from our voting structure might be a good example as would communities with a Debian-derived social contract. Software engineering research is fair game.

Be creative but remember that I’ve got a limited time on the podium and may be forced into the unpleasant position of being ruthlessly selective.

Please add examples to this wiki page or just email mako@debian.org.

That’s if for now and I’ll see you in… Umm… Oaxtepec.

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Talk: The Ubuntu Project: Overview and Development Model

My talk at BLU seems to have been carried out successfully.

The talk was nothing new for folks who follow this blog and know my other Ubuntu talks. It was a long (nearly two hour) number given to an audience with mixed experience with Ubuntu. As such, it covered a lot of ground by pulling from both my introductory Ubuntu talks and my To Fork or Not to Fork talk that I gave several times this summer. The talk was given at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Steve Ballmer gave a talk at Sloan two days later. His talk was better attended. Of course, I doubt he told people how to get free copies of his projects OS offering shipped to their homes at no cost.

Slides and notes follow.

Slides:

Talk Notes:

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Ubuntu Talk at BLU

Last night, I decided to check out the Boston Linux Unix webpage to find out when the next meeting would be and what the talk would be on.

To my surprise, the talk is tomorrow and is slated to be given by none other than Benjamin Mako Hill. Hmmm.

I vaguely remember agreeing to give a talk like this in general sense but don’t remember ever agreeing to a specific day. In any case, I’m not one to disappoint and am working on my slides.

If you’re interested in some post-Breezy action in Boston, please show up! If you can’t make it, I’m trying to arrange a proper release party for some point after I receive my Breezy CDs (a week or two I guess).

I’m sorry for the short notice. Of course, I’m giving the talk on short notice so I’m not too sorry. Additionally, I am missing both a class and a Media Lab sponsors dinner that I was already double booked for. You should be able to cancel up to one of your prior engagements to attend.

Information on the talk is on the BLU website. The talk will be held at MIT in E51-315.

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Talk To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian

As I mentioned recently, in what became a small European tour, I gave a number of versions of a technical talk based around a paper on Ubuntu and the way we build our distribution on top of Debian.

To Fork Or Not To Fork, was presented at LinuxTag, Libre Software Meeting and What The Hack. As I said last time, the talk describes some aspects the way that Ubuntu is developed as a Debian derivative and some reasons folks from a wide range of different Free Software projects might be able to learn something from our experience.

The talk is aimed at a rather technical audience of free software developers. Hopefully, this fills a void by acting as an Ubuntu talk that is more technical than the standard Introduction to Ubuntu without limiting its appeal to only current or prospective Ubuntu developers.

Although I gave this talk several times, I’m just including a single set of notes and slides. These are the versions from the third presentation at What The Hack. You can get the talk slides and notes in the formats listed below.

Slides:

Talk Notes: