Social-Media on Alchemical Musings

keeping calm

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 15:59:30 +0000

This blog has been a ghost-town for a while, but it’s not for my lack of textual output. All of my writing energy has been been devoted to the single minded purpose of my trying to complete my dissertation. I’m currently trying to complete a full draft by Labor day, in preparation for a Fall defense and and a 4pm, Oct 16th deposit. Revisions are brutal and it’s a race to the finish. If anyone wants to check it out, or help me refine this before I submit it just drop me a line. Here is my working abstract: Dangerous Gifts: Towards a new wave of mad resistance

Yelling it like it is

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:00:42 +0000

Adrianne Jeffries is a journalist on the tech beat who just published a pretty hot story in The Observer detailing how banks are mining social networking data to calculate credit scores. The article, As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit, describes how startups like Credit Karma and Lenddo are convinced that deadbeats flock together, and are harvesting our data-exhaust and feeding it into FICO scores. Having friends who default on their loans may soon negatively impact your credit worthiness. Following standard journalistic convention, Jeffries contacted privacy experts for their take on the issue. She reached out to Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law professor, social justice advocate, and director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Although Moglen is a vocal defender of personal privacy and liberty, he refused to provide her with the ease-to digest soundbite she came looking for. Instead, he takes Jeffreies to task for her hypocrisy, accuses her of contributing to the problem she claims she wants to fix, and for failing to fulfill her responsibilities as a professional journalist. Jeffries is stunned by this reaction, and published the complete transcript of her interview with Moglen, even though she did not use any quotes from him in her story. As I read the transcript of Moglen eviscerating professional journalism, I initially cringed in empathy for the journalist on the receiving end of Moglen’s brilliant tirade. Why would Moglen treat a journalist this way instead of giving her the harmless pull-quote she came looking for? The easy answer is that Moglen had a bad day, is a fool, or a jerk. However, in my experience, Moglen’s communications are usually purposeful and deliberate (although ’tender’ is not the first adjective I would associate with him :-) ). I think it is worth giving him the benefit of the doubt, and speculating on possible deliberate motivations for this response. Was Moglen trying out a new media strategy? Was this a calculated publicity stunt? A performative critique of journalistic conventions? How effective was it, for both Jefferie’s career and Moglen’s message? I think this incident deserves a close study, as it raises and reveals many important meta-questions about the shifting roles of journalism and activism, in addition to exposing the sad disarray of the nascent privacy movement. On the substantive issues covered in the story, Jeffries did a pretty good job researching the specifics and the underlying issues, and the piece is smart, witty, and provocative – with decent odds of capturing the attention of a few passing of eyeballs. The story conforms to the standards of the genre, and she quotes CEOs, venture capitalists, and a activist/public intellectual, Doug Rushkoff. The trouble is that over the years there have been countless stories detailing the pressing dangers of corporate surveillance, and the public does not seem to care (many have been covered on this blog, including a story about medication compliance factoring into FICO scores). After decades of trying to educate and advocate journalists and the public about these issues, I can easily imagine Moglen losing patience for the ineffectual conventions of mainstream journalism. U.S. journalists continue to water down their responsibility for truth-telling, speaking truth to power, and taking responsibility for being agents of change. The stilted genre of fair-and-balanced soundbites is even more absurd in the digital age when stories can be supported by providing long-form context and elaboration. Instead of pandering to the decontextualized soundbite, Moglen responded in a manner that demands all-or-nothing coverage. Similar to Emily Bell’s analysis of #occupywallstreet’s success, where the protester’s refusal to conform to soundbites and slogans helped them gain mainstream media cycles, Moglen’s response to Jeffries rejected the soundbite and resulted in her publication of their complete interview. For all we know Moglen has responded this way to other journalists, and this is just the first time the interview has been published. But, I think that activists should consider this response and weigh its relative benefits. Would the privacy movement have gained more any more credibility if Moglen had produced an easily digestible soundbite? Perhaps, although privacy has proven itself to be such a complex issue that another round of he-said/she-said warnings/reassurances are unlikely to truly educate or persuade. I think the real challenge posed my Moglen’s response speaks to journalism’s failure to embrace the possibilities of hypertext, and grow beyond the conventions that dead-tree publishing imposed. Why don’t stories regularly include links to the expert interviews, in their entirety? Or, if the interview is sloppy or inaccurate, links to the experts relevant work. Moglen has spoken on numerous occasions warning about the dangers of corporate surveillance, an Jeffries easily could have quoted Molgen in her article, and referred readers to talks like Freedom in the Cloud or Navigating the Age of Democratized Media. Her interviews with him should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time. The comments to the interview are also rich with perspectives on the responsibilities of journalists, though not many commentators engage in the critique of journalism that Moglen advances. Jeffries herself often engages, defending her response on the grounds that “The reporter’s responsibility is to report the truth. I’m not an activist or an advocate”, and branding Moglen a “digital vegan”. The polar extremes portrayed in this exchange indicate just how desperately the privacy movement needs to develop more nuanced models of strategic agency, as “going off the grid”, or giving up and “promiscuously broadcasting” are the only choices most people think are available to them. My research on the The End of Forgetting outlines alternatives that expand our range of choices and might help advance the terms of this debate beyond - unplugging vs. sticking our heads in the sand.

Water pressure

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:08:27 +0000

Happy blog action day! Last year I highlighted some of my previous posts on climate change, and its frightening how far we’ve regressed since last October. The best segue I can make between climate change and water is the amazing film Sun Come Up . Its (one of) the first to document climate refugees, giving pacific islanders a platform and a voice to share the story of their sinking homes, soon to be swallowed by the oceans. I think that powerful human narratives like these are the most likely to influence our deeply ingrained habits of mind. Riding these waves, I meant to catch On Coal River this week at IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction series this past Tuesday, but I missed it and will have to wait for it to circle back again. In the meantime I’m wondering about seismic cultural shifts - I don’t really believe in sharp historical discontinuities, but some changes look quick in retrospect, even if they don’t feel quick as they are happening. This summer I attended an Evolver spore on the Spirit of Water. Although it covers almost three-quarters of the planet and fills nearly 70% of our own bodies, this precious and seemingly boundless substance is becoming increasingly scarce? Food and Water Watch was tabling, and the movie Flow seems to have made some impact, but the prospect of water shortages and wars is dismal and depressing. Irrespective of the clinical repeatability Dr. Emoto’s experiments (as featured in What the Bleep), his work on water, consciousness, and intent is quite beautiful and inspiring. Its the note, and the drop, I choose to complete these free associations: Imagine the structures we could construct by focusing and harnessing our collective intension.

When Lessig was in Disneyland...

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:01:29 +0000

I had a fun idea for a new Free Culture campaign last spring, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it until now. LET MY CULTURE GO!
\

Walt Disney: Let my cartoons go!
Jack Valenti: Let my music go!
Rupert Murdoch: Let my news go!
Steve Jobs: Let my iPhone go!
Jeff Bezos: Let my Kindle go!
etc, etc.

I know it would be more consistent to substitute ‘our’ for ‘my’, but I really want to evoke the biblical/mythological imagery around freedom and liberation, while simultaneously calling these CEOs out for the pharoahs/slavemasters that they are (we used to have another term for 360 deals…). The campaign simultaneously inverts the framing of copying as piracy, and takes up the mantle of liberators. As Nina Paley rigorously demonstrates, there are many parallels between the struggles against Human Property and Intellectual Property. Just as we once thought it was morally acceptable to own humans, can we imagine a future where the ownership of ideas is viewed with similar disgust and incredulity? What are the best ways to remind people that Copying is Not Theft? Anyway, the signal to noise ratio is quite high, and it will definitely fit on bumper stickers and T-Shirts… Any graphic designers want to donate some skillz?

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:39:27 +0000

In honor of Blog Action Day I’m posting a round of my favorite posts relating to climate change and sustainable development.

At work, we are also working closely with the Earth Institute, including setting up the learning environment used in the new masters program in Development Practice. I have been collecting some fun links on the program’s community site. tck, tck, tck….

Interview: Christopher Mackie on Knight's Hyperlocal Gambit

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:10:20 +0000

Last week I reflected on the Everyblock.com acquisition. Since then, Knight’s journalism program director has blogged about their perspective on the sale, and some great conversations have continued. I have also had a wonderful opportunity to discuss the purchase with Christopher Mackie, a program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Chris is the Associate Program Officer in the Research in Information Technology program and is closely involved in Mellon-funded software initiatives. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: JB: Thanks so much for taking the time to share some of your thoughts on the recent purchase of Everyblock. As you know, Everyblock is a foundation sponsored, open-source journalism startup that was recently acquired by msnbc.com. Even though the Knight Foundation mandated that all the software they funded was released under an open (GPLv3) license, the future openness of this application is now uncertain. As an important funder of many valuable open source software projects I am wondering if you could share your reactions to this news? How do you feel about the outcome? Did the deal take you by surprise? CM: Hi Jonah – good to talk with you! Before we start, let me be clear about a couple of things. First, I don’t speak for the Mellon Foundation on this, so all I can share are my own views. Second, I’m by no means the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to intellectual property issues. In fact, I can find several people who know more than I do without even leaving the building at Mellon. What I do have is a particular perspective on IP issues that has been developed in large part from my work with our information technology program. I hope that my perspective is useful, but I wouldn’t want anyone confusing it with either an official Mellon perspective or some sort of consensus view among experts. As far as I can tell, consensus only exists among IP experts on issues that no one cares about. That said, as I follow the conversation, what appears to be happening with Everyblock is that a number of people are seeing for the first time some issues that have been seen before in other parts of the software space. In the process of thinking through the implications of those developments, they’re reinventing old arguments, most of which are insufficiently nuanced to be valid. Eventually, they’ll work it out, but right now, many people are still looking for too-simplistic answers. JB: This moment is such a great learning opportunity to teach grantmakers and journalists some really important lessons about Intellectual Property, and the complexities of Open Source software, community, and culture - is there anything specific you think we can learn from this transaction? CM: Rather than try to parse the many issues individually, let me just suggest a couple of basic principles that I use when I’m trying to advise projects on licensing issues: First, “the context is more important than the license.” The debate over BSD/GPL tends to take place at a very abstract, ideological level. This is the wrong level: when it comes to licensing, I believe that you really need to get down and grub in the dirt. Licensing decisions are almost always made better when they’re made in a carefully contextualized fashion. The single most important contextual dimension I know concerns the “organizational complexity” of the product. That’s my own, made-up term to describe the need to integrate your project with other organizational systems, human and software. Organizationally complex software requires significant adaptation or customization in most installations – which implies the need for significant vendor involvement in many installations. A good example of an organizationally complex system is something like a financial system, which tends to have to connect to all sorts of other software and to interact with all sorts of human workflows. Good examples of organizationally simple software are things like a Web browser or a word processor, which ought to work out-of-the-box without any customization or integration. If you have an organizationally complex product, BSD licenses tend to work better than GPL. Why? BSD licenses don’t scare off the vendors who have to poke around the insides of the product in order to support it, and who worry that their private IP may be compromised by an accidental contact with a GPL’d product’s innards. I’ve seen the arguments about whether this is actually a valid concern, by the way, and I’m not particularly invested in learning the right answer, if there even is one. As long as vendors believe or fear it to be true – and many do – then it might as well be true. Without vendors, it’s hard for an organizationally complex project to thrive, so BSD tends to win out in those sorts of projects. A second dimension concerns the degree of “market power” held by the users. Market power depends on the ability of users to recognize themselves as having shared interests and then to act on those shared interests. A user community that has market power can issue a credible threat to punish a misbehaving vendor; one lacking market power, cannot. This often isn’t a simple determination; for instance, consider Mozilla. At the core of the Mozilla community, as with most open source communities, is an intense, dedicated group that sees itself as having shared interests and clearly has the will to punish someone who attempts to misuse the Mozilla IP. But do they have the ability? After all, they’re only a tiny fraction of all Mozilla users. The rest are a widely distributed, diffuse group that would never imagine themselves as having much in the way of common purpose, beyond the desire to have a free Web browser. Which constituency matters more in calculating market power? It almost certainly depends on the context. Some people object to the phrase “market power,” preferring terms like “strength of community” or “trust.” I’m not too worried about what one calls it, but I will say this: once you get past the rhetoric, it mostly boils down to the community’s ability to deliver a credible threat to punish a malfeasant vendor. If the user community ceases to value the project enough to want to defend it against vendor malfeasance, or ceases to be able to act together effectively to deliver that defense, then, however much they value the project individually, it is unlikely to stay open no matter the license. There are other dimensions to think about, too; for instance, a project having multiple vendors is safer than one with only a single vendor, or none, because non-colluding vendors tend to act in ways that keep each other well-behaved. But those are the biggest two, in my experience so far. Earlier, you brought up the Sakai and OpenCast projects, both of which have been funded by us (and by other foundations, such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well). I believe that these two characteristics are why Sakai and OpenCast, as well as other community source projects, are able to use BSD-style licenses (they actually use the Educational Community License, or ECL, which is almost-but-not-quite the Apache license). Community source software projects produce organizationally complex products deployed by a coherent community of institutions willing and able to exercise market power if needed. For instance, the community of higher education institutions seems to have no trouble understanding their common interest in keeping Sakai’s IP open, even if they’re not Sakai users themselves–and as a group, they seem to have the will and ability to punish vendors that attempt to misbehave. Most vendors sell more than one product into these institutions, so they stand to lose more than they can gain from bad behavior on any single project like Sakai. The result: there is virtually no evidence of significant vendor malfeasance in any of the community source projects, despite the use of a license that in theory allows any vendor to close the code at any time. The closest you can find is the Blackboard patent dispute—which is a challenge to the ownership of the IP, not its licensing, and in which Blackboard has been careful to steer clear of any direct threat to the Sakai community. But would every vendor’s good behavior continue if the community stopped caring about Sakai? I seriously doubt it. On the other hand, if you have a product which is organizationally simple, as well as having a relatively powerless user community, then get thee to the GPL, because the temptations to steal and close the code just become too great for some vendors to resist. We’ve seen some examples of that, recently, too. Still, don’t believe that the GPL will protect you if your community cannot or will not. If the community is weak enough, nothing can really protect you. Second, “IP ownership trumps IP licensing.” Some of the commentators on Everyblock that I have read so far are circling around this point, but none has yet followed the logic all the way. All the debate over licensing tends to obscure the reality that final power lies in ownership, not licensing. For a surprising number of situations, licensing is little more than a red herring. If I own the code, I can issue you a GPL, someone else a BSD, and yet another license to a third party–take a look at the Mozilla licensing scheme sometime, for an example. If I’m also responsible for updating the code, I can change the license to all of you at any time simply by issuing a new version. Sure, you can still use the old version under the old license, but if I really want to make it tough for you to keep using the old version, there are ways. Finally, as you’re seeing with Everyblock, when someone owns the code privately, there’s nothing that prevents someone else from buying the code – often by buying the firm itself – and changing the licensing terms. I have no insight into MSNBC’s plans for Everyblock. Maybe they’ll close the code; maybe not. Maybe they’ll keep something open but close the commercial services they build on top of it – I don’t know. As your commentators have noted, no one seems to know – and that’s part of the problem with privately owned but open-licensed code. You just never know. That’s one reason why I tend to be wary about the “commercial OSS” model, no matter what license it uses. In many commercial OSS projects that I’ve seen, even the GPL is effectively just a cover for what is to all intents and purposes a closed code-base, because the owner/vendor is the only entity on earth that has any realistic likelihood of supporting or extending or developing the code further. Ask someone in the MySQL community how protected they feel by their license – or ask the people using Zimbra how they expected to fare if Microsoft bought Yahoo. It’s not about whether the current owner is good, bad, or ugly; it’s about the fact that you can never know whether it will be the same owner tomorrow. That’s a lot of uncertainty on which to base a mission-critical technology choice. JB: So, given the diverse range of contexts you describe, what specific strategies have you deployed to mitigate these risks? CM: Good question – and it’s important to emphasize the word “mitigate,” because there are no guarantees and there’s no such thing as absolute effectiveness. One thing we do in our program is to use IP agreements (a contract with the owner of the code to be developed) that require any transfer of ownership to be to an entity which must also agree to the terms of our IP agreement. In a sense, we make the ownership viral, whether or not the license is viral. That’s not a perfect solution, but it appears to be working for us so far. It also helps that we make our grants to non-profit organizations, which can’t be bought the same way you can buy a private or publicly held firm. When for-profits are involved in our grants, which sometimes happens when grantees decide to contract with for-profit developers, my program (Mellon’s Program in Research in Information Technology) has always required that the non-profit be the IP owner. We are not alone in this; for instance, when several major technology corporations—all for-profits—decided to share and protect some of their own intellectual property in an open environment, they didn’t trust it to a for-profit, but instead created the Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit that owns the Eclipse Project IP. Ditto the Mozilla Foundation. Still, it bears repeating that just putting your IP into a non-profit mindlessly doesn’t eliminate the risk, because it matters how the non-profit is structured and governed: nothing says a non-profit can’t be malfeasant, too, if in somewhat different ways. JB: Do you think that the Knight Foundation was swindled? Did they get outfoxed by msnbc.com, or do you think they are happy with this outcome? CM: I have no knowledge about what the Knight Foundation intended – has anybody bothered to ask them? [ed note: this conversation took place before Knight made a public statement] I think it would be foolish simply to assume that the grant makers have been outfoxed by this development: it may have been exactly what they wanted, or just a risk they decided beforehand that it was worthwhile to run. Keep in mind, too, that MSNBC hasn’t said or done anything about closing the code so far. Even if the Knight Foundation did want perpetual openness and the strategy wasn’t perfect, there’s still a chance that they’ll get what they wanted. All that’s really happened here is that the sense of security held by at least some members of the Everyblock community has been shaken by the purchase news. But it was always a false sense of security; at this moment, as far as I can tell, nothing objective about the openness of the project has actually changed. JB: Do you have any closing thoughts about this deal, or what you think grantmakers and open source advocates can learn from it? CM: If Everyblock serves to help some members of the openness community to get past their ideological blinders and recognize that IP ownership and licensing decisions are subtle challenges with relatively few simple, definitive answers, it will have done some good. After all, even the best source code is relatively ephemeral, but we can hope that such wisdom will last forever. JB: Thanks so much for your time and wisdom. I know alot of people who were quite surprised by this turn of events, and it feels like we all need a crash course in IP law /and/ sociology to navigate the intricacies of this political economy. Even veteran lawyers and free software evangelists are often confused by many of these complexities. I really hope that this case and your analysis will better inform future work of this type. Good luck keeping it open (and real)! CM: Thanks very much. I hope what I had to say is useful.

Giving Chickens Microphones

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:09:09 +0000

By now you may have heard of the innovative citizen-driven election monitoring system, Twitter Voter Report (they are getting great press cycles, with purportedly more to come). I actually wrote up and submitted the post that appears on infosthetics.com, a wonderful blog that tracks innovations in data visualization. This projects represents a really innovative use of Twitter as a “just-add-water” (gratis, but not truly free) infrastructure for distributed structured-data collection. It reminded me of a free platform a group at UNICEF is building to collect distributed structured-data in the third world (for places w/out easy access to the internet, but with cellular connectivity) - RapidSMS. Imagine how many millions of dollars the government would have spent to build a cell-phone enabled election monitoring system (that likely wouldn’t work). Instead, a group of volunteer activists, weaned on the open-source, do-it-yourself culture of code jams, shared repositories, and issue trackers, decided less than a month ago that they could build this themselves on a shoestring. This is definitely a big deal, and relates closely to a new tier of participatory media which I began to describe at my talk at CCNMTL’s New Media in Education conference this month. It also has everything in the world to do with the TagMaps tool I wrote about last November in my post Crowded Wisdom. Systems are coming online which are helping us synthesize vast volumes of tiny fragments of information into meaningful knowledge. Twitter Vote Report allows anyone to report voter suppression, and problems with specific voting machines, but it support tracking wait times, which will be aggregated and mapped on the website.

Pedagogical Sofware

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:09:32 +0000

Literally. See my post on The Plone Blog: Plone University

Plone University

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:21:06 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Open source software as pedagogical scaffolding, and F/OSS ecologies as a dialogical knowledge communities. This is a fun post recognizing the role of open source software and breaking routines in learning new programming patterns and paradigms. 7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines. I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby. But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now!

Asymmetric Competition and the CMS

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:06:21 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org

Beyond the CMS - What are Plone’s greatest future competitors? I recently encountered O’Reilly’s asymmetrical competition meme and think its a good jumping off point to discuss the differences between Plone’s perceived and actual competition. First, let’s catch up to where we are today:

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

The opensource CMS horserace has seemingly settled on a few players, and without provoking any religious wars, I continue to be impressed with the richness and maturity of all of these projects. But here in the educational sector there are rumblings which I think will spread beyond our corner. In our world ‘C’ stands for Course, not ‘Content’, and the big players are Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT), Sakai and Moodle. Here too, competition may come from surprising corners, as the game itself changes beneath us.

Free Laptops

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:39:10 +0000

In keeping with the Alchemist’s recent “free” disambuguation theme, here is my latest installment on the OLPC project:

Free Laptops: Creating, Producing and Sharing a Revolution

In this essay/story I leave wise ‘ol Plato behind, and tried for a straight up, journalistic take on the project. Except there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, so in this piece is explicitly infused with subjectivity and ideology. Conversations with Ian Bicking helped convince me that believing in this project is a ultimately a matter of faith, in which case our optimism or cynicism go a long way towards shaping reality. And our perceptions are often shaped by media, so lets start advocating for this project instead of kicking it in the shins.This is one reason I am starting to think that olpcnews should seriously ease up on the project, stop taking cheap swipes and jibes, and start offering more constructive criticism, or even better, apply for some grants so they can fix the project as they see fit. Happy Holidays!

Honest Software

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:13:23 +0000

Originally publihsed on theploneblog.org How hybrid economies help keep software honest. Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!). One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact. Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings). In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration. But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’. It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community. I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production. Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage”, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects. It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task. As Rheingold said “There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.” - Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

One Python Per Child

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:04:18 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org The $100 laptop project has chosen Python as the primary development language for The Laptop. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an olpc developer board, and have spent a little time learning about the platform and project. While there are a few issues I have with the project, it is really an thrilling moment in educational technology and after holding the hardware in my own hands I actually believe this vision might truly manifest. The main reason I am writing about this in the Plone blog is I have learned that the olpc’s application development language of choice is Python!

New York State of Plone

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:01:45 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Preliminary report on the Big Apple Sprint July fourth has come and gone, but the fireworks set off at last week’s sprint are still visible. The sprinters arrived at Columbia University bright and early, Wednesday morning. (note to all future sprint organizers: tell the caterers to skip the decaf and double the regular order). About ~13-15 sprinters were present, but we also coordinated remote sprints with Austria (+5 hours ahead) and Utah (-2 hours behind) meaning we were basically sprinting around the clock. We all used the freely available, plone-based, OpenPlans service to manage our collaboration and everyone found the software to be extremely reliable and easy to use. The sprint began with introductions and detailed demos of the tools and products people had been working on and were most proud of. Sprints are difficult to plan in advance since the skills and interests of the attendees are not decided until the final roster shows up. A diverse range of interests were represented, but common themes rapidly emerged

Death and Taxonomies

Wed, 31 May 2006 21:41:42 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org A forray into drupal 4.7’s taxonomy system and what Plone can learn from it. I have been moonlighting on a Drupal project and paying close attention to their taxonomy system. Drupal’s taxonomy/category/tagging system was completely revamped for their 4.6->4.7 release - a release close to a full year in the making, analogous to the Plone 2.0->2.1 “minor” point release. The site I have been working on, theicarusproject.net has a very rich collection of content, and one of the primary motivations for the migration is to get a better handle on the classification system - noboday can find anything on the current site. They were committed to Drupal long before I arrived, so I dug in with the hope of learning something from the contrast. PHP bashing aside, there are alot of interesting things happening in Drupal land. I hope to follow up this post with a few more cross-pollinating nuggets, but for now I will focus on their taxonomy system. Taxonomies in Drupal are considered the heart of the system, and the essential modules ship with the core and cannot be disabled. Most URLs in Drupal are effectively queries, much like our smart folders (actually, for anything aside from anti-chronological display order you need to install the Views module) but the display results are all instances of content with matching vocabulary terms. The absence of folders and containment initially confuses many administrators, and renders breadcrumbs largely useless, but does allow for the creation of sophisticated information architectures. Taxonomies are managed top-down, not bottom-up, and have a separate administrative interface for their creation and management. Once the taxonomy vocabularies are created, specific terms can be added to these vocabularies without having to create content associated with those terms (in contrast to a bottom-up category system, like the mediawiki). Category Management - Vocabulary Listings: Druapl supports multiple vocabularies, which can each be associated with one or more content types. Vocabularies can be flat, one level deep, or N-levels deep (hierarchical). They can be fixed or free form (meaning content authors can make up new categories upon content creation). The core tagging system does not support the creation of tags per-user, per-object - only per-object. Category Management - Add a Vocab: Category Management - Add/Edit a Term: The Drupal taxonomy system is very powerful, but its power is very open ended and does not necessarily lead users towards a uniform experience. The confusion around categories and taxonomies is best exemplified by the category module meant to consolidate and simplify taxonomy and navigation, but there is no consensus on its incorporation into the core. A large number of modules are built around taxonomies. Core Drupal supports roles, but no groups (organic groups is a popular access delegatoin solution, but it is incompatible with other access restriction modules - so you have to choose one), and does not have a notion of containment (ie folders). So, for example, one way to restrict editing access is by enabling the taxonomy access module. Another useful module is the taxonomy browser which allows for advanced search against unions/intersections of vocab terms. Category Browser: Once vocabularies are created, and terms added, content can be associated with these terms: Working on this site really drove home the value in separating the navigation axis (section) from the thematic axis (keywords), and separating these dimensions was easy to accomplish with the taxonomy/category tools built into drupal. In particular, once the scheme was developed, managing vocabulary lists (even hierarchical ones) is intuitive, albeit slightly clunky. I further chose to introduce a free-form tagging dimension for member contributed posts which may or may not fit into the fixed taxonomy. This is similar to myspace and facebook allowing for free-form hobbies and interests, and banking on a large enough user base that there will be overlap and potentially interesting intersections. The system still does not allow for the intuitive modeling of a many-to-many relationship, which I continue to think is the litmus test which will mark of a truly powerful taxonomy UI. There is still quite a bit of programmer know how involved in setting up this system so that it operates the way that content administrators expect, and arguably there are too many degrees of freedom introduced by such a general purpose modeling capability (if you think about it, a tagging system can essentially allow web administrators to model relationships which used to require programming custom applications against an rdbms). Nonetheless, Drupal’s taxonomy/category/vocabulary system definitely captures a few use cases more elegantly than Plone’s current core does. But perhaps the real lesson is the importance of not mixing navigation space and content space, which can be kept separate in Plone, but is all too easy to conflate (in Drupal too!). Note: most things I describe in this case study could have been accomplished within core Plone - I think the most interesting things here are the administrative UI for multiple vocabulary management, the different types of vocabularies, and how central they are in the construction of a Drupal site.

There is no folder

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 21:34:55 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Do not try to bend the folder – that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. Then you will see that it is not the folder that bends–it is only yourself. Tagging seems to have spurred a growing amount of research on categories and classification. A recent paper by Clay Shirky, entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags directly challenges the desktop metaphor which currently underlies much of Plone’s UI. To be sure, it is certainly possible to model the connections that Shirky describes using topics, smart folders, and a disciplined use of keywords, but the metaphor is critical for designing and intuitive system, all the way down to the icon. I have recently been working a bit with Drupal, and their handling of this problem is worth checking out. The core taxonomy module, combined with its corresponding menuing systems (menu, sitemenu, taxonomy menu) provide a great deal of flexibility in this regard. Organization is going organic.

Saints in the Church of Writely?

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:24:00 +0000

Two months back I saw Richard Stallman talk at a NYC Gnubies event and I asked him a question that I have been thinking alot about lately – Would a Saint in the Church of Emacs use gmail? To me the question revolves around the growing threat that 3rd party webservices poses to the freedoms that free software is designed to protect. In O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 he argues that software is transitioning from an artifact to a service, and that data is becoming the new “intel inside”. In an age when applications have become commodities, could the freedom of my data (in an open format) be interchangeable with the freedom of software? I recently listened to the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Mircosystems pose a similar question in his talk, The Zen of Free. He talks about the importance of Open Software implementing Open Standards, which is close to the idea I have been advocating, but doesn’t quite go far enough. Using free (as in beer) third party web services is very tempting, but I am worrying more and more about the traditional freedoms that free software protects against - vendor lock-in, proprietary data formats, and freedom to modify policy according to application specific requirements. I would be less antsy about using web 2.0 apps if I had some assurance that I could get my data back out without screenscraping a bunch of html pages. Even services with APIs like flickr and delicious create vulnerabilities, as I was loathe to discover last week. Delicious provides a programmers api, but its api only exposes methods which operate on a single user. Thus, if you want to export a collection of links that have all been tagged with a particular tag, (reasonable if you are engaged with a community in distributed research) you are back to screenscraping! These considerations and more advocate for the need for free (as in speech) versions of many of these services. There are certainly some side-effects of running a centralized service that are inherent in it being centralized, but many communities are making use of these “public” services because of their convenience, and the ease with which they can be “mashed up.” Which brings me back to the design that we have been thinking alot about at work lately. Anders and I presented a talk at pycon demonstrating some of these ideas. Anders did a great job writing our talk up here: Tasty Lightning Crucially, it is imperative not to conflate our advocacy for building components that expose themselves as webservices with building apps against third-party web services. The design we describe resembles a traditional mash-up, except the components involved are locally controlled as opposed to relying upon external, corporate services. For all the usual f/oss reasons it can be important to “own” and run your own services. But this argument also has everything in the world to do with Ulises In Defense of the Digital Divide as Paralogy essay. In this essay Ulises grapples with Lyotard’s critique of new media under the logic of capitalism which has “established commodification and efficiency as the ultimate measures of the value of knowledge.” he continues:

The Me Generation

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:38:27 +0000

isomorphic surprises: stickies, tasty, and the importance of user contributed content I have been thinking alot about tagging lately, especially how a complete tagging system - comprised of user-item-tag triplets, is isomorphic to rdf’s subject-predicate-object triplets. It is amusing to think about how egocentric Web 2.0 is - The subject is always me. Web 2.0 might be made of people, but not just any people - Just the most important one in the world. Today I had a fun time trying to explain to people on irc the power and importance of user contributed content annotations within plone. Crucially, user content annotations are per-user, per-object, and in many cases a single user might want to annotate a particular object with more than one annotation. Interesting annotations can come in many flavors. There are free form notes, fine grained annotations (anchored to particular phrases - think msword trackback - or geometrical coordinates on the target - nice for image annotations), keyword annotations (aka - tags), etc ect. There many problems that can be solved with custom per user content annotations, including quiz and poll results, per student answer submission, and lately we have been working on allowing users to clip audio and video by annotating start and end times on media objects. It is important not to confuse per-user tagging with DC:Subject - the dc metadata is shared across all users (like categories in the wikipedia) and in that sense, is global. While we are on the topic of tags, it is useful to talk about the vocabulary that drives the tagging. Vocabularies can be fixed or free, individual or collaborative, and personal or shared. All of these variations are interesting in different cntexts, and have to do with whether or not I see your tags, or if we each are developing our own ontologies. In educational technology annotations are a big part of the problems we are trying to solve, but there are tons of use cases in the world at large. Additionally, a high performance, robust tagging engine can power personal content organization, like gmail’s labels. Which brings me to the products we have been developing at CCNMTL. We have been using PloneStickies, a general purpose content annotation framework, in production for over a year now. Built using AT References, it allows us to create per-user AT objects connected to the target object. AT Schema Annotations won’t do the trick here since, like DC:Subject, these annotations are instance-wide. Z3 annotations might work, but by building AT derived stickies, we pick up search, workflow, permissions, and the richness of AT. This allows us to quickly and easily develop custom stickies, like the StickyClip. PloneStickies has a ways to go, but the basics work great. It is not yet super useful out of the box, since the portlet it ships with only allows users to attach a single free form StickyNote to the target object. But it is great to develop applications with. It ships with with some super snazzy css stickies, complete with colored/resizable/title-barred/drop-shadowed/roll-upable/transparent-when-dragging notes, which can preserve their own x-y position and state across sessions and never fall off your screen. It now supports attaching multiple stickies to a target, but does not yet provide a mechanism for the target object to place the stickies itself. At first we thought we could implement a Plone tagging solution using this framework - just create a StickyTags made out of keyword fields, and voilà - plonr. Trouble was, since tagging is such a symmetrical model, its tough to build an efficient zodb implementation (for me, at least) that can handle all the querrying we wanted to do. Enter the tasty microapp and the PloneTasty proxy (about 90% done). Tasty is a stateful (sqlobject) turbogears component that exposes a REST api, ships with its own snazzy ajax tagging client, and can be used across frameworks, languages, and platforms. We are even hoping it can help make the world a better place. So StickyTags (which doesn’t exist) and PloneTasty are two implementations of the same concept, with StickyTags being the AT/zodb implementation and PloneTasty/tasty the new microapp design (mashup architecture?) we have been working on and are pretty psyched about. And if you act now, you get the knife set and the lint remover too, for just 3 easy installments.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:29:17 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org In this episode, Sean Kelly at NASA compares j2ee, rails, zope/plone, turbogears, django… cue the laughtrack Okay, this is a long one, but it rivals any comparison matrix: better-web-app Plone comes out shining, although arguably it compares apples to pomellas. Someone with the chops should really cut this baby up into chapters, cause its a win for dynamic languages over j2ee, and python, and Plone to boot. (spoiler: he uses the zmi for “hello world” and ArchGenXML for the time tracking app).

all work, all play

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 01:54:00 +0000

Last Friday CCNMTL hosted a mini-conference on New Media and Education (pics). Me and my colleague Dan Beeby co-presented a marathon series of workshops on Sakai and Web Services. We repeated each of our two 35 minute talks 3 times over the day (2x3 talks == a very long day), and I can’t wait for the video’s to be published so I can see the rest of the conference ;-) The first talk unfolded into a conversation about Course/Content Mgmt systems, open/community source ecologies, and the purposeful use of tools w/in those environments. The second talk covered rss, blogging, delicious, flickr, odeo, and the balance between push and pull. The participants were attentive and engaged, and I although the pace was brutal, I really enjoyed working on these presentations. The funny thing about giving 6 talks in one day, is that by the third talk in, I couldn’t remember if I had used a particular phrase two slides back, or two hours back… Luckily, Dan and I knew the material cold, had a good rapport, and were very comfortable swapping lines and improvising. The only glitch was due to flickr not refreshing their feed for over 24 hours… can’t expect much more from an external service (more on that in a future post). The slides got a little mangled on the html export, but here they are: An Instructors Guide to Sakai & Courseworks Remodeled. Dan has a great touch in photoshop, so careful what sorts of pictures you leave laying around his desk.

A red guitar, 3 chords, and the truth

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 01:41:00 +0000

This weekend I participated in the NYC free culture summit and learned a few refreshing radical activism tricks from the class of ‘06. In stark contrast to the scholarly focus group I attended last week, this group explicitly understands that they need to create social spaces for like-minded activists to congregate, learn, and plot. The tools of the revolution were revealed in the speed geeking session - Once someone in the 21st century finds the truth, all they need is a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, irc, and rss (with a dash of delicious and flickr, to taste). Remarkable how quickly and easily people with real communication needs figure out how to use this suite of tools, understand which is good for what and when. Highlights included a Riot Folk performance, a talk by Siva (“Space. Hope. Imagination. Potential.”), a talk by the Creative Commons gang, and suprise appearance by Cory Doctorow . The most fun had to be not-protesting (you need a license to protest) outside of Time Sqaure’s Virgin Megastore, and reverse shoplifting DRM info into the stacks of damaged cds. The revolution might not be televised, but it could very well end up on flickr.

Closing Thoughts on MSTU 5510

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:54:00 +0000

Ulises recently asked us to summarize our thoughts for the semester in our blogs. Considering that this blog was started for this class, I was surprised by my own initial resentment at being asked to post something so specific here. During the course of the semester, this forum has become a place for me to speak, not to answer. Even when I was posting assignments for class, they were items and issues which I selected and chose. This initial emotional reaction indicates how engaging these tools can become, and helped me answer some of the questions on Uilses’ list. Its been great fun! Best of luck to everyone, and see you on Tuesday.

Happy Holidays!

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 01:50:00 +0000

The semester is almost over, and that means its time for me to compose some thoughts. As usual, this opens more questions than it answers, but I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. Collecting Knowledge: Narrative Tapestries and Database Substrates “An examination of Web 2.0 using Manovich’s Language of New Media, and an interpretation of folksonomies within the context of the narrative-database dichotomy. This inquiry looks at tagging as a mechanism for constructing narratives from databases, and relates narratives to knowledge construction and representation. Educational curricular activities involving tagging will also be considered.” Special thanks to Prof. John Broughton, John Frankfurt, Michael Preston, and Alexander Sherman for helping me develop these ideas.

Plone in an Elevator

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:26:34 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org How hybrid economies help keep software honest. Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!). One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact. Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings). In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration. But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’. It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community. I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production. Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage”, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects. It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task. As Rheingold said “There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.” - Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

Plone's Value Proposition

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:19:03 +0000

Originally posted at theploneblog.org The theory underlying Plone’s personal-ad campaign. At the marketing workshop in Vienna, one of the exercises we conducted was an informal poll of the personality traits and cultural values that people associate with the plone community. Motivating this exercise was an exploration of the recent Plone personal ad, which came out of the New Orleans Symposium. This anthropomorphizing of Plone was meant to embody the idea that software has a personality, and that since writing code is form of creative expression, the values of the author will inevitably be expressed in its features. So, for example, I will be suprised the day that Adobe easily allows for the assignment of Creative Commons licenses to content created using their tools, but no one is surprised by the fact that the Mediawiki wiki-engine deafualts to this license. If you accept this position, then selecting the right CMS is more than a matter checking off features on a matix. It becomes essential that the vendor’s values are consistent with the client’s mission. In the case of an open source project, the “vendor” is really an entire ecology, comprised of of the community, the software, and the processes and structures which bind them together. Here are some of the values that members of the Plone community currently associate with this project:

Adventures in Wien

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:03:00 +0000

I apologize for this study blog’s late start - I just returned from the Plone conference in Vienna, and the internet availability was spottier than it should have been. At the conference I presented a talk which relates closely to the topic of this seminar, entitled Platonic Wikis and Subversive Social Interfaces. People seemed very interested in the subject, and a common response was that these ideas were obvious when stated, but people were very happy to hear them concisely articulated and formulated. I will be posting my slides up on the conference site, but in the meantime, here is a working link to them: html ppt Photos and links from the conference should start appearing under plonecon2005 over the next few days. I will be catching up with ss05, blog postings, and sleep this weekend.

Techno-Bio:

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:53:00 +0000

I have an extensive background in software architecture, design, and development. Prior to joining the center, I was the lead developer at Abstract Edge, an interactive marketing firm which serviced both non-profit and corporate clients. I was also a senior developer at MaMaMedia, a children’s educational Web site. I am an active open source contributer whose technical interests include Linux, Python, and Content Management. [This blog was started for MSTU Social Software Affordances, and this post was written as an introduction].