mymz's blog

Unexpected consequences

Who could have imagined that two silly evenings would inspire such a grand project (albeit for such a nasty company)?

 

Anyone in Berlin?

Here comes a handy abuse of my syndication on Planet KDE, where I'm sure there are a fair few Berliners

I'm going to Berlin with Ali next week for a short holiday and I want suggestions for places to go, particularly any good clubs / bars / restaurants that aren't too expensive. If anyone has a must-visit spot, and would even like to escort us there , drop me a line. Ta!

In other news, anyone hear Hitchin (in Hertfordshire, England) should visit the Rhythms of the World Festival next year... it's completely free, with fantastic music, and Hitchin (despite my expectations, hey it's next to Stevenage!) is beautiful. Thanks for the invitation Clare! I'm still working solidly on my dissertation on free culture, trying to push iCommons towards ethical responsibility, working on a paper about membership for People & Planet, jointly developing a business plan for Remix Reading (soon to be RAVES), looking for a job from September (employ me!), and in spare moments working on the press for KDE 3.5.4 and aKademy. Fun in the sun!

On core values and iCommons

The past few days have seen lots of interesting commentary in the iCommons community, kicked off by my suggestions about governance and finances. I'm really glad to say that the iCommons Board of Directors are open to including the community and working through these issues properly. Suffice to say that I was happy with the outcome of a discussion about core values in IRC this morning, which would help with the implementation of some ethical policies I drafted on fundraising and purchasing.

But I want to address one or two issues that have come up in blogs and especially in the IRC conversation this evening. Here are two paraphrased quotes that illustrate the main problems well:

there is no need to define a set of core values, I say instead that people's work and contributions to icommons defines their values - buridan1

I can give an example of something from the morning conversation that I think is not a core value, and which should be avoided... carbon neutrality, which has no obvious connection to free culture. Adopting policies publicly and with a lot of fanfare about stuff like that would be exclusionary of people I think we ought to be including - Jimmy Wales

Some people, the above two included, have expressed a hands-off (or for the academically included, laissez faire) approach for iCommons: let the network evolve, don't overburden it with issues that aren't directly related. Some even go so far as to suggest that the strength of Creative Commons is its focus on tools rather than ideology, as though all the activists and advocates are merely interested in tools and have no ideological reasons to support CC (such as believing in freedom of access to information, for example).

Core values and good governance are required for some things!

As I wrote in my original article, when you're passing declarations ostensibly in the name of the free culture community, or even the iCommons community, this won't do. The move towards an iCommons Community Council is really positive because it legitimises the process of making declarations. It means the free culture community can have a global voice.

Laissez faire just hands power to celebrities, hyperactive participants and the particularly committed individuals, distorting the views of the wider community. It would, for example, be wrong for iCommons to simply adopt those policies I proposed on the basis of my work and the views of a couple of Board members. They should be scrutinised, debated and passed by the community at large or by their elected representatives.

We shouldn't restrict our core values to the commons

The second issue I have with the laissez faire crowd is that it's just a clever way of shirking moral responsibilities. Maybe carbon neutrality, or opposing sweatshop labour, aren't directly conneced to free culture, but should that stop iCommons from adopting policies to deal with two of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time? If Apple can adopt a reasonable ethical code of conduct for suppliers why can't iCommons?

Now we don't want the core values of iCommons to include every little platform shared by a few community members. But for me, if iCommons doesn't include a commitment to basic human rights, environmental responsibility and the like then I'm not interested. It's not a matter of saying: if you don't subscribe to this long list of ideological ideals then you can't come and play. It's more about a charity with funds, staff, merchandise etc. and that plays a major role in the free culture community doing all it can to be open, democratic and ethical about its conduct.

Core values are a useful tool

People worry that, if made explicit, the core values will scare people away, or harm a happy community by promoting debate and discord. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We don't need to exclude projects from being iCommons nodes, nor should we prevent people from attending events and participating in democratic processes, just because they don't subscribe to everything that the core values entail. But as an organisation with staff and a budget, iCommons must take a stand on fundamental ethical issues such as: will we sell merchandise made by exploited child labourers? should we try to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to meet the challenges of global warming? and so on.

Core values can (for example) be the basis upon which iCommons rejects a sponsor (because the potential sponsor's activities conflict with iCommons core values, e.g. they lobby for software patents). They shouldn't limit the scope for policy decisions, so iCommons can pass policy on carbon neutrality even if that's not a core value.

Core values also act as a rallying point, something more specific and visionary than "look at these groups who find some kind of common cause". You can either make the core values explicit through an open, transparent and participatory process, or you can wait until they sink the organisation in bitter disputes over sponsors, bad projects, whether or not particular licenses are free enough, and so on.

Finally, if we never define some core values for iCommons then we are in danger of ignoring the volcanoes simmering away in the background. What if iCommons became increasingly close to Microsoft due to sponsorship arrangements? Imagine if a small gathering of iCommoners at a summit passed a policy saying that iCommons condones piracy? Core values and clear governance structures get the important disagreements out in the open, and help the community manage them sensibly.

What's the obsession with wikis?

In the morning discussion we decided that a working group would be set-up to discuss core values. Chaired by an academic and largely composed of active community members, they would present a paper to the community four months in advance of the next iSummit, giving everyone time to digest and debate its contents before making some decisions at the summit. Now it seems that the working group has been dropped in favour of drafting it on a wiki. The following quote from buridan, who thoroughly opposed the core values idea, says it all:

perhaps a wiki statment of values program will provide evidence to some of what i've been talking about, [that the community won't agree]

How on earth is a diverse and largely disconnected community supposed to develop a statement of core values with nothing more than a wiki page? This isn't a Wikipedia style project, this requires experience, careful consideration, well facilitated discussions, position papers and the like. Thankfully Heather Ford was wise enough to suggest that, if the wiki approach fails, the working group will be set-up.

If I hear or read one more plonker going on about some mythical, utopian open source community where people just group around nice projects and everything is hunky dory I'm going to scream. Maybe in a safe middle class world where we can shut ourselves off from other issues, fine. But I doubt the exploited worker, the community suffering from climate change, or the people who fume when iCommons coseys up to Microsoft because of sponsorship deals, will be quite so enthusiastic about this laissez faire utopia.

 

The future of iCommons and free culture

My article on the governance and finances of iCommons has appeared on Newsforge. I really hope that lots of people in the free culture and free software communities read it, think about my arguments and above all reply! Post comments on Newsforge, write up your thoughts in another article or blog entry, talk about it on your project mailing lists, just get some debate going!

I sometimes struggle to justify to myself the time I spend working on , Free Culture UK and KDE. When I attend conferences like the iSummit 2006, which involved hundreds of people churning out C02 flying to Rio, being sponsored by the likes of Microsoft and Soros, then having to put up with an organisation that shows no concern for democracy and human rights, it really tests my conscience.

I'm sure everyone at iCommons is concerned with these other issues, I just hope we can act together to demonstrate as much.

 

We do it to ourselves

Damn you Portugal, again! England are out of the World Cup after another penalty shootout failure, but what a performance!

 

Once Rooney got sent off in the 62nd minute the team pulled off their best play of the cup, holding Portugal away from goal for an incredible 45 minutes with only ten men. It has to be said that Portugal really didn't play their best, so we were lucky there, but to take it all the way to penalties and have a few great chances in extra time was quite a feat. Shame it had to come to a shootout - an English football supporter's nightmare - and with a team that had no natural strikers left in it. How many cups have we been knocked out of now with the same pattern - missing players, a red card for a key player and a penalty shootout?

Good luck to Italy, who I hope win it this year at last

 

iCommons in Rio

I'm going to see if I can dump the contents of my brain before I sleep, though the lucidity may well suffer Smiling I got back from the summit today, which was a gathering of around 300 free culture advocates, activists, hackers and organisers held in Rio de Janeiro. To sum it all up? Crazy, inspiring, exhausting.


 

The flight out knocked me out straight away, and an Italian couple next to me with a dog (!) didn't help. I had fun pretending to be French with the flight crew until they tried to explain that there was a problem with my luggage, which pretty much demonstrated my terrible tourist grasp of the language. So the first day was a tired blur, chatting with people like Jon Phillips of Creative Commons/Inkscape and Björn Wijers of the fantastic Simuze about collaborating more on software for artists and CC projects. I went to the birds of a feather session on , which was a nice opportunity to get an overview of 's activities and to let people know more about . It was a shame the presentation took up so much of the slot though, I would have loved a full session discussing strategies and maybe even working on some joint documentation. Hopefully it will lead somewhere useful with online collaboration...

In the evening we went to an apparently typical Brazilian restaurant, which was based on the principle that a big belly soaks up beer best. You basically just sat there while waiters loaded your plate with ever-greater quantities of barbecued meat, and if you let your concentration lapse your near-empty glass got replaced before you could decline or ask for guarana instead. Getting used to staying in a plush hotel on the Copacabana beach was hard enough without them loading this poor student's gut with a waitered open bar and an all you can eat mentality!

The next morning I went shopping since my luggage hadn't arrived yet. I had only bothered to learn some basic taxi/restaurant phrases, so asking for pants and socks was a bit convoluted and embarrassing (i.e. pointing at my crotch). Eventually I found a shop that had stuff on display so I put on my idiot-tourist hat and obstinately pointed my way into getting the underwear and a


 

Saturday kicked off with a really interesting panel, especially with James Boyle and Niva Elkin-Koren coming to blows over CC strategy. Niva stressed that CC reinforces the norms of copyright, including ownership and the notion that intellectual products are commodities rather than communicative acts. Her presentation basically echoed concerns outlined in her recent paper. Licenses aren't a form of self-expression; she was critical of the "authors choice" agenda. She also suggested that choice in disclosure (i.e. when your work is published under a free license, allowing exclusive use periods) would be a powerful choice model that doesn't harm the user of freely licensed work. David Berry's recent critique of CC is well worth reading in this light. In response James Boyle defended the worth of the no-derivatives and non-commercial clauses in particular contexts (Berry should seek his arguments out since they fit his suspicion of the common-by-default agenda). It was great to have a debate almost breaking out about such fundamental issues, though a combination of time constraints and a high-five "we rock!" pragmatism quashed it soon after it began.

I do wonder how far social conventions can act as sufficient constraints. They could do away with the CC approach of using ownership jujitsu style to create a pseudo-common. For example, Boyle suggested that scientific journals need to use the no-derivatives clause to protect their reputation and guarantee that what you read is an original, reputable article. I might email him to ask why this is the case, because it seems to me that you can't ever trust a PDF you get emailed. What does the ND clause add except a stronger legal recourse in the case of fraud? Is the academic tradition against plagiarism not a good model to expand elsewhere? Speaking more broadly, what principles or objectives am I working with when thinking that legal regimes are costly whilst social conventions are a more genuine expression? Join myself and Tony Curzon Price in continuing the debate if you fancy it.

In the afternoon I took part in the enterprise commons workshop. As a green localist I love the idea of building a network of people and tools to support small and medium sized free culture businesses. Remix Reading is going that way by becoming a social enterprise called RAVES, which will partly be an agency connecting local artists with organisations who want workshops or contract work. The great thing is that we can integrate community and commerce, making the project sustainable without damaging our principles nor project dynamic. We hope to make money by giving people more creative opportunities, rather than restricting them or locking them into notions of private ownership. I'd recommend that anyone with an interest in keeping free culture financially sustainable without needing handouts from major corporates takes a good look at the network.


 

The second evening didn't go so well for me. A combination of caipirinhas, far too many cheesy balls (we didn't really eat a proper meal) and previous beer preparation at a cheap little local bar made me pretty ill, which made the next day fun, especially when combined with lack of sleep. I had to get up and speak on a panel, yay! Ah well, a self-deprecating opening joke always gets the audience on side... It was still fun to hang out with the likes of Gavin Baker, Becky Hogge, Tony Curzon Price and anyone else who would tolerate my conversation - the great thing about meetings like the iSummit is how cool everyone there is. It's really humbling hearing the amazing work others are doing, especially throughout Latin America which seems so far ahead of the rest of the world on free culture issues!

So then, my panel went well with interesting presentations on the public sector in the UK and Australia. Joshua Fouts (who, contrary to the photo on that page, now sports a beard) spoke about a really interesting interface of public diplomacy, the promotion of peaceful resolutions, online computer gaming and liberal copyright licensing. A lot of the panels had this balance; bringing slightly leftfield topics into the mix really showed the value and broad relevance of the summit beyond copyfighting.

I snuck off after lunch to watch the England match with some compatriots. Who'd've thunk you'd end up watching England reach the quarter finals with a lady from the Shuttleworth Foundation as company? Smiling

The last panel of the conference brought some much-needed controversy Eye-wink I'm going to write about this in more detail in the future, but suffice to say that the undemocratic nature of iCommons was laid bare by a series of kangaroo decisions. Expediency trumped proper procedure well enough, and whilst some delegates may feel comfortable ceding power to demagogues this nut prefers a self-proclaimed grassroots movement to be made legitimate by membership votes and the like. I also raised the notion that iCommons might ensure that its merchandise meets basic ethical requirements like the 's convention on labour standards to avoid the worst excesses of exploitation. Are we a movement looking to a better world, or a conceited club interested solely in copyfighting? The reception from the board was frosty, but I got lots of encouragement later in the day and evening, especially from Latin Americans!

So we headed off for a meal before the BNegão concert (free mp3s). Brazilians really love their meat, even the chips (fries for the yanks) were mixed in with thin slices of ham! Properly filled I spent the evening sipping water, making a fool of myself on the dance floor and thoroughly enjoying the unique sound of Brazilian Hip Hop (hint: add a trumpet!) The next morning Gavin, Tony, Cory Doctorow and I took a stroll up and down the wintry sunny Copacabana before heading home... to an overcast summer London Smiling Now four days to finish off a dissertation draft then I'm off to the P&P .

 

John Locke the copyright pirate

I gave my presentation on Lockean arguments for/again copyright yesterday, which outlines the beginnings of my dissertation on the philosophy of free culture. Besides being a bit of a revolutionary (albeit bourgeois) he also wrote some really interesting works on government and education. It was a fun excuse to load up The GIMP and give him a silly pirate hat, bandanna, shoulder tassles and an iPod. Anyway, anyone interested can grab my slides and handout.

At the moment my dissertation will probably begin with some background on copyright and the free culture movement, mostly for the benefit of the people marking it who will be unfamiliar with the subject. Then I'll step through Lockean arguments for copyright countering each in turn, setting myself up with a tentative conclusion that Locke wouldn't have supported today's copyright system and that his theory of property gives us guidance on what the free culture movement should tackle. I'll then give some attention to beneficial use in terms of consumption, production, learning and sharing. Finally I'll argue both against copyright as it stands today and the "we just deal with copyright" wing of the free culture movement, and advocate a philosophy of free culture concerned with enlarging cultural freedoms not just removing restrictions.

Now I just have to spend the next few months writing the damn thing Eye-wink.

 

Kubuntu Dapper

Kubuntu Dapper was released yesterday, though I've been running it for a month or so already. The only persistent issue I've had was Kubuntu refusing to talk to my printer properly, though thankfully that now seems fixed. It's a shame about the problems others are having.

Still, for me this finally feels like a system that does everything I want without any particular annoyances. No doubt I've become used to working in ways that cover up annoyances such as taking notes and writing up academic work. But Dapper fixed the one outstanding moan I had about KDE with this lovely piece of work developed mostly by Novell:

 

Now I can sit back, listen to my latest discovery and get on with my MA dissertation. If it weren't for KDE 4 on the horizon I might just lose all interest in software projects Eye-wink

 

Ecological philosophy in the garden

In the past year or so I've been experimenting with organic gardening in my small student house garden. I've grown a reasonable crop of potatoes, carrots, leeks, strawberries, parsley, basil and chives thus far. Over the winter I got some onions in, which are doing well, as are my next crop of early potatoes:

 

But I thought my experiment with cabbages and cauliflowers was a complete failure. Several cauliflower plants grew quite big but either died from pests (I grew my companion plants too late) or just sprouted useless flowers. But then today whilst weeding I found two plants that looked more like... success!

 

I've also got a nice crop of cabbages that I'll start eating just as soon as I finish the bits and bobs in my fridge:

 

A friend of mine now studying at Goldsmiths wrote the following in an article entitled Culture & Cultivation: The role of the Garden in society:

I think that gardening is one way of addressing and re-balancing the [ecological] disequilibrium. Gardening as art can be understood as an ethico-aesthetic discipline. This involves an examination of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, ecology, politics, individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Gardening provides a remedy to the degradation suffered by the environment and by society. It is concerned with the world and the people in the world. Gardens provide a model of how we should live; a model of social, environmental and economic stability and harmony.

Amen to gardens, and death to concrete / decking / gravel / ugliness!

Real freedom as _the_ key message

Aaron Seigo recently replied to a depressing post by Miguel de Icaza on the subject of freedom. His conclusion that "community, sovereignty and mitigating business risk" are three freedom-related messages that people will get was echoed by Cristian Tibirna's interest in "the social importance of the essential notions of collaboration ingrained in free software". I think Miguel's post, and others like it, are a case of software developers too wrapped up in short-term strategic market-think.

I've never made a secret of the fact that I'm principally interested in Free software, rather than software itself (yawn), so take this with a grain of salt. But Aaron and Cristian give four great reasons why freedom is potentially much more interesting than focusing small differences in functionality or price. There are two steps I think advocates need to take to see why freedom is such a compelling message.

First think of freedom in "real terms" - that is you are interested in people's actual ability to realise their freedom and not just the lack of restrictions they face. Don't talk negative ("Microsoft won't give you their source code", "so what?"). Talk positive: you have control over your software, you aren't locked into a particular company for support and modifications, you can learn from the source code, you can share this with your friends. This is real freedom, and it's something that proprietary software can't ever give people.

Second think of freedom for communities and society as well as individuals. The cynic in you may warn that a business owner only cares about the total cost of ownership, but he's likely to be interested in the networks of businesses and non-profit communities who have invested in KDE. With KDE companies get a community that they themselves can invest in and benefit from. Appeal to the idealist in people, talk about sharing and about those plucky programmers working on their passion. If you have time chat about your vision for a better future, the sort dreamt of by the free software and free culture communities, and point out that it's pragmatic not utopian.

When you're in the trenches worrying about a free version of Java or KDE's market share over the next year it's easy to forget about freedom. A five minute sales pitch to a business owner based on freedom may be a stretch. But step back, treat people as fully realised human beings, and I think it's clear that freedom is our biggest asset.

edit:An anonymous comment points to another aspect to the freedom message: it's not just source code, it's about open document formats that facilitate sharing, software that is usable/accessible so everyone can benefit from the functionality and free licensing, and so on. Real freedom, that's what's cool about us