commonspace

The world is flat (rate)

Today was CopyCamp2 in Toronto: a conversation about art, copyright and the Internet. Lots of fun examples of remix art. More Linux stickers and Internet savvy artists than last year. And a few boring culture bureaucrats playing broken records. Not a bad cocktail, all told.

The strange highlight was a session by Paul Hoffert, ex-hippie musician, Berkman fellow and founder of a new company called Noank. Their web site says:

Noank's mission is to license and distribute digital content globally while fairly compensating content owners, using the most efficient, sustainable, and effective business and technology systems. Noank's motto is "limitless legal content flow."

The idea is simple: blanket content subscriptions charged by ISPs for all the content you can eat. Users just grab content P2P-style the way they do now. Content creators get a slice of the subscription revenue based on the popularity of their materials.

What's interesting is not the idea on its own (it's not new), but the fact that Noank may actually make it happen, and at scale. They have a contract to offer their service to 25 million Chinese students in partnership with the ISP that serves all universities in China . Each student pays $20/year for all the online textbooks, movies and video they want. And, Noank has already signed up 40% of the content providers they've targeted, including all of the Chinese ones and a bunch of global majors.

More interesting is that fact that Noank will split revenue with anyone who owns content and signs a contract with them, even if they've already open sourced it. A case in point is MIT Open Courseware, which is in huge demand in some Chinese universities. MIT could put its lecture videos on the Noank P2P network and then claim a piece of the action, even though the material is available under CC free on the web. If it works, this both helps with both international bandwidth issues and allows those who produce open content to bring in money.

Is there are catch? Yes, of course. Noank uses super invasive client software to track the popularity of materials. Each use of each textbook, movie or video is recorded at the file system level on your computer. There is a piece in the client that anonymizes all this info before it is transmitted back to Noank. That may reassure you. It may not.

A final note: Noank's decision to start in China -- and to go to Russia next -- is worth paying attention to. As Paul stated in his talk, these are places with copyright cultures very different from those in the west. And, they are such big consumers ands creators of content that they will eventually influence how new business models and copyright play out globally. Noank figures such places make good terrain to hammer out their ideas. They are quite right. It will be interesting to see where (and if) this goes: good, bad and / or ugly.

Of snowballs and speedgeeks

I love watching snowballs roll downhill. The whole unconference meme is certainly one such snowball. In many ways, geeks have taken open space meetings further and wider in the last three years than mainstream facilitators have in the last 20. Which, as someone who has tented in both camps, has been amazing to watch.

Of course, rolling snowballs rarely leave time to reflect on questions like: why is this snowball rolling? and how can we make it roll faster? The result for unconferences: few people have moved beyond the basic open space tool set. Which is okay. Open is groovy on its own. But it gets even better when you spike the punch some additional catalytic ingredients. Oh, and a pinch of flattened power dynamics also helps. Very important.

What does this mean in practice? Unconferences need to layer in a bigger diversity of engaging, catalytic, people-connecting session formats. World Cafes. Spectrograms. Fishbowls. And even (gasp!) games. Like the web itself, formats like these focus unstructured space in ways that help us make new friends, spark new ideas and run with them really fast.

I've put stuff like this in my events for years, as have people my like friend and co-conspirator Allen Gunn. However, most events that call themselves unconferences haven't evolved past pure open space. Which is why I was so happy see Sarah Milstein's post on speed Q+A's at O'Reilly Web2Open:

We ran small speed Q&As with the experts: we set up five tables, one each for programmers, designers/UI specialists, marketing/community experts, businesspeople and undeclared, and then we had five experts--Clay Shirky, Kara Swisher, Matt Cutts, Saar Gur and Tim O'Reilly--each hold a nine-minute informal Q&A at a table. Every nine minutes, the experts switched tables until they'd hit them all. The whole thing took 50 minutes, plus lots of lingering afterward. It had great energy, and people were smiling the entire time.

This is akin to the speedgeek format that Gunner started using in 2004: ten presentations great presentations in an hour, with everyone roving around the room.

What excited me most about Sarah's post was not that she was using a session format I like (which I do). Rather, I was happy to see someone reflecting out loud about ways to innovate and improve unconferences. We need more of this. And, I suspect, there is more of it going on than we know about.

Which makes me wonder: is there a simple way to capture, synthesize and share techniques people are using to make unconferences better? There is the Aspiration wiki, but that deals quite specifically with how Aspiration runs events (full disclosure: I am board member). And, there is OpenSpaceWorld, but it is religiously just about open space. I am thinking about something like a 'making-the-unconference-snowball-roll-faster' collective wiki of techniques.

Would this be useful? A waste of time? Does something (good) like this already exist? Should we just use wikipedia (which already has some useful entries)? I'd be interested to hear what people have to think.

A small feedback note for Sarah about the speed Q+A format: Most of the responses to your 'what could we do differently?' question suggest adding more time for each presentation. Having facilitated dozens of speedgeeks everywhere from CopyCamp to the iSummit to Web of Change, I would suggest the opposite. Make them shorter, and do more of them.The idea is to spark ideas and to help you radar people to talk to later. It's hypertext. Take note of who you liked, and find them in the hallway track. Also, get beyond the 'expert' idea. It makes the whole experience more like television and less like the web.

What's at stake: net neutrality 101

Being Canadian, I've spent a great deal of time recently explaining what's at stake with net neutrality. Everyone gets the huge importance of keeping the Internet open, but many find it hard to believe that there really is a threat.

So, you can understand why I was delighted to find this (already 6 month old) video by the people who made Four Eyed Monsters. It explains the net neutrality threat in super clear, easy to understand terms:

What's even better: it's an open source documentary. Suggest clips or do your own remix, and the editors will consider rolling your bits into the next version of the mash up. It'll be great to see it evolve.

If you are wondering about net neutrality (or even if you already get it), please take 10 mins to watch this video. And, if you are Canadian, make sure to let our politicians and telecom bureaucrats know what you think.

Open salad

Salad makes a perfect open source project. While most people think it's a drag to produce a whole salad, it's not so hard to get them to cough up one or two ingredients. The ingredients people contribute automagically turn out to be complimentary, most of the time. And, as more people contribute ingredients, the salad gets better and better. Yum.

 

So it is that that the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) has made its first foray into open source: a bi-weekly Open Salad Club.

The CSI is a shared workspace for social entrepreneurs and change agents located in a downtown Toronto warehouse. It's home to about 100 different organizations. The Shuttleworth Foundation's International Evangelism Unit (that's me) is one amidst this multitude.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, about 20 CSI'ers throw an ingredient on the counter, mash it all up into an instant salad bar and nosh together. The rules for Open Salad Club, posted on a cafe table at CSI, are simple: "... each person brings two items that could conceivably go into a salad. Then we share. Your first trip to Salad Club is free."

The culinary results a wonderful: fancy cheeses; tasty nuts; super fresh produce; all mixed up together. Some of the tastiest and most unique salads I've eaten in years. And, without the dreaded 'what the heck am I going to bring for lunch today?' crisis in the morning. Just grab whatever you've got in the fridge and go.

Of course, it's the community vibe that really makes Open Salad Club rock. I've met (and learned the names of!) people I've been brushing past in the hallway for a year. And, my friend Marcia, who's just taken up residence at the CSI (and just moved to Toronto) is still out there in cafe gabbing away with people. Building salad together is a quick path to meaningful relationships, it seems. 

Important to remember: these community projects never come without trouble or controversy. There are already disputes over the name. Is it Open Salad? Or Salad Club? My strategy is to combine the two to avoid controversy, thus: Open Salad Club. Yet even this isn't good enough. Rumour has it that the people at the Hub in London have forked the name again, setting up Sexy Salad on the same model.

There is also the question of whether Open Salad Club is an original idea or a derivative work. Eric Squair, who got this salad sharing rolling, claims the idea originated at Greenpeace. However, there is no concrete information online about the previous Greenpeace version or the license under which its rule set was released.

In any case, Open Salad Club is tasty, convenient and fun. It's also one more example of 'open' being applied in novel and useful ways. Which, of course, makes it part of the case for open everything. More news, and maybe an Open Salad Club wiki, coming soon.

Philanthropy on the commons

I spent the weekend mulling over Mike Edwards' essay Philanthrocapitalism: After the gold rush. The basic argument is this: there is a movement afoot to harness the power of business for social change. This includes newly-minted foundations like Gates, corporate social responsibility programs and social entrepreneurs. These philanthrocapitalists are undermining the independence and social mission of civil society. As a result, we are missing out on real social transformation, and maybe even risking our democracy.

From where I sit, much of what Edwards says seems wrong or misdirected, mixing apples with oranges with assumptions. Which is why I was so surprised to see him briefly trumpeting one of my favourite ideas: "... new business models built around the commons, such as open source software." Edwards suggests that these new models have the potential to deliver deep changes to both our society and our economy. I agree. In fact, I would argue that they already have.

The power of peers

Just think about Wikipedia for a second. In less than 10 years, Wikipedia has completely overturned the intellectual and economic power structure of the publishing industry (or, at least, the parts dealing with reference materials). What's more, it has dramatically increased the number of languages that have their own encyclopedias (over 250), the number of topics covered (2.3 million in English alone) and the speed with which new topics get covered (there is even a little article on philanthrocapitalism). Like it or not, Wikipedia is unquestionably an incredible achievement.

Many would also argue that Wikipedia is a major public good, on the order of an education or library system. That's certainly what Jimmy Wales and others had in mind when the coined the Wikimedia Foundation's vision statement: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." The people behind Wikipedia were definitely thinking about what Edwards calls 'real social transformation' right from day one.

Of course, the most interesting thing about Wikipedia is not Wikipedia itself, but the method used to create and maintain it. Tens of thousands of volunteers around the world contribute and edit content on topics they are passionate about. When you add up all of these small bits of labour, you have what it takes to create the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia.

It's this kind peer production that Edwards is talking about when he speaks of 'the commons'. And, as Yochai Benkler eloquently argues in The Wealth of Networks, this model is not limited to Wikipedia: it is a part of a new and growing wave of non-market peer production that is creating tremendous public assets. Linux. Mozilla Firefox. The Public Library of Science. MIT's OpenCourseWare. The 60 million Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr. We create and hold these things in common. And, as we hold them, our economies, our societies and our democracies are transforming.

The yin yang dance

The funny thing is, Edwards seems to think that the commons and business are at odds. "The problem is that these approaches are absent from the philanthrocapitalist menu," he says. The facts say otherwise. Who are the top funders of of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson's Virgin Unite. Who funds the Creative Commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu.

More importantly: collaborative, non-market peer production was born from a world that lives on the fuzzy edge between public and private benefit. In his 1999 essay, the Magic Cauldron, Eric Raymond offered a taxonomy of open source business models that still left the code in the commons: cost-sharing; giving away things that have use value but no sale value; selling technical support or services. His point was this: business and the commons are not only compatible but, in many cases, actually interdependent.

In the almost 10 years since the Magic Cauldron, we've seen real world success by open source projects mixing public and private benefit. Committed to bringing books to the blind, entrepreneur Jim Fruchterman generates revenue from online services while staying staunchly not-for-profit. Once a single foundation, Mozilla is now a foundation and two companies as a way to consciously play across the private / public benefit divide. And, intent on transforming the economics of software with an always free, easy to use version of Linux, Mark Shuttleworth set up not a charity but a business. In stark contrast to Edwards, these folks do not see public and private benefit in a zero sum pitched battle: they see a yin yang dance. There may be times of conflict, but it is a conflict of interdependence and, ultimately, mutual benefit.

Open sourcing philanthropy

At the end of his essay, Edwards asks what he calls the $55 trillion question: how will we use the vast amount of new philanthropic resources that will be created in the next 50 years? My instincts tell me that Wikipedia, open source and peer production may hold part of the answer. The world of the commons has used openness, participation and community to create real and (hopefully) lasting public goods. Why not apply these same principles to improving education, creating low cost housing or evolving our democracy?

Of course, using open source principles to address a wide variety of social needs would require a new kind of foundation. In fact, it would require a whole wave of foundations built from the ground up around the values of openness, transparency and participation, and sitting happily on the fuzzy edges between public and private benefit. It would require us to open source philanthropy. Possible? I think so. And, who knows, maybe some of the so-called philanthrocapitalists might even be willing to help.

--

An edited version of this post is part of a debate about philanthrocapitalism taking place on OpenDemocracy.net. It's also highlighted on Slashdot.

We are opening: free textbooks for South Africa

Mark Horner launched his Siyavula blog this week! Yay! It'll be a great way for people to track this ambitious and important open education project. For those of you who don't know:

The objective is to make Open and Collaborative Resources (OCRs) a firm and sustainable reality in the South African education system and, in the process, make a massive contribution to improving the current crisis (just one short article but many exist). We will make contributions which cover the entire curriculum, from grades 1 through 12, for all learning areas in grades 1 through 9 and the majority of subjects in grades 10 through 12.

What Mark fails to mention in his first post is his own experience running the Free High School Science Texts project. FHSST has successfully produced open, royalty free math and science texts for grade 10 - 12 using a collaborative, volunteer-driven approach. Given Mark's chops, I'm convinced Siyavula will succeed.

Side note: in the Shuttleworth tradition of embedding vision and values in project names (Ubuntu), Siyavula is an  Nguni word meaning we are opening.

Open everything unfolds

The Open Everything  idea I've been talking about for a while has started to pick up steam. There is now a tiny web site up. And, there are events planned for London, Cape Town, Toronto, Singapore and a small, wonderful island off the coast of British Columbia.

Open Everything may be a bit of hyperbole. That's okay. Big, crazy ideas are useful from time to time. Big ideas can provide connection points. They can inspire. And they can help us cross pollinate amongst the huge diversity of human activity around the world that has been sparked by the open, participatory values of the Internet.

Of course, these Open Everything events are meant to be an experiment. Right now, the web site says that this is ...

... a series of conversations about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open.

I am sure it will say something very different a month or a year from now. That's the point of having the conversation.

No matter how the conversation goes, we will certainly have a better, more dynamic picture of 'open' by the time the first cycle of events is done. The idea is to record and podcast all of the talks, giving a concrete, under-the-hood look at some of the most interesting 'open' initiatives in the world. There is also a plan to build both a conceptual and geographic map of projects, people and businesses using openness and participation in their work.

At this stage, there are about a dozen people involved in bits and pieces of making this happen. We want more people to jump in, and we want critical feedback on the idea. If you're intrigued, feel free to comment on this blog post or to get in touch with me. Also, I can give wiki access to anyone who wants it.

Open licensing, and how we work

As I blogged previously, I'm doing a series of short pieces that look under the hood at the day to day work of the Shuttleworth Foundation. As the opening blurb to my first article says:

How We Work is a series of occasional articles that take a critical look at one aspect of our open philanthropy practice. Our aim is to reflect and improve upon our efforts while also sharing what we've learned with others.

The first target (or 'victim'?) of this process was the Foundation's open licensing policy. The whole team met back in January to reflect on our policy, talk about what is working and what isn't and to dream up ideas for how to do it all better. I've just finished a draft write up from this conversation, with the main points summarized in the introduction:

The Shuttleworth Foundation believes in open innovation. It is core to the society we want to build. Early on, we made a decision that what we do and fund should be under an open license. Our goal was to make it easy for people to use, adapt and improve whatever our staff and partners created. We wanted maximum viral impact, and we saw open licensing as the first step in this direction.

As it turns out, making open licensing work isn't easy, and going viral is even tougher. In the three years since embracing open licensing, we've bumped up against confusion over IP ownership, partners who are not willing to share, and lawyers who don't 'get' open. Also, in many cases, we've simply lost track of materials our partners have created. They may be open, but no one can find them. Not even us.

The good news is we're pushing past all of this, putting in place more systematic open licensing and archiving policies. As we do this, we thought we should write down how things have gone so far and explain where we are headed in the future. Hopefully, this will help others move into open licensing more quickly and successfully in the future.

Bottom line lessons and advice for other foundations are included briefly at the end of the article:

If you do decide to 'go open', it's important to take the time to be thoughtful about how it happens. Our experience suggests that there are three issues to pay particular attention to: license choice (choose a license like CC BY SA that has maximum viral impact); ownership (think about who has a stake in making ideas travel and keeping them open; and accessibility (make a clear plan for access and archiving). These are three areas we tripped up on, and that we're now working to improve.

There is a full version of the draft on Google Docs. I'd love to get comments and feedback on this as I will be doing at least one more version before we 'publish' it.

Processwise, I still like the idea of the How We Work series. The face-to-face team discussion was especially good, putting us all on the same page (or close to it) in terms of open licensing. It also surfaced some internal controversy on when our partners should own IP and when we should steward it ourselves. As a result, we were able to tweak our new open licensing policy so that it meets a broader set of needs and circumstances.

I'm less than sure on the write up format. It's good to have a formal, reflective article. The process of writing something like this deepens the thinking and even had an impact back on the follow up policy discussions. However, all the back and forth (and my own delays) made the whole process feel really felt slowwwwwwww. For the next topic (internal learning?), I may blog out loud early in the process and then come out with a more formal article a little later. I'd love comments on whether or not this mixed formal / informal writing strategy sounds useful.

Challenge. Change. Conversation. Revolution.

Whatever it is that I do for a living today, it all started with community video. Five years as a portapak toting video activist in the early 90s gave me deep roots. It sparked DIY entrepreneurship and hacking. It taught me that media is conversation. It fascinated me with the power of fluid, open, participatory ways of working. In so many ways, community video made me me.

Much of my inspiration came from the NFB's Challenge for Change: a late 60s effort to put video cameras in the hands of the poor and marginalized. Like the Challenge-for-Changers, I trained scores of people to make their own media. I helped build half a dozen media collectives. I pitched in on a few very important tapes, and on hundreds of energizing, but ultimately forgettable, hours of video fun. I committed every waking hour (and many dreaming hours, too) to the community video revolution.

And then, one day, I just gave it all up. I gave it up for the Internet.

In 1994, as the non-techie world got it's first glimpse of the web, I stopped preaching video and began to teach activists how to send email. Unlike the television world of the early 1990s, the culture of the Internet encouraged me (and millions of others) to use words like 'participatory' and 'media' in the same sentence. It was the perfect backdrop for a 10+ year adventure building social change media channels, co-creating participatory, unconferency conversations and collaborating with community tech activists all around the world. This adventure has become my life.

The thing is, I've never forgotten Challenge for Change. I've carried it in my heart everywhere. Last week this part of me stirred, and I smiled.

Misha asked me to help with facilitation for Handheld, an unconference built around an Internet-era participatory media project on inner city health. All of the women participating in the project a) used to live on the street and b) have recently had babies. They took pictures. They shot video. They did interviews. This material was then shown to health care workers, and interviews with health care workers were shown to the women. The resulting video bridge (and I suspect the final cut of the video) creates a dynamic, honest picture of the attitudes, rules and tiny daily actions that are rolled up in our very broken health care system.

Yet, it wasn't the power of this social message that made me smile. I smiled at the unconferency buzz of 100 people talking about both inner city health *and* media empowerment. I smiled as I met the women from the project, and heard them offer to work with other mothers during the closing circle. I smiled as ideas for a participatory video network for Toronto were proposed to the group. The unconference process was unleashing all kinds of creative energy that would simply grow once Handheld was over.

When I think back, this idea of media as messy beginning rather than neatly folded ending is one of the things that inspired me most in Challenge for Change. And, I suspect, it may have also inspired Kat Cizek, who organized Handheld. Kat's NFB Filmaker-in-Residence program at St. Michael's Hospital is very explicitly a riff on the Challenge for Change idea.

Of course, we now live in a viral media world where where open ended beginnings are commonplace. Kat says on her site: "We are in a revolution right now, and many people might not even know it." This is not only a revolution in access ($25,000 portpaks replaced by $100 cameraphones) but also in the whole form and function of media. We have moved in great part from consumption to conversation, which in was one of the main points of Challenge for Change in the first place.

As Handheld ended, I smiled a very huge smile about this conversation revolution. I also reminded myself that all conversations are not created equal, and the best ones require care, love and finesse. This of course was the brilliance of building an unconference around a participatory video project. It nurtured an already-started conversation further, sparking ideas, passion and commitments in all sorts of new directions.

It's useful to celebrate the conversation revolution. But then it's time to move on to nurturing, facilitation and curation. These are things we need more of now. Nicely, Handheld, Kat and the women she is working with offer a very helpful example.

PS. For a little more on what I was thinking about as I switched from video to the Internet, check out From VTR to Cyberspace: Jefferson, Gramsci and the Electronic Commons. Written by a Mark Surman who was much more idealistic and naive than the one you'll meet today, but still an interesting snapshot of a beautifully chaotic moment in time.

A pirate, a professor and a political compass

Over the past week, I've been reflecting on the ideas of two people: Jonathan Zittrain (a professor) and Matt Mason (a pirate, or at least a fan of pirates). This has got me thinking about the 'political compass question' again, which goes something like this ...

Right and left just aren't enough anymore. We don't live in a world where collective vs. individual sums up who we are (if it ever did). In fact, the much bigger tensions in today's world are: democracy vs. authority; diversity vs. singularity; ecumenicism vs. fanaticism. We are in a struggle between open and closed.

The thing is, most people still see the world through one-dimensional-political-spectrum-goggles. Sure, we hack around this. Youth culture. Open source. Punk capitalism. Matrixed social movements. Internet culture. We know how things are changing, and we are accelerating the change. Yet, despite these hacks, the imaginative frame that organizes political parties, schools, governments, big media, laws and, to a certain degree, our identities is stuck in the left-right mud. This is true almost everywhere I have been in big, bad world.

We need a new political compass, urgently. The left vs. right spectrum has hit a wall. It no longer helps us see what's possible, or even what's necessary. We need (at least) another dimension to help us explore the possibilities of open vs. closed on a mass scale. I've been playing with this diagram for a while now:

Left vs. right thinking has us log jammed on pressing issues like the environment, intellectual property and the evolution of markets. A few people are making breakthroughs on these topics, and they seem to be doing so by dumping the left vs. right mindset for open thinking. Grafting open (and closed) onto the map  that focuses our political imagination could help us break the logjams on a much larger scale.

This idea is not new. Paul Ray called for a new political compass in 1994 (and then trademarked the term. Silly man.). More importantly, I stumble across people hinting at the need to add open vs. closed (or, at least, open) into the broad conversation about economics, society and politics almost every week. Paul Hawken's book on new social movements. Matt Mullenweg's off the cuff comments about the real meaning of open source (last 10 mins of this talk). Meg Wheatley's articles about emergence. All are contributing to the debate and evolution of a new political compass, even if they don't know they are in the game.

This where Zittrain (the professor) and Mason (the pirate) come back in. I think they know they are part of the game, and are trying to help rebuild our politcal map.

Zittrain is concerned that the Internet is about to be killed off by the very culture of openness that it created. As outlined in great blog coverage of a recent Zittrain talk, the argument goes: folks like pirates and virus makers are using the bottom up nature of the Internet to do things that piss people off. This plays into the hands of governments and businesses who want to 'fix' things with laws and technologies that will take away the flexible, bottom up qualities of the internet. The only solution is to amp up our efforts police the Internet using well structured, rule based community policing like we see in Wikipedia.

While this argument is interesting, and the threats are very real, what really caught my eye was the Zittrain-o-gram used to show the political terrain upon which all this is happening. It looked something like this:

What I like about this diagram is that it shows the tension between closed (aka top down) and open (aka bottom up). These are recognized as distinct terrains on the map. We need maps like this. What I don't like so much is the way this sets up the rigorously open (the communitarians) and the anarchically open (the pirates) camps as enemies.

Matt Mason's new book, The Pirate's Dilemma, helps explain why. Starting with Walt Disney's use of fairy tales, winding through punk / hip hop / graffiti / open source, and ending up with pervasive, transient remix culture, Mason argues that pirate culture (and youth culture) is a major force of innovation. Yes, it competes with both traditional business and (sometimes) organized approaches to open. But, in doing so it forces more established players to take pirate innovations on board, increasing efficiency in the market, creating better products for consumers and (often) making the world a better place.

Mason diagrams this by inverting the traditional prisoner's dilemma diagram (altruism vs. selfishness) into a pirate's dilemma diagram (altruism AND selfishness). The bottom like is that market players and society win if the integrate the innovations of pirates. Those who don't lose. The diagram looks like this:

I like this diagram. Just like transcending right vs. left, turning the prisoner's dilemma inside out helps us expand beyond our limited 20th century political imaginations. More importantly, it shows that the pirates are actually contributing to the success of other players in society, including the rigorously open folks that Zittrain encourages us to back (and we should back them, for sure).

For me, the opportunity here is getting the open meme onto the broad social, political and economic map. As we do this, we should see the Zittrain's communitarians and Mason's pirates as yin and yang. Something like this:

We need both halves of open. And, while each group needs to insist on doing things its own way, we also need to recognize each other as allies. As Boris Mann blogged yesterday:

Basically, sniping other open projects isn't cool. ... The "enemy" here is proprietary systems. They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

While Boris is talking about software, the same idea extends to the whole open terrain. We don't need to agree on everything (that's the point, right). We just need to make it clear that open offers possibilities that most people can't even imagine yet, and that closed is not what we want. My sense is that we're on the cusp of building the maps and memes we need to make this message crystal clear.

Rockin' the telecentre house

Over the past six months, alot of people have asked me 'how's it going with telecentre.org?' My response has typically been: 'Ah, umm, okay. I think.' 2007 was a year of change and uncertainty.

My answer changed to 'telecentre.org is rockin' the house' this week as I hung with the whole team in Valparaiso.

This team is focused on concrete action that can truly help telecentres: a global telecentre.org training academy; a venture fund that will help telecentre networks and their members become successful social enterprises; a research program that will dig deep into the social and economic impact of public access computing. Also, there is new and strong communications team in place to capture and share stories of what is happening across the telecentre movement. Florencio has done a great job rebuilding this team, and they are moving fast.

Being at the team meeting also reminded me how much the telecentre.org community has achieved in the past three years. There are existing and emerging telecentre networks in almost 50 countries. There are strong grassroots leaders who are spreading the telecentre.org ethos on every continent. And, most importantly of all, the whole conversation about telecentres has shifted from 'this is a dying idea' to 'this is a social entrepreneurial spark that's about to catch fire'. While there is lots more concrete work to do, the telecentre movement has come a long way in the last few years.

From my side, I've made a commitment to work with the telecentre.org team for at least another year. My main job will be to focus on social enterprise development, with most of my time going into the creation of a small (and probably single-region) social venture fund to help networks develop into product and service channels. I will also continue to work on the development of new global partnerships.

It was a pleasure to hang with the whole telecentre.org crew again. They've got the tunes cranked and they are rockin' the house in a big way. It's a party worth watching, and joining.

Shoelacing social innovation

Social innovation (or any kind of innovation for that matter) can be a lonely gig. There you are, focused intensely on an issue or problem that you are passionate about, trying to invent / evolve / evangelize an approach that will really make a difference. Poverty. Hunger. Education.  Democracy. Knowledge. Whatever the issue, that's all that matters. One day, you'll have time to connect to other innovators to share what you know ... and learn about what they're working on. But not now. One day. 

A week or so back, the Young Foundation and gaggle of groovy partners launched the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) to overcome this story of isolation. Here's the web site:

The idea is great: radar emerging social innovations and lightly shoelace the innovators into a network (or at least make them aware of each other). Case studies highlight interesting innovations. Blog postings create a babble of emerging ideas. And face to face events (very promising) create the deeper human connections and content that will fire fuel back into the web site.

The problem is, great ideas also need to work in the real world. I have hope for SIX, but competing for attention, and even generating content, in a busy web world is tougher than ever.

As an already-busy-with-my-own-life-specialist-in-residence at SIX, I want to help with this. I want to contribute compelling content that draws people. I want to show up to comment and discuss stuff when it's helpful. I want to evangelize and get people excited. The thing is, I am just as time and attention strapped as the next guy on the social innovation block.

My hope is that that basic web 2.0 tech mashed up with some good ol' community media work can help with this. I scribbled some ideas on this earlier:

On the web 2.0 side, SIX could easily build up a more compelling feed of news by importing and rebranding RSS items from me and other specialists-in-residence who already have their own blogs. I'd be super happy to see them do this. The SIX editors just have to select the stories they want and publish them o relevant section of the site. I get extra exposure and a sense that I am contributing. SIX gets stories. Everybody wins.

SIX could quite easily build up it's case study section with some simple audio interviews. Most of the case studies seems to be super short descriptions of a project. This is great as a radar, but doesn't let me dig deeper. However, it's very tough to get people like me to write a long case study, and expensive to get researchers and journalists to do it.One way around this is for the editors to do quick Skype interviews with partners who have projects to profile, and then post these as podcasts along side a one paragraph description of the case. Or, to do fast interviews at SIX face to face event. Either way, it's like bootstrapped community radio on the web. We did something two years ago for the IDRC eALF project. I worked brilliantly, cost nothing and took up almost no time.

The other small and easy way to increase the value of the SIX site would be better and simpler outbound RSS feeds. Right now, I can only see a feed for the main blog page (which would be super useful if combined with the republishing idea above). However, I can't see a way to get feeds of the case studies or the features. If I had this, I could radar for interesting articles, and then come to comment on the site when they come up.

SIX could definitely go somewhere, but it needs to make contributing and engaging easy first. The good news is that there are some smart (and young) people behind it all. I am going to offer to help out with some of the ideas above in the hopes that it move things along.

--

PS. I just heard that the Young Foundation is also doing SocialInnovationCamp. Very cool. I suspect (and hope) that some of the web / event 2.0 energy of SIcamp will infuse itself in SIX.

PSS. To see RSS feeds an rebranding in action, look at my original posting here and the feed version here.
 

Planting seeds with open content

John Moravec of Education Futures posted today on the Cape Town Declaration, worrying that open course materials will do little to change education. He asks:

Is there something else that we should focus on where we can use new technological and social models to develop innovative tools for education?

The answer is: of course! There are dozens of things that pop to mind immediately: Tools that capture, share and evolve the tacit knowledge involved in teaching practices (LAMS). Peer-to-peer learning platforms where students support each other and teachers become more like facilitators (Kusasa). Sites that connect 'amateur' teachers with interested learners (The School of Everything). For-credit classes that embed students in the real time, hands on learning environment of an open source software community (Seneca College). Or simply DIY learning by doing, which is the point of the web and open source in the first place (Wikipedia). While most of these are nascent examples yet to scale or even prove themselves, they hint at where things are going.

It surprises me how many people jump to the conclusion that the Cape Town Declaration ignores all this. The people who wrote the Declaration -- and I suspect most people who signed it -- totally get how education can and is changing. That's why the Declaration says things like:

We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.

... and encourages people not only to think about content but also to:

... pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education.

We have a huge opportunity to transform what we mean by 'education' in the next 25 years. This will (hopefully) include a shift to more participatory, p2p, informal, learner driven approaches education.This shift may in turn totally transform how we deal with accreditation (can I prove what I taught myself) and even the whole way we organize publicly funded education (can me and my friends set up our own school with tax dollars?). While no one agrees on exactly how this will (or should) play out, one thing is clear: it won't happen all at once.

This is one reason the Cape Town Declaration focuses on educational content. We need a place to start. Opening up the content we use for learning, making it not only accessible but also remixable, is a super important first step. Once we've got the political, legal and technical seeds of a remix culture spread throughout the world of education, who knows what else we can create? I guess the idea is that we get to invent it along the way.

Open, philanthropy and a theory of change

A number of people have been asking me lately: what happened with the open philanthropy work that you posted about last September?

In addition to lots of fruitful little experiments (more on these later), my main work on the open philanthropy front has been on the Shuttleworth Foundation theory of change. In our own words, the purpose of this exercise is to 'explain what we do, simply'. While we may not have hit that mark yet, we have definitely forced ourselves to start digging into what we mean by open philanthropy. The current draft looks like this:

One of the first questions we stumbled across as we worked on this picture was 'what does an open philanthropy way of working look like?' We brainstormed a ton on this. Some of the ideas we came up with simply described our values as a team (e.g. integrity and irreverence). However, we also unearthed a few things that feel like the essence of the open philanthropy practice we're currently inventing. While the list is still likely to evolve, these include:

1. Open source everything. Everything that the Foundation creates, funds or helps with should be open sourced. This means: under an open license; available in an open format; and accessible from a public web site, always.
2. Share. Leverage. Share again. Open source is not just about giving (share), it's also about receiving (leverage). You don't need to look far in the software world to see this. Something like Ubuntu rests on the shoulders (and code) of giants who have shared tremendously. However, it only succeeds by leveraging these existing assets to create even more value, and then giving it back again. It's this leverage and share again process to moves things ahead. The Foundation can use this same share|leverage|share cycle to drive collaborative social innovation and radical improvement in areas like education.
3. Community as part of everything. Despite the rhetoric, most philanthropy and social investment happens in silos. The result is zero leverage, poor use of resources and slow progress. The Foundation needs to get down and dirty with communities working on education, innovation and access each step of the way. This means constantly looking at who's doing similar work, inviting them to our parties, and going to theirs. It also means befriending the enemies of those working against us. The open source world has lots to teach us about this. So does Gramsci.
4. Radical transparency. A core piece of 'open' -- open source, open events, open societies, open systems -- is being able to see what's under the hood. When you can see inside something, you can understand it, interface with it, hack it or rip it off altogether. If something is closed, you can't. Radical transparency means opening up not only your yearly books (we need to do this anyways), but also openly sharing your planning, learning and relationships as you go along. This doesn't have to be hard: just take the password off the wiki and podcast your events. By the doing things like this, the Foundation is likely to have partners who come with better ideas (interface), offer improvements (hack) and even run with things on their own (rip it off). That's what we want.
5. Listen, learn, evolve: constantly. The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations. It's strange to me that so few activists have learned that the same is true of social change. Open philanthropy must include constant engagement and conversation with partners, activists, policymakers and (god forbid) customers. Knowing what these people think in real time with 80% accuracy (using cluetrain-style market research) is way better than finding out with 99% accuracy five years too late (using the rigorous and expensive evaluation processes that foundations love). This is especially true if people think what you are doing sucks, as you've still got time to fix it. The Foundation needs to get involved in this kind of listening in a very systematic way, and then to use what it is hearing and learning to steer the ship.

In the Shuttleworth team, we already embrace some of these things in our daily practice, even if we do so far from perfectly. Everything we do and fund is under an open license. Initiatives like Siyavula and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration have community at their heart. And, we do listen, learn and evolve faster than any other foundation I have worked with. Open is deep in the DNA of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the team and most of our partners.

The thing is, embracing with these ideas isn't the same as succeeding with them. We're still a long way from having a break away hit with open sourced education. In fact, we're just starting (after four years of trying) to become more systematic about open licensing and archiving the things produced by the Foundation and its partners. And, we're still a ways off from a systematic approach to learning and transparency. The Foundation -- and this infant idea of open philanthropy -- are works in progress. We know that. It's part of the fun.

The theory of change discussion also forced us to look at our assumptions about how ideas move and how innovation happens. These ideas are even more in flux that the ones above, and will be subject to further discussion. In any case, some things that seem true so far include:

• Only some ideas will get traction. Our core, day to day work is investing in people and ideas that drive innovation in education, telecom and intellectual property. Our hope is that this work bubbles up some good ideas, and that the people behind these ideas will run with them. However, we know that only some of these ideas will get traction. That's okay. These are the ones we want to back, and that the open philanthropy approach can accelerate and improve.
• Good ideas need to become real products, services and policies. Transitioning from a good idea to something people use everyday is hard work. The Foundation and the open philanthropy process need to be focused on putting this hard work into ideas that are viable. This includes making sure ideas are well packaged and productized (even policy ideas need to be 'easy to use'), building communities and (social) markets around them and thinking deeply about their long term viability and sustainability out in the wild. It's only with hard work in these areas -- and then some degree of good fortune -- that the ideas we back ideas will start to have the kind education, innovation and access to knowledge impact that we are seeking. 
• If we're lucky, some ideas will go viral. The ideas that really scale -- at least in the short term -- will do so because they go viral. This is the real potential of open philanthropy. With open sourced ideas and strong communities, the conditions are right for going viral. But, scaling an idea this way also involves a tremendous amount of luck and serendipity. It also involves listening and being willing to jump when the opportunity arises. This is something we'll need to train ourselves to do.

This is still early theorizing. However, it feels like the core principles here have some merit: filter for ideas with traction; be rigorous about packaging and promoting ideas with promise; and jump on opportunities to spread and go viral. By doing these things, we're hoping that we can catalyze enduring changes to policy, practice and culture eventually nurture an open knowledge society (I guess we'd better define that one soon, but not in this post). It'll be interesting to see what works, and even more interesting to evolve our thinking along the way.

Anyways, that's a quick answer to those who asked what's up on the open philanthropy front. Fun stuff. More soon.

PS. The PDF version of the digram above is here.

Wordless in Phnom Penh

It's hard to find words for the week I just spent in Cambodia. Definitely a place in motion (which I love), but with a trajectory that's far from clear. Exhilarating. Confusing. Hard to stop thinking about.

Sparked but wordless, I took a ton of pictures, which are now on Flicker. I also did a bit of visual journaling, including this:

I met with and talked to people filled with so much hope: that the work they were doing would make a difference; that they education they're struggling to get will open doors; that the country will flower again. Yet, often from the same lips, came the sense that corruption, poverty and silly kinds of greed meant that none of this was possible.

Two practical experiences to illustrate. 1. Hope. I met the dean of Maharishi Vedic University in very rural Cambodia. Out loud, I admired the fact that he had risen from farmer's son to dean and remained committed to spiritually grounded participatory rural development. He looked in my eyes and said: poor help poor. He said it very forcefully. It came from the core of who he was. 2. Hopelessness. I read a newspaper ad for one of the many shopping mall filled condo developments popping up in poor areas of Phnom Penh, which proclaimed: Gold Tower 42 will improve living standard of the world. Part of a hug whirlwind condoized commercial disconnectedness that is popping up around Phnom Penh. Hopelessness. Hope.

The nice thing was that the hope and hopelessness didn't seem to cancel each other out. They felt somehow in creative tension, seeking balance. And, there was clearly high velocity flow and energy everywhere. A place in motion. I wait eagerly to listen and feel as it goes somewhere.

PS. I didn't share the journal sketch or pictures from my visit to the Choeung Ek killing fields. Another strange tension, and one of the most emotional experiences of my life. Too much to just post online for all. I can share directly if you are interested.

Village backbone

While in Cambodia last week, I spent two wonderful days visiting telecentres and network hubs run by the iReach project. The idea behind iReach is to create 10 telecentres in two rural areas all connected to each other by wireless broadband (10mb/sec). One of the sites has a mediumband satellite Internet connection which is then shared across all the sites. However, the Internet is not the main point. Rather, the idea is to do broadband sharing within the 10 villages, which can be up to 20 kilometres apart.

The idea is a brilliant: connect people locally using the best and fastest technology, and leave the Internet as an afterthought. The people running the two iReach pilots are already thinking of interesting ways to make this useful. Podcasts of local people talking about local issues beamed via the network to loudspeakers outside of local pagodas. Video conferences to teach English. Cooperation amongst local committee members democratically managing the project. There are difficulties, but things like this are happening (or about to happen).

However, it also feels like there is still a ton of untapped potential. These networks could provide an excellent channel for NGOs (or even the government?) who say they want to reach out and work with communities like these. The people and technology are in place to offer education, health care, government services and anything else imaginable to these communities, at least in part. There is also potential for interesting new business models, like the VillageTelco idea Steve Song is playing with. The next challenge for the iReach project will be to show people who say they want to reach out to these communities how the network can help make things like these happen. My sense is they are ready for this.

A side note, which really should be its own story: I was super impressed by the role that the Maharishi Vedic University. This institution is acting as the lead for the iReach project in Kamshai Mear. They oversee the project, have helped build to local management committee and have sourced many of the staff. What's impressive is how their combination of community development plus Bhuddist spirituality have given the project such a firm footing. All of the people we met and content we saw was very much *of* the communities being served. Example: an video promoting schoold enrollment with actors from the local management committee and villages. It's hard to describe, but it felt alot like Sarvodaya meets Challenge for Change. Quite impressive, and likely to be a good mix with the local hitech / broadband model.

Open vs. open vs. etc

As I posted way back when, I have been reflecting a great deal on the question: why are so many people attracted to the word 'open'?

If you scan the net or just listen to the conversations around you, the word 'open' is popping up as a modifier for almost every imaginable area of endeavor. Standards. Content. Design. Innovation. Education. Politics. Media. Government. Philanthropy. Religion. Fitness. Systems (social, technical and phsyical). Orgware. Meetings. And, of course, software.

Even I have to admit, much of this is just trendy bollocks. Open source software and the general groovy openness of the Internet have made people glom on to open everything (or open anything?). As a result, a good number of 'open x' ideas are simply Internet-ized angles on old, broken, closed processes (e.g. see wikipedia definition of 'open source politics').

Still, my intuition tells me there is something bigger afoot than just trendy babble. I believe this 'something' is related in part to the profound crisis of political / social / spiritual imagination that we currently face, especially in the west. Our old imaginative models of left vs. right don't work anymore. They don't describe reality, and they aren't helping us make a better world.

In 'open' people somehow see hope. They see an narrative container for democracy, inclusion, invention, progress and diversity. At least, that's what it feels like on the surface ... and that's what has spurred me to dig into the question 'what do people really mean by open?'

Before the holidays, I did a little 30 minute thought experiment: I created a chart comparing four very different yet well developed domains of 'open'.

The domains included open source software, open space meetings, open societies (Karl Popper's idea) and open systems (in complexity theory and nature). You can see the chart on googledocs.

The idea was very simple: compare the base ideas behind each of these areas of 'open' to see if there is anything substantively in common. Or, as a question, is there an 'essence of open' across these ideas?

While I need to dig deeper (what do you expect for 30 minutes of futzing with a chart?), at least two essential elements pop to the surface from this comparison: motion and transparency.

Motion is the most striking commonality of the 'four opens' in the chart. Energy moves between open systems and the world around them, transforming both the system and its surroundings. Popper's open society is driven by social mobility, with people moving between classes and identities. The magic of open space meetings flows from people moving between spaces (vote with your feet) and iteratively shuffling ideas that matter (the agenda wall). And, of course, open source is very much about the motion of evolving code and the flow of ideas inside / outside / between related software communities. With motion comes malleability, adaptability and resilience. 

Transparency also runs across these 'four opens', with each example including moving parts that are easy to see and act upon. People can see from the inside out, from the outside in and sideways in all directions. This multi-directional visibility is probably quite critical to what attracts people to the open concept. It implies a certain democracy without scarcity: all can see, understand and react to the system without taking away the ability of others to do the same. The power that flows from knowledge is not scarce. This may sound a bit flaky right now, but my gut says 'non-zero-sum democracy' is one of the main opportunities in open.

Of course, the places where there are not overlaps are just as interesting. The most notable is that 'collaboration' -- central to things like open space and open source -- doesn't really show up in the other two domains. It may be that collaboration is a good application of 'open' (ie. we need to work in an open manner to collaborate well) but is not really a part of the essence that draws us to 'open'. Similarly, the idea of accessibility -- the free beer side of open source freedom -- really only appears in the software domain.

Anyways, these are not profound breakthroughs. 'Adaptable' and 'transparent' are well known principles of things like open source. However, I do find the simple patterns (and non-patterns) across the different open domains somehow illuminating. I definitely want to dig deeper into 'the meaning of open' and see what more there is to learn.

Next step #1: read more on open innovation and complexity theory so I am grounded in other people's thinking. Next step #2: double click on this 'meaning of open' comparison. Katherine Reilly, Michael Lewkowitz and Allison Powell have all expressed interest in doing this with me (yay! ... and others welcome). Next step #3: pull this thinking into the open philanthropy manifesto I am writing this quarter and see if there is traction.

Unconferencing collaboration (and public policy)

I was just reading on the Doors of Perception blog that Collaborative Innovation is this year's theme at the World Economic Forum. Maybe this is a good thing (Jimmy Wales got to talk), and maybe it's not (Don Tapscott got to talk). In either case, the really sad thing is the continued trend events about mass collaboration that are as uncollaborative as possible. Davos is just one long-lecture-fest, with most people zoned out in the audience in passive listening mode. It's not collaboration, it's television.

Unconferencers and openspacers of the world have be running real collaborative events for years. However, trying to roll participation into conferences ranging from WEF (big and showy) to the iSummit (small and groovy) almost always meets with heavy push back. Even when talking about collaboration, most event organizers seem to think TV-style lectures are the only viable format. Strange, and maddening.

Happily, today saw a small victory for the unconference crowd, with an article on Toronto's TransitCamp appearing in the Harvard Business Review's 2008 Breakthrough Ideas section. My friend Mark Kuznicki describes it here:

... [the HBR] piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp.

Put simply, TransitCamp was an unconference to gather input on the redesign of the Toronto Transit Commission's web site. What's amazing is that the chair of the TTC attended and that many of the new and creative ideas from the event actually got fed into the site design process. Vancouver and San Francisco have ripped off the idea by holding their own TransitCamps.

My hope (and the hope of the TransitCamp ringleaders) is that the HBR article will give some legitimacy to the unconference idea, especially as a way to engage in both public policy dialogues and big conferency conferences (a participatory unDavos? ... okay, maybe not). Here's to hoping.

PS. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp.

Shuttleworth Foundation 'how we work' club

On this trip, I've started doing my open philanthropy work at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The biggest piece of this is developing the Foundation's theory of change and an accompanying open philanthropy manifesto (will post on this soon). The other bit is developing a series of 'how we work' papers.

The idea with the 'how we work' series is to show what open philanthropy means in practice and to encourage other people to rip off / emulate our ideas. Hopefully, the writing process will also help with internal reflection and learning. Maybe we're on to something with all this 'open' stuff, or maybe it's boohucky. The only way to find out is to look closely at how we are actually working.

In the spirit of transparency and openness (open philanthropy rule #6), I am posting my notes on the 'how we work' series below. Please comment, criticize and suggest additional topics.

Open philanthropy 'under the hood' article series

Series of papers that explain how we work and why. The series both gives us a chance to reflect on our practices (lunch time chats) and share open philanthropy practices we're proud of with others (the papers).

Who?

While this is an opt-in activity, everyone in the Foundation is invited to get involved. Some people will write these short articles. Others will simply participate in bookclubesque chats where we reflect on the topic to be covered in an upcoming article.

What?

Series of 10 – 12 papers on how we do things. Each paper is written by a staff member or a fellow based on a team wide lunch time discussion on the topic at hand.

The papers should be lightweight, practical and easy to read. The target length is 2 - 3 pages. At this stage, we're assuming each article will cover five questions:

• what we do (describe the practice)
• why do it (connects to open philanthropy idea)
• what's working
• what's hard / broken / ineffective
• steal this idea (step by step / tips / example materials)

Possible topics for the series include:

• Grant contracts, CC licensing and keeping stuff 'free' ''(Mark w/Karen)''
• How our fellowship program works, and why ''(Jason and Karien)''
• Theory of Change, what is and how we built it ''(Mark S)''
• Book club: being serious can be fun ''(Andrew)''
• Cape Town Declaration as network building ''(Mark S)''
• Freedom Toaster as spin off example, warts and all ''(??)''
• Wikifying your foundation ''(??)''
• Blogging your foundation inside out ''(Mark)''
• Using and promoting open document ''(??)''

Mark Surman will start with the 'CC licensing topic' in February. More topics will probably make themselves evident as we go along.

Why?

One of the open philanthropy principles in our Theory of Change is: listen, learn and evolve, constantly. That's why we are doing this. Specific goals include:

• reflect on how we work (lunch chats)
• use reflection to become more nimble, open and effective (better practices)
• document how we work so others will emulate (papers + podiums)
• spark a conversation on 'open' with other foundations (parties)
• get feedback and ideas from other foundations to help us improve (better practices)

There is also a piece in here about 'share, leverage and share again' which is another of the principles in our theory of change.

When?

The papers would be released monthly, probably with some sort of fanfare. We could also do a brief seminar on each paper. This could in turn be podcast.

PS. Full disclosure: anything thing that prompted the 'put this stuff up totally openly on my blog' approach is that I can't access either of the Foundation wikis right now. However, 'as public as possible' is probably the right attitude here, so I think I'll keep posting stuff like this here.

Old leftists are so boring

David Wiley came back with a Cape Town Declaration Spoof Both Funny and Depressing retort last night. Making the Linux / open content comparison, he writes:

If you’re having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out - just think about where open education is today.

He is right, of course. The underlying 'keep free content (or software or whatever) pure and non-commercial'  arguments behind the spoof are boohucky. We live if a hybridized-overlapping-all-the-models-and-boundaries-you-grew-up-with-are-gone kinda world. That's a good and creative thing.

Personally, I try to steer clear of arguments on this topic. They're old and they're tired. Laughing is easier and nicer.

Of course, I am happy to engage in what I see as the bigger underlying question here: how to we rebuild our political imagination now that 19th century notions of left vs. right / commercial vs. social / owner vs. worker are totally broken? We desperately need new political lenses. Digging into 'open' and imagining what these new lenses might look like is a very interesting topic indeed.