One of the amazing things about free software is how it has managed to succeed against all the odds - and against the combined might of some of the world's biggest and most wealthy companies. That shows two things, I think: the power of a simple idea like open collaboration, and how individuals, weak on their own, collectively can achieve miracles.
Although there has been some sniping about the quality of Wikipedia's entries from time to time, we generally take it for granted that when key articles are missing they will get written, and that if they are unbalanced, they will gradually get better -- all thanks to the open, collaborative editing process that sorts out such problems. But an interesting post on registan.net notes that these dynamics may not apply to some versions of Wikipedia -- for example, the one written in the Kazakh language:
The term "open source" was coined back in February 1998, and initially it applied only to software. But as the power of open, collaborative development became apparent, other spheres have adopted the "open" tag along with the underlying approach. Here's the latest example -- open source planes:
One of the most fascinating aspects of open source is how its key ideas are being applied elsewhere. Obvious examples include open content - things like Wikipedia - open data, open access and open science, but there are also moves to apply them to more specialised business disciplines like design.
Recently, a book called “Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive” was published, which provided the first in-depth look at this world. As you might hope given its subject-matter, the essays that go to make it up are also being made available online under a Creative Commons licence - but with a twist:
On Open Enterprise blog.
I've been following the move to open data by the UK government for some time on this blog. Major milestones include the creation of the data.gov.uk portal and the recent announcement back in November that “all departments will publish details of their spending over £25,000 for the last six months.” Now we have this:
On Open Enterprise blog.
Dimdim is a Web-based collaboration platform that I signed up for ages ago, but never quite got around to using. Looks like I may have missed my opportunity:
On Open Enterprise blog.
I met Matt Ridley once, when he was at The Economist, and I wrote a piece for him (I didn't repeat the experience because their fees at the time were extraordinarily ungenerous). He was certainly a pleasant chap in person, but I have rather mixed feelings about his work.
His early book "Genome" is brilliant - a clever promenade through our chromosomes, using the DNA and its features as a framework on which to hang various fascinating facts and figures. His latest work, alas, seems to have gone completely off the rails, as this take-down by George Monbiot indicates.
Despite that, Ridley is still capable of some valuable insights. Here's a section from a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, called "Humans: Why They Triumphed":the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.
In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book "The Nature of Technology," nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts.
This is, of course, a perfect description of the open source methodology: re-using and building on what has gone before, combining the collective intelligence of thousands of hackers around the world through a culture of sharing. Ridley's comment is another indication of why anything else just hasn't made the evolutionary jump.
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In the famous online argument between Linus and Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum during the very early days of Linux, one of the more memorable statements from the latter was the following:
I think co-ordinating 1000 prima donnas living all over the world will be as easy as herding cats.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Yesterday I had an interesting chat with Paul Clarke, an advisor to government departments on digital strategy, and a man with fingers in many interesting pies, about open government. The central issue we were ruminating upon was how to help those within government who want to open up, given the huge inertial forces operating against them.
On Open Enterprise blog.
As I've noted many a time, the UK government has been one of the most backward when it comes to adopting open source solutions.
The fact that over the last few years it has started to make vague noises about doing so shows more that it's realised it looks pretty dumb compared to other governments as a consequence, not that it's serious about things. Indeed, it's still the case that closed-source software dominates government procurement. A leaked copy of the government's IT strategy has the following imaginative attempt to explain why that is...
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the central questions this blog tries to answer is to what extent the principles behind open source software can be applied to other fields. One issue that emerges is whether or not the area in question possesses something like underlying source code: if it does, then the open source techniques can generally be applied; if it doesn't, it's much harder (not suprisingly, really.)
One area that seems ripe for open source ideas is architecture, which does indeed possess something close to source code with its blueprints. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see things like this:You are about to witness a quantum leap in design and accessibility of housing in developing countries. The event is the birth of an open source on the web that offers professional designs for affordable, durable, modular and climate-specific houses. The designs are brought in by architects from all over the world and are continually under construction in search of the solutions most suitable to the needs and preferences of the local buyers and future owners of these houses.
We want to make knowledge and creativity in housing accessible to a large group of people and are looking for architects to bring in new ideas. Welcome to Open Source House.
Crucially, the Open Source House project is collaborative, actively soliciting "code" from external contributors:Discover the OS House platform while becoming an active member
Once inside you'll rapidly get familiar with the intuitive environment we have set for you. By clicking through our 100% sustainable architecture content you'll find ready-to-download designs and information created during our workshops and creative sessions.
This content is our open knowledge database. To keep it growing os-house's platform is currently open to receive any material you have. So, if you have any sketch ideas, drawings or vision on sustainable housing, upload it and share it.
The extent to which these other aspects of open source software practice are implemented is probably a good rough guide as to whether the larger ideas are applicable or not.
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"How to Fix Capitalism" is an insanely ambitious post that ranges over, well, just about everything concerned with business and all it touches. The following proposals give some hint of its deep wisdom:# Abolish patents. They have not been proven to speed progress: the evidence seems to be to the contrary. They definitely increase costs, are an inefficient way of funding R & D and allow oligopolists to block competition.
# Reduce the copyright term to the optimal length suggested by research of about 15 years. It ought to be obvious that works produced in the reign of Queen Victoria should not be in copyright in the 21st century.
# Exclude works distributed with DRM from copyright to ensure that copyright works do fall into the public domain when the copyright expires.
# Reduce the copyright term on computer software to two years, and make copyright contingent on disclosing source code (so others can alter the software when it comes out of copyright).
This section also warmed the cockles of my collaborative heart:by telling people that they are expected to be selfish, they become more selfish. Economics students become more selfish because they are repeatedly taught to expect that people are rational and selfish: the association between the two can only strengthen the effect.
Society is permeated, especially in business, politics and economics, with the idea that is people pursue their own interests, this will automatically lead to the best outcome, and that, therefore, people should be selfish. This cannot be fixed by endless incentives to align interests: life and business is too complex for that to work. A free market is not a substitute for integrity.
Just share it...
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This is incredibly important:On 27 January 2009, one of us — Gowers — used his blog to announce an unusual experiment. The Polymath Project had a conventional scientific goal: to attack an unsolved problem in mathematics. But it also had the more ambitious goal of doing mathematical research in a new way. Inspired by open-source enterprises such as Linux and Wikipedia, it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open collaboration. Anyone in the world could follow along and, if they wished, make a contribution. The blogs and wiki functioned as a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid-fire exchange and improvement of ideas.
The collaboration achieved far more than Gowers expected, and showcases what we think will be a powerful force in scientific discovery — the collaboration of many minds through the Internet.
You can read the details of what happened - and it's inspiring stuff - in the article. But as well as flagging up this important achievement, I wanted to point to some interesting points it makes:The process raises questions about authorship: it is difficult to set a hard-and-fast bar for authorship without causing contention or discouraging participation. What credit should be given to contributors with just a single insightful contribution, or to a contributor who is prolific but not insightful? As a provisional solution, the project is signing papers with a group pseudonym, 'DHJ Polymath', and a link to the full working record. One advantage of Polymath-style collaborations is that because all contributions are out in the open, it is transparent what any given person contributed. If it is necessary to assess the achievements of a Polymath contributor, then this may be done primarily through letters of recommendation, as is done already in particle physics, where papers can have hundreds of authors.
The project also raises questions about preservation. The main working record of the Polymath Project is spread across two blogs and a wiki, leaving it vulnerable should any of those sites disappear. In 2007, the US Library of Congress implemented a programme to preserve blogs by people in the legal profession; a similar but broader programme is needed to preserve research blogs and wikis.
These two points are also relevant to free software and other open endeavours. So far, attribution hasn't really been a problem, since everyone who contributes is acknowledged - for example through the discussions around the code. Similarly, preservation is dealt with through the tools for source code management and the discussion lists. But there are crucial questions of long-term preservation - not least for historical purposes - which are not really being addressed, even by the longest-established open projects like GNU.
For example, when I wrote Rebel Code, I often found it hard to track down the original sources for early discussions. Some of them have probably gone for ever, which is tragic. Maybe more thought needs to be given - not least by central repositories and libraries - about how important intellectual moments that have been achieved collaboratively are preserved for posterity to look at and learn from.
Talking of which, the article quoted above has this to say on that subject:The Polymath process could potentially be applied to even the biggest open problems, such as the million-dollar prize problems of the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although the collaborative model might deter some people who hope to keep all the credit for themselves, others could see it as their best chance of being involved in the solution of a famous problem.
Outside mathematics, open-source approaches have only slowly been adopted by scientists. One area in which they are being used is synthetic biology. DNA for the design of living organisms is specified digitally and uploaded to an online repository such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Other groups may use those designs in their laboratories and, if they wish, contribute improved designs back to the registry. The registry contains more than 3,200 parts, deposited by more than 100 groups. Discoveries have led to many scientific papers, including a 2008 study showing that most parts are not primitive but rather build on simpler parts (J. Peccoud et al. PLoS ONE 3, e2671; 2008). Open-source biology and open-source mathematics thus both show how science can be done using a gradual aggregation of insights from people with diverse expertise.
Similar open-source techniques could be applied in fields such as theoretical physics and computer science, where the raw materials are informational and can be freely shared online. The application of open-source techniques to experimental work is more constrained, because control of experimental equipment is often difficult to share. But open sharing of experimental data does at least allow open data analysis. The widespread adoption of such open-source techniques will require significant cultural changes in science, as well as the development of new online tools. We believe that this will lead to the widespread use of mass collaboration in many fields of science, and that mass collaboration will extend the limits of human problem-solving ability.
What's exciting about this - aside from the prospect of openness spreading to all these other areas - is that there's a huge opportunity for the open source community to start, er, collaborating with the scientific one in producing these new kinds of tools that currently don't exist and are unlikely to be produced by conventional software houses (since spontaneously collaborative communities can't actually pay for anything). I can't wait.
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I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, one of the greatest achievements of sharing; I also enjoy wandering around Flickr, although its lack of over-arching organisation makes that hard to do. Maybe this is perfect solution: Fotopedia, "the first collaborative photo encyclopedia", which uses text from Wikipedia, but only to provide what amount to extended captions for the pix, which are generally very attractive.
It's not the first to do this - VisWiki has been around for some time - but Fotopedia seems to take a much more visual approach, which I find very pleasing, because it creates more than just a highly-illustrated version of Wikipedia. Articles and their pix are a little thin on the ground at the moment, but with any luck, that won't be the case for long once word gets out - and pictures start pouring in.
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As long-suffering readers of this blog will have noticed, I rather like the concept of the commons. As well as being good in itself, it also provides a way of linking many disparate fields - software, content, data, knowledge, fisheries, forests, oceans, the atmosphere. That's not really surprising, since the thing these all have in, er, common is that we share them, and the commons offers a model for sharing without destroying.
It's a viewpoint that's becoming increasingly widely shared (sorry, these words just keep popping up), and now we have this splendid manifesto that is specifically about all the commons I mentioned above, and how we need to change our attitudes to them:Humankind is suffering from an unprecedented campaign of privatization and commodification of the most basic elements of life: nature, culture, human work and knowledge itself. In countless arenas, businesses are claiming our shared inheritance - sciences, creative works, water, the atmosphere, health, education, genetic diversity, even living creatures - as private property. A compulsive quest for short-term financial gain is sacrificing the prosperity of all and the stability of the Earth itself.
The dismal consequences of market enclosures can be seen in our declining ecosystems: the erosion of soil and biodiversity, global climate change, reduction of food sovereingty. Agressive intellectual property politics harness those suffering from neglected deseases or who can't purchase patented medicines, reduce cultural diversity, limit access to knowledge and education, and promote a global consumerist culture.
...
a new vision of society is arising - one that honors human rights, democratic participation, inclusion and cooperation. People are discovering that alternatives and commons-based approaches offer practical solutions for protecting water and rivers, agricultural soils, seeds, knowledge, sciences, forest, oceans, wind, money, communication and online collaborations, culture, music and other arts, open technologies, free software, public services of education, health or sanitization, biodiversity and the wisdom of traditional knowledges.
The manifesto has a very concrete, practical aim alongside the more general one of raising awareness of the commons:The signers of this Manifesto, launched at the World Social Forum of 2009, call upon all citizens and organizations to commit themselves to recovering the Earth and humanity's shared inheritance and future creations. Let us demonstrate how commons-based management - participatory, collaborative and transparent - offers the best hope for building a world that is sustainable, fair and life-giving.
This Manifesto calls upon all citizens of the world to deepen the notion of the commons and to share the diverse approaches and experiences that it honors. In our many different ways, let us mobilize to reclaim the commons, organize their de-privatization and get them off markets, and strengthen our individual initiatives by joining together in this urgent, shared mission.
I particularly liked the framing of commons-based management as "participatory, collaborative and transparent", since this applies perfectly to open source, open content, and all the other things this blog has been covering.
I've signed the manifesto, and I urge you to do so and spread - no, share - the news about this important initiative.
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I'd come across TiddlyWiki before, but never really got what it was about....
On Open Enterprise blog.
This review of "Burning the Ships" is perhaps the most clueless thing I've ever read on Ars Technica:
Phelps' point throughout is that such deals were possible thanks to Microsoft's IP, which gave it something valuable to offer in cross-licensing agreements that brought companies together as partners, not just as totally independent rivals. That's the way it has to be for companies today; technology has grown so complex that a "fortress mentality culture and go-it-alone market strategy" simply won't work anymore. Collaboration and partnership are the new name of the game, and IP is the glue that seals such deals.
That's like saying giving people manacles is providing them with some nice bling. The point is they are manacles - just like intellectual monopolies are manacles. They are only valuable in the eyes of slave traders; any civilised society would ban them.
To call this "collaboration" is a perversion of language: it's about *enslavement*, pure and simple. It's just that Microsoft has become subtler.
Two years ago, the virtual world Second Life was everywhere, as pundits and press alike rushed to proclaim it as the Next Big Digital Thing. Inevitably, the backlash began soon afterwards. The company behind it, Linden Lab, lost focus and fans; key staff left. Finally, last March, Second Life's CEO, creator and visionary, Philip Rosedale, announced that he was taking on the role of chairman of the board, and bringing in fresh leadership. But against an increasingly dismal background, who would want to step into his shoes?
From the Guardian.
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It's no surprise that textbooks are being radically re-invented - after all, in the past they have been hideously expensive, which means that they were an obstacle to learning rather than the contrary. Nonetheless, it's heartening to see more and more ventures attempt to do textbooks properly. Here's another:CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in January 2007. Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.
As this makes clear, crucial elements include Net-based collaboration to produce open content that is "adaptive" to students' and teachers' needs. This is clearly the future of textbooks, and any company still banking on selling dead content on dead trees is likely to end up just as moribund.
It's hard enough working out what collaboration might mean with words, but even it's even worse with images. This probably explains why there aren't that many sites out there exploring the idea. Happily, here's one that's just opened its virtual doors, and it looks promising:Drawings at Sketchory.com can be freely shared by keeping to this Creative Commons license (which includes commercial use but requires attribution, among other things) with the additional prerequisite that you don't share over 1000 sketches.
Below every sketch, you'll also find an embed code you can use. Please note we cannot promise to keep pics up forever, and may also remove certain images sometimes, or change images or image content (like the watermark).
What's really remarkable is the scale: there are currently *250,000* drawings on Sketchory. (Via Google Blogoscoped.)
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