Weekend Reading

Here are two online journals that may be of interest. Both, happily, are open access, so you can root around to your heart's content.

The first is the inaugural issue of the International Journal of the Commons. I have to declare a very tangential interest here in that they asked me to review a submitted paper: obviously my well-intentioned comments were devastating, since it's not included in the present issue...

The other journal is Innovations from MIT Press. This has an interesting mix of articles, including one by Cory Ondrejka on Second Life, and others on the Science Commons and Open-Sourcing Social Solutions.

Wikimedia Commons Hits Two Million Mark

Hooray for the commons:

Wikimedia Commons, the multilingual free-content media repository managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, reached the milestone of two million uploaded files on October 9, 2007, less than a year after it reached one million. This makes Wikimedia Commons the fastest growing large Wikimedia project. The rapid growth reflects the young age of the project, launched just over three years ago in September 2004. Since March 2007, Wikimedia Commons has routinely had over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is now not uncommon for over 5,000 files to be uploaded in a single day. The largest single-day figure so far has been the 9th of September 2007, when a huge 9719 files were uploaded in a mere 24 hours.

(Via DigitalKoans.)

Communia Communes with the Commons

Hopeful sign, here:

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network wants to place itself as the European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues to the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics including, but not limited, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works). The network will cover the whole geographical territory of the European Union as well as neighbouring and accessing countries; it will also build strategic relationships with third countries such as the United States, Brazil, etc, where similar policy discussion on the above topics ongoing.

The COMMUNIA project will base its 3-years long activity on a tight schedule of thematic workshops and conference (respectively, 3 and 1 per year) with the goal to maintain a strong link between all the participants and use face-to-face meetings as a source of material for the analytical and practical work of the project, including the production of a book; an academic journal; a "best practices" guide for European research and reference centres on the topics covered by COMMUNIA; a final strategic report containing policy guidelines that will help all the stakeholders - public and private, from the local to the European level - tacking the issues that the existence of a digital public domain have raised and will undoubtedly continue to raise.

The price? A million European bendy ones - and cheap at the price. (Via Creative Commons.)

Telling the Ordnance Survey to Get Lost

Ordnance Survey is trying to get Web 2.0 hip:

explore is a new beta application from Ordnance Survey, allowing you to create and share your routes with the world, and join in with ones that already exist. Find out more about explore.

As this is a new application we need your help to build up the content. Please submit your routes and make explore a useful and exciting tool for all our users.

So it wants to tap into user-generated content. Which would be fine, were it not for the fact it doesn't play fair: its maps, funded directly by taxpayers, and often drawing on information provided by local authorities, also funded by taxpayers, aren't made freely available to those self-same taxpayers (ever heard of open access, chaps?). Why should people contribute to an enclosed commons? This is our data: free it, and then we'll make it soar.

Bottom line: ignore this until the Ordnance Survey (and its masters in the UK Government that lay down how the service must operate) get a real clue. (Via Ogle Earth.)

The (Uncommon) Fedora Commons

When I first heard about Fedora Commons I naively assumed it had something to do with the Linux distro Fedora, but I was wrong:

Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.

Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.

Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.

Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.

So not only is Fedora an organisation - recently funded to the tune of $4.9 million by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation - aiming to create a commons of "intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage", but it is also a piece of code:

Institutions and organizations face increasing demands to deliver rich digital content. A scan of the web reveals complex multi-media content that combines text, images, audio, and video. Much of this content is produced dynamically through the use of servlet technology and distributed web services.

Delivery of rich content is possible through a variety of technologies. But, delivery is only one aspect of a suite of content management tasks. Content needs to be created, ingested, and stored. It needs to be aggregated and organized in collections. It must be described with metadata. It must be available for reuse and refactoring. And, finally, it must be preserved.

Without some form of standardization, the costs of such management tasks become prohibitive. Content managers find themselves jury-rigging tasks onto each new form of digital content. In the end, they are faced with a maze of specialized tools, repositories, formats, and services that must be upgraded and integrated over time.

Content managers need a flexible content repository system that allows them to uniformly store, manage, and deliver all their existing content and that will accommodate new forms that will inevitably arise in the future.

Fedora is an open source digital repository system that meets these challenges.

In fact, Fedora is nothing less than "Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture". So the name is logical - pity it's so confusing in the context of open source.

The Real Spectrum Commons

I have referred to radio spectrum as a commons several times in this blog. But there's a problem: since spectrum seems to be rivalrous - if I have it, you can't - this means that the threat of a tragedy of the commons has to be met by regulation. And that, as we see, is often unsatisfactory, not least because powerful companies usually get the lion's share.

But it seems - luckily - I was wrong about spectrum necessarily being rivalrous:

Software defined radio that is beginning to emerge from the labs into actual tests has the ability to render all spectrum management moot. Small wonder that the legal mandarins there have begun to sneer that open source SDR cannot be trusted.

In other words, when you make radio truly digital, it can be intelligent, and simply avoid the problem of commons over-use.

Firefox as Commons

Interesting post here from Mozilla's Mitchell Baker, which shows that she's beginning to regard Firefox as a commons:

Firefox generates an emotional response that is hard to imagine until you experience it. People trust Firefox. They love it. Many feel -- and rightly so -- that Firefox is part "theirs." That they are involved in creating Firefox and the Firefox phenomena, and in creating a better Internet. People who don't know that Firefox is open source love the results of open source -- the multiple languages, the extensions, the many ways people use the openness to enhance Firefox. People who don't know that Firefox is a public asset feel the results through the excitement of those who do know.

Firefox is created by a public process as a public asset. Participants are correct to feel that Firefox belongs to them.

Absolutely spot-on. But I had to smile at the following:

To start with, we want to create a part of online life that is explicitly NOT about someone getting rich. We want to promote all the other things in life that matter -- personal, social, educational and civic enrichment for massive numbers of people. Individual ability to participate and to control our own lives whether or not someone else gets rich through what we do. We all need a voice for this part of the Internet experience. The people involved with Mozilla are choosing to be this voice rather than to try to get rich.

I know that this may sound naive. But neither I nor the Mozilla project is that naive, and we are not stupid. We recognize that many of us are setting aside chances to make as much money as possible. We are choosing to do this because we want the Internet to be robust and useful even for activities that aren't making us rich.

Only in America do you need to explain why you prefer to make the world a better place rather than making yourself rich....

Moo Goes Sticky

Those irrepressible harvesters of the commons have added stickers to their range. All the wonderful features of Moo cards are there, including being able to pick and crop every image individually.

Open Source and Happiness

What has this got to do with open source and openness in general?

"Countries that have most closely followed the Anglo-Saxon, strongly market-led economic model show up as the least efficient," commented Nef's policy director, Andrew Simms.

"These findings question what the economy is there for. What is the point if we burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to make, buy and consume ever more stuff without noticeably benefiting our wellbeing?"

(Excercise left to reader).

Why Biofuels Are Bonkers, Part 3875

I knew biofuels were environmentally bad news, but it seems that they are even worse than I imagined:

Glub, glub. The plant consumes over a million kilos of corn per day. That’s good news for area farmers especially as the price has almost doubled due to high demand. The bad news is that our current agricultural system is petroleum-soaked. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, machinery, irrigation pumps, and grain transport all depend on the stuff. Sustainable Table reports that each acre of corn, just in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, requires 5.5 gallons of petroleum .

Glub, glub. The plant uses 275 tons of coal a day, trucked down from Wyoming. Five rail cars, powered by diesel engines, head east with the finished ethanol each day.

Shluurrp. The plant uses 600,000 gallons of water every day to produce 150,000 gallons of ethanol. This water figure doesn’t account for pumped irrigation water (requiring petroleum) during corn cultivation.

So, nominally bio-friendly biofuels actually require lots of concretely polluting petrol and coal in order to be manufactured. So, wouldn't it just be easier to spend a little more time working on electric cars, renewable energy, you know, all that boring old stuff that might actually mitigate things, instead of creating this Escheresque staircase of pointless energy transmutation?

The Commons of African Cuisine

Behold the African Cookbook Project:

whose goal is to archive African culinary writing and make it widely available on the continent and beyond. A database is being developed and copies of hundreds of cookbooks are already being catalogued at BETUMI: The African Culinary Network. Google has offered assistance in eventually digitizing some of the information.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Enclosing the Commons, 21st-Century Style

In an age where commons are rare and exotic beasts, "enclosing the commons" seems quaint rather than troubling. But in the modern context, this is what enclosure means:

Amateur photographer Chip Py was wandering around the newly developed downtown section of Silver Spring when he decided to snap a few pictures. He thought the building rooftops set against the blue sky made for a handsome image. A security guard promptly rushed out to tell him that he was not allowed to take pictures; the Peterson Companies, the developer of Ellsworth Street, prohibited it.

Welcome to the latest enclosure of the commons: privately controlled public streets. Even if streets may be nominally public, companies have few qualms about claiming them as private and bullying people into forfeiting their rights as citizens.

Great, Microsoft - But What About the Commons?

Photosynth is undoubtedly amazing. But this video indicates that it's even more powerful than previously suggested; specifically, it talks about using public pictures on Flickr to create not only detailed, three-dimensional images of the world, but also to use any tags they have to provide transferable metadata. In other words, it's a product of collective intelligence, that builds on the work of the many.

That's all well and good, but I do wonder whether Microsoft has given any thought to its responsibility to the commons it is making free with here....

Ecological Economics and the Commons

Heavy but important stuff here:

some resources should be part of the commons because their physical attributes mean that common ownership and democratic allocation will be more sustainable, just and efficient than private ownership and market allocation. Information, which will play a critical role in solving the serious ecological problems we currently face, is one of those resources. So too are most ecosystem services. The fact is that conventional markets based on private property rights do not work to solve the macro-allocation problem, which in recent decades has become far more important than the micro-allocation problem. Solving this problem instead requires a system based on common property rights and democratic decision making concerning the desirable provision of ecosystem services.

The Internet is a Commons...

...and these people are cutting down the trees.

Great piece; sad, sad story.

Defending the Street Tree

Another great commons under threat:

In towns and cities across the country, millions of other street trees are less lucky. Supersized lorries batter their crowns, utility companies dig up their roots, high-density developments squeeze them out, mobile-phone companies and CCTV operators demand they are trimmed back, water-main repairs shut off life-giving leaks, insurers claim they are causing building subsidence . . . and we, the public, sue councils when we trip on pavements made wonky by tree roots.

The Tragedy of the Bumblebee Commons

We don't often think of bumblebees as forming a commons, but there's a clear tragedy caused by selfish exploitation going on here:

Several UK bumblebee species are heading inexorably for extinction, scientists have claimed, part of a process caused by "pesticides and agricultural intensification" which could have a "devastating knock-on effect on agriculture".

Not so much flight of the bumblebee as plight of the bumblebee.

A Loony Idea

From his office in Nevada, entrepreneur Dennis Hope has spawned a multi-million-dollar property business selling plots of lunar real estate at $20 (£10) an acre.

Uh-huh.

These are "truly unowned lands", he says. "We're doing exactly what our forefathers did when they came to the New World from the European continent."

"Truly unowned" as in "truly, a commons owned collectively by the native American tribes that were living there for thousands of years"?

Sheesh, when will they learn?

Coastline as Commons

It's catching on:

Walkers are to be given the "right to roam" around the entire coastline of Britain, under government proposals.

...

Mr Miliband told the Independent on Sunday: "England's coastline is a national treasure. It should be the birthright of every citizen.

Tragedy of the Water Commons

Sigh.

Some of the world's major rivers are reaching crisis point because of dams, shipping, pollution and climate change, according to the environment group WWF.

Its report, World's Top 10 Rivers at Risk, says the river "crisis" rivals climate change in importance.