Sharing Ideas about Open Philanthropy

As regular readers of this blog will know, for the last five years or so I have been tracking the diffusion of the ideas behind open source into other spheres. I'm particularly interested to see what does and does not translate easily to other domains.

Here's another application: open philanthropy. Although something called the Open Philanthropy Exchange has been around for ten years, I think this is something different, not least because people's understanding of openness and sharing have moved on enormously in that time:

# Open sharing of ideas in philanthropy serves us all as we seek to solve shared problems.

# We need a Freedom of Foundation and Nonprofit Information Act. These organizations are tax-privileged data repositories. As such, their tax privileges should be linked to the degree they openly share and contribute the information, data, and knowledge that they produce for the public good.

# Openness extends to the interoperability of data - ours and others. Efforts to open government reporting, data sharing from municipalities and states, and open access to public records on donations, nonprofit filings, and public funding sources are all in the best interest of solving social problems.

# Experimenting with openness will show us what works. The Sunlight Foundation's recent "datajams" and Sunlight Live coverage of the health care reform discussions are a great working example of what information matters to whom, about what, and when.

# The ability and expectations of open-ness are changing. These new expectations will change what transparency really looks like and how it works (Here's one version - the Cycle of Transparency). Philanthropy can guide this or react to it, but it can not ignore it.

# Open matters to communities.

There's also this important point:

One of the things we've learned from the open source software movement is that codes of professional practice matter - the early licensing efforts to create code that developers could access, use, improve, and share again are critical to how software development happens. We need similar codes of professional conduct and practice in philanthropy.

It's a work in progress, and it will be fascinating to see how it developers. Good luck to all concerned.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Openness: Purity of Essence

I wrote a piece for Linux Journal recently warning that Microsoft was beginning to hijack the meaning of the phrase "open source". But the problem is much bigger than this: the other opens face similar pressures, as Peter Murray-Rust notes.

In some ways it's even more serious for fledgling movements like open access and open data: there, the real meaning has barely been established, and so defending it is harder than for open source, which has had a well-defined definition for some time. Given the importance of labels, this is a matter that needs to be addressed with some urgency before "open access" and "open data" become little more than bland marketing terms.

OpenDocument Format: the Monograph

One of the great things about all things open, is that their documentation is nearly always freely available. A case in point is this monograph on ODF, which can be downloaded in its entirety, or chapter-by-chapter. It's all about choice.... (Via GotzeBlogged.)

Mapping Social Networks

Social networks lie at the heart of Web 2.0 - and of the opens. So it is surprising that more hasn't been done to analyse and map the ebb and flow of ideas and influence across these networks.

Here's an interesting solution for enterprises, called Trampoline. There are clear financial benefits for companies if they can understand better how the social networks work within (and without) their walls, so it's a good fit there too.

In a sense, all this stuff is obvious:

We humans spent 200,000 years evolving all kinds of social behaviour for accumulating, filtering and passing on information. We're really good at it. So good we don't even think about it most of the time. However the way we use email, instant messaging, file sharing and so on disrupts these instincts and stops them doing their job. This is why we waste so much time scanning through emails we're not interested in and searching for documents we need.

Trampoline's approach is so refreshingly obvious it seems radical. We've gone right back to the underlying social behaviour and created innovative software that harnesses human instincts instead of disabling them. We describe this process of mirroring social behaviour in software as "sociomimetics".

Trampoline's products leverage the combined intelligence of the whole network to manage and distribute information more efficiently. Individuals get the information they need, unrecognised expertise becomes visible, the enterprise increases the reuse and value of its knowledge assets.

Given the simplicity of the idea, it should be straighforward coming up with open source implementations. And there would be a double hit: a project that was interesting in itself, and also directly applicable to open source collaboration. (Via Vecosys.)

Open Source Jahrbuch 2006: Ja, Bitte

Although there's plenty written about free software and open source, there's relatively little in the form of books that try to offer a synoptic view. This makes the annual Open Source Jahrbuch, particularly valuable. As for 2004 and 2005, this year's is freely available as a PDF.

As you might expect, it is planned with a Germanic thoroughness, weighing in at 500 pages. As well as big names like Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig, it has a host of less well-known writers, who nonetheless have interesting things to say. I particularly liked the details of the famous Munich LiMux project, and the corresponding project in Vienna, WIENUX. Also good is the article on open source community building, which analyses several smaller projects.

I was pleased to see plenty of space given to both open content and open access. As readers of this blog have heard ad nauseam, there exists an important commonality between these opens, and it's gratifying to see open source's younger siblings getting some recognition here.

All-in-all, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best book on open source that has been published in the few years or so. Taken together, the whole series of Yearbooks form perhaps the most important collection of writings on open source and related areas to be found in any language.

Akkadian and the Opens

Any post that manages to link Akkadian with openness gets my cuneiform inscription.

Another View of the Opens

Here's a presentation by Jamais Cascio, a "foresight specialist", who despite his daft job title has put together quite a nice gentle trot through the opens. He gets most of it right, aside from the egregious clanger of calling Linux an operating system....

The Opens.mp3

If you really have absolutely nothing better to do, you could always listen to me wittering on about the opens at the British Computer Society a couple of weeks back. You can even read the book of the mp3 at the same, for double delight.

A Triptych of Science Opens

Here's a man after my own heart:

I've never had an idea that couldn't be improved by sharing it with as many people as possible -- and I don't think anyone else has, either. That's why I have become interested in the various "Open" movements making increasing inroads into the practice of modern science. Here I will try to give a brief introduction to Open Access to research literature; in the second instalment I will look at ways in which the same concept of "openness" is being extended to encompass data as well as publications, and beyond that, what a fully Open practice of science might look like.

(Via Open Access News.)

An (Open) Source of Endorphins

Somewhat belatedly, scientists are localising the physical basis for the kind of altruism that lies at the heart of the opens:

They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain's reward centre—the mesolimbic pathway, to give it its proper name—responsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.

Via Technocrat.

The Language of the Commons

Although we may have a general idea of what a commons is - not least the kind we stroll on - it's a difficult concept to pin down. So this essay on the language of the commons provides some food for thought.

It also has a nice quotation from another interesting piece, from Worldchanging, which begins:

Chris Sanderson and his colleagues at the Future Laboratory believe we're seeing a fundamental shift in how people think about the things they buy. I stopped by their London offices to find out what they're seeing and predicting.

"Overconsumption is no longer a signal of success," he says, sitting at a table strewn with proofsheets for the Future Labs house magazine, Viewpoints. Instead of conspicuous consumption, he says, a "conspicuous abstention" is emerging. People want less noise in their lives. They want design whose form serves function beautifully. They want homes with a spare, modern aesthetic and the health and sustainability benefits of green building. They're almost proudly adopting a "make do and mend, waste not want not mentality." Most of all, they're hungry for a connection between the things they buy and the lives they want to be leading -- and recognizing that sometimes the best thing to buy is, simply, nothing.

This clearly has fascinating correspondences with the way and the why all the opens operate.

On the Categorisation of Peer Production

Kant would have loved this one.

Here's a remarkable wiki from the P2P Foundation that seeks to explore and categorise the efflorescence of peer production that's going on these days. It's remarkable for its range, and for the fact that it includes just about every key word and concept used in this blog - with the exception of "open genomics" - complete with links to further wiki pages on topics like the Genome Commons. Amazing. (Via On The Commons.)

Sweet News for Sweden - But Not Only

A programme to promote open access in Sweden might seem of interest only to Swedes (or those who like to read Swedish academic papers), but it's actually good for everyone. Because, like open source, the more open access there is in the world, the greater the momentum behind the idea, and the more open acess there is.

As I've pointed out before, the opens are truly additive. Whereas traditional competition is just winner takes all, and losers get nothing, open endeavours are both winner takes all and everyone's a winner.

Microsoft's Next Desperation?

One indication of Microsoft's inability to handle the threat of the free software model is that fact that it keeps changing its strategy.

Back in 1999, it tried to show that Windows was more powerful than comparable GNU/Linux systems. It commissioned some research from a company called Mindcraft, which showed that Windows was indeed faster for many tasks. There were bitter arguments about the validity of these tests and their results, and several re-runs as each side tried to bolster its own position.

But what is interesting about this episode is that the weaknesses that were exposed in the GNU/Linux system were simply fed into the development process and fixed in the next release. This indicates one of the great strengths of open source. Solving problems is just a matter of skill; what is hard is pinning them down in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft did the Linux community a huge favour by spending lots of money finding the weak areas of its rival, which were then fixed.

Since GNU/Linux was soon manifestly as good as Windows in terms of performance, Microsoft was forced to change tack. In June 2001, Steve Ballmer famously told the Chicago Sun-Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". However, the business world was clearly less impressed by Ballmer's verbal tantrums than the his sales teams, and the outburst backfired badly. It merely showed Microsoft to be running scared.

More recently, the company has apparently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the free software world - a recognition of the fact that its customers are using it. But clearly, in closed rooms around the company, it is still searching desperately for something it can against open source.

One emerging tack was evident in a fascinating article that appeared in a magazine aimed at Microsoft Certified Professionals. In it, there was a glimpse into how the Microsoft world views the free software threat. Of particular note is the assertion that "Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D", and that "nobody in the Linux world" does anything comparable. The implication would seem to be that Microsoft is therefore a hotbed of creativity and innovation, whereas all free software can do is limp along with tired old tricks.

An extensive and thorough debunking of this assertion came from D C Parris in LXer. All the points he raises are good ones, but I'd like to focus on one in particular.

The statement that Microsoft is serious spending sums on research is true: you only have to look at Microsoft's Research division to see the wide range of work going on. Moreover, to Microsoft' credit, much of this work is made freely available in the form of published papers.

But the second part of the argument - that open source companies taken together spend nowhere near as much as Microsoft - is specious. The whole point about free software is that it represents the communal efforts of thousands of people around the world, most of whom receive no remuneration for their work. Indeed, money probably couldn't even buy the kind of obsessive attention to detail they routinely provide: it comes from passion not payment.

The new argument that the quotation from the above article is putting about comes down to this: that something given freely is worth nothing. In a way, this is the fundamental error that those who do not understand the open world make. In fact, the issue is much larger, and goes to the root of most of the key problems facing the world today. Which is why the "opens" - open source, open genomics, open content and all the cognate approaches - are so crucial: they lie at the heart of solving those same problems.

Publish and Be Damned!

The wilful misunderstanding of Google Books by traditional publishers is truly sad to see. They continue to propagate the idea that Google is somehow going to make the entire text of their titles available, whereas in fact it simply wants to index that text, and make snippets available in its search results.

As a an author I welcome this; nothing makes me happier than see that a search for the phrase "digital code" at Google Books brings up my own title as the top hit. The fact that anyone can dip into the book can only increase sales (assuming the book is worth reading, at least). Yes, it might be possible for a gang of conspirators to obtain scans of the entire book if they had enough members and enough time to waste doing so. But somehow, I think it would be easier to buy the book.

Of course, what is really going on here is a battle for control - as is always the case with open technologies. The old-style publishers are fighting a losing battle against new technologies (and open content) by being as obstructive as possible. Instead, they should be spending their energies working out new business models that let them harness the Internet and search engines to make their books richer and more available to readers.

They are bound to lose: the Internet will continue to add information until it is "good enough" for any given use. This may take time, and the mechanisms for doing so still need some work (just look at Wikipedia), but the amount of useful information is only going in one direction. Traditional publishers will cling on to the few titles that offer something beyond this, but the general public will have learned to turn increasingly to online information that is freely available. More importantly, they will come to expect that free information will be there as a matter of course, and will unlearn the habit of buying expensive stuff printed on dead trees.

It is this dynamic that is driving all of the "opens" - open source, open access, open genomics. The availability of free stuff that slowly but inexorably gets better means that the paid stuff will always be superseded at some point. It happened with the human genome data, when the material made available by the public consortium matched that of Celera's subscription service, which ultimately became irrelevant. It is happening with open source, as GNU/Linux is being swapped in at every level, replacing expensive Unix and Microsoft Windows systems. And it will happen with open content.

...and Went Down to the Sea

"Open": it's such a small word (and a strange one at that: stare at it long enough and it begins to look like something from another tongue). It's much used, and very abused these days. But that's to be expected, since it's fast becoming where so many other currents and trends are heading. Everyone, it seems, wants to be open.

That's what these pages are all about: how "openness" - as manifested in open source, open genomics, open content and all the other opens – lies at the heart of most of what's interesting in technology today. And not only. Just as technology is making its presence felt in so many other areas of life, so the open movements and their philosophies are feeding through there, too.