BookBlog

Copynight

The night after the Grokster case was argued in the Supreme Court, a batch of Austinites gathered in the Club de Ville courtyart to sip drinks and chitchat about digital rights.

Don Turnbull and David Nunez of EFF-Austin were there at Club de Ville, as were Clay, who invited us, Clay's housemate Austin, and Cody Koeninger, who wrote in with his name in the comments, after I embarrassingly forgot it.

Copynight is basically a standalone meetup for copyfighters. The instigators are Ren Bucholz and David Alpert, also of Ipaction (IPAC), the nascent digital rights fundraising and activist group.

Copynights have also sprung up in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Washington DC, Raleigh, Chicago, Toronto, and Providence.

We speculated about what will happen if Grokster loses. Will that simply encourage the spread of the "darknet" -- encrypted networks that are harder to trace?Is technology progress inevitable, even if the technology is illegal? Is the legal prohibition of filesharing doomed to suffer the same fate as the prohibition against alcohol?

(I think it might be inevitable globally, but that doesn't mean that the US will remain a leader if we use laws to slow progress. My favorite example is the Ottoman empire which outlawed unlicensed printing presses. At the height of the scientific revolution in Europe, there were 17 printing presses in the entire Ottoman empire. Progress happed elsewhere, but it passed the Ottomans by because they used their legal system to stifle the technology within their borders.)

We connected the copyfight to the effort to Save Municipal Wireless -- the fight against the SBC-fueled bill to outlaw city-supported high-speed internet. In both cases, an old and wealthy industry (movies and music; telephone and cable) is trying to outlaw the spread of new technology that puts their old business model at risk.

And -- hopefully most important -- we brainstormed about things we could do.

• keep meeting, and build a community of people who care about the issue
  
• teach about digital rights in high schools
  
• meet with our congresscritters about IP issues
  
• spread the word about alternative copyright and distribution to the indy community in Austin

Hopefully, Ren and David will be helping to spread the good ideas around.

In a side note about the tools, it's gratifying to see standalone "meetup" software. Copyfight doesn't have the fancy reminder and venue selection system that meetup has, but they do have a clickable map to find your meetup, and tools to organize a new one. The map is a nice touch -- you can see little groups of copyfighters lighting up the continent.

The web's "long tail" boosts library use

The Dallas Morning News reports that library circulation has increased since the internet has become mainstream

In Dallas, library circulation – the number of books, magazines or other material checked out – has increased 59 percent from 1998 to 2004, and similar increases have been seen at libraries nationwide...

"Through the Internet, people are finding out that specific items are available that 20 years ago they never would have known about," said Dale McNeill, public service administrator for the Dallas library system. "Then they come to the library to find them."

Geogreen in Texas

Several of the rural legislators in both parties who support municipal wireless for their districts and for the bandwidth-starved towns of rural Texas are among the group of sponsors of a clutch of bills proposing to increase the state's renewable energy standard.

The website of Texas Impact (I love Google) explains the story behind the Texas renewable energy bills.

In 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush signed historic Texas legislation establishing the nation's first "renewable power standard" or RPS. The law set goals for how much of Texans' electricity would come from renewable sources like wind and solar power. Texas has the best potential for renewable energy of any state. The 1999 law set a modest goal of three percent by 2009, meaning that by 2009, three percent of Texas electricity would come from renewables.

Texas is likely to reach the 2009 standard this year. And rural Texas stands to gain from the jobs provided by increasing renewables, mostly wind power. So several legislators are proposing increasing the renewable targets:

• SB 533 by Sen. Fraser and HB1671 by Rep. Hunter: 5,880 MW by 2015 ( 4.2% of state total)

• SB 836 by Sen. Duncan and HB1798 by Rep. Swinford: 10,880 MW by 2015 ( 7.9% of state total)

• SB1075 by Sen. Zaffirini and HB 2692 by Rep. Gallego: 20% of state total by 2020
  

Environmental advocates, including Texas Impact and the Union of Concerned Scientists are encouraging Texas to seek the higher 20% standard, which will result in the greatest increase in jobs and decrease in contribution to global warming.

The Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association is seeking 10% by 2015 because of concerns about building transmission for the amount of power in the next decade.

Anybody with domain expertise is most welcome to comment on the merits of the different goals. Is it the case that more is better? Is there a practical limit with how fast we can move?

Increasing renewables isn't just a tree-lover's dream. It's also one of the best things the US can to increase national security -- what Friedman calls the geogreen strategy. The Wahhabi think tanks that fuel Islamic fanaticism are funded by the Saudi government, which we subsidize with our oil dollars. Just a little less profit margin to the Saudis, and they reduce their exports of terrorism.

It seems like basic supply and demand economics. Starting more mideast wars increases oil prices and increases the supply of anti-American zealots. Increasing consumption of renewable energy and using less oil reduces the supply of anti-American zealots. Plan B sounds better to me.

p.s.

According to a market research report released earler this month by Clean Edge, Inc. solar, wind, and fuel cells are poised to grow from a $12.9 billion industry today to $92 billion by 2013.

The total US energy market was $350 billion in 2002, so clean energy has a total market share of under 4% (not counting increases in oil prices). A better way to measure market share would be in units of energy consumption, not dollars, but CleanEdge doesn't publish units.

According to the US Dep't of Energy cited on this vendor's page overall US energy consumption is growing at 2.2% a year. Taking out my trusty napkin, if you run CleanEdge's 30% growth rate on units, the US gets to 35% market share by 2013, which is over the tipping point for the mainstreaming of new technology. But is it fast enough to save civilization from global warming?

The hidden purpose of online petitions

Online organizing sites of all political stripes often include petitions to sign.

What's bizarre is that these petitions are sometimes posted at the same time that there is a live bill making its way through the legislature.

If that's the case, why would a constituent want to sign a petition, instead of contacting their representative directly?

The reason is that the organizing organization is primarily interested in capturing your email address to re-use. In some cases, the organization includes a privacy policy, telling you that you've just signed up for a mailing list. In other cases, such as the online appraisal petition, there is no privacy policy posted.

Since the early days of internet commerce, many consumers have gotten justifiably wary of contests, coupons, and other excuses to get signed up for an endless flow of spam.

Online organizing is in an earlier stage, and citizens are probably more trusting of the intentions of groups who are helping them take action.

The message for citizens is to be skeptical of petitions that don't have privacy policies, and to contact your representative directly, instead of signing a petition.

The message to advocacy organizations is to be honest. If you're giving citizens the opportunity to stay informed by joining a mailing list, say so upfront.

The death of the scoop

One of the hallmarks of traditional journalistic culture is the race for the "scoop" -- beating competitors in a race to cover a "big" story.

This meta-story makes several assumptions. Fellow journalists are competitors. One's job is to win against them. Sharing information is against the rules of the game.

When blogs cover news, the assumptions are different. Early reporting on the big Texas House telecom bill involves bloggers sharing information, puzzling out the intricacies of a debate with nearly 40 amendments, and the meaning of the bill that came out of the sausage machine.

The enemy isn't other bloggers -- it's the indifference of the mainstream media to stories that are less dramatic than an oil refinery explosion. The Statesman covered the telecom story. The Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle apparently didn't [correction: the Houston Chronicle picked up the AP story, and the Dallas News had a story on the bill's passage by Vikas Bajaj].

In a world of online peer production, facts aren't the scarce resource. Attention is the scarce resource. We're not limited by the front page, news-hour spatial constraint where an oil refinery explosion crowds out other news. We're limited by social dynamics that focus attention on the day's cause celebre.

The scarce resource is attention. Collaboration multiplies links and attracts attention. Thus bloggers swarm to assemble the facts.

Activist technology and tactics

The technology brainstorming by the Politology blog has some interesting implications for connections between political tactics and social software. The next few posts explore the connections.

Web politics and org structure

The Politology post suggested that political activists adopt the tools typically used by open source projects to manage large projects with decentralized contributions.

The article suggests:

A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while - bugzilla; mantis - but they're so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can

1. Identify an objective
2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
4. Track progress and make reports It's similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.

This suggestion raises questions about the organizational processes for using these tools effectively. Open source projects use various different organizational structures for managing releases and maintaining quality.

A bugtracking tool alone doesn't drive an open source project, and an action tool alone won't drive a campaign. The tools enable large-scale, effective collaboration, but they don't cause the collaboration -- leadership and organizational processes do.

Similarly, the politology article calls for:

A better "volunteer tracking" system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.

There have been a number of these volunteer markets already -- does anyone know how effective they are? Do any of them have critical mass in a domain area? Any metrics about successful matches made?

Since people engage in political action as part of broader motivations for affiliation and purpose, one might think that a "volunteer market" might be most effective in the context of a broader social network -- either centralized by an organization like MoveOn, or decentralized like a network of blogs. Or perhaps, as part of overall flea market like Craig's List, where you can find volunteer opportunities along with apartments, jobs and lovers.

Yochai Benkler's classic "Coase's Penguin" theorizes that "peer production" will arise where there is a vast supply of decentralized skills, low transaction costs, and low communication costs. It stands to reason that these dynamics will come into play with political action as well.

The "issue tracking" and "volunteer tracking" tools described in the article are part of the toolset used to co-ordinate large peer-production projects.

And yet. The "invisible hand" of Adam Smith's capitalist free market allocates resources effectively in complex societies. Despite the "invisible hand" there are many business schools that teach people how to set up and succeed at a capitalist enterprise.

Similarly, the "peer organizing" enabled by cheap coordination requires its own set of learnable organizing practices. Web-based organizing tools have promise, but they require human organizing to make them effective, just like any other domain.

Remix politics

The weblog and syndication model enables a "remix culture" -- information is readily available, freely discoverable, and easily recombined.

Two of the politology suggestions for activist technology imply this model, and can be extended further along these lines.

Politology suggests:

A congress tracking system: There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson's complete vote history.

Yes and... this suggestion doesn't go quite far enough. It would be even more valuable for bills to have "permalinks", and to create RSS feeds with bill updates.

For readers who aren't steeped in weblog tech: blog entries each have "permalinks" -- stable web addresses that enable the post to be referred to, commented on from another site, and discoverable later on with search engines. Weblogs typically provide RSS feeds that enable readers to subscribe to a blog. Smarter use of syndication/aggregation technology enables items to be discovered and recombined with finer-grained control

So, in addition to a central discussion, weblog remix tools would enable any number of decentralized discussions, that could in turn be aggregated and connected.

The politology post goes further in this direction with its suggestion for an "action aggregator.

Right now we're being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it's like they are competing with each other. It's nonsense - a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

This isn't hard at all, and could be done easily with today's technology. Organizations providing action alerts, like Consumers Union and EFF (to mention a few I work with), could create an action alert feed. Then, individual activists could subscribe to the specific feeds, instead of being inundated with action email.

These models fit nicely with patterns of networked action -- people learn and are influenced in groups that are geographically or topically close to them, and then band together to have a greater and more far-reaching impact.

Dewey award - thanks and puzzlement

Like Chip, my friend and co-organizer of SaveMuniWireless.org I was one of ten nominees for the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award, which is given out annually at the SXSW festival. This year's winner was Roger Steele, for his work at Manchaca Elementary School.

The award nomination was gratifying but rather puzzling. I received a cryptic email message explaining to come to a room at SXSW at 4pm on Monday. The biographical information they had was partial and not-quite-correct. There was moving memorial testimony about Dewey Winburne, and nominees were called up to receive plaques.

I am glad that Austin makes the effort to find and reward people who are doing community service. People like Chip embody an ethic of community service that is distinctive and good about Austin.

If the group organizing the awards wants to strengthen community service in Austin, perhaps they could organize get-togethers where current and past nominees can meet, network, and find opportunities to bolster their work.

Perhaps there could be a website to highlight community projects on an ongoing basis. If there are common interests, perhaps a Yahoo group or forum could provide ongoing communication.

I have no idea who organized the awards, so I'm not even sure where to forward these suggestions.

Tools for advanced net activism

Politology has a great post brainstorming about activist tools that should exist but don't yet.

• A congress tracking system: Thomas sucks. There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson's complete vote history.
• A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while - bugzilla; mantis - but they're so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can
  1. Identify an objective
  2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
  3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
  4. Track progress and make reports It's similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.
• A better "volunteer tracking" system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.
• An action aggregator: Right now we're being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it's like they are competing with each other. It's nonsense - a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

Tools for basic net activism

The SaveMuniWireless.org project has three main pieces:

* a public blog (SaveMuniWireless.org) - for reporting news, posting action alerts, posting municipal network profiles, and linking to reports. The blog becomes the source of news and background research.
* an action mailing list - for busy people to get action updates
* a coordinator mailing list -- a high traffic list for people coordinating nuts and bolts like photocopies of information packets
* a private wiki, for planners coordinating fact sheets, gathering information about projects around the state, building materials for the press.

I also use the Technorati blog search engine to find out who's linking to us and discover the extended conversation.

This basic set of tools is used again and again in different projects. Today, there are three separate pieces. We're using Movable Type for the blog, Mailman for the mailing list, and Socialtext for the wiki.

It would be great to have a packaged toolset, so people who were less tech-savvy than Chip and me could set things up.

And would be great to have closer integration between the tools
* publish content from the wiki to the blog
* single signin among the private tools
* single search among the public tools

SXSW: distributed social networks

The SXSW panel was called "decentralized social networks". The title was a bit of a misnomer -- I wish there had been a panel on distributed social networks.

The presentations by danah boyd and Jonas Luster covered the well-known flaws of centralized social networks such as Friendster and Orkut -- their awkwardness, explicitness, and lack of privacy.

These networks were the rage last year, but time has already proven what we guessed -- without a business purpose like LinkedIn, or creative purpose like Flickr, social networks are a fad.

Tantek Celik discussed XFN, a relationship notation that really is decentralized, but bears the drawbacks of explicitness and lack of tool support.

Joyce Park had a hypothesis that the explicit definition of relationships is more appealing to men than women. Joyce speculates that women are more reliant on "little white lies", and more hesitant to explicitly categorize their friendships. (this hypothesis doesn't fit set of men and women I know, including men who tell white lies and women who manage social networks like collectibles).

Rather than beating up on Orkut, Friendster, and males for for being overly explicit, I'd rather see a discussion of really distributed social networks, where relationships are assembled incrementally and often implicitly.

* the patterns of conversation and interaction that are revealed by the social network analysis of collaboration through blog links, blog comments, wiki authorship, and other public trails
* comparing these patterns to the patterns in other discussion media such as mailing lists and usenet
* patterns of affiliation in creative networks such as Flickr and LastFM, where connections are draw with a combination of explicit invitation and implicite taste-sharing

Since mandatory explicitness is clearly a mismatch to realworld relationships, it would also be fascinating to:
* discuss of the social uses and time-series changes of subtler intimacy gradients in social networks like LiveJournal
* fast-forward a few years, and see whether and how the correlation of identity provided by IDCommons or a cousin has had any impact on cross-network social integration.

I must admit that I didn't stay all the way through the panel. I was impatient for the next-generation panel -- maybe next year.

Trust in online communities: people and machines

Two presentations at SXSW on trust and online communities could not have been more different.

At the panel Mary Hodder facilitated, on Social Software and Shades of Trust,, Ka-Ping Yee at Berkeley and Alex Russel of Informatica and described the perpetual alphabet soup of digital trust standards and projects, from the late lamented p3p, through Liberty, IDCommons, and others.

Trust was seen as a feature and a subsystem -- an engineering problem that could be overcome, someday, with the right combination of usability design, standards, and architectural decomposition. There wasn't a strong explanation for why the same technical conversation had been going on for a decade, with few signs of successful implementation in the real world.

The canonical examples of trust involved formal programs and features -- Ebay's reputation system, the formal privacy statements on web sites, the desire for single signon between community websites.

At the panel facilitated by Molly Steenson on How to Grow Online Community, Craig Newmark of Craig's list and Matt Haughey of Metafilter both talked about trust as a social issue. Craig talked about the Craig's list assumption that people are generally good, and about the processes they use when people stop being good, from unintentional misbehavior to criminal fraud and spam.

Matt talked about the social difficulties of introducing moderation for some discussions, and the challenge of determining the right lightness of touch. Both Craig and Matt noted that when a poster misbehaves, the first step is to speak with that person directly; reasoning solves the problem about half of the time.

Where the previous panel looked to Ebay's formal reputation system as the trust model, Craig used the metaphor of a flea market, which is a combination of transaction marketplace and place to socialize.

Both Craig and Matt apologized about the lightweight, uncomplicated, "first-generation" nature of their systems, lacking the sophisticated design and features of later-developed social software. Yet Craig's list is one of the most successful online ventures in the world, and MetaFilter has been a longstanding and highly successful online community, fostering 3d communities in different cities, friendships and marriages.

I can't help thinking that the social-first approach to online community is the right primary approach.

Dinosaurs and mammals at SXSW

Back to back conversations at an SXSW party last night:
* a multi-billion dollar content company can't figure out how to cost-justify digitizing its content and making it available to fans
* a small web hosting firm with lots of artist customers publishes a blog and RSS feeds full of content from artists who want to get out the word about their creations, like, say this ipod holder.

Mammals are scurrying around the dinosaurs' feet.

Who buys Skype and when

The Skype crew are innovating and popularizing digital voice applications.

This is an area where innovation has been waiting to happen for a long time. I hope they have a good runway before they get bought, so they have some time to keep innovating, before somebody pulls them into 18 month product cycles and the good developers leave.

Whoever buys Skype will have a large influence on the pace of innovation in the area. I hope that it's a company that has a vision for open, diverse voice communication apps, rather than a walled garden with incremental, closed services.

A forum is not a conversation

This morning I stopped by this online forum about terrorism and democracy, organized by conference that David Weinberger and Joi Ito are attending.

In the forum, a set of people with diverse nationalities (US, Europe, Middle East, Asia), talk to each other at an abstract level about big topics like "terrorism" and "democracy".

Individuals express their own philosophical background and favorite arguments in their own rhetorical language (socialist, anti-american, liberal, non-violent, pro-violent resistence, etc). There is some interesting comparision between tactics of violence and tacticts of non-violence. Yet, there is no moderation that I can see, and little social pressure to bring people talk to each other rather than past each other.

The people are not part of any organizational structure, and are not trying to create any action. There is no shared objective, so people can talk forever without reaching understanding, agreement or resolution.

It is exciting that the forum attracted such a geographically and philosophically diverse group. But without facilitation and the creation of shared purpose, this exercise in sustained mutual incomprehensive is quite frustrating.

Just like a room and a table don't create a meeting, a discussion forum does not create deliberative democracy. There may be methods that work to make this type of conversation productive. They weren't used in that forum.

Austin Lounge Lizards star in funny activist animation

Prescription for Change is a very funny take on a serious topic -- drug companies are regulated before they release a drug, but they aren't obligated to disclose nasty side effects after the drug is on the market.

The video features the Austin Lounge Lizards and Animation Farm of Austin. It was produced by my friend Kathy Mitchell of Consumer's Union, the parent organization of Consumer Reports magazine.

Horse race coverage

This LA times article describes a three-way tie for LA mayor. The article describes the polls, the levels of ethnic support, the ads, the ad strategies (should they go negative?), and some scandal in the incumbent's office.

Yet, the article says, "more than four in 10 likely voters say they do not know enough about Hertzberg [one of the challengers] to have a positive or negative impression of him." The article doesn't help in the slightest. It says little about the candidates' backgrounds, positions, and beliefs. It says little about the incumbent's achievements or lack thereof.

So, this article is about a poll, maybe that explains it. But a search on the name of one of the candidates reveals a similar lack of substance in other campaign stories. In one story, the candidates compete with rain. In another, they compete in the news with mudslides. The paper goes out of its way say that the candidates are less interesting than the weather.

Maybe elections in LA are purely tribal, maybe people are bored with the election, but the newspaper is part of the problem.

Department of Creepy

In which David Frum objects to gay marriage because it somehow abolishes

the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband's duties to his wife - while equally binding and equally supreme - are not the same as a wife's duties to her husband."

Frum's statement is illogical because the "duties" that he is talking about -- whatever they are -- aren't anywhere near the law. I am curious, and at the same me, very leery to know what he means by these things that he doesn't mention out loud. Is it:

* a husband's obligation under Jewish law to satisfy a wife sexually (true)
* a wife's duty to have dinner ready and the table set by 7pm?
* a wife's duty to submit humbly to corporal punishment?

I am not looking to the day when these duties are spelled out and somebody tries to put them into civil law.