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"Foundations of Open" Australia 2020 local summit
Well, it’s over a week since I attended the Foundations of Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge local summit. For those outside Australia, in November last year Australia elected a new government after eleven years. One of the new government’s first initiatives was to announce a plan for a Australia 2020 summit. The summit proper is being held next week, with 1,000 attendees taking part. The whole thing is very encouraging of participation, and part of that includes the “local summits” by MPs. Senator Kate Lundy held hers with a focus on open source, open access and related issues. In 12 years, where might progressive and friendly government policy lead us? This summit was about putting heads together and dreaming big, then filling in the steps in between to try and make the ideal a reality.
Appropriately enough, Senator Lundy runs her own website using Joomla, and the summit co-chair Tom Worthington put up all the notes from the day into a Moodle course. (And I noticed while slides and things were being set up that Senator Lundy runs Ubuntu. Mad :D)
Anyway, for some reason I find the video files time out or something and won’t play. You can download them directly instead. The recordings are excellent – close up and very good sound. (The small sized files are quite decent quality, don’t feel obligated to download the large files.)
I particularly recommend
- Professor Lawrence Cram, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of ANU – Launch & keynote (video, 23min) – wide-ranging talk about his experience in the university/research sector and “foundations of openness” (academic freedom, open access, management of university reasearcher IP)
- Jeff Waugh – “Foundations of Open” (video, 43min) – “The Foundations of Open is a model for understanding the different aspects of openness in a digital age including standards, knowledge, governance, source code and the market.” [by the by, the James Burke ‘Connections’ clip he shows can also be found on Youtube]
- Pia Waugh – “Open Source as a public resource” (video, 43min) – “Specific ways we can better explore Open Source opportunities and innovations for business, government, broader social benefit and the Australian economy.”
- Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgill – “Open 2020 – Taking Advantage of FOSS” (video, 33min) – Public policy needs to guide business down a path that benefits society. Removing “structural impediments” (DMCA, software patents, trade secrets, “chilling effect” of lawsuits) to adoption of free software.
- Alan Smart, ASIBA – “Spatial potential” (video, 30min) – “Geospatial information needs to be open so that Australian businesses can add value, innovate and commercialise in order to be globally competitive.” (If you ever needed evidence to argue about the benefit to business, government and the public of open access/freely licensed geospatial data – all kinds of map data – then this talk would be a fantastic source.)
The first four are very good speakers, each in different ways. Tridge was very impassioned and articulate. Jeff is has quite a showman style. Pia is straight-up and her talks are information-dense and clearly informed by her experience. The integrity and leadership of all three, from the free software movement, is inspiring. While they know the importance of being able to speak other audiences’ languages (business, government) and how “selling” free software can help it spread, they also know there are certain values that cannot be compromised — and they are up-front about this too.
Professor Cram’s talk is considered and nuanced; he’s clearly aware (in a way that perhaps people from the free software movement tend to underestimate) that there is a cost to freedom (from (7’20’‘):
I think the way that we’re [ANU] thinking about it [university open access policy] is interesting to reflect on. There’s a technology layer that we’ve already got control of: the repositories, and the interfaces that people can access our work through are now available, and in many respects turned on. We’ve got a policy layer that has to do with the management of copyright, the interactions that we have with publishers. […] And then finally there’s the user layers, and they’re really quite interesting.
Just to show the kinds of things that we have to worry about: suppose that we conduct medical research. And our medical researchers publish a paper that’s quite erudite about a treatment for diabetes. And suppose that that, then, is on the web. And it’s uninterpreted. People will access that. The writers of the article never intended it to be addressed by people who worry about diabetes, and it’s not, therefore, interpreted in a way that’s helpful to them. It would be wrong, I think, to withhold the information, but it also has elements of wrongness to not interpret it as well. And the interpretation is something that we don’t think of doing at present. If you publish a medical paper in a medical journal, you’ve got a pretty good idea about most of the audience, and you don’t need to interpret it. So we are thinking about what it would mean to interpret, the portal through which the community accesses our online information.
(Professor Cram’s talk of “interpretation” reminds me of Andrew Keen in The Truth According to Wikipedia, lamenting the loss of “gatekeepers”, editors and publishers who choose what to publish — except Professor Cram can see the potential benefits despite the guaranteed difficulties on the way. It strikes me that Andrew Keen can see no better society than the one we had 10-20 years ago.)
There is also Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia (video, 37min), just in case you’ve never heard a Creative Commons spiel :) and Ann Steward from the government Information Management Office (who knew such a thing existed!), (video, 29min) if you want to hear some more perspective from someone actually in the public service (eg. what barriers exist to adoption of FLOSS). (I also found out about this document: Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies.)
…FLOSS. I just wrote “free software” and changed it. The phrase reminded me of a “nomenclature problem” that came up from Ann’s talk. Tridge earlier had deliberately used the phrase “free software” (well, I kinda feel everyone who uses it must do so deliberately). Ann, during her talk, said something like “Open, but not necessarily free, software”, then talking about the cost of e.g. training. “Open, but not necessarily free” is a strange thing to people who hear the phrase “(as in freedom)” in between the words “free” and “software”. After her talk, Tridge tried to make clear the distinction, of free-as-in-freedom software, but it didn’t quite make it.
Stallman says, Every time you say “free software” rather than “open source,” you help our campaign. Sadly I think the campaign for keeping alive that distinction is one that does not survive outside the software development community.
Anyway, Foundations of Open is now done, and the presenters’ submissions are now available. Let’s see if this big picture thinking can translate into anything concrete!
Reminder: ISEA 2008 Call for papers
International Symposium of Electronic Arts 2008 (ISEA2008) is happening in Singapore, July 2008. One of the five themes is wiki wiki:
The relative ease in developing online content with a community of ‘at a distance’ presents wiki as a model tool for tele-collaborative production. Wiki is yet another example of how technologies are changing the ways in which creative knowledge production is being transformed by enabling collaboration between diverse individuals. In this theme, we seek to initiate discussion, deliberation and development in collaborative creation using new technologies. How have new and old technologies contributed to the development of collaborative making? What are some of the issues raised by collaborative creation; for example, authorship, artistic responsibility, claims to intellectual property, conflicts and confluences of disciplinary knowledge and practices, etc. What are the spaces of such collaborative work – what are the transitional spaces between the artists’ studios and scientific labs?
We invite artistic and academic work that addresses and/or exemplifies the problems and possibilities of collaborative creative work that are enabled by technologies. Works that are created by collaborations between diverse and geographically diverse communities are especially encouraged.
Given that Singapore is just 7.5 hours away hm, that seems awfully long for just three hours time difference), it seems a shame for me to not even try to submit something. So I will have a think about it. Collaboration is something the free culture movement has down pat, after all, and Wikimedia especially so. Perhaps a look at the collaborative nature of the FPC process might be of interest.
It seems like something Joi might attend. Would be cool if there were some other Wikimedians around!
Abstract submissions close November 14th.
(Thanks to Adam @ FLOSS Manuals for telling me about it in the first place!)
PacLing 2007
Today I attended PacLing2007, the 10th Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics. I attended sessions on Named Entities, Lexical Semantics, Machine Translation and Terminology. There was also an invited talk by Ann Copestake on applying robust semantics. She had a neat example of how underspecification works, in solving Sudoku, and how you can make inferences from something underspecified. Well it’s easy with sudoku, I wonder how easy it is with language. :)
There were two main interesting points to me. The first is that Francis Bond, the Program Chair, asked all the presenters to license their papers under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and they did. All of the papers from the conference program are available under this liberal license. (The webpage doesn’t say so, but each paper’s PDF has this as a footnote on the first page.) I think this is a fantastic forward-thinking and commendable move on behalf of PacLing. It acknowledges that all human knowledge builds on what came before.
The second thing that was interesting was the session Bridging the Gap: Thai – Thai Sign Language Machine Translation , although in the end it was not perhaps a terribly exciting MT system. I was curious about how TSL was represented. Apparently they have a big dictionary of Thai word <-> photograph of someone making the equivalent TSL sign(s). Given that movement is a meaningful part of sign language I wonder how well this works. I am not sure now if the presenter told me that they slice up a video of the movement into frames to represent it, or if I imagined that. :)
I spoke to the presenter (I think it was Srisavakon Dangsaart) afterwards about signwriting, which she had heard of. She seemed to indicate it wasn’t used for TSL. I asked if it couldn’t be useful for TSL ‘speakers’ to be able to write using it. Her MT system is definitely useful and cool, but it’s basically one way: not really possible for TSL ‘speakers’ to create sentences using photographs of people making signs. She said it would mean they would have to learn three languages: TSL, signwriting, and written Thai (to communicate with the rest of the population). I don’t disagree, but I imagine it would be easier to learn to write Thai given literacy first in signwriting, which I presume would be an order of magnitude easier to acquire over any phonemic representation of a language (such as an alphabet-based script, which Thai is). That would be a fertile area for research I imagine.
