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CCau "Building an Australasian Commons" conference notes
The week before last I zipped up to Brisbane to attend the Building an Australasian Commons conference hosted by Creative Commons Australia. There were presentations from government, commercial projects, public broadcaster, educators and musicians. (The “music” roundtable was most amusing for an apparent stoush between the APRA guy and, well, everyone else.) Overall, I was just so impressed that there was so much going on that I’d never heard about before. Not like I hear about everything, but my ears tend to perk up at “Creative Commons”. That there was so much I hadn’t heard about seems a sign that CC is gaining some serious momentum in Australia.
They deserve to, I might add. Throughout the day I reflected on the similarities and differences between the Creative Commons movement and the Wikimedia movement. Both are non-profits with broadly similar goals, and were founded around a similar time (2001ish). Both now have US-based “parents” with region-based “chapters” (WMF) or “jurisdictions” (CC).
Where CC began life with some serious clout (and cash) behind it, Wikipedia was built on nothing much more than enthusiasm. Those divergent beginnings carry through to today, where WMF has only very recently “professionalised” and the chapters are still largely grassroots affairs; on the other hand CC jurisdictions tend to be staffed by paid professionals and housed in universities. This is not too surprising for CC, as their major task is “porting” the licenses to local laws. Their role is more of an enabling one, compared to Wikimedia which still feels itself to be a very hands-on, creating one. CC has jurisdictions so the licenses are adapted to local law. Wikimedia has chapters so its local members may belong. In this view there is no need for chapters to be “professionalised”.
Nonetheless, what can we learn from how CC conducts itself? I can’t speak for the other jurisdictions, but the Australian one is damn impressive. They do an incredible amount of gently-gently lobbying for the adoption of free content licenses and open access policies in a general sense, without only pushing their own licenses. They educate government, cultural and educational institutions about what CC is and how to use it. The Australian clinic started the Case studies project, which is a brilliant way of showcasing their successes and “normalising” the use of CC for organisations who are hesitant to jump on board. With this kind of index, they can easily find a similar-enough group that has already made the leap and make an assessment of how successful it was for them.
The lessons for Wikimedia from here are pretty obvious. Wikimedians could do a lot worse than evangelise the use of wikis in a generic manner just as CC evangelises the use of free licenses. Educating people about how wikis work in a generic way, their social norms and technical features, etc, helps to get people used to the idea in general. They will then be more predisposed to accept the use of Wikimedia wikis in particular. At the moment the only wiki cheerleader I really see is Stewart Mader, and he does an excellent job, but he is rather more focused on intranet-style wikis than generic community-content-building wikis.
Wikimedians may be loath to say, “Wikis are great, and yeah, feel free to use whichever wiki engine and whichever organisation host you like”. But I think we will be better off in the long run with larger numbers of people understanding wikis themselves, rather than smaller numbers understanding specifically our wikis.
The second lesson is: case study collection. Great idea. We totally need one. That’s a duh-case.
I was also thinking about the consequences of jurisdiction that begins life in a university department vs a chapter that begins life in Wikimedians’ cafes and talk pages. It seems to me CC(au) is much better prepared to deal with institutional involvement. Maybe it is just practice. By comparison, Wikimedians tend to be very focused on individuals’ contributions. They probably look very messy and “mob-rule”. That’s one way of looking at it that’s true, but I think there are others too, that we might do well to emphasise to different audiences.
When Wikimedia Australia is struggling a little to shape dozens of enthusiastic volunteers into something acceptable to Consumer Affairs, Creative Commons Australia is thriving with a handful of paid staff. If I sound a bit jealous of the perks of “officialness”, the office and giant printer, well, yeah, I am. Only a tiny bit though. I love that Wikimedia is filled with chemists and students and office workers and nurses, from 15 to 65(+), who have the boldness to believe that everyone can participate in the writing of the history books. We can observe what works for others and borrow all their best ideas (we all believe in a sharing culture, right ;)).
We’re slow to get going, but hey, we’re in it for the long haul.
Links for 2008-02-21
- Adam Hyde was interviewed on Radio New Zealand National about FLOSS Manuals (after some diversion about radio signals at the start). Kiwis have nice radio accents. :) I’m not sure what format “asx” is, but if you download this file, VLC can play it.
- Andrew Whitworth has posted his 2008 Non-technical Wishlist for Wikibooks:
- Actively solicit book donations
- Look for “friends” and “partners”
- Quality
- Focused collaborations
- Stable versions
- Make inroads into the classroom
- Core subjects
- Documentation and Usability
- Australia set to give the go-ahead for Creative Commons licensing, The Guardian (hey, I did mention that)
- The idea of a “New York City Free Culture Alliance” was floated on foundation-l, which sounds pretty awesome to me. I hope it goes ahead.
- Sydney has been selected to host FOSS4G 2009 (that’s “free & open source software for geospatial”). It will be “the seventh ‘formal’ gathering of the open source geospatial community and is expected to focus on the increasing importance of FOSS4G in the public and private enterprise”.
- Freebase, which I have mentioned previously, have announced the release of WEX (‘Freebase Wikipedia Extraction’). “The wiki markup for each article is transformed into machine-readable XML, and common relational features such as templates, infoboxes, categories, article sections, and redirects are extracted in tabular form. Freebase WEX is provided as a set of database tables in TSV format for PostgreSQL, along with tables providing mappings between Wikipedia articles and Freebase topics, and corresponding Freebase Types.” It’s not clear what date is on the Wikipedia dump they’ve used. But it could be a fun toy.
- Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble, discusses Veropedia and Citizendium, concluding, “[M]y recommendation is to quit wasting time trying to create a parallel database outside of Wikipedia. Instead, work within Wikipedia. Fix its articles and label them as such. It’s a win-win situation: You achieve your goal of improving Wikipedia but in a way that people will actually use.” Hm, somehow I don’t think Veropedians or ‘Citizens’ will see it that way. (The author opens with the charge that “they are now almost useless” which is a good indication he doesn’t have the same understanding of their lifespan and purpose as contributors. I think Wikipedia was also “almost useless” in 2002.)
- Document Freedom Day has now been announced for 26 March. It will “provide a global rallying point for Document Liberation and Open Standards.” It’s intended to be a counter-point to Software Freedom Day. (You can find it now in the free culture calendar, natch.)
- A Wikipedia Selection for schools DVD was produced for 2007, now suggestions are sought for additions or updates for the 2008 edition.
- Creative Commons now mark their free licenses with a seal designating them as ‘Approved for Free Cultural Works'. Although I find the seal itself a bit naff it’s a good concept.
- Finally, Wikinews brings you the latest in hot wiki wear, for just those times when you need your gear to back up your command, “JOURNALIST – COMING THROUGH!”
Creative Commons Australia: Building an Australiasian commons
Apparently CCau is holding an event called building an australiasian commons in late June, Brisbane. Might be worth the trek, there look to be some interesting things on the schedule including lots of case studies and reports from overseas.
Don’t forget, I’m still maintaining the free culture events calendar, which you can subscribe to as a Google calendar or an event-based feed. If you know of any events which belong on there, please drop me a line and let me know.
linux.conf.au LinuxChix miniconf
Woot, today was the LinuxChix miniconf of linux.conf.au (LCA), one of the three big free software related conferences held around the world each year.
I spoke on Wikipedia (duh), giving a kind of second-level introduction aimed at cutting through bureaucracy by explaining what was important and what could wait until later. I always used to think I had to read all the relevant policies and guidelines before I did anything. So I would spend hours pouring over MoS pages and the like before even writing a paragraph.
Later I got much more relaxed about it and figured, correctly, that someone else would clean it up to conform to MoS if it really bothered them that much (and evidently it does, or else it’s easier to make automated changes that relate to formatting than actual content).
In a nice surprise I saw Nick Jenkins, who I didn’t realise was attending LCA. He took notes on my speech and they’re probably better than mine so I recommend reading those. :) You can also read my slides from Wikimedia Commons.
There was lots of video going on and I will link it up whenever I see it published.
Stormy Peters gave a great talk about community managers. As I listened to her talk I realised… I am a community manager. All the things she mentioned are exactly the things I do in Wikimedia, mostly for Wikimedia Commons. How interesting.
Heaps of interesting people at LCA, and interesting talks. In the unlikely event that you are reading this and also attending LCA, come and say hi. It looks like I will be attending a lot (like, six or so) talks relating to multimedia and Ogg and so on. Well if it’s that or kernel hacking… :)
+ Photo from Mary of me musing during my talk. “Is Wikipedia run by Wikia… let me think…”
New page: events
Last night I decided there were enough free culture-ish events happening next year that it would be worth creating a calendar for them. So now there is events.
I pondered for a while the Textpattern plugins for events and calendars, but they were overly complex. So I decided to make a Google Calendar and just embed it.
.. But there doesn’t seem to be a “year” view, so it looks a bit sparse. I decided it needed an event list too. A bit of googling revealed that FeedBurner actually had a point after all: they have some thing called “BuzzBoost”, and it turned my Google calendar feed into some drag and drop code and wala – updates:
So the full list is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/freeculturecalendar. And you can add the calendar to your Google calendar: 
Let me know if you spot anything missing I should include.
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!)
CaFeConf 2007; unacademic knowledge
CaFeConf 2007 is just finished, and WMF had no less than Wikimedia Argentina’s Patricio Lorente representing. CaFeConf 2007 is the 6th conference of open/free software and GNU/Linux and is held each year in Buenos Aires (at least, as far as I can tell from Google’s translation of the Spanish Wikipedia article – any volunteers for translating it to English? :)).
Patricio’s slides are licensed under the GFDL and there is also video although the sound quality in particular is not too great. I believe his talk about the problems wiki communities face as they grow in size, but since I don’t understand Spanish I can’t tell you the nuances of it.
I was lucky enough to have Patricio attend my Wikimania talk. Lucky, because Patricio is a true believer, passionate and enthusiastic, and interested in the kinds of problems I mentioned in my talk. (And a lovely chap to boot.)
One of the last slides from his talk says this:
Recordar, todo el tiempo, que son
los novatos quienes llegan con
contenido nuevo en su equipaje.
La megalólopis Wikipedia debe
poder recibirlos con la calidez y
comprensión propia de la pequeña
aldea.
Or, as rendered by Google Translate:
Remember, all the time, which are
Novices who arrive with
New content in his luggage.
The encyclopedia should megalólopis
Able to receive them with warmth and
Own understanding of the small
Village.
I suppose this is a poetic restating of WP:BITE, which is just as well, because it never hurts to be reminded why exactly biting newcomers is bad (not just because others are watching). (If you can speak Spanish I’d love to know a more natural translation.)
I did an interview this morning on a friendly morning talk show, your basic “what is Wikipedia, how do you know it’s reliable, WikiScanner/Captain Smirk" deal. At one point they commented on my job title (computational linguist) and said something like, “I suppose that helps with all the wiki stuff.” And I remembered no… Wikipedia is not just for the geeks and the technically literate. Two million articles, big deal. If we really want to accurately represent “the sum of all human knowledge” we need input from all humans, not just the ones who understands 1s and 0s.
I mentioned farming and parenting as two fields that we need more input on. I have a farmer friend and I know he knows a ton of things that are poorly represented in Wikipedia, if at all. Farmers are generally out farming, rather than watching morning TV with a laptop in hand, no surprise there. But I guess in the future there will be more conflict between “knowledge” and “stuff without sources”. The ever-increasing crackdown on the need for citations and reliable sources should make the showdown necessary. Because it is no secret that science and the arts and academia have not studied everything that makes up people’s lives, even in a western country like Australia.
Do I sound anti-sources? I’m not. For a good many topics a reliable sources crackdown is the only way to go. But when otherwise uncontroversial, useful articles get deleted as “non-notable” because there are no possible sources because academia hasn’t come to it yet, I think we are not applying the fifth pillar quite often enough.
If there is no conflict, it could only mean the sources brigade had a victory and the keepers of “unacademic knowledge” left early, defeated. I would consider that a loss.
Bits & bobs/is shared vision more important than a specific license?
- WikiSym finished today. I would have loved to have gone; I hope more reports from there filter through various blogs.
- She’s Geeky is also on and it’s another event I would have loved to attended, but sadly wrong hemipshere, wrong continent. Luckily Liz Henry is attending and blogging (and also doing a presentation on wikis I believe, pity there’s not more wikichix there).
- Another interesting event is Pop!Tech which has just wound up in Maine. Check out the dozens of ‘pop-casts’ that they’ve made available — it really makes a difference for “those following along at home”. If you watch a good one, let me know; Gerard recommended Erin McKean to me and she is funny, passionate, free-culture-literate and geeky. So really a cool person. :)
- Wikimedia Sweden is almost really official. Congratulations folks!
—
Heather Ford recently posted an update on iCommons which led to a Declaration on Open Education. She made this comment:
The fact that the first, great draft of the ‘Cape Town Open Education Declaration’ has already been circulated, the fact that its impact was not ‘watered down’ by this “dispute” [about NC or not NC], and the fact that this group has recognised that standing together in our shared vision of what education should look like in the future is more important than the (important but less important) differences of opinion about copyright licences. This is a conclusion that I had long ago but didn’t know how to express: this movement has very little to do with copyright and everything to do with people; it has very little to do with being free to share content and everything to do with sharing perspectives and fellowship.
Hmmm. I don’t know how to feel about this. I would like to be convinced on this point. But currently each time I see some cool new project launched under CC-BY-NC my heart sinks a little. I don’t see a way around the conclusion that the Creative Commons NC clause especially creates a divide among content that maybe could have been avoided. If CC educated people more about how damaging a NC clause can be. If CC helped let individuals see their place in a long and evolved tradition of free culture. Maybe if CC didn’t offer it at all in the first place….
And when I read about someone who wants to release a ‘free software library’ under BY-ND terms I really think, someone missed the boat here… how did we let that happen?
