The following selected bibliography showcases only a small portion of the academics who have demonstrated that while it may take two to tango, it only takes one to give a scholarly paper a silly cliche title: There are also a few hundred groups who have demonstrated that larger groups can so as well.

This year, Software Freedom Day in Boston is being organized by Asheesh and Deb and OpenHatch which means a focus on increasing involvement in free software communities. If you are all interested in getting involved in the free software community in any way and at any level -- or interested in hearing about how that might happen someday -- this is a great event to attend. For my part, I'll be giving a short talk on getting involved in Debian. The event will be held on Saturday, September 17 at Cambridge College -- between Harvard and Central squares -- with an after party at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard.

I am haunted by the nagging fear that I have mailboxes, tucked into a dark corner of an office somewhere, and perhaps even full of checks and important documents, that I don't know exist.

I often hear criticism of "negative campaigning" in the free software movement. For example, in reply to a blog post I once wrote about an FSF campaign, several people argued against, "negative campaigning of any sort, in any realm." Drawing an analogy to political smear campaigns, some members of the free software community have taken the position that negative campaigning in general is not useful and that negativity has no place in our advocacy. First, it is important to be clear on what we mean by a negative campaigns. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between speaking out against policies or actions and smear campaigns that employ untrue claims, ad hominem attacks, and that attempt to avoid a real conversation about issues. I will categorically condemn the latter form of smear campaigning in campaigns for software freedom or for anything else. That said, negativity directed at negativity has had a positive effect in many social movements. I have supported and participated in "negative" campaigns against proprietary software, software patents, DRM, centralized network services, and the firms behind these practices. I've done so because I believe that if one is taking an ethical position, it is justified, and often necessary, to not only speak about the benefits of freedom but against acts of dispossession and disenfranchisement. In some of the most effective social movements, unambiguously negative messages have been central. Should a campaign for abolishing child labor talk only about how valuable adult workers are to their employers or how happy kids are when they don't work? Should a campaign trying to abolish land mines talk only about the benefits of bomb-free fields and intact lower limbs? Should a free speech organization only speak out about the social welfare brought by a free press and never against acts of censorship? These may seem like outlandish comparisons but you can find people writing, only a couple centuries ago, about how slavery should be abolished by arguing in favor of the benefits of paid labor. Even if the economic arguments in favor of paid work are strong, these arguments seems irrelevant and offensive today. Whether slavery is more or less efficient is a moot point. Society has rejected it because it is wrong. We have made important strides toward eliminating injustices like child labor and slavery because activists waged decidedly negative campaigns against them and convinced others to join in opposition. In doing so, activists declared the status quo unconscionable and created an ethical responsibility to find alternatives and to redefine what was "realistic." While I will not suggest that the movement for software freedom is comparable in ethical weight to these other causes, I know that the free software mission is similar in kind. Of course, if one does not think that user control over technology is an ethical issue but is instead merely a matter of choice, one will probably oppose negative campaigns. It is also possible that a particular negative campaign is tactically unwise in that it is unlikely to reach a large audience, unlikely to change people's minds, or be difficult to carry out successfully. But such campaigns are a bad idea because they are ineffective, not because they are negative. Additionally, a movement that is purely negative and offers no reasonable alternative to the stated ill may also be unlikely to succeed. This is why, for example, I believe it is good that the FSF uses the large majority of its resources in the "positive" role of supporting free software. For those that do treat technological empowerment as an ethical ideal, it is both justified and essential to condemn the systematic disempowerment of others through non-free software just as we celebrate the benefits of software freedom. "Negative" campaigns against proprietary software, software patents, and DRM in music have already led our community to important -- if incomplete -- victories. The desire to right wrongs has been a critical part of our movement's success and of many others'. We would be wise not to give it up.

In the Peabody Essex Museum a couple weeks ago, I saw a beautiful landscape by Albert Bierstadt of Donner Pass whose label referenced the famous Donner Party of 1846 and their, "sensational story of privation, cannibalism, and death." I would reorder that sentence.

SeeClickFix makes a mobile application you can use to report Boston drivers using their smartphones while driving, while driving.

When you care for somebody, it is difficult to tell them "no." When you trust somebody, you will tell them.

Much of my academic research involves statistics and crunching through big datasets. To do this, I use computer clusters like Amazon's EC2 and a cluster at the Harvard MIT Data Center. I will frequently kick of a job to run overnight on the full HMDC cluster of ~100 computers. Some of my friends do so nearly every night on similar clusters. Like many researchers and engineers, it costs me nothing to kick off a big job. That said, computers consume a lot of energy so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure out what the cost in terms of resources might add up to. An overnight job that uses a 100 computer cluster might use 800 computer-hours. Although power efficiency varies hugely between computers, most statistical analysis is CPU intensive and should come close to maximizing power consumption. According to a few sources [e.g., 1 2 3], 200 watts might be a conservative estimate of much a modern multi-CPU server will draw under high load and won't include other costs like cooling. Using this estimate, the overnight job on 100 machines would easily use 160 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. In Massachusetts, most of our power comes from coal. This page suggests that an efficient coal plant will generate 2,460 kWh for each ton of coal. That means that one overnight job would use 59 kg (130 lbs) of coal. In the process, you would also create 153 kg (338 lb) of CO2 and a bit under half a kilogram (about 1 lb) of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide each. It's a very rough estimate but it certainly generates some pressure to make sure the research counts! Of course, I've written some free software that runs on many thousands of computers and servers. How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software? What is the coal cost of choosing to write a program in a less efficient, but easier to write, higher-level programming languages like Python or Ruby instead of writing a more efficient version in C?

Recently, I was working with Daf and Rob on a little offline wiki project -- more on that soon -- and we realized that we needed to parse some dates in ISO 8601 format. One of us wondered out loud if there was a Python module that could help us. I offered to take a look. Turns out, less than two months before, someone had uploaded just such a module into Debian. The maintainer? Me.

The Acetarium, where I live, runs what we like to think of as the world's smallest artistic residency program by hosting artists, social scientists, hackers, and free software and free culture folks for periods of 1-3 months. Our most recently graduated resident, Noah, built a lawn scrabble set on the Media Lab ShopBot and held a Scrabble picnic this weekend with some former Acetarium residents and others. I don't really like playing Scrabble, so you can see me working on an essay (and verifying words) in the background. Thanks to Ben Schwartz as I yoinked these pictures from his blog.

At the Copenhagen airport, Mika and I found the quiet room. It was a soft, well lit, room designed for prayer and reflection. During the hour I was in it, the only other visitor was a child cracking open the doorway to peer in. The room had a guest book with hundreds of messages left by other travelers over the last couple years. People praised the airport administrators for providing the room, made suggestions, and complained about the room, the airport, and the country's shortcomings. They talked about themselves, their travels, their happiness and unhappiness with departing or returning home, and their thoughts about the world. I spend a lot of time in airports but only rarely speak to my fellow travelers. It's amazing how little I know about the thousands of people waiting in line with me, sitting near me on the plane, and sharing in the long, lonely, and often stressful experience of moving between countries and continents. The guest book provided a rare window into these people in what is normally the anonymous and depersonalized non-place of airports. In the quiet room, I could -- for the first time -- hear some of these fellow travelers speak.

Marcus Rohwetter has recently published a very detailed article about Antifeatures in the German monthly magazine Zeit Wissen. Although I've only read the article through automatic translation -- unfortunately, I don't read German -- I'm hugely honored that Rohwetter has taken the time to engage with the idea so deeply and to help translate the argument for a much broader community than the free software community I come from and am best able to speak to. A lot of what I've been trying to do in the last year or so is to figure out how to speak more effectively about the politics of technology control to audiences of non-technologists. Indeed, that's the whole point of the antifeatures concept. I deeply appreciate the help of Rohwetter, and others, in that project.

Last week, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society announced it's 2011-2012 list of fellows. I'm honored and excited that they elected to include me in a pretty incredible list of fellows, faculty associates, and other affiliates. It seems I'll be at Harvard next year. In my first year as an undergraduate -- when fights over Napster were raging -- I took a class taught by a Berkman Fellow on the political and social implications of Internet technology. The next year, I worked part-time as a teaching assistant for Harvard Law professor (and Berkman director) Jonathan Zittrain. These experiences had a enormous influence on my life and work. Before, my goal was to study and teach English literature. I've hung around on the fringes of the center for much of the last decade and I've grown immeasurably from the experience. Most recently, I've been working closely with Berkman director Yochai Benkler and current fellow Aaron Shaw on research in online cooperation. The new crop of fellows includes a pretty great group of people working on similar stuff and I'm looking forward to expanding the online cooperation research at the center and to a year of fascinating talks and discussions. I also hope that, after all these, years, I'll be able to give a bit back to an organization that has give me so much.

I've been in Europe for the last couple weeks but pretty occupied with things like attending my brother wedding and a series of outdoor excursions in Spain. Today Mika and I arrived in Berlin where I am going to attending and giving a talk at the Open Knowledge Conference on When Free Software Isn't Better. I'll also participate in a session on Wikipedia research facilitated by Mayo Fuster Morrell. On July 2nd, I'll be taking an overnight train to Vienna where I'll be attending the Open and User Innovation Workshop -- an academic conference where I'll presenting some of my research. From there I'll be hitching a ride to Munich with Marcell Mars on July 6th and, after that, a flight back to Boston with a weekend long layover in Reykjavik. Details on the trip are on page on my wiki and I encourage anyone to contact me if you're in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, or Reykjavik and want to meet up for a drink or a chat.

Australia s Department of Finance has mandated that the MS-Office document format should be the standard document format for all agencies [1]. Paul Wayper notes the fact that MS doesn t plan to support it s own standards and suggests ODF, also known as ISO/IEC standard 26300:2006. [2].Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Marnia Robinson about scientific reasons for avoiding porn addiction [3]. Her post links to a number of other posts on the topic on Psychology Today.Psychology Today has an interesting post by Noam Shpancer titled What Doesn t Kill You Makes You Weaker [4]. It seems to me that the belief to the contrary is due to people rationalising bad things that happened to them, it s not all bad as it made me stronger .Psychology Today has an interesting article by Noam Shpancer about the soldier as hero myth [5]. He argues that soldiers are really just employees, the risk to American soldiers in war zones really isn t that great and that they are just pawns to the military-industrial complex.Anders Ynnerman gave an interesting TED talk about visualising medical data which includes many startling 3D pictures of humans and animals that are being scanned [6]. He describes how this is useful in forensic analysis by the police and in better understanding biological processes.Margarita Manterola gave an interesting Debconf talk titled Making Debian Rule, again , she has some interesting ideas for improving Debian [7]. She is most focussed on social problems and the questions and comments had some interesting ideas. The Center for Non-Violent Communication [8] was mentioned in the questions, apparently their success includes teaching better communication skills to violent criminals, so it seems that they can help with some big problems.Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting article about the ratio of writers to readers on Wikipedia [9]. While he makes some good points I m wondering about the measure of an editor , there have been few months where I have made 5 edits, so I guess I m just a reader. I probably should take more care in logging in when I make changes though, I ve made more than a few small changes from random systems (client sites, Internet cafes, etc) without bothering to login. This would mess up the stats a bit.The Reid Report has an interesting article about Bush being limited in his international travel due to the fact that he has admitted being a war criminal [10].Understanding Prejudice is an interesting article that summarises a lot of psychological research [11]. It gives many ideas for anyone who wants to reduce prejudice.Robin Harris wrote an interesting ZD Net article about vibrations and the impact on disk performance [12]. Apparently it s very common to be able to get more performance from drive arrays if you dampen vibration, previously I believed that unless you had extreme vibration to cause catastrophic problems then nothing would go wrong. But it seems that even smaller amounts of vibration can cause a 30% performance loss or worse! There is work in progress on vibration-damping racks.In a story published in The Australian about the NSW ambulance service being shut down due to a virus, Professor Caelli cites SE Linux as an example of a technology to make computers more virus resistant [13]. Professor Caelli also states that there should be a legal requirement to have backup systems for computers that have such grave consequences if they crash.Sinclair Community College is offering a new class Fundamentals of Linux Security , it includes SE Linux [14].Slate has an interesting article about Pickpockets [15]. Apparently they are becoming extinct in the US as law enforcement has prevented the Fagins from training younger people, and it s only in Eastern Europe that the skills base remains.

• [1] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245276,australia-mandates-microsofts-open-office-xml.aspx
• [2] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2011/01/19#2011-01-19-minister-leigh-letter
• [3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201007/not-all-warnings-about-porn-are-moralistic-or-unscientific
• [4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201008/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-weaker
• [5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201101/soldier-hero
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/anders_ynnerman_visualizing_the_medical_data_explosion.html
• [7] http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/627.en.html
• [8] http://www.cnvc.org/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110206-00
• [10] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/02/bush-cancels-geneva-and-other-consequences-of-torture/
• [11] http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/
• [12] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/bad-bad-bad-vibrations/896
• [13] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/world-focus-on-ambulance-system-failure/story-e6frgakx-1226005951185
• [14] http://www.sinclairclarion.com/home/campus/2011/02/07/new-linux-class-starting-in-spring-quarter/
• [15] http://www.slate.com/id/2286010/pagenum/all/

When Reddit sold to Cond Nast and the founders all moved to California, their old place in Davis Square was empty for a few months and they let Mika I move in and take it over. It's an awesome place and we're still there along with some Web 2.0 graffiti they left on the roof. And so it is with pleasure that I've agreed to be interviewed by redditor Danny Piccirillo in a giant igloo he helped build -- if the unseasonably warm weather streak of weather doesn't manage to melt it before next week. Questions are being gathered at Reddit so feel free to go there and ask me any question you'd like to see me answer in an igloo.

The Ubuntu website states that we aim to make Ubuntu a wonderful place to participate . We developed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct to set a standard for participants to accept each other in the spirit of cooperation, and have improved it over time to state these principles more clearly. It is implicit in our philosophy that these and other Ubuntu values should hold equally true for everyone. I would like to propose that we upgrade this to an explicit statement on behalf of the project. I have spoken with many people who were interested in joining a free software project, but were put off because they felt unwelcome. I know various people who participate in Ubuntu today, but sometimes face difficult social obstacles in order to do so. Going forward, I would like for us, as members of the Ubuntu community, to make the extra effort to accept all kinds of people. This may sound simple, but it can be very difficult to put into practice. People often don t even notice they ve gotten it wrong, until the offended party points it out to them. We need tools and guidance to make this a reality. To that end, I would like to propose a diversity statement for Ubuntu. This draft has already received support from a majority of the Community Council, but I d like to take it a step further. Because I want this to be a commitment that we can all stand behind, I m also calling for support from the community as a whole. Please give this issue your consideration, and let me know in the comments if you can get on board with an official statement like this. The more support we have, the more real this commitment can be. Here s the text. Many thanks to Mary Gardiner, Valerie Aurora and Benjamin Mako Hill for their review and input.

The Ubuntu project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone. We are committed to being a community that everyone feels good about joining. Although we may not be able to satisfy everyone, we will always work to treat everyone well. Standards for behavior in the Ubuntu community are detailed in the Code of Conduct and Leadership Code of Conduct. We expect participants in our community to meet these standards in all their interactions and to help others to do so as well. Whenever any participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it. If someone has been harmed or offended, it is our responsibility to listen carefully and respectfully, and do our best to right the wrong. Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honor diversity in age, culture, ethnicity, genotype, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, neurotype, phenotype, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, subculture, and technical ability. Some of the ideas and wording for this statement were based on diversity statements from the Python community and Dreamwidth Studios (CC-BY-SA 3.0).

It's been reported for some time now that the number of active editors on Wikipedia (usually defined as people who have edited at least 5 times in a given month) peaked in 2007 and has been mostly stable since then. A graph of the total number of active editors in every month since Wikipedia's founding is shown below. The graph shows the aggregate numbers for all language Wikipedias. English Wikipedia is the largest component of this and is generally more variable. That said, very similar patterns exist for most larger languages. Felipe Ortega, who has provided many of these statistics, has warned against fatalist claims. Although there seems to be a decrease in the total number of active editors over the last two years, the situation seems to have somewhat stabilized in most languages. New editors in Wikipedia are replacing folks at almost the rate that they are leaving. It is also widely known that the number of readers of Wikipedia has been increasing during this period. According to the report cards released by the foundation using comScore data, the number of unique visitors to Wikipedia each month has increased by 61 million people in the last year -- over 17%. This discrepancy between rising readership and stable or sinking editorship should raise major concern. After all, the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is two part: (1) to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content and (2) to disseminate it effectively and globally. Although the Foundation report cards include measures of raw levels of editorship, a better metric of engagement and empowerment might be the proportion of readers who engage in editing. I could not find reliable data on the number of unique readers reached each month for more than a few months in the last year. What is available, however, is wonderful data on page views each month going back to 2008. Analysis of the data from available report cards show that, at least during the last year, there is a very stable ratio of 35 page views per unique visitor, as estimated by comScore. Using that measure, we can do a back of the envelope estimation on the proportion of users that are editors for the period where page view data is available, dating back from February 2008 ( marked with the grey dashed lined above). The graphs below show the very different results you get when you consider the change in the number of Wikipedia editors and the change in the editor-to-reader ratio. Once again, these data are combined data for all language Wikipedias although graphs look very similar for most larger languages. The results are striking. Although there has been a 12% decrease between February 2008 and December 2010 in the number of active editors, there is a 42% decrease in the proportion of readers who edit at least five times a month. We can see that fulfilling the first half of the Wikimedia mission remains a struggle. Although the graphs above do not say anything directly about the most active core contributors to Wikipedia, the fact that Wikipedia is being maintained by a tiny -- and shrinking -- proportion of its readership does mean that the idea behind Wikipedia is under threat. Although none are as big as Wikipedia, there are lots of good encyclopedias out there. The reason Wikipedia is different, interesting, and important is because -- unlike all those others -- Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is powerful because it allow its users to transcend their role as consumers of the information they use to understand the world. Wikipedia allows users to define the reference works that define their understanding of the their environment and each other. But 99.98% of the time, readers do not transcend that role. I think that's a problem. Worse, that the number is growing. The Wikimedia Foundation recently ran a major successful effort to attract donations in its annual fundraiser. Jimmy Wales' smiling mug is apparently enough in the way of motivation to get something like 1% of its readers to donate money to support the project. I think that's very good news. If the Wikimedia community can entice even half of those people to contribute through an increased involvement in the projects themselves, they might do more than ensure Wikipedia's continued growth. They would help take a step toward the empowerment and engagement of those users in sharing their own knowledge, and the continued fulfillment of a critically important mission.

In addition to lecturing for two courses at MIT this term, I recently had the pleasure of giving a lecture on antifeatures at the Free Technology Academy -- a program which offers Masters courses over the Internet. Quite a few of the FTA courses are about free software, free knowledge, and related topics! It was my first time giving a lecture to microphone and an empty room. Although I found it a little tricky to adapt to the lack of any audience, the FTA folks put together a great video. I'm psyched that the course material will be available as open education resources for anyone who might want to incorporate it into another course. If you've seen my LCA keynote about antifeatures (which is also available online), there's not going to be a whole new in the lecture. If didn't see it, you might want to check out the lecture. I'll be in the online discussion group around the Lecture for the next couple weeks but you need to sign up to participate.

The Free Software Foundation is in the last week of its annual fundraiser and has still has a bit of ground to make up. The FSF needs members and donations to merely sustain its basic activity protecting free software and engaging in minimal outreach. So as I've done in the last couple years, I've written a fundraising appeal for the organization. That why today my face is plastered, Jimmy Wales style, all over the FSF website. (For the record, the last bit was not my idea and I find it a little embarrassing.) My appeal this year begins with my feeling that as our lives become increasingly mediated by technology, the question of who controls technology becomes another way of asking "Who controls us?" Read the appeal for more. That statement, like much of the FSF's work, is not going to get very far with most users today. Most people don't think of technology as the source of control, power, or autonomy. They don't understand why software should be free or even what that might mean. Making this argument widely is something the FSF works hard to do. But supporting this work is a bit of a chicken-egg problem. The users we most need to reach have never heard our message and it can take some time to turn even the most receptive into supporters. For those of us that do care about technology and the power it has over its users, it's hugely important that we take action to support software freedom and organizations like the FSF that play a key place in this struggle. If we don't, nobody else will. The pool of people who might support the FSF today is small -- there are currently about 3,000 members -- but the stakes are huge: A choice between a world of DRM, locked down mobile phones, and non-free network services on one hand, and the possibility of a world where there are free alternatives on the other. The FSF won't win this fight alone, but it plays a critical role in it. The FSF is a small, humble, and responsible non-profit and a little money can have a big impact. If you are not an FSF associate member, now would be a great time to join. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. In preparing this appeal, I realized that my membership had lapsed a couple months ago and that my partner Mika was still donating at the reduced student price. We've personally fixed both these things and made an addition donation. If you are a member, you can check your status or make a donation. If you are not yet, Please consider joining us.