Before heading back to graduate school, my brother worked full-time as a personal fitness and strength trainer. Like many trainers, he started out in an established gym and then struck out on his own once he had established an clientele base. Working on his own, he got almost all of his new business from referrals. Although one might think that a trainer's trusted long-term clients would be the source of most new business, it was mostly the newer, less established clients who referred new trainees. The established clients had already referred everyone in their social network that might be interested. That's how I learned about the weak ties of strength.

I have an essay in the latest Free Software Foundation's bulletin which FSF members should be receiving this week. I've also republished the article on my website as When Free Software Isn't Better. The article confronts the fact that free software is sometimes not as high quality or featureful as proprietary alternatives and that most free software projects aren't particularly collaborative. It reflects on what these facts mean for free software and for open source. The Bulletin goes out to all FSF associate members. You should join to get a copy mailed to you in the future -- but mostly you should join because doing so supports the work of the foundation.

It's funny, I don't remember donning a cape and making an apperance on the food network.

Almost a year ago, I blogged about Between the Bars -- a project that offers a blogging platform to the 1% of the United States population that is currently incarcerated. The way it works is pretty simple: prisoners send letters through the postal mail. We scan them and put them up on the web. Visitors can transcribe letters or leave comments which are mailed back to the authors. About a month ago, my collaborator Charlie DeTar and I finally finished planning and paperwork and opened the site to bloggers. Over the last few weeks, we've had a bunch of authors sign up. We now have a daily stream of blog posts going up on the site. Please visit the site. Leave comments. Transcribe posts. If you know of prisoners who might like to use the site, let them know. If you want postcard fliers to send to prisoners, let us know.

At LCA in Wellington -- immediately after a trip to Japan where I saw sumo for the first time -- a number of us created a game we called "monopedal sumo." Basically, the rules are those of sumo wrestling. Push your opponent either down or out of a ring before they do so to you. Unlike normal sumo, in our game you do so standing only one one leg. If your second leg touches the ground. That also counts as a loss. It's surprisingly entertaining. Try it!

I used to think that couples who share a single email address were just too cute. Then I saw this article which imported this whole "keeping each other honest" logic into the practice. Mika and I have never even had accounts on each other's servers.

When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest that they would love to support free models, but that they don't see how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is the world I want to live in and, even though I don't know exactly how to get to there from here, I'm going to refuse to settle for anything short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as "impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being unimaginative. Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among many, that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and South Asia as jockeys for camel racing. Human rights groups campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course, they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives they were considering. As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in several Gulf states gave in to calls from UNICEF and others and created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded by racers desperate for an alternative, had created the first robotic camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter, cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys, racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis, to the system they had fought to keep. Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early free software advocates suggested that most programmers would likely need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful economic models to support free software have supported a large and growing free software industry. But we have free software business models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line to try them out. As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined "practical" and "realistic." One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It's easy to get stuck on the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a local maximum) and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little hill, chances are pretty good we'll find a "higher" peak. Of course, it is also possible that we will find the global maximum or the best possible solution to a given problem. In those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can be thought of as having many interacting dimensions -- and only some of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they are like trying to transcend the laws of physics. Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and knowledge are extremely complicated human creations. Do we really think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find out.

When I took over the developement of xen-tools, I looked around for an appropriate git hosting. I especially had a look at GitHub and Gitorious. If you just regard the features, GitHub is definitely more targetted on single developers and Gitorious more towards projects: At GitHub, every repository has its URL under the URL of a user page which makes it nearly impossible to have user independent, official repositories for projects which have more than one official developer. At Gitorious, every hosted repository needs to belong to a project, even if it s only a published configuration. But a project can have more than one git repository. You only seem to be able to have personal repositories if you clone some existing Gitorious repository. So from a feature point of view, the xen-tools git repositories fit way better to Gitorious hosting while the git repositories with zshrc, conkerorrc and desktop configuration files defintely have a more fitting addresses on GitHub, in my case http://github.com/xtaran/$repository. On Gitorious, they are now together under a project called Axel s configuration files at http://gitorious.org/abe which contains git repositories of my on grml s .zshrc based .zshrc, my configuration for Conkeror and all the files necessary for my ratpoison/xmobar based netbook/laptop desktop. I though feel a little bad for giving the project the very short slug name abe instead of abe-config (as I did initially) since abe is IMHO not a proper project name for my configuration files and possibly other projects would have a more reasonable claim for that project name on Gitorious. But that way it suites more its purpose: Gather some of my git repositories which don t belong to a proper project. But there s another important point when comparing Gitorious and GitHub: Free Software needs free tools as Benjamin Mako Hill posted recently on Planet Debian. Despite my (probably well known) distrust against Google and therefore also Google Code, and despite knowing the history of SourceForge becoming non-free, I was not that much aware that GitHub s software is only partially open source and therefore also not free software while Gitorious is both as it s licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (like StatusNet/identi.ca for example) which is basically GPLv3, but its ideas applied to hosted web applications scenario (where the GPL itself doesn t grasp), too. Initially I just had the xen-tools git repositories on Gitorious and all my small one-repository projects as copies of the repositories on my own git server on GitHub to get some more publicity for them and allow social cloning . After reading Mako s article, I decided to at least have repository clones on Gitorious of all repositories I mirror at GitHub, too. That way I force nobody to use the non-free tools on GitHub for social cloning one of my git repositories. And of course I have copies of my code somewhere on the net as backup. Or to say it with Linus Torvalds (slightly updated) words: Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on git, and let the rest of the world clone it. ;-) But isn t that tedious to always push your code to three repositories? No, it isn t. I just push my code to git.noone.org where I have configured the according remotes and the following post-receive hook:

#!/bin/sh
                                                                     
read oldrev newrev refname
git push gitorious $ refname:t 
git push github $ refname:t 

The only other thing necessary is to use ssh-agent and SSH agent forwarding to at least the host you re pushing to.

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful post about why designing products for wiretapping is a bad idea [1]. It seems that large parts of the Internet will be easy to tap (for both governments and criminals) in the near future unless something is done. The bad results of criminal use will outweigh any benefits of government use. Sam Watkins wrote an informative post about Android security [2]. Among other things any application can read all stored data including all photos, that s got to be a problem for anyone who photographs themself naked Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgements [3]. Somehow she managed to speak about the Theory of Mind without mentioning Autism once. The Guardian has an amusing article by Cory Doctorow about security policies in banks [4]. He advocates promoting statistical literacy (or at least not promoting a lack of it) as a sound government policy. He also suggests allowing regulators to fine banks that get it wrong. Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about Where Good Ideas Come From [5]. It s a bit slow at the start but gets good at the end. Adam Grosser gave an interesting TED talk about a fridge that was designed for use in Africa [6]. The core of the Absorption Refrigerator is designed to be heated in a pot of water in a cooking fire and it can then keep food cool for 12 hours. It s a pity that they couldn t design it to work on solar power to avoid the fuel use for the cooking fire. Josh Silver gave an interesting TED talk about liquid filled spectacles [7]. The glasses are shipped with a syringe filled with liquid at each side that is used to inflate the lenses to the desired refractive index. The wearer can just adjust the syringes until they get to the right magnification, as there are separate syringes the glasses work well with people who s eyes aren t identical (which is most people). Once the syringes are at the right spots the user can tighten some screws to prevent further transfer of liquid and cut the syringes off to give glasses that aren t overly heavy but which can t be adjusted any more, I guess that a natural extension to this would be to allow the syringes to be re-attached so that the user could adjust them every year to match declining vision. One thing that this wouldn t do is counter for Astigmatism (where the lens of the eye doesn t focus light to a point), but I guess they could make lenses to deal with a few common varieties of Astigmatism so that most people who have that problem can get a reasonable approximation. The current best effort is to make the glasses cost $19, which is 19 days salary for some of the poorest people in the world. Glasses in Australia cost up to $650 for a pair (or a more common cost of $200 or about $100 after Medicare) which would be about one day s salary. Eben Bayer gave an inspiring TED talk about one of the ways that mushrooms can save the planet [8]. He has designed molds that can be filled with Pasteurised organic waste (seed husks etc) and then seeded with fungal spores. The fungus then grows mycelium (thin fungal root fibers) through the organic waste making it into a solid structure which fits the shape of the mold. This is currently being used to replace poly-styrene foam for packaging and can apparently be used for making tiles that are fire retardant and sound proof for constructing buildings. The main benefits of the material are that it can be cheaply made without petrochemicals and that it is bio-degradable, I m not sure how the bio-degradable part would work with constructing buildings maybe they would just replace the panels every few years. Annie Lennox gave a TED talk about her Sing foundation to care for women and children who are affected by AIDS [9]. She describes the effect of AIDS in Africa as Genocide. Robert Ballard gave a very informative TED talk about exploring the oceans [10]. This was one of the most informative TED talks I ve seen and Robert is also one of the most enthusiastic speakers I ve seen, it s really worth watching! We really need more money spent on exploring the oceans. Jessa Gamble gave an interesting TED talk which suggests that the best thing to do is to go to bed at about sunset and then have a couple of hours of relaxing time during the middle of the night [11]. Apparently the subjects of body-block experiments who live for a month in a bunker without natural light or access to a clock get better sleep in this manner than they ever had in their life and feel fully awake for the first time. World Changing is a blog that has a lot of interesting articles about climate change and related issues [12]. It s worth a read. Cynthia Schneider gave an interesting TED talk about how reality competition TV is affecting reality [13]. Shows that are derived from the American Idol concept are driving a resurgence in some traditional forms of performance art while also promoting equality among other things it s apparent that winning is more important than misogyny. The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer is an interesting concept [14]. I think it would be good to have something similar for Computer Science. Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting and insightful essay about Piracy and Free Software [15].

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/09/wiretapping_the.html
• [2] http://sswam.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/android-security-model-is-insufficient-and-it-needs-a-firewall/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/21/password-security-cory-doctorow
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/adam_grosser_and_his_sustainable_fridge.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/9786/talk/971
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/annie_lennox_why_i_am_an_hiv_aids_activist.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/robert_ballard_on_exploring_the_oceans.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html
• [12] http://www.worldchanging.com/
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_schneider_the_surprising_spread_of_idol_tv.html
• [14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_Engineer
• [15] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20101011-00

This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.

In Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Richard Stallman explains that, if a friend asks you for a piece of software and the license of the software bars you from sharing, you will have to choose between being a bad friend or violating the license of the software. Stallman suggests that users will have to choose between the lesser of two evils and will choose to violate the license. He emphasizes that it's unfair to ask a user to make such a choice. Over the past few years, pirate parties have grown across much of the developed world. Of course, piracy remains the primary means of distributing media across most of the rest. Advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the "pirate" banner, representing the choice of sharing with friends over compliance with license terms. The free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) and free culture movements seem to have a confused and conflicted reaction to all this. On one hand, major proponents of several pirate parties are FLOSS and free culture stalwarts and several pirate parties have made FLOSS advocacy a component of their political platforms. Pirate Parties' clear opposition to software patents and DRM resonates with both FLOSS and free culture communities. On the other hand, FLOSS leaders, including Stallman, have warned us about "pirate" anti-copyright policies. Free culture leaders, like Lawrence Lessig, have repeatedly and vociferously denounced piracy, treated even the intimation of an association with piracy as an affront, and systematically distanced themselves and their work from piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace pirates as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? Our communities seem to have no clearly and consistently articulated consensus. I believe that, unintuitively, if you take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. In light of a principled belief that users should be able to share information, we can conclude there is nothing ethically wrong with piracy. Licenses have the power of the law but they are protected by unjust "intellectual property" laws. That said, principles are not the only reason activists choose to do things. Many political stunts are bad ideas not because they are wrong, but because they won't work and have negative side effects. Tactics matter too. Even though there might not be anything ethically wrong with piracy from the perspective of free software or free culture, it might still be a bad idea. There are at least three such tactical reasons that might motivate free software and culture to not support piracy or participate in pro-piracy movements and politics. First, a systematic disrespect for copyright undermines respect for all licenses which have been of a huge tactical benefit to free software and a increasingly important factor in the success of free culture. Copyleft licenses like the GPL or CC BY-SA have power only because copyright does. As Stallman has suggested, anti-copyright actions are anti-copyleft. That needn't be an argument against attempts to limit copyright. Indeed, I think we must limit and reduce copyright. But we must tread carefully. In the current copyright climate, I believe that copyleft offers a net advantage. Why should others respect our licenses if we don't respect theirs? Looking at the long term, we must weigh the benefits of promoting the systematic violation of proprietary licenses with the benefits of adherence to free software and free culture. Second, piracy is fundamentally reactionary. Part of its resonance as a political symbol comes from the fact that the piracy represents a way that consumers of media can fight back against a set of companies which have attacked them -- with lawsuits, DRM systems, and demonization in propaganda -- for sharing in ways that most consumers think are natural and socially positive. But piracy focuses on reaction rather the fundamental importance of sharing that drives it. As a result, most pirates do not support, or are even familiar with, a principled approach to access to information. As a result, many piracy advocates who speak out against DRM on DVDs will be as happy to use NetFlix to stream DRMed movies for $5 a month as they were to download for free. The best rallying cries do not always translate into be the most robust movements. Third, through its focus on a reaction, a dialog about piracy avoids engagement with the tough questions of what we will replace the current broken copyright system with. A principled position suggests that it is our ethical prerogative to create alternative models. The free software movement has succeeded because it created such a prerogative and then, slowly over time, provided examples of workable alternatives. A principled position on free software did not require that one provide working new systems immediately, but it makes the development of creative, sustainable approaches a priority. Attacking the system without even trying to speak about alternative modes of production is unsustainable. Free software and free culture call for a revolution. Piracy only calls for a riot. Piracy, in these three senses, can be seen as tactically unwise, without necessarily being unethical. By taking a principled position, one can go build on, and go beyond, RMS's comment. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an unwise way to try to promote sharing. Without being hypocritical, we can say: "I don't think piracy is unethical. But I also do not support it."

As I mentioned recently, I've been writing summaries of academic articles I read over on AcaWiki. You should join me and write summaries of academic articles you read or help improve the summaries other folks have shared! Of course, you can also just read AcaWiki summaries. But while reading summaries takes less time that reading the full articles and books, a 500-1000 word summary is still too much for some very busy people. That's why I created a new microblog on Identica where I post summaries of the summaries I post to AcaWiki. You can subscribe to AcaMako to follow along.

A month or so ago, I published a paper with Leah Buechley that is mostly an analysis of how the LilyPad Arduino has been used. I read an earlier draft last year and loved it so, when the opportunity arose, I was honored to help out as the paper evolved. LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah's design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making things that were qualitatively different from what most people made with microcontrollers and that, she hoped, would be of interest to women and girls. Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad's appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ. We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino). Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren't just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad's design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects. Leah and I believe that there's a more general lesson to be learned about designing technologies for communities underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) -- and for women in particular. The dominant metaphor in the discussion on women in computer science is Margolis and Fisher's idea of "unlocking the clubhouse." The phrase provides a good description of the path that most projects aimed at broadening participation of women in computing projects seem to take. The metaphor is based around the idea that computing culture is a boys' club that is unfriendly to women. The solution is finding ways to make this club more accessible to those locked outside. It should go without saying that we share Margolis and Fisher's goal of increasing participation of women in STEM. That's LilyPad's point, after all. It it hopefully also clear that we're supportive of, and involved in, projects working to remove systematic barriers to participation by women and other groups. That work must continue. But I also think that Leah's work with LilyPad suggests another way forward based on addressing issues of self-selection that will affect even the most welcoming technological communities. Here's what we say in our paper:

Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they're limited in breadth--both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don't join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they're simply uninterested in these disciplines. One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.

I have a strong belief that computing can be an empowering tool and that expanding users' control over technology is a critically important issue. Our paper argues that we should attempt to expand participation in computing by broadening the possibilities of computing, rather than only by broadening participation in extant, computing organizations, projects, and genres. Even if computing and electrical engineering communities were perfectly welcoming (which they are not) most people (both male and female, but disproportionately female) will choose not to participate. Building new clubhouses requires creativity of its proponents and risks charges of reinforcing stereotypes and existing status hierarchies. But, executed carefully and well (as I believe LilyPad has been), it suggests ways to reach the majority of people that no "unlocking" project will ever seem relevant to.

In the process of studying for my PhD general examinations this year, I ended up writing summaries about 200 academic books and articles. AcaWiki is a wiki designed to host summaries of academic articles so it seemed like a great place to host these things. Over the last few months, I've uploaded all these summaries. Since I've finished, I've continued to add summaries of other articles as I read them. My summaries tend to be rough. I write them, run them through a spellchecker, and then post them. I don't even reread them before publishing. I hope to improve them as I reread them over time. Of course, because I've uploaded them to wiki, I hope others will add to and improve the summaries as well. AcaWiki uses Semantic Mediawiki and provides nice platform for publishing, editing, and collaboration. Although there are still ways in which the platform can be better, what is needed now is, quite simply, more contributors. I am sad to see that my summaries make up a big chunk of all summaries on the site. So if you are a student, an academic, or anyone else who writes or has written summaries of articles or books or if you might want to do so, you should consider contributing your summaries, in whatever form, to AcaWiki. I've done a little work to help integrate AcaWiki and Zotero which might make things easier. Doctoral students reading for qualifying or general examinations in particular should should consider taking notes and studying with AcaWiki. From the student's perspective, writing summaries can be one of the best way to reflect on and learn a literature. In the process, one can create a great resource for the rest of the world. If a single doctoral student from each of twenty diverse fields of study published summaries of the 200 key articles in their area, AcaWiki would have the critical core of what is most relevant in academia. Help us build it!

(... achieve Debian world domination without endorsing Facebook) Yes Raphael, we can.
Nobody said it would have been easy, to reach Total World Domination endorsing Free Software only, but that's not a reason to stop trying. I've recently stumbled upon a very nice article by Benjamin Mako Hill, titled Free Software Needs Free Tools, which I believe it's the best possible commentary to the proposal of having an official Debian Facebook page. Of course there is nothing wrong in having non-official, or let's call them "fan" pages, about Debian on Facebook. As a matter of fact we already have one, as you point out. And I also agree that it would be better to know who is behind that page. Individuals, including Debian Developers, are obviously free to use whatever media they please to spread the cause of Debian. After all, as individuals, each of us decide upon her own personal trade-offs (for instance, a trade-off of mine is to have both identi.ca and twitter accounts and to post only to the former with forwarding to the latter). There is no way to have an official Debian Facebook page and pretend that we are not, de facto, endorsing Facebook. That's why I believe having official Debian presence on Facebook, or on any other non Free Software platform, will just weaken our cause. It will send out the message that Free Software it's something which is good for others to use, but not necessarily for Debian as a project. That does not mean that we live under a rock and that we consider social networks useless to promote the Debian cause. It just mean that we should be picky in choosing social networks that respect our Free Software principles, as we are picky in choosing licenses that are DSFG-free. For instance, I'm glad to mention here that the Debian publicity team has recently obtained access to http://identi.ca/debian and will start using it soon. Subscribe! PS This post also gives me a chance to comment on a so called "community page" of mine on Facebook. As I've briefly commented a few days ago I've nothing to do with that page. TTBOMK its content is just automatically injected from Wikipedia. The "Stefano Zacchiroli is on Facebook" claim on the upper left is true only in the sense that there are other people with my name on Facebook. IANAL, but such a claim (not the page in itself) will probably be considered an abusive advertisement in many countries around the world. update: re-word the identi.ca/debian paragraph, to better blend with surrounding text
update: mention "Debian" in heading

After a semi-recent thread on debian-devel, I poked around and realized that I'd never actually gotten around to formally announcing the release of source code for Selectricity, a piece of web-based election software designed to allow for preferential decision-making and to provide "election machinery for the masses." Selectricity is useful for a range of decisions but it targets all those quick little decisions that we might want to decide preferentially but where running a vote would be overkill. Things were delayed through a drawn out set of negotiations with the MIT Technology Licensing Office over how to release the code under a free software license of my choosing. I was swamped when things finally came through. Over time, I managed to forget that I never did a formal announcement, never setup a mailing list, and never did all those things that I have tried to teach other people in the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Code just sort of appeared on my website under the GNU Affero General Public License. It was until the debian-devel thread that I remembered I'd never made a formal announcement. Sorry about that! The git repository has been online and accessible through searches for more than a year now. Most folks who wanted the code seem to have been able to find it there. Indeed, a number of people have set up their own instances and a few have submitted patches to the code! But more visibility for the source means more empowered users, more visibility for free software, and more developers. So I've shipped all the code into a project in Gitorious (its like GitHub, except free), announced things on the Selectricity Blog, changed the Selectricity footer of to include a prominent link to the source. I've also created a mailing list. The Gitorious project page includes a wiki. I also want to mention this all here because the attention of the current development team seems mostly to have moved on to other projects. The current team seems able to keep the hosted version up and running, and even gets around to little improvements now and then, but there's definitely room for new life and new leadership. There are some nearly-complete and "complete minus further testing" features in the development tree that might provide low hanging fruit for folks interested in elections and decision-making who might want to get involved in Selectricity development. If you're interested and know (or want to learn) Rails, feel free to check out the code, introduce yourself on the list or contact team@selectricity.org to coordinate.

I finally finished an article I've had in one form or another for years about on the use of proprietary tools in the creation of free software. From BitKeeper to SourceForge to Google Code to GitHub, non-free tools and services have played an important role in free software development over the past decade and, I argue, continue to create a number of important, if sometimes subtle, problems for our community. The article was published in the Spring 2010 FSF Bulletin which was mailed to all FSF associate members. I've also posted the article on my website and in PDF form as well.

Due to a variety of people and places we want to see, Mika and I have regrouped around a more ambitious travel schedule in Italy for the next week or so. Our new plan is:

• August 23-27: Florence
• August 27-29: Verona
• August 29-31: Bologna
• August 31-September 1: Siena
• September 1-3: Rome

I know we'll have an organized LUG meeting in Siena. The rest of the period is a little more open. As always, if other free software, wikimedian, or like-minded folks are around and would like to meet up in any of those places, don't hesitate to get in contact. In related news, inspired by Florence and by Mika's domo-kun purse, I made a duomo-kun today.

I've got a pretty packed August. I just wrapped the Open and User Innovation Conference at MIT -- the academic conference on user and open innovation connected to my research. I organized the program and was MC for the 120+(!) talks and research updates on the program so it's a huge relief to see it come off successfully. On Thursday, August 5th (at 14:30 UTC) I'll be giving a talk on antifeatures at DebConf (the Annual Debian conference). It was accidentally listed as "Revealing Errors" until a few minutes ago -- sorry about that! It will be streamed live (details on the DC site) for those outside of New York City who might want to follow it. As soon as DebConf is done on August 8th, I'm going to head to Kor ula in Croatia to relax, read, and hopefully get a bit of research done, before I head off to Outlaws and Inlaws in Split on the 19th, a sort of piracy and (vs?) free software summit put on by mi2 connected to the recurring Nothing Will Happen where, from what I hear, quite a lot does. I'm going to have to leave Nothing Will Happen a little early to head to FrOSCon on the 21st where I'll be doing an antifeatures keynote again on the 22nd. I tend not to like to do the same talk too many times, or for more than a year, so this might be one of the last times I present on antifeatures in this form. After that, I'm going to head to Italy where I'll be between the 23rd and the 3rd of September. I'll fly and in and out of Rome and plan to spend some time in Rome, Tuscany, and Florence, but don't have a lot of set plans and might travel to Bologna or elsewhere. My schedule is pretty open. As always, I'm interested in meeting up for coffee or a drink with like-minded hackers, Wikipedians, researchers, activists, etc. If folks are interested in organizing talks or presentations, that sounds fun too. I'm keeping a brief description of my schedule updated alongside a bunch of ways to get in touch with me on my contact page. Don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes. I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students' assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however -- at my school at least -- there's always a grade. For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there's a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.

Today I started to tell a friend about something from dinner the night before. Except that she was at the dinner. And sitting at the same table! Even when prompted, I couldn't really remember! This does not warrant a blog post. Anybody who knows me well knows that my memory for these kinds of more mundane details is pretty porous. This kind of thing happens all the time. I'm writing this so that when I'm much older, and still forgetting things all the time, folks can use this as a reference point before concluding that senility is setting in. I'm afraid that everyone else will forget my forgetfulness!