For those that are curious as to I've been up to recently, you might be
interested to read this portrait of Eric von Hippel on Linux.com.
The article mentions that I'm currently studying with von Hippel in my
own effort to try to help build a more evidence-based understanding of
how free software works and explore some of the ways I might help it
work better.
I've been a bit remiss about keeping this space up to date with my
upcoming talks over the last month or so. Here's me playing catchup.
On Monday October 20th, I gave a talk on Selectricity for the IEEE
Boston Section's Society on Social Implications of Technology. It
covered more or less the same ground I coverd in my OSCON talk on the
same subject. Then next day, Tuesday October 21st, I gave a short talk
on Revealing Errors as part of the MIT-Harvard-Yale
Cyberscholars meeting.
There was nothing new or ground-breaking in either but it was good to
spread the word on the projects -- work continues on both.
I also have one more coming up: another Revealing Errors talk in
Amherst, Massachusetts at my alma mater on October 31st (Halloween).
If you are in Western Massachusetts and would like to meet up or attend
the talk, let me know.
On the morning after the final US presidential debate that happened a
week ago, I was invited onto the excellent new WNYC morning show The
Takeaway -- syndicated by Public Radio International. One of
the hosts, John Hockenberry, was in Boston to tape that edition of
the show.
I was on to talk about Selectricity and some of other ways that we
might use election technologies. I was on and off (mostly off) air for
the whole second hour (7:00-8:00 AM) of taping and had a bit of a
segment just into the second half of the hour. You can check out the
website or download the podcast.
Although it's definitely not as fun to listen to as my a last gig on
public radio, it's certainly more consequential. The role of the
techno-pundit was also -- unfortunately? --- easier for me to fill.
The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!).
I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that
“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play. Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.
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It's late notice but Boston area folks should drop by the local Software
Freedom Day events today. It goes from 10:00-16:00 and is located in a
great space in Chinatown. More information in on the wiki.
I'm teaming up with John Sullivan of the FSF to talk about free software
on in your pocket on unexecpted platforms. We'll show off CHDK (for
cameras), the FreeRunner (a phone), and probably also talk about
RockBox, iPodLinux, and more. It should be laid back and fun!
The whole point of SFD (and this SFD event in particular) is create a
space that's appropriate to folks that don't already know about free and
open source software and that aren't necessary technical. If you are a
hacker or an advocate, show up and meet some like minded folks and
introduce new people to the ideas that inspire you. If you are just
curious about this stuff this event is designed for you.
If you're not in Boston, check the SFD webpage. There are hundreds
of events around the world and may even be one near you!
It's been a year or so since I last reported what I was up to in my "day
job." The last year has been a productive, if sometimes schizophrenic,
period.
I've had a good time working with Eric von Hippel (innovation and
free and open source software research guru) and have decided I'd like
to do a bit more of that.
So I'm taking classes again -- mostly sociological methods courses -- to
try to learn a bit about becoming a social scientist. To do so, I've
enrolled in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship PhD program
at the MIT Sloan School of Management and am working on putting together
an interdisciplinary -- probably even interdepartmental -- research
program. My basic research questions remain the ones that have motivated
all my work: How can I get a better understanding of communities
producing free stuff? How can I help those communities do so more
effectively?
MIT has a large number of people who share these goals and interests.
Who knows, if I can put together enough of them and an academically
rigorous research proposal that will provide a real benefit to the free
software and free culture communities I care about, I might even manage
to get a degree out of it!
I'll also be staying on as a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic
Media where I'll continue to maintain and expand Selectricity, work
on Revealing Errors, and more.
Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen
the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and
the free software movement a happy birthday. While I'm not usually one
for birthdays, I thought I'd at least reflect on it briefly.
Certainly, it's a wonderful video -- for which Matt Lee at others at the
FSF should be proud. But it's fact that the GNU project is now
twenty-five years old that is truly noteworthy.
Wikipedia says that a generation (i.e., the average interval between
the birth of parents and of their offspring) is somewhere between 25-30
years in most of the Western world. Twenty-five years isn't just a big
number divisible by five, it marks a generational shift.
Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last
quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful
progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects,
thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably
vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the
software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects,
and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back
to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free
software movement.
It's not been an entirely smooth ride, feelings have been hurt, and it's
hard for GNU's proponents -- myself included -- to not wince at some of
what has been done in GNU's name and because of its example. But even
cynics must admit: the world is an undeniably better place because of
GNU and the efforts and ideas that it has motivated.
I turn 28 in December and have spent my entire computing life in world
where free software was a viable option and an active form of
resistance. Here's to another generation! May we be half as productive
and positive as the last!
When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive
sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a
very constructive and effective intervention.
I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the
story on my wiki.
I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software
Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much
of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more
comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book,
Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in
the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.
That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I
updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to
Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to
address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.
Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under
Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on
a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a
comprehensive wiki reference work.
After a late-night IRC conversation about egg corns, shaggy dog
stories and feghoots the idea for a short story came to me in the
bathtub this morning.
I give you, The Story of Josephville. Apologies in advance.
What I liked
.I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn
that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim
Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window
System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.
Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who
I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!
Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a
rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)
I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the
cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!
Nothing is more embarrassing than a website announcing that something
will happen on a particular date -- e.g., a product will be released, a
feature will be turned on -- after the date has come and gone! Even
worse, putting things off repeatedly can be a lot of work!
To help such people, I just did a very quick 10 minute hack I'm calling
The Vaporizer. It looks like just a date on a webpage. However, if
the date originally listed has come and gone, a little bit of Javascript
will change the site so that it shows tomorrow's date instead.
Vaporware providers of all types can use it to safely (and effortlessly)
put things off without worrying about looking overdue!
I have seen the future, and the future is tomorrow.
One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they
handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload
images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image,
you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or
Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long
process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost.
Basically, I'm annoyed because images in wikis aren't very "wiki."
I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it
easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser -- even if it
is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new
MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image
editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr's
wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick
to do the actual image manipulation.
It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I've called EditImage.
It's an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it's
nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki
wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have
it installed.
I'm certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact,
some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I'm not even the
first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr's code to do
image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a
nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional
image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to
add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation
and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.
When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the
misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many
people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person
who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was
apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of
the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!
In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project
and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying
to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for
the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest
"party night" of the conference!
For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video
recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below.
A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is
over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all
my freedom loving readers.
Emma Jane Hogbin gave a presentation on the gender gap in free software at Lugradio Live this weekend. One of the central messages was that a great deal of how to avoid putting women off computing can be distilled down to "Don't be a dick". This ties in well with Mako's restatement of the Ubuntu code of conduct as "Be excellent to each other" (a wonderful phrasing which demonstrates that Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is the most philosophically worthwhile film that Keanu Reeves has ever appeared in, and certainly not The fucking Matrix) and led to my 5 minute rant on why I hate the Linux community slightly later in the day, but does leave a certain problem. What standards are used to define whether given behaviour is dickish or not? The comments here show that there's disagreement even within a single sub-community of the larger free software world. Ben suggests that the reaction to perceived inappropriate behaviour is perhaps even more discouraging than the original behaviour, suggesting that bitching about things that offend you is dickish behaviour in and of itself. How do we decide whether someone is being a dick or helping the community? Is lack of tolerance a form of exclusionary behaviour?I'm in Portland, Oregon for the week where I'll be at OSCON. I'll be
giving two talks on the final day of the conference (July 25): the first
will be a 15 minute keynote on Revealing Errors at 8:45 in the
Portland Ballroom; the second is a full-length normal talk on
Selectricity at 11:35AM in Portland 255. It will be my first long-form
talk about Selectricity and I'm looking forward to it.
Because myself, a few Free Software Foundation staff members
including Campaign Manager Joshua Gay, and quite a few FSF associate
members will be in town, we're going to hold a small FSF Associate
Members event in Portland (the first outside Boston!). It's going to
be in the form of a pizza party with a few small talks from FSF folk
including myself. Here are the details:
It's free and open to all but is designed to provide a forum for members and friends. If you are an FSF member, please consider coming. If you're not a member yet, please don't let it keep you away; staff will be able to sign up new members there. RSVPs to Deborah Nicholson aren't necessary to attend but would be welcome. I'll be heading to Seattle right after the conference for a few days. If you would like to meet up in Seattle or Portland this week, please don't hesitate to get in contact.FSF Associate Members (& friends!) EventJuly 22nd 6:30-9:00PMOld Town Pizza226 NW Davis StPortland, OR 97209
Once again, Wikimania was wonderful. I gave my scheduled talk on
Autonomo.us and network freedom and network services. I also filled
in for a few speakers to give a "Zotero for Wikipedians" demo and to
say a few words about the BY-SA/FDL work as part of a Creative
Commons panel.
Perhaps the most memorable part of the conference was the writing and
performance of I Will Revise. A couple days before the conference, a
small group of Wikipedians -- The Difftones -- wrote the song at a
karaoke bar in Alexandria. We had a wonderful time leading a room full
of lightning talk attendees in song and a final rendition by a massive,
fully-packed, stage at the party on the final night!
It's online on meta.wikimedia.org. You should feel free to revise
it, add verses, and improve it!
Next.
