In a few weeks, I'm going to be giving the keynote address at the the Conference on Engaging in Open Source at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The conference is organized by the student chapter of the ACM at Dalhousie and looks like a unique, and very interesting, gathering. My talk will build on some of my previous critical analyses of the unique process of principle-setting in the free and open source software communities and will try to introduce some new and challenging concepts while framing the broader discussion that will continue in the rest of the conference. The conference will be held on June 1 & 2, 2006. Ping me if you're in the area and would like to meet up.

Three years ago, I was elected to the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. About halfway through my three year term, I was elected by the board to the (largely ceremonial?) role of Vice President of the organization. This month, my term is up and after a good deal of soul searching over the last weeks, I've decided to not run again. With time, I've become busy with other projects including work and graduate school at the MIT Media Lab, Debian, Ubuntu, One Laptop per Child, several book projects and more. Recently, I've found that I've simply had less time to put toward SPI than I have had in the past. Of course, I continue to care very much about SPI and its mission and feel that I done a good job of fulfilling my responsibilities throughout my term. The real reason I'd like to step aside to let some new blood and energy take a more active role and to let SPI take off in new directions. Since I've served a full term, I thought I would take the opportunity to look back at my work with SPI over the last three years and to the future. SPI's Recent Past Three years ago, I ran for the SPI board on a platform that I would like to see SPI work more like a real pro-active non-profit organization and less like Debian's legal shell. SPI was at at transition point then and the board spent a lot of time thinking about it was that SPI should do and what role it should fill in the free software community. Many of these questions are still open but the following is my round up. There are two types of non-profit organizations in the free/open source community. The first is the large-project foundation. Example are the GNOME Foundation, KDE Foundation, and Plone Foundation. These support and work closely with one large and otherwise institutionally independent project. The second type is concerned with advocacy or issues of concern to many or all free software projects. The FSG/LSB, Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom International, Linux International, and the Free Software Foundation are all examples of this type (although the FSF also supports the GNU Project so can be put into both camps). Three years ago, SPI was basically the Debian Foundation under a different name. However, SPI also supported a handful of other medium-sized projects (at the time, this included Berlin and OFTC). In this way, SPI provided some of the benefits of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to groups that were large and important enough to care about issues like the tax-deductability of donations, but small enough that starting their own foundation didn't quite make sense. This, I am convinced, is SPI's niche and its where the organization can make the greatest difference. While Debian continues to be the driving force behind SPI, this mirrors Debian close relationship with other free software projects as a downstream and a distribution. Debian may ultimately decide its has outgrown SPI and wants its own foundation but it's role in providing an umbrella for other free software project also makes a lot of sense. Over the last years, SPI has added several new member projects including GNUStep, Drupal and PostgreSQL and members of these projects have played an increasingly important role in SPI. OFTC members including SPI secretary David Graham have continued to drive the organization. I am thrilled to see that PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus is running for a seat on the board and wish him the best of luck. He has put a huge amount of effort into SPI in the past several months and I believe he would make a great board member. Of course, not everything has been rosy. While our organization is in slightly better shape than it has been in the past, SPI still suffers from a lack of interest and activity by participants in its member projects. SPI handles Debian's money and every Debian developer should be interested and involved in SPI; yet only a relatively small percentage are. I've run SPI sessions, talks, and BOFs at three of the last four Debian conferences but haven't been able to make a satisfactory dent in either the Debian community or SPI. The next board of directors will need to work actively and creatively to help do what the last board did not accomplish. While things are currently much better than they have been in the past, SPI has continued to be mired in a number of bureaucratic issues. Simple issues like accurate, timely and transparent bookkeeping have proved more difficult than the board or those brave (or foolhardy) enough to take on the treasurer position seem to have thought. I worked with the treasurer and our lawyer to meet with a bookkeeping service in New York City. The Future In the future, I'd like see to more members projects and more active participants from all members projects. I'd like to see a more active organization in general but am beginning to conclude that a fully volunteer "staff" is only going to be able to do so much. In terms of bureaucratic issues, several board members have lobbied hard to spend money to hire full or part time help either in an administrative capacity or as some sort of combination administrator/executive director. For a number of reasons, the board has been reticent to do this but I think it's become increasingly clear that our growth and relevance as an organization is going to require this. I think hiring the bookkeeping service was a good first step. I think at the very least, SPI should "outsource" most of the non-fun administrative work to others so that the board can focus on the important work of advocating free software and helping our member projects. I'm famously concerned with introducing paid labor into voluntary free software projects but I think that, if done right, this could be a very good step. In terms of my own involvement, I'm planning to stay involved as a contributing member or perhaps even as an adviser if the board will have me. I'd like to continue work on the SPI-Trademark committee and look forward to the day that we can create a general policy for helping folks use and license the Debian mark (and other trademark SPI may hold in the future) as permissively as possible. I'd also like to see a better documented process for becoming an SPI member project. This should explain to projects what SPI expects from them (e.g., democratic decision making, an active representative to SPI, etc), what they will get from SPI, and what is necessary to make it all happen. I'd like to work with some of the recent member projects to help document their experience and make easier for the next batch. I'm looking forward to taking some time off and look forward to the possibility of running for a seat on the SPI board again at some point in the future.

Any Day Now, The Official Ubuntu Book will show up in stores. I have a rubber-banded-together copy of the folded and gathered sheets and the the first batch of books should be bound (or being bound) right now. Those who have pre-ordered it from Amazon or elsewhere should have it in their hands quickly. In addition to my own name on the author page is (future Ubuntu Community Manager) Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, and Ivan Krsti . Many more members of the Ubuntu community and many editors at Prentice Hall deserve credit as well. I'm proud of the book. I sense that it's more consistent, better organized, and of a higher overall quality than my last book. Even better though, is the fact that the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Several chapters are already being shipped by default on the Ubuntu desktop and several translations are underway. You can read more about the book on the publishers site and order it from any number of places online. Books under such licenses are economically risky for publishers so please support the project by buying it if you end up finding the text useful!

(This is mostly reposted from an Advogato article I just submitted).

About a year ago, I posted an article on Advogato entitled, Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement. In it, I argued that Creative Commons and the free culture movement were struggling to build a cohesive freedom movement in the way that free and open source software had succeeded in doing by never stopping to define the ground rules of the commons movement. I argued that Free Software built a movement around calls for essential freedoms and against the actions of software producers who failed to live up to this standard. On the other hand, Creative Commons has argued for "some rights reserved" but never explained which rights were unreservable. In the process, they've done the invaluable service of creating a stable of powerful, internationalized licenses. But they failed to build the type social movement that some of us wanted. While this was never their goal, it left some people unsatisfied. In a later version of the essay published in Mute Magazine, I concluded by stating:

Whether in unison or cooperating in separate groups, it is time for those those of us that feel strongly about freedom to discuss, decide, and move forward with our own free information movement built upon a standard of freedom. When we have defined free information in terms of essential freedoms, a subset of Creative Commons works and a subset of Creative Commons licenses will provide tools and texts through which a social movement can be built.

I'm thrilled to say that that day is now within sight. A few weeks ago, Larry Lessig introduced me to Erik M ller, a Wikipedian who had read my article and was planning on launching the same project that I had been planning. It only seemed sensible to collaborate. Today, we have launched a draft of a Free Content and Expression Definition online at freedomdefined.org. The website is a wiki and we welcome feedback, suggestions, and alternative versions of the document. So far, we've have decided to stick closely to the freedoms of free software but are actively interested in updating these to be more relevant for other types of creative works. Of course, anything, even the name, can be changed at this point. To guide us through the project of debating and further refining a definition are four moderators who will ultimately be called upon to resolve disputes and disagreements about what the definition should and will say. These moderators are myself, Erik M ller, Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick, and Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Angela Beesley. You can view the announcement of the definition, please take a look at:

• http://freedomdefined.org/Announcement

To view the definition itself, please visit:

• http://freedomdefined.org

My friends Marcell and Tomislav organized a show called System.hack() that aimed to highlight many of the last half-centuries greatest "hacks" as a means of celebrating the hacks themselves while exposing them, and the idea of hacking and hackers, to a larger audience. As part of their show, I procured an original circa-1960's Cap'n Crunch whistle (the one that emits 2600 Hz when one hole is covered) and wrote a short essay for a book published along with the show. You'll have to track down Tomi and Marcell in Zagreb if you want to find my whistle but you can read about the hack in either English or Croatian on the exhibit's wiki. You should also check out the whole System.hack() wiki because there's some other good stuff up there from other contributors.