For the last half-year I have used CyanogenMod on an Nexus 4 as my main phone. Recently the touch functionality stopped working on parts of the display, and the glass on the back has started to crack. It seems modern phones are not built to last. For comparison, before the N4 I used a Nokia N900 for around 3 years without any hardware damages (in my drawer now, still working). A few weeks ago I started looking for a replacement. My experience with CyanogenMod had been good, but the number of proprietary blobs on the N4 concerned me. Finding something better wasn t easy though, so I m documenting my experience here. My requirements were, briefly, that I wanted a phone that I could buy locally that had a free software community around it that produced a stable environment. I have modest requirements for things I wouldn t give up on: telephony, data connection (3G), email (IMAP+SMTP), chat (XMPP), and a web browser. I like the philosophy and openness around the Firefox OS but the more I have read about it, it seems unlikely that it would deliver what I need today. In particular none of the devices capable of running Firefox OS appealed to me, and the state of email reading seemed unclear. I m sure I ll revisit Firefox OS as an alternative for me in the future.

As I had been happy with CyanogenMod, but concerned about its freeness, it felt natural to move on and test the more free software friendly project Replicant. Replicant only supports a small number of devices. After talking with people in the #replicant IRC channel, it seemed the Samsung S3 would be a decent choice for me. The Samsung S2 would have worked as well, but it cost almost as much as the S3 where I looked. Despite the large number of Samsung S3 devices out there, it seems the prices even for used devices are high (around 2500 SEK in Sweden, ~380 USD). I ended up buying a brand new one for 3200 SEK (~500 USD) which felt expensive, especially after recalling the recent $199 sale for Nexus 4. Noticing that brand new Nexus 4 devices are still over 3000 SEK in Sweden comforted me a bit. I would have preferred a more robust phone, like the CAT B15, but the state of free software OSes on them seem unclear and I wanted something stable. So, enough about the background, let s get started. Building and installing Replicant on the device was straight forward. I followed the Replicant Samsung S3 Build instructions to build my own images. The only issue I had was that I had not set JAVA_HOME and the defaults were bad; make sure to set JAVA_HOME before building. I built everything on my Lenovo X201 running Debian Wheezy, with OpenJDK 6 as the Java implementation. Installing the newly built firmware was easy, I just followed the installation process documentation. I made sure to take a clockworkmod backup to an external SD card before wiping the old system. To get a really clean new device, I also re-formated /sdcard inside clockworkmod; I noticed there were some traces left of the old system there. I spent about one week testing various configurations before settling on something I could use daily. A fair amount of time was spent looking into backup and restore options for Android devices. My idea was that I would take a backup of the apps I ran on the N4 and transfer them to the S3. The Android Debug Bridge (adb) has a backup/restore command, however it (intentionally) ignores apps marked as allowBackup=false which a number of apps has. It doesn t seem possible to override that settings so much for the freedom to backup your own device. I then discovered oandbackup. It can backup your entire system, saving each app (together with associated data) into a separate directory, for simple review and inspection before restore. You can do batch backups and batch restore. I couldn t get it to automatically restore things, though, which would be neat for really automated re-installations (there is an open issue about this feature). After noticing that some apps did not like being moved from the N4 (running Android 4.2) to the S3 (running 4.0), I ended up installing most apps from scratch on a freshly installed Replicant. I use oandbackup to the external SD card so that I can quickly restore my phone. For backup/restore of SMS/MMS and Call Log, I use SMS Backup+ against my own IMAP server. Camera pictures are synced manually using adb when I am connected to my laptop. There is a number of apps that deserve to be mentioned because they are what I use on a daily basis. All of them come via the free software market F-Droid. For email (IMAP/SMTP), I use K-9 Mail which is feature rich but still easy to use. For chat, I use Xabber. I use NewsBlur s free software app to read RSS flows. For two-factor authentication, I use Google Authenticator. I haven t evaluated different PDF viewers, but the first one I tried (APV PDF Viewer) has worked fine so far. Handling a a synchronized address book and calendar deserve its own blog post because it is a challenging topic, but briefly, I m currently using a combination of aCal and DAVdroid. Finally, since Replicant is still work in progress, some words about stability and notes on what doesn t work. This is probably the most interesting part if you are considering running Replicant on an S3 yourself. Overall system stability is flawless, I hadn t had any crash or problem with the fundamental functionality (telephony, 3G, Camera). People have said graphics feels a bit laggy, but I cannot compare with the stock ROM and it doesn t get in the way of daily use. First some notes about non-free aspects:

• Bluetooth doesn t work by default. After installing /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4334.hcd (MD5 b6207104da0ca4a0b1da66448af7ed4c) pairing and testing with a Bluetooth headset worked fine.
• Front camera doesn t work by default. After installing /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin (MD5 52eeaf0889bc9206860075cd9b7f80b9and) and /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin (MD5 0e6fdeb378fb154c39fd508ae28eaf2a) it works. The extensions are *.bin but I don t believe this code is executed on the main CPU.
• GPS doesn t work by default. After installing /system/bin/gpsd (MD5 6757ed2e2a283259e67c62e6b2b9cfef), /system/lib/libsecril-client.so (MD5 a836df0f947d2aa2ef20dcb213317517), /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so (MD5 1ea1d67f297dd52d59d40dbad9b02a0a) it works. This is code that runs on the main CPU, and even more alarming, it embeds a copy of OpenSSL and talks to various online servers for A-GPS, and is thus a likely (and probably not too challenging) attack vector for anyone wanting to remotely exploit any phone.
• Wifi doesn t work, and I haven t gotten this to work. There is a list of non-free S3 firmware on the Replicant wiki however my stock ROM did not ship with those files. I don t believe any of the blobs run on the main CPU.
• NFC doesn t work, and I haven t gotten it to work. It seems the infrastructure for NFC is missing in Replicant 4.0, it doesn t even expose the NFC hardware permission capability. This is quite unfortunate for me, since I daily work with YubiKey NEO and would have preferred to replace Google Authenticator with the YubiOATH that uses the NEO for OATH secret storage.

Some other observations:

• Panorama mode in the Camera crashes; see issue about it.
• There is a number of smaller graphical issues. I believe these are related to the EGL but haven t understood the details. What I ve noticed are the following issues. The task switcher doesn t show mini screenshots of all running apps (the screenshots are just black). ZXing is not able to QR decode images (I m told this is because Replicant uses a RGB color plane instead of the required YUV color plane). Video playback in the gallery is laggy to the point of being unusable. Video playback on Youtube in the default web browser works in full screen (not laggy), but not embedded in the webpage.
• MTP has been a bit unreliable, my main laptop is able to import photos, but another laptop (also running Debian Wheezy) just stalls when talking to it. This may be a host issue, I have experience similar issues with a Nexus 7 2nd generation device.

I am quite happy with the setup so far, and I will continue to use it as my primary phone.

I defended my dissertation three months ago. Since then, it feels like everything has changed. I ve moved from Somerville to Seattle, moved from MIT to the University of Washington, and gone from being a graduate student to a professor. Mika and I have moved out of a multi-apartment cooperative into into a small apartment we re calling Extraordinary Least Squares. We ve gone from a broad and deep social network to (almost) starting from scratch in a new city. As things settle and I develop a little extra bandwidth, I am trying to take time to get connected to my community. If you re in Seattle and know me, drop me a line! If you re in Seattle but don t know me yet, do the same so we can fix that!

org-mutt with org-mode >= 8 Thanks to Don I just remembered that I haven't yet announced org-mutt support for org-mode >= 8. Let's catch up! Since a few weeks I've been aware of the fact that my mutt/org-mode glue, AKA org-mutt, was no longer working with org-mode >= 8, due to the ditching of org-remember in favor of org-capture. Allegedly, org-capture should have been backward compatible, but it clearly is not. Before I had time to fix it myself, Mako came to my rescue and submitted a patch (now accepted) that does the needed porting. Free Software is truly amazing, isn't it? I've just updated the canonical org-mutt blog post, so that the documentation in there is up to date again. If you're using org-mutt, I suggest to refer to the Git repository as the canonical location for future updates, if any. Thanks Don, thanks Mako!

Recently I went through the process of getting my new key (C99E03CC is dead, long live 43C30A7D!) signed to replace the old one in the Debian keyring. Some people used caff to send out their signatures and in 3 different cases I did not receive the signature for my @debian.org uid, leaving me somewhat dumbfounded as signatures for other uids went through just fine, as did various test emails to my @debian.org address. After pestering people on IRC and discussing the issue with one of the signers, we concluded that Debian's mail servers are configured to reject any mail with invalid envelope-From header - and chances that caff-sent email is going to have an invalid one are pretty high. As far as I can tell, a valid configuration is such that echo $ USER @$(cat /etc/mailname) returns a valid email address. So, if you are a caff user, please make sure that your system is configured correctly before sending out signatures with it, namely that the emails sent using something like echo 'test' mail $ YOU @debian.org are getting through successfully.

The OASIS website has not been updated since a while. So I decide to take a shot at making more up to date. This blog post is about the pipeline I have but in place to automatically update the website. It is the first end to end 'continuous deployment' project I have achieved. Among the user visible changes:

• an invitation to circle the OASIS G+ page, which is now the official channel for small updates in OASIS.
• an invitation to fork the project on Github since it is now the official repository for OASIS.
• some link to documentation for the bleeding edge version of OASIS manual and API.

The OASIS website repository is also on Github. Feel free to fork it and send me pull request if you see any mistake. The website is still using a lot of markdown processed by pandoc. But there are some new technical features:

• no more index.php, we use a templating system to point to latest version
• we use a Jenkins job to generate the website daily or after any update in OASIS itself.

Since I start using quite quite a lot Python, I have decided to use it for this project. It has a lot of nice libraries and it helps me to quickly do something about the website (and provides plenty of idea to create equivalent tools in OCaml). The daily generation: Jenkins I have a Jenkins instance running, so I decided to use it to compile once a day the new website with updated documentation and links. This Jenkins instance also monitor changes of the OASIS source code. So I can do something even more precise: regenerate the website after every OASIS changes. I use the Jenkins instance to also generate a documentation tarball for OASIS manual and API. This helps a lot to be able to display the latest manual and API documentation. This way I can quickly browse the documentation and spot errors early. Another good point about Jenkins, is that it allows to store SSH credential. So I created a build user, with its own SSH key, in the OCaml Forge and I use it to publish the website at the end of the build. Right now Jenkins do the following:

• trigger a build of the OASIS website:
  • every day (cron)
  • when a push in OASIS website repository is detected
  • when a successful build of OASIS is achieved.
• get documentation artifact from the latest successful build of OASIS
• build the website
• publish it

Data gathering To build the website I need some data:

• documentation tarballs containing the API (HTML from OCamldoc) and manual (Markdow)
• list of OASIS version published
• links to each tarball (documentation and source tarball)

The OCaml Forge has a nice SOAP API. But one need to be logged in to access it. This is unfortunate, because I just want to access public data. The only way I found to gather my data was to scrape the OCaml Forge. Python has a very nice scraping library for that: beautifulsoup. I use beautifulsoup to parse the HTML downloaded from the Files tab of the OASIS project and extract all the relevant information. I use curl to download the documentation tarball (for released versions) and for the latest development version. Code Template Python has also a very nice library to process template: mako. Using the data I have gathered, I feed them to mako and I process all the .tmpl files in the repository to create matching files. Among the thing that I have transformed into template:

• the index.php has been transformed into a index.mkd.tmpl, it was a hackish PHP script scraping the RSS of updates before, it is now a clean template.
• robots.txt.tmpl, see the following section for explanation
• documentation.mkd.tmpl in order to list all version of documentation.

Fix documentation and indexing One of the problem of providing access to all versions of the documentation, is that people can end up reading an old version of the documentation. In order to prevent that, I use two different techniques:

• prevent search engine to index old version.
• warn the user that he is reading an old version.

To prevent search engine to index the file, I have created a robots.txt that list all URL of old documentation. This should be enough to prevent search engine to index the wrong page. To warn the user that he is reading the wrong version, I have added a box "you are not viewing the latest version". This part was tricky but beautifulsoup v4 provide a nice API to edit HTML in place. I just have to find the right CSS selector to define the position where I want to insert my warning box. Code Publish The ultimate goal of the project is the 'continuous deployment'. Rather than picking what version to deploy and do the process by hand, I let Jenkins deploy every version of it. Deploying the website used to be a simple rsync. But for this project I decided to use a fancier method. I spend a few hours deciding what was the best framework to do the automatic deployment. There are two main frameworks around: capistrano (Ruby) and fabric (Python). Fabric is written in Python, so I pick this one because it was a good fit for the project. Fabric biggest feature is to be a SSH wrapper. The fabric script is quite simple and to understand it, you just have to know that local run a local command and run run a command on the target host. The fabfile.py script do the following:

• create a local tarball using the OASIS website html/ directory
• upload the tarball to ssh.ocamlcore.org
• uncompress it and replace the htdocs/ directory of the oasis project
• remove the oldest tarballs, we keep a few versions to be able to perform a rollback.

Given this new process, the website is updated in 3 minutes automatically after a successful build of OASIS.

On Wednesday, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in front of a ridiculously packed house at the MIT Media Lab. I am humbled by the support shown by the MIT Sloan, Media Lab, and Harvard communities. Earlier today, I finished up paperwork and submitted my archival copies. I m done. Although I ve often heard PhDs described as emotional roller coasters, I feel enormously blessed in that I honestly can t relate. My eight years at MIT and Harvard have been almost universally positive and I have learned and grown indescribably. As excited as I am about my next chapter at the University of Washington, I m going to miss my life here. Deeply. My dissertation was three essays on volunteer mobilization in peer production. Once I have a chance to catch up and recover, I ll be posting the previously unpublished pieces. The Remixing Dilemma was included in the dissertation and is already online. The Media Lab AV team shot professional video of the talk. When I get a copy of the video, I ll post that too. But because I think it s important, I ve formatted and published the acknowledgments section of the dissertation today. Although there are too many folks to thank, I ve highlighted the contributions of my co-authors, and friends, Aaron Shaw and Andr s Monroy Hern ndez and my almost unbelievably incredible group of advisors: Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Mitch Resnick, and Tom Malone.

In a new paper, recently published in the open access journal PLOSONE, Aaron Shaw and I build on new research in survey methodology to describe a method for estimating bias in opt-in surveys of contributors to online communities. We use the technique to reevaluate the most widely cited estimate of the gender gap in Wikipedia. A series of studies have shown that Wikipedia s editor-base is overwhelmingly male. This extreme gender imbalance threatens to undermine Wikipedia s capacity to produce high quality information from a full range of perspectives. For example, many articles on topics of particular interest to women tend to be under-produced or of poor quality. Given the open and often anonymous nature of online communities, measuring contributor demographics is a challenge. Most demographic data on Wikipedia editors come from opt-in surveys where people respond to open, public invitations. Unfortunately, very few people answer these invitations. Results from opt-in surveys are unreliable because respondents are rarely representative of the community as a whole. The most widely-cited estimate from a large 2008 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and UN University in Maastrict (UNU-MERIT) suggested that only 13% of contributors were female. However, the very same survey suggested that less than 40% of Wikipedia s readers were female. We know, from several reliable sources, that Wikipedia s readership is evenly split by gender a sign of bias in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey. In our paper, we combine data from a nationally representative survey of the US by the Pew Internet and American Life Project with the opt-in data from the 2008 WMF/UNU-MERIT survey to come up with revised estimates of the Wikipedia gender gap. The details of the estimation technique are in the paper, but the core steps are:

1. We use the Pew dataset to provide baseline information about Wikipedia readers.
2. We apply a statistical technique called propensity scoring to estimate the likelihood that a US adult Wikipedia reader would have volunteered to participate in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey.
3. We follow a process originally developed by Valliant and Dever to weight the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey to correct for estimated bias.
4. We extend this weighting technique to Wikipedia editors in the WMF/UNU data to produce adjusted estimates of the demographics of their sample.

Using this method, we estimate that the proportion of female US adult editors was 27.5% higher than the original study reported (22.7%, versus 17.8%), and that the total proportion of female editors was 26.8% higher (16.1%, versus 12.7%). These findings are consistent with other work showing that opt-in surveys tend to undercount women. Overall, these results reinforce the basic substantive finding that women are vastly under-represented among Wikipedia editors. Beyond Wikipedia, our paper describes a method online communities can adopt to estimate contributor demographics using opt-in surveys, but that is more credible than relying entirely on opt-in data. Advertising-intelligence firms like ComScore and Quantcast provide demographic data on the readership of an enormous proportion of websites. With these sources, almost any community can use our method (and source code) to replicate a similar analysis by: (1) surveying a community s readers (or a random subset) with the same instrument used to survey contributors; (2) combining results for readers with reliable demographic data about the readership population from a credible source; (3) reweighting survey results using the method we describe. Although our new estimates will not help us us close the gender gap in Wikipedia or address its troubling implications, they give us a better picture of the problem. Additionally, our method offers an improved tool to build a clearer demographic picture of other online communities in general.

Is Franz Sacher, the Inventor of the famous sachertorte, still alive and and working at the at the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Might this help explain why EFF Technology Project Director Peter Eckersley is so concerned about protecting privacy and pseudonymity?

If you re a Debian user, you are probably already familiar with some of the awesome icons for IceWeasel (rebranded Mozilla Firefox), IceDove (rebranded Mozilla Thunderbird) and IceApe (rebranded Mozilla SeaMonkey).

I was pretty ambivalent about the decision to rebrand Firefox until I saw some of proposed the IceWeasel icons which in my humble opinion were just too cute, and awesome, to pass up.

Until very recently however, IceOwl (rebranded Mozilla Sundbird) had no such awesome icon. Quite a while ago, I filed bug #658664 in Debian complaining that iceowl does not include awesome icy owl icons. I wrote:

I was extremely disappointed when I installed Iceowl and discovered that it does not ship with an awesome logo or icons showing a picture of an IceOwl. Instead, it seems to be represented by picture of a (boring) paper calendar which is very generic and not awesome at all. IceWeasel, IceDove, and IceApe each include extremely awesome logos/icons that have really cool looking white illustrations of icy weasels, doves, and apes. IceOwl needs a similarly awesome logo to use as its icon. This bug seems particularly egregious because owls actually live in icy climates and come in white versions! For example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snowy_Owl_-_Schnee-Eule.jpg While illustrators need to imagine what an ice ape or ice weasel might look like, there is no such need for imagination in the case of an ice owl! As far as I m concerned, this bug should be release critical. Hopefully, someone will upload a patch quickly!

Finally, after many months of all of us suffering in silence, Nick Morrott came along and fixed the bug with the creation of this new, incredibly awesome, icy owl logo!

Last year, I applied for academic, tenure track, jobs at several communication departments, information schools, and in HCI-focused computer science programs with a tradition of hiring social scientists. Being on the market as it is called is both scary and time consuming. Like me, many candidates have never been on the market before. Candidates are asked to produce documents in genres e.g., cover letters, research statements, teaching statements, diversity statements that most candidates have never written, read, or even heard of. Candidates often rely on their supervisors for advice. I did so and my advisors were extremely helpful. The reality, however, is that although candidates advisors may sit on hiring committees, most have not been on candidates side of job market themselves for years or even decades. The Internet is full of websites, like the academic jobs wiki, Academia StackExchange, and the Chronicle of Higher Education forums for people on the market. Confused and insecure candidates ask questions of the form, Does blank matter? and the answer is usually, Doing/having blank may help/hurt, but it is only one factor of many. The result is that candidates worry about everything. Then they worry about what they should be worrying about, but are not. The most helpful thing, for me, was to read and synthesize the material submitted by recent successful job market candidates. For example, Michael Bernstein a friend from MIT, now at Stanford published his research and teaching statements on his website and I found both useful as I prepared mine. That said, I was surprised by how little material like this I could find on the web. For example, I could not find any examples of recent job market cover letters from successful candidates in fields close to mine. So to help fill this gap, I am publishing all of my job market material. I ve posted both the PDFs of the material I submitted as well as the LaTeX templates I used to generate the documents in my packet. My packet included:

• Research Statement (TeX) A description of my research to date and my current trajectory. Following a convention I have seen others follow, I cited my own work (but only my work) to form a a curated bibliography of my own publications and working papers.
• Teaching Statement (TeX) A two-page description of my approach to teaching, a list of my teaching experience, and a description of sample courses.
• Diversity Statement (TeX) A description of how I think about diversity and how I have, and will, engage with it in my teaching and research.
• Cover Letter (TeX) Each application I sent had a customized cover letter. I wrote mine on MIT letter head. Since each letter is different, I have published the letter I sent to the department that I took the job in (UW Communication). Because my new department did not request research and teaching statements, the cover letter includes material taken from both. For departments that requested separate statements, I limited myself to a shorter (1.5 pages) version of the letter with a similar structure.
• Writing Samples I included three or four of my papers to every job I applied to. The selection of articles changed a bit depending on the department but I included at least one single-authored paper in each packet.
• Letters of Recommendation Because I didn t write these and haven t seen them, I can t share them. I requested letters from my four committee members: Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Mitch Resnick, and Tom Malone.
• Curriculum Vitae (TeX) I have tried to keep my CV up-to-date during graduate school. I keep my CV in git and have a little CGI script automatically rebuild the published version whenever an update is committed.

I hope people going on the market will find these materials useful. Obviously, you should not copy or reuse the text of any of my material. It is your application, after all. That said, please do help yourself to the formatting and structure. Finally, I would encourage anyone who builds on my material to republish their own material to help other candidates. If you do, I d appreciate a link back or comment on this blog post so that my readers can find your improvements.

Recently, I ate at the somewhat famous London vegetarian restaurant Indian Veg Bhelpoori House in Islington (often referred to simply as Indian Veg ).

I couldn t help but imagine that the restaurant had hired Emanuel Bronner as their interior decorator.

When I last lived in Seattle, nearly a decade ago, I hosted the Debian Seattle Social email list. When I left the city, the mailing list eventually fell victim to bitrot. When Allison Randall asked me about the list a couple months ago, I decided that moving back to Seattle was a good excuse to work with Allison and some others to revive the community. Toward that end, I ve put up a little website and created a new mailing list. It s hosted on Alioth this time which will be reliable than me. Since it has been years, we have not moved over the old subscriber list so you ll have to sign up again if you were on it before. If you re a Debian developer or user and you d like to hear about infrequent Debian social gatherings in the Seattle area, you should sign up on the list!

I ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know! Starting June 24th, I ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen. I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

I use RSS feeds to keep up with academic journals. Because of an undocumented and unexpected feature (bug?) in my (otherwise wonderful) free software newsreader NewsBlur, many articles published over the last year were marked as having been read before I saw them. Over the last week, I caught up. I spent hours going through abstracts and downloading papers that looked interesting or relevant to my research. Because I did this for hundreds of articles, it gave me an unusual opportunity to reflect on my journal reading practices in a systematic way. On a number of occasions, there were potentially interesting articles in non-open access journals that neither MIT nor Harvard subscribes to and that were otherwise not accessible to me. In several cases where the research was obviously important to my work, I made an interlibrary request, emailed the papers authors for copies, or tracked down a colleague at an institution with access. Of course, articles that look potentially interesting from the title and abstract often end up being less relevant or well executed on closer inspection. I tend to cast a wide net, skim many articles, and put them aside when it s clear that the study is not for me. This week, I downloaded many of these possibly relevant papers to, at least, give a skim. But only if I could download them easily. On three or four occasions, I found inaccessible articles at this margin of relevance. In these cases, I did not bother trying to track down the articles. Of course, what appear to be marginally relevant articles sometimes end up being a great match for my research and I will end up citing and building on the work. I found several suprisingly interesting papers last week. The articles that were locked up have no chance at this. When people suggest that open access hinders the spread of scholarship, a common retort is that the people who need the work have or can finagle access. For the papers we know we need, this might be true. As someone with access to two of the most well endowed libraries in academia who routinely requests otherwise inaccessible articles through several channels, I would have told you, a week ago, that locked-down journals were unlikely to keep me from citing anybody. So it was interesting watching myself do a personal cost calculation in a way that sidelined published scholarship and that open access publishing would have prevented. At the margin of relevance to ones research, open access may make a big difference.

I love maps something that became clear to me when I was looking at the tag cloud of my bookmarks a few years back. One of my favorite blogs (now a book) is Frank Jabobs Strange Maps. So it s no coincidence that a number of my favorite MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles are map based. Trying to connect the two worlds, I sent Jacobs a write-up of the hunt and of a particularly strange sound-based map puzzle called White Noise that I worked with Don Armstrong to solve in the 2006 hunt. While I wasn t paying attention, Jacobs did a very nice writeup of my writeup of the puzzle for Strange Maps!

This post was written with Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez. It is a summary of a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist. You can also read the full paper: The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Monroy-Hern ndez using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my academic website.

Remixing the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts represents a widespread, important, and controversial form of social creativity online. Proponents of remix culture often speak of remixing in terms of rich ecosystems where creative works are novel and highly generative. However, examples like this can be difficult to find. Although there is a steady stream of media being shared freely on the web, only a tiny fraction of these projects are remixed even once. On top of this, many remixes are not very different from the works they are built upon. Why is some content more attractive to remixers? Why are some projects remixed in deeper and more transformative ways?

We try to shed light on both of these questions using data from Scratch a large online remixing community. Although we find support for several popular theories, we also present evidence in support of a persistent trade-off that has broad practical and theoretical implications. In what we call the remixing dilemma, we suggest that characteristics of projects that are associated with higher rates of remixing are also associated with simpler and less transformative types of derivatives.

Our study is focused on two interrelated research questions. First, we ask why some projects shared in remixing communities are more or less generative than others. Generativity a term we borrow from Jonathan Zittrain describes creative works that are likely to inspire follow-on work. Several scholars have offered suggestions for why some creative works might be more generative than others. We focus on three central theories:

1. Projects that are moderately complicated are more generative. The free and open source software motto release early and release often suggests that simple projects will offer more obvious opportunities for contribution than more polished projects. That said, projects that are extremely simple (e.g., completely blank slates) may also uninspiring to would-be contributors.
2. Projects by prominent creators are more generative. The reasoning for this claim comes from the suggestion that remixing can act as a form of cultural conversation and that the work of popular creators can act like a common medium or language.
3. Projects that are remixes themselves are more generative. The reasoning for this final claim comes from the idea that remixing thrives through the accumulation of contributions from groups of people building on each other s work.

Our second question focuses on the originality of remixes and asks when more or less transformative remixing occurs. For example, highly generative projects may be less exciting if the projects produced based on them are all near-identical copies of antecedent projects. For a series of reasons including the fact that increased generativity might come by attracting less interested, skilled, or motivated individuals we suggest that each of the factors associated with generativity will also be associated with less original forms of remixing. We call this trade-off the remixing dilemma. We answer both of our research questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch, where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment, a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound, and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million users, most of them under 18 years old. To test our three theories about generativity, we measure whether or not, as well as how many times, Scratch projects were remixed in a dataset that includes every shared project. Although Scratch is designed as a remixing community, only around one tenth of all Scratch projects are ever remixed. Because more popular projects are remixed more frequently simply because of exposure, we control for the number of times each project is viewed. Our analysis shows at least some support for all three theories of generativity described above. (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. (3) Remixes are more likely to attract remixers than de novo projects. To test our theory that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality, we build a dataset that includes every Scratch remix and its antecedent. For each pair, we construct a measure of originality by comparing the remix to its antecedent and computing an edit distance (a concept we borrow from software engineering) to determine how much the projects differ. We find strong evidence of a trade-off: (1) Projects of moderate complexity are remixed more lightly than more complicated projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators tend to be remixed in less transformative ways. (3) Cumulative remixing tends to be associated with shallower and less transformative derivatives. That said, our support for (1) is qualified in that we do not find evidence of the increased originality for the simplest projects as our theory predicted. We feel that our results raise difficult but important challenges, especially for the designers of social media systems. For example, many social media sites track and display user prominence with leaderboards or lists of aggregate views. This technique may lead to increased generativity by emphasizing and highlighting creator prominence. That said, it may also lead to a decrease in originality of the remixes elicited. Our results regarding the relationship of complexity to generativity and originality of remixes suggest that supporting increased complexity, at least for most projects, may have fewer drawbacks. As supporters and advocates of remixing, we feel that although highly generative works that lead to highly original derivatives may be rare and difficult for system designers to support, understanding remixing dynamics and encouraging these rare projects remain a worthwhile and important goal. Benjamin Mako Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, Microsoft Research For more, see our full paper, The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality. Published in American Behavioral Scientist. 57-5, Pp. 643 663. (Official Link, Pay-Walled ).

On the weekend of April 20-21, Students for Free Culture is going to be holding its annual conference, FCX2013, at New York Law School in New York City. As a long-time SFC supporter and member, I am enormously proud to be giving the opening keynote address. Although the program for Sunday is still shaping up, the published Saturday schedule looks great. If previous years are any indication, the conference can serve as an incredible introduction to free culture, free software, wikis, remixing, copyright, patent and trademark reform, and participatory culture. For folks that are already deeply involved, FCX is among the best places I know to connect with other passionate, creative, people working on free culture issues. I ve been closely following and involved with SFC for years and I am particularly excited about the group that is driving the organization forward this year. If you will be in or near New York that weekend or if you can make the trip you should definitely try to attend. FCX2013 is pay what you can with a $15 suggested donation. You can register online now. Travel assistance especially for members of active SFC chapters may still be available. I hope to see you there!

A few months late, perhaps, but I wanted to mention that my team (Codex) competed, once again, in the MIT Mystery Hunt. The prize for winning is the responsibility of writing the hunt next year. After being on the 2012 writing team I have mixed feelings about the fact that we did not win again. Although I did not walk away with another coin, I did manage to make an appearance in a multimedia story that the MIT Tech shot about the hunt which provides nice introductions to those who are not familiar with it. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/R-tmBfZ8CwQ" width="560"></iframe> It was fun to reflect a little bit on why I find the hunt so fun. I said:

In my day job, I work on a lot of problems that maybe don t have answers. It s really awesome to work in a space where if you put in 1-5 hours of mental energy, you will have a solution. Someone has test-solved for it, you know that it s solvable; you know that there is an answer and that there was designed to be an answer. There s something really satisfying about being able to do that.

If you re looking for a team to hunt on next year, feel free get in contact codex is generally quite open to new members.

A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat. According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because unlike many people I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name. Donfried s letter is the latest step in a saga that has been ongoing since last June. It has been a frustrating learning experience for me that has made me worried about Wikipedia, its processes, and its future. In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed. The ICD is a non-profit organization based in Berlin. According to its own website, a large part of the organization s activities are based around arranging conferences. Its goals peace, cultural interchange, human rights are admirable and close to my heart. Its advisors and affiliates are impressive. I had never heard of the ICD before their founder, Mark Donfried, emailed me in April 2012 asking me to give a keynote address at their conference on The 2012 International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy & Human Rights. I replied, interested, but puzzled because my own research seems very far afield of both cultural diplomacy (which I had never heard of) and human rights. I replied saying:

What would you like me to talk about I ask because I don t consider myself an expert in (or even particularly knowledgeable about) cultural diplomacy. Did someone else refer you to me?

Donfried replied with a long message seemingly copy and pasted thanking me for considering attending and asking me for details of my talk. I replied again repeating text from my previous email and asking why he was interested in me. Donfried suggested a phone call to talk about details. But by this point, I had looked around the web for information about the ICD and had decided to decline the invitation. Among things I found was a blog post by my friend James Grimmelmann that suggests that, at least in his case, the ICD had a history of sending unsolicited email and an apparently inability to take folks off their email lists even after repeated requests. I also read the Wikipedia article about the ICD. Although the Wikipedia article was long and detailed, it sent off some internal Wikipedian-alarm-bells for me. The page read, to me, like an advertisement or something written by the organization being described; it simply did not read to me like an encyclopedia article written by a neutral third-party. I looked through the history of the article and found that the article had been created by a user called Icd_berlin who had made no other substantive edits to the encyclopedia. Upon further examination, I found that almost all other significant content contributions were from a series of anonymous editors with IP addresses associated with Berlin. I also found that a couple edits had removed criticism when it had been added to the article. The criticism was removed by an anonymous editor from Berlin. Criticisms on the article included links to a website called Inside the ICD which was a website that mostly consisted of comments by anonymous people claiming to be former interns of the ICD complaining about the working conditions at the organization. There were also many very positive descriptions of work at the ICD. A wide array of pseudonymous users on the site accused the negative commenters of being liars and detractors and the positive commenters of being ICD insiders. I also found that there had been evidence on Wikipedia also removed without discussion by an anonymous IP from Berlin of an effort launched by the youth wing of ver.di one of the largest trade unions in Germany to campaign for good internships at the ICD. Although details of the original campaign have been removed from ver.di s website, the campaigned ended after coming to an agreement with the ICD that made explicit a set of expectations and created an Intern Council. Although the article about ICD on Wikipedia had many citations, many were to the ICD s own website. Most of the rest were to articles that only tangentially mentioned the ICD. Many were about people with ICD connections but did not mention the ICD at all. As Wikipedia editor, I was worried that Wikipedia s policies on conflict of interest, advertising, neutrality, and notability were not being served by the article in its state. But as someone with no real experience or knowledge of the ICD, I wasn t sure what to do. I posted a request for help on Wikipedia asking for others to get involved and offer their opinions. It turns out, there were several editors who had tried to improve the article in the past and had been met by pro-ICD editors reverting their changes. Eventually, those editors lost patience or simply moved on to other topics. By raising the issue again, I kicked off a round of discussion about the article. At the termination of that discussion, the article was proposed for deletion under Wikipedia s Articles for Deletion policy. A new Wikipedia editor began working enthusiastically to keep the article by adding links and by arguing that the article should stay. The new user edited the Wikipedia article about me to accuse me of slander and defamation although they removed that claim after I tried to explain that I was only trying to help. I spent quite a bit of time trying to rewrite and improve the article during the deletion discussion and I went link by link through the many dozens of citations. During the deletion discussion, Mark Donfried contacted me over email and explained that his representatives had told him that I was working against the ICD in Wikipedia. He suggested that we meet. We had a tentative plan to meet in Berlin on an afternoon last July but, in the end, I was too busy trying to submit my thesis proposal and neither of us followed up to confirm a particular time within the time window we had set. I have still never met him. My feeling, toward the end of the deletion discussion on Wikipedia, was mostly exasperation. Somewhat reluctantly, I voted to delete the article saying:

Delete This AFD is a complete mess for all the reasons that the article itself is. Basically: there are a small number of people who seem to have a very strong interest in the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy having an article in Wikipedia and, from what I can tell, very little else. Hessin fahem, like all the major contributors to the page, joined Wikipedia in order to participate in this issue. This article has serious problems. I have posted a detailed list of my problems on the article talk page: primary sources, conflict of interest for nearly all substantive contributions and reading like an advert are the biggest issues. My efforts to list these problems were reverted without discussion by an anonymous editor from Berlin. I have seen no evidence that the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy satisfies WP:ORG but I agree that it is possible that it does. I strongly agree with Arxiloxos that articles should always be fixed, and not deleted, if they are fixable. But I also know that Wikipedia does not deserve this article, that I don t know to fix it, and that despite my efforts to address these issues (and I ll keep trying), the old patterns of editing have continued and the article is only getting worse. This ICD seems almost entirely based around a model that involves organizing conferences and then calling and emailing to recruit speakers and attendees. A large number of people will visit this Wikipedia article to find out more about the organization before deciding to pay for a conference or to join to do an internship. What Wikipedia shows to them reads like an advert, links almost exclusively to of pages on the organizations websites and seems very likely to have been written by the organization itself. We are doing an enormous disservice to our readers by keeping this page in its current form. If somebody wants to make a serious effort to improve the article, I will help and will happily reconsider my !vote. But after quite a bit of time trying to raise interest and to get this fixed, I m skeptical this can be addressed and my decision reflects this fact. mako 05:18, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I concluded that although the organization might be notable according to Wikipedia s policies and although the Wikipedia article about it might be fixable, the pattern of editing gave me no faith that it could be fixed until something changed. When the article was deleted, things became quiet. Several months later a new article was created again, by an anonymous user with no other edit history. Although people tend to look closely at previously deleted new pages, this page was created under a different name: The Institute of Cultural Diplomacy and was not noticed. Deleted Wikipedia articles are only supposed to be recreated after they go through a process called deletion review. Because the article was recreated out of this process, I nominated it for what is called speedy deletion under a policy specifically dealing with recreated articles. It was deleted again. Once again, things were quiet. In January, it seems, the Inside the ICD website was threatened with a lawsuit by the ICD and the maintainers of the site took it down with the following message:

Apparently, the ICD is considering filing a lawsuit against this blog and it will now be taken down. We completely forgot about this blog. Let s hope no one is being sued. Farewell.

On February 25, the Wikipedia article on ICD was recreated once again out of process and by a user with almost no previous edit history. The next day, I received an email from Mark Donfried. In the message, Donfried said:

Please note that the ICD is completely in favor of fostering open dialogue and discussions, even critical ones, however some of your activities are raising serious questions about the motives behind your actions and some even seem to be motives of sabotage, since they resulted in ICD not having any Wikipedia page at all. We are deeply concerned regarding these actions of yours, which are causing us considerable damages. As the person who initiated these actions with Wikipedia and member of the board of Wikipedia [1], we would therefore request your answer regarding our questions below within the next 10 days (by March 6th). If we do not receive your response we will unfortunately have to consider taking further legal actions with these regards against you and other anonymous editors.

I responded to Donfried to say that I did not think it was prudent to speak with him while he was threatening me. Meanwhile, other Wikipedia editors nominated the ICD article for deletion once again and unanimously decided to delete it. And although I did not participate in the discussion, Donfried emailed again with more threats of legal action hours after the ICD article was deleted:

[A]s the case of the ICD and its presentation on the Wikipedia has seriously worsened in recent days, we see no alternative but to forward this case (including all relevant visible and anonymous contributors) to our legal representatives in both USA and Europe/Germany as well as to the authorities and other corresponded organizations in order to find a remedy to this case.

Donfried has made it very clear that his organization really wants a Wikipedia article and that they believe they are being damaged without one. But the fact that he wants one doesn t mean that Wikipedia s policies mean he should have one. Anonymous editors in Berlin and in unknown locations have made it clear that they really want a Wikipedia article about the ICD that does not include criticism. Not only do Wikipedia s policies and principles not guarantee them this, Wikipedia might be hurt as a project when this happens. The ICD claims to want to foster open dialogue and criticism. I think they sound like a pretty nice group working toward issues I care about personally. I wish them success. But there seems to be a disconnect between their goals and the actions of both their leader and proponents. Because I used my real name and was skeptical about the organization on discussion pages on Wikipedia, I was tracked down and threatened. Donfried insinuated that I was motivated to sabotage his organization and threatened legal action if I do not answer his questions. The timing of his first letter the day after the ICD page was recreated means that I was unwilling to act on my commitment to Wikipedia and its policies. I have no problem with the ICD and I deeply regret being dragged into this whole mess simply because I wanted to improve Wikipedia. That said, Donfried s threat has scared me off from attempts to improve the ICD articles. I suspect I will not edit ICD pages in Wikipedia in the future. The saddest part for me is that I recognize that what is in effect bullying is working. There are currently Wikipedia articles about the ICD in many languages. For several years, ICD has had an article on English Wikipedia. For almost all of that period, that article has consisted entirely of universally positive text, without criticism, and has been written almost entirely by anonymous editors who have only contributed to articles related to the ICD. In terms of the ICD and its article on Wikipedia, I still have hope. I encourage Donfried and his representatives to create accounts on Wikipedia with their full names just like I have. I encourage them to engage in open dialogue in public on the wiki. I encourage them go through deletion review, make any conflicts of interest they have unambiguously clear, and to work with demonstrably non-conflicted editors on Wikipedia to establish notability under Wikipedia s policies. The result still can be an awesome, neutral, article about their organization. I have offered both advice on how to do this and help in that process in the past. I have faith this can happen and I will be thrilled when it does. But the general case still worries me deeply. If I can be scared off by threats like these, anybody can. After all, I have friends at the Wikimedia Foundation, a position at Harvard Law School, and am close friends with many of the world s greatest lawyer-experts on both wikis and cyberlaw. And even I am intimidated into not improving the encyclopedia. I am concerned by what I believe is the more common case where those with skin in the game will fight harder and longer than a random Wikipedian. The fact that it s usually not me on the end of the threat gives me lots of reasons to worry about Wikipedia at a time when its importance and readership continues to grow as its editor-base remains stagnant.

[1]	It s a minor mistake but worth pointing out that I am not on the board of Wikipedia ; I am on its advisory board which carries no power or responsbility within the organization. Sometimes, the foundation asks for my advice and I happily give it.

The MIT graphic identity website provides downloadable stationery templates for letterhead and envelopes. They provide both Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates. But although they provide both black and white and color templates for Word, they only provide the monochrome templates for LaTeX. When writing cover letters for the job market this year, I was not particularly interested in compromising on color and was completely unwilling to compromise on TeX. As a result, I ended up modifying each of the three templates to include color. In the process, I fixed a few bugs and documented one tricky issue. I ve published a git repository with my changes. It includes branches for each version of three of the old black and white templates as well as my my three new color templates. I hope others at MIT find it useful. I ve tried to keep the changes minimal. I ve emailed the folks at MIT Communication Production Services to see if they want to publish my modified versions. Until then, anyone interested can help themselves to the git repository. LaTeX user that you are, you probably prefer that anyway.