Consilience

(sourcecode is to binary as ??? is to ppt/odp/pdf)

Ted Gould just posted to the planet with his presentation that he gave at the Desktop Summit. At the end of his post you’ll notice that he uploaded his presentation to Launchpad (at lp:~ted/presentations/2009_desktop_summit/).

I think that is a great idea! Not only does it provide the ability for the community to see what others are using for their presentations but it allows anyone to branch a presentation, which has awesome potential. Especially with the presentation format that Ted chose, SVGs. The S5 presentation format (XHTML/CSS/JS based) would also be a great candidate for easy branching and editing of presentations.

But what if you need to create presentations with others who use Powerpoint or Impress and you wanted to harness the power of a Version Control System? Old powerpoint (ppt) files are binary blobs which don’t work well in version control systems (they *work* but not *well*). Impress (odp) and new Powerpoint (pptx) files are effectively zipped archives of xml and images. However, since it is zipped, bzr treats it as a binary. I only tested with bzr but don’t foresee any of the other systems behaving any differently.

Why would you want to use a VCS for your presentation files? Especially a DVCS like bzr/git/hg? COLLABORATION!

Some of you may know that I am currently working with Open.Michigan, a project at the University of Michigan that enables the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER is effectively a broader term for the concept of Open CourseWare. Basically, everything used in education is a resource, not just presentations, and thus is useful for others to see, use, and remix. If you are curious to see what kinds of things we produce, see our Educommons installation.

Back to the topic at hand though: presentations and DVCS.

One of the major areas that the OER community could greatly improve upon is the area of remixing; taking the openly licensed materials and using them, adding new material, and creating something original. Remixing, in general, is enabled by having access to the source files of the material being worked with. Sure, you can use a PDF or a mp3 in a remix, but it is usually better to have the original .odt or multitrack file to work from. This is why Open.Michigan provides to the public the ppt files along with the pdfs of the presentations created through the OER program.

But lets leverage some of the tried and true methods of the FLOSS community in the OER community. One of the biggest and most fundamental benefits of the FLOSS world is that everyone has access to the source code, and can easily get it, edit it, and (hopefully) compile a new version of the program; effectively a “remix.” How does the FLOSS community lower the barriers and increase efficiency for that workflow? We provide public access to code repositories, instructions on building the software (documentation), and a bug tracker to inform what needs to be worked on next.

I want to mirror much of that to the OER community. One of the first things that needs to happen is to provide an easy way to manage multiple versions of a single resource (eg: presentation, video/audio, book). A VCS seems like the obvious choice. But there must be a better way than just managing binary blobs, right?

That is the part that I need to figure out next: how to utilize the power of a DVCS in this genre. Then I can move on to figuring out what a bug tracker for OER would look like (and if it is even needed). The documentation is actually already there, at least for Open.Michigan.

Do you have any ideas?

Tuesday night I gave a presentation at the Michigan!/usr/group (MUG) meeting about Creative Commons and its relationship with Free/Libre Open Source Software. I had a great time giving the presentation and judging from the amount and activity of the questions it seems like others enjoyed it, too!

I started off with a quick background on Creative Commons and what we do, in general. Then, after answering a ton of questions which were raised in the first 5 minutes, I went on to discuss CC’s role in the Free/Open Source Software community. Specifically, the FLOSS projects we develop and/or work on and how we can help others create awesome things.

If you weren’t there, you missed the opportunity to be a part of a great conversation between some great MUG members and I. But luckily, my slides are available online:

And, since Craig was nice enough to use my photo camera to record the presentation, we even have video! We only have 34 minutes of video, but that gets the majority of the talk. Apparently my camera records at a 1 gig per 10 minutes rate, we only got 34 minutes because it filled up my 4 gig memory card.

Thanks to everyone who came out, you made it fun.

As many of you know, I am currently working for Creative Commons and as such I am also always in the Creative Commons IRC channel, #CC. One of the unintended consequences of this abbreviation of Creative Commons is that it is also the abbreviation of Credit Cards (and “Change Congress,” come on Larry, branch out a little!). This didn’t really seem like a problem to me at first: who would have thought the #CC channel was a place about credit cards? Would people be applying for credit cards via IRC? No.

But, I forgot to account for the nefarious side of humanity. The people that are looking for an easy way to scam the world. On a somewhat regular basis people come into the channel and ask for credit card numbers. Scratch that, they DEMAND credit card numbers. A typical scenario is:


user1 enters #CC
< user1> !CC
< user1> ?CC
< user1> !give
< user1> give me credit card #!
... 5 minutes goes by
user1 leaves #CC


This has happened enough times that the /topic for #CC now includes this at the end: “Need credit card numbers? email tips@fbi.gov”

Today, however, I got my first personal request for credit card numbers. Since I idle in #CC, so goes the users logic, I must have access to credit card numbers to sell to people. Here is the full unedited transcript from our interaction:


12:03 Irssi: Starting query in Freenode with oera
12:03 < oera> hello, i'm here for buy credit card number, can you help me?
12:03 < greg-g> email tips@fbi.gov they can help you
12:05 < oera> ok thank but are you try this email?
12:06 < greg-g> they can help you
12:13 < oera> they can help me for going to jails ?
12:13 < oera!i=oera@eta91-1-82-234-203-250.fbx.proxad.net ["Leaving"]


Now, my response wasn't as good as it could be; it could be a ton more funny. What do you think I should say next time someone asks me for credit card numbers? I'm looking for snarky and/or punny responses.

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

This past week was Spring Break at the University of Michigan. So I decided to skip the trip to the beach and instead go to Washington DC to work 9-5 for a week. Really.

My school, the School of Information, has this neat program called Alternative Spring Break where students can go work with some really cool organizations in Washington DC, New York, or Chicago. It is an opportunity to go discover if you actually enjoy doing what you are in Graduate School full-time to learn (my words, not theirs). Also, it is a wonderful networking opportunity; I met some really great people last week and whether or not they can help me find a job is secondary.

I specifically worked for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. This is basically the “think tank” for the ALA Washington office. The Washington office also has the people in the Office of Government Relations; the people that go out there and make sure that the libraries’ perspective is heard on Capitol Hill. It is a really important perspective: who else are as big of proponents of open access to knowledge for all people? who else guards your privacy to such a great degree? Librarians are wonderful people to have on your side, but watch out if you do something wrong.

My time at the OITP involved writing a report about the HathiTrust, an endeavor originating at the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. It is, in the most simple of terms, a long-term digital works preservation project. It is preserving and providing access to all of the digital scans that are being given to the various member Universities from the Google Book Search scannning program and also the libraries’ internal scanning operations. But there are some important implications of the HathiTrust, and that is what I set out to find. I want to give special thanks to John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust, for answering my many questions.

Here is my predicament:

I take photographs with my new shiny digital camera (thanks to all your input on my previous post) and I use F-Spot to manage my photos. I love F-Spot; it does almost everything I want it to do. It tags photos, it takes care of organizing the files on my harddrive (folders are not a method of categorization for photos, tags are), and it even uploads them to my flickr account.

The thing that it doesn’t do is let me embed my choice of license into the photos. It does let me embed the tags into the metadata, so the base functionality is there.

I am a huge supporter of Open content licenses, specifically Creative Commons licenses [ed: Greg is employed by Creative Commons] and I would love to see the ability to set the license of a photo to something of my choice (eg: CC:BY-SA) and have that license info be a part of the image no matter where it goes. And hey, there is even a bug report/feature request for this: here.

My proposed Use Case:
Jane is your typical photographer who uses Linux. As a Linux user she is more likely to know about open content licenses such as Creative Commons licenses and also more likely to use such a license for her photographs.

Jane takes a bunch of photos and imports them into F-Spot. F-Spot lets her set the license for a group of photos to CC:BY-SA. She then uploads those photos to her website. She makes it clear on her website that all her photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA.

Now, when Yahoo or Google go indexing her website their spiders can programatically discern that those photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA from the metadata. The benefits of this information can be seen when searching flickr for Creative Commons licenses: no more worrying about infringing on other’s copyright when you use a photo. Another example is search.creativecommons.org which searches across multiple sites at once for CC licensed material.

All kinds of cool new automated things can be thought of with this information available within the file. flickr automatically displaying the correct license for a photo without you having to specify it; the same thing with personally hosted photo galleries; users of sites like wikipedia can more easily find images for their uses; etc. Also, now that license information will always be in that file so others who find it will know what they can and can not do with it without asking.

Are you also interested in something like this? Take a look at the information on this wikipage which outlines what you need to do to support this in the XMP metadata standard. The how of doing it is most likely not that difficult since F-Spot is already supporting the metadata standard. Or just subscribe to this bug report so you are kept up to date on its progress.

I am now safely back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View after a long week of planning the next 6 months for Ubuntu.

As I said in an identi.ca message: “I am just now realizing how crazy this past week was. You don’t notice it when you are in the middle.”

But now that I am back and able to reflect on what happened I have this to say: WOW! I am really excited about what will be happening in Jaunty and beyond. I am sure that because this was my first UDS I am, on average, more excited than some. It is always inspiring to be in groups of highly productive and intelligent people all working towards the same (or similar) goals. Now that I have this inspiration it is time to see what I can do with it.

First: My personal/work project (I work for Creative Commons): Content producing/playing applications should be “license aware.” WHAT? By that I mean that applications that play media (songs, videos, images) could display the license for the currently playing item. A good example is Banshee. There could be an additional column that shows which license a song is licensed under. Words don’t describe it well, how about a picture:

The really cool part about the above image is that Gabriel Burt added that functionality after the discussion on Monday at UDS about this very topic. He saw my dent that it was being discussed and decided to code it up for Banshee. It apparently only took him 40 minutes (!) to do it. Gabriel is a rock star, pure and simple.

Gabriel also wrote all of the license detection code himself, which he didn’t need to. Creative Commons provides a LGPL licensed library (liblicense) that can read and write license metadata for a variety of file formats (ogg, mp3, pdf, jpg, png, mov, etc). But, Gabriel would have needed to write Mono bindings for liblicense as it is written in C and only has python and ruby bindings right now.

Second: The Jams that various LoCos have been putting on are always a winner. Whenever you get a group of people together who want to learn something new with each other good things tend to happen. The Michigan Team has done Packaging Jams and Bug Jams. There are even thoughts of expanding the idea to other activities (Answer Jams, Translation Jams [wouldn't work too well for US State teams], and such).

Third: Now that we are getting good at putting on events like Jams and release parties we should let others know how we do it! The various LoCo teams are going to start producing some Best Practices when it comes to hosting events and such. Basically, we want every team to know how Mr. 4k and the French LoCo were able to host a release party for FOUR THOUSAND people. Granted, not every team will be able to do something like that in April, but learning how the French LoCo performed marketing would help us all.

Fourth: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is a great opportunity for artists to get their works on MILLIONS of computers worldwide; how can we get more participation in this contest? This is one project which I will be working on with Jono. Ideas: get the news out to other venues that we didn’t get to last time (ie: ccMixter).

I think that should be enough to keep me busy for the next few months. How about you: what projects/ideas really caught your attention at UDS?

With the recent slashdot article decrying the Terms of Service which were touted as disrespectable (implied) just as the TOS for Chrome which were changed I wanted to talk about something I find important.

The Problem

While the idea of granting Google a license to use in whatever way they choose all the pictures you upload to Picasa or all of the text on your Blogger blog sounds scary, there are good reasons to do so.

The good reason, which was pointed out by many in the comments on , is that unless you granted Google a license under those terms they really couldn’t legally display or host your pictures or blog posts. I would like to take this moment to describe a better way of doing things.

The Suggestion

Aside: IANAL.

Any web service you use which allows the creation of user material (blogs, photo hosting, microblogging, etc) should also all you to set what license you want your material to be under. Ideally they would give you more chooses than just “Copyrighted” and “Public Domain.” Other chooses, like the Creative Commons family of licenses, would enable not only user freedom for online services but also to promote the adoption of Open and Free Content Licenses that we all appreciate (probably, we are Open people).

This is instead of just giving permission to Google (or whatever web service you are using) to use it as they wish. My suggestion also lets other people know what they can and can not do with your content in clear terms (in the case of CC licenses, the GFDL is a bit more complicated).

What you can do.

So, if the web services you use don’t support assigning a license to your content (which means that is it is then under full copyright restrictions, as per the law in the US) see if you can either add it yourself in the case of open source projects or request it in the case of proprietary ones. I’m looking at your Facebook.

For the Open Source web services, you can take a look at some software libraries Creative Commons has developed (LicenseChooser.js and libLicense) to save you time to make it license aware.

Aside 2: I am employed by Creative Commons.

That isn’t me talking, that is the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress along with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project, and the SURFfoundation released a report (pdf) on Monday that basically states just that.

The stated purpose of the report is:

1. to review the current state of copyright and related laws and their impact on digital preservation;
2. to make recommendations for legislative reform and other solutions to ensure that libraries, archives and other preservation institutions can effectively preserve digital works and information in a manner consistent with international laws and norms of copyright and related rights; and
3. to make recommendations for further study or activities to advance the recommendations in the Report.

The key is number 2, “to make recommendations for legislative reform…”  From the release on digitalpreservation.gov:

As the laws of the countries discussed in the report demonstrate, in many cases exceptions and limitations do not accommodate the actions required for digital preservation.

Now, the recommendation doesn’t just simply state that anyone who wants to preserve information can do so.  So no, you won’t have the LOC on your side if you are sued for “preserving” media on your home machine which you do not have legal right to possess it.

From the report:

[These suggestions should] apply to all non-profit libraries, archives, museums and other institutions as may be authorized by national law (hereafter, “preservation institutions”) that are open to the public, provided they do not undertake these activities for any purpose of commercial advantage.

These institutions would be able to (1) reproduce as many copies as necessary for effective preservation, (2) transfer those copies to other formats as standards progress, (3) “communicate” those works within and between various preservation repositories to maintain redundancy.

Why did the Library of Congress et. al produce this report?  Because without some changes to the current status qua of copyright law libraries and archives will be unable to exercise one of their most important roles in our society: preservation.

[In the current US copyright system] there is no specific authorization for libraries and archives to make preservation copies of published works in their collections.

If you are at all interested in learning more about how copyright effects the preservation of our society’s knowledge, you should read the report.  Plus, for those of you who thought that librarians are just quiet subservient employees of the state that don’t speak up for our rights; think again.  Librarians are at the front of cultural freedom as any other group, if not more.

The first project which I have been working on at Creative Commons is now launched.  It is one of those projects which will help everyone in the Free Culture/Open Source movement in some way.  Here it is:

Creative Commons, as a ‘movement’ (more correctly, as a part of the Open Society Movement), has many users, both content creators and content ‘enjoyers’.  But, if you are interested in releasing some of your work under a CC license, where do you go for information?  The Creative Commons website obviously.  But, just reading over what the licenses say doesn’t give you all the information you need to make your decision.  It would be like reading the GPL and than saying, unequivocally, that the GPL will in fact be the best option for your specific case.  Sure, most of us believe that to be the case, but no small part of that reasoning is the fact that the GPL has served us all very well over the years.

What if you could read some interviews and opinions from people who have done what you are thinking?  That would probably help you decide in a more informed manner, right?

Well, that is what we produced for you.  Here is the blogpost announcement that tells you a bit about the project.  But here is my quick description:

What is the field which you create in (photography, writing, movies, music, etc)?  Do you want to read stories and interviews of people who produce similar content and release it under a CC license?  We now have many such writeups on the Case Studies page.  As you will see, that page and all of the case studies linked from it, are in a wiki.  So if you see something wrong/misspelled/out of date, feel free to fix it and help us all.

One thing you might notice which is missing from that list of music case studies is a writeup for SeverdFifth.  That isn’t because I didn’t want to do it; I just only had a limited amount of time to do the ones I could.  Here is my plea for you:

Help me write the SeveredFifth case study on the Creative Commons website!

As the project progresses keep it updated with new happenings and discoveries.  This would be a great way to make sure Jono’s musical adventure can help others interested in doing the same.  I have some quotes from a short interview with Jono I can put up later, but I won’t be able to get to it for at least the next day or two.  I set up a skeleton case study page for Severed Fifth here, but it really needs to be fleshed out.  That is where you come in.

Just go to the Severed Fifth Case Study page, and scroll to the bottom and click on “edit with form” (not the normal edit, the form option makes life a whole lot easier).  Help me fill in the missing information.

Lets show everyone how many cool Open projects there are out there, and how cool they all really are!