Consilience

On top of all the other changes in my life this summer, I’ve also accepted a position at Creative Commons starting full-time in September.

Because of my complicated history with CC, I did a quick interview to reintroduce myself to the CC community.

Some things that might be of interest to the Ubuntu community is the project that I am working on initially, LRMI. The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative is a project to create a vocabulary to describe educational materials (type, audience, assessment metrics, copyright license, etc) with the hope of submitting it to Schema.org for inclusion. If you are interested in metadata/web standards, please take a look; we’re looking for great individuals for the Technical Working Group.

If you aren’t interested in creating the standards, but are instead interested in how online (and Free/Open) education can change the world, talk to me about how FLOSS is at the center of that change. Tools (web or desktop based) can be built to make the work of learning more efficient, especially if those tools consume metadata that aids in every step.

Still curious? Read on. Entire interview reproduced below.

How did you get involved in CC initially?

It all started back when I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information working with the fledgling Open.Michigan initiative (of which current CC staff member Tim Vollmer was one of the founders). Open.Michigan is the initiative at the University of Michigan that helps faculty, students, and staff share their educational material with the world as OER (Open Educational Resources). I was drawn to this project primarily because it aligned with my background as a member of the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community. As I saw in the FLOSS world, our ability as creators of useful objects such as software and educational material to share these objects with each other in a way that allows them to not only read them, but also build upon them, is changing the way we interact with the world. One part of this ability is the legal assurance that you will not be sued for building upon someone else's work. This is where my interest, and involvement, with Creative Commons got its start.

I was an intern under the amazing Jon Phillips (rejon) during the summer of 2008 then stayed on as a Community Assistant for the next year. I continued my outreach as an unpaid fellow traveling to conferences until coming back to Creative Commons full-time.

Education Technology & Policy Coordinator, that's a mouthful. What does that mean? How does it relate to the work of other CC staff?

It is a mouthful! It means that I am the person you should talk to if you are working in the world of education, specifically Open Education, and have questions regarding integrating or consuming metadata, license choice and its ramifications, or any other legal, technical, or policy issue. This work dovetails nicely with the work being spearheaded by Tim Vollmer, Policy Coordinator, as I am focusing my time mostly in the education and technology realm while Tim also works on issues such as government data sharing and funder policy. I will be sort of a bridge between the CC technology team (note we’re hiring a CTO) and the policy and legal people, and a liaison for technology/policy discussions externally. My new boss is Cable Green, Director of Global Learning, who holds the big picture of how to scale OER.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how my new role can support and be informed by the work of the many OER leaders in the worldwide CC affiliate network.

You've been a copyright specialist at MLibrary for two years. There's a ton of cool stuff coming out of MLibrary. Tell us about that.

At MLibrary I worked for the Copyright Office which, contrary to what Melissa Levine’s (our fearless leader’s) title of "Copyright Officer" may imply, is not the copyright cop of the university. Instead, much of what I did was outreach and education on how faculty, students, and staff can share their scholarly works more broadly. This included issues of data sharing, open education, and open access publishing.

Specific to the library, the Copyright Office spearheaded the change of default CC license on the MLibrary website from CC Attribution-NonCommercial to CC Attribution. I hope that our reasoning for making the switch, which I outlined in a blog post, will help other galleries, libraries, archives, or museums (GLAM-institutions) adopt a similar license choice.

It is also about time for this year's Copyright Camp which is put on by MPublishing (the division within MLibrary that the Copyright Office resides). Copyright Camp is an unconference on all things copyright; from libraries to musicians, policy to practice, even education to robots!

Along with our outreach efforts, the Copyright Office also manages important projects at MLibrary including a new one concerning "orphan works."

So your most recent project is this orphan works thing, say more…

"Orphan works" are works (nominally books in our case) that are still under copyright but the copyright holder is not findable and/or contactable. These works are thus still unable to be legally reused without permission but there is no one to ask permission to reuse them.

With the leadership of Melissa and the help of my coworker Bobby Glushko, I built the process that powers the Orphan Works Project. The goal of the MLibrary Orphan Works Project is to either find the work's copyright holder OR determine that they are truly an orphan and make them available to users of MLibrary. (If you are a copyright holder of any works in the MLibrary collection, please fill out the form available on the project website.)

One could characterize part of the orphan works problem as one of a lack of metadata, or works with inadequate provenance. In a way, CC is mitigating future orphan works issues by making it easy for metadata to travel with works on the web.

You mentioned metadata and provenance, what excites you about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative?

LRMI excites me because it will finally allow all of the hard work being done by the various online education projects (open or not) to correctly tag their works with important information (such as license, audience, subject, learning outcomes, etc) to be indexed and exposed by popular search engines. Currently we have a smorgasbord of education-specific search engines that attempt to give learners access to the world's knowledge but they routinely fall short due to technical limitations. If the metadata applied to these resources is consumed and used by popular search engines, learning management software, and even the student's own computer then, I hope, big advances in education can be made more easily.

How can people get involved in LRMI?

There is a Call for Participation (CfP) and more information on the LRMI project wiki page that has all of the details.

You're also a technologist, not just a metadata technologist — no disrespect to the meta! What do you do with the Ubuntu community?

The Ubuntu community was the first FLOSS community I felt at home in. When I moved to Michigan for graduate school there was no local community team (aka "LoCo" in Ubuntu parlance) so I took it upon myself to create one. Little did I know that there was a wonderful group of individuals waiting for something like this and the team took off. The Michigan LoCo Team has since been your go-to group for Ubuntu (and FLOSS) related activities including release parties and bug and packaging jams. During graduate school when I should have been studying for exams or writing papers I spent a lot of my Ubuntu/FLOSS time reporting and triaging bugs.

Do you see underplayed opportunities for CC and OER communities to leverage Ubuntu and other FLOSS communities and vice versa? Or instances that we just know more about?

Everywhere. The FLOSS community is first and foremost a sharing or gift economy. This aligns well with the OER community (as I said before). There are many FLOSS projects that are primarily developed to be used in OER (such as the OERbit publishing platform and OERca content management system from Open.Michigan) that could have far greater impact when applied to non-institution specific endeavors.

I also firmly believe that some of the sticking points holding wide spread adoption of OER back can be addressed using software, and specifically FLOSS. Examples of this are the Open Attribute browser plugin that makes attributing CC-licensed works dead simple, the Open Badges platform being created by Mozilla that will help online learners record and display their efforts, and AcaWiki which aims to make high-quality scholarly article summaries available in every discipline. These are all great projects to get involved with from both the education side and the software side, if you are looking for something to contribute to in your free time!

As some of you may know, I work for the University of Michigan Library where my title is Copyright Specialist. One of the projects I am most proud of is the change of the default Creative Commons license for content created by librarians and staff at MLibrary and posted online from CC:BY-NC to CC:BY, removing the non-commercial restriction. Why is this important? Well, see what I wrote on the MPublishing blog, copied below under the terms of the CC:BY 3.0 license :)

Back in October of 2008, MLibary became one of the first academic libraries to apply a Creative Commons license to its website content. At the time, the Library opted for the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (“CC BY NC”) license. More recently, on November 18th, 2010, the library changed the default Creative Commons license used for all content created by librarians and staff hosted on the library website to an Attribution-only (“CC BY”) license.

Why did we opt for a CC BY NC license initially then – after some experience – remove the non-commercial restriction? Greg Grossmeier, Copyright Specialist at MPublishing, explains how the Creative Commons License MLibrary chose enables content creation.

Why use a Creative Commons license at all?
Before we get into the reasons why MLibrary changed its license, it is important to review the types of uses we are hoping to encourage by using any Creative Commons license in the first place. In the most simple of terms, we hope to encourage adaptations and redistribution of our content.

First, we are delighted to see our work actually used, improved or incorporated into new resources. When other organizations reuse our work (for example, another institution using some of our libguides) we know that others appreciate our work and find it useful. Second, by using a Creative Commons license that allows derivatives we enable others to make translations of the work without the need to get prior permission. With our use of a Creative Commons license we enable others to make translations and redistribute them for even wider reuse of our work.

Why remove the NonCommercial restriction?
First, removing the NonCommercial restriction provides greater clarity for those wishing to reuse our content. The NonCommercial clause in the CC licenses does not fully define what a “commercial use“ is. Thus, an individual or organization wishing to use our work cannot always be certain that their use would be acceptable. If they are uncertain, the users or organizations will either contact MLibrary to ask for clarification/permission (something which we wanted to avoid by using a Creative Commons license in the first place) or they will elect to simply not use our material. Unfortunately, the second scenario is typical.

A report released by Creative Commons in 2009 found that content creators see more uses as noncommercial than do content reusers. This means that individuals and organizations tend to self-censor their reuses of a NC-licensed work because they erroneously believe that their use will be considered a commercial use, thus not permissible by the license.

The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project uses a NonCommercial license from Creative Commons for their content. They elected to be explicit with their interpretation of what “non-commercial“ means. While this is very useful for users of MIT OCW materials it does not scale easily. This is because it is simply defining “non-commercial“ for MIT — and that definition might not be the same for all creators using NonCommercial licenses. Thus, it is not advisable for all creators using a NonCommercial license to write their own definition of “non-commercial.”

If 1000 people are asked to write their definition of “non-commercial” you will probably get 1000 different definitions. If all users of NonCommercial licenses produced their own definition of “non-commercial” then potential users will need to read that definition closely, and possibly ask for legal advice, each time they wish to reuse a work. Ironically, the more specific each content creator is about its particular view of ‘commercial’, the more confused and inconsistent the situation becomes. This confusion and inconsistency is the exact situation that Creative Commons aspires to eliminate.

Secondly, with the use of the Attribution-only license, the library is making a strong commitment to compatibility with other Freely and Openly licensed materials such as Wikipedia. If two licenses are incompatible with each other it means that content from one can not be incorporated into a work under the other. The NonCommercial clause is incompatible with many other open content licenses, including other Creative Commons licenses. In fact, it is only compatible with three out of the six Creative Commons licenses.

As the chart above shows, the most compatible license available (aside from waiving all copyrights) is the Attribution-only license. This allows others to reuse our content in the largest number of places and contexts including, importantly, the CC BY SA licensed Wikipedia.

By using the most compatible license available from Creative Commons, MLibrary enables efficient content creation. We make it possible for users to worry less about license incompatibility and permissions — and instead spend more time on the actual creation of quality content. We hope to see the positive influence of this throughout the local, national, and international library communities.

The above was originally posted on the MPublishing Blog under the title “MLibrary & Creative Commons: Commitment to Compatibility.” Reproduced under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

That’s right, the Michigan LoCo Team will again be participating in the Ubuntu Global Jam.

We’ll be at the always welcoming SRT Solutions location in downtown Ann Arbor (map) graciously provided by Jay.

We’ll be jamming from Noon to 5pm. Afterwards we’ll probably hit up one of the many nice beverage establishments close by.

What will we be working on? TONS! We’ll be testing, we be reporting bugs, triaging them, talking about StackExchange/Shapado/Launchpad Answers, and generally having a grand time with new and old LoCo members.

Remember, if you are coming, PLEASE REGISTER! (log-in and click on the “Register for this Event” link).

Today, Creative Commons has announced their campaign to support the new Catalyst Grants.

If you haven’t heard of it, the Catalyst Grant program is pretty awesome. It helps people who are working on great projects keep them going by providing the much needed funding. From the Catalyst Grant page:

Creative Commons is investing up to $100,000 to empower individuals and communities deeply rooted in the principles of openness and sharing. With the Catalyst Grants program, Creative Commons will seed activities around the globe that support our mission. Our goal is to scale our community’s efforts and support them in becoming self-sustainable. Through a rigorous public review and transparent evaluation process, the best proposals submitted by CC affiliates and the broader community, will be selected to receive $1,000–$10,000 to make their ideas a reality.

But, Creative Commons can’t do it all. And this is where you come in. By donating to Creative Commons you can directly help support the (no doubt) awesome projects that the grant program will select. Help support the commons by being a catalyst.

As you probably know, the Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up this weekend.

Well, along with this long list of US LoCo Teams, the Michigan LoCo is having an event on our east-coast. Our LoCo Directory event page has all the details.

I hope to see a lot of new faces!

[btw, that was really tedious to link to all of those US team events... glad there are so many, but ...]

And my email configuration addiction continues. As you may recall, I did an extensive (now out-dated) post about my email setup. I’m still using the basic configuration outlined there (all of the same programs) just some of my settings have changed a little. I tend to make little changes every now and then which I think will save me a tiny amount of time wet-ware processing my email. Below I outline how I am making the transition to new machines/installs easier for my email setup.

Restore Config Files

With the purchase of a new laptop, I have to re-setup my email’s (and other applications’) configuration. Luckily, I keep all of my configuration files in version control which is synced between 3 computers; my old laptop, my desktop, and my webserver (for mostly backup purposes, but also for imapfilter). All I had to do was run the following very basic commands:

mkdir src
cd src
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/dotfiles .
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/scripts .
cd scripts
./restore_email_apps.sh
./restore_symlinks_desktop.sh

The first 5 things are pretty self-explanatory: make a directory called “src,” go in there, then create 2 branches of the bzr repos for dotfiles and scripts.

Then, lets run two of the scripts in ~/src/scripts/.

restore_email_apps.sh is really just an easy way for me to remember which applications I use for email and its supported functions. The contents of that shell script is merely:
sudo aptitude install mutt-patched offlineimap msmtp abook
Yep, thats it.

The restore_symlinks_desktop.sh file is a little more involved. Basically, since I keep all of my dotfiles in a bzr repo called ~/src/dotfiles I need to tell the associated applications where to find those files. Well, I don’t really tell the applications, I trick them. I create symbolic links from where they are expecting the file to where I actually keep it. This is a common trick for these types of setups. In fact, if you didn’t want to use a traditional version control system to handle the versioning/syncing between computers you could store your dotfiles in your Ubuntu One folder and then they will be synced automatically. So, restore_symlinks_desktop.sh goes and creates all of those symlinks for me.

offlineimap

Now, you may have noticed that I use offlineimap with my email system. I won’t go into all of the benefits of offlineimap here, but the main ones that I enjoy are: local really fast storage of my mail (vs online) and brain-less email backups (its already backed up already).

However, using offlineimap creates one speed bump in this email setup; you need to redownload all of your email again, which, if you are like me and don’t delete anything (just put it in an Archive folder) then this can take a long time depending on your mail server. And, if you use gmail’s servers, they can lock you out of IMAP access if you download too much. Luckily, offlineimap is pretty robust and allows you to get around that problem fairly easily.

Note: I have only done this with offlineimap using the MailDir format so I don’t know what would be different for the other formats. Also, I haven’t seen any other guides like this online which is A) why I wrote this out and B) makes me wonder if this is bad for some reason [I did this over 5 days ago and haven't lost any email yet].

Anyway, here is what I did:

1) copy my .maildb folder from one computer which had a recent sync to my new laptop using a local LAN. I did this using rsync so it would compress during transit, because even at 10 megs a second, 6 gigs is a lot to transfer.
rsync -e 'ssh -ax' -auhvz --progress greg@192.168.1.102:/home/greg/.maildb/ /home/greg/.maildb/

2) rename the MailDir format email files to reflect the new computer’s hostname. The files look like this:
1264133355_0.24102.alexandria,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
That “alexandria” part is the hostname of my desktop. So, I need to change that to “zen” so it looks like this:
1264133355_0.24102.zen,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
But I need to do that for ALL of my email. find and xargs to the rescue!
find . -name '*' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename -v 's/alexandria/zen/'

3) setup offlineimap; ie: install and configure your email accounts. This is already done for me by running those two scripts above. Note: Make sure your ~/.offlineimap folder is empty (ie: don’t copy it over from your old computer).

3b) A big change from my last email setup is that I am now checking one of my mail account (grossmeier.net) over ssh. Basically, offlineimap ssh’s to the server, then runs an imap server (in my case, rimap). I followed the instructions set out here: http://eagain.net/blog/2007/02/09/imap-over-ssh.html (changing the pertinent parts about the imap service on the server, of course).

4) run offlineimap. You should see it SCREAM through your email archive as it adds the metadata to its .offlineimap folder from the local maildir you just copied to the machine.

There ya go. Now when you get a new machine and you use offlineimap to sync your email you don’t need to re-download all of your email again.

I finally broke down and purchased a new laptop.

My old trusty companion was a System76 Darter Ultra (revision 2). It was a great little machine with a 12.1″ screen, as much processor and RAM (4gig after purchase) as I need, and Ubuntu pre-installed. I can’t say enough about the people at System76; a small company out of Denver, Colorado where you know pretty much the whole company by first name. Carl is the owner; Tom is the guy answering your support questions; Erik is in charge of sales; and one of their daughters or nieces helps stuff envelopes on the weekends. I’m sure there are more people involved, but those three people I have had personal communication with via email and/or phone and every time it was great.

Why am I telling you how much I love System76? Because I feel bad not sticking with them for my latest purchase. I now have a Lenovo X200s. Another 12.1″ screen machine that is really light and works great.

Why did I switch my supplier? Honestly, because I wanted a machine that had a little better structural build quality (my Darter was a MSI barebones and started having structural issues near its 3rd year of life) and the X200s is just a little “better” (lighter and higher resolution).

So far, everything is working great out of the box*! The best part is I had a 160gig Intel SSD waiting to be put in it when it arrived. As soon as I replaced the harddrive I installed Lucid using a USB flash drive which was extremely quick. What that means is I never booted the original drive and thus never even saw the Windows 7 logo. :)

This machine, with the SSD drive, simply just screams. Best upgrade investment I ever made.

Action pics:

writing this blog post at my work office:

* The only thing not working correctly is two finger scrolling using the nipple and third mouse button (there is no trackpad). I tried the adding the hal quirk identified here, but it didn’t work. Haven’t messed with it too much, really.

Release Party Time!

Thats right, the Michigan LoCo Team will be hosting our biannual Ubuntu Release Party on April 25th in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The venue of choice is The Corner Brewery as it provides ample seating and ability to move tables around to have bigger groups. Plus, if you know where to sit there are power outlets!

And you know the Michigan LoCo can throw a party, we even had people come up from OHIO last time because they knew our party was better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year we even had people from CHICAGO make the drive over. I don’t even see Ohio or Chicago on the list of Release Parties yet.

Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.

Be sure to check out what other teams are having parties on the nice JauntyReleaseParties wiki page.

Hope to see you there!

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.

I’ve been triaging bugs for Ubuntu for a while and I have always wanted an easy way for bug reporters to give me all the relevant information that is needed to help with finding out the problem. The way I usually did this was to add copy/paste-able requests to the Debugging Procedures Ubuntu wiki page. This was a pain for a few reasons: sometimes those copy/paste segments weren’t there and I had to add them and it also necessitated I have those wiki pages open (and wasting valuable tab-space in Firefox).

But now, thanks to the work of Matin Pitt, you no longer need to do anything as complicated! If the package already has some Apport Hooks then all you need the bug reporter to do is to run the command: “apport-collect 12345″ (substituting 12345 with the bug number in question, obviously).

apport-collect will then go find all the open tasks for that bug (just in case it is assigned to more than one package), run all of the apport-hooks for those packages, and attach that information to the bug report. It does all of this with out any other interaction with the reporter. To see which packages already have apport hooks available for them, see the Apport wiki page. Now, we all need to start adding more apport hooks so this is even more useful.

Be sure to check out Martin’s original announcement on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list.