Zeynep Tufecki [twitter:zeynep] is giving a Berkman Tuesday Lunch talk titled “Gezi Park Protests & the Boom-Bust Cycle of Social Media Fueled Protest.” She says that surveillance and social media + protest are two of her topics, so swhen protests broke out in her home country of Turkey, she felt she really had to study it. She is today presenting issues she is still working through.

She says that on the positive side of the role of social media on politics, we see lower coordination costs, the ability to shape the narrative, and an ability to overcome internal prejudice. On the negative: slacktivism, surveilliance, and propaganda. For her the lower costs cause the boom-bust cycle in social media-fueled activism. There are many questions she says, including why most of these social-media fueled protests fizzle out.

People usually argue about the wrong questions, Zeynep says. Instead, she suggests that we stop looking so much at the outputs of social media-fueled protests and instead at their capacity-building. Also, stop using offline or online as the important differentiation, and instead look at them in terms of what they signal.

She gives some background on Gezi, Turkey. The media focused on Taksim Square in Istanbul, but the action was actually in Gezi park. Prime Minister Erdogan wanted to turn the park into a developed area with housing, a shopping mall, and an old Ottoman barracks. This was an unpopular plan, and was taken as a symbol for wider discontent. Neighborhood people held a small protest. Maybe 30 people. But it was met with overwhelming force, which raised fear of the gov’t become authoritarian. People took to the streets. Turkish media are owned by large corporate conglomerates in cahoots with the gov’t. CNN locally was running shows about penguins, while CNN International was covering the protests. “So people got upset and took to Twitter and to the streets” (including an image of penguins in gas masks).

via Turkish Press Review Blog

After multiday clashes in the area, “coordinated and spread almost solely on social media,” Gezi Park was Occupied. (Zeynep stresses that Turkey, unlike, other countries nearby, has a popularly-elected gov’t.) Zeynep joined in, packing an audio recorder, a bike helmet, and a tear gas mask. And sun protector lotion because statistically, she says, she felt most threatened by the Sun.

A single party had been in power in Turkey for 11 years. The country was polarized, but with an ineffective opposition. There are barriers to creating new parties (you have to get 10% to get any seats), which means the country is locked into an ineffective opposition.

At first the occupation was like a fair: clean, kitchens that were feeding 10K people, and like a carnival in the evenings because of the visitors. Occasionally, you’d get tear gassed. “Woodstock meets the Paris Commune.” She shows a picture of a Sufi whirler wearing a gas mask. People were finding politics.

There was “one no, many yes-es,” [an anti-globalization meme] which Zeynep argues is an Internet phenomenon. Turks who normally would never talk with one another found each other in the park.

There’s the free-rider question. Even if the protest itself were a festival, the costs would be real: Five people died, thousands were injured by tear gas cannisters which can be lethal.

The protestors’ main grievances were: growing authoritarianism, media censoprship, and police brutality. (Source: Zeynep formally interviewed 130 people.)

The Net’s role was to break the censorship, create a new narrative, and to coordinate. She looks at each of these:

The media censorship was incredible. CNN Turkey showed a soccer match as protestors were being chased down the city’s main street. Protestors used Twitter in part because there were too many family members on Facebook. “Ironically, Twitter became more essential because it was more public.” Twitter’s blue bird became the symbol of freedom, in part because people trusted Twitter not to turn over names. Also: lots of penguins.

Real-time coordination: Overall, the Net worked. People coordinated in real time via Twitter. Local businesses turned on open Wifi. People would text to others who then tweeted.

People learned new literacies, especially who to trust. One Twitter stream only tweeted citizen journalism if it came with a photo, to increase credibility.

Counter narrative: Very youth and humor oriented. People came because it was a great place to be, even with the tear gassings. People felt fairly confident that they wouldn’t get shot at, similar to Western Europe or the US.

Leadership: There were 130 organizations, but no central leadership. Much of it was ad hoc, which worked because of social media.

After a few weeks, the protest was brutally dispersed, and then it moved to local parks and neighborhoods. When it broke up, the govt mostly decided to treat the protestors the way GW Bush treated the anti-Iraq War protests: not as a threat, but more like merely a focus group.

Capacity building: Look at capacity, not outcomes. E.g., look at literacy, not GDP (Amatyra Sen). Internet’s capacity-building renders other forms of capacity-building less useful.

The online and offline are one ecology. (She’s looking here at post-citizen protests, i.e., protests were the participants are already recognized as citizens).

The Net lowers the barriers for the resources necessary for protest. No one planned the Gezi protests. They just arose.

So what do protest do? They grab attention, promote social interaction, reveal info, and signal capacity. Her thesis: Internet protests don’t signal the same way as pre-Internet. The Net gains attention without media mediating. Media dependency brings distortion, censorship, and counter propaganda — but also dominance, focus, and singular narrative. Media attention pre-Net often signaled elite dissent. With the Net, movements can get attention on their own terms, but can’t get a singular or dominant narrative. “Since there is no single elite voice, there is no reliable way to signal elite dissent.” Now you can’t get away from polarized narratives.

For social interaction capacity, it’s a big win for the movements. It’s much easier to find people like you on the Net. “The Internet is a homophily machine.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t work just for the movements you like. e.g., the anti-vaccine movement. It’s a win for social movements, but there will be many more movements.

Info revelation. Pluralistic ignorance = you think you’re the only one who is thinking something. The Net gets us past that, e.g., Facebook pages. But, then there are bandwagon/cascade effects.

Signaling: Protests as “stotting.” (“Stotting” = animals jumping up in the bush.) One explanation: it signals how strong you are and thus how fast you can run. Before the Net, because there wasn’t an easy way to organize, if you got a million people to DC, you’re signaling that you have an infrastructural capacity far beyond those million. Now, getting lots of people in the street doesn’t signal the threats that modern govts care about. Even when there are costs, those costs don’t signal the capacity to hurt the govt in ways the govt cares about. So, slacktivism is a bad argument; it’s not the cost of typing that’s being signalled.

Network internalities for social media-fueled protests are weaker. The Left doesn’t celebrate building network internalities because the Left sidesteps important tensions (leadership, representation, delegation). “Side stepping those tensions means that after the street protests, things are more unclear for the Left.” The Left is unable to negotiate, which is why so many movements are stuck at no. The Net allows them to sidestep developing ways to negotiate, etc. The Right, on the other hand (e;g., Tea Party) is comfortable challenging primaries.

To sum up: Look at the building of capacities, not how many people show up. This explains why there’s a repeated cycle where the protests are unable to engage in effective negotiation, representation, pressure, and delegation.

Q&A

Q: What other than Twitter is being used?

A: In Gezi, people knew how to post to Twitter by texting. And Twitter gained the users’ trust. Facebook was important for longer conversations. People collected photos on Tumblr. A lot of blogging, etc. But Twitter was how protesters talked with one another. Turkey isn’t a client state and didn’t need to appeal to America. And hashtags were dropped, so analytics miss just how big it was.

Q: [me] Is the Left stuck forever not being able to get past protests to actual change?

A: In Google Egypt Wael Ghonim was identified as a leader, and he was picked up for questioning. But he couldn’t have coerced a change even if he’d wanted to. I’m not saying this is great. At Gezi, the govt said “Let’s negotiate.” But who do you send? They sent people from the traditional NGOs, but they had no representational capacity. They listend to the Prime Minister. But they weren’t empowered to negotiate. The govt was genuinely frustrated that they couldn’t find a negotiating partner. So after the negotiations, there were some demands, they came back to the park. It’s 3 or 4am. They’re trying to explain what happened. People were confused. There was no way to deal with it. The next day, the protestors formed little forums, but how do you decide which to listen to? Some people were ready to accept it an go. People wanted consensus. But consensus has meant “a lot of social pressure.” That doesn’t work in the modern city. So where do we go with this? It can’t just be technology. There has to be a recognition among Left movements that if you can’t ever delegate or negotiate, then you’re stuck at No. The Right isn’t like this. The Right is using social media to make really significant strides. They’ve blocked the President’s agenda. They’re getting elected in Europe. They Left is unable to get together enough to address the 30-40% unemplyment in Spain. The big visible protests are Left wing. The big visible gains are Right wing.

Q: You said there were about 150 social groups involved in the movement. What was the relation between how they organize this protest and …?

The 150 groups didn’t represent the people on the ground. The groups formed the leadership because they were there, but people on the ground didn’t think of themselves as being there as members of those groups. The traditional NGOs had no capacity to lead, and didn’t understand that.

Q: I was a protestor in Ankara. I was tear gassed three times. Tastes good. How can we orient this approach to be an alternative to the traditional opposition structure? The classic opposition parties in Turkey do not represent the young people, the democratic-based people.

A: We have a huge crisis in opposition representation. The classic opposition parties do not represent the young generation. The young are big on pluralism, for example. There’s no party that represents the live-and-let-live ethic among the protestors. E.g., the young have no polarization around the head scarf issue: “They should if they want to, and not if they don’t want to.” That’s not represented in Parliament. The electoral system blocks the formation of new parties because of the 10% barrier. But, also, the young have a cultural allergy to representation because in traditional politics they see corruption, not representation.

Q: But there’s a trend in the Turkish community to do something. We have to find an alternative.

A: What motivates the existing govt is people losing office.

Q: How many companies offer Internet facilities in Turkey?

A: The backbone goes through one and then it’s sold to companies that can sell access. Great for surveillance. But it’s not the same concern as elsewhere, which is why people felt safe tweeting. Turkey is probably more wired than the US, which isn’t saying so much. Smartphones are necessary just to coordinate meeting up. Much lateness.

Q: In India, we have two successful models. The protests against the rape case were done through FB. An anti-corruption movement was able to organize millions of people throughout the country. But how do you coalesce these energies, give it a shape? But a word of caution: Panic about people from the northeast of India spread throughout the country thanks to social media, leading to killings.

The biggest case of non-state terrorism happened in Pakistan because of a video. Is the Internet good or bad? Yes.

Q: Is protest never effective?

A: Numbers still matter. But it depends on what it’s signaling, which also depends on context. If it signals than we’re here and we’re going to challenge you in your weak point, then yes…

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Erik Martin is giving a talk at the Nieman Foundation. He’s the general manager of Reddit.com. (Disclosure: We’re friendly.) He tells us that Reddit gets 5 billion page views per month, and 70 million unique visitors.

Erik gives us a tour and some background. Every morning he clicks on the “Random” button and visits the subreddits (= topically-based pages within the site) the button gives him. He does so now, hitting subreddits such as bitch, i’m a bus, ukele, battlestations (office desks), and what’s this plant. Reddit, he says, is like a giant message board. You can create a board (subreddit) about anything. There are over 100,000 that get at least a post a day, and 6,000 that have substantial activity. All the subreddits are created by users, who also can create the page design. All the posts are voted up or down by users. Users also set the rules for subreddits. For example, at the Coversong subreddit, users have apparently decided all posts have to be videos.

Now he’s interviewed by Justin Ellis.

JE: How did you get to Reddit?

EM: He worked for Mammoth Records. It got bought by Disney. Then hecame a documentary filmmaker. Then marketing films and distributing them online. He read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham) [great book]. He then read about Paul Graham’s Y Combinator incubator. He applied to do a documentary about it, but was rejected. Still, he was hooked. Reddit came out of the first round of projects. He saw Reddit and loved the unpredictability of it. “Every link as a rabbit hole you might go down.” He got to know the cofounders and said “IU want to find a way to work with Reddit because that’s what I’m doing with all my time.” Alexis Ohanian asked him to work on a TV pilot that was going to incorporate Reddit into a news show. But it didn’t work; the Internet part was an add-on. Then he got hired as a community manager at Reddit.

JE: Reddit has a lot of geography. What does it mean to be a community manager?

EM: He looked at it as being the manager of a band. He’d promote promising items. He’d try to keep things functioning. And he tried to make sure that the community didn’t get taken advantage of, e.g., when people didn’t link back to Reddit.

JE: When you create a subreddit and a crowd shows up, how does that happen?

EM: Sometimes it’s obvious why. But others we can’t figure it out. One of our most popular subreddits is Explain Like I’m Five. That one you know what you’re going to get. Same for Ask Me Anything. Those explode when hot topics arise.

JE: How does this community stay together so long?

EM: Some of it is the customization of subreddits.

JE: Because anyone can create a subreddit, Reddit has gotten into trouble from time to time. There have been some very creepy subreddits. What’s the guiding principle for what is allowable?

EM: Our philosophy is that it’s a site that has 5B page views, and we have 35 employees [so we can’t moderate everything]. If you’re going to function you have to have some rules, but they have to be relatively finite, relatively easy to understand, and relatively self-enforceable. So, we have six rules. We have added one or two throughout the years. We try to keep them simple. No spam. You can’t try to break the site. You can’t try to cheat. You can’t put people’s personal info up. You can’t have anything illegal. We added that you can’t have material that sexualizes minors. If we had one that said “Don’t be a jerk,” it wouldn’t be enfrceable. No one would agree about how it applies. So there’s tons of stuff on the site that we find horrible and offensive, but the site works best when we keep it open and governed by those simple rules.

JE: What responsibility do you think you have if you see something that you personally feel is wrong?

EM: What I find offensive is different from others around the world or other positions. People don’t come here because they think we have the best judgment about what’s offensive. Plus, you have all the context. E.g., people complain about the PicsOfDeadChildren subreddit. That’s obviously very offensive. But what if it were called “Child Autopsy Photos” and it put itself forward as presenting medical training photos. Or a subreddit about death. Or a subreddit about combat video. It’s beyond offensive. It’s people being killed. It gets very tricky.

JE: There have been 3 major stories illustrative of Reddit and citizen journalism: The Aurora movie theater shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the shooting at the Navy Yard in DC. In the first, there was first person reporting. With the second, there was that but also the spreading of info from elsewhere and then the misidentification of one of the suspects in the bombing. With the third, someone created a subreddit to investigate what was happening, but you guys shut that down. What have you learned?

EM: In those three situations, the response of the community was the same as what you’d see offline: People trying to figure out what went on. Telling their story. Making jokes. Speculating about all kinds of things. Trying to make sense of what happened. Later on they were trying to help in some way. With Boston, it was different because the authorities wanted help from the public: they said if you have photos, upload them, etc. There was a subreddit where people were trying to identify the bombers, and that got a lot of attention. The actual subreddit where the Brown Univ. student was misidentified by name was actually the normal Boston subreddit, and it was removed after about an hour. That wasn’t good enough. That led to horrible consequences for that family.

So, what have we learned? We learned that people want to share, to talk, to help, to be a part of these huge events any way they can. We learned people can be callous and cavalier by mentioning people’s name. The vast majority were careful and thoughtful, but some were not. The Navy Yard subreddit was a joke. It had six posts, most from journalists satirizing the Boston bombing subreddit. It went against our rules and we shut it down after an hour.

JE: But you apologized after the Boston bombings…

EM: Absolutely. We do post-mortems and followsup. We did one when President Obama came on. So, yes, we apologized and talked aout what we can do better. And we also talked about the amazing things people did: people bringing their pets to parks in case people needed cute animal therapy, the sending of pizzas to EMTs and the police… We are an open source site in policy as well as code.

JE: Is it enough to do a post mortem? Newspapers issue corrections.

EM: There are thousands of subreddts, so there isn’t a way to reach everyone. We’re a platform, not a newspaper. We’re like Twitter or Youtube or WordPress. We don’t have a position on the veracity of one thing or another. I hope people learn to be more empathetic nandlearn that what you say on line has repercussions. But I don’t think we’re like a publication, and we’re not an editorial team.

JE: How do you see the role of journalism on Reddit? Why are people doing self-reporting?

EM: They want to be part of the story. They don’t want to be passie about what’s happening in the world. Even if
it’s uploading a meme. They’ve seen something start and then get big in a single day. Of course they want to share what’s happening in their neighborhood or share their thoughts about what’s going on in their govt Redditors vote 20M time a day.

JE: What’s the relation of journalisms and Reddit?

EM: We’re agnostic about what you’re linking to. But original reporting is more important than ever because people can find an audience. What’s happening on Reddit and what’s happening in the mainstream media happen to be in different hemispheres now but ultimately it’s the same thing. I hope people doing reporting will be active in a comment thread on Reddit or elsewhere.

JE: But you are creating content in some way, e.g., the Ask Me Anything’s where anyone can come in answer questions from the community. It’s very much like what media companies do.

EM: And in other Reddits people share recipes or workout routines. It’s like what you get in the media. It’s communicating, it’s story telling.

JE: How do you make money? You have ads and Reddit gold memberships.

EN: We don’t need to make a lot of money. We’re very lean. Our NY office is in a coworking space. We basically have ads for big movies, mobile phones, etc. We also have ads from mom and pop companies. Reddit Gold is a premium membership, $24.99/year. You get some extra features but most people do it to support the site. We have a secret Santa program (Reddit Gifts) that has an e-commerce site to help those exchanges and to make money.

JE: Reddit was purchased by Conde Nast and then spun off in 2011. How is it different?

EM: We started in 2005. Bought by Conde Nast in 2006. I started in 2008. Reddit was basically neglected by Conde: we were growing but there was a hiring freeze. OTOH, no one told us what to do. An example of how it made a difference: Before we were spun out, our ad operations was done through Conde, which is great for major magazines, not for a weird site where all you need is $5 to run an ad. So it didn’t make sense for us. We wanted an ad server that was fast and open source, which now we have.

Q&A

Q: Any trends in the type of content being produced? Trending toward the absurd? Or what?

A: It gets harder and harder to think about overall trends because the site is becoming more fractious and disparate each day. I think people are really motivated by the unexpected. Our audience is increasingly cynical. We also have an audience that is increasingly idealistic. You see trends were people are more connected across national and geographical boundaries; if there’s a discussion on healthcare the top comments will be from people around the globe. And it’s always been possible to have the serious next to the ridiculous; the last remaining bulkheads are being whittled away.

Q: Can you remain content agnostic?

A: No, it’s not possible. We’re not content agnostic towards spam or personal information. We try to be as close to agnosstic as we can.

Q: How much does porn account for your content?

A: About 85% of the subreddits are safe for work. (The Trees subreddit is not because you could get in trouble looking at pictures of weed.) Porn is maybe 5-10%. Our biggest subreddits are the video subreddits, As Reddit, etc.

Q: Terrorists radicalize by looking at pictures of dead babies. Have you had to hand over who your users are to agencies trying to track people on Reddit trying to radicalize people?

A: User privacy is core but we comply with what we have to comply with.

Q: [me] Reddit used to have a strong culture. People knew the same references, were playing the same games, had the same general politics, etc. But that shared culture seems to be weakening as Reddit becomes more popular. Does this concern you??

A: Yes, there is a certain sense of shared community that’s being fractured. But it’s being migrated down the subreddits the way you’re more loyal to community or borough.

Q: [me] Can you say more about IAMA’s, which at their best are a quite remarkable journalist form of collaborative interview?

A: The exciting thing for me is to see that format seep into other subreddits. We actively are trying to encourage that. E.g., mayoral candidates should do AMAs in their city’s subreddit. Or scifi authors are doing them in the sf subreddits. It goes back to that idea of so much of the word being predictable. If you waatch watch an interview on even some of the great programs — Charlie Rose, for example — even if they’re really good, you know what to expect. With the Reddit AMA’s not only do you not know what sort of questions are going to be asked, since you can answer a question at any length, it ends up taking this unexpected terms. If you look at the calendar of upcoming IAMA’s, you don’t even know which ones are going to be popular, outside of a Bill Gates or Tom Hanks, but if you look at the top AMAs for a week it will be a celebrity, subway driver, person with a weird disease, and way down the list will be someone with a household name. It’s unpredictable, and it’s unpredictable to the person being interviewed. It’s very different from what you get on a press junket where people go into robot mode. The AMA format can be more fun for them the standard press interview.

Q: Tumbler did a lot of active outreach to media. You don’t go out to, say, Newsweek and ask if they want a subreddit.

A: Yes. It’s difficult for us to do. Tech News Today is a great subreddit. They don’t directly flog their content. PBS has done one. But it’s hard.

Q: A newspaper could have its own subreddit where their folks are doing AMA’s etc.

A: Yes. But curating and cultivating a subreddit is a lot of work. It’s hard enough getting journalists to participate in comments on their own site.

Q: Companies you wouldn’t expect have made editorial plays. E.g., Twitter has being hiring editorial staff. Why are they doing that?

A: We’ve done some of that to prime the pump. E.g., Adam Savage’s publicist would probably say no to a request for an AMA at a site that looks like it’s from the 1990s [like ours], but if I go out with a camera and ask him to respond to the top ten questions, they might say yes. But then they see that the AMA works. So we only do editorial work for pump priming.

Q: What’s up with the design?

A: Look at the big sites. Minimal but flexible platforms. When you start doing a more professional and complex design, you suddenly needing 10x more people, and then you need 10x the money…But subreddits can monkey with the CSS. They can even change the Gold button, our “buy” button. Rich text works.

Q: For a traditional news org, the misidentification of the Boston Bomber would have been very expensive. Who owns the error from a legal perspective, in the US and elsewhere?

A: In the US, platforms are not responsible for what people say. The person who says it is responsible. I don’t know if Reddit could exist as a Canadian company. People give us a non-exclusive contract to display their words.

Q: But because you have some rules, doesn’t that make you responsible?

A: The more you monitor, the more responsible you are. But everything on the site is determined by human behavior. We are a platform for people discussing things. We’re not a publication. We don’t have editorial control.

Q: Is one of your 35 people a lawyer?

A: No.

Q: So when you get subpoenas…?

A: We’ve had to learn more than we want. We also have very good lawyers we consult with when we need to.

Q: The site in 5 years?

A: I don’t know. The users have better ideas than we do. All we try to do is take ideas they develop and help make them happen. So, in 5 years I think Reddit will be in more countries, more cross-country conversation. We have great engineers so we’ll be doing more interesting things. In 5 years I hope there will be 1,000 Reddit apps, using Reddit in novel ways that I couldn’t come up with. I never imagined that Reddit would be useful for live events. People are using our “edit” button 50/hour for this, which is not what the button is intended for, and Reddit’s not even very good at. People have created a site that reorganizes Reddit in chronological order and they can do that because we’re open source and don’t send lawyers after them. If we evolve in 5 yrs it will be because people in the community take it in those new directions.

Q: Venture capitalists?

A: Y-Combinator’s original investment was $20K. We were self-sustaining until Conde Nast bought us. We also had a very small angel round in the past year, around $1M. Very small. We’ve never spent a lot of money so we’ve never had to raise a lot. We’re close to break even now.

Q: Have any news events truly originated with Reddit?

A: As far as I know, one of the first reports on the Aurora story was from someone at the theater, before there was anything known to the media. The biggest story where Reddit was involved in the story was probably the SOPA/PIPA blackouts. Someone started to go after GoDaddy: “I’m moving 75 domains from GoDaddy” and it grew, and the next day GoDaddy flipped its position. Also, someone went after Paul Ryan and he ended up changing his mind.

Q: How can I troll Reddit for news stories?

A: When a new Android comes out, reporters go to Reddit to see what’s new in that version. I don’t know why more reporters don’t go to the relevant subreddits and ask for help on a story.

Q: We reporters are competitive.

A: In the sports world, you routinely see stories getting updated based upon information at Reddit.

Q: News orgs are trying to figure out how to engage with their audiences via social media. Advice?

A: Popular Science killed comments. Fine. You don’t have to have comments. But if you have them, you should pay attention to them. E.g., Roger Ebert would edit your comment as an admin, which is a terrible practice, but people didn’t mind because he was doing so to respond to their comments. I don’t understand why in general comments in 2013 are not all threaded and vote-able. Most are still in reverse chron, highlighting the latest. And most seem to be trying to hide their comments.

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Here are the sessions people are proposing for the second day of the LODLAM conference in Montreal:

• Getty Vocabulary goes open




• Linked data on mobiles, wearable devices




• Do cool things with the data sets that you have on your laptop – let’s build stuff!




• Your tools and solutions




• NLP for linked open data for libraries, archives, and museums. Data extraction, taxonomy alignment, context extraction, etc.




• World War I in LOD




• LOD and accessibility & assistive devices




• The Pundit software package




• the KARMA mapping tool




• Tools and techniques for generating concordances between people




• Why Schema.org?




• Copying and synching linked data




• FRBR and other standards [couldn’t hear]




• How to create a new generation of LOD professionals. Getting students involved in projects.




• The future of LODLAM




• Normalizing ata models and licensing models

The official list is here.

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Kevin Ford from the Library of Congress is talking about BIBFRAME, which he describes as a replacement for MARC and a rethinking of the entire ecosystem.

(If a response isn’t labeled “Kevin,” then it wasn’t Kevin. Also, this is much compressed, incomplete, and choppy. Also, I haven’t re-read it.)

Q: From the Bibframe mailing list it seems like there isn’t agreement about what Bibframe is trying to achieve.

Kevin: Sometimes people see it narrowly.

Q: It’s not clear how Bibframes gets to where it replaces MARC.

Kevin: We’re not holding back some plan or roadmap that we’ve mapped out perfectly with milestones and target dates. We’re taking it as it comes.

Q: There’s a perception on the part of vendors and customers of vendors that this is a new data specification that vendors will have to support, and that that’s its main function, and possibly that’s pushing the knowledge representation in a direction that’s favorable to the vendors — a direction that’s too simple.

Q: Is there an agreement about the end point?

Kevin: There’s agreement that it needs to do what MARC does but better. We’re doing data representation, not predicting the systems built on top of it.

Q: What are the functional requirements that Bibframe’s trying to meet with this new model? What are your metrics? And who are you trying to satisfy?

Kevin: It’s not vendor focused. We hope systems will be built that expose the data as linked data.

Q: Bibframe let’ you associate a record with a particular work, which is a huge advance.

Q: Bibframe used to talk about roundtripping from MARC to Bibframe to MARC. But Bibframe is now adding info, so I don’t see how roundtripping is possible.

Kevin: Not losslessly.

Q: Bibframe is intended for libraries, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t seem that Bibframe is intended for use outside of libraries. There doesn’t seem to be any thought about how other ontologies might be overlaid. And that was a problem with MARC: it was too library-centric. Why not investigate mapping it into other vocabularies?

Kevin: Nothing stops you from including other namespaces. As for mapping to other vocabularies, we’re working on a 40 year time scale and can’t know that other vocabularies will be around.

Q: We need some community-building to make that happen. We need to be careful not to build an ontological silo.

Q: The naming of this data set is unfortunate: Why” bib”, which has a connotation of books, when really it should be about any kind of information-bearing object. Why not call it “InfoFrame”? Who uses “bibliographic” other than libraries? Why limit yourself?

Kevin: I cannot begin to tell you how much time was spent on what this thing should be called. It went through a couple of different names. It’s not an ideal name, but I hope that the “bib” association falls by the wayside.

Q: The library ecosystem includes articles, licenses, and many other things that weren’t part of MARC. Is Bibframe aiming at representing all of that?

Kevin: Yes, it’s in scope. Certainly data about journal articles.

Kevin: Yes, Bibframe lets you define your own fields, as in MARC.

Q: We’re going from cataloging to catalinking: from records about resources to links related to topics, etc.

A: We need services that will link resources to other resources. Bibframe doesn’t do that, but it’s more amenable to it than MARC.

Kevin: [Sorry, but I missed the beginning of this.] When it comes to subject headings, we expect you to resolve that URI. If people are doing that every single time, then it’s a candidate for being included. That lookup could be a query into your local system. I’ve assumed you’ll have to have a local copy of it.

Q: Versioning? Why did you ignore the work of the British Library?

Kevin: We didn’t ignore it at all. We need to attend to what’s achievable by the smallest institutions as well as the largest.

Q: For a small institution, is it practical to move away from MARC?

Kevin: Not for some. Some still use card catalogs. I expect some of the first systems will be an outward layer around legacy systems.

Q: We need a larger discussion about provenance and about trust on the semantic web. Libraries should be better participants in that discussion; it’s a deeply important space for us.

Q: This conversation makes me cynical about our profession’s involvement. We need be talking with users. We need community involvement. We’re worried about the longevity of FOAF? It’ll outlast Bibframe because people actually use it. Let’s keep turning inward until we’re completely irrelevant.

Q: Yeah, the idea that there has to be one namespace seems so counter to the principles of linked data.

Q: Do we have anyone outside of the library community here?

A: I’m mainly a web developer. There’s a really big gulf. The Web will win when it comes to how libraries operate. Whether Bibframe will be a part of it remains to be seen. In the web community, everything seems exciting, but I feel so much angst in the library community.

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Corey Harper [twitter:chrpr] starts a session by giving a terrific presentation of the problem: Linked data discussions and apps have focused too much on resources instead of on topics, narratives, etc. — what users are using resources to explore. We are not extracting all the value from librarians’ controlled vocabulary.

Some notes from the open discussion. Very sketchy, much choppier than in life, and highly incomplete.

Why not use Solr, i.e., an indexer of SQL databases? In part because Solr doesn’t know enough about the context, so a search for “silver” comes back with all sorts of hits without recognizing that some refer to the mineral, some to geo places with “silver” in the name, etc. E.g., if you say “john constable artist birthdate,” linked data can get you the answer. [I typed that into Google. It came back with the answer in big letters.]

Linked data can do the sort of thing that reference librarians do: Here’s what you’re looking for, but have you also seen this and this and that?

How do we evaluate the user interfaces we come up with? How do we know if it’s helped someone find something, put something into context, tell a story…?

We have two weird paradigms in the library community: Lucene-based indexes of metadata (e.g., Blacklight) vs. exhibit makers (e.g., Omeka). How to bring those together so exhibits are made through an index, and the flow through them is itself indexed and made findable and re-usable. (And then there’s the walking through a room and discovering relationships among things.)

How do we preserve the value of the subject classifications? [Here’s one idea: Stacklife :) ]

It’s important to keep one of the core functions of catalog: to identify and create identities for resources. A lot of our examples are facts, but in the Humanities what’s our role in maintaining identities around which we can hang relationships and maintain the disagreements among people. How do you help people navigate that problem space?

The Web’s taught us that the only way to find things is through search, but let’s remember the “link” in “linked data”: the ability to find the relationship between things you’ve found. E.g., the Google Knowledge Graph and Google fact panel are doing this to some degree. We’ve lost that, thanks to computers.

People want to have debates and find conflicting information. It’s hard how to bring this into a search interface.

The Digital Mellini project digitized a specialized manuscript and opened up. Once something is digitized, there are pieces you cannot see with the human eye — e.g., marginal notes.

Other examples of the sort of thing that Corey is talking about:

• Linking Lives. EACCPF (corporations persons and families).

• SNACs [??] (“Facebook for dead people”) mines finding aids to find social relationships.

• LinkSailor (RIP) traversed a many OWL sameAs relationships.

• CultureSampo (Finnish)

• Tim Sherratt‘s group has something coming out soon

People think that museum web sites are boring. At LODLAM we’re a bunch of data geeks and are the wrong people to be talking about user interfaces. Response: We should take the Apple route and give people what they don’t know they want. We should also be testing our models against how people think about the world.

“I have a lot of data. It’s very sparse and sometimes very concentrated. It’s hard to know what users want from it. I don’t know what’s going to be important to you. So we generate video games, using geodata to create the playing field.” That’s not a retrieval engine, but it’s a way to make use of the factoids.

Read “The Lean Startup.” The Minimum Viable Product is an important idea. Don’t underrate the role of the product owner in shaping a great project. (Me:) Having strong, usable, graphs that take advantage of what libraries know would be helpful.

Who are our clients? Users? Scholars? Developers? A: All of them. Response: Then we’ll fail. Response: Catalogs were designed to manage collections, not for the general public. People have been forced to learn how to use them; you have to understand the collection’s abstraction. And that’s not sustainable.

Our library wants to build the graph. We build simple interfaces to demonstrate the power, but our value is in building the graph.

We don’t want to deliver linked data to users. We want to build the layer between the linked data and the apps. If we do it well, users won’t know or care that there’s linked data underneath it.

We tend to focus on what we think our users should want. It’s an “eat your broccoli” approach to search. E.g., users want social networks, but many scholars resist it because it seems too non-rigorous.

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I’m at LODLAM (linked open data for libraries, archives, and museums) in Montreal. It’s an unconference with 100 people from 16 countries. Here are the topics being suggested at the opening session. (There will be more added to the agenda board.)

(Because this is an unconference, I probably will not be doing much more liveblogging.)

• Taxonomy alignment

• How to build a case for LOD

• How to build a pattern library (a clear articulation for a problem, the context where the problem appears, and a pattern for its solution) for cultural linked open data

• How to take PDF to the next level, integrating triples to make it open data? How to make it into a “portable data format”

• How can we efficiently convert our data to LOD? USC has Karma and would like to convene a workshop about tools.

• How to convert simple data to LOD? How to engage users in making that data better?

• A cultural heritage standard.

• User interfaces. What do we do after we create all of this data? [applause]

• Progress since the prior LODLAM (in San Francisco)? BIBFRAME? Schema.org?

• Preserving linked data

• The NSA has built the ultimate linked data tool chain. What can we learn?

• Internal use cases for linked data.

• How to make use of dirty metadata

• A draft ontology for MODS metadata (MODSRDF)

• Collaborating on a harvesting/enrichment tool

• Getty Vocabulary is being released as LOD [applause], but they need help building a community making sure they have the right ontologies, early adopters, etc.

• The data exhaust from dSPACE and linking it to world problems — find the disconnects between the people who have problems and people with info helpful for those problems

• Identities and authorities — linked data as an app-independent way of doing identity control and management

• RDF cataloging interface

• Curation and social relationships

• Linked Open Data echo systems

• A new understanding of search — ways LODers search isn’t familiar to most people

• BIBFRAME

• Open Annotation tools enabling end users to enrich the graph

• Our collections are different for a reason. That manifests itself in the data structure. We should talk about this.

• In the business writ large, maybe we need the confidence to be invisible. What does that mean?

• Feedback loops once data has been exposed

• Wikidata — the database that supports Wikipedia

• Forming an international group to discuss archival data, particularly in LOD

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Categories: libraries, liveblog, taxonomy Tagged with: libraries • linked data • lodlam Date: June 19th, 2013 dw

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I gave a 20 minute talk at the Wired Next Fest in Milan on June 1, 2013. Because I needed to keep the talk to its allotted time and because it was being simultaneously translated into Italian, I wrote it out and gave a copy to the translators. Inevitably, I veered from the script a bit, but not all that much. What follows is the script with the veerings that I can remember. The paragraph breaks track to the slide changes

(I began by thanking the festival, and my progressive Italian publisher, Codice Edizioni Codice are pragmatic idealists and have been fantastic to work with.)

Knowledge seems to fit so perfectly into books. But to marvel at how well Knowledge fits into books…

… is to marvel at how well each rock fits into its hole in the ground. Knowledge fits books because we’ve shaped knowledge around books and paper.

And knowledge has taken on the properties of books and paper. Like books, knowledge is ordered and orderly. It is bounded, just as books stretch from cover to cover. It is the product of an individual mind that then is filtered. It is kept private and we’re not responsible for it until it’s published. Once published, it cannot be undone. It creates a privileged class of experts, like the privileged books that are chosen to be published and then chosen to be in a library

Released from the bounds of paper, knowledge takes on the shape of its new medium, the Internet. It takes on the properties of its new medium just it had taken on the properties of its old paper medium. It’s my argument today that networked knowledge assumes a more natural shape. Here are some of the properties of new, networked knowledge

1. First, because it’s a network, it’s linked.

2. These links have no natural stopping point for your travels. If anything, the network gives you temptations to continue, not stopping points.

3. And, like the Net, it’s too big for any one head, Michael Nielsen, the author of Reinventing Discovery, uses the discovery of the Higgs Boson as an example. That discovery required gigantic networks of equipment and vast networks of people. There is no one person who understands everything about the system that proved that that particle exists. That knowledge lives in the system, in the network.

4. Like the net, networked knowledge is in perpetual disagreement. There is nothing about which everyone agrees. We like to believe this is a temporary state, but after thousands of years of recorded history, we can now see for sure that we are never going to agree about anything. The hope for networked knoweldge is that we’re learning to disagree more fruitfully, in a linked environment

5. And, as the Internet makes very clear, we are fallible creatures. We get everything wrong. So, networked knowledge becomes more credible when it acknowledges fallibility. This is very different from the old paper based authorities who saw fallibility as a challenge to their authority.

6. Finally, knowledge is taking on the humor of the Internet. We’re on the Internet voluntarily and freed of the constrictions of paper, it turns out that we like being with one another. Even when the topic is serious like this topic at Reddit [a discussion of a physics headline], within a few comments, we’re making jokes. And then going back to the serious topic. Paper squeezed the humor out of knowledge. But that’s unnatural.

These properties of networked knowledge are also properties of the Network. But they’re also properties that are more human and more natural than the properties of traditional knowledge.

But there’s one problem:

There is no such thing as natural knowledge. Knowledge is a construct. Our medium may have changed, but we haven’t, at least so it seems. And so we’re not free to reinvent knowledge any way we’d like. Significant problems based on human tendencies are emerging. I’ll point to four quick problem areas.

First, We see the old patterns of concentration of power reemerge on the Net. Some sites have an enormous number of viewers, but the vast majority of sites have very few. [Slide shows Clay Shirky’s Power Law distribution chart, and a photo of Clay]

Albert-László Barabási has shown that this type of clustering is typical of networks even in nature, and it is certainly true of the Internet

Second, on the Internet, without paper to anchor it, knowledge often loses its context. A tweet…

Slips free into the wild…

It gets retweeted and perhaps loses its author

And then gets retweeted and lose its meaning. And now it circulates as fact. [My example was a tweet about the government not allowing us to sell body parts morphing into a tweet about the government selling body parts. I made it up.]

Third, the Internet provides an incentive to overstate.

Fourth, even though the Net contains lots of different sorts of people and ideas and thus should be making us more open in our beliefs…

… we tend to hang out with people who are like us. It’s a natural human thing to prefer people “like us,” or “people we’re comfortable with.” And this leads to confirmation bias — our existing beliefs get reinforced — and possibly to polarization, in which our beliefs become more extreme.

This is known as the echo chamber problem, and it’s a real problem. I personally think it’s been overstated, but it is definitely there.

So there are four problems with networked knowledge. Not one of them is new. Each has a analog from before the Net.

1. The loss of context has always been with us. Most of what we believe we believe because we believe it, not because of evidence. At its best we call it, in English, common sense. But history has shown us that common sense can include absurdities and lead to great injustices.

2. Yes, the Net is not a flat, totally equal place. But it is far less centralized than the old media were, where only a handful of people were allowed to broadcast their ideas and to choose which ideas were broadcast.

3. Certainly the Internet tends towards overstatement. But we have had mass media that have been built on running over-stated headlines. This newspaper [Weekly World News] is a humor paper, but it’s hard to distinguish from serious broadcast news.

4. And speaking of Fox, yes, on the Internet we can simply stick with ideas that we already agree with, and get more confirmed in our beliefs. But that too is nothing new. The old media actually were able to put us into even more tightly controlled echo chambers. We are more likely to run into opposing ideas — and even just to recognize that there are opposing ideas — on the Net than in a rightwing or leftwing newspaper.

It’s not simply that all the old problems with knowledge have reemerged. Rather, they’ve re-emerged in an environment that offers new and sometimes quite substantial ways around them.

1. For example, if something loses its context, we can search for that context. And links often add context.

2. And, yes, the Net forms hubs, but as Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson have pointed out, the Net also lets a long tail form, so that voices that in the past simply could not have been heard, now can be. And the activity in that long tail surpasses the attention paid to the head of the tail.

3. Yes, we often tend to overstate things on the Net, but we also have a set of quite powerful tools for pushing back. We review our reviews. We have sites like the well-regarded American site, Snopes.com, that will tell you if some Internet rumor is true. Snopes is highly reliable. Then we have all of the ways we talk with one another on the Net, evaluating the truth of what we’ve read there.

4. And, the echo chamber is a real danger, but we also have on the Net the occasional fulfillment of our old ideal of being able to have honest, respectful conversations with people with whom we fundamentally disagree. These examples are from Reddit, but there are others.

So, yes, there are problems of knowledge that persist even when our technology of knowledge changes. That’s because these are not technical problems so much as human problems…

…and thus require human solutions. And the fundamental solution is that we need to become more self-aware about knowledge.

Our old technology — paper — gave us an idea of knowledge that said that knowledge comes from experts who are filtered, printed, and then it’s settled, because that’s how books work. Our new technology shows us we are complicit in knowing. In order to let knowledge get as big as our new medium allows, we have to recognize that knowledge comes from all of us (including experts), it is to be linked, shared, discussed, argued about, made fun of, and is never finished and done. It is thoroughly ours – something we build together, not a product manufactured by unknown experts and delivered to us as if it were more than merely human.

The required human solution therefore is to accept our human responsibility for knowledge, to embrace and improve the technology that gives knowledge to us –- for example, by embracing Open Access and the culture of linking and of the Net, and to be explicit about these values.

Becoming explicit is vital because our old medium of knowledge did its best to hide the human qualities of knowledge. Our new medium makes that responsibility inescapable. With the crumbling of the paper authorities, it bcomes more urgent than ever that we assume personal and social responsibility for what we know.

Knowing is an unnatural act. If we can remember that –- remember the human role in knowing — we now have the tools and connections that will enable even everyday knowledge to scale to a dimension envisioned in the past only by the mad and the God-inspired.

Thank you.

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Ryan Carson [twitter:RyanCarson] of Treehouse at the Mesh Conference is keynoting the Mesh Conference. He begins his introduction of himself by saying he is a father, which I appreciate. Treehouse is an “online education company that teaches technology. We hope we can remove the need to go to university to do technology.”

Treehouse “treasures personal time.” They work a 4-day week, 8 hours a day, although they pay for a full 40-hour week. He asks how many people in the audience work for themselves or run their own company; half the people raise their hands. “We have a fundamental belief that people can work smarter, and thus faster…We use a lot of tools that decrease drag.” E.g., they have an internal version of Reddit called “Convoy.” It keeps conversation out of email. “We ask people to never put anything in email that isn’t actionable.” A 4 day week also makes recruiting easy.

“As a father, I realize I’m going to die, sooner rather than later. If I work four days a week, I can send 50% more of my life with my wife and kids.”

Q: Why not a 3 day week?

A: It’s a flag to say “We believe personal time is important.” We’ll do whatever we have to. I’ve told people not to send email over the weekend because it makes work for others.

Q: How about flex time instead?

A: We have tried that, and we let people work from home. “People are smart and motivated and want to succeed. We presume that about people.” We’re demanding, and we’ll fire people if they don’t perform. But you have to institute practices, and not just say that you believe in personal time.

Q: Do you have investors? How do they respond?

A: We have $12M in investment. But we didn’t raise money until after we were profitable. I used my experience running 3 prior companies to give investors confidence. And no one asked about the 4 day week. It doesn’t seem to matter to them. My prior company was an events company and it got bought by a company that worked 5 days a week, and it was messy. I think our team there is now working 5 days.

Q: How do you provide 7 day a week support?

A: Our support team time shifts.

Q: How do you control email so that it’s only actionable?

A: It’s a policy. Also, we use Boomerang which lets us schedule when email is sent.

Now Ryan talks about the tools they use to facilitate a distributed team: about 30 people in Orlando, 8 in Portland, and the rest are distributed in the US and UK. “We don’t have a headquarters.” We are an Internet company. We use Convoy: part water cooler, part news distribution. Notes from meetings go there. It took a dev about a day to create Convoy.

We also use Campfire, a chat program. And Trello for task management. And Google Hangouts. (He notes that you have to be wired, not wifi, and have good gear, for Hangouts to work well.)

Q: Do you have to work over the weekend when there’s a hard deadline? And do you put more of an emphasis on planning?

A: Yes, we sometimes have worked over the weekend. And we’ve sometimes had a problem with people working too much. I think some people work without telling us, especially developers and designers. But if they have to work, their managers have failed. And it does mean we have to plan carefully.

Q: What are your annual meetups like?

A: It’s a full week. No agenda, no working. Pure get drunk, have fun. People work much harder if they like each other and believe in each other.

Now on education. By 2020, there will be 1,000,000 jobs in tech than students. Nine out of ten high schools don’t even offer computer programming classes. [Really? Apparently so. Wow.] Treehouse tries to address this, along with Udacity, CodeAcademy, Code School. In a video, Ryan says that Treehouse will cost you about $300 for an entire course of tech education, making you ready to enter the workforce. “The education system is a racket. Universities have milked us dry for ten years.” 40% of jobs in STEM are in computer science, but only 2% of STEM students are studying it. “In 41 out of 50 states coding classes don’t count toward high school graduation math or science requirements.” “In the future, most students won’t get a four year degree, and I think that’s a good thing. We are moving toward a trade school model.”

Q: Many companies use college degrees as a filter. How do you filter?

A: In 5 yrs there won’t be enough graduates for you to hire anyone because Google and FB will pay them $500,000/year. At Treehouse we apply points. You can see someone’s skills.

Q: What will people miss out on if they don’t go to college?

A: People will miss out on the social aspect, but people can’t afford to go into debt for that. College as the next step is a new idea in the past 15 years. [Really?] You’ll have free liberal arts education available through free online courses. You’ll pay for trade school training. “We’ll just have to have faith that people can be responsible adults without going to university.”

Q: How do you help people who complete your courses find job?

A: We’re rolling out an entire department for this. As you learn on Treehouse, you get points and start to establish your rank. Employers will be able to search our database saying, e.g., “I want someone with over 1,000 points in CSS, 800 points in Javascript, and 500 points in business.”

Q: How are you going to mesh these ideas into traditional education?

A: Sub-par universities will die. Education will be completely different in 10 years. We don’t know what it will be.

Ryan says that he’s not doing this for the money. “People who need education can’t afford it.”

[Judy Lee tweeted that Ryan should have asked us how many in the audience have a university degree, and how many of us regret it. Nice.]

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Derek Khanna is giving a Berkman talk on trying to connect the dots so that policy-makers “get it.” “How do we even frame discussions about the economy and innovation?” Copyright law hasn’t been re-assessed in at least 15 yrs, he says. He begins with his bakcstory: He’s from Mass. Worked for Romney and Scott Brown. (Derek wrote the copyright reform report for the Republican Study Group.)

Rule 1: “Being right is just part of the battle.” Rule 2: “It’s less important what you say…It’s most important who says it.” Rule 3: “Control the framing of the issue.” E.g., we [copyright reformers] frame copyright very differently than does Capitol Hill.

Take SOPA. He quotes Adam Green saying it’s not a matter of right vs. wrong but old vs. new. Staffers had been warning about SOPA, but suddenly the public engaged. The result was astounding: Co-sponsors became opponents of the bill. Derek says it wasn’t Google that killed SOPA. It was the 3 million people reaching out to Congress that killed it. “People like Elizabeth Stark, Alexis Ohanian [reddit] and Aaron Swartz.” The RIAA and MPAA like to frame it as having lost to Google rather than having lost to the American people. (He points to a Mario Savio speech that begins “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious…”) SOPA remains very much on Congress’ mind, he says.

The framing was “perfect”: SOPA will censor the Internet and inhibit innovation.

Most conversations about copyright are framed as: Piracy is rampant, costing American jobs. Content is a crucial export, “the only thing produced in US any more.” Copyright is thus good, but more copyright is better.

Derek set out to reframe it in his “Three Myths of Copyright.” At a panel he asked “Who thinks terrorism is bad? Who thinks the TSA is only the way to protect us?” Likewise, is copyright the only way to protect content when it makes 23M Americans into felons? He points to the difference between the original copyright law and the current one. To conservatives, it can be framed as looking like a wild divergence from the original intent.

The “Three Myths” memo went out and was supported by conservatives until 24 hours later when it was pulled. A few weeks later, Derek was fired. He’s continuing but he thinks that when you’re on the outside, you have to fight small, strategic battles.

Idea + Movement + Effort = Legislation

A few weeks ago the head of the copyright office endorsed many of the reforms in “Three Myths,” updating copyright for the digital generation. The day before the content industry made the old argument in Roll Call. The other side isn’t countering. The content lobby knows that Roll Call is read by Congress. We need similar expertise.

How do we start?

1. Don’t wait for the next SOPA. They’re going to be much subtler in how they do it next time. Sites are still being taken down, e.g., Megaupload. Also funding mechanisms were cut off for ThePiratesBay. Also, Google was forced to take down links to torrents, etc. So, why would they come up with another SOPA? Instead they’re using international treaties to codify the DMCA forever, using stock language that gets replicated in treaties. These treaties only require Senate approval, or through executive actions. Therefore, we have to be more activist.

2. We have to analyze existing law.

3. We need support from both the left and the right

4. We need to focus on areas of common interest where we can form a collective whole

5. Asymmetrical warfare: Where are we strong and they’re weak? Where have they overplayed their hand? E.g., if you want to take on copyright law, that’s not asymmetric because there’s a strong argument on the other side.

“We lack the institutional capacity to quickly intervene in the political process in the way the content industry has. We therefore need to be smarter and more tactical.” We should start with smaller battles. We should avoid the narrative of “fighting the Man,” that companies are evil, etc. That won’t win over a party that sees itself as a party of business. “Instead, foster a David v. Goliath narrative.” That media like that narrative.

We should not talk about piracy. And even if the DMCA needs to be replaced, that’s a non-starter on Capital Hill.

Derek’s first campaign was on cellphone unlocking, after the Librarian of Copyright said it was now illegal (i.e., ending the DMCA exemption) to enable your phone to be used on a different carrier. Unlocking would increase competition among carriers. Derek wrote an article for The Atlantic that pointed out that the technology for the blind also has to be exempted every three years, a clear example of how the system is broken. Derek expected this issue to be hard. It didn’t get any mainstream media attention. It has a $32M lobbying effort on the other side. “That’s a problem on Capitol Hill: We don’t have a lobby for the future.” IT requires making hypothetical arguments.

But as the argument went on, examples emerged. E.g., Republic Wireless offers very cheap connectivity, but it depends on users bringing in unlocked phones.

Derek started a White House petition that got 114,000 signatures, the largest at the time. In part this worked because of people’s prior experience with SOPA. There were positive arguments on Left and Right. Left: It’s a matter of fairness. Right: Property rights. Derek added to this the value of innovation as a cross-party value.

After the petition, the FCC announced an investigation, and the White House came out in favor of unlocking. Before that, Derek had urged Congressfolks to come out in favor of it, if only because he was worried that after Obama came out in favor of repeal, the right would take the other side. But shortly after Obama endorsed, some conservatives came out in favor. Bills were introduced in both chambers.

Unfortunately, we have no way of mobilizing the 114,000 people who signed the petition; the names couldn’t be captured.

Why was it successful?

1. They made it simple. (Also with SOPA: SOPA = censorship)

2. Leveraged social media

3. Utilized video

4. Created a diverse coalition

5. Gained mainstream credibility

6. Channeled energies into a measurable demonstration of support

7. Kept Congress in the loop

8. Solid media narrative

9. Avoided talking about piracy. Instead: competition, innovation, and property rights.

10. It was unfair

11. Everyone has a phone…

Derek presented this at a conservative org and got called a Marxist. Fox Business also: “You’re just against contracts.” “When you take up an issue, you have to know where your third rails are.” Response: The contract is between you and your carrier; the feds shouldn’t be arresting people for violating a contract.

Why is it important? It’s the first time Congress has questioned the DMCA. We might get a hearing on it. Congress is unaware of the implications of the DMCA. It also helped Congress realize that international treaties are being used as a backdoor for these restrictions. It may affect the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. And it helped identify allies.

Bottom line: “A free society shouldn’t have to petition its govt every 3 years to allow access to tech.” It’s akin to free speech, he says.

On the CFAA: “The statute is terrible.” There’s consensus about this. “But no one has written about in Weekly Standard or Politico.” It hasn’t reached Congress’ attention. Most members of Congress think that the sky is falling when it comes to cybersecurity. Every time a cybersec bill comes up, Congress has experts telling them that we are in deep peril. “Essentially the arguments for CFAA are that we need to reduce the DoJ’s discretion.” You have to defeat that training. Meet with Rogers or McCain or the other cyber-hawks and convince them that the CFAA needs to be reformed, that we can target hacking with a more narrowly focused bill.

Q&A

Q: Can we try to drive a wedge in the opposition?

A: Yes. The RIAA’s and MPAA’s policies don’t foster innovation in their own industry. Over a 100 wireless carriers supported us on unlocking.

Q: You said that people who “get” tech are on the side of openness, etc. That optimistically suggests that if we educate people, they’ll take more common sense positions on tech.

A: Not entirely. Congress listens to people they trust, who are the RIAA, MPAA…

Q: …But even if Congressfolks fully understood tech, would the funds they get from the content industry still sway them?

A: Yes, some understand and still oppose us. But the ones who understand generally agree with us. The story is more complex: The MPAA/RIAA are very liberal, but the right still tend toward copyright protection.

Q: Why is the content industry so powerful, given the size of Google, etc.

A: AT&T and Verizon are both in the top ten of lobbying companies: $32M. Google spends about $6M on lobbying. “No tech company had a DC presence until Microsoft” when it was about to be broken up. Also, as the tech companies invest heavily to survive, say, patent law, why would you favor wholesale patent law change? Also, when the RIAA/MPAA sue kids, the money goes back into lobbying, not to the artists. They’re self-funding. But the tech industry has to justify why they’re spending money on lobbying.

Q: In Pakistan, piracy is rampant. Doesn’t that hurt innovation?

A: Piracy is real. But, those generally weren’t loss sales. The obsession with piracy is the problem.

Q: How about the role of public interest groups?

A: I’m a big fan of Public Knowledge and EFF, etc. But they need supplementing with more activist movements.

Q: If we focus on small victories, will people think we’re not doing enough? Will you have to keep winning bigger and bigger?

A: You can exist at a level for a while, if you’re strategic about it. Eventually you have to move on to bigger battles.

Q: How about the importance of multistake partnerships?

A: You need as many allies as you can. E.g., I’m interested in orphan works: in copyright but you can’t find the copyright holders. Our interests are in line with the RIAA.

A: Are we in a moment like the environmental movement before it formed under a single banner?

Q: I’m not an expert on the environmental movement. There are lots of lessons to be learned from them.

Q: Is there a schism in the conservatism over copyright reform?

A: I haven’t seen much of a schism. The best argument I’ve heard is the natural rights one: copyright ought to exist forever. But that’s not the system we’ve adopted. Our founding fathers rejected it. I’d like to build a cross-party coalition, but that’s a longtime goal.

Q: Did you get pushback on using the WH petition mechanism?

A: I got some from privacy folks.

Q: When we win a battle, the other side comes up with something more drastic. E.g., we won a first sale argument, but the right may be preparing something much more drastic. How can we avoid that?

A: I’m not sure they’re going to try to reverse the first sale doctrine, but we need to have our eyes open.

Q: What should we do right now?

A: We’d like to start to bring together the CISPA coalition.

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Anil Dash is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk, titled “The Web We Lost.” He begins by pointing out that the title of his talk implies a commonality that at least once was.

Anil puts up an icon that is a symbol of privately-owned public spaces in New York City. Businesses create these spaces in order to be allowed to build buildings taller than the zoning requirements allow. These are sorta kinda like parks but are not. E.g., Occupy isn’t in Zuccotti Park any more because the space is a privately-own public space, not a park. “We need to understand the distinction” between the spaces we think are public and the ones that are privately owned.

We find out about these when we transgress rules. We expect to be able to transgress in public spaces, but in these privately-owned spaces we cannot. E.g., Improv Everywhere needs to operate anonymously to perform in these spaces. Anil asks us to imagine “a secretive, private ivy league club.” He is the son of immigrants and didn’t go to college. “A space even as welcoming as this one [Harvard Berkman] can seem intimidating.” E.g., Facebook was built as a private club. It welcomes everyone now, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s ours. It’s very hard for a business to get much past its origins.

One result of online privately-owned public spaces is “the wholesale destruction of your wedding photos.” When people lose them in a fire, they are distraught because those photos cannot be replaced. Yet everyday we hear about a startup that “succeeds” by selling out, and then destroying the content that they’d gathered. We’ve all gotten the emails that say: “Good news! 1. We’re getting rich. 2. You’re not. 3. We’re deleting your wedding photos.” They can do this because of the terms of service that none of us read but that give them carte blanche. We tend to look at this as simply the cost of doing business with the site.

But don’t see it that way, Anil urges. “This is actually a battle” against the values of the early Web. In the mid to late 1990s, the social Web arose. There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you’re a blogger. It was distinctive. Now being introduced as a blogger “is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer.” “No one’s a Facebooker.” The idea that there was a culture with shared values has been dismantled.

He challenges himself to substantiate this:

“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.

Less visibly, the laws is being bent “to make our controlling our data illegal.” All the social networks operate as common carriers — neutral substrates — except when it comes to monetizing. The boundaries are unclear: I can sing “Happy Birthday” to a child at home, and I can do it over FaceTime, but I can’t put it up at YouTube [because of copyright]. It’s very open-ended and difficult to figure. “Now we have the industry that creates the social network implicitly interested in getting involved in how IP laws evolve.” When the Google home page encourages visitors to call their senators against SOPA/PIPA, we have what those of us against Citizens United oppose: we’re asking a big company to encourage people to act politically in a particular way. At the same time, we’re letting these companies capture our words and works and put them under IP law.

A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.

At the old Suck.com, hovering on a link would reveal a punchline. Now, with the introduction of Adlinks and AdSense, Google transformed links from the informative and aesthetic, to an economic tool for search engine optimization (SEO). Within less than 6 months, linkspam was spawned. Today Facebook’s EdgeRank is based on the idea that “Likes” are an expression of your intent, which determines how FB charges for ads. We’ll see like-spammers and all the rest we saw with links. “These gestural things that were editorial or indicators of intent get corrupted right away.” There are still little islands, but for the most part these gestures that used to be about me telling you that I like your work are becoming economic actions.

Anil says that a while ago when people clicked on a link from Facebook to his blog, FB popped up a warning notice saying that it might be dangerous to go there. “The assumption is that my site is less trustworthy than theirs. Let’s say that’s true. Let’s say I’m trying to steal all your privacy and they’re not.” [audience laughs] He has FB comments on his site. To get this FB has to validate your page. “I explicitly opted in to the Facebook ecology” in part to prove he’s a moderate and in part as a convenience to his readers. At the same time, FB was letting the Washington Post and The Guardian publish within the FB walls, and FB never gave that warning when you clicked on their links. A friend at FB told Anil that the popup was a bug, which might be. But that means “in the best case, we’re stuck fixing their bugs on our budgets.” (The worst case is that FB is trying to shunt traffic away from other sites.)

And this is true for all things that compete with the Web. The ideas locked into apps won’t survive the company’s acquisition, but this is true when we change devices as well. “Content tied to devices dies when those devices become obsolete.” We have “given up on standard formats.” “Those of us who cared about this stuff…have lost,” overall. Very few apps support standard formats, with jpg and html as exceptions. Likes and follows, etc., all use undocumented proprietary formats. The most dramatic shift: we’ve lost the expectation that they would be interoperable. The Web was built out of interoperability. “This went away with almost no public discourse about the implications of it.”

The most important implication of all this comes when thinking about the Web as a public space. When the President goes on FB, we think about it as a public space, but it’s not, and dissent and transgression are not permitted. “Terms of Service and IP trump the Constitution.” E.g., every single message you put on FB during the election FB could have transformed into its opposite, and FB would be within its ToS rights. After Hurricane Sandy, public relief officials were broadcasting messages only through FB. “You had to be locked into FB to see where public relief was happening. A striking change.”

What’s most at risk are the words of everyday people. “It’s never the Pharaoh’s words that are lost to history.” Very few people opt out of FB. Anil is still on FB because he doesn’t want to lose contact with his in-laws. [See Dan Gillmor’s talk last week.) Without these privately-owned public spaces, Anil wouldn’t have been invited to Harvard; it’s how he made his name.

“The main reason this shift happened in the social web is the arrogance of the people who cared about the social web in the early days…We did sincerely care about enabling all these positive things. But the way we went about it was so arrogant that Mark Zuckerberg’s vision seemed more appealing, which is appalling.” An Ivy League kid’s software designed for a privileged, exclusive elite turned out to be more appealing than what folks like Anil were building. “If we had been listening more, and a little more open in self-criticism, it would have been very valuable.”

There was a lot of triumphalism after PIPA/SOPA went down, but it took a huge amount of hyperbole: “Hollywood wants to destroy the First Amendment, etc.” It worked once but it doesn’t scale. The willingness to pat ourselves on our back uncritically led us to vilify people who support creative industries. That comes from the arrogance that they’re dinosaurs, etc. People should see us being publicly critical of ourselves. For something to seem less inclusive than FB or Apple — incredibly arrogant, non-egalitarian cultures — that’s something we should look at very self-critically.

Some of us want to say “But it’s only some of the Web.” We built the Web for pages, but increasingly we’re moving from pages to streams (most recently-updated on top, generally), on our phones but also on bigger screens. Sites that were pages have become streams. E.g., YouTube and Yahoo. These streams feel like apps, not pages. Our arrogance keeps us thinking that the Web is still about pages. Nope. The percentage of time we spend online looking at streams is rapidly increasing. It is already dominant. This is important because these streams are controlled access. The host controls how we experience the content. “This is part of how they’re controlling the conversation.” No Open Web advocate has created a stream that’s anywhere near as popular as the sites we’re going to. The geeks tend to fight the last battle. “Let’s make an open source version of the current thing.” Instead, geeks need to think about creating a new kind of stream. People never switch to more open apps. (Anil says Firefox was an exception.)

So, what do we do? Social technologies follow patterns. It’s cyclical. (E.g., “mainframes being rebranded as The Cloud.”) Google is doing just about everything Microsoft was doing in the late 1990s. We should expect a reaction against their overreach. With Microsoft, “policy really worked.” The Consent Decree made IE an afterthought for developers. Public policy can be an important of this change. “There’s no question” that policy over social software is coming.

Also, some “apps want to do the right thing.” Anil’s ThinkUp demonstrates this. We need to be making apps that people actually want, not ones that are just open. “Are you being more attentive to what users want than Mark Zuckerberg is?” We need to shepherd and coach the apps that want to do the right thing. We count on 23 yr olds to do this, but they were in 5th grade when the environment was open. It’s very hard to learn the history of the personal software industry and how it impacted culture. “What happened in the desktop office suite wars ?” [Ah, memories!] We should be learning from such things.

And we can learn things from our own data. “It’s much easier for me to check my heart-rate than how often I’m reading Twitter.”

Fortunately, there are still institutions that care about a healthy Web. At one point there was a conflict between federal law and Terms of Service: the White House was archiving coments on its FB wall, whereas FB said you couldn’t archive for more than 24 hrs.

We should remember that ToS isn’t law. Geeks will hack software but treat ToS as sacred. Our culture is negatively impacted by ToS and we should reclaim our agency over them. “We should think about how to organize action around specific clauses in ToS.” In fact, “people have already chosen a path of civil disobedience.” E.g., search YouTube for “no infringement intended.” “It’s like poetry.” They’re saying “I’m not trying to step on your toes, but the world needs to see this.” “I’m so inspired by this.” If millions of teenagers assembled to metformin without prescription engage in civil disobedience, we’d be amazed. They do on line. They feel they need to transgress because of a creative urge, or because it’s speech with a friend not an act of publishing. “That’s the opportunity. That’s the exciting part. People are doing this every single day.

[I couldn’t capture the excellent Q&A because I was running the microphone around.]

The video of the talk will be posted here.

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