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September 1, 2006
In September, the students return and Boston’s life begins again. Fall is spring in Boston.
[Later that same day:] From a lovely post on Aug. 24 by Liz Lawley: “For me, fall is like spring–new beginnings, fresh faces, a sense of promise and potential.”
If I’m only a week behind Liz in ideas, I’m doing really well!
August 26, 2006
The Google Earth camera plane is going to be flying over the O’Reilly campus at noon today, shooting at a resolution of two inches (i.e., 1 pixel = 2 inches). As someone said last night when this was announced, “Brush your teeth.”
So, there’s discussion of what to do for the plane when it passes. Here are a few ideas:
1. Reenact a scene from Hieronymus Bosch, although we may not have enough time to make the pig demon heads.(This is a real chance to get in touch with the bottom up grassroots, so to speak.)
2. Create a street scene lying down so the image will look like it was shot from street level, rather than top down.
3. Create a high res photo using two-inch squares of gray tones. [Tags: foocamp06 google_earth]
August 10, 2006
From the Open Net Initiative (Berkman, Cambridge, U of Toronto, Oxford):
[Tags: vietnam censorship berkman oni]Drawing from technical, legal, and political sources, ONI’s research finds that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is focusing its filtering on sites considered threatening to its one-party system. Furthermore, the technical sophistication, breadth, and effectiveness of Vietnam’s filtering are increasing with time. Similar to China, Vietnam has taken a multi-layered approach to controlling the Internet; Vietnam applies technical controls, the law, and education to restrict its citizens’ access to and use of information. Vietnam is carrying out this filtering with a notable lack of transparency – while Vietnam claims its blocking efforts are aimed at safeguarding the country against obscene or sexually explicit content, most of its filtering efforts are aimed at blocking sites with politically or religiously sensitive material that could undermine Vietnam’s one-party system. This is the latest in a series of case studies that address Internet filtering by states worldwide.
August 6, 2006
J aggregates some of the media coverage of the conference… [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]
Joseph Reagle talks about “Is Wikipedia Neutral?” He says that question provokes scoffs from academics. He started out thinking “neutrality” was a bad term to use, but now he’s not so sure. [As always, I’m paraphrasing poorly.] For one thing, the term acts as a “heat shield,” allowing discourse to focus on writing an encyclopedia. But there are difficulties, he says. Is there a non-circular definition? Is it talking about the platform, processes, policies, people, practices or articles?
He points to the ancient practice of deciding who’s “it” by doing a “one potato, two potato” protocol. Wikipedia can learn about playing fair from this.
From policy neutrality in technical standards, we can learn to seek “plurality and impartiality, where possible” but with “a relization that this impartiality itself might have less than desirable consequences.” E.g., the PICS standard was neutral but would have helped China be even more totalitarian.
From content neutrality in speech regulation, we learn that we need an explicit justification for discrimination.
From neutrality in times of war, we can learn the value of staying engaged with all even while not participating in the war.
He provides considered definitions of objective, neutral and transparent. Objective means the claims correspond to reality, and are made within a validating framework. Neutrality means that the claims are satisfactory to the claims’ constituencies. Transparent means the claims don’t pretend to be objective nor accommodating various constituences, but “plainly represent the speaker’s bias.” (He acknowledges there are problems with all of these.)
A framework for neutrality: Sensitivity to multiple claims, a notion of impartiality and pluarlity, sporstmanlike good-faith and adherence to known rules, and a commitment to use least-onerous rules to improve.
Is “neutral” the right word to talk about Wikipedia? Yes. It’s better than “unbiased,” the original coinage of Nupedia. Wikipedia aims at countering systemic bias. It is struggling to supporting the world’s languages. And neutrality is “not understood so much as an end result, but as a process and frame of mind.” [I’ve done way too much compression…]
Q: Is it neutral to point a long set of paragraphs denying the Holocaust in the Holocaust article?
A: There are ways to handle this… [Sorry, I’m not presenting his answer adequately.]
Q: [me] Really interesting presentation. But doesn’t this just push the question of neutrality further down? The contending “constituencies” are satisfied but there’s a decision about which constituencies to take seriously.
A: Yes, this is tough. Wikipedia is practical and tries to come up with practical solutions… [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipediabetsy_devine]
It’s a Q&A session. This is a very spotty report.
Q: How can we be assured that the elected board is truly representative?
A: (Jimmy) Choose wisely.
Q: The foundation charter is showing its age. Going to revisit it?
A: Yes. We’re having a Board planning retreat.
Q: What about Africa and the African languages?
A: (Jimmy) Thoughtful, slow steps. Talking with people on the ground there.
Q: What do you do about potential board members who can’t afford the travel, etc.? Pay them?
A: We’d cover travel, but this is not a paying position.
Q: Why is Angela leaving the board? She says it’s become less collaborative. How?
A: (Angela) E.g., we vote on a wiki rather than having discussions.
Q: What is the real scope of Wikimedia? “Access to all the world’s knowledge” is too broad and “Build an encyclopedia” is too small…
A: (Jimmy) Big question. Look at operationally at we’re doing. [But what guides decisions about what projects to undertake?]
Q: Upcoming conflict between validating by experts and celebrating the read-write culture. Should the board push a strategy or let it be settled by the community?
A: (Jimmy) The conflict between quality and openness is an illusion. It comes about when our tools won’t let us achieve what we want to. E.g., the stable version will remove almost all the need for semi-protection; we can leave the pages open while ensuring the public sees quality pages. The board shouldn’t get involved in deciding detailed questions such as “What counts as a personal attack?”
Q: Most of us respect the neutral point of view while understanding there’s no such thing as a neutral point of view. Maybe it’d be better to talk about respectful points of view?
A: (Jimmy) One of the great things about NPOV is that it’s a term of art and the community fills it with meaning. It has been filled with the notion of respect. You should propose this on a mailing list…
Q: Will social sharing ever be more powerful than money? Can the Board start the campaign?
A: (Brad) People are more powerful than money or social sharing.
Q: We don’t know much about the finances…
A: (Jimmy) They’re looking good. The audit process is underway.
A: (Michael) For the first time, we’ve had a steady stream of donations from the “Please help” button. We’re not as constrained as we used to be. We have a bit of a buffer in the bank, about $500K. Small donations are coming in at about $30K/month. We’re getting more donations from corporate sponsors as well.
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikimedia wikipedia]
July 29, 2006
Working in a nicer spot.
July 28, 2006
Look, I know this is only hard for me because I’m a flipping Linux moron, but it took me 45 minutes tonight to find an address of a Linux version of Firefox that I could download using the wget command. The other addresses work fine if you already have a browser, but I couldn’t find one in my MythTV installation other than the minimalist one that comes with it; that one displayed the Firefox binary as a spray of numbers on my screen and the Myth web browser has no apparent “save to file” command. But this address works, at least so far: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
1.5/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-1.5.tar.gz (Do it as a single line of course.)
There’s probably an easier way to do this using apt-get, a package installer, or even synaptic. (KnoppMyth installs Debian linux.) But it don’t work none for me.
July 7, 2006
Bill writes about Counterfeit Chic, a blog by Susan Scafidi that “argues for greater IP protection of cultural products.” Bill says he was skeptical about European extensions of copyright protection to perfumes, but:
[Tags: bill_mcgeveran susan_scafidi copyright copyleft digital_rights]After a little reflection, I am not quite so sure. Scafidi (and [Bill’s friend Jessica] Silbey) both anticipate this obvious reaction, and they both point out a few things. One of the most thought-provoking is the observation that the areas they see as potentially under-protected are often those oriented toward or perpetuated by women: fashion, cooking, folklore.
June 28, 2006
In this case, it’s a physical tag…a pretty piece of chrome with the Superman logo on it, suitable for wearing around the neck or attaching to keys. It says “Go Forward” on it, a courageous message from a person paralyzed from the neck down.
A set of two costs $10. All the money goes to the Christopher Reeve Foundation.
Disclosure: I’m on a marketing advisory committee for the Foundation and am blatantly shilling for it in this post. [Tags: superman]
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