I care about… – Page 21

Scott Kveton moves to JanRain

My good buddy Scott Kveton has announced that he’ll be leaving the OSL to become the CEO of JanRain, Inc., a Portland-based developer of identity management software systems.

This is significant for a couple reasons, not the least of which is the end of Scott’s great leadership at the OSL, leading to the rise of the premiere host of open source projects such as Mozilla, Gentoo and Drupal.

Besides the legacy he’s leaving behind, the work he’s doing next promises to be extremely interesting, and I wouldn’t expect anything less. Considering that Verisign has built its own OpenID server and that there are more and more OpenID-based identity solutions cropping up, it’s safe to suggest that you keep your eyes on this one. With Kveton stepping onto the field, OpenID proponents have a new ally who’s sure to make rapid advances on the question of open identity (and no, his blog post title is not ironic).

Privacy? What privacy?

I had an interesting exchange at the Net Squared conference last week involving privacy and tags. It came down to a question from someone new to tags: “So if you tag everything with this tag, doesn’t that mean that everyone can find what you’ve tagged?”

The answer is, of course, yes.

Which drew some rather wide eyes and a breath, “Oh”.

And that’s when I went off on my anti-privacy rant. About how privacy is like sand between your fingers and that the more you try to hold on to it, the less you really can maintain control over. And subsequently, over time, more and more spills out into the hands of others, often those who you least expect or want to have information about you.

Like the government or like your paranoid employer beholden to laws of the government. Like insurance companies or the folks who run the ATM card networks. Like people who determine how much you should pay for certain things.

Anyway, sniveling aside, a long time ago I decided that there is no privacy in anything digital (which is both a beautiful and a terrifying thing, depending on how much you know about technology). Knowing a bit myself, but not quite enough, I’ve decided to try and flood the network with as much information about myself as possible in the naive and desperate hope that by creating more positive and truthful information I can counter whatever lies may someday be advanced against what I’m really up to. I mean, when the government is spying on your cell phone calls, your boss is paying people to read your emails and who knows who’s snooping on your WiFi connection, what else can you do? Certainly not pretend that you have an iota of privacy anymore! Enh, whatev. At least the kids get it.

Stunning infringement

The next brouhaha? Or is it jsut my lack of understanding of IP law showing again? Here at the FactoryCity, we make the news, you decide (Tim would be so disappointed in me, stirring shit up again!)!

But, the point is this: is the recent collaboration between Yahoo-Flickr-Nikon a legitimate re-use of people’s photos with commercial intent? Or, in the case that photos are explicitly designated as licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license, as in the case of Flickr employee Heather Champ, is the license simply being ignored? (Heh, not to mention the fact that featured photo was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel, but I digress.)

I mean, this is really interesting. I guess I don’t care so much about there being product placement on Flickr where it’s relevant — I mean, Scott Beale and Thomas Hawk take awesome photos with Canon EOS‘ — that’s useful information! And now I want to buy a Canon EOS 5D!

But to go all out with some lame-ass big bucks ad campaign not of the community smacks of Chevy Tahoeism. And frankly, turns me off. Oh well.

So how about them licenses? Am I shooting blanks here or, if your photos are showing up in Nikon’s campaign, are ya feelin’ a bit taken advantage of? After all, the TOS say very clearly that “What’s Yours is Yours”. So what’s the deal here? Eh eh?

Blowing up trademarks

Ian Betteridge provides me an opportunity to clarify what I meant in my post on Why BarCamp is a Community Mark.

In strewing together patents, copyright and trademark, I created what he refers to as a specious argument, which, after having looked it up, means that it sounds good on the surface to the point of making sense but ultimately is wrong. Given the structure of my argument and how he interpreted what I said, I would actually agree with him.

But that’s because I was commenting on the need to reexamine all US intellectual property laws in light of the recent “Web 2.0” brouhaha, and in particular, trademark, since copyright is essentially debunked with Creative Commons and patents, well, they’re a whole different can of fish.

Let me rephrase my argument thus: Trademarks do not stifle innovation (unlike copyright and patents). They do, instead, inhibit distributed ownership of a mark or symbol, and when it comes to an idea that a community strongly connects with or takes at least partial ownership, trying to wrest it out of the hands of that community will result in the kind of tantrum we witnessed recently.

Have you ever taken a pacifier away from a contently suckling 2-year-old? Exactly.

(And I offer that metaphor not as a commentary on the behavior of anyone but to give you an idea of the attachment one might form with something it identifies as its own, even if, clearly, it’s the property of the parent who purchased it).

So, if we’re to move into a productive discourse about this area of IP, let’s, shall we?

Ian poses two questions to me in his post:

Can anyone give an example where trademark law – NOT patents or copyright – has been used to stifle innovation or damage the interests of consumers (and no, the O’Reilly spat can’t be used – the facts of the case aren’t exactly clear, especially if you read Tim O’Reilly’s response).
If trademark law was removed from the statute books tomorrow, what would be the consequences?

To the first, I’d argue that that’s not really my point, at least in terms of stifling innovation, nor the reason why trademark must be considered.

He does combine the notion of “[damaging] the interests of consumers”, but I don’t think that’s actually the argument I’m making either. In fact, I’m more interested in the plight of Tim O’Reilly — and what he might have done differently — besides sending out the C&D letter — to protect or enforce his organization’s mark. Let me be clear: it’s important that people receive due credit for the work that they do and the ideas that they generate (and, to counter Mr Douglas’ suggestion, I have always called myself a co-organizer of the first BarCamp — pfffbttt). This is a tenant of open source chivalry and at the cornerstone of a meritocratic system.

Trademark law was designed to stop people from using a mark in unsanctioned ways — and requires obvious enforcement efforts in order to sanctify your ownership of that mark: fail to protect it, you lose your legal protections.

So what the whole idea of a Community Mark is to proactively look at this situation — at the impossibility and huge expense of trademark enforcement on the web — and find some balanced approach whereby the cost of enforcement is thrust upon those who use the term most and belong to the original creative community. I don’t think that anyone would argue that the O’Reilly camp didn’t help advance the Web 2.0 concept and phrase — just like Adaptive Path-man JJG pushed forward the term AJAX for technologies that had been in use on the web forever. The difference, as it played out last week, was that the legal department at CMP decided to try to enforce their legal protections, and got biatch-slapped because the community felt betrayed (well, in particular, Tom Raftery). His response could have easily been predicted, as it was a human one, and ended up with everyone feeling a bit indignant about how the witchhunt gathered force so quickly in the absense of an official “Tim” response (just like the response to Cheney’s shotgun wedding after 24 hours of silence).

A Community Mark is a pragmatic reconsideration of the kind of laws that were written long before we had the internet and instant forms of mass communication. And just like the Dean campaign or the Spread Firefox NYTimes campaign, time and time again it’s been shown that if you rely on your community in real ways, and give them influence of your destiny, they will come out to support you — and most notably — protect you.

DHX: The audience is hacking

In case you haven’t heard, this weekend is the 10th SuperHappyDevHouse, otherwise known as “DHX” and will be held at France Telecom’s South San Francisco HQ.

This devhouse is different than previous devhouses in that it’s taking place somewhere other than David Weekly‘s house and it’s also being run as a contest to see who can build the best self-sustaining and self-running money-printing machine in a weekend.

As David says in this video (from Ryanne), if you can build a business in a weekend (like he did with PBWiki) that says something pretty interesting about the time that we’re living in (not to mention the irrational exuberance picking up again).

Read the competition FAQ and then go sign up on the wiki. Oh, and there’ll be a party this Friday kicking off at 7pm, leading into the weekend-long event.

Bonus trivia: all proceeds will be donated to the CCCP.

Egg, meet chicken

For all you nay-sayers out there waiting for some reason to implement microformats, you now have no excuse.

Not only can you search for microformats (like my hcard — search for “messina“) but you can also submit your content for indexing to the newly launched Pingerati site. The search so far covers hCard, hCalendar and hReview… and I’m hoping to get more conversations kicked off around better interfaces for microformats as well as more practical ways of implementing and making use of microformats (like Jeremy Keith’s austin.adactio.com page).

In any case, we finally have a use besides filling your address book for all those conference speaker pages that Tantek has converted!

What’s your community model?

I didn’t think that I’d come to resent the question “What’s your business model?” as much as Andy does, but I have. While a relevant question with the appropriate disclosure of intent (i.e. “How will you sustain the work that you’re doing so that I can make an informed decision about whether I should do business with you?”), too often it’s used as a yardstick for measuring whether someone is worth talking to, if at all — an unfortunate vestige of the old capitalist elite.

So, from now on, that’s why when someone asks me what my business model is, I’ll probably say something like… “I don’t care.”

Because I don’t. Not really.

Having a business model implies planning, making money, capitalizing. The occasional sell out. Yeh, well, ask me what my “love model” is and then we can talk — y’know, the one that means, “How are you going to make sure that you’re able to keep doing what you love doing?” (y’know, stuff that Scoble’s been thinking about lately).

So it’s dawned on me that the other legitimate question for organizations embracing the present and the what-comes-next is the question of what “community model” to follow and how they envision growing the relationship with the folks who will benefit most from the work they love doing.

I mean, that’s certainly more interesting and deterministic than some made-up plan guessing at how they think they’re going to pay the bills. I mean, heck, that problem is so pedestrian anyway. Seems to me, if you’re doing good work, you’re making the right friends and it’s obvious that you love your work, the payola will come. Seriously.

But seriously folks, a community model is essential to any successful modern sustaining endeavor. Kieran made this point at WineCamp: if you’re going to be building social tools, you’ve got to be connected to people.

You can no longer hide yourself away in a stealth-mode cubicle-laden walled garden for 2 years and then pop out your love child and expect it to spread like wild-fire.

Nor can you just drop a dollop of cash into the ether and expect a “community” to gel out of nothing. You need to first build up a cadre of true believers or you’ll have no credibility and offer no reason for anyone to care. At best, you’ll inspire a mediocre response — which is, quite honestly, worse than no response at all.

So let me lay it out for you: where we’re going, there are no products. There will be communities, just like there’s always been — and no room for your AJAX-featuring, web2.0-compliant, tagrified monstrosity of an interface-being-passed-off-as-a-business-model.

Yes, there will be new communities that span across new amounts of geography and understanding that maintain immediate, uninterrupted connections, but those’re about the only differences from the communities of people that have ruled for ages. If you want to build a product for today and tomorrow’s markets and somehow make money doing it (so you can keep on doing what you love), you either need to find a pre-existing community or cultivate a new one. Just like buying vines from an existing vineyard or creating your own. But it starts — and ends — with community. Not some ego-stroking super-smaht business model.

And once you’ve found the community with which you most directly relate — and inspires you to do the work you most love — you can start building. But realize that you’ll be building and toiling away on things that are both personally satisfying and community-relevant. The tools that you design and deploy should have both additive and symbiotic effects for both you and the community to which you belong. Otherwise, what you’re doing isn’t legitimate, isn’t sustainable, isn’t interesting or isn’t worthwhile. And who has time to work on things which aren’t worthwhile? Right?

Why BarCamp is a Community Mark

I’ve been watching the debate about O’Reilly’s enforcement of its “Web 2.0” service mark with mild amusement. It’s the old world being pistol-whipped by the new. Again. And ironically (…or not, depending on how much you know), it’s the O’Reilly camp on the receiving end. Again.

Look, I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably have to keep saying it again and again, but once you go open, you can never go back. Nor is there a half-way point down the rabbit hole.

If you benefit from open source, you give back to it. You play by its rules, not ones that you dictate. Period. If you don’t, the system self-corrects and kicks your ass. (Oh, and I hope that Microsoft is listening, because if it’s just playing nice while Mr Ozzie is on top for now, it’s inching ever-closer to the biggest bitch-slap of its storied existence).

Anyway.

Here’s what I have to say, because Cory let me down and Marc is one of the fews folks making much “Policy & Law 2.0” sense about this whole thing.

Trademark, copyright and patents are the DRM of genius. They lock down possibilities and in effect, shut down imagination and inspiration. Unsanctioned and unlicensed, that is. On Marc’s blog, Ian Betteridge writes:

Trademarks laws are designed to protect consumers, not to ensure a revenue stream for companies. Theyâ€™re designed so that no one can make crappy vacuum cleaners and call them “Hoover” (except, Hoover themselves, of course 🙂 ), thus fooling you out of money and incidentally protecting the company from damage to its reputation.

This is the correct interpretation of trademark law as it was intended in 1876. Yeah, that’s right, 130 years ago.

Now while many laws that’ve been on the books for a while now still apply and make sense, things have changed and as evidenced by our country’s leadership, not all laws make as much sense anymore.

Intellectual property protections at one time served to protect the consumer, the little guy, the entrepreneur. That was back when the feedback loop that corrected fraudulent activities was slow, tedious and often ended with a dual in the middle of main street. With patents being filed en masse by folks like Texas Instruments (who will likely never use or enforce the majority of their portfolio), with copyright being used to stifle creativity and expression and trademarks being applied to community-protected language and ideas, it’s clear that the original uses and purposes of these legal concepts are not only under scrutiny, but may have finally become the last ditch effort large power-mongering corporations with major budgets to go after the smaller, more nimble independents that they were designed to protect.

. . .

Now, when I originally made my case for Community Marks, it was in response to two frustrating experiences that I’d had working on SpreadSpread campaigns for Mozilla and Creative Commons, two bastions of open intellectual product. In both cases, ownership of their trademarks stymied their desire to allow their communities to assume ownership — and enforcement — of their identifying symbols (aka logos and wordmarks), and in effect, squashed nascent community-based efforts to do the work of more costly PR firms.

The Community Mark was a prediction of the kind of ongoing community tarring happening to O’Reilly. This is, after all, what happens when you try to take away the language or symbols by which a community identifies itself and serves as a warning for what could happen to Mozilla if they stepped up and stopped community projects from cropping up. Or what would happen if anyone tries to trademark BarCamp or use it for purposes that the community does not sanction or endorse.

And that’s why, without any other necessary action than merely calling it one, BarCamp has been and will continue to be, a Community Mark. The BarCamp community is a far better mechanism for detecting fraud and shutting it down than any obnoxiously-expensive legal department. And when you’re dealing with an environment as large as the web, what other choice do you have? You can’t possibly register your trademark in every single web-touching, worldwide jurisdiction (as Tom points out). And yeah, go ahead, tell me that I’m naive and that’s not how business works and blah blah blah ok-you’re-boring-me because you’ll end up in exactly the same shoes that O’Reilly/CMP/cha cha cha chimichanga enchilada find themselves in today.

I mean, honestly, wouldn’t you rather have the enormous power of the community on your side than not? Ok then, case closed.

What I’m looking forward to at WineCamp

In case you haven’t signed up yet for this weekend’s WineCamp, now’s the time to do it.

I’ve been thinking about it lately, and what I’m hoping to get out of it. Unlike other BarCamps, we’re really trying to break things up and introduce some new folks and ideas to the ad-hoc model (and by ad-hoc, I mean we’re buying up supplies, food and even the tent Tara and I’ll use throughout today and tomorrow!). It’s non-profits, it’s technologists, but really, disciplines aren’t the most important thing — it’s the conversations that will result — and the sunlighting of opportunities where all this new social media stuff has failed to light a fire.

What I’m most looking forward to, besides a great time, a great venue and some great wine, is talking to Donald Lobo and David Geilhufe of CivicCRM/CivicSpace (as well as Zack, Neil and Kieran) on how to make their platform more palatable and useable by normal folks. I would have loved to use CiviCRM to organize WineCamp, but it’s just too much software and I don’t have the time or expertise to make it sing for me. Now that I’m on the other side and actually organizing, I have a much clearer picture of what this stuff needs to do and how simple it needs to be.

I’m looking forward to catching up with my good friend Mini, who works with the Level Playing Field Institute and has created an awesome project called Smash Cast.

I’m also looking forward to discussing modern education reform with folks like Charles Morgan from Presidio Hill, about all kinds of good stuff with Murray Freeman who I met some time ago at SHDH… about what we can do to make non-profits more tech savvy and at the same time, technology builders more sensitive to matters beyond dollars and cents. Stuff that the Compumentor folks know a great deal about (and who have been instrumental in making this happen).

Above all, can we identify the projects and challenges that don’t have business models but that need to be built regardless?

There’s so much more to look forward to — and I can’t believe that it all starts tomorrow night with a big ol’ fashioned weenie roast on the vineyard, but heck, that’s the way this thing should get started. Pescitarian or whatever I am, even I recognize the need to go back to basics and start simply every now and again.

WineCamp is that: it’s the best of the old world, coming into the new. And that tension and grounding in culture, is what I hope will provide the right kind of environment for new ideas, for new thinking and for new hope to ferment. 😉

Someone tell me

Which is better? The new Google Web Toolkit or Yahoo’s UI Library?

And I don’t mean just in terms of capabilities… but how about:

how well they interoperate?
how good their licenses are?
how responsive their communities are?
how they compare with other open source alternatives

I’m not much of a developer, but come the next Mash Pit, I’d like to know which framework or toolkit I should be betting on.