Things I think about – Page 40

For the rest of the month

iCal icon …there will be nothing but events. I kid you not.

June 20, 2006 – 10:00 – 18:00 – MashPit San Francisco III – at Wharton West, 101 Howard Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA
June 20, 2006 – 20:00 – Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party – at 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA
June 21 – 23, 2006 – Supernova 2006 – at The Palace Hotel, 2 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA
June 23 – 24, 2006 – BloggerCon IV – at CNET, 235 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA
June 23, 2006 – 19:00 – 24:00 – BarCampSanFrancisco Kick-off Party – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
June 23 – 25, 2006 – BarCampSanFrancisco – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
June 29 – July 01, 2006 – Gnomedex 6.0 – at Bell Harbor International Conference Center, 2211 Alaskan Way, Seattle, WA

(And yes, you can add these events to your calendar easily.)

Oh, and cool sidenote, Senator John Edwards will be keynoting Gnomedex. Guess if you can’t get the inventor of the internets, you can at least get a running mate.

The future of open leadership

With the Feed Icon Trademark debate, I’ve become fascinated by a number of Mitchell Baker‘s recent posts on open source leadership (or perhaps more appropriately community stewardship).

Just last night we held our second coworking meeting to discuss a number of topics (of which we were able to plow through very few)… Key among them was the question of how to best open up the space for non-anchors while not overly burdening the existing key-holders. And, in opening up the space, how to we set a fair pay-for-the-time-you-use rate that doesn’t burden the project with excessive overhead or rules.

After an exhausting discussion for over an hour and a half, we had to adjourn the meeting following Brad’s Snooze Button Guideline. We covered quite a number of possibilities, from hourly rates to hosting quarterly “supporters”, but ultimately ended up without a final resolution other than to submit proposals to the mailing list for continued debate.

Here’s what’s strange about it: throughout the meeting (I can’t be sure but…) I did feel like I was sitting in the role of facilitator — not exactly the leader, but close enough. I mean, that’s a pretty common role to play, right? Most meetings need a leader of sorts, right?

So now the question that I have is, or perhaps what I’m most confused about, is what kind of leadership does the coworking project need? What kind can it stand? I agree with Mitchell that relying on the “community to decide” will moreoften than not result in disappointment or frustration for communities actually don’t decide anything, they only appear to make decisions. And yet, there is this apparent allergy in open source communities that forces the subversion of the ego and the consequent vilification of those who attempt to make a decision on behalf of the group.

Ian responds to Mitchell:

Good leaders do not make decisions – they simply help the community to make better decisions. To do this they listen well, and they think long and hard. Then, when they see the prevailing wisdom surface, they communicate those decisions more fruitfully.

…which sounds pretty good and egalitarian on the surface. In fact, not a bit unlike what they call representative government. And yet, I think that that only captures a fraction of what a leader, in the community context, really does.

It is my belief that good, reflective and responsive leadership is needed for any project to find success. But that leadership need not be hierarchical. Or dominant. Or, most of all, exclusively masculine. And it also can’t be cowardly or cow-tow to the imposing and voluminous voice of the community it serves. That’s why leadership is important; it’s not about power, it’s about clarity of purpose and of seeing things through to their desired conclusion, deterring that which threatens to scuttle the intentions of the group.

Case in point, the witch-hunt that O’Reilly recently survived suggests that communities can easily be turned into echo chambers for groupthink and channeled hostility. Without strong leadership, you’re liable to end up with a neverending succession of teapot tempests without accomplishing anything productive.

So, coming back to the meeting last night, we have goals in common, even if the path is not clear. Which is precisely the kind of opportunity in which leadership emerges — the kind that isn’t focused in any one individual but is shared among the individuals in the collective. In a very real sense, it is the BarCamp model of leadership, of self-determination, of personal responsibility and of realizing your own role in consciously creating circumstances for yourself.

The point is this: open source leadership is not a contradiction, it’s just deeply misunderstood. And it seems high time that, as we open up to serving wider markets and communities, that we learn what it really means to embrace a kind of leadership that does not rely on traditional concentrations of power or of exclusivity or malevolent competition, but instead works to helps us each reach beyond ourselves to reveal each our own potentials. I don’t know clearly what it looks like, but I do think that Mitchell is on to something and that somehow, this little coworking experiment of ours might bring us steps closer to discovering just how open, modern leadership will actually bring us forward.

Flock 0.7 in the wild

Flock has released its first public beta after many moons of rough ride’em development. Out of the box, things look pretty smokin’, but I still think Flock has a ways to go before becoming the next generation browser (and of course, I’m only consistently hard on the things I care most about).

With a brand new (Drupal-based!) website from Facebook UI designer and design rockstar Bryan Veloso, the Flock project is starting to look like something, and they’ve certainly brought it along considerably since I left in March. Whether they will really pioneer novel interfaces and inspire new thinking on how the browser can better democratize the more compelling social aspects of the web remains to be seen. As they say, Rome wasn’t build in a day; then again, by Rome 0.7, I wonder if a broader foundation would have needed to have been built for Rome 1.0 to become as great and powerful as it did. Time will tell, won’t it? Time will tell…

All in all, congrats to the team — I remain eager to see what’ll come next.

Patent the baby, trademark the bathwater

If you take anything away from the second trademark brouhaha in as many weeks, it’s this quote from Mozilla Chief Lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker:

I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark- type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark – like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.

So obviously, this points to the discussion I’ve been waging towards the establishment of something akin to the Community Mark idea. It’s not that trademark should necessarily go away; instead it’s about providing a choice when traditional trademark law simply does not make sense and only stands to incense and divide communities — which, ironically, such laws were intended to protect.

I don’t think the question in this case really revolves around the question of the meaning of icons so much as the enforcement and consistent use of symbols that come to mean something to a given community. For what Mitchell is really proposing is something more like reverse trademark, where you compel someone to use your mark in a certain way in order to produce consistency. Let’s face it, by restricting the use of the mark or icon, you’re actually moving away from your goal, which in this case is to establish a symbol, to be used in common, to identify a particular interface interaction.

It doesn’t seem like trademark is the appropriate means to the end in this case… and I’m very happy that Mitchell has proposed that the best solution is likely her option #3, “to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and [see] how that works.” This is, I believe, the only true option that stands a chance of gaining widespread adoption as well as heading off the kind of scorn and antipathy that members of the open source community simply don’t need.

I am a citizen and I have agency

So in case you missed it, Tara left Riya very recently, following a trend that’s at least a couple months old (but blowing out recently).

The obvious question is: “what comes next?”

Well, without much time and without much hesitation (which means going on the sense in our collective gut, which our worldly president espouses), we decided to take the plunge and start our own consorgency.

We’re calling it Citizen Agency. And we’re still trying to figure out what we’re gunna shape it into… but we’ve got some initial ideas.

The name was spontaneous to be sure, as we’re on a tight deadline to get this thing launched, but it captures some of the important organizing principles behind what we’re doing. And of course, no good project or idea is without a kickoff track to its soundtrack… so, substitute “Patriot” with “Citizen” in the eponymous song by Pearl Jam and a picture starts to emerge:

And I ain’t no communist
And I ain’t no socialist
And I ain’t no capitalist
And I ain’t no imperialist
And I ain’t no democrat
I sure ain’t no republican either
I only know one party, and that is freedom

Whatever this thing we’re building is, it’s gunna be consistent with everything that’s lead to our shared success so far, including starting with a community model and building it out through channels that respect the dignity of our consorgents and partners.

Ah, and if you have an idea of what kind of symbol might represent this idea, we’re all eyes.

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).

Where journalists and bloggers fear to roam

The lead off panel this morning at FING is about the media. Pretty broad, yes, but it’s interesting to see a representative of CNET paired with someone who seems to represent the avant-blog… i.e. that “citizen journalism” (which is not really journalism in my view, but local reportage) will eventually shrink the 250 or so Le Monde journalists currently on the roles (apologies if my comprehension is lacking as the French still foils me).

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the role of journalism in society lately, owing to a book called Backstory that I found on the sidewalk on my way to catch the N line. It’s helped me to reconsider and analyze my thinking and the timely discussion about “citizen media”, “citizen journalism” and the Wall Streetifcation of newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune.

Invariably there is a need for journalists, just as there is a need for chefs. Though the raw ingredients of any story are plentiful, it’s how they are assembled and the experience and presentation (as in, context) that makes something not merely palatable but actually satisfying. In that respect, the role of a journalist in society is to inform, to question, to foment debate by adding new ingredients to a story to spice things up. Additionally, they are able to expand and recontextual the main course in the context of a meal, something that “citizen reporters” rarely do — or need to, for that matter, owing to the shared local knowledge of their audience.

The guy from CNET argues that neither blogging and citizen media or journalism will necessarily continue as they are today — that instead, the media companies of the future will exploit many sources of information (including company databases that are currently private as well as authentic media), cultivate “information professionals”, and create context for stories that citizen reporters can not or do not have the time to create.

But the journalist is not going away — not as a discipline. To think so is foolish, just as suggesting that scientists are going away because Makezine is becoming popular. The rise of the amateur does not imply the demise of the professional, rather it signifies the continuation of the great sorting out that is going on, as suggested by Friedman. And in this case, it seems to me that if we are to make the best of it, we will rediscover and help redirect professionals back into the roles that they first trained for and originally desired to fulfil. Rather than writing to “please an audience” or “sell more papers”, the journalists of the future (in the original sense of the word, not the Wall Street version) will act on our behalf, helping us to understand and mediate the vast quantities of information that will surely be upon us all in short order.

Change is good

In case you missed it (and I don’t really blog too much about personal stuff much, but it’s okay to be a little human once and again), Tara and Riya have bid each other their farewells and both are moving on to the next chapters of their storied Web 2.0 lives. Not unlike a certain fella you may know. Hmmh. Funny, n’est-ce pas?

We also packed up most of my stuff from Teh Langpad this weekend and moved it over to Tara’s place where I’ve pretty much been livin’ anyway. But yeah. Ho boy.

And, as you know, Teh Space is off and running. Like, a real workspace (but it’s still not the same as finally having something of a home). But still.

Oh, and tomorrow I leave for France until Sunday. Yowza.

And did I mention Picoformats (shuddup, yes I am serious)?

Well, anyway, this whole post is really about Tara and how brave she is to be going out on her own in all this. There’s a lot that she has to figure out, but even more opportunity that she needs to figure out how to make the most of it… I’m proud to be her PiC and to watch eagerly as she ponders her next steps and where she’ll lead the Pinko Brigades from this point onward.

I’ll tell you one thing, it only gets more interesting from here.

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?