Society & economy – Page 11

WineCamp planning report

A number of us met up last night to discuss our plans for WineCamp. With less than 60 days to go, we haven’t got much time to get everything in place. But we have a crack-team of folks who are dedicated to making this a reality.

Let me say something about what I’m hoping to see result from this event: connections. It’s not everyday that you get geeks and technologists rounded up in some foreign land with non-profits and NGO-types. It’s designed that way on purpose. Hey, get people out of their natural surroundings — remove the wifi, the laptops, the power (yes, really) — and some interesting interactions are sure to emerge. Especially when you’ve got a good dose of mountain air and an supple supply of wine flowing.
And those connections? Hopefully lasting ones. Hopefully collaboration will spring up. Ideally a few sustaining solutions will be thunk up.

So last night we spec’d out the schedule for the event, what we need to make it happen, how much we’re going to charge for the event (free isn’t really an option if we’re providing food so we’re a small fee for the weekend) and what else need to be done.

And there’s lots.

But listen, here’s the thing so you understand where this is coming from. The goal of the weekend is to start conversations. To bring together folks from two fields who desparately need each other (open source and non-profits) but haven’t had a neutral ground in which to talk freely or constructively.

Here’s how it’ll work, since I’ve been lazy about writing this up:

Friday night, people arrive in Calaveras. People make their way to the Ferriere Vineyard and set up camp from 6-9pm. Something like that. Accommodations in local hotels will be available for those not wanting to brave the wide open eastern California spring air. We’re just not gunna book it for you — that’ll be up to those who want to stay in hotels. Ok, so meanwhile people break out the acoustics and bongos around the campfire, have a chill serenade until folks mosey off to sleep.

Day 2, Saturday morning. Cowboy brunch with all the fixin’s… griddle pancakes, maple syrup, coffee, bacon (for meat eaters).. the whole works. We take this to sometime around 11am, making sure folks driving the 3 hours or so east of San Francisco get there (ideally folks arrive Friday night, but undoubtedly some will come on Saturday).

Around 11:15am we have the kick off. Some brave soul will face the crowd, tell them what WineCamp’s all about, and what the heck we’re doing. Yeah, that’s likely going to be me. The day’s loose schedule will be reviewed and then we’ll break out into small group pow-wows, with all the ad hoc trappings of Barcamp, but without wifi, without power, without PowerPoint or any other digital or powered accoutrements. Seriously. Day 2 is a day for gathering, for conversing, for just being with other people outside — outside talking about the things that really get them excited to wake up every morning — but that all also rile them up around midday when the technology they have gets in their way.

The point is to talk about where we’re at, what we love and what we can make better.

We’ll go into the evening, have a big dinner cookout BBQ fit for Matty Matt. The works, y’know? Ribs or whatever you carnivores like. Plenty of veggies and corn and — yes — salad or something. Drinks, dessert. Y’know. A big cookout!
Oh, and did I mention the pure flow of wine all day long? Yeah, that’ll help tide people over who are off their digital fix for the day.

So we go until whenever Saturday night, I dunno, we’ll figure it out.

Sunday the junkies can have their toys back because on Saturday, in the afternoon, they would have planned out what they wanted to do the next day in small teams of creators, thinkers, implementers, users and reality-checkers. These small teams will determine what happens where on Sunday — whether it means going back into the town of Murphy’s where we will have power and wifi for your hacking needs or whether you stay at the vineyard and keep thinking big thoughts that will change your organization (or the world) upon your return.

Look, it’ll all make sense and work out when we get there. We’re all smart people with something to contribute; I’m not going to worry about it!

Things we do need to work out? Getting meals like lunch and dinner sponsored. Getting a port-a-potty on site (I think Andrew has this one covered). Buying firewood. Water. T-shirts! Provisioning a conference-center space on Sunday for hacking and creating (though we seem to have a sponsor that will take care of this!). There are plenty of things to do. There are few of us. There seem to be many people interested in attending. And I’m totally jazzed about what this event will mean for the open source and non-profit communities.

So I guess I’m asking now — in the spirit of open sourcing this event — to start turning this into your event. Tara and I leave for Bangalore in a week and will be gone for about that long (for Barcamp Bangalore). We’ve got lots of things going on. And already, we’ve had a great outpouring of support from folks like Chris Heuer, Jen Myronyk, Andrew Ferriere and great folks at Tech Soup/Compumentor/Net Squared like Billy Bicket, Greg Beuthin, John Lorance, and Marnie Webb.

This is all a big experiment and hey, the more folks who really own a piece of making this event a success, well, the more a success it will be.

So if you can contribute and help organize, join up on the mailing list, drop on the wiki or let us know how you can help. And yes, we have a sign up page too… it’s not quite as simple as registering on Upcoming — we’re actually collecting money to cover the cost of food this time — and any extra money we have left over will be donated to Net Squared. So get in early if you’re really planning
on going — spaces are limited to 150.

Powazek said it best

Derek makes a great point. Of course, this point has been made before, only now we have an alternative phraseology (that no doubt will be corrupted all the same at some point): “authentic media“.

I dig it, but perhaps we could go a step further and make it totally off limits, calling it “amateur content”, in the nothing-is-worth-doing-unless-you-love-it kind of way.

Think about it this way: friends don’t let friends monetize friends. You’ve gotta be an amatuer to do it for something other than the benjamins. I mean, who wants to create “professional” content? Exactly.

Still, let’s use “authentic media” for now and see how it goes. And we can all be happy amateurs creating authentic media together.

The failure of stakeholder capitalism

William Pfaff chimes in with an enlightening piece about the riotous protests going on in France, positing observations about the differences between the modern (American) model of capitalism and the previous model that the French are trying to protect:

The earlier model said that corporations had a duty to ensure the well-being of employees, and an obligation to the community (chiefly but not exclusively fulfilled through corporate tax payments).

That model has been replaced by one in which corporation managers are responsible for creating short-term “value” for owners, as measured by stock valuation and quarterly dividends.

The practical result has been constant pressure to reduce wages and worker benefits (leading in some cases to theft of pensions and other crimes), and political lobbying and public persuasion to lower the corporate tax contribution to government finance and the public interest.

In short, the system in the advanced countries has been rejigged since the 1960s to take wealth from workers, and from the funding of government, and transfer it to stockholders and corporate executives.

The second change Pfaff discusses is the effect of globalization and an internetworked environment, demonstrating the widening segmentation of the employers and the employed. Essentially, and certainly this is true in larger organizations, the “faceless masses” that occupy the millions of cubicles in Western workplaces now cost too much to maintain. What with health care, benefits and the cost of physical space, it simply makes more sense to move the engine of the economy to cheaper, more “accommodating” (and less developed) countries:

We need go no further with what I realize is a very complex matter, other than to note the classical economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages,” which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence.

There never before has been unlimited labor. There is now, thanks to globalization – and the process has only begun.

It seems to me that this European unrest signals a serious gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences of a capitalist model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world.

Truly the economic theories that have dominated the landscape for the last century are in need of a serious rethinking. And if not, then we must refactor our institutions and indeed, our civilization, to deal with the obsolescence of formerly dependable insulating walls that kept economies independent and serving of the local geographic population. As those walls now no longer exist, the socialist system is in jeopardy of withering away completely and the striation between those who have and will continue to have more and those who never will in capitalist systems means that we’re in for a rough ride ahead (bubble or not).

Surely as the internet diffuses power throughout the world’s connected, those folks lacking economic mobility or the opportunity and privilege that others speak of freely will take to this new medium to make their voices heard and, perhaps, make their struggles felt — offline. It’s happening in France now; though none can say if it’s a short term anomaly, it does seem that a great deal of unrest is pervading the societies of the world as modern capitalism colonizes new markets. I can’t help but consider what this means and what the 21st century will look like as territorial conquest fades from relevance and ideological domination becomes the new tell tale indicator of power and influence.

Laptop thefts on the rise in SF

According to a report in the Guardian (ironic, no?), Strong-arm robberies of laptop computers are on the increase. Looks like it’s time to get a laptop lock for Mlle G4.

BellSouth to New Orleans: Let them eat cake

The mission of The Emergency Email Network(sm) states:

“Provide notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner”

Â© 1999 The Emergency Email Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

…which is quaint, presupposing that during a disaster, you’ll actually have some form of internet connectivity. Ironic, given that this service (complete with robot teleaid) is linked to from the BellSouth website and that they’re suing the city of New Orleans to prohibit them from offering free 512KBPs wifi to its citizens. Something about the government not competing with private industry.

Okay, well, whatever. Clearly they have to pay the mortgage and clearly competing with the hurricane-ravaged government of New Orleans is a burden no monopoly company should have to deal with:

“Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition,” says the story. “Some states have laws prohibiting them.”

Yeah, alright, them’s the rules and all, ain’t they? I mean, Google has to abide by Chinese law in China…

Such as it’s the case that the government’s been neutered from providing adequate network services to its constituents, it strikes me that it might just be time, oh, I dunno, to get up and make our own network? And hey, the work’s alreeady begun with community mesh projects like CUWireless and SFLan. So get on a bus and head to the upcoming National Summit for Community Wireless Networks. And add your thoughts, resources or capabilities to the shiny new MuniFied wiki.

I have barely a clue about the technical ins and outs of wifi, but if I know one thing, it’s that we can’t wait around and rely on the public or private sectors to get it right, make it open, make it free and then guard against bullshit maneuvers like BellSouth’s taken against the very communities that need this kind of connectivity the most.

Free your iPod

Those French, man, I tell ya… first they take a “principled” stand against Bush’s war (amounting to an “anything but what the US does” strategy) and now they’re takin’ on Apple and DRM.

Is there any rhyme to their reasoning or are they just taking on the causes cÃ©lÃ¨bre et du jour? And are they even on the right side this time or just utterly confused? I know I am!

Riya goes beta, joins Web 2.0 fray

Ok, so my interest in Riya is certainly not devoid of special interests, but I am definitely looking forward to the day when I can play around with their service (it currently doesn’t support Camino, Flock or the Mac — waahhhh!! (That’s okay though, Tara gave up on Flock recently anyway so we’re equally bummed about each other’s products… ha!)).

What’s cool about Riya? Well, privacy mumbo jumbo aside, Riya will be an exceptionally useful tool — that we’ll all eventually come to take for granted as much as we do decent text search (and as much as the government already lavishes the use of face-rec on its citizens). I can hear the grand kids now (no, that’s not a Freudian slip, sheesh): “Wait, you mean you didn’t have photo search?? How did you keep track of what your 6,000 buddies were up to?!”

So yeah, once they fix the platform limitations so that I can actually use it, I’m sure I’ll get a kick out of finding all kinds of bad shots of myself. Until then, if you’re on IE, Firefox or the PC, let me know how your first experiences with Riya go.

To be clear…

…Michael Arrington apparently jumped the gun when he blogged that a Firefox 2.0 alpha is available. According to Asa, they’ll announce it when it’s time.

Still, useful comments in the Crunch Gallery from Niall and Leonard, as well as a link to 2.0 feature overview.

And, an insightful demonstration of our media (yes, we the bloggerati) to self-correct and expand, given the discussion last night on media elitism at the monthly Cybersalon. Sorry Andrew, I just met you but I’m going to have to call bullshit on your whole premise. Blogs are the media (to invoke Steve Gillmor) and y’know what? We don’t need no fancy overhanging bureaucracy to ensure accountability or accuracy. We can handle it amongst ourselves thank you very much — because unlike many of you in the old MSM, we won’t sell out our audiences or dump crap on them because we can — indeed, with so much choice and the “millions and millions of blogs”, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that good content will emerge, will be attended to, will be corrected, reblogged, excoriated and made better through the process of mutual censure and examination.

Realize finally that we are more than the media, that media is made to serve us, that if it fails to serve us, we will abandon it, route around it, find another way to connect and to communicate. So while Michael might have spoke too soon, the feedback loop that corrected his error is in effect for all of us who attempt to speak the truth, using media. And in that, never has there been a more open, transparent and robust form of media in the history of our civilization.

Under the Economist’s microscope

Title and Registration

The Economist has a very interesting article on its perceptions of open source from the old skool monetize-your-poo world. Tara puts it best: “There was a study that came out advising against buying small cars, what with all these SUVs on the roads today.”

Hmm. Yeah, you’ll notice that depending on how you frame the question (and depending on which ones you ask), the conversation will take on a vastly different character. Another way to put it: YOMV (your “objectivity” may vary).

So the Economist usually is pretty fair and balanced, so I’ll give them some credit. And I’ll cite some gems:

However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be. The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property.

On describing the open source community ecosystem (similar to my own map of the Mozilla Universe from my Spread Firefox days):

From that core group, the open-source method lets a series of concentric circles form. First, there are around 400 contributors trusted to offer code into the source tree, usually after a two-stage review. Farther out, thousands of people submit software patches to be sized up (a useful way to establish yourself as new programming talent). An even larger ring includes the tens of thousands of people who download the full source code each week to scrutinise bits of it. Finally, more than 500,000 people use test versions of forthcoming releases (one-fifth of them take the time to report problems in bug reports).

On IP woes (with which we’re all familiar):

The question of accountability is a vital one, not just for quality but also for intellectual-property concerns. Patents are deadly to open source since they block new techniques from spreading freely. But more troubling is copyright: if the code comes from many authors, who really owns it?

The reason why CivicForge is necessary:

Rather than a democracy, open source looks like a Darwinian meritocracy. …even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions.

And challenges for the future of open source… can it create a wellspring of sustainable innovation or simply rip off proprietary products’ concepts and interfaces?

Even if the cracks in the management of open source can be plugged by some fairly straightforward organisational controls, might it nevertheless remain only a niche activityâ€”occupying, essentially, the space between a corporation and a commune? There are two doubts about its staying power. The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of â€œThe Success of Open Sourceâ€? (Harvard University Press, 2004). â€œLinux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaplyâ€”but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,â€? he says.

The second doubt is whether the motivation of contributors can be sustained. …Once the early successes are established, it is not clear that the projects can maintain their momentum, says Christian Alhert, the director of Openbusiness.cc, which examines the feasibility of applying open-source practices to commercial ventures.

And so what I’m left with is uncertainty; yet filled with hope. Clearly they’re on the outside looking in. They’ve grabbed a few butterflies, stuck them to a board and declared that these beautiful little self-organizing creatures are interesting but in all probability, impractical. Not interesting to our captains of industry.
“It just won’t work”, goes the refrain. “How could it?”

â†’ Begin rant.

And that’s all well and good because it won’t. Not with the old models in tact. Not with DRM fucking everything up. Not with opaque institutions coveting their intellectual property like it was a birthright. Not with your laws that stifle innovation, with your education system that keeps kids thinking in narrow rectangles, keeps down the free flow of work, of play, of curiousity.

What this article fails to do — purposefully — is to recount the story of open source from the perspective of the inhabitants of the bazaar. This is clearly the cathedral view on the open source phenomenon, asking, “How can we learn from their successes and monetize the fuck out of them?” Why not ask about how the proliferation of SUVs made our streets and highways unsafe?

Well, that would expose the fallacy of our faux-capitalist system. It’s not open, not free (enough), not a level playing field. Corruption is the grease on the axles that drive the wheels powered by the diesel of the sovereign state. When you come to our town, we invite you in, we see what you’ve done everywhere you’ve gone, everywhere you’ve been. Yet being open, we let you in. We even sit down and share scotch. But you won’t get it without becoming a part of it.

Not just like that. And not just by opening us up on an examination table, by poking at our vital organs, by studying our work, quantifying our behavior. To benefit from open, you’ve got to be open, believe open, see open, live open, want open.

So thanks, Econ, for stopping through; you’re welcome to return. I’ve always thought that you’ve done good work — but hey, realize that you can’t coopt this by writing about it as though it’s a company to be acquired or business practices to be assimilated. Keep at it, hopefully you’ll get it over time. I wish you well back at the altar.