Society & economy – Page 4

We found women in tech, so why are you still not reporting about them?

There’s a good article on unconferences by Scott Kirsner in next week’s BusinessWeek. He talks about what an unconference is, discusses the rise of the wider community and the potential threat to the traditional conference model.

All in all, he does a pretty good job capturing an accurate picture of the “unconference scene” and it was great getting to talk to Scott about his piece.

I did want to take issue with his singling me out of “two fellow Web2Open organizers”, and bring some attention to gender blindness in media stories such as this one.

As with many stories in the popular press, it’s fairly typical to rest the foundation of a story on one or two key individuals; it keeps complexity low and avoids getting bogged down in details that are only of import to the characters of the story. And I’m sure that Scott didn’t intend any malice, but that Ross and Tara, who both stood on those chairs with me went unnamed strikes me as a missed opportunity to highlight not only the hard work that lots of folks have put into building this community, but in particular undermines the credit that Tara deserves for the incredible amount of work that she did to make Web2Open happen. If anyone, she’s the one that really deserves to be called out in the article.

But there’s a second and more insidious issue that I want to raise now, while the issue is relevant… If you read over the article, with the inside knowledge that I have of the background that went into the article, it’s doubly unfortunate that Tara wasn’t given more credit as a female organizer when she did far more than I did to pull off the conference; on top of that, the mention of Web2Open attendee Sudha Jamthe (a previous BarCamp organizer, no less) and Tara Dunion, spokeswoman for the Consumer Electronics Association, seem to paint them as bit players when compared to white guys like me, Dave Winer and Doug Gold.

Now, maybe I’m just over-sensitive to this kind of stuff, building mountains out of molehills and all that, but I suppose that’s the price of vigilance. And it’s also something that I can’t ignore when BarCamp is not and has never been solely about individuals, but about what we can do together, when serving each our own’s best interests. And this is especially relevant if you read Aaron Swartz’s thoughts on mysogny in the tech community:

If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

I really noticed this when I was at foo camp once, Tim O’Reilly’s exclusive gathering for the elite of the tech community. The executive guys there, when they thought nobody else was around, talked about how they always held important business meetings at strip clubs and the deficiencies of programmers from various countries.

Meanwhile, foo camp itself had a session on discrimination in which it was explained to us that the real problem was not racism or sexism, but simply the fact that people like to hang out with others who are like themselves.

The denial about this in the tech community is so great that sometimes I despair of it ever getting fixed. And I should be clear, it’s not that there are just some bad people out there who are being prejudiced and offensive. Many of these people that I’m thinking of are some of my best friends in the community. It’s an institutional problem, not a personal one.

Promoting women when they’re doing great things in the tech community has to become a top priority. Providing and seeking out the women who are serving in backbone roles within our community and bringing the spotlight to them and supporting them must become a shared priority. Working with women’s groups to create both inviting events and interesting opportunities to draw out and inspire the reluctant or hidden female talent is something that conference and *camp organizers alike must attend to.

I think I’m extra sensitive about this particular case for two reasons. The first is that we tried really hard and went out of our way to encourage and create diversity both in Web2Open and in the Web2Expo. It was certainly a challenge, but I’m proud of the progress we made. I personally had the privilege to work with three incredible women on the designer track (Kelly Goto, Jen Pahlka and Emily Chang) and I think that made all the difference. The second issue probably stems from the Schwartz interview where Philipp Lenssen (the interviewer) reports:

The last barcamp I was at, in Nuremberg, had a men/ women ratio of about 80/ 2. It was quite sad, and I was wondering what the cause of this was. Is it partly also a problem of the hacker culture, to behave anti-social, and that this puts off more social people? Many good programmers I know, for instance, aren’t too social.

To which Aaron astutely replies:

I think that’s probably part of it; many people don’t have the social skills to notice how offensive they’re being. But even the people who are quite social and competent misbehave and, furthermore, they support a culture where this misbehavior is acceptable. I don’t exclude myself from this criticism.

Now, for a BarCamp to have an 80-2 male-female ratio is unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. And I would hope and challenge the BarCamp community, in particular, to do whatever it takes to work to remedy a condition like this. There are simply no excuses, only constant improvements to be made. And if any community were up to the challenge of taking head on and reversing this long term, systemic trend of making women effectively invisible, I should hope, and moreover expect, that it would be the BarCamp community to take the first worldwide steps towards addressing this critical matter and setting some baseline priorities for how we’re going to improve this situation.

The relative value of open source to open services

There’s an active debate going on in the activeCollab community stemming from the announcement that the formerly exclusively community-backed open source project will lose much of its open source trappings to go commercial and focus a closed platform providing open web services.

For those who aren’t aware, activeCollab was created as a free, open source and downloadable response to Basecamp, the project management web app. In June of last year, the project founder and lead developer, Ilija Studen, offered his rationale for creating activeCollab:

First version of activeCollab was written somewhere about May 2005 for personal use. I wanted Basecamp but didn’t want to pay for it. Being a student with few freelance jobs I just couldn’t guaranty that I’ll have money for it every month. So I made one for myself. It’s running on my localhost even today.

Emphasis original.

Ilija offered many of the usual personal reasons for making his project free and open:

Learning.
Control.
Establishing community.
Earning money.

Now, the last one is significant, for a couple reasons, as was pointed out at the time of the first release: Ilija wanted to make money by offering commercial support and customization on a product imitating someone else’s established commercial product.

But competition is good, especially for my friends in Chicago, and they’ve said as much.

But, Ilija made one fatal mistake in his introductory post that I think he’s come to regret nearly a year later: I find it normal to expect something in return for your work. activeCollab will always be free.

And so a community of Basecamp-haters and open source freeloaders gathered around the project and around Ilija, eager to build something to rival the smug success of Basecamp, something sprung from the head of the gods of open source and of necessity, to retrace the steps of Phoenix before it (later redubbed Firefox), to fight the evils of capitalism, the injustice of proprietary code, and to stave off the economic realities of trying to make a living creating open source software.

For a little under a year, the project slogged on, a happy alternative to Basecamp, perfect for small groups without the ability to afford its shiny cousin, perfect for those who refuse to pay for software, and perfect for those who need such collaboration tools, but live sheltered behind a firewall.

A funny thing happened on the way to the bank, though, and Ilija realized that simply offering the code for people to download, modify and run on their own servers wasn’t earning him nearly enough to live on. And without an active ecosystem built around activeCollab (as WordPress and Drupal have), it was hard to keep developing the core when he literally was not able to afford continuing to doing so.

Thus to decision to break from his previous promise and close up the code and offer instead an open API on which others could build plugins and services — morphing activeCollab from a commodity download to a pay-for web service:

Perhaps I am naive, and this was the business model all along. i.e. Build a community for the free software during early development and testing, then close it up just as the project matures.

That was not original plan. Original plan was to build a software and make money from support and customization services. After a while we agreed that that would not be the best way to go. We will let other teams do custom development while we keep our focus solely on activeCollab.

But, the way in which he went about announcing this change put the project and the health of his community at risk, as Jason pointed out:

Ilja,

I’m a professional brand strategist, and while nothing is ever certain, I also feel that this is a bad move.

Essentially you’ve divided your following into three camps. For, against and don’t care. A terrible decision.

What you should have done (or should do… its not too late)__

—> Start a completely seperate, differently branded commercial service that offers professional services

—> Leave your existing open-source model the same and continue to develop the project in concert with the community

————————-

Sugar is not a great model to follow. It’s not.

A better example would Bryyght[dot]com, a commercial company hosting Drupal CMS. The people there are still very actively involved in the original open-source project.

Overall, you should choose your steps wisely. While you’re the driving source behind the project – NOBODY fully owns their own brand.

A brand is owned by the community that are a part of it. Without customers, a brand is nothing.

JH

A brand is owned by the community that are a part of it. Without customers, a brand is nothing. (Hmm, sounds like the theory behind the Community Mark).

I think JH has a point, and with regards to open source, one that Ilija would do well to consider. On the one hand, Ilija has every right to change the course of the project — he started it after all and has done the lion’s share of work. He also needs to figure out a way to make a living, and now, having tried one model, is ready to try another. On the other, closing up the core means that he has to work extra hard to counter the perception that activeCollab is not an open source project, when indeed, parts of it still will be, and likely, won’t be the worse for it.

That many of the original Basecamp haters who supported Ilija’s work have now turned their anger towards him suggests that he’s both pioneering a tribrid open business/open service/open source model and doing something right. At least people care enough to express themselves…

And yet, that’s not to say that the path will be easy or clear. As with most projects, the test is now how he manages this transition that will make the difference, not that he made the decision.

All the same, it does suggest that the open source community is going through an evolution where the question of what to be open about and with whom to share is becoming a lot harder to answer than it once was. Or at least how to sustain open source efforts that play into facile operation as web services.

With the Honest Public License coming in advance of the GPL v3 to cover the use of open source software in powering web applications and services, there are obvious issues with releasing code that once you could count on being tied to the personal desktop… now with the hybridization of the desktop/internet environments and the democratization of scripting knowledge, it’s a lot harder to make a living simply through customization and support services for packaged source code when you’re competing against everyone and their aunt, not to mention Yahoo, Google and the rest.

Steve Ivy asked a poignant question in his recent post on Open Source v. Open Services: If the service is open enough, what’s the value of the source?

Truly, that is a question that I think a lot of us, including folks like Ilija, are going to have to consider for some time to come. And as we do consider it, we must also consider what the sustainable models for open source and open services look like in the future, for we are now living finally living web service-based economy, where the quality of your execution and uptime matter nearly as much, if not more, than the quality of your source code.

NASA 2.0

If you haven’t been wondering what’s up with NASA lately, you’re probably not alone. Though once a bastion for the advancement of humankind, in recent years the space agency has seemingly vanished into a well of bureaucracy and lack of coherent, public-supported vision.

Now, thanks to a number of young, forward-thinking upstarts within the organization, that might all start to change, starting tomorrow night at NASA’s Ames Research Facility in Mountain View, California with the kick off of the World Space Party (aka Yuri’s Night).

With 4,000 expected attendees, this is probably one of the first if not largest raves ever held on government property (you can only imagine the red tape that they had to go through to get this approved!). The space is perfectly suited for this kind of thing — and represents the new thinking and outward focus surging within the organization.

On top of that, there is growing interest in open source (notable given the restrictiveness of the NASA Open Source Agreement), in Second Life, and in coworking, as witnessed by NASA’s tenant status at Citizen Space and in their CoLab project.

I’m certainly excited to see these changes coming to NASA — and if it’s any indicator of what changes might be wrought in the government with the addition of a little 2.0 fever and open source, there’s hope for us yet.

Matt points out that NASA is now using WordPress on their newly released blog.

What news feels like

I was walking down the street today when I glanced sidelong at a newspaper box and caught the words “Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy”.

A fleeting moment of relief came over me and I thought to myself, “Finally.”

But sometimes we believe into existence that which we want to see. And sometimes that belief, though powerful, proves false.

Upon further investigation I suffered the let-down of all time: just like always, the Onion was not reporting real news, but merely made up fantasies that were too good to be true.

What’s interesting about this has nothing to do with The Onion, though. Instead it has to do with the medium and with the message.

For one thing, the fact that what I thought I saw was in newsprint still carried with it a certain kind of psychological weight or trustworthiness… it wasn’t like reading Tailrank about some spoofed headline… if it was in print and on the street in one of hundreds of thousands of newsstands around the world, surely there must be some truth to it. Alas, the medium betrayed me.

As for the message — it is revealing to me how sharp the sudden sense of relief was at that the thought that “the war is over”. I mean, facing fact, this is the largest war that my generation has ever seen. We’ve now seen more soldiers and coalition forces killed than went to my high school. More than ten times that have been injured or wounded. And yet the thing keeps dragging on, to no certain end.

Y’know, I’ve always liked war movies — especially ones about World War II. If there was ever such a thing, history has recorded this affair as the feel-good war of the century — where boys were turned into men, women filled the factories and smoking and Coca Cola became icons of the American psyche. The same can nary be said for the current war.

And, whatever the reality of earlier wars, this one seems even further away from reality — even more impossible — and even less certain about its ultimate goal than the previous black-and-white conflicts.

…which I suppose is why the faux-headline in the Onion caught my attention and gave me a sense of, well, hope. Because that’s what this war seems to lack — there is no real villain anymore, no hero, there is no sure outcome, there is no obvious way to end this black hole that’s been unleashed. My dad and my grandfather were both enlisted men and if either were involved in active duty today, I’m not sure that I could really understand what they were after.

Oh sure, protecting freedom; certainly, saving face after removing Saddam without a plan for winning the peace; planting democracy in the Middle East? Um, okay? Saving the world from terrorism? Making the world a better place? How does making war make things better?

…

Y’know — I live a very privileged life. I’m so grateful to have the things I have: to live in a fantastic city with a fantastic woman; I help run an amazing upstart business situated in a terrific space with some incredible individuals. I work on things that I love and that I’m passionate about. I’m pretty much in touch with my family and I have the most fabulous friends all over the world.

So when it comes to this four-year-old war — with all the good things that I have in my life — I guess I’m just stuck wishing for a headline that indicates something other than that it’s just got to keep going for sake of… keeping going.

IconBuffet and Shopify add support for OpenID

Two more announcements for OpenID adoption — but this time on the consuming side (as opposed to my originally incorrect report about WordPress.com — for now, they’re only serving as an identity provider).

The first is Shopify, a great Rails-based custom store application. As Alex points out, these guys really get it right — and make it super easy to create compelling marketplaces. And now, it’s super easy to log in with OpenID.

Meanwhile, IconBuffet has gone through a major overhaul, becoming something of a social network for … icon enthusiasts! (Sweet!) One of the more existing aspects of the relaunch (at least for me) is their use of OpenID: you can either create a new account with an existing OpenID (say, your WordPress.com blog URL) or you associate your existing account with an OpenID. Either way, they too’ve made it really easy to get going with OpenID.

I imagine that these won’t be the last of the increasing deployments of OpenID in the medium- to long-tail (read: not Google or IBM, but small business community). What’s so existing about these recent additions is their proximity to commerce — and how folks like Shopify could eventually weave a web service that allows you to check out — entirely by way of logging in to your OpenID provider. If you choose a good OpenID provider, you can start to see how the CardSpace metaphor makes sense — just like when you go out to eat and depending on whether it’s a business meal or a personal expense, you’ll use a different credit card to pay.

The same thing is true for OpenID — where you can have as many OpenIDs as you like and you can pick among them for different uses or purposes. It’s only a matter of time before I go to check out at IconBuffet, I login with my WordPress.com OpenID and I’m able to use credits that I’ve purchased on WordPress.com to pay for my icons — with no need to reach for the credit card, to fill in my address info or any of that ever again!

Now, if that doesn’t sound exciting, you might want to check your pulse. 😉

Under lock and key

Daniel Quinn has written about civilization and how agricultural farming is what has brought us to our current environmental predicament. In his books, particularly Ishmael and My Ishmael, he points out putting the food supply under lock and key (as opposed to being readily available for foraging) is a natural outgrowth of agriculture, given its surpluses and that our entire infrastructure is built around that condition.

Recently I’ve been reading his book Beyond Civilization, which, contrary to what you might think, is a treatise against civilization in general — not an advocation of improving civilization, but of an abandonment of the notion altogether, for in civilization, we find the memes that time and time again lead us down the path of exploitation and environmental desecration.

Rather than just continue building civilization in a different way, he advocates walking away — and developing a new model of making a living based on tribal economics.

While his vision is appealing to me, I’m stuck wanting to see massive change and revolution, sensing the urgency of our situation. On the other hand, no massive and complete upheaval will actually work, since inverting the triangle would simply result in another triangle.

Instead, and this is the way biological systems work, we need incremental change and new memes that shape our thinking and our approach to our reality.

I’ve been thinking about this lately and find that DRM and Intellectual Property Laws represent one side of Daniel’s Quinn’s story — and efforts like Coworking, BarCamp, microformats, open source and others represent, or at least have characteristics, of the other.

In particular, I question any institutional trend towards consolidation, crystallization, centralization or the locking up of naturally occurring resources or readily reproducible resources (like digital data). With much of my work, I’ve attempted to implement or at least follow the framework suggested by Andrius Kulikaukus in his “An Economy for Giving Everything Away”. I’ve also taken lessons from Daniel Quinn’s work and others, and have come to prefer a longer and more incremental approach to the changes that I want to see made real, and I think that this is the path of open source and biomimetic innovation.

Having visited BarCampLondon, I instantly see the value of making BarCamp open and proactively inclusive from the beginning. Retrospectively, I’m proud that there was no urge to trademark or lock down the name, the brand, the model or the community — as anathema to the spirit of BarCamp those actions would have been, they were choices that were made, either explicitly or implicitly, over time. And there are lessons to be had from our experiences.

On occasion, the notion of trademarking the BarCamp name has been brought up, primarily from a defensive perspective, to chill any attempts by “bad actors” or “corporate interests” from taking away from us that which we call our community, much CMP nearly did with their “Web 2.0” trademark. Now, I can tell you that I can understand the reasoning behind this and can sympathize with it. I can also state, quite certainly, that I’d rather the name be taken from us than to bring us back to centralization and the methods of enforcement and protection that I find so unseemly in a gift-based, community context.

Trademarks, patents and copyright all place upon the owners of such Rights obligations that do not beget community. As DRM are the economic shackles of genius, so I would not move to limit the bounds and possibilities that good actors within the community might do. That is not to say that we are immune from abuse, only that our priority should be the encouragement and promotion of proper and positive use.

To that end, we rely on a community of peers to uphold our values and principles, and do not outsource the responsibility of this work to a cathedral, a court of law, a foundation or other centralized establishment. We defer instead to the routing of the network and the creation of nodes in bearing shades of the original.

This is an ecosystem, we are the grid, this is walking away from civilization, this is rise of the tribes of BarCamp.

I’ll conclude with a quote from Daniel Quinn‘s Beyond Civilization, where he invokes an interesting word in describing “A new rule for new minds”:

We deeply believe in taking a military approach to problems. We proclaim a “war” on poverty. When that fails, we proclaim a “war” on drugs. We “fight” crime. We “combat” homelessness. We “battle” hunger. We vow to “defeat” AIDS.

Engineers can’t afford to fail as consistently as politicians and bureaucrats, so they prefer accedence to resistance (as I do). For example, they know that no structure can be made rigid enough to resist an earthquake. So, rather than defy the earthquake’s power by building rigid structures, they accede to it by building flexible ones. To accede is not merely to give in but rather to give in while drawing near; one may accede not only to an argument but to a throne. Thus the earthquake-proof building survives not be defeating the earthquake’s power by by acknowledging it — by drawing it in and dealing with it.

This is the path forward, and the path that I prefer to any kind of control, ownership or dictatorship. I believe that it also the one of the BarCamp community, and so long as we are able to accede to our environment and always respond to it positively, productively and optimistically, I think that we stand a chance to see the change realized that we wish to become.

The atmosphere of community

Photo shared by Glenn Letham under a Creative Commons License.

Was thinking over the Digg and Flickr hub bubs and had an observation.

For one thing, Kathy Sierra’s mediocrity index comes to mind — where you’re either at both ends of being loved and hated (to greater and lesser degrees) or you’re in the middle, and frankly, no one cares.

There’s something else that’s missing from that graph though… part of it is helping to prepare community builders and managers for what happens when you get a surge in one direction or the other… and the other part is what leads you to climb outwards, in either direction.

I might propose a natural phenomenon to be considered here, and that is the phenomenon of atmosphere and the weather that results by being contained in this protective particle shell.

Without atmosphere, you’re a dead planet — there’s no oxygen, the conditions are extremely harsh and barren, and life simply cannot thrive.

Too much atmosphere and you get global warming effects — things like “community algae blooms” where too much life is created too quickly and the internal ecosystems break down because they buckle under the weight of the increasing resource demands… we are living in a period similar to this today (also, think spam!).

Now, the sweet spot — where systems are in harmony and life is able to sustain isn’t necessarily a walk in the park. Under these conditions you definitely get weather — and that weather can be destructive, can come on unexpectedly and worse, can ultimate change the landscape forever.

From a community building standpoint, this is the kind of weather that you need to be extremely careful of, because these tempests in teapots can wreak havoc on the livelihood of your broader community ecosystem and can do untold damage if you’re unprepared when it happens. The strategy to take varies on the kind of weather we’re talking about, and whether you’ve conjured it up by something you’ve done or whether external factors are to blame.

A couple examples: Digg’s founder Kevin Rose declares the end of the Top Diggers list… Flickr declares their acquisition by Yahoo… 18 months later, they announce the termination of independent Flickr accounts… The Wikipedia co-founder breaks off to establish his own competing project called Citizendium… Mozilla revenues are flat after earning upwards of $80M the previous year… The Flock founders leave in semi-rapid succession… BarCamp is planned and executed in a span of 6 days “changing the way we think about, organize, and participate in technology conferences“.

All of these events bear an interesting semblance to what I might call social weather patterns: moments in time when a tropical storm could have made the shift from a benign warm rain into a destructive gale force hurricane at a moment’s notice. Also consider tremors and earthquakes as coming from within, typically along well known social fault lines where some well known controversy erupts and shakes the pillars of the community. In some cases, these shifts have happened, taking out entire communities or leading to the crumbling of support infrastructure or the dissolution of leadership causing people to flee for refuge in neighboring communities. These behaviors are all fairly well documented and established in the real world — but for once, because of the digital context I’m thinking on, we can see precisely that this weather is heavily influenced by us — a conversation of sorts that our environment is having with us and for us on a grand scale.

In any case, looking at Flickr in particular, there are lessons to be had.

In particular, Flickr decided to drill into a particularly well known fault line in the community and stirred up a minor tropical storm. They had prepared for it, however, and in the early hours of the storm, had staff manning the levee-forums as the first order of defense. Next came the blogger response with heavy winds and crashing waves — Stewart and others waded into the comments and attempted to diffuse any self-spiraling weather patterns. Finally, with the leadership and community infrastructure still firmly intact, the storm subsided into the sea (aside from a few stray lightning bursts) and things continued on as normal, as they should.

But this is not always the way things go down. And without proper preparation and an understanding of the goal of resiliency as opposed to domination, you’re likely to fare far worse under similar conditions.

So the greatest lesson from this is to consider the existence at the poles of Kathy’s index… to realize that stormy weather is a good thing, and a result of positively creating atmosphere — an excellent indicator that you’re alive and creating the conditions for life and for survival. Without weather, you’re probably dead; and with too much atmosphere, you’re probably suffocating your community, in which case, it could be too late to turn back anyway. Keep these things in mind as architect the foundations of your community — and remember that community isn’t warm and fuzzy all the time.

Making more sense of Flickr’s Ides of March

Yesterday I wrote a post that was admittedly vague and rambling. I definitely did not “go home” before I wrote it, so I’d like to correct that, and try to make my meaning clearer (and by “go home”, I’m using speaker trainer Lura Dolas‘ concept of being grounded and authentic before opening your mouth to say something).

So, if I were to rewrite my post, I might say something like this:

The account merger for Yahoo! and Flickr accounts on March 15 (the Ides of March) should not come as a surprise; indeed, we’ve known that it was coming for a long time.

What the deadline represents to different Flickr members is personal and unique; there is very little generalization that can be made of the event, except that the reactions vary greatly along a spectrum from utter indifference to downright anger and resentment.

What Flickr members are experiencing is consistent with what any passionate community experiences when something that represents the core of their experience is disturbed. Whether logical or not, it’s kind of like repotting a plant — the more sensitive to the environment, the more the transplant can be debilitating, destabilizing and disorienting. There’s no rhyme or reason per se, but the individual shock can be a challenge to overcome.

Anecdotally, my personal experience was rather blasé. Previously, I had maintained a “self-perceived independence” by not succumbing to the demands of the Yahoo! conglomerate and merging my account. Indeed, every time I signed in via the “old skool login”, I got a rush of silent pride that I was still free, having avoided “following the sheep”.

My resistance somehow guaranteed that I still had ultimate control over my destiny — and that no corporate monolith could tell me what to do — especially as long as I had trusted friends on the inside advocating for my right to free choice and free association.

But that was a temporary illusion that I knew in the back of my mind would someday end.

And yesterday, the jig was up, the mirage evaporating in the form of a FlickrMail: the embodiment of Flickr’s final transformation from a renegade underdog that busted convention and ran roughshod over a corporate hegemon to become yet another cog in the machine.

Or so the self-serving mythology goes.

In reality, I’m not so sure that all that much has changed, really. I am inclined not to make any final pronouncements about Flickr, Yahoo! or whatever else. Hell, I switched over my account, and it wasn’t that bad. Innocence lost, yadda yadda, the world carries on.

Now, the part that I want to take a moment to reflect on, which I also alluded to in the last two paragraphs of yesterday’s post (and is somewhat carried on here), is the part about managing, owning and making choices that effect the destiny of the identity (or identities) that one has spent time creating and cultivating online.

I would posit that the fear or fear-driven reactions that a lot of people have expressed or experienced in the past two days can be traced to this particular nugget of thinking.

What we lack online today is the equivalent of what we call human rights in the offline world. As it stands, Terms of Service are written foremost in the interest and protection of the Corporation. Thus individuals have little transformative recourse when things go wrong for the vocal are but few among millions.

As such, minority hold outs are left feeling particularly vulnerable and exposed. Especially in the case of Flickr, where people have developed visceral and almost human connections through the service, anything that threatens their “dominion” is an invasion that provokes an immune response by what I’d call the “proverbial community anti-bodies”, for better or worse.

In this case, Yahoo! — as the larger organism eclipsing the smaller — is perceived as effectively infusing its memetic DNA into the cultural neurology of the lesser system and without effective recourse to prevent this kind of “digital eminent domain“, the anti-bodies lash out in response to the invading foreign agents, as you would expect in any biomimetic system.

This dance is natural, is normal, and a simple part of biological and social evolution. In the scheme of things, I think the reaction of the minority does make sense here, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter that much. Given the current architecture of social networks, where your existence and environment is at the whim, pleasure and financial health of the network owner (let’s call her “God”), these kinds of decisions will continue to elicit strong social responses when God acts like… well… God.

Asides (lightly scrambled)

I do wonder, then, if this kind of personal exasperation would more quickly lead to the creation of “articles of digital personhood” or a collective “bill of digital human rights”. Or if, instead, it might drive the furtherance of independent identity services that promise to restore dominion over one’s online personas.

On a larger scale, will these experiences lead to the recognition of our digital selves as rights-weilding extensions of ourselves? Were there a “Digital Civil Liberties Union”, would those with grievances turn to such a centralized body for redress? or, rather than unionizing power, would they prefer to simply come and go as they pleased, as one does when she moves from one house to another, taking all her possessions and friendships with her but leaving the structure behind, and letting the market woo and serve her by playing to her desires and free will to choose?

Bating the mousetrap with chunky peanut butter

Original by starpause kid and shared under a Creative Commons License.
When it comes to mousetraps, it’s fairly common knowledge that an effective cheese alternative for trapping mice is peanut butter.

However, we already know that Yahoo isn’t too fond of peanut butter. At least the smooth kind spread thin.

So it’s interesting to note that, perhaps as part of the strategy to outlaw renegade peanut butter within the organization, the formerly independent outpost known as Flickr will be forcing users to either merge or create a new Yahoo account to login after March 15:

On March 15th, 2007 we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at http://go.yahoo.com.

If you still sign in using the email-based Flickr system (here), you can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page: http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

If you have questions or comments about signing in with a Yahoo! ID, speak up!

You can imagine that not everyone is happy about this, especially after the reaction the first time around:

Now, I’m not interested in opening old wounds. The Flickr folks have given plenty of notice about the coming changes (figure at least a month and a half if not the full 18 months since they were acquired) and of course are available for consolation, hand-holding and so forth.

Oh, and contrary to my tendency towards conspiracy theories, I’ll let Stewart debunk them outright:

And that’s it: there’s no secret agenda here, no desire to come to your homes and steal your TV. Over time, it just gets more expensive to maintain independent means of authentication and we could “spend” those efforts on other things which make Flickr more useful, more fun, more versatile, etc. And the smaller the ratio of old skool to Y!ID-based gets, the harder it is to justify not spending that effort on improvements.

I will, however, take this opportunity to rise up on my soapbox again and point out something worth reflecting on…

Look, Google’s already done the same thing with Dodgeball; it’s a sure bet that they’re going to do the same thing with their YouTube acquisition. We know that Yahoo logins are going to show up on MyBlogLog and eventually, probably Upcoming too — and, for that matter, any other user-centered acquisition that comes down the pipe. Microsoft is no different. Let’s face it: the future of the web is in identity-based services. And this is a good thing, if you’re ready for it.

My buddies Brian Oberkirch and Aldo Castañeda talked about the potential for this new economy recently. It’s coming and it’s scary (for some) and it’s unclear what it looks like. But the more that this happens under authoritarian login regimes, the more concern I feel for the effect these consolidation efforts will have on true democratic choice in where and how you spend your attention.

Realistically, it’s not terribly surprising that Yahoo! and the rest are going this direction. Hell, from a systems perspective, you’re just two entries in a grand database in the sky whereas you could be one. From a service perspective, unifying “you” across systems allows convenience and synergies to emerge. The problem is that these actions belie the sophisticated relationships that some people have with their online accounts and how their personas are represented. Though not everyone cares a whole lot about their screennames, others absolutely do. And beyond that, for whatever reasons they have, some people simply do not want to go near Yahoo! — something they never thought would be a concern of theirs when they originally joined Flickr.

But there’s a curious reality to look at here.

While I call Flickr home (NIPSA’d and all), just as there is a vehicle to vent my individual frustrations to Flickr, those same vehicles and mechanisms are available to me to splinter off and build my own peanut-butter-rich outpost anew. The missing piece of the puzzle, however, is my identity. I can’t just pack up my digital self and move on… whichever login system Flickr uses — Yahoo’s, Google’s, their own — I can’t “take it with me”. Even with their API, which is one of the most generous in the biz, it still doesn’t give me the ability to fully reincarnate myself somewhere else.

Now, I could and would like to turn this into a pitch for OpenID, but I won’t, at least directly. The Yahoo! folks have already expressed their distaste for creating Just Another Identity Silo and I keep waiting for them to prove it. I don’t mind waiting a bit longer. The wheels of the OpenID community are already in motion and I don’t have to plead for acknowledgment from the powers that be. The truth is, there are only a few more sites that will fall. The truth is, we are only now beginning to realize the degree to which we are all exposed and what the reality of our transparent society looks like. And the truth is, we are only just beginning to wake up to the idea that we should and can have dominion over our online lives, just as we believe is our right offline.

The Burning Man trademark controversy

In this post I talk about the Burning Man trademark controversy and its ramifications for other community initiatives, for the community mark concept and then outline a few ideas relating to the advance of community-driven intellectual property.

Original uploaded by Sterling Ely and shared under a Creative Commons License.

Scott Beale has been keeping me up to date on the Burning Man trademark controversy and today Eugene Kim pinged me about the story hitting the Chron.

What’s so interesting and didactic about this controversy is that it embodies, on a grand scale, the kind of micro-controversies that open source communities have faced for a long time around intellectual property and trademark matters.

On the one hand, you have the folks from Black Rock City, LLC, the ones who put on the event, fearing corruption and abuse by commercial interests:

…about the idea raised in the lawsuit of putting the Burning Man name and image in the public domain. While the concept is interesting, the reality is that we’ve been fighting attempts by corporations to exploit the Burning Man name almost since the first day we set foot on the playa. Making Burning Man freely available to individuals who would only use it to make money would go against everything all of us have worked for over the years. We will not let that happen.

On the other side, you’ve got folks, like John Law who filed the lawsuit, willing to embrace the chaos, as we often say, and let the market and — more importantly — the community — decide the brand’s fate (given certain conditions):

Burning Man belongs to everyone.

Burning Man is the sum of the efforts of the tens of thousands of people who have contributed to making Burning Man what it is.

The name Burning Man and all attendant trademarks, logos and trade dress do not belong to Larry Harvey alone or to Black Rock City LLC.

If they don’t belong to anyone, they belong to the public domain. If they are in the public domain, the event can still go on and the trademarks, logos and trade dress can still be used. But the event organizers don’t own those things and each and every one of the event participants are free to use these things as they want without permission or interference from the event organizers. There’s nothing to stop the party from being as big and wild as ever.

Then, of course, there are the corporate and commercial interests, who see a huge opportunity to capitalize on the value, reputation and attention-getting that the brand has generated over the years, who, according to reporter Steven T. Jones, envision MTV coverage, a burner clothing line from the Gap, Girls Gone Wild at Burning Man, billboards with Hummers driving past the Man, and other co-optations by corporations looking for a little countercultural cachet.

It’s unfortunate that when money starts changing hands, the original ethos and spirit of creation inevitably becomes undermined and damaged. I’ve seen this happen many times over — and when it doesn’t, it’s either because the commercial potential (the true measure of modern-day success in most circles) dissipates, or the community refuses to go down without a fight and relinquish dominion over the destiny of the project — of their creation.

But protecting the integrity of a community-built brand is a massive challenge for any collective — especially when protection isn’t exactly top of mind for most members of a group (ignoring the bystander effect). This kind of protective behavior is also, in many ways, antithetical to the type of free and open ethos that was so originally attractive. Thus, when things migrate from an ethos-driven commons to a commerce-driven economy, many of the original drivers for participation are subsumed by “maintenance- and protection-mode activities”.

This is something that Mozilla, Creative Commons, BarCamp, Microformats</a, OpenID, Tribe and others have and will continue to deal with. Thus given my experiences, I’ve been trying to express ideas for an alternative to trademark in the Community Mark concept, to varying degrees of success.

With this Burning Man situation starkly highlighting how nasty trademark disputes can get (and it’s only going to get worse for decentralized communities in the future, as the burners tend to be early pioneers of digital culture).

So, the question that remains to be considered here is what kind of moral code could be applied in this situation to mitigate the harmfulness of this dispute? — and for the future, what can similar community groups do to preserve their culture, their idealism and their connection with positivity and creativity when they begin to experience internal or external commercial interest?

Gollam: My Precious It’s long been my contention that, if the BarCamp mark should ever be co-opted (in that the community at large would lose effective dominion over the brand’s destiny — and we’ve had our brushes with disaster as well as ongoing and continuing controversies), that the brand and name should effectively be destroyed.

It is my opinion, perhaps naively so, that the health of the BarCamp community and resultant cultural productions are far more valuable and useful as contributions to the advancement of civilization than the name or the brand. And, the brand is really only as valuable as the community is healthy, so in my thinking, the nature and organic decay that might occur over time to the brand itself is to be embraced, accepted and allowed to run its course, even if it means that the original mark be abandoned or annihilated in the interest of preserving the sinews of the collective.

I think that John Law’s proposal to put the Burning Man mark into the public domain is an interesting one, and I would hope a genuine one. On the other hand, however, he contends that if the other two owners of the mark are going to continue raking in $8M a year running the business, he deserves his piece of the pie. Such is the insidious damnation of intellectual property:

If it’s a real fucking movement, they can give up control of the name, Law told the Guardian in the first interview he has given about Burning Man in years. If it’s going to be a movement, great. Or if it’s going to be a business, then it can be a business. But I own a part of that.

Now, I have two proposals of my own to make in this case, and they probably will not come as a surprise.

The first is a response to centralization and crystallization in and of communities — in other words, a way to address the stabilization, ordering or staleness of a community leading to its isolation, vulnerability and/or co-optation. As Ori Brafman has said, the best remedy and protection is disintegration, shattering the community into its original component parts, and the sending of those pieces to the wind to reformulate elsewhere, in a wholly new and unfamiliar form. This is actually the process of conflagration that signifies the ending of Burning Man every year and should be a salient reminder of the temporal nature of these constructs; indeed such renewal is necessary for the long term survival of the global organism.

The second proposal is more specific. I would like to append an escape clause to the current thinking on the Community Mark concept. Whereas the lifetime of a Community Mark shall be “as long as the community is willing to protect and uphold the integrity of the mark, and no longer”, I think it is necessary to also stipulate what happens to the brand after a disintegration event… and, as a sort of “living will” for the community to protect against the corrupting influences of consolidation-in-the-sole-interest-of-commerce… There may be two outcomes — one, that a community mark may end up unowned and in the public domain, whereby no single entity may lay claim to it; and the second: a kind of intellectual property black hole where the mark is Robert Paulsened — that is, completely erased from memory, never to be spoken of or invoked again, at least in the context of the original meaning. Instead, and in its void, a new entity may be created, but totally new, with no connection with the former, such that the restorative acts of creation can save the community from itself and from the destructive and minimizing effects that possession, consolidation and megalomania leads to.

So, I do hope and expect that the community of Burning Man can pull itself through this and beyond the stagnating grasp of commerce for the sake of commerce, but only time will tell. I imagine that the community is resilient enough to live through this and at the same time, hope that the rest of us are able to learn from the pain and anger that that community is now experiencing.

Category: Society & economy