Category: Work

The Case for Community Marks

Executive summary: In recommending the establishment of Community Marks, I propose that an alternative to trademarks is needed for community-based projects like Bar Camp and Microformats. The need for Community Marks stems from the non-commercial focus of these projects and the way these projects spread virally on the web. While we need to protect the integrity of a brand like Bar Camp, licensing and legal enforcement is too costly in terms of time and money to make sense for loosely joined communities. Therefore, if we can leave enforcement up to the community via the Community Marks denotation, we will be able to serve the vital function of identifying a community’s work and projects without burdening that community with undue legal process and enforcement costs.

Community Mark You can’t imagine how excited I am to write this post… not only is it an important one, but I’ve just gotten my busted laptop back and wow (is this bad?) I feel like I have my life back again. Never really thought I’d say such a thing, but eet’s true I teenk.

So I’ve been discussing the idea of Community Marks with a wide number of folks for some time (starting back when I was working on Spread Firefox and preemptively released the hi-res versions of the Firefox logo before I had full authority (that post has since been taken down)). I believe that this idea is an important tool which has grown out of the emergent philosophy that I see in the camps and in community-directed, “unowned” projects like Microformats.

Let’s get into it: I’m not a lawyer and I will never pretend to be, but that doesn’t really matter as far as I’m concerned and I’ll tell you why.

When it comes down to it, law is totally made up by humans. It’s just a system of conventions that codify certain beliefs about morality and righteousness within the context of a given civilization, society or group.

Laws weren’t and aren’t always penned in Congress, either. In fact, unbeknownst to most school children, that timeless classic that tells of the “life of a bill” is simply a story that you can choose to agree or disagree with. For the purpose of this discussion, I disagree with its fundamental premise that all laws (and rules governing trade and so on) must go through that process to become “real” or as enforceable as any other law.

Sure, this could be an academic or artistic inquiry on my part, whatev, that’s fine. Today, I’m interested in a little armchair-legislation, the kind that has no teeth or legal basis in our current legal system, but nevertheless solves an important need with which existing law currently doesn’t deal: the need for community owned and enforced marks (as in an open alternative to trademarks).

I won’t belabor where this all came from, but suffice it to say that the SpreadSpread campaigns (Spread Firefox, et al) have repeatedly encountered problems when commercially valuable trademarks need to be put in the hands of a community and the public domain is not an option.

The view heretofore has been that this is necessary, with dubious restrictions that protect the ability of the trademark owner to enforce their brand and indeed ensure the perceived quality that their logo, wordmark or servicemark represents.

In the case of Firefox or Flock, even though they are the result of countless hours of volunteer effort, you still need to be able to prevent some nefarious hacker in the remote expanses of cyberspace from releasing a spyware-laden version of either browser and calling it by the name of the official binary. Allowing such behavior could conceivably cause confusion in the mind of the consumer and potentially lead to an economic impact on the brand’s reputation. Therefore, it would be legitimate (and legal) for either Flock or Firefox to go after the offender and stop them from continuing such behavior. Just check out the on the lengths one can go to protect their IP in such a situation. Seriously.

And that’s why trademark was created: to make sure the people who own a brand can enforce their dominion over it to keep making money off it unfettered.

Um..

I mean.. uh… “to guarantee the integrity of a brand’s goods or services in order to prevent confusion in the marketplace.” (Stupid Freudian slips!)

So anyway, that’s all good and well, but it’s not enough. And it doesn’t address the issue I’m trying to resolve: the need for a mark that is owned, operated and enforced by a community that isn’t driven by purely economic interest. Instead, the motivation derives from the desire to uniformly represent their work product as the output of a specific community. Period.

So the case for community marks is primarily necessitated by projects like Bar Camp, which collectively is the product of scattered cadres of individuals the world over who take ownership of the brand on behalf of the larger community. None own the name or mark outright, instead they agree to hold an event based on Bar Camp, espousing its primary principles; in that way, they are extending the reach of the mark and therefore have earned a de facto license to use the Bar Camp logo and moniker. Now, should another separate event be created with primarily commercial gain in mind that uses the Bar Camp brand and co-opts the integrity of the name, it would be up to the community to go after and enforce the brand, either through blogging, boycotting or other subversive means. We simply don’t have the financial or temporal resources to go after such an offender, but we do have a small army whose response could be economically devastating to that effort.

I mean, let’s look at two precedents here: Creative Commons and Microformats.

With Creative Commons, you’ve got this idea that maybe not everything needs to be owned exclusively by default… Maybe you can allow for some distributed ownership of intellectual work in order to grease subsequent derivative creative expression. And maybe both the community and the original author will see benefits.

With Microformats, they’re leveraging community behavior to standardize the way we mark up our documents for the benefit of everyone. No one owns Microformats, though Tantek et al do a pretty good job shepherding the community. Nevertheless, the result of their work is something that the community takes pride in, identifies with, would be willing to expend individual effort to defend the integrity of.

And we learn two more things from them: to solve human problems as a primary objective and second to pave the paths of existing behavior. Don’t reinvent everything all the time. Just do what’s simple; just codify what’s already being done.

And gee, we’ve come full circle haven’t we?

Microformats are basically mini-laws for marking up your documents. Hell, go ahead and break them, do your own thing, there’s no punishment because the community doesn’t see punishment as being in line with its sense of justice. But joining up and following the rules, in this case, will actually bring you some benefits and not to mention, make your life (if you’re a user of the web, anyway) a little bit better.

So let’s codify this need to represent community works in a common mark. I want to be able to put a stamp on the work that I do within a community that identifies it to the world — that says: Me and a buncha folks made this and we’re proud of it. We did it not to make money but out of passion and love and because it’s in our nature to create without secondary purposes in mind.

And then let’s call it a Community Mark to make it clear what’s driving our purpose. It’s not trade — it’s the community, stupid! And from now on, if you want to create your own Community Mark, just slap a CM on your mark and hope for the best. Hell, we can’t enforce these things unless we hand them over to a broader community anyway — and since it’s really the community that owns the mark anyway, who better to look out for their wellbeing?

It’s an email, email, email world

I had a very useful and informative call last night with some folks from the Portland Usability group, organized by Frank Spillers of Demystifying Usability (a recording of the event is available for the next month). They had a lot of really useful feedback as they walked through the Developer Preview of Flock, explaining their expectations of certain interface elements and expressing confusion when they couldn’t figure out what terminology like “Star this page” meant or what a “Shelf” might be used for. Feature discoverability was another big problem; for example, they really thought that the history search was an awesome feature… but only once they found it!

On the one hand, a lot of the that I’ve been doing since we launched our Preview Release was validated. Much of the confusion they experienced has been addressed and hopefully resolved, though I look forward to doing more of these events both prior to and after each major release.

And since I was also able to give a high-level overview of where we’re going with Flock and what our vision of the web looks like (more sharing of timely “me-created” content than static-library-lookup-information old skoolness), they were able to point out aspects of Flock that didn’t seem to fit that vision — many areas, again, that we’ve been actively working on.

One thing that I didn’t expect — and this is more due to my own developeresque myopia than anything else — was that sharing to the group implied email! Yeah yeah, I know, what? Of the six people involved (albeit a small sample but nevertheless of fairly technology-familiar folks) only one knew of Del.icio.us… and that was Frank, the organizer. I purposefully chose not to explain what delicious was before we got started, instead interested to see how the group might discover or at some point desire “bookmark sharing”. Well, that never happened. At least in Flock (chalk one up for the Firefox del.icio.us extension).

Everytime they thought of sharing, they instantly turned to email (only Frank had previously blogged as well). So we’d get flows like this: Create a collection… Ok, want to share? “Oh, right click and email it!” Create a snippet in the shelf… Ok, want to share? “Oh, right click and email it!” And so on.

This was fascinating feedback. Apparently we have much to do to evangelize blogging, favorites sharing and similar socially-centric web services (Flickr had no traction with the group either) if we’re going to bring the benefits of Flock to folks who haven’t yet discovered that there’s a rich social social social world awaiting them!

…and yes, this really gave me even more enthusiasm for the direction that Flock is heading. We’re just a couple years ahead of the curve for the quote-unquote longtail, which honestly is a very very good place to be right now.

Announcing Mashup Camp

mashup camp

So it serves me right that serendipity scooped me on this one, but I’d had this long post thing that I was working on about the Death of Web * Dot Oh but well, as it was boring and even longer than my other tomes, I never got around to finishing it. So I’ll summarize, since my point was extremely simple, if not pedestrian:

Whatever you want to call it, the point is, we’ve got some pretty decent technologies at our disposal now. And some of them are open, as in open source or open APIs. It’s about time that we stopped futzing around and built tools that worked for ordinary folks, yeh, the ones who don’t have time to live and breathe tech like the rest of us seem to. Most of the world is not like us (surprise!) and at some point, yes, we must break free from our autistic cocoon and realize, “Gee Spudsky, there are other people in the world who still don’t know what a web browser is. Well I’ll be. Dang nab it!”

(I probably should podcast that so you can hear the thick southern drawl on that endquote.)

Whatever, so that’s the premise and the treatise of my defunct rant: build good stuff with what we’ve got for ordinary, good people!

Um, so why do I bring that up? Glad you asked.

So I mentioned open tech stuff. Stuff that you can use without having to ask for permission because it’s granted or presumed granted or licensed that way. These are the tools of what’s coming next. (That which shall remain nameless. Grr.)

So what I want to do is two things. And I’ll be totally honest about this:

  1. I want Brad Neuberg’s Coworking idea to spread. And I want it to succeed and take on a life of its own, just like Bar Camp has. Those things which are simple and seem to have built in relevance to a community will survive and flourish when given proper sunlight and water. Coworking needs that.
  2. I want a venue and a space that I can go to and designhack with other skilled, interesting folks working on similarly interesting projects, where there is no ego involved, only the building of The Next; where there’s wifi, access to caffeinated beverages, chairs, tables, couches… and no distractions. Such an environment breeds innovation, breeds connections, friendships, revolutions. And when it can become distributed, plazeless even, you have a shot in hell at finding success.

So here’s the deal. January 17 we’re going to have a Mashup Camp at the Coworking space. No, it probably won’t be exactly David Berlind’s concept, even though he gets credit for blogging the idea first (goddamn procrastination!). Rather it’s going to be a day of intense GTD.

There will be 12 of us, mixed and mashed from a superlative cadre of geeks. It’s open to apply, but we’ve got limited space and time, so, 12. Anyway, we start in the morning promptly at 10am (after informal coffee, etc). We do brief intros, discuss our project, what we’re bringing to the table as far as knowledge, know-how and passion. We then break up into a couple groups based on what we want to get done and the utility of our offerings. …Spend the next couple hours drawing, writing, designing, architecting… getting to something with teeth but not code. Break for lunch and cross-polination.

Here’s where we could get tricky (it is a mashup camp after all). Maybe after lunch we play musical chairs with the projects. Y’know, mashup the teams? This means that the folks early in the day really need to be clear about what they want since it’ll be someone else’s fingers actually punching the keys and juicing the code.

Wait, do you mean that want a decent spec?

Uhm, yes.

Don’t worry, we’ll make something up. So after the mashing of people, a coding melee ensues and by the end of the day, we’ll have something. Scratch that, we’ll have a few things. Probably not all that pretty, but beginnings. And, I’ll tell you this in advance, one of the projects will be to construct the website that will host these projects moving forward… what shall become a proverbial open source treasure trove of mashups. Oh yes my friends, this is going to be good.

Ning, eat your heart out. No offense, but a bunch of passionate geeks in a room can run blindfolded circles around any prefab solution any day. Remember? this stuff is for real people. And for that, well, you’ve gotta have heart.

Improving composition in browsers

Blog QuillSo a bunch of us at the newly opened up Flock HQ were discussing the Performancing extension today, wondering how we could both support and benefit from their work… It’s clear that we need to improve the quality of composition tools available in browsers, period. Doing this by elevating the experience and smoothing out the behavior of the Mozilla editor (which both Flock and Performancing use) seems like the way to go, creating value for the open source, Flock and Firefox communities.

As it is, Firefox ships with this editor built-in. Thunderbird uses it too, as does NVU (though I believe that they forked awhile back). You can imagine that refocused effort on this editor could potentially lead to an alternative to plain textarea that’s both stable and adequately featured (as opposed to hacking on an embedded solution).

So the thing is, how do we go about defining and building out the specs for the next generation Mozilla editor? How do we better collaborate with folks like Performancing to make this a reality?

As for Flock, well, this effort really needs to exist as a community-wide project. We’re all already pretty focused on other aspects of the browser and while making changes the editor are essential long term, it’s not in our immediate roadmap. Sure, Anthony makes incremental changes here and there (replacing the span tags, for example), but we just don’t have full time resources to allocate at the moment.

And that’s where the work that the Performancing community is doing comes in. Ideally if we can collaborate and coordinate on the needs we both have, we can begin to craft a list of user experience and development requirements to support our comingled goals of bringing blogging to Firefox and Flock users.

Ajaxian recently posted an Ajax Office Roundup that provides us some insights into how people are trying to use editing in browsers. The reality is, we don’t need Word for the web, especially when it comes to blogging, but we do need some established basics, like bolding, italics, blockquoting, linking and so on. And while those are already fairly well accounted for in the existing editor, we’ve got to look beyond formatting to natively supporting rich metadata in microformats and other forms of structured blogging.

I’ll be pinging the Performancing folks to see if they’re down for working together somehow. Maybe we start be cross-polinating each other’s forums.

After all, this is about choice and working on building awesome tools. This is what open source is all about. So hey now, here’s a quintessential opportunity for us to get some benefit and promotion for the work we’re doing anyway.

…Wanted to destroy something beautiful

Blood of Destruction

You have to understand something about Flock. Nothing is permanant. We’re hungry. Destruction is a form of expression. It’s a form of existing, of creating, of saying, we exist.

So if we have to, we will destroy Flock. Not in the way you think. Not in that stupid, insipid, “yes it ends here way”. No. In that, “nothing worth doing happens the first time around.”

We will destroy it because the ideas are weak, the promise less than what we desire, less than what we are capable of. We will kill it because it needs to be killed. Because evolution is inevitable.

We’re hungry. What this country gives us doesn’t feed our need to create, to produce, to solve and to connect. With all due respect, fuck you, we will create in the same action that destroys. We don’t believe in what we’re given; there is something better.

Damn you, I’m not kidding.

CocoaRadio interview posted

Factory Rockstar I’ve got another interview out in the wild, this time at Blake Burris’ CocoaRadio.

The interview was conducted at my favorite San Francisco cafe, Ritual Roasters, so there’s a bit of a din in the background. It also took place over a month ago, which makes some of the information obsolete (I wrote about cloning APIs here). On the other hand, I do talk fairly expansively about the vision for Flock… how microformats will help, what it’s like developing a cross-platform Mozilla app and where we’re in general going with Flock.

I think it’s probably the best real-world articulation of what Flock’s all about so far, so if Flock still doesn’t make much coherent sense to you, definitely take a listen and let me know what you think.