Paul's Web Space 2.1

Lessig Final Free Culture Lecture Thursday

This Thursday, January 31, Lawrence Lessig is delivering his final lecture on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium. After ten years, numerous books, and the founding of Creative Commons (a practical, proactive attempt to free up some cultural content by enabling content creators to declare less restrictive licenses on their works than the default "All Rights Reserved"), Lessig is moving on to address the problem of government corruption. His talk will be filmed by Open Source Cinema, for inclusion in their upcoming feature film "Basement Tapes," an open source documentary. Those in attendance will also be treated to scenes from the film and re-mixed work from Open Source Cinema's web site.

The recently-released film "Good Copy Bad Copy" covers much of the same ground, and features Lessig, DC policymakers, and artists such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. The filmmakers seek further distribution and funding to support more similar efforts. I learned about Good Copy Bad Copy via the blog of Jake Shapiro, Executive Director of Public Radio Exchange and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. In a fascinating post describing a trip he took to Moscow last year, he turned me on to both that film and an organization based in London called the Freedom of Expression Project. This effort sounds remarkably like iCommons, which seems to involve everyone from Creative Commons to Wikipedia, to the Berkman Center; I wonder if they collaborate.

I have already mentioned "Before the Music Dies" in this space — another film that comes to mind. BFMD really focuses on numerous systemic problems with the music industry, but its attempts to control artists and creativity, and its inability to embrace new ways of dealing with and distributing content are related. Seth Godin recently wrote an insightful piece covering the same territory, reviewing lessons to learn from the challenges facing the music industry.

Labels: creativecommons, freeculture, freedomofspeeech, lessig

   Link: http://events.stanford.edu/events/125/12594/

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CPSR Technonogy in Wartime Conference

If I were in California this weekend, I would definitely be going to the Technology in Wartime Conference at Stanford Law School, sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). This conference hearkens back to the the founding of CPSR almost 30 years ago, as an organization concerned about the growing threat of nuclear war and how the application of computer technology increased this threat through battlefield automation and the flawed (and still under development) Star Wars missile defense system. CPSR has since broadened its portfolio of issues to include election systems, privacy, and freedom of expression, among other issues, but the excesses of the national security state continue to require our diligent attention.

Another highlight of the event is that CPSR will present its Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility to Bruce Schneier, who will then give the conference keynote talk on dual-use technologies. Bruce is my favorite security expert, computer and otherwise, for both his wide-rangining knowledge and his ability to puncture security myths and facades; I'm a long-time subscriber to and avid reader of his e-newsletter CRYPTO-GRAM.

Instead of the CPSR conference at Stanford, this weekend I'm doing something cool in DC. I'm attending the WidgetDevCamp, a day-and-a-half BarCamp-style meeting at a downtown marketing firm. It looks like a really interesting time, lots of cool people, ideas, even some dirty hands. I'm hoping to come out of there with a widget for edweek.org, or maybe some better ideas for measuring social/web2.0 efforts like widgets. At any rate, I'm sure to learn something, meet some cool peeps, and blog about it here later.

Labels: activism, cpsr, surveillance

   Link: http://www.technologyinwartime.org

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Data Portability Movement Grows

Big news in data portability - Facebook, Google, and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Particularly in the case of Facebook, this is big news. Listen to Robert Scoble discuss his experience with Facebook and Plaxo, describing why he was temporarily kicked off of Facebook for automated importing of data to Plaxo. He points out that Facebook's policies in this area are hypocritical, that they are all about sucking up your data wherever they can find it, but prevent you from moving data out to other applications. Read more about this development and its importance in ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

This is a fast-moving project, so early in the new year, as hot on the heals of that announcement we hear that individual members from the companies LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter have also joined the Workgroup, a move LinkedIn touts in its own blog. (Read more analysis in ReadWriteWeb.) Following closely behind are individuals from Drupal, NetVibes and MyStrands. And to top it all off, Google, IBM, and Verisign are reportedly in talks to join the OpenID Foundation


What is Data Portability? According to Wikipedia, it is "Data portability is the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another." OpenID (a founding partner in the Data Portability Workgroup) is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. A closely-allied concept from the world of MicroFormats is the idea of Social Network Portability, or the tools and interfaces that would allow users to easily move information about themselves and their contacts between different social networks.

The first I heard of these concepts was when I started reading about the Data Sharing Summit last fall in Richmond, CA. Jeremiah Owyang offers a very well defined set of goals for the data portability movement on his blog.

Here are some places to learn more about it and stay up-to-date on developments:

• Workgroup Home Page
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Google Group
• Twitter Feed

Labels: dataportability, facebook, google, openid, standards

   Link: http://www.dataportability.org/

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How can nonprofits use Twitter?
Publication or Coordination!

Net² wants to hear ideas for how nonprofits can use twitter, or if they should even bother. This query is part of the Netsquared Think Tank, a project seeking ideas on useful applications of the social web for nonprofits. This entire project is very self-referential, as it takes place on a blog (preferably via references to answering posts on other blogs), and I received my call to action via messages to members of their Facebook group.

Anyway, I can envision two easy ways for nonprofit organizations to take advantage of twitter. I work for a nonprofit publisher, so the first way, which could apply to edweek.org as well, would be this: create a Twitter user for edweek, or perhaps several for different news feeds or different publications (or blogs, the possibilities are endless:). Then you could use something like twitterfeed to direct the RSS feeds from those blogs or publications (or topics) straight into the twitter feed of that user. See c|net News.com or CNN Breaking News. If you don't want to automate this, assign a producer to post stories that are most interesting or controversial. We're planning to make several stories per day totally free, and thinking of ways to spread these around the web, so this idea might be put to the test.

The other application I envision is something a little more in the spirit of the service — use twitter to coordinate a group of people on the ground during an activist activity, such as a large demonstration in Washington DC, or a group out canvasing, or a lobby day on the hill. Make sure everyone has a twitter account a cell phone with adequate SMS capacity, and configure the twitter accounts to follow each other with SMS notification on. This would end up being almost like a cell phone SMS chat room, where you could coordinate locations, ask for help, etc. It seems like there would be a lot of set-up, and potential noise unless you turned everyone else's notification off, so may be impractical, but it could be cool if it worked. (Note: probably not appropriate for "actions" that would benefit from discretion ;-) ;-)

Labels: net2thinktank

   Link: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/britt-bravo/join-net2thinktank-how-can-nonprofits-use-twitter-should-they-even-bother

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'Net Privacy for Children; 4-year-old Fashionistas!

As I blog about my daughter, I'm suddenly thinking I shouldn't blog or tweet, etc. kids' names...so I'm going to stop naming any children in any of my public writing. Not that it will make a huge deal by itself, it's mostly the policy that's supposed to mean something. I'm a privacy advocate who lives my life on the 'net pretty much as an open book, both for professional reasons, and due to cynicism on my part regarding the privacy protections that remain (in tatters). However, I don't need to drag anyone else, especially kids, along with me into my public life on the web.

Henceforth, you'll more posts looking like this:

My daughter told me a story about her preschool class yesterday that I found surprising, and very funny. I don't know what we were talking about, but fairly unprompted, I found out that she suddenly wasn't the biggest fan of pink. Now to me, this was NEWS, so I explored the back-story behind this development, and discovered the following (pay attention if you want to stay abreast of the most avant garde fashion trends).

All of the girls in my daughter's class but two have left pink behind as last year's color; the current hot color among 4-year-old girls is purple. Likewise, for all the boys but two, black is the new brown. The exact wording was something like this (from a 4-year-old):

I used to like pink, but I don't any more. All of the girls, except for xxx and xxx, say pink is old, it's from last year. All the boys now like black except xxx and xxx; they still like brown, but all the other boys say brown is from last year.

From the mouths of babes...I mean the next generation of fashionistas.

Labels: children, internet, privacy, safety

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