The Longest Now

(echoes of a broken system)

UPDATE: Aaron committed suicide on January 11, 2013.(!) More on his life here.

Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to knowledge, open government, and an informed civil society.  He has worked as a software architect, digital archivist, social analyst, Wikipedia analyst, and political organizer.  Last year he co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the non-profit political advocacy group Demand Progress.

He is also currently charged with computer fraud by the US Attorney’s office, in what appears to be the latest example of “a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction” based on the broad applicability of wire fraud and computer fraud statutes.  An overview:

Background

Aaron has studied institutional influence and ways to work with large datasets.  In 2008, he founded watchdog.net, “the good government site with teeth“,  to aggregate and visualize data about politicians – including where their money comes from.  That year he also worked with Shireen Barday at Stanford Law School to assess “problems with remunerated research” in law review articles (i.e., articles funded by corporations, sometimes to help them in ongoing legal battles), by downloading and analyzing over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding.   The results were published in the Stanford Law Review.  Most recently, he served for 10 months as a Fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, in their Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He contributed to the field of digital archiving, designing and implementing the Open Library, which serves as a global digital resource today, and as a foundation for any digital libraries in the future.  And he collected 2 million  public-domain court decisions from the US PACER system — a system that nominally makes all such decisions available to the public, but in practice keeps them hidden behind a paywall — to add to Carl Malamud’s collection at resource.org.  (That work in turn gave rise to the crowdsourced RECAP project.)

The Case of the Over-Downloader

Last week, Aaron was charged by a grand jury with computer fraud [1], for allegedly downloading millions of academic articles hosted by the journal archive JSTOR, and exceeding authorization on MIT and JSTOR servers to do so.

JSTOR claims no interest in pursuing a legal case.  However they are not part of the prosecution, and Aaron faces a possible fine and up to 35 years in prison, with trial set for September.  You can support his legal efforts online.

The Association of College and Research Libraries notes that both the prosecution and Swartz’s supporters have characterized the trial with “superficial, and deeply incorrect, messages about libraries and licensed content“.

So how did this come to pass, and what does it mean for the Internet?

Details of the case and public reactions it inspired, after the jump.

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Brand has a lovely interview in The European this week (auf Deutsch) on his ideology and thoughts on language preservation and nuclear power.  Worth a read, even if only in translation.

As Wikimedia has grown as a movement from a website and cool idea to a family of sites and a network of national and international non-profits, we have developed many ways to engage partners and the media, raise funds, and make large-scale decisions.  National chapters have become significant non-profits in their own right, and collaboration between chapters and the global Foundation has become more intricate.  For instance, chapters today run and support international events, offer scholarships and grants to community members, raise significant funds directly through the annual sitenotices, and run branding initiatives — including the global campaign for “Wikipedia as World Heritage Site” organized recently by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In 2009, during Wikimedia’s strategic planning process for the coming five years, a task force focused on movement roles was set up.  Its task was to research how individual contributors, Chapters, and the Foundation currently interact, and how they should ideally work together, and how this happened in other global organizations.  This was the most abstract part of optimizing operations, which included discussions of how we  guarantee financial sustainability, build partnerships and infrastructure, and influence public  perception and policy.

This group tackled questions of how the different parts of the movement develop strategy, make decisions across the movement, and communicate with one another.  A few initial recommendations were made, but these issues required more detailed discussion.^[1] So a Board working group was created to continue the work.

This group chose to focus for its first year on the roles of formal organizations in the movement — the WMF and its Committees, Chapters, and other structured groups that should have similar formal recognition.  We tabled the equally complex issue of the roles of individual contributors, wiki projects, and other informal groups to a separate discussion.

The result of this work will be a set of recommendations to the movement as a whole – expressed in a movement charter that all formal parts of the movement can endorse, to the WMF, and to chapters.  The project and its recommendations are being developed on the Meta-wiki.  All are welcome to participate in the working group and discussions (or simply browse our meeting notes).   By Wikimania this year, the group aims to have recommendations on new models for organizations that the WMF should recognize (Associations and Partner Organizations),  on movement standards for transparency and auditing, and more.

I will post a series of updates about the project over the coming weeks, leading up to in-person discussions at Wikimania.  If you have questions about the project or any of its targets, suggestions about important issues we aren’t yet considering, &c – please let me know on my talk page.

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A week after announcing the Translate API would be shut down in December, Adam Feldman updated his earlier blog post with this brief note:

In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the passion and interest expressed by so many of you… I’m happy to share that we’re working hard to address your concerns, and will be releasing an updated plan to offer a paid version of the Translate API. Please stay tuned; we’ll post a full update as soon as possible.

So: no specifics yet, and no explanation of the abuse they’ve encountered, but a paid API should be available eventually. Definitely a step in the right direction; this has received some warm responses from developers.  It is interesting that they still seem surprised by all of this attention; and it was a healthy reminder to everyone of how fragile a non-free ecosystem is (no matter how cool its APIs are).

Rebecca Black: How could you fail to love such a sincere meme machine?

Update: Her latest video, Which seat should I take, is hard to beat.

Two Icelandic videogame artists/chessplayers/boxers. 12 minutes of speed chess. Up to 5 rounds of boxing. 1 match of CHESSBOXING.

Today the Tehran Times, an English-language paper based in Tehran, and other Iranian news sources, engaged in a bit of Internet journalism, copying some satire (‘Saudi king offers to buy Facebook for $150B to end revolt’) — down to a misspelling of Zuck’s name — into a summary of news on the King’s announced plans for social reform (providing cheap land for housing). This got its fifteen minutes of fame on forums and Twitter, enough to draw a brief official denial.

It’s not news that minor news agencies can be too busy to check facts or worry about copyright, but you’d think they would be more sensitive to satire. All I have to say is: Freshrant made the joke first.

Motofumi Kobayashi’s infamous “metal gear bunny” comic about USA GIs in the Vietnam War (released in the US as Apocalypse Meow) is now a slickly produced animated series. It is a careful 3D rendering of the original, bloodless body count and all.

Wikimedia had a terribly successful fundraising campaign ths year, with a team of stats-loving traffic and feedback analysts learning a lot about our reading audience and how to connect with them. There was diverse support for the idea of running some banners to promote donating time and expertise and edits as well as money, and some general-purpose “discover Wikimedia” banners were run the first week of January, but this was soon overtaken by preparations for the (wickedly fun) 10th anniversary celebrations.

We should do more of this. The idea of inviting people more explicitly to edit, and running campaigns dedicated to this, is more fundamental to the nature of Wikipedia than fundraising itself. We should be thinking about all year round, spending as much time and effort campaigning for meaningful content contributions as we have for funds.

What would that look like? Here is one idea: WikiProjects could be encouraged to write copy for their own banners, from a hook to a detailed call for what they need. These would be run for a % of new visitors proportional to the project’s capacity to absorb new contributors. A few generic projects would be geared up for a larger influx of editors, and established editors would be asked to help work with those newbies (and to set up comfort zones where they can find and help one another).

The generic projects would ramp up slowly; with one month’s newbies helping welcome those who came the next month. Some new policies regarding working with newbies would need to be proposed on the major wikis, possibly with a group like the original Fire Brigade dedicated to helping the ambassadors and welcomers with the extra load. And the specific WikiProjects could continue to draw in as many new editors as they want, and could try out different messages to attract just the right sort of reader (including efforts at targetting specific kinds of readers).

What do you think? How would you reach out to readers if you could change the way the site looks? (What ever happened to the idea of highlighting the “edit this page” tab?) Over 1% of people who saw the best fundraising messages clicked through them — imagine what we could do if we showed all of those people that they could really edit.

RHOK has a great name (if only an OK acronym) and sweet mandate: hacking to save the world. They work with Crisis Commons and other grassroots groups, organizing physical meetings to hack for two days with a competition theme (prizes for the best hacks). Great, right?

But is this a meme whose time has come, that’s been subverted by people who aren’t hackers? How will it change over time? The proof may be in the results, but the corporate firepower lined up behind this project, and the vagueness of how its organizing takes place, make me wonder. From a recent NPR piece on the project:

Patrick Svenburg, a director for Microsoft and a co-founder of Random Hacks of Kindness, says it was a little risky at first.

“We threw all cautions to the wind, and we got a little group of people together in November of 2009 at the first hackathon in Silicon Valley,” he says. “About 100 people showed up. I didn’t get fired; nobody got fired. It was a nice experiment.”

Indeed. More than 20 cities took part in RHOK #2, so let’s hope it continues to thrive.

We’ve been working on a few different visualizations of the OLPC community around the world.  The most enjoyable and colorful is olpcMAP, a collaborative mashup designed by Nick Doiron that blossomed after last month’s map sprint.  (Nick is an avid map hacker and long-time OLPC volunteer who has also written the popular Map activity for offline Map-creation and -marking using XOs.)

Before this map was launched, the sorts of global visualizations we had were limited to large established groups (mapping chapters and major deployments), average statistics by region, or thousands of scattered individuals without a coherent feel.  olpcMAP combines this with personal and class projects from hackers and teachers around the world, adds search and an API for reuse, and feels above all approachable.

At the moment you can import JSON data and can choose between Google Maps and OSM layers.  The search matches both on locations on the map and on keywords used in marker descriptions. It is designed around the Google App Engine, and the growing olpcMAP API lets you request images, iframes, or KML to use this as  backend for further remixing (say, embedding a screenshot or overlay of part of the map elsewhere on the web).

You can browse the olpcMAP code and try setting up your own instance.  The framework is quite general, and it is straightforward to brand it for other communities.

I would love to see this sort of map of Wikimedians around the world, for instance — I suspect that we would see a very different picture of ourselves as a community than our current self-image.  The distribution of 10th Anniversary events this month was a first step in this direction, and was a surprise to many people.

And it would be amazing to see comparative maps of different global communities — Firefox users, Ubuntu hackers, Red Cross volunteers — using this model.   If you’ve tried to set up your own olpcMAP instance (if this becomes a general community-mapping framework, perhaps we should pick a more universal name), or have features you would love to see implemented, please let us know.

An interesting parenting discussion is underway on Quora. There’s primarily a focus in these conversations on performance, knowledge, and skill; with a few asides on inspiration and creation.

The anecdotes in question are too general to say anything about genius and will, though I have similar questions there — William James Sidis is on my mind. (ᔥBoing^Boing)

For my mother.

NMAtv gives the secret DailyShow cabal a saucy McRibbing. (Hat tip to the show for calling it out.)

The Rice University administration seems to be having a very bad summer. A few weeks ago, they secretly planned the sale of KTRU, their nationally-renowned independent campus radio station. They ‘managed to keep their ongoing negotiations completely quiet until about 12 hours before the sale was approved by Houston’s Board of Trustees’. I didn’t realize until today that the sale was considered final — students have been protesting since it became public, and the administration has offered no explanation.

Now last week they leaked the news hinting they would shutting down their promising digital Rice University Press contradicting the will of RUP’s Board of Directors. This, after commissioning an external review that recommended supporting it and integrating it better into the Library and related services — and again, with no public explanation.

I have fond memories of Rice University — I studied there during high school; they supported Connexions in its infancy; friends of mine teach there. (I try not to hold the whole Sidis incident against them.) So it pains me deeply to see this wanton self-destruction. I can’t imagine what they stand to gain from either move — they will lose any money from the sale to discontented KTRU alumni from the radio’s 40-year history. (No one seems willing to support that sale — here is a petition from 350 concerned UH alumni in support of keeping the radio station at Rice.) What gives?

Not papers, but still: Wow. (The Guardian on Wikileaks; later picked up by most major media) Wikileaks is now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, discussed seriously by political, military, and academic leaders.

And to think I made fun of the logo when it came out.

After early months of interest and glory — peaking in a spike in mailing list traffic that was moderated for being too active — Citizendium’s growth all but shut down levelled off and has declined steadily since 2008.   Now it is looking for a long-term home.

I have mixed feelings about Citizendium.  I was excited about it in 2006 — at first blush, it offers a serious alternative for expert editors who want to contribute to free knowledge but feel unappreciated or unwelcome at Wikipedia.  And in general, compatibly-licensed alternatives to Wikipedia are a very good thing – the whole point of using free licenses is to encourage reuse.   But to succeed on the scale of its original dreams, Citizendium must overcome its insularity and make good on its core promise of quality.  Not unlike Wikipedia, it is currently known as much for its humorous highlights as for its best work.  And it faces the same problems with difficult and misguided editors — some who have quite solid credentials — only with a much smaller community to handle that workload.

I still hope for a proliferation of cousin projects, all competing to find the best way to spur collaboration around free knowledge.  There is so much to explore in the way of how to create welcoming communities for different audiences of writers and creators.  Community atmosphere, and a limitation in the types of knowledge that can be easily shared, are among Wikipedia’s major bottlenecks.   It is welcoming to a narrow[ing?] audience, and if this does not change it may face its own dramatic slowdown in participation – more joyful models are welcome.  (My recent favorite, in style, tools, and atmosphere: fotopedia.)

The questions that inspire Citizendium remain:  How can we expand collaborative production of educational works to topics that require rare expertise in a field?  How can we verify new works as quickly as they are produced, and how much does this speed depend on the commonality of the knowledge involved?  
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