The Longest Now

Huzzah! (HT to Jill & team)

On sworn virgins, and other recurring social rules and accomodations.   A beautiful blog.

Short thorough coverage by the Wikipedia Signpost.

Extraordinary shots of Black Rock City (w/ a Cinestar 8)

See also: A daytime tour of the city, methodical rather than artistic (w/ a homemade Ozone plane + GoPro + DragonLink)

With a lovely quotable interview by Wired’s Matt Simon

If you haven’t visited law.resource.org recently, do so now. I’ll wait… you are in for a treat.

Carl Malamud and Friends (soon to be a show on CNN) have kept up the momentum of their early work to digitize and publish technical and other standards, many of which are now online in all their glory.

And there’s a lovely collection of introductions, from the 5-minute summary of why and how to free building codes, to a 20-minute showcase of what the resource.org team does. (via boing^boing)

This is still rather top-down for my tastes — there’s no obvious way for me to help out, fund the digitization of a particular code, or run a digitizing party in my neighborhood library or FabLab. But I am inspired by the persistent work and vision of the people making this dream a reality.

They also have a lovely site devoted to a national scanning project for scanning all the archives: YesWeScan. Which gave rise to this excellent blog post and commentary from the Archivist of the US, David Ferriero*.

* Recently seen at Wikimania DC saying, in his beautiful closing speech, “If you have any trouble using Wikipedia… tell them, if it’s good enough for the Archivist of the US…”

Dr. Philippe Charlier, forensic historical sleuth, tries to recreate the life and death of figures throughout history, from his office in Paris. He spends much of his time popularizing his findings. Some in his field criticize this hypervisibility.

Charlier replies: “I want to share everything I know with the greatest number of people. What I do is not dilettantisml; it’s intellectual vulgarization.”

(HT to Elaine Sciolino & the Grey Lady)

Happy Independence Day!

A few good pieces on the Declaration of Internet Freedom:
* Christian Science Monitor: The Internet needs its own ‘declaration of independence’
* Forbes: Freshly-Minted Declaration of Internet Freedom Demands ‘Free and Open Internet’
* ABC News: For July 4, a Declaration of Internet Freedom
* And an excellent, long piece by The Verge: How the net’s minutemen plan to protect the future

And ACTA was just rejected by the EU Parliament:
* Controversial anti-piracy agreement rejected by EU

Kudos to everyone involved in that turnaround.

Over the past year, in the US, Italy and other countries, Internet communities have flexed their muscles and demonstrated their popularity and capacity for organizing public opinion, by convincing lawmakers not to pass bills that would have made life difficult for ‘Net service providers and site owners.

Recently, two US Congressmen who were important opponents of SOPA in the House and Senate, Darrell Issa and Ron Wyden, called for and then published a draft Digital Citizen’s Bill of Rights, which they opened for public annotation and comment.  (Kudos for the concept and quick turnaround – that’s a more direct engagement of readers than any other political effort I’ve seen recently. But I hope they keep developing the platform, or move it to something more refactorable.)

This week a more global network of organizations that strive for open access to knowledge and the Internet have published a “Declaration of Internet Freedom“, calling for governments and institutions and people everywhere to support a similar set of principles that support what we have come to think of as a free (and adaptable) Internet.  I support that effort, as do the EFF, Public Knowledge, Free Press, and the Cheezburger empire.  Even if the ‘declaration’ is more a proposition of principles to uphold.

You can sign on to the declaration online.

P.S. for an explanation of the subject, see this.

My recent post about China’s parody of the annual US reports on national human rights made me want to read the actual reports.  It’s the sort of cleanly organized information that I love, combined with the lack of citations and categories that I hate.  We’ve never issued a high-level summary of that form about our own country.  But we did take part in a review of national human rights last year, for the UN Human Rights Committee – something similarly high-level but less methodical.

If this sort of thing interests you, you will enjoy the full details of that process, which gives quite a rich flavor to our internal national discourse, complete with:

• A puffy initial “toward a more perfect world” self-assessment
• A mix of moral, practical and political recommendations from all UN member states (put forth by any interested state during an open 3-hr Q&A session, and compiled into their own report; resulting in a fascinating set of ~250 recs including 70 or so duplicates for the popular ones)
• A quick reflection after that Q&A, followed by a refreshingly detailed set of  straightforward responses to those recommendations

The recs and responses are worth reading all the way through.  They are concise and – aside from Cuba and Venezuela occasionally derailing the discussion – all seem to take the process most seriously.  If you’re not keen on all the details, here are some highlighted recs with our responses in italics:

• Perennial topics:  Ratify the declaration of indigenous rights (x10 different recommendations for this): yes, done;  similar covenants on the rights of women; on children; and on the disabled(x20+): support, let’s make progress;  the covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (x18): sorry no progress here;  limit our policy of treaty reservations: no, though we may consider specifics)
• The death penalty:  this is unsurprisingly the juiciest topic.  We are the last western country to kill prisoners, which is more clearly immoral to each generation.  This drew the plurality of recs.  Again,  straightforward and telling responses (Abolish the death penalty(x20+): no;  place a national moratorium on the death penalty (x10): no;  consider placing a moratorium on the death penalty(x5): no;  restrict the number of offenses carrying the death penalty(x2): noo;  consider reviewing relevant laws or studying the possibility of starting a campaign to implement a moratorium(x3): still no;  withdraw the reservation to article 6, paragraph 5 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights that prohibits the death penalty for those who committed a crime when they were minors(x1): not as such;  consider withdrawing the reservation to article 6, paragraph 5 of the ICCPR(x2): okay, will consider.)
• Those 200+ recommendations just keep giving.  Algeria made the recommendation I did above, “include and rank the human rights situation in the US in the annual country reports on human rights – as was done for the annual report on trafficking of persons” (in 2010)  This was met with one of our few specious responses: no need, also we don’t rank anyone.
• Norway is awesome.  They make 7 solid apolitical recommendations. No rehashing international policy disputes or convention-signing, which can be nominal at best: a focus on essential changes that can be carried out now, and would be historically significant.

Revisiting an old “let’s replace ISBN and FRBR” essay of mine:

Many library systems currently rely on ISBNs and… FRBR-style groupings of related works, without a universal and generalizable system [for global identification of part of a collection, or its level of abstraction]. I will use “Open Work Number” and “Abstraction and Originality Level” in place of ISBN number and FRBR level [1] as placeholders for future better-defined specifications…

For ages, learning was assumed to be social, interactive, oral. Written knowledge, where available and somewhat portable, was a specialized complement that few scholars, recordkeepers, explorers and other specialists used or needed.

As long as you needed a tutor or guide to learn, whether or not good static (lifeless) written material was available was a lesser concern.

In the last three millennia, it gradually became cheaper to produce text, commonplace for scholars to learn to write concisely and convey ideas so that others could learn them on their own. In every field, books eventually replaced ritual and oral record as the standard for precipitating knowledge into a lasting, canonical form, and passing it on. This was driven forward by personal memorials and finance and law – pillars of clan- and city-building.

Certain forms of knowledge were considered a shared good of society – from how to find resources to social and practical norms. And some were actively disseminated as necessary, such as legal and religious dictates. Other knowledge was something that could be sought out, or bought and sold. During the time when knowledge about the world was a scarce resource, yet easy enough to write down and transmit, even basic information about the shape of the planet was bartered and sold like any other good.

Today we both have bounteous knowledge, and pressing problems that better global education can address. The opportunities that could result from a more broadly educated world society are far greater than the short-term opportunities of a commodity market for practical texts.

And we will get more thorough, more accurate, and better texts of all sorts – once we think of general knowledge as a part of culture and civic infrastructure, not as something that can be owned and hoarded. We made this transition with scientific discoveries centuries ago, with mathematics before that, and today we reap tremendous benefits from that. It is time for all knowledge to join their ranks as a cornerstone of our civilization.

How can we help this come about? Take a piece of awesome, inspiring, practical knowledge that you currently buy or rent as a commodity, and make a free version of it. Publish it to a shared commons that makes it easy to maintain and update over time. Tell others who get it from the same source you did. Stop using general knowledge that you can’t repurpose, and your use of the alternative will make it the best in the world in its niche.