I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

I just got back from the OpEd project/workshop. In short, it was worth every penny and if you are interested in writing an OpEp and riding the public debate bandwagon, this is the perfect place to start. Why? Well, first because the world of punditry and debate needs more diversity and women and this project is fundamentally geared toward getting more women into the system and in a no nonsense, accessible, inspiring, and yet utterly pragmatic fashion.

First, if you don’t know the stats concerning women, they are depressingly dismal. For example, 9 out of 10 submissions are from male writers and 88% of published pieces are from male authors (and this is matched by all sorts of other disturbing figures about the lack of women non-fiction writers, TV producers etc). In the OpEd field, the main problem, in short, is that women are not even trying.

Today’s full-day workshop was enlivening and engaging. Catherine Orenstein, the founder and dynamic leader of the project, dusts away a lot of the mystery of this writing genre and equips participants with some basic skills and tactics to get you started (then, in my opinion, it takes a fair bit of work and persistence to master, just like any type of writing but it is not rocket science either).

What I like most about the project is its utter pragmatism. Cathy knows that once there are enough women in the system, the project can close shop, for it will be other women who will take over the reigns and inspire other women to write them (and informally mentor them as well). It is well known, for example, that once there is a critical mass of women, let’s say in the work place, then these women are the point people for recruitment so that the company does not need to actively recruit women.

I have heard this argument before and have had a number of personal experiences that confirmed this fact. Last year, for example, a student from my department was organizing a conference and he could not, for the life of him, find any female speakers or discussants, despite asking a number of them who declined because of other commitments. He had ran out of options, that is, until he talked to me. In less than a minute, I rattled off like 5-7 other possible choices and within a day, we had 2 on board. It is clear that women know other women (and many are friends) so the best person to go to to tap into are other women.

In terms of the actual writing of an OpEd, I am not sure I will be writing one anytime soon in so far as I need to really pump out a few more academic articles as the future of my jobs depends on them. But I may write a draft version of one that I will hammer into finer shape if a timely news event arises. Otherwise, I look forward to spending more time on this genre, especially once my book is done and know that if I am going to stay in academia, I will for sure make space for this type of thinking and writing.

Finally if you are interested in attending one of the public, women-only seminars and you know me, let them know you learned about the project through me, and you will get discount.

The students in my Hacker Culture and Politics have now been at the question of politics and ethics in the world of hacking for over a month. I think a pretty solid foundation has been built and now we are getting into much nittier grittier issues, like intellectual property law. The latest entry is on IP and provides an excellent sense of what we talked about and what we covered in class and in the readings.

I am excited to see the class blog develop, if nothing else, because it gives a pretty good sense of the topics we cover and what conversations we have. I used to find it frustrating to have classes literally vanish away after they were done and yet so much labor and time had been put in them! This type of blogging is important as it can provide a tangible and somewhat fixed medium for capturing and preserving what happened (and then free you from having to save boxes of notes that you can collect during college).

I know there were a number of times I really really wanted to recall something from one of my undergraduate classes, but since I had finally thrown away the big old boxes of notes and readings from those days, there was no place to look. It was just not practical to lug my boxes of notes from place to place, move to move especially when I only wanted to take a look every few years for maybe one thing. With this type of blog, there is a record of what happened for everyone to share.

That said, I am faced with a problem when I teach this class again. Since we provide what I think is a pretty decent account of what we are doing, I will most probably have to put down the blog for a period of time when I am teaching it again though of course the syllabus and readings will also change to some degree.

One thing I am known to do is complain how the public/academic discourse surrounding/around technology/computers is overwhelmingly male (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Shirky and I can go on and on). But one day I realized that if I am bothered by it, I should do more than talk the (often) empty talk of complaint. So I decided to enroll in a day long training for writing OpEds, which kicks off tomorrow.

I am not sure if engaging in public debate is what I want to do, mostly because of piling more work and time commitments on a very full plate but I am starting to explore what it means and what it may take to leave the Ivory Tower. Here is a little more info about the OpEd Project:

The OpEd Project – featured by The New York Times, Feministing.com and Katie Couric on CBS News – is an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate focus on targeting and training women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, online sites and other key forums of public discourse. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages – which are a source for all other media – deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space which is intended to showcase divergent opinions. It also means we are only hearing from a tiny sliver of the nation’s best thinkers. Imagine a baseball team of only pitchers – how well would it do?

Although I doubt there are any French historians who read this blog, there may be a few IP historical wizards who can help me answer the following question about Denis Diderot, the editor and one of the main writers of the famous Enlightenment Encyclopedia, who apparently was a pro-copyright kinda guy.

According to this Carla Hesse article, Diderot, who participated in the emerging debates around idea of copyright, “argued that products of the mind are more uniquely the property of their creator than land acquired through cultivation” (Hesse, p. 34). She furnishes us with the following quote from Diderot that captures this moral sensibility:

What form of wealth could belong to a man, if not the work of the mind. If not his own thoughts … the most precious part of himself, that will never perish, that will immortalize them? What comparison could there be between a man, the very substance of a man, his soul, and a field, a tree, a vine, that nature has offered in the beginning equally to all, and which the individual has only appropriated through cultivating it”

My first questions is, if this is the case, did he differentiate between the literary efforts of, lets say a novel, which he wrote as well, and his Encyclopedia whereby the former would be eligible for copyright protection (as it has to do with personal thoughts and originality) whereas the later would not because it was less about originality and more about cataloging human affairs, actions, and knowledge (though of course it did require work of the mind). Another more simple way of putting this is: did he desire/seek copyright protection for the Encyclopedia?

It is also worth noting that a good chunk of the Encyclopedia documented the practical arts or in other words, craft. As Richard Sennet describes it in his amazing book on craft making as follows: “It volumes exhaustively described in words and pictures how practical things get done and proposed ways to do them” (2008: 90). Remember too this was a project of collaboration and he apparently collaborated with many scientists as well.

So the subject matter was a domain of knowledge whose utility, so to speak, could come to fruition if it had an ability to be passed on person to person, generation to generation. This makes me want to know even more than I do (and I do want to know) whether he viewed copyright as appropriate for a literary work that basically described the practical arts and which was also created through the hands and minds of many (though he did did seem to sweat and labor more than anyone else.). Any thoughts? Answers?

I want this book. The problem is I don’t want to pay $324.79 for it either. Looks like a great collection of essays. It has one of my favorite articles on the history of intellectual property by Carla Hesse, which you can download for yourself here.

In a mere 20 pages she conveys not only a general history of IP law in Europe and the United States,(which she actually makes riveting) but captures the philosophical contradictions and problems that have marked and marred IP as it has traveled from nation to nation and as it has grown in scope and depth in the last 200 years. I cannot recommend it enough.

I am a big fan of zotero as it has helped me manage my research, especially collect, tag, time stamp, and keep web pages that are likely to vanish. I can’t recommend it enough. I have yet to use its bibliographic functionality and apparently it is this functionality which has made it the subject of what what looks like a pretty questionable law suit.

It has been a while since a IP lawsuit has really caught my attention (only in so far as it was the same old thing, not because it was not important) but this one definitely has caught my attention (and caught me off guard as well as I never really associated End Notes with Zotero, in so far as they seem to work pretty distinctly). I am eager to see how an academic institution, George Mason in this case, will react. I just hope they stand firm and also get some great legal team to help out.

Parties around the world were held yesterday to celebrate Software Freedom Day. I went to the NYC party which attracted an impressive number of people who were mingling and celebrating on the beautiful rooftop of Limegroup/Limewire office. Here are a few pictures and a short video of Eben Moglen who has done a whole lot to make software freedom a reality today.

The other night I was relishing in the irony that during the era when the American government became most regulation averse, fully touting and embracing the idea of free markets, it also had to save a core sector of our market, leading effectively to a partially nationalized financial sector. I was going to write about the irony made visible by our current financial crisis but Karl beat me to it and said it better than I could or did. Most papers have not mulled over this irony but here is one place where it was raised

One of my favorite things to watch are the “making of [movie, documentary etc] segments that are now routinely included in any DVD. It is nice to look behind the curtain and see exactly what choices are made, what is excluded, and why they are made.

I wish that more books, especially academic ones, had a “making of” section, giving a window into these choices. We are not exactly encouraged to include this commentary in the book itself but one can find this type of insight in author interview. I recently read one such interview with the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The interview is on his site and the original is here.

There are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting, such as how to treat iconic figures such as RMS and ESR [not as researchers, for example ] and the importance of letting your research and thinking brew over a fairly long period of time, despite the pressure of publishing fast, quick and dirty, which is especially strong with anything “digital.”

The book is hefty and long, but as is emphasized in the interview, it is also pragmatic and readable. If folks on Planet have not yet checked it out and are not ready to commit to a long book, I would checkout Chapter 6 on the creation of the copyleft. It is sure to please academics and geeks alike.