One of the Internet Archive’s newest sites, openlibrary.org, is set up to be a completely free, Web 2.0 operation. Yet it’s low profile and relatively specific topic (books and only books) have relegated it to a lonely corner of the internet with minimal use; despite it’s vast technical infrastructure for free culture, it has seen minimal participation. However, by lowering the barriers of entry even further in the future, it has the potential to see the same success as sites like Wikipedia have.

Also, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to be treating the phenomenon in question as if it is more narrow than it really is, but I do recognize that the specific community I’m looking at can’t be the only place where this is happening, and it’s certainly not the first place where it’s happened either. Still, it’s a really neat thing to watch.

The specific phenomenon I’m thinking of here is the growing tendency for non-programming communities to identify places where they need significant code projects, and the ways that those communities create, manage, and sustain those projects despite being made up primarily of people without coding backgrounds. And the specific community (or, perhaps, meta community) I’m looking at is online media fandom. These are the people who write fanfiction and obsessively debate the philosophic meanings of obscure (or popular) film, television, and books.

Media fandom is made up primarily of females, a group already under-supplied with coders. And since many members of fandom are interested in narrative and story, they tend to be drawn to liberal arts studies rather than more technical fields like computer science or engineering. This is, of course, simply a trend. There are plenty of technically brilliant members of the community, and some extremely good coders as well. And while most members may not have technological training, they do spend a lot of time online, and they’re quite intelligent, so they know quite a bit more than most lay-people.

Still, for big projects, especially projects which are primarily intended to solve a need within this relatively limited community, they don’t really have the critical mass of coders that would generally be considered necessary to kick off a major open-source effort. The fandom communities have figured out a few ways around that, and the pattern they’ve been using is really cool.

Now, it’s important to remember that there are technically minded and trained people in the community, so they’re not working in a total vacuum, but some of the projects the community has undertaken have been extremely ambitious. Not really the sort of thing you want to try to put together with just a handful of talented people.

The solution has turned out to be sort of stupidly simple: offer to train community members. When a project matters to the community in a way that it generates real support from a large portion of the members of that community, a call for enthusiasm and time will get a lot more responses than a call for experienced coders. By investing a chunk of coder time and energy in training and mentoring, a project which the community is committed to is quite capable of getting the eyes, minds, and coders it needs to be successful.

In some ways, Dreamwidth is a project in which this is taking place. There’s a decent amount of time spent in the Dev community (through blogs and IRC) on mentoring newbies. There’s a general sense that the more the merrier, and that everyone has to start somewhere. If someone is interested in helping, the group already doing code will work hard to make sure that there’s a place for that new person to contribute.

But the project that does this in a way that really gets me excited is the OTW-Archive project (http://archiveofourown.org/). The reason this project is so interesting is that it was built from the ground up to support this sort of interaction. The design team specifically decided to do their code in Ruby because they felt that Ruby was easy to learn for first-time coders and has a very strong body of existing tutorials.

I won’t go into all the reasons why the OTW-Archive is an important project for (and is seen as such by at least part of) the online media fandom community, but suffice to say that a lot of people were very excited about it when it was still just an idea being tossed around. Of course, given the excitement of the community, its size, and the fact that it does possess a number of very competent code people already, it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t entirely necessary to design a system from the ground up that makes it easy to train and integrate total newbies into the coding team. But in addition to widening the base of coders available by mentoring newbies and ensuring that it’s easy for them to get started, this approach does something else important for the project.

It gives the community of users (which is significantly larger than the community of coders) a stronger sense of ownership. They know that if they wanted to, this project of code is set up so that they can participate. This seems to help overcome the most common failing of open-source projects, especially ones oriented on social interaction: the coders are the only ones who feel like they own things. This approach, in which projects grow up from a community and spend a lot of time and energy training community members to accomplish the project themselves ensures that everyone has a stake, and that those with a stake who want to contribute can, even if they don’t have the background for it already.

The hard line between “coders” and “users” blurs. There are still those who write code, and there are still those who don’t, but as it becomes easier for the latter to become the former the entire project can blur down into something that is for the “community” as a whole, and not owned by one group or another.

I’d argue that the granularization of content provides more opportunities for context than ever before – Google just hasn’t invented the algorithms yet. Condensing information into their base parts isn’t useful out of simple laziness on the reader’s part – it’s setting the stage for next generation artificial intelligence. Lanier refers to this, but mistakes artificial intelligence as being useful only as a replacement for human decision making. But as this data shift occurs, the need for guesswork in algorithms declines. The data available will be so much more concrete that the collective intelligence (whether artificial or not) can interpret it more effectively, along the lines of the scientific entries Lanier confesses Wikipedia does so well.

The idea that we’re willing to “settle for less” in return for speed has been repeated by skeptics we’ve looked at throughout the semester – from those criticizing low-quality MP3 versions of music to reading Tweets for news. But this assumption relies on individuals operating on an either-or mentality. If I go the Wikipedia entry first, I won’t follow any references. If I read about an earthquake on Twitter, I’m not going to read the article about it in the Times the next day. Some of us go the extra distance, others don’t – but that’s always been the case. That’s a bit of a tangent, but so is staging half of your anti-Web 2.0 argument by blaming a new medium for a systemic apathy in our society.

This is bad news for net neutrality.  Comcast and other communication companies could begin to charge extras fees for high bandwidth content e.g. YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix.  While this decision gives the edge to the communication companies it would be bad for business if they did implement a tiered network.  A tiered internet could further legislation in Congress to grant the FCC more control over how the communication companies control their internet networks.  Google has recently said they will be installing 1 Gbps internet to a select few of towns.   Google’s business is dependent upon people using the internet. A tiered internet would be bad for business for Google and many other internet companies.  The federal government is also pushing for  a nationwide municipal internet. With Google getting into the ISP and the federal government wanting to establish a municipal ISP the debate over net neutrality could become a moot point.

The battle lines will now shift to US Congress and where the lobbyist of both sides of the issue will duke it out.

Paper & Presentation Due: April 28th

For your final project, you’ll actively participate in an online, open source, or free culture project. This means you’ll find a project (look for a list down below), sign up, and dive in. This can be anything from a particular Wikipedia subject (or project within the site), to an open source coding project, to a Flickr community. The main criteria is that it should:

• Specifically involve or invoke at least one of the topics we’re covering in class
• Be participatory and collaborative in nature — the more people involved with it the better, this shouldn’t be an individual project that you’ve been thinking about.
• Freely licensable (shareable under a copyleft license).

Then, you’ll write a longer paper (2000-3000 words) on the project and you’ll present the project and your experience to the class at the end of the semester.

Paper

Part of the paper will be focused on a concise but detailed history of the project, and will require research and references to primary sources. This means if you’re writing about a particular subject inside Wikipedia, you’ll want to describe and reference (via Talk Page Archives or individual snapshots of the pages) all the substantive components, arguments, and decisions that contributed to its current consensus. Similarly, if you’re discussing a general topic or event, you’ll want to detail its original inception, the ideas and principles that garnered it momentum, and so on.

What role does or did copyright play in your project’s history? What are the important legal decisions and relevant bits of copyright law that affect your project? How is it involved in the larger narrative of cultural production in a digital age?  And finally, to what extent does your topic implicate and problematize traditional commerce?

You will be graded on your attention to detail and understanding of the origins of the project, so it will be important to go beyond what the public may already know about it. I want to be convinced that you’re an expert on this subject, and you can demonstrate as much by going in-depth and delivering a narrative that might not have otherwise been heard.

In the second half of your paper, I want you to discuss your interaction with its community and the project as a whole. How did you find it? What were you able to achieve? What did you intend to achieve? What would you change if you did it again?

Using your experience with the project, I want you to critically analyze its successes and failures as a contemporary free culture project.

These are complex projects and their issues aren’t always black and white, but that doesn’t mean you can’t form your own conclusions supported by reasoned argument, evidence from primary sources, and points from our readings and class discussion.

As always, you should be referencing distinct points we’ve covered in our reading, but feel free to find other reliable sources to reference.

Presentation & Blog Post

Your presentation will effectively mirror structure of your paper, but you’ll only have 10 minutes to present the subject to your peers. This means you’ll have to spend approximately half of your time explaining in detail, the history of the topic and then move to a more qualitative analysis of it. Finally, you will be required to post a version of your presentation (preferably via Slideshare.net) on our blog, and write a brief summary explaining the topic and your points. This will be a public-facing version of the summation of your work for this class, so make sure you’re happy with it.

Non-Exhaustive List of Projects

Wikipedia (itself)
Any other Wikimedia Project
Wikipedia Article or Project
Any Wikia Project
SETI@Home
Foldit (formerly Folding@Home)
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Conservapedia
Students for Free Culture
A Flickr Group
OpenStreetMap
4chan
Ubuntu Brainstorm
Ubuntu Bug Tracking
Slashdot
ClickWorkers
RepRap
MakerBot
Open Video Alliance
Percussion Lab
Status.net
P2P University
Any Free / Open Source Software Project
Galaxy Zoo
Digital Proofreaders
RemixedMedia

Fred’s class is a big ongoing history lesson for recent history, where 5 years ago seems a real long way back. We delved back a little further than 5 years initially though. Since January, we’ve romped through topics such as the Statue of Anne, the concept of fair use, the DMCA, Eldred, Google Books, TOR, Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, Wikipedia and we’re still going…

This week we read Professor Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks – Chapter 3: Peer Production and Sharing. There’s only one small part I’m going to comment on this week, and it ties back to the “jeez , history just got way less dusty than I’m used to” point.

At the end of the chapter, there is a short discussion of spectrum policy. Professor Benkler explains the concept of a “spectrum commons” and the fact that WiFi sat in the realm of “low-power devices like garage openers and the spurious emissions of microwave ovens.” Now, unless you have been locked in a garage or had your head in a microwave oven over the past week or so you can’t have missed the ginormous amounts of press on the recent publication of the FCC’s Broadband Plan. The Plan addresses the issue of spectrum directly and according to the NYT, the FCC hopes to “free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters” (NYT, 02/12/10).

Spectrum is but one of many issues to be looked at as we try to improve the provision of broadband to US citizens, open access and increasing competition being of critical importance. I mention spectrum in this post specifically though to highlight how the history Fred is telling us about is very much evolving and changing. The fact that a piece published 4 years ago that are studying as ‘history’ is authored by someone who is in the press this weekend on these issues again, being debated, and considered – and of seriously critical importance: its great. I’m struggling for the right word, but essentially, if I have to study history, I like my history lessons to pop – happily they are snap-crackling at the moment.

A lackluster representation of Google about to beat up LVMH

Luxury brand giant LVMH just lost a suit against Google for selling their trademark brand names as keywords to non-LVMH companies looking to associate their sites with, for example, the Louis Vuitton name.  LVMH was pissed about two things in this case:

1. The possibility of losing control of their brands when searching for their uber-classy merchandise also yields sites promising “Authentic” designer handbags at impossibly low prices.
2. with all these crap-peddlers snatching up their brands as key words, the price for LVMH to buy its own brand names in Google AdWords has skyrocketed.

After several French rulings in favor of LVMH, the EU’s highest court responded to an appeal: cry me a river, fancy boy, Google’s not doing anything wrong. Or something like that.

Google’s victory in this case is being heralded as a major precedent-setting moment for the search engine. And, in the most cut and dry sense, this is a major victory both for Google’s bottom line and the level of accountability for the content of the advertisers that buy brand name AdWords. Look a tad more closely at the stipulations, however, and it’s not the out and out win Google would have liked.

First up, although Google can’t be held accountable for the content of sites advertising, they do have to remove ads for sites if the brand owner complains about any sort of blatant infringement. If they fail to do that, their lack of legal responsibility takes a nose dive. In terms of the sheer manpower that could be involved in managing these takedowns if brands get serious about monitoring and reporting, this is a bit of a blow to Google.

Secondly, Google could be held liable for selling search terms that are determined to encourage counterfeiting (ex: fake Christian Louboutin shoes). Given that Google has a history of taking down link to obvious counterfeiting sites when notified, this isn’t too much of a blow. But these cases, if brought to court, will be judged individually to determine whether or not Google accepted the ad buy in good faith or maliciously knowing that the purchaser intended to sell fakes. Again, this is a potential man power/salary issue that feels a bit unnecessary given Google’s relatively good faith record.

Thoughts?