Planet NYC

Coming June 15th to NYC Resistor, the 2013 Interactive Show.  We’re still soliciting for a few more projects, but we’ve already got a great menagerie of really interesting & fun work lined up.  This year’s theme is Digital Archeology.  Expect to see the old, and the old hacked into new… Our show usually sells out far in advance, so don’t dawdle. Get your tickets here: http://interactiveshow2013.eventbrite.com/

Max Klein's recent posting on Sex Ratios in Wikidata, Wikipedias, and VIAF as well as work by Nathan Matias prompted me to check if I ever published my code behind the Wikipedia vs Britannica gender comparison. Apparently I did not. However, you can now see (and use) the two little functions I used to guess the gender of a biographical subjects: guess_gender_name and guess_gender_pronoun.

As a followup to our reverse engineering and configuration of 6DOF PUMA robot arms, we’ve updated our controller source code to have full closed form inverse kinematics support. The math is based on A Geometric Approach in Solving the Inverse Kinematics of PUMA Robots, by Lee and Ziegler (1983). Due to the configuration of prismatic and rotational joints in the PUMA arms, it is possible to derive a two part direct trigonometric solutions to the IK problem for this type of arm.

The IK solution uses the DH Parameters to compute the three joint angles for the major axes (the rotation around the stalk, the upper-arm angle, and the fore-arm angle) such that the center of the spherical joint will be placed at a given XYZ position. There are two binary additional binary parameters for this configuration: RIGHT/LEFT controls the orientation of the arm on the right or left side of the stalk, and OVER/UNDER for the configuration of the elbow pointing up or down. See figure 5 in the paper for a diagram of the four possible combinations of these two parameters.

Once the first three theta angles are known, the second phase of the IK solution computes the last three wrist joint angles given the third binary parameter UP/DOWN, and three vectors: the “approach vector” a[] that points in the direction of the tool, the “sliding vector” s[] that points in the direction of the grasping joint, and the “normal vector” n[] that points towards the top of the tool. Figure 4 from the paper shows the relationship of these three vectors in the hand coordinate system.

This video shows the IK iterating between two points (in RIGHT and OVER mode) and generating a piecewise linear path that holds the tool (a cheap pen) mostly level on a constant heading aligned with the X axis. It is a little jerky since the motor controllers don’t have a way to chain commands between points and my calibration on the joint lengths and angles isn’t perfect. Also note that the wrist joints are cross-coupled and require proportional adjustments based on the other joints positions, so the code has some fudge factors to try to account for this behaviour. There are also some corner cases to be sorted out when the “best” joint angles switch quadrants, which will swing the tool around in a circle.

The code isn’t super clean and can use some refactoring to move the DH parameters into a config file, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the human readable code compared to the machine generated ikfast output.

Rapid prototyping tools are great for quick hacks, but their real power lies in their ability to allow you to quickly iterate and refine a design. Earlier this week I hacked together a primitive nine-channel punched paper tape reader, but it had a number of limitations: the LEDs that I was using to read the bits were noisy and slow, the materials used didn’t mask the light well enough, the tape wasn’t mechanically aligned well, the electronics were a mess and the entire mechanism was difficult to use. This Friday, I decided to do what my third-grade teacher would tell me to do every time I half-assed something: go back and do it right.

This time I used proper phototransistors and IR LEDs I scrounged up around the space (thanks, Miria and Raphael!). Because they’re 5mm in diameter (and the spacing between channels is only 2.54mm), I had to come up with a new sensor packing. This one reads bits from four separate columns over a space of five columns, requiring an internal buffer of five columns to reconstruct a single column of data. Even so, the spacing was tight, and I had to sand down the flanges of the phototransistors and LEDs to make everything fit. I milled simple PCBs for both sides to keep things nice and neat, and used a small surface-mount potentiometer to limit the current to the LEDs in case the paper wasn’t thick enough to block enough light. The light mask is made of black acetal this time, and the spacers include runners to help keep the tape straight. There’s still no automatic feed mechanism, but we now have a reader that’s fast and reliable enough to read tapes in earnest.

The updated code, mechanical drawings, and PCB designs are all up on Github. There are still a few tweaks we’d want if we were going to scan more tapes, but this version works very well. Now we just have to figure out what to do with all these PDP-8 binaries. Any ideas?

(Note to time-travelling computer conservators: in the past/future, please do not store your paper tapes in damp basements. These programs are stinky. The Fortran compiler, in particular, is exceptionally foul. Yours truly, phooky.)

Ever wanted to trick your nails out with a paint-job worthy of notice?  This is how… and no need to pay a salon $50 for the glory.  We’ll teach you how on Saturday (5:30-8:30pm) after our Laser Class, using templates stamps and other techniques.  We’ll have a small selection of polishes, so if you’re after a specific color combo you may want to bring your own. Tickets still available here– be prepared to come with a base-coat or to add one while you’re there.  GUYS WELCOME! (Remember you can also paint your toes).

Trammell came across a cache of punched paper tape recently. My immediate impulse was to create the most primitive tape reader possible. Thusly:

The rig is composed of a Teensy++ 2.0, eighteen red LEDs, eighteen resistors, and a few bits of laser-cut plastic. LEDs are used to both illuminate the paper and sense the holes. The sensor design is based on the classic Arduino LED sensing code. It’s not very reliable, but it’s a fun afternoon proof-of-concept.

If you’re interested, the code and design files are up on github.

Some of you may remember the last installment in our on-going series on computational necromancy, where I made a call out to the internet to help revive my bit-rotted copy of the once-lost Cray Operating System. An amazing programmer named Andras has answered that call in a way I would have never thought possible – he not only used his kung-fu to recover an intact copy of COS from my disk image, he wrote a simulator for an entire data center worth of Cray X-MP equipment and got it to boot!

If anyone has been sitting on Cray-1 or Cray X-MP software (or you just have some idea of how to use COS!) for the last 30 or so years, now is the time to come out of the woodwork! Get in touch with me or Andras and we’ll make it happen.

Go, download the simulator and have your own simulated 1980′s data-center! Or just read his incredible write-up on his progress so far!

Last January the Pirate Party polled its lowest vote in eighteen months in the regional elections in Niedesachsen: 2.1%. Some commentators  minimized the significance of this because the region is relatively rural and somewhat short on the demographic which has comprised the core of Pirate support: (male), young and urban dwellers. But even where such voters were to be found in numbers – Hanover, Braunschweig, Oldenberg and Göttingen – they scored very badly, rarely exceeding 3%. Overall they did not even approach the 5% threshold required to enter the regional Parliament.

More ominously for the Pirate’s future prospects the Green Party vote grew strongly, a source from which they have successfully syphoned quite some support in the last eighteen months. Federal elections take place this September (alongside regionals in Bavaria and  Hessen) but the PP’s chances of success are fading; opinion polls in recent months have them languishing around 3%

Recipe for Disaster

In part it’s a familiar story: a party, propelled to success by a generalised alienation from the political class, finds itself the beneficiary of protest votes and the falls out of fashion. Here it must be said that their elected representatives have attempted to transform themselves into ‘serious politicians’ in a most boring fashion, and without any success. Instead, the effort to define themselves coherently on a national level has led them to disintegrating.

This fragmentation derives from the lack of a clear (or even vague?) ideological framework framework. This is encapsulated in the tension over the policy demand for the basic income – as supported by the Berlin party – and the vision of the pirates as a social liberals in some other regions. This latter position would include party leader Bernd Schlumer, as well as the vice Sebastien Nerz (a former member of the Christian Democrats), and is now evolving its own internal organisational caucus in the form of the so-called the Frankfurt Kollegium. Meanwhile Johannes Ponader, the former political secretary  perceived as being on the left, has committed hara-kiri, after having been subjected to a public lynching cheered on by a media scandalised at his unashamed drawing of social welfare and pruriently fascinated by his ‘polyamorous lifestyle’.  All this has been accompanied by regular resignations from the collective leadership exposing a serious lack of solidarity from bottom to top. Mantras about the modernisation of politics through technology, participation and transparency are evidently not adequate.

To make matters worse the Pirates will go into the September’s election at a major financial disadvantage. Party financing in Germany is sourced largely from the state. The amount received is based on a formula whose essential elements are (i) number of votes received (ii) amount of money raised from own members. Because the Pirates have few fee paying members (perhaps as low as 11,000) they will get just 800,000 euros, despite their recent electoral success. To put this in context, two extreme right parties the NPD and Republikaner will receive a million and a half each – neither of these parties are in the Federal Parliament and both have been massively outvoted by the Pirates in regional elections over the last eighteen months. The CDU will receive 46 million! Elections are about money, and the PP not having much means that they cannot afford full time employees and all that stuff.

And while 2011 it was enough for the PP to be the ‘party of the internet’ in order to attract some support, but their sweep of victories awakened the other parties to the branding upgrade they required. In the last year both CDU and SPD have launched their own digital associations in an attempt to close the modernity deficit. In the debate over the introduction of a neighbouring right for newspapers even the CSU’s digital politics speaker opposed the so-called Google tax.

When in Doubt, Digital Rights are Always Good…

Now I’m sceptical about elections and representative democracy etc but if you’re going to play the game, hey, be smart about it, rather than behaving like a bunch of ingenues. Instead, even on issues which they should own they appear incapable of communicating their positions.

Most recently Telekom has been kite-flying the end of flat-rate broadband in a move which spells a clear threat to net neutrality and likely also a move to increase the gouging of consumers. Likewise the Government has failed to put an end to the copyright shakedown industry knows as the ‘abmahnung process’ whereby as many as 4.3 million internet users have received demands from lawyers for copyright infringement payments (between 400 and 2000 euros) in the last seven years. In all of the fractiousness they might want to get back to what they know to be shared ground. More will be revealed at the next party conference which takes place this month in Neustadt.

Recently, some have claimed that the English Wikipedia was "segregating" female novelists.

I don't follow the complexities of WP as closely as I once did but classification is one of those seemingly innocuous, nerdy things that is more difficult and profound than one would think. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote a (now classic) book entitled Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences in 1999 that showed how nurses' work and the racial distinctions in South Africa reflected the biases and power structures of their societies; they wrote "Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration" (p. 33). For instance, my understanding of this Wikipedia case is that Amanda Filipacchi's conclusion was correct: some women had been moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" and this was viewed as a demotion.

However, while this can be used as an example of androcentrism or perhaps the work of misguided contributors, it doesn't recognize that the design, function and implementation of categories is far trickier than we might think.

Taxonomy: How ought we organize our conceptual world?

Since the Enlightenment most encyclopedia abandoned earlier efforts to create a taxonomy of knowledge and simply provided entries via alphabetical order: it's that hard. (Encyclopedia Britannica's Propædia was an effort to try to retain some sort of integrated view of knowledge but was in no way comprehensive.) While Wikipedia is sometimes characterized as a "Web 2.0" site, this system of categories and subcategories is out of step with sites that simply permit people to tag things, and then query those tags.

Manageability: What makes a good category page?

In an attempt to create a taxonomy of concepts and related articles, you might end up with massive pages. Hence, many of the decisions at Wikipedia aren't so much about taxonomy but usefulness, and massive pages aren't useful. Hence, there are efforts to pare down pages when possible by moving things to subcategories, which I think is what was happening here.

Biases: How do categories reflect social/historical biases?

Yet, the notion that men are the default is problematic. Why should women be "dumped" in a subcategory? (Similarly, Sam Klein noted that male beauty pageants are separated from beauty pageants.)

Wikipedia's guideline permits gender specific subcategories "where gender has a specific relation to the topic."

For example, Category:Women contains articles such as International Women's Day, Women's studies, and female-specific subcategories. Similarly, Category:Men contains articles such as father, men's studies, boy and human male sexuality, as well as male-specific subcategories. Neither category, however, should directly contain individual women or individual men.

Women novelists doesn't strike me as "a specific relation" and I believe the movement of authors was more of an effort to pare down the size of the page.

Meaning: Is being moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" a "demotion"?

I think so, and most agree this is problematic. Indeed, while the Wikipedia guideline recognized "specific relation" subcategories, instances of those subcategories should still be included in the parent category. In the example of heads of government "Both male and female heads of government should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category (e.g. Presidents, Monarchs, Prime Ministers, Governors General)."

Usefulness: Is being able to easily find "American Women Novelists" useful?

Indeed. As Liz Henry and Sarah Stierch have argued, attempts to delete/neuter pages about women novelists, scientists, and others are also problematic.

Technology: How best to implement the functionality we want?

Is it possible that instances of a subcategory could also show up alongside instances of a parent category? This isn't technically supported now and parent category pages would continue to be massive. Could we instead have tags (instead of categories and taxonomy) which are queryable (e.g., "show me all novelists who are also female")? This is the "Web 2.0" way of things, and can be done, but its not how Wikipedia is presently built.

Practice: Imperfect

I continue to be surprised Wikipedia works at all. Many Wikipedians often do their best, but it is very messy: sometimes there is little consensus and people do things in good faith without understanding the implications. This work can also be incremental and haphazard, giving an incomplete or confusing picture at any specific moment in time, or reveal a latent and distributed bias.

Given the technology on hand, I think it makes sense to create "specific relation" pages but ensure their content is not presented as segregated or less-than other content.

A year ago Super Awesome Sylvia demoed MarioChron for the Adafruit MonoChron dekstop clock kit. It’s really neat — once per minute Mario hits the box and receives a coin, so his score is equal to the time. Now thanks to the GPL license on the code, you can carry it on your wrist with the port of MarioChron to the Pebble Smart Watch:

You can install the prebuilt mario.pbw binary and the source is available for further hacking. Here’s a short video of Mario’s coin collecting action (the jump height has since been fixed in the source code).

The code is a straightforward port that reuses almost all of the original logic. The only change is to rearrange the screen slightly from the MonoChron’s 128×64 LCD to the Pebble’s 168×144. This involved translating the glcdClearDot() and glcdSetDot() calls to 2×2 rectangles using the Pebble’s graphics_fill_rect() functions. Unfortunately the e-paper display on the Pebble is designed for mostly static images, and updating it at 10 Hz for the animation draws far more power than a once-per-minute clock face. This means that this watch face consumes lots of power and the Pebble only lasts part of one day instead of an entire week. Perhaps optimizing the redraws instead of redrawing the entire screen would let it last longer.

Want to learn how to write your own watches for the Pebble? Sign up for the May 18 Pebble programming class at NYCR or come to the hackathon after!

We just hit a few inflection points at MakerBot. It's an exciting time for the company and the industry.



The biggest shift was last September when we launched the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer and the new MakerWare. By being made with a chassis of powder coated steel and with a number of refreshing updates, it's a machine that professionals can feel proud to have on their desk. The wooden machines we made were awesome and each of the 3 previous generations were leaders in the category at that time, but the Replicator 2 is black. The users that have shown up to get this new MakerBot are a mix of professionals getting a jump on the innovation process.  



MakerWare was a shift away from ReplicatorG. It's a lot easier to use and streamlines the whole process of moving a digital design from your computer to your MakerBot. Our software team worked hard to make it simpler and more powerful.

In December we moved offices. At the old botcave, I had rented anything on the block that we could put desks into and it had become a rabbit warren. With our new office, I focused on keeping things simple with simple desks and we spent our buildout money on nice ergonomic chairs. People work hard at MakerBot and it's a lot easier to work hard when you've got good posture in a nice chair.



Thingiverse Customizer is an application that runs on Thingiverse that allows people to make things that can be customized. This new class of customizable things is huge. It means that a lot of people who haven't thought of themselves as designers get to jump into the world of digital design. Want to try it? Check out the lithopanes project, as seen above and make an awesome 3D model!



At MakerBot, we're making great partnerships with companies that innovate. We worked with Nokia to create backs that go right on the Lumia series phones. We've teamed up with Autodesk to do some wonderful things too.

MakerBot is hiring! We've got a lot of work to do and we're looking for people to help us. Go to the MakerBot jobs page to check it out.

This is all just some of the stuff that we're working on. The game is on and we're focused on making wonderful things happen in the world.

As a CEO, I've grown a lot. I used to be the guy who wanted to do everything myself and now we're 200 people and I've got a team that reports to me and each one is a ninja in their field. I love coming to work. I enjoy the people I get to work with. Life is busy, full of hard work, and good!

What time is it? It’s time to #MakeAwesomeHappen and learn to program the new Pebble Smart Watch! We’ll be teaching a three hour class on 18 May on how to write custom watch faces that work with the official Pebble SDK. The programming environment is low-level C, with no memory protection, and no emulator nor a debugger, so you’ll need to be fairly comfortable with writing embedded code or at least not afraid to debug with printf()*. If you’ve programmed a device like an Arduino you should be ok with the class. Tickets for the class are on sale for $125. The hackathon afterwards is free!

If you haven’t heard of it, Pebble was the wildly successfull kickstarter project that pre-sold over 80,000 watches. The watch has a 144×168 transreflective e-paper display, an ARM M3, Bluetooth, an accelerometer and lots of potential. MyPebbleFaces has a few hundred ideas for fun projects and many people have already programmed their dream watch faces.

After the class, we’ll be holding an all-night hackathon to write some new watches. Developers from Team Pebble will be here to hack with us and help answer any deep questions about the API. The hackathon is open to everyone with a Pebble and is a great chance to meet other wearable wrist-watch computing enthusiasts in New York. If you don’t have your Pebble yet or don’t want to risk your prized wristwatch, we’ll have a limited quantity of factory seconds that might not be waterproof, might have glue bubbles, or discoloured bezels or other QC issues available for $75. Tickets for the class and hackable watches are available here!

Get that Club Mate cold and those soldering irons hot because it’s time for another Interactive Show! We’re putting out the call to hackers around the globe to come show your stuff at our annual party.

This years theme: Digital Archeology. Think old technology with a new purpose, or new technology retropackaged to look vintage. As always anything interactive applies so use your imagination.

We’re targeting mid-June so there’s plenty of time to get involved. If you’re interested in participating drop us a line.

ANVC Scalar looks very promising:

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. …

The feature list and the showcase look great. If this tool is even half as good as it seems to be, the world will be a better place.

There’s just one problem: the code isn’t open source.

I couldn’t find the source code linked to from their site. [Update: I eventually found a link to it, when I re-trawled the site one last time after having already written most of this post. The link is from their sign-up page, but the license stated there, the ECL-2.0, is not the same license as actually found in their source code snapshot. See below for details.]. There’s a contact form, which one could use to ask them for the source code, but hmm, that’s not how these things are usually done. The only message I could find about development was this:

Development Roadmap: Scalar is in ongoing development. This spring 2013 beta release provides broad public access to the platform via the Scalar servers (click the orange “sign up” button to get started.) While many authors have experimented with Scalar during our alpha phase, we are eager to roll the platform out to even more users. We look forward to hearing from you.

It’s perfectly fine to be planning to be open source and just not have gotten there yet, of course (though it’s usually a much better strategy to just be open from day one instead of waiting for everything to be perfect before going public under an open source license — the advantages of open source are greater the sooner in the development process you open up). But what the Scalar site says is that the software is open source: present tense. That’s only meaningful if there is source code released publicly under an open source license.

I finally resorted to Google: search://github anvcscalar/ (after github+scalar didn’t get useful results), and found their Github repository at github.com/anvc/scalar:

Congratulations on discovering Scalar, the next generation in media-rich, scholarly electronic publishing!

If you just want to create a Scalar project, the easiest route is to work from our servers. You can register and learn more at http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/ . Using the version of Scalar that is hosted on our servers guarantees that you are working on the most up-to-date version of the software. During our beta phase, updates will continue to happen with some frequency as features are added, user feedback is incorporated and Scalar continues to broaden the horizons of electronic publishing. If you are technically inclined and decide to host your own version of Scalar, you’re free to customize and modify it in any way, but it’s up to you to download, install and troubleshoot updates as they become available.

We are also very grateful for all feedback based on your experiences using Scalar. We are especially interested to know where and how you are using it, innovative or unexpected uses of Scalar, requests for features, opportunities for future development, potential press, archive or scholarly society partnerships, as well as reports on any bugs or difficulties you may experience. Learn more at http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/

So, is the open source code to Scalar really here? Well… sort of and sort of not. There is a complete source tree, and an “INSTALL.txt” file whose instructions look like they would get that version of Scalar up and running. But there’s only one significant code commit, from 11 days ago (March 30th): the initial import of a source code snapshot, under their own custom license that does not appear to be an open source / free software license as recognized by the OSI and the FSF. The restrictions placed by the license are not onerous, but I’m not sure the indemnification clause is compatible with the Open Source Definition, and clause 4 disallows anonymous and pseudonymous redistribution of modified versions, which I believe is also incompatible (as well as being a bad idea):

4. Any files that have been modified must carry notices stating the nature of the change and the names of those who changed them.

There are other potential problems with the license, but I won’t go into them here. The point is, this is not an open source license. So, stacking up the situation:

• You can’t find the code from their site, at least not from the expected places. But if you’re persistent and use a search engine, you can find it.

• They’re not doing development in the open. Instead, they’ve dumped one code snapshot out to the public, and it’s not clear at what intervals they will put out the next ones. There’s no public forum for development discussion, nor is there any public bug tracker. (Alternatively: maybe these things all exist and I just couldn’t find them?)

• The license is not an open source license, though this appears to be more by accident than design — they clearly do intend to be open source. The best way would just be to use a recognized open source license, because even if they fixed the issues in theirs, people would still have to learn yet another custom one-off license. (There’s no need for them to spell out the trademark protections as they do because a copyright license does not imply trademark permissions anyway.)

It’s the point about not being under an open source license that makes them “officially” not yet open source. But the other points are important too. While you can be technically open source while doing development in a closed manner, why would you want to?

None of the above denigrates their technical achievement so far: the software is pretty exciting, and I hope these issues get resolved soon, because it would be great to have a tool like this available as open source software. I took the time to write about Scalar both because the project looks so interesting, and because what their current situation (open-source-wise) is not uncommon. We often see projects using the words “open source” without quite getting the tune. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix if they want to.

I haven’t been a pen guy since I wasted too many hours spinning and flipping them in high school. Who really writes by hand anymore? But then I started pocketing these graph-ruled moleskine reporter notebooks and thus began the hunt for a pen that could perfect the notebook experience. A few months ago, I finally settled on Muji gel ink hex pens with 0.3mm tips.

I tried a lot of different pens while feeling out what my requirements for a little notebook pocket pen. This one meets almost all of them. For example, it skates across the page like a greased puck on ice. Some pens accomplish this by looding the page with ink, but I write small, especially in a tiny mileskine. I require a sharp, precise line. The Muji keeps a narrow, wet, gliding tip that dries fast and doesn’t bleed along the paper’s fibers.

Also, I lose pens faster than a politician can break your heart, so I can’t abide gold-plated pocket clips and heirloom rosewood barrels. These pens clock in at $3.75 apiece. When I lose them I mourn the lost pen, not the cash.

Because the pen is going to sit in my pocket, I want something light and not too thick. The Muji is like a pencil in weight and shape. It’s longer than I want in a pocket pen, but it works well enough. I might cut one down to see how short I can make it.

The downside to this pen is the cap. It sits snug on the barrel, and I’ve not lost one yet, but it nags at me when I stow it in my pocket. And the flimsy plastic in the pocket clip feels like it might break, so I don’t use it. I’m going to pick up the refillable click point version of these pens, although I think they’re a little ugly.

For a $3.75 pen I’m going to lose, I don’t fred durability, but one thing bears note: I dropped one and it fell perfectly straight down on the point. It never wrote smoothely after that, so I replaced it. I can’t tell yet whether this is an issue.

If you want to get fancy, the pen comes in a rainbow of colors. I’ve tried black, blue, red and purple. All show up vividly and contrast and coordinate nicely with each other. For a few bucks more, you can pick three colors and put them in a click pen. This is pricey at $7.50 and the 3-color pen is thicker than I’d like, but the convenience of having black plus two accent colors (I write action items in red) is hard to beat.

As a pocket pen for small notebook use, the Muji pen is great. This isn’t the pen for writing on a crumpled up paper bag or to letter a sign, but in the little private world formed by my head, my hand and my notebook, it’s just about perfect. My moleskine now gets constant rather than sporadic use, and that more than anything is what puts this pen in my pocket every day.

I just read Evgeny Morozov’s critique of Tim O’Reilly in the Baffler. It misses its mark pretty widely. I know Tim, and have worked with him on some of the things mentioned in the piece, and I don’t recognize the man Morozov thinks he’s found.

The article is profoundly intellectually ungenerous. If there are N ways to interpret something, Morozov picks the one that most matches his thesis, whether or not that’s the interpretation that makes the most sense in context. He also indulges in guilt-by-association and guilt-by-superficial-similarity. So what that Eric Raymond likes guns? So what if some things Tim says are similar to some things Ayn Rand said? Does that mean Tim O’Reilly is any closer to being a libertarian, second-amendment-quoting Randian? (He’s not — far from it. I’m not either, but some of my friends are. I wonder what Morozov would say.)

I’m increasingly disenchanted by Morozov’s apparent belief that he is a more careful and rigorous thinker than, well, everyone. This piece contained a great example of why. Morozov starts out by quoting O’Reilly:

Expanding on this notion of “algorithmic regulation,” O’Reilly reveals his inner technocrat:

I remember having a conversation with Nancy Pelosi not long after Google did their Panda search update, and it was in the context of SOPA/PIPA. . . . [Pelosi] said, “Well, you know, we have to satisfy the interests of the technology industry and the movie industry.” And I thought, “No, you don’t. You have to get the right answer.” So that’s the reason I mentioned Google Panda search update, when they downgraded a lot of people who were building these content farms and putting low quality content in order to get pageviews and clicks in order to make money and not satisfy the users. And I thought, “Gosh, what if Google had said, yeah, yeah, we have to sit down with Demand Media and satisfy their concerns, we have to make sure that at least 30 percent of the search results are crappy so that their business model is preserved.” You wouldn’t do that. You’d say, “No, we have to get it right!” And I feel like, we don’t actually have a government that actually understands that it has to be building a better platform that starts to manage things like that with the best outcome for the real users. [loud applause]

Here O’Reilly dismisses the entertainment industry as just “wrong,” essentially comparing them to spammers. But what makes Google an appropriate model here? While it has obligations to its shareholders, Google doesn’t owe anything to the sites in its index. Congress was never meant to work this way. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws with too much overreach, but to claim that the entertainment industry has no legitimate grievances against piracy seems bizarre.

Now, wait a second. Tim was spot-on. He’s pointing out the big problem of representative democracy: the distortion inherent in the transactional, seat-at-the-table model, the distortion that comes from having interest groups with deep pockets. They become, effectively, first-order constituents even though they’re not citizens. Tim reminded the listener that the explicit purposes of copyright law do not include pleasing any particular corporate actors — industry can be a means to an end, in these laws, but it’s not supposed to be an end in itself. If government can achieve the stated ends without making Demand Media happy, then it is free to do so. Of course, that’s understandably difficult for politicians in practice… But Morozov’s refutation isn’t about implementation details. It’s about the philosophy, the underlying purpose:

While it has obligations to its shareholders, Google doesn’t owe anything to the sites in its index. Congress was never meant to work this way. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws with too much overreach, but to claim that the entertainment industry has no legitimate grievances against piracy seems bizarre.

Read that carefully: Morozov is saying that, while Google is only strictly speaking responsible to its shareholders, Congress’s responsibility includes satisfying… industrial/corporate constituents? Not merely as a means, but actually as a first-order end??

Uh? Can he really mean that?

I assume he doesn’t, and that rather he’s just not thinking very carefully. Earlier in the essay, Morozov seemed just fine with the idea of “disrupting someone’s business model”. I guess he’s just not in favor of Tim O’Reilly being in favor of it.

(See how easy a Morozov-style takedown of Morozov is?)

Tim bounces a lot of big ideas around. Anyone sincerely looking for something to criticize could find something useful to say (and in many cases Tim would appreciate it, and even change his mind). Yet when Morozov gets close to one of these things, he shies away from making an effective criticism, and instead opts to make Tim’s ideas look bad through shallow, associative analysis, without saying outright what would be a better idea. Morozov provides no constructive analysis; he wants someone to be wrong, but he doesn’t particularly care what’s right. This is just Andrew Breitbart for intellectuals.

Big ideas have porous boundaries, but that isn’t the same as being meaningless. A good critic recognizes the useful big ideas, and after puncturing them helps define their boundaries better, or else counters with other ideas — puts something on the line, actually comes out and says something capable of being refuted. Morozov never takes the second steps. He plants seeds of doubt, but takes no responsibility for the crop that results.

(Update: O’Reilly himself seems to have had a similar reaction to mine.)

So, once in a while, I wake up feverish in the middle of the night, screaming “CLAMPS! I NEED MORE CLAMPS!” Oh, you too, huh?

It’s your lucky day! Or rather, this coming Sunday, April 7th is your lucky day, when NYCR and our good friends at the Industry City Distillery will be having our first-ever garage sale. We’ll be selling all kinds of hardware oddities, including:

• Clamps!
• Hand tools!
• Power tools!
• Strange, unidentifiable tools meant for neither hand nor eye!
• Microscopes! Boroscopes!
• Audio equipment! Video equipment! Audiovisual equipment!
• Files! Floppy diskettes! Raw steel! Cooked steel!
• A vertical mill! (U-buy, U-move!)
• Clamps!
• Files!
• Electronic bits! Non-electronic bits!
• More VHS recorders than you’re prepared to buy!
• aaannnddd moooooorrrreeee!!!

We’ll be having the sale in beautiful Industry City, Brooklyn, in association with the Industry City Distillery, manufacturers of incredible spirits. Come by to buy! Come by to browse! Come by to meet amazing people!

The sale starts at 11:30 AM, Sunday, April 7th and continues until sunset, at which point we’ll just start calling it a party. The address is 33 35th Street, Brooklyn, NY, just two blocks downhill from the 36th Street Station on the D, N, and R trains. It’s just one stop on the N train from NYCR.

See y’all Sunday!

(We’re not kidding about the mill.)

No doubt somewhere there is a blog which rigorously documents works brought into the public domain by the expiration of their copyright – but I haven’t found it yet. In Europe the rule for print is simple: seventy years after the death of the author. For our purposes that means that the books/articles etc of authors who died in 1942. Three authors from the long list here caught my eye.

Franz Boas spent a lot of time in Berlin before leaving Germany for the US, partially driven by anti-Semitism. There he became one of the founders of modern anthropology and an important opponent of those who sought to legitimise racial inequality on the basis of biology. Boas died in the company of Levi-Strauss after lunch in Columbia University where he had taught for many years. A couple of his texts are up on Project Gutenberg, but rather little considering the scale of his ouput.

Sticking with anthropology I came across the work of Bronislaw Malinowski while reading Marcel Mauss’s “The Gift” where he is cited as authority on the patterns of gift circulation in Melanesia. He did extensive fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands and is credited for coining the term of ‘participant observation’. Notwithstanding his fame Malinowski has been heavily criticised by other anthropologists for his racist attitudes towards the Trobrianders whom he treats ‘primitives’ in his diaries.

Lastly Robert Musil, born in Austria, he lived for much of the 1920s in Berlin but returned to Vienna in 1933, where he remained until the Anschluss when he and his Jewish wife fled for Switzerland. His “Man Without Qualities”, an unfinished trilogy, is a much admired modernist novel, and has been lingering on my endless reading list for some time now. The first two parts were published prior to his death, but the last instalment was released posthumously by his wife in 1943.

All entered the public domain on January 1st this year, although in the case of Musil this obviously applies only to the German original of his works – the english translations which appeared int he 1950s will have separate copyrights of their own.

I just upgraded Planeteria to Python3. It took half an hour. I ran 2to3, upgraded some dependencies, ran 2to3 on a few manually and I was done. It just worked. Like magic.

Now to do some upgrades and deploy it.

Godwin's feminist corollary: As an online discussion about sexism continues, the probability of a woman who speaks out being called a feminazi approaches 1.

Anita's irony: Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.

I've long been fascinated by the varied "laws" and "rules" of life online. Indeed, in 1999 I compiled an extensive list of quotations that "capture the governance of memes as social norms on the Internet." In 2010, my book about Wikipedia and good faith collaboration made use of Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

In light of the maelstrom of discussion around Adria Richards this past week and the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian last year I've been struck by how gendered the laws and rules are. Many of the aphorisms I collected in 1999 are influenced by the libertarian take on "freedom" that I now question in "Free as in Sexist?". The "Rules of the Internet" emerged from 4chan culture and are written from the perspective of sexually-frustrated young men who have a penchant for (underage) porn. From any other perspective, there are other patterns to online conversation that are seemingly, unfortunately inevitable. Hence, I've coined a few laws of my own (though I'm sure their naming and specification could be improved.) Feel free to tweak or add your own!

The RSS feed for this site is now fixed. Thanks, Gunnar.

At the bottom of this otherwise good article is a little circle with the label “604 Kudos” next to it (the number will be different by the time you see it):

If you move your mouse pointer into that circle, without clicking, the circle reacts and the text changes for a second or so to “Don’t move”… then a moment later the picture is a little heart and the kudo count has been incremented by one. You’ve apparently kudo’d this article even though you didn’t click!

WTF? That’s so obviously wrong that I am at a loss to explain how any web designer could possibly have thought it was okay. If there is one user interface contract every user knows, it’s that “If you didn’t click, you didn’t do it”. Even without that bizarre “Don’t move” imperative, it would have been a bad idea; with the imperative, it’s an intentional bad idea. What are we going to see next? Click-through EULAs that don’t actually wait for you to click, but claim your agreement because you hovered your mouse pointer in the wrong place?

This isn’t just a dark road. It’s a dark and silly road. Designers, resist please.

For some reason, I’ve always liked pictures that manage to capture the mood of music. Perhaps it’s because of the inherent impossibility of a still image showing something we experience dynamically as sounds over time. Such pictures are literally evocative, because second-order evocation is all they can do — they can remind you of a completely non-visual experience, but you have to fill in the rest.

Here are some photos of that kind, of Rick Perlstein playing jazz (excellently) at my place recently:

OpenITP’s first round of 2013 project funding is still open for proposals! The deadline for application is 31 March 2013

Contact: sandraordonez {_AT_} openitp.org

Reposted from OpenITP.org (see also the OpenITP FAQ for answers to common questions about applying for an OpenITP project grant):

Should your project apply? Here’s some help deciding:

OpenITP project grants are meant to support specific technical efforts to improve users’ ability to circumvent censorship and surveillance on the Internet. “Technical” doesn’t have to mean software or hardware — for example, we also consider efforts to improve user experience through translation, testing, projects to improve documentation, meetings that get developers together in person to solve specific problems, etc. The main thing we’re looking for is that your proposed project is finite (e.g. has a deadline, is scoped) and contributes to OpenITP’s core mission of enabling freedom of communication on the Internet.

We’re interested in all good proposals, but note we’re especially receptive to proposals that improve user experience (UX) and in translation (of both software and documentation). Don’t take that as a filter, though: if you have a good proposal that’s not about UX or translation, we still want to receive it.

While our grants don’t have a hard limit, they tend to be in the $5k-$30k USD range: enough to fund a specific piece of work, or to provide seed funding for a new idea, but not enough to be a primary long-term funding source. Therefore we try not to burden applicants with a lot of bureaucratic overhead and paperwork to apply for a grant. It’s enough to send us a brief description of what you have in mind, and point to public URLs for further details. Since we only fund open source work, we expect that most proposals we receive will already have been discussed in publicly-archived forums anyway, and perhaps written up on a public web page — though there may be exceptions, such as projects that are becoming open source but aren’t all the way there yet. In any case, we’re comfortable clicking on links and reading stuff on the Web. You’re not required to package everything up in one PDF to make a proposal. Just tell us what you want to do, make it easy for us to find what we need to find, and we’ll take it from there. We’ll ask you questions as we have them.

Here are some examples of things OpenITP approved funding for in our previous round:

• An implemention of Off-the-Record (OTR) in Javascript, initially for the Cryptocat project but reusable by other projects.
• Improvements to the GPG Tools project for developers (e.g., build process improvements, etc) and for users (better address book support, documentation improvements).
• Improvements to Serval to ease user adoption (lessening reliance on root access to handheld devices, better peer-to-peer distribution of updates, more end-user documentation).
• Those examples aren’t meant to narrow the possibilities. They’re just meant to give you an idea of the scope of our project grants and types of projects we’re looking to support.

Your turn!

Tweet: @OpenITP seeking proposals for first round of 2013 circumvention tech project grants! http://is.gd/Xs217B

Oh look, an article about OpenITP.

A few months ago, Georgia Bullen and I spent a bunch of time trying to remember what company had the “travel squirrel”. Searching the web for “travel squirrel” didn’t help, and now the travel squirrel is a running joke in our office.

Fast forward to tonight, when I ran into Alexis Ohanian on Amtrak. We started talking about his work with Hipmunk, and he told me the key to capturing the big fat middle of the non-business travel market is to get that person who takes one trip a year to think of Hipmunk when they book. I told him about the travel squirrel and we decided that if people like me and Georgia can’t tell a squirrel from a chipmunk, we need to teach Google that when folks request the travel squirrel they really mean a different wandering rodent entirely.

Incidentally, Alexis drew the logo. He allowed that maybe it looks a little squirrely. It was kind of him.

Recently I've spoken about my paper Free as in Sexist? in a couple of places. I was happy to return to Jerry Brito's podcast "Surprisingly Free" to discuss the gender gap, Geek Feminism, Finally Feminism 101, the Ada Initiative, codes of conduct and the benefits of balanced participation (i.e., I do not believe a better gender balance would "emasculate free culture and rob it of its vitality"). I also gave a talk based on the paper at UMASS Amherst (slides, video) and met some awesome people.

Although the book has been out for a number of months, available for purchase and download, Coding Freedom finally has a dedicated home on the Interwebz. Based on my graduate research in anthropology and my dissertation, the book takes an up front and close look at various personal, affective, ethical and political dimensions of free software development. While the book is not on Debian per se, there is one chapter dedicated to the project and a whole lot of Debian developers were interviewed for the book. You can read some reviews and if you like what you see, take a dip.

One of the unexpected benefits of my research on geek feminism and the "gender gap" is to have met some fantastic people. I've been especially impressed by, and grateful for, Valerie Aurora's and Mary Gardiner's work at the Ada Initiative.

We work to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture by educating both women and people of all genders who want to support women in open tech/culture. Most of our work is free of charge and freely reusable under Creative Commons licenses. Our work is entirely funded through individual and corporate donations. -- What we do

I'm so pleased to have been invited to join their advisory board and look forward to contributing to their efforts.

It has been so very long since I have left a trace here. I guess moving to two new countries (Canada and Quebec), starting a new job, working on Anonymous, and finishing my first book was a bit much.

I miss this space, not so much because what I write here is any good. But it a handy way for me to keep track of time and what I do and even think. My life feels like a blur at times and hopefully here I can see its rhythms and changes a little more clearly if I occasionally jot things down here.

So I thought it would nice to start with something that I found surprising: famed information designer, Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale was a phone phreak (and there is a stellar new book on the topic by former phreak Phil Lapsley.

He spoke about his technological exploration during a sad event, a memorial service in NYC which I attended for the hacker and activist Aaron Swartz. I had my wonderful RA transcribe the speech, so here it is [we may not have the right spelling for some of the individuals so please let us know of any mistakes]:

Edward Tufte’s Speech From Aaron Swartz’s Memorial
Speech starts 41:00 [video cuts out in beginning]
“We would then meet over the years for a long talk every now and then, and my responsibility was to provide him with a reading list, a reading list for life and then about two years ago Quinn had Aaron come to Connecticut and he told me about the four and a half million downloads of scholarly articles and my first question is, ‘Why isn’t MIT celebrating this?’.
[Video cuts out again]
Obviously helpful in my career there, he then became president of the Mellon foundation, he then retired from the Mellon foundation, but he was asked by the Mellon foundation to handle the problem of JSTOR and Aaron. So I wrote Bill Bullen(sp?) an email about it, I said first that Aaron was a treasure and then I told a personal story about how I had done some illegal hacking and been caught at it and what happened. In 1962, my housemate and I invented the first blue box, that’s a device that allows for free, undetectable, unbillable long distance telephone calls. And we got this up and played around with it and the end of our research came when we concluded what was the longest long distance call ever made, which was from Palo Alto to New York time-of-day via Hawaii, well during our experimentation, AT&T, on the second day it turned out, had tapped our phone and uh but it wasn’t until about 6 months later when I got a call from the gentleman, AJ Dodge, senior security person at AT&T and I said, ‘I know what you’re calling about.” and so we met and he said ‘You what you are doing is a crime that would…’, you know all that. But I knew it wasn’t serious because he actually cared about the kind of engineering stuff and complained that the tone signals we were generating were not the standard because they record them and play them back in the network to see what numbers they we were that you were trying to reach, but they couldn’t break though the noise of our signal. The upshot of it was that uh oh and he asked why we went off the air after about 3 months, because this was to make long distance telephone calls for free and I said this was because we regarded it as an engineering problem and we made the longest long distance call and so that was it. So the deal was, as I explained in my email to Bill Bullen, that we wouldn’t try to sell this and we were told, I was told that crime syndicates would pay a great deal for this, we wouldn’t do any more of it and that we would turn our equipment over to AT&T, and so they got a complete vacuum tube isolator kit for making long distance phone calls. But I was grateful for AJ Dodge and I must say, AT&T that they decided not to wreck my life. And so I told Bill Bullen that he had a great opportunity here, to not wreck somebody’s life, course he thankfully did the right thing.
Aaron’s unique quality was that he was marvelously and vigorously different. There is a scarcity of that. Perhaps we can be all a little more different too.
Thank you very much.”

It's always gratifying when people read something I've written and point out shortcomings or issues that could be further explored. (This is far superior to not being read at all -- and even receiving empty platitudes.) I also wish I could amend a publication with links to those responses and the resulting conversation. Since I can't do that, I do want to recommend the following.

—

Sky Croeser points out that I conflate anarchism and libertarianism when I speak of a free speech ethic that favors potentially alienating speech over inclusive participation. I agree they are not the same. Her description of the difference is an excellent gloss of my own movement from identifying as a libertarian in my teens to an anarchist in my twenties.

Libertarians tends to privilege an extreme individualism, failing to acknowledge the role of structural oppression in creating inequality, and seeking to diminish (or extinguish) the role of the state in favour of more freedom for the market. Anarchists, on the other hand, tend to place individual freedom within the context of community, acknowledging the role of structural oppression, and critiquing both the state and the market as systems for allocating resources.

My intention was not to say they are the same, but to build upon earlier scholars who note a particular speech ethic that exists within both constituent strands of Net culture and the effect that ethic can have on participation. Indeed, as I note in the paper, it is kind of crazy to place the political ideologies of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond alongside one another. But I think you can when you ask if their conceptions of "freedom" act similarly with respect to permitting alienating speech, or, at the least, in not recognizing this possibility. That said, I'd love to see a comparative analysis of the political philosophies of Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, and Jimmy Wales. (Following Fred Turner's studies of counterculture to cyberculture, I think there is an interesting east vs west coast divide.)

I also agree with Croeser that I pass lightly over possible remedies to the problems I identify. This is a limitation of space and focus for any given piece. For instance, in discussing online communities I -- and others -- frequently make use of Jo Freeman's seminal The Tyranny of Structureless. However, the latter part of her essay on "principles of democratic structuring" has largely been ignored in the online context and much more can, and should, be said. For myself, I do plan to focus more on "geek feminism" interventions in future work.

—

Over at Geek Feminism Tim Chevalier has posted a thoughtful reflection. A hesitation I even have in discussion the "gender gap" is the implication of a binary, essentialist gender. Again, for reasons of space and focus, I removed my discussion of this, but I greatly appreciate and recommend Tim's perspective.

Then I try to imagine what it would be like for me if on top of all of this, I felt like I had to conform to a vaguely woman-ish gender role. I didn’t know I wasn’t female until I was 18, and didn’t know I was male until I was 26, but I never felt much pressure to be what girls or women were supposed to be. On the other hand, if I was a cis woman, or even more so, if I was a trans woman (since trans women get expected to conform to gender stereotypes for women even more so than cis women are when their trans status is known), working in the industry I work in, I would have an almost impossible set of constraints to solve. As Reagle shows, success and status in open-source (and even in non-technical "free culture" communities like Wikipedia editing) are correlated with adopting a (superficially) overconfident, aggressive, argumentative persona. Women get to choose between being socially stigmatized for violating gender norms, or being ignored or mocked for violating open-source cultural norms. It's a double bind.

My Kickstarter campaign to update my book Producing Open Source Software has passed the funding threshold — thank you, backers! — and now is going into overfunding.

This is great news, and is what I’d hoped (though not anticipated). I’d like to spend as much time as I can on the revisions, so am trying to push the overfunding as far as it will go. As I wrote on the Kickstarter project page:

Yes, overfunding is fine:

The amount I’ve set as the threshold is enough to make all the important updates I’m aware of right now, but things don’t need to stop there. If this project gets overfunded, that’s even better: that would allow me to spend even more time improving the book, including doing more research (e.g., talking to people in more open source projects, companies, etc), having more colleagues review the work-in-progress & incorporating their feedback, improving site infrastructure to better automate the ebook builds, improving the translation infrastructure, etc. More money == better book and better access, basically. I’ll be doing my work in a publicly visible repository, so anyone can stop by and see what’s going on at any time. Patches welcome, of course.

There are 9 days left in the campaign now! Please tweet, dent, Facebookify, blog, Google Plusificate, Tumblrize, and do whatever other Internet social networking verbs are appropriate to help spread the word.

• Retweet: Kickstarter campaign to update @ProducingOSS book going into overfunding! New reward available… http://ur1.ca/coc1l . Thanks, backers!
• See the Kickstarter Project Update.

I’ve just added a new backer reward level too:

Pledge $10 or more

The above, plus I will dedicate one of the book’s version control commits to you, or to the project, person, or organization you designate. Note that all the book’s vc checkins go into a publicly visible repository. (This reward is new — I added it after the campaign had been running for 20 days. Many thanks to Michael Bernstein for thinking of the idea!)

Many, many thanks to all the backers so far. One of the nicest things about this campaign has been seeing many so familiar names from the open source world pledging to the campaign. (Don’t get me wrong, though: I appreciate the donations from people I don’t know, too! I assume most of you are readers of the first edition, and your pledges are the best evidence I could have asked for that the book has been useful.)

A few special thank-yous:

Scott Berkun and Gervase Markham both not only pledged, but wrote very kind blog posts about the book and this Kickstarter campaign; I’m pretty sure those posts are responsible for spikes I saw in the pledge rate right when they came out. (And just as I was writing this I saw Duncan Davidson did the same; thank you! Am I leaving anyone out? Don’t be shy; if you posted about the campaign, I’d love to know about it…)

Then just a couple of days ago, Michael Bernstein did an amazing mini-campaign of support. First he posted on Google+ about it, then shared it widely among well-chosen circles (there was a spike in donations then, with many coming from plus.url.google.com, so it seems pretty clear it was due to his post). Then, after tweeting it, he wrote me a detailed email with instructions for how to succeed in the overfunding phase, including concrete strategies and some excellent & creative ideas for adding rewards and stretch goals — advice that I am taking (as you can see from the new reward above). Basically, as far as I can tell, for a day he made this campaign his own, and that’s going to make a big difference. Michael, thank you.

For reference, my blog post about launching the campaign is here, though you might want to just use the campaign page itself for postings.

Spread the word! Overfunding == better book.

Thank you, backers & friends! It’s made my month to see how large the intersection of those two sets is.

1. Encounter

In 2007 we were in the San Francisco area to shoot interviews for Steal This Film 2. One of our point people in the Bay was our friend Peter Eckersley and we had planned to film with him in his house over a few drinks. At some point Jamie King came in having collared Aaron Swartz somewhere out on the street, and he agreed to go on camera as well. In addition to these two there was also Raph Levien, a programmer and creator of Advogato. We settled in for a marathon session.

See a transcript for “On Peer To Peer, Digital Rights Management and Web 2.0″.

The others drank vodka, I stuck to wine, and Aaron, if memory serves, kept it straight edge on milk. Luca Lucarini took care of the camera work whilst I did most of the interviewing, although there was some alternation, with interviewees occasionally becoming interviewers and Jamie taking over some times as well. Proceedings did not come to a halt until about 4.00 in the morning, by which time the bodies of all involved littered the room, curled up and asleep.

See a transcript for “The Network Transformation”

After the film’s release, I sat down with the tapes to see what material could be extracted to be made available online as part of our footage archive. Later I wrote to the interviewees to ask their agreement to make it available under a fairly permissive CC-BY-SA license. Aaron gave me his consent by mail shortly afterwards.As these clips make clear Aaron was extremely articulate and a compelling speaker. Although I knew about him by reputation beforehand, it after this interview that I started to pay attention to what he was saying and  doing.

2. Lockout

I learnt about his data extraction escapades at JSTOR because my own means of accessing it, via MIT, was blocked following the alert triggered by his activity. But this minor inconvenience was trivial in front of the admiration I felt for his wide-scale data liberation.

From the time of his arrest Aaron had many supporters, but not all of them felt comfortable with what he was alleged to have done. Some argued that his energy would be better invested in further attempts to reform the copyright system via campaigning and legislative amendment. Others, such as Orin Kerr, regard the actions of which he was  accused — brute force data-dumping of a proprietary database whilst concealing his identity — as placing him outside the boundaries of an implicitly ‘virtuous’ civil disobedience: where the protagonist sacrifices himself at the altar of the law in order to draw public attention to an intolerable wrong.  Kerr continues:

In his own words, he didn’t want to “just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge.” Rather, he wanted to change the facts on the ground to make his preferred world a  fait accompli.   That is, he wanted to make the laws unenforceable, winning the debate unilaterally outside of Congress. In his words, he wanted to act so that the democratically-enacted laws that allowed privatization of knowledge would become “a thing of the past.”

While I disagree with what Kerr has to say, I like the way he phrases the second part of it, it has the ring of a synthetic manifesto to it. And on the net we really are millions who abide by the spirit of such a manifesto.

ps Mako has written a nice piece recalling some quirky moments with Aaron.

I'm happy to note that a pre-print of Jeff Loveland's and my article on encyclopedic production is now available. Originally it was toll restricted and I planned to post a pre-submission author's draft, but happily the "full text" is now freely accessible.

Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle (2013). Wikipedia and encyclopedic production. New Media & Society, (online preprint).

Wikipedia is often presented within a foreshortened or idealized history of encyclopedia-making. Here we challenge this viewpoint by contextualizing Wikipedia and its modes of production on a broad temporal scale. Drawing on examples from Roman antiquity onward, but focusing on the years since 1700, we identify three forms of encyclopedic production: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production. While each could be characterized as a discrete period, we point out the existence of significant overlaps in time as well as with the production of Wikipedia today. Our analysis explores the relation of editors, their collaborators, and their modes of composition with respect to changing notions of authorship and originality. Ultimately, we hope our contribution will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical cases germane to the social scientist’s concerns, and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia have a lifespan exceeding the past decade.

Also, Rebecca Rosen has blogged about the article over at the Atlantic: What If the Great Wikipedia 'Revolution' Was Actually a Reversion?

postscript

It can sometimes take a long time and circuitous route for one's work to see the light of day. As evidence, I began thinking about Wikipedia in a historical context in 2005 within Jonathan Zimmerman's excellent Historical Research class and in a reading seminar with my fellow student Michael Zimmer and advisor Helen Nissenbaum. This work appeared as two chapters in my 2008 dissertation(now public). Chapter 2, on Wikipedia's antecedants made, it into Good Faith Collaboration (GFC). While I had converted chapter 3, on comparative modes of encyclopedic production, into a draft article, it fell by the wayside. However, in 2011 I was pleased that Jeff Loveland, a real encyclopedia historian, was kind enough to review GFC. Doubly so, since I had just read his excellent monograph An Alternative Encyclopedia? Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History (1745). After some discussion, we decided to take on the question of encyclopedic production together. The collaboration, all over email, was a delight. However, the journey is not yet finished; it could take another year for the article to actually be printed and bound, and receive its final pagination.

I don't often work on quantitative projects, but since publishing Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Brittanica with Lauren Rhue I've come to appreciate just how difficult it can be to communicate findings unambiguously. Of course, had we found that Wikipedia had no biographies of women that would be straightforward enough. However, what we found was a bit more nuanced and I tried to capture that in a single sentence within the abstract:

We conclude that … Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica.

I worked on that sentence for a while, trying to communicate that these findings are with respect to proportions of missing articles and relative to Britannica, but it is easily misunderstood. For instance, Nathan Matias summarized the paper in a recent blog posting as:

Wikipedia covers more women than Brittanica, although the Wiki is more likely to be missing articles on key women.

I think the erroneous fragment "more likely to be missing articles on key women" is a consequence of poor communication on our part.

That sentence in our abstract is trying to communicate the following: Wikipedia's domination of Britannica in biographical coverage is greater for men than for women. We found this in a comparison of percentages and a logistical regression. First, "while Wikipedia had nearly twice the number of female biographies than did Britannica (113 to 60), it had over two and a half times the number of male biographies (673 to 254)" (p. 1145). That is, Wikipedia trounced Britannica with respect to both men and women, but did so more so when it came to male biographies. Second, in a logistical regression, "Male and Unknown, have non-significant coefficients, suggesting that the influence of gender may not be consistent across both reference works. In contrast, the Male in Wikipedia coefficient is significant, providing evidence that gender contributes to the subject’s degree of coverage on Wikipedia" (p. 1147-1148). We then attempted to summarize this in the conclusion as follows:

While Wikipedia has more biographies of women than does Britannica in absolute terms (Table 1), Wikipedia tends to be less balanced in whom it misses than is Britannica as seen in the percentages of missing articles (Table 2) and the positive and significant Male coefficient in the logistic regression (Table 3)

So, two more comprehensible ways we might put this are:

1. Wikipedia dominates Britannica in biographical coverage, but more so when it comes to men.
2. Britannica is more balanced in whom it neglects to cover than Wikipedia.

Friends, I just backed a Kickstarter that I think you should know about. Seven years ago, Karl Fogel wrote a book that became the manual for doing open source software projects. He’s crowd funding the revision. As a community, we need this book to get updated. I invite you to contribute. Thanks.

Disclaimer: In various contexts, Karl is my boss, my co-worker, my employee, and my business partner. In all those contexts, he’s also my friend.

John Wallis' (short and accessible) thesis Destructive Editing and Habitus in the Imaginative Construction of Wikipedia challenges my perspective of Wikipedia as an actual community; a community in which stable, friendly, and collaborative relations can exist. He prefers to view Wikipedia as an "imagined community" of impersonal combatants in which the powerful use a discourse of "neutrality," "verifiability," "vandals," and "trolls" to maintain its structure. He writes "There is very little friendliness or light-heartedness, or even sustained relations of fellowship between any two editors. Editors tend to meet on discussion pages as strangers and make no effort to improve their relationship" (Wallis2012deh, p. 9). Of course, Wikipedia is a big place, and you see different things depending on where you look. Given Godwin's law (we come to see others online as Nazis) and Wikipedia's Zeroth law (it shouldn't work in practice) I thought it important to look at and identify what I call good faith collaboration.

Wallis' point of view is a worthwhile and interesting perspective. Yet, what I found most interesting is a new scholasticism. In this view a work's contribution consists exclusively of interpreting an interesting phenomenon in the light of dead philosophers. When I read such a work, I'm left with the feeling that I didn't actually learn anything new about the world. Perhaps this is why I'm not a very good academic. At heart, I consider myself a geek and a hacker: excited to learn about things that work, to critique and to improve that which does not, and to share the results with others.

Perhaps this scholasticism is part of what I sometimes call "the whiteboard and the shelf." As a (Web) engineer, the most important thing in my office was the whiteboard on which I could happily collaborate with my peers on a solution to a technical problem. Of course, perhaps a solution already existed, but our solution would no doubt be better! This failing is the "not invented here syndrome." Conversely, when I was working on my Ph.D. I realized I was coming down with "citation paralysis" syndrome. I felt that I was not able to think and express a thought without first checking the literature. My most important asset had become the book shelf and bibliography.

I like to think I no longer suffer from the "not invented here syndrome" but I am ashamed when I (meaning well) stop creative thought with a reference to the book shelf (i.e., a "citation slap down.")

So why did Wallis' piece prompt me to think about this? I've rarely seen the new scholasticism stated so directly: Wikipedia offers nothing novel, at least to the anthropologist.

A large proportion of the studies that have been specifically devoted to Wikipedia (and it has been particularly attractive to quantitative sociologists and communications theorists, because of the abundance of raw data) quote at some point a paradigmatic maxim known as the Zeroeth Law: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work". Wikipedia is taken to be an impossible case, and its concrete materialisation therefore constitutes grounds for immediate and surprised investigation. Chieflythe factors most shocking to researchers are Wikipedia’s decentralised coordination, its attraction of willing participants, and its refusal to decline into mess of destructive in-fighting. Decentralised governance is hardly a cause for awe among anthropologists (perhaps this is why they have stayed away), and all of these points are not in truth the distressing anomalies they are made out to be. (Wallis2012deh, p. 32)

Indeed, Wikipedia is fully comprehensible by philosophers (however great) that had never even seen it.

The imaginative construction of Wikipedia is a highly familiar process driven by forces of power/knowledge and division of labour documented by social scientists in the 70s and in the 19th century respectively; it is not a new phenomenon. In some respects it rests on a "network" frame but it is always fleshed out by political and other discursive practices of different kinds, many of which are amenable to Bourdieuian theorisation. (Wallis2012deh, p. 38)

Granted, Bourdieu was brilliant. And I'm sympathetic to those that challenge ahistoricism. Indeed, in the book I wrote "A hazard in thinking about new phenomena — such as the Web, wiki, or Wikipedia — is to aggrandize novelty at the expense of the past. To minimize this inclination I remind myself of the proverb 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'" I then used nineteenth century history and Quakers to frame and explain Wikipedia! But Wallis' quotes seem all-together bleak.

I meant to announce this last week, but some very sad circumstances intervened (see the previous blog entry).

Now there are 19 days left in my Kickstarter campaign to fund doing a second edition of Producing Open Source Software. I still hope to reach the goal, of course, because I want to give the revisions the attention they deserve. If you liked the book, and would like to see it updated (it’s been seven years), then please pledge and please spread the word. I can only do the update by devoting serious (i.e. funded) time to it. O’Reilly Media will publish it, as they did the first edition — but only if there’s something to publish .

(They’ve been very supportive of the book, by the way, including a generous advance for the first edition and behind-the-scenes help with this Kickstarter campaign, but I was never expecting an advance for this revision; the economics of publishing simply don’t work that way. Publishers should be able to work hand-in-hand with authors doing Kickstarter campaigns, and if anyone understands that, it’s the publisher that started the Tools of Change publishing conference.)

Here are more details, copied from the Kickstarter page:

It’s time to update my 2005 book “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project”. Help me do it right.

In 2005 I wrote a book called Producing Open Source Software, about the human side of running free software / open source projects. It was published by O’Reilly Media, and simultaneously released online under a free license. It’s been pretty successful, at least in the ways I’d hoped: it’s cited frequently by people I respect, it even sells decently, and I get plenty of constructive bug reports (my favorite measure of success). It’s also been translated into many languages, often by volunteer translators or translation teams.

But 2005 is a long time ago. The world of free and open source software is changing — technically, culturally, even legally — and the book really needs to be updated after seven and a half years. To give you an idea: GitHub didn’t even exist when the first edition came out!

I’ve been doing a lot of open source consulting since the first edition was published — consulting about open source processes, how to launch and run projects, etc — with a wide variety of clients: governments, for-profit companies, non-profits, and individual developers. I’ve also been talking to people in a many different open source projects. Along the way, I kept thinking that I’d love to incorporate the things I’d learned into a second edition. Eventually, I realized that the way to find time to do it was to treat the book like a client — hence this Kickstarter campaign.

The second edition, like the first, will be published by O’Reilly Media, and will be under the same free license.

Yes, overfunding is fine:

The amount I’ve set as the threshold is enough to make all the important updates I’m aware of right now, but things don’t need to stop there. If this project gets overfunded, that’s even better: that would allow me to spend even more time improving the book, including doing more research (e.g., talking to people in more open source projects, companies, etc), having more colleagues review the work-in-progress & incorporating their feedback, improving site infrastructure to better automate the ebook builds, improving the translation infrastructure, etc. More money == better book and better access, basically. I’ll be doing my work in a publicly visible repository, so anyone can stop by and see what’s going on at any time. Patches welcome, of course.

…

Read more at the Kickstarter page.

Yesterday I attended the NYC memorial service for Aaron Swartz at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Hearing about Aaron’s accomplishments and his spirit of pragmatic idealism from those who spoke was humbling, inspiring, and so, so sad.

I’m particularly grateful for the words of Aaron’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who closed the service by challenging the technologists in the room with the questions, “If you believe that technology is making the world a better place, why do you believe that? Do you really understand what makes the world a bad place to begin with?” We had already been told that Aaron looked for the worst problems, the most fundamental, and then for the highest-impact solution. Taran’s benediction was a pointed reminder of how different Aaron’s approach was from the norm—that silicon valley made its billions by solving the problems nearest to it. Groceries to your door. Hyperlocal coupons. First-world problems.

Several people talked about Aaron’s comprehensive approach to the problems he encountered. He was a technologist, but he knew that few problems have purely technological solutions. When Aaron began digging at a problem, he saw not a single root, but a rhizome—the vast, hidden network that not only fed that problem but sent up shoots in distant, seemingly unconnected places. Aaron pried at this network, sometimes gently and sometimes clumsily, wherever its roots led.

Aaron tugged at the problem of poverty and found it partly rooted in unequal access to education; he tugged some more and found that fundamental human learning had been enclosed by a conspiracy of the first world’s universities, publishing companies, and for-profit research laboratories. When he pulled a little harder, someone saw him digging in their garden, called the cops, and broke all our hearts.

As our grieving community tries to understand how this happened—how we let this happen—and how we can honor Aaron the the wake of his death, we find the kind of problem that Aaron understood better than most of us. We pry up the injustice of Aaron’s death and trace a root to a bad law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, whose own roots reveal a captured and poorly informed legislature. We trace a different root to an inhumane prosecutor’s office and from there to a plea-bargain system and federal sentencing guidelines that all but guarantee unjust outcomes.

Miserably, we trace all of this back to ourselves, because this brutal system grew out of our own conspiracy of indifference to the least fortunate in our society. Aaron’s hateful prosecution was possible because we ignored the same injustice when it wasn’t happening to the people we know. Because, as Catherine Bracy wrote and several speakers at the memorial said, too few of us followed the roots of our criminal justice process out to the racism and poverty that feed its disproportionate outcomes. Aaron would have, but he’s not here anymore. It’s time for the rest of us to start digging.

Update 1/22: I originally misquoted Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman slightly (but not substantively).

By now anyone reading this blog has already heard the news about Aaron. I already posted an obituary and remembrance over at QuestionCopyright.org, so will just refer to that. At the end of it there are links to two collectively-built memorial sites on the Internet.

Sad, sad time.

First Monday's 200th issue is up (I first published there 17 years ago!) and includes "Free as in Sexist?: Free Culture and the Gender Gap".

Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed (or more so) as that of the computing culture from which it arose. Based on the collection and analysis of discourse on gender and sexism within this movement over a six–year period. I suggest three possible causes: (a) some geek identities can be narrow and unappealing; (b) open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people; and, (c) the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.