geekroom

We’re currently waiting to get the licensing issues figured out before releasing the 1.1 version of H2O. In the meantime, we’re pondering what to put into the 1.2 release. Here are the current leading candidates:

• threading for the message boards
• cross project message board discussions
• project announcements
• optimization of the interesting projects query for the front page
• project sections
• section only rotisserie and message board discussions
• batch user import (csv)
• misc small bugs

As these things tend to be, this has turned out to be more ambitious than hoped. Most of the features are required for an experiment we’re hoping to perform with our fall HLS courses that will test the quality of discussion produced by rotisserie vs. standard message board discussions.

The excellent Maggie Cohen has been making incredible progress cataloguing the Center’s huge archive of multimedia materials at the Berkman Center Media Library. She’s worked through nearly the entire library, describing every lecture, conference presentation, picture, and file present in the library and adding person, project, and other categories to the pieces. Once she’s done, we hope to CC most of the material and promote it more actively as a living archive of all of the great material produced by the Berkman Center over the years. If you haven’t looked at the media library recently, take a look now. Especially try playing with the text search and the category based navigation, which both now return meaningful results.

I figure it’s necessary to start a Berkman blog with the above story title.

We’re trying to launch the latest version of H2O. This version will include for the first time basic learning content management features (a fancy way of saying that it allows project leaders to upload content into their projects and organize the content into topics). One of the many purposes of the H2O project is to promote the availability of free educational materal, so we’d like to offer project leaders the option of attaching a Creative Commons (CC) license to any given piece of content uploaded to the system. Unfortunately, there are legal issues in allowing users to represent what the license of a piece of content is. If someone uploads some content that he doesn’t own and claims that it is CC, we might get in trouble when someone else redistributes that content. So we might have to take out the CC licensing option and just remain in the constrictive world of traditional copyright, even for those folks who’d like to share what they are producing.

This possibility kills the engineer in me. We’ve already written the code, it’s code that serves a clear public good, but our crappy broken copyright laws could prevent us even from putting up a service that allows folks to exchange educational material freely. Fortunately, I work at the Berkman Center, where smart lawyers who believe in doing the right thing abound, so it’s likely we’ll figure out how to make this happen. But if it’s a struggle to make it happen at the Berkman Center, it’s not likely to happen much elsewhere.

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