The Longest Now

Over a dozen Congressmen have changed or clarified their position on PIPA and SOPA over the course of the past 36 hours, towards opposing the bills.   This includes six senators and two representatives who had previously been co-sponsors or solid supporters of the relevant bill in their chamber.  Many more who formerly were neutral about the bills or leaning towards opposing them, are now calling them “misguided”, saying they will “cause more harm than good”, “harm free speech rights”, “weaken freedom of expression on the Internet”, and would “harm Internet innovation and jobs”.  Most agree that the bills as written “need to be stopped”.  It seems that some of them have looked at the bills with a magnifying glass for the first time.

Senator Boozman summarizes: “Over the past few weeks, the chorus of concerns over Congressional efforts to address online piracy has intensified“.  A week ago it looked like there might be a straight 60-vote approval of PIPA in the Senate; now it is losing suppoters by the hour, and may have a hard time getting majority support; making it unlikely to make it to a vote at all.

Blackout impact

Politico and others suggest that much of this movement was a direct result of the strong online statement made by the EFF, Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, and others – and the protest organized by those groups to express their views to every representative and senator in the country.  Wikipedia produced a ‘find your local representative’ widget, to ensure that we encouraged readers to call their representatives directly; Google simply encouraged signing a petition.

Once the blackout launched, it trended worldwide on Twitter, with hashtags such as #factswithoutwikipedia, #SOPAstrike and #wikipediablackout.  At one point, according to Trendistic, #wikipediablackout was used in 1% of all tweets.  Hotspots claims that SOPA (and #SOPA) has accounted for a quarter-million tweets an hour since then.

The EFF reports that by 5pm, over 250,000 1 million people had contacted their representatives through the EFF blacklist site. Wikipedia reports roughly 160 million people have seen their blackout page, and eight million of those have looked up their elected representatives’ contact information through its tool.  (No word on how many made contact; if there is a dropoff rate similar to the first clickthrough, then that would make another 400,000 contacts.)  Google reports gathering 4.5 million signatures on its petition.

Statements today from members of Congress:

Senators noting their disapproval of PIPA yesterday and today: (those who switched away from previously indicated support are listed in bold)

Senators who changed from support, to advocating a delay in voting for revision and reconsideration:

House Representatives stating disapproval or opposition: (those switching away from previously indicated support or cosponsorship again in bold, but this was harder to ascertain):

A doff of the hat : Much of this data comes from or was confirmed through ProPublica‘s excellent timeline of public statements by Congressmen about SOPA and PIPA.

Background:

• Lamar Smith expects to return to SOPA drafting discussions in February
• National Post on how not to stop online piracy

Jan 18 Blackouts:

• Wikipedia: Imagine a world without free knowledge
  : Blacked out, for all intents and purposes.
  : Revised main message, by FT2 and others
• Google: Tell Congress please don’t censor the Web!
• 2600.com is unavailable.
• Default Firefox start page to highlight SOPA
• Tumblr plans reprise of “Protect the Net” banners across its tumblogs.

On the WP blackout:

• Why WP is still available (just hard to reach)
• A Blackout extension for anyone running MediaWiki 1.17
• This could be the 1st time in years that en:wp:RecentChanges is readable

Analysis of WP blackout:

• Middle school teacher @ inforgood: why is wp going away for a day
• MSNBC intentionally misses the point: big sites fail to protest
• NY Times front page
• LA Times sees little hope of peace with Hollywood
• CNN front page
• New Statesman opinion essay by WMUK trustee Steve Virgin

Reflection:

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake. — R. Tagore

Community comentary:

• Risker, one of three community authors of the en:wp decision to shutter the site on Jan 18th, in #wikimedia-sopa :
  “Folks….thank you all for doing such an amazing job to implement the screwiest decision I’ve ever had to write. You have all done well.“
• Some people are lost without WP, mirrors or no mirrors
• “Well, it’s good for people to learn how to get around the blackout of sites, because they’ll need to know how if SOPA passes.“
• I can search Wikipedia through the mobile sights…. Black that out too!!! QUICKLY (01:00 EST)
• As I thought when I read Geoff Brigham’s blog post on SOPA, ‘it’s gotta be bad if it makes the DMCA look good.’

Public commentary:

•  @NatLibrariesDay Wikipedia is closed for business today, but your local public library isn’t! ow.ly/8xqFk

Every January I spend a weekend in the Land of Mystery, tucked into a facet of MIT: that is, the MIT Mystery Hunt.

It is somewhere between a religious experience, performance art, and an exercise in observation, pattern matching, and problem solving. It is also wickedly tricky, a pinnacle of amateur puzzle contests: teams of 50+ people spend two full days solving a series of interlocked puzzles to find a coin hidden somewhere on campus.

This past weekend I took my annual pilgrimage across Cambridge to MIT for the Hunt, but for the first time my team was running the event, rather than competing. This was our tenth anniversary as Team Codex (we started out the year before as the aduni team, then adopted a proper codename), and producing the Hunt was a fitting way to celebrate. Many of us had a backlog of puzzle ideas that were converted into working puzzles over the course of the past year, with much iteration and satisfaction. Few of us had ever designed Mystery Hunt-caliber puzzles before, though we knew in principle how it was done.

We staged the first musical-themed Hunt on record, in an effort to encourage teams to share their own creativity while solving. Max and Leo from The Producers showed up at MIT, now out of jail and looking to make goo^B^B^B out like bandits, this time for good. They staged a short production of their own to get everyone in the mood, and then invited students to help them research and put on a series of guaranteed musical flops… While this didn’t work out exactly as planned, along the way were fancy cocktail parties with potential stars, swimming-pools full of Sets of ducks, research into the private peeves and longings of theater critics, campus spelunking, video game hacking, and a denouement in which, unbelievably… . . . well, it’s complicated. You’ll just have to explore the Hunt site itself to see how the saga ended.

We had roughly 70 active people on our organizing team, and everyone played multiple roles — writing, testing, and implementing puzzles, software, and skits. Our lead performers, in addition to being fine actors and musicians, happened to be professional puzzle writers and editors, and wrote many of the Hunt’s 107 puzzles as well as the book for our productions. Our lead editor also kept the production team together through stressful moments, providing black humor as needed, and preserving a fast editing pace all Fall without upending our minimal-heirarchy team. Hotshot solvers shifted gears to rewrite swaths of code. When puzzle-lover Neil Patrick Harris declined to MC the awards ceremony, we called on a home-grown rock star instead. Dozens of people joined the cast in the final weeks and picked up their parts without a hitch.

Having been involved with organizing perhaps a dozen events of similar size, I can say without hesitation that this was the most satisfying and life-affirming. We had varied and prolific organizers, an elaborate and dynamic schedule, a completely committed audience, and an extraordinary host-participant collaboration, with continual feedback. While the event ran for only 1500 people, its primary output was a broadly valuable story, told through puzzles: something that may be enjoyed for years or generations to come: a set of curious, colorful, maddening, marvelous puzzles, illustrated and interlinked, free to solve and repurpose. Just one more Act in the perennial romance between creative puzzlers and scientific endeavour.

Here is a sampling of this year’s puzzles, drawn from my favorites. Happy hunting! The average puzzle takes 2-10 person-hours to solve, depending on your experience and how quickly the right insights come to you.

Sounds Good To Me
(my all-hunt favorite)

Slash Fiction
(best casting and music, and the most expensive puzzle production)

Paper Trail
(an elegant, satisfying black box)

Yo Dawg I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
(yo dawg, i herd you like herd you like)

Itinerant People Of America
(man, this one is a hodge-podge.)

Picture An Acorn
(the final aha! will make you chump for joy)

The Rainbow Connection
(Now that’s rainbow-bright…)

Google Bodyslam
(“so, we’re working on a pro wrestling puzzle. what should we call it?”)

JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS
(the puzzle consists of nothing more than the title)

Coming To A Location Near You
(a wikipedia-based scavenger hunt)

Dr. Poduvan is a 75-year old farmer from Tamil Nadu and Wikipedian. He captures everything I love about Wikipedia in a few sentences:

When I purchased my first computer in 2005, just using the mouse was difficult because my hands shake. But by 2009 I had discovered Wikipedia. One day, I created an article about ancient Indian poets. I added about 30 of their names to the page and then I went to sleep. The next morning, I found 473 names on the page. That is what makes Wikipedia work!

So it is. Please remember to contribute to Wikipedia, one list and article at a time. (in Hindi · in Tamil)

Update: Boing^Boing has a lovely interview with one of the students who was sprayed by the police.

a) isn’t new (it was common in the 1960’s before being toned down), and

b) isn’t a matter of a few bad actors like Lt. John Pike

(more…)

This pair of single topic blogs are excellent and to the point:

Worldwide: the top 1% of household wealth/personal income starts at roughly $10M/$100K (though the available data are weak, and neither is measured consistently).

Many in the top 10% feel as though they are in the top 1%, thanks to the same effect that causes people of all backgrounds to underestimate the imbalance of wealth distribution.

Occupy Wall Street, a protest calling for “human rights over corporate rights“, and stating that “the 99% are fed up with the greed and corruption of the 1%”, has been in force for three weeks now. After drawing roughly 1000 people in its first week, well under expectations, last weekend police around Union Square used tear gas on a group of female protestors – during the process of arresting 80 people. The use of such force has led to a surge of coverage, support, and participation. The movement has since built momentum, and today 400  700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, after they took over one side of the bridge, to the supportive honking and waving of many drivers.

Coverage of these protests has been slim until today. The protests are loosely organized, and the organizers such a they are did not have particularly strong cnonections to independent or mainstream media reporters. Some suggest that mainstream media had reasons to bury the story. Others suggest the lack of an obvious message and target for the protest made it hard to grasp what was going on. There have been no clear spokespeople for the protest, actual marches have been chaotic and much smaller than projected, and the only places occupied were parks and other public spaces, limiting the notability of the effort.

But all that has changed in the past two days. Earlier this week, a movement web site was set up, including a blog, calendar of events, press contacts, and a donation link – which goes (controversially) to movement supporter AFCJ. They area also publishing minutse of all meetings of the movement General Assembly, which is the governing mechanism for movement-wide decisions. Yesterday the protest (“the movement”) published its first official statement, coming out of a general assembly. In it they promised three related statements to come – listing demands, principles, and guidelines for starting your own local occupation.

Today, they took over Brooklyn Bridge, something of a first, and the 700 ensuing arrests is the largest police response to a protest in a very long time. The last time something similar happened in DC, it ended in a successful class lawsuit.

Community reporters have also been honing their work and getting picked up in Intenet memes and in mainstream media reposts. For instance, Wikipedia shutterbug David Shankbone snapped a popular photo of the protestor vibe on Thursday.

This weekend, the total crowd was up to 6000 protestors – and other smaller protests (like an anti-rape protest elsewhere in NYC) have started to claim affiliation or at least kinship with OWS. Mid-afternoon, the main protest unexpectedly moved towards the Brooklyn Bridge, and observers reported a mile-long line march of protestors.

Hundreds made it onto the bridge and occupied the car lanes in one direction, before being split from the rest of the crowd by police. (The bulk of the crowd then moved to Liberty Plaza.) They shut down traffic for at least two hours. The police were not prepared for this, nor were the mainstream city media. It took them a while to bring in paddy wagons and buses, to make hundreds of arrests, and to get more than trivial coverage of what was happening on the blogs of New York papers. Despite the ambient fears of excessive force, I had the impression that many police were not unsympathetic to the protestors — something reminiscent of the WTO protests over a decade ago.

Some good reads to get a feel for the march and protest:

• The NY Daily News had solid ongoing coverage, and recently reported there were a smaller number of protestors on the Manhattan Bridge as well.
• Army vet Ward Reilly has been curating messages and actions of support from US military personnel from all branches of the armed forces. After last weekend’s tear gas incident, groups have been attending the rallies to protect the protestors. A message that a group of 15 Marines said they were heading down to today’s NYC protests was picked up from him and spread as a rallying cry that the whole country was behind the protest. Similar shows of support and protection have been shown for smaller satellite rallies being planned or held in DC, Boston, LA, and other cities across the country.
• Evan Fleischer, representing from Boston, curated some of the best Twitter pics and comments on his blog. Via Newyorkist, who was on the scene:
• No attempt to prevent taking of bridge; no units to do so. #occupywallstreet. Matter of fact, one officer laughing at the absurdity…
• There was a surprising amount of honking, yelling and waving from vehicular traffic on BK Bridge as marchers marched…
• And Micah Sifry put this into context in a timely article this morning, just before the day’s protest got underway. (Micah: Encore!)

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s coverage and followup, and to being back home in Boston soon.

Dylan M. (@thomasmonopoly) is a real person from New York.  He writes a bit of music, has a personal website, and generally uses a lot of Google services.  Whoops —  or at least he did, until he was G!unpersoned last week.

A week ago, Dylan had an active Google Profile,  a Gmail account, and his website was set up through Google Sites. Then, for an unspecified Terms of Service violation, all of these were suspended or deleted.  Google reps did not specify which, nor did they explain the TOS violation to him.

Here is his initial raging post to a community help forum on Jul 16; a followup the next day.  Customer service, such as it is, has not been kind.  Here are two examples of a “deserved what you got” mentality.  (If you’re a true customer-focused org, noon ever deserves a bad experience!)  On the other hand, here is a lovely note from Google social czar Vic Gundotra, just the sort of thing everyone wants to hear: “You bet on Google.  We owe you better.  I’m investigating.”  (update: DM reports getting a call from VG on July 25, with more info to come)

Naturally, Dylan wanted to know why he was banned.  (Even more naturally, he wanted a copy of his email and addressbook, and some minimal duration of email forwarding.)

What’s happening here

Since the US Post Office has given up on providing digital mail and addresses for people, we have all lost most of the civil rights that used to apply to our mailing address — the right to maintain an address over time, the right to a system of mail delivery that could not be spied on by other citizens…

(more…)

A few details about the photo in my recent post about using Wikipedia in Afghanistan:

• They are reading Wikipedia online, not offline; you can see the sidebar.  Making use of the mesh network available from their compound.
• There is a set of solar panels in the background, not quite visible, providing power for a mesh wifi node nearby.
• The adult using the XO is facing into the sun, not away from it; and the screen is less readable in the shade than it would be in the direct sunlight.  This may be one of the first times he has used it.

Launching next year in the Big Red Topological Sphere: a Museum devoted to the Queen of the Sciences and supported by local New York organizations and by Google.  Learn about the Musem of Mathematics and what they have planned:

momath.org

Brows the syllabus and photos from the amazing course Human-Computer Interaction +Rapid Prototyping +Learning Sciences + Constructionism + Critical Pedagogy which is given by Paulo Blikstein at Stanford’s beyond bits and atoms group.  Does that sound like something you’d be interested in doing in a town near you?

It something in between the Media Lab’s lifelong kindergarden group, fablabs, and an peruvian olpc robotics lab, for grad students.

Working inside the box

The movement roles of individuals, informal groups, and our many wiki projects need to be discussed by a different group of participants, reflecting the diversity of community and editorial efforts that make our projects work.  This discussion will receive more attention from the current MR working group once its recommendations are published this summer, but can be pursued independently from the current formal-entity discussions.

This set of issues is very broad, perhaps the broadest set of issues raised during strategic planning.  Topics on organizational structure, dynamics, and communication all have analogies in more traditional movements and organizations.  However the constellation of independent wikiprojects, ad-hoc groups, and active individuals is closer to the structure of a town than that of a non-profit; and we have had less in the way of concrete advice on how to organize and plan such work.

By the same token, these issues are central to the original success of the Projects, and to pressing questions such as how to increase participation, openness of projects to new types of contribution, and communication across projects. What groups have the role of helping wikiprojects communicate about their work, or organize and maintain their efforts?  Responding to floods of new users?  Responding to spam, vandalism, and abuse of project policies?  Maintaining  accuracy and quality?  Who are responsible for protecting contributors who are harassed or placed at legal or personal risk?  Who manages messaging on the main pages and banners of the projects?  And who prioritizes updates and improvements requested by each project?

Anyone interested in starting this next phase of movement roles analysis is encouraged to do so on Meta – and to join the current working group even if the ‘formal entity’ topics are not of interest.

The Wikimedia movement consists primarily of hundreds of thousands of contributors, reusers, donors, and other readers who support the movement and the projects each in its own way.  However the most complex parts of the movement, with their own legal, financial, and bureaucratic issues, are the incorporated groups within the movement — the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters, each incorporated in its own jurisdiction — and the governance groups that oversee and inform the work of those groups.

At present, chapters are the only groups formally recognized by the WMF with standard trademark agreements and a license to pursue partnerships within their jurisdiction.  Another group type – a partner organization without geographic limits – is being proposed in one of the MR recommendations.    There are few global governance groups at present, only committees of the Foundation and its Board of trustees.  Two other bodies have often been discussed:  a community council with representatives from the editing communities of the projects, and a chapters network or organizational council with representatives from all chapters and similar formal organizations.

The initial work of the Movement Roles group has focused on the roles and responsibilities of these formal groups, which have some of the most explicit needs for coordination.  A related effort is needed to resolve these questions for informal groups – the roles of the more numerous individuals, small groups, and informal organizations that sustain the movement.

A week after announcing the Translate API would be shut down in December, Adam Feldman updated his earlier blog post with this brief note:

In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the passion and interest expressed by so many of you… I’m happy to share that we’re working hard to address your concerns, and will be releasing an updated plan to offer a paid version of the Translate API. Please stay tuned; we’ll post a full update as soon as possible.

So: no specifics yet, and no explanation of the abuse they’ve encountered, but a paid API should be available eventually. Definitely a step in the right direction; this has received some warm responses from developers.  It is interesting that they still seem surprised by all of this attention; and it was a healthy reminder to everyone of how fragile a non-free ecosystem is (no matter how cool its APIs are).

Projects like EveryBlock have a noble goal – to have information about every block in a city for cities around the world, to let you follow information relevant to where you live and work.  But they tend to stall at the level of a few thousand new entries about a city each day — far less than even the collective newsrooms in a city process.  And they don’t have many ways for individuals to contribute information about where they live, or to distribute the task of seeking out new govenment data and posting / tagging it where appropriate.

How do we make things like this real?  How do we identify the hundred or so large ongoing tasks for a city – from posting its laws and regulations and codes, to sharing any information about its public works, to sharing updates from residents about the state of its infrastructur, to crimes and concerns, to social events and new business openings, to apartments for rent and neighborhood committee meetings?

Google’s APIs Product Manager Adam Feldman announced on Thursday they will cancel the Google translate API by December, without replacing it, and that all use of it will be throttled until then.  Any reusers or libraries relying on the translate API to programmatically provide a better multilingual experience will have to switch over to another translation service.  (Some simple services will still be available to users, such as google.com/translate, but APIs will not be available to developers of other sites, libraries, or services.)

Ouch.  This is a sudden shift, both from their strong earlier support for this API (I was personally encouraged to use it for applications by colleagues at Google), and from their standing policy of supporting deprecated services for up to 3 years.   What could have spooked them?  Why the rush? As of today, the Translate API page reads:

The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.

Most disappointing to me is the way this announcement was released: buried in a blog post full of minor “Spring Cleaning” updates to a dozen other APIs.  Most of the other deprecated APIs were replaced by reasonable equivalents or alternatives, and were being maintained indefinitely with limits on the rate of requests per user.  None of them is being cancelled within six months, and none of them are half as widely used!

I hope that this obfuscation was an unintentional oversight.  There have been 170 irate replies to that post so far, almost all about the Translate API cancellation.  But it has been three days already without any significant update from Feldman or any mention of the change on the Google Translate blog.  Google’s response to a ZDNet inquiry was that they have no further information to provide on why they made this decision.

(more…)

Rebecca Black: How could you fail to love such a sincere meme machine?

Update: Her latest video, Which seat should I take, is hard to beat.