The Longest Now

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…

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(echoes of a broken system)

UPDATE: Aaron committed suicide on January 11, 2013.(!) More on his life here.

Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to knowledge, open government, and an informed civil society.  He has worked as a software architect, digital archivist, social analyst, Wikipedia analyst, and political organizer.  Last year he co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the non-profit political advocacy group Demand Progress.

He is also currently charged with computer fraud by the US Attorney’s office, in what appears to be the latest example of “a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction” based on the broad applicability of wire fraud and computer fraud statutes.  An overview:

Background

Aaron has studied institutional influence and ways to work with large datasets.  In 2008, he founded watchdog.net, “the good government site with teeth“,  to aggregate and visualize data about politicians – including where their money comes from.  That year he also worked with Shireen Barday at Stanford Law School to assess “problems with remunerated research” in law review articles (i.e., articles funded by corporations, sometimes to help them in ongoing legal battles), by downloading and analyzing over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding.   The results were published in the Stanford Law Review.  Most recently, he served for 10 months as a Fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, in their Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He contributed to the field of digital archiving, designing and implementing the Open Library, which serves as a global digital resource today, and as a foundation for any digital libraries in the future.  And he collected 2 million  public-domain court decisions from the US PACER system — a system that nominally makes all such decisions available to the public, but in practice keeps them hidden behind a paywall — to add to Carl Malamud’s collection at resource.org.  (That work in turn gave rise to the crowdsourced RECAP project.)

The Case of the Over-Downloader

Last week, Aaron was charged by a grand jury with computer fraud [1], for allegedly downloading millions of academic articles hosted by the journal archive JSTOR, and exceeding authorization on MIT and JSTOR servers to do so.

JSTOR claims no interest in pursuing a legal case.  However they are not part of the prosecution, and Aaron faces a possible fine and up to 35 years in prison, with trial set for September.  You can support his legal efforts online.

The Association of College and Research Libraries notes that both the prosecution and Swartz’s supporters have characterized the trial with “superficial, and deeply incorrect, messages about libraries and licensed content“.

So how did this come to pass, and what does it mean for the Internet?

Details of the case and public reactions it inspired, after the jump.

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OLPC Afghanistan currently works with school in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kandahar.   This is one of our most politically complex and interesting deployments.  The initial schools involved tend to be on the wealthy side, but are still often in areas with poor power and connectivity.

Jalalabad also houses Afghanistan’s only FabLab – which set up the first “FabFi” mesh network to serve the surrounding community.  After the deployment of OLPC laptops to a local school there, families began to have access to the Internet, and to Wikipedia, for the first time.  Here are three generations of one family, outside on their roof, browsing Wikipedia together:

An Afghan family browses Wikipedia together outside

(As it happens, one of the university students who helped localize the software into Dari and Pashto is also a Wikipedian.)

Over a year after that deployment finished, I am working with FabLab folk to figure out what a similar lab and community wifi setup might look like in Herat, where we also have an OLPC school and may add another.  They’re refreshingly fun and competent people to work with, and full of great stories about young Afghans taking interesting ideas and running with them, turning them into amazing art projects or montages or startups.   Any city trying out cool new technical innovations should have a fablab to amplify the joys of being on the cutting edge.

Today we have 4,000 families connected to eachother and to the Internet in Afghanistan through OLPC; we hope to have thousands more by the end of the year.  And now I’m wondering if we can get fablabs started in the US cities where there are significant OLPC projects.

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.

Brand has a lovely interview in The European this week (auf Deutsch) on his ideology and thoughts on language preservation and nuclear power.  Worth a read, even if only in translation.

As Wikimedia has grown as a movement from a website and cool idea to a family of sites and a network of national and international non-profits, we have developed many ways to engage partners and the media, raise funds, and make large-scale decisions.  National chapters have become significant non-profits in their own right, and collaboration between chapters and the global Foundation has become more intricate.  For instance, chapters today run and support international events, offer scholarships and grants to community members, raise significant funds directly through the annual sitenotices, and run branding initiatives — including the global campaign for “Wikipedia as World Heritage Site” organized recently by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In 2009, during Wikimedia’s strategic planning process for the coming five years, a task force focused on movement roles was set up.  Its task was to research how individual contributors, Chapters, and the Foundation currently interact, and how they should ideally work together, and how this happened in other global organizations.  This was the most abstract part of optimizing operations, which included discussions of how we  guarantee financial sustainability, build partnerships and infrastructure, and influence public  perception and policy.

This group tackled questions of how the different parts of the movement develop strategy, make decisions across the movement, and communicate with one another.  A few initial recommendations were made, but these issues required more detailed discussion.^[1] So a Board working group was created to continue the work.

This group chose to focus for its first year on the roles of formal organizations in the movement — the WMF and its Committees, Chapters, and other structured groups that should have similar formal recognition.  We tabled the equally complex issue of the roles of individual contributors, wiki projects, and other informal groups to a separate discussion.

The result of this work will be a set of recommendations to the movement as a whole – expressed in a movement charter that all formal parts of the movement can endorse, to the WMF, and to chapters.  The project and its recommendations are being developed on the Meta-wiki.  All are welcome to participate in the working group and discussions (or simply browse our meeting notes).   By Wikimania this year, the group aims to have recommendations on new models for organizations that the WMF should recognize (Associations and Partner Organizations),  on movement standards for transparency and auditing, and more.

I will post a series of updates about the project over the coming weeks, leading up to in-person discussions at Wikimania.  If you have questions about the project or any of its targets, suggestions about important issues we aren’t yet considering, &c – please let me know on my talk page.

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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).

Commons hits eight figures of media. The WMF blog post about it is lovely.

Commons growth continues to be geometric and visually stunning. And the extra horsepower running it (and making regular dumps!) marks a great improvement from last year. Now we need to help the community there keep up with its popularity!

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.

Wikimedia had a terribly successful fundraising campaign ths year, with a team of stats-loving traffic and feedback analysts learning a lot about our reading audience and how to connect with them. There was diverse support for the idea of running some banners to promote donating time and expertise and edits as well as money, and some general-purpose “discover Wikimedia” banners were run the first week of January, but this was soon overtaken by preparations for the (wickedly fun) 10th anniversary celebrations.

We should do more of this. The idea of inviting people more explicitly to edit, and running campaigns dedicated to this, is more fundamental to the nature of Wikipedia than fundraising itself. We should be thinking about all year round, spending as much time and effort campaigning for meaningful content contributions as we have for funds.

What would that look like? Here is one idea: WikiProjects could be encouraged to write copy for their own banners, from a hook to a detailed call for what they need. These would be run for a % of new visitors proportional to the project’s capacity to absorb new contributors. A few generic projects would be geared up for a larger influx of editors, and established editors would be asked to help work with those newbies (and to set up comfort zones where they can find and help one another).

The generic projects would ramp up slowly; with one month’s newbies helping welcome those who came the next month. Some new policies regarding working with newbies would need to be proposed on the major wikis, possibly with a group like the original Fire Brigade dedicated to helping the ambassadors and welcomers with the extra load. And the specific WikiProjects could continue to draw in as many new editors as they want, and could try out different messages to attract just the right sort of reader (including efforts at targetting specific kinds of readers).

What do you think? How would you reach out to readers if you could change the way the site looks? (What ever happened to the idea of highlighting the “edit this page” tab?) Over 1% of people who saw the best fundraising messages clicked through them — imagine what we could do if we showed all of those people that they could really edit.

From a world of transient characters and jargon, a vignette about synergy and beauty:

1. Two friends program and voice a two-minute RPG.
   The game becomes somewhat popular.
2. Someone posts a very literal, frustrated, typo-ridden review.
   The review becomes infamous.
3. The voice actor finds and narrates the review.
   The narration becomes very popular.
4. Someone finds the narration and animates its text to Carl Orff.
   A one-hit wonder is born.

Epic win.

Simple, passionate, efficient: a solid global implementation of one of the cheapest irrevocable life-improvements (fixing cleft palates) modern medicine can offer. Smile Train is a remarkable charity.

They are fascinating on a few levels, from the clarity of their work and tactical training local doctors, their selection of spokespeople and Oscar-winning short documentary, to the controversy of their fundraising tactics, and the lingering drama of an early fork. If you haven’t heard of them before it’s worth taking ten minutes to find out what they do.

It took me a while to realize what I was reading: an entire zine site – from featured stories to news blurbs and gossip sections to photosets and interviews – about celebrity charitable work. How, when, and why people give, third-party events recognizing different sorts of giving. Glossy coverage of civic events supporting the needy or arranging barn-raising and disaster recovery in towns around the world. Site polls about how visitors plan to help a homeless person in their neighborhood that day.

Somehow they pull this off in a sincere and heart-warming way. What say you?

http://www.tonic.com/

Awesome in at least three different ways.

We are lucky to have such a cool president. Anyone who takes the time to record a message for a public campaign to keep angsty teens from committing suicide is good in my book, but Obama really put some effort into this — it’s fantastic.

Joseph Reagle is a Wikipedian and a researcher of social collaboration.  He was an early fellow at the Berkman Center before I got involved there, worked on some interesting W3C projects, and joined NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication where he studied collaboration and Wikipedia.  He turned some of his PhD work into a book on Wikipedia culture, which was just published this month.

“Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia” is an excellent read, suited for both my mother and for the armchair sociology buff.  Having seen some of the detailed research that went into it, I was pleased to find it organizes that into clear narrative facets, each illuminating part of the whole, without creating artificial story arcs.

The book is careful with its use of language and terminology, self-conscious of when it is sharing a widely understood phrase and when it is creating one that it needs for clarity.  It includes a comprehensive look at Wikipedian writings and coming-of-age debates during the heady period from 2004 to 2006, when much of the texture of current community structures was being formed.  The writing is poetic at times, and I particularly appreciate its comparisons to similar projects across two millennia (we have indeed been collating and collaborating for a long time)

This is also the first extended research into Wikipedian culture to strike what I feel is a carefully-sourced (60 pages of endnotes!) and neutral perspective, giving it a certain… idempotence.  In the tradition of early philosophical wikis, Wikipedia has long hosted a great deal of its own commentary on and analysis of itself and its community, and these existing analyses are given apprporiate historical prominence.  Good Faith Collaboration builds on these on-wiki conversations to offer a balanced look at decision-making within the community, describing the varied and sometimes conflicting views held by groups within the community.

Kudos to Joseph for this work, which I suspect will become a launching point for future community analyses.

There is much more that could be accomplished with the open ten-year history of Wikipedia across its many languages, subprojects, and variants!   One natural expansion (both for Wikipedia and for other long-lived transparent communities) would be to repeat a certain community analysis at regular intervals along a timeline.  We can observe and classify cultural change with a precision and a visualization of propagating memes that would be impossible in more opaque communities (dominated by invisible communication).  This was more true a few years ago than it is today — in the past year many significant documents or ideas were drafted in private, and perhaps not versioned at all, and many conversations left unarchived.  If we are to continue to make this sort of learning and analysis available for future generations, we may need to refocus our energies on public and transparent communication channels.

One of my brother’s latest projects, Chile 8.8, is a reflection on the act and goals of architectural reconstruction of cities, for this year’s Architecture Biennale. If you are near Venice while the 2010 Biennale is on, stop by the Chilean Pavillion and take a look.

17 soluciones arquitectónicas fueron seleccionadas para participar del encuentro titulado “La gente se encuentra en la arquitectura”… Los proyectos, que ya fueron construidos o lo serán en el corto plazo y se expondrán en un gran biombo de 130 metros, siguen tres pilares de reconstrucción: patrimonio, prefabricación y organización social.

17 architectural solutions (to destruction) were chosen to participate in the Biennale, where this year’s subject is  “People Meet Architecture”.  The projects, which have been or will shortly be built, and displayed on a 130 meter screen, focus on one of three pillars of reconstruction:  heritage, prefabrication, and social structure.