Sat, Aug 13, 2005
Free Identity! #
A suggestion for JimmyWales's list of things that need to be free: Free identity! (JNG)
"Free" in this case has a different meaning than it does than it does with the other items on Jimbo's list. We need to free our digital identities from the organizational silos that currently collect and control information about ourselves. I am not suggesting that all digital identities fall under an open content license; I'm saying that the individual should have the ability to decide who has access to his or her digital identity and what they're allowed to do with it. (JNH)
Why is this important? Privacy is the obvious and most important reason. A secondary reason is that free, or at least mobile identities are a prerequisite for Jimbo's tenth item: Free communities! It's not enough to be able to migrate content from one community to another if you can't also migrate people's identities as well. (JNI)
How can we free identities? Technically, it's not that's hard, and there are already several proposed specs and implementations, all of which support some notion of SingleSignOn and profile sharing with individual control. Personally, I'm partial to the IdentityCommons approach with i-names, where identifiers are globally resolvable, information is distributed, and the notion of contracts built into the data structure. In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we agree on an interoperable technical specification for identity. Fortunately, many of the folks in this space are already working on collaborating, thanks to the efforts of OwenDavis, KimCameron, PaulTrevithick, DocSearls, and many others. These people have taken to calling themselves the "Identity Gang." (JNJ)
The social questions are the hard ones. What does it really mean to control our identities? What should the social and legal agreements between individuals and organizations look like? If I give my business card to someone, what's the implicit contract associated with this action, and what would it mean to make that contract explicit? (JNK)
These questions are hard, but they're solvable. Unfortunately, we're not devoting much energy towards these issues right now. Perhaps a more public exhortation for freeing identities will lead to an effort to address these social questions that equals the current effort to solve the technical ones. (JNL)
/collaboration/idcommons | Posted at 12:44pm
Jimmy Wales on Things That Need To Be Free #
Thoughts on JimmyWales's keynote at WikiMania. Read RossMayfield's post for a more extensive summary: (JN8)
- "1. Free the encyclopedia!" Jimbo considers the English and German Wikipedias "done," and he expects the rest to be complete in about 10 years. His metric is 250,000 pages of content. (JN9)
- "3. Free the curriculum!" Jimbo suggested that professors work collectively on free textbooks, which raises the obvious question: Would this be successful? Incentive structures in academia are heavily weighted towards individual achievements, and a group of professors may not have the diverse makeup necessary for a superior collective outcome. Nevertheless, I think there's some potential there and that it would be a worthwhile experiment, especially for books at the grammar and high school level. (JNA)
- "8. Free the product identifiers!" I found this to be the most original of the 10. The so-called LongTail is creating a market for product identifiers based on open standards. Jimbo calls these LTIN, or "LongTail Identification Numbers." This would be a great, achievable, bottoms-up project for someone smart who wants to make a big impact on the world. The timing seems right. (JNB)
- "10. Free the communities!" Jimbo's basic point was that communities need to own their content, even in for-profit spaces (like his current project, WikiCities). This is the BlueOxenAssociates philosophy and our approach with the BlueOxenCollaboratories. Licensing community content under CreativeCommons is not enough, though. You need freely transportable identities, which leads me to a proposed addition to the list: Free identities! I'll expand on this in a future post. (JNC)
- To Jimbo's credit, the keynote was highly inclusive, even Wiki-like. Folks from the audience freely contributed ideas and critiques (PermissionToParticipate was rampant throughout the conference), and Jimbo modified his list on the fly. When someone in the audience suggested, "Free research!", Jimbo responded, "You're right. I'm going to make that number four." (JND)
- Jimbo on business models and free content: "Everyone tells jokes, but we still have professional comedians." He also noted that this line isn't his, saying, "I steal everything, including my jokes." (JNE)
- The most challenging suggestion was, "Free medical information!" In theory, this sounds wonderful. Someone in the audience (Florian) told an anecdote about a project in Austria to create a fully anonymized knowledge repository where doctors could share misdiagnoses. Jimbo suggested that such a resource should be available to everyone. The flip side of the argument to freeing medical information is that the content literally could be the difference between life and death. There's a tremendous responsibility among the part of the authors and publishers. As Jimbo noted, no one is going to die if there's an inaccuracy on the Thomas Jefferson Wikipedia page. (JNF)
/talks | Posted at 12:38pm
Patterns at WikiMania 2005 #
When I first met ChrisPeterson (now a BlueOxenAssociates advisor), she told me the story about coining "OpenSource." The sign of a good name, she explained, is when people naturally start using it on their own. At a meeting of developers and evangelists in early 1998, rather than argue strongly in favor of the term, she introduced it subtly. Although the response wasn't enthusiastic at the first, everyone in the room found themselves using the term, and by the end of the meeting, they all agreed to evangelize it. (JMS)
Similarly, my strategy for introducing and identifying patterns of high-performance collaboration is to subversively introduce patterns into various communities and then to listen. If people naturally use a pattern in conversation, the name is probably good and the pattern itself is probably real and repeating. As people become familiar with the concept, they are more likely to identify and name other patterns. Over time, the language shifts your thinking, giving you a cognitive framework for thinking about, talking about, and improving collaboration and collaborative tools. Moreover, the process itself is iterative and collaborative, which is both the right way to develop PatternLanguages and also another application of collaborative patterns. (JMT)
I've been giving some variation of a stock talk on patterns for over a year now, including last week at WikiMania 2005. It usually consists of a quick introduction, a few examples, and an interactive portion where I tease out patterns from the audience. The audience banter is always the best part. It's always different, and it's provided me with entertaining anecdotes, new patterns, and better pattern names. (JMU)
Last week, I mentioned four patterns that Wikis facilitate: PermissionToParticipate, SharedDisplay, VisiblePulse, and WorkingDraft?. TimStarling followed my talk with an overview of MediaWiki development, and when he mentioned their IRC channel, he said, "This is our community's VisiblePulse." I love it when the process works! (JMV)
The discussion teased out other patterns, especially [Celebration]? and [Initiation]?. (LindaRising and MaryLynnManns mentions both of these in their book. They have a better name for the latter, but I don't remember it off-hand.) One person told a great story about both. His team met for the first time in Australia, and before embarking on their project, they brewed beer that they planned on drinking after they finished their project. (JMW)
Other patterns observed and not observed at the conference and within the community: (JMX)
- The [Celebration]? at the end of the conference was great, but the [Initiation]? wasn't particularly remarkable. This isn't unusual for conferences, where [Initiation]? tends to be in the form of a keynote. (JMY)
- One pattern closely related to [Initiation]? is [Introductions]?. At conferences, this generally comes in the form of name badges, which we had at WikiMania. I think there's a huge opportunity for further facilitating this pattern at conferences, which is something BlueOxenAssociates is working on. Hacking Days also would have been significantly more effective if we simply went around the room each day and quickly introduced ourselves. It's one of those patterns that sound obvious when you hear about it, but is often forgotten when actually designing an event. (JMZ)
- Conferences usually do WaterCooler? well, and WikiMania was no exception. We had long lunches, a party on the last night, an IRC channel, and some organized activities in FrankfurtAmMain for stragglers following the conference. In particular, the organizers did two things really well. The HausDerJugend was an excellent choice of venue, because it was an intimate space where social interaction was practically unavoidable. Most of the participants stayed at the hostel, which meant that there was always an interesting conversation to be had by simply going downstairs and hanging out in one of the common rooms. Plus, most of us who stayed there also had roommates, which is not typical for the conferences I attend. The restaurants and bars -- touristy though they were -- were in very close proximity, which made it easy to grab a beer and talk. ([Food]? is a closely related pattern.) Finally, Hacking Days served as an unintentional WaterCooler?, at least for those of us who were not MediaWiki developers. Coming early is something the organizers should encourage more widely next time. (JN0)
- I'm very biased towards highly interactive event design, and it seemed like it would have been especially appropriate for a Wiki conference. That said, the panel format worked better than at most conferences, and I think the Wiki culture of PermissionToParticipate had a lot to do with that. The audience interacted easily with the presenters at all of the talks I attended, and most of the speakers did a nice job of incorporating feedback into their presentations. One thing they did not do well was actively promote and integrate the conference Wiki as a place to take notes and have additional discussions. Again, this seemed surprising for a Wiki conference -- yet another indication that making patterns explicit is a good thing. (JN1)
- Another favorite -- also found in Linda and Mary Lynn's book -- is SpotlightOnOthers. This runs rampant throughout the Wikipedia community, which is wonderful. Tim cited me when mentioning VisiblePulse, and by the next morning, SunirShah had incorporated PermissionToParticipate into his talk on conflict resolution. I found this time and again in people's talks. One reason it occurred so often during the conference is that the organizers used a Wiki to develop the program transparently. People watched other people's talks develop and incorporated their content even before the conference began. (JN2)
- A critical pattern, especially for inter-organizational collaboration, is NeutralSpace. Wikipedia would not have been successful if it did not have an open content license (which facilitates NeutralSpace) and, to some extent, if it were a for-profit company. At the board panel on the last day, several people brought up the question of online ads. On the one hand, ads have the potential of bringing in a tremendous amount of revenue, which could be put to good use for the community. On the other hand, it breaks the NeutralSpace pattern that has served Wikipedia so well. The community was more or less split on this issue. My vote: No ads! (JN3)
One last pattern that I both observed and missed was UsersTalkToDevelopers?, a pattern I first described in, "An Introduction to Open Source Communities." Previously, I criticized the MediaWiki developers for not practicing it enough. With the whole conference finally behind me, I want to both soften and and strengthen my statement. (JN4)
Many of the MediaWiki developers came to the project as Wikipedia contributors. BrionVibber, one of the leaders of the project, probably never would have joined had it not been for the Esperanto Wikipedia, of all things. After having more time to interact and observe the developers, I think that on average, community interaction is more prevalent among the MediaWiki developers than it is with many other projects. (JN5)
That said, it's still not nearly what it can and should be. During the sessions on politics and developing countries, several panelists complained that the tools had a way to go to meet their needs, and yet, none of the developers were attending their sessions. HosseinDerakhshan? noted that techies are generally not interested in issues outside of their sphere. (JN6)
Not all the blame falls on developers, however. As great as it would have been to see more developers abandoning the technical sessions in favor of the more social ones, it would have been fantastic to see more Wikipedia contributors attend some of the technical sesssions. Both communities need to learn and respect each other's language if they truly want to engage collaboratively. [Bridges]? are critical to make this work. Note that this applies not only to MediaWiki, but to all OpenSource projects. (JN7)
/collaboration/patterns | Posted at 12:07pm
Ross Gets Down #
Sunday evening, August 7, 2005: (JMQ)
Me: I took an incriminating photo of RossMayfield at Brotfabrik last night. Should I post it on my blog? (JMO)
Sorry, Ross. Sunir made me do it. (JMR)
/personal | Posted at 11:39am
WikiMania 2005 Redux #
[I originally wrote this two days after the conference, but because of limited Internet access the past few days, I couldn't post it until today. -EEK] (JME)
WikiMania is over. What a whirlwind three days. I'm so glad I came early for Hacking Days, because it gave me a chance to meet key members of the community in a relaxed environment, the calm before the storm as it were. That I was able to blog my impressions each day is proof of that. (JMF)
Blogging during the conference itself turned out to be impossible. I had no time to get away and gather my thoughts, at least on my computer. RossMayfield mentioned a PeterKaminski maxim during my talk: Face-to-face time is too precious to waste working. Well, I embodied that philosophy this past weekend. I met people from roughly twenty different countries and managed to spend quality time with most of them. (According to FlorenceDevouard, there were 52 countries represented among the 300 participants and speakers.) (JMG)
Right now, my body is complaining about the cumulative effects of repeated late night sessions over too much beer and apfelwein, but my mind and spirit are refreshed. Each day, a different group of us shared stories, laughed, and argued about international politics, Wikis, Fleischbutter, and our compatriots, families, friends, and selves. (JMH)
Now, I find myself both moved and troubled. This is not the first time I've walked away from a great event like this and felt this way. In many ways, this gathering embodied what communities and collaboration should be about. The danger is that we might view it as the way things are. They're not. Many of us will return to our banal lives, bracing ourselves for the inevitable stack of work that accumulated in our absence. Some of us will return to homes that practice rampant censorship, to populations with miniscule literacy rates and significant poverty. All of us return to a world that is dangerously volatile, where tensions between our respective countries are taut and frayed. (JMI)
Did our little gathering make the world a better place? Sure. It will take years for our new and strengthened ties and our newly broadened perspectives to noticeably change the world, but the effects are real and will reverberate and grow over time. However, these changes are also barely apparent now, and the work that we must continue to do is daunting. (JMJ)
In the end, I walk away from this conference a little wiser and a little scared, with a lot of hope and a renewed sense of purpose. More importantly, I look forward to the new partnerships that will inevitably emerge, and I wait excitedly to see my new friends once again. (JMK)
I'll have more to say about the conference itself, but not this week. This week, I'm in Berlin, exploring a great city that has changed so much in only fifteen years and spending time with old friends and new. (JML)
[Berlin was fantastic! I'll blog extensively about it next week after I post the rest of my WikiMania thoughts. -EEK] (JMM)
/events | Posted at 11:33am
