What is the biggest impact Open States has had to date?

I suppose it depends on what kind of impact we're talking about. Governments are slowly coming to terms with this and we've seen states like Minnesota and Kansas start to move towards machine-readable access of their data—and I think we can take some of the credit for that. A big part of it is that they just have smart people working there that get the importance of making this data available in as many ways as possible.

I'm particularly partial to the impact that the project has had on individuals. Sunlight open sources everything we do, and as a result, we have over 130 projects on GitHub. Most of these projects aren't things that the average developer uses, so they don't see a ton of attention from outside developers. Open States has been a real success in a unique way—it has gotten developers that were otherwise unaware of open government involved. We've had contributions from approximately 50 developers, ranging from minor tweaks to a parser to fix an error that a user noticed to entire states contributed. I think it has made a real impact in providing a gentle introduction for developers looking for a way to contribute.

"Culture is anti-rivalrous. The more people know and sing a song, the more cultural value it has. The more people watch my film Sita Sings the Blues, or read my comic strip Mimi & Eunice, the happier I’ll be, so please go do that now and then come back and read the rest of this paragraph. The more people know a movie or TV show, the more cultural value it has. Monty Python references attest to the cultural value of Monty Python – we even use the word “spam” because of it. Shakespeare‘s works are culturally valuable, and phrases from them live on in the language even apart from the plays (“I think she doth protest to much,” etc.). The more people refer to Monty Python and Shakespeare, the more you just gotta see em, amiright? Or not, it doesn’t matter whether you see them, you’re already speaking them. That all culture is a kind of language, I’ll leave for another discussion."

"This memo considers three radical ideas applying to the Web, not necessarily as serious proposals (although given support they could be turned into such) but as thought experiments or fantasies meant to sharpen the discussion of the "meaning" of URIs and other current issues of web architecture. The first fantasy is the idea that a URI's meaning is in how it is used, not what it "identifies". The second is the prospect of second sourcing for URI behavior. The third is the idea of encyclopedia-style documentation for URIs."

"An interesting question to ask then is: how large would the public domain be if copyright had not been extended from its original length of 14 years with (possible) 14 year renewal (14+14) set out in Statute of Anne back in 1710? And how does this compare with how the situation, back when 14+14 was in “full swing”, say, 1795?"

"Next time you hear someone invoke "information wants to be free" as a justification for demanding free-as-in-no-payment-expected content, ask them: precisely what content have you released for free lately?"

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

"An important addition to the growing international dialogue about the commons can be found in the new anthology, Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? (discussed in this previous blog post). Recently released in German, the essays in this book are now available online in English.

The book was edited by Silke Helfrich and published by the Heinrich Boell Foundation; Helfrich is the former director of the Foundation’s Mexico City office, which hosted a major conference, Citizenship and Commons, in December 2006. The collection, whose title in English is To Whom Does the World Belong? offers a thoughtful and provocative array of viewpoints on the commons. (The links below connect to pdf files of the essays.)"

"Finally, in the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and by agreement with our interviewees, we are making this footage available to others who want to make films on this subject, and who may not have the resources to travel to and meet these exceptional individuals. We hope the HDV Torrents we have provided are of sufficient quality. If you have any issues, please contact us.

Steal This Film is a work in progress, incomplete, open to contradiction and response. The task of talking back to our point of view is one we leave at the feet of you, the viewers, users and produsers of the film."

"The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts."

"RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. You can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the social networks below."

"The best thing about raw data is that almost everyone knows how it works. This means that as far as the data (re)user is concerned, the datasets are text files (or perhaps a close variant) that they can download, open in some default application, and get some immediate use out of it."

"Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open."

"One of the most compelling ideas now beginning to be discussed is the need to shift from a market-based society to a commons-based society. In America today, the ideal of “The Market” has become an out-of-control engine reshaping nearly every aspect of life from education to the environment to our private lives. The commons—all the things we all own together that are not for sale to the highest bidder—has been lost in this process, impoverishing us all to a larger or smaller degree. Many things fall within that definition of the commons– air, water, health of the land, the internet, public health, scientific knowledge, cultural traditions, even languages. For the most part, commons do not have price tags. Imagine them for a moment as properties in which each of us holds an equal share of stock."

"Yet before our eyes, another reality is emerging – or rather re-emerging, because it once served humanity for centuries. That reality is the commons, which derives from a different side of human nature, and therefore operates on different principles than the market supposedly does. That other side is not the sappy, self-sacrificing altruist that marketophiles posit as the only alternative to their model of human behavior. Nor is it the grim utilitarian socialist. Rather, it is whatever resides in us that wants to be engaged with and around other people – whether to accomplish a task or just because it is fun.
This convivial side of economic life is beyond the bandwidth of most economic thought. The corporate market tends to repress it, and partly for that very reason it has been fighting its way back through the concrete. Cyberspace and the World Wide Web gave it a vast and unenclosed new realm, much as the New World once did for the surging energies of Old Europe...."

"IMMEDIAST projects are against all forms of coercive communication, cultural monologue and media control. We acknowledge non-violent public insurgence as a legitimate response to sustained violations by media and state. We recognize the air as public property, and the signals that travel through it to be the domain of the public."

"The Defensive Publications program, a component of Linux Defenders, enables non-attorneys to use a set of Web-based forms to generate defensive publications. It relies on substantial participation from the open source community using a "Wiki"-like contribution model. OIN plans to work with participants to ensure that each defensive publication is an effective disclosure. The completed defensive publication will be added by OIN to the IP.com database, which is, in turn, used by IP attorneys and the patent and trademark office to search for prior art when examining patent applications."

"... This program is revenue-neutral, and will help to make roads more accessible to low-income drivers by charging people for actual road use rather than for car ownership. The system will also benefit drivers by reducing the amount of time stuck in traffic.

One interesting quirk of the system: because a straight vehicle tax is being swapped for a per-mile fee, cars will actually become cheaper and car ownership should therefore go up. Total miles driven, on the other hand, will drop. This sort of “mobility as a service” arrangement may become more common in the future. For example, Shai Agassi has been on a tear recently with Better Place, which aims to sell electric vehicles on a pay-as-you-go cell phone model."

"The recent disruption marked the final blowup in a year-long game of chicken played by Sprint Nextel and Cogent and brought to light an uncomfortable reality: The Internet is held together by collection of secret contracts struck between private companies, free from government oversight and regulation."

"At this moment in history growing numbers of citizens—including many who never before questioned the status quo—are willing to explore perspectives that once would have seemed radical. Millions of Americans are now making shifts in their personal lives such as buying organic foods, trying alternative medicine, collaborating in creating software, and beginning to search for something that offers a greater sense of meaning in the world. They may not yet understand the idea of the commons, but they are looking for something different in their lives.

The time seems ripe today for a decisive shift in worldview. People everywhere are yearning to tap the potential of the human spirit to create a better world, and the dream of a commons-based society holds great practical potential to transform that hope into constructive action."

"Yochai Benkler, who’s written at length about the economics of commons production, pushes Heller for details, embracing the idea of the anticommons, but looking for specific ways out: do we need more commons? lower transaction costs? spot markets that make it easier to transact around property? Heller (correctly?) summarizes his question, “Very nice, but so what?” He offers a possible way out: in cases of scarcity, private property makes sense, while in situations with no scarcity, a commons model makes more sense. If it’s possible to use telecoms whitespace in a non-rivalrous fashion, spectrum should be a commons; if not, perhaps we need a more intelligent form of private property."

"My father the anthropologist and I are alike in one way at least: we don’t suffer fruitless systems in silence. In one way at least, we are different: I cannot content myself with complaining to the powerless and uninvolved."

"This decision has confirmed what was already obvious from a plain reading of the statutes, that Minnesota cities can use their bonding authority for deploying the essential infrastructure of the next century."

"Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment.

To purchase a digital copy of the California code costs $1,556, or $2,315 for a printed version. The state generates about $880,000 annually by selling its laws, according to the California Office of Administrative Law."

"... If the bus company has to meet labor, environmental, and equipment standards to cart passengers around for a fee, it could easily be undercut by unlicensed shared-ride operations, it says. Whether that turns out to be true or not, Trentway finds itself in the same basic situation that existing business like Encyclopedia Britannica faced when free or low-cost upstarts like Wikipedia threatened to crowd-source their core product into oblivion"

The key: "...it needn't be bureaucratically untenable."

"If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question."

via Hugh MacLeod, on Twitter

"Well, in many of those stores, the government never gets the money. The owners of the stores get to keep it. And who are the big beneficiaries of that?" Note the bit on Cabela's.

"What better way could there be to create a nation of constant lawbreakers than to instill in that nation a contempt for its own laws?"

"A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it"

"Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable."

"Would you believe, I needed Sony’s authorization, to read Charles Dickens on my new PRS-505?"

"We are dealing with a 25-year degradation of everything public."

via Sam Rose

Man does not like IA.org

"there are at least 350 scholarly journals for which the price of a single institutional subscription exceeds the revenue needed to provide hosting and technical support for an open access scholarly journal"

"A public realm needs scarcity: without constraint we devolve into the weak forces of diffusion..."

"Theses must be born-digital (i.e. NOT PDF); Domain ontologies must be used; All data must be included in theses;Data must be validated before submission; Theses must be openly exposed to data and metadata crawlers..."

Important.

So much for agalmia.

Several genetic programming folks were asking after "real world" datasets last week. Here some are.

Read and understand.

10000 electronic texts have been produced <b>collaboratively</b> by Distributed Proofreaders.