"The digital humanities are a part of the open humanities to the extent that those same values are held, though of course the purely digital elements (the code, the markup, the hardware) are unique to the digital humanities and live largely outside of OH. That being said, much of DH—the commitment to open source, the collaborative nature of the field, the interdisciplinarity—is open."

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.

"This is just to say that if we think keeping our scholarly work primarily out of public sight [except for the occasional conference presentation] until its penultimate moment of publication in a conventional venue such as the academic journal or book, at which point quite a few years of our lives [mainly spent in the solitude of studies and libraries or other semi-private spaces where we could manage a foothold] may have been devoted to that work whose “arrival” in print may even occur long after we have moved on to other projects, then we risk working too much in the dark, apart from the world which has bequeathed to us our objects and methods of study and reflection [I might also add here that this traditional way of doing things also keeps our work sequestered within the academy, and does not allow us to reach a more broadly public audience, which, in my mind, is a real perversion of the term "humanities"]. We also do our work largely apart from the very peers whom we hope will welcome and even love it when it is “finished.” Yes, for the kind of work we do, quiet is required, even long stretches of solitude [because this is when ideas often arrive to us that could never have arrived any other way and also because it's hard to translate medieval Latin when people are milling all around you], but you’ve got to get outside every now then. And maybe also reflect on the fact that even the supposed inside/outside divide is primarily an illusion."

"  Q: As your answer indicates, there is more to OA than green and gold alone; there is also gratis and libre OA. In 2008, you produced a grid demonstrating the four-way relationship among the different types of OA. Can you expand on this, and outline the relative merits of gratis and libre OA? 

A: Gratis OA is simply free of charge. But it’s not more free than that. Gratis literature may stand under all-rights-reserved copyrights and give users no more rights than they already had under fair use (or fair dealing).

Libre OA is free of charge and free of at least some copyright and licensing restrictions. Libre literature stands under some-rights-reserved copyrights, at most, and permits uses that exceed fair use. The advantage of libre OA is that researchers needn’t slow down to ask permission for legitimate scholarly uses that exceed fair use, needn’t take the risk of proceeding without permission, and needn’t err on the side of non-use. By the way, the grid you mentioned was merely a preview of a longer article, which explained the gratis/libre distinction in much more detail."

"Copyright law’s grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry … and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion’s free culture."

"Here are five to start us off:

Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook. The first thing we have to mention, which we have mentioned a few times already, is Twitter. The reasons we like Twitter are complex and I won’t pretend to understand them all, but I’ll throw out a few suggestions. First, its “follow” rather than “friend” model is more open, allows for the collaboration and non-hierarchy that the Internet and digital humanities values. Second, and related to this, Twitter is the place where content-creators—journalists, writers, artists, web developers, etc.—tend to hang out. We overlap with those communities, or at least seek to overlap with them, in productive ways. They are the distant nodes from which we hope new innovations will come. Third, Twitter, in the way we use it, is mostly about sharing ideas whereas Facebook is about sharing relationships. Scholars are good at ideas, maybe less so at relationships.
Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles. The second thing I’ll mention is agile development, the philosophy of “releasing early and often,” which we do not only with software/code but also with our ideas and writing when we Tweet, blog, and chat. We do this as good neighbors but also in the hope that releasing our code and ideas will improve with contributions from end points of our networks.
Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing. Most of the most successful digital humanities projects are those done by scholar/technologists not those imagined by scholars and implemented by technologists. Likewise, the most successful digital humanists are scholars who know the technology, often those who are self-taught, not ones who seek a client-vendor relationship with technologists. We take this insight to heart in our hiring at CHNM, looking for people with formal training in the humanities and self-taught tech skills.
Like: PHP / Dislike: C++. Fourth, and following from the last point, we like PHP not C++. This is another way of saying we like the transparent, easy-to-learn, and simple (if sometimes ham-handed) technologies of the Web more than the more powerful, more sophisticated, more elegant, but less approachable compiled code of the desktop. A focus on getting the most out of simple, transparent, vernacular technologies allows us to keep the door to the field open to new entrants.
Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding. In one respect, this may seem obvious: everybody likes grants. In another respect it’s probably going a little too far to say we don’t like intramural funding: it is essential to building and maintaining capacity for our centers and staff. But it seems to me the most successful digital humanities projects are those that result from competitive grant making processes, especially the federal grant making process. Why is this? I can point to at least three reasons: 1) Attracting grant money keeps us innovating, which, like it or not, is a premium in our business. Grants are given for new work, not for more of the same. 2) Writing grants and serving on panels keep us in conversation with the field. We have to keep current and keep in touch with one another to justify our projects to grantmakers and to recommend others’ projects for funding. Increasingly, funding guidelines themselves require collaboration. 3) Unlike much traditional scholarship, which often requires one big deliverable (a book) after years of close-kept study, research, and writing, grant work requires defining and meeting a set of closely timed, concrete deliverables, a mode of work which encourages the kind of agile development so valued by the Internet and digital humanities community."

"TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient, System"

"…I’ve invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. My goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek, aiming to capture his range of styles (colloquial conversation on the street, philosophical debate, rhetorical displays, poetic analysis, and so on) in a contemporary idiom. The nature of the project requires a wide readership for its success, so I hope you will pass this along."

"Just as the auto-industry is fragmenting as it becomes clear the majors can’t satisfy niche demand propelled by personalization, the mobile phone industry knows that the success of Apple’s iPhone is a sign that customization and personalization are now more important than engineering excellence. No manager, executive or designer is unaware of it – though we’ve seen a succession of ultra-high functionality phones launched recently, with a phone-based Sony playstation device to come."

"There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about …"

"Personally, I’d love to see some of these problems above fixed and I’d love to be able to really nod my head in agreement when I read that Yahoo is serious about a more “open and relevant web.” That would be much better than me shaking my head in disagreement and writing letters."

"I don't know about you, but for most of us "the best solution available in the market" is the one that costs the least and does what I want it to. If it's free, even better. Can we say "Google"?"

"Most organizations have serious problems with data management because it's expensive to do systematic curation, which includes documenting the context in which data were generated or derived, including the instruments involved, the protocols and such," Palmer said. "But that also requires caring for the data and making them available to other scientists. It takes serious commitment and investment."

"1. Keep the scope as simple as possible.… 2. Practice ‘Good Enough’.… 3. Kill extra features.… 4. Make it public, quick."

"Under the new plan, EWA will immediately shift from a traditional membership organization to an open community, embracing a wider net of people concerned about the quality of education information. The organization will create 21st century mechanisms for supporting traditional writers in real time while adopting creative advocacy on behalf of first-rate sustainable journalism."

"The Commission’s resolution also included a call for ODOT to attend their next meeting on February 2 (9 am at City Hall) to discuss the benefits of a bike/ped path included in the bid process. ODOT will release the RFQ that same day, so Brown pointed out that the resolution and alternative technical specification in the RFQ will have to be sent to ODOT this week. ODOT will host a meeting for parties interested in designing the Innerbelt Bridge on Feb. 9. Kuri asked if this was a public meeting (and offered after that a group of advocates might consider forming as a design ‘firm’ to bid on the project – for at least the purpose of attending the Feb. 9 meeting. The guidlines for bidding on the Innerbelt Bridge can be found here.)"

"Since the launch of DataSF last summer, the City’s clearinghouse of government datasets, we have seen our tech community create new services and products never dreamed of within the walls of government. And now we are giving people access to technology systems like our 311 call center through open source, so they can decide how and when they interact with government.

We face many challenges today, none more urgent than the economic crisis, but with it comes an opportunity to seek new ways of governing. In San Francisco, like other cities, we are using this opportunity to engage our greatest resource, the public, to build a government that works better for all of us."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"Extensive research has been done to analyze the phenomenon of open source software development from various perspectives. By contrast little is known about open source development of tangible objects, so–called open design, so far. Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of this ‘new innovation model’ outside software may have been a key reason for this gap.

This paper contributes to the literature on the open source mode of product development by providing a quantitative study (N = 85) of open design projects. Our goal is to explore the landscape of open source development in the world of atoms, to analyze project characteristics, structures, and success, and to investigate similarities and dissimilarities to open source software development."

"Open source, if we view it through a different lens, is really more about a distributed methodology for software development. The burden of creation is widely distributed across a massive community with more-or-less equal access to tools and systems. In this context, the role of the legal tool is more akin to an enzyme. It was an essential piece of a puzzle, but it was not the only piece. In fact, without the rest of the infrastructure (connectivity, tools, and people) the legal tool on its own would not have led us to GNU/Linux."

"What Olson shows in the book is that although all parties in a group may strongly desire and benefit from a particular collective good (e.g., a stable climate), under many circumstances they will not take individual action to achieve that collective good. In particular, they often find it in their individual best interest to act against their collective interest. The book has a penetrating analysis of what conditions can cause individual and collective interests to be aligned, and what causes them to be out of alignement."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"In a CouchDB-enabled web, data-flows don't have to be centralized, which means friends can communicate without going through a fixed domain. This makes the web more efficient. It also means I can make data available to my social network without relying on 3rd-party services."

"DFA is an innovative 501(c)(3) organization with a unique business model combining elements of a non-profit organization with those of a biotech company."

"The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member driven organization that:

Supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
develops benchmarks for cloud computing;
supports reference implementations for cloud computing, preferably open source reference implementations;
manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing."

"Section Eight Design was selected as the winner for their partnership with Teton Valley Community School, a non-profit, independent school in Victor, Idaho. The proposal, pictured above, focuses on scalability and a connection to the outdoors, taking advantage of the school's location at the base of the Teton Mountain Range. In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces that the school will build incrementally as they raise funds, gardens, farm animals, and local, drought-resistant flora will be integrated into the school's fabric to promote community, environmental responsibility and a "sense of place.""

"The following groups strengthen Open.Michigan through related efforts, resources, input, and ongoing discussion around the initiative."

"How far would and should news organizations be willing to go with this extended vision of membership? I can see newspapers as they have existed being quite uncomfortable with the idea of handing over control and even membership to the community. I can hear their fears of being co-opted or gamed. But that comes from still thinking of news as the property of a single company. Those days are soon over."

"At the moment, any of us who use web applications tend to spend a lot of time and effort populating application databases to make them useful to us. But when we do so, we tend to lose control of our data. They go into a private database schema, and what access we have to that depends entirely on what the application allows us to do. Sometimes there are reasonable ways to get the data back out (some kind of an XML dump perhaps), sometimes not. But always the application is in control. And linking data across applications is, in general, somewhere between hard and impossible.

FluidDB can change all that by leaving the user in control of his or her data, granting the application only such permissions as necessary or desired, and ensuring that the user retains flexability and control."

"The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. "

"There are many sources to find out something about everything. Until now, there’s been no good place for you to find out everything about something.
The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, it's a central source for the information you need to power the projects the world needs. (learn more: help|faq)"

"Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-month average so dud projects will be offset by sales of profitable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a community that is not just passionate but also knowledgeable, better projects are likely to get funded.

The promise of returns is enough to get former investment banker Andrew de Montille excited.

"I put money in the bank not because I consider it as a charitable investment," says de Montille. "Rather, I am very confident that some of the projects will do well enough to be profitable to the investors.""

"Standards create opportunities to do stuff. These opportunities may well be patent worthy. So if you want to grow out the thicket around the emerging standard you just lock some smart guys in a room and start them brain storming. Some of what they come up with will be obvious, but that hardly means you won’t be able to capture a patent for it. Just to add to fire to the shit storm it appears that Redhat’s patent is for the mind bogglingly obvious idea of transfering XML data over AMQP. Of course any patent worth it’s lawyering starts with some broad claim and then get’s more focused."

"Collabforge is developing the online collaboration strategy for what will be a Web portal that helps Australians to find, navigate, understand and act on federal, state and local government environmental efficiency programs. The site will provide information for households, schools and small businesses, and is investigating options to best engage the public including via social media and web 2.0 opportunities."

"This page (and sub-pages) contains a list of data related to Ann Arbor. Feel free to add pages describing additional datasets. Copy an existing data page to get the correct format, so the data will appear in the summary table below."

"I would greatly appreciate a list detailing these security risks, the process by which they were identified, and the names and titles of the people at the DDA (or people who the DDA contacted) who have the necessary technical expertise to both determine and enact this identification process. A reply by email is sufficient, although I am willing to submit a formal FOIA request by mail for this information."

“Hi all. Over the last day or so I have talked about your project with a few DDA members and what arose from these conversations was a shared concern that because the project was not an initiative created by/run by the DDA there are no controls in place for this at present. For instance, there is no DDA policy about how to allow /or even if it should allow an outside group to use the DDA’s parking data for a private enterprise. There is a concern about how unsecure/secure the DDA website is made when sharing this data. And finally, a concern that if the project had value to parking patrons, that the DDA itself should consider providing this service as an extension of what it is already doing on-line.”

"What Dave Winer says here about the news applies as well to scientific publishing. The arguments about open access and about review quality are but a sideline to a much more fundamental one: how to create sustainable mechanisms that will increasingly open up the process of writing up new ideas, reviewing them, and publicly building a consensus for or against their scientific soundness and importance."

"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."

"Nowadays there is a common agreement about how our society needs to be able to change and adapt to the fast changes that happens in the economical, social and environmental dimensions. We are interested not in single and few changes, but in the ability to continuously introduce new ideas in our products, processes and organizations in order to maintain our conditions or improve them. We are interested in the ability to innovate our activities in what they do and how they do it."

"It's time for OCLC to recognize they made this mess, not others. They have perpetrated some astouding missteps—from attempting to sneak through a major rewrite of the core member policy in a few days without consultation, to a comic series of rewrites and policy reversals, culminating in withdrawing the policy entirely for discussion. (It now seems clear they did so on the heels of a member revolt, whether general or just of some key libraries.)"

[Insert triumphalist Collaborationist pronouncement that I will someday be forced to make sheepish fun of here]

This is more cool than I expected anything to be in 2008.

"Whatever you can identify with a URL is fair game. You can invent your own simple business logic by defining rules for what tags to use, and when and how to change them. You can monitor RSS feeds, in any feedreader, in order to be alerted when monitored items change. You can share or delegate the work by sharing or delegating access to the del.icio.us account. And last but not least, when you need to get a programmer to make use of this database you and your collaborators have built, that person’s job will be drop-dead simple."

"We see generally about ten areas you should consider in terms of what you should publish, such as (1) improvements to core technology, (2) innovations you might normally document elsewhere, like in a paper or conference, remember we want the PTO examiner to see these documents, or (3) where you might think others will patent, or (4) innovative concepts you see that “link” well know ideas or patents together , or (5) around your key new ideas you have, or (6) new uses for existing ideas, or (7) new potential technical standards, or (8) industry directions, or (9) how users use your idea or (10) the directions of open source"

"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."

"My problem is that I don't think there are good guys and bad guys. Things are the way they are for a reason, and there is always a reason, even when the result is atrocity and outrage."

"Wikipedia is a second example where scientists have missed an opportunity to innovate online. Wikipedia has a vision statement to warm a scientist’s heart: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” You might guess Wikipedia was started by scientists eager to collect all of human knowledge into a single source. In fact, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, had a background in finance and as a web developer. In the early days few established scientists were involved. To contribute would arouse suspicion from colleagues that you were wasting time that could be spent writing papers and grants."

"Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court."

"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."

"[WorldCat rep] insists that "OCLC welcomes collaboration with Open Library", which seems a funny way of putting it. As I said last time, they've played hardball: trying to cut off our funding, hurt our reputation, and pressure libraries not to cooperate. When we tried to make a deal with them, they dragged their feet for months, pretended to come to terms, and then had their lawyers send us an "agreement" to sign that would require we take all OCLC-related records off our site."

"One can only assume that if the nature and extent of their eavesdropping activities had been publicly known, there would have been greater public outcry over them. But the public never learned of these activities until long after the fact."

"You have the illusion of security. And that is far more dangerous than no security at all."

The ground is a foreign country

This man is apparently an illiterate reactionary popinjay. Haven't seen a better example for the term "popinjay" in years.

"the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free"

"I suspect that true innovation doesn’t have to put up toll roads."

via Peter Suber

(My title)

via Hugh MacLeod, on Twitter