newspeak

Transform any text into a patent application – Sam Lavigne.

Patent the open source community now!

We all are cursed (or blessed) with patentable ideas. In my case, for each stupendous idea that comes to me–I’m being ironic–there are the less great but more practical ones. But then these, along with the stupendous ones, confront the patenting barrier. It costs a lot of money, yes, but just drafting the idea and putting it into the right form is hardly trivial. (Though that does not mean that trivial ideas are not patented; far from it.)

Destination 2020 – Clerk of the Privy Council.

Fascinating. Scanning it now, but so far get the impression that the author(s) at the least know their buzzwords. And also how to implement some ostentatious examples of taking the little people seriously, at least as a crowd that’s been sourced, if not as a union that has any collective power. (The difference between a union and a crowd is the difference between coherent action that can be sustained and developed and a single event that may result in a commodity but need not.) I’m hardly opposed to crowdsourcing, but am far more interested in what can translate to sustained community identity and action. But am still reading through (or scanning with dry eyes) the text.

The various US defence departments support open source software use. To what extent? And to what extent do those offices using it contribute to it?

Department of Navy Chief Information Officer – Policy: DON Open Source Software Guidance.

Instructive: On the role of transparency (and also accountability) are so vital to community, where “community” can be both a productive network or consumer association.

This is why established peer-to-peer marketplaces like Etsy and Airbnb make a point of using their design chops to celebrate information that others sweep under the rug. Go to their websites and you’ll encounter pages outlining terms of service, cancellation policies, dispute resolutions and other boring details, treated with the same elegant design and clever copywriting as taglines and banner ads. Features like searchable photos, well-written descriptions and sensible interaction flows are everywhere, not because they’re nice to have, but because they’re the foundation that allows this trust-based model work. These are what make browsing for vintage furniture more comfortable on Etsy than on eBay, and meeting people on Match.com less creepy than on Craigslist.

via Uber Learned the Hard Way: Transparency Rules the Sharing Economy | Design | WIRED.

The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three Body and Chinese Science Fiction | Tor.com.

Thanks to David Brin for pointing me and others to this rather interesting essay on science fiction in China and this remarkable set of texts. (One reason I like and have always liked science fiction is because, on that rare occasion, it is both uncanny and occult, defamiliarizing and also somehow speaking to a truth of the present unto the future; a discovered text that spells the actuality which, with any luck, you might be able to inhabit. But usually, this is what happens: you don’t.)

London cabbies to offer EVEN WORSE service in protest against Uber • The Register.

The protests in London and elsewhere, along with the legal posturing and actions, raise the question: what does a union do? From the union of taxicab drivers, Uber’s squad (who are not, I think, unionized?) represent scabs, opportunistic interlopers who destroy the unity of labour’s front by satisfying demand. Scabs are bad for all workers because workers only have power when en masse; singly, they are, if not victims, very close to it. But in a union, the worker can assert a degree of power that will give him and her a measure of the profit derived from his or her labour.

Or so in theory and often enough, in practice. But taxicab unions are strange; as I understand it, they seem to resemble more closely regulated guilds. That doesn’t mean that one cannot have (or that there are not) legitimate taxicab unions of drivers. Nor would Uber’s (or Lyft’s) business model be opposed to that. But a protected guild exists largely to suppress competition in a way that unions do not (unions don’t really care, I’d guess, about competition, though longstanding and tightly-coupled unions, as perhaps can be seen with auto unions, probably stretch that guess).

What it comes down to then, as I see it, is more a contestation about the nature of the personal transport market. Is it to be open to all? What guarantees of safety, insurance, liability must be met? And where does the role of innovation sit?

In the established taxicab markets, there seems to be virtually no innovation. Sure, there have been enhancements in payment systems, as we see in New York City. And, yes, in the more conscious cities there are more “green” cars, like hybrids.

But that’s it? What about shared commuter vehicles? About family or grocery rentals? Or electric vehicles? Or, even more grandly, the development of an infrastructure that would even provide for and encourage fleets of rented electric vehicles? I suppose one could answer that this is not within the remit of a taxicab, which is usually seen as the resort of the drunk or hurried or desperate. But isn’t that rather a failure of conceiving what urban transportation is? Mass transit is one aspect of it; there are others, too. And if we are in fact to be serious about managing global warming, I should think we have to consider the place of personal vehicle, rented or not.

Think tank: Open source requires cultural shift of UK councils | Joinup.

ICTs for Development | Talking about information and communication technologies and socio-economic development.

This blog nicely centralises several threads. It’s anchor lies with U of Manchester (land of the origin of the Industrial Revolution, so long ago), but its reach goes far beyond that.

For me, as a community strategist, I am keenly interested in the kinds of technology that any given productive community adopts. There is no single flavour that suits all tastes; much depends on locality and on the quality and nature of the infrastructure, and this is true regardless of the ultimate (or even initial) internationality of the project.

If a MOOC instructor moves, who keeps the intellectual property rights? | Inside Higher Ed.

The article doesn’t really touch on the technological element. Professors use university-provided infrastructure, usually of the bricks and mortar variety (ivy optional); Moocs may use a variety of technologies but not bricks nor mortar. Moocs are probably–one hopes–more than videos or fancy PowerPoint slides. They could include a range of interactive elements. And the particular technology used by a Mooc is likely owned by the institution employing the professor, who has created the course. Moving from one institution to another, in many places an exceptional area of intellectual property identity favouring professorial ownership, thus could be complicated by differences in technology and infrastructure.

The differences that technology make to community identity and possibility, as well as to the degrees of practical freedom, come up all the time in open source environments. Having such a manifold of technologies, as well as, inevitably, licenses and governance protocols, does not produce the best environment for collaborative work and innovation. But it does provide for no end of political machinations and tactical market plays; for business (and politics) as usual.

“Storage of IBM record cards at the Federal records center in Alexandria, Virginia, November 1959. Between 1950 and 1966 the records centers received millions of cubic feet of records, saving the federal government more than the total spent for the entire operation of the National Archives Records Service.” Note: There are about 20 rows of pallets visible, each row is 15 pallets wide, pallets are stacked two high (at least). Each pallet contains 45 boxes of punched cards. Standard card boxes contained 2000 cards. Each card held up to 80 characters, for a total of about 4.3 billion characters of data in this storage facility – about the same as a 4Gb flash drive.

via File:IBM card storage.NARA.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.