OpenSource

OS Software & Content

Creative Business in the Digital Era

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The Open Rights Group (UK) has created a wiki to collaboratively design a course on building businesses that are more open with their intellectual property:

Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP? We’re thinking of examples like Radiohead letting their fans decide a fair price for the digital version of their new album. Or Magnatune’s use of Creative Commons licences to allow music buyers to sample songs before they buy. Or writers like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds giving away their books for free under a CC licence whilst also publishing and charging for print copies. Or websites that produce an API so that others can build third party applications using their data, such as Google Maps. Once we’ve gathered a list of examples, we will pick a few case studies to focus our research on.

The easiest way to help is to add pertinent pages on del.icio.us (tag = org-cbde).

Local Industry and Researchers Gather

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Last night was the monthly gathering of the Moncton area knowledge and IT industry, hosted by Mount Allison University’s research services. I really enjoyed Bruce Robertson’s presentation on his work with the semantic web, and more specifically the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project. It’s great to know a professor of Classics who also runs his own Linux server.

Another event of note that was announced last night is the free Ruby on Rails workshop to be held in Moncton on 10 Oct 2007, to be followed by a two-day training session. The host, Spheric, is a local company that has embraced open source development applications in order to better grow its business and offer enterprise-level software.

Are you open for business?

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OpenBusiness is a website dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship based on open principles and is not just about open source software. These folks have developed an Open Business Guide, in the form of a wiki, to discuss the specifics of operating an open business:

Open Source [software] was the first sector in which peer-based production led to quality products. However, innovative business models have started to appear in other economic sectors experimenting with open approaches. Now there are online record labels using Creative Commons licenses, Open Source film projects, peer funded music labels, p2p finance services and the list of innovations regarding information management in the widest sense almost endless.

The wiki gives a lot of practical advice on how to profit by being more open. It is in many ways a simpler and synthesiszed version of Yochai Benkler’s work, The Wealth of Networks, which I would recommend as THE major reference on the digital networked economy.

On a related note, Matt Asay reports the COO of Fotango quitting when he found out that his company was abandoning its open source business model; stating, “Open source is not a tactic. It is not a strategy. It is the only practical way of competing in this marketplace.”

Closed companies are still making money, and profits, in much the same way that buggy makers continued to sell their products after the internal combustion engine was produced – for now.

carriage-factory-museum.jpg

The old, closed model is doomed and openness is something that every company and non-profit organisation had better understand – soon.

Open Source Model for Developing Bids

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Nick Booth passed this on to me a while back. It’s about a bid to government that was developed in a completely open and transparent manner. The entire story and process is available at the Open Innovation Exchange:

This Open Innovation Exchange site was launched on April 22 2007 and used until May 14 2007 to develop an “open source bid” to the UK Cabinet Office, which invited proposals for a Third Sector innovation exchange. The invitation to tender for a £1.2 million three-year programme said:

“The innovation exchange will pilot new approaches to fostering, exchanging and replicating third sector innovation, ensuring that public services benefit from the approaches they pioneer. The innovation exchange will seek to connect innovators to one another, to those who might benefit from their work, including public service, commissioners and third sector organisation, and others who might invest in their work.”

We believed that we could develop a better proposal by sharing our ideas with others, and inviting comments and contributions. We succeeded in that, and delivered the final proposal on May 14. It is available here.

However , we aren’t are stopping now, and we invite people to continue to contribute ideas on how the exchange – and other collaborations in the field – could work.

Below are a set of question and answers on our original approach to the bid. Simon Berry answers some challenging questions here.

You would never see a corporation opening up its bidding process to the world and if it tried, its lawyers would strongly advise against it. But in this case, it worked. Once again, an industrial model has been flipped on its head by the Net.

I believe that this is an indicator of the future of collaborative work and shows how the open source model is not just for software development but can be used in almost all work endeavours.  The Internet is a revolutionary and powerful tool for all of us, as long as we keep it open and neutral.

Elgg powers business and academic community

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Emerald Publishing has started an online community based on the open source Elgg platform. The news release compares the community with MySpace and Facebook:

Amanda Briggs, Head of Research and Development at Emerald, says, “InTouch was developed with our research and contributor communities in mind. Online technologies have had a dramatic effect on the educational and learning environment and students regularly use informal social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to communicate with their classmates. Now, Emerald authors and editors can take advantage of these technologies in a space that is designed specifically for the academic and business community – InTouch. Users can create online communities based around journals or research interests, share ideas and expertise with (and learn from) their peers. This service supports our commitment to building and facilitating communities around key management research areas.”

This is great to see, but most of that functionality comes from Elgg, which only gets a quick mention. You would think that they could have at least put a hyperlink to Elgg in their news release, n’est-ce pas?

Office 2007 Overkill for Schools

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Via Stephen Downes and Dave Warlick is a previous report I filed away in January. It seems that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) doesn’t see much value in adopting MS Office 2007 for schools:

A Becta review of Office 2007 identified more than 170 new features, but considered many of them to be of more use in a business environment than an educational one.

A detailed analysis of the new functionality again found that none of the new features was a “must have” for schools and colleges.

Becta said, “As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007.”

I’ve already said why I won’t use Vista and I don’t feel any pressure to start with Office 2007 either.

Using Wndows Vista is Torture

Business Quote of the Week

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Patents and copyrights were conceived as individual rights, not corporate goods. And open source proves that inventions can be even grander than before if rights to the work are held in common.To some people this still sounds like revolution, like a peasant’s revolt. It’s not. It’s just a new market reality, one which has no use for Kings.

Dana Blakenhorn on ZDNet.

The difference between revolution and evolution is a matter of perspective.

Update: On second thought, perhaps this decision from the Supreme Court of Canada (2002) would be a better quote:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

Facebook selling your information?

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Last week, I said that I thought that there should be an open source alternative to Facebook (and there is at least one) . A few days later I came across this video overview of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I wasn’t sure of its veracity. Today, I saw this note from Lorne Novolker on Facebook:

Apparently Facebook has started SELLING user information (surprise, surprise!) to third parties. They call it the “Facebook Development Platform.”

To restrict use of your information, do the following:
Click “Privacy” on top right.
Under the “Facebook Platform” section click”Edit Settings”.
Scroll down to the bottom and UNCHECK ALL of the items under facebook platform.

Most creepy is the inclusion of photographs!
(Do your friends a favor and repost this as your own note.)

Unless a platform is truly open source, it seems that when we participate, someone else always profits.

Do we need a public alternative to Facebook?

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As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming. As private systems proliferate, it’s time for our publicly-funded institutions to jump on the Web 2.0 cluetrain and offer an alternative.

Following the recent mass murder at Virginia Tech, over 200 Facebook communities were created as “a gathering place for those affected by this event, both for people who lived through it and those moved to express their condolances”. At Library 2.0, [dead link] Laura Cohen also noted that there was no equivalent social networking system (SNS) provided by Virginia Tech, so people, mostly students, had to use a commercial platform.

When I advise clients on Web 2.0 applications I discuss the pros and cons of free systems. These are excellent “use as is” systems, as long as you don’t intend to move your data or think you will need it in the event of new rules or a system shut-down. Some platforms, like social bookmarks, let you export your data in an open format which can be used by other systems. However, you cannot do this with most SNS, nor can you export your posts from the ubiquitous Blogger. That is a critical distinction between “free” and “open source”. With the latter, you can access the source code, export your data and move to another host. The more data you create, the more important it will be to control it.

Our public institutions may be missing the boat on SNS. Currently there are over 15 million Facebook users and the growth curve is steep. Universities could easily adopt open source SNS, like Elgg,[dead link] to provide a similar free service. The advantage would be ownership by a publicly-funded institution or perhaps even the alumni association. Laura Cohen [dead link]sees the loss of this information as a cultural issue:

I’m concerned about this because many academic libraries are charged with preserving the cultural memory of their institutions. In the age of Web 2.0, a great deal of this culture is being played out in networked communities unaffiliated with these institutions. If campus constituencies are gathering in external spaces, how will their activities be preserved? The third party gathering places – Facebook and many others – may or may not survive over the years. In fact, they surely won’t outlive most of the institutions with which their members are affiliated. When these services fold, their content will fold with them. Issues of privacy aside – and these are major issues – a great opportunity for preservation will be lost.

I noticed that our local university is highlighting student bloggers [dead link]. Unfortunately, all of these blogs are hosted on Google’s Blogger. Why not provide a Mount Allison University blog for life to all students? Hosting it on an open source platform would also give students the ability to export their data if they so wish. Furthermore, a free blog and/or SNS would be an excellent way to stay in touch with alumni. An easy first step for educational institutions would be to test out Elgg’s Eduspaces [dead link]. It’s free AND open source.

Open data protocols and open source systems have become more important for me as I realize that I have almost one thousand posts on this website and many more comments. This is an important professional archive for me now, but this was not an issue initially. You don’t realize the importance of the open source model until after you’ve passed the point of no return.

Update: You may want to watch this video overview [dead link]of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I haven’t researched it to verify that it’s accurate.

World Intellectual Property Day :-(

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World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day with creators, users, and the facts once again getting lost in the process.

Read the rest of Michael Geist’s commentary on WIP Day in Canada.

On the bright side, there is Creative Commons as a counterbalance to vested corporate interests:

In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.