Jimmy Wales on Things That Need To Be Free

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Thoughts on Jimmy Wales‘s keynote at Wikimania. Read Ross Mayfield‘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 Long Tail is creating a market for product identifiers based on open standards. Jimbo calls these LTIN, or “Long Tail 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 Blue Oxen Associates philosophy and our approach with the Blue Oxen Collaboratories. Licensing community content under Creative Commons 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 (Permission To Participate 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)

Blue Oxen and the Commons

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

There’s a fascinating discussion going on in the GivingSpace collaboratory about the commons, instigated by Phil Cubeta. Since that discussion is really focused on the Omidyar Network, I thought I’d throw in my two cents by describing how I see the Blue Oxen Collaboratories fitting into this discussion.    (2DK)

We currently host 22 alpha collaboratories, some of which are private spaces for organizations. The vast majority of them are public, however, and we encourage all of our groups to have public spaces. In fact, we will probably mandate that all of our organizational members have at least some public space in order to use our infrastructure.    (2DL)

We have not yet explicitly licensed the content of those discussions. It’s not an easy problem, although I suspect one of the Creative Commons licenses will work. However, we do know what principles we want the license to espouse:    (2DM)

  • You own your own words.    (2DN)
  • You’re speaking in public, so react accordingly.    (2DO)

Blue Oxen is interested in open discourse, the free exchange of ideas, and most importantly, collective learning. We’re not interested in demanding royalties from someone else’s idea, just because that idea was formulated in our space. We’re interested in facilitating a better ecosystem, and we’re betting that we will benefit far more from a better ecosystem than we would by making claims on other people’s IP.    (2DP)

“Facilitating the ecosystem” is something people hear me say often. It’s why all of our research is available under a Creative Commons license, and why all of our software is developed as Open Source. It’s why we emphasize interoperability with our tools, and why we’re doing our best to make it easy to export content from our collaboratories over to other sites. Our goal is to improve collaboration, and a policy of openness enables us to do that.    (2DQ)

All that said, it’s not as simple or as easy as it sounds. For example, what do you do about requests to remove content from a Wiki or one of our mailing list archives? (We discussed this issue a few months ago at the Collaboration Collaboratory.) Also, what about governance? Our collaboratories are not the commons. Although we try to be as open as possible, I’m not inclined (as of yet) to make the space entirely self-governing. That said, because our tools are Open Source and because we share our knowledge openly, people have the flexibility to create a self-governing commons using our tools and knowledge. In this way, we’re supporting the creation of commons. Again, it’s all about the ecosystem.    (2DR)

There’s also the question of sustainability. We’ve obviously closed off potential sources of revenue by being as open as we have. I strongly believe that we can not only sustain ourselves. We haven’t proven that yet, but I’m confident that we will soon enough.    (2DS)