Jimmy Wales – Eugene Eric Kim

Openness Rocks

Published September 23, 2012 by Eugene Eric Kim

I took the above picture at Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires. It’s of Micah Alpern giving a talk entitled, “Designing a large scale community moderation system for Yahoo! Answers.” Micah, now at LinkedIn, was the design lead for Yahoo! Answers, and at the time, he was still at Yahoo!.

As you can see from my annotations, Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikia) and Jack Herrick (founder of wikiHow) were also in the audience. I thought nothing of this at the time. We’re all friends and are part of the same community, which is why we were all there in the first place. But afterward, I realized that folks from other industries might find this picture exceedingly strange. You could argue, for example, that wikiHow competes with Yahoo! Answers. (A bit of a stretch, but valid.) And at the time, Wikia was developing its own Q&A system.

In other words, here was Micah, freely giving away all of his lessons learned to two people who were arguably competitors, not to mention the rest of the audience and whoever else ended up watching the freely available, openly licensed video of the talk.

I was reminded of this picture and this moment by Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s short and sweet post, “Openness rocks.” He cites a few examples, and he concludes, “This is how we get better as an industry.”

That quote right there embodies the mindset that makes innovation happen, that makes certain industries a joy to be in, and that makes the world a better place. Openness indeed does rock.

WikiSym 2005, October 16-18

Published September 8, 2005 by Eugene Eric Kim

Come to WikiSym 2005 on October 16-18 in San Diego, California. Held in conjunction with OOPSLA, it’s shaping up to be an excellent conference. Along with usual suspects (Ward Cunningham, Jimmy Wales), Robert Haas, the former U.S. poet laureate, is keynoting. I’ll be moderating a panel on “Wikis in the Consumer Enterprise,” with Joe Kraus, Peter Thoeny, and Thomas Weigert. If you plan on attending, let me know. (JQ3)

Free Identity!

Published August 13, 2005 by Eugene Eric Kim

A suggestion for Jimmy Wales‘s list of things that need to be free: Free identity! (JNG)

“Free” in this case has a different meaning than it does than it does with the other items on Jimbo’s list. We need to free our digital identities from the organizational silos that currently collect and control information about ourselves. I am not suggesting that all digital identities fall under an open content license; I’m saying that the individual should have the ability to decide who has access to his or her digital identity and what they’re allowed to do with it. (JNH)

Why is this important? Privacy is the obvious and most important reason. A secondary reason is that free, or at least mobile identities are a prerequisite for Jimbo’s tenth item: Free communities! It’s not enough to be able to migrate content from one community to another if you can’t also migrate people’s identities as well. (JNI)

How can we free identities? Technically, it’s not that’s hard, and there are already several proposed specs and implementations, all of which support some notion of Single Sign-On and profile sharing with individual control. Personally, I’m partial to the Identity Commons approach with i-names, where identifiers are globally resolvable, information is distributed, and the notion of contracts built into the data structure. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we agree on an interoperable technical specification for identity. Fortunately, many of the folks in this space are already working on collaborating, thanks to the efforts of Owen Davis, Kim Cameron, Paul Trevithick, Doc Searls, and many others. These people have taken to calling themselves the “Identity Gang.” (JNJ)

The social questions are the hard ones. What does it really mean to control our identities? What should the social and legal agreements between individuals and organizations look like? If I give my business card to someone, what’s the implicit contract associated with this action, and what would it mean to make that contract explicit? (JNK)

These questions are hard, but they’re solvable. Unfortunately, we’re not devoting much energy towards these issues right now. Perhaps a more public exhortation for freeing identities will lead to an effort to address these social questions that equals the current effort to solve the technical ones. (JNL)

Jimmy Wales on Things That Need To Be Free

Published August 13, 2005 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)