ragesoss

YOYOW vs. privacy and anonymity

sage — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:52:32 +0000

Laura DeNardis, in her presentation for the “Technologies of Dissent” panel at the Access to Knowledge and Human Rights conference today, illustrated the dangers of too much openness and access to certain kinds of knowledge by pointing to eightmaps.com, a mashup of Google Maps and donor data for the Prop 8 anti-same-sex-marriage campaign in California: you can find out right where these donors live in San Francisco.

Later in the panel, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was emphasizing the virtues of online anonymity for facilitating free expression and dissent (with EFF’s Tor software, for example).

Obviously, most people at this conference think Prop 8 is a bad thing while anonymous communication between dissidents in places with oppressive and censorious governments is a good thing. But is there a principled argument that eightmaps.com is good and legitimate and those Prop 8 donors ought not be able to hide from the public, while dissidents in Iran or China ought to be able to organize and speak out and push for their favored kinds of political change behind the cloak of anonymity?

It’s the tension, as panelist Anupam Chander explained it, between the Foulcault and the Habermas versions of the Internet’s potential: universal panopticon surveillance state vs. universal public sphere for rational discourse.

My own view is that there’s a balance to be struck between the classic net principle of YOYOW (“You Own Your Own Words” meaning both that you can say what you want to say and you are responsible for what you say) and the right to speak anonymously. The balance (one of the driving tensions in the history of the Wikipedia community, incidentally) is essentially the question of the limits of anonymous speech and action.

(Shooting from the hip here) I suggest a rule of thumb: the closer the political environment approximates an ideal Habermasian public sphere, the stronger the imperative that that people own their own words when they choose to engage in public discourse. Likewise, the more limits on what people are allowed to say, the more right they have to engage in a wider variety of anonymous speech and action. (For speech that is not intended to be part of the public sphere, things are quite different and there is more of an argument for privacy and anonymity.)

[A summary of the whole panel is up on the Yale ISP blog: A2K4 Panel II: Technologies of Dissent: Information and Expression in a Digital World]

“Minds for Sale” (or, “Clickworkers of the world, unite!”)

sage — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:39:51 +0000

This recent lecture by Jonathan Zittrain is long, but well worth it. It’s about various forms of crowdsourcing and clickwork, and their scary potential for exploitation, political manipulation, political repression, and other bad stuff, related to what I’ve blogged about Demand Media vs. Wikimedia and the psychology of fun and games.

The send-up of Wikipedians and why Wikipedia isn’t on Subvert and Profit is kinda cute at 39:20.

Demand Media vs. Wikimedia: the battle for the soul of the Internet

sage — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:13:35 +0000

There’s one company I’ve been talking about more than any other lately: (the demonic) Demand Media http://jr.ly/mmzt and http://jr.ly/mxtp

-Jay Rosen on Twitter, 27 November 2009

When journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen discusses Demand Media and its business model, he always includes the parenthetical adjective demonic. Demand Media is the answer to the question, what would Internet content look like if it was entirely and solely driven by advertising revenue? Content is commissioned based on an algorithm that calculates the lifetime value of the ads that could be run against it.

Demand Media takes the routinization of knowledge work to its logical extreme. (For those with a Marxist bent, is there any clearer example of the knowledge worker alienated from the products of his labor than Christian Muñoz-Donoso, from Rosen’s first link?) And Demand Media expects to be producing “the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year” by next summer.

Wikipedia and other free culture projects, sometimes pejoratively described as “crowdsourcing” projects, have been criticized for undermining the economic viability of traditional, professionally produced media. But what if the real choice for the future is not between the Wikimedia model and the traditional media model, but between the Wikimedia model and the Demand Media model? Media driven by love versus media driven by money. Editor-driven media where everyone is an editor versus demand-driven media where no one is an editor. Media built from soul versus media with no soul.

Wikipedia blog posts I want to write

sage — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:48:48 +0000

I have a bunch of ideas for more “Wikipedia in Theory” posts, but I’ve been too busy to write any of them lately. So maybe if I jot down some of the ideas, I’ll get around to them before I forget about them.

“Wikipedia in Theory (postmodernism edition)” – how does the idea of metanarrative, and the postmodern condition of “incredulity toward metanarratives”, apply to Wikipedia, where readers are free to construct their own narratives as they weave from one article to the next (creating their own larger stories from the small ones in each article)?
“Wikipedia in Theory (economic governance edition)” – the recent economics Nobel was for work on economic governance of the commons. How does Wikipedia look in the light the work of Nobel laureates Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson?
“Wikipedia in Theory (philosophy of technology edition)” – this could actually be several posts, but the key thing to explore is how the technology of Wikipedia shapes its social environment and vice-versa. A related point that Erik Moeller drew my attention to a few years ago is how the wiki is an environment that allows even fairly novice users to extend and modify the technology, broadly interpreted as not just the base MediaWiki code but also the templates, interface, and even policy and process.
“Wikipedia in Theory (media studies edition)” – if there’s some truth to the idea that “the medium is the message”, then what messages is Wikipedia’s medium sending?
“Wikipedia in Theory (cyborg theory edition)” – Donna Haraway’s powerful-but-challenging Cyborg Manifesto (1991) lays out many themes that resonate strongly with Wikipedia and the cultural effects of the net more broadly: the importance of affinity over identity; the blurring of lines between social organisms and social machines; science fiction-inspired utopianism; the “informatics of domination”, and more.

Other suggestions are welcome. What theoretical perspectives do you find interesting or provocative or useful when applied to Wikipedia?

Flickr, Getty Images, and revoking CC licenses

sage — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:20:22 +0000

Flickr started a program earlier this year with Getty Images, in which Getty staff find great photographers and ask them to put some of their work into the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, so that Getty can sell rights to the images and pay the photographers when their photos get licensed. As the Flickr blog explains, they are now expanding this program: photographers can submit portfolios of their best work to be considered for inclusion by Getty.

When I first came across this Getty Images-Flickr program a few months ago I noticed something interesting in the terms of the program, and it might be a lot more significant now that this program is ramping up. The FAQ specifically addresses the issue of CC-licensed photos:

There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.

If you’re not cool with that, that’s totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.

But what happens if, say, Wikimedia Commons already has those CC images? Are Getty and Flickr basically just looking the other way about the fact that in many cases it wouldn’t be possible for photographers to” reserve all rights to sale” on their freely-licensed works that are circulating in the wild, even if they wanted to? What about intentionally making sure your CC images have been added to Commons and verified by the Flickr review bot before submitting them to Getty?

On the Internet, anyone can be a historian

sage — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:57:58 +0000

The Washington Post has a flattering profile of a young Wikipedian, Adam Lewis, who worked on the article for Washington, D.C. The punchline comes a few paragraphs in:

Lewis joined thousands of other amateurs toiling in obscurity on Wikipedia, where facts are more important than the star historians who tend to dominate the popular view of history. On Wikipedia, anyone can be a historian.

I think this is suspect in a couple of ways (do “star historians” really dominate the popular view of history? what does “historian” mean in the Wikipedia context, where the policy is “no original research“?) but the spirit of the remark is right on, and relevant beyond just Wikipedia.

The history profession hasn’t yet been much affected by the “pro-am revolution“, but it’s increasingly possible for amateur historians to do original work with professional quality (even if that work is unlikely to much resemble academic history writing). Some academic fields–astronomy is the most dramatic example–have already started benefiting greatly from the contributions of amateurs. But history seems slow on the uptake, with frustratingly little appetite for collaborative projects and little interest in taking the work of amateur historians seriously (the exciting projects of George Mason’s Center for History and New Media notwithstanding).

Will that change dramatically? Will a pro-am revolution come to the history profession? The case of history of science may be instructive here. History of science has actually had a vibrant “pro-am” community (of scientists who write science history) since well before the Internet made relevant sources and publishing venues easily accessible to other interested groups of amateur historians. Nevertheless, historians of science have not drawn closer to pro-am scientist-historians in recent decades–just the opposite, they’ve withdrawn from scientist-historians and often dismiss their work as hopelessly naive or self-interested. If history of science is any guide, I fear that history as a whole may view the coming rise of “pro-am” history as more of a threat than an opportunity.

[cross-posted at Cliopatria]

Wikipedia in Theory (psychology of fun and games edition)

sage — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:41:16 +0000

In my last Wikipedia in Theory post, in which I looked at game theory and experimental economics, David Gerard commented:

People edit Wikipedia because it’s fun. What is the economic motivation to buy music or play WoW? The theory’s out there.

But what, exactly, is that theory? What makes Wikipedia fun? Is that the same thing that makes World of Warcraft fun? The same thing that makes gambling fun? The same thing that makes all three addictive, sometimes pathologically so?

As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single well-established theory of fun and games. There are some interesting ideas floating around, though.

The best known comes from positive psychology: the concept of flow, which is often considered the essence of what makes games and other activities fun. Flow is that state of sustained concentration (and associated elation) when all of your efforts are directly toward a difficult and significant task that is nevertheless within your capabilities. Different kinds of Wikipedia work are available that can test the skills of adolescent and professor alike and Wikipedians are free to choose tasks they think are significant, so it’s easy to make sense of why Wikipedia can be fun in terms of flow.

Another widely quoted formulation of fun comes from A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster:

Fun is just another word for learning.

James Paul Gee expands on this concept in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In a short journal article, he summarizes some of the relevant points:

Good games give information on demand and just in time, not out of the contexts of actual use or apart from peoples purposes and goals…
Good games operate at the outer and growing edge of a players competence, remaining challenging, but do-able…
Games allow players to be producers and not just consumers. Along with the designer, the players actions co-create the game world.
In computer and video games, players engage in action at a distance, much like remotely manipulating a robot, but in a far more fine-grained fashion. Cognitive research suggests that such fine-grained action at a distance actually causes humans to feel as if their bodies and minds have stretched into a new space…a highly motivating state.

All of these aspects of games have parallels in Wikipedia editing. In the last case, Wikipedia offers not just the illusion of affecting the world at a distance, but a way to actually do so; writing on Wikipedia has the potential to affect readers across the world.

Neuropsychology puts flow and fun and learning (and addiction) into chemical terms: it’s all about the dopamine. All that talk about flow and motivation and fun gets boiled down to the release of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, which is associated with pleasure, motivation, concentration, reinforcement, learning, and addiction. Sustained released of dopamine (or in the case of some addictive chemicals, dopamine re-uptake inhibition) both creates a sense of pleasure and elation and creates an association between the activity at hand and the dopamine jolt, motivating you to do that activity again (and again).

That’s the core of activist game designer Jonathan Blow’s critique of mainstream video game design. To quote from my post on video game addiction:

the best practices of commercial game design, particularly MMOs, are “predicated on…player exploitation” by “plugging into their pleasure centers and giving them scheduled rewards”. He suggests that the gaming industry may be engaged in “the intellectual and emotional equivalent of [Joe Camel]“.

That same principle is at work on Wikipedia, with people compulsively checking their watchlists to see if their work has been built upon or the comments replied to. But with careful attention to the principles of video game design, Wikipedia could probably be made much more compelling/fun/educational/addicting to a larger number of people.

How freely licensed photos generally get used (a sequel)

sage — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:52:03 +0000

Last year, I blogged about how freely licensed photos are used and misused across the web. Figuring out how my photos are being used (as long as I’m being credited by name) is much easier now with the Google search options (rolled out in May 2009 and with more options added just this month), which let you limit search results to newly indexed pages.

I have over 3500 CC BY-SA photos on Flickr (including lots of family photos, abstract shots, and other stuff unlikely to be reused) and probably around 1000 original photos on Wikimedia Commons, generally available under both GFDL and CC BY-SA (and a good portion of which are not duplicated on Flickr). At this point there is a fairly steady stream of reuse, most of which I’m not directly aware of (except when I go looking, like now). I estimate that my ~4000 photos are put to new uses at rate about 15-20 times per week. Let’s see what types of uses my photos have been put to recently.

Searches (limited to results first indexed within the last week) for “ragesoss” and “Sage Ross” ought to turn up nearly all of the new cases where I’m being credited for photos.

As before, the most active user of my photos is World News Network (wn.com), a set of algorithmically-generated sites that are titled like local or special interest newspapers but basically just link to offsite news stories, add free photos, and run ads against the photos and headlines. For example, this story about pesticides in peaches links to the actual story from The Oklahoman but adds my picture of peaches. The credit reads “(photo: GFDL / Sage Ross)”. Although I think a link back to the source or my Commons userpage (which is where the attribution link at Commons points) is appropriate, it probably doesn’t violate the letter of the license (which is already stretched thin when applied to photos and other things very dissimilar from software manuals). In another example, they use a CC license instead of the GFDL for my photo of coffee beans. In this case, the credit reads “(photo: Creative Commons / Ragesoss)”, with no link to the specific license or the source. This violates both the spirit and the letter of the CC BY-SA license. World News Network has used my photos hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and I’m sure many other photos from Commons by other Wikimedians are being systematically (mis)used similarly.

Another common type of usage is from the many sites that are trying to monetize user-generated content and share the ad revenue between writer and website owner. In these cases, it’s the individual writers who are responsible for obtaining photos (and rights thereto), so compliance with free licenses varies widely. I found my photos on articles from suite101.com and hubpages.com. The suite101 article, “Free Instructions on How to Make an Apple Pie“, uses a series of photos I took while my sister was making pie. All the photos but one are credited to me and link back to the source on Commons, although no license info is indicated at suite101; this violates the letter, but not the spirit, of the CC licenses. Oddly, the lead apple pie image is misattributed and links to an entirely different pie photo from a quasi-free stock photography site; the writer probably used that image first but then replaced it when she found my photos. At HubPages, the article “Health Insurance Rescission and How To Fight It” uses my photo but merely credits it as “Photo by ragesoss” with no link or license information. AssociatedContent is another site like that where my photos show up frequently; they seem to be better than most at following the provisions of free licenses.

Blogs use my images somewhat less frequently. Recent uses include this entry in the Utne Reader “Science and Technology” blog (which does a great job with the credit line, linking to both source image and the specific CC license) and this one from the Choices Campus Blog (which has the mediocre credit line “Photo Credit: ragesoss at Flickr.com” with no link).

A final significant category of uses is in articles from professional news and content sites. Overall, these sites are somewhat more likely to use freely licensed images properly, but sloppy or improper uses are still common in my experience. The only recent credit I found is from the CNBC story “GE, Comcast Continue Talks Over NBC Stake“. The unlinked credit line simply reads “Photo: Ragesoss”, but the photo is one of my few early photos on Commons that I released as public domain rather than a copyleft license. So CNBC doesn’t have any legal obligation to give a more precise photo credit (or even to credit me at all), although if only for the sake of journalistic integrity they probably ought to do better.

Conclusion: People use freely licensed photos liberally from Flick and Wikimedia Commons, but there isn’t much indication that most reusers understand what the licenses mean or what they require from reusers. The free culture movement has a long way to go; cultural change is a lot slower than license adoption.

On a tangent, it’d be nice if Wikimedia Commons was equipped with something like refbacks combined with image recognition to automatically discover and collect web pages that are reusing Commons media. I think I’ll make a proposal on the Wikimedia Strategy Wiki when I get a chance.

Wikipedia and Olympics Committee heading for collision?

sage — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:25:45 +0000

CC-BY-SA photo of Usain Bolt, by Richard Giles

It looks like Wikipedia is actually at the center of the recent copyright kerfluffle of the photographer (Richard Giles) who got a legal threat from the International Olympics Committee (IOC) over licensing his images from the Beijing Olympics under Creative Commons licenses. Giles explains the situation on his blog:

It turns out that my Usain Bolt photo was being used by a book shop in the UK to advertise the launch of the Guinness Book of Records 2010. This was being done without my knowledge, and as they pointed out, in breach of the license granted on the Olympic ticket.

That photo was the only one of 293 in the s et on Flickr that was licensed with a ShareAlike license (allowing commercial use) rather than a non-commercial license, and Giles had relicensed that particular photo at the request of another Flickrite so that it could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and used on Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is probably where that UK merchant found it and, assuming the license to be legitimate, used it (so it would seem) under the terms of the free license.

Giles reports that it looks like the IOC really just objects to licensing that allows commercial use. Depending on what the IOC says in response to his request for clarification, Giles may be changing the license on that Usain Bolt photo and asking the UK merchant to stop using it.

What happens now? By buying a ticket to the Olympics, Giles’ appears to have (implicitly at least) agreed to terms and conditions that say he won’t use photos from the games except for private purposes. But he does own the copyright to the Bolt photo, and therefore ought to (except for those terms and conditions) be able to license it however he likes. Will the fine print of an Olympics ticket be strong enough to force Wikimedia (which agreed to no terms and conditions) to stop using the photo and offering it to other downstream users?

Liveblogging Baby Day

sage — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:17:51 +0000

UPDATE: more photos are now up on Flickr, along with a video of Brighton with hiccups!

4:15 am. Faith and I are on a brisk walk before our planned 6:00 am check-in at the hospital.

6:14 am. Check-in was quick. We’re in our big room, the baby’s heartbeat is on speaker, and the nurse is taking a focused history and asking about birth plan stuff.

7:43 am. Three different nurses tried to start IVs but hit valves. Our main nurse, the mother of a blogger I met at the West Hartford townhall meeting, is very nice. She started the IV successfully on a second try.

8:20 am. The oxytocin drip is going now. Amazing how the same chemical that makes you feel good after you donate to NPR (or so Ira Flatow tells me) also brings babies out quicker.

9:34 am. Faith is bored so she’s doing work: scheduling residency interviews, checking icanhascheezburger, etc.

9:55 am. Our nurse is setting things up so the doctor can break the water. I’m not allowed to post anything specific about the labor after this. Faith and the nurse are bitching about private insurance and their profiteering ways; it’s a good thing Faith qualified for Husky (Medicaid) when she got pregnant, since there were important things that her primary insurance didn’t cover.

10:15 am. Faith reports that the contractions are “starting to not feel so good any more.”

11:37 am. Things are getting more exciting. We’re watching the BBC show Merlin as a distraction. This is the apparatus the baby goes in for his exam after he’s born:

12:55 pm. I just got kicked out of the room. It’s hospital policy that family aren’t allowed to be there when they administer an epidural; fathers tend to faint and injure themselves. Our nurse says she’s had to drag fathers out by the feet. Here’s the medicine, ready to be hooked up:

1:41 pm. Nap time.

3:10 pm. Our nurse was going to leave us for a while, but then she realized that it’s almost BABY TIME! We start pushing as soon as our doctor is available, it looks like. The nurse estimates half an hour until then.

4:23 pm. He’s here!!!

5:46 pm. He’s 8 pounds 1 ounce. He’s already fed once and he’s very good-natured. We’ve been testing his reflexes; one pic is the Moro reflex (startle reflex), one is the palmomental reflex, and one is just cute.

6:48 pm. Brighton is 19.5 inches long.

9:22 pm. Brighton has been snoozing for a while. It’s my objective assessment that he is, in fact, the cutest baby ever. Thanks so much to everyone who offered congratulations and kind words. To those scheming to steal and/or eat him: we’re on to your shenanigans, and we’ll have none of it.