Into the Age of Abundance. Perhaps one of the biggest evils that government-sponsored capitalism produces is artificial scarcity. Effective drugs for treating AIDS and other deadly diseases can be produced and distributed cheaply, but they aren't. Instead, scarcity is maintained by enforcing patents internationally. Similarly, scientific and cultural information could be easily archived and distributed for free to everyone, everywhere. Instead, the "content industry", from music to movie to book publishers, is trying to maintain (and increase) scarcity by lobbying for mandatory copy prevention mechanisms, flooding the market with incompatible storage devices, and demanding harsh punishment for the millions who violate its idea of "intellectual property".
We need to work on strategies to visibly protest the actions of the legislature and, let's be honest here, to replace it in the long term. [full story at infoAnarchy]
This is a well-thought-out piece. I especially appreciate the fact that the author proposes a wide variety of concrete strategies for fighting the good fight:
The best defense against FUD is education: Let's compile databases of hardware, software and content that is free of intrusive DRM and can be played in any fashion desired by consumers.
Another strategy is letter writing. Yes, I know what you want to say -- letters never have any effect. And that's true for writing letters to politicians: They're used to ignoring anything that doesn't come with a contribution. But letters to device manufacturers are something else.
If your ISP sends you a cease and desist letter, find out if you have the option to switch ISPs. If you do, ignore the letter and keep on sharing. If they want to lose a customer, it's their loss, not yours.
Also, consider file sharing in the real world. Get a 160 gig drive and/or a cheap DVD-R burner (the only format that has some acceptance) and trade with your friends.
It may be hard to completely hide the origin of a file, but it is much easier to make it possible for a file sharer to plausibly claim that he did not intentionally share and download the file. This is the case with systems like MNet, which automatically distribute segments of files across the network.
Use Linux or another open source operating system, if you don't already. This may sound preachy and cliched, but open software makes the invasion of DRM and "trusted computing" a lot harder.
the open source movement has succeeded in all but eliminating the need for proprietary software. But there is no adequate substitute for marketing yet. [...] So what is needed is a replacement for the filtering and marketing processes of the content industry. Collaborative filtering, which is already used in primitive forms on sites like Kuro5hin, Advogato and, in fact, this one, seems to be a cost-effective solution to separate signal from noise. [...] Do not expect big name companies to do this for us: It fundamentally contradicts the way they operate. Collaborative filtering would help exposing scams and faulty products and make it easy to punish corporations that misbehave. It is the opposite of traditional marketing, it cannot only replace it, because of its democratic nature, it is vastly superior. [...] Once collaborative filtering is in place, paying the creators of high quality content is a no brainer. Voluntary donation systems do work, as proven by Kuro5hin's successful $35,000 fundraising and Blender's successful €100,000 campaign (see our wiki: gift economy data).
The essay ends with "Join us, because the alternative is unthinkable."
Dear reader, I beg you to link to this piece. It deserves the exposure.
It is a public display of facility they may not feel they have, and may not have; one correspondent was afraid his spelling was bad.
It makes folly as clear as wisdom, but is more persistent than a comment made in the hall
It takes time and thought (and a little hubris—per Larry Wall) to put words out for others, and to make them—and think them—good enough for public consumption.
I'm sure more ideas will come to me, later...enough folly for now.
Emergic: The Vision. Rajesh Jain is trying to build a community publishing system for the 80% of the world that can't afford a $1500 PC. He is in the states visiting from India. He is taking the train up from NYC to meet with me on Monday. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
This is very exciting. I hope Rajesh succeeds. I can't wait to see this world get larger - and thus smarter.
Bill Vaughan. "If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity." [Quotes of the Day]
[...] Very few posts are appropriate for all audiences. How do you keep them straight without going nuts?
[...] You have several choices:
1. Shut up. Self-censorship. Don't say what might come back to harm you.
2. Narrowcast. Try to avoid leakage between your worlds. Create channels of content in separate web spaces.
3. Wear masks. Assume a name, a style, and a persona for each of your publics. Pseudonymity on top of narrowcasting. This may work for some things but not for all. Curious or dedicated prying eyes often see through these.
4. Live with it. If you have little or nothing to lose, you can say:
"If they can't take a joke, they can leave."
"If they object to my posts, they can always fire me."
"If they fired me, I shouldn't have been working there anyway."
"I don't care if my insurance company knows I have disease X"
"I want my friends and colleagues to know all about me, good or bad."
This is the simplest, easiest, riskiest approach.
We want more options. Secure, controlled access may give us a few more or strengthen one or two these. But blogging in public is a public act. It takes new awareness and skills to raise these blurry fences. [aka Bloggers for Hire]
Personally, I'm not sure I want to be a different person to different people. I'd lose myself.
[...] So, is the Net making us more social? All I can say is that while I'm sitting alone, eyes on my monitor, for many many hours a day, I'm meeting and talking with a literal world of strangers in groups held together by nothing but raw interest. Social? Absolutely. More social? Better social? I'm not even sure it's a sensible question any more. [JOHO the Blog]
New from BioMed Central: Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. An excerpt: "This open access, online journal publishes papers on all aspects of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results/conclusions in the context of current tenets, providing scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information to support informed experimental and clinical decisions". [FOS News]
Another illustration of how the new, cheap but powerful, medium fosters diversity. Journals like this are a much-needed addition to the existing literature. I'm sure countless people in many fields have wasted time trying to reproduce results that had already been found negative by others, but that couldn't be published anywhere in the traditional, space-tight system. So this is a small step for biomedicine, but a big step for science.
"Publishing negative studies will save taxpayers from paying for duplicate studies, and will help scientists learn from one another's mistakes."
Looking at the print literature would have you believe that everyone succeeds everything on the first attempt. "Here's what we wanted to do, here's what we tried, and look, it worked." False starts and blind alleys are almost never documented. But they're there. Lots of them. If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Now I guess the next question is, how many scientists are willing to admit to making mistakes? And among those, how many will go to to the lengths of conscientiously documenting them, in a public manner? I hope these brave souls are out there; but I know a lot of scientists who wouldn't for the life of them do it. This is an incursion into Science Taboo-land.
Actually this is bound to be a big issue in corporate knowledge management also. Documenting mistakes is obviously desirable from the point of view of the company, but it may not be perceived as such by individuals.
Whither blogs?. Where are weblogs going? How will they adapt to the workplace?
1. Blogging platforms are quickly growing smarter.
Blogs are document centric (the post is at the core) so they can evolve toward what you think of as project / process / knowledge management tools. XML, SOAP, databases, and content management services are part of the blogging toolkit. Content syndication and RSS news readers are part of it too.
Blogs are document-centric and people-centric, and that is their chief strength. They connect people to documents and to people.
...
3. Community tools are improving too.
Social capital is getting easier to observe and measure in blogspace; no reason it shouldn't happen in your enterprise's blogspace. Every week we see new tools that help users identify what's new, what's relevant, who's the expert. We see people forming communities of interest/practice, project teams, spreading memes and tools; evidence that people are reading as much or more than they're writing.
Weblog kitchen is a case in point. It's gradually aggregating people who are together trying to flesh out what this new medium is and where it's going.
4. Knowledge extraction is coming.
Weblogs leave a trail that can be mined by social network analyzers, text miners, taxonomy and categorizers, and search engines. All of this is work that today's KM systems ask the poster to do at the time of the post. Blogs lower the effort hurdle; they're easier, so they get used. And their trail of time-stamped posts, citations and cross references, traffic logs, and syndication feeds (in XML) mean that other tools can be added when you get to it.
...
7. Secure blogs.
Create private spaces, a la Groove, but using your weblog tool. Authenticate some users, be public with others. I do this to a limited degree now, with private categories shared with engineering partners.
Now this is an idea that would take off pretty quick if implemented adequately. Sounds like tricky stuff though.
8. Mobile blogging.
I've seen people posting from AOL IM, phones, pagers, Palms, RIMs, and 80211'd notebooks. When you have an experience worth sharing, a snapshot of that Kodak moment, you want to blog it then and there. Watch blogging capabilities migrate to the tools you carry.
.... I guess, there are more reasons, but I'd like to focus on one of them: why subject matter experts are not good in creating training.
The misguided logic of the Paulette Principle is this: If you are good at what you do, you must be able to teach others to do it. Training designed by subject matter experts spells disaster in one of two ways: (1) Basic information is left out because the subject matter expert does not recognize what basic means anymore, or (2) the subject matter expert is so hot on their topic that every possible nuance of the topic is included in the training.
It illustrates my idea about differences between teaching and knowledge sharing. Even if someone wants to share knowledge, it's not necessary that he can help others to learn. [Mathemagenic]
This would explain why so many university professors can't teach very well.
I'd be interested in any conjecture about the, possibly many, reasons why those people won't teach?
Teaching is a tricky term: it has too much to do with school and formal settings. I would look for something short with meaning intentional facilitation of learning instead of teaching. But so far I continue to use teaching…
So, why people don't teach? I guess the main reason is the they can't imagine themselves as school teachers.
Ok, why people don't share? Some answers could be found in reasons for not sharing and BRINT discussion about knowledge sharing incentives. I would summarise it simply: people don't see the fun and the value of sharing (for a variaty of reasons), or don't have right skills and right environment to support knowledge sharing.
But I still have a feeling that the answers are not here yet... I hope we will get the topic of motivation for knowledge sharing in our research agenda.
I have always had a problem with this viewpoint since the emergence of the web because the one thing you can almost guarantee is that someone out there in the world, if not dozens or hundreds of others will have had a similar idea and be working on it.
They may also be brighter than you and more advanced in their thinking than you and have more time to develop the idea. So why not seek them out and collaborate them!
But like all good ideas - even this one is not unique - I have just discovered Phil Wainewright in his Loosely Coupled weblog advocating exactly the same mindset and putting it in a far better way than I might [].
Read the full posting and think about it. We all have ideas that would be better shared than hoarded!
I think this highlights one important aspect of a highly networked world that we are all going to have to get used to. There are very few genuinely original ideas in the world. Someone, somewhere has inevitably already come up with the same idea. By pooling your thoughts with theirs, both of you will likely progress them further than you could have done individually (or maybe someone else watching the exchange will have a new insight that takes the idea further than the pair of you). The more open the network, the more everyone can feed off each other's ideas. The less open it is, the more slowly everyone progresses.
So which is better? I think the answer is that, in an extensive open network, the one thing you can be sure of is that someone else already has the same idea as you. If you deny that fact, you relegate yourself to coming in behind them. If you accept it and embrace the network, you have a chance of participating in their success. (I have a feeling this has been said better by someone at Microsoft, but I can't recall the reference just now. Perhaps someone reading this will be able to refresh my memory).
Side note: I recently developed some RSS code for Lotus Notes and I'm not aware of any similar code available on the web. Now I could try to hold on to it or sell it but its not core to what I'm about and I do not have the time or inclination at present to do anything more with it. So I've made it available on my site for free download.
In the past few months over 50 people from around the world have downloaded it. Most have left their e-mail addresses and most have subscribed to my knowledge-letter. When I come back to further develop the RSS capability on my site - I will have built up a small network of people whom I can contact and share ideas with. Hopefully getting more out of it than I have put in. But I don't really care - if I had not published the code - it would have rotted on my hard-disk - publishing it means that people get to benefit from it and move the technology forward. In the long run everyone benefits. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
I identified myself with KM camp. Half a year back I was in e-learning camp. I’m definitely looking for some bridges.
Last thought: And there is HRD (human resources development) camp as well. I want bridges...
Follow-up thought: I promise to add two things to my blog - my bio with interests and my PhD ideas. Within one month. [Mathemagenic]
Trying to identify different flavours (knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, communities of practice, e-learning, information architecture, library science...) only obscures the simple fact that we're all trying to solve that difficult core problem of finding effective ways to transmit knowledge from mind to mind - in other words, communication between people. Let us bring down the language barriers that prevent us from combining our forces; let's work as one large, powerful group. I'm sure we can pull it off.
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