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Category: Information Commons (Page 3 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

THURSDAY Carolina Innovations: Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz

As part of the Office of Technology Development‘s Carolina Innovations Seminars, I’ll be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Some helpful source material (pun intended) can be found at these links:
Free Software Foundation
Open Source Initiative
GNU Project
GNU Philosophy including the 4 Software Freedoms
Software Freedom Law Center
Wikipedia on Free Software
Wikipedia on Open Source Software

For non-software, see Creative Commons, iCommons (international Creative Commons movement) , and the Science Commons Project.

This is another experiment in opening the conversation like the one I just did down at Berry College where using the wiki really worked well. This time a blog post instead.

So Post at this link.

Innovation and Rights (Digital and other)

Andrew Chin and I will be speaking to Computer Science 380 classes on “Digital Rights and Innovation” soon. Andrew will be speaking on November 14 and I’m up on November 28. Both are scheduled for 5:00 pm in Sitterson 014.

For my part, I’ve asked the students to read Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Chapter 1 is an Introduction and a Summary of the book by chapters that will give a great overview. Chapter 8 “Adapting Policy to User Innovation” is the meat of our discussion from a policy and law point of view.

Both chapters and in fact the whole book can be bought or downloaded for free from Eric von Hippel’s site.

I’m also asking folks in the class that have questions and/or issues that they’d like discussed to post them here as comments.

Webology or Information Science?

Sayan writes:

I came across this article on BBC where TBL says “When you look at university courses, web science isn’t there – it seems to fall through the cracks ”

The latter half of the article is entirely devoted to this idea. I think this is a good opportunity for SILS to pursue. Just my $0.02 Love to hear your take on the issue and what SILS is planning to do about this.

I reply:

The announcement from Southhampton and MIT gives a little more background.

I see this announcement as Computer Science trying to pick up all the threads they lost when they ignored anything besides technology. Web 2.0 and News 2.0 and Business 2.0 use technologies but the secret sauce that makes GooTube, Flickr, Blogger, even NetFlix and Amazon work and be worth millions isn’t the technologies — I keep saying.

Kathy Sierra has a nice and timely bit on her “Creating Passionate Users” blog called “Why does Science/math/engineering education education in the US suck?”. Kathy is on to what’s left out and why Information Science done right won’t turn out mere engineers.

In UNC SILS, we like to think we are already there using sociology, psychology, history, story telling, systems thinking, etc starting from a human interaction perspective.

November 10: Peg Leg Sam, Possum Trot, and Pilebutts

What: Peg Leg Sam, Possum Trot, and PilebuttsFolkstreams.net at CRADLE Friday
When: noon – 1 pm Friday November 10
Where: 214 Manning Hall, UNC – Chapel Hill

Paul Jones and Kristina Spurgin will talk about preservation, digital preservation and access issues in Folkstreams.net, A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites.

A recent award of a new IMLS grant will allow folkstreams.net to expand its collection of documentaries by 35 films.
Folkstreams.net will use also produce original material relating to the Folkstreams project, including:

. a guide to best practices in video digitization;
. video clips for the site’s Video Aids for Film Preservation section
. portals, guides and outreach materials for senior citizens and teachers.

Folkstreams.net

November 9: Open Source Licensing

November 9 – As part of the Office of Technology Development’s Carolina Innovations Seminars, I’ll be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

So go to the link below and add your comments.

Readings and postings here.

Signal needs Joomla help

Uzi sends this plea on behalf of Signal: The Southeast Electronic Music Festival in Chapel Hill:

Signal is ramping up for the 07 festival in April. We desperately need a joomla expert to configure some
settings for us (it’s probably not much work but I just can’t figure it out to fix it). If anyone is interested, I can send you a link the site that’s under construct to see what our requirements are. If you can do the job, we’ll work out the payment.

Contact him: uzoma nwosu uzoma .nwosuATgmail.com

100 Million Websites

Just took a call from John Hill of WCHL 1360-AM for comments on the CNN story “Web Reaches New Milestone: 100 Million Sites.”

It’s not clear to me immediately what constitutes a site, perhaps a unique URL?, but a serious looking guy from Netcraft (Rich Miller) assures us on the CNN bit (and at the Netcraft site) that we are there in numbers. If each MySpace and Facebook entry were considered a web site, where would we be? Note: I see from the Netcraft site linked just above that he means hosts not sites.

With the Google acquisitions of JotSpot, Writerly, and YouTube, we can see that the web site per se is less important than web services that allow for collaboration, cooperative work and contribution of and comment on content. Even at this the content is less important than the social acts of embedded in the collaboration, etc.

My first web page, perhaps web site?, was created on a NeXT with Tim Berners-Lee looking on back in 1992. It was ahead of its time. Not because I made it or anything that I did, but because TBL’s web browser wasn’t a browser. It was a collaborative communications tool from its conception.

I opened two windows. One in which I surfed the web — all 5 or so sites. One in which I created my web page. I took TBL’s own page and added my changes making it my own. I then added new links by highlighting and dragging to the composing window. It as completely collaborative.

We are only nearing that ease of collaboration and creation now with what Dale Dougherty named Web 2.0.

I also got off on how all of this ongoing storm of creativity is fed and nourished by Net Neutrality. Write your senator and support Net Neutrality today!

Open Source Hardware today at Duke

In about an hour in fact, Chuck (who recently posted here) will be speaking about Open Source Hardware. Here’s the dope:

*Wednesday, November 1st, 2006** :: 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240, Duke University
Wednesdays at the Center*

Free Design and The Open-Source Hardware Movement
Chuck Messer, Tackle Design
Sponsored by John Hope Franklin Center and the ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) Program
For more information, contact Grant Samuelsen by phone at 919-684-6469 or by email at grant.samuelsenATduke.edu

Social Networking Protection?

Slashdot and others are all excited about the Federal Trade Commission’s moral panic game, Buddy Builder [link to popup Flash on this page]. Nevermind the funky name, the OnGuardOnline hosted site, pits you against a panel of fake characters as you answer some obvious questions about what to reveal in an IM or email.

Then you get to Round Two where you are asked:

One of the risks of some social networking sites is that there’s no way to control who will be viewing your page — including criminals or identity thieves. True or False.

Social networking pages provide a safe way to share your information with the world, including your school, favorite music group or sports team, where you hang out and more. True or False

More insecurity-building quizzes here. You can learn to fear P2P, Wireless, Spyware, ID Theft and more.

Upcoming speakings etc.

October 31 – Paul Jones speaks to news room at News and Observer (internal only sorry) about news as conversation and citizen involvement in political and investigative reporting.

November 9 – As part of the Office of Technology Development’s Carolina Innovations Seminars, Paul Jones be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Readings and postings here.

November 13Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media and director of the Center for Citizen Media will speak at 4 in the Pleasants Family Room of Wilson Library

December 8ibiblio at NCREN Community Day

January 20North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Google’s Craig Silverstein visit reviewed (in Korean)

Visiting Korean journalist Yeri Shin blogged about Craig’s visit on her Korean language blog. Yeri assures me that it’s all complimentary.

I haven’t Babblefished the article yet, but the Google Beta Korean to English translator takes this:

(오른쪽에 티셔츠 차림의 소탈한 인상의 아저씨가 바로 실버스틴입니다. 왼쪽은 제가 듣고 있는 블로그 관련 강의를 맡고 있는 폴 존스(Paul Jones) 교수예요. 이 날 사회자였죠.)

and gives this:

(The uncle of the increase which the t-shirt outfit is informal in right side is rightly the thread bus [thin]. The left side the blow which I am listening pawl Jones which keeps the relation strong will (Paul Jones) professor example bedspreads. This day master of ceremony [yess] [cyo].)

I can see why the Google tool is still Beta ;->

At WCOM

Inside the LPFM sausage factory, where about 10 middle schoolers are putting on the Teen Spirit show on 103.5 WCOM. Not only are the music choices amusing, but the process by which they are chosen by 13 year olds selforganizing their various music choices (and requests) is instructive. Not unlike Free Software projects ;-> Only a little dead air in honor of Halloween so far.

Later, I’ll be back in a different capacity on Melva’s Musings on Jazz as part of a tribute to DizzyGillespie with children’s book author/reviewer/reader Susie Wilde and composer TJ Anderson all of us coordinated by Melva Okun. 7 – 9 tonight.

Artificial Intelligence vs Social Intelligence

As Craig Silverstein was talking yesterday, I thought of Marvin Minsky the father and grand promoter of Artificial Intelligence at MIT. Not because Google uses very smart AI, but because they don’t do much of it at all.

Folks on the East Coast (overgeneralizing for effect) grabbed the Minsky challenge to create a machine intelligence that mimics and surpasses human intelligence. Afterall, machines can operate, doing certain functions, much more quickly and accurately than humans. Minsky-ites were also influenced by MIT linguists like Chomsky who pushed that concepts of deep structure that could be handled, if properly understood, by machines.

Salton‘s great work and insights at Cornell while not tied to AI seemed to promise that machine understanding of keyword might make for successful searches. But the real magic in SMART (Salton’s Magical Retriever of Text) was and is relevance feedback in which human evaluation of results, whether explicit or implicit, increased both the precision and recall of a search.

The more intelligently that the system could learn from the results noted as relevant, the better the subsequent result sets. Aggregating group results gave even better “Good” results and seemed magic (at the time) compared to simple keyword searches.

Larry Page’s insight in constructing PageRank was to see that goodness could also be indicated by the number of links related to a certain document. Again capturing the human intelligence embedded in the act of linking. Not just human intelligence but social intelligence. What we call knowledge capital or in a larger sense social capital.

Successful searches moved from less modeling of the brain, less artificial intelligence, and more and more social intelligence and what we now see in Web 2.0 as social networking. Not that computing and engineering didn’t matter, but that the machine component is most effective as a magnifier and enhancer and connector of the social intelligence supplied by humans.

Will AI ever be successful? Silverstein says “My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in doing search.”

NOTE: I have not yet read John Battelle‘s The Search

SilversteinRank = Excellent Karma

If Craig Silverstein had invented the method by which Google decides how to return results, would the top secret Google juice be called SilversteinRank instead of being named after Larry Page as it is as PageRank? I was assured by Craig that the secret (licensed from Stanford til 2011) would have lost the wonderful pun and definitely be called SilversteinRank.

Most of the questions asked and answered at today’s talk were meatier and more relevant than that one. Craig talked about Google Book Project, Google Scholar, Mobile futures, Google Health and Google Coop.

On the digitzation front, Craig noted that only 20% of the world’s printed material is in print. 5% is in the Public Domain and 75% is neither in print nor copyright free — these are the infamous orphan works that are not interesting enough to be kept available for profit but cannot be made available legally for free. 75% of our recorded knowledge made unavailable by bad policy.

Craig lived in Chapel Hill years back. About 30 years back as it turns out. For a few years when he was around 4 or 5 years old while his parents completed their medical training at Duke. While here, he had a run in with a Duke athlete. A basketball player came to visit Craig’s school (in Durham). He asked each child what their favorite college team might be. Craig answered the Tar Heels. He was marked for life.

He did, as Fred pointed out, wear a shirt of the appropriate blue shade for his talk here.

We had a great panel. Moderating for folks like these — Jose-marie Griffiths (Dean of SILS), Barbara Rimer (Dean of Public Health), Carol Jenkins (Health Sciences Library Director) and Fred Stutzman (claimid.com and Social Networking researcher exceptionalle) — was easy and fun. (err I was the moderator).

Great crowd of about 600+ people and good questions. Good evening.

Dec 8: ibiblio at NCREN Community Day

NCREN logoWe’ll be torn on Friday December 8!

ibiblio.org is to be a big part of the North Carolina Research and Education Network Community Day from 8:30 – 3:30 at MCNC in the Research Triangle Park. There will be some great sessions there including K-12 Networking and Ad Hoc Video Conferencing.

But it’s happening at the same time as the UNC Social Networking Symposium. Yikes!

Both events require registration, so sign up before showing up.

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