Technology Blog

Elizabeth may get a chance to sneak in one last post from Defcon — if she doesn’t get hacked — but I’ll go ahead and wind things down.

Thanks to Larry for having us, and thanks to you readers for coming to hear a bit about us. Your feedback is well appreciated.

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I love public libraries. As a kid, I spent most of my lazy Saturday afternoons inside one of the various branches of our library system, delighted at the idea that, wherever I looked, there would be stories, magazines, or books on virtually any subject to capture my attention. The feel of the library was no less captivating. An ethos of learning and relaxation definitely hung in the air, bringing together people of all ages — from pre-schoolers to senior citizens — into the midst of a Renaissance-like mesh of scientific thinking and artistic expression.

At any given moment at a library, there are probably kids oohing and aahing over gross bugs, budding young authors writing the next chapters in their stories, and students collaborating on their research assignments. Quite simply, libraries represent a bastion of culture and knowledge, a source of creative inspiration (for me, and almost undoubtedly, for many others).

The free culture movement fosters a similar sense of learning and sharing and creating, which is probably why I was drawn to it in the first place. On a very fundamental level, the collective body of works created by scientists, artists, and thinkers (who want to share their ideas) deserves a place for public consumption, and the online community seems to be a natural extension of the borrowing-and-creating concept epitomized (in my view) by public libraries.

When I entered college, I was somewhat surprised, and disappointed, to discover that many of the institution’s libraries were closed to the general public (for security reasons or otherwise), and that a significant percentage of classroom materials were available only to enrolled students. Granted, students may be paying for the education, but knowledge is, well, knowledge and deserves to be free (an oversimplification, perhaps, but my views nonetheless). Therefore, I was pleased to learn about MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a “free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world”, or as I like to think about it, an effort combining the openness of a public library with the academic intensity of a university.

Naturally, I started wondering about ways in which students could convince their own universities to embrace initiatives like OpenCourseWare, or at the very least, make small changes that could increase the openness and accessibility of knowledge created by professors and information kept in the libraries. What sort of hurdles need to be overcome for this to happen? Is talking to professors and administrators enough? As a student, what can you do to make classroom content more readily available?

For me, this issue is important for the same reasons I feel thrilled to step into a library and read, learn, and explore to my heart’s content. Initiatives that contribute to a truly global repository — or, more fittingly, library — of ideas almost always bring about about public good.

You could say that I grew up with free culture, or that free culture grew up along with me. Free culture as a coherent movement is young, although you could say that its roots go back to the beginning of print culture, since before we had bloggers we had independent pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. It could go back to the beginning of culture itself, since before we had DJs we had the remixing and appropriation inherent in oral cultures of the past and present. Still, only recently have people been connecting the dots, with the help of the democratizing power of digital technology and the internet. The free culture movement is young (like me), and perhaps that’s why I feel that young people like me should have a special affinity for it.

I was born in 1984, the same year as the free software movement, the year RMS left MIT to start the GNU project. Stallman refers to the free software movement as his child, and I’ve sometimes wondered, “What would the free software movement be like, if it were a kid? Would they be fun to hang out with? I bet they would be an idealist like their father, and, well, kind of like me.” In 1984, the internet, which would help make free software more than an idealistic dream, was itself just a babe. The number of hosts on the internet was just breaking one thousand… I don’t think anyone even knows how many hosts there are on the internet today. 1984 was also the year that the Supreme Court decided in Sony v. Universal, the “Betamax case,” that taping shows off your TV in order to watch them later was a fair use, not copyright infringement, and that the VCR manufacturer could not be held liable for the infringing activities of its users so long as the VCR had “substantial non-infringing uses.” The battle over what exactly the Betamax ruling meant has continued up until the present day, surviving the disappointingly unclear Grokster decision this summer, but that decision in the year of my birth was a significant victory for free culture, even though none of the parties that were “on our side” would have recognized themselves as part of a fledgling movement.

Shortly after I was born, my family became “early adopters” of the personal computer. Our first computer was an Altos computer with a 40 MB Winchester hard drive, it cost $18,000 and it was the state of the art! (I now carry 512 MB on my USB keychain drive, which cost 50 bucks.) My father wrote it off as a business expense for his home office, and as soon as I was old enough to sit up, he had me playing “educational” games on the green monochrome screen. As I got older I began to use word processors like Wordstar, where I learned the revolutionary concepts of “copy” and “paste,” and how digital technology allows you to edit a document, dissecting it into its component parts and reassembling it, without destroying the original. I loved this freedom to experiment with different versions of the same document, mashing together different drafts and building a better version from the mistakes of the past. I didn’t know this at the time, but later the internet would allow me to do this collaboratively on a global scale.

Blogging arrived on the scene as I arrived in high school, with the term “weblog” arriving in 1997 and “blog” being coined in 1998. Naturally, at the time I did not know that I would eventually have my own blog, or that I would meet my girlfriend through Livejournal. (Lauren dear, would this be too public of a place to “officially” ask you out?)

Presumably “bloggers” were covering the story as Napster debuted in 1999, and I joined millions of others in using it to expand my musical horizons. Before Napster, I mostly listened to my favorite band, Queen, and whatever my parents listened to or what came on the radio. After Napster, I became a fan of genres that many people have never heard of, such as progressive rock, trance, and third wave ska, and this led me to purchase many CDs I would, otherwise, have never have purchased. (This had an impact on my own musical compositions, as my noodling around on the guitar began to produce full-fledged songs around that time.) Some of my favorite finds on Napster were purely accidental, songs that turned up in the search results while I was looking for other things. For instance, I was searching for the Matrix soundtrack, and found a trance song labeled “Matrix ][”, which I later discovered was actually “Grid ][” by the Cynic Project, who apparently was just a college kid making music in his basement. The Cynic Project album, “Soundscape Sampler,” was available from MP3.com at the time, and MP3.com did on-demand printing of CDs for their artists, so I bought the CD.

That CD is now a historical artifact, of course, since MP3.com was killed off shortly after I purchased that album. I watched as both Napster and MP3.com were destroyed by record industry lawsuits, and I became angry and resentful. At the time, I didn’t know the history of the persecution of new technologies by the industries of old, but I did know that these services created a marketplace for more obscure talent who did not have other means to access the listening public. Perhaps more importantly, they helped lead to a more educated listening public, as any decent library should. Both of those services were important to my development as a person and a music fan, and both of them were pioneering services that enabled independent artists to reach the public without having to sell their souls to a record label. I didn’t understand why there hadn’t been more of a public effort to defend these communities, and I was disappointed that I hadn’t gotten a chance to fight for the revolutionary potential that they offered. Argue as much as you like about the ethics of filesharing, it’s a complex issue that cannot be boiled down to a simple “right” or “wrong.” Peer-to-peer is bigger than filesharing anyway, and while Napster awakened me to the power of the internet to circumvent existing avenues of distribution (and control), the internet is not a one-trick pony. Writing off the power of the internet to change the world, and the power of the people who grew up with it, would be a grave error.

Any history buff could tell you that in 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamplet which inspired the colonists to continue with their revolutionary fight against the British. Any geek or Super Bowl fan could tell you that in 1984 - the year I was born - the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, helping to start the computer revolution. The free culture movement is a different type of revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. Free culture is, after all, like print culture squared; it represents a shift from one-way broadcasting to two-way communication. And leading the fight for a participatory culture is just Common Sense.

(Stupid Ecto for Windows is ignoring my request that this be a draft entry ‘til I’m done, so expect frequent updates over the next hour or so…)

This afternoon I’m at another MSR talk, this one by Robin Hunicke, who’s a really interesting woman. Her talk is on increasing diversity and creativity in CS. Here’s the formal description:

ABSTRACT:
Decreased enrollment in Computer Science has led many universities, businesses and government institutions to take a closer look at the field and how it is perceived. As computers become increasingly essential for education and commerce, how can we shape their image within the popular culture? Is it possible to re-invent CS, and to attract new students with diverse backgrounds, goals and talents?

In this talk I will present a post-mortem of my (non-standard, but incredibly fulfilling) education in CS, AI and video games. I will describe my experiences with art and computer science education, standardized and self-guided curriculums (undergraduate and graduate alike). I will discuss my dissertation research and explain how working closely with the game development community has inspired my research and informed my practice as a student and educator.

Finally, I will explore my work with the IGDA’s Education Committee, and show how games are transforming CS programs across the globe. By describing this work in the context of my own experiences, I hope to shed some light on the issues raised above. In particular, how games and CS can work together today, to attract the designers, programmers and leaders of tomorrow.

BIO:
Robin Hunicke is finishing her PhD in Computer Science at Northwestern University; her dissertation work is on AI for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in video games. In addition to her studies, Robin works with the International Game Developer Association (focusing on Education and Diversity efforts), participates annually in the Indie Game Jam, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and the Game Design Workshop at the annual Game Developers Conference. Through these efforts, she strives to build bridges between academics and developers, to promote independent, student and women developers, and to evangelize concrete, directed analysis of games and game design. For more information, see her web site.

She wants to “make another me”—she thinks it’s mostly because people don’t realize that there are opportunities in this space. So, what has to happen to “make another me”?

So, how do we reposition CS? CS is more than a discipline, it’s a way of thinking about things in a procedural way.

Starting with “The Wonder Years”—what were her first experiences with technology? Her father was a nuclear engineer, her mother was a historian and artisan. As a child, she wanted to be a tinkerer and an explorer. There aren’t a lot of female role models for those activities, but she could do a lot of those activities through games (Atari, NES/SNES, M.U.L.E.). BUT…these were not her machines. These were her brother’s machines. She was branded as “gifted” and given a lot of opportunities. But the opportunities wiere in a creative and expressive context, not in the context of procedural learning. Never tied to programming or math or problem-solving.

She felt a tension between science (in school, owned by others), and art (outside of school, personal ownership).

So, 7-12 grade she had a positive focus on humanies and extracurriculars, but her aptitude for math and science wasn’t encouraged. Her overall enthusiasm for school waned.

When she got the U of C, she was able to take a class on programming as a liberal art (Bill Sterner & Don Crabb). Aristote and Turing, Turkle and Tversky. Discussions of history and architecture and oral history, but in the context of computing. She began spending hours in the ocmputer lab making things. Again, an internal split—but she was now starting to try to merge these components.

She built her own interdisciplinary program: film, fine art, oral/historical narrative, women’s studies, and computer programming. Her focus was on storytelling and memory. Because there was no CS major, she could take classes in an ad hoc way, seek mentors as needed, and experiment. Only later did she realize that this was not typical.

In considering grad school, she got the strong impression from successful women she talked with that she had to love math to be a computer scientist. But she did it anyways.

At Northwestern, she’s really had an opportunity to do interdisciplinary work, to include things like narrative intelligence, game studies, and game AI in the context of CS graduate study. She discovered a new community, people who could explore with her, learn form each other, share ideas and enthusiasm.

Out of this, came events like the Indie Game Jam, Experimmental Gameplay Workshop, the Game Design Workshop, etc.

There are familiar challenges. There are no famous female game developers, for example. Her experience in CS has bled out into the industry, which has caused her to want to find ways in academia to correct the problems that can in turn bleed out to industry.

There’s a “night and day” problem is how we approach all of this, similar to the split she felt as a teenager. How can we correct this?

Suddenly schools are approaching her to develop games-centered curricula.

Why CS? Why should anyone major in it? Is it accessible? Expressive? Useful? Enjoyable? Profitable?

We need to change the identity of CS—it needs to become a core competency and a tool. We need to evangelize ourselves as programmers as well as our other skills.

CS is a tool, not just a discipline or profession! Kids need to learn how to do procedural thinking. We need to expand how kids think about machines, about procedural thinking.

How can we make CS projects more about expression and about choice?? This is the critical, fundamental problem. Your work says something about you. If you choose work over family (I’m not sure why she frames it this way), you really want it to be a positive expression of you.

If you can program, you can help people in a variety of fields to accomplish tasks. CS doesn’t just mean being a professional programmer sitting in a room writing code, It’s increasingly a component of all kinds of professions and jobs. You’re a better finance analyst if you know how to program database queries and spreadsheet macros, or write your own analysis tools.

How can we use interest in other areas as levers into CS. Her cousin is an environmental scientist who would benefit from being able to write a simple Python program to analyze data she’s collected.

Trailblazing is nice, but bridges may be better. We need better journals, conferences, web sites, amlinl lists, student groups, travel, and internship programs.

Her advisor is using a “Bauhaus model” for education, using a scheme-based tool for projects. He’s demystifying procedural thinking, pointing out that it’s got creative components, not just mathematical and scientific components. He points out how people can use these tools to integrate into their interests.

The next generation of computer scientists won’t be identifiable by current stereotypes. And this will inspire more women and underrepresented minorities to take CS classes and learn computing skills. New contributors lead to cross-pollination, long-term relationships, and groundbreaking work in the field.

(I’m amazed to hear her say she’s never given this talk before—she’s funny and passionate and knowledgable and convincing. She needs to be getting this message out all over the place!)

In response to a question she talks about the panic going on in universities about declining enrollments. (Can’t replicate her very funny version of what the dialogs sound like in departments…) She says, and she’s right, that we need to be thinking about the customer — but that it’s hard to have these conversations when you’re panicked about your own existence (I would really love to have her come give this talk to our faculty and administration at RIT…)

“I think we should teach computer science like we teach spelling.” Why can’t we teach 10-year-olds to program? If they can memorize baseball statistics (and Pokemon characters), they can learn to write code, too. (My 11-year-old has been teaching himself how to program in Javascript for the last year—he’s a great example of exactly what she’s talking about.)

She blasts (appropriately) the advertising for the recent Microsoft DirectX Meltdown, which showed women as g-string-wearing sideline characters next to powerful male superheroes.

There are all kinds of computer scientists, and we need to learn from each other. We can’t generalize form our own experience. None of us knows instinctively what “women” want in games, for example, We need to learn from each other.

We need to acknowledge that there are sometimes advantages to being the only woman, the center of attention—and it can be hard to give up that center stage. But we have to work harder to reach out to other women, welcome them, include them.

I am Andy Scudder, a rising sophomore at the Unversity of Evansville, where I have been working to organize a FreeCulture.org chapter.

One of my friends at school got a shiny, brand-new Nikon D70 as a graduation gift and was, obviously, excited about the creative possibilities that it would provide. She already enjoyed browsing my photos on Flickr, so it was no surprise to me that she soon had an account of her own and started posting a few shots from her new camera.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the question she asked me a few days later.

“Can I make it so that people can’t print my pictures unless they have my permission?”

I tried to be helpful and tell her that she could keep people from seeing the original-sized images (and therefore only have access to images that wouldn’t be a suitable print resolution), but she persisted. To her, this was a legitimate question. Since she has no way of knowing who would view her pictures online and what they do with them, she felt that it would be in her best interest to “protect” her copyright by limiting what people could do with it. As she explained it, “I want people to look at my stuff. But I also want to know who has it. It is part of being an artist; you have to know who has your stuff.”

But to me, it was a dangerous question. If an artist wants to prevent someone from printing his or her work from their computer, then what other controls would we have to open our hardware, software, and very lives to if such technology existed and was widespread? This is all very reminiscent of the problems with Adobe’s e-book reader and its “permissions” system. The ability of software to arbitrarily determine what rights we should and should not have based on a few bits flipped in a file on the whim of the author or publisher reminds us that, as Lessig wrote:

On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame.

My concern from this encounter is not that my friend lost interest in Flickr, but that as an art student fresh out of college, she felt that control of what other people’s computers could and could not print was an essential feature of copyright. This is a dangerous idea for technology and the freedoms that it promotes, and if most artists hold the same concerns that my friend expressed, then DRM technologies would not only be common but the expected norm by artists.

How can we change this? It seems inevitable that if if we continue to educate our students about copyright with programs designed by the MPAA which do not reconcile for the changes to the creative landscape that digital technology and the Internet have enabled, then we will quickly lose our digital freedoms. Instead, we need to help artists understand the benefits of the digital world and why locking down their works in this landscape would not only hurt the patrons of their works, but the very creative freedoms that they enjoy.

I won’t be traveling to the UK this week after all.

Apologies to all whom I’d planned to get together with. Another time, I hope.

One of the criticisms of the free culture movement in general has been that there are far too many academics and geeks talking about the potential perils of overreaching control over information, and not nearly enough artists. If the artists really believed that this is a threat to culture, the skeptics say, they would act out.

While I do definitely agree that our organization and the movement as a whole need to engage those who are creating art, music, and other creative works, there are a lot of young people out there who are doing exactly the type of work that embodies an open culture. Take Cory Arcangel, who melds art and technology in his Super Mario clouds hack, or Matt Boch, a video artist who combined films of his childhood with his favorite video game to create an exploratory work. Artists like these are reflecting upon works of the past and using new technologies to build upon them.

So even if there are all these young people doing interesting things, how do we get them to care about free culture? Some artists may prefer to embed a political message in their work instead of participating in outright activism. At the same time, I believe that there is a new generation of creators and artists that do indeed care about these issues. As an organization and a movement, we need to make an effort to reach out to these people, to hear their stories, to exhibit their work, and to bring them in.

As a rising 2L at Harvard Law School, I’ve taken an interest in the intersection between law, technology, and culture. Along the same lines, Fred Benenson and I will be giving a presentation for Freeculture.org at this year’s Defcon in Las Vegas explaining why techies should care about the issues surrounding free culture. Much like we need to attract the artists, we also need to make the case to the geeks that they should care about and take action on these cultural issues. More to follow from Defcon…

Frankly, I didn’t see this one coming. When I wrote my small-tools manifesto, I really and truly and stupidly thought the network computing revolution was going to be rooted in a Linux-like geneology, borne of the swarm-ware philosophies of K&R, the natural progression out from a network operating system.

Wrong-o, dude.

What’s worse wound salt for my pompous punditry is not just that I was prognostically wrong, but that I was as wrong as I could be; while I was off lamenting the drift from small-tools thinking and suffocating under ever more monolithic Linux desktop bloat, the MAC-heads were rolling in it. Who-da thunk it?

“… when we first thought of Konfabulator, one of the key pieces was accessing internet content. Well guess what Yahoo has boat-loads of? Yup. And what’s really great is that they’re starting to open it up to everyone in a format that’s useable outside the traditional browser, as XML feeds. Guess how they’re going to provide real-world examples of how to use this stuff …”
[ Yahoo!, here we come! ]

Ok, admittedly, it’s not total-complete network computing, and when they say ‘cross platform‘ they have their heads up their proprietary sands. But dig, it’s still headed in a healthy direction, and from what I can tell from their story, and not being able to actually try it, Konfabulator on Yahoo! seems a heck of alot closer to the recombinant anything anywhere mark than any Nautilus or Yum.

It’s true. Coincidence, or just poetic justice, but the data is in and honest, that’s the new Federal Ministry of Health warning.

Canada advised users of the erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra on Tuesday to “seek immediate medical attention” if they experience sudden vision loss or other vision-related problems when taking the medications.
[ Canada issues warning about Viagra vision loss ]

Now I’m wondering if my inbox will start getting jammed full of offers for low-cost visual-enhancement devices and scams for unlicensed off-market vision tests …

Howdy there: I’m Gavin Baker, a rising sophomore at the University of Florida and co-founder of the Free Culture group there. I hope this week will give Larry’s readers a chance to learn more about us, and prompt some valuable discussion.

I’m writing from an Internet café in Montréal, Québec, where I’m travelling and taking French at l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Besides the observations that naturally arise from contact with a foreign country and culture, I’ve also had the chance to meet some of Canada’s leaders in the free culture movement, about which I’ve written previously on the Free Culture blog (“Dispatch from the True North, Strong and Free”, “Vive la Culture Libre”).

FreeCulture.org calls itself “an international student movement,” but the claim is a bit tenuous: All our campus groups are based in the U.S., the organization is registered with a U.S. address, and most of our volunteers are in the U.S. This is not to minimize the role people outside the U.S. have played in building FC.o, nor our friends overseas, some of whom have said they’d like to plant the group in their countries — but we’re heavily American, and rather U.S.-centric.

FC.o has a long way to go in terms of the resources we can offer new start-ups, and even further when there’s a national, cultural, or language barrier to overcome. Canada, though, makes an appealing prospect for the second national Free Culture group, due to the long-standing ties between the two countries. When I return to the States, I’ll be taking some time to reach out to students in Canada interested in our work.

The question remains, however: What do we do when we get there? For instance, how should the presence of international groups affect our decision-making process? Should Canadians have a “vote,” so to speak, when determining American policy, and vice-versa? Can we divorce national and international affairs, and leave each country to pursue their own interests, while keeping a united front on international policies? Put simply, to what degree should the fates of groups in different countries be tied?

More generally, what does it mean to be “international” in the free culture arena?

What are the differences between the legal and cultural climate in the U.S. and other parts of the world? If individual issues translate differently across borders, how can we phrase an underlying philosophy that makes sense? Where do we look to find students and volunteers who are interested and knowledgeable about the issues? What can we do to lend assistance where it’s needed?

I believe that international cooperation is neccesary to address some of the problems in copyright, in particular: I’m no expert, but I get the impression that many of its uglier facets are set in stone via international treaties (e.g. WIPO) or come as pre-requisites for foreign aid. But much of free culture, per se, is distinctly national, regional, or local — so a “flexible federalism” with a coherent but open-ended philsophy is neccesary. Or am I wrong?

What do we need to know to operate across borders and in the international sphere? What structures do we need to do so? What differences should we expect? And how do we plant new local presences in unfamiliar soil?

My UK trip is fast approaching, and I’m having to start to think about logistics.

I get into Heathrow late Saturday morning (a direct flight from Seattle, in fact!), and will be going to the rental apartment in London that I’m sharing with my colleague—Scala House.

Sunday we’ll take the train into Oxford for the symposium we’re presenting at (leaving my colleague’s partner to play in London during our absence) and will stay in Oxford through Wednesday midday. Then we’ll take the train back to London, and will stay in the apartment through Sunday, when we all head back home. (I leave early on Sunday morning. Blech.)

So, what night is good for a London blogger/geek get-together? Should we use this post as a gathering point?

—
Updated 2:11pm

I’m going to be meeting Tom Coates on Thursday night, at a time and location as yet to be determined. Will provide more details here as I have them.

I may be going to visit MSR Cambridge Labs on Friday—still working that out.

Looks as though I’ll be meeting Foe for coffee on Saturday.

There’s something going down about this that I just don’t follow. Sure, I know what payola is and I understand that Sony BMG got caught stocking the cookie jar, but dig, they pay out to big stations to get airplay for their stables, and when they get caught, what happens? Well, think about it: Money changed hands so … don’t forget the tax!

In its settlement with Spitzer, the company agreed to pay $10 million and to end the illegal practice of paying to have its songs played on the air. The $10 million will be distributed to nonprofit organizations that promote music education.
[ Sony BMG payola case settled for $10 million ]

You see, the ten mils aren’t being apportioned to all those other recording artists who had been bumped from the airways by the greased palms, it goes to ‘promote music education‘, which, y’know, could mean, ‘funding small fanzines for the likes of Avril J. Lo tracking‘ or stuffing school band-practice with free Sony pops charts, and whatever that music ed might actually be or who administers this windfall of forced corporate sponsorship or what they spend it all on doesn’t make a whole lot of difference because, dig, the Payola still worked — the Sony artists slyly slipped into the fore of the media are still there reaping the benefits of the bribes.

From what I see here, all that really changed is the courts demanded a cut, and slapped Sony with a Payola Tax.

Open Source: so I was just looking at href=http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/>OSCON 2005’s website,
and I noticed that it listed Kim Polese, of SpikeSource, as a presenter.

I don’t really pay any attention to what’s happening in Java these days,
but it appears that SpikeSource href=http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/06/HNkimpolese_1.html>
launched last year to provide ‘enterprise support services for
open-source software’ with a Java/enterprise slant.

Funnily enough, my last encounter with a Kim-Polese-headed company
did indeed have a big effect on me, open-source-wise.

That company was href=http://web.archive.org/web/19971012060106/http://www.marimba.com/>
Marimba, and they made an excellent Java GUI builder called href=http://sunsite.nstu.ru/sunworldonline/swol-02-1997/swol-02-marimba.html>Bongo.
In those days (nearly ten years ago!), I was working on a product for href=http://www.iona.com/>Iona as a developer, in Java and C++, and we
needed to provide a GUI on a number of Java tools. I chose to use Bongo,
as it had a great feature set and looked reliable.

Wow, was I wrong! The software was reliable — sadly, the same
couldn’t be said about the vendor. What I hadn’t considered was the
possibility that the company might decide to discontinue the product, and
not offer any migration help to its customers — and that’s exactly what
happened, Sometime around 1998, Marimba decided that Bongo wasn’t quite as
important as their Castanet ‘push’ product, and dropped it. Despite calls
from the Bongo-using community to release the code so that the community
could maintain it and avoid code-rot, they never did, and as a result apps
using Bongo had to be laboriously rewritten to remove the Bongo
dependencies.

I learned an important lesson about writing software — if at all
possible, build your products on open source, instead of relying on a
fickle commercial software vendor. It’s a lot harder to have the
rug pulled out from under you, that way.

Update: Well, it seems it was quite far off the mark about Marimba. Someone who worked
at Marimba at the time read the blog entry, and got in touch via email:

I was an employee of Marimba in the early days, and was around when we
developed Bongo, and still later, when we discontinued it, and still later,
when Bongo *was* released to the open-source community (jm: appears to be
around the start of 1999 I think). It was hosted on a site called
freebongo.org and continued to be enhanced with new features and a lot of
new and cool widgets. It was ultimately discontinued a few years later due
to lack of interest.

It was hosted and primarily maintained in the open-source community by one of
the original Bongo engineers. href=http://www.javagazette.com/ui-freebongo-indepth.shtml>Here’s a link
from the Java Gazette from the days when it was called Free Bongo.

So don’t go blaming Marimba. We did listen to our users and release the
code!

Fair enough — and they deserve a lot more credit than I’d initially assumed. I
guess I must have missed this later development after leaving Iona.
Apologies, ex-Marimbans!

Patents: This has come up twice recently in discussions of
software patenting, so it’s worth posting a blog entry as a note.

There’s a common misconception that a patenter does not necessarily need
to enforce a patent in the courts, for it to remain valid. This isn’t true
in the US at least, where there is the legal doctrine of ‘laches’, defined
as follows in the Law.com dictionary:

Laches - the legal doctrine that a legal right or claim will not be
enforced or allowed if a long delay in asserting the right or claim has
prejudiced the adverse party (hurt the opponent) as a sort of ‘legal
ambush’.

The Bohan Mathers law firm
have a good paragraph explaining this:

…the patent holder has an obligation to protect and defend the rights
granted under patent law. Just as permitting the public to freely cross
one’s property may lead to the permanent establishment of a public right
of way and the diminishment of one’s property rights, so the knowing
failure to enforce one’s patent rights (one legal term for this is
laches) against infringement by others may result in the forfeiture
of some or all of the rights granted in a particular patent.

See also this and href=http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=us/264/463.html>this page
for discussion of cases where it was relevant. It seems by no means
clear-cut, but the doctrine is there.

Tom Peters has a checklist for keeping a stiff upper local lip in the impending enslaught of lumbering globalized juggernauts, and the good news is, if you’re already in small business, it ain’t nuthin you don’t already know: Keep low, keep nimble, dig in, don’t pee in your drinking water, and stay out of the Dinosaur’s lunch path for starters, and a few other good advices for fleet-foot mammals …

Can the small player compete in a world of Citigroups and Bank of Americas? I said it was a lark. And I more or less meant it. That is, among other things, giants%u2014 “new tech,” CRM, etc notwithstanding%u2014 will always be clumsy and impersonal relative to an “intimate local” who is really out to make a dramatic difference. Here’s my Wallop Walmart 16 list of “musts” if you are a “little guy” (one-person accountancy, restaurant, community bank, etc) out to eat the Big Guys’ lunch
[ Beating Wal*Mart (Starbucks, etc) is a lark! ]

“So,” I hear you ask, “does it work?” ….

Remember the days when you could just pop open your laptop in the park and wham, you’re wired in? Oh wait, I forgot. Those days haven’t happened yet. But if Wireless Toronto has their way, it won’t be too long now, no and it won’t be too long …

When logging on to a Wireless Toronto hot spot the user is presented with a community board that promotes local artists and events. From there users can have free internet access to surf the web. If you want to find one of their hot spots a list is available. Some exciting new locations are being added soon
[ BlogTO | Wireless Toronto ]

I’ve been on their list for some weeks now, originally in search of that pesky elusive WiFi antenna connector that I’ve long since given up any hope of finding, but as often happens on a quest, en route I’ve found a BOF space where the topic on the table is how to undermine the madness of WiFi Barbwire, with a refreshing twist of local arts promotion?

Ben Shneiderman, who was also at the faculty summit, is giving an open (to Microsoft employees) talk today on Creativity Support Tools. I’ve seen Ben talk before, and he’s a lot of fun. He’s put up a web page to support this talk, but I missed the URL. Will try to get it later, once the presentation has migrated onto the internal server.

He starts by saying he’ll be focusing on the topic of chapter 10 of Leonardo’s Laptop. (Which reminds me; I need to get one of my grad students to box up and mail me some of the key research books from my office, including that one.)

Quotes a participant in one of his workshops who says “I’ve spent 20 years thinking about collaboration, but only 2 hours thinking about creativity.”

Much of the literature on creativity doesn’t mention computers at all. This is a new space that he’s claiming. Not making machines more creative (AI approach), but developing/improving computing tools to make people more creative.

Heifferentiates between revolutionary, paradigm-shifting creativity, impromptu everyday creativity, and his area of interest, “evolutionary, normal science, music, and art, creative knowledge work.”

How do we enable professional workers to move a little higher up the ladder in knowledge work using creativity?

Talks about the difficulty of doing empirical research into creativity, and reviews some theorists in creativity research:

• Structuralists: Polya’s How to Solve It (1957), Couger (1996) review of 22 “creative problem solving methodologies” and Atman’s design steps (Atman et al Design Thinking Research Symposium 2003)
• Inspirationalists: Free associations, Breaking set, Visualization (Aha!)
• Situationalists (context, community, collaboration): Personal history, Consultation, Motivations

Tells about a student who sent him email saying “My PhD proposal is attached, can you tell me what you think?” No context, no definition of expectations, and no reason for him to look at it.

Highly recommends Csikszentmihalyi’s book _Creativity_ (1993) — not quite a software requirements document, but close enough to allow him to take the next step towards that.

1. Domain: e.g. mathematics or biology “consists of a set of symbols, rules and procedures
2. Field: “the individuals who asct as gatekeepers to the domain…decide whether a new idea, performance, or product should be included” (originality is a necessary but not a sufficient component)
3. Individual: Creativity is when a person…has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion in the relevant domain”

(At this point there are a lot of comments and questions from the room; this is like a professor’s dream seminar enviroment—a room full of very bright and interesting people who are here because they want to be, and are enthusiastically engaged in what you’re talking about.)

Shneiderman proposes these eight activities:

1. Searching and browsing digital libraries
2. Consulting with peers and mentors:
3. Visualizing data and processes
4. Thinking by free association
5. Exploring solutions — “what if” tools
6. Composing artifacts and performances
7. Reviewing and replaying session histories
8. Disseminating results

Talks about each individually:

For search, we need not just effective basic search, but also improved multimedia search, overviews and previews, result set categorization and visualization, multiple session searches. (Gets a laugh when he says that if you can’t find something to be creative about in search that Google hasn’t done, you shouldn’t be in this business.) We need faceted search, and the ability to preview cardinality of results. (MSN Search folks, take note: you should watch this presentation on the internal resnet site.)

Consulting with Peers and Mentors: Prefaces by saying the next killer app is responsibility, trust, empathy. The problem with consultation is a lack of trust. Need negotiated expectations.

Visualizing data and process—refers to _Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think_. Many data types to deal with in visualization, scientific visualization is different from information visualization. Getting to networks (from trees) is the challenge.

Talks about exploration and discovery. Shows a photo of birds, asks people to answer the question “what’s interesting here?” High dimensional spaces are messy. You can’t be hunting unless you know what you’re hunting for. If you don’t have hypotheses and/or specific queries, you can’t explore effectively. In any field, peopel are trained to look at things in thorough, orderly way. He says we need to develop the same skills for looking at high-order data. (Can’t you argue, though, that those orderly ways can cause blinders?)

Shows a chemical table of elements in spreadsheet form. Anything interesting? Hard to tell. Shows it in a scatter graph, asks the same question. People note outliers and correlations. So, can we build an outlier detector? A correlation detector? (Ah…yes, it’s the outlier detector that’s interesting to me in the context of social networks. We do a lot with correlation, less with outliers…)

Demos Multi-V: Hierarchical Clustering Explorer. Displays demographic data using it. Very complex tool, but at least demonstrates clustering methods. Also provides some very nice correlation tools; this is a data set with 14 different variables relating to US counties. So…counties with a large number of young people have high unemployment. Decreasing #s of highschool grads correlate to increasing levels of poverty. These are not surprising, but you can find interesting second and third level correlations. For example, slight increases in income cause dramatic reductions in poverty. Also possible to find quadratic relationships, outliers, and other kinds of clusters and relationships. Biologists were particularly interested in how the tool could identify gaps.

This is a fascinating tool. Would love to play with this in the context of social networks, tagging behavior, etc.

He’s running out of time, so flies through the rest of the slides:

Free association—suggests Axon idea processor.

Exploring solutions: mentions the work of Michael Terry and Beth Mynatt at Georgia Tech. Create multiple versions at a time, not one at a time.

Composing artifacts and performances—provide templates and exemplars. Need better tools, for better presentations.

Reviewing and rpelaying session histories…record, review, annotate, disesminate. Treat histories as first class objects. Replay them, step through them, etc.

Adobe photoshop history tools…each event is a discrete component; we should be able to do that in all tools.

Disseminating results—need better ways to do this. (Doesn’t mention blogs, but that seems like an obvious tool here.)

Challenges for creativity work: Domain knowledge is vital, it may take years, individuals have highly varied approaches, and the theories (about support tools) are shallow, evaluation is difficult, need better ways to do triangulation and multi-dimensional representation.

Influencing our colleagues: Want NSF to incorporate creativity into existing programs, also encouraging a new NSF program on software tools and socio-technical environments to enhance creativity. (Hmmm…the “socio-technical environments” piece of that is intriguing.)

Mentions Richard Florida’s compelling argument about creativity as a potent economic driver.

And that’s all, folks. Wow. A lot of content packed into a short time frame, and a lot of great ideas to think about. These research talks are definitely one of the big perks of being here…

Jim Witte from Clemson University is here for the faculty summit, and is doing a talk for the community technologies group in MSR today. He’s talking about the lack of focus on sociological aspects of computer-based communication in the literature. Notes that there have been articles in the American Sociological Review in the past two years on everything from cricket to tulips, but not one on social impact or significance of new communication and information technologies.

I asked whether some of the problem is with traditional disciplinary boundaries—does it matter if it’s sociology or anthropology or communication or education? (Similarly, Lilia points out that these researchers are clustering in places like AoIR, rather than more discipline-focused areas.) Another attendee makes a comment about this being the difference between “what can sociology do for us” vs “what can we do for sociology”?

Jim suggests that we shouldn’t be isolating this research, we should be integrating it into the top journals in the fields. In part because of the hiring/tenure pressures, and in part (I think; this wasn’t said explicitly) because the field as a whole needs to understand and appreciate these increasingly important topics.

Someone suggests that much sociological research revolves around inequities, and that we need to identify the inequities in technological contexts in order to catalyze sociological research. When Lilia and I point out that there are lots of forms of inequality and exclusion in online contexts, he agrees, and clarifies that what he means is that we need to be focusing journal articles on those aspects if we want to be noticed in the sociological canon.

Jim moves on to talking about some of his web-based survey research. He’s been doing survey design work for National Geographic (here’s the 2005 survey).

How do their tools differ from others out there? Selective invitation of respondents can be supported, as well as open convenince sampling. Allows monitoring of sample development aparticipant response, including source of respondent. They can support complex skip patterns (branching) to tailor survey to respondent. Incroporates non-text material into questions and prompts (images, documents, audio/video). Allows tracking of respone behavior, including time spent on individual quesitns and use of the “back button” to review or change earlier responses.

(Hmmm…I need to talk to Jim and Roy about using their system for our NSF survey this fall.)

A statement that “this is how you think about X” sparks a great debate between the psychologists and sociologists about whether we “know” what’s going on in somebody’s head. One person says “if I don’t know what’s going on in my head, how could you?” Another says that’s absolutely not the case. Then we argue about the extent to which people, say, play a snippet of music in their heads to represent a genre. Several of us feel that this is not necessarily how “most” people do this—it’s something that’s based on learning styles (auditory vs visual, for example), or perhaps other factors (age? gender? education?).

At the end of his talk, Jim mentions some other interesting projects at Clemson, including “animated work environments” (AWE), which allows your work environment to physically change based on needs. (So, for example, your kids are using their computer to work on homework, and then want to eat dinner at their desk—can the surface change to protect the computer while eating?)

All in all, a really interesting talk with some great discussion surrounding it—this is exactly the kind of event and interaction that makes working here so much fun.

Despite my somewhat snarky comments of yesterday, I’ve enjoyed being at the faculty summit over the past two days. The attendees here are smart and savvy and a pleasure to talk to. The research being discussed is cutting-edge and intriguing. The MSR projects being demoed are amazingly cool. The design expo, which showcased student projects in interaction design from six different universities, was fabulous. And in true Microsoft style, everything has worked like clockwork—transportation, food, entertainment, etc. (I’ll be posting photos to Flickr later tonight with images from last night’s dinner cruise.)

It’s easy to blog about problems—when there’s friction or blockage the impulse to vent provides a powerful incentive to write. But now that I’m “inside,” I wondered what kind of response I’d get to my somewhat negative posts yesterday, particularly from my new colleagues here at MSR. This is, after all, one of their flagship events, and I was taking shots at their featured speakers. (I have asked for access to the video of Wulf’s talk yesterday, so that I can watch it again and see if I somehow misunderstood or misheard him. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t, but I’ll feel better if I check.)

I’m delighted to report that I’ve received no negative backlash, and a good bit of positive reinforcement. The message that I’ve been hearing here, over and over, is that employee weblogs are powerful and valuable, and that they should be honest. On the internal mailing lists about blogs, I’ve seen employees castigated by their colleagues for being overly defensive in response to criticism, but not for levying criticism of their own.

Overall, I’ve found the corporate culture here much less oppressive than I’d anticipated, which has been a pleasant surprise.