CORRECTION: Trips: China, Japan

A mistaken belief led to this post of mine a short while ago:

“23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.”

In fact, as was very kindly pointed out to me, this is not the case: Good-Day, though a friend, has not in fact contributed in the way I wrongly described. As was pointed out to me:

“Localization efforts are not due to Good-Day, but tremendous contribution by
ja individuals and SUN K.K., who are not Good-Day's employee. Especially
khirano's coordination has been most noted one. Really surprising, that
such a individuals can do great coordination. Recently, Kubota-san, is taking
over his position, and now he's been doing very well. As far as I know,
no substantial contributions from Good-day, at least of localization.”

My regrets in posting such an error, and my apologies to the all concerned, especially to my friend Kazunari HIrano (Khirano), who has been such a strong contributor to the project and promoter of it. And I welcome Kubota-san!

Alas, errors like the one I made do occur, and I simply ask that when they do that they be pointed out to me. I’ll return the favour :-)

Thanks to those making OOo what it is and even better.

Topsy

My friend Rishab’s company, Topsy Labs, Inc., received the accolade of recognition by none other than the WSJ. See, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/05/27/topsy-bets-on-real-time-twitter-search-with-15m-backing/

What is Topsy? I like the homepage description: “A search engine powered by tweets,” and its About page states,

“Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn't think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

“Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

“Because of how Topsy works, Topsy can do things other search engines don't usually do. Topsy results are fresh, because they're based on what you're talking about right now. Or this week. Or the past month. Topsy has "trackback" pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing. Conversations are about people, and Topsy has pages for every person it listens to - listing the things you've been talking about.”

Google tracks blogs but not comments and it does not, far as I know, track tweets. I’m sure it will. But for now, as the the zeitgeist is increasingly carried by tweets (sigh...), not to surf this wave is to come close to sinking in a sea of sharks. Oh, I doubt Google will disappear and expect it to evolve, to grow ever larger, and to do this fast. But I also have to wonder if it’s losing its agility, if it’s not increasingly beholden to legacy mechanisms of revenue generation. Sure, it’s famous for experimenting and issuing novelty items not enough people liked. (Though I confess I rather liked many.) it tries to be different from itself, to stay young. But it’s not about to sacrifice, and it can’t, the machine that’s made it so rich. Meanwhile, there is now Topsy. And it’s fun.

Foss, elections, politics

I’m debating submitting an abstract to the Web 2.0 conference in New York this November. My tentative title is some version of “Community Works or How Participatory Communities Are Changing The World.” Other options were along the lines of, “Politics and Community In the Age of Web 2.0” and so on. I guess what I’m interested in pursuing is the relation of community organization and community work as seen in Foss. I don’t see that much of a difference: in each case, people work on a joint endeavour, sharing their work, their results to build something that is new and frequently remarkable. It worked for Obama, whose deserved victory has made “community organizing” a more respected term, for he clearly won in great part because of his skill in organizing communities.

But what is a community here? A participatory community, the sort I find interesting and am writing about, is approximately rhizomatic in structure, meaning that like grass, mushrooms and so on, there is no single central node; there are rather many. In the case of something like the Obama’s campaign, there was of course a specific focus, and there were certainly marching orders, agenda items that the Obama community was asked to abide by. But if I understand correctly, there was still a lot of room for local independence, provided it fell within the campaign’s general focus, to educate and to get the vote out. Thus, there were lots of local parties and though there ware guidelines for these, the actual implementation was up to the hosts.

But why did they participate at all? Why so many, too? Well, for the same reason that Foss is taking the world by storm: because the classic hierarchical and top-down systems of authority and value frustrate people. It’s easy to sit there a consumer to what is given and to grumble at most but not to effectively question, content with the idea that you have no power at all, or just the power to complain. But no one really likes that, for it’s really not fun to be told again and again that fear and uselessness and boredom are your appointed lot and that you can only look upon the doings of those who can via the glass of the tv.

And it’s quite another to be given the chance to make a difference. A real difference. Like electing a president; like changing the course of history. Like creating something new that disrupts the very way we do things, make things, distribute things. Sure, not everyone wants this; tv can be fun, and participation is not for everyone. But say that only 1 percent do find it rewarding. That’s a lot of people. And they have friends.and family. These others will be influenced, will see that this is simply not bizarre behaviour; that being a citizen doesn’t mean you can buy the best things cheapest but that you can make something with others.

I tend to believe that bling consumerism is dead or at least dying. And that participatory communities are coming to the fore, rising. I’m by no means alone. It’s the zeitgeist and one that has been gaining momentum for the last couple of years. Foss is a profoundly important node, for ultimately it is not really about software but about a way of making and distributing what you make; and of working with those near and far, connected by a technology that is changing so fast the present is dulled by the future we can hardly wait to arrive. But we have to make sure that what we get allows us the freedom of participation. Otherwise, it’ll be so very last century.

Some cool links:

Knowledge Ecology Notes » Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay submit proposal on a WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons

(in my capacity in ODF campaigns, I’m increasingly involved in Accessibility issues. Accessibility is key; more on this later.)

And,

The Free Software Pact

Value : Notes on Foss 2009-05-25

India’s Nano is selling the top-end model, not the lower end. I’m not surprised. We see this pattern in other consumer goods, outside of India, too. The iPhone wins not just because it works well, but because it’s the (supposedly more costly) Apple brand. Quality, status, these two are rolled into the package represented by the brand. One is not judging the value of the object (and implicitly the value of one’s judgement) on price alone; that would be vulgar and counterproductive. Rather, one is implicitly making the claim that one can afford value, with the tacit hint that the cheaper things lack actual value.

In thin clients I’ve seen this; and in Foss, the same narrative. Because thin clients (a better term is needed!) are seen as the cheaper version of a packet laptop (or even leaner netbook, and in comparison to the iPhone--please, let’s not utter them in the same sentence), and because Foss is seen as the poor man’s costly proprietary software, neither can win: both lose by virtue of their perceived--not actual--value. It doesn’t matter that, say, OpenOffice.org is superior to proprietary equivalents in many areas, or that, I have no doubt, the Nano is more than adequate for the needs of the typical driver in India and elsewhere. The perceived value of these and their kind is that they are, in a word, “cheap.”

(Digression 1: English has that wonderful word; French does not--it’s bon marché, as if you got a good bargain--and in Spanish, it’s barato, again, hinting at a good bargain. English reduces the logic to “cheap,” a term that implies value as good as the price and hints that you could have done so much better, had you only not been such a miser and so cheap. We are, in English, so often what we buy. I’d be interested to learn what other languages say about their culture of the marketplace, and if they have single, pithy words like, “cheap.”)

(Digression 2: I’m hardly discounting the appeal of the inexpensive and even cheap, which when spun right works. EBay has made billions by emphasizing value you can afford; and I live a long block away by the unbelievably gaudy Honest Ed’s, which loudly proclaims itself as selling cheap things--but that is to say, good deals. Cheap, when spun right, sells. No one wants to be taken for a fool, no matter how much you can afford it.)

So, what we’ve done with OpenOffice.org is to focus on other elements: it’s quality, which is to say, it’s real value, using, whenever possible, actual examples. I started doing this a couple of years ago, at a large conference, when I emphasized that the reason I use OOo is not because it’s free--cheap--but because it gives freedom; not because it does only what I need, but because I can add to it, modify it, make it mine in a way i cannot with proprietary software. I use Firefox, I explained, not because it is cheap and I didn’t have to pay anything for it. All browsers (with a couple of interesting exceptions) are like that: free. Rather, I use it because it does things Safari cannot; and because it gives me freedoms closed source software, however open the APIs may be, does not. I use it, in short, because it is a better commodity and it is a commodity that transcends its status as merely a thing lying there with the trace of its making inaccessible.

Like all Foss, Firefox and OpenOffice.org proclaim their community and that community is accessible.

Links 2009-05-24

I actually do have a lot of work to do, and am doing it, but interspersed with the duty writing and reading there’s this:

The SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Nominate your favourite now. Last year, OpenOffice.org won. (Embarrassingly, my friend Rishab and I had taken the wrong subway train, so missed the event; argh.)

Vote now to announce to the world that OOo is really the best community work! (I wonder how things would look if a sizeable fraction of OOo’s estimated 50 or 100 or 150 million users voted.... and I also wonder just how international the effort and attention to it is.... but we can try to make it global. Nominate that favourite now.)

Trips: China, Japan

9 June sees us fly to London, where Tina will do research on India and Victorian England. A lot of Victorian Indian material is sequestered in the British libraries/museums; not a surprise. We'll probably still make a trip to India for more research, esp. in Jaipur. But for now, it's London, and this is good: I love London. While there, we'll be seeing the new production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren, and probably a lot of other shows. I just wish it were all cheaper. For us poverly Canadians, the pound weighs nearly twice our loonie, so going out for, say, pizza, means that that humble pie has suddenly transformed itself into a lordly dish. Good thing about the current recession, though: things are litte brighter for the willing traveller, and our hotel, the Hoxton, in Shoreditch, is très cool and even better than that, given the rates we were able to get.

23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.

But Good-Day is fairly alone in this endeavour. To be sure, there are many individuals and small groups who have made and who make OOo a player in Japan. But there are not enough, and that's a shame. It's a shame because the alternative--proprietary licensed material--places public and private corporations in a terrible bind of dependng their own quotidian activity on the health and interest of a very remote company. Their choice, I suppose. But is it of the people who elected the representatives to government? I wonder. I also wonder whether the recession--which, incidentally, has highlighted the economic consequences of dependency like no other lesson could--will change the view on forging sustainable and local works, such as OpenOffice.org in Japanese, for the Japanese market, supported by Japanese companies, and so on. To me, the choice seems plain. And if there are deficiencies in OOo for the market, then let's work on them. I would guess that it would be cheaper to resolve these than continue to pay, for god knows how long, the effective tax levied by proprietary companies for code that is as essential as ink and paper to the daily running of civil life.

So, I am optimistic about this meeting and hope that it opens the door to many others, with IPA, other government groups, and with more Japanese companies, some of them already deploying OOo and profiting from it. But these I shall not name here do not contribute back to the project. They thus weaken it.

China, and in particular Redflag 2000, have strongly supported OOo development. Indeed, the government (or at least a facet of it) has gone on record endorsing and pushing Foss. Redflag, which hosted the superb OOoCon last November in Beijing, where the company is located, has placed a lot of developers on the task of developing the code for the market. But, it too, is somewhat alone, an odd point, given the situation, but one I expect will change in the very near future. Of course, investing in OOo or any large Foss project, is a lot like (read: identitical to) investing in a company: you don't do it unless you have some assurance of its economic and intellectual viability. Judding Foss projects has proved notoriously difficult in this regard. What ruler do you use? Hits per page? Downloads? Bugfixes? All are suspect, as none is nicely equivalent to the usual business metrics, which can be translated to: Money in hand. So it sounds good--but that's not enough---to say that OOo has been downloaded about 200M times and that tens of millions use it and some even on a daily basis. Show me not the code but the money here, for the question inevitably comes down to, How do you survive, as a project?

Of course, the answer to that is easy, and oddly has nothing to do with altruism. It has rather everything to do with self intererst and the calculus of markets and enterprise politics. And it has to do with the interest value of the shown code to individuals and groups. OOo, as I realized on my first day back in October 2000, is immensely interesting and potentially disruptive in a way few other applications are or can be. For it is a set of tools that give users and developers the wherewithal to produce a range of documents, not just "office" ones, and the open standard(s) it uses further grant an open window to the range of Web apps that other suites cannot take advantage of.

But back to China. The immediate reason for the trip is COPU's annual event, this year in Beijing at the end of June. The event is both theatrical and, in part for that reason, qutie important. As well, it gives us participants a chance to meet ex camera with those we would probably miss. And that alone is worth the ticket.

Notes on informatic autonomy, architecture, Foss, 2009-05-23

I have to confess I’ve become an economics and political science junkie. Obviously, a lot of it has been prompted by the set of crises we are globally facing now: economic, social, political, ecological...and there is no sharp boundary among them: thus we defeat a long Western tradition of thought that distinguishes A from B from C and envisions the social as distinct from, say, the ecological, and so on.

(To be sure, there have always been efforts to braid the threads, and many are represent quite well-known efforts, and arguably any ideological account always does this, as it strives to narrativize the seeming incidental as the consequence of a primary cause, however complex. But I refer less to early ideological efforts--not sure if there are any now, and I certainly don’t hold by any--nor far more sophisticated Foucautian or New Historicist accounts as to the daily politico-economic speech of imagining boundaries around the social, political, ecological, economic, etc., as if what happens in one does not necessarily affect the other, and the processes of A work more or less in isolation from those of B and of C and so on. A straw man, yes, no one is so simplistic, I hope, but showing surprising life.)

So, how does this relate to OpenOffice.org? (For I feel the compulsion to speak of OOo in a blog whose general title is “OOo-speak.”). I guess I could escape that and say that given the above, all would relate to it :-). But here’s a more particular way.

Foss is, I’ve been arguing, sustainable, in that it (ideally) does not depend for its sustenance on the injection of cash or resources from afar but rather develops local business, academic, financial ecosystems. Obviously, not all Foss projects do this and in fact most probably do not. Nevertheless, that is the goal--what I and others have also called “informatic autonomy”--and it’s a worthy one. It also differs from “independence,” in that I see no real virtue in being fully independent and in fact see that as a fetish and an illusion. No one and no thing is independent, we--individuals, groups, nations--all interdependent, like it or not. To imagine otherwise is dangerously foolish.

Lacking informatic autonomy, and thus a sustainable program of development and distribution, means that the polity is determined by the interests of others. Sometimes this does not matter, a there might be happy agreement over the determinations. But say that a disagreement occurs or that a calamity of one sort or another changes the balance.

But how to calculate the balance between international efforts and local ones? It’s not a question of “should” but of “how,” for what we’ve seen is that insularity (a form of independence) can’t work now, at least not if the issue in question has national effect, as a lot of Foss does. Of course, the answer lies in the vary nature of Foss, which is famously structured as a distributed and geographically unspecified “community.” And in conceiving that structure, or rhizome, to be more accurately descriptive, a modularity is also imagined, so that a contributor working on one element or module can do so more or less independently, and it is only when finally compiled and the (chosen) modules integrated that the assemblage can assert its identity as a specific thing, a whole, fully articulated by the efforts of the locally autonomous groups who work under the banner of a license that grants them what I’ve elsewhere called horizonless collaboration.

But what happens when modularity is not present? How then is the local autonomy and for that matter, the articulation of effort to produce the whole? (And with that tease, I’ll leave off this entry and go on a bike ride while it’s still light and unrainy ouside. A glorious spring here in Toronto--we’ve moved from the yellow season of early spring to the lilac, and even those are fading in favour of the iris.)

Notes, links 2009-05-19

Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it: a lot of my mail (IMAP) with my work server chose to vanish. The cause of this remains a little mysterious, but it’s possible it was because I was using Thunderbird and probably had not set it right; or perhaps it was b/c I was using Apple’s Mail.app, which has had problems accessing and downloading copies of messages from the old work server. Either way, a stupefying period of hours fixing things wasted.

Links: One of my favourite sites for Foss news is Free Software in Latin America. It complements Solar, which is mainly focused on Argentina, and other sites. For anglophone readers, there is some relief: FSLA is in English.

But the best part of FSLA is that the articles it includes are very often very interesting. See, for example, this: Argentine Professor Attacked for Sharing Philosophy Classics Online. The issue is one of who controls the copyright of what should normally be considered public domain material but is not here, as the professor is evidently distributing material that the French publishing house Les Editions du Minuit, claims ownership over.

The article points out that Argentina, like many other countries, must import foundational texts at enormous expense to all. it would thus seem as a no-brainer to take things online and distribute not costly paper but cheap electrons. But cost for me or you is usually another way of saying profit for them. And therein lies the problem that Foss and Open Access face: the change in economic practices.

Clearly, it is to the social good to make as available as possible works generally deemed to be not only important but foundational. Arguably, the government or whatever agency could pay the publisher and then distribute the properly licensed work. But say the government doesn’t or cannot do that. Or say that the actual cost is so steep that it could more properly be called extortion. Piracy is thus inadvertently encouraged, as it is very unlikely that the threat of punishment by remote agents will dissuade many; historically, it has not. Thus, and obviously, this is not a purely particular issue but a general one, a better solution lies in moving away from copyright policies that really only made sense before the Internet and before the distribution of copied documents was so easy.