Open licensing, and how we work

As I blogged previously, I’m doing a series of short pieces that look under the hood at the day to day work of the Shuttleworth Foundation. As the opening blurb to my first article says:

How We Work is a series of occasional articles that take a critical look at one aspect of our open philanthropy practice. Our aim is to reflect and improve upon our efforts while also sharing what we’ve learned with others.

The first target (or ‘victim’?) of this process was the Foundation’s open licensing policy. The whole team met back in January to reflect on our policy, talk about what is working and what isn’t and to dream up ideas for how to do it all better. I’ve just finished a draft write up from this conversation, with the main points summarized in the introduction:

The Shuttleworth Foundation believes in open innovation. It is core to the society we want to build. Early on, we made a decision that what we do and fund should be under an open license. Our goal was to make it easy for people to use, adapt and improve whatever our staff and partners created. We wanted maximum viral impact, and we saw open licensing as the first step in this direction.

As it turns out, making open licensing work isn’t easy, and going viral is even tougher. In the three years since embracing open licensing, we’ve bumped up against confusion over IP ownership, partners who are not willing to share, and lawyers who don’t ‘get’ open. Also, in many cases, we’ve simply lost track of materials our partners have created. They may be open, but no one can find them. Not even us.

The good news is we’re pushing past all of this, putting in place more systematic open licensing and archiving policies. As we do this, we thought we should write down how things have gone so far and explain where we are headed in the future. Hopefully, this will help others move into open licensing more quickly and successfully in the future.

Bottom line lessons and advice for other foundations are included briefly at the end of the article:

If you do decide to ‘go open’, it’s important to take the time to be thoughtful about how it happens. Our experience suggests that there are three issues to pay particular attention to: license choice (choose a license like CC BY SA that has maximum viral impact); ownership (think about who has a stake in making ideas travel and keeping them open; and accessibility (make a clear plan for access and archiving). These are three areas we tripped up on, and that we’re now working to improve.

There is a full version of the draft on Google Docs. I’d love to get comments and feedback on this as I will be doing at least one more version before we ‘publish’ it.

Processwise, I still like the idea of the How We Work series. The face-to-face team discussion was especially good, putting us all on the same page (or close to it) in terms of open licensing. It also surfaced some internal controversy on when our partners should own IP and when we should steward it ourselves. As a result, we were able to tweak our new open licensing policy so that it meets a broader set of needs and circumstances.

I’m less than sure on the write up format. It’s good to have a formal, reflective article. The process of writing something like this deepens the thinking and even had an impact back on the follow up policy discussions. However, all the back and forth (and my own delays) made the whole process feel really felt slowwwwwwww. For the next topic (internal learning?), I may blog out loud early in the process and then come out with a more formal article a little later. I’d love comments on whether or not this mixed formal / informal writing strategy sounds useful.

Challenge. Change. Conversation. Revolution.

Whatever it is that I do for a living today, it all started with community video. Five years as a portapak toting video activist in the early 90s gave me deep roots. It sparked DIY entrepreneurship and hacking. It taught me that media is conversation. It fascinated me with the power of fluid, open, participatory ways of working. In so many ways, community video made me me.

Much of my inspiration came from the NFB’s Challenge for Change: a late 60s effort to put video cameras in the hands of the poor and marginalized. Like the Challenge-for-Changers, I trained scores of people to make their own media. I helped build half a dozen media collectives. I pitched in on a few very important tapes, and on hundreds of energizing, but ultimately forgettable, hours of video fun. I committed every waking hour (and many dreaming hours, too) to the community video revolution.

And then, one day, I just gave it all up. I gave it up for the Internet.

In 1994, as the non-techie world got it’s first glimpse of the web, I stopped preaching video and began to teach activists how to send email. Unlike the television world of the early 1990s, the culture of the Internet encouraged me (and millions of others) to use words like ‘participatory’ and ‘media’ in the same sentence. It was the perfect backdrop for a 10+ year adventure building social change media channels, co-creating participatory, unconferency conversations and collaborating with community tech activists all around the world. This adventure has become my life.

The thing is, I’ve never forgotten Challenge for Change. I’ve carried it in my heart everywhere. Last week this part of me stirred, and I smiled.

Misha asked me to help with facilitation for Handheld, an unconference built around an Internet-era participatory media project on inner city health. All of the women participating in the project a) used to live on the street and b) have recently had babies. They took pictures. They shot video. They did interviews. This material was then shown to health care workers, and interviews with health care workers were shown to the women. The resulting video bridge (and I suspect the final cut of the video) creates a dynamic, honest picture of the attitudes, rules and tiny daily actions that are rolled up in our very broken health care system.

Yet, it wasn’t the power of this social message that made me smile. I smiled at the unconferency buzz of 100 people talking about both inner city health *and* media empowerment. I smiled as I met the women from the project, and heard them offer to work with other mothers during the closing circle. I smiled as ideas for a participatory video network for Toronto were proposed to the group. The unconference process was unleashing all kinds of creative energy that would simply grow once Handheld was over.

When I think back, this idea of media as messy beginning rather than neatly folded ending is one of the things that inspired me most in Challenge for Change. And, I suspect, it may have also inspired Kat Cizek, who organized Handheld. Kat’s NFB Filmaker-in-Residence program at St. Michael’s Hospital is very explicitly a riff on the Challenge for Change idea.

Of course, we now live in a viral media world where where open ended beginnings are commonplace. Kat says on her site: “We are in a revolution right now, and many people might not even know it.” This is not only a revolution in access ($25,000 portpaks replaced by $100 cameraphones) but also in the whole form and function of media. We have moved in great part from consumption to conversation, which in was one of the main points of Challenge for Change in the first place.

As Handheld ended, I smiled a very huge smile about this conversation revolution. I also reminded myself that all conversations are not created equal, and the best ones require care, love and finesse. This of course was the brilliance of building an unconference around a participatory video project. It nurtured an already-started conversation further, sparking ideas, passion and commitments in all sorts of new directions.

It’s useful to celebrate the conversation revolution. But then it’s time to move on to nurturing, facilitation and curation. These are things we need more of now. Nicely, Handheld, Kat and the women she is working with offer a very helpful example.

PS. For a little more on what I was thinking about as I switched from video to the Internet, check out From VTR to Cyberspace: Jefferson, Gramsci and the Electronic Commons. Written by a Mark Surman who was much more idealistic and naive than the one you’ll meet today, but still an interesting snapshot of a beautifully chaotic moment in time.

A pirate, a professor and a political compass

Over the past week, I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of two people: Jonathan Zittrain (a professor) and Matt Mason (a pirate, or at least a fan of pirates). This has got me thinking about the ‘political compass question’ again, which goes something like this …

Right and left just aren’t enough anymore. We don’t live in a world where collective vs. individual sums up who we are (if it ever did). In fact, the much bigger tensions in today’s world are: democracy vs. authority; diversity vs. singularity; ecumenicism vs. fanaticism. We are in a struggle between open and closed.

The thing is, most people still see the world through one-dimensional-political-spectrum-goggles. Sure, we hack around this. Youth culture. Open source. Punk capitalism. Matrixed social movements. Internet culture. We know how things are changing, and we are accelerating the change. Yet, despite these hacks, the imaginative frame that organizes political parties, schools, governments, big media, laws and, to a certain degree, our identities is stuck in the left-right mud. This is true almost everywhere I have been in big, bad world.

We need a new political compass, urgently. The left vs. right spectrum has hit a wall. It no longer helps us see what’s possible, or even what’s necessary. We need (at least) another dimension to help us explore the possibilities of open vs. closed on a mass scale. I’ve been playing with this diagram for a while now:

Left vs. right thinking has us log jammed on pressing issues like the environment, intellectual property and the evolution of markets. A few people are making breakthroughs on these topics, and they seem to be doing so by dumping the left vs. right mindset for open thinking. Grafting open (and closed) onto the map  that focuses our political imagination could help us break the logjams on a much larger scale.

This idea is not new. Paul Ray called for a new political compass in 1994 (and then trademarked the term. Silly man.). More importantly, I stumble across people hinting at the need to add open vs. closed (or, at least, open) into the broad conversation about economics, society and politics almost every week. Paul Hawken’s book on new social movements. Matt Mullenweg’s off the cuff comments about the real meaning of open source (last 10 mins of this talk). Meg Wheatley’s articles about emergence. All are contributing to the debate and evolution of a new political compass, even if they don’t know they are in the game.

This where Zittrain (the professor) and Mason (the pirate) come back in. I think they know they are part of the game, and are trying to help rebuild our politcal map.

Zittrain is concerned that the Internet is about to be killed off by the very culture of openness that it created. As outlined in great blog coverage of a recent Zittrain talk, the argument goes: folks like pirates and virus makers are using the bottom up nature of the Internet to do things that piss people off. This plays into the hands of governments and businesses who want to ‘fix’ things with laws and technologies that will take away the flexible, bottom up qualities of the internet. The only solution is to amp up our efforts police the Internet using well structured, rule based community policing like we see in Wikipedia.

While this argument is interesting, and the threats are very real, what really caught my eye was the Zittrain-o-gram used to show the political terrain upon which all this is happening. It looked something like this:

What I like about this diagram is that it shows the tension between closed (aka top down) and open (aka bottom up). These are recognized as distinct terrains on the map. We need maps like this. What I don’t like so much is the way this sets up the rigorously open (the communitarians) and the anarchically open (the pirates) camps as enemies.

Matt Mason’s new book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, helps explain why. Starting with Walt Disney’s use of fairy tales, winding through punk / hip hop / graffiti / open source, and ending up with pervasive, transient remix culture, Mason argues that pirate culture (and youth culture) is a major force of innovation. Yes, it competes with both traditional business and (sometimes) organized approaches to open. But, in doing so it forces more established players to take pirate innovations on board, increasing efficiency in the market, creating better products for consumers and (often) making the world a better place.

Mason diagrams this by inverting the traditional prisoner’s dilemma diagram (altruism vs. selfishness) into a pirate’s dilemma diagram (altruism AND selfishness). The bottom like is that market players and society win if the integrate the innovations of pirates. Those who don’t lose. The diagram looks like this:

I like this diagram. Just like transcending right vs. left, turning the prisoner’s dilemma inside out helps us expand beyond our limited 20th century political imaginations. More importantly, it shows that the pirates are actually contributing to the success of other players in society, including the rigorously open folks that Zittrain encourages us to back (and we should back them, for sure).

For me, the opportunity here is getting the open meme onto the broad social, political and economic map. As we do this, we should see the Zittrain’s communitarians and Mason’s pirates as yin and yang. Something like this:

We need both halves of open. And, while each group needs to insist on doing things its own way, we also need to recognize each other as allies. As Boris Mann blogged yesterday:

Basically, sniping other open projects isn’t cool. … The “enemy” here is proprietary systems. They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

While Boris is talking about software, the same idea extends to the whole open terrain. We don’t need to agree on everything (that’s the point, right). We just need to make it clear that open offers possibilities that most people can’t even imagine yet, and that closed is not what we want. My sense is that we’re on the cusp of building the maps and memes we need to make this message crystal clear.

Rockin’ the telecentre house

Over the past six months, alot of people have asked me ‘how’s it going with telecentre.org?’ My response has typically been: ‘Ah, umm, okay. I think.’ 2007 was a year of change and uncertainty.

My answer changed to ‘telecentre.org is rockin’ the house’ this week as I hung with the whole team in Valparaiso.

This team is focused on concrete action that can truly help telecentres: a global telecentre.org training academy; a venture fund that will help telecentre networks and their members become successful social enterprises; a research program that will dig deep into the social and economic impact of public access computing. Also, there is new and strong communications team in place to capture and share stories of what is happening across the telecentre movement. Florencio has done a great job rebuilding this team, and they are moving fast.

Being at the team meeting also reminded me how much the telecentre.org community has achieved in the past three years. There are existing and emerging telecentre networks in almost 50 countries. There are strong grassroots leaders who are spreading the telecentre.org ethos on every continent. And, most importantly of all, the whole conversation about telecentres has shifted from ‘this is a dying idea’ to ‘this is a social entrepreneurial spark that’s about to catch fire’. While there is lots more concrete work to do, the telecentre movement has come a long way in the last few years.

From my side, I’ve made a commitment to work with the telecentre.org team for at least another year. My main job will be to focus on social enterprise development, with most of my time going into the creation of a small (and probably single-region) social venture fund to help networks develop into product and service channels. I will also continue to work on the development of new global partnerships.

It was a pleasure to hang with the whole telecentre.org crew again. They’ve got the tunes cranked and they are rockin’ the house in a big way. It’s a party worth watching, and joining.

Shoelacing social innovation

Social innovation (or any kind of innovation for that matter) can be a lonely gig. There you are, focused intensely on an issue or problem that you are passionate about, trying to invent / evolve / evangelize an approach that will really make a difference. Poverty. Hunger. Education.  Democracy. Knowledge. Whatever the issue, that’s all that matters. One day, you’ll have time to connect to other innovators to share what you know … and learn about what they’re working on. But not now. One day. 

A week or so back, the Young Foundation and gaggle of groovy partners launched the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) to overcome this story of isolation. Here’s the web site:

The idea is great: radar emerging social innovations and lightly shoelace the innovators into a network (or at least make them aware of each other). Case studies highlight interesting innovations. Blog postings create a babble of emerging ideas. And face to face events (very promising) create the deeper human connections and content that will fire fuel back into the web site.

The problem is, great ideas also need to work in the real world. I have hope for SIX, but competing for attention, and even generating content, in a busy web world is tougher than ever.

As an already-busy-with-my-own-life-specialist-in-residence at SIX, I want to help with this. I want to contribute compelling content that draws people. I want to show up to comment and discuss stuff when it’s helpful. I want to evangelize and get people excited. The thing is, I am just as time and attention strapped as the next guy on the social innovation block.

My hope is that that basic web 2.0 tech mashed up with some good ol’ community media work can help with this. I scribbled some ideas on this earlier:

On the web 2.0 side, SIX could easily build up a more compelling feed of news by importing and rebranding RSS items from me and other specialists-in-residence who already have their own blogs. I’d be super happy to see them do this. The SIX editors just have to select the stories they want and publish them o relevant section of the site. I get extra exposure and a sense that I am contributing. SIX gets stories. Everybody wins.

SIX could quite easily build up it’s case study section with some simple audio interviews. Most of the case studies seems to be super short descriptions of a project. This is great as a radar, but doesn’t let me dig deeper. However, it’s very tough to get people like me to write a long case study, and expensive to get researchers and journalists to do it.One way around this is for the editors to do quick Skype interviews with partners who have projects to profile, and then post these as podcasts along side a one paragraph description of the case. Or, to do fast interviews at SIX face to face event. Either way, it’s like bootstrapped community radio on the web. We did something two years ago for the IDRC eALF project. I worked brilliantly, cost nothing and took up almost no time.

The other small and easy way to increase the value of the SIX site would be better and simpler outbound RSS feeds. Right now, I can only see a feed for the main blog page (which would be super useful if combined with the republishing idea above). However, I can’t see a way to get feeds of the case studies or the features. If I had this, I could radar for interesting articles, and then come to comment on the site when they come up.

SIX could definitely go somewhere, but it needs to make contributing and engaging easy first. The good news is that there are some smart (and young) people behind it all. I am going to offer to help out with some of the ideas above in the hopes that it move things along.

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PS. I just heard that the Young Foundation is also doing SocialInnovationCamp. Very cool. I suspect (and hope) that some of the web / event 2.0 energy of SIcamp will infuse itself in SIX.

PSS. To see RSS feeds an rebranding in action, look at my original posting here and the feed version here.
 

Planting seeds with open content

John Moravec of Education Futures posted today on the Cape Town Declaration, worrying that open course materials will do little to change education. He asks:

Is there something else that we should focus on where we can use new technological and social models to develop innovative tools for education?

The answer is: of course! There are dozens of things that pop to mind immediately: Tools that capture, share and evolve the tacit knowledge involved in teaching practices (LAMS). Peer-to-peer learning platforms where students support each other and teachers become more like facilitators (Kusasa). Sites that connect ‘amateur’ teachers with interested learners (The School of Everything). For-credit classes that embed students in the real time, hands on learning environment of an open source software community (Seneca College). Or simply DIY learning by doing, which is the point of the web and open source in the first place (Wikipedia). While most of these are nascent examples yet to scale or even prove themselves, they hint at where things are going.

It surprises me how many people jump to the conclusion that the Cape Town Declaration ignores all this. The people who wrote the Declaration — and I suspect most people who signed it — totally get how education can and is changing. That’s why the Declaration says things like:

We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.

… and encourages people not only to think about content but also to:

… pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education.

We have a huge opportunity to transform what we mean by ‘education’ in the next 25 years. This will (hopefully) include a shift to more participatory, p2p, informal, learner driven approaches education.This shift may in turn totally transform how we deal with accreditation (can I prove what I taught myself) and even the whole way we organize publicly funded education (can me and my friends set up our own school with tax dollars?). While no one agrees on exactly how this will (or should) play out, one thing is clear: it won’t happen all at once.

This is one reason the Cape Town Declaration focuses on educational content. We need a place to start. Opening up the content we use for learning, making it not only accessible but also remixable, is a super important first step. Once we’ve got the political, legal and technical seeds of a remix culture spread throughout the world of education, who knows what else we can create? I guess the idea is that we get to invent it along the way.