Keep the Zotero going

Don't know if you use Zotero or any similar Open Source research tools, but if this article, linked from Crooked Timber, is accurate, then you might want to sign this petition.

As quoted at CT:

OCLC was founded in 1967 by Fred Kilgour, a pioneering Ohio librarian, with a simple idea: Instead of having every library in the country separately catalog a book—laboriously entering its title, author, and subjects in just the right format—why not have one person enter the cataloging information, upload it to a central computer, and then let everyone else download a copy from there? It was called WorldCat, for World Catalog, and it’s been a resounding success. … OCLC’s control passed from librarians and academics to business people (its senior executive comes from consulting firm Deloitte & Touche). They realized they had a monopoly on their hands … used the resulting flow of cash to fund a spree of acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other fields … dragged its feet in getting library records on the Web …

All this was bad, but it was tolerable. At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that’s what I and others have been doing—Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn’t been a fan. They’ve been trying to kill it from the beginning—threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. … But recently, it’s gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library. It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here—LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened.

Transparency, again

In this post, I introduced two variations on a definition of transparency:

• How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?
• Authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus.

But depending on the context, transparency also means a few other things. With respect to commercial activities, transparency means that you get what
you pay for and it is known to you what you are paying for it. Seen from this standpoint, surprisingly, one of the more transparent transactions in which you will ever engage is the purchase of gasoline. They put the price on a great big sign out front; the price even includes all federal and state taxes; and you control the trade at every step. You could argue that it is less than transparent since the amounts explicitly going to the state and feds are not usually spelled out. But since everyone in the local area has the same burden built in, what difference does it make where it goes? It's the cost to you that matters.

The opposite of this might be the purchase of a house: first you negotiate with the previous owner, then you negotiate with the bank, then you have to pay title insurance, mortgage insurance, transaction fees, flood insurance, and possibly a few other things before you take possession. Later, you find that there are tax advantages and disadvantages (depending on where you live). Other complex deals are comparable: the purchase of a cell phone with a plan and a car with financing involve bundling, hidden costs, fees, taxes, and so on.

For the most part, though, purchasing stuff in a modern economy has become so much more transparent than it was here in the past, or the rest of the world even now. Most of my daily transactions are closer to the gasoline. They post a price, you select the standardized product, you swipe your debit card, your bank transfers the exact amount to their bank, and everyone is happy. Quite different from the bazaar trade in which you weren't sure of the price or the quality/quantity you were getting, and it was risky just carrying your cash on you.

On the other hand, the modern world has made such transactions the opposite of transparent when looked at from another angle: you don't really have any idea what you are getting or how it got here. How much Nigerian or other blood was spilled bringing that gasoline to market? Were those khakis sewn by kidnapped children in India? How many pesticides and effluent went into the production of your spinach? I'm not going to link examples to each of these or the many other stories we hear on a daily basis. You know them as well as I, perhaps better.

I just thought it was worth pointing out that modern crypto has made the money part of our transactions incredibly secure, so secure that we may soon be able to carry on large swaths of economic activity in cyberspace and outside the surveillance of our insect overlords. However, the actual creation and transport of matter, of things in meatspace, cannot be secured with the intelligent application of prime numbers and collision-free hash algorithms. So, how does one create transparency in the creation of hardware?

There are a few open source hardware movements. The Economist just highlighted some of them (may be a $ link). In it, they mention the Chumby, the Neuros OSD, the RepRap (not mentioned in the article, a comparable project is Fab @ Home), the Tuxphone, OpenMoko, GumStix, and Eric von Hippel's book, Democratizing Innovation. Additionally, I have come across a large number of open source Wi-Fi projects, including this mobile hotspot (but the parts are not OS), this solar-powered grid project to bring the tubes to kids in the developing world (an idea complementary to the $100 laptop), and especially the Linksys WRT54G router. And let's not forget open source automobile projects Oscar, Society for Sustainable Mobility, and c,mm,n (I proposed a framework for how an open source car project might work here).

When you can fire up the matter compiler and build your own car after paying for the matter with a secure transaction, the world is going to be a very different place.

PS: I ran into this article in Wired immediately after posting.

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Food for thought.

Update - at last!

Geez, so I haven't updated this thing since April? Okay, so I've been busy.

The last posts I started to work on but never completed were a review of a variety of dystopian novels and films I had recently experienced and an exploration of misguided demographic findings of correlation. But from there, I got side-tracked onto a couple of projects that I have put off for a while, and those resonated with things that have been going on in my professional life. For one, I finally got around to renewing an interest in linux. My laptop is now a dual-boot system.

The first time I tried it out many years ago, it was still at the "linux is so cool, if you can't find a driver you can write your own and you can even rewrite and recompile the kernel if you want to!" stage. Sorry, I want to use the computer for other ends, not as an end in itself. Open Source is almost there, perhaps the latest release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) puts it over the top. I see where even Dell is selling a laptop with Ubuntu installed.

The next thing was to finally read some Neal Stephenson right after Richard Feynman's Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. After plowing through Cryptonomicon, I went down to the local book exchange and pulled off the entire shelf, consisting of Snowcrash, Diamond Age, Zodiac, and Quicksilver. Unfortunately for me, one result of these (especially Feynman and Cryptonomicon) was to resurrect a childhood interest in cryptography.

The interest in crypto has tied in to an unfortunate but ongoing relationship with computer security policy. Unfortunately, the more you learn about this type of thing, the more paranoid you become. Yeah, having to memorize lots of strong passwords is difficult, so difficult that many people resort to writing them down and storing that within arm's reach of their computer, but without those and other seemingly overkill measures, you might as well be running a wide-open system. But then again, even if you have the strongest crypto around, the weakest link is usually the human factor, as illustrated by the common knowledge that most password's are within arm's reach of their computer. Comcast recently learned this lesson the hard way. And while it may be hard to pity Comcast, anyone who has read Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg should understand that hacking pranks like these create a sense of alarm and lost innocence, sorta like when the residents of a small town have to start locking their doors because someone thought it would be fun to vandalize one house with unlocked doors. But this hardly excuses the overbearing stance of corporate security, who would really rather that you didn't have a computer at all.

Speaking of small towns, photos from our recent visit to Lake Wobegon.