Month: March 2005

Copynight

The night after the Grokster case was argued in the Supreme Court, a batch of Austinites gathered in the Club de Ville courtyart to sip drinks and chitchat about digital rights.
Don Turnbull and David Nunez of EFF-Austin were there at Club de Ville, as were Clay, who invited us, Clay’s housemate Austin, and Cody Koeninger, who wrote in with his name in the comments, after I embarrassingly forgot it.
Copynight is basically a standalone meetup for copyfighters. The instigators are Ren Bucholz and David Alpert, also of Ipaction (IPAC), the nascent digital rights fundraising and activist group.
Copynights have also sprung up in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Washington DC, Raleigh, Chicago, Toronto, and Providence.

We speculated about what will happen if Grokster loses. Will that simply encourage the spread of the “darknet” — encrypted networks that are harder to trace?Is technology progress inevitable, even if the technology is illegal? Is the legal prohibition of filesharing doomed to suffer the same fate as the prohibition against alcohol?
(I think it might be inevitable globally, but that doesn’t mean that the US will remain a leader if we use laws to slow progress. My favorite example is the Ottoman empire which outlawed unlicensed printing presses. At the height of the scientific revolution in Europe, there were 17 printing presses in the entire Ottoman empire. Progress happed elsewhere, but it passed the Ottomans by because they used their legal system to stifle the technology within their borders.)
We connected the copyfight to the effort to Save Municipal Wireless — the fight against the SBC-fueled bill to outlaw city-supported high-speed internet. In both cases, an old and wealthy industry (movies and music; telephone and cable) is trying to outlaw the spread of new technology that puts their old business model at risk.
And — hopefully most important — we brainstormed about things we could do.

  • keep meeting, and build a community of people who care about the issue
  • teach about digital rights in high schools
  • meet with our congresscritters about IP issues
  • spread the word about alternative copyright and distribution to the indy community in Austin

Hopefully, Ren and David will be helping to spread the good ideas around.
In a side note about the tools, it’s gratifying to see standalone “meetup” software. Copyfight doesn’t have the fancy reminder and venue selection system that meetup has, but they do have a clickable map to find your meetup, and tools to organize a new one. The map is a nice touch — you can see little groups of copyfighters lighting up the continent.

Geogreen in Texas

Several of the rural legislators in both parties who support municipal wireless for their districts and for the bandwidth-starved towns of rural Texas are among the group of sponsors of a clutch of bills proposing to increase the state’s renewable energy standard.
The website of Texas Impact (I love Google) explains the story behind the Texas renewable energy bills.

In 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush signed historic Texas legislation establishing the nation’s first “renewable power standard” or RPS. The law set goals for how much of Texans’ electricity would come from renewable sources like wind and solar power. Texas has the best potential for renewable energy of any state. The 1999 law set a modest goal of three percent by 2009, meaning that by 2009, three percent of Texas electricity would come from renewables.

Texas is likely to reach the 2009 standard this year. And rural Texas stands to gain from the jobs provided by increasing renewables, mostly wind power. So several legislators are proposing increasing the renewable targets:

  • SB 533 by Sen. Fraser and HB1671 by Rep. Hunter: 5,880 MW by 2015 ( 4.2% of state total)
  • SB 836 by Sen. Duncan and HB1798 by Rep. Swinford: 10,880 MW by 2015 ( 7.9% of state total)
  • SB1075 by Sen. Zaffirini and HB 2692 by Rep. Gallego: 20% of state total by 2020

Environmental advocates, including Texas Impact and the Union of Concerned Scientists are encouraging Texas to seek the higher 20% standard, which will result in the greatest increase in jobs and decrease in contribution to global warming.
The Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association is seeking 10% by 2015 because of concerns about building transmission for the amount of power in the next decade.
Anybody with domain expertise is most welcome to comment on the merits of the different goals. Is it the case that more is better? Is there a practical limit with how fast we can move?
Increasing renewables isn’t just a tree-lover’s dream. It’s also one of the best things the US can to increase national security — what Friedman calls the geogreen strategy. The Wahhabi think tanks that fuel Islamic fanaticism are funded by the Saudi government, which we subsidize with our oil dollars. Just a little less profit margin to the Saudis, and they reduce their exports of terrorism.
It seems like basic supply and demand economics. Starting more mideast wars increases oil prices and increases the supply of anti-American zealots. Increasing consumption of renewable energy and using less oil reduces the supply of anti-American zealots. Plan B sounds better to me.
p.s.
According to a market research report released earler this month by Clean Edge, Inc. solar, wind, and fuel cells are poised to grow from a $12.9 billion industry today to $92 billion by 2013.
The total US energy market was $350 billion in 2002, so clean energy has a total market share of under 4% (not counting increases in oil prices). A better way to measure market share would be in units of energy consumption, not dollars, but CleanEdge doesn’t publish units.
According to the US Dep’t of Energy cited on this vendor’s page overall US energy consumption is growing at 2.2% a year. Taking out my trusty napkin, if you run CleanEdge’s 30% growth rate on units, the US gets to 35% market share by 2013, which is over the tipping point for the mainstreaming of new technology. But is it fast enough to save civilization from global warming?

The hidden purpose of online petitions

Online organizing sites of all political stripes often include petitions to sign.
What’s bizarre is that these petitions are sometimes posted at the same time that there is a live bill making its way through the legislature.
If that’s the case, why would a constituent want to sign a petition, instead of contacting their representative directly?
The reason is that the organizing organization is primarily interested in capturing your email address to re-use. In some cases, the organization includes a privacy policy, telling you that you’ve just signed up for a mailing list. In other cases, such as the online appraisal petition, there is no privacy policy posted.
Since the early days of internet commerce, many consumers have gotten justifiably wary of contests, coupons, and other excuses to get signed up for an endless flow of spam.
Online organizing is in an earlier stage, and citizens are probably more trusting of the intentions of groups who are helping them take action.
The message for citizens is to be skeptical of petitions that don’t have privacy policies, and to contact your representative directly, instead of signing a petition.
The message to advocacy organizations is to be honest. If you’re giving citizens the opportunity to stay informed by joining a mailing list, say so upfront.

The death of the scoop

One of the hallmarks of traditional journalistic culture is the race for the “scoop” — beating competitors in a race to cover a “big” story.
This meta-story makes several assumptions. Fellow journalists are competitors. One’s job is to win against them. Sharing information is against the rules of the game.
When blogs cover news, the assumptions are different. Early reporting on the big Texas House telecom bill involves bloggers sharing information, puzzling out the intricacies of a debate with nearly 40 amendments, and the meaning of the bill that came out of the sausage machine.
The enemy isn’t other bloggers — it’s the indifference of the mainstream media to stories that are less dramatic than an oil refinery explosion. The Statesman covered the telecom story. The Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle apparently didn’t [correction: the Houston Chronicle picked up the AP story, and the Dallas News had a story on the bill’s passage by Vikas Bajaj].
In a world of online peer production, facts aren’t the scarce resource. Attention is the scarce resource. We’re not limited by the front page, news-hour spatial constraint where an oil refinery explosion crowds out other news. We’re limited by social dynamics that focus attention on the day’s cause celebre.
The scarce resource is attention. Collaboration multiplies links and attracts attention. Thus bloggers swarm to assemble the facts.

Web politics and org structure

The Politology post suggested that political activists adopt the tools typically used by open source projects to manage large projects with decentralized contributions.
The article suggests:

A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while – bugzilla; mantis – but they’re so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can

  1. Identify an objective
  2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
  3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
  4. Track progress and make reports It’s similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.

This suggestion raises questions about the organizational processes for using these tools effectively. Open source projects use various different organizational structures for managing releases and maintaining quality.
A bugtracking tool alone doesn’t drive an open source project, and an action tool alone won’t drive a campaign. The tools enable large-scale, effective collaboration, but they don’t cause the collaboration — leadership and organizational processes do.
Similarly, the politology article calls for:

A better “volunteer tracking” system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.

There have been a number of these volunteer markets already — does anyone know how effective they are? Do any of them have critical mass in a domain area? Any metrics about successful matches made?
Since people engage in political action as part of broader motivations for affiliation and purpose, one might think that a “volunteer market” might be most effective in the context of a broader social network — either centralized by an organization like MoveOn, or decentralized like a network of blogs. Or perhaps, as part of overall flea market like Craig’s List, where you can find volunteer opportunities along with apartments, jobs and lovers.
Yochai Benkler’s classic “Coase’s Penguin” theorizes that “peer production” will arise where there is a vast supply of decentralized skills, low transaction costs, and low communication costs. It stands to reason that these dynamics will come into play with political action as well.
The “issue tracking” and “volunteer tracking” tools described in the article are part of the toolset used to co-ordinate large peer-production projects.
And yet. The “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s capitalist free market allocates resources effectively in complex societies. Despite the “invisible hand” there are many business schools that teach people how to set up and succeed at a capitalist enterprise.
Similarly, the “peer organizing” enabled by cheap coordination requires its own set of learnable organizing practices. Web-based organizing tools have promise, but they require human organizing to make them effective, just like any other domain.

Remix politics

The weblog and syndication model enables a “remix culture” — information is readily available, freely discoverable, and easily recombined.
Two of the politology suggestions for activist technology imply this model, and can be extended further along these lines.
Politology suggests:

A congress tracking system: There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson’s complete vote history.

Yes and… this suggestion doesn’t go quite far enough. It would be even more valuable for bills to have “permalinks”, and to create RSS feeds with bill updates.

For readers who aren’t steeped in weblog tech: blog entries each have “permalinks” — stable web addresses that enable the post to be referred to, commented on from another site, and discoverable later on with search engines. Weblogs typically provide RSS feeds that enable readers to subscribe to a blog. Smarter use of syndication/aggregation technology enables items to be discovered and recombined with finer-grained control

So, in addition to a central discussion, weblog remix tools would enable any number of decentralized discussions, that could in turn be aggregated and connected.
The politology post goes further in this direction with its suggestion for an “action aggregator.

Right now we’re being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it’s like they are competing with each other. It’s nonsense – a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

This isn’t hard at all, and could be done easily with today’s technology. Organizations providing action alerts, like Consumers Union and EFF (to mention a few I work with), could create an action alert feed. Then, individual activists could subscribe to the specific feeds, instead of being inundated with action email.
These models fit nicely with patterns of networked action — people learn and are influenced in groups that are geographically or topically close to them, and then band together to have a greater and more far-reaching impact.

Dewey award – thanks and puzzlement

Like Chip, my friend and co-organizer of SaveMuniWireless.org I was one of ten nominees for the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award, which is given out annually at the SXSW festival. This year’s winner was Roger Steele, for his work at Manchaca Elementary School.
The award nomination was gratifying but rather puzzling. I received a cryptic email message explaining to come to a room at SXSW at 4pm on Monday. The biographical information they had was partial and not-quite-correct. There was moving memorial testimony about Dewey Winburne, and nominees were called up to receive plaques.
I am glad that Austin makes the effort to find and reward people who are doing community service. People like Chip embody an ethic of community service that is distinctive and good about Austin.
If the group organizing the awards wants to strengthen community service in Austin, perhaps they could organize get-togethers where current and past nominees can meet, network, and find opportunities to bolster their work.
Perhaps there could be a website to highlight community projects on an ongoing basis. If there are common interests, perhaps a Yahoo group or forum could provide ongoing communication.
I have no idea who organized the awards, so I’m not even sure where to forward these suggestions.

Tools for advanced net activism

Politology has a great post brainstorming about activist tools that should exist but don’t yet.

  • A congress tracking system: Thomas sucks. There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson’s complete vote history.
  • A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while – bugzilla; mantis – but they’re so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can
    1. Identify an objective
    2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
    3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
    4. Track progress and make reports
      It’s similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.
  • A better “volunteer tracking” system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.
  • An action aggregator: Right now we’re being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it’s like they are competing with each other. It’s nonsense – a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.