Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Disney Mashup on Fairuse and Copyright

Click here to play

via Amalyah Keshet and Wired Magazine "Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright"

The ten minute movie, directed by Eric Faden, came out of Stanford University's Fair Use Project Documentary Film Program. Stanford's Fair Use Project--to which Stanford Law professor, Copyright guru, Creative Commons advocate and Wired writer Lawrence Lessig contributes--was founded last year to "support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom." And, well, the movie is damn sure creative, and certainly seems to take the boundaries of fair use about as far as they can go

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Penguin Day Reflections: OS as FairTrade, OS Feminism, and OS - the Next Generation

Open Source Feminism - Click to Play

Penguin Day is a day-long workshop for nonprofit organizations to explore the range of issues and options inovlved in using Free and Open Source Software.  Penguin Days happen in different locations several times a year and for the past three years, these meetings have taken place after the annual NTC: Nonprofit Technology Conference.  Last Saturday, I attended my first one.  Although I was pretty exhausted by Saturday,  I learned a great deal.

I was curious to observe the gender balance at Penguin Day and while I'm not as meticulous as Christine in counting and calculating the number of women and men in the room, I took a quick video to get a reading. Very roughly, the percentages for Penguin Day look better than industry standards for both OS and commercial software.  The video incorporates some slides from Angela Byron's excellent presentation, "Women in Floss" which also speaks to the dark side of gender issues in FOSS communities.  The presentation offers some good pointers to women in how to get involved in FOSS communities.

Click To Play

The morning started off with a Spectrogram Session.  A line was drawn with duct tape from one side of the room to the other.  Aspiration's Executive Director, Allen Gunn, read a series of opinion statements and asked if we disagreed or agreed or were neutral.   Everyone in the room found a place on the line relative to their opinion.  A group dialogue followed allowing people to articulate why they felt one way or other.

I'm sort of foggy on all the questions - due to my tired state, but the first set of opinion statements was "Nonprofits should adopt open source software for practical reasons" and "Nonprofits should adopt open source software for philosophical reasons."    The discussion reminded of the one I heard in the UK and read later on the Circuit Riders list "Is Open Source Fair Trade for Nonprofits?" (Interesting that KhmerOS had a table at the Cambodia Fair Trade Expo)

The video captures those on the philsophical side.  I was standing on the "adopt for practical reasons" side of the line.  I was somewhat persuaded to come closer to the middle in listening to David's and Jamie's arguments.   I think that of advocates need to have open source technology stewards behind them to be successful -- there is a need for stewards to guide the choices, training, translators -- to help nonprofits adopt open source software.

Might I dare suggest that future spectrograms include a question about gender balance in OS? Or, has this issue already been discussed in this context?

I attended a session about OS Online Communities facilitated by the Joomla! guy (whose name I can't remember due to my exhausted state and I apologize for that). UPDATE:  His name is Johan Janssens.  He told the story about the growth and challenges facing the Joomla! community.  (These stories need to be written down and it sparked a memory of a conversation I had with Zittrain at iLaw in 2005 who pointed me to a researcher at HBS who was looking at Open Source Software Communities.)

The questions that emerged from this group were not different from those that are asked when we talk about online facilitation and online communities.   These folks would be perfect participants for Nancy White's Online Facilitation Workhop. 

• How to bring new people up to speed.  How to get the good pieces to rise to the top.
• What are the tactics for supporting online open source communities?
• What makes online forums work or not work?  What are the best practices?
• How to get into the forums without being labeled as a stupid newbie
• How to engage people in valuable conversation?
• How to prepare the next generation of moderators in OS communities?
• What is the best tool for very large communities?
• How well does the tool support the organic growth of the community?
• What are the techniques for conversational weaving?
• What is the gensis of an open source community? 
• Since OS communities generally begin with a small group of developers or a scratch your own itch approach and some developers tend to be egomanics - how do you build community within this culture?

I participated in the speed geek session where about ten people get to pitch a project or idea to a rotating group of four or five people.  I pitched my Open Content game for Nonprofits.  In retrospect, I designed the game more for a range people who work in a nonprofits - technical and mangerial - and this audience a mix of more technical and technology providers.    Still, I got a lot of great feedback for the next remix of this game.  (Sorry Janet, no videos too tired to multi-task.)

After a lunch of pizza (which accelerated my tiredness), I lead a very small group informal discussion on Open Content.  We didn't play the game, but we had a great discussion about the creative commons licensing and the issues the notion of open content surfaces.

While she was busy facilitating a linux session, Michele Murrain had managed to blog a very thoughtful post shining a light on the Open Content issues (pay for it or set it free).  I agree with Michele's viewpoint, although I understand why Michael Gilbert and Laura Quinn respectfully disagree:

But ultimately, yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector should be freely available, and under Creative Commons (or similar) licensing. That's the only way to provide important information to nonprofits that need it - some have a hard time affording even nominal fees for that sort of thing.

Click to Play - Adam Thompson Interview

At the end of the day, I met Adam Thompson who teaches at UofC Santa Cruz and I discovered that he distributes some of my blog content to his 25-40 students each semester.   He notes that the field is changing fast and that the blogosphere moves faster than textbooks and the "by" license makes this sharing easier. 

So, if my content was locked up and available on a fee basis, I might make some money but then again I might have less exposure.  I guess the key whether your main source of income is from the sales of your actual content or whether your content is line extension and you make your income via consulting or teaching.  Lots to think about here.

Click to Play - Are Mediated Experiences Bad?

I went out for a group dinner after Penguin Day.   I got a ride from Simon Rowland who was using his blackberry and GPS to help navigate to the restaurant to meet up with the rest of the group. In the front seat, Simon was talking about mediated experience with Zac Mutrux and how our engagement with gagets gets in the way of us being in the moment and interacting with people face-to-face.   This reminded of a post I wrote called "Shall we put away the cameras and have a conversation?"

This calls to mind a debate in the educator community about some years ago about computer-mediated experiences - and how it is a (mostly) bad thing.  Has this view changed by the pervasive Internet access? What struck me is that Simon is probably a Gen Y and Zac a Gen X and I'm a babyboomer.  My perception was that younger people do not feel mediated experience is a bad thing.  I was wrong -- this attitude isn't necessarily generational.

Click to Play - OS Next Generation
Music - Voyage Black

And, since I mentioned generations, my kids are "We Gen" and I wonder if they think mediated experience is a bad thing?   I must also mention that the blow up penguins were huge hit in our house - they are still being flung down the stairs.   Even more importantly, it gave me a chance to introduce the kids to the concept of Open Source software -- Harry's observations about penguins were interesting.

This is a "Best of" for finding CC "BY" photos in Flickr

Last week when I blogged that won the Creative Commons flickr photo contest, the prize I got was Lessig's on my answering machine.  And, I just got an even better gift.  In today's email, J Wynia, shared with me a tool he created with the Flickr API that lets me search for interesting photos that I can remix or use and automatically generates the attribution.  Yeha!

Given your recent discovery of the "by" CC license and your recent inclusion of photos under that license from Flickr on your posts, I thought you might like to know about a tool I built a while ago that searches through Flickr CC-licensed photos based on "interestingness". I use this tool to find pretty much all of my post photos.

This is the value I get from blogging - the ability to connect with other people around a common interest.    Yet, I wonder if this is a compelling enough reason for those work in nonprofits?  

Legal Education in Networked World: Berkman Center Discussion

At Harvard Law School in real life via the Berkman Center, there was an fascinating discussion tonight called "Legal education in a networked world."  It was moderated by Charles Nesson.  You could also watch a video cast on the web as well as in Second Life.   So, I attended via Second Life where Rebecca Nesson was the in-world moderator and she was also at the real life event.

There were some technical issues, but that didn't prevent me from having an extremely engaging conversation in Second Life while listening to a fascinating  panel on how technology should be integrated into the law curriculum and how professors can incorporate it effectively in their pedagogy to engage student learning.   This was a rich conversation that raised wonderful questions and debate with different viewpoints --  digital natives and digital immigrants --  their learning styles and technology use patterns, etc.  I can't begin to summarize the eloquent words that Nesson used to facilitate the conversation.

The session opened with a question on whether students should be allowed to use laptops in the class to take notes or not.  Panelists expressed a range of views -- raised questions as to whether having the laptop was a distraction or barrier to learning or not.  They also talked about what it is like for the professor not to have eye contact, questions about whether or not multi-tasking gets in the way of learning, etc.   In Second Life, the chat was very rich and made us wonder how much the RL participants were missing. 

It was also interesting that when they video projected the Second Life environment on the screen, all of us avatars got very tame ... no dancing, piano playing or flying.   I wanted to bring out my grand piano, but there was a lot of lag in-world and then the system needed to be rebooted ... and that's when I missed a good portion of the discussion ...

Anyway, go listen to the video.  I know it is about legal education - the debates and chat reminded me of the back channel discussion during the MacArthur Foundation Digital Learning and Media press event.  This topic is being discussed in many other fields and very interesting ..

Comic Book on Fair Use for Filmmakers

Direct Link to "Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law"

Museum, Education, and Library IT networks have special interest or affinity groups on the topic of copyright and fair use.  The MCN (Museum Computer Network) Intellectual Property Special Internet Group is chaired by Amalyah Keshet.

She frequently posts to the MCN list on the topic and also blogs about it at the Museumatic blog and that's how I discovered this comic book via a post she did on children's educational materials about copyright.  (Note: She isn't ranting about the above book and materials)

There is a good list of resource materials at the site, including a link to the Documentary Filmmakers Statement on Best Practices in Fair Use from the Center for Social Media that Michael Hoffman pointed to in his post on fair use.  The site also has a blog on the topic of fair use.

The Great YouTube Copyright Debate

This YouTube video is from Kenneth Goldstein  and it's hilarious.   

On the serious side, I wish there were some clear guidelines about what exactly is fair use in the nonprofit space. 

TechSoup recently published a FAQ about "Borrowing Images from the Web.   There is some advice on fair use:

Don't I get to reprint an image without permission under the "fair use" doctrine?

While "fair use" is a somewhat nebulous term — and subject to interpretation — it refers to the things you can do with an image without permission. In general, it may be considered fair use if you are reproducing a work for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

Note, however, that if you reprint a work and if the copyright is called into question, the burden will fall on you to prove that you "believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that [your] use of the copyrighted work was a fair use," according to the U.S. Copyright Office. The U.S. Copyright Office notes that the factors that help determine whether use of a work constitutes fair use include:

• The purpose of the work, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
• The nature of the copyrighted work.
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Keep in mind that penalties for knowingly violating U.S. copyright laws can be severe; if you have any question as to whether something constitutes fair use, err on the side of caution and double-check with the copyright owner or consult an attorney.

My approach has been to stick with Creative Commons licensed Share Alike 2.5 licenses.  There are amazing photos in flickr and wonderful music in ccmixter.org

During the Webinar with Michael Hughes of See3, the question of fair use came up, specifically around the mashup that was made to promote NTEN video content.   Specifically, since the mashup uses clips from a copyrighted Frank Capra film, is this a copyright violation or an example of fair use? NTEN
is in a great position to connect nonprofit technologists with legal copyright/fair use SME's on this issue and helping nonprofits technologists navigate the world of Fair Use and Copyright Laws.

A few resources to explore, including the Fair Use Network via the Museum Computer Network (btw, the museum world is very on top of copyright/fair use issues.   Michael Hughes also mentions the Center for Social Media as a good resource.

Blogging and Liability Class with Lauren Gelman at State of Play Academy

At this summer's Blogher Conference, I had the opportunity to hear Lauren Gelman, Associate Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society,  and Dean of State of Play Academy present at the blogging communities session called, "So, You Have This Crazy Idea."  She gave us a primer on copyright and fairuse,  shared her experienced from a blogging community for law students, talked about her plans for teaching this topic on the 3-D virtual world, there.com.

The State of Play is a law and technology academy built in a virtual world.  The purpose is to challenge the traditional means of delivering legal education. Lauren Gelman will be teaching a class called "Bloggers and Liability" and it will cover statutory and First Amendment protections for bloggers, recent cases that might affect them, and things you may need to worry about on a citizen journalism blog community site.  The class runs this Tuesday, September 19 and Thursday, September 21, from 8:30-9:30 EST.

Lauren is soliciting questions from interested participants at the State of Play Academy course website (login required if you want to post; otherwise, you may just click “guest access”). If you’re interested in attending and have never been in There.com, Lauren can get you an avatar — just email her at gelman at Stanford dot edu.

Some additional resources:
Lauren Gelman's Blog
Beth Simone Noveck, cairns blog
JD Lassica's video of Lauren Gelman on copyright and personal media from Blogher, 2006 Conference
Susan Crawford's blog

Photo from Lauren Gelman's Blog

iLaw: Cyber Strategy for a Developing Nation

Photos of the slides

I was particularly eager to hear the afternoon lecture, Cyber Strategy for a Developing Nation, by Charles Nesson at iLaw.  The agenda didn't have a detailed description, so I thought this might be a case study along the lines of how to influence a UA policy similiar to this one about Trinidad.   This most inspiring case study on cyberstrategy was about how to change the culture of the prison from penal to rehabilitative using a network of computer labs linked to FM radio.   Or the more elegant opening questions posed by Nesson: "Is there some magic in the Internet space that can help fight crime? If you could change the culture of prisons, you could change the culture of the country?"

Oh no ... I thought to myself.  Is this one of those flashy third world technology demonstration projects where a prestigious organization and a digerati provide a wad of cash to impose a technology solution that gets a lot of media hoopla, but isn't sustainable?  I'm pleased to report NO!

Even though he refers to himself in the backgrounder piece given to participants prior to the lecture as  "Billion Dollar Charlie" and is the Weld Professor of Law and founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School,  the first principle in the project was "the Berkman Center did not come with a project or technology, but rather to amplify a project of Jamaica, from Jamaica, for Jamaica."  Nesson put the onus on his Jamaican partners to focus the group on a project, a key concept in capacity building. 

In 1998, during the embryonic stages of the project,  this focus turned to a concept  called "Reverence for Life," a  non-demonational philsophy of self-development which had taken root in Jamaica's prisons.  This project encouraged inmates to form singing groups and have temporary release to do performances.   The initial cyberstrategy was to capitalize on the inmates' interest in music by using music as a means of teaching digital skills.   The background piece can found here.

He imagines a Jamaica ten years in 2008, ten years after the initial discussions about this project began. "We might imagine Jamaica in 2008 that has become a remarkable leader in the world. It has adopted a cyber strategy in its own development that is sustainable and scalable.  Cyberspace identity is key. The process of self-reflection and identifying differences, working ways to relate to issues, and going forward. Taking that process from individual level and extrapolating to national level."

Then he takes us to where they are now - after seven years of doing, reflection, and improving this project - he lays out the main elements of the project:

 

• Skill training. The prisoners stay in the computer lab and work hard to master digital skills.
  

• Cyberschool.   There is a head teacher (Kevin Wallen, a computer store owner) and the principal (the prison warden)

• The culture:  He explained some of the historical tensions between the prison staff and inmates - how it is changing through the project.

He described the curriculum where inmates learn both computer skills and the recording/audio production skills and the classroom space (with "walls made of radio signals").  The latter is a network of computer labs in the various presentations that are also connected to FM tower.   The project users available "cheap" technology, second hand computers and a radio network - donated by people in Jamaica and other sources.

The cube in the center is called "Necker Cube." From one point of view it looks one way and another point view looks different.  Nesson says it is a metaphor for dispute.  The anatomy of a dispute is
to identify parties, issues, and structure a process and create an environment for feedback from neutral observers.  Nesson explains that  the project does this to address the issues of culture change, particularly the historic tensions between inmates and staff.

He covered the curriculum which has two tracks - the computer skills and what I might call more "human-centered" technology courses.    The descriptions of the courses and teaching approach very much resonated with all the work I've done "TechnoStress" over the years. 

His description of the robotics course -- "Lego of Your Mind."  The master teacher,  Kevin Wallen, developed these human centered courses because he observed that the initial entry into the medium via the keyboard and screen scares new computer users.  So for teaching robotics, he starts with an actual object.  He first has students have fun building the truck out of legos and then teachers them to make it move.  He starts with the child within.  There is another course called "Tell Your Story" where the inmates tell their story by giving them the mike.  It is an act of expression and then the inmates work on the production of the output, putting their digital skills to use.  There is also a course on ethics.

A big part of the next year will be outreach about the program.  They will have an inagural in September and plan to produce a music dvd by one of the more talented inmates (proceeds will go back to inmates, the prison, and the victims' families).  They will presenting project to business leaders in Jamaica and at WSIS.   They are also looking at how to bring this type of program into the school system in Jamaica.

Nesson gave this annecdote ...

 

"Take for example .... Wikipedia.  My wife teaches high school and they don't like it.  When students do a research paper without looking at wikipedia, the student research paper is far superior.   But what if they went to wikipedia and made a critical comparison?  And what if they put their paper into wikipedia. The student is contributing the body of knowledge. If dealing with local  article, this will be unique. Tourism is the number saving industry.  What if student  goes to wikipedia and posts an article about Jamaica and helps tourism."  

Interesting, this idea came from impromptu conversation with Will Richardson

There were some poignant moments in the Q&A ... with one questionner from Kashmir sobbing and asking if this type of project could be used to help bridge a deep religious divide.  The was the also the obvious question:

Q: Did this work because you’re Harvard University?

Nesson: I don’t know the answer.  Harvard connection is a big plus. You can call a meeting and get into the door. The project depends on extraordinary people. I suspect that one can find extraordinary people in other places.  It is about empowering people to recognize their potential.  

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Laptop Sticker Analysis

  Stickers 
  Originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.


Why do people put stickers on their laptops?

I was only here for the last day. 
So I only saw six examples of this - bumper stickers on laptops.
Here's the set.   According Wendy Koslow it is for identification.
So you can easily figure out which laptop is yours.

The person next to me, Mike Fisher, from LA who is a business
person and programmer says it fis for the same reason
people put bumper stickers on their cars:  personal expression.

Why do you put stickers on your laptop?

IP Protection for Software: Cake and Amish Barn Raising

The morning session was titled “IP Protection for Software” which covered the legal regimes that might be brought bear on software. The session offered some great primers of the various technical terms and copyright laws as well as some metaphors for explaining free versus proprietary software. It also included a case studies, most notably the SCO vs Linux case which Zittrain, running out of time, condensed into 15 minutes.

Some basic terms were defined: 

Source code: Source is a recipe, a set of instructions to get at something tasty. The recipe can be passed around and shared. There are comments in code which as Zittrain notes, “Are for the programmers when they come down from the caffeine high the night before and help them understand what they did the night before.”

Object code: Is the cake. Executable code for a operating system. The stuff the runs on the machine.

More: “Sequence, structure, and operation” – make reflect creativity. 

The categories are starting to blur. They initially existed for technical convenience. Lawyers seized on these distinctions to determine how protection should work.

Public Domain: There is object code and source code, but chances are that you have to re-engineer the object code. The development model is one person. The license: “I’m not going to assert my copyright rights.” However, it isn’t so easy to introduce in the public domain as Creative Commons has learned – it requires research, memos. The other way is if the copyright expires. For software, it is 95 years. Think what happens in 2095-97, Windows 95 is in the public domain. People can improve it!

 

Free Copyleft: There is cake and a recipe. So, there are no guessing games. You get the ability to play with the recipe. The license is “GPL” or “General Public License.” Lots of examples on www.opensource.org. The development model is like an Amish Barn raising. (Irina got the actual photo in the presentation, my camera battery was dead.) The community is responsible for the building. While you could have one person write and release under GPL, but it is collective authoring. (Zittrain mentioned there is some HBS research in how big the community needs to be.  I asked him later and he gave me the name of the researcher and email, but couldn't share paper yet because it is still being written.)

 
Proprietary: There is cake, but not the recipe. You are getting to run it, not the schematic of which it was built. Who knows what is under the hood? There are many different types of licenses …”Here’s the cake, eat it. Now, put down that fork and step away from the cake.” Pointed to an example in Microsoft Server software license that you can share benchmarking information. There is an evolving hybrid called: Shared source program. This is how proprietary companies can jump on the os bandwagon. You can look at the recipe, but can’t make it better. You can understand it. You can’t do a lot with it. The development model is “firm-based.” Our community will build the barn of your dreams and we’ll give you a number to call if the barn leaks.

 

Turning to the law:

Described the legal mechanisms that a proprietary software developer would use for protection. They want to assert as much control as possible. But what activities do they want to prevent?

•  Consumer reproduction of object code

• Commercial reproduction of object code: Competitor making a copy of the code and selling them. “privacy”
• Nonliteral Copying: Other people from building from scratch a program that does the same thing or looks to the user that does the same thing.
• Incorporation of source code in new programs – “follow-on copying” – taking the best and building something new. Modestly improved versions of the original or slices of the original and incorporating in a larger application.

 
Four Legal Tools

Trade Secrecy: Until 1980s

Contracts: until 1980s

Copyright Protection: Slowly gathers popularity and becomes the most effective and common mechanism after 1980

Patent: increasing

Describe the history of copyright law which go this in 1994:  “Computer programs whether object or source code shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention.”

Copy Left: The General Public License

Zittrain described the origins. The natural instinct for MIT programmers, “I’ve got something cool, let’s share it and send it out. Not - Eureka, where’s the lawyers.?”

The GPL is if you bake a cake with someone’s recipe, you have to share the recipe, and if you make a cooler cake, you better send the recipe out there.  You can still charge for physical copies of the work – once you get it and you can make copies of it. “Handling fee.”

The GPL is a unilateral permission. If you want to make copies, it is okay – I won’t come after you. But you must do xyz.

Covered the case study: Sco vs Linux

• What are the larger strategies at work in the war between free and proprietary?
• Should we care who wins?
• What the international implications?

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Zittrain Quotables

Zittrain Quotables

"Put a software developer in a room with pizza at one end and software comes out the other end." (Photo of pizza from last night Berkman Center Thursday Bloggers Meeting)

"(GNU not UNIX) example of GPL. What does GNU mean?  It means GNUS not Unix.  "It is a head recursive acronym."

"I love computers and get paid to play with computers.  Surf and call it research"

"Lawyers charge by the hour to tell you they don't know and follow up with a 20 page memo." (about copyright issues)

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Live from iLaw! IP Protection for Software

This is a test to see if I've made onto the wireless network in the classroom at the iLaw conference.   We're waiting for the first session to begin,  Intellectual Property Protection for Code.   The speakers are William Fisher and Jonathan Zittrain.    I'm noticing that many laptops here have bumper stickers.

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iLaw Anxiety . . .

On Friday, I have the opportunity to use 1/3 of Deborah Finn's press pass to the iLaw conference at the Harvard Law School.  I get to go for free, but I have to blog at least one of the sessions.  I was a little anxious about whether or not I was going to have fun blogging there or not.   But thanks to David Weinberger's post today about iLaw, it looks likely ...

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