The Network is the Culture

New Zealand currently has 4 such repositories, which is 4 more than 6 months ago. That's the good news. The bad news is that these 4 repositories today hold only 308 records in total. The other countries with 4 repositories are South Africa, Hungary, Colombia, Chile and Finland, containing 371, 1962, 2540, 438 and 14,564 records respectively. In the last 6 months, the United States has added over 50 repositories and the United Kingdom added 14.

What might this mean for us in New Zealand? We know from our switch to the metric system that it's entirely possible for a small country to switch from one set of standards to another. If the [[European Union can consider adopting -> http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/3439]] ODF across all of Europe, it's not something that need daunt us. I suggest to you that New Zealand's online future depends on open standards and it would be a shame if a great company like Microsoft, with so much to contribute, were to be left behind.

Good afternoon. My name is John Rankin. (:2column:)

Good afternoon. My name is John Rankin.

My challenge to you is how might we nurture New Zealand's digital evangelists. While we continue to fund useful and worthy online initiatives, let's also make space to encourage those who challenge our thinking. How do we create opportunities for those who see new connections between different strands of digital thought? Do we, perhaps, need some New Zealand Digital Writers in Residence fellowships?

It's my perception that we are often cautious and risk-averse about picking up ideas from the edge; we wait until they have reached the overseas mainstream. Then, because of our small size, we adopt them quickly. I'm not sure I agree with the widely-stated belief that we are "early adopters"; we are more often "fast followers". But perhaps New Zealand Online requires more than that; prehaps it requires a willingness to take the occasional leap into the unknown. As the t-shirt says, "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room."

My challenge to you is how might we nurture New Zealand's digital evangelists. While we continue to fund useful and worthy online initiatives, where is the space for encouraging those who challenge our thinking. How do we create opportunities for those who see new connections between different strands of digital thought? Do we, perhaps, need some New Zealand Digital Writers in Residence fellowships?

The brief I received for this talk was to "say something controversial and thought-provoking about New Zealand online communities". We'll start with the Yarn Harlot and the Winter Olympics. At the end of January, a blogger in Toronto named Stephanie Pearl-McPhee -- the [[Yarn Harlot -> http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/]] -- posted an idea on her blog. She called it the Winter Knitting Olympics and suggested that her readers set themselves a knitting challenge during the Winter Olympics and post the results on the Web. Participants were required to be drug-free; coffee, wine and chocolate don't count. Within 24 hours, 3000 people had signed up and by the start of the Winter Olympics there were over 4000 -- over twice as many as were taking part in the real event. There were at least 4 New Zealand participants; from Kaitaia, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. We know this because someone had the idea of setting up a [[frappr map -> http://www.frappr.com/]] for the event. Frappr is a mapping service for global online communities. You go to the community's frappr page -- in this case the [[Winter Knitting Olympics -> http://www.frappr.com/knittingolympics]] -- and stick a pin with your name on it into a map of the world.

After participating in all the meetings, Microsoft has come out [[against the ODF proposal -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/xml_office_standards/]] and said that Office will not include ODF support. It is not against the idea of ''an'' open document format as such, rather it proposes that everyone else standardise on its own proprietary format, which it will license them to use. Its publicly-stated position is that most customers don't care about standards, it's only a small but vocal minority of their unsuccessful competitors pushing for open standards, and business men and women are concerned about more important things. It says, for example, that bringing Internet Explorer into [[compliance with HTML and CSS standards -> http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5088642.html]] is a low priority. As [[Mandy Rice-Davis noted -> http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1247452]] in another context, "Well `'e would [say that], wouldn't `'e?"

What might this mean for us in New Zealand? We know from our switch to the metric system that it's entirely possible for a small country to switch from one set of standards to another. If the [[European Union can consider adopting -> http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/3439]] ODF across all of Europe, it's not something that need daunt us. Perhaps it's time we had the debate. I suggest to you that New Zealand's online future depends on open standards and it would be a shame if a great company like Microsoft, with so much to contribute, were to be left behind.

Individuals innovate; strategies don't. My challenge to you is how might we nurture New Zealand's digital evangelists. While we continue to fund useful and worthy online initiatives, where is the space for encouraging those who challenge our thinking. How do we create opportunities for those who see new connections between different strands of digital thought. Do we, perhaps, need some New Zealand Digital Writers in Residence fellowships.

My modest proposal is to set up a New Zealand Online Wiki Web site, gathering together in one place the works of some digital evangelists of interest. For those new to the idea, a Wiki is a web site where anybody can edit the contents of any page, using any web browser. Perhaps the best-known, some say most notorious, example is [[Wikipedia -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page]], which, by the way has 22,763 articles that refer to New Zealand; there are also 414 articles in the [[M{a}ori language version -> http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/]].

I suggest that the Web has evolved the way it has largely because of digital evangelists, rather than from the managed execution of any overarching digital strategies. By digital evangelist I mean an individual with a passion to bring one big and inspiring idea to life. The question I want to explore is how New Zealand Online can foster an environment in which our own digital evangelists can find their voices. We can't ''manage'' our way to the Winter Knitting Olympics or Figwit; but we perhaps ''can'' create the conditions under which such ideas emerge blinking into the daylight and gather strength.

To illustrate and perhaps illuminate this question, I want to talk about 3 voices from the digital infrastructure -- the invisible, under-the-hood stuff that makes a networked culture possible. John Unsworth gave us the phrase ''[[Liberation Technology -> http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/liberation.html]]''. He suggests that if the nineties were the e-decade (e-business, e-government, e-health), the aughties are the o-decade where "o" stands for "open" -- open access, open standards, open source, open everything. Each of the 3 examples is a piece of liberation technology; each came to life because a small number of committed, articulate, and passionate individuals made them happen. Each engaged a growing community of practitioners to pick up the ideas and pass them on to others.

Governments world-wide spend billions of taxpayer dollars on research in universities and other institutions. The taxpayer pays for this twice: first we pay for the research, then we pay again to read about the research in an academic journal. The idea behind institutional research repositories is simple: the outputs of taxpayer-funded research should be freely available over the web to everyone. Use of a common open standard to describe each research output means that information seekers can discover all relevant research on a particular subject, wherever it is held. Every research output gets its own unique and permanent web address. We get new measures of the impact of our research and hence the return on our taxpayer investment. How many people have read the abstract? How many people have downloaded the article? How many links are there to the article? All the software you need to set up and run such a repository is open source, or if you prefer, you can subscribe to a proprietary hosted service.

One of the most interesting recent developments on the Web is ''mash-ups'' -- sampling, remixing and republishing content from different online sources for new purposes. Combine, for example, Chicago's crime statistics with a street map of the city to see where bad things happen. This of course runs straight into matters of copyright and what constitutes "fair use" of another's work. So we see, for example, the idea of "pod-safe music discovery" -- finding online music sources that it's OK to embed into a podcast. This is a big problem and it's getting bigger. When Brenda Dayne wanted to make a special [[podcast for St David's Day -> http://www.cast-on.com/?p=32]], it involved sending emails to 4 Welsh bands asking if it would be OK to inclde songs from their Web sites.

Much online work does not need the strict, some would say onerous and draconian, controls that the music and film industries wish to impose over their copyright material. It does not require any form of Digital Restrictions Management regime (a more accurate term than the benign-sounding Digital Rights Management preferred by those promoting control over, and potentially payment for, our every online action). But it does require a way to ''express'' digital rights. Some online file formats can now embed Creative Commons Licensing information in the content's metadata. This means that I can (at least in principle) search the Web for pod-safe music or royalty-free photographs.

What does this mean for New Zealand Online? Well, when you assign a Creative Commons licence to an online work, you get to choose a "country licence". So far, there are 27 countries listed, plus a generic licence. New Zealand is not on the list, so any New Zealand work licenced under Creative Commons must use the generic licence. This seems a pity. When government funds a community digitisation project to bring content online, it would make sense to let the community choose the terms under which the content becomes available. Some will choose to reserve all rights; some will choose non-commercial use only, so the material can, for example, be used in schools; and others will choose other options. I suggest we have a duty to preserve, protect and extend our digital commons from those who wish to fence them off and charge us for access.

The [[Open Document Format -> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office]] is an open standard designed for general office documents -- the letters and reports, the spreadsheets, the presentations. If you send me a document in ODF, I don't need to know what software you used to create it and you don't need to know what software I will use to open it. Technically, this is trivial -- the standard is published, ratified, open and royalty-free; it's no different from Save As HTML. Commercially, it only requires a one line addition to any existing office software supply agreement: when saving a new document, the default file format shall be ODF.

After participating in all the meetings, Microsoft has come out [[against the ODF proposal -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/xml_office_standards/]] and said that Office will not include ODF support. It is not against the idea of ''an'' open document format as such, rather it proposes that everyone else standardise on its own proprietary format, which it will license them to use. Its publicly-stated position is that most customers don't care about standards, it's only a small but vocal minority of their unsuccessful competitors pushing for open standards, business men and women are concerned about more important things. It says, for example, that bringing Internet Explorer into [[compliance with HTML and CSS standards -> http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5088642.html]] is a low priority. As [[Mandy Rice-Davis noted -> http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1247452]] in another context, "Well `'e would [say that], wouldn't `'e?"

Those promoting ODF point to the flowering of innovation that has flowed from the Web being based on open standards and contrast this with the stagnation of our office tools. And others, [[such as Google -> http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/FFBD4EBEBEAFBF86CC2571300016AC92]], wonder why we continue to use office software at all, and print-centric word processors in particular, when we can and should be doing everything on the Web. This speaker wrote his presentation with a Web browser as an HTML page and pointed it at an online [[typesetting server -> http://www.wikipublisher.org/]] to create the print version. Whatever...

It's my perception that we are often cautious and risk-averse about picking up ideas from the edge; we wait until they have reached the overseas mainstream. Then, because of our small size, we adopt them quickly. I'm not sure that I agree with the widely-stated belief that we are "early adopters"; we are more often "fast followers". But perhaps New Zealand Online requires more than that; prehaps it requires a willingness to take the occasional leap into the unknown.

In my spare time, I participate in an [[open source software project -> http://www.pmwiki.org/]] and the thing I find most interesting about the experience is what you might call "24-7 innovation". Whatever problem there may be, someone will pick it up at any time, day or night; new ideas get raised, expanded, enhanced and implemented. People come and go from the project, but the community persists. I now understand that being able to inspect the code is only one facet of open source software, although it's one many people focus on. But it's also a development process, a funding model, a licensing mechanism, and a distribution approach. In other words, it's about creating a sustainable community around an idea.

Individuals innovate; strategies don't. My challenge to you is how might we nurture New Zealand's digital evangelists. While we continue to fund useful and worthy online initiatives, where is the space for encouraging those who challenge our thinking. How do we create opportunities for those who see new connections between different strands of digital thought. Do we, perhaps, need some New Zealand Digital Writers in Residence.

As well as hosting the works of New Zealand's own digital writers (and I'm looking in particular at today's other speakers), invite Lawrence Lessig to contribute a page about Creative Commons; invite Bill Gates to contribute a page about `OfficeML; invite Tim Berners-Lee to write about the Semantic Web. Let's be even bolder: invite Theresa Gattung and Annette Presley to write about broadband. And because it's a Wiki, anyone will be able to edit, correct, comment on, improve, or add to any page. Sometimes it seems as if many blogs are just preaching to their own choirs. We really need a many-way exchange of ideas and a place where different strands of digital thinking might converge -- an open, online extension of this forum. And I'd like to suggest this as the connecting theme: "New Zealand's Digital Content is Open."

In other words, sow a diverse range of seeds, fertilise and water them, and see what grows.

Let's remember that the Web is about the same age as the cinema was in 1906. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

How have institutional repositories come about? Stevan Harnad from the University of Southampton created the first, and still most widely-used, repository software, called [[ePrints -> http://www.eprints.org/]]. He and [[arch-evangelist Clifford Lynch -> http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html]] have pretty much convinced most of the world that this is an idea whose time had come. So far, there are research repositories in over 40 countries. These use a diverse range of software, most of it open source, and they all follow the same open standard.

We need an easy way for authors of online digital works to tell others what rights they have granted -- what you are allowed to do with that work. Lawrence Lessig has given us the [[Creative Commons Licence -> http://creativecommons.org/]] to solve this problem in a simple, elegant and flexible way. An author answers 4 questions and Creative Commons uses the answers to determine the appropriate licence. For example, this talk is on the Web under an "[[Attribution Share-Alike -> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/]]" licence, meaning you can do whatever you want with the content, provided that you attribute the work to me and grant the same rights to others that I grant to you. We move from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved".

As well as hosting the works of New Zealand's own digital writers (and I'm looking in particular at today's other speakers), invite Lawrence Lessig to contribute a page about Creative Commons; invite Bill Gates to contribute a page about `OfficeML; invite Tim Berners-Lee to write about the Semantic Web. Let's be even bolder: invite Theresa Gattung and Annette Presley to write about broadband. And because it's a Wiki, anyone will be able to edit, correct, comment on, improve, or add to any page. Sometimes it seems as if many blogs are just preaching to their own choirs. We really need a many-way exchange of ideas and a place where different strands of digital thinking might converge -- an open, online extension of this forum.

I suggest that the Web has evolved the way it has largely because of digital evangelists, rather than from the managed execution of any overarching digital strategies. By digital evangelist I mean an individual with a passion to bring one big and inspiring idea to life. The question I want to explore is how New Zealand Online can foster an environment in which our own digital evangelists can find their voices. We can't manage our way to the Winter Knitting Olympics or Figwit; but we perhaps ''can'' create the conditions under which such ideas emerge blinking into the daylight and gather strength.

Much online work does not need the strict, some would say onerous and draconian, controls that the music and film industries wish to impose over their copyright material. It does not require any form of Digital Restrictions Management regime (a more accurate term than the benign-sounding Digital Rights Management preferred by those promoting control over, and potentially payment for, our every online action). Some online file formats can now embed Creative Commons Licensing information in the content's metadata. This means that I can (at least in principle) search the Web for pod-safe music or royalty-free photographs.

First we embed the Alzheimer's gene. If the document is born digital in a proprietary format, one day we will be unable to read it and the content will be gone from our memory. The 3245 people who have signed Paul Findon's [[Adobe FrameMaker for Mac OS X -> http://www.fm4osx.org/]] petition are staring this problem in the face. If there is anybody from Adobe in the audience, please take a message to the mothership: "Adobe `FrameMaker is one of the greatest pieces of software ever written; we would like to buy a Mac OS X version."

Those promoting ODF point to the flowering of innovation that has flowed from the Web being based on open standards and contrast this with the stagnation of our office tools. And others wonder why we continue to use office software at all, and print-centric word processors in particular, when we can and should be doing everything on the Web. This speaker wrote his presentation with a Web browser as an HTML page and pointed it at an online [[typesetting server -> http://www.wikipublisher.org/]] to create the print version. Whatever...

What do the 3 examples cited above have in common? They are all beautifully simple -- it's easy to get your head around them -- yet they all change the way we see the world and what's possible. This is not new: "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth." Sun Microsystems used to say that "The Network is the Computer" and it took a long time for the rest of us to understand what they meant. In an online world, I suggest that "The Network is the Culture." The network amplifies our every online action. If we do dumb things, we get amplified stupidity; if we have good ideas, we get amplified creativity.