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One year wikiversary
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- 1/22 5:22 PM
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My personal wiki turned one year old today. That was fast. As I've picked up and used additional tools such as a wiki, Twitter, and perhaps most recently Pownce (congrats on the public launch BTW!), I've found that each serves a specific purpose in my life, and that's ok, there's no need to try to force each to be all things. See my "Identity facets" sidebar for the full list of sites I'm currently actively using for various publishing purposes.
My wiki (hosted by the nice folks at PBWiki) has mostly served as a place for me to record notes, incomplete thoughts, works in progress that may help other folks out. I've also used it as a place to keep current contact information, work on some collaborative efforts (such as the upcoming Body Optimization session at SXSW 2008), and other projects.
It's also a place I've kept notes or documents that I expect to keep current / update in place, as opposed to blog posts, which are more like snapshots of thoughts in time. For example I put bug reports and feature requests on my public wiki, rather than hassling with the login and TOS hurdles of the myriad feedback systems of the products and services that I use.
I've shared my wiki password with a few friends, a few of whom have made edits/fixes here and there. I'd like any friend or colleague that I'm currently collaborating with on a project to have access, so, contact me for the password.
I've found a personal wiki very useful for publishing information that I felt needed to be published but couldn't quite figure out where to put it. The beauty of it is that if/when I do later find a more "proper" place for the information (such as a feedback forum on a product site), I can simply put a URL to the page with the information on my wiki, which I can then update as necessary without worrying about checking yet another forum site.
I recommend that everyone start their own personal wiki for capturing and updating these kinds of random thoughts. Go to PBwiki.com to get started.
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Open as possible means public domain plus a strong community
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- 1/1 7:46 PM
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My journey implementing and/or iterating/improving/creating "open" standards began almost 10 years at Microsoft when I was assigned the area of CSS support in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Along the way I've learned a lot about the longterm value of open standards, open source, and open content, and as a result the plethora of "open" licenses out there. Having seen real difficulties that different "open" projects have had working together due to license (or even philosophical definition of "freedom") incompatibilities, limitations, friction, barriers to developing derivative materials to help "open" projects, and even FUD used inside many corporations to limit use of "open" resources, it led me inexorably to one conclusion.
If you want your "open" project to be as open as possible for maximum benefit and reuse, you have to (a) release it to the public domain, and (b) depend on the community for strength of cohesion and identity. Both are important, and only recently (the past few years) has the latter been made truly possible by the Web, blogs, and real-time search and update services.
Perhaps the most common question I've been asked in response is whether I'm worried about someone (or some organization) taking such material in the public domain and "abusing" them, whether creating a incompatible variants (of formats), forking, commercially benefitting etc. The latter is the easiest to address. Standards work best when there is commercial incentive to implement them and implement them interoperably. The former aspect requires analyzing underlying assumptions.
The implicit assumption in the questions of the form "what if someone/something takes your work and does something bad with it" are as follows:
- your - implies a personalization of the work. Standards work because they are easy for others to use and implement interoperably. Not you. Inventing a standard for yourself is not really that useful (though many standards efforts seem to be of that nature, a person or company inventing a standard just for themselves, perhaps as an academic challenge of sorts). A true test of the effectiveness of a standard invented/created by person A, is whether person B and person C can (at least semi) independently create interoperable implementations of that standard. As a result, lone-inventor standards almost always fail.
- bad - assuming we've already disposed of implied "bad" uses which actually are not bad (and perhaps even good for a standard, such as commercial use), that leaves the implicit assumption of recourse, and the implication that without public domain you would otherwise own a copyright or some other legally enforceable intellectual property (IP) right that you could use to retaliate or curb such "bad" behavior, effectively at that. This is a very bad assumption. The reality is that unless you are very wealthy with deep pockets, pursuing legal action to fight abuse of a standard is a futile effort. Even with legal funding, the progress of such recourse is so slow that the battle is often already won or lost in the marketplace, leaving legal victories typically pyrrhic at best. These days, perhaps the strongest actor in that "marketplace" battle is the community built around the standard, and the realtime feedback and coverage they can provide as mentioned earlier.
Rather than grasping at the false sense of security that copyright or other IP protection seems to afford, the irony is that it is actually stronger to affirm and accept that for practical purposes (given time and costs of enforcement) there really isn't much IP protection available to individuals or open source projects, and thus you must depend on the community built around the standard. This open acknowledgment of dependence on the community and absence of any other support provides much more open incentive for the community to stay cohesive, rally around, and strengthen itself in order to preserve the openness and fidelity of a standard.
Thus, on this "Public Domain Day" as noted by the Creative Commons blog, I encourage anyone and everyone creating or developing an "open standard" or "open data format" to do so completely in the public domain.
If you're going to start a new wiki, whether for a new web standards effort, or for a random community topic, consider requiring that all contributions be placed into the public domain. The Body Optimization wiki (first to do so AFAIK) notes this requirement in its PBWiki login form with a reference to the Creative Commons Public Domain license (CC-PD), and has so from its inception.
If you are leading an existing "open" standards effort, whether for a data format or protocol, I encourage you to strongly consider doing what we did with microformats:
- (a) requiring any new contributions be placed into the public domain (per CC-PD or any future version).
- (b) encouraging existing/past contributors to explicitly agree to release all past, present and future contributions (with some reasonable time to do so)
- (c) afterwards, going through and cleaning previous contributions as necessary to place all the work into the public domain.
Everyone that works on any open standard can make a big difference to the greater body of open standards that all of us depend on to freely build use and iterate upon tools that interoperate. Make it one of your new years resolutions to either take the leap to public domain with your open standards efforts, or at least take some of the above-noted concrete steps toward doing so, and make your open standard as open as possible.
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Tantek Çelik
San Francisco, CA 
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