Distripedia

Announcing Distripedia!

Announcing Distripedia! by drew Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A first crack at a distributed, crowd sourced and perhaps crowd funded encyclopedia. (I had to get in a buzz word or two but they are not offtopic.)

So, let's say you want to write a distripedia article on a subject. Cool. Write the thing.

Then tag it and put it one the web somewhere that the search engines can index it.

First thought is to tag it something like this:

[distripedia:science:physics:gravity:(authors:author1:author2)]

You can decide if you will be the sole author of the article or if you will write it with the help of a team.

Thoughts?

[edit: I set up a blog for discussing and refining the idea - Distripedia]

all the best,

drew

Is Copyright Dangerous To Democracy?

Is Copyright Dangerous To Democracy?

Is Copyright Dangerous To Democracy? by drew Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

In light of recently reported things like the play in the "Digital Economy Bill" in the UK or the secret ACTA negotiations, I wonder if copyright is a danger to democracy.

Britain's new Internet law

Radioactive assumptions in the Digital Economy Bill

Mandy and Me: some thoughts on the Digital Economy Bill

Mandelson's 'three strikes' rule in jeopardy

Digital economy bill: A punishing future

Mandleson, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law

No, ACTA Secrecy Is Not 'Normal' -- Nor Is It A 'Distraction'

Hollywood: Never Mind the Transparency, Here's the ACTA

Stopping the ACTA Juggernaut

Brazil, Pakistan Criticize “One Size Fits All” Piracy Solution

Copyright overreach goes on world tour

What are they telling us? That the only way to protect their copyrights is to gut democracy? To gut freedom? To gut privacy? To gut free speech?

(Hopefully more to come...)

Sourceforge Survey Request

So I got an email from sourceforge today about participating in a survey.

"I would like to request your participation in a survey that SourceForge is doing in cooperation with Professor Charles Schweik and his team at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

We are asking you to answer some questions about zbcw, a SourceForge project you are, or were, associated with.

...

The survey will take approximately 25 minutes to complete. As a thank-you for your participation, you will receive a small token of our appreciation upon completing the survey.

..."

OK, so I appreciate the hosting I get at sourceforge and so I clicked the link to take the survey. On the second page in before I hit the first question, I ran into this:

"3. Benefits: We do not anticipate a direct benefit to you for completing the survey, however, you will be providing valuable information that will be published in a forthcoming book (hopefully published in an open access e-book format) on open source collaboration. In addition, we will make our results and reports available as soon as possible at www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/ossuccess."

Fail.

If they will commit to publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license or a reasonable equivalent, I would love to take the survey.

Also, I went to reply to the sourceforge email to tell them this but it was from a noreply address... So I am posting to my little blog instead. Perhaps someone concerned will come upon it.

And sourceforge, the offer of an unnamed small token of your appreciation is more of an insult than an inducement to someone like me. Just a data point that you might want to take into consideration for future mailings.

Just in case it is unclear to anyone, all of this is posted with well wishes and good intentions in the hopes that it can help improve things for the future.

all the best,

drew

ps. zbcw is zotzBrothers Chess War