At the Open Everything Retreat. Lots of great people and conversations. No time to blog.

A presentation on "Open Research, Open Educational Resources and Open Learning" (made by Stian Håklev at Indian Institute of Public Administration in Delhi, Aug 13, 2008). The opening few minutes will be familiar to anyone who knows what free content is, but there's more of interest that follows:

Engineers Without Borders UK are interested in how to contribute to the Appropedia wiki, and the process of making content free‎. Which of course leads to questions about when someone's content is their bread and butter. A section of that page, "But I earn a living from my content!", addresses this question, but needs much more thought.

I'm at the Humanitarian Centre at Cambridge University - a "hub organisation that 'thinks local and acts global', sharing complementary resources and skills to achieve more than the sum of its parts." This basically means that these world-changing organizations share office and meeting space, and get to do lots of incidental meeting with like-minded people. Great idea - every city should have at least one. Every small NGO (and big NGO for that matter) should be part of one.

Being interviewed with Mark Charmer (@charmermark) I learnt a lot about Akvo & that I didn't know until the interview started. He expressed very well the issue of organizations each having their own silos of knowledge, and the potential that arises from opening them up.

Akvo is a NGO focused on water, working in the Netherlands, and they are developing Akvopedia. Akvo and Appropedia are discussing how we can best work together. It's unfortunate that the names are so similar - it gets confusing - but the main thing is to work out the best way to share content, to collaborate rather than duplicate our efforts.

Watch the video at Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris Watkins of Appropedia - you can leave comments there or here. If I seem a bit quiet, it's partly the 36 hours' travel from Australia, arriving in the Netherlands the day before the interview.

Or download the rather large MP4 video file (250 mb). An audio-only file isn't available yet (we're just all very busy).

Vinay and Smári have been telling me about a conference in Iceland on the 5th of July and urging me to come - sounds great, very aligned with my own interest using free knowledge to save the world.

Eben Moglen is speaking, along with other good value people. But the homepage is in Icelandic, so I can't tell you more, just yet.

I like the Creative Commons By Attribution license - it's more free, letting people mix the content more easily and use it how they want, even mixing it with non-free content - as long as they give attribution.

The challenge is, if we decide to switch Appropedia to this license, much of our content will have to be clearly marked as being under a different license. (I'm thinking a template top and bottom, and some kind of box for content on pages where the content is from mixed licenses - we'll need to use a bot to put the notices on every page, to start with.) 

We'll want to contact as many editors as possible and ask them to release all their past contributions under the new less restrictive license, and begin a process of identifying which old content can have the "GFDL" mark removed, to bring it over to the new license.

I believe it will be worth the pain, and we're starting to discuss it within Appropedia now.

See Which free license should you use?

At Appropedia we're thinking about how we support the OLPC with free content, and in particular the kind of free content that is most suitable for the target users in developing countries - that means more about appropriate technology and less about US presidents than it currently has, for example. (See Appropedia:Make your content free for more on the reasoning behind this). OLPC's Summer of Content is still a possibility for this year - if we can pull last things together and find more sponsors* in less than 2 weeks. The same two weeks that I'm getting ready to head overseas for more than a year. Yikes.

But we already have projects and interns. Anyone interested in helping get this happening?


*I'm not sure of the sponsor situation, but I heard the plan was to pay $1000 per intern (most of whom are in the developing world). If we're short of funds we may do it on the lower amounts used in the 2007 Summer of Content, but we hope it doesn't come to that.

Reading Bjørn Lomborg's ideas, I'm learning* that he's not a climate skeptic, and many of his ideas are sound. Things are getting better for most people in the world (even if it still sucks for many), water wars aren't as likely as some make out (it's usually cheaper to build desalination plants - not great, but better than war), most pollutants decrease as societies become prosperous, pesticides in our diet are not a major cause of cancer (compared to coffee and alcohol), and of course, that we should do cost-benefit analyses for solutions to our problems. And as for his image as a climate skeptic, even in The Skeptical Environmentalist he acknowledged the reality of climate change - though he questions the best response.

In this light it looks like an important contribution to the debate - if only the debate hadn't been conducted at an emotive rather than factual level.

That said, I still have major problems  with some of his arguments, and a central plank of his arguments, prioritization, is summed up in these quotes by his critics (from the Wikipedia article):

Lomborg specialises in presenting the reader with false choices - such as the assertion that money not spent on preventing climate change could be spent on bringing clean water to the developing world, thereby saving more lives per dollar of expenditure. Of course, in the real world, these are not the kind of choices we are faced with. Why not take the $60 billion from George Bush's stupid Son of Star Wars program and use that cash to save lives in Ethiopia? -- from a pie thrower.

and:

As Lomborg notes, "We will never have enough money," and therefore, "Prioritization is absolutely essential." Why, then, does he weigh the environment only against hospitals and childcare, rather than against, say, industry subsidies and defense spending?  -- Grist Magazine

I also have never seen much attention to the technological impact of carbon pricing, and it seems like Lomborg is no different. By sending a price signal now, we encourage money and effort to be spent on solutions that could turn the climate change challenge around. E.g. What happens when solar becomes cheaper than coal, and energy storage becomes affordable? A massive transition to a post-carbon economy will begin, that will make most of the models irrelevant. (To be fair he does conclude that there should be investment in renewable energy technologies, but I don't think he discusses the market-based approach.)

There's also the fact that many measures to stop global warming, especially efficiency measures, are an economic benefit, not a cost at all.

Of course, I've been wrong on Lomborg before, and I may still be.

But how do we reach a more intelligent level of debate? We can't wait for the mass media - that's not their field. I'd like to see Lomborg release his work under a free license, so we could remix it, expand and assess arguments, and plug holes, making the comparisons that he himself  missed.


*Okay, a friend has been defending Lomorg to me for ages, but I never quite believed him.

I asked friends for feedback on the Majority world article, and the only reply was a heated one about how crap it was (I can count on honest feedback from David). I've worked on it it's ready for more concrete feedback.

We do have a policy of  Neutral point of view (NPOV)* (and that was part of my original concern with the article) though the details are being worked out. That includes representing multiple points of view, including ones we believe to be false, with the arguments against them. It doesn't permit rants.

Citations are desirable, but Appropedia doesn't have the same "notability" requirements as Appropedia - getting into a newspaper, journal or book isn't what makes an idea notable in our view. We're still working out what that means, but the Rigor policy is important.

But the greatest need for the site is more factual and useful info. As for the "majority world" issue, it's hard to address a subject like this in a single article. And hey, it's hard for me to concentrate on one thing. So, while editing the above article, I also started these pages:

• Good intentions, disastrous outcomes
• Neocolonialism
• South to North knowledge transfer
• Colonization
• What works in economic development
• War economy

Feedback appreciated!

*I just saw the the bit in our proposed NPOV policy about "How I switched to CFL lighting and improved my love life" - does someone want to start that article?

A bunch of different folk are doing BarCamps - unconferences -  on a Green theme. GreenCamps Lists the ones I could find, though I haven't had time to organize the page.

Coming soon to the San Francisco Bay Area is GreenDevCamp - May 31st in Redwood City. I'll be on the wrong side of the planet, but hopefully a couple of my fellow Appropedians can make it.