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| I love this post by Curt Beckmann, my friend and colleague, to the Appropedia Blog: Wikipedia makes me proud to be human
It's true. For all our faults, we humans have done something amazing at Wikipedia. Sure, the folks on staff there deserve a bit of credit, but it's the millions contributors like you and me that built that phenomenal resource. And fast. And it ain't exactly done yet. I just took a look at the English Wikipedia statistics page again. Eleven million registered users. Not bad. Three million articles. A whopping 350M page edits. If the average edit takes a minute (gee, that seems short to me) then that's at least 6M hours of work! All done free for the rest of us to make use of. And of course that's just in English; I figure we oughta multiply by ten for all the other languages (and yeah, that seems low also). Equally amazing to me is that even the organizing structures and policies were all built organically by volunteers. The approach has been "let's try to find policies that will work." And, one way or another, 11M registered users (plus a bunch of anonymous users and some bots) managed to figure out how to work together, for free, to build something functional and useful. So, yes, I marvel at the remarkable edifice that is Wikipedia, and I think it says something about what humans are capable of. And yet, I've only made a few small edits there. Instead, Wikipedia's success motivated me to create my own wiki around how we humans can work together in practical ways to make lives better. ( "WinWinWiki" got as big as 14 pages before I joined Chris and Lonny here at Appropedia, which had more pages, maybe even 100.) Appropedia's hard problem is that much of the information we value often resides nonverbally in people's heads and not on some web page. Find the words to describe how to select the best local dirt for your earthen blocks takes some cleverness. Consider something as "simple" as rainwater harvesting. Wikipedia has a nice overview page on the topic, but they don't provide enough information to build your own system. Appropedia has a portal focused on rainwater harvesting, with lots of links to practical articles on actually doing some rainwater harvesting. No doubt there are still unanswered questions, or regional variations that could be added. Some of that info is hiding on the web somewhere, but some might be in your head. Or in someone's head who (gasp!) doesn't spend much time on the internet, or perhaps doesn''t have regular access (at least for a couple of years). Appropedia faces a lot of the same challenges that Wikipedia did, and some different ones as well, but there's one challenge Appropedia won't face. When Wikipedia was first getting started, many said it was impossible. "Who's going to spend the time? How can content quality be maintained? How will disputes be settled? If you let just any unregistered Schmo edit, it'll be a spammer''s paradise. Yada yada, it'll never work." But of course it has worked, amazingly well. (Here's a nice self referential article about that, and, for balance, a discussion of criticisms. I just love that.) And since Wikipedia has been-there-done-that, the notion that Appropedia is impossible seems rather naive or even far-fetched. The question is not "if" like-minded humans can build a large open library of practical and sustainable solutions, but "how" or "when". I find that profoundly inspiring. It's why I'm here. Oh, and I have a 6-year-0ld son. He needs to understand what's possible for humans to do by working together. When he's my age ("39"), he'll have another two billion people to share the planet with. Maybe you can help me show him what we can do together?
I still think "WinWinWiki" is a cool name. | |
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| 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: | |
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| 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. | |
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| 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). | |
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| 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. | |
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| 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? | |
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| 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.
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| 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. | |
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| 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: 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? | |
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