I glanced at CPAC earlier this week, and noticed Bill Buxton giving a talk. I looked things up, and found out this was at the 77′th annual Couchiching conference and that CPAC’s Video on Demand
had this full talk (and even longer Q&A session), as well as a few
others from the conference that I also plan to watch later (watch then
soon, as CPAC only keeps the videos available for a limited amount of
time).
While there are some things that Mr. Buxton believes that I don’t
agree with, I find that there is more I agree with than disagree. While
the whole conference titled “The Power of Knowledge: the New Global
Currency” appears to have themes which tie in directly with anyone who
reads my blog,. I want to recommend you start with Mr. Buxton’s talk.
I am not going to offer a review, and at over 2 hours and 20 minutes
of a talk I can obviously not offer commentary on all the things he
discussed, or even all the things I would love to have a conversation
with him about. I have narrowed to a few things that stuck in my mind
to comment and expand on.
He spoke about being in a flight with his wife reading a review of
an art show, and he was reading a review of the One Laptop Per Child
(OLPC — I watched his talk on my XO-1).
The art review, like other reviews of culture, puts the show in the
context of other shows, while the OLPC review read as a parts list. He
joked about how a book review done the way that the OLPC review was
done would sound: (paraphrasing) “It has a hard cover. When you open
it, the pages do not fall out. I can turn the pages. The font is 12
point Times Roman, and I can read it easily with my glasses. The pitch
is good, and the paper looks like it will last a long time. There are
some pictures in it, and a story, and the price isn’t that bad compared
to some other thing.”
Technology clearly has an impact on our culture, and Mr. Buxton asks
us to question why we don’t review technology the way we do the outputs
of the cultural industries.
The fact that this hardware review was for the OLPC is interesting
given that this is an educational project that just happened to use
technology, not a technology project. The commercial marketplace had
not yet offered the tools in the form of hardware and software
sufficient to meet the needs of the educational project, so they
brought hardware and software people in. Decisions were made about the
design of both the hardware and the software from the perspective of
the educational model they had chosen, with this including a decision
that as much of the software as possible should be able to be (legally)
studied, modified and shared by students (I.E. that it would be
Free/Libre and Open Source).
As someone keenly interested in the global education goals as public
policy, I have been watching this project closely. I have noticed many
people focused on the hardware, and not just the reviewers. From what I
can see one of the key spokespersons for the project, Nicholas
Negroponte, has become too excited about the laptop aspect of the
project, including embracing software that is not able to be studied,
modified or shared. To me the hardware is interesting (I use mine every
day), but of the hardware or software it is the software that is the
rules which most define how this technology will impact the culture
that it will be introduced in. It is like comparing the physical
architecture of our parliament buildings and what impact it would have
to build a similar building in another country, to our democratic
processes and legal system and what impact it would have to introduce
these in another country.
I suspect the best way to review the OLPC project is to reference
and think about things said by people who are not involved in the
project at all.
Lawrence Lessig, introduced some concepts in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (See also Code Version 2).
He spoke about software as being the set of rules which a computer
obeys, and the connection to policy/regulations/law which are rules
which humans obey. I am a strong believer that software should be
analyzed not from a natural sciences point of view, but from a social
sciences point of view with a focus on law and politics. From this
perspective it is clear that there is a difference between rules being
used where the destination country (or individual citizen, as
appropriate) can clearly study, modify and share modifications from a
set of rules where such studying/modification/sharing is specifically
prohibited.
Where Lessig offers governance insights, Yochai Benkler
offers important economic insights. Mr. Buxton mentioned the work of
Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, which is referenced in Benkler’s Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm. He suggests that the methods used to produce Linux is an example of a new, third mode of production beyond markets and firms.
I mention Lessig’s insight as I believe it is a key piece of the
cultural impact of digital technology that is dangerously missing from
nearly all conversations about technology. Mr. Buxton mentioned a
number of other technologies which he likes from the Amazon Kindle,
Sony e-book Reader, Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Zune, and even some game
consoles. While Mr. Buston never intended to do a review, my critique
of nearly all the digital technology that he mentioned (with the
exception of the hardware/software primarily used by the OLPC project)
is the same: these are technologies which are locked down where the
person who possesses them (most often even “owns” them) do not hold the
keys. I may have a technology background, but this is not a
technological observation on my part. It is an observation of a policy
decision with huge cultural impacts — wetware issues — where the very
existence of the policy decision is clouded in noise generated by
technologists, disallowing us a a civil society to adequately debate
this policy decision.
Mr. Buxton was asked a question about government regulation around
the issue of paying for content. His answered very well by saying that
as a designer that he noticed the question was not asked in a very
“designerly” way. A designer will look at an issue and propose a number
of different solutions (the number 5 came up). That way there is not a
one-to-one relationship between the person and the solution offered,
allowing critiques to not be personal. It also means that you can
better evaluate the good and the bad of each proposal. A question that
was asked from the perspective of government enforcement of business
models for creativity was not “designerly” because government
enforcement is itself only one possible solution, and we really need to
think about what those other 4 options are.
Conversations about copyright are often not very “designerly”. They
also lack in something else Mr. Buxton mentioned, which is that the
context for different types of creativity are different. He spoke about
how music, being essentially a performance art, can work quite well if
we move to focusing on the performance and less the recorded artifact
(recorded music). The same can not be said of literature which (even
though some in the audience disagreed) isn’t really a performance art,
and much would be lost if the only authors who could be paid
professionals were those who were public speakers using their books as
promotion. The topic of relying on commercial advertising to fund
creativity, and the types of creativity that this works for and the
types that would be lost this way, was also mentioned a few times.
Each different type of creativity exists in a different context, and
these 5 “forks in the road” that we should explore are likely to be
different for each. My involvement in the copyright policy debate has
enabled me to learn a lot about the music business, and trying to
understand the 3 very different copyright holding groups (composers,
performers and makers) involved in that industry. What I see as the
current dynamic in the music industry (”makers” dominated in the
near-past with expensive technology required for recording and
distribution, while composers and performers will dominate in the
future) is very different than what I observed personally in the
software industry (productivity software slowly moving to peer
production, away from industrial production/funding methods). While
both of these changes were brought on by changes in the costs of
communications technology bringing the marginal cost of production and distribution near zero, the impact of this change on each of these creative sectors has been very different.
I make my money as a software author and Internet/security
consultant, and given this I come into contact with a lot of other
fellow software/Internet people. A common thing I hear is that music,
books, television and other creative sectors should adopt the same
types of production, distribution and funding models we are
increasingly doing in software. While I am a supporter of Free/Libre
and Open Source Software, I believe it is wrong to presume that you can
transplant methods which work for one form of creativity in one
cultural context onto something entirely different.
As a volunteer in copyright policy I hear very similar things from
lawyers and lobbiests for the cultural industries and cultural
communities. While the government promotion and enforcement of foreign
locks on communications technology is what brought me into this
specific policy debate, I cringe when I read some of the “one size fits
all” copyright proposals. The Creators’ Copyright Coalition in their Platform on the Revision of Copyright includes a suggestion that the private copying regime be extended
to include all categories of work covered by the Copyright Act. While
there are some categories of creativity in a given cultural context
where compulsory licensing is an ideal solution, this coalition made up
of representatives of many creative communities seems to have forgotten
that there are other contexts where this same policy will have a
devastating effect (See: Copyright: locks, levies, licensing or lawsuits? Part 2: levies).
I believe it is dangerous for both of these communities to think
that what has worked for them in their context can be transposed and
imposed in very different situations, and not end up doing far more
harm than good.
The final question from Bill Buxton’s Q&A was around one of
those areas we seem to share less ideas or experience. Someone asked a
question about Open Source, and Mr. Buxton spoke about how it can’t be
used to solve all problems. Fair enough, but I’m not convinced from his
answer that Mr. Buxton has spent the time thinking about the necessary
criteria or diversity of currencies to look at when evaluating when
this knowledge development methodology is the right answer and when it
is not.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is really about an
organizational structure, and not about the outputs of the processes.
Having the software be able to be run, copied, distributed, studied,
changed and improved without additional permission or payment may seem
like a trait of the software, but it is better understood as a trait of
an organizational structure.
I could over-simplify my own thinking on when FLOSS is the best
option and say that where there is so-called “Software Piracy” by
private citizens, then the problem that this particular software was
solving should probably have been solved using FLOSS methods. I really
believe that what the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is doing may
make sense from the narrow perspective of its small membership, but is
harmful to follow as a direction for public policy.
FLOSS methods are best at solving general problems where there are a
large number of people who need to have the same problem solved and it
can be solved with the same (or very similar) instructions to a
computer. FLOSS methods don’t work well when the problem is narrow to a
few people, and thus where it is hard to motivate people (or their
employers/customers, given quite a bit of FLOSS is commercial in
nature, and not part of the voluntary sector) to collaborate on a
problem which the collaborator has no interest in solving.
When there are a narrow set of beneficiaries to solving a problem,
other organizational structures may be better. It may surprise people
to know that the vast majority of software (by lines of code, not by
the generally useless indicator of vendor revenue) is custom software
used in-house at a firm and never distributed to anyone else. Only a
small amount of software is widely distributed (solves general
problems), and the “debate” about so-called “proprietary software” (the
software methods dominated thus far by Microsoft, and used by other BSA
members) vs. FLOSS really only relates to that small amount of software.
I suspect that the person asking the question had the same bias that
I did when I first heard Mr. Buxton talk, which is that I was
distracted by knowing his current employer. Mr. Buxton has only been
with Microsoft for a few years, a tiny part of his long career.
For instance, when Mr. Buxton mentioned Open Source and the dictionary on CBC’s Spark,
I thought he was suggesting that it was the author of the dictionary —
and not the FLOSS community — that had coined the term. He was
suggesting something very different, which is that the processes used
by FLOSS, Wikipedia and other such collaborative systems are not
recently created processes. The same processes of collaborating across
space and time was used to create the dictionary, long before modern
communications technology.
I agree with this, and believe that the recent change comes not that
these are new processes, but that the reduction of the marginal
costs/transaction costs (cheaper communications technology) has allowed
more of this type of collaboration to happen than was practical in the
past.
I believe that it was my being distracted by his employer that lead
to my misinterpreting this idea. I mention this in the hope that other
people will not make the same mistake, even when Mr. Buxton is saying
something they may not agree with. I find that I learn more from people
who I disagree with than I agree with, and despite the fact that I seem
to agree with Mr. Buxton on quite a bit of what he had to say, I found
the talk very thought provoking and educational.