ooo-speak

COPU 2009: Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship

2009-06-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

The below is the speech I will probably (you never know, and I tend to be parenthetical, digressive, and inordinately fond of extemporaneous speechifying) give at the China OSS Promotion Union’s (Copu) 2009 event to be held early next week in Beijing. Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Company, a strong supporter of and contributor to OpenOffice.org, has, via Copu, subsidized much of my trip and made possible what I believe will be very productive lectures, meetings, discussions. These include a lecture at Tsinghua University after the Copu speech, and quite probably other presentations and meetings with Chinese officials and groups interested in OpenOffice.org, Foss, and moving ahead fast.

(I always say and also believe that time rushes and that there is always some threat we must apprehend and deal with, be it particularly noxious FUD about the ODF, Foss, OOo, or, sometimes, me. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I believe that this year is really quite crucial. Our competitors are not sitting idly by but building blocks of argument to persuade their existing and possibly even new clients of the virtues of their application and its features. Not sure if they talk about their format any longer. And meanwhile, the rampant distribution of “pirated” software continues, eroding not only those with a vested interest in the shrinkwrapped commodities, but also us, the Foss community, for a pirated work is not “free” and does not grant the four freedoms elemental to Foss but is only a bastard version of freeware, only more pernicious, as it comes with the snarky satisfaction for the user that he’s somehow pulled a fast one on the Man. Dream on: In what Illich would have called the Shadow Economy of piracy, the only ones taken for a ride here are those who have priced their freedoms cheap.)

Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship
Abstract
I argue that participatory communities such as those making up successful Free- and Open-Source communities ultimately depend upon the intangible enthusiasm of its adherents, and that that enthusiasm cannot be fabricated but only enabled by a supportive environment. I conclude by advocating an on-the-ground regionalism giving flesh to Web relations in community development, as regionalism quickly brings to local groups the flexibility that accommodates to social, cultural, political differences around the world.

Basics: What makes a community?
What makes for a free- and open-source software community? I mean a “participatory community,” one more or less autonomous in operation, and one in which its members crucially, are engaged in working together. And what makes such a participatory community (“community,” for short) is, not at all obvious. Assembling a group of developers and other contributors to work on code licensed under a suitable Foss license, and linking the contributors using sophisticated tools for communication and production does not automatically produce a community. We all know this. The people may all be working on the same thing, and even be communicating their work amongst themselves, but they do not necessarily form a Foss community.
Ask the people involved how they feel about the project they are working on and how they feel about each other and unless they see themselves as part of a community, as sharing an identity, however conditioned by their work, they will likely answer with degrees of indifference. For these, working outside the logic of a community, the work is nothing more than a job, even though the code that is produced is open. License enables community but does not determine it; other factors are required.
Absent the spirit of community, it is difficult to engage the interests of talented developers outside of stakeholder companies and difficult as well to motivate those in the stakeholders to exceed themselves and do brilliant work. The result is that for all the investment poured into a project by the stakeholders, the project is always in danger of dying by attrition and a fatal lack of interest by developers and ultimately users.
One can cite any number of examples of such projects. Indeed, it is the fate of the vast majority of Foss efforts. Code is put out there―on SourceForge, say, but also on many other equally good sites―and then neglected. I've read statistics indicating that something in excess of 90 percent of all project code on SourceForge is not only never downloaded but the project URLs are not even visited. For all practical purposes, there are no communities associated with these dying projects. (A useful thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of new businesses also fail, and if not for exactly the sam reasons, at least for similar ones: no market / community to sustain the endeavor.)
But why even bother to try to form a community? Why not just hire developers or programmers? A Foss community gives more value than the sum of its parts, or stakeholders' interests. One can certainly work with free code without a community, but once that investment is withdrawn, there is every reason to suspect that the code, the project (if there even is one), will simply sink into oblivion. Perhaps that fate is sometimes tolerable and even desired. But if so, it's not one that most developers, project managers and executives would want. For it seems like a waste of resources and effort.
Foss “communities” are therefore important in that, at the very least, they limit the risk of wasted resources while also furthering a culture of development and distribution that exceeds any one stakeholder's expectations. Foss communities keep projects alive and growing, and they also do something that is enormously difficult: they give a project an identity that is far more than the sum of the stakeholder parts and is in fact and autonomous, in that it is not a predicate of any one stakeholder. To put it in business terms, successful Foss communities coin a brand identity whose value can be very great indeed.
For many of you this is probably obvious; for others, coming from business or government, Foss communities persist in being somewhat mysterious. Regardless of your experience, and even if it is obvious to you that Foss communities matter, the question that I try to answer here may not be: How can one constitute a (sustainable) community?
Constituting a community
I don't have the foolproof answer to the question I ended with above, How can one constitute a (Foss) community. A few years ago, at a conference in Brussels, I laid out the governance and some technical provisions needed to structure a working Foss community. But even if one has the ideal governance model and code architecture (an extraordinarily important point, is architecture and its impact on governance and community―and for all that it's been amazingly neglected), one is still not guaranteed a living, sustainable community. Laws, as it were, do not make a people; you still need the spirit that binds them into a common identity. Without that spirit, you have only the letter of the law, not the spirit, and you have very nearly nothing. But as I stated above, you need more than just spirit.
Political infrastructure is important
Nevertheless, one still needs the political infrastructure in order to constitute a Foss community that has any chance of sustaining itself. Mere spirit won't do it in the long run. This means that there must be in place the mechanisms by which any member of the project can communicate to another and freely discuss project matters with the expectation that discussions have effect and are not just politely ignored. As well, it is generally important, though I no longer think it requisite, that members have a sense of “ownership” in the community or at least in what they are doing. It's a feature more important in some areas than others, and as Foss continues to move away from its origins in the West and find welcome homes in Asia and Africa and India, that model becomes less essential.
All the same, this is just another way of saying that what global participatory communities need is a structure of governance that can accommodate difference within the community itself. Governance means here the guidelines by which authority is coordinated. Given the global nature of, especially, large Foss projects, or even smaller ones (the Internet knows now boundaries), flexibility is crucial―but so are guidelines that ensure impartiality and nullify arbitrariness.
The point then is to avoid the tiresome burdens of bureaucracy while exploiting some of its more useful characteristics, such as the principle that rules are only legitimate when they apply without passion or interest but with impartial disinterestedness. (I confess: that's not a likely situation, but one can imagine.) A structure as I've hinted above―minimal and with a focus on communication and implicitly on merit, as demagoguery ―approaches that goal. It allows for a hierarchical flexibility, with some projects being more horizontal than others, which, for reasons usually having to do with stakeholder preference and code architecture (again, code architecture determines so much in the political arrangement of Foss communities!), are more vertical. Either mode can result in a sustainable Foss community, and neither a radically horizontal structure, as can be seen generally with Linux, or a more vertical one, as in Eclipse, will make or break a Foss community, though I'm sure adherents of each mode would argue otherwise. (There is no strict methodology for Foss; there are only results, just as there is no strict, single way in which people body themselves as a nation.)
But what does make the difference is subtler. It can be:

the personality and charisma of a key member (say, the founder, as in the case of Linux―and of course Apple, though it is not exactly an open source company)
the perceived value of the commodity produced, either because of its utility or something else less obvious, and the attendant enthusiasm of endusers and non-developer contributors for the product and project, even if they do not actually code. OpenOffice.org presents itself as an exemplary case. For these, OpenOffice.org speaks to what they want both as an application and project that they can be part of―and affect.
extraneous considerations, such as the political and social context of the project, or elements such as the file format. OpenOffice.org can be used here again; and of course, that's because I'm partial to it.
An Us vs. Them sense that can attach itself to the project. For many Foss projects, this is actually too easy a way to form a community. It's easy to attack large, hegemonic companies and to proclaim oneself the freedom-bearing saviour. It's much harder, however, to actually create something that does what is needed and that satisfies not just the Geeks among us but also the knowledge workers and others who, well, use the proprietary software on a daily basis because they must, as part of their job. (Incidentally, these workers don't care about the drama of freedom playing out on their desktops. They care about doing their work fast and painlessly.) At some point the rhetoric of defiance must meet the fact of ability, else there is only hot rhetoric or vaporware
A supportive environment. This can take the shape of government support or cultural or educational or business support and enthusiasm. It can be subtle: recall that nearly all contemporary successful Foss projects saw their origins in universities, which gave the talented student the intellectual room and support to develop not only his ideas but to pass them on to others.
- More broadly, It is vital to have an environment that nurtures young projects and, most importantly, gives developers the sense that what they and their companies may do with Foss is neither criminal nor foolish but at the least a sensible strategy. (It should be noted that this provision need not imply a background of wealth. I am not suggesting that the individual developer be supported by the state or by doing contract work that pays well. Those scenarios are possible for rather few polities. I am suggesting that Foss be considered as a business and production strategy on par with others.)
Finally, and this is a necessity for any participatory community, the community must be able to identify itself. That is, it must be able to enunciate what it is about: what its goals are or its focus of work or whatever that can be shared and held as one's own by all who wish to join it.

There are no doubt other anchors to the formation of a Foss participatory community. (Students of political science can also probably identify elements from Max Weber and Benedict Anderson, to name but two. In many ways, a community is a community is a community, regardless of the actual nature of its work.)Authorizing community
Few projects, large or small, have so captivated the political and social imagination of so many in so many nations as OpenOffice.org. It has done so on the basis of its default file format, which it initiated, the OpenDocument Format, and because it holds open to every kind of contributor, not just developers, the possibility of going beyond the limits on imagination and productive activity imposed by proprietary software.
OpenOffice.org rolls into a single, vast community many of the points sketched above and it is indeed used by many from South Africa to Venezuela as a vehicle for freedom. (Foss, of course, and by extension, OpenOffice.org cannot be identified with a single political stance. That doesn't stop others from trying to do just that.)
But the emergence of OpenOffice.org in the Chinese field presents some interesting challenges, not least of which is the establishment of a participatory community or communities focused on OpenOffice.org (or, for that matter on other projects).
It's always a challenge to set up such a community―I hope I've made that clear. But the challenge here lies as much in the coordination with the international groups, as with the identification and articulation of authority.
The first problem―language--is well known and if not easily resolved, at least it's pretty clear what has to be done. The second problem is more difficult to resolve. Authority issues have always and will always shadow Foss projects. Actually, this is a good thing. It is another way of saying that one of the freedoms of Foss lies in the radical distribution of authority, the effect being that if a developer or group can claim the authority (and persuade their peers of it) to set up rival projects―forks--then they are free to do so. The distribution of autonomy is a central characteristic of Foss, regardless of governance structure. That is to say, more or less autonomous shadow projects―forks―go with the territory. All Foss projects can be forked and most have been; OpenOffice.org itself has countless small forks, and most are simply non-threatening.
They are non-threatening because they lack the resources of the primary project. The majority of developers don't want to change without compelling reasons, and stakeholders are not about to change either, without some compulsion. Each large project has its own momentum.
But that is not so when the project is small or when the social and cultural context do not have a history of autonomous participatory communities but do have a long history of strong communities enabled and sustained in part by an outside authority which has spoken them into being and therefore partly constituted them. In this case, persuading people that they can well, just go ahead and do it, doesn't work and is, as they say, a nonstarter. Under whose authority, they might ask?
Saying that everyone should be adopt a do-it-yourself approach and use his own authority gets us nowhere, and as a former scholar of US culture and its international effects, it's hardly a strategy I'd like to endorse. Besides, there are better solutions: one works within the cultural and social contexts.
I'd like then to propose guidelines for establishing local and regional communities that also communicate with their international organizations.

Proposal: Guidelines for establishing Foss communities
Elements:

Authority comes with what you do. The international organization can testify to your work and identify and honor what you have done via public documents and statements. But this is only the recognition of work done, not work that could be done.

Local communities share the global identity. Their identity is modulated by context but the basic message, the essential identity of the project is and must be the same. Otherwise, one has effectively fragmented the project and diluted it. Communication with the international organization is essential. Communication can be via wiki, via forums, mail list, IRC, etc. The important point is to constantly remind others in the world not only of what you are doing here but of the context of your work. Otherwise, people will forget, as everyone is always more interested in his own work neighborhood than in some one else's. It is an obligation we all share to represent to others what we are doing in the larger global community.
Foss licenses give freedom. But by the same token they complicate the field and introduce the serpent into the garden, as it were, of competition: for developer attention, if nothing else, but quite often for product market share. Squelching competing forks does not work, it only causes bad feelings and weakens the primary community. A sustainable community succeeds, however, not by coercion but by the appeal of its work, identity and members. Underpinning this appeal is the trust that both local contributors and the international community put in the legitimacy of the license. It's what enables the project and what I have elsewhere called the horizonless collaboration of Foss. Anything that challenges that legitimacy challenges the project itself.
These guidelines will not necessarily make for sustainable, living Foss communities. You will still need the other, more intangible elements, which can be summarized as an enthusiasm for the project and its mission that transcends any particular commercial claim. Otherwise, it's just a form of marketing, and that does not work to create a community. Enthusiasm, on the other hand, comes from those within the project and draws others in.

The Importance of Regionalism
I have been advocating that regional and local groups be formed to further the larger goals of the international project―and vice versa. The advantage of regional groups or organizations―local branches of the international―is that each local context has its own style of communication and community formation. Not all rely on the Internet and all use it and the social Web differently. Regional groups accommodate to local differences and promote the fast creation of networks that bring in new developers, new contributors, new users.
But no user, no developer will participate in an atmosphere of fear, doubt, uncertainty and in the absence of strong and usable support. Rhetoric is nice but actions are nicer. It's not about politics; it's about making things.

Eccles cake in Shoreditch

2009-06-17T19:07:00.000-05:00

Just had an Eccles cake at St. John Bakery and Wine and it was extraordinary. I had never had one before, and that was surely my loss. Actually, the restaurant itself is fairly extraordinary.

CORRECTION: Trips: China, Japan

2009-05-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

A mistaken belief led to this post of mine a short while ago:

“23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.”

In fact, as was very kindly pointed out to me, this is not the case: Good-Day, though a friend, has not in fact contributed in the way I wrongly described. As was pointed out to me:

“Localization efforts are not due to Good-Day, but tremendous contribution by
ja individuals and SUN K.K., who are not Good-Day's employee. Especially
khirano's coordination has been most noted one. Really surprising, that
such a individuals can do great coordination. Recently, Kubota-san, is taking
over his position, and now he's been doing very well. As far as I know,
no substantial contributions from Good-day, at least of localization.”

My regrets in posting such an error, and my apologies to the all concerned, especially to my friend Kazunari HIrano (Khirano), who has been such a strong contributor to the project and promoter of it. And I welcome Kubota-san!

Alas, errors like the one I made do occur, and I simply ask that when they do that they be pointed out to me. I’ll return the favour :-)

Thanks to those making OOo what it is and even better.

Topsy

2009-05-27T23:40:00.000-05:00

My friend Rishab’s company, Topsy Labs, Inc., received the accolade of recognition by none other than the WSJ. See, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/05/27/topsy-bets-on-real-time-twitter-search-with-15m-backing/

What is Topsy? I like the homepage description: “A search engine powered by tweets,” and its About page states,

“Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn't think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

“Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

“Because of how Topsy works, Topsy can do things other search engines don't usually do. Topsy results are fresh, because they're based on what you're talking about right now. Or this week. Or the past month. Topsy has "trackback" pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing. Conversations are about people, and Topsy has pages for every person it listens to - listing the things you've been talking about.”

Google tracks blogs but not comments and it does not, far as I know, track tweets. I’m sure it will. But for now, as the the zeitgeist is increasingly carried by tweets (sigh...), not to surf this wave is to come close to sinking in a sea of sharks. Oh, I doubt Google will disappear and expect it to evolve, to grow ever larger, and to do this fast. But I also have to wonder if it’s losing its agility, if it’s not increasingly beholden to legacy mechanisms of revenue generation. Sure, it’s famous for experimenting and issuing novelty items not enough people liked. (Though I confess I rather liked many.) it tries to be different from itself, to stay young. But it’s not about to sacrifice, and it can’t, the machine that’s made it so rich. Meanwhile, there is now Topsy. And it’s fun.

Foss, elections, politics

2009-05-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

I’m debating submitting an abstract to the Web 2.0 conference in New York this November. My tentative title is some version of “Community Works or How Participatory Communities Are Changing The World.” Other options were along the lines of, “Politics and Community In the Age of Web 2.0” and so on. I guess what I’m interested in pursuing is the relation of community organization and community work as seen in Foss. I don’t see that much of a difference: in each case, people work on a joint endeavour, sharing their work, their results to build something that is new and frequently remarkable. It worked for Obama, whose deserved victory has made “community organizing” a more respected term, for he clearly won in great part because of his skill in organizing communities.

But what is a community here? A participatory community, the sort I find interesting and am writing about, is approximately rhizomatic in structure, meaning that like grass, mushrooms and so on, there is no single central node; there are rather many. In the case of something like the Obama’s campaign, there was of course a specific focus, and there were certainly marching orders, agenda items that the Obama community was asked to abide by. But if I understand correctly, there was still a lot of room for local independence, provided it fell within the campaign’s general focus, to educate and to get the vote out. Thus, there were lots of local parties and though there ware guidelines for these, the actual implementation was up to the hosts.

But why did they participate at all? Why so many, too? Well, for the same reason that Foss is taking the world by storm: because the classic hierarchical and top-down systems of authority and value frustrate people. It’s easy to sit there a consumer to what is given and to grumble at most but not to effectively question, content with the idea that you have no power at all, or just the power to complain. But no one really likes that, for it’s really not fun to be told again and again that fear and uselessness and boredom are your appointed lot and that you can only look upon the doings of those who can via the glass of the tv.

And it’s quite another to be given the chance to make a difference. A real difference. Like electing a president; like changing the course of history. Like creating something new that disrupts the very way we do things, make things, distribute things. Sure, not everyone wants this; tv can be fun, and participation is not for everyone. But say that only 1 percent do find it rewarding. That’s a lot of people. And they have friends.and family. These others will be influenced, will see that this is simply not bizarre behaviour; that being a citizen doesn’t mean you can buy the best things cheapest but that you can make something with others.

I tend to believe that bling consumerism is dead or at least dying. And that participatory communities are coming to the fore, rising. I’m by no means alone. It’s the zeitgeist and one that has been gaining momentum for the last couple of years. Foss is a profoundly important node, for ultimately it is not really about software but about a way of making and distributing what you make; and of working with those near and far, connected by a technology that is changing so fast the present is dulled by the future we can hardly wait to arrive. But we have to make sure that what we get allows us the freedom of participation. Otherwise, it’ll be so very last century.

Some cool links:

Knowledge Ecology Notes » Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay submit proposal on a WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons

(in my capacity in ODF campaigns, I’m increasingly involved in Accessibility issues. Accessibility is key; more on this later.)

And,

The Free Software Pact

Value : Notes on Foss 2009-05-25

2009-05-25T14:47:00.000-05:00

India’s Nano is selling the top-end model, not the lower end. I’m not surprised. We see this pattern in other consumer goods, outside of India, too. The iPhone wins not just because it works well, but because it’s the (supposedly more costly) Apple brand. Quality, status, these two are rolled into the package represented by the brand. One is not judging the value of the object (and implicitly the value of one’s judgement) on price alone; that would be vulgar and counterproductive. Rather, one is implicitly making the claim that one can afford value, with the tacit hint that the cheaper things lack actual value.

In thin clients I’ve seen this; and in Foss, the same narrative. Because thin clients (a better term is needed!) are seen as the cheaper version of a packet laptop (or even leaner netbook, and in comparison to the iPhone--please, let’s not utter them in the same sentence), and because Foss is seen as the poor man’s costly proprietary software, neither can win: both lose by virtue of their perceived--not actual--value. It doesn’t matter that, say, OpenOffice.org is superior to proprietary equivalents in many areas, or that, I have no doubt, the Nano is more than adequate for the needs of the typical driver in India and elsewhere. The perceived value of these and their kind is that they are, in a word, “cheap.”

(Digression 1: English has that wonderful word; French does not--it’s bon marché, as if you got a good bargain--and in Spanish, it’s barato, again, hinting at a good bargain. English reduces the logic to “cheap,” a term that implies value as good as the price and hints that you could have done so much better, had you only not been such a miser and so cheap. We are, in English, so often what we buy. I’d be interested to learn what other languages say about their culture of the marketplace, and if they have single, pithy words like, “cheap.”)

(Digression 2: I’m hardly discounting the appeal of the inexpensive and even cheap, which when spun right works. EBay has made billions by emphasizing value you can afford; and I live a long block away by the unbelievably gaudy Honest Ed’s, which loudly proclaims itself as selling cheap things--but that is to say, good deals. Cheap, when spun right, sells. No one wants to be taken for a fool, no matter how much you can afford it.)

So, what we’ve done with OpenOffice.org is to focus on other elements: it’s quality, which is to say, it’s real value, using, whenever possible, actual examples. I started doing this a couple of years ago, at a large conference, when I emphasized that the reason I use OOo is not because it’s free--cheap--but because it gives freedom; not because it does only what I need, but because I can add to it, modify it, make it mine in a way i cannot with proprietary software. I use Firefox, I explained, not because it is cheap and I didn’t have to pay anything for it. All browsers (with a couple of interesting exceptions) are like that: free. Rather, I use it because it does things Safari cannot; and because it gives me freedoms closed source software, however open the APIs may be, does not. I use it, in short, because it is a better commodity and it is a commodity that transcends its status as merely a thing lying there with the trace of its making inaccessible.

Like all Foss, Firefox and OpenOffice.org proclaim their community and that community is accessible.

Links 2009-05-24

2009-05-24T21:34:00.000-05:00

I actually do have a lot of work to do, and am doing it, but interspersed with the duty writing and reading there’s this:

The SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Nominate your favourite now. Last year, OpenOffice.org won. (Embarrassingly, my friend Rishab and I had taken the wrong subway train, so missed the event; argh.)

Vote now to announce to the world that OOo is really the best community work! (I wonder how things would look if a sizeable fraction of OOo’s estimated 50 or 100 or 150 million users voted.... and I also wonder just how international the effort and attention to it is.... but we can try to make it global. Nominate that favourite now.)

Trips: China, Japan

2009-05-24T08:47:00.000-05:00

9 June sees us fly to London, where Tina will do research on India and Victorian England. A lot of Victorian Indian material is sequestered in the British libraries/museums; not a surprise. We'll probably still make a trip to India for more research, esp. in Jaipur. But for now, it's London, and this is good: I love London. While there, we'll be seeing the new production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren, and probably a lot of other shows. I just wish it were all cheaper. For us poverly Canadians, the pound weighs nearly twice our loonie, so going out for, say, pizza, means that that humble pie has suddenly transformed itself into a lordly dish. Good thing about the current recession, though: things are litte brighter for the willing traveller, and our hotel, the Hoxton, in Shoreditch, is très cool and even better than that, given the rates we were able to get.

23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.

But Good-Day is fairly alone in this endeavour. To be sure, there are many individuals and small groups who have made and who make OOo a player in Japan. But there are not enough, and that's a shame. It's a shame because the alternative--proprietary licensed material--places public and private corporations in a terrible bind of dependng their own quotidian activity on the health and interest of a very remote company. Their choice, I suppose. But is it of the people who elected the representatives to government? I wonder. I also wonder whether the recession--which, incidentally, has highlighted the economic consequences of dependency like no other lesson could--will change the view on forging sustainable and local works, such as OpenOffice.org in Japanese, for the Japanese market, supported by Japanese companies, and so on. To me, the choice seems plain. And if there are deficiencies in OOo for the market, then let's work on them. I would guess that it would be cheaper to resolve these than continue to pay, for god knows how long, the effective tax levied by proprietary companies for code that is as essential as ink and paper to the daily running of civil life.

So, I am optimistic about this meeting and hope that it opens the door to many others, with IPA, other government groups, and with more Japanese companies, some of them already deploying OOo and profiting from it. But these I shall not name here do not contribute back to the project. They thus weaken it.

China, and in particular Redflag 2000, have strongly supported OOo development. Indeed, the government (or at least a facet of it) has gone on record endorsing and pushing Foss. Redflag, which hosted the superb OOoCon last November in Beijing, where the company is located, has placed a lot of developers on the task of developing the code for the market. But, it too, is somewhat alone, an odd point, given the situation, but one I expect will change in the very near future. Of course, investing in OOo or any large Foss project, is a lot like (read: identitical to) investing in a company: you don't do it unless you have some assurance of its economic and intellectual viability. Judding Foss projects has proved notoriously difficult in this regard. What ruler do you use? Hits per page? Downloads? Bugfixes? All are suspect, as none is nicely equivalent to the usual business metrics, which can be translated to: Money in hand. So it sounds good--but that's not enough---to say that OOo has been downloaded about 200M times and that tens of millions use it and some even on a daily basis. Show me not the code but the money here, for the question inevitably comes down to, How do you survive, as a project?

Of course, the answer to that is easy, and oddly has nothing to do with altruism. It has rather everything to do with self intererst and the calculus of markets and enterprise politics. And it has to do with the interest value of the shown code to individuals and groups. OOo, as I realized on my first day back in October 2000, is immensely interesting and potentially disruptive in a way few other applications are or can be. For it is a set of tools that give users and developers the wherewithal to produce a range of documents, not just "office" ones, and the open standard(s) it uses further grant an open window to the range of Web apps that other suites cannot take advantage of.

But back to China. The immediate reason for the trip is COPU's annual event, this year in Beijing at the end of June. The event is both theatrical and, in part for that reason, qutie important. As well, it gives us participants a chance to meet ex camera with those we would probably miss. And that alone is worth the ticket.

Notes on informatic autonomy, architecture, Foss, 2009-05-23

2009-05-23T06:47:00.000-05:00

I have to confess I’ve become an economics and political science junkie. Obviously, a lot of it has been prompted by the set of crises we are globally facing now: economic, social, political, ecological...and there is no sharp boundary among them: thus we defeat a long Western tradition of thought that distinguishes A from B from C and envisions the social as distinct from, say, the ecological, and so on.

(To be sure, there have always been efforts to braid the threads, and many are represent quite well-known efforts, and arguably any ideological account always does this, as it strives to narrativize the seeming incidental as the consequence of a primary cause, however complex. But I refer less to early ideological efforts--not sure if there are any now, and I certainly don’t hold by any--nor far more sophisticated Foucautian or New Historicist accounts as to the daily politico-economic speech of imagining boundaries around the social, political, ecological, economic, etc., as if what happens in one does not necessarily affect the other, and the processes of A work more or less in isolation from those of B and of C and so on. A straw man, yes, no one is so simplistic, I hope, but showing surprising life.)

So, how does this relate to OpenOffice.org? (For I feel the compulsion to speak of OOo in a blog whose general title is “OOo-speak.”). I guess I could escape that and say that given the above, all would relate to it :-). But here’s a more particular way.

Foss is, I’ve been arguing, sustainable, in that it (ideally) does not depend for its sustenance on the injection of cash or resources from afar but rather develops local business, academic, financial ecosystems. Obviously, not all Foss projects do this and in fact most probably do not. Nevertheless, that is the goal--what I and others have also called “informatic autonomy”--and it’s a worthy one. It also differs from “independence,” in that I see no real virtue in being fully independent and in fact see that as a fetish and an illusion. No one and no thing is independent, we--individuals, groups, nations--all interdependent, like it or not. To imagine otherwise is dangerously foolish.

Lacking informatic autonomy, and thus a sustainable program of development and distribution, means that the polity is determined by the interests of others. Sometimes this does not matter, a there might be happy agreement over the determinations. But say that a disagreement occurs or that a calamity of one sort or another changes the balance.

But how to calculate the balance between international efforts and local ones? It’s not a question of “should” but of “how,” for what we’ve seen is that insularity (a form of independence) can’t work now, at least not if the issue in question has national effect, as a lot of Foss does. Of course, the answer lies in the vary nature of Foss, which is famously structured as a distributed and geographically unspecified “community.” And in conceiving that structure, or rhizome, to be more accurately descriptive, a modularity is also imagined, so that a contributor working on one element or module can do so more or less independently, and it is only when finally compiled and the (chosen) modules integrated that the assemblage can assert its identity as a specific thing, a whole, fully articulated by the efforts of the locally autonomous groups who work under the banner of a license that grants them what I’ve elsewhere called horizonless collaboration.

But what happens when modularity is not present? How then is the local autonomy and for that matter, the articulation of effort to produce the whole? (And with that tease, I’ll leave off this entry and go on a bike ride while it’s still light and unrainy ouside. A glorious spring here in Toronto--we’ve moved from the yellow season of early spring to the lilac, and even those are fading in favour of the iris.)

Notes, links 2009-05-19

2009-05-19T23:33:00.000-05:00

Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it: a lot of my mail (IMAP) with my work server chose to vanish. The cause of this remains a little mysterious, but it’s possible it was because I was using Thunderbird and probably had not set it right; or perhaps it was b/c I was using Apple’s Mail.app, which has had problems accessing and downloading copies of messages from the old work server. Either way, a stupefying period of hours fixing things wasted.

Links: One of my favourite sites for Foss news is Free Software in Latin America. It complements Solar, which is mainly focused on Argentina, and other sites. For anglophone readers, there is some relief: FSLA is in English.

But the best part of FSLA is that the articles it includes are very often very interesting. See, for example, this: Argentine Professor Attacked for Sharing Philosophy Classics Online. The issue is one of who controls the copyright of what should normally be considered public domain material but is not here, as the professor is evidently distributing material that the French publishing house Les Editions du Minuit, claims ownership over.

The article points out that Argentina, like many other countries, must import foundational texts at enormous expense to all. it would thus seem as a no-brainer to take things online and distribute not costly paper but cheap electrons. But cost for me or you is usually another way of saying profit for them. And therein lies the problem that Foss and Open Access face: the change in economic practices.

Clearly, it is to the social good to make as available as possible works generally deemed to be not only important but foundational. Arguably, the government or whatever agency could pay the publisher and then distribute the properly licensed work. But say the government doesn’t or cannot do that. Or say that the actual cost is so steep that it could more properly be called extortion. Piracy is thus inadvertently encouraged, as it is very unlikely that the threat of punishment by remote agents will dissuade many; historically, it has not. Thus, and obviously, this is not a purely particular issue but a general one, a better solution lies in moving away from copyright policies that really only made sense before the Internet and before the distribution of copied documents was so easy.

Notes, Links, 2009-02-2

2009-02-26T09:58:00.000-05:00

The action by the UK to promote open source published 24 February is of course terrific news and should be hailed as such. I hope it will, along with similar other European acts, stimulate the North American governments to also promote open source, open standards, and thus directly and indirectly innovation and economic growth here. Certainly, we need it. Note--the policy directive issued by the government is not a dismissal of proprietary software, and it is not a celebration of the freedoms granted by Foss. It is rather a statement about giving taxpayers the best value for their taxes:

“While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.

“Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.”

Why then the directive now? Because “we need to increase the pace,” as the innovation, the dialog between government users and the IT industry, needs to be allowed free rein, and not the essentially furtive and sporadic efforts that have preceded this directive--and which characterize government procurement practices elsewhere.

Yet there is good news emerging: Canada put out a Request For Information to which numerous companies replied, including Sun. (I helped draft the response, along with Bruno S.; Simon P. provided the logical frame.) And late last month, I gave a two-hour discussion on Foss and policy to the Ontario government. All of which is to say that in Canada there is movement in the right direction--a movement I fully expect to see grow. Why? proprietary software costs taxpayers money--upfront, down the road, in the end.

Of course, we all expect the usual arguments, and I’ve already noted harbingers of them: that there are hidden costs to Foss, and that these include such things as migration of documents, files, people; and also training and certification costs, and then the biggest fear of all, the by and large bogus problem of using software that may have license issues. In the case of OpenOffice.org (and probably most other significant software the government is likely to consider) that’s a false fear.

But that won’t stop some. In Microsoft’s suit against the in-car navigation device maker TomTom for patent infringement, even though the suit is ostensibly and ostentatiously not against Foss, (“Open source software is not the focal point of this action.”), the environment Foss is clearly affected. For whatever the merits of this suit (and TomTom is hardly quiescent here) this is very close to the sort of fear frightens governments and corporations away from Foss: That there is a tiger lurking in the open source commons.

It shouldn’t. But it should provoke us to ensure that our code is clean and that any code that we expect others to build on and distribute must be have an unimpeachable pedigree. And that goes for proprietary software, too. Or does anyone really think that the mélange of doubt can only apply to works licensed under Foss copyrights? So let’s speculate that the end result of this sabre rattling is ultimately to endorse a copyright regime that is characterized not by FUD but by transparency, of license and code, and backed not by market-driven entities but by responsible community organizations and companies--those that understand where innovation lies and how to promote it, so as to foster a sustainable present and future. We certainly need it.

Notes 25 Feb. 2009

2009-02-25T17:05:00.000-05:00

With some alarm I note I have not made an entry since prior to OOoCon, and that was back in November. (A brief entry on that is coming.) No excuse but work and other, distracting things. Coming at the end of the year--or close to it--and then that end of year being such a series of economic crises and political triumphs, it was easy to lose sight of the obligation to engage in conversation with the communities of which I’m a member. (I have to thank my friend Sophie G., for prompting me to write, to reveal what I’ve been doing. It’s so easy to ensconce oneself in other work, and then to persuade oneself that public relation is not necessary, as Isn’t what you are doing on the community’s behalf?)

But I have not been idle. My focus of late has been on regional efforts, in particular, Canada and the province where I live, Ontario. As well, I’ve been trying to get OpenOffice.org in more colleges and universities and--this is the more interesting point--developed more by students at those places. The key, as I’ve long believed and written on before, is to have Foss and not just OOo, become part of the curriculum, the way, say, any other (computer) language is taught, as a model, as the frame for a workspace, as a vehicle for engaging in real open source communities. But this clarifies the issue: teaching Foss, and OOo, is at least a dual effort: on the one hand, one must teach the code, and on the other, the process of open-source collaboration. For a student, the latter part is arguably the more problematic part, as school shields her from harsh scrutiny. Consider it a kind of gestational space, where all sorts of vulnerabilities can be revealed and worked on, and to expose the student then to the outside world is to betray the implied premise and promise of college.

But, as I’ve equally argued, the options are really not so Manichean: one can structure classwork to retain that membrane while also working with Foss groups. Indeed, students do this all the time, when they work in science labs and engage in actual, serious and publishable work. And in colleges such as Seneca, we see the success of a method like this applied to Foss instruction, including OOo.

I spoke on education and also another key issue, regional groups, at OOoCon, and I’ll discuss that shortly. But for now, at the end of last month I delivered a guest lecture at the newly inaugurated Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Buffalo. The lecture was on “open source” but it was for me really an examination of the cultural and political, not to mention technological, change that has taken place more or less globally in the last year, and can be summarized as the end of the Reagan Era and the Dawn of the Obama Era, though I hesitate to credit Obama, at this point, with his weak economic policies, as branding an era. But I’ll give him benefit of a doubt. Regardless, the shift has been from an exit from neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologies to something that is still taking shape but which, I should hope, and will certainly try to achieve, a political frame that is more just and sustainable and attends to what people are doing where they live every day. Foss is crucial here, as it diverges from neo-liberal imposition of products and the means of creating them and opens the market to those things made at home, for the home market.

It goes beyond that, however. Foss, to me, also implies a weakening of the consumer/producer dyad that over the last century has configured the way people think of themselves, their communities, their possibilities. (And the dyad has only been around for about a century, I’d guess, or since the rise of the department store and urban consumerism--in the city, you are generally if not axiomatically a consumer of goods produced elsewhere; less so on the farm--and the department store comes into being in the latter half of the 19th century, towards the end.) I went to college at Berkeley, and lived in the student co-ops, where we all had to do 5 hours of work a week to keep the system running. (Boast: I was the youngest elected USCA Board Member, at 18, and for year the worshift manager--I organized the work schedule and then told people how to do the jobs I’d assigned them: sort of like what I do now....) The Co-Op was “ours”; we were responsible for its upkeep, its clealiness, its food: no one else. This bred responsibility. It fostered ambition; it developed community skills; and it made, I honestly believe, for better citizens. (Or, at least, that was the idea; there were, as with all other Rochdale-inspired cooperatives, problems with drugs, and disruptive anarchic types. But I tend to think that had more to do with the times (late 70s) and the inexperience of framing governance, than with the idea of the cooperative itself, which I still believe in. (Incidentally, turns out that Toronto had, around the same time, the largest and most successful coop, not far from where I live now, on Bloor Street. Drugs, some violence, dissolution hit it, and it ended. Delany, in Dhalgren, got it right, when he imagined the beautifully violent apotheosis and also the end, of the 60s in Bellona, and of the 70s in Triton: isolated from the world, the centre cannot hold and things fall apart, in violence and narcissism.)

But back to the point: Foss weakens the impermeability of the membrane separating producers from consumers by giving the tools of production to every user and by making production itself not simply an obligation, a job, but an act of community building: an act of being yourself. This theme ended up being the dominant one in my lecture, and I characterized it by asserting that the era of Paris Hilton, of Bling, was dead, over with. The new era, the one figured by Obama, has yet to earn its name. But it is roughly one of sustainability and social responsibility, but equally of community. Being yourself no longer implies the market; it implies now or will, community. The difference lies in effects: as a consumer the consequences of what I do when I buy something are obscure; as a member of a community, that obscurantism is impossible, and what I do affects me, too.

Malaga Manifesto 2008-10-22

2008-10-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

Malaga Manifesto

Question:
How do we form communities, participatory groups, that are self-sustainable? For in the last two days we've heard many discussions about how this or that gov't is supporting Libre Software. But we have heard no solutions to this, besides making the source available. That seems to me just another way of looking to the market for solutions. And I do not think that works.
So what I would like to propose here is the draft of a manifesto on the formation of sustainable participatory communities. I use the term “participatory” because FOSS is specific to software, but we all know, at least we all want to believe that libre software communities are but one instance.
The principles:
• Do today what can be done tomorrow and the day after, or planning for the future in every act. This means that it's indefensible to pollute your local environment (or even your neighbour's) because that kills the future, yours and his.
• Do things in the consciousness of others (con la conscienca de los otros). This means that you have to engage others in what you do. The future is like another country, and it could be near or far. We wont' last forever, Kurzweill or not; and what we do, if we want to engage others, and I think we do, as the age of gross egotism is dead, I hope, must be done in ways that enable others to sit at the same table as you. Call this the commensal principle, and it is the hope of the commons.

(Forget about forgetting the past or declaring history bunk; capitalism's short memory is our long life. Razing the past to build the future never works because the past remembers us even as we try to forget it in the fiction of the present and future.)

• Do what you can now, and don't wait for some sign, revolution, spectacle of catastrophe. We have the tools to act, we have the sense, and we all know what has to be done. But I at least don't want local communities of fascists acting on the spur of their own distorted beliefs. I want communities of freedom, based on the principles of individual freedom and responsibility and acting in conjunction with others.
Freedom and responsibility, communities of freedom: Freedom without responsibility is a version of what the Victorians would derisively call the American "Do as you like" ideology. Freedom without responsibility is the death of community, and we can see some fine examples of it today, in the blood money flooding Wall Street and now Main Street. (What me worry? ideology, is another way of putting it, if flippant.)
The inverse, responsibility without freedom doesn't work, it's fascism. We've had enough of that and it always keeps nations, people down, benighted. Consider it community without possibility, an impossible community. The goal is rather liberty and community, community and liberty, not one or the other, and one not privileged over the other. (If the American revolution brought liberty without the claim of community--the US got federation, instead--the French revolution introduced the necessity of community as a crucial element of freedom. But as history has shown, it's a balance, a negotiation, a narrative. And elements of the triad gt lost. This is why I believe we need to renew that social contract, revive the egalité, fraternité, liberté as goals and practices.)
So, I assert--the need for developing communities of liberty for establishing sustainable systems of production. This is true whether we speak of energy, food, or Foss, and in practice, each instance will have its own archive of examples, contexts, but one logical effect would be to respect local markets, wisdom and to connect disparate communities, for as the Málaga conference shows, the world is connected

Liberty / Community and Málaga 2008: OSWC

2008-10-21T05:23:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write mostly on the Open Source World Conference, OSWC, which takes place this year n Málaga, Spain. But I present later on today, Tuesday, and thought I'd go over some points I want to raise in my presentation. These also riff on a discussion that I had with Simon Phipps last night after the panel on sustainability. He argued, quite powerfully ad lucidly, for the fundamental importance of freedom in the architecture of social and technological communities.

About the conference: At least 8,000 people, with huge numbers of students, government officials, and business people. Software Libre, FOSS, is a serious thing here, and is not just a Libertarian act of independence or, far worse, a marketing afterthought predicated on the expectation of its own failure.

The theme this year is sustainability. As it happens, it's a theme I've been harping on for the last year or so, and have been trying to tie to green movements related to energy, food, manufacture. Green is totally the wrong term, of course, as it aligns the movement (not an ideology per se) to US ecological movements, and those are fatally flawed. They have their origins in 18th and 19th century aesthetic movements, and not in more politically defensible economics. I prefer the term "sustainable economics" as it implies several things:

* Do today what can be done tomorrow and the day after, or planning for the future in every act. This means that it's indefensible to pollute your local environment (or even your neighbour's) because that kills the future, yours and his.

* Do things with the consciousness of others: This means that you have to engage others in what you do. The future is like another country, and it could be near or far. We wont' last forever, Kurzweill or not; and what we do, if we want to engage others, and I think we do, as the age of gross egotism is dead, I hope, must be done in ways that enable others to sit at the same table as you. Call this the commensal principle, and it is the hope of the commons.

(Forget about forgetting the past or declaring history bunk; capitalism's short memory is our long life. Razing the past to build the future never works because the past remembers us even as we try to forget it in the fiction of the present and future.)

* Do what you can now, and don't wait for some sign, revolution, spectacle of catastrophe. We have the tools to act, we have the sense, and we all know what has to be done. But I at least don't want local communities of fascists acting on th espur of their own distorted beliefs. I want communities of freedom, based on the principles of individual freedom and responsibility and acting in conjunction with others.

Freedom and responsibility, communities of freedom: Freedom without responsibility is a version of what the Victorians would derisively call the American "Do as you like" ideology. Freedom without responsibility is the death of community, and we can see some fine examples of it today, in the blood money flooding Wall Street and now Main Street. (What me worry? ideology, is another way of putting it, if flippant.)

The inverse, responsibility without freedom doesn't work, I tend to believe, and seems a lot like the Victorian Era. Consider it community without possibility, an impossible community. The goal is rather liberty and community, community and liberty, not one or the other, and one not privileged over the other. (If the American revolution brought liberty without the claim of community--the US got federation, instead--the French revolution introduced the necessity of community as a crucial element of freedom. But as history has shown, it's a balance, a negotiation, a narrative. And elements of the triad gt lost. This is why I believe we need to renew that social contract, revive the egalité, fraternité, liberté as goals and practices.)

So, I argue--or I guess, assert--the need for developing communities of liberty for establishing sustainable systems of production. This is true whether we speak of energy, food, or Foss, and in practice, each instance will have its own archive of examples, contexts, but one logical effect would be to respect local markets, wisdom and to connect disparate communities, for as the Málaga conference shows, the world is connected.

13 October 2008: Paris Launch Party for OpenOffice.org

2008-10-16T07:48:00.000-05:00

Quite possibly the most interesting honour bestowed upon OpenOffice.org was capitalized by the launch party held in the government offices of the Île-de-France, in Paris. At least 600 registered for the event, and at least half that showed up, no doubt for the speeches, including mine, and the Region's deputy's, M. Lepinski, and Charles Schulz'; and also for the terrific buffet and wine.

The Region is moving strongly toward FOSS and OOo in particular, and has a brilliant program to distribute upward 400K USB keys with OOo installed. That's just a start. There are 11M people in the Region, effectively the MTA of Paris, and, why not....? free software, and especially free productivity software, is a superlative investment, in the present and also the future. Free software, like OOo, empowers--to use the old term--people to engage in modern economic and cultural discourse.

The Francophone project is hugely involved in this migration. Under Sophie Gautier's lead, it succeeded in placing OpenOffice.org, in French, in the hands of hundreds of thousands and in inspiring hundreds of contributors. Under the current lead, Jean-Baptiste Fauré and Tony Galmiche, the work not only continues but has seemingly accelerated.

I've appended below the text of my speech in French and in English. My thanks to Charles for translating the speech from the English. I had tried writing it in French, and though it came out okay, it sounded, risible. Not so Charles'.

First, the English, then the French.

13 October 2008
Paris, Île-de-France

-Louis Suarez-Potts

My thanks to the President of the Region Île-de-France, Silicon Sentier, Charles Schulz, and the people of Paris who have worked together to make this event so splendid and such a wonderful celebration of community and social responsibility. I am proud to be here among you.

This is an historic occasion. We celebrate this evening not just the eighth birthday of OpenOffice.org, not just the 50 years since the founding of the Fifth Republic and its promise of a more rational government, but we also celebrate the great success of a vast community outside of government, outside of business, but essential to both.

We celebrate the people who make OpenOffice.org what it is, as a fact, but also what it means as a promise. For it is a means of communication, a theatre of collaboration. It promises a future in which the anxieties of monopoly, of proprietary license, of language, and ultimately of dependency and isolation are banished. This fact and promise of autonomy and freedom are what OpenOffice.org means for 100 million, if not more. And this is why it has become the theatre in which the intellectual and commercial freedom for so many is being enacted by those who are not mere spectators but the drama's authors and performers, too.

Tonight, and every day and night there is work done on OpenOffice.org, we, the Community, renew the social contract. And we make it new and modern. Elsewhere, in the last few decades we have seen it fade in importance. Social responsibility and an understanding of the consequences of actions taken today for others now and in the future has nearly disappeared in the haze of blind self interest. We must change that, and are changing it. The consciousness of others, the awareness of our effects, on people, just as on nature, today and tomorrow, nearby or far away, is not an ideological luxury but a necessity.

For we have seen that in the absence of a modern social contract we act as if fire does not burn nor wood char, and are then surprised to find not the mansion of our dreams but ashes.

I refer of course to the spectacle of capitalism's conflagration we have witnessed this last month—that we continue to witness--and to the lesson that we can take from it: That liberty without fraternity produces fierce catastrophe. And into this catastrophe we have been thrust as actors without a script.

Equal, fraternal, collaboration gives us that script. Building something together, of mutual benefit and interest answers the questions raised by the Crisis: What do we do now, in the spectacle of capitalism's aftermath? We work together locally, with global consciousness, aware that we exist in a community that is not limited by mountains or oceans but only by the reach of our ambition.

Free software marks the line of division between the ancien régime and this, our modern world. In that past, conventions hostile to free collaboration prevailed. In this modern age we greet tonight, we must collaborate on solving the urgent problems of intellectual property, food, energy, climate change: on all that makes up our world, our society. Together, as we see here tonight, our living is the joy of shared success.

On behalf of OpenOffice.org, I thank you.

-------

13 October 2008
Paris, Île-de-France

-Louis Suarez-Potts
Je voudrais remercier le Président de la Région Ile de France, Silicon Sentier, Charles Schulz et tous les Franciliens qui ont travaillé ensemble pour célébrer de la façon la plus magnifique la Communauté et les valeurs sociales universelles. Je suis fier d'être parmi vous ce soir.

Nous assistons ce soir à un moment historique. Ce que nous célébrons ce soir, ce n'est pas juste le huitième anniversaire d'OpenOffice.org, ce n'est pas seulement les 50 ans d'existence de la 5ème République et sa promesse d'un gouvernement plus rationnel, mais ce que nous fêtons ce soir, c'est le succès planétaire d'une vaste communauté existante en dehors de gouvernements, d'entreprises, mais qui est pourtant essentielle aux deux.

Ce soir, nous rendons hommage à tous ces gens qui ont fait d'OpenOffice.org ce qu'il est, comme un projet établi, et ce qu'OpenOffice.org signifie en tant qu'ambition. Car OpenOffice.org n'est pas juste un moyen de communication, ou un théâtre de collaboration; non, OpenOffice.org promet aussi un future dans lequel les angoisses et la pression de grands monopoles privés, de licenses et de code propriétaires et pour finir, les menaces de dépendance et d'isolation seront bannies. Notre promesse et notre engagement pour la Liberté et l'Indépendance est déjà une réalité pour plus de 100 millions de personnes à travers le monde.Et c'est pourquoi nous sommes devenus le point central, la scène sur lesquelles les libertés intellectuelles aussi bien que commerciales peuvent s'exprimer et ont été garanties par ceux qui ne sont pas de simples spectateurs, mais les acteurs et auteurs de cette pièce.

Ce soir, comme tous les autres journées et soirs, le travail continue sur OpenOffice.org et nous, la Communauté, renouvellons à chaque fois le contrat social. Nous le renouvellons et le modernisons. Ailleurs, ce contrat a vu son importance décliner lors de ces dernières décénnies. La responsibilité sociale et une compréhension de ce que les actions d'aujourd'hui impliquent pour demain ont pratiquement disparu dans les nuées aveugles des intérêts personels. Nous devons changer cela, et sommes en train de le changer. La conscience des autres, celle de nos actions et de leurs effets sur les gens et sur la nature, aujourd'hui et demain, à courte ou à longue échéance, n'est plus un luxe idéologique mais une nécessité.

Car nous avons vu l'évidence, qu'en l'absence d'un contrat social nous agissons comme si toutes choses étant égales par elle-mêmes, et nous nous surprenons à ne trouver que des cendres à la place de la villa de nos rêves.

Je fais bien sûr référence au triste spectacle de la déflagration du capitalisme à laquelle nous avons assisté ce mois-ci, et à laquelle nous continuons à assister- et à la leçon que nous pouvons en tirer. Cette leçon est que la liberté sans la fraternité ne conduit qu'à la catastrophe. Et c'est dans cette catastrophe que nous avons été jetés comme des acteurs sans leur script.

Le logiciel libre marque la frontière entre l'ancien régime, et celui-ci, notre monde moderne. Dans le passé, les pactes hostiles à la collaboration libre ont prévalu. Dans ce nouvel âge que nous saluons ce soir, nous devons travailler ensemble à résoudre l'urgence posée par les problèmes de la propriété intellectuelle, par le manque de nourriture, d'énergie, et des changements climatiques: en bref, sur tout ce qui fait notre monde et notre société. Ensemble, comme nous le sommes ce soir, nous nous incarnons dans la joie du succès partagé.

Au nom d'OpenOffice.org, Je vous remercie.

OpenOffice.org 3.0

2008-10-13T04:14:00.000-05:00

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is far more than just the latest version of OOo. It's also the beginning of a new age for productivity suites. Why? Because OOo 3l0 takes a huge step toward the real future of desktop productivity. It uses extensions and it expresses its data in an open standard; these we know, though we are only now beginning to appreciate their importance. And it also works beautifully with the latest suites, including MS Office 2007.

The result is more than an alternative that's free and that frees. It is a new way of doing things, one that builds on the commons held now by tens of millions living everywhere on this globe. It is a way that trusts the wealth of the commons and imagines a world where the impoverishing effects of vendor lockin are a thing of the past.

Vendor lockin means being stuck with the vendor who sold you your application because all your files are in the format used by that application. It means you can only communicate fully with others who share your vendor. It means that monopoly is the most logical outcome.

OOo bypasses that problem by using an open standard, the OpenDocument format. Both proprietary and free applications can use it, and they do. Even MS Office supports it, via a plug in. The net result is a world where the free exchange of information is not just possible but very likely, as it is no longer impeded by proprietary concerns.

OOo 3.0 adds to that freedom by using extensions much the same way that Firefox does: it gives all users the freedom to add new features, functionality. At present, we have a couple of hundred, and they have proved popular. We've also done minimal advertising. I anticipate that in the coming months, as 3.0 gains yet more popularity (all servers are down at the moment), there will be more and more interesting extensions out there.

I can see extensions that radically depart from what we consider "office" tools---and why not? OOo is an integrated set of tools based on fairly conservative conceptions of office software. But there is no compelling reason to stick with the conservative past, and every reason to be creative.

So, let's be creative together.

Brazil

2008-04-25T09:07:00.000-05:00

Brazil--the Sinatra song speaks of holiday hope, escape, beauty, love, and their loss--

Brazil, where hearts were entertaining June
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured "Someday soon"
We kissed and clung together

Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now, when twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of
Return I will to old Brazil

Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now, when twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing that I'm certain of
Return I will to old Brazil
That old Brazil
Man, it's old in Brazil
Brazil, Brazil

And it was brilliantly used by Terry Gillian in his bleak 1985 satire, Brazil. The country remains a focus of hope and expectation, a sunny future, shadowed by its dark realities. But the current federal administration, Lula's, is changing things, and though the disparities of wealth and privilege remain stark and brutal (Brazil is, like the US, one of the more dramatically disparate countries in terms of wealth and privilege), things are very much improving. The government takes seriously the condition of its people and the importance of social responsibility.

I discovered this anew in my most recent trip to Brasilia, for meetings with the education ministry, and Porto Alegre, for fisl 9.0. Briefly, the meetings were immensely productive, and fisl was extraordinary. It is one thing to hear the strong rhetoric for Floss and another to see it in action (read about the KDE installations). The ministry, along with other federal and provincial governments, is dedicated to Floss and wants to move fast on it. OpenOffice.org is crucial there, as it is the best productivity suite on the planet, and that it is also free software--well that simply seals the deal. But the OpenOffice.org we are talking about is BrOffice.org, the Brazilian Portuguese version that is distributed by the BrOffice team. They had to rename it for trademark reasons, but it's the same thing that nearly a hundred million others use daily. And these facts raise some compelling points:

        •        Many Brazilians, including those in the Floss movement, as well as those in major corporations and government offices, are unaware of the identity of the two
        •        Support and training are sporadically available. Now, if someone or some public or private enterprise wants support for OOo, they can find it in several languages by going to our Support page; Sun (my employer) also provides for-fee professional support for OOo, along the same lines as for StarOffice.
        •        But the default understanding of the public and private enterprises in Brazil does not include support, training, services, and these are sorely wanted. Thus, we have the states of Paraná, the huge, quasi-federal office Serpro, the social security agency and many, many more which I learned about in the three-hour session dedicated to OOo and in personal discussions. (Indeed, I had so many of these that I regretfully could attend very few sessions.)

The ultimate point: we need to develop the support business in Brazil. Of course, Brazil is not alone; we need to do this elsewhere, too. But the need is urgent there and the market is open, and as I mentioned in my presentation late Saturday, Brazil really is the leader here and has the ability to join with India and South Africa and possibly China in proving the role and value of Floss in creating not only markets independent of colonial shadow but socially responsible.

But what about support? By support, I mean first and second level support, the sort that reassures regular endusers; and I also mean training. NO polity, no enterprise embraces Floss without minimizing liability. That means they want support and services and training contracts. It means building the ecosystem for OOo and doing so now.

BTW, if you have not looked at this, now is the time: http://www.hackerteen.com .

fisl9.0

2008-04-16T12:47:00.000-05:00

It's hard not to be enthusiastic about fisl, or to expand the acronym, the 9th Fórum International Software Livre, held each year in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In part, my enthusiasm stems from the energy and commitment to free software shown by the government; and in part, from the warmth and friendship demonstrated by the Brazilians.

OOo will, as always, have a booth at fisl, and we will--a first--be holding workshops, demonstrating how to build extensions, and answering question about code, format, project, community. If the past is any measure of the future, I'm fairly sure the event will be memorable and fun.

But there are challenges. The BrOffice community is big and growing but integration between it and the international community needs to be stronger. I would love to know, for instance, some basic data, such as how many people download the application, or some basic information about who is using it. Of course, I am aware of the big players, such as major government offices. And am also acutely aware of the difficulty of obtaining solid information about the users of free software. But, the more and the better information that we possess, the more effective we can be in shaping the product, addressing needs, and so on. And the more the BrOffice community works with the international one, the easier it ultimately is to grow the developer community.

Brazil is by no means alone here: all the major regions suffer the same problems, to greater or lesser degrees, and they come down to a lack of sophisticated developers. Nor is OpenOffice.org at all unique; all major Foss projects are in the same boat. We are also taking similar actions to redress these lacks, but results do not come the next day or even the next month. Education, mentoring, outreach, community coordination, all take time to bear fruit, all are forms of capital investment, and all are worth it--from the perspective of the government, and from that of the project.

And in this regard, as I've witnessed in the last few days, Brazil is a real leader. Its government has powerfully realized the necessity not just of using Foss but of producing it. And it is to OOo's credit and honour that we are so deeply involved in the move to productive freedom.

LGM 2008

2008-04-09T15:54:00.000-05:00

The Libre Graphics Meeting is to be held this year in Wroclaw, Poland, from 8-11 May. I cannot make it, but I did attend last year's and it was a great event. OOo doesn't really focus on graphics, but it can: there is no reason to limit the application to the supposedly dull office bucket. Graphical applications, moreover, can include works such as Scribus, as well Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Blender, and with our own Draw gaining prominence and importance, it makes sense to form tighter liaisons with these and other free graphical projects. After all, we all want to give all users, everywhere, the power and freedom (and aren't they linked?) to create.

Help support LGM 2008. Make a donation.

fosdem 2008

2008-02-25T17:06:00.000-05:00

I don't know how many attended fosdem 2008 but it had to be in the thousands. All the sessions were packed, every room filled, and the hallways, where the stands were, were jammed during the breaks. It was, without question, one of the best conferences I've been lucky to attend, and I'm glad that OpenOffice.org had such a strong presence there this year. Next year, am sure, we'll have an even stronger presence. Certainly, we'll have the audience for it, if this year was any measure.

The only sad thing: I never had time to actually attend any of the talks and sessions I wanted to go to. Instead, I met many I had wanted to meet up with and otherwise helped out Sophie G. and Leon M. at the stand. My thanks to them: They set up and manned the booth all day Saturday and, in Sophia's case, Sunday. We gave out hundreds of brochures Frank P. and Stella had created (and Jürgen had printed up) and probably over a hundred t-shirts. And we could have given away many times more that number, I am sure, as our DevRoom was in the AW building, and not the obvious main building, where the food was and Mozilla was.

Mozilla was celebrating its 10th, and I learned that Sophie had been working on it since its start. I hadn't known this. Here, I've been working with Sophie for something like 7 years (!) and turns out that she had already a long history with Mozilla--and no doubt other projects.

But the most interesting story at fosdem (that I heard) is probably Leon's, and it has little to do with Foss. Leon looks like a sailor, or so I believe--he has a the look and robust dishevelledness I associate with long-time seamen, and it turns out that he was, for many years, a navigator on a freighter. These were no small jaunts--his longest trip was 53 days, around the Cape of Good Hope. That's a very long time indeed to spend on a ship, not to touch land, not to eat fresh food, not to stop. There were more stories, and Leon told us some, but I wish he'd told us more. We were at Restobière, having a wonderful classic Belgian dinner and had tried what really was, as he had promised, the world's best beer (dark and rich and yet not sweet but complex, like a very fine wine), plus some remarkable lambic beers whose astringent yeastiness was amazingly good, and were discussing code, procedures, and the usual.

But how did Leon enter gain entry into OOo? No clear answer--it differs for all volunteers, anyway--but I think it had to do with his character--independent and fearless, confident in his ability to solve any problem, but by no means hostile to community. I asked him if he had, after 53 days, hated his shipmates. No, he said, not at all; the opposite. And that's a revelatory statement. For OOo and Foss, in general, require toleration and the ability to get along with those who may irk you because you believe that it's necessary, that otherwise, if you fight, if you let quarrels destroy the effort, the ship will founder, the project will succumb, and there are always sharks.

I'll try to post the fosdem talks we gave as soon as I can. They were good!

Where was FOSS at Davos?

2008-01-30T22:03:00.000-05:00

The World Economic Forum is held at Davos. Historically, its relevance has been questionable, but this year, the focus was on collaboration, a topic close to FOSS. So I asked Brian Behlendorf, who attended, Where was FOSS at Davos? Here is his more or less unedited response, which Brian graciously allowed me to publish here; all rights, of course, remain his.

Where was FOSS at Davos? On one hand, in its most abstract form, it was everywhere - the theme of the conference this year was "the power of collaborative innovation", after all. And of the people I talked to, the idea that businesses would find it in their own self-interest to work jointly on projects with passionate individuals, the government, or other businesses, even their competitors, was relatively uncontroversial. Jimmy Wales's presence at this year's conference and last was also proof that this was a concept that went beyond software. Though, a couple of people were surprised to hear that Wikipedia was a non-profit - which suggests that further ideas about IP ownership and the role of non-profits isn't as well understood.

The more specific sessions at the conference dealing with collaboration - you can find links to them, often including video, at www.weforum.org - often were discussions less about collaborating with the open public and more about collaborating with business partners in a private setting; or with customers but in a still very controlled way. One example given by Mark Parker, CEO of Nike, was their collaboration with Apple: they have a set of running shoes that can communicate back with an iPod information about distance, speed, and calories burned, which then feeds a desktop app back at home and a web site where reportedly 40 million miles had been collectively burned. The runners can see each other's totals, compete for the most miles ran or calories burned, and message each other on the site. This, of course, is a long distance from the kind of collaboration we know about in the FOSS world... maybe I am damning with faint praise here, but it seems better than nothing.

But back to FOSS. As Davos is often best thought of as the Olympics of networking, finding a way to describe FOSS and its attributes crisply was important. Everyone had heard of Linux, 99% had heard of Apache, and of those I asked about 80% had heard of OpenOffice. That's the good news. On the downside: twice, I mentioned ODF vs. OOXML in conversations with people, and each time, there was a lack of awareness of the issue. I really don't want to embarrass them so I won't name names, but they were people who really should have known; one was a leader of a business that has been around for years and has serious document management and longevity issues, the other a government official who was charged with preserving his country's culture but sadly non-technical. In both cases, the initial response was along the lines of "this is a mess that you techies have created, I expect you to clean it up", as if it was simply a matter of defects in code that a company like Microsoft would be cleaning up quickly. If it turned out that valuable company data from 1993 were in a Word file format that couldn't be properly read by Office 2008, then they'd simply hire someone or a firm to dive in and repair it by hand. I believe I brought both of them around to understanding how it's not just a matter of bugfixing or outsourcing the problem, that it is a knowlege and institutional threat, and the role they need to play as informed customers in pressuring vendors to do the right thing. But, Microsoft's judo-move with OOXML of appearing to do the "right" thing that isn't actually right in practice has more power than I think you or I would wish were true.

Most of the time, though, Davos isn't a place to have difficult conversations about situations and events that appear to be beyond the field of the people in the conversation - it's often simply a place to meet and build bonds with people in your field and, more importantly, beyond; bonds that later can be used when a crisis hits or some need arises. I found myself preferring to discuss possibilities and potentials rather than what's wrong or looming worries. I know that sounds impossibly frou-frou, and I could blame the rarified air, or the overabundance of champagne. Instead, though, I think it's because this is for most people a one-week escape from the harsh realities of their daily business world, into a world where they can relate to others as people, to be stoked by new ideas. They'd much rather talk about the potential for Open Source software on the OLPC as a means to democratise technology; or Open Source software in disaster relief operations as a means to increase flexibility.

Perhaps it's my own failing of marketing, but I need to improve the way I talk about the ODF/OOXML debate so that it sounds less about conspiracy paranoia (no matter how well deserved) and speaks more about possibility, choice, freedom, economic opportunities, and growth. The Extremadura story is a beautiful story about free software, for example - especially when it's told in a way that shows how it could have never had a similar impact had they chosen to use proprietary software, even if "donated".

Deadline for OOoCon Extended

2008-01-27T21:44:00.000-05:00

The deadline for OOoCon has been extended until 10 Feb. As John McCreesh (Marketing Lead) wrote,

"Last month we set a deadline of January 31st for the receipt of
proposals for hosting the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference 2008 - see
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=345.

"In response to a number of requests from organising teams, we have
agreed to put back the deadline to midnight UTC February 10th. We will
aim to open the community voting process a few days later, and announce the winning bid on March 1st.

"We hope this will enable all teams to put forward their best possible
bid. Good luck and thanks to those working hard on their bids!"

OOoCon has gained importance each year. But it remains a definitively community event, a place where those who know each each other through mail lists can finally meet--or meet again. And it's also, of course, the place where developers can present on the work they are doing, will do and want to do, as well as the place where business people come to learn more about OOo--and to promote their own works. Last year, in Barcelona, OOoCon lasted one day longer than usual, and I feel it wasn't long enough (and not just because I wanted to stay longer in Barcelona). I am sure that this coming year will be even more intense and interesting, and be the place where we can see what IBM, Redflag Ubuntu, Google, and others have been doing.

Why MS Office for Mac 2008 fails to impress

2008-01-18T13:21:00.000-05:00

To say that I was surprised to read Matt Asay's blog on CNet extolling Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 is an understatement. Asay likes MS Office for Mac's UI and integration and despite its downsides, like the fact that it uses OOXML, not ODF, and does not synchronize with his Blackberry (or much else, though I'd guess it does fine with Microsoft products, but that's just a guess), he believes that the "upgrade was worth the price."

Really? I guess when I think about an application I think, to be sure, about the pleasure of using it and whether it is easy to use. No one likes an application that obtrudes and prevents fluid thought (which is hard enough to get, anyway).

But I also think about how my work using it will affect others. Would my colleague, for instance, be able to read what I send? Would I be able to read what they send me? How long can I trust the format to last? Ie, will I (or others) be able to freely access it decades from now? And this raises the question: Why would I want to use something that implicitly is exclusive? Sure, I use a Macintosh, but the work I do on it that is public employs free software and open standards, and that's where MS Office for Mac fails. Okay, I confess I have not personally tried out MS Office for Mac 2008--I cannot justify buying it--but I am aware that MS Office hasn't really changed from earlier versions in a crucial way: It still doesn't play well with others and in fact, as Matt admits, effectively forces the user to dive into the MS universe and close the door after him. That isolationist attitude is predicated, to be sure, on file format, but also on the philosophy of interoperation that differentiates MS's logic of development from Foss' and in particular OpenOffice.org's.

Our philosophy is to work with others. We do not insist that our application must do everything. We do insist that it be open--use open source and open standards, so as to allow (and indeed encourage) effective interoperation of different applications, big and small. The result is that there is no real limit to OOo and the application ecosystem (on the desktop, on the Web) it centres. And there is a limit to what MS Office (and others of its ilk) can do.

But can OOo match the UI that Matt loves so much? Yes. Can it also have the level of integration (or interoperation) that he likes? Yes. Okay, when? Well, 3.0 is slated for the end of summer, and when released, it will be able to work with Mozilla's Lightning calendaring application--which integrates with Thunderbird, the email client. And as OOo already supports lots of extensions and will support even more as time goes on, the wealth of options and tools can only increase. And most are likely to be free.

Freedom here is not the price one pays for mediocre software. There is nothing mediocre about Mozilla, OpenOffice.org or so much other Foss. Freedom is rather the tool that underlies the working of superior software, and that includes making it as pleasurable to use as to develop.

No macro or VBA support for MS Office's Excel 2008

2008-01-15T11:25:00.000-05:00

A first look by MacRumors at MS Office 2008 for Mac gave a surprise: No VBA for Excel.

This is quite important. It's important because the business community has come to rely on MS's VBA for macros and other scripted actions. To be sure, Microsoft is evidently going to use Apple Script more, but there is no translation from VBA to Apple Script, at least not that I know of.

The result: a very costly and hobbled application of dubious merit, too, using a file format that is racing backward even as it tries t keep up with ODF.

In contrast, OOo uses the ODF and also uses OOo Basic, which works in much the same way as VBA. There is even an effort underway to translate VBA to OOo Basic, and for many macros, I have been told, it is successful.

The point: Any business, large or small, or even individual, with many macros already written (or that intends to write them), ought to think twice if not thrice before spending absurd amounts of money on an application that removes such a tool. And they ought to look at OOo which is not only free, but does have built-in macro tool that does, to a degree, translate from VBA. (BTW, there is a project furthering the interoperability between VBA and OOo Basic.)

Education as a project

2007-12-31T11:55:00.000-05:00

For about a year, maybe two, the education project seemed to languish. In fact, since I first thought of the project, in Crete, several years ago (after a fine dinner of goat and resin wine and olives, animated by the conversation of friends, inspiration came easily and fluently), and even after, when I formed it with Sophie Gautier. There was a lot of interest but little public action. I would make contact with all sorts of education officials--professors, administrators--but nothing came of, and I think my co-lead, Sophie, was finding the same; and nothing was appearing on the public project pages or lists. This was our fault. Thus, if at the Symbiosis society of colleges in Pune, India, I may have been warmly received and heard from faculty and students alike keen interest in including OpenOffice.org coding in classrooms, there was, in the end, no evident result. It seemed all a show, or perhaps there was something simply missing I wasn't aware of. Being invited to give yet another presentation or workshop on the same topic is just not enough. What I wanted was for students to start working on OOo and even begin appearing on the public lists, and that was simply not happening.

There are several reasons that come to mind for the lack of continued activity. One is that any community formation, especially one of this nature, where I am asking students and professors to work on complicated code with little obviously in the way of payoff, does not come easily. It's hard enough to form participatory communities among those interested in participating and in participation's outcomes. It's even harder when both what counts as participation and outcome challenge the status quo.

And that challenge to the status quo in the make up of curricula and their basis is from one perspective what I was (and am) asking for. (Although my suggestion is by no means as radical as Eliot's in 1885, when he proposed the free elective system at Harvard.) Curricula are established--accreted--over decades and implicitly represent a culture's very idea of knowledge, practical or abstract. They do not change immediately, at least not those supposedly teaching fundamental, canonical, truths. And how could they? The very notion of a truth is that it's not susceptible to change. So if from one point it seemed I have been asking for professors to relinquish not just control over the class's pedagogy, replacing her with the community, but also the very content to be taught, it's no wonder that there has been little traction.

But, no, I was and am not asking for a big change, just a small one with big effect, and one that, for that matter, trades on what is already going on. My notion is not a Toffler-eaque merging of the the academic with the industrial and commercial, or more accurately, the replacement of academic knowledge with trade school skill. That would be a replacement of, say, truth and theory and principle with effect and how to produce that effect: a loss of knowledge and the very substance of innovation and newness, or the logic underlying the effect. (I won't enter into the interested/disinterested debate here, though it is of course relevant, especially as large companies increasingly determine the coursework in areas that are costly to maintain, such as the sciences.)

But what then do I mean by including OOo and other Foss code in education? It means to me as much the teaching of software collaboration and open source tactics of communication as the canonical teaching of code using Foss in classic (obligatory) and elective programs. It can also mean the inclusion of Foss in certain vocational college programs, as at Seneca College, in Toronto, where students are instructed on how to work on Firefox extensions as part of their basic instruction in coding and where collaboration is taken very seriously. In short, it means involving students and professors in Foss projects as a means of teaching collaboration and code. The satisfaction to be gained by this is immense, or so I believe, as students will learn not only how to code better but how to work with others in more or less real-world environments. They will not be abandoning the perimeters of the classroom; not at all. They will rather be including, in certain cases, the dynamic of Foss participation.

An example could be writing papers and giving presentations in the humanities. At one point, it used to be thought that the student's presentations--at whatever level--were essentially empty exercises and not at all related to professionalizing the student. That is, what the student learned could be thought of as being useful, but more in the abstract sense of becoming a better citizen and abler at presenting his views. The idea that a presentation given in a classroom could actually be a means of professionalizing the student and making her abler to get a job, say, or otherwise perform in real world situations, has only in the last generation become more present. When I was in graduate school, it simply wasn't clear, for instance, that my presentations were actually a kind of practice, or could be thought of as such, nor that I should be thinking about presenting at real conferences. All that was over the horizon.

But had it been on the horizon.... well, I would have been far better prepared, and I would have had a far better understanding of the process. Would I have lost out on the liberal luxury of learning at my leisure anything I chose? I don't think so. One learns best discursively, by talking and thinking about something with others, by engaging in dialogues and by taking what one thinks seriously. I think I would rather have been more serious about learning in general.

And I think that including Foss in classrooms will have a similar effect of encouraging students to take what they are learning seriously--not as empty exercises in abstract learning but as something that has real effect, both for them and for the world.