fascinating figures in the information world
TRANSCRIPT
CIAN forum 15 July 2008
Fascinating figures in the information world
who to watch and read to keep abreast
of where we are heading
Lawrence Lessig
Professor at Stanford Law School, founding board member of Creative Commons
Focuses on the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies
Lawrence Lessig
Books & talksCode and other laws of cyberspace - how the core
values of cyberspace are being threatened and what we can do to protect them
The future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world
- Creativity flourishes on the web because it is a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment
Free culture: the nature and future of creativity - considers the diminishment of the public domain of ideas and shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation
www.youtube.com/watch?v
=7Q25-S7jzgs&feature=related –
Lawrence Lessig at TED
Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of the internet and director of the World Wide Web Consortium.
He supports the contention that no body should own the domain names, as they constitute a public resource.
‘The roots of the domain named should not be owned, it is a public domain resource and it should be managed very carefully for the people of the world.’
Creative Commons
Provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.
creativecommons.org/about/license
support.creativecommons.org/videos
Flickr uses CC
Lessig & PowerPoint
Lessig's presentations ‘are a fantastic combination of content, art and brand...’
www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html
Jimmy Wales
American Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation and promotion of Wikipedia in 2001
Wikipedia
Ranks among the top ten most-visited web sites worldwide.
Criticisms focus on systemic bias, inconsistencies, reliability and accuracy, vandalism.
Wikipedia gossip
• See Jimmy Wales’ own entry and read about criticism of the editing changes he made to this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_wales
• Ongoing squabble between Jimmy Wales and former Wikipedia colleague, Larry Sanger. Larry has now established Citizendium, a Wiki with stricter editing rules and obligatory disclosure of editor's real names
Howard Rheingold
Writer on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing) - www.rheingold.com
Conflict and cooperation
Howard is interested in the tension between self and community interest.
Tragedy of the commons - conflict over finite resources between individual interests and the common good. Free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation
Cooperation and conflict
Why are we willing to cooperate with people whom we have never met?
Social dilemmas – individually rational, collectively irrational – but can highlight an innate sense of fairness in humans
eg Prisoner’s dilemma
Smart Mobs
Howard wrote a book called Smart mobs – groups that emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation.
www.smartmobs.com/book/book_summ.html
Clay Shirky
American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of internet technologies
www.shirky.com
Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations
What happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organisational structures.
www.herecomeseverybody.org
Tagging
Clay Shirky has written about this in Ontology is overrated: categories, links, and tags
The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster but, as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
Jessamyn West
I love libraries because I believe they are a true manifestation of the public sphere in the US.
www.librarian.net/about/ - see CC licence
Jessamyn West
‘My passion presently is mucking about in the intersection of libraries, technology and politics and describing what I find there.’
www.librarian.net/talks/aus2.0
Nicholas Negroponte
Founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and the One Laptop per Child association (OLPC)
OLPC
OLPC aims to provide children in developing countries access to education through the provision of $100 laptops and mesh networks in which the laptops connect to each other
OLPCRead transcript from ABC Radio National
Or watch TED talk
Or see pics on Flickr
danah boyd
Best known for her expertise on social networking. Her research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts.
www.danah.orgdanah’s blog
danah boyd
danah writes a lot about a range of interesting topics. Try:
• Information access in a networked world• Knowledge access as a public good
Beth Kanter
Trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media
www.bethkanter.org
Beth Kantor
Here is Beth’s blog
Beth supports Creative Commons:
creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7806
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