Charlie Nesson begins by saying that the morning had a negative cast to it. It was about fear. But he was uplifted when Yochai and Jimbo got to what Wikipedia is and could be. [Live blogging. Full of errors and omissions. Posted unedited and unspellchecked.]

He asks the general counsel of Viacom what he does in the course of a day. Mike: Viacom is an entertainment company, but it’s diverse, from cable TV to Internet. It has 140 channels around the world (ComedyCentral, MTV, etc.), video games His day consists of planning, managing, and dealing with surprises.

Charlie asks Esther Dyson what she does during the day. “I’m a court jester.” She swims every morning. She’s retired. So she does what she likes, including sitting on boards, giving advice, writing, giving talks, working with “do-good” groups trying to foster democracy in emerging markets.

Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, says he’s on 7 boards, kibbitzes on politics.

Charlie says that he speaks for Eon, Dean of Cyberspace, and she has some questions. Wikipedia is the instantiation of the building of the knowledge commons. Why didn’t it come out of a university?

Esther: It came from neither the university nor government because they have rules and process. They don’t welcome strangers. Wikipedia is just a rule set. And, btw, you should check out barcode wikipedia. The topics are products with barcodes. [Ah, the power of unique identifiers!]

Charlie says to Mike of Viacom that Harvard is in a sense a public media company. We sit on a huge archive of material, most of which is copyrighted. The permission system is mired in transaction costs. So, we can’t use our treasure unless we pay a huge amount in time and money to free it up. So, it sits there. You too site on a huge pile ofassets. You’re looking at the system from the other side.

Mike: The system that creates those books depends on an economic incentive.

Charlie: Suppose we had the network infrastructure but no copyright. If we had to make a new system, can we agree that we would not choose the existing system?

Mike: Yes. We would have created something with many different features. You should be allowed to decide how to make your works available. But disrupting those expectations undermines people’s willingness to make works.

Charlie: The Net is a true inflection point. It changes defaults. It starts you from an open space, and you create private spaces within it. That means that the answer to Mike’s argument should be: Yes, except things have changed. We should be in a hurry to change.

Mike: There are tons of examples of those changes. E.g., the record companies have given YouTube site licenses.

Esther: If you’re really going to start over, there’s a principle that if someone creates something, they ought to control its distribution. But there are lots of business models and varieties of contracts.

Reed: Here are some facts that might be true. Over the past 20 yrs, if you look at all content, the price of the hardware in that network has continuously declined. The price of sw has stayed flat. So, the predominant value of the Net is now software. That inhibits the take-up rate in poorer economies. Linux is a response to that.

Esther: The price of the sw isn’t the inhibitor. They’re happy to use stolen sw.

Mike: There are a lot of new, efficient licenses that have developed, including blanket licenses designed to reduce the transaction costs. And we’ve developed ways to get our content out everywhere. And getting clearances are a pain in the butt for Viacom, too.

Charlie asks if we should worry about what JZ has pointed to, the locking down of devices.

Reed says that what happened to the music industry will happen to “elite universities.” You can tell by the fact that universities don’t spend a lot on IT that they don’t know how to accomplish their mission in the new world. E.g., bring Western knowledge to China.

Charlie says that the open access movement wants to bring all knowledge to everyone everywhere.

Esther: Education is about more than making info available.

Charlie: We should be able to make education that is interesting to people around the world. But can you do that with Verizon in charge of the connection and the cellphones?

Reed: In most countries, it’s a state-owned company and has nothing to do with education. We now know that within 15 yrs virtually everyone will have a Net connection, and most will be a wireless connection. Universities need to get ahead of this parade or they won’t be a significant part of how people learn.

Esther: In India, she saw the multimouse, so you can stick a single usb device into a port, and it connects to 8 mice, each with its own cursor. Eight students at a time. That’s MSFT investing in emerging markets. She tells a story about S. Africa to make the point that we shouldn’t be looking for government solutions. We need open markets.

Q: (David Marglin) How do we welcome strangers? How do we beat our swords into plowshares?
Charlie: Harvard has gone open access. That’s news. Other universities notice. Elsevier notices.

Q: You’ve addressed how you broadcast your ideas. But that’s easy. Paris Hilton does that. Harder: How do you listen to all the people who have ideas? How about if Harvard could listen to all those people. And how about getting the science dept to talk with the art dept?

Q: If there were no copyright, we’d have a digital library of Alexandria. Copyright is about providing incentives, not about lowering transaction costs, etc.

Mike: The library wouldn’t exist if people didn’t have incentives. It’d be great if al content had metadata so rights could be cleared automatically, lowering transaction costs. [So there we have the two visions: A system of perfect control to lower transaction costs, and a commons. Me, I want the commons. [Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

John begins by pointing to Publius, a set of essays and discussions about the Net’s many “constitutional moments.” But his overall topic is, as Yochai Benkler frames it, whether the networked sphere expands democracy. E.g., photos and videos of the monks’ protest in Burma were spread through the Internet. [Live blogging. Sloppy. Incomplete. Inaccurate. Wildly incomplete. ]

Argument 1: “The Internet allows more speech from more people than ever before.” JP hands it to Ethan Zuckerman to talk about Global Voices. There are probably more than 100M outside of the US creating content on line, says ethanz. Global Voices tries to surface those voices. International news has gone from a supply problem to a demand problem. How do you find those voices? How do you understand (= translate, contextualize) them? How is your attention held? Ethan says that although he was initially skeptical of blogging, Salam Pax convinced him. But, it’s not perfect. E.g., governments (and sometimes corporations) try to cut down access to the tools. More worrisome, people don’t pay attention to much outside of what the mainstream media tell them to. “We haven’t found the way to shape the news agenda through social media.”

JP puts up the map of the Farsi blogosphere. In response to question about Cass Sunstein’s hypothesis, John Kelly (who made the map) that even though blogs cluster by political stance, they are still densely interlinked.

Argument #2: Although the Net lets more people tell the story, “states are finding more and more ways to restrict online speech and to practice surveillance.” JP points to the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks state blockage of speech.

Esther Dyson: To get Internet to help democracy, we need to fix the people. The Net is just a tool. We need profiles of courage. Also, there’s virality of protest.

Audience: We cannot rely on people doing the right thing. Many think that control and censorship are good things.

Audience: It’s not just a digital divide, but a media literacy gap.

Argument 3: “The Internet facilitates the formation of online groups, which in turn has great impact on democracy and governance.” Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation talks about Public Markup, which enables people to comment on bills, etc. JP asks if there are downsides to this increased transparency. E.g., the star wars kids who didn’t want the exposure. Can people be harmed by transparency and the power of collective action without recourse? Ellen replies, “Not yet.”

JP calls on Yochai Benkler. What questions should we be asking in the next ten years? Benkler responds: “I’m sorry, prof., I didn’t do the reading.” His serious reply is that we are moving from imagining and fearing, to actually gathering data and doing detailed analysis.

David Reed: While the Net is great at group-forming, there is an upper limit. Each group demands attention. There’s an attention economy that limits this. In the political space, you can starve out attention. [Tags: berkman democracy john_palfrey berkmanat10 ]

[

After Dean Kagan (correctly) identifies JZ with the Berkman Center, JZ begins by talking about the importance of the fact that the Net at its start was unconstrained by a need to make money. They therefore didn't have to count how many people were on it or how much they were using it. So, they made it so anyone could get on just be hooking in. Anyone can build on it. It explains the hourglass shape of the Net: Diverse media, diverse tasks, all going through Internet protocol. [Live blogging: JZ is a great speaker, and my scribbled notes don't come close to capturing the flow, much less the texture, of his talk.][Note: I'm posting this without re-reading or spellechecking so I can go join the hallway chat.]

IP reflects the constraint and lack of constraint. Ethernet, for example, relies on social conventions to keep the hardware following the protocol. Same with email. The natural way to create email would have been to set up an authenticated database. Instead, email assumes a distributed email address and assumes people won’t spoof addresses. Solutions to problems generally are postponed until the problems arise. He points to the informal, unpretentiousness of the IETF as typical of the founding attitude of the Net.

JZ points to the “generative” power of having programmable computers attached to an open network.

The heart of his argument: The social conventions may not be enough to prevent the “turning of the barge” of the Net. We are losing the fight. Our PC’s assume that codes running there are good and desired, whereas PC’s (and Macs) frequently run programs we don’t understand or want. Vint Cerf has said that perhaps 250M machines around the world are running code waiting for commands to do something evil, e.g., botnets. “This is an absurd situation. We would not allow our cars to be used for joyriding.”

E.g., Pakistan YouTube by exploiting a network weakness: An ISP altered its routing tables so that other routers thought it was one hop from YouTube, so YouTube traffic went that way.

“The Internet is a collective hallucination that works so long as we don’t stare at it too carefully.”

He puts up a 2×2: hierarchy <> polyarchy, and bottom-up<>top-down. (Polyarchy means lots of people can try out lots of things.) JZ says bottom-up = generative and top-down = sterile. He puts the Internet in the bottom-up, polyarchy quadrant. “This area works great until it doesn’t.”

So, then what do you about it? Have the government fix it? A Patriot Act for cyberspace, as Lessig fears? Sometimes the government does intervene, JZ says. E.g., it adjudicates domain name disputes. But he shows the ITU’s architecture for fixing the Internet: an enormously complex chart that is the opposite of the simple Internet hourglass. The changes is to quality of service (not best effort) and fully compliant with all regulatory requirements. That’s the future Internet being designed for us. Likewise, PCs are being locked down. He points to the Mac that says Macs are better because all the pieces come from a single vendor. Even with the coming of the iPhone SDK, all apps have to go through the Apple Store, subject to Apple’s regulations, as announced by Jobs: Nothing illegal, malicious, privacy violative, porn, bandwidth hog or “unforeseen.” JZ thinks that this type of lockdown, which is coming, is the worst of both worlds. Locked down appliances and gated communities.

He points to FaceBook being used as an alternative email, but with pretty hideous terms.

So what do we do? Perhaps the lower left quadrant: bottom-up hierarchy: Bottom up solutions with enough adherents that it has the heft of a hierarchy. We need social buy-in. E.g., Wikipedia has technology that makes the price of mistakes not to high and that lets people talk and come to agreement. That’s the kind of buy-in we want for stopbadware.com at the Berkman Center. But this also requires that we import some practices from the regulatory sphere, e.g., an appeals process to get people off the stopbadware list. We need ways of expressing our social preferences with the condience that they will be respected. But, he says, some of these social techniques can be subverted. And we don’t always agree on norms. When we don’t find solutions in that quadrant, we find ourselves turning to government.

Q: Scottt Bradnor: JZ is sort of right, but hyperbolic.

Q: David Reed: I sort of agree. There were a lot of skeptics when the American democracy was founded. The problems we’re suffering through are not the iconic ones. They’re more subtle. They’re about power shifts and whether commercial entities are really helping us. I’m not convinced the problems are insurmountable. [Tags: ]

Terry Fisher talks about the Berkman’s scope. He initiates a cheering section to try induce Jonathan Zittrain to accept Harvard Law’s offer of a professorship. [JZ! JZ! Z!]

Charlie Nesson talks about the values of the Center: “Open code, open acJcess, open talk, open education.” He asks us to build “the university” across all distances. “We are the future of the Internet,” he says.

[Tags: berkman terry_fisher charlie_nesson jonathan zittrain ]

Dean Kagan has just announced that the Berkman Center, which had been part of Harvard Law, is now an interdisciplinary center, part of Harvard University overall.

This is not only quite an honor. It also will embed the Center even more directly in the full range of Harvard’s discourse.

[Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

The tenth anniversary celebration of the Berkman Center is starting. It’s a two day conference about the future of the Internet. It’s sold out.

The backchannel is at irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman. I assume it’s being webcast but I don’t know where. (I came into the conf room without a program.) The tag is “berkmanat10.” For more, check here. Also, STeve Garfield is streaming it live here.

[Tags: b@10 berkmanat10 ]

So, I was chatting with the driver of the limo my hosts in Las Vegas kindly supplied for me. When I said that I write about technology, he told me about his startup. It’s a social network that he’s confident will knock FaceBook and MySpace off the map. So, when I got back home tonight, I took a look. The Zenzuu explanatory page consists of a 6-minute video right off of late-night cable.

The pitch is that if you check into Zenzuu 30 times per month, they’ll give you 80% of the ad revs. And if you sign other people up, you’ll get a cut of their ad revs. All of which is fine, and reminds us of the absurd amounts of money we users generate for the social networks we use. But Zenzuu is so focused on the revenues that the video doesn’t mention a single feature of the site.

The fact that all the ads on the site are for Zenzuu itself pushes it over the edge into self-parody.

By the way, would you surprised to learn that Zenzuu’s privacy policy seems to suck, although I’m not sure because it’s in a font designed by and for squirrels.[Tags: social_networking_sites facebook myspace zenzuu ]

I’m in Las Vegas, and my Blackberry just tried to do a bluetooth pairing with “Brenda Lee.”

Do we now have a whole new — and easily spoofed — type of Celebrity Encounter? And how many degrees from Kevin Bacon does that make me?

[Tags: bluetooth celebrities ]

The Berkman Center’s Publius Project is now live. There you’ll find essays on the Internet’s “constitutional moments,” even though most of those moments do not involve a written constitution … which makes the topic all the more interesting. (My contribution, on tacit governance, is here.)

[Tags: publius governance ]

Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell and Forrester person, pointed to some good sites in her keynote at Community 2.0. The Starbucks suggestion box is nicely done, but I especially like the way Tivo participates in the independent forum, TivoCommunity.com

By the way, the Community 2.0 conference was an interesting gathering of people interested in various aspects of the various ways businesses build and are embedded in communities. [Tags: cluetrain marketing charlene_li groundswell ]

He’s doing well, although the recovery is going slower than he’d like.

Men well, ethanz.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

The Berkman Center has announced the launch of the Publius Papers, a collection of short essays (op-ed length) about the various ways constitutional moments the Internet is going through, from formal declarations to norms and nuances. The essays are in conversation with one another, by a whole bunch of authors. The exact site will be announced tomorrow on the Berkman main page. And it’s with a great deal of trepidation that I say that the first essays is mine, on why the government that governs tacitly governs best, with responses by Esther Dyson and Kevin Werbach. Ulp.

[Tags: publius esther_dyson kevin_werbach ]

Parade magazine today reports on the top ten names for baby boys and girls this year:

Jacob

Emily

Michael

Isabella

Ethan

Emma

Joshua

Ava

Daniel

Madison

Christopher

Sophia

Anthony

Olivia

William

Abigail

Matthew

Hannah

Andrew

Elizabeth

Ok, but I seem to meet more and more kids with one-off names. Isn’t the long tail of names getting longer every year?

[Tags: long_tail ]

Hypothesis: Entertainments in which the actors are visibly having a good time with one another, and are winking at the audience, don’t age well.

Evidence: Rat Pack movies. Burt Reynolds movies. Jimmy Fallon sketches.

Evidence to the contrary: ___________?

[Tags: entertainment movies ]

Oh, I am so about to make a fool of myself in public…

I now have a D-Link DNS-323 plugged into my home network. It’s a network storage device that I want to use as a centralized backup for my family’s various computers because some of us don’t always plug our Macs into our USB external hard drive to let the Mac Time Machine work its backup magic. Unfortunately, the hack I found on the Net to get Time Machine to recognize the DNS-323 doesn’t work for me: Time Machine lets me say I want the backup to be housed on the DNS-323, but the software craps out when it actually tries to back up to it. If there’s an easy way around that, I’d love to hear about it.

In the interim, I’ve been playing with rsync, a command-line utility included in Leopard that does backups. I’ve had no luck with rsyncX, which is a Mac specific version, but rsync is working. It took some doing to get it running on the DNS-323, including installing fun plug (the DNS-323 is a linux box) and writing a config file that specifies which machines rsync recognizes. My Linux hacker nephew Greg did that part of it for me. (Thanks, Greg.)

There’s a script that enables rsync to mimic Time Machine. It’s been working pretty well — my hourly backups go far slower than they should, so I’m undoubtedly doing something wrong — but I had a heck of a time telling it which directories I want it to back up. You gain control over the backup set by specifying a file of inclusions and exclusions. You do this in the rsync command line by saying “–exclude-from=filename” where you replace “filename” with the name of the file that has the list.

After a bunch of Internet research and way too much trial and error, I now have a list that does what I want, although I’m sure it’s laughably kludgy, and possibly fatally wrong. Nevertheless, here’s how I think it works…

The file can list both includes and excludes. You indicate which is which by prefacing each item with a + or a -. The list assumes that the root directory is whichever one you specified in the rsync command line. So, if your command line said that you want to back up “/Users/me/”, then you would tell it to exclude “/Users/me/junk” by putting the following line in your exclude-from file:

- junk/

Likewise, to include /Users/me/importantstuff/ you’d put in the line:

+ importantstuff/

But, at least in my experiments, that line will not include any subdirectories of importantstuff. After failing to understand the instructions I found on the Net, and after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found that it works if I also include the line:

+ importantstuff/**

The double stars tell it to backup all the subdirectories and all their subdirectories, ad infinitum. I’ve found I have to put in both the line without the stars and then the line with the stars. You’d think the line with the stars would be enough, but in my tries and my errors, it wasn’t.

The list of inclusions and exclusions is sensitive to the order of the list. If you have particular subdirectories you want to exclude (e.g., importantstuff/junk/), put them first:

- importantstuff/junk/**

If you want rsync to backup only designated directories, list your excludes first, then your includes, and end with

- *

which tells it to exclude anything you didn’t already tell it to include. I have the feeling that that may be an ugly hack with unintended consequences. Remember, I don’t know what I’m doing.

So, my exclude-from file looks roughly like this:

- *Azureus*/
- *Azureus*/**
- Documents/TiVo*
- Documents/Aptana*
+ Sites/
+ Sites/**
+ Pictures/
+ Pictures/**
+ Music/
+ Music/**
+ Documents
+ Documents/**
- *

Two important notes: 1. The -n parameter on the command line will run rsync in “what if” mode, showing you what it would do without actually doing it. 2. As I’ve likely made some embarrassing and awful mistakes, please read the comments in hopes that some knowledgeable and kind soul will correct me. [Tags: rsync exclude-from dangerously_wrong ]

When I blogged about Flyp on Tuesday, I didn’t know it was about to run an article about Charlie Nesson’s poker university, a place where students learn about life by playing poker online. The article is short and showy, but it’ll give you the idea… (Charlie is the founder of the Berkman Center. [Tags: poker charlie_nesson ]

Footnote has posted the 1860 Census with its usual array of tools and goodies, some of which require a free membership. But the basic browsing and viewing is open to all. Footnote does a nice job with this stuff, including annotation tools and other social amenities.

For those who are keeping score, there were about a dozen David Weinbergers listed in the census that year, including one whom the FBI investigated I think for draft dodging. [Tags: foonote census 1860 ]

I’ve taken the title of Sharon Richardson’s post at JoiningDots because it’s so apt. She writes:

What’s weird from an information and context perspective is how remote this disaster feels, compared to other events such as the Tsunami, Hurrican Katrina and Sept 11th. (A similar effect happend with the earthquake in Pakistan.) Is that because Burma is such a closed society, meaning there are very few first-hand on-the-spot-as-it-happens pictures and videos? Research has proven that people connect more when shown a specific story rather than massive (no matter how scary) statistics. The tsunami also occured in a region with strict controls. Perhaps having a tourist spot complete with Westerners and their camcorders helped.

Maybe a more evolved consciousness would be unaffected by the particular stories and the particular videos, for rationally we know that the disaster is a disaster whether or not there happens to be film at 11. Or maybe our atavistic reaction to personal stories is a necessary part of our being moral creatures … so long as we still make the donation even when, in the absence of stories, only pure reason moves us .

[Tags: burma morality ]

Moveon.org is recommending that we donate to the International Burmese Monks Organization, which already has a network of local people in place. Moveon.org thinks that money donated to the monks via Avaaz.org is more likely to do good quickly there. Here’s a link.

We usually like to give to groups we’ve looked into pretty closely. But those groups — e.g., Oxfam — are frustrated that they are unable to help directly and quickly. So, for now we’re placing our philanthropic bet on Avaaz.

[Tags: burma ]

The Harvard Law faculty has voted unanimously for an Open Access policy based on the one that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a few months ago. Yay!

John Palfrey, Harvard Law’s new vice dean for library and information resources (and, of course, the soon-to-be-former exec dir of the Berkman Center) gets to implement this happy policy.

[Tags: open_access harvard libraries john_palfrey ]