free culture – Adam Hyde

The Art of Losing Control

The production of a book is usually very tightly controlled by the author(s) and publisher(s) that produce it. We have come to accept that as just the way it is. You want to write a book, then naturally you have the right to decide what the text of that book will be. Seems almost non-controversial.

So, it’s normal to be asked how can you exercise a similar amount of control over a book in Booki. Its an understandable question but very difficult to answer. Difficult because the answer has to cross paradigms – the first paradigm being the established book production and publishing model that we all know, and the second being book production with free licenses in an open system. So I usually find myself answering questions like this with a simple “You can’t,” and waiting for the reaction. It’s intended to be a provocative answer and the further the eyes roll back in the skull the more I know I have to unwrap the concept of ‘publishing’ in the new(ish) era of free culture for whoever it was that asked the question.

But the reality isn’t so simple – it’s much more interesting.

First, there seems often to be an unspoken assumption that control is necessary. Along with this comes the assumption that open content must be protected. Protected from harm – not just the malicious kind, but harm inflicted by contributions that lower the quality of the text. My experience from four years running an entirely open system (FLOSS Manuals) is that there is little to fear except spam. In four years running FLOSS Manuals, I have not seen a single malicious edit. It seems to be the case that if people are not interested in your book they will leave you alone. If they are interested, I have found that the approaches to the text are sensitive and respectful and more often than not they improve the work – sometimes in very surprising ways. On one book I worked on, a retired copy editor went from top to bottom of the 45,000 word text in his afternoons and made an incredible improvement to the text. I would like to have thanked him but I never met him.

The trick is not to protect the text but to manage it. To do this, first, you must make a decision on what kind of development process this will be and what kind of contributions you would like. From my experience, the best strategy is to try and relinquish as much control as possible in order to achieve the right kind and amount of contributions. To this end, Booki provides some very useful tools to help you. If you want to keep your book very quiet, then you can hide a book so that it does not appear on Booki at all, except on your profile page. Privacy through obscurity. If you want to keep things really really quiet, then you can grab the Booki sources and install Booki on your own server (or laptop) somewhere out of reach of anyone. Or if you want the book totally open for anyone to jump in, then that is the default position with Booki all you have to do then is get the word out as much as you can and invite people to contribute. If you create a new book or chapter then that information gets broadcast on the front page of Booki, however, it is often harder than you think to attract attention and contributions. It often relies on how effectively you can get the word out and how attractive you make the offer. You need to reach out to people and inspire them. The more direct the approach the better – personal emails work best – and emphasising concrete outcomes is very likely to improve results, as is making the offer fun, relevant and illustrating a real need. But the usual rules apply for attracting volunteers in any realm – it’s a mix of luck and getting the tone and channels right.

Once the contributions start rolling in, then it’s up to you to manage this process. To this purpose, there are a number of tools available in Booki – most importantly the history tab where you can view changes and roll back to earlier versions of any chapter as you wish. If things get out of control, you can clone (copy) the entire book and decide on a more moderate development approach. However, the best tool for managing input and getting the book to where you want it to be is social management. You need to coerce the contributors to come along with you and share your vision of what the book should be. At the same time, you need to also be able to make the process satisfying to them. There are tools available to help with this communicative process (chat, notes etc) but it’s often reliant on your tone and approach.

‘How to control’ a book is a question I would like to see asked more often with more nuance and colour to the question. However, I think if you can lose the feeling that you must control the book and instead relinquish as much control as possible, you will be surprised and very probably excited by the results. In a world of free culture, it’s all about the art of losing control…

What is a Free Book?

To get the rewards of collaboration and reuse, content must be easily shared and that means content must be free. What is ‘free content’?

What is ‘free content’?

Since 2001, there has been a movement called Creative Commons [ see https://creativecommons.org ] which is the latest in a long line of projects to produce copyright licenses that allow the copyright holder more nuanced control over the rights reserved and conferred. The ‘standard’ and default copyright license is ‘all rights reserved’. That means no one can do anything with your content without your permission. That license, for example, makes criminals out of students that photocopy chapters for their personal use. It is actually more complicated than that, as each country has its own specific laws governing copyright. However, copyright law for all countries has the same general intention – to stop anyone other than the copyright holder from reusing the copyrighted work without permission.

Creative Commons gives more control over the rights the copyright holder transfers to others. For example, the Creative Commons Non-Derivative licenses allow others to copy the work legally but not to change it. The Creative Commons Share-Alike license allows anyone to reuse and change the content, as long as they transfer the same right to others who utilise the derivative work

‘Free content’ is a condition of reuse and collaboration. It is extremely hard to work collaboratively within a constrained copyright environment and almost impossible to reuse such content. So is making content free simply a matter of choosing a Creative Commons license? No, it is not. To understand why we can start by looking at the requirements of software freedom as outlined by the Free Software Foundation:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The sub-sector which labels itself ‘Open Publishing,’ while advocating Free Culture as the way forward for publishing, largely doesn’t seem to abide by these kinds of freedoms, especially with regard to making the source available for change, which is stated as a precondition for two of the above ie. “Access to the source code is a precondition….”.

‘Open’ mostly means ‘free to distribute’ in the open publishing world. It does not mean or imply the right to have access to the editable sources, nor does it mean the right to fork. The reluctance to embrace these freedoms is closely related to the fear of losing control of a book and the fear of ‘poor quality’ creeping in. Hence open production seems pretty untenable for the majority of the open publishing world.

If it is going to differentiate itself from merely ‘open distribution,’ ‘Open Publishing’ must address these issues. It might be good to develop a similar ‘Four Freedoms’ manifesto for free books. It is important to do this because so far we have got it wrong: Creative Commons licenses, for example, do not require the source to be available. However, freedom is not just about licenses and we shouldn’t rely on others to define free culture for us: we must generate a culture where we acknowledge and uphold the values and consequences of free content. If we don’t do so, we will not be able to take advantage of the immense value Free Culture really offers.

Books should be free, they should always be available to be used, transformed into other formats (an especially necessary freedom in this day of multiple ebook readers), re-used, translated, remixed – whatever you want. Books should not die on the shelves, or as a PDF-only release, or in an archive.

In the discourse of free culture, however, the discussion of what constitutes a free book pretty much starts and ends at the license. Is this a free book? Does it have a Creative Commons (or similar?) license? Yes? Then it is a free book. Solved.

We need a culture that embraces the values and consequences of free content, not a culture that worships licenses.

A free license does not mean that a book is free. The following are common strategies for copyright protection that are exercised by producers of ‘freely licensed content’:

Not-free free license

A not-free book in this context uses a license that appears free but isn’t really. Licenses like the Free Documentation License and those Creative Commons licenses that have Non-Commercial (NC) or No-Derivative (ND) conditions are not free. I don’t want to get into this here, as it is a lengthy and (in my opinion) boring conversation, but the bottom line for me is, can you use this book in any way you want? If the answer is no, it’s a not-free book.

Ambiguously not-free

Many publishers use two licenses for their content. Strange but true. They use a standard copyright ‘all rights reserved’ license and something like a Creative Commons license, or sometimes there is just confusing and conflicting information. If you want an example, take a look at page vi of the following Ubuntu manual

It states : This book is published under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 license

Sounds good but it is soon followed by a lengthy ‘go away’ clause that reads :

This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or likewise unless permitted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

That is, in my opinion, confusing to most readers. CC-BY-SA is one of the most-free licenses but the clause reads like a standard ‘all rights reserved’ (proprietary) license and would send off the same signals to the average reader ie. go away and don’t even bother to try and do something with this book (other than reading it). This is not-free.

Practically not-free

This is the worst type of not-freedom as it is essentially a trick to appear free while actually employing a mechanical form of copyright protection. Many books might use very good free licenses and use very bold, unambiguous and clear license statements. So, does this make it free? Well, no. The reason is that in order for something to be re-used it needs to first be in a state that enables its re-use. For example, PDF is not a good re-usable format. Printed books are also not a good re-usable format. Both of these formats allow content to be copied but this is not the same as re-used. This kind of trick is often used by publishers wanting to gain currency and favour in the Free Culture or Open Educational Resources sectors. To them, we can only say : WE NEED THE SOURCE.

Many otherwise very good free content fails to even offer the content in formats that can be easily transformed. ‘Offering the source’ would allow readers to create other formats. One very good example is the Theory On Demand series (which is freely downloadable here ) which only offers PDF and online FLASH player versions of the books: you cannot get the sources so you cannot create EPUBs for your iPad or Mobi for your kindle.

However if ‘free’ means that only copying is allowed then it is a poor freedom to have. We want to be able to change books, convert them to other formats, translate them, improve them – as free licenses suggest we can. What if I want to change the contents of a book how do I do it? If I have to first reproduce the book by manually typing out 40,000 words then the book is practically not-free. It is for this reason that free culture licenses should mandate that books (must be specified as this clause is not applicable to all media) must provide the source somewhere (online is suffice) in plain text or other standardised popular format. Currently, most free licenses do not require this, so many books can avoid this issue while still calling themselves free.

A good analogy exists here with free software. For example, a PDF is essentially a binary and distributing a PDF and calling it ‘free’ is like distributing a software binary and calling it free. Free software is aware of this catch and hence for a software to be free you must be able to access the source code. You have not only the right to change free software but the means to change it. The same understanding should exist for books. Can you get access to the content so you can change it easily? If the answer is no, then it is not a free/open book.

Further to this, I would argue that all books must make it known through the appendices, colophon, or in the body of the text itself, where the original raw sources can be found.

On this topic, Creative Commons licenses are actually ill-equipped to tackle this issue. The source of books should be available for anyone to access so they can easily work with the book, and if we must (yawn) live in a world of copyright, then the license should at least require that the book source is available. Currently, Creative Commons licenses do not require this, whereas the General Public License (and others) do.

Access to the editable source of a book is a pre-condition for a free book.

Not-free mandate

Lastly, let’s re-examine the culture of proprietorship. In the world of software, there are two main types of software – free/open and proprietary. The former is licensed with open licenses enabling reuse and alteration etc and the later licensed under closed all-rights-reserved copyright licenses and complicated end-user agreements. Suffice to say that the effect of proprietary software is that you can’t mess with it.

However, free software can also suffer from cultural proprietorship regardless of the license used. Essentially if you do not feel that you have the mandate to change something then you are not empowered to change it. This can often be the consequence of the culture of a free software project – many of which are not open cultures by any means. Mostly they are male-dominated meritocracies which intimidate many would-be contributors.

The same scenario can exist for book production regardless of the license being used. In fact, books have a heavy cultural legacy of proprietorship that we must work hard to overcome. Books are made by “authors” and it is difficult to challenge the domain of the author even if the author is obviously not a single person. Evidence of collaboration in the production of a work is not the same as enabling an open mandate to change or fork (copy-and-change) a work. We must overcome this by celebrating the possibilities of forking and altering other people’s works. We do this by doing it. Without doing this – without actively participating and taking advantage of the riches that free culture production offers – we are maintaining the processes and values of proprietary (closed) culture.

[Produced somewhere around 2010/2011]

Wikimania 2007 Report

FLOSS Manuals فارسی

This is a brief outline of my experience of Wikimania 2007 in Taiwan (August 3-5). I won’t cover all the talks I went to or the flossmanuals-centric discussions I had, just some of the highlights of the event itself. The event was very focused on all things Wikimedia (the umbrella foundation for Wikipedia and its associated projects – Wikimedia commons, Wikiversity, Wikibooks etc – http://www.wikimedia.org/) and Mediawiki (the wiki tool that the foundation uses for all its projects – http://www.mediawiki.org/).

I was there to present FLOSS Manuals (http://www.flossmanuals.net) and did five FLOSS Manuals presentations – a workshop on the FLOSS Manuals system, a technical presentation, 2 poster sessions, and a lightning talk. I also moderated a few sessions.

The event was very informal and relaxed. Pretty much everyone there was a Wikimedian of some description and I think they liked the fact that it was a small informal event. I was one of the few ‘outsiders,’ not having made a thoughtful contribution to Wikipedia or any of its projects, but I felt very welcomed and I was impressed at the strong support for free culture in general. Wikipedia was by no means the dominant thread of the event, its themes spread wide and you can see a full schedule here – http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule

The first day had some excellent speakers and was the strongest day for presentations. Every presentation was very informative and there were some very inspiring moments.

It was also interesting because the event opened with Florence Nibart-Devouard (the new chair of the WMF) ‘preparing the ground’ for new revenue models. Her presentation was essentially about ‘why we need to make some money’ and how the WMF might go about it. I understand the Wikimedia community is very sensitive to this issue, so I think she was proceeding cautiously and I imagine this was the beginning of more presentations seeding these ideas.

Lawrence Liang’s presentation about the ‘authority of knowledge’ was a highlight for me on the first day. He spoke about how Wikipedia could learn from the demise of manuscript culture at the birth of the print age. As I understand it, at the start of the print age, printed books were considered as the most recent release of a body of work, and updating these works and feeding into the content cycle of a book was common. As an example, Liang used Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The works were updated by many people and were living breathing entities, however, when he died, the works became his canon and were considered in some way ‘frozen’ by the academics. Any edit of the text after his death was seen as producing a defective edition. So the ‘authoritative’ point (the canonisation of Chaucer by academics) killed off the participatory culture surrounding his texts. Liang was pointing to this issue at Wikipedia and the debate surrounding how Wikipedia might be striving to attain an analogous ‘authoritative’ position. His point, I think, is that the pursuit of Wikipedia towards being an ‘authoritative knowledge object’ is less interesting (and potentially troublesome as it may deter contributions) than the methodology for creating knowledge that Wikipedia has established.

I discussed this with a Wikipedian (a long term contributor to Wikipedia) and they said they have no problem with the number of edits decreasing – in fact, apparently many Wikipedians welcome the possibility that the English Wikipedia might soon be the first ‘finished’ Wikipedia.

Also on the first day was Masayuki Hatta, another excellent talk. It was small but on the button. Masayuki is a Debian hacker from Japan, and he was talking about the troubled Free Documentation License (FDL) that the Wikimedia Foundation uses for its projects. He argues that the license is inappropriate (many people at the event agree with this position) and suggested that there is a big problem with changing the license because with the FDL the person that created the document holds the copyright and only they can relicense the content. We went through this process too with FLOSS Manuals a few months ago and thankfully everyone agreed to change to the GPL.

In response to Masayuki, Evan Prodromou (http://wikitravel.org) suggested it might not be necessary to get everyone’s permission as there have been several large open source projects that have changed licenses without getting permission from all contributors – an interesting point, but I think that if Wikipedia did this it would be followed by a great deal of controversy as consultation and ‘doing things the right way’ (not just the expedient way) seems me to be regarded very highly in Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Masayuki, being a hacker, suggested a hack to get out of the FDL. He suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation send an envoy to the Free Software Foundation to speak to the redraft of the FDL currently underway. Masayuki had been involved in a similar process for the GPLv3 and said he was surprised that the FSF actually listened and made some notable changes as a result. So, Mayasuki’s hack included lobbying the FSF to make the FDL compatible with other licenses (such as some Creative Commons licenses) – this would allow for license interoperability between the FDL and other licenses but also it would also allow for content currently covered by the FDL to be distributed under the compatible license. This, in effect, opens a backdoor for the Wikimedia Foundation to slip out of and ditch the FDL in favour of something more interesting.

Mayasuki recommended the best strategy to affect the draft process for the FDL currently underway is to make a presentation in person to the Free Software Foundation.

Magnatune (http://magnatune.com/) presented their interesting sales strategy for CC licensed material. They license their content under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike Attribution. You can download the content for free, or you can buy it at a price you are happy with. Magnatune argue that is is very effective and they generate a lot of revenue this way.

Dominic Chen presented the c-shirt project which allows you to remix a t-shirt design from cc licensed material and they print out a t-shirt for you. I made a pretty clumsy t-shirt from a road sign that said ‘GPL’ and the Wikipedia definition of FLOSS. It was admittedly a pretty geeky design, but I really appreciated the c-shirts attempts to make this whole world of open licenses live beyond the screen.

Seth Anthony did a very interesting study on the life cycle of Wikipedia editors, identifying, similarly to open source, that the minority is doing the lion’s share of the contributions. His slides are here (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/wikimania2007/b/b7/Wikimania2007-SethAnthony.pdf) if you wish to read more about this very interesting subject.

Near the end of the event, Joi Ito (Chair of CC) presented CC’s world vision. It was a slick presentation but I was a little unsure why it was given such a prominent position (it was the penultimate plenary). Probably because the local organisers had just launched CC Taiwan, but I couldn’t help but wonder how hard CC is working to try and woo the big lumbering FDL-tainted giant to their side. I asked a question to Ito, essentially – if the redrafted FDL was compatible with CC licenses, what would the position of CC be? That Wikipedia should stay with the FDL or change to a CC license? I have to say his answer seemed to suggest that they would be happy with compatibility, but then he seemed to side track so I’m not fully convinced.

I was interested to note throughout the event that there is a growing awareness that MediaWiki is not a generic ‘fix all the knowledge holes in the universe’ tool. The problem seems to be that all the non-Wikipedia projects housed within the Wikipedia Foundation have developed because the content ‘did not fit it’ to a wiki encyclopaedia. However, the projects have been set up by default inMediaWikii. Mediawiki is clearly an ill fit for open university strategies, and probably it has limitations for wikibooks as well (structured wikis are more suitable for books and manuals in my opinion). It is a big issue I think and it was apparent in one session on Wikiversity that they were going in the wrong direction and that the tool-led approach was the wrong one.

Possibly related to this tool-led position was an interesting discussion lead by Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki and wiki-markup language (WML). He is now involved with WikiCreole (http://www.wikicreole.org/) – an initiative to harmonise the disparate WML versions. I can see the point, but I think there is a more fundamental issue. As I understand it WML was invented because people couldn’t write HTML. It was a strategy to lower the threshold of entry. However, the very sophisticated WYSIWYG tools are now doing this splendidly. So why a need for WML at all? In fact, it could be argued, WML is harder to learn than opening a WYSIWYG editor and typing away like you have many times in your favourite word processor. This point was touched on by Brian Behlendorf from the Apache Foundation but I don’t think Ward Cunningham could really accept the position (understandably).

I had many meetings while at Wikimania and met many interesting people, too many to list, but I was particularly interested in finding more out about print-on-demand which was conspicuously missing from the scheduled discussions. I met with Eric Moeller, a Board member for the Wikimedia Foundation and we discussed Wikipedias wiki-to-print future. It is interesting that they are going in this direction but I am unsure of this strategy. They know their business better than I, so I will wait and see, suffice to say I will be interested in the quality of books produced from direct wiki-to-print.

So…that is a short summary. There was much more happening and much more I could talk about but I thought it best to stick to the highlights