Open Sourced

Open Sourced( );

Breaking boundaries between

ownership and collaboration in

the information age.

Open Source Everywhere

Open Source Projects that Changed the World

Build it. Share it. Profit.

Vol. 1

Winter 2011

{ }

OpenSourced

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Chris Anderson

EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Thomas Goetz

MANAGING EDITOR: Jacob Young

FEATURES EDITOR: Mark Robinson

ARTICLES EDITOR: Robert Capps

STORY EDITORS: Jon J. Eilenberg, Sarah Fallon

SENIOR EDITORS: Chris Baker, Nancy Miller, Adam Rogers, Jason Tanz, Bill Wasik

SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR: Mark McClusky

SENIOR WRITER: Steven Levy

COPY CHIEF: Jennifer Prior

COPY EDITORS: Brian Dustrud, Holly Haynes

SENIOR EDITOR, RESEARCH: Joanna Pearlstein

ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITORS: Rachel Swaby, Angela Watercutter

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC RELATIONS: Samantha Rosenthal

PR MANAGER: Rachel Millner

EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER: Jay Dayrit

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Erica Jewell

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scott Dadich

DESIGN DIRECTOR: Wyatt Mitchell

SENIOR ART DIRECTOR: Margaret Swart

ART DIRECTORS: Alice Cho, Tim Leong

ART DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS: Margaret Swart

CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER: Victor Krummenacher

SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR: Zana Woods

PHOTO EDITOR: Carolyn Rauch

DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR: Anna Goldwater Alexander

PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Sarah Filippi

VIDEO EDITOR: Alexa Inkeles

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR: Ron Licata

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Ryan Meith

SENIOR MAVERICK: Kevin Kelly

FOUNDING EDITOR: Louis Rossetto

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Thomas J. Wallace

Culture

18 Open Source Creativity

20 Freeing Knowledge

DIY

12 Build it. Share it.

17 Arduino Developers

Community

02 OpenSource Everywhere

06 Change the World

DYK?

22 Social Media Revolution

24 Open Source Facebook

get ready for

the era when

collaboration

replaces the

corporation.

3

Open Source Everywhere( ){

Cholera is one of those 19th-century

ills that, like consumption or gout,

at first seems almost quaint, a malady

from an age when people suffered from

maladies. But in the developing world,

the disease is still widespread and

can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera

strikes an unprepared community, people

get violently sick immediately. On day

two, severe dehydration sets in. By day

seven, half of a village might be dead.

Since cholera kills by driving fluids

from the body, the treatment is to

pump liquid back in, as fast as possible.

The one proven technology, an intrave-

nous saline drip, has a few drawbacks.

An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can

cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy

against a large outbreak. Other systems

cost as little as 35 cents, but they're

too complicated for unskilled caregiv-

ers. The result: People die unnecessarily.

"It's a health problem, but it's also

a design problem," says Timothy Pre-

stero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer

who cofounded a group called Design That

Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineer-

ing students, Prestero, who has master's

degrees in mechanical and oceanographic

engineering, focused on the drip chamber

and pinch valve controlling the saline

flow rate.

But the team needed more medical exper-

tise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle,

a Web-based industrial-design project

that brings together engineers, design-

ers, academics, and professionals from a

variety of disciplines. Soon, some phy-

sicians and engineers were pitching in,

vetting designs and recommending new

paths. Within a few months, Prestero's

team had turned the suggestions into an

ingenious solution. Taking inspiration

from a tool called a rotameter used in

chemical engineering, the group crafted

a new IV system that's intuitive to use,

even for untrained workers. Remarkably,

it costs about $1.25 to manufacture,

making it ideal for mass deployment.

Prestero is now in talks with a medical

devices company; the new IV could be in

the field a year from now.

ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is

modeled on a method that for more than

a decade has been closely associated

with software development: open source.

It's called that because the collabora-

tion is open to all and the source code

is freely shared. Open source harnesses

the distributive powers of the Inter-

net, parcels the work out to thousands,

and uses their piecework to build a bet-

ter whole, putting informal networks of

volunteer coders in direct competition

with big corporations. It works like an

BY THOMAS GOETZ

11.11.03

4 Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1

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06 Change the World

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Software is just the beginning… open source is doing for mass

innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get

ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.

ant colony, where the collective intel-

ligence of the network supersedes any

single contributor.

Open source, of course, is the magic

behind Linux, the operating system that

is transforming the software indus-

try. Linux commands a growing share of

the server market worldwide and even

has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warn-

ing of its "competitive challenge for us

and for our entire industry." And open

source software transcends Linux. Alto-

gether, more than 65,000 collaborative

software projects click along at Source-

forge.net, a clearinghouse for the open

source community. The success of Linux

alone has stunned the business world.

But software is just the beginning.

Open source has spread to other disci-

plines, from the hard sciences to the

liberal arts. Biologists have embraced

open source methods in genomics and

informatics, building massive databases

to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast,

and other workhorses of lab research.

NASA has adopted open source principles

as part of its Mars mission, calling

on volunteer "clickworkers" to iden-

tify millions of craters and help draw

a map of the Red Planet. There is open

source publishing: With Bruce Perens,

who helped define open source software

in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing

a series of computer books open to any

use, modification, or redistribution,

with readers' improvements considered

for succeeding editions. There are li-

brary efforts like Project Gutenberg,

which has already digitized more than

6,000 books, with hundreds of volun-

teers typing in, page by page, classics

from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the

same time, a related project, Distrib-

uted Proofreading, deploys legions of

copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg

texts are correct. There are open source

projects in law and religion. There's

even an open source cookbook.

In 2003, the method is proving to be as

broadly effective - and, yes, as revolu-

tionary - a means of production as the

assembly line was a century ago.

In the beginning thousands of coders,

hackers, and developers answered Linus

Torvalds' call - and helped him build a

In the Beginning:

Message-ID:

[email protected]

From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix

Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?

Summary: small poll for my new operating system

Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) op-

erating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional

like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since

april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback

on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it

somewhat

Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll imple-

ment them :-)

Linus

5Open Source EverywhereCommunity();

We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation.

robust system that continues to pick up

steam. Yet what's amazing about Linux

isn't its success in the market. The

revolution is in the method, not the

result. Open source involves a broad

body of collaborators, typically volun-

teers, whose every contribution builds

on those before. Just as important, the

product of this collaboration is freely

available to all comers. Of course,

there are plenty of things that are

collaborative and free but aren't really

open source (Amazon.com's book reviews,

for instance). And many projects aren't

widely collaborative, or are somewhat

proprietary, yet still in the spirit of

open source (such as the music avail-

able from Opsound, an online record

label). Not to mention that, as with any

term newly in vogue, open source is

often invoked on tenuous grounds. So

think of it as a spectrum or, better

still, a rising diagonal line on a

graph, where openness lies on one axis and

collaboration on the other. The higher an

effort registers both concepts, the more

fully it can be considered open source.

OF COURSE, FOR ALL ITS NOVELTY, OPEN

SOURCE ISN’T NEW.

Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll

recognize the same ideals of sharing

scientific methods and results in the

late 1600s (dig deeper and you can

follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy,

circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and

see the same ethic in Amish barn raising,

a tradition that dates to the early 18th

century. Or read its roots, as many have,

in the creation of the Oxford English

Dictionary, the 19th-century project where

a network of far-flung etymologists

built the world's greatest dictionary by

mail. Or trace its outline in the Human

Genome Project, the distributed gene-

mapping effort that began just a year

before Torvalds planted the seeds of

his OS. If the ideas behind it are so

familiar and simple, why has open

source only now become such a powerful

force? Two reasons: the rise of the

Internet and the excesses of intellectual

property. The Internet is open source’s

great enabler, the communications tool

that makes massive decentralized

projects possible. Intellectual property,

on the other hand, is open source’s

nemesis: a legal regime that has become

so stifling and restrictive that thou-

sands of free-thinking programmers,

scientists, designers, engineers, and

scholars are desperate to find new ways

to create.


We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation.

we are at a convergent moment, when a

philosophy, a strategy, and a technology

have aligned to unleash great innovation.

Open source is powerful because it’s an

alternative to the status quo, another

way to produce things or solve problems.

And in many cases, it’s a better way.

Better because current methods are not

fast enough, not ambitious enough, or

don’t take advantage of our collective

creative potential.

Open source has flourished in software

because programming, for all the romance

of guerrilla geeks and hacker ethics, is

a fairly precise discipline;

It’s relatively easy to run an open

source software project as a meritocracy,

a level playing field that encourages

participation. But those virtues aren’t

exclusive to software. Coders, it could

be argued, got to open source first only

because they were closest to the tool

that made it a feasible means of produc-

tion: the Internet.

The Internet excels at facilitating the

exchange of large chunks of information,

fast. From distributed computation projects

such as SETI@home to file-swapping systems

like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have

exploited the Internet’s knack for network-

ing. Open source does those one better: It’s

not only peer-to-peer sharing - it’s P2P

production. With open source, you’ve got the

first real industrial model that stems from

the technology itself, rather than simply

incorporating it.

“There’s a reason we love barn raising

scenes in movies. They make us feel great.

We think, ‘Wow! That would be amazing!’”

says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at

Yale studying the economic impact of open

source. “But it doesn’t have to be just a

romanticized notion of how to live. Now

technology allows it. Technology can

unleash tremendous human creativity and

tremendous productivity. This is basi-

cally barn raising through a decentral-

ized communication network.”

7Open Source EverywhereCommunity();

you’re only as good as your code.

}

here are seven projects that have, quite

literally, changed the world.

Culture



DIY



Changed the World( ){

GNU: The grand-daddy of them all, and

everyone’s favorite recursive acronym,

the GNU project was founded in 1984 on

philosophical grounds that software

should respect users freedom. GNU is

the founder of several other projects,

but possibly the most important in

sheer scope is the GNU General Public

License, the GPL. The GNU project also

tried for years to come up with a

complete desktop system based around

the Hurd kernel, but found another ker-

nel that quickly leapfrogged GNU’s

efforts, and was quickly adopted.

LINUX: Linux is now used to refer to a

class of operating system that gener-

ally uses GNU userspace tools and the

Linux kernel. Developed by Linus Tor-

valds as a college project to clone the

Minux kernel, Linux has taken off in

ways that were unimaginable a few years

ago. Linux runs on the largest main-

frames, and the smallest cell phones.

APACHE: In the early ’90s, the most

popular web server was a public

domain http server developed by the

National Center for Supercomputing

Applications. That project fell to

the wayside, leaving webmasters all

over the world developing their own

patches and fixes. The Apache project was

started to bring all of these patches

together in one server, which made it A

“Patchy” Sever. In less than a year, the

Apache web server became the number one

server on the Internet, and stays at

the top today. Ease of access of the

Linux kernel, the GNU userland tools,

and the Apache web server created a

perfect environment for businesses large

and small to start hosting their own

web sites in the fledgling Internet.

MYSQUL: The worlds most popular open

source database, MySQL powers all or

part of the b most popular web sites.

Corporate backing ackend of many of the

worlds and ingenuity have made help

MySQL make inroads against some of the

biggest competitors in databases. MySQL

has deep integration with Linux and the

BY JON BUYS

08.09.10

Community


06 Change the World

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Open Source Projects that


9Open Source Projects that Changed the WorldCommunity();

With almost religious fervor, open source

evangelists have been fighting the good fight

for freedom of code

DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE NEXT

GREAT OPEN SOURCE PROJECT?


open source community,but also has a

successful corporate identity as well.

Acquired first by Sun, and more recently

by Oracle, the corporate side of MySQL

provides the support necessary for open

source software to thrive in the enter-

prise data center.

LANGUAGES: Normally seen together as PHP/

Perl/ Python, the “P” of the LAMP stack

(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) encompasses

the interpreted languages that form the

glue of a massive number of sites. Word-

press, Drupal, Expression Engine, Movable

Type and more are all built on the back

of PHP.

MOZILLA: Risen from the ashes of Netscape,

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has stormed

the world by showing how far a browser’s

capabilities could be pushed. The first

browser with tabs, the first browser

with extensions, the first cross-platform

browser, Firefox has pushed the industry

forward. Features of the original Firefox

can now be found in Safari, Chrome, and

even Internet Explorer.

FREEBSD: FreeBSD is similar in function-

ality to Linux, but has a completely

different family tree, and a much looser

license. FreeBSD was adopted by NeXT to

provide the base of their NeXTStep

operating system, which provided the

base of OS X, the merger of NeXTStep and

the original Mac OS. OS X, in turn,

spawned the iPhone OS, now called iOS,

which powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and

iPad. Apple’s mobile “i” devices changed

the entire cell phone industry, and

knocked the smart phone market on its ear.

The importance of open source projects

like those above cannot be underesti-

mated. The impact on the market, the

workplace, and even our culture is so

deep that it’s difficult to measure or

understand. What is known though is

that we are still at the beginnings of

the open source movement, and that

there are still great things waiting to

be done. Do you know of the next great open

source project? Sound off in the comments!

{ }

}

open source

software isn’t

just about

getting some-

thing for free...

11Open Source Projects that Changed the WorldCommunity();

it’s a statement about how

the world should be( );

it’s a statement about how

the world should be( );

Build It. Share It. Profit. ( ) {

14

BY CLIVE THOMPSON 10.20.08

Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1

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15

CHECK THIS OUT,” Massimo Banzi says. The

burly, bearded engineer wanders over to

inspect a chipmaking robot “pick and

place” machine the size of a pizza oven.

It hums with activity, grabbing teensy

electronic parts and stabbing them into

position on a circuit board like a

hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds.

We’re standing in a one-room fabrication

factory used by Arduino, the Italian

firm that makes this circuit board, a

hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders.

The electronics factory is one of the

most picturesque in existence, nestled

in the medieval foothills of Milan,

with birdsong

floating in through

the open doors and

plenty of coffee

breaks for the

white-coated staff.

But today Banzi is

all business. He’s

showing off his

operation to a group

of potential custom-

ers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of

the boards and points to the tiny map

of Italy emblazoned on it. “See? Italian

manufacturing quality!” he says, laugh-

ing. “That’s why everyone likes us!”

Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been

sold worldwide since mass production

began two years ago. Those are small

numbers by Intel standards but large

for a startup outfit in a highly special-

ized market. What’s really remarkable,

though, is Arduino’s business model: The

team has created a company based on

giving everything away. On its Web site,

it posts all its trade secrets for anyone

to take—all the schematics, design files,

and software for the Arduino board.

Download them and you can manufacture

an Arduino yourself; there are no

patents. You can send the plans off to a

Chinese factory, mass-produce the

circuit boards, and sell them yourself

pocketing the profit without paying

Banzi a penny in royalties. He won’t sue

you. Actually, he’s sort of hoping

you’ll do it.

That’s because the Arduino board is a

piece of open source hardware, free for

anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and

his team have spent precious billable

hours making the thing, and they sell it

themselves for a small profit while

allowing anyone else to do the same.

They’re not alone in this experiment.

In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens

of hardware inventors around the world

have begun to freely publish their specs.

There are open source synthesizers, MP3

players, guitar amplifiers, and even

high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You

can buy an open source mobile phone to

talk on, and a chip company called VIA

has just released an open source laptop:

Anyone can take its design, fabricate it,

and start selling the notebooks.

“

Build it. Share it. Profit.Do it Yourself();

Can Open Source Hardware Work?

Banzi admits that the concept does sound

insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot

of risk; the group spends thousands of

dollars to make a batch of boards.

Then again, Linux sounded pretty in-

sane, too, back in 1991, when Linus

Torvalds announced it. Nobody believed

a bunch of part-time volunteers could

create something as complex as an

operating system, or that it would be

more stable than Windows. Nobody be-

lieved Fortune 500 companies would

trust software that couldn’t be “owned.”

Yet 17 years later, the open source

software movement has been crucial to

the Cambrian explosion of the Web

economy. Linux enabled Google to build

dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and

Ruby have become the lingua franca for

building Web 2.0 applications; and the

free Web-server software Apache powers

nearly half of all Web sites in the

world. Open source software gave birth

to the Internet age, making everyone,

even those who donated their labor,

better off.

Every open source project begins with

an itch that needs scratching. Linux

16

was launched when Torvalds decided he

didn’t like the operating systems

available to him. The top three—Micro-

soft’s DOS, Apple’s operating system, and

Unix—were all expensive and they were

closed; Torvalds wanted a system he

could tinker with. As it happened, a lot

of other geeks wanted the same thing.

So when Torvalds began working on Linux

and sharing his code, other hackers

were willing to pitch in and help

improve it for free—creating a virtual

workforce that was infinitely bigger and

smarter than Torvalds himself. That is

the central benefit of open source

projects: They’re like a barn raising in

which everyone gets to use the barn.

Somebody has a problem and creates a

tool to solve it. And once the tool is

created, hey—why not share it? The hard

work has already been done. Might as

well let others benefit.

Arduino began the same way. Banzi was a

teacher at a high tech design school in

Ivrea, Italy, and his students often

complained they couldn’t find an inexpen-

sive, powerful microcontroller to drive

their arty robotic projects. In winter

2005, Banzi was discussing the problem

with David Cuartielles, a Spanish micro-

chip engineer who was a visiting re-

searcher at the school. The two decided

to design their own board and enlisted

one of Banzi’s students—David Mellis—to

CAN OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE DO THE

SAME THING?

“ If you publish all your files, in one sense, you’re

inviting the competition to come and kill you,”


Team Arduino

PHOTO: JAMES DAY

17

Team Arduino

Gianluca Martino

write the programming language for it. In

two days, Mellis banged out the code;

three days more and the board was com-

plete. They called it the Arduino, after

a nearby pub, and it was an instant hit

with the students. Almost anyone, even if

they didn’t know anything about computer

programming, could use an Arduino to do

something cool, like respond to sensors,

make lights blink, or control motors.

Then Banzi, Cuartielles, and Mellis put

the schematics online and spent 3,000

euros to make the first batch of boards.

“We did 200 copies, and my school bought

50,” Banzi says. “We had no idea how we’d

sell the other 150. We didn’t think we

would.” But word spread to hobbyists

worldwide, and a few months later there

were orders for hundreds more Arduinos.

Turns out there was a market for this thing.

So the Arduino inventors decided to

start a business, but with a twist: The

designs would stay open source. Because

copyright law—which governs open source

software—doesn’t apply to hardware, they

David Cuartielles

Massimo Banzi

Build it. Share it. Profit.Do it Yourself();

18

Arduino gadgets:

PHOTO: JAMES DAY

decided to use a Creative Commons license

called Attribution-Share Alike. It

governs the “reference designs” for the

Arduino board, the files you’d send to a

fabrication plant to have the boards made.

Under the Creative Commons license,

anyone is allowed to produce copies of

the board, to redesign it, or even to

sell boards that copy the design. You

don’t need to pay a license fee to the

Arduino team or even ask permission.

However, if you republish the reference

design, you have to credit the original

Arduino group. And if you tweak or

change the board, your new design must

use the same or a similar Creative

Commons license to ensure that new

versions of the Arduino board will be

equally free and open.

The only piece of intellectual property

the team reserved was the name Arduino,

which it trademarked. If anyone wants

to sell boards using that name, they

have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This,

Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make

sure their brand name isn’t hurt by

low-quality copies.

Members of the team had slightly dif-

ferent motives for opening the design of

their device. Cuartielles—who sports a

mass of wiry, curly hair and a Che

Guevara beard—describes himself as a

left-leaning academic who’s less interested

in making money than in inspiring

creativity and having his invention

used widely. If other people make copies

of it, all the better; it will gain more

renown. (“When I spoke in Taiwan re-

cently, I told them, ‘Please copy this!’”

Cuartielles says with a grin.) Banzi, by

contrast, is more of a canny businessman;

he has mostly retired from teaching and

runs a high tech design firm. But he

suspected that if Arduino were open, it

would inspire more interest and more free

publicity than a piece of proprietary,

closed hardware. What’s more, excited

geeks would hack it and—like Linux fans—

contact the Arduino team to offer

improvements. They would capitalize on

this free work, and every generation of

the board would get better.


}

}

Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson already has, designing two

Arduino-based autopilots for unmanned model aircraft: ArduPilot

and BlimpDuino (you can find them at diydrones.com). Here's his

formula for getting your creation out and into the world.

Want to join the World of arduino Developers?( ) {

19

Download the Arduino schematic

and circuit board files from

arduino .cc. Use the free version

of CadSoft Eagle (from cadsoft.de)

to modify them for your particu-

lar creation.

If you want to produce and sell

the product yourself, use a

manufacturing service like

Screaming Circuits to assemble

the boards on robotic pick-and-

place soldering machines.

Upload your files to a board

fabricator like BatchPCB. Your

boards will be manufactured in

Chinese robotic-electronics

factories and sent to your house.

Typical cost is $10 each.

Alternately, an open source hard-

ware specialist like SparkFun or

Adafruit can make and sell the

product for you. They’ll add a

profit margin and pay you a

license fee.

Order bulk electronic parts from

digikey .com and solder the

components onto the board to

make a prototype. Test the board

and your code. You’re ready to

distribute your gizmo to the

Publish your revised schematics

and circuit board files so that

others can modify them. The

cycle begins again.

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Arduino DevelopersDo it Yourself();

Open Source Creativity( ) {

Mitch is a technological Renaissance

man; he’s a hacker, author, instructor

and the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a device

that allows one to turn off any television

with a click of a special remote.

He and co-founder Jacob Appelbaum headed

to the Chaos Communication Camp near

Berlin, Germany in 2007. CCC is a creative

gathering that occurs every four years

and was founded by the Chaos Computer

Club. This German hackerspace that has

been instrumental in developing the new

wave of hackerspaces.

Hackerspaces started in the U.S. in like

the late 1980’s, early 1990’s,” says

Altman. “There were a handful of them.

There were different than the way they

are now. Back then, it was very small

groups of people who were incredibly

talented, almost always with software.

And they were not very open to other

people. They got together and did what

they loved, which is software and just

kept it amongst themselves... Occasionally

someone would come along who was doing

something just so cool they would let

them in. But… a lot of people thought it

was a bit elitist… They did a lot of

great work and a lot of what we take for

granted today with the internet is a

result of these people.”

By the ‘90's, a bunch of German hackers

called collectively the Chaos Computer

Club, they caught wind of what was

going on there. Of course, there were

ties from Europe to North America. And

they started doing hackerspaces in a

uniquely German way. And these people

have a lot of anarchist background, so

they were doing it with less… rules,

less control, less… leaders —no leaders.

And so they started having hackerspaces

that were more open, and then sharing

the model so that hackerspaces, little

ones, would open up

all over Germany in not only big towns,

but smaller towns as well. And that

BY JENNY OH

01.26.11

20

“ i hadn’t heard of hackerspaces prior to producing

this story about noisebridge, a hackerspace locat-

ed in san francisco’s mission district.”


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06 Change the World

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“ they caught wind of what

was going on here.”

went on for awhile, and there were

maybe 50 hackerspaces or so in the world

by 2007…Of course, people had been

hearing about Chaos Camp and hacker-

spaces and hacker conferences, which

were getting more and more popular. At

the same time, the do-it-yourself

movement is taking off with the help of

Make Magazine, and Maker Faires, which

are becoming huge at this point.” Upon

their return, Mitch and Jake were

inspired to start their own hacker-

space, along with several colleagues who

founded HacDC, The Hacktory (the found-

er has moved on to create Hive76) and

NYC Resistor.

Me and Jake told everyone we knew that we

were gonna start a hackerspace. If you

wanted to be a part of it, let’s do it.

And we put the word out in email lists;

there are a lot of geek email lists that

have existed in San Francisco for a long

time, and we created our own email

list. Really quickly, within a couple of

weeks, we had over 15 people. And within

like 3 or 4 weeks, we were meeting

every Tuesday in cafés around town.

21

Hackerspaces

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The project works on how to make precious

new information easily available to anyone

who wants it. Education professor and

project director John Willinsky has been

working on the project since 1998. He

began with the premise that research should

be made more widely available. Since then,

the project has taken a more technological

direction.

It revolves around free, downloadable

software that provides scholars with the

means to launch new or existing journals

and the option to make those journals free

and publicly available. With this “open-

source” option, the project aims to have

many scholars join it in its mission to

improve the quality of public research

not only in the U.S., but also all over

the world.

Freeing Knowledge( ) {

The project involves mainly software

developers, researchers and librarians,

who together created open journals and

conference systems and are currently

working on an open monograph press. The

journals system provides a publishing

platform that allows scholars not only

to make their hard-earned information

widely available, but also to easily

manage the journals, edit and peer-review

submissions and carry out the overall

publishing process.

The scholars who use the software to publish

their journals do not have to go through

commercial publishers. This means the

project does not publish the journals

itself. Rather, it facilitates the

publication process so scholars can do

so easily and efficiently.

More than 7,500 titles in 35 languages are

using the software, half in developing

countries. The journals address a wide range

of topics, from arts and poetry to medicine,

and can be published by anyone from a high

school student to a university professor.

BY KELSEY GEISER

01.26.11

22

“ we are trying to help developing countries

use their own language to contribute from

their own perspective but still with scholarly

standards,”


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One of the journals is printed in

Kiswahili, making it the program’s first

journal in an African language.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a researcher and

systems developer in the project, has

spent time researching and running

workshops across Latin America to

discover how best to help editors in the

region publish research journals.

“I see the open-access movement and the

work that we do as aimed at helping

journals in these regions that are not

currently valued by the system achieve

visibility, recognition and prestige,”

Alperin said.

He and others working toward this goal

around the world have found it difficult

to encourage people to change how they

publish their work. Alperin has been

working to reverse this aversion to

open forums for research by “using

technology to shift the landscape of

what is possible.”

Jamie O’Keeffe, a fellow researcher in

the open-access movement, is making

similar strides in the medical field.

She is working on a journal researching

the impact of open journal resources by

looking at health care providers.

O’Keefe’s research is “an exploratory

study to investigate the ‘current’ state

of access,” she said in an e-mail to The

Daily. She found through interviews

with health care providers that critical

decisions physicians needed to make

depended on their access to particular

research articles.

The project’s open conference systems

allow users to easily manage large

meetings. It helps them to create webpages,

to schedule, to review submissions, to

create registries and to organize the

small but important details of

conference planning.

The program is also working on an open

monograph press, which will allow for

free access to monographs, edited volumes

and scholarly editions, many of which

are especially difficult for developing

countries to access.

The project plans on expanding its mission,

especially in the field of student

journals and in further supporting the

active participation of developing

countries in the global network.

The project has taken technological

leaps towards making journals easily

available. However, its long-term goal

is to make all scholarly information

openly accessible.

“About 20 percent of research is now

freely available, and we are not going

to stop until it is 99.9 percent,”

Willinsky said.

23

“ we can make knowledge

available online more

easily, more widely and

more cheaply,”{ }

Open Source EverywhereCommunity();

}

There seems to be a contingent out there that analyzes each of the globe's

various political conflicts and attempts to figure out, through plenty of

speculation and the occasional Wikipedia look-ups of far-flung sovereignties,

which uprising will mark the first true "social media revolution."

This sort of rhetoric has been going on

for nearly two years when an anti-government

uprising in Iran swelled up through

Twitter and, as a result of traditional

media crackdowns, became the primary

medium in which much of the world knew

about what was going on in the Islamic

nation. The activists' efforts ultimately

had far less impact on the government

than many of the breathless Twitter

observers expected, and for too many of

them it's now known as the movement in

which everyone tinted their Twitter

profile photos with green as a sign of

solidarity (which now seems awfully

passive). This, alas, wasn't "the social

media revolution." And so the pundits

moved on.

So let's look at the basic numbers. Facebook

has more than 600 million users around

the world, an inarguable lock on the

mainstream in much of the world and

significant penetration even in the

countries where it doesn't have as much

reach. Twitter is about one-third its

size, though its most active users tend

to be more in the vein of newshounds

and culture fans than FarmVille players

and vacation photo swappers--which may be

the reason why the smaller Twitter is

A dictator toppled by Twitter or ousted

through the efforts of a Facebook group?

It's an enticing idea, particularly for

those who are in the business of social

media and have a personal stake of sorts

in tallying each instance of social

media's global value making headlines.

Twitter punditry this week has been

peppered with speculation about whether

upheaval in Tunisia or the subsequent

anti-government protests in Egypt might

amount to the "first" true revolution

spawned by social media. But this just

isn't the right way to measure things:

the occurrence of a "social media revolution,"

at this point, should be neither

noteworthy nor remarkable. If a dictator

is overthrown or a government ousted,

it would be notable if Facebook or

Twitter weren't used.

That's because social media is a part

of the world we live in and has become

such a crucial form of communication

that it will factor into any political

movement nearly anywhere in the world.

In other words, the use of Twitter,

Facebook, or YouTube should not be what's

worth talking about. At this point, it

takes away from the substance of the

revolution (or lack thereof) itself.

BY CAROLINE MCCARTHY01.26.114:00 AM PST

There’s no such thing( ) {


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as important, if not more so, than Facebook

in political activism. Both social media

services are actively looking to expand

their reach in developing countries,

particularly Facebook, which has launched

mobile sites and applications geared to

lower-end cell phones and slower connections.

The truth is that smaller elements of

"social media revolution" have been all

around us already for over half a decade—

even in our own, comparatively humdrum

political system in which "revolution"

means a switch in the partisan balance

of a governing body accompanied by plenty

of red-and-blue news-ticker graphics on

cable networks. George Allen, a Republican

senator from Virginia, was in a tight

race for re-election in 2006 until a

video from a campaign rally surfaced on

YouTube in which he called one of his

opponent's campaign staff volunteers by

a bizarre epithet that turned out to be a

racial slur of sorts. The video went

viral, Allen lost, and his "macaca moment"

has been widely highlighted as the source

of his downfall--in spite of the presence

of countless strategists, publicists, and

glossy campaign ads, social media's power

prevailed.

Yes, social media can lead to the

improbable rise of leaders who otherwise

might never have had a shot. Without

Meetup and the readership of liberal

blogs, former Vermont governor Howard

Dean might never have had a shot at the

Democratic presidential nomination

(which, of course, he lost). In 2008,

Barack Obama's campaign team's digital

savviness was a crucial component in

the candidate's popularity among young

voters who heavily favored him at the

polls. Two years after Obama's inauguration,

these things should no longer surprise

us —nor should we be surprised that,

yes, social media is a vital instrument

in political change all over the world.

as ‘social media revolution'

Open Source EverywhereCommunity(); 25

}

Open Source Facebook Contender Releases Code to Public( ) {

26

DIASPORA, an open source challenger to

Facebook, hit its first milestone

Wednesday, releasing code for fellow

hackers to test drive and improve.

The code is not ready for general use,

and you can’t go to Diaspora.com to use

it. Instead, those with programming

skills can install it on their servers,

test the code, and work on it — adding

features via a shared code-hosting

service called Github, where the changes

can be pulled into the main code base.

Diaspora warned that there are known

security issues with the code, making it

clear this was a release for developers,

not early adopters. The code is based on

Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.

As its name suggests, Diaspora isn’t aiming

to turn Diaspora.com into a replacement

for Facebook.com, but instead is seeking

to create software that allows people

to have more control over their social

network, without having a single entity

holding all the data and making the rules.

The idea is to disperse social networking,

so that it works more like e-mail, where

users can sign-up for an account with

any number of providers or buy their

own domain name or use a hosted service

or even run their own e-mail server — but

all can still interact, regardless of how

or where their e-mail service is. Dias-

pora isn’t the only effort at creating

so-called federated social networking —

there’s a number of other active open

source projects, including the Appleseed

and OneSocialWeb.

Diaspora was founded earlier this year by

four New York University students as a

way to create a social network that put

users in control of their data. The four

tapped into this spring’s anti-Facebook

zeitgeist to collect $200,000 in online

donations, even one from Facebook founder

Mark Zuckerberg.

The founders moved to Silicon Valley this

summer and have remained largely silent,

except for very occasional blog updates.

On Wednesday, Diaspora made good on its

August promise to release its source code

in mid-September. On the Hacker News

message board, fellow start-up engineers

were generally pleased with the code,

which focused more on user interface issues

than packing in as many features as possible.

BY RYAN SINGEL

11.16.10

6:27 PM


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The idea is to disperse social

networking, so that it works

more like e-mail

27

Diaspora says it intends to keep devel-

oping the product and that an “alpha”

release aimed at users, not just devel-

opers, is scheduled for October.

Screenshot: The Diaspora Project’s

activity stream as implemented in its

developer release.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan

Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

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Documents

Open Sourced