Thought(s) For The Day 10-7-08

I presented at the SPARK conference today at Arizona State University and the keynote speaker was Scott McNealy from Sun. He said many interesting things regarding his views on sharing (for it), open source (very much for it), and the financial bailout by the U.S. Government (very, very much against it). He told the students not to pay so much attention to the “mission” of companies, but their cause (a "higher order bit"). He said Sun’s cause was to "Eliminate the digital divide without harming the planet." (Sun’s thin client Sun Ray terminals are inexpensive and use only 4 watts.)

He also spent a decent amount of time plugging Curriki, which I thought was interesting given that this was a gathering of mostly IT folks (the conference was designed to bring together folks from the IT industry and students in ASU’s various IT and Business programs).

At one point, when he was talking about open source and the importance of transparency, he said:

If the trojan horse had been made of glass, do you think they’d have rolled it through the gate?

Now, at that point he was specifically talking about transparency and the security advantages of open source software, but I thought it related very nicely to all the conversations we’ve had about transparency in the education space.

Later he talked about how many foreign governments are going open source for both security and cost reasons and that the U.S. is lagging behind in this area. Many of the business and academic leaders of Arizona were in the room and he challenged them to “open Arizona” as a way to get more people "on the network" and involved in 21st century learning and working. That got me thinking again about the use of proprietary software in my own school district and wondering how much longer we can continue to be "closed." No answers to that question, just thinking.

Wikipedia Knew VP Picks Before You

The Washington Post has an interesting story about predicting who Senator Obama and Senator McCain would pick as their running mates:

In the days leading up to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate announcement, political junkies glued to broadcasts and blogs for clues of McCain's veep choice might have done better to keep a sharp eye on each candidate's Wikipedia entry.

It turns out that some folks were watching the Wikipedia entries for clues to both picks, and both Biden's and Palin's entries saw the most substantive action in the days before the picks were announced. The story doesn't say whether this is due to insiders updating the entries to get them "accurate" before the announcement ("some of the same wiki users [that were making changes to Palin's page] appeared to be making changes to McCain's page"), or whether this is another Wisdom of Crowds situation, but I suspect it's a little of each.

I also find it interesting that there's a company, called Cyveillance, that has analysts monitoring sites like Wikipedia.

Cyveillance normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness.

Now that's an interesting phrase, "seeking open source information," that I'm going to have to ponder for a while.

"Open Up the World of Learning to Everyone Who Wants to Learn"

From the New York Times:

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an “opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard’s provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said.

Interesting addition to The Cult of the Amateur arguments. At least one professor isn't buying some of those arguments:

Professor Shieber also doubts that free distribution would undermine the journal industry. "We don’t know if that would happen,” he said. “There is little evidence to support that it would." Nearly all scholarly articles on physics have been freely available on the Internet for more than a decade, he added, and physics journals continue to thrive.