www.nickhodge.com

Flickr Group for all images.

del.icio.us search for all blog posts from Jimmy’s Trip

The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of Jimmy Wales in Mel­bourne on the 27^th April 2007. This is not a ver­batim tran­script. This post is purely a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion, not the opin­ion of the author.

This blog post, and Flickr images are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

This work is licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Aus­tralia License.

With Mark Pesce

Mark intros Jimmy again. Been a long day.

Cas­ual con­ver­sa­tion. Peer pro­duc­tions, peer questions.

Mark will ask 2 ques­tions, then alternate.

Q: Get­ting over the hump of ini­tial people

JW: 5–10 people make a wiki com­mit­ted to com­ing in and check­ing up. Fee for entry is 5 com­mit­ted people. eg: swahili lan­guage wiki­pe­dia; Sanjo from Tan­zania. star­ted on it. Wrote first 75 art­icles. Blogged+emailed. slowly built a com­munity. Taken off. Past 1000 art­icle threshold. One per­son pas­sion­ate. Doing the social stuff.

Suc­cess­ful wiki greater than the con­tent, its all the social phe­nomenon that’s important.

Its lead­er­ship, and per­sist­ence. Lead­er­ship: phrase : ser­vant lead­er­ship, idea, lead the com­munity not by gen­eral Command+control; fol­low­ing the com­munity. Role in coach­ing, guiding.

Another example, wikia: furry. About sub­cul­ture of furry about people who like to dress like anim­als. More of them than you can ima­gine. Furry wiki star­ted quickly, within first first month (green­reaper). First month 100 editor. 30–40 reg­u­lars. 5–10 admins, Whole com­munity in the world. (editor: now I’m scared). Needed a place to make it hap­pen. (editor: more evan­gel­ism for wikia)

Thank you for not email around word doc­u­ments, do it in a wiki.

Q: This trip, in South Africa and India. First world and third world coun­try schools. Wiki­pe­dia and Edu­ca­tion> what is it becom­ing in the 21^st Century

JW: is a tra­di­tion­al­ist in the man­ner of school­ing. Kids using com­puters, tech­no­logy, peer learn­ing: extremely valu­able: teacher-student rela­tion­ship: 1:1 There is some­thing spe­cial: tech­no­logy NOT com­pet­ing with teach­ers. Free up time for teach­ers. Stand­ing in front of a classroom doing your own video: you can be replaced.

In many uni­ver­sit­ies: huge 300 people lec­ture ses­sions: not valu­able; get most enter­tain­ing pro­fessor: teacher value is 1:1 real time dia­gnostic assess­ment. Sit down with an indi­vidual, not mass classroom. Routine learn­ing done in other ways.

Daugh­ter embar­rassed him Cambodia/Kampuchea 6 years old. Spin­ning the world around. Home school­ing. Indi­vidu­al­ized instruc­tion. (editor: hur­ump from audi­ence)

Q: Andrew Wilson: Man­aging Fire in Vic Gov’t Use of tech­no­logy in a multiple-stakeholder world.

JW: remove the tight hier­archy; wiki is more than just the soft­ware; its the social side. Removal of vot­ing for edit­or­ial decisions. Get­ting people from diverse back­grounds and choices, listen­ing to all people, 70/30 vot­ing ignores 100% of the 30%‘s input. That’s not good.

Must be broad com­munity support.

JW: Watch the old movie, 12 angry men, premise: murder trial. Set in Jury room. Begin­ning from nearly all con­vict; then pick­ing apart each of the indi­vidual argu­ments. By the end of the film, vote to acquit.

When a wiki is work­ing well, and healthy, process/group : one per­son can change the world. Wiki a great tool for struc­tur­ing how the argu­ment is placed. For­ums = flame war, wiki is much more col­lab­or­at­ive. Con­sensus doc­u­ment needs to sur­vive: need to find some­thing that all agree on.

Q: Mark, rebuilt copy­right regime rebuilt from scratch

US, copy­right law, by default everything you write is under copy­right. Now essen­tially uni­ver­sal. Done just before the inter­net became “big”. Now you have to do more stuff to make some­thing into the pub­lic domain.

Think of the lots of stuff that they don’t care about copy­right; it is by default. The hampers our abil­ity to share. Can be done cas­u­ally with a statement.

JW: let’s have regime where there is no default copyright.

Some people have moral rights/economic rights to retain copyright.

How long should it last? Copy­right has exten­ded to absurd lengths. Not driven my organsi­ation, done by movie industry. Long life IP assets. JW’s view is “it doesn’t care”. So, Dis­ney = 200 years that’s fine; col­lat­eral dam­age in other spheres.

Now, its one size fits all. Recent AU rul­ing copy­right of a design of a boat was func­tional not artistic. Dif­fer­ent act for design pro­tec­tion (from news­pa­per art­icle). Good idea: mul­tiple options. Bene­fi­cial for soft­ware: life+90 years?? reas­on­able. Soft­ware author? Life of the com­puter. Eco­nomic life of soft­ware less than 90 years; Old ver­sion of Excel into the free soft­ware move­ment to make it better.

After a short of period of time, re-register and small fee — lets many things fall into pub­lic domain by default. Many pieces that are eco­nom­ic­ally feas­ible; eg: put into wiki world.

Cur­rent pro­cess is ardu­ous, track­ing down the rights.

JW: Pat­ents: Soft­ware pat­ents are a bad idea. No opin­ion of drug industry. In soft­ware industry, pat­ents are defens­ive rather than offens­ive. Pat­ents on the web restric­ted to 6 months. (editor: JW’s open­ing bid on time, that’s all) Pat­ents are a real threat to wiki­pe­dia vs. copy­right. With pat­ents, viol­a­tion: not sure if you are viol­at­ing it (sub­mar­ine pat­ent). Inter­est­ing polit­ical issue

Q: APRA: Opin­ion. 3–4 Tb of server on songs. From teen­agers. Is it a mute point in regards to copy­right as the younger generation.

What is fair use? JW has no opin­ion on how music per­formers are paid, distributed.

JW buys from iTunes. Tech­no­logy is going to make shar­ing easy; “cas­sette tapes and video” is going to kill com­pan­ies. Record and timeshift, has been fought against by con­tent cre­ation industry.

DRM is a stu­pid idea, cf: Steve Jobs, Pub­lish­ing Com­pany. Get­ting in the way of ease of use for users.

Q: Mark; every­one will be fam­ous for 15Mb. Bio-page, has some­thing he doesn’t want. JW dinged for edit­ing own page. We can edit our own page, com­munity will fix. Too much truth?

JW: bio­graph­ies of liv­ing people is the toughest ques­tion. cf; Queen Vic­toria, she’s dead so she doesn’t care about her wiki­pe­dia entry.

So, how do we deal with bio­graph­ies of liv­ing people? Thought­ful man­ner, sens­it­iv­ity. Talk page vs. yell at you.

Not every­one is about white­wash­ing page. Solu­tion is to become a more open, pub­lic per­son about your life. Fam­ous people, cer­tain things are known — nar­rat­ives grow around these stor­ies, but only a part of the real story.

Jimmy Wales want to sail around the world. He has an interest in it. Not on his wikipedia.

Wiki­pe­dia is power­ful of google.

Oth­ers are so “over” the inter­net: they don’t care. More and more art­icles, less and less fam­ous people.

Dis­cus­sion now is what level of not­ab­il­ity for wiki­pe­dia entry.

There are bio­graphy guidelines. danah boyd huge impact on her field. cf. being not­able for being on Foxnews vs. aca­demic work. Watch­ing the debate on see­ing if you should be deleted.

Worse than find­ing your are unim­port­ant; but also talk about dele­tion. Mech­an­ism for blank­ing from external view.

Cat­egor­ies are prob­lem­atic. Tag there or not. Nuance in text, can­not in cat­egory. Crim­in­als for instance. Who should be there or not? Politi­cian caught driv­ing DUI. Some will cat­egor­ise as crim­inal. Its bin­ary on/off. Tricky. Cat­egor­ies are provocative.

Q: Mark, pleas­ure to spend a week with JW. JW, Brian Balendorf, Tim Berners-Lee: low ego people. Ego beat out of you?

JW: early incid­ent in wiki­pe­dia in Span­ish; dis­pute over impres­sion JW was going to put advert­ising in Wiki­pe­dia. Oppon­ents were trick­ing people. JW overly com­bat­ive. Viol­ated the first rule of wiki­pe­dia, assume good faith. Need to explain yourself.

Don’t have an argu­ment with someone for the point of the argu­ment, but in a different

Brian: intro­duced to Richard Bran­son as “the per­son who freed the inter­net from Microsoft”, JW says its true.

In open source world, win vs. right.

Can­not be a boss and be a jerk. Com­pan­ies won’t sur­vive. With high level people, they can be jerks, and the employ­ees will sur­vive. With volun­teers its dif­fer­ent; you have to be as nice as possible.