Card game

Hi folks.

Alpha release of the Copyright/Commons card game is up
http://lucychili.net/sfd/alpha.shtml
Rules will need some stress testing.
Game is licensed GPL.
Use it mod it go for it.
If you distribute it please put yours up online so people can share that too.

I have uploaded the current deck in pdf and open document format.
These can be printed directly from those files. I have one deck so far so print two decks on different colour paper so you can see which person's card is which. If you dont have colour paper but do have a colour printer you can
if you print one set in colour and the other in grey scale then you sneakily get two sets that look different.

The old cards are still there as PNG's directly into the webpage.
You can print the webpage out to get the old set but I usually printed them at 50% size so you fit more to a page.

I have tried to make the framework fairly standard so that people can make custom decks and the game will still play correctly. Comments welcome especially from folks who have had a go.

Cheers

Janet

A matrix for developing a branding system for information and technology

A citizens response to DMCA, Critique welcome.

Hullo folks

I am working on a response to DMCA as a citizen/consumer/adapter.

ie The publishers have communicated what they want to sell, even down to adjusting law to accommodate their preferred mode of selling information and technology, but now there is an opportunity for people who use and adapt information and technology to respond.

We need to communicate what we want to buy, use, adapt, improve, share and to be able to identify those kinds of things on the shelves so we can vote with our pennies.

I posted a while back about an idea for colours of freedom a branding campaign for consumers.
With the need to have things work beyond colour and in ascii and metadata the colours became states in the following table. The table is based on Unix RWX states.
The states could be ouput as a colours or labels, logos or used to find specific files or used to exclude some license types from a search because they would not suit the purpose of the person searching.

This is a supposed to be a babelfish kind of thing for mapping all licenses according to their functional impact from a citizen/consumer/user/adapter perspective. There would need to be additional information about the specifics of the license being profiled, but this is a first step towards some responsibility for making the rights associated with a product evident at point of sale.

http://lucychili.net/au/

Community Computer Recycle' Scheme

Great blog about education at Grant High School
http://ccrscheme.blogspot.com/

Rationale

* There is a growing body of students who want to develop computer technician skills but do not learn well from theory.
* Their learning needs to be practical based.
* This used to be the domain of the 'geek'.
* Useful for students to learn to do things for others.
* Useful for students to feel that they have developed skills that are useful to others

Great work folks =) Cheers to Wara.

Scotland: Open Schools Alliance

Now is the time to act

John Pugh, MP for Southport, has put down Early Day Motion 179 in parliament:

Software in Schools

"That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market."

This is a real opportunity for us to make our voices heard. Now is the time to fax, email, write, phone or visit our MPs and ask them to sign this EDM and show the DfES and Becta that they can no longer continue to support a discredited model of software procurement without being taken to task. http://www.openschoolsalliance.org/

SA: Hansard of FOSS speech by The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

\IND\Speech:nn:The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: I would like to speak today about free and open source software, something that was once dear to the heart of the Hon. Ian Gilfillan. I would like to acknowledge the presence in the gallery this afternoon of Mr Paul Schultz, who is a key supporter of—

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Hon. J.S.L. Dawkins): Members should not refer to people in the gallery.

The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: Thank you, Mr Acting President. Last week it was reported that the French parlia­ment was dumping Microsoft products in place of open source soft­ware. The move came after successful transmis­sion by their Ministry of Agriculture and Police. Starting in June next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows; Mozilla's Firefox web browser in place of Internet Explorer; and Open Office—a free open source alternative to Microsoft's Office software. Documents will be saved in a non-proprietary open document format. As an aside, I note that on 31 March 2006 the National Archives of Australia also settled on the open document format to ensure long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers.

A detailed study concluded that the move will result in substantial savings, despite the associated migration and training costs. Free and open source software is being produced as I speak by developers all over the world and, indeed, many of them are operating in South Australia. The majority of these developers are volunteers, donating their time and energy to improve and give away free software. And it is free in every sense of the word—free from any licensing costs, but also free in the sense that it can be used, copied, studied, modified, improved and redistributed with little or no restriction. With developers all over the world freely and constantly improving the software, it is little wonder that many open source solutions are now outpacing Microsoft solutions.

I want to focus primarily on the Linux Open Source Operating System—a free competitor to Microsoft Windows. There are various `flavours', if I can put it that way, of Linux, including Red Hat, Novell Suse, Mandriva, amongst others. One of the most popular at the current time is called Ubuntu, which is Linux as well. Ubuntu in the African Zulu and Xhosa languages loosely means `humanity towards others'. First released in 2004, this software collection is backed by Canonical, a non-profit company founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark Shuttleworth made his fortune as a software developer in the dot com era, with a company which was built on free and open software, supplying digital encryption services internationally, primarily to banks. Mr Shuttleworth (who was also the second space tourist, in fact) decided to contribute back to the free and open source software community and Ubuntu was born.

Ubuntu distribution has topped the ranks of Linux distribution down loaded from the internet since its release and is developed by a worldwide community specifically with the ordinary computer user in mind. Indeed, I note that the business card of Mr Paul Schultz says `Linux for human beings'. On behalf of the South Australian Ubuntu users group, I suggest two concepts to promote free and open source software as a way forward. First, that we should open the IT funding criteria. Funding for IT in schools is often focused on acquiring and maintaining software licences. The use of free and open source software allows the spending to be refocussed on education and training.

I note that it has been reported that Indiana is moving 22 000 of its students from Windows to Linux platforms. Secondly, South Australian schools and libraries need somewhere to try out Open Source software. A publicly accessible facility is required where businesses and community groups can test these technologies to learn about whether they are suitable for their purposes. Western Australia, with the Open Source WA Demonstration Centre, and Victoria have both undertaken projects to boot strap their free software sector. It will be great to see something like this in South Australia. I encourage members to try the CDs I have distributed to all their offices today and encourage a further uptake of Open Source software for South Australia, as it represents a real alternative to very expensive systems that Microsoft produces.

Heads and hands

Conversations with Kat Jungnickel at StudioIncite MakingWifi often include words like maker and fingertip knowledge, the ability to understand something in a physical applied way, whether that is about making a mashup bicycle or understanding how riding something taller than a 4WD changes your cycling, balance, journey choices.

Kat is interested in innovation in a connected way, not just head to hands, but person to person, person to space, wireless community group or bike group to their neighbourhood, city, place and community. Kat is visiting with Air Stream wireless group in Adelaide to explore and document these ideas.

Through this bizarre AUDMCA journey I've been thinking about similar ideas. Many of the policies and proposals being considered and implemented by our government are trending towards a separation of thinking and dialogue from rote performance of specified responses to information and technology.

A proposal for brokering IT to a sector of AU market which structurally separated the 'head' policy organisation from the 'hands' local IT customers and providers rang alarm bells for me earlier this year. Particularly as the respondents to the survey indicated that they trusted their peers and wanted better dialogue beyond a formal brokering structure separating suppliers from consumers. I see some of the ethics in IT proposals heading in similar directions, requiring people to respond in predictable ways to ethics challenges in order to minimise insurance risk by producing predictable outcomes to specified inputs.

Top down broadcast model businesses have specified goals for the structured processes and ideas for managing the hands eyes and minds which interface with their operations. People who access information are seen as consumers, any participation in technology or information which is not resulting in value for their business is seen as a threat or a theft. This includes independent innovation or socially useful exchange and adaption of information. Our government has blindly aligned itself with these companies to implement the DMCA compromising our medical access to medicine and promoting on the spot fines for people accessing information.

Until there are active political alternatives able to generate real change in these policies and processes, it will be people like the geeks of law and the doctors without borders, teachers, librarians who will become the caretakers of our culture and development into the future. All the hybrid communities of people who use their knowledge of applied information and technology in community contexts and who are prepared to engineer their own legal structures and responses to serve community and environmental realities.

I for one welcome our new distributed peers and am trying to keep learning more about both law and tech so that I can participate more effectively too. Beats the heck out of complaining every time the political/economic franchise mobs run one of those FTA DMCA gui template wizard things with specified exemptions for compulsory law.

Its perhaps a new and uncomfortable responsibility to be developing the context of our work, but I think its a better long term sustainable model. I think it is a part of real freedom to have real responsibility. The brokered alternative reduces the number of participants allowed to think or generate new approaches with each iteration and is not grounded in social and environmental values. I believe it is breaking as a result and this is why there is so much stress/flux and disengagement in the standard political model.

Meanwhile outside of these formal structures and prescribed modes of participation there are communities of people discussing how they create value and interact directly with people who want their work. People negotiate frankly and directly about GPL and finding a way to create technologies which enable people to interact freely, now and in the future. Geeks tackle the granular and obfuscated path through licenses, trademarks and law looking for the best approaches to making technology and information a safe substrate for innovation, dialogue, collaboration, learning, collaboration.

So heres a thanks to all the people working with their heads and hands to make good policy, community, legal and social space and dialogue for innovation and technology. Freedom is important. I think shouldering responsibility for the legal frameworks around the technologies we use is part of what makes FOSS different. Licenses developed openly in partnership with the communities who participate in the technologies is inspiring.

For me it is a part of the idea that the heads making policy need to have fingertip knowledge of world they are crafting, and that the hands making the technologies are best able to innovate safely, wisely, and frankly when they are a party to these processes.

CATO: Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The DMCA needlessly inconveniences paying customers who want the freedom to play their legally purchased content on the devices of their choice. It locks out inventors who want to create cutting-edge media devices that allow consumers to use their existing music and movie collections in new ways. Fighting piracy is important, but we need to choose anti-piracy policies that are effective and don’t do excessive collateral damage. Judged from this perspective, the DMCA has been a failure.

by Timothy B. Lee http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6025