Extra Extra: Users Finding New Things is Different than Newspeople Writing News

The Project for Excellence in Journalismpublished results a few weeks back from a week long study of Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo! News. (“The Latest News Headlines: Your Vote Counts“).

The study asked “How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people,” and found that:

If a new crop of user-news sites – and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites – are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources

As the project report goes on to explain, there was a signficant difference betweem what was considered important in the “mainstream press” and the “news agenda” of the user-sites. Additionally, they note that the sources used are different – “Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come from either blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.”

They conclude:

In short, the user-news agenda, at least in this week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues. But the agenda they set is nonetheless quite different.

There are, I think, a number of problems with these conclusions.

Read more…

Gartner Open Source Summit Day 3

The third and final day of the Gartner Open Source Summit included Tony Wasserman talking about Best Practices for Open Source Evaluation and Adoption.

Wasserman works with Carnegie Mellon West, and is the Executive Director of the Center for Open Source Investigation.

He covered a lot of the basics of what organizations need to keep in mind as they evaluate open source projects, and some resources (the Business Readiness Rating, for example) they can use to support those adoption plans.

His basic principles for evaluating software:

• Does the software do what I need it to do?
• Are there good sources of documentation and support?
• Is the software being maintained and updated?
• What do others think about the quality and performance of the software?

Good advice for open and closed source alike. People often get caught up in the details and intricacies of licensing options and miss the basics. Not that you don’t need to think about licensing, but you can’t let a focus on the fact that you’re looking at open source software distract you from the core questions you already know how to evaluate.

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Another panel I saw was “Commercial Open Source: Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning?” by Brian Prentice.

He put the recent controversies this summer of SugarCRM’s attribution license and the CPAL in the context of a longer term divide between competing interests within the open source world – pointing to VC’s funding commercial open source companies, who hope to control the costs of sales and marketing by using open source as a distribution model but feeling the need to hold back some intellectual property to create a sellable asset.

He described the challenges inherent in the “functionally delineated” model, where there is a community edition which is free and an enterprise edition which is not. Users and organizations adopting this style of commercial open source must be careful to recognize the details of what is and is not included in the solution they’ve adopted. (Just as in a functionally delineated closed source model with different versions of a product each version must be clearly differentiated).

Alfresco, on the other hand, was signaled out as a counter-example, or at least another way of doing commercial open source, since the community and enterprise editions are functionally identical, with the difference being support and services. (Disclosure: Optaros is an Alfresco Platinum Partner).

I suppose you could say that what we’re seeing is a period of experimentation as companies which would otherwise have been traditional proprietary companies trying to learn from and benefit from the open source ecosystem. It’s neither the end of the beginning nor the beginning of the end, just another chapter in the ongoing saga.

Gartner Open Source Summit Keynote

Just a few quick impressions from some of the sessions at the first day of the 2007 Gartner Open Source Summit.

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

Read more…

Yochai Benkler at the Gartner Web Innovation / Open Source Summit

I spent the latter half of this week at the Gartner Web Innovation and Open Source Summits. (Officially two different conferences, but held over the same three days in the same location).

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Read more…

Wikipedia, Ogyu Sorai, and Academia

I’ve heard a number of different folks – both in personal conversations and at conferences – talk about issues citing Wikipedia in an academic context.

Generally this begins with a reference to some school or another (generally seems to be a History department, but I’ve heard multiple schools referenced) which has forbidden the citation of (or maybe even the consultation of) wikipedia entries in student essays. The argument they’re using this bit of data could be either:

1. You can’t cite wikipedia in an academic paper, and that is evidence of the fact that Wikipedia isn’t as good as real encyclopedias with editors and print publication houses behind them.
2. You can’t cite wikipedia in an academic paper, and that is evidence of just how behind the times the ivory tower academics are.

This month’s Communications of the ACM refreshingly adds a richer context to what I was beginning to suspect was some kind of urban legend. Neil Waters, of Middlebury College, wrote this month’s viewpoint column, titled: “Why You Can’t Cite Wikipedia in My Class.” (For now, at least, it appears to be free full text in html or pdf – not sure if that will always be true).

In it, he describes how the Middlebury College History Department came to forbid Wikipedia citations in student essays:

I made that effort [to perceive the positive side of Wikipedia] after an innocuous series of events briefly and improbably propelled me and the history department at Middlebury College into the national, even international, spotlight. While grading a set of final examinations from my “History of Early Japan” class, I noticed that a half-dozen students had provided incorrect information about two topics—the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638 and the Confucian thinker Ogyu Sorai—on which they were to write brief essays. Moreover, they used virtually identical language in doing so. A quick check on Google propelled me via popularity-driven algorithms to the Wikipedia entries on them, and there, quite plainly, was the erroneous information. To head off similar events in the future, I proposed a policy to the history department it promptly adopted: “(1) Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors. (2) Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source.”

The rest, as they say, is history. The Middlebury student newspaper ran a story on the new policy. That story was picked up online by The Burlington Free Press, a Vermont newspaper, which ran its own story. I was interviewed, first by Vermont radio and TV stations and newspapers, then by The New York Times, the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, and by radio and TV stations in Australia and throughout the U.S., culminating in a story on NBC Nightly News. Hundreds of other newspapers ran stories without interviews, based primarily on the Times article. I received dozens of phone calls, ranging from laudatory to actionably defamatory. A representative of the Wikimedia Foundation (www.wikipedia.org), the board that controls Wikipedia, stated that he agreed with the position taken by the Middlebury history department, noting that Wikipedia states in its guidelines that its contents are not suitable for academic citation, because Wikipedia is, like a print encyclopedia, a tertiary source. I repeated this information in all my subsequent interviews, but clearly the publication of the department’s policy had hit a nerve, and many news outlets implied, erroneously, that the department was at war with Wikipedia itself, rather than with the uses to which students were putting it.

The key context here is that Wikipedia was (and still is, I believe) disallowed in a specific context, not that Middlebury was trying to prevent its students from seeing that historical interpretations are debated and argued about.

As Waters notes:

If [the goal] is to make Wikipedia a truly authoritative source, suitable for citation, it cannot be done for any general tertiary source, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica. . . . If the goal is more modest—to make Wikipedia more reliable than it is—then it seems to me that any changes must come at the expense of its open-source nature. Some sort of accountability for editors, as well as for the originators of entries, would be a first step, and that, I think, means that editors must leave a record of their real names. A more rigorous fact-checking system might help, but are there enough volunteers to cover 1.6 million entries, or would checking be in effect reserved for popular entries?

In other words, Waters isn’t an ivory tower academic, refusing to cede authority over knowledge to the great unwashed, but a practical educator trying to help his students develop critical thinking skills. (Though I think he has missed out on notion that wikipedia’s governance is also evolving – it isn’t stuck in one model but constantly looking at the right balance of controls versus openness, and how changes on those levers affect the quality and quantity of entries on the site.)

There’s a place for detailed primary and secondary research, and a place for general tertiary sources – and learning that difference seems like a good thing for students and conference presenters to do.