Markup.io: Another Simple Service For Annotating Content

I was recently alerted to markup.io,  a new Web-based service for annotating public Web sites. In his tweet Pat Lockley observed that this provided “another bo.lt like tool for #ukoer #oer #ocw remixing“.

I installed the Chrome extension to use this service (a bookmarklet is available for other browsers) and annotated the home page for this blog. As can be seen the service creates a copy of the page on the markup.io service with annotations using simple drawings and text tools.

I recently mentioned the Bo.lt service and suggested that although there are obvious copyright concerns in allowing any public Web page to be copied and edited, such an easy-to-use service might be particularly useful in the context of open educational resources (OER) for which licences are available which permits such re-use. It should also be noted that additional annotations can also be added – although it does not appear to be possible to delete annotations, so there will be dangers about graffiti appearing (such as, for example the name of a famous footballer who took out a super-injunction appearing on a BBC news article).

It does strike me, though, that the direct editing of a page which Bo.lt provides does have risks, not least the dangers of  the ease of forging content which Bo.lt provides.  Although markup.io is also taking a copy of a page and hosting it one its own servers the annotation approach which the service provides seems to minimise risks of forgery.  Perhaps this is a useful approach for annotating Web-based OER resources?

What I Like and Don’t Like About IamResearcher.com

IamResearch.com

I was recently told about the Iamresearcher.com service, a repository of information about researchers and their research activities. “Not another one!” was one reaction I heard. But is there anything that can be learnt from this service, which has been developed by Mr Yang Yang, an MSc student at the University of Southampton? Les Carr, over on his Repository Man blog has been “Experimenting With Repository UI Design” and describes how he is “always on the lookout for engaging UI paradigms to inspire repository design“. Might this service provide any new UI design paradigms?

Things I Like

I have to admit that I was pleased with how easy it was to get started with the service. I signed up and asked the system to find papers associated with my email address. It found many of my papers, with much of the metadata being obtained from the University of Bath Opus repository. I them searched for other papers which weren’t included in the initial set and was able to claim them as belonging to me – including one short paper which had been published in the Russian Digital Libraries Journal in 2000 which I had forgotten about.

I can now view my 49 entries and sort them in various ways: in addition to the default date order I can also sort by item type; lead author; co-authors and keywords. The view of my co-authors (illustrated) was of particular interest: I hadn’t realised that I had written papers with 55 others.

In comparison the interface provided on my institutional repository service does now seem quite dated. However this is perhaps not unexpected as according to the Wikipedia entry the ePrints software (which is widely used across the UK) was created way back in 2000.

Revisiting the question as to whether we need another service which provides access to research information I would say ‘yes’. Such developments can help drive innovation. In this case ePrints developers are in a position to see more modern approaches to the user interface. In addition the service describes itself as “Web 3.o ready application” by which they seem to mean that the service “connects researcher and research students anywhere in the world using an intelligent network”.

I haven’t seem much evidence of Web 3.0 capabilities in the service, apart from being able to download details of my papers in FOAF format, but perhaps the “ready” word is providing a signal that such functionality is not yet available.

Things I Don’t Like

There are some typos on the data entry forms and some usability niggles, but nothing too significant – indeed after attending a recent Bathcamp Startup Night and hearing the suggestion that “If you’re not embarrassed about the launch version of your software then you released it too late” (a quote from the founder of LinkedIn) I welcome seeing this service before everything has been thoroughly checked.

The language used in the terms of service are somewhat worrying, however:

No Injunctive Relief.
In no event shall you seek or be entitled to rescission, injunctive or other equitable relief, or to enjoin or restrain the operation of the Service, exploitation of any advertising or other materials issued in connection therewith, or exploitation of the Services or any content or other material used or displayed through the Services.

It also seems that as a user of the service I undertake not to:

Duplicate, license, sublicense, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, display, sell, rebrand, or otherwise transfer information found on iamResearcher (excluding content posted by you) except as permitted in this Agreement, iamResearcher’s developer terms and policies, or as expressly authorized by iamResearcher

Hmm. The service harvested its metadata from other repository services, such as the University of Bath’s Opus repository but does not allow others to reuse its content. This seems to undermine the benefits provided by permitting (indeed encouraging) others to make use of open data. In addition the service appears to be hypocritical, as the University of Bath’s repository policy (which was created using the OpenDOAR Policy tool) states that “The metadata must not be re-used in any medium for commercial purposes without formal permission“. Now the Iamresearcher.com service does not appear to be a commercial service – but its privacy policy states that “To support the Services we provide at no cost to our Users, as well as provide a more relevant and useful experience for our Users, we serve our own ads and also allow third party advertisements on the site“. If advertising does appear on the service, won’t it then be breaching the terms and conditions of the service from which it harvested its data?

Personally I have no problem with advertising being used to fund services where, as in this case, there are multiple providers of services. Indeed those who argue for openness of data should be willing to accept that data may be used for commercial purposes. However services which accept the opportunities provided by open data should accept that they should be providing similar conditions of usage.

The final concern that I have about the service is that currently it can only be accessed if you sign in. I feel this is counter-productive – indeed one person I mentioned this service to asked why he should bother. That’s a fair comment, I think. And seeing that the terms and conditions also state that users of the service are not allowed to:

Deep-link to the Site for any purpose, (i.e. including a link to a iamResearcher web page other than iamResearcher’s home page) unless expressly authorized in writing by iamResearcher or for the purpose of promoting your profile or a Group on iamResearcher as set forth in the Brand Guidelines;

I now wonder what benefits this service can provide to the research community. Developers of other repository services, however, should be able to learn from the technological enhancements the service provides, even if the business model is questionable.

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Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

The BO.LT Page Sharing Service and OERs

Earlier today, having just installed the Pulse app on my iPod Touch, I came across a link to an article published in TechCrunch on the launch of a new service called Bo.lt.  The article’s headline summarises what the service will provide: “Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage“.

The comments on the article were somewhat predictable; as seems to be the norm for announcements of new services published in TechCrunch some were clearly fans (“OMG! This is going to change everything!“) whilst others point out that the new service provides nothing new: “Shared Copy (http://sharedcopy.com/) is a great service that’s been around for 4 years that does ~the same thing“.

Of particular interest to me, however, were the comments related to the potential for copyright infringements using a services which, as the TechCrunch article announced “let’s you copy, edit and share any page“. As the first comment to the article put it: “I can just see it…this will make it easier for 1) people to create fake bank statements, 2) awesome mocking of news headlines, 3) derivative web designs“.

In order to explore the opportunities and risks posed by this service I registered for the service and created a copy of the home page for my blog and subsequently edited it to remove the left hand sidebar. As can be seen an edited version of the page has been created, and you can view the page on Bo.lt.

So it does seem that it will be easy for people to copy Web pages, edit them for a variety of purposes, including poking fun, creating parodies (has anyone edited a Government Web page yet) as well as various illegal purposes.

But what about legitimate uses of a service which makes it easy to copy, edit, publish and share a Web resource?  The educational sector has strong interests in exploring the potential of open educational resources (OERs) which can be reused and remixed to support educational objectives.  We are seeing a growth in the number of OER repositories.  Might a service such as Bo.lt have a role to play in enabling such resources to be reused,I wonder?  Will Bo.lt turn out to be a threat to our institutions (allowing, for examples, disgruntled students unhappy at having to pay £9,000 to go to University to create parodies of corporate Web pages) or a useful tool to allow learners to be creative without having to master complex authoring tools?

Archiving Blogs and Machine Readable Licence Conditions

Clarifying Licence Conditions When Archiving Blogs

UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog has recently been frozen following the cessation of funding from the MLA (a government body which is due to be shut down shortly).

As part of the closure process for our blog we have provided a Status of the Blog page which summarises the reasons for the closure, provides a  history of the blog, outlines various statistics about the blog and provides some reflections of the effectiveness of the blog.

Another important aspect of the closure of a blog should be the clarification of the rights of the blog posts. This could be important if the blog contents were to be reused by others – which could, for example, include archiving by other agencies.

As shown a human readable summary was included in the sidebar of the blog which states that the content of the blog are provided under a Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The sidebar also defined the scope of this licence which covered the textual content of blog posts and comments which were submitted to the blog.  It was pointed out that other embedded objects, such as images, video clips, slideshows, etc, may have other licence conditions.

However automated tools will not be able to understand the licence conditions.  What is needed is a definition of the licence in a format suitable for automated reading. This has been implemented using a simple use of RDFa which is included in the sidebar description.  The HTML fragment used is shown below:

<img alt=”Creative Commons License” src=”http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/88×31.png&#8221; /> This blog is licensed under a <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/&#8221; rel=”license”>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License</a>.

How might software process such information? One example is the OpenAttribute plugin which is available for the FireFox, Chrome and Opera browsers. This is described as a “suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work“. Use of the OpenAttribute plugin on the Cultural Heritage blog is illustrated below.

Assigning Multiple Licences To Embedded Objects in Blogs

The image above shows the licence for the blog in its entirety.  However the blog is a complex container of a variety of objects (blog posts from multiple authors;  comments from readers and embedded images and other objects from multiple sources)  and each of these embedded may have its own set of licence conditions.

How might one specify the licence conditions of such embedded objects?  In the case of the Cultural Heritage blog there was a statement that any comments added to the blog would be published under a Creative Commons licence so although anybody making a comment did not have to formally accept this licence condition, it practice we can demonstrate that we took reasonable measures to ensure that the licence conditions were made clear.

In order to specify the licence conditions for embedded images we initially looked at the Image Licenser WordPress plugin.   However this provides a mechanism for assigning licence conditions as images are embedded within a post, which are then made available as RDFa.  Since in our case we were looking at retrospectively assigning licence conditions to existing images (in total 151 items) it was not realistic to use this tool.

The Creative Commons Media Tagger provides the ability to “tag media in the media library as having a Creative Commons (CC) license“. But what licence should be assigned to images on the blog?  These include screen images and photographs which may have been include by guest bloggers but which have not been explicitly assigned a Creative Commons licence.  The question of  Who owns the copyright to a screen grab of a website? was asked recently on ecademy.com with a lack of consensus and a patent and trade mark attorney providing the less than helpful suggestion that “It is better to include a link to the original work if it is on the Web rather than to copy it.“ The uncertainties regarding ownership of screen shots are echoed in a Wikipedia article which states:

Some companies believe the use of screenshots is an infringement of copyright on their program, as it is a derivative work of the widgets and other art created for the software. Regardless of copyright, screenshots may still be legally used under the principle of fair use in the U.S. or fair dealing and similar laws in other countries.

In light of such confusions there is a question as to what licence, if any, should be assigned to images in the blog. As described in the Creative Commons Media Tagger FAQ it is possible to run the plugin in batch mode to “tag media that was already in your media library prior to installing and activating CC-Tagger“. It occurred to me that it would be best to assign a non-CC licence by default to all images and then to manually assign an appropriate CC licence to images such as those taken from Flickr Commons in a post entitled “Around the World in 80 Gigabytes“. However using the batch made of the tool appeared not to change the content – and it is unclear to me whether there is a way of providing a machine-readable statement in RDFa stating that a resource is not available with a Creative Commons licence.

Using the Image Licenser tool on an individual image resulted in the following HTML fragment which illustrates how a machine readable statement of the licence conditions can be applied to an individual object:

<img class=”size-medium wp-image-2206″ title=”Flickr Commons” src=”http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/files/2011/02/flickr-commons-300×205.jpg&#8221; alt=”image of flickr commons home page” width=”300″ height=”205″ />

Discussion

Whilst finalising this post I asked on Twitter “Is it possible to use RDFa to provide a machine-readable statement that an image *doesn’t* have a CC licence? …” and followed this by describing the context: “.. i.e. have a blog post with CC licence for content but want to clarify lience for embedded objects. #creativecommons“.  Subsequent comments from @patlockley and @jottevanger helped to identify areas for further work which I hadn’t considered – I have kept an archive of the discussion to ensure that I don’t forget the points which were made. A summary of my thoughts is given below:

Purpose: Why should one be interested in ways in which the licence conditions of objects embedded in blog posts? My interest relates to arching policies and processes for blogs.  For example if an archiving service chooses to archive only blogs for which an explicit licence is available there will be a need to ensure that such licences are provided in a machine-readable format in automate to allow for automated harvesting.  There will also be a need to understand the scope of such licences. In addition to my interests, those involved in the provision of or reuse of OER resources will have similar interests for reusing blog posts if these are treated as OER resources.  Finally, as  @jottevanger pointed out this discussion is also relevant more widely, with Jeremy’s interests focussing on complex Web resources containing digitised museum objects.

Granularity: What level of granularity should be applied – or perhaps this might be better phrased as what level of granularity is it feasible to apply machine readable licence conditions for complex objects? Should this be at the collection level (the blog), the item level (the blog post) or for each component of the object (each individual embedded image)?

Risks: Should one take a risk averse approach, avoiding use of a Creative Commons licence at the collection level since it may be difficult to ensure that each individual item has an appropriate Creative Commons licence)? Or should one state that by default items in the collection are normally available under a Creative Commons licence, but there may be exceptions?

Viewing tools: What tools are available for processing machine understandable licence conditions? What are the requirements for such tools?

Creation tools : What tools are available for assigning machine understandable licence conditions? What level of granularity should they provide? What default values can be applied?

I know that in the OER community there are interests in these issues.  I would be interested to hear how such issues are being addressed and details of tools which may already exist – especially tools which can be used with blogs.

UKOLN Seminar On OER Open to All

UKOLN’s seminar programme continues on Thursday 14 April 2011. Vic Jenkins and Alex Lydiate of the e-Learning team in LTEO (Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office) with describe the JISC-funded OSTRICH (OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation Cascading across HEIs) project. As described in the abstract for the seminar:

The progress of the OSTRICH project so far at the University of Bath will be described by Vic Jenkins (Learning Technologist in the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office). This will include highlights and challenges encountered, discussions around IPR for learning and teaching resources, and the sustainability of processes for managing the release of OERs on an institutional basis.

Alex Lydiate (Educational Software and Systems Developer) will present an overview of the design of the Drupal-based OSTRICH distributed repository and the rationale behind it.  This will include an outline of the proposed strategy for representing the OSTRICH OER records on the Web.

As with previous seminars this year the event is open to others in the sector with an interest in the development of open educational resources to attend.  The seminar will also be streamed live.  If you would like to attend, either in person or remotely, please complete the online booking form.

Note that following the most recent UKOLN seminar there was a suggestion that we should make use of the Ustream streaming video service rather than Bambuser.

In order to familiarise myself with this service I created a brief video clip which provides an announcement about the seminar.  On replying the clip (which, I should add, contains no additional information) I discovered that as well as the advertisement on flights to Australia (illustrated) there is also another advert display as a caption on the screen and a video advert is played before my video starts.

It seems that:

Ustream is free because it is ad-supported, but if you want to get rid of ads on your stream ― no problem!

Going Ad-Free on Ustream is simple. With a few easy steps, you can remove ads from your channel to fully control the viewing experience.

And whilst going ad-free may be simple, it costs from $99 per month. The use of advertisement to fund online services is something we have tended to avoid in higher education in the past.   But in light of reductions in funding, I wonder if we will start to see increased use of services which contain adverts, not only in sidebar widgets but also at the start of video clips.  Will this, I wonder, be regarded as an appropriate response to addressing reductions in funding?

Thoughts on the New WebGL Open API Standard

A Brief Introduction to WebGL

A post on the TechCrunch blog today asks “Who Needs Flash? New WebGL And HTML5 Browser Game Sets Tron’s Light Cycles In 3D“. It seems the Cycleblob browser game which has been released today was written exclusively in JavaScript, using elements of WebGL and HTML5. WebGL is ”a graphics library that basically extends the functionality of JavaScript to allow it to create interactive 3D graphics within ye olde browser” which was released in March 2011.

The TechCrunch article provides a summary of WebGL:

As a cross-platform API within the context of HTML5, it brings 3D graphics to the Web without using plug-ins. WebGL is managed and developed by The Khronos Group, a non-profit consortium of companies like Google, Apple, Intel, Mozilla, and more, dedicated to creating open standard APIs through which to display digital interactive media — across all platforms and devices.

Over the past decade or so that W3C’s approach to the development of open standards has focussed on the development of declarative markup languages based on XML such as SMIL and SVG.  But here’s another approach which is based on providing open APIs with buy-in from browser vendors and other IT companies. Might WebGL have an impact in the development of interactive e-learning and research applications, I wonder?

But Is WebGL Really Open?

Investigations into the potential of WebGL for development work in higher and further education should consider its openness and its likely sustainability.  Although  is has been developed and maintained by a non-profit consortium it is questionable whether an API maintained by an industry consortium should be regarded as an open standard according to a definition of an open standard which the UK Government is currently attempting to define.  As described in a recent post the UK Government’s first condition for an open standards is that it is “result[s] from and are maintained through an open, independent process“.  A industry consortium, even if non-profit making, surely cannot be considered independent; if this was the case Microsoft  could set up a similar consortium responsible for the maintainance of their formats and code base which they could then claim to be an open standard.

But such considerations are really only relevant for those who feel there is a simple binary divide between open standards and proprietary approaches. In my view there is a complex spectrum of openness and for now  I would feel that WebGL is worth considering for development work – and the fact that WebGL is not supported by Microsoft should be regarded as an interesting challenge for developers but not necessarily a reason for discounting it.

Observing WebGL’s Development

It should be noted that there is an entry for WebGL in Wikipedia and, as is often the case, the article provides a useful brief summary of the standard:

WebGL is a Web-based Graphics Library. It extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser.

The development of this entry is interesting.  A stub entry for the article was created on 14 September 2009 and there have been regular updates ever since.

I must admit I hadn’t realised that statistics for revisions of Wikipedia articles are available.  The statistics for the WebGL article reveal that there have been 192 revisions from 104 users. It is also possible to view details for those who have edited the article and to discover how many users are watching the article.

The statistics page for the article also informs us that the WebGL article has been viewed 40,009 times in March 2011 and is ranked 7,576 in traffic on en.wikipedia.org.

What have I learnt from observing the information about the WebGL Wikipedia article, as well as the information provided in the WebGL Wikipedia article itself?

The chart of the number of edits over time shows that there is a steady growth in the number of edits, which suggests that the article is continually being revised.  The main contributors to the article include those involved in development in computer games which may suggest that the priority for future developments may be in this area. However the article itself lists Google Body as an early application of WebGL which perhaps suggests that WebGL could have a role to play in the development of teaching and learning applications.

Your Thoughts

Are there any  examples of early use of WebGL within the higher education sector, I wonder?  I would be interested in hearing about examples and, perhaps more importantly, hearing about experiences of those involved in WebGL development work.

In addition I’d be interested in comments on observation of use and changes in Wikipedia articles as a means of providing early indications of new standards which may be of interest to  developers.  Is this an approach which could be used more widely?

 

 

Twitter Posts Are Not Private: What are the Implications?

The article published on the BBC News Web site yesterday seemed unambiguous: “‘Twitter messages not private’ rules PCC“.  This news item summarised news published by the PCC, the Press Complaints Commission, which ruled that “Material that is published on Twitter should be considered public and can be published“. The context was a complaint by a Department of Transport official that the use of her tweets by newspapers constituted an invasion of privacy – apparently the official, who was named in the article, had tweeted about “being hungover at work“. But even though she had a clear disclaimer that the views expressed by her on Twitter were personal, her tweets were published in the press. An article in The Guardian provides further information – it seems that the Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday) published this information.  I must admit that I find it unsurprising that the Daily Mail has used this as an opportunity to have a dig at the public sector. But what are the implications of this ruling for the rest of us? Some thoughts:

• It’s pointless saying one’s (public) tweets are personal if you tweet in a professional capacity. The press can publish such information and use this as an opportunity to have a go at you and your host institution.  This is the standard type of advice which is given to students using social media, but perhaps we forget to think about the implications for ourselves.  Twitterer emptor Caveat Twitterer! – as perhaps the various footballers and cricketers who have been fined for tweeting inappropriate remarks would echo.
• This news does seem to validate reuse of tweets. Martin Hawksey, who developed the iTitle Twitter captioning service will no doubt be relieved that it seems he does not need to obtain permission before reusing public tweets as will developers of Twitter archiving services (and note that in the JISC-funded developments to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service for which UKOLN provided the project management we did identify that privacy concerns did need to be considered).
• However it should be pointed out that this ruling came from the PCC – it is not a legal ruling.

Good news which seems to validate reuse of tweets or a dangerous intrusion into personal space? What do you think? Should all organisation be providing guidelines not only on institutional use of social media but personal use, such as EDINA’s guidelines which were published recently (with a Creative Commons licence) which states:

EDINA, as part of the University of Edinburgh, is your employer and as such you have a legal and moral responsibility not to bring either organisation into disrepute. Maintaining the reputation of EDINA, EDINA projects, services and staff members plays a crucial part in ensuring the continuing success of the organisation. Comments, particularly those with a strongly negative or unprofessional tone, can have serious unintended consequences. It is therefore important to remember that what you say about your work, even in personal social media presences, can reflect upon EDINA.

Please exercise common sense over whether or not the space you are posting to (whether your own or as a guest post on another person or organisation’s blog or social media presence) is an appropriate space for discussion of work or work related matters. If in doubt, you can always ask your line manager for advice.

The Hounding of the Baskerville article in the Independent on Sunday is worth reading to provide a context to such discussions.

Risk Management Calculator For Open Content

Approaches to Risk Management in Innovation

In the past I have argued the need for a risk management approach to the exploitation of innovative services. This approach formed the basis of an invited talk I gave on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference held at the National Library of Singapore. The paper I presented was subsequently published in the Program journal: ”Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends“. Note that this paper is available in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats from the University of Bath repository.

The paper focussed primarily on the risks associated with use of Cloud services.  However there are associated legal, copyright and related risks which need to be considered.  Professor Charles Oppenheim contributed to a paper on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web”  which built on this previous work and outlined a risk assessment and risk management approach for copyright risks. Again this paper is available in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats).

These papers argued the need for a risk-based approach and proposed a framework for understanding and documenting the risks, understanding the associated risks of doing nothing (e.g. missed opportunities), the associated costs and ways of minimising risks which have been identified.

This framework, which is intended to support the discussions and production of  documentation for development activities, acknowledges that there is a context to such decision-making, with organisations likely to have differing perspectives on risks: a government organisation is likely to be more risk-averse, for example, than an innovation company funded with venture capital. In addition different contexts of use  will require different approaches to risk assessment: whilst many users  will be willing to use a Social Web service to host photographs and videos, the same users may not wish to see their payroll system out-sourced in a similar fashion!

The JISC-Funded Risk Management Calculator

However our work did not provide a tool to support these processes. I was therefore pleased to receive an email today which announced a “New licensing tool for open content“. The announcement stated that

Licensing is complex and the more open you make content under an end user licence the greater the risk if you havent sought the necessary permissions. In partnership with the Higher Education Academy, JISC is funding a support project on IPR and licensing issues for Open Educational Resources. The latest addition to their suite of support resources is a new tool – the Risk Management Calculator  designed to help understand levels of risk associated with publishing open educational materials.   Typical examples of this might include materials which are still in copyright, but for which the rights holders cannot be traced or are unknown (so called Orphan Works).  The calculator helps those relatively new to licensing to make the right decisions when creating open content.

Naomi Korn, the project director for this work,  described how:

The Risk Management Calculator is a good example of the way the OER IPR support project team works: a marriage of copyright and licensing expertise with a group of immensely talented staff from the technology enhanced learning team at Plymouth University creating tools that users can use to help them understand and do copyright and licensing better.

The risk management calculator is available as a Web-based tool and an example of its used is illustrated below:

I think this is a valuable tool which should help to embed a risk management culture in development activities and move away from the simplicities of policy-based approaches  which can hinder innovation at a time in which rights issues can be complex and gaining permission can be costly and time-consuming, if  not impossible.

What are the risks, I wondered, if I wished to publish a video of a conference in which members of the audience may be identifiable?  It might be expensive and time-consuming to identify such people, track down contact details and seek permission. In such cases a risk management approach would appear appropriate. However using such a video and providing a Creative Commons licence for the resource will give a medium risk rating of between 180 and 450, although not assigning a Creative Commons licence would give a low risk of 90.

Now when I look to reuse photographs, for example, I check to see whether any identifiable individual might be embarrassed by the photo (are they picking their nose) – so there additional contextual issues which the calculator doesn’t address.  But seeking to include such factors in a tool would be likely to make the tool cumbersome to use as well as costly to develop.  So I welcome the release of this tool, whilst providing a suggestion that the decisions need to be taken by a human and not determined by the rating provided by this tool.

Note it is also worth making the point that the selection of a Creative Commons licence is likely, in many cases,  to be more risks than not assigning such a licence.  It would, I feel, be unfortunate if this tool acted as a barrier to greater use of Creative Commons.

Non-Commercial Use Restriction Removed From This Blog

Posts and comments published on this blog have been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA). I have used this licence since Creative Commons became accepted in UK legislation, initially for deliverables provided by the JISC-funded QA Focus project. As described in a paper on ”Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ presented at the EUNIS 2005 Conference:

The decision to make QA Focus briefing papers available under a Creative Commons licence was made as part of the project’s exit strategy. The project deliverables will be available for at least three years after the end of funding, as required by the funders. However we were concerned that a passive approach would not be effective in maximising the project’s impact across the community and that the approach advocated and lessons learnt could be forgotten or ignored. There was also a concern that the project’s deliverables would become invalid or inaccurate over time, as a result of technological, legal, etc. changes. To ensure the deliverables continued to promote good practice in the long-term, a policy was developed to allow free use and modification of briefing papers.

The BY-NC-SA licence was chosen as it seemed at the time to provide a safe option, allowing the resources to be reused by others in the sector whilst retaining the right to commercially exploit the resources.In reality, however, the resources haven’t been exploited commercially and increasingly the sector is becoming aware of the difficulties in licensing resources which excludes commercial use, as described by Peter Murray-Rust in a recent post on “Why I and you should avoid NC licence“.

I have therefore decided that from 1 January 2011 posts and comments published on this blog will be licenced with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC BY-SA).

Note that version 2.0 of the licence is being used, as this is the latest version which has been ported for use under UK legislation.

Also note that the licence applies to the text of blog posts – other objects published on the blog, such as screen images, video clips, etc. will not normally be covered by this licence.

Impact, Openness and Libraries

“Measuring Impact” is the theme of the December 2010 issue of CILIP’s Library and Information Update magazine.  In an editorial piece entitled “Capturing Numeric Data to Makes an Evidence Based Approach” Elspeth Hyams provides a shocking revelation: school libraries have very little impact. Or at least that’s how how a review commissioned by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is being spun.  The reality, as described in an article by Javier Stanziola published in CILIP Update is that “studies of library impact are hard to find” – a quite different story. The article, “Numbers and Pictures: Capturing the Impact of Public Libraries“, suggests that “the sector is not playing the Prove Your Impact game well“.  I agree, and this criticism can be applied to the higher education sector too.

Elspeth feels that future longitudinal research will depend on data collection by frontline services (and knowing what data to collect).  The editorial concludes “So whether we like it or not, we would be wise to learn the ways of social scientists and the language of policy making“.

The importance of gathering data in order to demonstrate impact and value underpinned a session I ran recently on ““Sixty Minutes To Save Libraries”: Gathering Evidence to Demonstrate Library Services’ Impact and Value“.  As described in a post on “Gathering and Using Evidence of the Value of Libraries” which reviewed the session we did identify relevant sources of data which are collated annually from information provided by academic libraries by SCONUL which could be used to demonstrate value and impact and, if aggregated, could raise the profile and value of the academic library sector.

As described on the SCONUL Web site:

SCONUL has been collecting and publishing statistics from university libraries for over twelve years, with the aim of providing sound information on which policy decisions can be based.

Further information is provided which informs readers that “All UK HE libraries are invited to complete the SCONUL Statistical Questionnaire, which forms the foundation of all SCONUL’s statistical reports and services. The questionnaire details library resources, usage, income and expenditure for any academic year.“

However, as was discussed at the session, the SCONUL data is not publicly available. It seems that the SCONUL Annual Library Statistics is published yearly – and copies cost £80.

And here we have a problem.  As I write this post a SCONUL 2010 conference is taking place and via the #scounl10 hashtag I see Twitterers at the event are summarising the key aspects of the various talks:

SCONUL can help us promote the value of libraries to wider world/senior people (see tweet)

We need to be a more self-confident community – blow our own trumpet e.g. about our track record with shared services (see tweet)

Again I agree.  But the closed nature of the statistics is a barrier to blowing one’s own trumpet and promoting the value of libraries.

Perhaps more importantly in today’s climes, the closed nature of the report and the underlying data (which is closed by its price, closed by being available only to member organisations and closed by being available in PDF format) is how perceptions of secrecy goes against  expectations that public sector organisation should be open and transparent.

And whilst one might expect certain public sector organisations to have a tendency to be closed and protective (the Ministry of Defence, perhaps) one might expect libraries, with their characteristics of trust and openness, to see the advantages in being open as a underlying philosophy, as well as being appropriate in today’s political environment.

A few days ago I attended the Online Information 2010 conference. I particularly enjoyed the talk on “The Good (and Bad) News About Open Data“  by Chris Taggart of openlylocal.com, “a prototype/proof-of-concept for opening up local authority data … [where] everything is open data, free for reuse by all (including commercially)“.

In Chris’s presentation he described the potential benefits which openness can provide and listed concerns which are frequently mentioned and responses to such concerns.  Rather than trying to apply Chris’s approaches in the content of academic library data which is collated by SCONUL I will simply link to Chris’s presentation which is available on Slideshare and embedded below.

So if the following arguments are being used to maintain the status quo, remember that increasing numbers of councils have already found their own ways of addressing such concerns:

• People & organisations see it as a threat (and it is if you are wedded to the status quo, or an intermediary that doesn’t add anything)
• The data is messy e.g. tied up in PDFs, Word documents, or arbitrary web pages
• The data is bad
• The data is complex
• The data is proprietary
• The data contains personal info
• The data will expose incompetence
• The tools are poor and data literacy in the community is low

I began this post by citing the sub-heading to an article published in CILIP Update: “the sector is not playing the Prove Your Impact game well“. Are academic libraries playing the game well? Can they change? Or will SCONUL be regarded as an intermediary which is wedded to the status quo?  Or might the change be driven by a bottom up approach?  After all since the individual institutions are collating the information prior to submitting it to SCONUL could the raw data be published by the individual institutions?

Stifling Innovation and Getting in the Way of Users

“Is Flipboard Legal? http://bit.ly/d20eC1 >> interesting how copyright often seems to be in the way of consumers when it comes to progress” tweeted Jonathan Grimes recently. This comment on how copyright can stifle innovation and hinder benefits to users reminded me of an (unsolicited) email I received recently from the Marketing Manager of the Copyright Licensing Agency.

The email was advertising an event on ‘Intellectual Property Will Save the British Economy’. However the email footer informed me that “The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential to the intended recipient“. So it would seem that I am not allowed to mention the event!

Whilst I clearly appreciate the need for copyright I also understand how the Internet is challenging traditional views on copyright. There is therefore a need for copyright to change, just as the Internet has changed many other aspects of our life.  One would hope that organisations which are actively involved in copyright issues would be leading developments, perhaps by providing a Creative Commons licence for marketing materials. Sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Meanwhile, as I discovered from a post entitled Is copyright a help or a hidrance to UK research? on the UoL Library blog the British Library has published a report entitled “Driving UK Research: Is copyright a help or a hinderance” (PDF Format).

As described in the press release “This report has been published under a Creative Commons licence, enabling others to copy, distribute, and make derivative non-commercial works. All future uses of the material contained within this report must but appropriately attributed and shared under the same licence agreement as the original publication.“  It’s good to see that the British Library understand the advantages to be gained from licencing copyrighted materials under a Creative Commons licence.

Twitter and the Digital Economy Bill

Twitter Is Important

A blog post on Reportr.net has described how “How Twitter added to the #askthechancellors TV debate“. The post describes how “Channel 4 estimated that the debate generated 20,000 tweets over a two-period, becoming the number one trending topic in the UK and London on Twitter, and number three worldwide“. The post went on to mention that “The director of Polis at the LSE, Charlie Beckett, described it as a small triumph for democracy” and how the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones suggested that “Twitter, rather than television, could be the place where the issues are really dissected“. I agree – indeed as I suggested in a recent post “Perhaps use of Twitter is starting to become an important part of the political debate, with tweets becoming the twenty-first century’s equivalent to the heckles at election meetings – sometimes rude or irrelevant – but an important part of the democratic process“.

Can We Reuse Tweets?

But are we permitted to reuse tweets as opposed to passively read them in a Twitter client? Can we, as Martin Hawksey did, use Twitter to provide access to Gordon Brown’s Building Britain’s Digital Future announcement with twitter subtitles? Can Twitter archiving services provide public archives of hashtagged events such as the recent Rewired State: Rewired Culture event or the forthcoming JISC 2010 conference or, indeed, the archive of Gordon Brown’s Digital Future announcement which was used by Martin Hawksey to provide his Twitter captioning service?

“What’s the problem?” you may ask “Tweets aren’t subject to copyright. Anyway so  many people and organisations are now reusing tweets that a precedent has been established.  We know we can rip the CDs we own to put on our iPods despite this technically being, in the UK, an infringement of copyright legislation“.

Copyright of Tweets

There are two problems, I feel. The first is that tweets (the product of a creative intellectual activity) are subject to copyright. And the Twitter Terms of Service makes it quite clear that, unlike Facebook, Twitter do not claim ownership:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

The Digital Economy Bill

The other problem, in the UK at least, is the Digital Economy Bill.  In the past week or so I have read about protests against this proposed legislation ranging from the “Open Rights Group demonstrates against the Digital Economy Bill, as parliament confirms date for second reading through to Chris Sexton’s post on “Democracy and the Digital Economy Bill #debill“.

Chris, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, has written to her MP in protest against the bill. She feel the bill is bad enough but the main focus of her letter is ”the process of ‘wash-up’ – when bills are not debated properly but rushed through as parliament is dissolved by a series of trade offs between the parties“.

The Nightmare Scenario

I agree with Chris’s concerns. But in her letter to her MP Chris, who is also chair of UCISA, pointed out that “UCISA recognises the need to tackle online copyright infringement; as mentioned above our model regulations specifically highlight breach of copyright as a forbidden activity“.  Hmm – so University regulations treat copyright infringement as a forbidden activity.  And although you might get away with citing individual tweets as ‘fair use’ I suspect you couldn’t use this argument if you reuse of large numbers of tweets without the permission of the individual twitterers :-(  So is Martin Hawksey’s Twitter captioning tool infringing copyright? Should his host institution enforce UCISA model regulations and stop this ‘forbidden activity’?  And if the institution fails to act, might the institution have access to the Internet disconnected under the terms of the Digital Economy Bill?

Discussion

But am I correct when I argue that tweets are copyrighted resources?  This issue was raised last year on Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick blog.  Of particular interest are the comments by Guile, Scott Allan and Brock which illustrate the spectrum of opinion. Guille starts his response by saying:

Is a tweet copyrightable?

Most likely. Under the Copyright Act, 17 USC § 102,
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

Scott Allan reinforces this view: “Technically, it’s copyrighted, whether it’s on Twitter, a blog comment, a discussion forum, USENET, whatever“. Scott, however, points out that “That said, it’s totally a ‘fair use’” issue” and goes on to speculate on what ‘fair use’ might mean in the context of a tweet (although he doesn’t address the issue of ‘fair use’ for a collection of tweets).

In contrast Brock begins his response with the assertion:”There is no copyright protection for a tweet“. Brick goes on to argue that “In copyright law, [a tweet] lacks the ’substance’ of a literary work” and suggests that “Copyright protection does not extend to such minimal expressions that are typical in our society“. I should add, however, that Brock concludes his comments with the notice: “THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE OR COUNSEL; IT IS MERELY INFORMATION“.

Personally I suspect that if you seek legal advice you will be warned that “Case law hasn’t been established; we advise you be be cautious” before concluded “it would be best to seek permission before reusing tweets“. I heard similar suggestions ten years ago on the need to seek permission before linked to a resource. And looking at the Web2Rights toolkit on IPR (PDF format) it seems that you should seek permission.

There are dangers in seeking legal advice, I feel. But what to do? Perhaps we should seek a test case. I wonder if Martin Hawksey would be willing to act as a martyr in the cause of establishing that tweets can be reused without fear of our Web services being shut down?

The “Building Britain’s Digital Future” Announcement

I have just caught the end of Gordon Brown’s live video stream (hosted on the number10.gov.uk Web site). I have also been following the Twitter discussions centred around the #bbcdf #bbdf tag (a topic which has trended on Twitter this morning).

There has been a certain amount of cynicism in my Twitter feed, with developers being sceptical about Gordon Brown’s knowledge of Linked Data (if it’s difficult for experience Web developers to get, why are politicians talking about it) and others asking “Who will pay for the announcements which have been made?”.

I’m sure that Gordon Brown doesn’t know much about Linked Data – but he does have advisers who do. And I’m pleased that Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton (who, together with Dame Wendy Hall, gave the opening plenary talk about Linked Data at the Online Information 2009 conference) has been advising the government on the benefits of openness, open data and Linked Data. The question of how such developments will be paid for is a more relevant one – perhaps further cuts could be made in the UK’s Trident programme?  More realistically I’m sure civil servants will be giving details of the associated costs and the Tories will be questioning how it will be funded. So I don’t intend to get bogged down in the details of the costs; rather I want to pick up on some of the key points which were made.  And I’ll use some of the tweets from @hadleybeeman as a summary of the various announcements.

The comments that “PM making a plan to secure recovery, growth, jobs, success in the global marketplace” and “PM committing to bring public borrowing down fairly and without damaging public services” are just electioneering and content-free. The comment that “PM says we can’t rely on an open market to look after all Britons; instead we need an open partnership of business, economics & gov” is more political and reflects a Blairite mixed economy vision. It seems that the “PM is after open, interactive public services. Be prepared to cancel current projects (which?) to save £billions. Create 1/4 mill jobs“.  Hmm – cancelling IT projects (and Web sites). As Hadley commented, the devil is in the detail -which projects are to be cancelled?  And also won’t cancelling current projects result in job losses rather than job creation? Perhaps this is creative accountancy: 1/4 million jobs created for new projects (but 1/2 million jobs lost for those working on existing projects?).

Moving away from political speculation (and a degree of cynicism) the comment that “PM says that underpinning next generation of Britain is next generation of web: semantic web” is interesting and is the announcement that the “PM committing to access to every home, digital services transforming the way each citizen interacts with gov” (an announcement that has already been published in today’s Guardian). meanwhile researchers at the University of Southampton will probably be opening bottles of champagne at the news that the “PM announcing £30m to create Insitute of Web Science. Best of world scientists, headed by Prof Nigel Shadbolt & Sir Tim Berners Lee“.

I was particularly pleased with the announcements which demonstrated a commitment to greater openness. We heard that “PM announces commitment to greater transparency of workings of Whitehall. data.gov.uk, 1 Apr: Ordnance Survey data will be open” and the “PM announcing that in autumn ALL non-personal government data will be released. “New Domesday book”, overseen by National Archives”. In addition “PM says we will release all @directgov content for reuse“.

The announcements were all about new initiative and policy decisions, though.  We heard that “PM: we will close 500 more gov websites. New requirement that each will be interactive with citizens“. The apparent demise of central government Web sites as publishing mechanism seems to  have been announced:  “PM: “My Gov” marks the end of the one-size fits all, man from the ministry knows best view of public services” and an announcement which will probably frighten civil servants: “PM: “My gov” will be gov on demand. Civil svnts will no longer be editors. Citizens will be in control, determining lvl of engagement“.

My final comment is that Gordon Brown seems to have embraced a Web 2.0 vision:  “PM: Opening more policy to e-petitions, scrutiny & consultation. Podcasts, twitter, flickr, youtube, new No10 iphone app (free)“.

I have tried to provide a quick summary of this morning’s announcements, based on Hadley Beeman’s valuable live tweets.

So it seems that the Government will be shutting down many of its brochure-ware Web sites and replacing them with more interactive services which will incorporate use of various Web 2.0 approaches  and technologies (such as Twitter).   The Government will also be opening up access to its (non-personal)  data and will be providing access using Linked Data approaches.

I think this is a very radical series of announcements which, on the face of it, fit in with my views on the benefits of Web 2.0 in the public sector and the benefits of openness and open data.

What do you think?

Microsoft “Wilfully Infringed i4i’s Patent”

Last year i4i won an injunction preventing Microsoft from selling Word 2007 because of patent infringement. Microsoft, of course, appealed against this injunction – and, as described last night in the Guardian’s Technology blog, the court’s decision is:

“a panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a revised opinion in i4i v. Microsoft which affirms the August 11, 2009 Final Judgment by The Honorable Judge Leonard Davis that ruled in favor of i4i and found that Microsoft had wilfully infringed i4i’s U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449“

Good news at seeing a court decision going against the evil empire?  I think not.  We have  now seem a company winning an award based on their ownership of a software patent. So if you feel that software patents stifle innovation you should be regretting this decision.  And how will Microsoft react?  I suspect they will regret not having submitted a patent covering their use of XML in the MS Office application suite to prevent such decisions – i.e. use of a defensive patent, described in Wikipedia as “the purchasing of patents or patent rights in order to keep such patents out of the hands of entities that would assert them against operating companies“.

And as i4i have been successful in their claim against Microsoft, might they now make claims against other organisations? Such concerns were highlighted last year in an article published in eweek.com entitled “Microsoft Patent Lawsuit Could Spell Trouble for Open-Source Format“. A successful software patent claim is based news for open development, as far as I am concerned, even if Microsoft are the victims. What are  your thoughts?

Openness? No Thanks, I’ll Have An iPad

After month’s of speculation the iPad was announced yesterday And after a day in which many  Twitterers were responding to Steve Jobs’ announcement today we say the headlines in the press. The main photograph on the front page of The Daily Telegraph featured Steve Jobs with Apple’s latest creation and in an unusual display of agreement the technology correspondents of The Telegraph and The Guardian were in broad agreement: Claudine Beaumont, The Telegraph’s technology editor  described how her ”first impressions of the device are largely positive. Apple has once again built a product that looks good and feels great in the hand, and the familiar user interface, borrowed from the iPhone and iPod touch, is perfectly suited to the bigger screen“. Meanwhile Bobbie Johnson, the Guardian technology correspondent felt that “For anyone who loves new technology, getting the first touch of a new Apple device is a little like laying hands on the Shroud of Turin, or seeing a unicorn: the first experience of a mythical object imbued with miraculous properties“.

We are now starting to see the blogging community giving their views. One of the first I saw was from Chris Sexton, IT Services director at the University of Sheffield. Her thoughts can be summarised in a few words “yes, I am lusting to get my hands on one”.

So it’s a feel winner for the sector, then. And we can start to make plans for how we can exploit the potential of this device when the early adopters bring it into work and, a later date, how we can provide insitutional support for the device.

Or should we?  The Case against the iPad was made in a blog post by Timothy  B Lee.  Although Timothy is an Apple fan he is opposed to the closed nature of the iPad, in particular the app store which must be used to download new applications:  ”The store is an unnecessary bottleneck in the app development process that limits the functionality of iPhone applications and discourages developers from adopting the platform. Apple has apparently chosen to extend this policy—as opposed to the more open Mac OS X policy—to the iPad.“

I made a similar point in a post on “This Year’s Technology That Has Blown Me Away” in which I compared the open environment of the HTC Magic phone and the Android operating system with the closed nature of the iPhone.

However the post, which summarised a talk I gave at a Bathcamp meeting last year, was a tongue-in-cheek commentary of the Android device which has many flaws – I use my iPod Touch whenever a WiFi network is available and only use my Android phone if I have to use the 3G network (or need to make a phone call).

So although I’m not a regular Apple user I do find my iPod Touch a great device which I use every day – andI also recently bought a second hand iMac which I now use as my main machine at home (and which I’m using to write this post). And I can understand the reasons why Chris Sexton is lusting after the iPad and appreciate the similar reactions which I have come across from various techies at work and on Twitter.

And yet these tend to be the same people who talk about openness and open source.  Perhaps those words are just used as code when seeking to knock Microsoft and aren’t meant to be applied as general principles. Or they might be felt to be regarded as important in an institutional context but are not felt to be relevant for personal choices.  But what does this mean to the users; those who aren’t early adopters but may feel that comments about openness, open standards and open source are used to suppress use choice?

What’s The Score? And Whose Score Is It, Anyway?

What’s the Score?

What was the score in yesterday’s Chelsea versus Sunderland game? The final score was 7-2 – and according to the BBC Web site the score at one stage was simultaneously 5-0, 5-1 and 6-1!

Screen image showing three different football scores (taken from BBC Web site)

I managed to capture a screen image showing this inconsistency. This was slightly cumbersome to do as for my first attempt the page updated so that the scores were consistent before I completed the screen capture – and I failed to notice this before I published a tweet. I was somewhat surprised, but pleased, to find that I could launch another browser (Opera) and replicate the inconsistencies – at which point I quickly disconnected from the Internet prior to capturing the screen image before the display was updated.

As well as being an incident that Chelsea fans may appreciate, I thought it was also interesting example of issues such as assumptions of trust (“it’s on the BBC Web site – it must be correct”), technical complexities (the individual scores were correct at one stage – the inconsistencies were possibly due to caching problems with data coming from multiple sources), the possible dangers of scraping HTML pages, etc.

Whose Score Is It, Anyway?

Since my blog posts are published with a Creative Commons licence if anyone else wishes to reuse this example, perhaps in the content of new media literacy, you will be free to do so. Except, of course, the screen image is taken from the BBC Web site – and the scores and details of the fixture seem to be the copyright of Football Dataco Limited, a company which has a very long and detailed Rights Information page. However as is often the case Wikipedia provides a useful summary of the company:

Football DataCo is a British company in the football (soccer) industry that grants licences to third parties (such as newspapers) allowing them to reproduce certain intellectual property (such as fixture lists and statistics) owned by the UK’s four professional football leagues: the Premier League, The Football League, the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish Football League.

The article goes on to describe the controversy surrounding Football Dataco’s ownership claims for the fixture list:

The company has been racked by controversy in the UK media, after a 2004 European Court of Justice ruling that the Premier League and Football League cannot use the European Database Directive to demand payment from media and pools companies for the publication of fixture lists. Football DataCo refute the ruling, arguing that a legal precedent was set in the UK back in 1959, when the Football League won a landmark copyright victory against Littlewoods, claiming income from the pools company for their use of the fixtures list.

Staunch opponents of Football DataCo argue that the ruling is long out of date, and needs to be brought more inline with the advances in information collection and delivery that we are seeing with the world wide web.

When I started looking at the ownership of football information I remembered that I used to follow a Twitter account which provided updates on Premier League football scores, but that service was shut down after the developer (@ollieparsley) received a Cease-and-Desist letter from Football DataCo. Ollie has written a blog post entitled “The FootyTweets ‘Cease and Desist’ Story” about this.

Back To Ownership

This post began when I thought it would be useful to capture the surprising screen image from the BBC Web site. I thought that this would make an interesting example to use in one of my talks about trust. But the post seemed to go in a new direction when I started to explore the copyright issues. Perhaps, as I suggested in a post on “How I Use Creative Commons For My Presentations” there’s a need to take a risk management approach to making use of such football scores. But isn’t that approach condoning the rights of large companies to take ownership of what should be public information?

PS I’ve just noticed that this is post number 666. I’ll say more.

How I Use Creative Commons For My Presentations

“Provide Case Studies”

Following my recent post in which I highlighted Glyn Moody’s concerns regarding “Threats to Openness” I received a tweet from @Brunella in which she suggested that she would prefer specific details based on case studies as opposed, I imagine, to a generic call to embrace openness.

The Spirit Is Willing; The Content is Complex!

Coincidentally there was an action on me to describe the approaches I take to making my presentations available with a Creative Commons licence, something I’d done for all of my public presentations since a talk on “Web Futures: Implications For HE” which I gave at King’s College London in January 2006.

The request came from Tom Baker, after I attended a Dublin Core tutorial which Tom and Makx Dekker gave just before Christmas.   Tom used a number of PowerPoint presentations in a series of talks on a variety of aspects of Dublin Core and Linked Data.  I noticed that the title slide for each of the slide decks contained a copyright statement  and wondered whether the slides would be made available after the event and if the content would be available with a licence which permitted reuse.  Tom responded that he would like to make the slides available with a Creative Commons licence but as the slides contained material from others, such as logos,  images and quotations, he was unsure whether he could make use of a Creative Commons licence.

I pointed out that this situation was not unusual – indeed slides which do not contain content from others are likely to be unusual, I would expect. This is certainly the case for my slides, which contain logos from funders, screen images, quotations, etc. So here’s a summary of the approaches I take to making the content available with a Creative Commons licence.

A Case Study in Use of Creative Commons

General Approaches

Since 2006 all of my presentations contain a Creative Commons logo on the title slide.  An example of a typical title slide, taken from my most recent talk on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web” is illustrated below.

The Creative Commons logo is provided not only on the title slide but also on the template for the thumbnails of the slides, which can be useful if hard copies of the slides are made available.

The title slide (and the template for the thumbnails) also contain a URL of where the master copy of the slides is held. This makes it easy for anyone who wishes to reuse the content.  The thumbnail temple also contains a UKOLN logo which can help to identify the host organisation of the author.

Quite often (as in this case) the slides are also made available on Slideshare.  The rights statement on Slideshare is modified so that it reflects the Creative Commons licence which has been used. The slides are also made available for download from the Slideshare repository.

In many cases I also give permission for my talk to be recorded, with a Creative Commons licence also used for the recording of the talk. Note, though, that I often reserve rights to change my mind after I have given the talk if I feel that I have said something I shouldn’t have (although I have never enforced this).

What of the Complexities?

But what of the complexities of a resource such as a set of slides which is likely to contain content from a variety of sources? As well as the copyrighted logos from JISC, MLA, the University of Bath and UKOLN which are contained on the title slide, my typical presentations will contain many screen shots. They are also likely to contain quotes from others as, in good scholarly fashion, I try to provide an academic audit trail for my thoughts and arguments.

Doesn’t the complexities of such rights rule out use of Creative Commons – or require time-consuming negotiations to obtain permission to reuse content from others?

My approach has been to take a risk management approach and to ensure that the origin of content from others can be easily identified.  Underneath the Creative Commons logo is the statement:

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat).

The caveat is followed by a link to a page on the UKOLN Web site which states that:

It should be noted that the presentation may contain screen images owned by others. Where possible citations for the images are provided (in the form of hypertext links to the source Web site).

Whenever I embed an image (which is normally a Web page) I try to include a link to the origin (typically as a hyperlinked blue arrow, but sometimes the URL may be displayed).  This is useful for me, as it can help me maintain my slides (e.g. checking whether a screen image is up-to-date).  But this also enables anyone who wishes to reuse my content to see where content came from, and to make their own judgement as to whether they are prepared to reuse such content.

I try to minimise the risks that a copyright holder will feel aggrieved by use of their content –  typically I use such content in a positive fashion (“here’s a good example of …“) so that any accusations that I am undermining the content owner’s revenue stream can be argued against.  And where I wish to be critical of a resource, I do not include any criticisms in the slides themselves, but make the content during the talk (or invite participants to give their opinions).

When I make use of a resource with a Creative Commons licence (such as a Flickr photograph) I will again provide a link to the origin. I also do this when I am including a quotation (although it may not always be possible to include a hyperlink).

To conclude, I regard a PowerPoint presentation as a complex object, containing multiple resources each with their own set of rights.  But rather than regarding such complexities as an excuse to avoid permitting reuse of my resources, my approach is to be open about the complexities and suggest that anyone who wishes to reuse the resources should make their own risk assessment, based on the information I have provided. This approach reflects the  ideas described by myself and Professor Charles Oppenheim in our recent paper on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web“.

Is this an approach which others find useful?

The Threats To Openness

I’ve a folder called “Openness” in my RSS reader. And the most prolific blogger in this folder is Glyn Moody in his Open blog.

As indicated by the blog’s sub-title “open source, open genomics, open content” Glyn comments on a broad range of issues related to openness.

These are areas of interest to me too – indeed back in 2007 myself, Randy Metcalfe and Scott Wilson write a paper entitled “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access” which was published at the ELPUB 2007 conference.

As indicated by the paper’s abstract although we feel that open standards, open source and open content can provide many benefits in education and research we realise that there are also potential pitfalls and complexities:

For advisory services, the goal is to achieve the best solution for any individual institution’s needs, balancing its enthusiasm with its own internal constraints and long term commitments. For example, open standards are a genuine good, but they may fail to gain market acceptance. Rushing headlong to standardize on open standards may not be the best approach. Instead a healthy dose of pragmatism is required. Similarly, open source software is an excellent choice when it best meets the needs of an institution, but not perhaps without reference to those needs.

Despite the warning against “rushing headlong’ into the latest open technology I fell into this trap personally in my purchase of my open source HTC Magic Android phone (I use my closed source iPod Touch when a WiFi network is available, using my sophisticated Android SmartPhone mostly as a dumb mobile phone!)

However in general I promote a culture of openness – for example I’ve used a Creative Commons licence for this blog since it was launched and have used Creative Commons licence for my presentations since my first Web 2.0 talk entitled “Web Futures: Implications For HE” given at King’s College London in January 2006.

But although I personally have embrace the notion of open content and have promoted greater take-up of Creative Commons for over four years I haven’t really considered the ways in which organisations and industries which feel threatened by the notions of openness may be responding – and perhaps undermining my attempts to encourage public sector organisations to engage more actively with the openness agenda.

Glyn, however, does seek to warn his readers of ways in which organisations are seeking to undermine the notion of openness. And in a post entitled “The Great Digital Bait and Switch” he cites an article published in the Wall Street Journal:

The palm-sized Arduino serves as an electronic brain running everything from high schoolers’ robots to high-end art installations. But perhaps the oddest thing about the device is the business model behind it.

Plans for the Arduino, a simple microcontroller board, are available online, and anybody may legally use them to build and sell knockoffs.

As Glyn concludes the article is “equating the ability to *build* on the work of others, and improve upon it, as another kind of “knock-off”. This is not just wrong-headed, but really pernicious, because it implies that open source is little better than counterfeiting.“

Back in 2005 we heard that from Bill Gates that “Free Culture advocates = Commies“. And now these arguments are being revived. But what’s different is that back in 2005 it was easy to dismiss Bill Gates’s views as being irrelevant. But today we have Peter Mandelson and the Digital Economy Bill which would “give government ‘unprecedented and sweeping powers’ to amend copyright laws“.

So maybe the gently pushing of open content is no longer enough. Perhaps we need to trumpet loudly our commitment to openness and be prepared to challenge those in the public sector who are still wavering over use of open licences. If we fail to stand up and loudly express our views, we may find that the commercial sector sets the agenda and influences public opinion into the mistaken belief that openness is about theft.

Will you join me in using a Creative Commons licence as a badge of pride and a means of encouraging creativity and innovation!? Can this be your resolution for 2010?

An Opportunity to Open Up Institutional Data?

It was while I was waiting for the bus home last night and skimming though the afternoon’s tweets that I noticed here had been a lot of activity around Lord Mandelson’s announcement of a major modernisation of England’s degree system. Alan Cann’s tweet, in particular, caught my eye:

RT @1994group Not all unis are the same – UK cannot sustain 140 unis & expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks.

What? Was this an official announcement that  140 Universities aren’t sustainable?  Will mine be one to go?  Following links through to the 1994 Group statement which “welcomes Government’s Higher Education Framework” I discovered that this wasn’t a sensationalist headline or a result of a truncated Twitter summary. No, as  the statement said:

“Not all universities are the same – the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities and expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.”

Conditioned as I am to reading gloomy predictions of the future in the public sector  I misinterpreted the clause “the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities“. The statement would probably have been less open to misinterpretation if it had simply said “the UK cannot expect all 140 universities to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.”  I would endorse this view.

But if universities aren’t expected to carry out the same range of tasks, what commonalities should there be? After all, if the institutions have little in common, what is the point of sectoral agencies such as HEFCE and JISC? Clearly there are many areas in which the sector benefits from sector-wide funding and policies, many of which are outside the scope of this blog. But I was particularly stuck by the comment that

“The 1994 Group has consistently called for more transparent and accurate information around the student experience to be provided. There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels, and to help HEIs identify problem areas and work to enhance aspects of the student experience“.

Ah! Is this open data we are talking about? Is this about allowing others to access, reuse and interpret our data?  This is an area in the research community, with passionate advocates such as Professor Murray-Rust, have been arguing for opening up our research data. We have also recently seen the benefits to be gained by providing access to library circulation data, encouraged by JISC funding of the MOSAIC project (Making our shared activity information count). And of course we will all be aware of the significant work being carried out across the JISC community in the areas of open access and open educational resources.

And yet, despite such high profile activities in exploiting the benefits of openness we still see arguments being made which appear to stifle further initiatives in this area. Back in 2004 I encouraged IT Services to set a leading role in embracing openness: “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” – but in revisiting that suggestion recently I see responses such as there is “no culture in UK HE of sharing material like this” and “concern[s] over … ownership“.

But if IT support staff seem reluctant to engage in sharing support materials (and I should add that I am also unaware of similar initiatives in the Library sector) perhaps the drive should come from those working in MIS departments.  After all they will manage the large databases  which could be opened up. And the MOSAIC project has experiences in how data can be anonymised to avoid the understandable concerns regarding privacy and data protection.

Are any institutions opening up access to such data? Although I appreciate that the 1994 Group’s statement that “There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels” could just be a call for more funding or for better access to data from government agencies (OS maps, perhaps?).  But if you work at one of the 1994 Group institutions (University of Bath, Birkbeck University of London, Durham University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Exeter, Goldsmiths University of London, Institute of Education University of London, Royal Holloway University of London, Lancaster University, University of Leicester, Loughborough University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Reading, University of St Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Surrey, University of Sussex or the University of York) mightn’t this provide an opportunity to initiate discussions about opening up institutional data?

 

Opening Up Institutional Training Resources

I’m now back from a few day’s at Aberystwyth University, where I had been invited to speak at the launch of the HEFCW-funded Gwella project and to give a seminar on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments“.

As this involved a long train journey I also sought to maximise my time in Aberystwyth by participating in a regional meeting for Welsh Web managers. During the brief summaries of areas of work which the members of institutional Web management teams had been involved in I noticed that a number of the institutions were involved in the delivery of training in use of Terminal 4′s Content Management System. But why, I wonder, are institutions still developing their own training resources? As the meeting took place at the start of the first international Open Access Week I did wonder whether an institutional move towards (or commitment to) open access for research publications and research data shouldn’t be complemented by an institutional commitment to providing Creative Commons licence for institutional training resources. And shouldn’t Information Services departments and Libraries be taking a leading role in this area? After all it is staff in the IT Services departments who will be well-placed to develop the technical infrastructure to provide access to such resources and Library staff who can advise on access mechanisms, use of metadata, etc.

This suggestion is not new – back in 2005 I presented a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ at the EUNIS 2005 conference. But it is probably timely to revisit this subject, not only due to links with the Open Access Week but also the related interests in open access for learning resources, as described recently in an article entitled “Get it out in the open” published in The Times Higher.

Now I’m not saying that the availability of open training resources, which might include podcasts and screencasts as well as more conventional training resources, will necessarily always be used – perhaps trainers and user support staff will continue to prefer to use resources they have developed themselves. But if that is the case, then what is the point of services such as JORUM and funding initiatives such as JISC’s Open Educational Resources programme? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to the community in general if more people were involved in such debates?

Facebook Buys FriendFeed; Identica is Open Source; Does It Matter?

As described on TechCrunch a couple of days ago, Facebook Acquires FriendFeed. The Monkey Bites blog advises “Let’s Be Friends in its article on how Facebook acquired FriendFeed. But the reaction in the Twitterverse seems to be negative, with concerns that Facebook’s walled garden mentality will be applied to FriendFeed and that the ownership which Facebook claims for content posted within Facebook will also apply to content on FriendFeed. This acquisition may be a threat to Twitter, as suggested on the ZDNet Asia blog: “Facebook takes aim at Twitter, buys FriendFeed“.

Meanwhile the announcement that the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has “started a little DC twitter activity” has been met with comments suggesting that identi.ca should be used on the grounds that “above all laconi.ca is Open source“.  Dan Brickley backs this suggestion:

While it has a smaller userbase than twitter, the project is very friendly to standards such as RDF which DCMI is also committed to. Identi.ca/laconi.ca is also API-compatible with Twitter, and allows you to repost from identi.ca to twitter accounts automatically.
…
Oh, last thing re identi.ca: there’s a groups mechanism, so we could experiment with groups for DCMI or sub-communities…

But how relevant is this dogma? FriendFeed, it seems, is cool in some circle, as is identi.ca, whereas Twitter and FaceBook aren’t.  And some FriendFeed users are talking about closing down their accounts whilst fans of identi.ca are seeking to encourage newcomers to joint, citing the richer functionality it provides as well as its open source pedigree. But to what extent will the issues of ownership of the code, rights over the data and the richness of the functionality affect people’s decisions?

For me the important aspect of these social tools is the associated community – and as a well-established Twitter user I am not too concerned regarding the openness of the source code. And although I am willing to experiment with providing richer functionality with Twitter, such as recent experiment with use of multiple hashtags for events,  I do appreciate the point which Mike Ellis has raised, suggesting that it’s Twitter’s simplicity which is a key aspect of its success. So is there any evidence that identi.ca open source code and richer functionality will be successful in migrating a community to it? And is it really true that the integration between Twitter and identi.ca will be seamless and transparent?  Why do I feel I’ve heard these arguments before – without the supposed benefits actually being delivered? Facebook buys FriendFeed; Identica is open source; does it matter? To you it might, but to the vast majority of users I suspect it doesn’t.

Respect Copyright (and Subvert It!)

The Digital Britain Report

The Digital Britain report was published a few days ago and as is stretches to over 230 pages we’ve needed that time to digest the report or, perhaps more likely, allow others to read the report and publish their summaries! My specific area of interest in the report is what it says about copyright.

The report describes how “Already today around 7.5% of total UK music album purchases are digital and a smaller but rapidly increasing percentage of film and television consumption is streamed online or downloaded” and that although “User-generated and social content will be very significant” it will not be “the main or only content“.

The report goes on to argue the case for the ‘creative industries’ and repeats their claims that they “have indicated they suffer considerable losses from unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing” – and fails to acknowledge the criticism of these figures described by Ben Goldacre’s “Illegal downloads and dodgy figures” article in the Guardian’s Bad Science column.

Section 18 of the report puts the recommendations bluntly:

This is unacceptable. The Government considers online piracy to be a serious offence. Unlawful downloading or uploading, whether via peer-to-peer sites or other means, is effectively a civil form of theft. This is not something that we can condone, or to which we can fail to respond. We are therefore setting out in this report a clear path to addressing this problem which we believe needs to result in a reduction of the order of 70-80% in the incidence of unlawful filesharing.

My fears are that equating use of networked technologies with large scale copyright infringement will lead to organisations’ being conservative in their approaches and being unwilling to take any risks that they might be seen to condone the  ‘serious offence of online piracy’.

So let’s look at other views on copyright, beyond the teenage kids who seem to stand accused of downloading music and videos and ruining the country’s economy (I’ve tried to avoid the temptation to say the bankers have done that, but have failed!)

“Copyright Warriors”

Earlier this year Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University wrote a blog post on “Universities as copyright warriors“, this being a follow-up post to one which asked “Should universities break copyright law?“. In the former post Martin described how he:

“wasn’t arguing that universities should ignore copyright because they think they’re special, or that they should advocate wholesale piracy. Rather it was that universities are in a privileged position. They can fight on behalf of the general populace.“

Professor Stephan Harnad, University of Southampton, has been fighting for the research community for several years. You just have to visit the Open Access Archivangelism blog to see evidence of the work being done by Stevan and many fellow open access researchers not only here in the UK but around the world. “Ensure your research publications are published in an open archive” is their cry “and make publicly-funded research openly available“. And such simple requests are supported by significant examples of technical solutions, business models,  institutional services and growing international pressures to build on this work.

Professor Peter Murray-Rust, Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge (who, incidentally, has his own entry in Wikipedia), has been making a similar plea to open up scientific data. Peter recently argued that “Copyright in Scientific Theses is holding us back; Ignore it“.  Peter’s opening comments are worth noting:

I feel the dread hand of copyright hanging Mordor-like over the whole area of scholarly publishing. I heard to my horror in PennState that one University had embargoed all its theses in case they violated copyright. So I tested this in my talk and asked “are there repositories that embargo all their content for fear of copyright?” and got a few nodding heads. So I am taking this as fact, and asking:

Why is no-one except me angry about the way that copyright (or exaggerated fear of it) is stifling electronic innovation in academia?

Pete goes on to make the plea “let’s abandon copyright in science. What does it gain us? Almost nothing, unless you author a successful textbook. Nowhere else is copyright the slightest use to a scientist and its stands in their way at every step.” And note that Peter is not arguing for the abolition of copyright; he makes it clear that “if you are working in creative arts you may wish to protect your work“. Peter’s views are focussed on science. And he repeats this message loudly “SO AS A FIRST STEP LET’S JUST PUBLISH ALL OUR **SCIENCE** THESES OPENLY AND ALLOW UNRESTRICTED DOWNLOADING AND RE-USE?”.

Beyond The Professors

If you read Martin Weller’s,  Stephan’s Harnad’s and Peter Murray-Rust’s blogs you will find much more in-depth discussions on the benefits of openness in teaching and learning and research. But the danger is that such views will be dismissed as the ramblings of professors who are secure in their own position. How can others engage in maximising the openness of resources? How should young researchers and academics respond? And what approaches can the service departments – libraries and IT Services, for example – take?

A Personal Approach

Back in 2005 I gave a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ which concluded “IT Service departments are well-positioned to encourage a culture of sharing by encouraging an open access approach to IT support materials through use of Creative Commons licences“.

In January 2006 I made a commitment  that the resources used in my public presentations would be available with a Creative Commons licence – and since giving a talk on “Web Futures: Implications For HE” at King’s College London on 27^th January 2006 the title slide of my presentations has contained a Creative Commons licence. That talk was also the first time (I think) in which I recorded my talk and made the talk available also under a Creative Commons licence.

But what of the risks in making one’s own resource available under a Creative Commons licence?  What if the slides contains resources owned by others (e.g. the JISC and MLA logos on the title slide; a screen shot of the BBC Web site; etc.)? What if I make defamatory comments in my talk?

Rather than ensuring that no copyrighted material are used in my presentations I take a risk assessment approach. I weigh the risks that if I use the JISC logo on my title slide that JISC will sue me for copyright infringement – pretty unlikely!  I also try to ensure that a provide hypertext links to third party resources so that the original site can be easily found. And the Creative Commons logo has a caveat which links to a statement that points out that the slides may contain copyrighted resources. The onus is then on anyone who wishes to reuse my resources to undertaken their own risk assessment.

Professor Charles Oppenheim helped me to understand a risk management approach at a seminar he gave at UKOLN on the copyright implications of institutional repositories. In response to my question as to whether the complex copyright questions (“Podcasting lectures? What about performance rights?” ) meant that institutional repositories were unlikely to take off, Charles suggested a simple formula which could be used to gauge the risks. The Oppenheim formula is simply:

R=AxBxCxD

where R is the risk factor of your decision; A is the probability that you are infringing copyright; B is likelihood the the copyright owner finds out; C is the likelihood that they will care enough to take any action and D is the compensation they are likely to seek.

A simple formula which (when I asked permission to publish it) Charles told me is intended as rhetorical device rather than aiming to provide any significant deep insight. But this has been an approach I have found useful.

What Next?

What can we do if we are supportive of the views which Professors Weller, Harnad and Murray-Rust, but feel constrained by our perceptions of the risks and barriers? My suggestions:

Free your materials: Make use of Creative Commons for the materials that you create.

Take a risk management approach: Change does not occur without taking risks. So we prepared to take risks, but asses the risks and make an informed decision.

Be open about the risks: Share the approaches your have taken with others. Help them to assess the risks they may face in reusing your content.

And remember that there will be people and organisations within our sector who will have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. If, for example, you are involved in negotiating copyright deals, you may be concerned that your empire would be threatened by the widespread available of open content. Or maybe you simply don’t want to rock the boat.   But change is needed!

Materials For Blogging and Web 2.0 Workshops For Heritage Organisations

Earlier today I ran a half-day workshop entitled “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations“. This workshop was commissioned by ASVA (Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions, following a seminar I gave on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” at the Museums and Heritage Show.

The workshop made use of a series of briefing documents which have been developed to support the cultural heritage sector. As well as the documents which have been published the workshop also provided an opportunity to receive feedback on a number of additional documents we have produced, including An Introduction to Twitter and An Introduction to Seesmic (the video micro-blogging tool).

A number of other briefing document were used in two day-long workshops which were commissioned by CyMAL to support staff working in museums, libraries and archives in Wales. These events, entitled Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach To Social Software, provided a broader overview of the potential of Web 2.0 in cultural heritage organisations, and also addressed barriers to the take-up of Web 2.0 and strategies for addressing such barriers.

The feedback we receive on the documents (and on the need for additional documents) is an important part of the quality assurance processes for the resources. It should also be noted that we are making these documents available under a Creative Commons licence and encourage their reuse.

This approach to use of Creative Commons for resources I’ve created over the past few years has been taken primarily in order to maximise the impact of the content of the resources. And I would encourage others to do likewise. However, as Scott Leslie has recently described in a blog post on “Planning to Share versus Just Sharing” there is a real danger of encountering “frustration with ineffective institutional collaborations“. The summary of Scott’s post exhorts readers to “grow your network by sharing, not planning to share or deciding who to share with“.

This approach reflects the views expressed by Mike Ellis and myself in a paper entitled “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers” presented at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference. As I described in blog post back in July 2007 back then the cry was “Just do it!“. A year on, despite the economic problems we’re facing, the recent US election result seems to have resulted in a more positive approach to the world and a willingness to makes changes. So perhaps our cry should now be “Set up a blog? Use Creative Commons for our resources? Yes, we can!“

Openness In HE, But Not Elsewhere

Approaches To Openness in UK Higher Education

I commented recently on Andy Powell’s decision to live blog at the conferences he attends, so that his thoughts, opinions and comments can be shared with a wider community and his views discussed openly. This approach to openness reflects a culture which we can see increasingly in the high education sector, which is now will to make its research publications available though open access repositories, its data available under Science Commons licences and documentation and other resources available under Creative Commons licences.

Such approaches to openness in general aren’t being taken on ideological stances, but rather a belief that the benefits of education and research are best served by providing open access to the resources for use by others.

Approaches To Openness in the Wider Public Sector

It seems, though, that such approaches are not necessarily being taken in other public sector organisations, This struck be recently following one of posts on “Government Web Sites MUST Be WCAG AA Compliant!“.  In response to my concerns Adam Bailin of the Central Office of Information suggested that I give my comments on the Digital People – Accessibility forum.

In order to contribute to this forum it seems you need to fill in a cumbersome registration form, with a string of attached conditions. And, much worse, you even need to register in order to read the discussions on the forum. It’s therefore hardly surprising that there is hardly any discussion taking place on the forum.

Now the terms and conditions are much worse than I realised when I signed up. As can be seen to read the terms and conditions you need to scroll horizontally and vertically, although no scroll bars are displayed (so much for accessibility!). Of course when I registered I never read the terms and conditions, but I though it would be interesting to see the terms and conditions which the UK Government requires people to agree to in order to discuss UK government policies.  So the full details follow – but please mote they are very long.

Feel free to give your thoughts on these terms and conditions. One particular condition which struck me was:

“You acknowledge that http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk reserves the right to charge for the Community of Practice and to change its fees from time to time in its discretion.“

Now why do I feel that such terms and conditions provided on services such as Facebook would be used to condemn the service, but the Government seems to be able to get away with it?

Note that as the terms and conditions are so long, I have included a More tag in this blog post, so that you will have to follow the link in order to view the full list of terms and conditions.

Reflecting On Openness and the Semantic Web

The printed copy of the proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference divides the papers into four sections: Institutions, User Participation, Web Space and Reflecting. The concluding section, on Reflecting, contains only two papers: one on Semantic Dissonance: Do We Need (And Do We Understand) The Semantics Web? by Ross Parry (University of Leicester), Nick Poole (The Collections Trust) and Jon Pratty (Culture 24) and my paper on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?, co-authored by Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch), which I’ve posted about recently.

It is pleasing that the two papers which reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by recent Web developments have been written by a combination of researchers and practitioners based in the UK.

Ross Parry’s paper is based on a series of workshops funded by the AHRC which were held at various locations in the UK during 2006 and 2007. The paper describes discussions which have taken place recently in the UK in which it has been suggested that “museum data with good URIs, consistent metadata and simple tagging are seen to provide a vitally stable infrastructure on which to build“.

To this list I would add the importance of providing data which is free from restrictive licence conditions and which is exposed for reuse by other applications which can exploit the rich semantic data.

But stable URIs, consistent metadata, simple tagging, open data and machine interfaces – isn’t this what Web 2.0 is about? From one perspective, people may regard Web 2.0 as shorthand for referring to blog, wiki and RSS applications. But Tim O’Reilly’s original Web 2.0 diagram makes it clear that Web 2.0 is broader than this.

In a chapter entitled ‘‘If it quacks like a duck…’ – developments in search technologies‘ in a recent Becta Research Report on Emerging Technologies for Learning Volume 3 (2008) (PDF version of chapter) my colleague Emma Tonkin argues that:

By “semantic”, Berners-Lee means nothing more than “machine processable”. The choice of nomenclature is a primary cause of confusion on both sides of the debate. It is unfortunate that the effort was not named “the machine processable web” instead.

I think Emma is right: the term Semantic Web has caused much confusion. But if the Semantic Web is really a machine processable Web in which clean URIs can help to provide programatic access to structured data, then isn’t this very close to what Web 2.0 may be considered to be about?

And can you claim to be in favour of the Semantic Web if you are critical of the architectural aspects of Web 2.0? Or, to put it another way, isn’t engagement with Web 2.0 a needed stepping stone towards the Semantic Web? And won’t we find that those who come out with reasons for not engaging with Web 2.0, will come out with a similar set of reasons for not engaging with the Semantic Web?

What Does Openness Mean To Your Community?

Myself, Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch) are the co-authors of a paper on “What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?” which has been accepted for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. And I’m pleased that David Bearman (conference co-chair) response when he read the paper was that it should be discussed in a Professional Forum at the conference. Indeed David’s comment on the paper was “it sounds like it could be the most amazing session at MW this year” :-)

The paper suggests that openness can include open standards, open source, open APIs, open access and an open culture (i.e. a willingess to encourage user-generated content). But the paper also acknowledges that there is a downside to each of these aspects. Some of these concerns were raised by Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the MDA in a thread on “The speculative aspect of using Web 2″ on the MCG JISCMail list. Nick commented:

… ‘how can you be so naïve’? Low cost of entry? We were promised that with Open Source Software and it turned out to be no cheaper. Reaching audiences while we sleep? They told us Z39.50 and interoperability would solve that and we’re still not there. Content Management will make everyone a publisher? You just try and get a username and password out of the Council IT Admin.

I’m pleased that Nick raised such concerns. He’s right when he suggests that the potential benefits of both open source and open standards have been over-hyped. And, similarly, the benefits of Web 2.0 can also be exaggerated. But my response to the concerns raised by Nick are to argue that we need to develop more sophisticated ways of engaging with these aspects of openness – and just because policy makers appear to feel that simply mandating use of open standards and open source software will be sufficient to deliver their benefits, doesn’t mean we are faced with the binary choice of accepting or rejecting such views. Rather we need to engage in discussions and debate on ways in which real benefits can be realised.

I’ve been involved in working collaboratively with others in developing models for exploiting the potential of open standards and open source software. At the Museums and the Web 2.007 conference I presented a paper on Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, co-authored with my colleague Marieke Guy and Alastair Dunning (then of AHDS). These ideas were further developed and extended to include open source and an open access in a paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access co-authored by Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Randy Metcalfe (then of JISC OSS Watch).

But there’s a need to build on these approaches and to develop approaches for exploiting other aspects of openness. And such approaches need to recognise the dangers and difficulties. But just because there are difficulties, doesn’t mean we should reject openness – rather it means we need to continue having the debate, whether it’s on mailing list such as the MCG list, on this blog or at the professional forum at the Museums and The Web 2008 conference. So I’ll ask here the questions w’ll be discussing in a few day’s time: what does openness mean to your community, what are the benefits it can provide, what are difficulties which are likely to be faced and, most importantly, how do you feel such difficulties should be overcome.

Your feedback is warmly welcomed.

Open Science, Open Seminars

Open Science

One of the ways in which myself and my colleagues in UKOLN keep up-to-date with new developments across our communities is through the UKOLN seminar programme. The speakers tend to be those who are working in areas related to our interests and have something new to say.

The most recent seminar was given by Cameron Neylon, of STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and School of Chemistry, University of Southampton. The title of Cameron’s talk was “A Beginner’s Guide to Open Science: Not for beginners but by beginners“. Cameron described his involvement in various aspects of ‘openness’ within the context of scientific research. Further information on his work is available from his Science In the Open blog - and he also contributes to the Openwetware blog, as you can see from his thoughts on his visit at UKOLN. He described how Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis are being used by the scientific research community, not only for making notes and sharing ideas, etc. using blogs and wikis in ways which will be familiar with readers of this blog, but also what I would describe as ‘semantic blogging’ – use of templates to allow structured information (e.g. names of objects, processes, etc) to be used in ways which allowed for rich use with the blog/wiki environment and reuse in other contexts. For example in the Sortase Cloning example, the data in the table in not created using a table editor (which can lead to errors being introduced) – rather a template will ensure that the data is valid. In addition the data is integrated with other relevant areas of the blog. Effectively the blog is being used as a structured scientific content management system.

Cameron also described OpenWetWare – “an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering” which runs on the MediaWiki software. Another example Cameron provided of use a a wiki within this community was UsefulChem, which this in this case uses the externally-hosted Wikispaces service.

As well as illustrated how blogs and wikis are being used by the scientific research community, Cameron also described how he is embracing the Web 2.0 philosophy of openness. In a post on “The OPEN Research Network Proposal – update and reflections” Cameron described an open process for submitting a proposal for a research grant. The proposal was written using Google Docs and the final version, prior to its migration to an in-house application for producing the PDF in a format required by the research council, is freely available for viewing. – and, if you are interesting, you can compare this with the version which was submitted(PDF file) to the funding council.

Use of blogs, wikis and open development – some great example of how Web 2.0 is being used by the research community. And, as I discovered when Googling for further information on Cameron Neylon’s work, it doesn’t stop there. A number of given by Cameron and others involved in open Science activities have been videoed, screencasted or recorded. For example a talk by Jean-Claude Bradley on “Open Notebook Science: Putting the Information User in Control through Transparency” is available as a screencast using the Google Video playerand several talks are available as podcasts through iTunes, as illustrated below.

Open Seminars

This latter example reflects some of my current activities. Cameron kindly gave me permission to video his talk and, as an experiment, I have uploaded the first 10 minutes of the talk (which is all I took) to YouTube.

I’m aware of the limitations of this particular video: I didn’t have my tripod to hand, for example and there is visual clutter – bottles of mineral water  – in front of the speaker (although perhaps this could provide an  for a sponsorship deal :-). And there are clearly resource implications in recording seminars on a systematic basis (provided, of course, that speakers would be willing for their talks to be made publicly available). In this case, however, (using my Casio Exlim EX-Z1080 camera) I simply needed to take the recording and plug the camera into my PC. I was then asked which application I wished to use. selecting the YouTube uploader, I simply needed to fill in a few fields and press the upload button. Simplicity itself – and it was pleasing to receive an unsolicited email from a colleague saying “Thanks Brian, that was useful to get a feel for the seminar since I missed it yesterday“.

I think it was particularly appropriate that a seminar on Open Science provided an opportunity for this initial experiment in opening up access to the talk to a wider audience. But what do you feel about this? Is the light weight approach adequate? Is the 10 minute clip sufficient or does the lack of the full talk frustrate you? From the point of view of the speaker and the main audience (colleagues at UKOLN and other participants from the University) would such openness tend to stifle open discussion and debate? And, finally, can we, if we are thinking about making greater use of video recordings, really justify the additional time and effort this make take?

New Open Data Licence – a Milestone for Sharing Data on the Internet

Myself, Scott Wilson and Randy Metcalfe co-authored a paper on “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access” which Scott presented at the ELPUB 2007 conference. The paper described the potential benefits of use of open standards and open source software and an open approach which characterises much of the Web 2.0 environment.

We were aware when writing the paper, though, that there was a gap related to open data. I’m pleased to report that this gap is now being addressed with the launch by Talis and Creative Commons of a new open data licence, which the press release describes as “a milestone for sharing data on the Internet”.

I was aware of Talis’s work in this area when I attended a session on Open Data at the WWW 2007 conference, which I wrote about some time ago. One of the questions I asked at the conference related to the governance of Talis’s Community Licence.  I was assured that Talis aimed to get it established as an open licence governed by a trusted neutral provider and this was confirmed in a post by Paul Miller in September 2007.  And now the results of that work is openly available.

Talis’s press release is given below.

Talis and Creative Commons are delighted to announce the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, the first output of a successful partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons.  Creative Commons is well known for its advocacy and licensing work in the arena of ‘creative works’ such as songs, images, and copyrightable text.

In developing the Public Domain Dedication and Licence, Talis secured the efforts of Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde, asking them to build upon the principles of the earlier Talis Community Licence in ways that ensured its fitness for international purpose whilst aligning it more closely to the phrasing of Creative Commons’ overarching protocol.

Talis Technology Evangelist Dr. Paul Miller commented, “At Talis we’ve been arguing for a more permissive culture around use and reuse of data for a very long time. Working with our partners at Creative Commons and elsewhere we now have a clear framework upon which to build, and in our Public Domain Dedication and Licence we have the very first licence to conform to that new Science Commons Open Access Data Protocol. With this announcement we provide a tool to those who already understand the value of unlocking their data. We can also use discussion of this first tool to carry a wider set of messages to those who remain unaware of the importance of data licensing to their own activities.”

The legal environment within which data exist is radically different to that for creative works, and although there have been attempts to apply existing Creative Commons licenses to data, the legal validity of those efforts is questionable. In Europe we have Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament, and its various expressions in the laws of member states to define the so-called Database Right. These protections do not apply in jurisdictions such as the United States. A different approach is therefore required if we are to facilitate the widespread availability of data upon which the emerging Semantic Web will depend.

John Wilbanks, Creative Commons’ Vice President responsible for the Science Commons project, commented “For a commercial organisation such as Talis, with a heritage in the business of creating and managing data, to recognise the importance of the ‘freedom to integrate’ says much about changing attitudes to the ownership and use of data. That they  went beyond this recognition and did something about it with their licensing and advocacy work says much about them and the team with which they collaborated. The Open Data Commons Licence is the fruit of that collaboration. Both CC0 and the ODCL offer a sound legal basis upon which creators can follow Talis’ example and recognise that there is far more to be gained by enabling access to data than by continuing to lock it away. Uniquely built for data, the Open Data Commons Licence approach furthermore implements the norms of data sharing for scientific data, providing the guidance for scientists to act as good citizens without exposing them to lawsuits and lawyers.”

Jordan Hatcher, who completed the redrafting effort, commented, “Building an open data licence for the community is very much a collaborative process and we need everyone’s input to make the licence be the best it can be — including meeting everyone’s needs for open data. The project’s goal is to produce an easy to understand licence and that means having it user tested just like software. In the end, the Open Data Commons licence will provide a workable and easy to use solution for data integration that will take care of the relevant rights over data and databases.”

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for use from today. We are working with the Cambridge-based Open Knowledge Foundation in the expectation that they can take on the support and development of this and related licenses in the future, ensuring true community ownership of the licensing cornerstone upon which so much data will come to rely.

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for download from www.opendatacommons.org,  along with the first set of documented Community Norms.

Many congratulations to Talis for this work.  Now that the licence  is available, let’s start making use of it and share our data as well as our text, images and software.

Open Development And Amplified Events

Open Development

Ross Gardler, Manager of the JISC  OSS Watch service, visited UKOLN yesterday to give a seminar on open development. Although OSS Watch’s main interest is in the application of this methodology within open source software development, as Ross made clear open development can also be applied in other contexts, including the development of content and in learning contexts. Ross has recently commented on the application of an open development approach by the JISC-funed WepPA project.

I am very much in favour of the approaches which Ross described, and personally have been making much of the materials I have developed available with a Creative Commons licence for a couple of years.  I have also participated in Wikipedia, creating a number of entries and helping to improve the quality of content created by others. This very much fits in with Ross’s views on open development, I think.

Open Development and Amplified Events

UKOLN has been taking a similar approach to the exploitation of networked technologies at events over the past few years. Lorcan Dempsey coined the term “Amplified Conference” to describe events in which the content and the discussions aren’t restricted to the closed community of participants who are physically present at the event, but can be freely accessed by all. A paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences“ presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference described our initial work in this area, which was subsequently followed up by a series of briefing papers which provide advice on best practices for doing this.

Open Development and UKOLN’s “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” Workshop

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” will take place in Birmingham on Monday 26^th November 2007. Although the workshop is fully subscribed, with about 100 participants, we intend to allow remote participants to access the workshop materials and, we hope, either view a live video stream of the plenary talks or event view the video stream within Second Life.

The live video stream and use of Second Life service will be provided by Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation (sponsors of the workshop). Andy has described the plans for the technological infrastructure which will be used to make the talks available to a remote audience, so I won’t repeat this here. What is worth commenting upon from Andy’s post is the openness about the potential problems we may experience: “Sounds complex?  Probably.  Do-able?  I think/hope so.  It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.” But rather than having a low profile experiment with a closed group of friends, the approach Andy and myself are taking is to be open about this experiment (on both our blogs and on a number of mailing lists), which we hope will maximise the learning of the potential benefits of this approach, but perhaps also more useful, the problems we may encounter and the things we might do differently things next time.

As well as the technical challenges which Andy will be addressing, there are also various non-technical issues which I have been focussing on.  I have been in contact with all of the speakers informing them of our plans and getting their agreement to be streamed to a live audience (additional pressure on them, but I’m pleased to say that they are all willing). We have produced an Acceptable Use Policy document for the event, intended for participants who plan to make use of their laptop (or other networked device) during the workshop.  And Andy and myself and currently discussing the best ways of providing real time chat during the talks. This can be used to support the remote audience, for example to inform them of the slide which is being displayed. But should we have separate channels for the various media – would the video streaming audience be interested in the Second Life discussions “nice avatar“)?

And, of course, as well as the work which Andy and I (and my colleagues in UKOLN’s events team) are involved in, this open approach encourages input from potential participants and others who may have taken part in similar amplified events. Such open development also involves shared responsibilities (for example, we would expect remote participants to try out the various tools in advance of the event and to take responsibility for fixing any local configuration problems) and sharing the risks (being supportive if not everything works as planned).  But the open source development approach of ‘release early, release often’ in order to maximise the feedback can also be provide benefits in many other areas. 

We welcome your thoughts.

The Power Of Information

I attended a meeting recently at which a civil servant introduced a report which he was summarising as ‘exciting’. I had to stifle a yawn, thinking that what might be exciting for a civil servant would probably be very dull and boring. But I was wrong – the report on “The Power Of Information” is of much interest to those of us (and I include many readers of this blog) with an interest in promoting open access to information.

The report (which is available as a PDF document – 280 KB, 57 pages) was commissioned by the government and published in June 2007, as described on the Cabinet Office Web site.

The background to the report is an awareness of the popularity of Web 2.0, especially those which provide user generated content and how such technologies, coupled by a more open agenda, can enable information provided by government bodies to be reused in various interesting ways (Paul Walk recently commented on the phrase “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else“).

The government’s response to the review (which is available as a PDF document – 610 KB, 20 pages) was very encouraging, broadly agreeing with all of the recommendations.

Although this report is aimed at information produced by central government bodies (i.e. information covered by Crown Copyright) my view is that the publication of the report and its acceptance should be welcomed by those in the educational and cultural heritage sectors. The report can help to move the debate within these sectors on the reuse of data and encourage experimentation and sharing, rather than the conservatism we have seen in the past, with worries about loss of IPR and potential (though perhaps seldom realised) income-generation possibilities.

A report worth reading, I feel.

Wikipedia – Can We Provide Open Access For Training Materials?

Melissa Knighton, who works on the Staff Development Unit at the University of Leeds, and I took part in a workshop at ITCP held in Trieste a couple of years ago. So I was interested to rediscover her Elgg blog recently. Her posting on Wikipedia – a resource for learning and teaching? described a staff development course on the role of Wikipedia in learning and teaching. Further exploration of the Elgg blog service at the University of Leeds led me to a posting on Wikipedia: What the critics say by Angela Newton, the Information Literacy Team Leader in the Library at the University of Leeds. Angela’s posting summarises Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses – issues which, I’m sure, will be addressed more fully in the staff development course.

But how much time and effort will be spent in duplicating the development of similar materials across the library and information sector? The Library sector, in particular, should appreciate the benefits to be gained by providing open access to resource, and such benefits need not be restricted to research publications – Creative Commons licences can also be used with document and training materials. This is an argument I made in a paper on Let’s Free IT Support Materials! which I presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference.

Which will be the first Library to provide a Creative Commons licence for its documentation and training materials? And have a Creative Commons logo on slides used in training courses? Or is this already happening?