Library Manifesto

A friend of mine is a librarian, specifically a law librarian.  She posted a link on Facebook to an article about appreciating librarians.  It spawned a pro-librarian rant from me that I thought I would blog about ( and include with maybe an edit or two).

The problem we face is that our knowledge and culture are being digitized, which while it exponentially improves accessibility to that cultural knowledge, also jeopardizes it.

There is the simple physical risk faced by the media on which these artifacts are being stored, those media becoming less and less permanent by the year.  While books and canvas were imperfect, being vulnerable to the elements and accidental edits on reproduction (and not so accidental ones), they seem to have lasted decades and centuries.  The printing press (theoretically) improved the accuracy of reproduction, and reduced the risk of loss.  Works are fixed to digital media by means less permanent than the chemistry of inks and paints.  Though factory-pressed optical media are probably the most resilient fixations since stone tablets (the laser etches an aluminum disc which is sealed into polycarbonate), homemade writeable optical media use dyes that, while more resilient than magnetic media, are rarely of a near-permanent grade.  Less permanent than dye-based optical media are magnetic media.  Though some can hold their polarizations for indefinite amounts of time, they are susceptible to magnetic fields like speakers, x-ray machines, and power transformer blocks.  And then we have non-permanent ethereal storage – the emergence of the cloud, or community-based distributed network storage, the integrity of which is only theoretical and based on statistical predictions.  In the end, we still need books as a mostly permanent record.

There is a more insidious risk though.  Read the rest of this entry »

Technology (law) is everywhere!

In “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” (Chapters-Indigo Link), which I mentioned some time ago (Information is the Good, the Currency, and the Era) and which Bill Gates wrote a decade ago, the examples given are pointedly not information technology businesses.

Of course, Gates is talking about information systems and the logistics of information management; but Gates is a pretty big picture guy, and there’s a reason he chooses GM over Xerox, and McDonald’s over Electronic Arts. Information technology is a tool in information logistics and information management. Gates is not yet explicit in this distinction, though he may be later. (I haven’t finished the book yet – I had something really big come up. More about that later.)

But the importance of recognizing information logistics as what programmers would call an abstraction, and information technology as one of several interdependent means of implementation is implicit in the work. This is similar stuff to what I developed, through my consulting business (Costin Media), into Information Dynamics Intelligence™ (IDI).

I’m not going to plug Costin Media and IDI too much though, as the business is necessarily on hiatus at the moment. A month ago, I began articling at a small general practice law firm. This means lots of things, paramount among them: 1) In 11 months, I will be a lawyer; and 2) I can’t have a job outside of my articles as per Law Society rules, so I’m not pursuing any consulting work.

At the firm where I’m working, I deal a lot with wills & estates, family law, and small business.  “But wait!” you say. “Where’s the intellectual property and information technology?”

And I answer, “Everywhere.”

Read the rest of this entry »

How to save a drowning business

This post, short as it is, has been in development for a while.  I’ve been concerned that it will appear merely populist, almost socialist, in its call against needless “downsizing.”  It isn’t socialist.  It’s about the creative enterprise that business can be.  I want this to be understood by a generation of executives who’ve lost sight of the organism of business.

We are in a terrible time, economically speaking.  This is not news.  But there is a sharp division between broken markets and the actual economic and productive engine of society.  There are indicators that productivity need not be as harmed as the equity markets have been.  This is because of different motivations.  Shareholders, typically, want to make money.  Some also want to have their hands in the pies of growing industry, but even so, money is a key motivator.  There are two ways of making money from corporate equity:  one is from equity growth – the growth in the value of a corporation; the other is from dividends – a shareholder’s proportion of the company’s profits.

Executives are responsible to the shareholders.  But there are two ways in which they can address shareholder demands:  one is equitable growth, which happens when a company builds and grows.  The other is from profit, which happens two ways:  either from growth in revenue that outstrips growth in expenses, or from cuts to expenses that exceed the drop in revenue.  The first is positive, and the second is negative.  More importantly, profit will usually follow a constructive plan, while equitable growth will never (unless there is a profitable acquisition) follow massive downsizing that is done merely to create profit bubbles and golden parachutes.

(What do I mean by a profit bubble?  Decrease client satisfaction at great savings to expenses, and exploit the lag before the revenues drop from clients pulling out.)

Now on to my cherished month-old metaphor: Read the rest of this entry »

Information is the Good, the Currency, and the Era

I’m reading “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” by Bill Gates.  (Chapters-Indigo Link Here)  He wrote it ten years ago, which allows me the critical distance I prefer when reading a book that prognosticates.

Say what you will about MS Windows, Mr. Gates knows business.  So I figured his views on business in the post-industrial age would be at least interesting if not wholly prescient or doctrinal.

Actually, I would suggest that we are now post-post-industrial.  I’m going to digress for a bit.  I’m not sure I will come back.  You’re probably not all that surprised.  During the industrial age, money was used to trade industrial output.  For a brief period, beginning with the expansion and deregulation of derivative markets and ending with the financial swan-dive-with-a-jet-pack-and-a-small-nuclear-device this past autumn, money was used to trade mathematical shadows of money.  Money became more than an instrument of trade, but the seed of massive abstracts that themselves became a primary good of the world economy.  What is interesting about that short era is that during the industrial age, as currency was used to evaluate and trade industrial output, it was still indexed to gold as that currency; during the money economy, the gold standard was removed.  During the industrial age, money was seen as abstract, and thus it required a tie to tangible gold.  Once money was no longer seen as an abstraction, the ties to gold seemed superfluous dead weight being dragged behind an explosive global economy.  With the ties severed, we had two forms of money defining the economy: currency and its derivatives.  Which of them was the post-industrial good and which was the post-gold standard?  Derivatives are not money; they are data and theories and probabilities about money.  But they were being bought and sold.  It would seem they were the good.  The deregulation of derivative markets, however, allowed them to be used as the currency for those trades.  It would seem that they were currency then, which as we’ve seen is an abstraction of a standard, which would in turn indicate that the standard was money itself, which is not a standard, but a metric indicating value.  Both derivatives and money are, themselves, information.  The markets have deflated, swallowing (by some measures) decades of economic growth.  But the existence of those derivative markets was symptomatic of the development of a new economic era wherein information underpins the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

Opening the Scope of Employee Contribution

Wow.  Two months.  Sorry about that.  Things have been changing and I’ll be launching a new business shortly.

One of the major things I’m doing with this new business has to do with the way management recognizes and utilizes talent within an organization.

Some years ago, I took a summer job in a warehouse.  On the company totem pole, I was the pile of twigs gathered around the bottom – I was a seasonal picker.  It was my stated goal to aim for average performance numbers.  Not only was I not expected to excel, as seasonal help I wasn’t even asked to try.  It was my job to achieve mediocrity pulling widgets out of bins on shelves, and count them out in base-dozen (i.e., 3.11 in this notation meant three dozen and eleven), never having to count above the number twelve.  What if there were more than a gross of a given widget in an order, you ask?  Those were in cases, and the full cases were dealt with by those in higher positions.  Literally.  They used a forklift and other warehouse racing vehicles.

I counted these widgets in batches up to twelve at a time, and put them – neatly (packing them neatly was a requirement of the job) – in boxes.  Not rocket science.  Years earlier, I had an assignment in my computer engineering class to write a short program in FORTRAN 77 that would calculate the amount of rocket fuel required for a given payload, taking into consideration the calculus of the fuel being payload as well.  I don’t know if that quite qualified as rocket science, but I found it harder than counting out widgets in bundles of twelve.  We also played with lasers that year in a physics lab, and I kept seeing green dots for days afterward.  I won’t even get into why you shouldn’t down a large bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans before trying to program in Pascal.  But I digress. Read the rest of this entry »

On Virtual Travel

Why would a denizen of a virtual world want to cross over into another virtual world, especially if she couldn’t bring her special powers, skills, or goods into that other world?  This was the question asked in a comment the other day:  http://weblawg.costinmedia.com/wp/legal-explorations/laws-for-the-virtual-universe/comment-page-1/#comment-3604

There are many examples of the attachment a player feels for his character in a role playing game, and there are also analogies in meatspace that are helpful.  There are two questions being asked above.  One is, why would a player want a character to cross between worlds?  Implicit within this is the question of whether the player wishes bi-directional movement between worlds.  The second question is, which of the character’s unique details in one world is the player willing to forego for the privilege of crossing over?

I’m using the word “player” to refer both to game players and users of non-game virtual worlds, by the way.  Players feel a connection to the characters they create, and this connection is related to the investment they put into the persona development of that character.  I’ll start by looking at character development in games not mediated by computers.  Let’s compare Monopoly and Dungeons & Dragons.  In Monopoly, if the game unexpectedly ends, the greatest loss you’re likely to feel is related to how much time, work, and luck went into acquiring your virtual property.  You didn’t create a unique character; you didn’t develop a persona for the wheelbarrow different from other wheelbarrow personae created by other players who’ve represented themselves by that playing piece. Read the rest of this entry »

Who carries your Web 2.0 banner?

What’s at stake when you let others step in your online footprint?

I wrote here about the possibility of something resembling agency through social networking / Web 2.0 / user-created content a short time ago.  I am now in the fortunate position to be examining this issue first hand, as I’ve been asked to provide content for the Tazzu blog.  My first piece there is going up simultaneously with this piece.  On the Tazzu blog, I suggest that you monitor how others perceive your relationship with those whom you authorize to use your name, your goodwill, your reputation, your platform, etc.  Here, I would like to get into a little more detail answering a specific question:

What is the difference between goodwill risks and liability risks with Web 2.0?

First some definitions:

From the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998):

Goodwill:  2.  The established reputation of a business etc. as enhancing its value.

Liability:  2.  A person or thing that causes one problems or puts something at risk.

From Black’s Law Dictionary (8^th Ed., 1999):

Goodwill:  A business’s reputation, patronage, and other intangible assets that are considered when appraising the business, esp. For purchase; the ability to earn income in excess of the income that would be expected from the business viewed as a mere collection of assets.  Because an established business’s trademark or servicemark is a symbol of goodwill, trademark infringement is a form of theft of goodwill.  By the same token, when a trademark is assigned, the goodwill that it carries is also assigned.

Liability:  1.  The quality or state of being legally obligated or accountable; legal responsibility to another or to society, enforceable by civil remedy or criminal punishment.

Vicarious liability:  Liability that a supervisory party (such as an employer) bears for the actionable conduct of a subordinate or associate (such as an employee) based on the relationship between the two parties.

From this, we can see that goodwill has to do with the perception of your enterprise, and liability has to do with getting into real legal trouble.  How are they connected by this Web 2.0 stuff?  Well, let’s look at that vicarious liability thing.  It refers to being liable for what someone does in your name, and requires two parts. Read the rest of this entry »

Laws for the Virtual Universe

What if virtual worlds, no matter their purposes, narratives, unique details, and other variations, could be linked?  What if they had borders between them, keeping the right stuff in its place, but in other ways being permeable?

I am in the process of revising my paper, “Sheriffs and Vigilantes of the Cyber-Frontier: Justice within Virtual Worlds,” and have also just read Cory Ondrejka’s essay, “Escaping the Gilded Cage: User-Created Content and Building the Metaverse.”  In the paper, I elaborate on “interration,” a process proposed by Ed Castronova, and expanded by Jack Balkin.  Essentially, it would make new legally recognized jurisdictions out of virtual worlds, complete with proper articles of “interration,” principles of accountability, and formal limits on liability.  It would do to virtual worlds what incorporation does for entrepreneurs and businesses.

Ondrejka, in his essay, suggests how to make the Metaverse an actuality.  The Metaverse was a complete virtual world in Neal Stephenson’s phenomenal novel, “Snow Crash.”  It should be noted that Cory Ondrejka is one of the head honchos at Linden Labs, creators of Second Life – a bona fide attempt at the Metaverse.

What I wonder is this: Read the rest of this entry »

The Value of Liberal Arts in a Recession

The New York Times recently published an article, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” by Patricia Cohen.  I was told about this article by McMaster University English and Cultural Studies Professor, Dr. Sarah Brophy.

NYT Article at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human.html

There are a few points in the article I would like to explore, from the perspective of someone who has partaken of the pastures on both sides of the fence.  First of all, I suggest that the dichotomy of liberal arts – the humanities – as an Ivory Tower luxury opposite the greenback-printing mill of technical disciplines is an artificial dichotomy.  Secondly, I suggest that it is a dangerous one.

Cohen sets out this dichotomy right at the beginning of her article, though she rightly questions whether it is a good idea to shift resources to technical training and sciences from liberal arts:

“A traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation.  Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose:  They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.”

I would like to add to this:  The humanist training, the whetting of mental faculties that not only separate us from the animals but allow us to weigh and manage the fruit and potential fruit of our technical wizardry, is as essential to a growing society as the freedom that makes it possible.  Growth in our society, as it was during the renaissance and in Athens two millennia earlier, is predicated on inseparable democratic and intellectual freedom.  Participation in a free democracy cannot be accomplished without growth, and growth cannot be accomplished without the intellectual ardour for which the humanities train us. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Stallman came to Vancouver, and I upset him

Richard Stallman was in Vancouver two weeks ago.  He performed, if I may describe his lectures like that, three times; I caught the first.  I asked Stallman a question after it was over, and thoroughly annoyed him.  I know that I annoyed him because he grew flustered, stamped his feet, turned away from me to the rest of the crowd and yelled at me.

Richard Stallman’s claims to fame are manifold.  From writing the emacs text editor (for you Windows-only users, there are text editors out there, which are designed for programmers, that show Notepad to be a genuine embarrassment to Microsoft), to being leader of the GNU development team, to founding the Free Software Foundation and being the free software movement’s chief evangelist, Stallman, or rms (as he prefers to be called), is a legend in the software world.  rms is equally well-known for his temper, his unsociable behaviour, and the monorail upon which he drives the train of his thoughts.

“Enough, Jeremy,” you are saying, “What did you ask him that made him stamp his feet, pump his fists, and otherwise react like a six-year-old who was told that he has to do his homework before he watches television?”

Before I tell you what I asked him, I have to tell you about Stallman’s lecture.  I found it very interesting.  I went to the first of three lectures held in various places that weekend.  This first one was at the UBC Faculty of Law, in the mega-hall (101, 102, 201).  It was primarily about the fundamental principles that underlie “free software”.  rms was quick to explain the difference between “free” software and “open source” software, a distinction I have often blurred.  I will do my best, in the future, to maintain this distinction, as it made a lot of sense to me.

Stallman explained the difference in different ways.  There is a language issue.  “Free” has two meanings in English; other languages tend to be more specific.  The distinction can best be drawn using the words “libre” (from French, which shares its Latin root with “liberty”) and “gratis”, referring to the price tag in dollars.  Both open source and free software are gratis, but only free software is built and distributed on a philosophy which incorporates principles of liberty.

Read the rest of this entry »