Twisting the bytes

The Wikipedia Editor Survey 2011, published last April, emphasized the importance of explicit acknowledgement and recognition of effort among Wikipedia editors as an instrumental factor to sustaing and grow its community over the next years (page 4):

Positive Reinforcement: Acknowledging the effort of editors is important to reverse the editor decline. It is a commonly held view that editors just want to see their articles improve and read by lots of people and they don’t care about the opinion of their peers. This is false. The survey finds that acknowledgement of peers via a nice note or a barnstar (or kitten) is valued even more highly than achieving featured article status. To sustain and grow our community, we need to provide each other with positive feedback, and we should create tools to make it easy to do so.

In fact, this is the central argument of “El Potlatch Digital: Wikipedia y el Triunfo del Procomún y el Conocimiento Compartido” ["The Digital Potlatch: Wikipedia and the Triumph of Commons and Shared Knowledge"], a new book that I have written along with Joaquín Rodríguez, vice-dean of EOI. The book has been published in Spanish by Ediciones Cátedra, and now it should be available in your favourite book shop.

Participation in Internet communities has been a fascinating topic for researchers, practitioners and members of these communities. A previous study by Michlmayr, Robles and González-Barahona showed evidence of lasting volunteer participation in Debian. In this work, they defined the half-life of contributors as the “the time required for a certain population of maintainers to fall to half of its initial size”. Their estimation for the half-life in Debian was 7.5 years. In other words, after 7.5 years of project evolution we can still find 50% of the initial Debian maintainers participating in the project. Enough said about commitment of Debian developers.

In the case of larger online communities like Wikipedia we need to account for the effects of casual contributors versus more active and experienced editors. In any case, our study on the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia, published in 2008, shows that the balance between casual and very active contributors has remained stable since many years ago (2004). Even more interesting is the fact that this balance did not experimented any variation from 2007 onwards, despite the well-known “plateau effect” in the monthly number of edits to the largest Wikipedias starting that year.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to infer possible causes behind this behavioral patterns from observational studies like these ones. What does it make participants to stay in online communities? What factors motivate them to contribute? Why do they stop participating? This book is an attempt to shed some light on this, mixing empirical results with qualitative investigation (interviews to editors in the Spanish Wikipedia).

Our conclusion is clear: meritocracy and effort recognition has a central role in the motivation of contributors in collaborative habitats like Wikipedia. This resembles the Potlatch, an example that let us understand how in certain contexts we need to give away our capital (material or intangible) so that the community can give it back to us as acknowledgment, recognition and renown. As a result, in these collaborative habitats the working capital does not have a monteray but a symbolic nature, under the form of reputation and popularity, and the logic of its accumulation demands unselfishness to create antoher form of social value. We don’t claim that this example is valid for all kind of Internet communities, but some of the best-known cases (such as Wikipedia) exemplify the triumph of shared knowledge and Commons over other individualistic strategies.

PS: We believed that it was a great opportunity to publish this book in Spanish, specially with a reputated publisher such as Alianza, given the lack of books about Wikipedia in our native language. However, we would be very happy to have this book also available in English. So if you can help please let us know!

I have a question to challenge all my colleagues working with research data in Computer Science: When was the last time you could replicate a previous study, from other author(s)?

For different reasons, over the past few months I have found myself diving into the rich collection of previous research works in several areas: Wikipedia studies, libre software engineering, social media and social network analysis, to name a few. Probably, many of you already know my inborn bias towards quantitative research (but also for multidisciplinar research methods). So, it may sound totally unsurprising that most of the publications I was reviewing included empirical experiments on different datasets gathered from a wide variety of sources, target systems and virtual communities. As I was scrolling through the pages, I realized, once again, the huge proportion of research work that cannot be replicated in a easy way. Still a sad lesson to be learned, considering that, today, most of us researchers work with digital data. And bits can be duplicated or sent to the other side of the world at negligible cost.

I already commented in my first post the curious study conducted by my colleague Gregorio Robles, about replicability of research works published in MSR. For those of you unfamiliar with MSR series, this is a working conference (formerly a workshop) devoted to the art of “Mining Software Repositories”. It is also co-located with ICSE, preeminent conference on software engineering, so it attracts the top-notch specialists in this area. One would expect that a scientific conference focused on such an empirical, hands-on activity would encourage (and even demand) the ability to access all datasets and tools used in previous experiments, in order to i) better learn the insights of different methods and practical solutions to problems in this area and ii) to make their life easier to other researchers willing to build on top of existing methods, tools and results.

Far from this, the conclusions from the replicability study were quite dissapointing. From the 171 papers published in the 6 previous editions of MSR, the most frequent case (64 papers) is that of a study that uses publicly available data sources, but it doesn’t offer access to the processed dataset (the results), or to the tools/scripts to perform that study, either. Even more worrisome is a trend discovered in these publications: as time goes by, the number of papers with publicly available processed datasets was lower!! Therefore, the situation is getting worse.
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Some time ago, I read a paragraph on the book “Producing Open Source Software“, by Karl Fogel, explaining the need to write down conventions and agreements that have become essential for daily life in an open source community. In this way, people joining your community at a later point can quickly grasp its folklore and tacit rules (not only techincal rules, but also for social interaction).

Since the book is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0, I can post the following excerpt to illustrate the above point:

Don’t try to be comprehensive. No document can capture everything people need to know about participating in a project. Many of the conventions a project evolves remain forever unspoken, never mentioned explicitly, yet adhered to by all. Other things are simply too obvious to be mentioned, and would only distract from important but non-obvious material. For example, there’s no point writing guidelines like “Be polite and respectful to others on the mailing lists, and don’t start flame wars,” or “Write clean, readable bug-free code.” Of course these things are desirable, but since there’s no conceivable universe in which they might not be desirable, they are not worth mentioning. If people are being rude on the mailing list, or writing buggy code, they’re not going to stop just because the project guidelines said to

Well, I completely agree with this point of view. However, over the past years FLOSS has become quite popular among a broader audience. And we have to acknowledge that some of these new participants may not have this very simple, but fundamental perspective in mind, for multiple reasons. There have always been many examples of this kind, since human relationships are complex and frequently not as precise as we would need them to be in the digital world, without direct face-to-face interaction. But there was a general perception about a growing number of cases were good manner and politeness were flagrantly obviated, and not only in open source communities, but also in other open coumminites around free knowledge production.

That’s why this recent post on Jono Bacon’s blog quickly got my attention. Jono is the Ubuntu community manager, and he’s quite respected for his extensive experience in this role. He’s also the author of the authoritative book about Community management, “The Art of Community“. Once a year, he also hosts the Community Leadership Summit. I think these are strong arguments for taking his word for this. I really love this part:

I love to have a good debate, and I am never afraid to shake hands and say “let’s just agree to disagree” or calmly not participate.

In fact, a growing number of participants in debates (not only in virtual communities, but also in live debates, let alone TV shows) think that the ultimate goal is to completely convince the other interlocutors who don’t share their own point of view. However, the most positive side of debates is actually to exchange different points of view. Of course, there are key differences, depending on the topic. Sometimes, you discuss really technical stuff, and there are quite clear arguments in favor of a certain solution (for efficiency reasons, development guidelines, readability, maintainability, compatibility, etc.). But some other times, the arguments just express opinions on a certain issue, and there may be different points of view.

One way or the other, I think that this call for respect in open communities is really in place, right now. And thus I fully support its aim. Please, help to spread the word and preserve the healthy spirit of open collaboration around free knowledge.

Over the past 4 years, I’ve been an avid consumer of open content, mainly images and text licensed under CC-BY-SA (my favourite license ever). 90% of times, I collect it to prepare slides and other learning materials for university courses, training sessions, lectures or conferences (the other 10% is just for fun, since I love photography and I release all my works under CC-BY-SA). I think we still have a long way to go to faciliate the search, creation and reuse of open content. And now, I have a great opportunity to share my experience with other people and learn other points of view.

Starting tomorrow till Friday Nov. 5, I’ll be in Barcelona attending Mozilla Drumbeat Festival 2010. I admit I have high expecations on this unconference/festival or whatever name you give to an event that will bring together ~400 persons around OER and the Web. You can check the program here. The Festival has been designed as a forum to foster participation and quick interaction (maybe, it reminds me our great Open Space sessions in WikiSym, but on a larger scale)

Some of the sessions I plan to attend will cover different perspectives of a very important topic: how people create and reuse open content on the Web. In this line, we have for instance a session on “How to encourage content reuse”, another one exploring how to build better platforms to find open content (“Pathways to open content”) and finally, a brainstorming session about “The next big thing in OER”. Thus, I’ve been thinking about these issues, what they have in common and how we can solve any problems that open content creators and users may find. This is my attept to summarize my thoughts, so far.

From my personal experience, and according to comments from other colleagues, there are 3 main issues impacting open content reuse:

1. Understanding which license to choose: We have many different licenses to choose for our content. However, many people still feel ok licensing their work under a Non-Commercial clause. While it’s true that this is a positive step towards openess, I think we also need to remind why licenses including NC clauses are not compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition.
2. Searching for open conent: Still today, almost a decade after CC was created, it is still a pain in the neck to find open content on the web. Well, I don’t mean it’s difficult to find any open content or good open content (just visit Wikimedia Commons and let me know what you think). I mean it’s very time-consuming to find the open content you need for a certain cituation (exercise: find an image depicting a fire flame, with decent quality, not including a candle, lincensed under CC-BY-SA. How much time did it take you?).
3. Using and storing open content: Finally, you found that great image for your slides. OK, you save it on a local folder, you include the image and link the original author (if needed), and you include a licensing comment. You’re done. Now, say that 3 months after that, you need again some images you already downloaded. You go to your local folder and… you don’t remember neither the author nor the license for most of them (if not all). You need to open the file where you used them to search for that info, or you search the web again (and pray for the search results to remain unaltered over the past 3 months). Sometimes, you end up including a long string on the file name to record this info, but that’s not very handy to tidy your stuff, right?

What we find here is the absence of a standarized, seamless support for embedding critical information in open content files (specially author info and license type). What if your favourite text processor or presentations software already tracks for you the author and license info and includes a footnote automatically? What if you can automatically create a table of licenses and authors in LaTeX? And my favourite ones: file managers. How about opening a local folder with Dolphin (or Nautilus, or Gwenview…), right click on your mouse and select “arrange files by author and license type”? They could also present a small note with that info on mouse rollover.

In summary, the root of all these issues (educating your users, finding open content on the web and leveraging the use of open content in academia and other contexts) is the lack of a standarized support to embed open content relevant info in multimedia files. Pierre Far, who’s leading the session on “Pathways to open content”, suggested a possible solution: XMP. This is an example solution for standard support to include information of file contents in the file header. It also supports many different types of multimedia files (including making use of EXIF heders we photographers love in JPEG files). But there may be others. I don’t mind what we finally choose, as long as everyone agree to use the same standard.

Conclusion: if we aspire to get real support from end-users to open content, we must help them offering seamless suspport to perform daily tasks required in the new workflow (dealing with licenses and author info). With this apparently simple step, we would shoot down all problems above with a very simple but effective move. Time for other people to jump in the discussion, and stadards masters to start thinking about this.

Looking forward to meeting you in Barcelona!

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization aimed  to promote the CC licenses around the world, thus generating positive awareness and impact on the global issue of knowledge share. Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, reflects this vision in an interview for TechRadar. This interview got my attention, and triggered this post.

How to build a good business model for non-profit organizations supporting open movements(*)?

(*) [Note: in the absence of a better term, I've been using open movements to encompass all sort of initiatives articulated around collaborative communities, open to the contribution of any person, pursuing the creation of physical or digital works and knowledge compliant with the definition of free cultural works. For instance, this includes Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), as well as creative works (text, images, audio, video, etc.) released under a free license].

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