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!

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.

But even the original sources, the publicly available digital datasets that nurture empirical research in Computer Science (and many other areas) may become scarce. Sometimes, privacy concerns are put on the table to support the data locking approach, overlooking methods to anonymize information (useful at least for certain studies). Other times, we witness how social media platforms like Twitter unilaterally change their TOS making it more difficult to conduct research that uses its (public?) datastream. Not only that, but also forcing other very useful services like 140kit.com to stop providing a useful service for the research community. Suddenly, the company wants to monetize the analysis of this rich data stream through well-known resellers.

In the Wikipedia article about Science you can find a great citation attributed to Richard Feynman:

…there is an expanding frontier of ignorance…things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected

I believe that classic researchers, living in a world without digital artifacts and cutting-edge communication networks understood this much better than us. In Physics, Chemistry or Natural Sciences, most of times theories had to be contrasted with experiments, and results must be validated by other independent scholars to become widely accepted. And not for a naive argument of suspecting other colleagues committed errors or imprecisions. It is a matter of learning from previous work, and augment it in a more efficient way. I’m usually amused at the stories of other colleagues or students, who found themselves struggling with empirical studies, sometimes involving huge datasets. “You know, I spent much more time to retrieve data, to organize it, to deal with incorrect or nonsense values and to prepare data to be analyzed than actually performing the analysis and interpreting results!” I smile, then nod. “But research papers usually tell nothing about that!” Many people will say that’s because of “space limits” to write your report. Uh!

For example, Wikimedia Foundation is now undertaking an ambitious plan to revamp the Meta:Research wiki, that currently conveys a lot of information about past, present and future studies and research iniatives on Wikimedia projects and datasets. One of the goals is to organize and facilitate open access to original and processed datasets produced by researchers in this field, so that the next time you want to replicate or build on top of previous research results you don’t hit a brick wall.

Next time you come back from CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, ICSE, MSR, OSS, WikiSym, or any other relevant conference ask yourself this question as for the best research works you found: Could I replicate this work? Could I extend  it in an easy way, without starting all this process from scratch? Where can I find the data source, the dataset and the tools presented in these paper? Just as we find natural to archive research publications, why don’t we find just as natural to archive and give free access to research data and artifacts (processed datasets and code)? Why can’t we measure research impact, as well, by the number of times other researchers re-use research data and artifacts, already available, for their own convenience?

I’m sorry, but I think Computer Science scholars cannot simply dismiss this big issue. We should remember a good-old saying from school: the best way to learn something is by doing it. Let’s make it easier for others to learn from our work, and improve it.

What I didn’t expected (honestly) is that, one week after that, I would be able to find an exemplary case of this kind of issues. I’ve just discovered WikiExperts, a division of OnlineVisibilityExperts, which offers (I quote verbatim):

INCREASE VISIBILITY AND CREDIBILITY of your company, brand, or product by being present in Wikipedia – world’s largest and most used research tool. Wikipedia has more traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Delicious and almost all other social media. Your social media marketing strategy is incomplete without it.

For anyone familiar with Wikipedia policies, it’s obvious that this service comes into conflict with one of the things Wikipedia is not: Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means for promotion. If we take a closer look at the previous blurb, we can find some questionable points. The statement that Wikipedia is “the world’s largest and most used research tool” is very clever, but somewhat biased. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Thus, it can be used (in the adequate way) to start our own research, pointing us to more authoritative information sources. Wikipedia’s accuracy depends, among other things, on the many reviews from volunteer editors and support from outside, reliable information sources (a.k.a [citation needed]). It’s just the first step, not the end of the journey. Another point quickly grabbed my attention. These folks are explicitly considering Wikipedia as a key part of a social media marketing strategy, comparing it to Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. Should we really do that? Well, I think the answer is: no, we shouldn’t.

Many people tend to think about social media in terms of audience and outreach. Today, marketing and PR experts constantly follow global trends to identify where (phisically or, now more frequently, virtually) we spend most of our time. It would be really tempting to consider Wikipedia as a great platform for promotion. Except for the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which imposes some restrictions not shared by other social media. In Twitter, for example, I am free to talk about anything I want to. And this also includes expressing my very personal point of view about any topic. However, in Wikipedia editors must follow certain policies, in particular the five pillars. More precisely, NPOV is incompatible with promotional purposes about topics in which one might have direct interests (such as charging for writing a Wikipedia article on behalf of a certain company, organization or individual).

All the same, we can even find the WikiExperts code of ethics, where they state they adhere to Wikipedia policies, such as avoiding opinionated, biased or unsupported content, not removing negative information, writing about not notable topics or performing activities contrary to Wikipedia principles. Even after reading this, one wonders how this could be ever achieved if you are being payed, explicitly, to improve the public image your contractor. We must also note that this is quite different from initiatives such as the Public Policy Initiative or scientists improving Wikipedia entries on RNA biology. These editors doesn’t have a direct interest in presenting  a certain point of view. They just want to improve Wikipedia’s coverage about those topics, for the common good. It is very difficult to assert that you can do the same if you are an interested party in a “social media marketing strategy”.

This is not the first time promotional affairs have been detected in Wikipedia. In his excellent book, Andrew Dalby points out some examples such as Marshall Poe or Boy*d Up (this one apparently misinterpreted). As time goes by and Wikipedia popularity continues to increase, I’m afraid that we will see a significant increment of these actions. However, we must remember that Wikipedia is not just like any other social media. If Wikimedia Foundation is working to keep it going without advertisements, it is for very good reasons (like preserving the NPOV pillar). Any other attempt of circumventing these basic policies would be just trying to subvert the principles of Wikipedia itself, those that led it to become the flagship reference for open content that it is today.

As a final remark, let me clearly state that I’m not arguing against the business of social media management or PR. On the contrary, companies should care about building a better image in the virtual world, and creating more agile communication channels within their own community, as well as with customers. In fact, Wikipedia has developed some mechanisms for on-line social interaction, but this is wholly aimed to support debate on writing encyclopedic articles.

But even this huge impact in mass media and social networks will eventually fade out. What will happen, then? Well, we will come back to our daily routine: going to work, attending high school or university, driving home,  hanging out with friends, going on vacations… Nonetheless, something will continue to make a difference. Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit, will always be available, whenever we need it. Thanks to thousands of inidividual donors , it has truly become a fundamental tool of our networked information economy.

The best examples are real stories from real users. Today, I was interviewed with Raystorm (sysop of the Spanish Wikipedia) in La Ventana (Cadena SER), a national radio show. At some point, Gemma Nierga invited her audience to call the program, send tweets and write Facebook updates to share their opinion and thoughts about their daily experience with Wikipedia. It was really illuminating. Guillermo, from A Coruña confessed: “Wikipedia has established a turning point in our bar gatherings [...] It has simply ruined them in one fell swoop. You only have to look up the answer in Wikipedia, and you are done”. Yeap, I can remember many of those: which soccer player was the top scorer last season? In which year did that movie open? Amparo from Madrid is also “delighted”. She is over 65, she keeps on working and, today, “Wikipedia saved my life, twice!!” while working with a German colleague. She had to find the correct German Lander corresponding to several cities mentioned in a report. In just a few minutes, she was done. “It is impossible that I had a book about German States in my office!”, she concluded.

That is Wikipedia, in pure state. That is why, despite we all know that many articles could contain some flaws at a given moment, it receives more than 400 million unique visits per month, and Wikimedia Foundation projects (summing up all their traffic) are the 5th most visited websites in the world, and the only ones in the top-10 supported by a non-profit organization. That is why we use it at work, in education, writing blogs like this one, hanging out with friends, and in a myriad other different situations.

This is the past, and the present of one of the flagship projects of Internet, sustained by open collaboration, producing free content available for everyone, at no cost. Sometimes I smile when I remember how some people, back in 2005, stared at me with a strange, fascinated expression to come out with something like “Wikipedia… seriously? Is that the topic of your thesis?” I am glad that I chose Wikipedia.

With 17 million articles in more than 270 different languages, it is tempting to state that Wikipedia has already reached a well-established position. However, the project must continue to improve its quality and accuracy, and broaden its content, restlessly, fuelled by the spirit of dynamism, openess, collaboration and free content. Wikipedias with fewer articles will increase their number of entries. We wait for better participation from countries and region in the Global South. The editing interface will become easier and more intuitive, to make it accessible for a wider group of potential editors. The list is both challenging and encouraging.

Wikipedia is made by the people, for the people. Therefore, as a new digital incarnation of the commendable spirit of The Musketeers, Wikipedia depends on our work, and we now depend on its content. it will evolve to answer the needs of our interconnected society. Let’s work together to make Wikipedia a remarkable accomplishment of our open, collaborative, digital world.

Una para todos y todos para una…
Une pour tous, tous pour une…
One for all, all for one…
Una pro omnibus, omnes pro una…
[You can place here the translation in your own language]

Happy birthday, Wikipedia.

Support OpenRespect.org

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.

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!

By Yohei Yamashita (CC-BY 2.0)

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].

It may sound strange that I want to write about a business model for a non-profit organization. However, that  a “non-profit organization” is not aimed to distribute their surplus among owners or shareholders does not mean that they do not seek for optimizing their revenues, leverage the impact on their target market and ensure future sustainability of the organization and its sponsored projects. Some examples are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the GNOME Foundation or the Wikimedia Foundation.

Every organization in the above list has either a clear set of projects to take care of  (e.g. Apache, Mozilla, GNOME, WMF) or a sharp set of concrete services to offer (e.g. EFF, FSF). Business models have been already studied to some extent in open source software. As Carlo Daffara explains in his blog, the general basis of OSS business models is property and efficiency. However, in the case of open movements their outcomes are free cultural works, sometimes including copyleft clauses. Therefore, property in not usually an asset is this more general context.

Creative Commons has their CC licenses, and a well-defined, global objective to appeal their donors for funds: supporting knowledge share. Despite that, Ito declares that:

“It would be great to have a revenue stream, because personally going around and doing fundraising every year is a lot of work”

Indeed, fundraising is a lot of work. But sometimes, it can be easier to achieve good results  if the added value is a tangible benefit. And it is now when a good business model comes into place.

Consider for a moment the business model of some of the other non-profit organizations. Most of them (if not all) have a set of products or added-value services to offer to their audience. My colleague Dirk Riehle shows this model clearly in his article “The Economic Case for Open Source Foundations”. Every supporter and every donor of the organization will better embrace their cause if, in addition to ethical and social values, there is a tangible outcome with positive influence on their own strategy and their market. Examples are numerous companies that collaborate to support Apache projects to commoditize baseline Internet applications like the Apache web server, based on open standards. Companies and individuals support Mozilla Foundation to benefit from libre software products (like Firefox or Thunderbird) based again on open standards, with better features, stability and security. Finally, we have companies like RedHat supporting a common desktop environment like GNOME, which is a basic architectural component of their enterprise products. The legion of WMF donors contribute for similar reasons. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and other projects supported by WMF provides them content and services attractive for them (free encyclopedia, free multimedia content), besides the ethical goal of sharing knowledge with the whole society.

What does Creative Commons offer? Legal assessment? No. Added-value services to track free content? No. They just offer legal tools to share knowledge adequately. In other words: the licenses. That’s it. Is it valuable? Well, yes of course! Could they do it better? I really think so.

Going back to Mr Ito interview, he talks about the efforts to create an easy way to tag Internet content published under a CC license. Even more important is that this information should be machine readable, so it could be easy to search for free cultural works, and facilitate proper attribution to original authors. The RDF standard can be the solution to export this information. But we don’t have a revenue model yet, right?

I think the revenue model is right there, but Creative Commons has to make a clearer added-value offer. The idea of facilitating free content tracking is terrific. So, what’s the service? Obviously, to create a centralize resource to enable accurate search for free content. I’m sorry to say that Google, Yahoo (a bit better thanks to Flickr) and other search engines fall short when it comes to search for free content in the Internet. Specially, when I want a concrete license or, better, when I specifically want to avoid certain clauses (like Non-Commercial).

Wait a minute. Doesn’t Wikimedia Commons provide one of the biggest archives of free cultural works already? Definitely. But I’m not talking about hosting the content. I’m referring to archiving references to the content. The first approach would be something similar to Wikimedia Commons, or Internet Archive. The second is a service to ease search procedures. Of course, you also need resources. But much less storage capacity than following the first approach.

Likewise, once Creative Commons is able to consolidate an archive of references to free cultural works, they can also offer a broader and more comprehensive set of visualizations and metrics than they offer today. In turn, this will lead to a better understanding of the widespread success of knowledge share, providing better (empirical) arguments to attract a large number of donors to the cause. In addition, not only creators but also users of free cultural works (a broader audience) would have a direct reason to contribute and donate. The better the archive, the easier the search for the content we need, so we support the improvement of the archive.

The revenue cycle is thus complete.

Above all (and if everything stays the same), we will remember this affair due to the huge opportunity Oracle is missing in this precise moment. Oracle is missing a healthy project, OpenSolaris, with a committed community of users and developers around the world, in one of the most critical market segments at this moment: high performance operating system platforms. What a blunder…

Some recap of the highlights before going on with my analysis. As you all know at this point, in 2009 Oracle bought Sun Microsystems paying $7.4 billion, just few weeks after IBM gave up negotiations for $7 billion. Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison reportedly declared that Sun’s Java programming language was “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired”. Another landmark product of Sun, the Solaris operating system, focused on high performance computing centers, was also a main attraction to close the deal.

Over the following months, expectations created right after the announcement faded out, giving way for skepticism and uncertainty about the real intentions of Oracle in this operation. Further decisions in Oracle and subsequent news did not contribute to clear up the growing doubts.

Solaris 10, the latest stable version of the original Sun enterprise operating system, could be used for free, without any restrictions (including commercial purposes), if you did not want to get official support from Sun. However, Oracle decided to stop this practice as of April 2010. Now, you can download for free only a 90-day trial version (see Oracle’s new license agreement for Solaris 10, section 3 (a) ). The slogan “Solaris 10: no longer free as in free beer” became quite popular. It also left many corporate Solaris clients with a difficult decision: do we pay the license and new support service or shall we move to another platform?. Millions of dollars in many companies are at stake.

In addition, Sun had started another thrilling project in March 2007, when they informed that Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, was hired to lead the so-called Project Indiana. This eventually led to OpenSolaris, the community edition of Solaris operating system. The first OpenSolaris release is dated May 5, 2008. Nevertheless, several months after Oracle’s acquisition something started to change. The OpenSolaris community formerly used to have fluent relationships with Sun as their primary sponsor. Then, they had no clues about the official policy to be adopted by Oracle. And the red giant remained (and still remains) silent. No feedback, no comments. This forced an ultimatum to Oracle by the OGB (OpenSolaris Government Board). Oracle must appoint an official liason with the OpenSolaris community by August 16, 2010. Otherwise, they will return community control to Oracle (that is, they give it up).

Before this, 2 lead developers  in OpenSolaris  left Sun to join Nexenta: Garret D’amore and Richard Elling (expert in the powerful ZFS filesystem). The motivation behind these signings is NexentaStor, Nexenta’s main product focused on enterprise storage systems, based on OpenSolaris and ZFS.

The last chapter of this tech novel is the announcement of Illumos, performed by D’amore on August 3. Contrary to many comments, Illumos is neither a fork nor a new distribution. It is not a fork because Illumos will remain 100% compatible with OpenSolaris, thus remaining in the same development path. It is not a distribution, either, since Illumos will not release a packed product ready to be installed and deployed. Following the description by my colleague Miquel Vidal, one of the founders of Madrid OSuG, Illumos is a “code derivation”, aimed to create a 100% libre software branch from the main OpenSolaris source code. Thus, Illumos is a baseline product, only source code on which we can build our own distribution (like NexentaStor).

Now, my comments about Oracle’s undefined position and Nexenta’s move. First, many people think that Oracle is wasting the opportunity to take over the OpenSolaris community on purpose, due to some obscure, evil motivations against the open source movement, as a whole. I disagree. In my opinion, Oracle is a victim of an archaic business and outreach policy, maybe useful for  private software but pointless in the open source arena. They avoid making any official comment about any Oracle product that has not been released yet. Including the next release of OpenSolaris (even though it is a community product not a private software commercial product).

Nothing can damage more an open source community than lack of transparency and feedback. Specially when the business model relies on a single-firm that sponsors the whole project (formerly Sun, now Oracle). Even better, Oracle shouldn’t make a great economical effort to maintain the OpenSolaris community at this point. The main initial push was already lead by Sun (in terms of funding and development time). This way, Oracle could have their own baseline community edition for their brand new operating system, just like RedHat has Fedora and Novel has OpenSuse. The many benefits in terms of cutting-edge innovations to be incorporated in Solaris and stability tests should not be underestimated.

On their side, Nexenta is driven by a similar interest: ensuring the sustainability of their NexentaStor solution, based on OpenSolaris. Unlike Oracle, however, they know what to do in an open source ecosystem. Instead of remaining silent, Nexenta decided to make the first move, giving the whole community a breath of fresh air. Besides, they make it clear that their intention is to ensure compatibility with OpenSolaris, and they invite Oracle to contribute. Yes, Nexenta invites Oracle, not the other way around.

Now, Oracle is missing the community lead. In a single-firm driven community, this is equal to losing control over the innovation cycle. Nexenta can now work to ensure that the main development effort will be focused on their own priority interests. The longer Oracle remains inhibited, the greater their influence loss in OpenSolaris community. Eventually, in case that Oracle persists in this attitude, they will end up without any innovation or development source to improve Solaris. In other words: they will have another standard private software product, with no strategic advantage over their competence. They will have to spend many more development resources on their own to try to obtain similar results. Just as Oracle has been always used to do in the past.

Some competitors like RedHat quickly realized about that. Of course, since they already have their own baseline community in place (Fedora), they’re not interested in getting in charge of OpenSolaris. Their strategy was to attract as many customers as possible while in an uncertain atmosphere, offering great deals for migration plans to RHEL. It is curious that Oracle seems to understand some of the benefits of open source software, because they started to offer a recompiled version of RedHat Linux since 2006, offering their own customer support service and certifying compatibility with their product catalog. Now, they let RedHat the opportunity to strike back.

Honestly, I’m not very confident about Oracle changing their strategy in the short term. They do have people who really understand the new boundary conditions imposed by open source (at least, many lucid minds imported after Sun acquisition). Unfortunately for Oracle, none of them seems to be right now in a  top-level decision-making position in the company.

Therefore, we may remember this episode as the great Oracle’s gaffe. Or could they change their mind?

The “Battle for Sunlight” has just started. Let’s see what happens in the future.

Update: Well, only one week after I wrote this post, Oracle finally made a decision about the future of Solaris 11 and OpenSolaris. Not suprisingly, the have decided to drop off the former community initiative started by Sun Microsystems in OpenSolaris. You can read the news on Slashdot about the announcement. The internal communicate also states that Oracle is aimed to focus primarily on the release and support of Solaris 11 to maintain it as a flagship enterprise operating system, resurrecting Solaris Express as a trial-only version. As I wrote in my original post, I don’t think this is a very smart decision. However, Oracle is too used to the “traditional way of doing things” as to be really convinced of the real benefits of having a FLOSS community to support your products with innovative features. This also paves the way for other companies to leverage the OpenSolaris source code. Who knows? Maybe we can see an alternative enterprise OS, compatible with the original Solaris, competing in the market with Solaris 11. Of course, other question is if Oracle is willing to maintain compatibility in their “official” Solaris version. Time will tell.

I admit it was pretty easy that this occurred to me, because: a) this was my first Wikimania; b) I gave too many talks (3!), thus missing other interesting slots and c) I wasn’t ready for the really active ambient of Wikimania. But, let’s go on with some futher details, since I have some “mixed feelings” about certain points.

In the first place, some words for the organizing team. I think  they didn’t do a bad job, since the size of the conference demands a lot of energy. Honestly, many people were dubious the week before about it, since there was certain organizational mess with some issues (schedule, registration, wifi connectivity…). Granted, some issues  must be improved for next editions  (vanishing wifi, and accommodation for many colleagues on Sunday). But the conference itself went on really well, the venue was excellent and they were really helpful, so thank you Marcin and the rest of the organizational team for your hard work. I only miss my Wikimania bag. I didn’t get one because I registered on Friday 9 evening, (I was busy all the day in WikiSym 2010 :-/).

Something quickly attracted my attention: there were virtually no “general sessions” or “keynotes”, besides Sue’s and Jimmy’s. This leaves a lot of room for parallel tracks, but it also makes you rack your brain to decide which talk you should go to in the next slot. Attendees were quite friendly in general, and I had the opportunity of meeting a lot of interesting people (WMF staff, community members, researchers and consultants), most of them for the first time (unfortunately, Jimmy wasn’t among them, since it was terribly difficult to approach him at any time). Support from Wikimedia Deutschland (special thanks to Daniel Kinzler and Pavel Richter) was awesome, like it was impressive the feedback from the audience after the presentation of latest results of the flagged revisions study. However, I could also see that there were many different groups, and people merged together only up to some extent. No surprise, though, since this is a conference for community members, and it’s natural that you tend to spend more time with your long-time mates. I was also really happy with the interest attracted by the summary of research works on Wikipedia (with Mako and Jodie Schneider) and the subsequent panel on research ethics in Wikimedia communities.

The Wikipedia Strategy plan was, obviously, one of the core issues along the conference, as well as presentations and discussion on how to improve relationships between local chapters and wikipedia communities (most popular talk in the program). Finally, the WMF role in this Strategy Plan seems to focus on 3 main areas (alternatively, you can also have a look at the movement priorities):

• Improving WMF technical infrastructure to answer the constantly increasing demands of a growing number of readers.
• Strengthen, grow and increase diversity of the community of editors, something I specially applaud since it has been one of my main requests since long time ago.
• Catalyse impact on geographical areas of interest and key (mobile) technologies to empower WMF projects outreach and penetration significant portions of their target audience

This will involve some big challenges. In my opinion, the most difficult one will be to increase WMF staff at a rapid pace, fast enough to tackle all these priorities, while maintaining at the same time internal coordination in good shape. Community hiring could be a very smart move in this regard to provide additional capillarity to their actions.

The worldwide premiere of the movie “Truth in numbers: The Wikipedia Story” also deserves some lines. The film has been produced with ~500K$ from private donors and it aims to offer an informative introduction to the Wikipedia project with an accessible language for the general public. I really like the way they mixed praise and critics (including self-criticism) and how they stress the tireless work undertaken to increase awareness of the project in numerous countries and remote regions around the world, sometimes facing very difficult conditions [sorry, but you'll have to wait until October 2010 to learn more details on this!]. However, I don’t like at all the common baseline built to present most of the critics against Wikipedia.  Almost all invited speakers rising concerns and negative comments were scholars, holding extensive academic experience and (curiously) some sort of “hostility” to digital media. Sorry but 1) I don’t think they’re representative of the whole group of critics and, inversely, there are many scholars with more positive opinions about Wikipedia (I only remember Ed Chi showing up, right now); 2) given the current need to advocate for use and contribution to Wikipedia from the academic world, to fill in specific knowledge niches, I don’t think this approach makes a real benefit as for the image of Wikipedia among this audience; 3) the good point of surprising all these speakers with the good quality of their own biographies in Wikipedia should have been highlighted much before, closing this line perhaps to let some room for other different points of view. I’d like to hear sociologists, journalists, tech practitioners, industry executives… Some showed up just briefly. Please, wait patiently for the final version to be aired, so that you can build your own point of view.

Some people told me that the big party was good, but too far away from Gdańsk downtown and the way back was not very funny. I was partly thankful, since I was really shattered that night after too may endless days of work that week. After that, Jimmy’s talk was really good, presenting some refreshing videos that displayed nearby stories of wikimedians around the world, with emphasis on mid-size Wikipedias (one of the main targets for the next 5-year period). On top of this, Spain won the World Cup that Sunday (July 11, 2010) and despite of the fact that we couldn’t gather together to watch it, it was an amazing experience to feel the ambient in Gdańsk downtown that night.

OK, maybe a bit long, but there were many things to comment in this post. Looking forward to a great Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, next year!

WikiSym 2010 has been special in many aspects. The Symposium and Program Committees were appointed between Dec. 2009 and Jan. 2010. Thus, we had only 6 months to rush into everything (CfP, venue location, logistics, proceedings, etc.). We decided that it was a good idea to search for synergies with another important conference celebrated every year: Wikimania 2010. Gdańsk was a very attractive city, and potential interactions between attendees to both events could be great. In the end, we packed a very interesting week, overlapping both events. However, the challenge was also to test if both communities would be able to find common points of interest. Besides this, WikiSym 2010 explicitly broadened the scope of the conference, to welcome  presentations on Open Collaboration in general, beyond the scope of wiki platforms. So, many things to discover!

Looking back at WikiSym 2010, one week after the closing session, I’m really satisfied. I will try to summarize the most important pros and cons from my notes. First, the positive points:

• Keynotes: Awesome! Really, believe me, they were great. Cliff Lampe’s opening keynote was both inspiring and timely. I want to remark both adjectives. The presentation style was really engaging for the audience (fresh comments, jokes). He really made my day, and I admit I had very high expectations about his performance, reading comments from past presentations (like CSCW 2010). At the same time the topic, the need to find solutions for social scientists and engineers to work together in interdisciplinary groups, is probably one of the top-priority issues in my research agenda. In turn, Andrew Lih’s presentation was also exceptional. Many people in the audience were not aware that Gdańsk article in the English Wikipedia triggered the creation of the 3-revert rule (3RR), one of its core editing guidelines today. After this, the audience was again engaged in a fascinating presentation about the process to create knowledge in virtual communication media, the role of content curators and predictions of new emerging applications for reference check and information validation.
• Open Space: Perhaps all I need to say about the Open Space this year is that virtually all available slots were taken just 20 minutes after the start! I had never seen such an active response from the audience in previous years (we usually needed the whole first day to fill in all gaps). This was the real core of interaction between wikisymers and wikimaniacs, with many, many fruitful discussions. For instance, in the slot to debate about the features and requirements to be satisfied by “the next perfect wiki platform” we were able to write 5 pages (A2 size) full of great ideas. After all these slots, I gathered and endless list of hints and insights for future work. I really like the vibe of WikiSym’s Open Space.
• Good mix of research topics: We had presentations covering virtually all interesting aspects of open collaboration platforms (though it is true that mainly focused on wikis): innovative tools, reports from practitioners, novel methodologies to analyze open collaborative platforms, enhanced interfaces for Human-Wiki Interaction… As you might expect, Wikipedia was again a hot research topic (presentations running  through the whole first day). I believe that we are still ahead of the curve as for presenting the cutting-edge advances in this area.

Now the downsides, though in fact they are more like a short list of things I think we can improve:

• Industry participation: This is not an exclusive phenomenon happening at WikiSym. Take a look at this good article on the evolution of CSCW conference series, by J. Grudin, and you will see that getting the attention from industry is becoming more and more difficult. In my view, we could achieve more industry participation if we find a way to offer what they are looking for: business opportunities and potential clients. I think this remains as one of the major challenges in the WikiSym series, and one we are going to tackle for next year, definitely. Furthermore, I think a significant proportion of industry audience still does not realize about the potential applications of many tools presented in WikiSym, for sure one of the most pragmatical conferences in terms of applicability of tools and methods presented in research tracks.
• Covering even more topics: So far, the steering committee of WikiSym has decided to maintain our original name. But we really want to stress our real focus, shifting from “just stuff about wikis” to “anything you do the wiki way“. That is, we also want to capture new rapidly evolving ways of communication and collaboration. What about presentations on Facebook? What about  Twitter and Identi.ca? Increased coverage of blogs? Collaborative journalism? Publication of books and multimedia content under open licenses? Collaborative editing of multimedia creations? And what about community making, leading and management?
• Merging different audiences: This year, WikiSym hosted a session leaded by socio-political scholars. We also had a workshop on open educational resources, and another  one about teaching with Wikipedia.  Following Cliff Lampe’s keynote, I’d really like to see even more researchers, scholars and practitioners from social sciences and humanities to join WikiSym, as well as other conferences highlighting the organization and evolution of virtual communities.

We also had two Best Paper awards: the first one for an interesting paper by Annalisa Pelizza,  opening new venues for the analysis of open collaborative projects, and the second one for a short paper by Erika Poole, categorizing different types of wiki platforms found in the industry. Both represent the rich and healthy community developed around WikiSym over the past 6 years.

Now, it’s time for planning ahead. WikiSym 2011 must answer the challenge: to keep up with the superb work done so far and leverage the series to a new level, addressing the expectations and interests of a larger audience confronted to the ever-changing reality of open collaboration in the cyberspace. As the new Symposium Chair for WikiSym 2011, together with the invaluable support of our new Program Chair Andrea Forte, we will do our best to complete this mission.

Stay tunned! A new year of excitement is coming!