SJ’s Longest Now

Long-term challenges in education

Posted on September 2nd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, metrics.

Mitchell Charity recently quoted to me from Lant Pritchett’s essay, “Long-Term Global Challenges in education: Are There Feasible Steps Today?” – Ch.3 of RAND’s Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals.

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

0 comments.

The Tower of Babel : normalizing language representation

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: SJ, chain-gang, international, popular demand, wikipedia.

Part of a series on difficult topics from the Wikimedia community

There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

1 comment.

Wikimedia elections : thank you! and next steps

Posted on August 14th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: SJ, international, metrics.

The elections results are out, and I will be serving the community as a Trustee for the next two years. I am looking forward to the challenge; thank you to those who trusted me with their vote, and congratulations to Ting and Kat – it is an honor to represent the community alongside them.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

0 comments.

My Wikimedia platform

Posted on July 30th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, international, popular demand, wikipedia.

I’ve organized my thoughts about being a good Board member in my platform for the Wikimedia Board.

The most common questions I have heard since this year’s elections began are, what does the Foundation do? and what is the Board of Trustees for? I posted answers to these questions and a few more.

People also ask, how do I qualify to vote? To be eligible to vote,

• You must have 600 edits as of June 1, and 50 within the past 6 months.
• You may need to create a Unified Login to count edits on more than one project; or to vote from your main wiki.
• If you are not eligible, you can still encourage fellow Wikimedians to vote, or leave suggestions for future elections

I am more intent on this year’s election than I have been in any year past – in part because the Board’s role has been shifting away from one that actively engages and challenges the community, something valuable Agnela and Anthere brought to the Board that I miss.  I am deeply concerned by the lack of community growth for the past two years, and the complete stagnation of new project development (despite the growth of new independent educational free knowledge projects that requested Wikimedia hosting). And I was just talking to my friend Bibhusan Bista, who said that there is definite interest in the Foundation in Nepal, and in contributing to Wikipedia’s spirit of openness; but of course few editors there feel they can engage in related discussions (and none, for instance, would be eligible to vote).

So I have two goals for my campaign beyond getting elected: to inspire people to vote and remind them why a good foundation matters, and to encourage them to raise community priorities and requests of the foundation, while attention is on governance over the next two weeks (and while you can get an immediate response from at least three future Board members, something often hard to come by).

My request to you, if you appreciate Wikipedia and want to see it thrive, whether or not you have the edit count needed to vote: please leave suggestions about how Wikimedia should grow, blog about the election and your reasons for caring about it, and help support the election in smaller languages and projects.

4 comments.

What it means to be a Wikipedian

Posted on July 29th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, international.

Part 1 in a series about being a Wikimedian.

When people ask me about myself, I often say I am a Wikipedian and a physicist.   A physicist in that I want to know how things work at different scales, and to estimate specifics from first principles, limiting factors, conserved properties.  And a Wikipedian in that I want to understand what large groups of people can do to fix what needs fixing while learning and enjoying themselves.

I regularly have to explain what I mean by this last bit – not a desire to add to Wikipedia itself, or to contribute tidbits of knowledge to something, but the quick check for the edit button when you find a mistake in any environment, the urge to improve things on the spot – the sense of turning to someone next to you and saying, “let’s fix this”.

Let me give you an example from recent memory.  Last week I was visiting my local clinic in Cambridge.  It is a quiet building, competently staffed, with more security and information desk staff than is absolutely necessary.  Noone would say they were struggling to make ends meet.  They have a few vending machines throughout the clinic – offering drinks and snacks that are decidedly unhealthy.  I couldn’t find a single healthy product in them, aside from bottled water (and there are water fountains on every floor).

Clearly a fine idea gone wrong.  This didn’t sit well with me, so I started asking the staff about it.  Noone could say for sure how they were chosen; and all agreed that while the convenience was nice, they should at least be limited to healthy foods.  I asked if there was anyone I could talk to about it (not really), and left a request card suggesting a replacement.

This was deeply unsatisfying.  I wanted to fix this right away… it seemed clear this would make everyone better off,  and I had an idea of what to do.   I could imagine a process of replacement running like this:
(more…)

10 comments.

Offline reading and editing of the world’s knowledge

Posted on July 26th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: international, popular demand, wikipedia.

Offline wikireaders have been around for over a decade in various forms, but still it seems few of them are really excellent.  (If you’re interested in such things, I have a mailing list for you…) At OLPC I’ve worked on various ways of sharing content with groups of students who are offline, and last year Chris Ball and Wade Brainerd built a WikiBrowse application, based on Patrick Collison’s iPhone Wikipedia app, that has been downloaded by 400,000 children and teachers in English and Spanish.  This was the first reader to store a compressed dump, expanding pages as they are read, and including a few images.  But it still doesn’t allow you to easily compile your own version of WikiBrowse based on your preferred title list, and it doesn’t support full-text search or offline editing.

Now Pascal Martin of Linterweb and Wikiwix fame has released a new product : Okawix, the engine behind a new DVD snapshot of wikipedia; it is now linked from download.wikimedia.org.  You can reads more about it on their Wikiwix blog.  This could be the foundation for a fully functional Wikipedia on a Stick project, with editing and commentary, as the WikiStick hackers from Taiwan envisioned a couple of years ago.  See for yourself!

1 comment.

on the future of Wikipedia

Posted on July 22nd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: international, wikipedia.

A number of recent initiatives have been started to plan for the future of Wikimedia projects and of Wikipedia in particular. The Foundation has made a 12-month Strategic Planning initiative one of their top priorities for the coming year, and hired three staff and an outside consultancy for the purpose of organizing input from the communities.

On the English Wikipedia, the Arbitration Committee tried to organize a community think tank to provide research and advice on community development and long-range plans, something which is generally wanted and needed by the community, but which people didn’t like having associated with the AC. (personally I think the idea will work fine once people get rid of application processes and acceptance metrics, and simply encourage everyone to take part in a focused sort of brainstorming, in a well-ordered way.)

At the New York Wikiconference this coming weekend, a number of the talks are about planning for outreach and future chapter and project growth — something it would be good to see more of at local events and on-wiki.  And I am running for the Wikimedia Board in part to help vitalize and expand Wikipedia’s sister projects, which have never emerged from its shadow (while still promising the same sort of universal single-source for free knowledge that we would all love to see and use).

So… what would you like to see in Wikipedia’s future?  What have you been waiting to happen for years that hasn’t yet come to pass?  What would you like to see from Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, or Wikisource?  Are you still secretly hoping that Wikispecies will merge with the Encyclopedia of Life?  Do you want Wikiquote to be as popular as LyricWiki, only legal? Are you happier with Enciclopedia Libre and WikiZnanie?  Let me know.  The best ideas will be thrown up on the whiteboard at the wikiconference.

5 comments.

Wikipedia now incompatible with third-party GFDL text

Posted on May 27th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, wikipedia.

The GFDL 1.3 allows collaborative sites to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA 3.0 as their license, under limited circumstances.

Wikimedia has been advocating for this change for some time, and with much effort from the FSF and Creative Commons a solution was worked out last November: such a transition would be available only for massively collaborative projects, and only for a limited time.  If a project opted for this transition, it could not incorporate any new GFDL material after the release date of the new license (November 3, 2008); and it had to decide by August 1, 2009.

Given the first date, one would assume a site would want to move as quickly as possible to decide, to avoid a prolonged period when no outside material under most any free license could be incorporated.  Nevertheless, it took us over 6 months to decide to make the transition.  Now we are faced with two hurdles: ensuring that no GFDL material has been migrated into a Wikimedia project since November, and far more complex, communicating with the hundreds of smaller GFDL wikis who chose their license for compatibility with Wikipedia, to ensure they know about this change and what it means for them.  They only have until the first of August to figure it out.

So I’ve started compiling a list of GFDL wikis and other collaborative sites that have not yet indicated any awareness about the license switch or considered switching themselves.  This includes at least half of the 20 largest GFDL wikis other than Wikipedia, both major medical wikis (Medpedia and WikiDoc), PlanetMath, and the old Spanish Wikipedia fork.  Please help contact these sites and update their status on this project page: [[m:Licensing update/Outreach]]

1 comment.

Did someone say Яolcats?

Posted on February 10th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

No, not rollcats, but Яolcats — the glorious and gorgeous (and occasionally quite uncatty) lolcats of Russia.

Faves: March is a state of mind …

1 comment.

How I became a Wikipedian

Posted on October 8th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

I had forgotten the long essay I wrote about this transition here on my blog… or rather, on my first law school blog, when blogs.law was new and cuddly.  My transition to the current wordpress skin made it more visible, new-found visibility online made it a repeated spam target, and I rediscovered it today.  So spam has done something good for me.  Thanks, spam king!  

For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

1 comment.

Posted on September 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

Daniel goes to Ethiopia.  Elana is digitizing some of her reels of footage this weekend, so expect some fantastic video from Mongolia and elsewhere soon.

0 comments.

Saving the world from destruction, 5E-44 sec at a time

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang, indescribable, international.

I hope you’ve all seen this by now.  Thank goodness for perpetually-compounded world-saving.

0 comments.

frightmotif: deleveraging and the veil of illusion

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, fly-by-wire, international, metrics, poetic justice.

Our interconnected global economy is built on the illusion of trust.  Gautama himself would be impressed by how far we have advanced the texture of societal illusion.  While there are certainly many non-illusory sources of trust, the trust most modern men have in our financial instruments and currencies is based on a blind association of “interest rates”, “inflation”, “market valuation” and similar concepts with a hazy set of economic laws, as though they were fundamental laws in the sense that one discoveres Mathematical or Physical Laws.   Not social norms that could change on short notice; not starting rules of nomic games of risk and manipulation; not Massively Multilayered Online Resource-Permuting Guidelines, hundreds of indirections removed from the original social norm of personal credit and unenforcable on any large scale.  They are perceived instead as Laws, discoverable and immutable.  Not quite.

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

• Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
• Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
• Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
• Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
• Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
• Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
• Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam’s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
• Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold. (more…)

0 comments.

XO Wikireader : compressed joy

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international, poetic justice.

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

0 comments.

Country music

Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.

Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.

If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…

0 comments.

Story Jam New York – Storytelling for all

Posted on March 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, fly-by-wire, international.

Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun.  We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon.  I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.

Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.

0 comments.

Posted on December 24th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

My friend Zdenek is creating a local gallery of knowledge and photographs of documents and buildings from his hometown of Češnovice. The result is a lovely collection of local history that any city would be proud to have.

It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.

At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?

Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.

0 comments.

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