The Longest Now

The announcement | The event page

Over the past year, in the US, Italy and other countries, Internet communities have flexed their muscles and demonstrated their popularity and capacity for organizing public opinion, by convincing lawmakers not to pass bills that would have made life difficult for ‘Net service providers and site owners.

Recently, two US Congressmen who were important opponents of SOPA in the House and Senate, Darrell Issa and Ron Wyden, called for and then published a draft Digital Citizen’s Bill of Rights, which they opened for public annotation and comment.  (Kudos for the concept and quick turnaround – that’s a more direct engagement of readers than any other political effort I’ve seen recently. But I hope they keep developing the platform, or move it to something more refactorable.)

This week a more global network of organizations that strive for open access to knowledge and the Internet have published a “Declaration of Internet Freedom“, calling for governments and institutions and people everywhere to support a similar set of principles that support what we have come to think of as a free (and adaptable) Internet.  I support that effort, as do the EFF, Public Knowledge, Free Press, and the Cheezburger empire.  Even if the ‘declaration’ is more a proposition of principles to uphold.

You can sign on to the declaration online.

P.S. for an explanation of the subject, see this.

Harvard Libraries recently released bibliodata from their collections – 12 million works in all – under a CC-0 license, which lets other sites and researchers reuse that data in any way possible.

This is the biggest release of bibliographic data of its kind — four times the size of a similar release by the British Library in late 2010.  (Without an explicit release under a free license, such collections of metadata are covered by ‘database rights‘).

How would you reuse these records in your own work and dreams?  Some quick ideas:

• WP or Wikisource could create 12 million stubs with those records
• Open Library will improve and update its own metadata collection, which was built from scraped subsets of such data
• We can write scripts that autogenerate “lists of works” for authors and authors or categories for works
• We can automatically find mismatches between our person-data and title-data and those in MARC
• We can publicly clean up mistakes in the MARC catalog and suggest updates