2008 Couchiching conference opening keynote by Bill Buxton
(First published on IT World Canada blog)
I glanced at CPAC earlier this week, and noticed Bill Buxton giving a talk. I looked things up, and found out this was at the 77′th annual Couchiching conference and that CPAC’s Video on Demand had this full talk (and even longer Q&A session), as well as a few others from the conference that I also plan to watch later (watch then soon, as CPAC only keeps the videos available for a limited amount of time).
While there are some things that Mr. Buxton believes that I don’t agree with, I find that there is more I agree with than disagree. While the whole conference titled “The Power of Knowledge: the New Global Currency” appears to have themes which tie in directly with anyone who reads my blog,. I want to recommend you start with Mr. Buxton’s talk.
I am not going to offer a review, and at over 2 hours and 20 minutes of a talk I can obviously not offer commentary on all the things he discussed, or even all the things I would love to have a conversation with him about. I have narrowed to a few things that stuck in my mind to comment and expand on.
He spoke about being in a flight with his wife reading a review of an art show, and he was reading a review of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC — I watched his talk on my XO-1). The art review, like other reviews of culture, puts the show in the context of other shows, while the OLPC review read as a parts list. He joked about how a book review done the way that the OLPC review was done would sound: (paraphrasing) “It has a hard cover. When you open it, the pages do not fall out. I can turn the pages. The font is 12 point Times Roman, and I can read it easily with my glasses. The pitch is good, and the paper looks like it will last a long time. There are some pictures in it, and a story, and the price isn’t that bad compared to some other thing.”
Technology clearly has an impact on our culture, and Mr. Buxton asks us to question why we don’t review technology the way we do the outputs of the cultural industries.
The fact that this hardware review was for the OLPC is interesting given that this is an educational project that just happened to use technology, not a technology project. The commercial marketplace had not yet offered the tools in the form of hardware and software sufficient to meet the needs of the educational project, so they brought hardware and software people in. Decisions were made about the design of both the hardware and the software from the perspective of the educational model they had chosen, with this including a decision that as much of the software as possible should be able to be (legally) studied, modified and shared by students (I.E. that it would be Free/Libre and Open Source).
As someone keenly interested in the global education goals as public policy, I have been watching this project closely. I have noticed many people focused on the hardware, and not just the reviewers. From what I can see one of the key spokespersons for the project, Nicholas Negroponte, has become too excited about the laptop aspect of the project, including embracing software that is not able to be studied, modified or shared. To me the hardware is interesting (I use mine every day), but of the hardware or software it is the software that is the rules which most define how this technology will impact the culture that it will be introduced in. It is like comparing the physical architecture of our parliament buildings and what impact it would have to build a similar building in another country, to our democratic processes and legal system and what impact it would have to introduce these in another country.
I suspect the best way to review the OLPC project is to reference and think about things said by people who are not involved in the project at all.
Lawrence Lessig, introduced some concepts in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (See also Code Version 2). He spoke about software as being the set of rules which a computer obeys, and the connection to policy/regulations/law which are rules which humans obey. I am a strong believer that software should be analyzed not from a natural sciences point of view, but from a social sciences point of view with a focus on law and politics. From this perspective it is clear that there is a difference between rules being used where the destination country (or individual citizen, as appropriate) can clearly study, modify and share modifications from a set of rules where such studying/modification/sharing is specifically prohibited.
Where Lessig offers governance insights, Yochai Benkler offers important economic insights. Mr. Buxton mentioned the work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, which is referenced in Benkler’s Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm. He suggests that the methods used to produce Linux is an example of a new, third mode of production beyond markets and firms.
I mention Lessig’s insight as I believe it is a key piece of the cultural impact of digital technology that is dangerously missing from nearly all conversations about technology. Mr. Buxton mentioned a number of other technologies which he likes from the Amazon Kindle, Sony e-book Reader, Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Zune, and even some game consoles. While Mr. Buston never intended to do a review, my critique of nearly all the digital technology that he mentioned (with the exception of the hardware/software primarily used by the OLPC project) is the same: these are technologies which are locked down where the person who possesses them (most often even “owns” them) do not hold the keys. I may have a technology background, but this is not a technological observation on my part. It is an observation of a policy decision with huge cultural impacts — wetware issues — where the very existence of the policy decision is clouded in noise generated by technologists, disallowing us a a civil society to adequately debate this policy decision.
Mr. Buxton was asked a question about government regulation around the issue of paying for content. His answered very well by saying that as a designer that he noticed the question was not asked in a very “designerly” way. A designer will look at an issue and propose a number of different solutions (the number 5 came up). That way there is not a one-to-one relationship between the person and the solution offered, allowing critiques to not be personal. It also means that you can better evaluate the good and the bad of each proposal. A question that was asked from the perspective of government enforcement of business models for creativity was not “designerly” because government enforcement is itself only one possible solution, and we really need to think about what those other 4 options are.
Conversations about copyright are often not very “designerly”. They also lack in something else Mr. Buxton mentioned, which is that the context for different types of creativity are different. He spoke about how music, being essentially a performance art, can work quite well if we move to focusing on the performance and less the recorded artifact (recorded music). The same can not be said of literature which (even though some in the audience disagreed) isn’t really a performance art, and much would be lost if the only authors who could be paid professionals were those who were public speakers using their books as promotion. The topic of relying on commercial advertising to fund creativity, and the types of creativity that this works for and the types that would be lost this way, was also mentioned a few times.
Each different type of creativity exists in a different context, and these 5 “forks in the road” that we should explore are likely to be different for each. My involvement in the copyright policy debate has enabled me to learn a lot about the music business, and trying to understand the 3 very different copyright holding groups (composers, performers and makers) involved in that industry. What I see as the current dynamic in the music industry (”makers” dominated in the near-past with expensive technology required for recording and distribution, while composers and performers will dominate in the future) is very different than what I observed personally in the software industry (productivity software slowly moving to peer production, away from industrial production/funding methods). While both of these changes were brought on by changes in the costs of communications technology bringing the marginal cost of production and distribution near zero, the impact of this change on each of these creative sectors has been very different.
I make my money as a software author and Internet/security consultant, and given this I come into contact with a lot of other fellow software/Internet people. A common thing I hear is that music, books, television and other creative sectors should adopt the same types of production, distribution and funding models we are increasingly doing in software. While I am a supporter of Free/Libre and Open Source Software, I believe it is wrong to presume that you can transplant methods which work for one form of creativity in one cultural context onto something entirely different.
As a volunteer in copyright policy I hear very similar things from lawyers and lobbiests for the cultural industries and cultural communities. While the government promotion and enforcement of foreign locks on communications technology is what brought me into this specific policy debate, I cringe when I read some of the “one size fits all” copyright proposals. The Creators’ Copyright Coalition in their Platform on the Revision of Copyright includes a suggestion that the private copying regime be extended to include all categories of work covered by the Copyright Act. While there are some categories of creativity in a given cultural context where compulsory licensing is an ideal solution, this coalition made up of representatives of many creative communities seems to have forgotten that there are other contexts where this same policy will have a devastating effect (See: Copyright: locks, levies, licensing or lawsuits? Part 2: levies).
I believe it is dangerous for both of these communities to think that what has worked for them in their context can be transposed and imposed in very different situations, and not end up doing far more harm than good.
The final question from Bill Buxton’s Q&A was around one of those areas we seem to share less ideas or experience. Someone asked a question about Open Source, and Mr. Buxton spoke about how it can’t be used to solve all problems. Fair enough, but I’m not convinced from his answer that Mr. Buxton has spent the time thinking about the necessary criteria or diversity of currencies to look at when evaluating when this knowledge development methodology is the right answer and when it is not.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is really about an organizational structure, and not about the outputs of the processes. Having the software be able to be run, copied, distributed, studied, changed and improved without additional permission or payment may seem like a trait of the software, but it is better understood as a trait of an organizational structure.
I could over-simplify my own thinking on when FLOSS is the best option and say that where there is so-called “Software Piracy” by private citizens, then the problem that this particular software was solving should probably have been solved using FLOSS methods. I really believe that what the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is doing may make sense from the narrow perspective of its small membership, but is harmful to follow as a direction for public policy.
FLOSS methods are best at solving general problems where there are a large number of people who need to have the same problem solved and it can be solved with the same (or very similar) instructions to a computer. FLOSS methods don’t work well when the problem is narrow to a few people, and thus where it is hard to motivate people (or their employers/customers, given quite a bit of FLOSS is commercial in nature, and not part of the voluntary sector) to collaborate on a problem which the collaborator has no interest in solving.
When there are a narrow set of beneficiaries to solving a problem, other organizational structures may be better. It may surprise people to know that the vast majority of software (by lines of code, not by the generally useless indicator of vendor revenue) is custom software used in-house at a firm and never distributed to anyone else. Only a small amount of software is widely distributed (solves general problems), and the “debate” about so-called “proprietary software” (the software methods dominated thus far by Microsoft, and used by other BSA members) vs. FLOSS really only relates to that small amount of software.
I suspect that the person asking the question had the same bias that I did when I first heard Mr. Buxton talk, which is that I was distracted by knowing his current employer. Mr. Buxton has only been with Microsoft for a few years, a tiny part of his long career.
For instance, when Mr. Buxton mentioned Open Source and the dictionary on CBC’s Spark, I thought he was suggesting that it was the author of the dictionary — and not the FLOSS community — that had coined the term. He was suggesting something very different, which is that the processes used by FLOSS, Wikipedia and other such collaborative systems are not recently created processes. The same processes of collaborating across space and time was used to create the dictionary, long before modern communications technology.
I agree with this, and believe that the recent change comes not that these are new processes, but that the reduction of the marginal costs/transaction costs (cheaper communications technology) has allowed more of this type of collaboration to happen than was practical in the past.
I believe that it was my being distracted by his employer that lead to my misinterpreting this idea. I mention this in the hope that other people will not make the same mistake, even when Mr. Buxton is saying something they may not agree with. I find that I learn more from people who I disagree with than I agree with, and despite the fact that I seem to agree with Mr. Buxton on quite a bit of what he had to say, I found the talk very thought provoking and educational.