Public Knowledge and Connecting Communities with Academia
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:03
So, it's my pleasure to introduce the last, maybe second to last speaker, I think we're still negotiating how this is going to work for the day. She is a founding member of the Boston area tech cooperative called Agaric. Agaric, is that how you pronounce it? Excellent. Any of three ways, so that's one of them I hope. Her background
00:21
is around advocacy and promotion of free and open source software. Many of you are OA activists first and you may have dipped either one or nine toes into open source. I would put forward that the opposite perspective is especially valuable as a matching piece to this which is the not the open access person dipping their toes in open source but the open
00:42
source person speaking to academia from the outside. Both communities deeply believe in sharing expertise and the power of learning and by bridging the gulf between their communities I think there's a lot of power to be gained. I was able to tease out of her during the break that she's also the previous front woman of organ donors and diabolics to bands.
01:06
This is especially important to note as I'm handing her a microphone. This is Mickey Metz, aka Free Scholar. Thank you Alec. Hello everyone. Let's see, where do I start? When people ask
01:28
me what I do I usually say a few different things because I do many different overlapping things but my main concern is connecting communities together that have overlapping needs or they
01:44
have resources or something in common that they don't really know because they haven't really visited each other. I make it a point to grasp what is this community doing? What is their goal? What is this community doing? What is their goal? And get them
02:03
to intermingle by presenting events, alerting my networks to there's an event going on here and encouraging people when I speak to go to a room where you feel most uncomfortable to learn something. It really takes courage to learn outside of your box and it's something
02:24
really important to do. I grew up in a very small town, a very small wealthy town in Connecticut and if I did not grow up there and did not have the parents I had I would not know what scholarly publishing is. A lot of people, you're a very small small small spectrum of a
02:49
group in in the world and it's a very hidden society to most people. The school I went to happened to be funded by a wealthy town so we had the resources for everything. So my junior
03:03
high school was like a lot of people's college and I ended up skipping high school pretty much. Being involved in the community side of it which I saw was very lacking because everyone was so uptight about the degrees that their kids were going to get and the schools they
03:22
were going to go to and it kind of enlightened me to realize school is mainly a place to go to make friends and when you're 40 and you're failing at business one of your friends might have a a very good business to hire you into. That was my main lesson looking back when I was
03:43
about 30 I realized that. So I moved to Boston from Connecticut and got involved in living in a very close-knit community. A lot of people haven't lived in a place where they've known their neighbors for like 40 years. Has anyone? Excellent. A few people outliers and this this
04:08
is a really important thing because what we are building and what you are publishing pertains to communities and to the individuals in it. Yet they know nothing of the process nothing of
04:22
the what it is for where it is. Aaron Schwartz was a criminal we don't know about him really deeply but you know it's it's kind of a scary sketchy area. A library is very foreign to a lot of people I have met since leaving Connecticut. I'm wondering I'd love to ask since there's so
04:42
many librarians here there's a couple of questions I have and I've brought some books with me. I'm part of a movement called platform cooperativism and it's based on building platforms that are owned by the members that are used by the community like an uber for the drivers that's
05:03
owned by the drivers that type of thing. So what I would like to do is relate that to how scholarly publishing could be part of a cooperative as Kevin was talking in the lightning talks he had some great ideas for a cooperative there. I'm going to go to the next slide. Technology
05:31
is different everywhere. These are the communities that I am kind of interlinking. Oh thank you
05:43
technology just advanced beyond me and now we all get to sit at our desk and not move over to get the exercise and do that okay and you can see I've indulged. Yes so I belong to the United States Federation of worker cooperatives which is mostly worker cooperatives that are in
06:07
North America and they have resources for building a cooperative maintaining your cooperative and how to we're very based on ethics a workplace democracy is a really
06:21
important thing and democracy is left out of a lot of corporate workplaces where there is a hierarchy. So let's see Drupal is a community I'm wearing a t-shirt it's a free software community anyone can use it anyone can modify it build it change it and which brings me to
06:43
another minor back step open source and free software are basically the same thing except in the values and the politics when you say free software you are using what the free software
07:04
foundation deems as free software and that involves a commitment to ethics and responsibility when you say open source you are just saying the software is competent and works well and you
07:21
can change it and modify it and use it it has nothing to do with the people in the situation. So in the early days when Richard Stallman came about creating the GNU operating system and needed a kernel for it a little piece it's called Linux the Linux guy came in and people said it
07:43
was open source so he kind of took that and left the values of free software behind because that was his politics which is you know perfectly fine but I just like everyone to know there is a difference that is hard to see if you look for it it's there. The Drupal community runs
08:03
operating on free software and everyone shares by donating back to the community modules that extend the functionality of Drupal. Drutopia is a group that Agaric my web development co-op is
08:22
involved in and we are putting together a cooperative for Drupal hosting that basically is Drupal as a service so you would get all the benefits of Drupal and you would be able to modify it and change it any way you want and at any point take it and go where you want to go. We
08:43
see this as being beneficial for things like publishing and for sharing knowledge for sharing features and for sharing configurations because the last word configurations that's what holds most people back from having a web presence they cannot afford the configurations and they
09:06
can't afford the time to go learn them in a Drupal community not everyone can. I advise you to if you can take a look at it it's a wonderful thing to give as a gift to someone who has no work and a great imagination to be able to build their whole life on a content management
09:28
system that has a community that backs it up. GNU, that's the GNU head there and that's for the Free Software Foundation and the GNU library of free software that I'm sure everyone knows
09:45
about. Has anyone here heard of the library freedom project? Okay I suggest anyone who's a
10:02
friend Alison Macrina has put this together and she puts together teams of people to go into libraries and help librarians organize things and use free software and sets up trainings, teachings that involve also the community to come in and learn what is at the library.
10:23
You see I think a lot of people in this room you're already driving the car but most people are still in the house looking for the keys and they do not know where their car is parked. They just got it yesterday what color was it? It's a very unfortunate divide that we have
10:45
so there are little inroads like getting involved in a community that is a little foreign to you. Drupal might be a little foreign at first but I know plenty of librarians that are in the Drupal project that even in Boston there are two of them that come to our meetups.
11:03
One is the librarian at Yale and the other one is I'm sorry I'll have to look that up. Okay and down to the last one BOCOLAB. This is what my talk is based on. The Boston
11:20
Collaboratory School is a plan to have a school that uniquely combines the insight, knowledge, and power of a neighborhood with the students that are in the school building and schools should not end where the building ends. I'm really disheartened and annoyed that schools
11:47
are so separated from communities that this has allowed horrible things to happen in our communities and not just people not knowing each other and you don't know you're living next door to a brilliant scientist who's working on something that you're working on but they're
12:03
not in school. You know it's really divided us and we must get back to making the school a part of the neighborhood like it was a part at some point I'm not sure when but there are certain pockets where you see stories of a school that's in the middle of the town and the parents
12:24
are involved and the siblings come and everyone meets in a room and talks about things that rarely happens anymore because kids are now like being pulled by a collar whisked along to learn the latest thing lest they be unimportant and not have a voice like the unfortunate people
12:44
in the world they hear about that don't have voices. People don't have voices and there is a reason there is a divide between people who know about scholarly publishing and people who don't. People who read the Inquirer or people who just don't realize there is an inroad for them
13:06
to make a better life through education without having to pay thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars and be in debt until you're in your 40s that is really unconscionable knowledge should
13:21
be free it should be shared it should be available and there is enough cooperative money value in communities to make that happen. Back to the BOCO lab the school how is this going to do anything? My idea from this for the school is a mentoring type of facility where
13:44
Drupal could be a centerpiece or WordPress could be a centerpiece a free software that allows building of something was is the centerpiece as a project that the community is involved in and when you start you go into the community to find out what people believe that they need.
14:06
This I learned this a really important lesson from a professor an associate professor at MIT um doing at the code is MIT co-design lab and it's about when you're building something you
14:23
don't stand over here and build it and bring it to someone like has always been the the way to do it it's a great thing we're bringing you um it really needs to start with the people who are going to be using this and with you it needs to be a group discussion.
14:41
So we went through my team at agaric went through a semester of the co-design class and we worked with four local cooperatives and got them to um each member of a team was on a member with a certain cooperative in town and the job was to get them to their next level
15:03
whatever that needed to be whether it was a business plan or they needed a website or if they needed to do some outreach and find out if their product or or um whatever they were doing was needed and it was a very valuable lesson. Once things are built by people in a group
15:23
the adoption rate is huge people want to use the tool it's it's just important and encompasses their goals and dreams too. Boca lab will teach students and students will teach us that we're building something for the community why because the community needs to sustain itself
15:51
how could that be we have why do we need that we have all these like we have Walmart and we have McDonald's we can go eat and we can shop well our school will teach about extractive
16:04
technologies and why they are not really good for communities especially small communities that can be overwhelmed and now we've created things in in the U.S. and probably other places called food deserts what is the does anyone know what a food desert is that's horrifying
16:24
putting food too far away for the person to get to it or they can't afford it now I believe if people in communities were more involved in what was going to be scholarly published before it was published that there would be different things published and people would
16:54
you can get the people to understand what the giving is I think it is it's going to be easier
17:02
our school will also teach people about cooperative business models an example would be say the town needed a recycling plant you teach the kids you would have recycling in the curriculum a recycling curriculum to break it down my friend has already
17:23
done this where she made the curriculum age appropriate for each teacher and she ended up winning the Markel paper award for doing this and actually raising money for the school and it's gone on to be sustainable and to contribute back to the community we can have
17:44
towns and and places running like this but people down over on there need to know what people down over on there are talking about and they can't if it's all hidden beside behind a screen of scholarly publishing which is hidden behind a screen of lack of education which is hidden
18:05
behind a screen of a lack of the money going to the right places to get the resources to be able to reach people as my friend ed whitfield said you know that saying you can teach a man to fish
18:21
blah blah blah well what if this man doesn't know what a fishing pole is can't afford one and there's no water for miles how is that going to help it's not so there's a lot of other work to be done drupal as an ecosystem people in the drupal community contribute back
18:46
to drupal by creating a module or maintaining a module that someone else has created or building a module that is needed for certain things it's it's a wonderful way to get people on all levels talking on the same level and doing something that has a great outcome
19:07
um at the end of uh i'd like to leave some time for questions and i'd like to i brought a copy of a book that i have a an essay in and it's called ours to hack and to own i'd like to give away a copy to people who have some really good questions
19:26
about how cooperatives ism the community and the school and publishing all need to come together on a certain ground and what would be or like what would you ask to try to get that to happen
19:41
maybe where you live or where you've seen something so the boston collaboratory school is at boco lab.org or i'm yeah boston collaboratory.org and we're slated to open in 2019 um my me along with my team members of agaric will be the technologists for this school
20:09
so we will be using free software wherever possible and whenever not possible because we have to hook into one of their proprietary school systems we will make effort to change
20:24
that proprietary school system at every turn and that's our job um this is drutopia a hosting solution because you can't really build your freedom on top of a
20:44
proprietary foundation i'm sure everyone here working with um the platform is um aware of that but it's it's really enlightening when you tell some people that that um they can't build
21:02
their whole dream thing on facebook you know it's not it's not going to work as they want it to so that's it really i really welcome the chance to be here it's really excellent to meet some of you people i look forward to meeting more and i look forward to
21:22
some questions thank you for an excellent talk you were right that i should come to it
21:44
and um now my question is we're getting together our members of the community we're identifying what the community needs um that was this school is dealing with people of what age we're a high school a boston public high school grade seven through twelve okay but
22:05
our first year we will start with um just seventh grade uh 70 to 80 students um now um my pro my uh question is how do we avoid um getting them how do we
22:23
what we really want our students to do to be able to be able to do this 20 and 30 and 40 years years later um how do we avoid getting us getting them to solve the problems of 2019 um in 2039 i was when i was in school we had we were taught this was in the 19 in the
22:47
early 1960s i was being taught to uh for example to set uh set type by hand yes nobody in the 1960s was setting type by hand you couldn't have gotten the job doing that if you wanted to um but coal is coming back you know but
23:05
we'll teach you to mine some coal next yes it's like but had they been had they been up to date they would have taught me to operate a liner type machine which would have been just as useless because the things change and how how are you going to organize them to to uh develop the
23:26
skills and the personal this personal and communal skills that they are going to need to deal with new problems that neither they nor you can uh can foresee at this stage well that's that's a tough one that encompasses a lot but i would say it's not totally something
23:46
you can avoid but it's also not something that can be that is not learned from the point in it is not going as far like say they started to teach you type setting and then two weeks later said oh wait a minute you got to learn this that's not going to happen we have to in in
24:05
this day and age there's the info overload where you can kind of see with a scatter shot what is coming what is and what is going in a lot of it you can't be specific but by
24:20
constant polling um the agile method of teaching every time you teach one of the parts an hour of the classes well what do you think that do you think what we're learning is old-fashioned do you think what have you heard that's new your news report input it true then you break
24:44
it down okay this is new how good is it how do you see it being here in 20 years or do you see it disappearing you have to have focus groups constantly these are the things that we're avoiding when we watch tv these are the conversations we're avoiding they're left in the
25:01
gutter these are the things we're avoiding when we go to the show why aren't we sitting in groups of five or four ten people having these difficult conversations what is new where should we go i better get down to the school and suggest that at the school meeting that i want to go to because i'm you know it's going to be fun that's another thing this the fun has been
25:23
sucked out of education so people are fearful of it now it's been made um people have been made proud to not be educated you know it's like a very strange place we're living in but the way to not be overrun and outdated there is none we're constantly going to be fishing in that
25:43
barrel but if i could run down to the lab where you were learning to typeset and you'd been there two weeks and i said hey the you know you got something else here that's going to be old you would try something else then you would have a little of nothing you might say i like typesetting i'm going to make it live and see who's still needing stuff in typesetting
26:04
and be a specialist who knows there are many ways you can't be on top of everything but the more input you gather from the people that are around you and the people you do things with the better off you'll be on getting something that is that you need and can be used by others
26:25
who have the same needs you know it's it's not that it's it's difficult but with hindsight we can see some things that we've constantly avoided that are totally needed like a toilet on every corner who thought you know jeez no no one's working on that how many centuries
26:50
just to build on that question it sounds like you've anticipated that scenario by having the cross-pollination with the different communities yes so that if you if you also so you're looking
27:07
big picture who are the organizations what are the resources get them to interact and connect and also communicate with the school then you've got more of a chance to
27:21
to know what the innovation is and it's a more holistic approach yes like yes if you know what others are working on you can kind of get a sense of what's around and you're you have to bring in the creative thoughts to it so many times the creative thoughts are cut out because
27:42
those people are not educated in the uh certain principles that you're discussing i don't think that just a question in terms of in terms of the school is that um part of the the plan is to also keep engaging the um the community stakeholders and the and the
28:02
businesses and the innovators i know in boston is a big innovation community is that part of it as well that's a totally part of it that's like the heart of it um introducing students to actual businesses that thrive in the area or or that are trying to get started in the area but people
28:21
who live there how could they help this new business that wants to start get a footing who what what you know permits do they need like go through the whole walk with people and learn how to start a business for yourself um the cooperative model really engages that the the there's an ongoing relationship between the community and the school it's like why should
28:45
they be two separate things i've never understood that and that's why i was the skipper of schools and i hung out where the people were and had creative ideas and then i would run back to the school and tell people oh why don't we have music to do this thing because people are really
29:04
uptight here we should have music in the um auditorium i mean in the uh lunch rooms and people were like wow that's kind of a cool idea some people were like what are you crazy but you have to be creative and go outside of your element to get ideas so yes the community
29:22
is just intertwined with the school and not just whoops sorry pta meetings it's um a school where there won't be real tests and exams there will be more of constant awareness gathering how are you feeling how is this working for you it's based on personal
29:43
learning also so that kids are dealt with as individuals not like the blob of a class so thanks uh hi i'm i'm nate i work as a front-end developer for the public knowledge
30:00
project so i am one of a bunch of people who have to try and build a software platform for a really really diverse set of people and user needs uh and i i mean i'm a big believer in software ownership and the power of platforms but we do face
30:21
a challenge in how we compete with a commercial marketplace that uh has much more control from end to end over its processes and its ability to design uh an experience from the start to the finish at a certain level um when you design a platform you design you know something
30:43
that you can build something with but but what gets built with it and how to the quality level it gets built with all that kind of stuff there's a huge variation and so there ends up with a a perception problem in terms of how you're competing against commercial services because
31:01
uh you can't necessarily guarantee somebody an output that they want at a quality level that they want uh with a platform because ultimately they're in they're in control of that and oftentimes people don't want to be in control of that so i'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about uh particularly the way it relates to design and user experience and that kind of
31:23
process if you have any thoughts about how platforms can compete in a very wild garden services oriented marketplace yikes that is so so hitting the nail on the head we are now in an era where people do not want responsibility they want the daddy company
31:45
to take care of everything so it is extremely hard to um entertain the notion of having input into the platform that i'm on you know do i have to be a rocket scientist do i have to go to school what do i how much time will it take there's all these gray areas but i think people
32:06
are becoming awakened to what has been taken away from them with the responsibility and being able the more stories come out about how these companies billion dollar companies are
32:20
hacked every day and they don't tell you about it because that would make them go down in wall street um but it's just the disreputable business um there it won't be for everyone i can tell you that but i think people are getting more into wanting to know what's going on
32:42
in certain circles and yeah it's not going to be the world on fire with it tomorrow but i think it's going to grow and i think well cooperatives are 242 billion dollar a year industry just in north america alone so i think once some people get a handle on that and get
33:03
rid of the fear of not having a you know work or any money to buy food then i think we can make progress but that's a major stumbling block they have their whole the genius bar the you know the help everywhere but they're still cheating you underneath and they're stealing all your information
33:21
and data i think people have to get tired of people stealing your data and as edward snowden said saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to you know hide it's like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say it's just dumb it's
33:41
dumb if you think about it so so in your work with the drupal community i wonder if there's any thoughts you can share on how code contributions are evaluated by the community
34:00
for integration into the code base and whether there might be some lessons learned for us to take back to think to rethink our peer review system because as we've heard mentioned in in different contexts that it it is under it is being challenged currently okay well now you've gotten into another hornet's nest
34:22
all right that's um recently my partner ben my agaric partner uh wrote a blog about this very thing that the bottleneck is the approval process people are committing all of these modules and all of this code and there's a bottleneck of people who can okay it and um
34:46
the drupal community is not yet a cooperative we're working on that where there would be you know many hands to oversee this overlapping a bigger panel but right now it's just it's very difficult and there's a lot of crying and stuff going on people's foot crunched in the door my
35:05
code's been there for like you know a year now or something you know it's just it's sad so i can't give you guys any insight into that except to keep working on it there has to be a method maybe appointing maybe some kind of um people to oversee that it gets so many
35:25
push-throughs a month or something you know there's got to be a minimum standard that everyone can in a blockchain work by or something like that if this doesn't get done then that doesn't get done and you won't get this not not a punishment but you know i'm not sure
35:45
does anyone else have any insight on that moving the getting the code looked at and reviewed and entered into the system in a timely manner is crucial to our success you know um the big companies you know have a team ready there that's 20 people they're going to look
36:04
at it all day you're going to stay overnight jones and it'll get done it'll be out in the morning buggy as hell but it'll be with the no bugs label but it'll be out there um i don't i i i'm i'm happy though to know that people in the free software community
36:25
aren't really that pushy to put stuff out there with bugs and say it's bug free that's a really cool thing that i've found you know it's out it's may have bugs help us find them come on that's that's just i think people are gonna adopt that as a way of having
36:42
some minimum control in their own life because most people i know are at the you know exasperated they have no control in their life whatsoever point great well
37:03
ah the last book that we have is written by a friend of mine trebor schultz it's called uberworked and underpaid and it's a very interesting analysis of the uber system and that type of a um a system i guess that's enforced on people that looks great from the
37:24
outside and then you find out there's drivers sleeping in their cars and owing uber lots of money and did anyone know uber is one of the world's largest banks if not the largest bank and they've done this by financing cars to people who can't really afford them
37:44
so it's a really disreputable business model that looks great and helps us get there and you know it's like god i have to use that sometimes oh jeez you know my hands i took a shower after i used uber last so it's like no actually i have not used it in a while and
38:07
it's really hard to make these sacrifices but i'm happy to see a room full of people who have made some really great sacrifices to do some really great things on this planet and i hope you don't get discouraged because dang it's hard out there keep it up thank you
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