4 posts tagged “activism”
During a phonebank rally today, I hacked together an IUI / iPhone-based "Mobile California Proposition Guide."
As you stand on line on Election Day, please take a few seconds and skim through the propositions which matter most to you!
I've been thinking a lot about the future of the Fox these last few weeks, attending CHI 2007, a local Ruby conference, and chatting with del.icio.us Yahoo! Joshua, DHH, and chief wrangler Mitchell B. the other night here at TheFarm.
Over the summer, part of my research will try to make use of the openness of the current Web to make itself even better, but as of right now I'm still trying to finish up a few research projects and playing with the latest nightly build -- "Minefield" -- of Firefox 3 alpha 5.
The integration of Cairo seems to make East Asian language typography that much nicer for typesetting in the small, but I do miss Camino's beauty and, as a web developer, the facility of web-app prototyping that Adobe and MSFT tool chains promise us.
I ask myself, for example, if I wanted to build my own HacketyHack, how many hoops would I have to jump through to get it working on a MozPad moon versus an Adobe Apollo or a MSFT Expression Blend?
Besides lending a non-corporate voice to the MozPad crew, and contributing open source energies to a "fast and delightful HTML parser" written in Ragel-Ruby, my few suggestions to the MozCo MoFo orgs are these:
1) In the Foo Bar Baz SuperHappy-syle of unconferencing, instead of holding an "active Mozilla developers"-only set of days, bring in folks who want to write the next HacketyHack or myEBayFox, who want to be the next Blake Ross or build little apps to make their web apps just a little easier to use.
Moon camp anyone?
2) Clients are starting to look more like servers (IronRuby on the client, too) and servers are starting to look a little more clients, as back-end engineers learn JavaScript and front-end engineers learn Rails. While these once were two very different worlds, client and server, I think it still pays to take a lesson from Matz, like DHH did, and focus on how the programmer feels while programming. Firebug makes you feel great. Can we do the same for extending how we browse/interact/play/communicate on the web, too?
We need not fully address the question of End-user Programming of the client-side web, but even if we deCOMtaminate Mozilla-land, how much better off does that leave us? I would call for, instead, a RESTfully organic Firefox.
We use del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com, gmail and 30b, why not take their lead and self-host Firefox's top-level components with RESTfully localhost (!) web services, HacketyHack Mongrel Merb-style, rather than try to dig our way out of the kingdom of XPCOM.
GoogleAmaYahoo have shown that web services work on a global scale. How come I can't roll out my own personal web services for bookmarking, dealing with a microformatted web, or even just personalizing my own web UX?
3) MozCo and MoFo -- Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation -- is neither some faceless for-profit corporation nor some green-blood bleeding non-profit. It's both but neither, which, as Mitchell points out, is somewhat confusing.
My final suggestion is this. Perhaps we should think of MozCo + MoFo not as some conjoined twin of corp. and 501(c)3, but as a social business.
What's that? In the words of Nobel Laureate Yunus,
Now, that's a vision I can get behind.A social business will be a non-loss, non-dividend company
Many young people today feel frustrated because they cannot see any worthy challenge, which excites them, within the present capitalist world. Socialism gave them a dream to fight for. Young people dream about creating a perfect world of their own...
We get what we want, or what we don't refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.
We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.
What do you want? Do tell, do tell. Tell, and then do!
Last week I went with a friend to a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" on campus, part of V-Day 2007 here at TheFarm.
I didn't think much about copyright and IP during the performance, but over the weekend (as part of my research on mashups) I finally got to reading Lessig's Free Culture (released under an Attribution-NonCommercial license), which warns and informs us about the quickly shrinking sphere of free(-as-in-speech) culture.
And so, during a lunch discussion today in the Women's Center, as an VMono actor, director, and playgoers (past tense) talked of how the Monologues spoke for them and spoke to them, at times, and didn't spoke for them or of them, at other times, I thought of Lessig, the Law, and the "Lock Down" of our culture.
You see, when you put on a show like "The Vagina Monologues", you need to make sure you apply for permission from the copyright holders. Otherwise, as one high school in Bronx found out, you best prepare for trouble.
Now, let's take a look at VDay performance rights, specifically guidelines for colleges wanting to put on a performance of the Monologues:
Organizing and Casting:
...Men are invited to participate in College Campaign productions but not as actors...
Script:
You must use the V-Day version of the script of The Vagina Monologues that will be made available to you. No other version of the play is acceptable for your production. Do not use the book of the play or versions of the script from previous College Campaigns. The new script must be followed. You may not edit any introductions or monologues. You may not exclude or change the order of any of the monologues. You may not use excerpts of the play in advertising or preliminary events.
...
Failure to adhere to these rules will result in V-Day's rescinding permission for you to present a production of "The Vagina Monologues."
I have to wonder if our generation, more than any other, grew up reading (and mostly obeying) legalese like this, and have been inured to its coded limitations. I do think that copyright has a worthy place in modern society, as described in the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Author and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
...but I also believe that copyright, as practiced today, often serves to support corporate interests rather than the Progress of useful Arts and society at large.
In the specific case of "The Vagina Monologues", how does copyright and the fear of legal action stifle free re-expression, remixing, and re-presentation? Why should we care?
"The Vagina Monologues" is part of a larger effort to empower women everywhere and to stop violence against women gendered violence, but, unsurprisingly, every monologue -- being the voice of one -- must be thusly incomplete. Where is the chorus sung by women of color? The intersexed and/or genderqueer? Or those who grew up without a net?
As Lessig notes, this is where creativity, remixing, and other voices enter on the stage. He describes how Disney's first incarnation of Mickey Mouse borrows from Steamboat Willie, who borrows from "Steamboat Bill", a song inspired by Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill Jr.".
But the newly extended life of modern copyright means that, today, we can't remix, re-create, re-inspire as freely as we once could. If we take a look at the origins of Eve Ensler's Monologues, we see that the play itself is a remix, a re-combination of the stories that women shared with Eve about their Southern belles, their Panty hamsters, their Chuffs and Bearded Oysters.
And yet, we're not allowed to rewrite, re-order, add or subtract, from these stories to add our own voices to the play. If corporate interests have their way, it may be like that (for this play) for another hundred years. I think that really sucks.
So, I'd like to call for the copyright owners of "The Vagina Monologues" to re-license the Monologues under something akin to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, no later than 2010 -- fourteen years after Eve Ensler's original performance on the show.
My friend Paz directed this year's show here at TheFarm, and asked me to write up what I had started to tell her about Free Culture, Creative Commons, and the like, and so I write this for her, for you, and for the rest of us.
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Now for a word about literacy.
Later this week, we'll be having a discussion on sexuality, described as "a frank open discussion". While I think that's great, I mentioned to Margo that it might be useful to frame this dialogue more specifically as a discussion on sexual literacy. We don't learn, growing up, much vocabulary about our bodies, except clinical terms, or how to talk about boundaries, relationships (with self and others), and our sexual identity.
When we think of textual literacy, we might think of a period of time we spend learning to be comfortable with a written language, practicing how to express ourselves with relative ease. I think we ought to think of sexual literacy in a similar way. It's more than just knowing a few words or that we should talk about "it", but also about the way we slowly learn to be comfortable in putting words to our feelings, terms to our squirmy sentiments, and have the courage to communicate, hoping to connect.
