Category Archive

I’m going to work on this over the next couple of days, but I jotted down some notes today about some of the topics/ideas I plan to explore here. If anyone has any additions, thoughts, criticisms, questions, etc, fire away. Note, this is just a rough listing of ideas, not at all structured or complete. I’ll be filling it in as we go along.

There are, I think, four areas I want to look at:

• The LibriVox How-Tos … Factors Contributing to Our Success
• A Brief History of LibriVox
• Thoughts on Open Structures and Public Domain
• Open Structures Elsewhere, Existing and Possible

Am I missing anything crucial there?

Here is a laundry list of rough topic/chapter/idea headings … (reader beware, it’s a bit of a mess):

The LibriVox How-Tos … Factors Contributing to Our Success

1. Central Idea: Power of the Book
2. Clarity of objective
3. Clarity of guiding principles
4. Clarity of policies
5. Clarity of participation streams
6. Fun
7. Ease of participation (as little or as much)
8. Minimal cost of participation (tools and outlays)
9. Community & niceness
10. Positive Feedback Loops
11. Open arms policy of participation
12. Idealistic but not dogmatic
13. Open minds policy of project development
14. Kill the ego…Kill the ego
15. The meritocracy/addiction principle - how admins become admins
16. Anarchy with an Iron Fist
17. If you want it, build it
18. Multiple participation streams
19. Valuing contributors above contributions
20. No money please
21. United Nations of audio projects - trying to welcome all languages
22. Help v1: Internal support for the non-techies
23. Help v2: internal support for everybody
24. Welcoming newbies
25. Online People & Those Who Can and Do
26. New Blood: Keeping the admin group strong

A Brief History of LibriVox (probably not interesting to a wider public)

1. Origins of an idea
2. How the Internet Makes Crazy Ideas Possible
3. Launch
4. BoingBoing.net
5. Internet Archive & Open Library
6. Forum
7. Structure Comes … We have Process!
8. Refinement and Robustness
9. The People of LibriVox
10. Farenheit 451: Defenders of the Faith; Digital Bards
11. Lovefest - Personal Thoughts about LibriVox Goodness
12. Hatefest - Personal Thoughts about LibriVox Badness
13. The Big Debates:

-Public Domain vs Creative Commons
-Being Nice
-Your Standards and My Standards

Thoughts on Open Structures and Public Domain (Philosopher’s Zone)

1. My dinner with Richard Stallman
2. Brewster Kahle & Universal Access to All Human Knowledge
3. Free Culture & Lawrence Lessig
4. Wales’ Wikipedia
5. Thoughts on Public Domain: Good Cities, Big Parks, and the Internet
6. Why Free Culture Matters
7. Free Culture, Hacking, and Tinkering with Your Car - what “open” might mean
8. The Open Project as Organic System
9. Evolution, Rigid Systems, and the Future of Humanity
10. Commons-Based Peer Production vs Crowdsourcing
11. Anarchy, Right, Left … and Open
12. Aren’t Free Projects Going to Put Everyone Out of Work?
13. Contributors and Creators, not Consumers
14. Building a Parallel - Not Oppositional - Structure
15. Taking on Jaron Lanier
16. The Question Concerning Information Technology
17. Where Collaboration Might Work; Where it Might Not
18. What Motivates: Why Economists Have it Wrong
19. Abstract Art, LibriVox, and the Human Brain
20. Boris’ Snowplow

Where Else Open Projects Might Be Used

1. Bringing Open Structures into the Real World
2. Something Needs Doing
3. People Care About the Something
4. Defining the Problem & Solutions
5. Structuring Contributions
6. Managing Contributors
7. Modular systems: open toolkits
8. Scaling Up
9. Changing Thinking: What Do You Value?
10. Other Projects: wikipedia, gutenberg, distributed proofreaders, others please?
11. data and government
12. Crowdsourcing & A For-Profit Version
13. The Money Question … And Participation
14. Where Could this Work?

• environment?
• health?
• food?
• politics?
• urban planning?
• education?
• diplomacy?