Free Our Information

The Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, is quite simply, fantastic. Every year they have a conference where they have talks and presentations about the coolest ideas coming up, all with the potential to alter how we perceive and interact with the rest of the world. Fortunately, they are all available online. I've only seen a few, but so far they have all been mind-blowing.

The presentation below is by Hans Rosling, and it's about statistics. And it's freakin' sweet! Not in a math-nerd way, but in an everyman way. It's 20 minutes long, and worth every minute.





The most important part of the presentation is the last five minutes. We simply must have a new paradigm of knowledge - of perceiving it and disseminating it. Rosling's presentation is one of the best illustrations I have seen of this. Governments and organizations collect massive amounts of data, and then make it inaccessible. I believe the big revolution of this century will be the liberation of data - the democratization of information. This includes statistics, but more importantly science, entertainment, culture - human knowledge in its entirety. Presently, the producers and masters of human knowledge serve as gatekeepers whose primary role is to create systems which limit access to knowledge. You have to pay dearly to buy books or go to a university. Access to an academic journal often costs $20 per article and are written as to be inaccessible to anyone who has not spent years learning unnecessary jargon. This is no way to promote and disseminate knowledge - it merely keeps knowledge within the elite who are already knowledgeable. Largely, this democratization will occur because of the Internet, but it is much larger than that as well. I believe the impact of liberated data will eventually be on the level of the creation of the printing press, or universal suffrage. It will take time (many decades), and there will be no dramatic news coverage, but the weight of the impact on society will be enormous.

You can download the Trendalyzer software used in the presentation for free.

More Open-Source Please!

Nintendo has announced they are opening up the Wii, allowing anyone to create and distribute games for it. This is a very smart move. Fans' collective creativity and enthusiasm will always be more innovative than that of a small group of professional developers (for just about anything.) Innovation comes with risk, but fans only risk losing their time if they make a flop. Developers potentially risk their jobs.

Plus, people like having control over their technology - being locked out (technologically and legally) of a system you paid for does not inspire customer loyalty - I'm looking at you Microsoft, AOL, and RIAA. Treating fans and customers as team members will always win out in the long run over treating them as potential intruders and theives. Hopefully, more will follow Nintendo's success.

MIT to make all university courses free to everyone

MIT has announced that all 1,800 of its courses will be made completely free to anyone to download. If you ever wanted to know anything about anything, especially technical stuff, this is a great opportunity to find out. All 1,800 courses are available here including audio and video copies of lectures, as well as written text. Just load it up to an MP3 player, or burn it to a CD, and listen while you go to work. Yale will be starting a similar program in a few months.

There is a great conflict in cultural, economic, and technological paradigms right now between closed-source systems and open-source system. Closed-source systems involve a limited, centralized, usually hierarchical group of people that make decisions in private. They produce a product or service that is consumed, and critically, the consumer has very little knowledge or control over how that product/service is made or used. Examples include Microsoft’s software, big-label music, and arguably Roman Catholicism. All fashion their products privately, and then produce it to the consumer with heavy restrictions on how it can be used/understood. Tinkering, copying, or questioning are not encouraged, and are often actively suppressed. In each there are producers and receivers, and little interaction between them.

Open-source systems, made viable through new technology, allow the entire public to participate in learning and making decisions. Open-source systems are decentralized, transparent and democratic. Examples include Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, YouTube, blogs (like this one), free online classes, and arguably Quakerism. Tinkering, questioning, and interactive participation are encouraged. Open-source software systems, like Mozilla, are nearly always more secure than closed ones, like Internet Explorer. Mozilla’s code is open for anyone to see, and so thousands of volunteers have tested its weaknesses and contributed to it to make it stronger. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, relies on secrecy instead of actual strength for security, and is highly vulnerable because of this. In a matter of about two years, Wikipedia went from obscurity to becoming the world’s most cited reference source. Written entirely by volunteers, this open-source encyclopedia boasts 1,699,795 articles (in English; many more articles are in additional languages), and gains hundreds more every day, making it the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world. A recent study found its science articles were just as accurate as those of Encylopedia Brittanica. There are many parallels with natural selection here: sheltered, homogenous entities will wither away once their protection is removed; robust, transparent, heterogeneous entities will thrive.

Obviously, both closed and open source systems are necessary and both will always be around. But open-source will continue to become more and more dominant. The journey to that point may be quite long and bumpy as ideas of intellectual property are rethought and transformed, but open-source systems will almost always outcompete closed systems given enough time. MIT's decision to make their entire selection of classes available as free to everyone is a great start in applying the value in open-source system, and will surely inspire many to take advantage of it.