Open sharing – how killing the culture of trade secrets could benefit Wales
Wales Business — By Rhodri ap Dyfrig on January 25, 2010 7:00 am
Wired together: the internet is joining us in ways that are only now being realised
IT’S not just the tools we use for which we should give thanks to engineers, web heads and geeks. Increasingly, around the world, those people are using the new technologies to develop better ways of relating to our fellow human beings.
Blogging provides a good example. It’s a social technology that was popularised by software writers as a way of keeping others updated on new ideas and prototypes. Blogging has now spread to academics, politicians, policymakers, business people, charities, musicians, artists – everyone.
Blogging has grown beyond its origins and now has its own culture and ethos. Who might be interested in a certain piece of knowledge, or a particularly opinion? Anyone, really. That’s what drives so many people to post. The web is big enough to contain it, and those searching on related subjects will find it. And there is a lot to be said for the benefits of sourcing such knowledge.
Knowledge is no longer a scarcity. We don’t need to work quite so hard to obtain it. As a consequence, the age of trade secrets has arguably come to an end. It has become harder to hold on to information so getting an edge comes in the execution, how you apply it.
And, in keeping with the breakneck speed of development these days, this open sharing ethos is being applied at events, embracing this new thinking while providing an antidote to overpriced and frequently disappointing conferences.
My involvement in this comes with a new event called Hacio’r Iaith – Hacking the Language. It’s a development which has sprung not from a desire to spend grant funding, nor from a single ideological perspective, but just out of a passion for using new technologies and for creating, communicating and collaborating online – activities that also happen to occur in the Welsh language.
Hacio’r Iaith, which takes place this Saturday (30 January) in Aberystwyth, is loosely based on two types of event that have emerged worldwide since 2005: BarCamps and Hack Days. Both are related in that they offer an opportunity for people who are passionate about technology to come together to share ideas and knowledge and to create better web experiences through collaboration.
BarCamps are essentially open sourced technology conferences. They started as a response to FooCamp events, organised by publisher and technologist Tim O’Reilly. These were invite-only events that took place in O’Reilly’s HQ. The FOO – stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”; the Camp – well, the geeks attending actually camped out overnight in tents. Seeing the buzz generated by FooCamp, others decided to adapt the format and open source it. By now many hundreds of BarCamps have taken place worldwide, with WordCampUK becoming the first to take place in Wales last year.
The structure of the event is key, but it has also been applied to conferences on themes other than technology. These are some of the main ‘rules’ for participation:
- Events are free and open to all who wish to attend, on the premise that those who do attend take part in some meaningful way. That may be through presenting a project, holding a discussion, helping to organise, providing sponsorship, and so on. As the budget is usually minimal budget, it is best to discourage passengers;
- The programme is put together on the day. Rooms and WiFi are organised beforehand, but the running order consists of an empty grid of speaking slots. If you wish to speak or hold a session, then you must place your name on the grid;
- ‘Delegates’ choose what they want to attend, and are encouraged to move freely between sessions. Vote with your feet;
- As many sessions as possible will be held within the time limits of the programme. However, it is common for side sessions of a few people to take place in corridors if they come up with an idea good enough to discuss;
- Slots can go on as long as the speaker wishes, as long as they don’t overrun into the next available slot;
- Attendees are encouraged to share what they have learned with the world both during, and after the event.
The poster for this weekend's event
Hack Days, on the other hand, are slightly different in that they are aimed more at programmers and those interested in ‘creating cool stuff’. These can be hacks, mashups, applications, RSS feeds, plugins, scripts and so on. Like-minded coders gather together in a very informal environment, usually with a certain theme or set of data to work on. The aim is sometimes to make sense of raw statistical data through mashups and visualisation, as The Guardian attempted when it held their Hack Day in 2008; or by giving a space for coders to create any project they wish as Yahoo! did with its original Open Hack Day in 2006.
Many BarCamps use wikis prior to the event to disseminate information, but also to collaborate on organising sessions. For Hacio’r Iaith, we have followed the same model and some presentations have already been flagged up on the wiki, including a live streamed podcast by the team at Metastwnsh web and technology blog. Some of the subjects covered will include machine translation, bilingual web design, services for Welsh learners, digital media, Welsh language social media, the history of the Welsh language web, speech technology, educational technology, and more. With over 35 people attending from a wide range of websites and backgrounds, we expect the discussions to be lively, passionate and above all participatory. It is all about sharing and learning in a relaxed way.
We’ll be dedicating an afternoon to the Hack Day element, and hope to be able to create something new out of the vast amounts of largely untouched data from a range of public and private organisations. The aim is that the end product of the session is useful or constructive for people beyond the event.
Everyone who attends is encouraged to tweet, blog, film, record audio of what they see and hear, and air their opinions on them. The discussion in the sessions is meant to kick-start further debate in other spaces. We will also try to record all the sessions in order to share them online after the event. The ethos is open and so any input from people only able to attend virtually will enrich the proceedings.
Throughout the day there’ll be gaming and other entertainment to give people time-out from discussions, and finally a decidedly analogue walk to the pub for more talk. For a Welsh geek, that’s a day of bliss. The type of day that we hope others will emulate in other parts of Wales.
Full details of Hacio’r Iaith can be found on their wiki and website
Tags: Barcamp, blogging, FooCamp
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8 Comments
I’m really looking forward to Hacio’r Iaith!
I’ve attended a couple of barcamp-style events in the past and found them very useful. Admittedly they were both about technology.
But there’s no reason to confine the format to technology. The format has been successfully applied to other fields, anything where people might want to share knowledge and discuss topics with peers.
For instance, a barcamp for discussion of political issues in Wales might be very interesting, for example. It could be conducted in any language, or languages. With a venue and a wiki page it could easily be thrown together. Perhaps the only difficult thing is finding a sponsor, if there are any significant costs (such as translation). I think it’s also a part of the ethos that the entry charge should be as low as possible or free. This is for people who want to attend a useful conference but are not looking to make money in the conference business.
Another idea (and one I’d particularly love to see) would be a barcamp-style conference for entrepreneurship and start-up business in Wales.
(Disclosure: I am a co-organiser of Hacio’r Iaith.)
I’m afraid I am too much of a realist. Being a part time designer and inventor of sorts I know how important it
is too keep ones intellectual property…my blog contained a few designs but not the ones I’m serious about. Lock and key..catch my drift!
This is because the business world is increasingly Machievellian and the big and well off will use the small independent guys idea’s. This is exactly what these gatherings are all about and the real purpose.
I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand I agree and sympathise with Senn that these gatherings could be hacked by rip off merchants stealing good ideas but on the other hand I am of the opinion that ‘ideas are cheap’ but implementation of those ideas is not and it may be better to float these ideas into the open source community without hope of monetisation. The pay off comes when someone then pays you for support or development of the idea. This is how open most source works. In addition, hoarding a tech idea and its IP to yourself without the resources to implement, test, or trial market leaves the individual inventor vulnerable to the furious pace of change especially in the web world. I guarantee you that your good idea of today is probably ‘old hat’ tomorrow and has probably been thought of anyway by a thousand Chinese or Indians.
Another dimension to this is that anything really new is going to be really really complicated – it takes large multi disciplinary research teams to work on drug discovery and big pharma often spends an order of magnitude more on IP protection than on the research itself. Also even what you might think of a relatively simple open source software solution such as a shopping cart written in perl or php (like OS Commerce or VirtueMart) has required collaboration of thousands of programmers over some years. Microsoft and Apple have obviously done all they can to protect source code for Windows or OSX operating systems but this has just led to people coming up with work arounds like Ubuntu and so on.
Mind you, personally, I am far too old (and teetotal) to attend something like Hacio’r Iaith so we are thinking of sending Tom who should revel in it! Pob lwc i chi.
I doubt whether ideas that stem from Hacio’r Iaith will be ‘ripped off’ by evil multinationals, but I think that if they are, it might do Wales (and our reputations!) a lot of good. In fact, when faced with trying to create a thriving web culture in a minority language, being open is the only option. It is only through sharing and collaboration that we can achieve our goals. We are so short of development clout and potential funding (there have not been a huge amount of commercial web successes in Welsh as yet, although there are a few) that we often have to prioritise actions, rather than produce on a mass scale and see what sticks. How many start-up failures are there for Twitter’s success? We can little afford this kind of failure:success ratio. Share ideas, and get people to help you to achieve them. If Google or Microsoft want to nick a few ideas for the benefit of Welsh and other languages of a similar position, then all the better. Getting them to notice us and our needs at all is the problem!
Open source software has a built in safety mechanism however. Code designed under an open source GPL license is not just freely available for every commercial developer to nick and re-use to boost profts on the cheap. The license protects the IP in a way that works differently from normal IP, in that the GPL license only allows re-use if the end product from re-use is also released under a GPL license. Your copyright is asserted, but in a different way.
@CambriaPolitico Glad that you’re sending somebody, but if Tom wants to come then he better get his name registered sharpish as we’ve only 2 spaces left.
Hacio’r Iaith is an excellent example of creating conversations necessary for innovation and I am sorry I am elsewhere on the day on other open innovation for Wales activity.
Inventorium will launch in Spring. It is an EU funded activity funded under the Interreg 4A Wales-Ireland programme. It is about knowledge transfer for digital business. It stems from a belief that Open Innovation is the way forward for the 21st century. Open Innovation starts from the knowledge that good ideas for your enterprise aren’t always developed “in-house” and that all “in-house” innovation can not be monetized “in-house”. We need new paradigms of sharing and collaboration. Most of all we need conversations. a problem in Wales NHS may have a solution in some small enterprise – but without the conversation who knows?
Open Innovation does not exclude IP protection – however in the final analysis if there is no business model attached to invention the inventor is left starving in a garret with patent attorney bills. However Inventorium will use some binding “Chatham House” rules when needed. However in the main we will try to engineer enterprising conversations.
The other issue is that innovation is better in a spirit of fun and excitement- pob lwc to Hacio’r Iaith
When people release software under an open source licence, they expect and usually WANT big corporations to embrace it.
A good example is WordPress. If it had been kept proprietary it would never have achieved the huge success it has done. The GPL licence has allowed WordPress to grow an ecosystem of users, all of whom benefit and some of whom turn into contributors, making it even better in the form of plug-ins, themes, bug fixes and so on. It has created paid work for developers, designers, hosting companies and consultants. It’s used by Ford motors, The Wales Office, 10 Downing Street, The Telegraph (who use it for their comments system) and – I note – WalesHome. It’s estimated that 33 man-hours/person-hours have gone into its development from not just enthusiasts, but professionals, around the world.
Just a clarification about the GPL licence. It’s true you can redistribute it freely, even in a modified form, as long as you retain the same licence. But you are not obliged to release the code for your modified version if you install it only once, say on a web server. (You can do of course.) The “viral” effect of GPL is about when you redistribute it.
GPL only applies to software but there are other “some rights reserved” licences outside of software which allow re-use and re-adaptation. The best known for photos, video, text and so on is Creative Commons. Like GPL, it also depends on the existing copyright system in order to work.
I propose we remove the term “intellectual property” entirely. It’s pretty useless for explaining things or helping people understand the law and the way ideas are grown. It’s a vague umbrella term which covers copyright, design, patents and trademarks – all of which are covered by different laws. It’s a pity governments use the term “intellectual property” because it brings more confusion than clarity.
This might be worthy of a session at Hacio’r Iaith!
@senn, I don’t see how a designer would gain an advantage from only putting the second class examples online. Surely it would be better to showcase your absolute best stuff if you’re looking for clients? That’s your call though.
A moot point about the term ‘intellectual property’ – you’re right that this is useless jargon.
We love WordPress too!
If you’re curious, we have lots of output and thoughts from the Hacio’r Iaith event at the website.
http://haciaith.com
(Google Translate does a reasonable job of getting the gist of a Cymraeg text in English, if desired.)