“…[our] learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmicall, epistemically changed - and changed precisely in the area of learning.”
Frozen choices
“Every such meeting, in other words, involves a thousand choices, but not a billion, because most of the big choices have already been made. These frozen choices are what gives institutions their vitality — they are in fact what make them institutions. Freed of the twin dangers of navel-gazing and random walks, an institution can concentrate its efforts on some persistent, medium-sized, and tractable problem, working at a scale and longevity unavailable to its individual participants.”
Shirky continues,
Institutions also reduce the choices a society has to make. In the second half of the 20th century, “the news” was whatever was in the newspaper on the morning, or network TV at night. Advertisers knew where to reach shoppers. Politicians knew who to they had to talk to to get their message out (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not.) Readers understood an Letters page as the obvious way of getting wider circulation for their views.
That dual reduction of choices masks an essential asymmetry, though. Institutions are designed to reduce they choices for their members, but they only happen to reduce the choices in society. A publisher may want reporters at their desks at 10 am, and to be the main source of breaking news for the paper’s readers. The former desire is under the publisher’s control; the latter not.
“Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket–that is assuming they had passed the interview–and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were wisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.”
Richard Owen was the driving force behind the creation of London's Natural History Museum, which opened in 1880. In contrast to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum was dedicated to open access and civic engagement, according to Bryson.
“I think that in general we have a pathological response to anything we measure. We tend not to measure the thing we care about; we tend to measure something that indicates its presence. It’s often very hard to measure the thing that you’re hoping for.”
“Like other museum institutions SMK is used to being seen as a gatekeeper of cultural heritage. But our collections do not belong to us. They belong to the public. Free access ensures that our collections continue to be relevant to users now and in the future. Our motivation for sharing digitized images freely is to allow users to contribute their knowledge and co-create culture. In this way, SMK wishes to be a catalyst for the users’ creativity.”
“The rate of technological change has gotten so fast that we need to inform the design to reflect it."
Ryan Anderson, director of future technology for Herman Miller.
“More hack, less yak”
“More #grok, less talk”
“The only valid measurement of code quality: WTF’s/minute”
“…Attentiveness to detail is an even more critical foundation of professionalism than any grand vision.”
“Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer’s intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control”
“Like a good novel, clean code should clearly expose the tensions in the problem to be solved. It should build those tensions to a climax and then give the reader that ‘Aha! Of course!’ as the issue and the tensions are resolved in the revelation of an obvious solution”
Open Science
“A crucial aspect to this project [the Allen Institute for Brain Science] –and others the Allen Institute has pursued over the last eight years–is an “open science” research model. Early on, we considered charging commercial users for access to our online data. From a strictly financial standpoint, it made sense to reap front-end fees and, down the line, intellectual property royalties. The revenue could cover the high costs of maintenance and development to keep the resource current and useful.”
Allen continues,
But our mission was to spark breakthroughs, and we didn’t want to exclude underfunded neuroscientists who just might be the ones to make the next leap. And so we made all of our data free, with no registration required.
Our facility is neither the first nor the last to use a shared database to embrace ‘open science’ and reject the competitive, single-lab paradigm. Traditional research incentives — where journal publications are the coin of the realm — tend to discourage vital sharing. What I’ve concluded is that foundations and other private funders who support scientific research also can help promote wider sharing of scientific data. Before funders write a check to a university, they should ask about the researcher’s policies and track record on sharing.
“The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do the same thing…”
The Public Domain
“The internet gives access to the digitised portion of that knowledge and creativity on a scale previously impossible. It is the driver for massive digitisation efforts that will fundamentally change the role of cultural and scientific heritage institutions. The digitisation of analogue collections creates new opportunities for sharing and creative re-use, empowering people to explore and respond to our shared heritage in new ways that our legislation has yet to catch up with. It has also brought copyright to the centre of attention for holders of our cultural and scientific heritage. Our memory organisations have for generations had the public duty of holding the heritage in trust for the citizenry and of making it accessible to all. Both of these functions are usually conducted at the citizens’ – i.e. the tax payers’ – expense.”
The charter continues,
Entrusted with the preservation of our shared knowledge and culture, not-for-profit memory organisations should take upon themselves a special role in the effective labelling and preserving of Public Domain works. As part of this role they need to ensure that works in the Public Domain are accessible to all of society, by making them available as widely as possible. It is important for memory organisations to recognise that as the guardians of our shared culture and knowledge they play a central role in enabling the creativity of citizens and providing the raw materials for contemporary culture, science, innovation and economic growth.
“A large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over which one’s control is much stronger.”
Mike Lydon on Embracing Impermanence:
“We’re seeing a lot of these things emerge for three reasons,” Lydon continues. “One, the economy. People have to be more creative about getting things done. Two, the Internet. Even four or five years ago we couldn’t share tactics and techniques via YouTube or Facebook. Something can happen randomly in Dallas and now we can hear about it right away. This is feeding into this idea of growth, of bi-coastal competition between New York and San Francisco, say, about who does the cooler, better things. And three, demographic shifts. Urban neighborhoods are gentrifying, changing. They’re bringing in people looking to improve neighborhoods themselves. People are smart and engaged and working a 40-hour week. But they have enough spare time to get involved and this seems like a natural step.”
via New York Times: It’s Time to re think ‘temporary’, December 19, 2011
“Arguments concerning the opportunity cost of open access (giving away potential revenues, for example) are based less on specific examples than on hypothetical opportunities — “the magic app” — that frankly never materialise.”
“The non-commercial clause that has governed use and re-use of the Museum’s metadata is rooted in the belief that non-profit academic charities should enable free use only for non-profit purposes. But in the digital age, with evidence that use and re-use can increase knowledge when it is openly linked across the entire web, the new view is that data funded by the taxpayer should have the broadest possible distribution.”
“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.’”