Using philanthropic funding, Baraniuk and the team behind OpenStax contracted professional content developers to write the books, and each book went through the industry-standard review cycle, including peer review and classroom testing. The books are scope- and sequence-compatible with traditional textbooks, and they contain all of the ancillary materials such as PowerPoint slides, test banks, and homework solutions.

So there is professional level seeding of content while also allowing for wiki-like contribution:

Each book has its own dashboard, called StaxDash. Along with displaying institutions that have adopted the book, StaxDash is also a real-time erratum tracker: Faculty who are using the books are encouraged to submit errors or problems they’ve found in the text. “There’s also the issue of pointing out aspects of the text that need to be updated,” notes Baraniuk, “for example, keeping the Sociology book up-to-date as the Arab Spring continues to evolve. People can post these issues, and our pledge is that we are going to fix any issues as close to ‘in real time’ as possible. These books will be up-to-date in a matter of hours or days instead of years.” When accessing a book through its URL on Connexions, students and faculty will always get the most up-to-date version of the book. Faculty can, however, use the “version control” feature on Connexions to lock in a particular version of the book for use throughout a semester.

If you thought that keeping up with authoritative versions of an ebook and citing it (trust me it is odd to cite to a location in a Kindle book) was messy, this new model will throw you. Then again, that is a small issue.

Group contributions for the latest on an issue and the ability to choose versions is a great idea. Law texts that could update the latest cases or a change in legislation as they happen and then be refined overtime would be wonderful. Of course teachers use other ways to reach these goals. But if crowds/commons style approaches to texts work, we may see better and less expensive versions of textbooks. How the system will mangage disputes about content and education boards’ issues with approval remains to be seen. Still, the promise of this approach should make the miasmic aspects of education boards look silly and create a press for improved ways to have quality content available for educators and most important, for students.

“Far too many pieces of code critical to the reproduction, peer-review and extension of scientific results never see the light of day,” said Andrew Morin, a postdoctoral fellow in the structural biology research and computing lab at Harvard University. “As computing becomes an ever larger and more important part of research in every field of science, access to the source code used to generate scientific results is going to become more and more critical.”

If the essay were available, we might assess it better too.

Nonetheless, the idea is interesting. It reminds me of work by Victoria Stodden who has looked at this issue for some time. From her bio:

Victoria Stodden is assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University and serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), and on Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee. She is one of the creators of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research and has developed an award winning licensing structure to facilitate open and reproducible computational research, called the Reproducible Research Standard. She is currently working on the NSF-funded project: “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.”

Victoria is serving on the National Academies of Science committee on “Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process” and the American Statistical Association’s “Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality” (2013).

In other words, if you are interested in thisarea, you may want to contact Victoria as well as Mr. Morin.

The book is described here (OUP site) and here (Amazon). The Introduction and Table of Contents are available here.

Short abstract:

“Infrastructure resources are at the center of many contentious public policy debates, ranging from what to do about our crumbling roads and bridges, to whether and how to protect of our natural environment, to patent law reform, to electromagnetic spectrum allocation, to providing universal health care, to energy policy, to network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, set the terms and conditions under which the public gets access, and determine how the infrastructure and various infrastructure-dependent systems evolve over time. This book advances strong economic arguments for managing and sustaining infrastructure resources as commons. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.”

Darth Vader? Good. Bag Pipes? Good. Darth and bagpipes put together with a guy in a kilt and on a unicycle? I leave that judgment to posterity (and you all).

Julie Cohen’s book is fantastic. Unfortunately, I am late to join the symposium, but it has been a pleasure playing catch up with the previous posts. Reading over the exchanges thus far has been a treat and a learning experience. Like Ian Kerr, I felt myself reflecting on my own commitments and scholarship. This is really one of the great virtues of the book. To prepare to write something for the blog symposium, I reread portions of the book a second time; maybe a third time, since I have read many of the law review articles upon which the book is based. And frankly, each time I read Julie’s scholarship I am forced to think deeply about my own methodology, commitments, theoretical orientation, and myopias. Julie’s critical analysis of legal and policy scholarship, debate,and rhetoric is unyielding as it cuts to the core commitments and often unstated assumptions that I (we) take for granted.

I share many of the same concerns as Julie about information law and policy (and I reach similar prescriptions too), and yet I approach them from a very different perspective, one that is heavily influenced by economics. Reading her book challenged me to confront my own perspective critically. Do I share the commitments and methodological infirmities of the neoliberal economists she lambasts? Upon reflection, I don’t think so. The reason is that not all of economics boils down to reductionist models that aim to tally up quantifiable costs and benefits. I agree wholeheartdly with Julie that economic models of copyright (or creativty, innovation, or privacy) that purport to accurately sum up relevant benefits and costs and fully capture the complexity of cultural practices are inevitably, fundamentally flawed and that uncritical reliance on such models to formulate policy is distorting and biased toward seemless micromanagement and control. As she argues in her book, reliance on such models “focuses on what is known (or assumed) about benefits and costs, … [and] tends to crowd out the unknown and unpredictable, with the result that play remains a peripheral consideration, when it should be central.” Interestingly, I make nearly the same argument in my book, although my argument is grounded in economic theory and my focus is on user activities that generate public and social goods. I need to think more about the connections between her concept of play and the user activities I examine. But a key shared concept is that indeterminacy in the environment and the structure of rights and affordances sustains user capabilties and this is (might be) normatively attractive whether or not users choose to exercise the capabilities. That is, there is social (option) value is sustaining flexibility and uncertainty.

Like Julie, I have been drawn to the Capabilities Approach (CA). It provides a normatively appealing framework for thinking about what matters in information policy—that is, for articulating ends. But it seems to pay insufficient attention to the means. I have done some limited work on the CA and information policy and hope to do more in the future. Julie has provided an incredible roadmap. In chapter 9, The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing, she goes beyond the identification of capabilities to prioritize and examines the means for enabling capabilities. In my view, this is a major contribution. Specifically, she discusses three structural conditions for human flourishing: (1) access to knowledge, (2) operational transparency,and (3) semantic discontinuity to be a major contribution. I don’t have much to say about the access to knowledge and operational transparency discussions, other than “yep.” The semantic discontinuity discussion left me wanting more, more explanation of the concept and more explanation of how to operationalize it. I wanted more because I think it is spot on. Paul and others have already discussed this, so I will not repeat what they’ve said. But, riffing off of Paul’s post, I wonder whether it is a mistake to conceptualize semantic discontinuity as “gaps” and ask privacy, copyright, and other laws to widen the gaps. I wonder whether the “space” of semantic discontinuities is better conceptualized as the default or background environment rather than the exceptional “gap.” Maybe this depends on the context or legal structure, but I think the relevant semantic discontinuities where play flourishes, our everyday social and cultural experiences, are and should be the norm. (Is the public domain merely a gap in copyright law? Or is copyright law a gap in the public domain?) Baselines matter. If the gap metaphor is still appealing, perhaps it would be better to describe them as gulfs.

Its timing couldn’t be better. Passions over the proposed SOPA (and Protect IP/PIPA, and OPEN, and related) legislation have barely cooled, but debates will certainly continue over Internet governance and copyright infringement on digital networks.  More legislation is coming. Understanding the Internet as infrastructure — not just the infrastructure of the Internet — is essential to understanding the costs, benefits, and risks of new law in this area. In fact, one might say that the goal here is not simply to minimize the risks associated with the Internet, but to maximize its benefits.  Brett’s book is a great guide.

Speaking of which, David Post has a succinct summary of the problems with SOPA, here.

I was remiss earlier in not linking to SOPA analyses by other Madisonians:

Greg Lastowka posted a commentary here.

Frank Pasquale posted a commentary here.

Updated (later on 2/14):

Bruce Boyden posted a three-part analysis of SOPA on Madisonian.net way back in November and December 2011, ages before things really heated up in earnest.  Before, that is, the blackout.  Part I is here.  Part II is here.  Part III is here.

Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml

Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

Thank you to Marvin for an excellent article to read and discuss, and thank you Concurring Opinions for providing a public forum for our discussion.

In the article, the critical approach that Marvin takes to challenge the “standard” model of the First Amendment is really interesting. He claims that the standard model of the First Amendment focuses on preserving speakers’ freedom by restricting government action and leaves any affirmative obligations for government to sustain open public spaces to a patchwork of exceptions lacking any coherent theory or principles. A significant consequence of this model is that open public spaces for speech—I want to substitute “infrastructure” for “spaces”–are marginalized and taken for granted. My forthcoming book—Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources–explains why such marginalization occurs in this and various other contexts and develops a theory to support the exceptions. But I’ll leave those thoughts aside for now and perhaps explore them in another post. And I’ll leave it to the First Amendment scholars to debate Marvin’s claim about what is the standard model for the First Amendment.

Instead, I would like to point out how a similar (maybe the same) problem can be seen in the Supreme Court’s most recent copyright opinion. In Golan v. Holder , Justice Ginsburg marginalizes the public domain in a startling fashion. Since it is a copyright case, the “model” is flipped around: government is empowered to grant exclusive rights (and restrict some speakers’ freedom) and any restrictions on the government’s power to do so is limited to narrow exceptions, i.e., the idea-expression distinction and fair use. A central argument in the case was that the public domain itself is another restriction. The public domain is not expressly mentioned in the IP Clause of the Constitution, but arguably, it is implicit throughout (Progress in Science and the Useful Arts, Limited Times). Besides, the public domain is inescapably part of the reality that we stand on the shoulders of generations of giants. Most copyright scholars believed that Congress could not grant copyright to works in the public domain (and probably thought that the issue raised in the case – involving restoration for foreign works that had not been granted copyright protection in the U.S — presented an exceptional situation that might be dealt with as such). But the Court declined to rule narrowly and firmly rejected the argument that “the Constitution renders the public domain largely untouchable by Congress.” In the end, Congress appears to have incredibly broad latitude to exercise its power, limited only by the need to preserve the “traditional contours.”

Of course, it is much more troublesome that the Supreme Court (rather than scholars interpreting Supreme Court cases) has adopted a flawed conceptual model that marginalizes basic public infrastructure. We’re stuck with it.

From the New York Times:  “Swatch, Supplier to Rivals, Now Aims to Cut Them Off.”

Swatch’s dominance of watch manufacturing dates to the early 1980s, when Nicolas G. Hayek, father of the current chief executive, was entrusted by banks to take over two indebted watch companies. He merged them and turned the combined business into a mass-volume production platform [commons, if you will] for what the company’s Web site describes as “a low-cost, high-tech, artistic and emotional ‘second watch’ — the Swatch,” as well as for other brands.

The merger received the blessing of the competition authorities and was seen as a last-ditch attempt to save a sector whose work force had shrunk almost two-thirds in 15 years, to 33,000 employees in 1984.

Employment has since climbed back to 49,000, and watch companies now face the problem of recruiting enough qualified staff to meet their orders.

In June, the Swiss competition authority ruled that Swatch would be allowed to lower its deliveries of mechanical movements to third parties next year to 85 percent of the 2010 levels, pending an antitrust investigation and a final ruling on whether Swatch could stop supplies altogether. That ruling is expected in the second half of next year.

From the New Yorker:  “Battle Lines,” reviewing Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of The Iliad.  Mitchell and the reviewer, Daniel Mendelsohn, agree that the modern Iliad is recognized as a kind of wiki-composition (commons, if you will) rather than the work of a single, solitary author.  They disagree over the wisdom of Mitchell’s approach, stripping away the accretions and interpolations to reveal what Mitchell claims is an even greater poem, leaner, more dramatic, more awe-inspiring.   Mendelsohn argues (and I quote the abstract):

But too often his insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Part of the way in which the epic legitimizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms. All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. The Iliad isn’t pure; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great. It doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning?

Also from the New Yorker:  “Crunch,” about the development of modern apples and particularly about the development and release of the “SweeTango,” a “club apple” [commons, of a sort] produced at the University of Minnesota.    From the abstract:

Instead of an ‘open release,’ which meant that anyone could grow the apple, the university decided to release it as a ‘managed variety,’ or what’s known in the business as a ‘club apple.’ The university would grant a license to an outside company, which would establish a consortium that could market and grow the apple nationally. Growers could apply to the consortium for permission to grow the apple and, if accepted, would be obliged to sign a lengthy contract stipulating how and where they could grow it, as well as where they could sell it.

Not all growers are pleased.

And from one kind of apples to another:  The Future of the Internet blog on Microsoft’s new Windows 8 app store and how it re-creates (in part) the gatekeeping problems posed by Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores.  That post builds on earlier arguments (Jonathan Zittrain) about “the end of the PC,” that is, the end of the idea that computer users have the power to add software to their machines without having their choices filtered by an intermediary.  Comparatively “open” technologies are succeeded by technologies that are comparatively “closed.”  This case, like  the Swatch example shows that the problem of intermediaries is not simply their existence, but the nature of the power that they exert.