dose

For some time now I have been struggling with a collision of a few strands, the free software movement and the open source production model; and particularly how they might be applied to non-technical projects. I’m not a technical guy myself (I’m a writer) and so my participation in any the free software movement can only be as a user, and perhaps the odd comment on a forum somewhere, either looking for help with a problem or suggesting a solution. Still the fundemental principles (opening up a project so anyone can participate, allowing full volunteer collaboration, attacking a huge project in component bits, so people can give as much time or energy as they wish) I thought, could be a “new” model for doing all sorts of things. What those things were, was not clear to me.

The wikipedia was one example that got me all excited when I first found it: here was a project that used the power of the internet, people’s thirst for knowledge, and the idea that poor people and rich people should all have access to the same knowledge, and the astounding interest people have in giving their time to projects they believe in, with no financial benfit. (The wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, a sort of self-regulating community of free information providers. Read more about them on wikipedia’s page about wikipedia).

My first edit of a wikipedia article was a revelation, and I understood that soon, if not already, this would be the first-stop in any online search … maybe there would be other stops, but wikipedia would always have an important place as a collector and free disseminator of the world’s knowledge. It has become my first stop.

At the same time as I started to view glimmers of the non-tech possibilities of the “free movement” I discovered the pleasures of blogging - instant and easy publication of whatever I wanted to write; and later podcasting - a cheap and easy way for anyone to provide audio content. Much has been written about the transformative effects of these two innovations, but for me personally, it meant not just the availability of all sorts of thinking and content I would not otherwise have had access to, but more importantly a means to comment publicly on that content, and often a way to engage in discussions with other writers and podcasters. In that sense I saw a great liberation possible — importantly aided by the presence of the free software community (eg wordpress and blogsome) committed to providing the software tools to take advantage of this revolution for free. I should note that other, less free-software-like groups, (such as www.blogger.com) are as free as anyone else.

Around the same time I discovered the Creative Commons movement, which added a philosophical and legal dimension to protecting the content, namely protecting people’s right to provide content for free, into a public realm, a realm that has been shrinking for at least the past 25 years.

And it’s this public sphere which is of interest to me. Perhaps it’s just my taste, but if you look at the great cities of the world, the cities that most people could visit, and say, that was astounding it’s vibrant public space that makes those cities wonderful.

London and Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Sydney Australia, New York, and I would venture my own home of Montreal, offer a mix of commerce, food, art, parks, public space, business, transport, relaxation, all in one place. The components of one add to the others, and make an integrated whole. Each of those cities have their own particularities (the pubs and pin-stripes of London, the Bistros and buildings of Paris, the cafes and churches of Rome, the butchers and chaos of Hong Kong, the taxis and galleries of New York), but all of them give the sense that life is really happpening, that you are in the midst of a place alive. Either by design or history, life is encouraged to happen in public.

And, my theory is that humans like to be in places where life happens (note cities are not the only places to feel this; you get a similar sense, tho different, in nature).

I am currently reading Moishe Safdie’s The City After the Automobile (a book I wish I had read before I started my almost-finished novel, Blind Spot –here’s a pdf of chapter 1– which concerns, among other things, Oscar and his anarchist, anti-car driving instructor, Victor). Safdie writes at length about Le Corbusier and other architects of the 20th century city, who laid the foundations for our lifeless, particularly North American cities, designed for cars, not people; arranged around unusable/unsued public space, parking lots, highways, and commerce; the desire to close the formerly public within private walls; and the separation of the different bits of life into their component–and separated–parts. That is, confine commerce within malls (with no natural light to distort things!), with few controllable entrances, and no interesting life outside; keep the schools over there and the churches over here, the business parks isolated, and the housing developments elsewhere.

In other words, among other things, these cities took all the component bits of life, separated them, removed the “need” for public space, and sterilized everything, killing it. If you have visited Mississauga, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto and one of the biggest cities in Canada, you know the results. A city no one likes, but which provides relatively large yards.

All this to say, my feeling is that Public Space, and Public Domain improves life for everyone — even the rich who can afford to finance their own, sterile versions of life as they wish it. This is why vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods (such as Montreal’s mile end) attract artists and students, and subsequently the rich. People like to live in places where life is happening. And life happens where there is public space for all the elements of life to intersect. New York’s East Village, for instance, is an astounding place (increasingly less-so), and nothing is more wonderful than the those spaces squeezed between two tenament buildings that have been transformed into tiny community gardens, some of which have become the home to chickens! In downtown Manhattan.

All this is a long meditation about Public Domain, and how it benefits everyone. A vibrant public domain makes for a vibrant world, and we are slowly losing any sense that the public is important.

Hence the launch of LibriVox, my little contribution to growing the public domain, even as it diminishes around us. The objective is to ask volunteers to record audio versions of chapters of books in the public domain, and make them available in the public domain. Many have joined up, and I hope for many more to join. The objective (ha!) is to add 100 (1000?) completed titles by the end of 2006 … but if wikipedia worked, perhaps this will too… a totally volunteer, non-technical literature project using a free software/open-source model, a public domain license, and the power of the internet and podcasting to bring it all together. Why not wander over to LibriVox and put your name down for a chapter?