Rebecca MacKinnon: a Fangirl’s Post for Ada Lovelace Day

Suw Charman-Anderson of Open Rights Group fame, announced her pledge “to publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Well, I’m not usually one to take the girl-power bait, but Ada Lovelace Day seems like a fun opportunity to out myself as a fangirl. The gender debates have by no means reached a catharsis, but rather than tangling myself in *that* web today, I’ll dedicate a post to a Lady of the Interwebs that I admire: Rebecca MacKinnon.

To start off, Rebecca has a CV that makes your jaw drop: former head of CNN’s Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Center, Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Open Society, a member of the inaugural Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board, and and and.

But more important than just a resume laundry list, Rebecca’s been a tremendous force in amplifying voices from regions underrepresented in Western media. In December 2004, Rebecca and Ethan Zuckerman launched Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists reporting, summarizing, and translating the news and blogosphere opinion around the world.

Beyond journalism, Rebecca dedicated a lot of energy to lowering legal and technical barriers to sharing creative content. She’s been involved in a project near and dear to my heart, Creative Commons. In October 2008, CC Hong Kong launched as Creative Commons’ 50th jurisdiction. Rebecca was behind the effort to bring CC to Hong Kong since Day 1, and she’s been curating good arguments for it ever since.

In the meanwhile, she finds time to publish articles on censorship, China, and other juicy internets topics. What’s more, despite all the high-brow accomplishments, Rebecca is an incredibly down-to-earth person, articulate, smart, and judging from the brief time we worked together, very kind.

So there you have it. The fangirl is outed; you’ve heard my high praise for a woman in tech I admire. Now what about you? Join the pledge and tell the ‘webs about your geek heroine!

Image: “Rebecca MacKinnon” by Joi, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported license.

Open Design @ oebf Mar. 26

The second Open Everything Berlin Fokus kicks off 26.03.09 at 7.30 pm, newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48. The theme? Open Design.

We invite designers, retailers, thinkers, makers and users to discuss
and share their point of view and experience in the field of OPEN
DESIGN. We hope to create an opportunity and platform to make new connections, find undiscovered paths and strategies to explore design in a collaborative manner, be it designers in-between,
retailers-to-user or maker-to-user wise.

Open design can be interpreted and made in numerous ways:

• As a designer, publish your work for the users to make and remake it
• Make the design sustainable by localizing private or commercial production
• Find an international community around your design ideas to co-create
• Customize your ideas with the help of users and retailers
• As a user, become a designer and participate in creating the things that really fit your needs
• and many more

How do you interpret OPEN DESIGN and in what context do you think you can make use of it?

See you there! You can read about last month’s Openeverything + CC Salon.

Openwashing

"be open. be free. be Berlin."

Openwashing: to spin a product or company as open, although it is not. Derived from “greenwashing”

There’s a troubling trend surfacing in the marketing world, one that’s riffing off a now-familiar strategy, “greenwashing”. We’ve all seen products coated in greensheen, the misleading marketing ploy that spins a product as environmentally-friendly in order to woo eco-cozy customers.

Now, there’s a whole new buzzword bingo game in town, and it’s all about transparency, access, and believe it or not, “openness”.That’s right. Companies are courting openness like it’s the new green.

Take, for example, the above (badly-photographed – sorry!) advertisement from the Berlin Partner GmbH, a promotional arm of Germany’s capital.

Their new slogan, “be open. be free. be Berlin,” is designed to evoke coolness and inspire acceptance with the young and wired generation. I think it’s pretty illustrative of what I’m calling openwashing. Reading through the campaign’s Terms of Use, for example, I’ve come across these gems:

7.2.

The user is not permitted to download content of any kind from the website and/or to copy and/or otherwise reproduce it, unless this is explicitly permitted on the website and/or made possible (e.g. the ability to send a link to a success story by means of a function provided for this purpose on the Website).

7.3.

Changes or modifications to the website or parts of the website are not permitted.

So, let me get this straight. Users can send in lots of stuff and build the value of the campaign with their content, but they can’t use any of it once it’s uploaded? At least the Berlin Partner don’t claim exclusive usage rights for users’ own submissions, but they do restrict those users, and everybody else, from being able to do much of anything with it. Plus, Berlin Partner retains all the user content, even if you send them a termination of contract.

I don’t really want to bash Berlin Partner too badly, because I think the campaign’s concept is kinda neat. But I just think they should be consistent with their messaging.

But this is not the only example of openwashing, and in fact, there are instances that make a better case for illustrating what I’m talking about. Take a look at The Guardian’s “Open Platform”…and Dave Winer’s rebuttal of the misnomer.

On a meta-level, openwashing probably isn’t a bad thing. Openwashing is a side effect of customers’ growing desire to have transparency and access in their services. It’s signaling that openness is an important feature for today’s end-users. And just as environmental awareness carved a niche for green products, perhaps a similar thing will happen for openness.

So, on the one hand, I’m finding these slogans disheartening and disingenuous. It’s frustrating to see merchants of cool co-opting “openness” for closed products. But on the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing for the Free Culture movement at large. The more frequently companies resort to openwashing, the greater the weight they’re indirectly giving these issues. It might be opportunistic, but the more companies perceive openness as sexy, the more, I hope, these principles will actually be implemented.