This afternoon I arrived in Mountain View. After a walk to my hotel from the Caltrain station I felt that this town is not made for pedestrians. Tomorrow the ELC 2008 conference starts and I don’t intend to pay for a taxi every day. And a local public bus system exists, but it would take hours to cross the relatively short distance to the Computer History Museum.
I thought that a bike would be cool. The hotel concierge called a bike shop in Stanford which rents bikes, but they would charge 60 Dollars for three days and this definietly exceeds my budget. So I went to my hotel room, googled for ‘used bike mountain view‘ and the first hit brought up the Bicycle Exchange | Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.
The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition helps needy families and individuals by repairing and donating used bicycles to our partner community service organizations. A warehouse and workshop is fully outfitted with storage, repair stands and tools for year round operation.
Well, I am an individual and I need a bike for three days… so I called Dave, who’s phone number can be found on the website. I reached him in the middle of a meeting – later I learned that he is a physicist conducting research on solar energy – but anyway he told me that of course he could lend me a bike and I should pick it up at his garage later that day.
So now I am a proud cyclist of a mint green Koga Miyata bike from the 80ies that purrs like a cat and speeds around the corners of Mountain View. It seems that through a link between the physical space and the digital space the White Bicycle Plan has been revived by some activists in the Silicon Valley. It’s not the old Provo dream to give away bicycles to the public. Dave gave me a lock and I deposited some money. The new concept is that likeminded people build communities and share goods – not only data in the digital space but also bikes in the physical space.
???????? ????? ????????In many parts of the world, communalism is a modern term that describes a broad range of social movements and social theories which are in some way centered upon the community
The Bicycle Exchange is a good example that Communalism works, because it proves that a community of people which is connected through the digital space can really change the physical world for the better.
I discovered an interesting blog posting by Yihong Ding, a student from the Brigham Young University. The article is noteworthy because it shows that even in the blogosphere there are good reasons for asserting and protecting the copyright of data.
Yihong mentions the initiative of Data Portability and introduces the new concept of “Resource Portability”:
As we have discussed earlier, the central issue is how to allow users managing their “owned” resources properly. Improving the portability of Web data is a very important step towards this general request; but it is not the general request yet. To reach the eventual goal, we need to implement a new mechanism that well manages ownership, beyond portability, of data. Moreover, this ownership management issue is not only about data, but also about other resources such as services. Thus I am more favorite to the term “resource portability” than the “data portability.”
The key of resource portability is the switch of ownership over resources instead of the deployment of resources. For instance, when a user make a comment on a blog, who should own this comment, the commenter or the blog owner? By default, the current mechanism is that the one who owns the physical storage space of the comment owns the comment. Most of the time, the comment belongs to the blog owner. Many other times, however, the comment may actually be owned by a third party who provides the space for the blog owner. In very few extreme cases, the commenter actually owns the comment. This reality theoretically contradicts to the comment logic that the one who makes the comment (i.e. the commenter) should be the unquestionable owner.
So why is it important that a commenter owns his blog comment? Yihong suggests that “the commenter has the full control of updating or even deleting the comments based on their own interest”. In my opinion this makes a lot of sense, because for several reasons an author might want to revise or even withdraw what he wrote in public. Ownership over Resources means that the author keeps the copyight of his content, even if he has to publish it on a technical platform he can not control.
Of course, Resource Portability reminds me of many ideas we discussed on the DMP mailing list.
The Autry National Center is a museum in Los Angeles that “explores the experiences and perceptions of the diverse peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inform our shared future”.
Today I visited this place together with Phil and Bud. A map in the exhibition displays that North America was colonized in the form of communities sharing common interests and beliefs. This map made me aware of the parallels between American colonialism and the recent developments of the web. As a matter of fact, more and more companies spend money to build web communities around certain topics – on recent example is dove.msn.com.
These commercial Web 2.0 communites may serve as another example for a process called Electronic Colonialism, a term that was coined by Tom McPhail:
Electronic colonialism theory explains how mass media are leading to a new concept of empire. It will not be one based on military power or land acquisition but one based on controlling the mind. It is a psychological or mental empire. It is an evolving global “Empire of the Mind”. The global media are collectively influencing the minds, attitudes, values, and languages of individuals around the globe.
On the blog Rosenblumtv I discovered a brilliant article on Electronic Colonialism through TV. Projects like dove.msn.com prove that this form of colonialism has finally entered the Web. As I wrote in a previous posting, brands can dominate communities. Maybe I am the last one who got it but I found it really enlightening to understand that it’s the brands and the Web 2.0 companies building commercial Web communities which are powering the development of the Web towards Electronic Colonialism.
