The Open Book

THE CONTEXT // From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. The Open Book <http://theopenbook.org.uk> is an ambitious project to explore these emergent understandings, put together by The Finnish Institute in London as a part of the critical Reaktio series <http://bit.ly/ZvrLn8> with the help of the Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org> and a global team of contributors and mentors.

THE BOOK // Inspired by the world’s first Open Knowledge Festival <http://okfestival.org> this fall in Helsinki, The Open Book explores the social and technological manifestations of this movement for the first time, featuring over 25 in-depth thought pieces written by pioneers of openness around the world from London to São Paulo - many of whom were suggested by you! Also included is “The Evolution of Open Knowledge” <http://bit.ly/YGwj7N>, the world’s first crowdsourced timeline of openness from 1425 to the current day which we asked you to contribute to <http://bit.ly/122EuLV> earlier this year.

THE CONCLUSIONS // Due to the divisive nature of such an experimental publication, we do not attempt to present any single argument on what ‘open’ is. Instead, we hope The Open Book will serve as a platform for discussion and a launching pad for new ideas about the future of a global open knowledge movement in a time of rapid technological progress.

THE LAUNCH // As many of you already know, The Open Book was officially launched at FutureEverything in Manchester last month: <http://bit.ly/146xxwf> Many thanks to everyone who came and showed their support - it was a great event! Here's a summary by Antti Halonen, Head of Society at the Finnish Institute: <http://bit.ly/ZvqHjj>

GET YOUR COPY // Web: The Open Book is now available online for free as a PDF (CC-BY-SA license) at <http://theopenbook.org.uk>. Print: You can also grab a beautiful print copy at-cost via Amazon: <http://amzn.to/ZcZ2xn>. Please share with colleagues and friends!

Reprap

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Reprap is an example of how sharing has the potential to change the society we live in.

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend...

Free Culture Game

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games).

Open Info for All

Tomorrow I will be giving another presentation to a group of librarians about Second Life. This time I will talk a bit about online virtual worlds generally as being applicable for libraries. Today I spent over an hour trying to organise an account for two 16 year work experience students visiting HUMlab in Teen Second Life. It was basically a fiasco and unless one lives in the USA it is not possible to log into Teen Second Life. We used ActiveWorlds instead (felt liek going back in time for me), which looks good (and loads super fast) but is totally empty (600 worlds and 54 accounts active). I tried to log into adult Second Life today 4 times and the computer crashed every time, with 39 000 accounts active.

The vision of the Internet Archive led by Brewster Kahle is one that online virtual worlds such as Second Life (and Google for that matter) ignore at their peril. In two years Second Life could easily become the ActiveWorlds of today as some other new platform is overrun with accounts. But a completely collaborative network project such as the Internet Archive will continue to grow as its users build it. According to this video the archive has managed to scan in 250 000 books with libraries paying for doing it so as to keep their collections truly open. While the catch cry with Second Life is that all the content is "user owned and created" where else are you going to take it as there is nowhere else to run the LSL script outside Second Life? The servers are all run by SL and the contents are theirs. I believe an open system is a distributed system.

Thanks to Jill for the word on the Archive video.

Second Life is Open Source

Now things are going to get very interesting:

"San Francisco, CA – January 8, 2007 – Linden Lab®, creator of 3D virtual world Second Life® is releasing the code of its Viewer application to the open source software development community. Developers can now access the source code to the Second Life end-user software in order to make modifications, enhancements and to add new features."

As the press release goes on to explain the code is available online for anyone to develop but it is not yet open slather:

"Linden Lab intends to incorporate certain code changes and enhancements into the official version of the Second Life Viewer, which will only be available from the Second Life website. All code developed outside Linden Lab’s in-house engineering team will be thoroughly reviewed to ensure quality standards, stability and security. Support will continue to be given for the official version of the Viewer only, with third party projects unsupported by Linden Lab."

The source code is available here:
http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/
Get to it people!