My name is Jim Brown. I received my Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Digital Literacies and Literatures from the University of Texas. In September 2009, I will join the English Department at Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor. I write for multiple blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings via this RSS feed. Clinamen focuses mostly on my research interests, and its title is explained in this post from January 2008. SearchRecent comments
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Change.gov and Intellectual PropertyTim O'Reilly recently suggested putting change.gov under revision control. After a recent dust up about content on Obama's Transition website being taken down and then re-posted, many have questioned the transparency of the site. O'Reilly's suggestion of revision control is interesting because it would better allow members of the community to see what's changing on the site. However, I'm not sure I'd go as far as O'Reilly's suggestion that the site be run on a Wikipedia model. I have no problem with Obama aides and staff writing policy statements without any type of crowdsourcing. While it would be nice if the changes were made more apparent, I don't necessarily know that having the community contribute to these documents is the best thing. But this entire conversation comes down to differing understanding of who "owns" this information (if anyone can be said to own it at all). Having Obama's volunteer network write policy was probably never in the cards, but different members of that network have different ideas about what kind of involvement they should have. When the policy statements mysteriously disappeared, many in the netroots community felt a bit violated. This seems to stem from the feeling that this netroots community helped (in some sense) to author these documents. I am very interested in how the Obama administration will follow through on promises of transparency, but I'm not sure I'm that interested in opening up policy documents to a Wikipedia model. Some sort of commenting function might suffice. But this isn't the only intellectual property issue to come up in recent days with regard to Obama's Web presence. Lawrence Lessig and some of the commenters on his blog have asked why Change.gov is published under copyright and not copyleft. I have to agree. What on this site requires the "all rights reserved" tag? What would be the harm in publishing the entire site under a CC license? I can't think of any content on this site that requires an "all rights reserved" statement. All of this discussion is a great thing, and it indicates that people have different ideas about who can or should own pieces of the Obama movement. Hopefully, the administration will think through some of these issues. The "all rights reserved" issue seems to be very easy to fix, and (to me) is a no-brainer.
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Speaking of who owns the
Speaking of who owns the Obama movement, what do you think of the recent article in the LA Times stating that the appearance that his campaign was mostly funded by small donors is a myth? According to the article, only about 26% of donors who contributed to the campaign could be categorized as "small." The article pointed out that Bush received about 25% of campaign donations from small donors in 2004. Some have been quick to criticize the findings in the article, but it does raise the question of whether Obama is the head of a true grassroots movement.