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Innovation

 

Advocating Openness

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

In a few months I’ll be completing a three year fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation. What has it all been about?

Some three years ago pioneers of social innovation in South Africa, excited about access to knowledge, openness and the knowledge commons were struggling with the default setting of closed in policies, laws and minds. People seeking to radically change education, scholarly communication, innovation, publishing and standards in South Africa encountered Intellectual Property law as an obstruction. Intellectual Property law is complex, technical and in many cases unclear. Laws are blunt instruments, Intellectual Property laws are among the bluntest, but the effects on positive social change are often diffuse.  Terms like “Intellectual Property” and “Access to Knowledge” can seem abstract. But the issue is simple, often brutally simple. How do we get books in the hands of kids so that they can learn, data to scientists so that they can cure diseases, and knowledge to entrepreneurs so that they can create new products? How can engineers, teachers, techies and social entrepreneurs navigate around the obstruction?

Presciently Helen Turvey hired me not only to help open projects as they grappled with intellectual property issues but also to identify the major systematic challenges to open presented by intellectual property law and opportunities to change it. I became, in the words of my good friend Philipp Schmidt “chief counsel for the open movement in South Africa”.

The team at the Shuttleworth Foundation reckon that good change happens faster if we can first change default settings of closed to open. Often the default is set by to closed by intellectual property; law but also by intellectual property policy and practises.

During the first two years we learned that if we were familiar with the shape of problems, and the solutions which had been tried that we were prepared, so that when conditions changed and presented an opportunity we could act quickly. We learned to take advantage of existing processes for policy advocacy, as well as devising longer processes for systemic change. We acted as a resource to others so that they could move faster and challenge the barriers in their own spheres.

After nearly three years the social innovation space in South Africa is moving towards openness. Although I haven’t achieved all that I’d liked to in the time, thanks to the support of colleagues, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and our partners we’ve given shape to desirable reforms, mapped major obstacles, neutralised some dangers and helped a lot of projects. There are now many more people working in this space who know how to navigate around the hazards of Intellectual Property.

Sharing ideas and experiences was always central to my work but during 2009 I concentrated on turning our previous efforts, and learnings into resources that others can use in the future. This has resulted in two initiatives: Copyright for Educators, and an analysis of access to knowledge efforts in South Africa.

Copyright for Educators is an open, scenario based, course which incorporates many of the lessons we’ve learned from grappling with copyright issues in learning environments. Copyright for Educators was one of the anchor course of the Peer to Peer University pilot. One of the participants was able to get credit for the course as independent study in his Instructional Technology PhD. His assessment of the first iteration of the course was: “for a first pass, I felt the organization of the Copyright for Educators course was very good. The content was interesting and to the point.”

The most challenging issue which the course deals with is the inclusion of copyright works used under exceptions, like fair use, in materials that are under open licences. For example someone might use a photograph under an educational exception in an instruction module that is under a Creative Commons licence. I first raised this issue in a Shuttleworth Foundation issue paper, which subsequently became a chapter in a book: Implementing the World Intellectual Property Agenda (available for free download). The issue has been taken up by ccLearn, the people at Creative Commons focused on open education, who’ve developed a report “Otherwise Open” and recommendations for educators.

There have been a wide range of approaches to increasing access to knowledge in South Africa, but no single record of the different approaches. During 2009 I was able to organise many of the activists, scholars and entrepreneurs to contribute to research on the different approaches and projects, and to have it published as part of the Yale Access to Knowledge Research Series. It examines the battle for open standards, the Foundation’s intervention into the Pearson publishing mergers, the Free High School Science Texts project, and the work of partner projects such the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge project, and the Opening Scholarship project at the University of Cape Town.

I had the opportunity to contribute a great deal to the Foundation’s Open Resources policy. The policy and the thinking behind it were featured as cutting edge in a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing, Policies, Practices and Opportunities.

South Africa still has a long way to go towards an open knowledge society, the kind of society in which networks of links, code and content are open at every level. But there is now movement towards open as a default setting. There is growing agreement that access to knowledge is a basic issue, important to everyone.

Posted in A2K, A2LM, Commons, Innovation, Privatising Public Knowledge | No Responses »
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The Inverted Universe of Academic Unfunding

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Science fiction stories often ask their readers to willingly suspend disbelief and imagine a parallel universe, one just like the one which readers inhabit, except for one or two minor details. Imagine, the story goes that a human develops an ability to know what others are thinking.

As the story develops it usually transpires that these details are not so minor but have dramatic consequences. Those consequences in turn, if the story displays any insight into the human condition, illuminate ironically, tragically or humorously an incongruity in the reader’s universe, such as discovering that its better not to know what other’s are thinking about oneself.

We could call these parallel universe stories.

What would we call stories in which the difference between universes is not a minor one but major one, in which an important feature is the exact opposite of the one with which readers are familiar. I think the term inverted universe would do nicely.

And it is an inverted universe story that we find, not in science fiction but in the strange history of universities and economics over the last 30 years. A little more than 30 years ago saw the imposition of a new role on universities, this imposition was part of a far bigger story, the story known as Reagonomics in the United States, and Thatcherite economics in the United Kingdom and its (former) colonies. The new role was to serve not as centres for learning, innovation and life saving discoveries such as the polio vaccine, which had been their role previously but as out-sourcing companies for corporate research and development.
The rationale advanced for this change was that universities should be entrepreneurial by which was meant not that universities should transform the societies in which they are situated, which is Peter Drucker’s idea of innovation, but that the social capital represented by universities would no longer be matched by investment capital from a state intent on reducing corporate taxation.
Universities would henceforth have to pay their own way. That the state had quite deliberately made universities dependent on it for funding in order use the universities to serve its ends in homogenising the ruling class, or for military technology was conveniently forgotten. Society could not afford to subsidise learning. Universities would have to compete as firms in the market (despite having public interest mandates). That role is still being thrust on universities, especially resource poor universities in the global South, which are under pressure to obtain “3rd stream income”.

Over the last six months governments, especially in the global North, have spent extraordinary amounts of money subsidising banks and investment companies, entities which by their very definition are market players, able to extract a premium for their re-allocations of capital (and risk). By their nature banks are profit making institutions, just as by their nature universities are not.

And so we realise with a start that we inhabit an inverse universe to the one inhabited by our grandparents; one in which banks are subsidised, heavily subsidised by the state, while universities are meant to fend for themselves.

I’ll admit of course that many universities still grudgingly receive some State funding, although less and less for core functions, and more and more for rendering services, such as bolstering a state patent portfolio. I’ll also admit that the state funding for banks is touted as a desperate measure for a desperate situation, ostensibly a unique situation. Its the scale that is revealing though, the bail out will burden tax payers for a generation, while directors continue to take home bonuses. A mere 10% of that amount of the bail outs thus far would have given universities a massive capital injection, making them free of reliance on state funding for the foreseeable future.

Does the story of the inverse universe illuminate our present? Unfortunately it is our present, one in which public institutions like universities must seek private funding to survive while market players are subsidised with taxpayer money. If we can learn anything it must be that the social capital represented by universities is well worth state investment, and that the claims that value lies only, or indeed primarily in market mechanisms is profoundly mistaken.

Posted in Innovation, Privatising Public Knowledge | No Responses »

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