FreeCulture.org, the student free culture organization, released the second release candidate (RC2) of its bylaws last week. I am a board member of FC.o and was very involved in preparing RC2; I consider it my last effort as a member of the organization. The following is a guide to the draft bylaws, with my comments. [...]
Posts from ‘September, 2007’
Going-away party: DC, 27 Sept.
I’m moving back to Florida from my current place in Washington, D.C. within two weeks. My friend Nicole was kind enough to organize a going-away party for me. It’s next Thursday evening, 27 September, at an Ethiopian restaurant (should be veg-friendly). If you’d like to come, email me at gavin@gavinbaker.com for the invite.
Sixteen and counting: sharing science on the Web
On August 6, 1991, a post to a Usenet newsgroup started a revolution. Today, the world is tantalizingly close to realizing the vision hinted at in that post to alt.hypertext sixteen years ago.
Seeking a way to facilitate the sharing of data among high energy physicists, a contractor named Tim Berners-Lee designed a system “to allow [...]
Let’s all sue Creative Commons: a defense, and suggestions for publicity et al.
I get a bit defensive when I see my friends getting sued – perhaps a little bit due to my loathing for the seemingly inevitable day when I, too, get sued. So I was irked when I heard this week that Creative Commons had been dragged into a lawsuit by a photographer and his subject [...]
Funder mandates and open access: states and universities
A lot of the momentum propelling the open access movement recently has come from self-archiving mandates from public funders of research – specifically, national-level government entities. Green funder mandates are easy to rally around, and very satisfying when they pass. It’s easy to see why: national agencies are among the largest research funders, impacting thousands [...]
wget logs are big
I had reason to download a large number of Web pages recursively, for reasons I’ll explain later. To make it work correctly required a lot of trial and error, and so to better understand what was happening, I started running:
wget –debug -o log
which operates wget in verbose mode and logs the output to a file [...]
Opening education
I’m taking David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education class at Utah State University this semester.
“But Gavin, didn’t you graduate?” Sure I did. But you’re never too old to learn, and when it comes to open education, I’ve got of learning to do. I could probably teach a class on, say, FOSS or open access, but [...]
WHO’s journal has backwards approach to open access
The World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations, is ostensibly an organization dedicated to the public interest. The fourth point of the WHO agenda is “harnessing research, information and evidence”. In support of these goals, the agency publishes a scientific journal, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. In their own words:
Since it [...]
