As, I’m sure many of you know, language and “what we call things” in the free software/open source world is a huge thing. Some people will probably get mad for my use of the slash in the previous sentence. This post, is mostly for my own good, as an experiment (and for future reference) to see where I stand on various word-choice questions in this area. I’m going to organize the post as a series of (brief) reflections a couple of key words.

Free Software

I think free software, addresses and represents the core of what this whole mess is about. Free software--as an idea--addresses the communities, the “hacking spirit,” the ideological goals, the political and philosophical elements of the community.

It’s also horribly confusing in English, and no matter how often we say “free as in speech” or “free as in freedom,” it’s not really going to get better. I think, also, “libre” is a poor use of the English language, and I cringe a lot when I read it. I’ve taken, when possible to refer to “ideas about software freedom” and “the movement for software freedom,” which works as long as you don’t need to refer to a specific piece of software.

In those cases, I often cave and say “open source software” because it open source is a more clear adjective. I also think that open source describes “the thing” and the “process” more clearly, and that’s an advantage. I dislike that open source, means “not scary to big businesses,” and disregards the fact that this (free/open source) software is better/more valuable than proprietary/closed software because it is free and open source not simply because it happens to be better in quality.

GNU/Linux

I tend to say GNU/Linux, because--at least in my use cases--the kernel isn’t nearly as important to how I think about my operating system as all the tools that surround them, and if the next big thing in the Unix-like (open source) operating system was a Debian or Arch-like system with GNU parts around the FreeBSD kernel or the Solaris kernel, I’m there.

I switched from OS X to GNU/Linux mostly because I wanted: better package management and (oddly enough) to be able to run an X11 desktop. The truth was, I was basically running a GNU(ish) system around Darwin (OS X’s kernel), anyway.

With all luck, I’ll have most of a draft of the short story I’ve been working on done by the time this goes live, but if not certainly rather soon there after. This is an exciting announcement in and of itself, but perhaps the more interesting thing is that in the process of doing this I sank into writing this story in org mode.

My general M.O. for writing for the last several years has just been to write and store the files in markdown and use whatever text editor I fancy. I write the blog this way, I write papers this way. Everything seems to work fine, there are converters for LaTeX, HTML, and the plain text format is absolutely and completely readable to people who aren’t as obsessive about text files as I am.

While I’m a huge org-mode proponent, I don’t tend to think that org-mode makes a particularly good writing environment (or haven’t, heretofore) because unless you use org-mode org files are sometimes a bit ugly, and the syntax is enough different from markdown to confuse me, and…

The general consensus, that I’ve seen is that while org-mode is indeed a great boon to the intensive-emacs user, that it’s not an ideal production editing environment. muse-mode, or my favored markdown-mode might be better if you’re actually writing text.

And then, as I got into the writing of this story, I realized that I was flipping rather seriously (and annoyingly) between my notes for the story and the story I was writing. Also, when I’m writing book-length (or conceptually book-length) work, I tend to break up the text into more manageable chapter-length or scene-length files, which is conceptually useful for me.

In a short story, it didn’t seem to make sense to break things up into more than one file, and after I’d written a couple thousand words, I realized that something needed to be done. I created a file, with some header meta-data (using the yaml form that jekyll), an org-mode statement to define custom-status words that seem relevant to the writing/editing process, and then first level headers define key scenes or breaks in the story. I’ve never written (or read, to the best of my memory) a story that required more than one level of organization (but ymmv), and then--and this is the clever part as far as I’m concerned--property drawers for notes about what happens in the scene.

Property drawers stay folded by default, and are intended to store a collection of key-value pairs, but they don’t get exported by default, and so are a good way to keep your notes and your writing together and then export, as needed when drafting is done.

Also, I’ve recently added the following to my key-binding list, which adds a property drawer to the current heading, which is indeed a good thing:

(global-set-key "\M-p" 'org-insert-property-drawer)

I’ve posted a copy of my template file for your review and edification.

Comments?

In the last several days, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and working on this new novel that seems to be capturing too much of my attention. It’s a nifty story, definitely the best piece of fiction that I’ve written henceforth, despite all my worry, dread, and seemingly limitless self-doubt in relation to the project. Despite the gremlins on my shoulder saying “why aren’t you working on short fiction; why aren’t your characters having more sex; do you really think you can float such a disjointed/complex narrative; do you have a clue where this is going? …and so forth,” I’ve learned a few rather interesting things from this story this past week.

It’s a time travel story, stupid!

Yeah, I’m well into the 7th chapter (of about 12?) and I finally figured out that I was, at it’s core telling a time travel story. No, it’s not a case of getting several tens of thousands of words on paper and realizing that you’re writing the wrong story, but rather that I’ve always thought of it as a quirky space opera, and just this week I realized that what makes it quirky is that it’s fundamentally a time travel story.

Right.

My goal in this project was to write about history and how “history” emerges from “a collection of things that happen” to something more coherent and recognizable as such.

In a weird way, my fiction (since I started writing again in early 2007, at least) have always addressed the issues at the very kernel of my academic/scholarly interest. I’m interested in how communities form, and how people negotiate individual identities amongst groups of people. Open source software, cyberculture in general, and hackers are one way of looking at this that is very much the center of how I’m looking at these questions. Queerness is another. Same kernel.

In any case, history--however defined or used--is a key part of this community-identity-individual loop. Can you participate in the emacs/emacs-lisp community without knowing about the history of the XEmacs fork? Linux without knowing a little about the early days with Minix and UNIX? Git without knowing a little about CVS and the bitkeeper story? If you can, not for very long. There are other more mainstream culture examples as well, Americans and the great depression (particularly Roosevelt’s fireside chats, say?). Queers and stonewall? Etc.

This stuff is, to my mind, an incredibly important factor in “who we are” and how we all exist in our communities and the world at large. And because I’m who I am, I’m writing a story about this.

The science fictional effect, at play is relativity--lacking fantastic super-liminal (FTL; faster than light) space-drives--our characters must endure some pretty intense time dilation during transit: it takes them t weeks to get from planet A to planet B but meanwhile, it’s t years later on both of the planets who more or less share a common time line.

Now I don’t do the math right, for it to work out as being sub-light speeds (exigencies of plot; interstellar spaces are really big), but the time dilation is a huge feature of the story and of (many) main characters place in the world, particularly in contrast to each other.

And thus, in a manner of speaking, it’s a time travel story. Albeit where the time travel is one way (future bound,) linear, based on Einsteinian principals, and common place.

And it took me half the book or more to recognize the story as such, which will--if nothing else--allow me to explain the story a bit better.

In the future Project Xanadu Worked

I’ll probably touch on this later, but I realized (and this might not be particularly unique to my story) but that my characters were interacting with “the database” in the world. An internet-like system, only more structured, and more distributed, easier to search, easier to operate locally.

Which was basically Project Xanadu, on an interstellar scale. The features that my characters take advantage of:

• Distribution and federation of copies: I have ansible technology in the story, but even so, given the trajectories of data storage technology it makes more sense to store local copies of “the database” than it does, to route requests to the source of the data, or even your nearest peer for records. Assume massive storage capability, advanced rsync (a contemporary tool synching huge blobs of data across a network), and periods of, potentially, years when various ships, outposts, and systems would be out of contact with each-other. Nah, store stuff locally.
• Versioning Having a data store that stores data along a temporal axis (versions across time) is handy when you’re working on your computer and you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to. It’s absolutely essential if you have lots of nodes that aren’t always in constant contact. It means you don’t loose data after merges, it solves some concurrency problems, interstellar data would require this.
• Structure: The contemporary world wide web (The Web) is able to function without any real structure, because we’ve imported data visualization from (more) analog formats (pamphlet layout/design; pages; index-like links, desktop metaphors), and we’ve developed some effective ad-hoc organizations (google, tags, microformats) which help ameliorate the disorganization, but the truth is that the web--as a data organization and storage tool--is a mess. My shtick about curation addresses this concern in one way. Creating a “new web” that had very strict page-structure requirements would be another. In the novel, their database grew out of the second option.

The future is here folks, but you knew that.

Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of “literature,” in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.

The overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they’re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.

So then, writing.

Writing is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don’t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing’s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (“Did you read that book? What did you think?”) and which is certainly socially productive.

But that’s not business, or at least that doesn’t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn’t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.

I’ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying “art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.”

Also in this nexus of ideas, I’ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into “less energy spent on survival” and thus more energy spent on more… abstract… endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.

I’m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more “abstract” markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their “blog” functions as advertising for “actual” work in some other arenas. That’s not a bad thing, and really I think “real writers” have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, “Authors” make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don’t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.

And maybe that’s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it’s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.

Onward and Upward!

If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, “science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.”

While this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the “mainstream” to take science fiction more seriously. It’s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you’re sympathetic.

I’m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.

Science fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it’s also about the future. And that’s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.

I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website “TealArt” (don’t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it’s worthwhile to explore GTD again.

For those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a “personal productive methodology” designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It’s good stuff, and while it’s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:

• Have a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life. One place where systems can fail is if you’re using different “databases” (in the non-technical sense) to store information and tasks, and you have a piece of information that might fit in either system: when you go to look for it later (or need to be notified by it later) the chance of you missing the task because it’s on the wrong list is much higher if you have more than one place where lists might be.
• Think about tasks and projects being broken into “actionable items,” and have actions be the unit of currency in your system. As you assimilate information be sure to record anything that needs doing and keep it in your system
• Attach two pieces of metadata to your action: project (what larger goal does the action help you acomplish; you’ll likely have a list of these projects), and “contexts” (where do you have to be in order to do the action, things like “phone” “office” “erands”) are helpful for focusing and making it easier to move your projects forward.
• Do regular reviews of the information on your todolists, and spend (an hour?) once a week making sure you’re not foregetting things and that you’ve checked off all the actions that you’ve actually done and so forth.

There are other details, precise methods which GTD people focus on, talk about, and provide in their software applications. Frankly I’ve not read the book and I’m by no means an expert on the subject. I continue to have objections to the system: it assumes large tasks and quickly and easily be broken down into smaller tasks (which isn’t always true), and that projects follow linear and predicatable sequences, which I find to be almost universally false. While the reviews help counteract these sorts of assumptions about projects, I have always tended to find GTD a poor solution to the productivity problem:¹ both for myself and in my observations of how other people work.

At the same time, I think the notion of a single system that comes to the mainstream via GTD and of weekly/regular reviews, another artifact of GTD, are both really helpful and powerful concepts for organizing ourselves. The other aforementioned “features” are helpful for many, but I feel that very often organinzing the “GTD list,” and our lives to fit ino a GTD list is often too much of a burden and gets in the way of doing things.

I’m interesting in finding out how people these days are talking and thinking about GTD these days. I think the fad has died down, and I’m interested in seeing what we’ve as a geeky community have learned from the experience.

Interestingly, I’m probably doing something much closer to what GTD recomended these days than I ever have before. org-mode is (among many other things) a capiable GTD tool. I think it’s successful not simply because it supports GTD, and the task-management features seem to have grown out of an emacs/writing writing platform rather than a calendar platform. The end result is that I’ve found the GTD way to be quite effective, though its largely unintentional.

I’m interested in hearing where your own systems are, and how you feel about GTD these days:

• Do you use GTD or GTD based methodologies for your personal organization?
• If you only use some which, and why?
• If you don’t use GTD, what system if any do you use?
• If you once used GTD but stopped, or have considered using GTD and then didn’t, I’m particularly interested to learn why you came to these conclusions?
• What current factors influence the way that you organize your work?

I hope that covers everyone. I’m particularly interested by how creative folks work, but i think in the right light that covers most of us. I look forward to hearing from you?

Cheers, sam

I’m working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don’t think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.

The brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the “authors” and the “users.” While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don’t sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.

There are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don’t get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code. The second, is the “viral” or “share alike” provisions where you can trust that anything released under the GPL will stay under the GPL.

While these mechanisms increase freedom and equity in situations where there are a select group of contributors and one legal author¹ the freedoms are most powerful when the boundaries between contributor and author and user are blurred.

This is all very basic stuff in the area of software freedom after all. The truth is that, as near as I understand there aren’t terms that can be used to get a similar effect with non-code projects (exactly.) There are a couple of copy left licenses, issued by Creative Commons and even the Free Software Foundation, but there are problems with both of these strategies. Here are the issues as I see them:

The GNU FDL is designed, primarily for software manuals and documentation in support of free software, and is strategically designed for this kind of text. It, as a result, lacks a certain… grace and elegance for dealing with other kinds of text, particularly when dealing with derivative and physical reproductions of a work.

In contrast, the Creative Commons Licenses² (CC) don’t have a concept of “source,” so that while they provide the same sorts of rights regarding distribution of work (and thereby equalize some of the rights between distributor/user), they don’t facilitate derivative work in the same way that open source licenses do.

I’m mostly worried about the following scenario. Say I release a piece of audio-art in a lossless (high quality; source) format (eg. FLAC/WAV) as well as MP3/OGG file (lower quality; compiled) under a CC license that permits derivative work under a viral/share alike terms. Then you turn around, re-equalize, and mix my audio-art with some other similarly licensed audio, and release it as a derivative work. That’s cool. But the derivative work needed be in the higher quality format, because CC doesn’t have a concept of source. Not having a concept of source doesn’t effect the possibility of derivative works, but it does mean that derivative works are second-class citizens, as it were. CC doesn’t equalize this relationship.

If I’m wrong about this interpretation, I’d love to be corrected, for the record.

For works where there’s a single author, having derivative works as second-class citizens isn’t a bad thing, and I can imagine that it would be seen as a feature in some cases. In cases where a text/work is authored by a community this is a major flaw.

I hear that there’s a project to Simplify the GFDL (or provide a way to use the GPL for documents/texts) that might remedy these problems (haven’t dug through it yet). In the mean time, I’m wondering what folks think on the subject.

My inclination is to just use the GPL with the specification that “source” would be some sort of plain text (ASCII/UTF-8/UTF-16) compatible file. That achieves the goal required, without too much fuss or concocting a new license that would prove incompatible down the road. I think mandating a particular format (markdown/org-mode/xhtml/LaTeX) is a bit too strict, but I’d hate to see a document developed in the open, released as a PDF derivative without making (say) LaTeX sources available.

Though I’ll be the first to acknowledge the irony that for non-software works, the “source” isn’t “human readable source code” but rather “machine readable data source.”

The only real practical concern is that if the FSF releases a 2.0 of the FDL (or a SFDL) that becomes the a standard for free/open source non-software/text projects then going with the GPL might make that a difficult/bothersome transition on that. So the question, seems to be would providing the option to upgrade to the GNU FDL make sense (eg. this work is licensed under the GPL [with an understanding of what the source is] version 3 or (at your choice) a later version [or a later version of the GFDL]).

Anyway, back to writing.

I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I’m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn’t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, “the best laid plans of mice and men,” as it were.

Yesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said “crap, I need to write fiction.”

So I did. And I yanked out about 500 words (which is about my current daily fiction writing goal,) and then I was done. And I felt good. One of the reasons I’m so intent upon writing fiction despite my utter lack of training, and dubious skill is that in aggregate writing fiction makes me very happy. This example demonstrates--as if we needed more examples--that while it’s important to get in the habit of writing, ritualizing the habit is probably counter productive.

When I finished doing school the last time, I thought, “yes! no more homework,” except that this writing experience (from a procedural point of view) was a lot like homework (“ugg time I should do this”). Surprisingly this isn’t such a bad thing: writing makes me happy, and truth be told I’m pretty good at doing homework.

Anyway. Enjoy your day, and write something if you’re inclined thusly.

I’ve had “write post about writing/read sexuality” on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way’s this is in response to Nora’s post on magic district and I think something else that I can’t trace down the reference to.

Basically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel “Ham handed.”

And I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it’s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn’t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it’s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.

Sure, it’s possible to under-represent queer lives in fiction, it’s possible to write queerness inappropriately, or to over-normalize it. But if your readers are distracted, if they’re made uncomfortable, you probably did something right.

I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It’s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I’ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.

My goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It’s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like. I’m not sure what the future will hold, or what exactly is going to happen with my fiction, but it’s going to be there.

One of my background projects, however (and I’ll write about the theory here in an essay,) is generate a few “curatorial” pages for critical futures (and I suppose for tychoish as well). Basically I want to give people an easier “in” to the stories that I post on the web. This includes more creative templates and some hand-compiled guide pages, and as websites become home to more and more information my thought is that curation is the only real solution to this, and that, in that, it’s really the next big thing for content. But that’s another thought for another time…

Check out the new Critical Futures story, “Knowing Mars, http://criticalfutures.com/2009/03/”

Thanks for reading, and do tell your friends/submit fiction if that’s your thing.