Sustaining grant-funded software

As I've written before, I am impressed by the Our Courts foundation, web site, and materials. My children found the interactive games compelling, and I'm considering using the volunteer guides in their schools.

I'm disappointed by their decision to use CC-BY-ND-NC as the license for the materials, in particular the inclusion of the NC (no commercial use allowed) and ND (no derivative works allowed) restrictions. The definition of "non-commercial" appears intuitively obvious, but as the discussions at creativecommons.org have demonstrated, its full import is still unclear. When coupled with ND (no derivatives), it's almost unnecessary; since no one can make a derivative work, anyone trying to commercialize the unchanged content would have to compete with Our Courts, which is providing the same work at no cost. The economics apparently wouldn't encourage such an attempt. There's also a compelling argument that restricting commercial use is unnecessary to protect the freedom of works and is incompatible with the principles of free software and free culture.

However, the use of ND is a bit more of a concern to me; it means that adopters can't adapt the materials if appropriate: altering vocabulary to address a different grade level, translating to another language, adding fact patterns or rights to the card hand-outs in the volunteer guide. Each potential improvement is a derivative work prevented by the license. Further, it means the games can only be re-distributed intact; downstream recipients, programmers and content developers, cannot add a new fact pattern to "Supreme Decision", or add/alter fact patterns to "Do I have a Right?" (DIHAR), add/change lawyers, add/change law firm upgrades, add rights, translate, etc.

I will guess that their team has plans to create more and different resources (games, materials, etc.); I look forward to them as they arrive. However, as they move forward, older resources will tend to ossify. By removing the no-derivative (ND) restriction (and perhaps by replacing it with SA) they may in fact improve the chance that these materials stay relevant and become more widely adopted, as they are adapted to new statutory environments, and are translated into Spanish, Chinese, and other languages. I recommend they use the CC-BY-SA to make it possible for Our Courts to foster an ecosystem around the content, and leverage their investment in those impressive materials by taking advantage of the enthusiasm and efforts of a wider, engaged community.

No grant-funded project wants to think about what happens when the soft money runs out - but funding doesn't last forever. Until Our Courts figures out an economic model that's self-sustaining, they run the risk that when they can no longer afford to publish and improve their materials, that investment and hard work disappears. They might take a look at the Connexions repository as an example of a project which uses the CC-BY license, thereby ensuring that their materials will continue to be updated and useful by the community even if their own funding should run out.

Seems obvious

When network operators (phone and internet) implement wiretap back doors to allow governments to monitor your data, it should be expected that the wiretap channels can also be accessed by other entities. This includes other governments, employees at your service provider, random third parties. The fact that these wiretap facilities have no audit trail means you don't even know when your data has been compromised.

Don't steal this textbook

I'm a pretty regular reader of Kevin Carson's writings over at the Mutualist Blog and at C4SS, the Center for a Stateless Society (I only read his contributions and cannot recommend any of their other writers to date). As a self-described "libertarian leftist" he contributes a lot to a vision of a distributed and decentralized society, one which is potentially more robust economically and socially. His work is a generally well reasoned synthesis of wide range of philosophers and economists; I recommend not only his blog posts but the longer works published as PDFs. In a nutshell: broadly available tools of production and raw materials should make it possible for more people to participate in the economy as producers, to contribute improvements to processes and designs, and to realize the full value of our efforts. Decentralization reduces the concentration of wealth and power and make the system more resilient because the failure or destruction of any one contributor (individual, group, firm) does not have a huge effect on the ecosystem. In such a system, no one producer is too big to fail, contributors leverage incremental increases in knowledge, and everyone realizes the bulk of the value they add to the economy.

Sometimes Mr. Carson gives advice on how get to such an ecosystem. In Steal this Textbook, Mr. Carson identifies textbook producers (especially publishers of college texts) as market manipulators, and suggests a course of action to reduce or remove their influence in the market. He points out that professors both write and recommend texts for classes, and suggests that new editions are produced and printed for what are typically minor changes (which disrupts the market for used/re-sold books). These points are debatable; but let's assume arguendo they're true. He suggests the market power of the textbook publishers can be broken by a coördinated effort to scan and electronically distribute copies of their books; however, I think this is not a reasonable course of action, and the effects may run counter to what he might intend. It's also a recommendation to break the law, which I can't condone anyway.

My second objection is that his suggestion is counter-productive. A wide scale disregard for copyright would undermine (for example) the Free Software ecology; the enforced sharing inherent in "copy-left" licenses such as the GNU General Public License requires the respect of the rights of the authors and copyright holders in the relevant software. Without such protection, such gifts to the community could be appropriated by publishers who would benefit from the value without contributing anything to the community in return. In another example, the works at C4SS (and on this blog) are published to the readers under a Creative Commons "By Attribution" license, which means you can use the work however you like as long as you credit the author(s). The academic ecosystem relies on reputation, and attribution is a crucial component of that calculation. A disregard for copyrights would undermine these and related sharing based environments.

Another objection arises from economics. When textbook publishers lose revenue because of illegal copying, they can to some (large?) extent recoup the loss by increasing prices on legitimate textbook purchasers because there are as yet no alternatives to their products. An example comes from computer operating systems: it isn't massive copying or "piracy" alone which makes Microsoft worried about their hegemony, it's the presence of alternatives to MS-Windows. As long as there were no viable alternatives to using MS-Windows (remember the 1990s), Microsoft could take advantage of their monopoly position to raise prices to maintain their profit margins, and their corporate and legitimate end users had no choice but to pay the rents. Now that Apple is increasing its market share, Linux is taking over data centers and desktops, and distributors like Lenovo and Dell are pre-installing Ubuntu on computers, Microsoft faces an upper bound on what customers are willing to pay for their software, which makes piracy a much more potent threat to their revenues. I suggest to Mr. Carson that it's far more effective for people to support and contribute to open education resources such as Connexions than to spend time scanning and distributing copyrighted texts on the internet. Once there is real competition in the textbook space, the publishers will start worrying about their rotting corpses [being displayed] on [our] battlements. Until then, the publishers can figure out alternate ways to extract revenue from students: mandatory textbook fees per student from universities? Textbook rentals instead of sales (like K-12 schools)? Higher textbook prices? etc.

As I and other comment writers suggest on the article, readers should look for open source textbooks, wiki books, and open education efforts such as Connexions to participate in. Having valuable peer-produced texts to use in education will start the process of forcing the textbook publishers to change their profit model to survive. I don't think it's worth the effort to scan and distribute textbooks; all that will do is convince textbook publishers to adopt the RIAA approach. Far better to have publishers react as IBM did to free software: figure out how to make money by providing added value, either with improvements to the products, or in associated services.

Teaching the law

As we raise our children to become informed and active citizens, I think it's important they have an understanding of how the legal system works. They should become familiar with the rights and responsibilities they have under current law, and know how laws operate and are created. This knowledge will help them evaluate their rights and responsibilities, and give them some guidance as they inevitably wonder how to change the system.

Professor Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, in a an influential (but a bit dense) work in 1919, analyzed how laws operate. His description attempted to resolve the ambiguity around the term "rights" (as used by different, other philosophers) by presenting laws as a realization of 8 foundational concepts (right, no-right, duty, privilege, power, disability, immunity, liability), used as both opposites and correlatives. A Unified Theory of Law by lawyer John Bosco, available at the amazing Connexions knowledge repository, takes Hohfeld's Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and distills it to a simpler structure, which can hopefully be more easily understood by middle and high school students. The core of the concept is the "Periodic Table of the Law", which takes the three independent variables of legal construction and demonstrates the nine components of the three possible types of law.

Another site called Our Courts is designed to present legal concepts to middle school students through interactive games and instructions for classroom volunteers. The site was developed by an organization whose board is led by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. The site is currently organized around two interactive (Flash) games: Supreme Decision, which walks a player through a Supreme Court case, the issues involved, and an analysis of each; and Do I Have a Right? (DIHAR), which helps students understand some of the rights secured by the amendments to the US Constitution.

The materials are well organized and compelling; the content is complete and engaging, and the presentation is appealing. The games are supported by teacher materials and volunteer guides so practitioners and parents can easily bring these civics lessons into classrooms. The games are well designed: they're informative at the right level (middle school); they include randomized events, so it's possible to play more than once without being bored; there are enough variables (especially in DIHAR) to play with so kids can make decisions such as upgrading the office or individual lawyer desks; and the game benefits (points) are directly and proportionately related to the goals, so success is rewarded, and failure counts gently against you. Their team clearly had access to game play designers who know what they're doing.

I encourage you to go check out these resources!

Facebook

I'm not really using Facebook, although I have an account on there. I feel that its design is fundamentally flawed because it doesn't reflect how I actually interact with my friends.

Facebook (and, to be fair, most of its peers and competitors) is designed to treat all the people you know as a single pool, an equivalence class of others; adding someone as a friend basically allows them to interact with you and all your other friends. When you make a "post" on your "wall", your friends, and maybe their friends, and maybe the world can see it; if you let friends "post" on your "wall", all of them can do so, and see each other's entries.

That doesn't mirror how I communicate with others in the real world; I don't interact in the same way with all my friends. My relationships with different sets of friends revolve around different activities, along orthogonal axes. For example, many of my friends are ones with which I share a particular hobby or interest; I don't particularly care what their political or religious views are, because they're not important in those contexts (business colleagues are a typical example). Then there are people with whom I specifically share values and ideals, and with whom I work to accomplish other shared goals or changes. Finally, I have family, with whom I have even different ties. To make it even more complex, the groups are not mutually exclusive; there are overlaps.

I'm just not convinced that there are that many things I want to communicate to all those people at the same time. For example, I might choose to express a political opinion, but I really don't want to discuss it with everyone. I also don't necessarily want my "wall" to be in the middle of a heated discussion between people I know, but who may not know each other, and who may never find common ground. And I think I'd like to have some space where I can discuss, plan, or do things with my friends or family which I would not necessarily want to disclose to my business colleagues.

The online facility which I think may be closest in spirit to what I think would be appropriate is Google Wave. I should be able to create one or more Wave(s) for each of my groups of friends, and collaborate with them inside. Individual "wavelets" can be open to all the people on the Wave, or to some subsets. In addition, the collaboration facilities will be much richer than any existing social media platform; for example, I've not been able to share documents with people on Facebook, so small groups of us use Google Documents together.

So that's a long explanation for why I might not "friend" you on Facebook. It's nothing personal; I'd just rather we keep in touch some other way.

HOWTO: Houston Flu

The City of Houston has a resource dedicated to information about the H1N1 and seasonal flu viruses, including a list of places where the vaccines (shot and spray) are available at no charge. Google has a map facility where you can put in your zip code and find commercial sites which have stocked, are stocking, and will stock the various vaccines. Houston ISD is opening campuses to provide vaccines this weekend; check back because they're likely to continue the program for a while.

And finally, Google Trends is predicting flu severity by tracking geographically-identified searches for flu related terms. Their methodology is interesting; they basically look for search terms whose temporal frequency matched historical outbreak data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for particular locations, and then use those terms to predict forward what CDC trends will be based on current searches. It's an interesting approach, especially since CDC data is only available after a lag of two weeks or so. It's just a correlation, and may be useful to provide earlier warning of outbreak. But it all depends on how well current and future search terms match ones used in the past, and depends on how representative Google searchers are of the population, etc. YMMV.

Stay healthy and safe this flu season!

This, I don't understand

The Houston Chronicle published a story about the Texas unemployment tax going up again next year. The logic behind such a move is perplexing. The fund, which is established by the Texas Labor Code, increases its impact on businesses (especially small businesses) during bad years, and reduces its impact on business during good years. This is because the tax rate goes up in bad years; the rate is calculated (roughly, and in part: see 204.062ff) by taking the unemployment claims to September 30 (in bad years, this goes up) and dividing this by taxable wages for the same period (in bad years, this goes down). The result is to essentially exacerbate the effect of recession by putting a higher burden on solvent businesses to support the unemployment fund in bad years.

The fund is organized as a reserve (see section 203.028(b)), so contributions should instead be increased during good years, to reduce the load on businesses during bad years. This would allow the state to assess businesses when they can best afford it, and save money for periods when businesses could use a break.

Disclaimer: I'm neither an economist nor an actuary. There may in fact be sound business reasons why the tax is structured the way it is, but I'm afraid they're too obscured by what seems like an obvious flaw in the reasoning behind the calculation. I'd appreciate any comments explaining why the current setup makes sense.

Privity of Estate

One of the concepts in our Property class which seems to confuse people is called privity of estate. Essentially, two parties have privity of estate when they can trace their land back to a common parcel. However, the analysis taught in our casebook and in the literature (I think even going back before Llewellyn) uses a two part process: first look for "vertical privity" on each side, back in time to a party who has "horizontal privity" with a common vendor.

Well, there's no reason why the terms "horizontal" and "vertical" make any sense in this context. Our casebook authors suggest that professors have, from time immemorial, drawn the analysis on a chalk board, and have put the original vendor and vendees in a horizontal line, and then drew subsequent conveyances in a vertical line (in some imperfect fashion representing time). I think people get confused because the adjectives "horizontal" and "vertical" have no other specialized meaning in this area of law.

As long as we're making terms up, I'd like to suggest some more descriptive phrases for what's occurring in these transactions. Perhaps the term "horizontal privity" would be better described as privity of estate following partition, privity of covenant (if there is an enforceable covenant), shortened to perhaps "partition privity" or "covenant privity" (a related concept is "contract privity"). A vendor who partitions their parcel and sells part of it to a vendee is in "covenant privity" (or "horizontal privity") with the buyer. Then you could have privity of estate in the whole or privity of assignment, which might contract to "transfer privity", "conveyance privity", "whole privity", "assignment privity", or something similar. This describes "vertical privity" in which the vendor conveys an entire parcel (without partition) to a vendee.

Any takers? Does these make more sense than "horizontal" and "vertical" privity?

Policy Governance (R)

There is a governance model, developed by John Carver and elaborated at http://www.carvergovernance.com/, which describes one way an organization can structure itself to best serve its mission and the needs of its internal and external constituents. I was first introduced to the concept as the "Carver Model", and I'll use that phrase here, since "Policy Governance" is a registered trademark of John and Mirriam Carver.

Let me start by saying that I think the principles behind the model are sound. I agree that a governing board or council should work toward a model in which it is responsible exclusively for high-level decisions; a board should certainly limit itself to discussing mission, goals, policies, and limits on executive authority. When a board is focused on minutiae (the day-to-day operations and interactions of staff, micromanagement of assets, etc.) then the life of the organization grinds to a halt because the board is a bottleneck. First UU Church Houston (First UU) has dealt with this in the past by delegation, but perhaps in a less than optimal way; perhaps the least appealing option exercised was an "executive committee" made up of the board president and some other leaders which met quietly each week and which made a lot of decisions, some of which were unpopular or challenged at later board meetings. The limits on the authority of the committee were not formalized and minutes were not typically kept, which made it difficult to argue that the church was being run in a transparent fashion.

The Carver Model thus describes an organizational structure in which an Executive reports to the Board, and the Board sets goals, policies, and limits on the Executive so the Executive can independently run the Church (see here). This is a good division of authority and responsibility; the Board has a focus on the forest, the Executive on the trees. The devil is in the detail of the composition of the Executive.

Although some congregations empower an Executive team, others place all the authority in the hands of the minister. A hybrid example is one where the Executive is a team but is dominated by ministers. I believe the last two models are inherently flawed because in the typical UU church, minsters are granted tenure. This privilege makes it difficult for the Board to effectively use any leverage to make sure the Executive continues to perform their duties consistently with the policies and limits set by the Board on behalf of the congregation at large. Ministers who for whatever reason begin to have a strained relationship with the whole or significant parts of the congregation are difficult to remove when their position becomes untenable, and a congregation can become severely fractured during the process. A model which vests complete authority (or a majority influence) over staff and spending in a tenured minister or ministers is in my opinion a dangerous mistake.

What would be a better model? There are benefits to having a single Executive (the CEO) who is empowered to make final decisions over operations. Such an person can be effective without calling meetings and can be held to account when they fail to execute their duties responsibly. When a decision needs to be made, an independent CEO (not a minister or a member of the Board) can make it with few concerns about a potential conflict of interest. To keep the CEO responsive to the Board and the congregation, this position should be filled by a lay person whose employment is controlled by the Board; they should be removed by a simple Board vote if they fail to perform their duties.

There are also benefits to having an Executive team but I think they may be inherently harder to realize. A team can perhaps be more available than a single person; in a situation which needs a quick decision it may be more likely to reach one of several people than one alone. The team can also take input from various areas of the church and balance them accordingly. It however seems harder to assign responsibility to a group when things go wrong; whom do you hold accountable in such a situation? Perhaps the team can be chosen by the congregation but members can be removed by the Board (triggering another selection process) if they are not performing their duties.

Let me close by saying I think a church can benefit from removing their governing council from daily operations and by having an independent Executive. I find the model which grants the Executive role to a tenured minister unappealing because it confuses having charismatic leadership in spiritual matters with the dangerous situation of having a charismatic leader of the bureaucracy. I suggest that First UU in particular consider having either an Executive team (on which the minister can sit, in minority) or a paid staff person identified as Manager or CEO.

Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai was sworn in today to serve a second term as leader of Afghanistan. I flashed back to an earlier article from the UK Telegraph.

I'm having trouble reconciling this:

The Abdullah camp said it would announce whether their candidate would pull out of the run-off at a 9.30am (5.00am GMT) Kabul rally on Sunday, but an official added: "We will not participate in an election which is not transparent and fraud-free."

Diplomats have told the Sunday Telegraph they estimate the chances of a second round proceeding to be less than half and falling.

with this:

Mrs Clinton said the withdrawal of a candidate would not be "unprecedented" and would not affect the legitimacy of the vote.

She said: "We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides not to go forward.

"I don't think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election."

It just seems to me that it's rather easy to challenge the legitimacy of the result of an election which is neither transparent nor fraud-free. Kudos to the Telegraph for putting them next to each other in their article.