Open Warrior

Ubuntu Global Jam

The Ubuntu Global Jam took place around the world this weekend. The Ubuntu Global Jam is an international event in which volunteers from LoCos (Ubuntu Local Committees) all around the world get together to work on improving Ubuntu. The purpose of the event is to encourage people to get involved with Ubuntu on a large scale and learn about ways in which the can contribute to Ubuntu. For instance, people can learn about and work on bug fixing, translation, documentation, testing, packaging or anything else that interests them.

The Ubuntu-ZA South African LoCo team hosted a bug fixing event at the Yola offices in Cape Town as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam, with a focus on fixing broken packages in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric, set to be released in October this year.

Since many of us were from a scientific background we decided to focus on fixing broken scientific packages, though that didn’t really happen and we just ended up fixing things that sounded cool or that we were specifically interested. For instance, given that I am a huge KDE fan, I tried to focus on fixing KDE packages, though I did fix a few others.

Fixing Bugs

We ended up being quite a small group with Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed), a Debian Developer and Ubuntu Master of the Universe (MOTU) leading the group, Michiel Baird who (I think) had a bit of experience fixing Ubuntu Bugs and Marco Gallotta and I who had no experience fixing Ubuntu bugs. Stefano was great in walking us through fixing broken packages – from identifying them, to figuring out what was wrong with them, fixing them and then contributing the fixes back to Ubuntu and in some cases Debian and upstream.

The great thing about the Global Jam is that it encourages everyone to get involved, regardless of their skill level. So even if you’ve never touched source code in your life, you can still help out by testing, writing documentation or translating the software. It was a great experience for me – I’ve always wanted to put my skills to use and get involved in helping to improve Ubuntu, but have never known where to start. The Cape Town Global Jam, under the lead of Stefano, was a great way to get stuck into it and has set the ball in motion for a lot more work to come!

Get Involved!

On a similar note, remember that Software Freedom Day 2011 is less than two weeks away so be sure to get involved! The Cape Linux Users Group and the UCT Linux Enthusiasts Group will be hosting an event on Software Freedom Day at UCT, so check out the Facebook Event if you’re interested in being part of it, even if it’s just to pop in and say hi

Just days after my post about “the attention economics of information” a classic example of our move into the attention driven economy has come to the forefront of the entertainment industry.

Madonna, the 14th most popular recording artist of all time, has signed to a new label called Live Nation. Live Nation is different from other recording labels in that, instead of concentrating on CD sales, they concentrate on live performances and merchandise – a strategy that is perfectly aligned with the attention economy in that it identifies that the means of information distribution has changed, and is modeled to suit this change, ie. modeled on attention.

The implications of this new business model are clear – success is a function of attention. If more people are reached, more people will be interested in attending concerts and buying merchandise, and Live Nation will be more successful. This is fully supportive of the less restrictive licenses which arise in the attention economy, such as the creative commons licenses, which grant end users the right to copy and distribute material.

Live Nation have identified the change taking place in the economy, isn’t it time the rest of the big players do?

I believe in sharing information. I encourage sharing information. I share information.

When I do the above people always ask me, “but how can you give away something you created for free?” A question which I hope to answer in this post. And yes, I do give information which I have created away for free because I believe that people stand to benefit more from me sharing information, than if I keep it all to myself. And as an extra bonus, that I also have more to gain from sharing information than from keeping it to myself.

In this post I’ll just deal with the fact that individuals stand to benefit more by sharing information than by keeping it to themselves, and I’ll make my point using the theory of attention economics.

But first, to clear things up. By information I mean anything which can easily be shared between people at no cost, such as music, software, stories, etc. Think about it, it costs nothing to play someone a song or tell them a story! Also, it costs nothing to copy a music cd to your hard drive, or to install a piece of software.

According to Wikipedia, “Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity.” Attention economics makes sense if you consider the amount of information that we have access to. We’re bombarded with information every day, and we choose which information we pay attention to – this drives the attention economy. To be successful in the attention economy, individuals need to gain the attention of as many people as possible.

I believe that creative individuals (ie. musicians, authors, software engineers) have more to gain financially by sharing what they’ve created than by keeping it to themselves and only allowing certain people access to it, with very specific instructions as to what they can (and can’t) do with it. To see why this is so we’ll have to go back in time, to when information first became a commodity (I’ll focus on music since it’s something that everyone is familiar with!)

Before music was ever stored on some physical medium people would gather to listen to musicians play. The musicians would create a following and build up a name for themselves. This led to more and more people wanting to see them play and perform, thereby creating a steady source of income. Then the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877 meant that it became possible to distribute music, but doing so was expensive and involved large amounts of capital – this was the industrial age.

In recent years however things have changed – it is now easy to create and distribute music. In fact, anyone with a home computer and an internet connection can create and distribute music. The emergence of technologies such as broadband internet and new online social networks have led to a boom in the availability of information, leading to a boost in the amount of sharing that goes on, mainly across P2P networks.

Commercial distributors of information still produce their information using the industrial method. They make use of large amounts of capital for expensive, top of the range equipment. They then make use of copyright law to secure their investments. This approach to information distribution is counter productive in the attention economy as it limits the amount of people who can be reached. In order to succeed in the attention economy the creative individual needs to reach as many people as possible and thus draw as much attention to themselves as possible. Once an individual has the attention of others they then have the opportunity to capitalise on that attention. For musicians this might take the form of higher attendance levels at performances. For authors it might take the form of them being called in to discuss their views on the latest political issues. For software engineers this might take the form of them being asked to write customisations for software.

The best way for a creative individual to gain attention is to allow their works to be experienced by as many people as possible. And since there is no cost in reproducing information, the best way to get information out there is to give it away for free – to allow people to freely copy it and distribute it without fear of prosecution. In doing this creative individuals can leverage themselves and create opportunities for themselves and others which otherwise would not have existed.

Note: The following images are not subject to the same copyright terms and conditions as the rest of the article.

Amancay Maahs. Warmth. Available under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/amanky/1501960898/

Matt McGuire. Sharing The Juice. Available under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/zummersweet/1299207641/

Malenga. Sharing. Available under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/malenga/557556392/