You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2014.
About two and half years ago, I wrote a blog post on shifting baseline effects in assessing copyright regulation. My main argument was that a large proportion of researchers, practitioners and regulators cannot even envision how the much less restrictive intellectual property regimes of the past have worked because what we perceive to be a “natural level” of protection has changed.
Today, XKCD provides a great illustration of the concept of shifting baselines more generally by commenting on the recent debates on cold weather in spite of global warming:
(leonhard)
This year on August 27-29 the OpenSym conference on open collaboration will take place in Berlin:
The 10th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2014) is the premier conference on open collaboration research and practice, including open access, open data, open educational resources, IT-driven open innovation, open source, wikis and related social media, and Wikipedia research and practice. Learn more about OpenSym 2014 and the OpenSym conference series.
The Call for Papers includes special calls for all these different areas. In addition, I have the honor to co-chair the the doctoral symposium together with Claudia Müller-Birn.
Each track has its own submission site, which you can find on EasyChair. Please select the appropriate track. Submission deadline is April 20th, 2014. The deadline for submitting to the doctoral symposium is June 1st, 2014.
(leonhard)
In a very recent study on “Paid vs. Volunteer Work in Open Source” (PDF), Dirk Riehle and others found that “about 50% of all open source software development has been paid work for many years now and that many small projects are fully paid for by companies.” However, in openly licensed projects outside of the software realm, the co-existance of paid and volunteer contributors is often considered problematic. For example, while paid coding is uncontested and vital for open source software, paid editing in Wikipedia is often seen as a danger to both the project’s neutral point of view and the motivation of unpaid contributors.
How serious the effects of Wikipedian’s skepticism towards paid editing can be was evidenced last week, when the Wikimedia Foundation dismissed Sarah Stierch, one of its most prominent employees, because of paid editing. The current issue of Wikipedia’s community newspaper Signpost is entirely devoted to
the dismissal of Sarah Stierch, whose paid-for editing activities were first revealed in a blog post. This included a screenshot of Stierch’s profile on oDesk, a global clearinghouse for the hiring and management of remote workers. The profile showed that she had been paid US$300 to author a Wikipedia page for an “individual”, along with two billed hours for a “Wikipedia Writer Editor” job that was “in progress”.
On a more general level, paid editing had already been an issue in the German Wikipedia community. Wikimedia Germany, the local Wikimedia chapter organization, had even funded a project on “Grenzen der Bezahlung” (literally: “Limits of Paying”) to discuss and evaluate issues around paid editing. The project was run by Dirk Franke, a long-standing member of the German editing community, who very recently has taken up a position with Wikimedia Germany (unrelated to paid editing). The following interview was conducted in German and Dirk Franke emphasized that he was speaking only for himself, not his new employer.
Dirk Franke (Foto: Tobias Schumann, CC-BY-SA-3.0)
You have been working on the limits of paid editing in Wikipedia in a project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. What was your main question?
Dirk Franke: Actually, the project was funded by the German Wikimedia association, which is legally independent from the focal Wikimedia Foundation. In addition, I have not conducted the project for Wikimedia but rather in the course of a grant program, where members of the community could suggest different projects; I always understood it that way that I was conducting the project for the Wikipedia community and not so much for the chapter association.
The question was more a practical one. Paid editing is both a forseeable problem and a forseeable development. Thus, the question was, how can I encourage the community to think about the issue even before the problem is immediately around the corner and it is in fact to late?
This blog is provided by our guest blogger Kristen Hopewell. Kristen Hopewell is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada and has been a visitor of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in 2013.
After protracted and contentious negotiations among trade ministers in Bali last month, the WTO announced agreement on a new global trade deal. The so-called “Bali package” is being touted as an historic achievement and a victory for the WTO.
However, such claims should be met with considerable skepticism. In reality, the deal stuck at Bali is of limited consequence and the hype surrounding it is intended to mask the deeper failure of the Doha Round. Read the rest of this entry »
The year 2013 has been our fifth year of blogging and its highlight was the publication of our blogbook “Governance across borders: transnational fields and transversal themes“. By selecting and thematically grouping the articles into an edited volume, we make it easier for potential readers to grasp lines of arguments and common themes that span single blog posts. We’ve also found that many of our posts had a more lasting effect than expected, evidently supplying information and insights worth preserving in a more structured format. The book is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license and available as an on-demand-printed edition, as a PDF (10.1 MB) and as an Epub (1.1 MB) file.
Of course, we also continued blogging and, as every year, we are happy to present some statistics:
Top 5 blog posts 2013 (in terms of visitors):
- Measuring the “Adoption” of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs)
- In partial agreement with SKS on what caused the Indian Microfinance Crash
- The State of IFRS in Africa: Is IFRS in Disarray?*
- Copyright Implications of the Gangnam Style Phenomenon
- The “invisible epidemic”: non-communicable diseases
* also #1 in the Top 5 of 2012
governancexborders.com 
