Some somber news...
Some somber news...
NSS could get their membership behind something like this project
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak
presented by me at SSI conferences and in this paper:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
This may sound like tooting my own project, but seriously, at:
http://www.nss.org/about/index.html
it is claimed the NSS has more than 22,000 members. If 10% of these
members are committed enough to cut down on watching broadcast TV and
spend 10 hours a week (about 500 hours a year) working on free
manufacturing knowledge and designs for space habitats (created perhaps
by self-replicating seeds), that is about 1,000,0000 hours a year of
work put into crafting the future. Such a group could accomplish a lot
with that effort even with essentially no money or other donations. (It
helps to have some full timers (paid or volunteer) to coordinate such an
effort of course, although it isn't entirely needed, as long as at least
one person sets up and runs a decent infrastructure.) The NSS membership
could become the core of a serious effort having ramifications beyond
just outer space. The problem with NSS and other organizations
(including eventually SSI?) is they didn't build on what the internet
makes possible by greatly expanding the SSI Senior Associate model of
getting interested amateurs and hobbyists involved with a problem (and I
mean those terms respectfully -- a "hobbyist" or "amateur" can often be
better at some things and more knowledgeable and dedicated in an area
than a paid "professional".)
organizations with different roadmaps for human development (Mars, SPS,
Moon, Habitats, BFI/Earth) to collaborate in creating such a free
library because they can all draw from the free information for their
specific projects. However, to date, organizations, including SSI,
attempt to keep their work proprietary so they can control it tightly
and make money off of it to fund other paid efforts. The internet
mediated volunteer development approach modeled after GNU/Linux and the
free software movement is a way forward IMHO.
The problems I have with, say, taking over an existing non-profit
organization going through convolutions or wound down (having explored
this before) though is they rarely rethink how they accomplish their
missions once they get invested in an approach (membership becomes self
selecting to support their plans) and they often come with liabilities
(including internal political issues, but also financial and legal ones
including contracts etc.) from previous steps or misteps. I don't know
enough about the NSS to know if those issues apply significantly in its
case. I've tried to start a non-profit for these activities myself
http://www.pointrel.org/
and so far got hung up some on the composition of the board (giving out
free software and free content and can be risky these days, and I want
an active board who cares about the issues) plus some other
distractions. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
>In any case, a free library of manufacturing knowledge is a way for
>organizations with different roadmaps for human development (Mars, SPS,
>Moon, Habitats, BFI/Earth) to collaborate in creating such a free
>library because they can all draw from the free information for their
>specific projects. However, to date, organizations, including SSI,
>attempt to keep their work proprietary so they can control it tightly
>and make money off of it to fund other paid efforts. The internet
>mediated volunteer development approach modeled after GNU/Linux and the
>free software movement is a way forward IMHO.
license fee, so if SSI wanted to make money of their "not for profit
business" they could but they were not able to stop progress through
closing out competitive development basing on their patents.
Many inventors who are not inclined to give their inventions away for
free may be willing to use such an open license approach.
Frank
>
> Some somber news...
>
This Friday I'm meeting with a few people at NSS HQ. My agenda is
pushing Internet activism -- and some other changes.
Vis-a-vis the Internet: We need to examine things like Slashdot and the
Dean campaign (whatever else you think of the guy, he seems to have come
up with an effective Internet strategy). The current NSS website is
very lame.
Another thought: the Sierra Club survived for decades as an outdoor
organization with occasional political activism on a small scale.
Perhaps we could learn something from them as well.
I think a case can be made for dropping the dead tree magazine. 20
years ago space news and views were somewhat hard to come by for the
average person. Now we've got space.com, nasawatch.com, lots of blogs,
e-mail lists, etc. We have had a communications revolution -- let's see
how much we can take advantage of it.
A final observation: 5 years ago I took up with another group that
started taking off in the late 70s. The group? The Hash House Harriers
-- The Drinking Club with a Running Problem. Here's what I wrote in
another e-mail comparing NSS to the hash:
I also have a peculiar benchmark. The Hash House Harriers -- a frankly
semiunderground "disorganization" dates to the late 70s, as does L5. The
hash can be somewhat disreputable. So why do we (the hash) now have
about 500 groups in the U.S., 1200-1500-2000 worldwide and can get
around 900 people to come to DC for a Red Dress Run and 4000 to Cardiff,
Wales for a world convention? I have a few ideas, but I'd like to hear
your thoughts first.
Personally, I've done both local and national activism. We've made lots
of mistakes. (I include myself in that criticism.) Can we learn from
those mistakes? Can we do better in the future?
A major revamp of space activism -- and a major revamp of American
aerospace -- seems in order.
Chuck Divine
>
>A major revamp of space activism -- and a major revamp of American
>aerospace -- seems in order.
>
>Chuck Divine
>
person march in D.C. for space exploration or SPS?
Val
> This Friday I'm meeting with a few people at NSS HQ. My agenda is
> pushing Internet activism -- and some other changes.
>
> Vis-a-vis the Internet: We need to examine things like Slashdot and the
> Dean campaign (whatever else you think of the guy, he seems to have come
> up with an effective Internet strategy). The current NSS website is
> very lame.
(although there are many such boards which are empty -- mailing lists
tend to work better for many reasons), I'd like to encourage you to
suggest to NSS the idea of using the internet to connect people already
interested in space technology to actually design space related things
under free licenses, as opposed to use the internet mainly to encourage
activism to get the government to spend more money on contractors who
make (proprietary) space things. You can look at this paper I presented
at the 2001 SSI conference for some related ideas:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
> Another thought: the Sierra Club survived for decades as an outdoor
> organization with occasional political activism on a small scale.
> Perhaps we could learn something from them as well.
That's exactly how I see such an internet based free space technology
designing organization working. Instead of outdoors activities we're
talking inddor ones designing space habitat or SPS or moonbase or Mars
etc. (through the internet or even with occasional local group
meetings), and then perhaps a little activism on the side will naturally
grow out of that or be spun off.
All the best.
--Paul Fernhout
>>In any case, a free library of manufacturing knowledge is a way for
>>organizations with different roadmaps for human development (Mars, SPS,
>>Moon, Habitats, BFI/Earth) to collaborate in creating such a free
>>library because they can all draw from the free information for their
>>specific projects. However, to date, organizations, including SSI,
>>attempt to keep their work proprietary so they can control it tightly
>>and make money off of it to fund other paid efforts. The internet
>>mediated volunteer development approach modeled after GNU/Linux and the
>>free software movement is a way forward IMHO.
>
> You could use the public license approach also without waiving the
> license fee, so if SSI wanted to make money of their "not for profit
> business" they could but they were not able to stop progress through
> closing out competitive development basing on their patents.
>
> Many inventors who are not inclined to give their inventions away for
> free may be willing to use such an open license approach.
I think there are a couple of broad issues here.
One is that technology protected for a short time by a patent could
still be in the database of technological designs -- but perhaps not
used in an actual physical implementation without royalties. (I worry
about whether people might claim patents prevent using the techology
idea in simulation -- perhaps a grey legal area?)
In the context of such a project, I don't have that much of a problem
with hardware patents related to space technology -- in twenty years (a
likely timeframe for projects to happen in) today's patents will all be
expired (software patents are a different issue). I have more of an
issue with copyrights, which are now effectively perpetual (they keep
getting extended) and cover more and more aspects of a work than just
the specific tangible form of it. And trademarks are yet another thing
to be controlled or not. Obviously this is a complex issue, see for example:
http://www.deoxy.org/ipmyths.htm
taken from:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
The other broad issue is the notion of motivating volunteers to
cooperate to design the blueprints of technical artifacts, where the
blueprints and related assembly instructions etc. are copyrighted and
sold in some way by some organization exclusively. I don't see that idea
moving forward emotionally or politically if an organization tries to
get volunteers to make such blueprints and then claim ownership over
them by the organization. SSI already had some issues with such an
attempt stalling (the Matrix project) for lack of enough volunteers and
publicity -- it's very hard work to keep such a system up to date even
using volunteers (as Mark Prado of the excellent PERMANENT site
www.permanent.com/
will attest to :-). Proprietary works will generally get much less
publicity, and non-profits rarely have funds to advertise.
In general, volunteers can never trust an organization (even a
"non-profit") not to sell out and then shelve all their donated work --
without clear and binding licenses or other contractual statments. I
think the non-profit / for-profit distinction won't help that much in
this regard. Realistically, I think the only proposal that will fly long
term with volunteers is similar to current free software and open source
models -- that their end product is made freely available either in the
public domain or under some GPL-like license. More details are in the
2001 SSI paper I presented
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
For the most part, I think we are past a "build it and they will come"
time for internet sites. One can be built easily enough (although long
term peer-to-peer is the way to go for various technical and legal
reasons), but such an effort needs to be pointed at and promoted by a
group like the NSS as well as others if it is to take off.
--Paul Fernhout
>
>> Another thought: the Sierra Club survived for decades as an outdoor
>> organization with occasional political activism on a small scale.
>> Perhaps we could learn something from them as well.
>
> That's exactly how I see such an internet based free space technology
> designing organization working. Instead of outdoors activities we're
> talking inddor ones designing space habitat or SPS or moonbase or Mars
> etc. (through the internet or even with occasional local group
> meetings), and then perhaps a little activism on the side will
> naturally
> grow out of that or be spun off.
been trying to bring the power of the open source paradigm to bear on
non-software problems for quite a while. Success has been extremely
limited (I know, I'm part of such an effort right now, and it's barely
moving). Any plan to use large numbers of volunteers on complex
technical tasks has to take into account previous efforts: software is
the only one that has managed to do this with any success. The reasons
have to do in part with the nature of software itself, as detailed by
Eric Raymond in his excellent book _The_Cathedral_and_The_Bazaar_, most
of which is available online here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/> along with
commentary and additional insights. This is *the* document that must be
understood in order to figure out how open source software works.
The history of attempts to build collaborative volunteer based
technical efforts is lousy. All but a tiny handful have failed.
Interestingly, the OS software case was never organized - it sprang
spontaneously from the individual efforts of thousands of programmers
trying to solve their own personal problems, and then sharing the
solutions. I think there are critical things to be learned from
software, but the fundamental differences are really important.
The Amsat efforts are particularly interesting because they are space
based. Again, though, the volunteers got some personal utility out of
the project in that each volunteer also used the satellite.
My sense of the way technical projects can be made to work is that the
necessary condition is that the volunteers get some personal use out of
their work-product. The volunteers must also be technically competent
in the relevant area. A whole bunch of people with minimal technical
skill working on a project may be less useful than a single person
working alone. In fat, the overhead required for communication and for
bringing volunteers up to speed may be more than the total amount of
labor involved in the project.
I suggest that only way to get productive work out of a volunteer
project is for people who are already technically competent to decide
to collaborate on something with short term benefits for the volunteers
themselves. Short term may be five years or so, but certainly anything
with no payoff for a decade or more is going to have a very serious
retention problem.
I hate being a wet blanket, but there are fundamental reasons why large
scale volunteer technical efforts can only be made to work under very
specialized circumstances. I do not think SPS or ET infrastructure
design is one of them. People need concrete feedback and a sense of
personal reward in order to keep up the necessary level of involvement.
......Andrew
>
>>This Friday I'm meeting with a few people at NSS HQ. My agenda is
>>pushing Internet activism -- and some other changes.
>>
>>Vis-a-vis the Internet: We need to examine things like Slashdot and the
>>Dean campaign (whatever else you think of the guy, he seems to have come
>>up with an effective Internet strategy). The current NSS website is
>>very lame.
>>
Hi Chuck - that's been a point of contention I know between various NSS
board members and the executive leadership. But the volunteer-run
alternative - nsschapters.org - isn't much better as far as
interactivity goes (apologies to Bruce :-)) - perhaps because it's never
been considered very official. I did just notice the cool event calendar
feature though...
http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Technology/Space/Colonization/Chats_and_Forums/
for a few links (the Space Policy Digest BBS seems to be dead though), -
also the space.com forums, not listed there.
Arthur
>
>>>
>>> Vis-a-vis the Internet: We need to examine things like Slashdot and
>>> the
>>> Dean campaign (whatever else you think of the guy, he seems to have
>>> come
>>> up with an effective Internet strategy). The current NSS website is
>>> very lame.
>>>
>>>
> Hi Chuck - that's been a point of contention I know between various NSS
> board members and the executive leadership. But the volunteer-run
> alternative - nsschapters.org - isn't much better as far as
> interactivity goes
These guys are building and flying actual hardware in space. Note the
absence of a flashy website. Just a bunch of links to practical
information for people doing hands-on stuff.
NSS is irrelevant because they aren't doing concrete things. Magazines
and websites exist to help members *do* stuff, not as ends in
themselves. If NSS can't find a way to recreate itself in terms of
members doing things themselves, then it should be allowed to wither.
Whether it is really possible to create such an organization is an open
question. I think that there are possibilities for amateur rocketry to
grow into something really relevant, at least as far as providing
hands-on training for the people who will go on to found or work for
companies doing stuff in space. Another area worth exploring is amateur
robotics. People are already building semi-autonomous robots in their
garages. A small shift in emphasis might be enough to get some of them
building robots relevant to lunar and asteroidal exploration.
Imagine a convention where instead of talk after talk about building
lunar colonies or space elevators there were hands-on workshops on how
to make robotic arms that won't lock up in hard vacuum, or on recovery
systems for sounding rockets reentering from 200 km up. Imagine a
contest between robots to navigate simulated lunar lava tubes. A
society that could put on a convention like that would *not* have a
member retention problem :-)
I don't know if this is a realistic vision or not. The robot idea
certainly has some promise. I'd like to see NSS reinvent itself as an
organization of doers rather than dreamers, but if it doesn't, there
will still be plenty of dreamers without NSS. When it comes to space,
there is no shortage of dreamers.
......Andrew
Andrew,
and or help people to do things, I believe the value of a hearts and minds
campaign aimed at the general public should not be overlooked. In fact, over
the long term, that may be the most valuable of all. However, you are
certainly right on the 'lame' comment for the NSS website. Certainly
reinvention should occur, but not necessarily in just the one direction.
Val
> These guys are building and flying actual hardware in space. Note the
> absence of a flashy website. Just a bunch of links to practical
> information for people doing hands-on stuff.
the focus of the society as a whole, since its declared
purpose as a nonprofit is "educational" to promote the commercial
development and use of space - the AmSat people have quite different
aims; more power to them (and there was an AmSat talk at the Colorado
ISDC so they're certainly not being ignored).
Arthur
Andrew-
contemplate them some more.
To address one point you raised of immediate usefulness, one reason I
have thought in terms of a larger effort than just space infrastructure
(so, all of technology, including historical technology and imaginary
technology) is so that the people who work on such a project coudl come
from many interest groups, some of which may have a much shorter time
scale. For example, industrial arts teachers using the system might have
very specific short term classroom needs to demonstrate how some system
works. Or people running a Living History Farm might want to add in
their farm technology for educational purposes or to do some kind of
analyses with a simulation. Or people planning an off-the-grid home
might want to do some though experiments. Or people doing an educational
space activity liek various Space Settlement contests might find it of
useful for student projects. So, while I think you raise some excellent
issues, they seem to affirm the notion that a free technology project
should be of much larger scope than just space habitats etc. to get
going, and once their is some initial traction than ever larger efforts
coudl build on that base...
Also, I would appreciate any specific links or references you might wish
to post on these sorts of non-software free or open technology projects
which you refer to.
While there are a few proprietary technology amalgamation sites, here
are some free ones I know of:
My favorite is the "The Humanity Libraries Project"
http://www.humaninfo.org/
"The Humanity Libraries Project of the Human Info NGO is a network
project of more than 100 partners. Its aim is to provide universal free
or low-cost information access through co-operation between UN Agencies,
Universities and NGO."
Here is one at MIT which seems to be in a similar spirit to OSCOMAK
which appears to be much more ongoing (including having their second
conference):
http://thinkcycle.org/
"ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting
distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing underserved
communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of
open source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among
individuals, communities and organizations around the world."
And there is the Buckminster Fuller Institute (who coined the phrase
"Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science"):
http://www.bfi.org
"This site is devoted to advancing Humanity's Option for Success,
inspired by the principles articulated by Buckminster Fuller. We hope to
empower site visitors to see the big picture and exercise individual
initiative. Everyone on board our Spaceship Earth can live abundantly
and successfully on an ecologically sustainable basis. Humanity has the
option to make it. We must choose it before it expires. ...
"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay
race right up to the final moment." -- Buckminster Fuller 1980"
There are others as well -- http://www.luf.org/ for example.
"The Living Universe Foundation seeks to preserve the ecology of the
Earth while colonizing the oceans and outer space, all as part of
humanity's attaining its highest possible scientific, humanitarian, and
aesthetic development."
Or also:
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/first/re-design/opensource.html
I don't think any of them focus on the details of licensing issues as
much as I have -- perhaps that is why they have all made more progress. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
>I think there are a couple of broad issues here.
>
>One is that technology protected for a short time by a patent could
>still be in the database of technological designs -- but perhaps not
>used in an actual physical implementation without royalties. (I worry
>about whether people might claim patents prevent using the techology
>idea in simulation -- perhaps a grey legal area?)
that were using those patented technology for simulation is allowed
and the author/inventor cant prevent others to use improved
technology through third party improvement patents?
>
>In the context of such a project, I don't have that much of a problem
>with hardware patents related to space technology -- in twenty years (a
>likely timeframe for projects to happen in) today's patents will all be
>expired (software patents are a different issue). I have more of an
>issue with copyrights, which are now effectively perpetual (they keep
>getting extended) and cover more and more aspects of a work than just
>the specific tangible form of it.
You should also have an issue with hardware patents, because before an
institution or company starts building hardware they want to make
sure, that nobody can prevent them to use patented technology.
The right of inventors to block others in using their inventions at
all blocks space development also.
To waive that right of inventors but letting them the right to charge
license fees (maybe limited to a given percentage) is what I propose
here.
That could speed up space exploration a lot I think.
For the copyright part of patented technology:
Why not just create a public license which encloses both, patent AND
copyrights of inventions, were copyrights expire with the patent?
Frank