2013 Farm Bill's Threat to Open Access

I was reading the Senate's version of the 2013 Farm Bill which is scheduled for  markup this week. Where there is a lot not to like in the bill, it contained one particularly disturbing provision, the use of $100 million of taxpayer's money to create the non-profit Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.  The purpose of the Foundation is to solicit private funding for agricultural research, and to match it with taxpayer dollars. The bill states very clearly that  "The Foundation shall not be an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government." 

On the surface this seems like a good thing. If industry is going to benefit financially from publicly  supported research then it makes sense that they have some skin in the game. But here is what caught my attention and raised my ire: 

1. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.—The Board shall adopt written standards to govern ownership of any intellectual property rights derived from the collaborative efforts of the Foundation. 
   

In other words, the Board, which is not an entity of the U.S. government, will determine the intellectual property provisions for the research funded by U.S. taxpayers. This is incredibly disturbing, and a clear end-run to the public's demand for open-access to science research. Just when it appears that open-access will become the law of the land we have a proposal in the Farm Bill to circumvent that access.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2013 will require Federal agencies with research expenditures over $100 million to create publicly available repositories of journal articles.  It is basically an extension to all Federal agencies of the National Institute of Health's open-access provisions mandating that the public have access to the results of the research they funded. 

If the people pay for the research, even part of the research, the results belong in the public domain. It's that simple. This language in the Farm Bill is just wrong. It needs to be changed to make sure that the public's intellectual property is not given away and locked-up forever. Write or call your Senators! 

Crowd sourcing a future focused list of core competencies

I'm leading a conversation for professional educators (academics) next week focused on the future of work. This is one of a series of Webcasts dealing with preparing the next generation of non-formal educators. My emphasis will be on optimizing workplace environments around ideation, creativity, and complex problem solving-- basically freeranging. I'm going to be focusing on workplace environments that are friendly to creatives, makers, and solvers.

In preparation for my session I watched the first sesssion which happened last week. The presenters described the results of a delphi study (and another study) that had just been conducted (accepted for publication but not yet in print) that discussed the core competencies of non-formal educators needed for the year 2015. Here is the list:

• Communication Skills
• Diversity
• Interpersonal relationships
• Professionalism
• Resource management
• Self direction
• Teamwork and leadership
• Thinking and problem solving
• Teaching
• Information technology
• Technology adoption and application
• Research
• Program planning, development, and evaluation
• Subject matter expertise
• Volunteer management
• Continuous learning
• Customer service
• Flexibility and change
• Organizational knowledge
• Understanding stakeholders and communities
• Management and supervision
• Marketing

It struck me that this list could have just as easily been generated 10 years ago, and that it's not all that future focused. I know that a delphi is going to bring you a pretty conservative result-- the very nature of the way panelists are selected and the process will eliminate edge perspectives, and the consensus process will result in more conservative and basically safe findings. I think the core elements are probably found in the list above, but they are needing more specificity.

My reaction was to start creating my own list of the core competencies that will be needed in five years for a learning intermediary. What are the needed competencies for a networked economy where social learning is exploding? I had a pretty good start on a list when I realized that this might make an interesting crowd sourcing activity. Let's see if we can put together a list that really has a future focus, and I promise to use it in the seminar next Thursday.

Have at it-- either comment here, or over on Google Buzz where this post will be fed. Thanks!!!!

The post can be found here on Google Buzz: Crowd sourcing a future focused list of core competencies

The history of copyright from 1831-1891

A free book on the history of copyright in the United States from 1831-1891. I'm fascinated with almost everything from this period of time as I think it more closely represents how information currently moves in society as compared to the aberration that was the 20th century. I plan to start reading it today. You can get the book here: Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891

A taste:

In the republican model of authorship, an author’s purpose is to
contribute to the public good, to educate and inform, promote virtue,
and to fight tyranny. For an author to depend upon the largess of a
patron is seen as slavish. However, instead of proposing that the
author’s livelihood be based on a property right to their work, this
ideology concentrates upon lowering barriers to entry and extending
authorship to a broad swath of society. Taken to the extreme, in this
model there would be no professional authors – but every citizen
would have the education, opportunity, and civic duty to participate
in a populist public sphere by writing

Sounds like a perfect model where every citizen has access to a modern and ubiquitous printing press-- like we have today.

What else did you have to do this weekend but learn about copyright? We've strayed too far from its original intent. Join me in reading. Its even free!

Open germplasms?

Why not? Why not our public land-grant universities leading the way? A general public license for seeds?

So here is a counter-proposal. Following the example of what was done for free and open source software with a “General Public License” (GPL), Jack Kloppenburg is proposing to establish a GPLPG (General Public License for Plant Germplasm) license for seeds and plant varieties that allows free use of the plants by farmers and growers, but prevents any so licensed seeds or plants from being subsequently altered and made commercial.

The license imposes on subsequent users of the Plant Germplasm (the seeds or plants) that any new varieties developed on the basis of those plants be similarly licensed for free use.”

Mixing work and family time

Many people would find the notion of mixing work and family time ludicrous. They'd find it unprofessional and rail against it. Yet, the separation of work and family is a rather recent change when taken in the context of human development. Sending the children off to their own version of a factory school while the adults go to their separate workplace is decidedly anti-freeranging. It's not natural, and until the last 200 years or so it was not the way we humans lived.

That's why I found this article Busting Down the Office Door about mixing family and work time so refreshing:

The gurus of productivity would say that by mixing work and family time I’m shortchanging my family and killing my efficiency. Which is true to a point, and I wouldn’t want to spend all of my time splitting my focus like this. But for me, the ability to work from within the living system of my family is one of the reasons I chose to work at home.

This is absolutely the kind of thinking you'll find at the heart of freeranging. I'm sure many organizational people would find this shocking. But, when most of us are now working as knowledge workers, creatives, and makers we need to be optimizing our work spaces for creativity and ideation. Family is an essential part of that equation.

Productivity is an obsolete concept unless we're talking about robots. People need to work more naturally in order to be creative in ways that only humans are capable. We have a long ways to go before this type of working environment is considered the norm, but it's exactly what is needed for where our world is headed. Let the change begin.

Enable hiding--inhibit learning

Great post by Harold Jarche on Learning in Public:

Transparency is the first, and perhaps largest, hurdle in creating new management frameworks for a networked world. Learning in public makes our work transparent and can help us develop critical next practices in our increasingly complex workplaces. We all have to start thinking and working like rocket scientists.

If you bake-in hiding to your core IT infrastructure you'll kill your social learning. The old will destroy the new before you can even make it out of the gate.

For your message to spread...

We are meme machines...

Memes == copying with variation and selection (Dr. Susan Blackmore).

For your ideas to spread your immediate network must have: 1) permission to copy, and 2) permission to modify and create variations. Otherwise, your message will never get beyond your immediate social network which we know is something less than 150 people. If you want your reach to be limited just lock your message down with restrictive copyrights.

If on the other hand your mission is to have a far greater impact you're going to need to set your message free:

It's really quite simple. Hold it tight and you limit your ability to have impact. Set it free, and with a lot of luck your message might replicate beyond your echo-chamber. This is why I say over and over and over-- social networking and by extension social media-- starts with getting the permissions right.

Wanting to dive deeper? I highly recommend watching this Susan Blackmore TED talk on Memes and "temes":