A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to this infamous YouTube video of the Sasquatch music festival where, if you haven’t seen it, one lone naked dude starts an awesome dance party. I have to say, that after our inaugural workshop last week in Berlin, I think we’re past the point of three people falling over themselves. We were probably (definitely) in that phase during the pilot, where we stumbled through our courses, attempting to cohere and make sense of things, but without the glue to pull it all together. Even after the pilot and before the workshop, we sort of looked back and saw the different pieces and couldn’t quite put it together in our heads. For one thing, we didn’t know each other. Instead of a face without a name, it was more like an email without a face, anonymous @ placeholders populating our inboxes. Secondly, we knew we were scattered around the globe, which somehow deepened the mental disconnect. And finally, though we all had different reasons for volunteering, I suspect most of us had joined thinking it would simply be a fun experiment. Sure, why not organize a course online? It’s only six weeks of my time. An online book club? Sounds fun, and most importantly, noncommittal. If the pilot tanks (or even if it doesn’t), we can always pull out. We’re only volunteers after all. At least, that’s how I felt.

Then the P2PU workshop transpired. But before I dive into that, let me give newbies some background into what P2PU is, and what it’s all about (or at least, has become). I think Larry hit the nail on the head when he said that, “P2PU is the social learning wrapper around OER.” More elaborately stated, “The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.” It’s an idea that was dreamed up and shaped by five founders a year or so ago, that materialized into an initiative called Peer 2 Peer University, manifesting itself in both virtual (p2pu.org) and physical (p2pu.org/Team) forms. We launched the pilot with seven courses (seven+ volunteer course organizers, plus volunteers around tech and admin issues) on 09.09.09. The pilot ran for six weeks, during which time we saw a good number of participants drop off like flies. The majority of our participants had full time jobs, were full time moms or dads, or were otherwise engaged with non-virtual life. There was also the issue of multiple tech platforms (blogs, wikis, etc.) which not all of us or our participants were fully familiar or comfortable with. Basically, it was a true pilot, from start to finish.

So we learned a lot about what didn’t work, but how to transform that knowledge into progress?

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

Well, with one awesome facilitator to keep us on target and another one to keep us moving forward, we put our heads together and brainstormed our way through four intense days of workshop. We set the agenda on the first day in post-its–the Wall of Ideas–and then proceeded to take the wall apart piece by piece in break-out sessions in the days ensuing. Personally leery of group work, I was at first skeptical about these group sessions, where we were split off into three groups of four–how much could we really accomplish with three disparate group resolutions? How much consensus could we really reach? And wouldn’t we end up hating each other in the end having to work, live, and play with each other? (Especially me with my penchant for disliking most people upon first meeting?)

First impressions, even if they are unpleasant (which they weren’t), don’t last long when you have a group of truly genuine, intelligent, and like-minded people together in one space for four days. Maybe it was Berlin, or the uber hip design space we were working in, or the fact that we all cared about the basic innovative idea of P2PU (peers learning from peers outside the ivy walls of tradition)–whatever it was, and as cheesy as it may sound, we truly connected. There was not one person who came out of that workshop who was skeptical of what we had accomplished or where we were headed. Some of us may have started out that way, myself included, but by the end we were ready to change the world, or at least the unbounded universe of education.

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

It was amazing how much consensus we reached after the hours of discussion in groups and report-backs to the group at large, how much concrete progress we made in terms of objectives and volunteered tasks to achieve those objectives. I think the moment when I knew I was part of one of the most functional groups of people I have ever worked with was near the end on Saturday during the tech session. John got up after our report-backs for what we’d like to see created (because the idea of casual changes to an existing platform did not even cross our minds) and laid out a schedule of deadlines and feedback dates where this was all going to be implemented. My jaw dropped–really? Since when did developers ever set deadlines like this, and since when did those deadlines ever come to mean anything? Especially volunteer developers? I was floored. I think we all were, not to mention incredibly humbled by this collective vision that had somehow coalesced from our individual ambitions and presented itself to us unawares.

I may sound like a giant cheese ball, but I really, truly appreciated the presence of every single person I met in Berlin. Throughout the group discussions and individual conversations I had with people, not to forget the dinners and yes, not entirely sober dance sessions, I really got to know each and every P2PU volunteer as more than just an @ placeholder, and as someone who was contributing to some larger effort just like me, on an entirely voluntary basis. I think in the end that is the crux of P2PU, that it’s made up of and run by volunteers–people who are willing to risk their time and effort to realize a vision that may not be realizable.

There are various theories as to why this happens in groups, one of which we discussed over our last dinner–that a part of a person’s brain shuts off when she or he feels part of a larger group effort, essentially positing that some part of her nature is satisfied that was previously working to be satisfied (maybe?)–but theorizing aside, P2PU is a lot more concrete and unidirectional than it once was. We have a real agenda and a community vision, and we’re headed towards it. I’d say that makes us more than three people falling over themselves. We’re somewhere in between three people and the awesome dance party that erupts at the end. We’re in the growing stages, and I’m willing to stick around ’til the end, if there is such a thing.

Photo by kiyanwang CC BY-NC-SA

The conference itself was teeming with a variety of a different sort; the make-up of the audience (or perhaps the auditorium itself) strangely reminded me of a theater I attended back in Orange County. The crowd was a tad older, and certainly more formally dressed than the usual canvas sneaker and jean combo I am used to. And not entirely opposed to free culture folk, but certainly unlike, they were the paradigm of decorum.

WhippleHill services high schools in their online communication needs, and mainly because its founder, Travis Warren, went to one, it specifically targets private schools. WhippleHill is a for-profit, but like a lot of for-profits who offer services around next generation web technologies, pushing out open content and tools to their community only helps them. WhippleHill is a great example of the service model that is growing around open content and open tools, and I think it’s a model others should be taking note of, especially in this belly-up economy.

If anyone can work up a crowd, I should have guessed it would be Clay Shirky (or someone like him). Shirky elicited much laughter, and I definitely recognized anecdotes from his book whereupon I had LOL-ed. The one that got the crowd in particular was involving high school students’ myspace or blog postings, which usually revolved around such “banal” subjects (Shirky’s words not mine) like the thumb fishing app for the iPhone (personally, I did not know such an app existed and so found this post rather interesting). The title of the one student’s blog post was “Gone fishin’ ” and displayed an image of the iPhone with the app in the background. Underneath, it read, “I have been spending way too much time on this” or something akin to it. Now why would she (it was a she, and a fashion student in this case with a (not-so-curious to me anyway) fascination with Hello Kitty phone covers) post something so banal? Shirky asked. It’s simple; she’s not talking to you.

This, he continued, is what high school students discuss at the food court in the mall. If you’ve ever listened in on one of their conversations, it is filled with banal subjects like Hello Kitty phones. But you are obviously the weird one in this case, for what are you doing at the mall listening in?

Funny, and hilarious by some standards, but I had read it before. So what piqued my interest was his pizza-by-the-slice analogy (if it was in his book, I missed it). Maybe I’m just a foodie, but I found it a very apt example of what can happen when you get large groups of people together. Basically, Shirky grew up in the Midwest, where he worked at a pizza joint that only sold whole pies. (Myself having worked at a pizza chain in the OC recognized and sympathized with this situation.) Upon a visit when he was 16 to New York City, he was astonished that their pizza places not only sold pizza by the pie, but by the slice, and he wondered how this was sustainable. Well it turns out that NYC pizza joints have the pizza baked ahead of time, a novel concept, and simply reheat each slice when sold. From this he gleaned that the city has enough people willing to purchase pizza by the slice, which is what makes this type of marketing strategy sustainable. “When you get really large amounts of people involved, improbable events become certainties,” he concluded. “You can’t predict in advance how things will happen, so you have to provide tools to allow things to happen.” Baking the pizza prior to purchase was this sort of tool for pizza joints; it not only saved time but gave people more options. In turn, it allowed a kind of business (pizza-by-the-slice) to flourish that would not have otherwise done so.

Shirky is the master at anecdotes, and dropped a few more gems into the bucket before retiring to answer questions from the audience. I won’t go into detail about them here, for risk of running too long like my last post, but I would urge any and everyone to read his book, Here Comes Everybody. It puts the world into enlightening anecdotal perspective, and you are bound to catch yourself uttering a lot of “Mmmhmms” throughout. Anyway, now that I’ve done my part in promoting book sales, I wonder how long it will take before he decides to make it available online under a Creative Commons license…

“Loss of control is already in the past.”

This was the response Shirky gave to an audience member who asked how he should deal with parental and faculty concerns about the use of new media tools. It was also, coincidentally, the meme I went with for my own presentation, where I emphasized that it is up to us to educate our youth with a different approach to copyright law, because kids are going to keep doing what they are doing anyway—namely, what the Recording Industry Association of America calls “piracy”. The world is changing has already changed and we need to do our part in dealing with it rather than flogging a dead horse.

I presented to a full room, and even spied people lingering in the doorway while I was giving my talk. I thought my voice would give (I did croak a few times, and friends have told me I have an “adorable” little lisp…), or that my Macbook would suddenly shut down (as punishment for using proprietary software), but other than a little projector-laptop miscommunication in the beginning, things went pretty smoothly. Surprisingly, I ended with fifteen minutes to spare for questions, which were not all filled up. It’s always hard to gauge an audience who doesn’t respond with wild exclamations of support, so I wasn’t sure if they “got it” or not. But after the session, I had quite a few people come up to me, and there were general smiles and thank you’s all around. Jen, who deals with the WH communications end of things, told me it was all the rage on Twitter, and that one fellow had even mentioned how he was going to integrate Creative Commons education at his school. This made me happy. Teaching kids about CC is probably one of the best ideas in terms of copyright education. I only wish I was the one who came up with it. But as the sentiment goes, what does it matter, if you can build upon that idea and make it better. My favorite session member was one woman who sat smiling with attention at the very front. After I had finished packing up my things, she thanked me and remarked, “I have so much to learn!” I wanted to tell her—so do I!

In retrospect, I think Travis’ suggestion over a phone call some months prior is what helped with preparing for this crowd. By this crowd, I mean members of the majority of the education population who know almost nothing about copyright law, much less Creative Commons. He told me to “start at the beginning”, and I really took that advice to heart. Having started in the middle of things myself, when the open movement was already in full swing, I was really grasping at straws for a while. A lot of talks on CC will gloss over its origins and the history of copyright law—but WHUC 09 made me realize how important it is to linger on these details. Showing people the history behind Creative Commons, namely what led to its necessity, is pretty much identical to showing them the importance of “open”.

I’m not sure whether it was this unexpected turn of events that imbibed the conference with an infectious vitality, or if it was just another Saturday, but by the end of the day I had more than enough energy to keep on going until dawn (which, by the way, I did). The unexpected was the running theme in my experience of OVC; from my surprise at the diversity of conference attendees (there were independent film makers to corporate representatives) to the majority of non-techie talks and perspectives, I found my disparate worldviews converging and the bigger picture of OPEN jigsawing them into place. I think that’s ultimately what I came away with: openness and transparency as the jigsaw glue for the multifarious endeavors out there, all of them uniquely inspiring but collectively crucial. Rather than elaborating on humanity’s progress (or shortcomings) on this front, I’m going to get a little more specific.

Beginning with the universal disclaimer (for me), it is so easy to get lost or caught up in the details of what we do for this collective movement termed as “open”. As a hired advocate specifically for open education (a movement concerning the centralization of open educational resources in education), I often find myself struggling to see how it all fits into the bigger scheme of things known as life. In the past, I’ve always contributed this struggle to my penchant for philosophy, or for sweeping schema that aim to somehow make sense of a nonsensical world, and consequently dismissed this struggle because of this, assuming that because there are so many people in the world much smarter than I, it all somehow does fit and I just don’t see it yet. Well, I think I was right and wrong: there are a lot of smart people in the world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they see any better. The people who see anything are those who recognize that there is more to every story, and the ones who see more are those who realize that openness and transparency is what’s going to drive that home to everybody else.

The Open Video Conference was a hit because it extended its scope from the technical platforms enabling open video to the people who make open video happen. By getting at why they are making it happen in the first place (because video is one powerful medium for openness, because it’s what we’ve got to counter the nonsense that runs nonstop on cable television), the conference was able to impact a wider range of people—people like me who aren’t part of your typical choir.

All of the OVC is open video online and probably going viral as I type. But since most people don’t have the time or patience to view every single session, I’m going to do a brief download on some of my noteworthies here (keeping in mind that I had to miss some great sessions for others). In chronological order:

Yochai Benkler: Keynote

Yochai Benkler, probably best known to the world as the author of The Wealth of Networks, kicked things off on Friday by emphasizing that “ownership is [no longer] authority”, as evidenced by Wikipedia. He aptly observes that no one company has all the smart, capable people in the world, and that the Internet, in having radically decentralized the industrial information economy, has enabled these smart, capable people to work together on their own. This he dubbed as “distributed learning and innovation”: “Distributed learning and innovation means that the right person with the right skills can come up with the right solution.” He ended with this statement: “Distributed innovation is [now] in the service of distributed democracy.”

Fair Use Battles: What’s at Stake?

Anthony Falzone (good cop, Stanford’s Fair Use Project) and Corynne McSherry (bad cop, EFF) really illuminated for me how much you can do with copyrighted works. I, like many (especially teachers), have been afraid of infringing copyright when in reality we can do so much with copyrighted works via fair use. Anthony focused on specific cases where fair use has been upheld in the courts, finding that transformative use, such as social commentary, is largely considered fair use. He states that “the point of copyright is not to reward authors—the point is to reward authors so they create stuff.” It’s an incentive to encourage, not discourage, creativity. “The supreme court has said this again, and again, and again. Fair use = Free speech.”

However, Corynne also showed us the dangers facing fair use, such as DMCA take-downs, which make it incredibly easy for anyone to have your work blitzed out of existence without so much as a warning, even if what you posted was a fair use! She made me feel better, though, by telling me that there were things I could do, such as counter-noticing, or contacting the EFF.

Lizz Winstead: Featured Talk on Satire and Commentary

The co-creator of the Daily Show is a “firm believer in the satiric landscape” and focuses “mainly on the media because [she] feels like if the public gets it—that they can’t trust the mainstream media—then they will start looking elsewhere” instead of on “these dipsh*ts that get it wrong.” It’s the topical commentaries—responses to issues—that people really pay attention to. Bottom line: “Politics is personal.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Mobile Journalism Collective

The Mobile Journalism Collective focuses on citizen journalism, asking who is the citizen 2.0? Their answer: “Citizen 2.0 shares social information for a better life.” Part and parcel of the collective is training youth producers of digital media in the “one-shot” method, short glimpses into life that tell a story in one camera shot. “Impactful storytelling is a human responsibility” and “everyone can be a storyteller given cheap and portable modes of telling.” However, instead of simply promoting new media, they focus on “taking old media spectrums and inserting the citizen’s voice there.” It’s not about CNN versus a woman’s footage of a fire; “it’s about working together to give a bigger picture of what actually happened.”

I found this extremely pertinent to what ccLearn is attempting to do with Student Journalism 2.0, which is working with high school journalism teachers and students to get them up to speed on how journalism in the Internet age is rapidly changing and what they can do to contribute to its future. Incorporating citizens into news reporting is already huge, as evidenced by current events in Iran, and will only become more so.

Jonathan Zittrain: “Here Comes Everybody”

Jokingly impersonating Clay Shirky, Zittrain was funny and enlightening, referencing the Star Wars Kid as an example of collective consent on the Internet. Wikipedia is a labor of love; nobody gets paid to contribute to this vast online collection of reference articles, yet it continues to grow and sustain itself against vandalism. The Star Wars Kid is a phenomena that occurred when a group of kids decided to put up an embarrassing tape of one their peers on YouTube wielding a golf ball retriever as a light saber. Dubbed only as the Star Wars Kid, the Wikipedia entry for him refuses to divulge the kid’s name due to a consensus that occurred on a related conversation page. Yet, those who disagree still attempt to edit his name in, so why doesn’t it appear? Because others are constantly patrolling pages to make sure the community’s decision is enforced. The page is not locked and no one is forcing these people to enforce anything. So why do they do it? Zittrain says “people contribute because they want to be part of something larger than themselves.”

Mediaspace Potentials and Mapping Open Video

Kari-Hans Kommonen and Sanna Marttila (Arki research group at the University of Art and Design Helsinki) presented on their respective projects at Media Lab in Finland. Both were fascinating presentations, and those who missed out due to conference scheduling should definitely check out their site and the session videos online. Kommonen talked about the change in media environment from analog to digital—how the computer is a meta-medium because it is programmable and you can make it function like any other medium. This is a (r)evolution in design because you “can increase the functionality of all analog devices inside the computer; (it’s) a multifunctional computer that can do anything!” The mediaspace refers to the new media environment that resulted from this evolution in design, the “networked information economy.” In the current world, “Media is our nervous system”; “Society negotiates its beliefs and designs in media. Redesign of the media environment leads to redesign of the societal thinking process.”

Marttila, also on the Creative Commons Finland team, showed us Venn diagram-based maps of social tools, resources, and people intersecting—and how all three combine to produce open video. These maps demonstrated the findings of a study involving documenting people and their interactions with media in the everyday (such people included acrobats and winter climbers). She found that people are the main ingredient for openness, a strong “design belief that people themselves are the best designers of their own activities.” Key finding: Video is a process—not an end result. “Individual videos can not be fully understood outside of the process they belong to.”

Open Video in Education

I was pleasantly surprised by this panel on open video in education. Formal education institutions are so rooted in the past that they are usually less forward thinking than your average open culture advocate. But most everyone in the room, including the audience, were in agreement that open video and open technologies are essential to the future of education. The expressed concerns were more about how to convince the higher-ups at these institutions to see the light.

However, the session was not lacking in representation. Someone remarked how the variety of perspectives yielded a kind of “transformer panel.” From Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge University’s Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) who set the tone in the beginning by assuming that it is (or should be) apparent to everyone that CC BY is the best license for OER, Tiffiny Cheng (Participatory Culture Foundation) who highlighted Miro, the open source free high definition video player, to UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley, the panel was diverse but consistent in their view that open video for education is essential, that CC licenses for that video is a given, and that—to quote an audience member’s words—”You have to do more than just tape lectures.”

Xeni Jardin: Keynote

If I had to describe Xeni Jardin in one word, it would be fabulous. With her near-platinum blond hair in striking short swirls and with just as edgy eye make-up, Jardin was the OVC’s eye candy. But we wouldn’t expect any less from Boing Boing Video, from whence she hailed. Do I have anything else to say about her? Just that she has crazy interview skills* and a magnetic personality. Oh, and she attributed Boing Boing’s success to the fact that “all of [it] is Creative Commons licensed content.”

Amy Goodman: Keynote

Amy Goodman, host and founder of Democracy Now! and one of the first independent journalists delivered something powerful to a packed auditorium. I say powerful in spite of the fact that unlike all previous presenters she had no flashy keynote to accompany her speech, only a blank screen, a podium, and a handful of papers. I have never seen her speak before, and it was obvious when she paused for a second near the beginning that she was nowhere near as Web 2.0 savvy as her audience. What gave her credence, however, was the fact that she accepted the change in the media landscape, and not only did she accept it, she supported it—by giving shout-outs to Creative Commons and Twitter. She quoted a time when she was asked what she thought of the mainstream media. Her answer: “I think it would be a good idea.” She drove home the point that open video levels twenty-four hour news networks who are more extreme than mainstream. What I found most striking, though, was her conviction that she and her fellow colleagues were representing the shield, versus the sword. It reminded me of the speech given by world-renowned writer Haruki Murakami on accepting the Jerusalem Prize earlier this year entitled, “Always on the side of the egg.” In light of February events in the Gaza strip, Murakami responded to protests about accepting the Jerusalem prize. He went ahead and accepted, stating that novelists like to do exactly what they are told not to do. But he also gave another reason, that—”Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” He continued,

“Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.”

She also quoted Woody Allen, which, coming from her, was a hell of a lot more inspiring—”90% of Life is just showing up.” And, she said, “Rosa Parks was not just a tired old seamstress.” (She was a revolutionary.)

Surprise video conference with Pirate Bay’s Co-founder

*Xeni Jardin returned on stage to wrap up the conference and interview Peter Sunde, co-founder of Pirate Bay who is awaiting appeal. I’m not going to say too much about this one (it was the end of the day and live streamed and I didn’t take notes) except that it was incredibly entertaining and Peter was sipping apple juice (it really was just apple juice). He was also incredibly at ease for someone sentenced to one year in prison. Anyway, the video is definitely worthy of a laugh and a lunch break.

That’s all

I’m not a seasoned veteran of conferences, and I usually don’t have the constitution for wading through gigantic masses of people. I have to say, though, that the Open Video Conference really rocked my socks. All two of them. Thanks so much to the Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance who put this on. I look forward to OVC 2010.