jwilbanks
Posts by this author
March 3, 2011
(blows off the dust since the last entry)
(Life trumped blogging; my first child was born in March)
Just before I went into the parent tunnel, which is awesome by the by, I attended a seminar conducted by Niels Windfeld Lund, General Manager of the World Opera.
Not my usual event. But music's…
September 10, 2010
Last month I was on Dr. Kiki's Science Hour. Besides being a lot of fun (despite my technical problems, which were part of my recent move to GNU/Linux and away from Mac!), I also discovered that at least one person I went to high school with is a fan of Dr. Kiki, because he told everyone about the…
August 11, 2010
I am cribbing significant amounts of this post from a Creative Commons blogpost about tagging the public domain. Attribution is to Diane Peters for the stuff I've incorporated :-)
The big news is that, 18 months since we launched CC0 1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place…
July 11, 2010
Dorothea has written a typically good post challenging the role of RDF in the linked data web, and in particular, its necessity as a common data format.
I was struck by how many of her analyses were spot on, though my conclusions are different from hers. But she nails it when she says:
First, HTML…
July 7, 2010
I've gotten a few emails about the Pepsi-ScienceBlogs tempest. It's clearly taken a toll on ScienceBlogs' credibility. Some of my SciBlings have resigned in protest, and others are taking shots on the topic.
Sponsorship is part of scientific publishing, even in the peer reviewed world. Remember how…
July 2, 2010
I tend to want to make posts on Creative Commons related topics at the CC blog, but this is essentially a personal post, and I also want to have it as widely read in our community as possible.
Today is Kaitlin Thaney's last day at CC. She's been working for us on the Science Commons project for a…
June 29, 2010
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research - coming from their brains - in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and…
June 2, 2010
As part of the series of posts reflecting on the move of Science Commons to Creative Commons HQ, I'm writing today on Open Data.
I was inspired to start the series with open data by the remarkable contribution, by GSK, to the public domain of more than 13,000 compounds known to be active against…
May 14, 2010
I've kept this blog quiet lately - for a wide range of reasons - but a few questions that have come in have prompted me to start up a new series of posts.
The main reason for the lack of posts around here is that I've been very busy, and for the most part, I've used this blog for a lot of lengthy…
March 22, 2010
Creative Commons was fortunate enough to be involved in a fascinating workshop last week in New York on Open Hardware. Video is at the link, photos below.
The background is that I met Ayah Bdeir at the Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities in Beirut, and we started talking about her…
February 21, 2010
The winner in our t-shirt contest. The background to the robot is a 2d barcode that de-references back to creativecommons.org, which I like a lot :-)
February 19, 2010
Photo outside the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge, UK, licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike by jwyg (Jonathan Gray).
Today marked the public announcement of a set of principles on how to treat data, from a legal context, in the sciences. Called the Panton Principles,…
February 13, 2010
I'll start my final post on the Tech4Society conference by giving thanks to the Ashoka folks for getting me here to be a part of this conference. Most of the time, even in the developing world, I'm surrounded by digital natives, or people who emigrated to the digital nation. It's an enveloping…
February 12, 2010
Getting ready to head up to Tech4Society's final day. I'm on a panel called the tipping point, about how to scale social entrepreneurial success beyond a local region or state. My instinct is to say "pack your suitcase and start traveling" but that's not very helpful. Even if it's how I have been…
February 11, 2010
I did an interview recently where the author, clearly having done some homework, called out an old quote of mine arguing that ideas aren't like widgets or screws, that they're not industrial objets.
I'd said that a long time ago, inspired by John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of…
February 1, 2010
I'm going to get re-starting blogging here this week, after a crazy few weeks of work at the day job.
In the meantime, here's a few links to stuff I'm doing, reading, and writing.
The team has been busy working on governance and systems for the Sage Commons (the first globally coherent dataset is…
December 3, 2009
My last posts on why I don't like the open source metaphor for science have generated a lot of good comments, here and in my email, twitter, and in person.
They've forced me to think about what exactly it is about the meme that makes me so uncomfortable, and raised some good objections and points…
November 5, 2009
I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of my argument remains the same - science is not software, and we shouldn't treat it the way we treat…
October 30, 2009
I was asked in an interview recently about "open source science" and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the "open" communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It's about…
September 2, 2009
This post was prompted by the combination of three events: a visit with the founder of PubGet, an invitation to keynote at a conference on publishing, and an interview with Bora about the Science Online 2009 conference last January in RTP.
The past year has seen an explosion of talk about the…
September 1, 2009
Seriously. Just getting around to technorati claiming. Move along, nothing to see here. Watch for a lengthy post on scientific publishing later tonight or tomorrow.
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August 20, 2009
I wrote this up on the request of a colleague who heard my talk recently on open data. I'm posting it here for comment and adding some hyperlinks...
Moving from a Web of documents to a Web of data (or of Linked Open Data) is an oft-cited goal in the sciences. The Web of data would allow us to link…
August 5, 2009
I was in a roundtable yesterday talking about Health IT with a bunch of very smart people in the bay area. It was sort of a briefing of ourselves and others about the real issues underpinning what it would take to generate real disruptive innovation in health technology and health costs. The vast…
July 31, 2009
Following on to yesterday's post, where I wrote about the four functions that traditional publishers claim as their space (registration, certification, dissemination, preservation), I want to revisit an argument I made last week at the British Library.
In my slides, I argued that the web brings us…
July 30, 2009
I spoke last week at an event at the British Library about the future of the scientific article. It was a lively event - lots of friendfeed and twitter reactions - and it got me thinking a lot about the way we use publication in science.
In my conversations with research staff and leaders at the…
July 11, 2009
Just a quick hit - I'm digging out after a wonderful break from work - but this deserves notice...
Since 2004, WisconsinView has made aerial photography and satellite imagery of Wisconsin available to the public for free over the web. As part of the AmericaView consortium, WisconsinView supports…
June 24, 2009
There's an interesting tweet about attribution in the data web. And it raises a tension I run into a lot but haven't seen a lot written about: the shifting nature of what the word "attribution" means.
We have a fairly common understanding of attribution in our daily lives: credit where credit is…
June 23, 2009
I'm at the Seed - Council on Competitiveness State of Innovation Summit. I was thinking about live blogging, but find that doing so makes it hard for me to think about what people are actually saying. There's a webcast if you're interested.
As far as conferences go, it's a good one. Rock stars on…
June 1, 2009
I'm happy to say that I'll be doing a forum at the British Library on July 22, called Scientific Findings in a Digital World: What is the Genuine Article? There's a Nature Network group you can join to participate in the creation of the agenda.
This is pretty cool. The British Library is a…
June 1, 2009
Paul Miller and I recorded a chat last week that's now online as a podcast from Cloud of Data.
Paul is a smart guy and it was a fun interview. We first met when he was working with Talis, which is a very progressive company in the UK (they sponsored some of the development of the PDDL and…