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The papers presented here seem to be from a wide range of backgrounds. Some from a social perspective (identities, etc.), and others from technical perspectives (identity management using FOAF, OpenID, etc.), still others from a legal perspective. Quite interesting.

"Open source software developers have a powerful set of tools to make distributed authoring of software possible: diff to identify what's changed, patch to apply those changes elsewhere, version control to track changes over time and show provenance. Patch management would be just as important in a collaborative open data project, where users and other researchers might be submitting new or revised data. What would git for data look like? Heck, what would a local branch look like? I have a new attribute, you have a different projection, she has new rows, how does this all tie back together? (I eagerly await claims that RDF will solve this problem and all others) That's just development. The interface between developers and users is the release. State of the art for a lot of government data is the equivalent of source.tar.gz. No version numbers, much the ability to download older versions of the datasets or separate stable and development branches. Why would we want to download the historic version of a dataset? Because a paper used it and we want to test the analysis software that the paper used to ensure we get the same answer. Or because we want to see what our analysis technique would have shown with the knowledge that was available back then. Or simply to be able to track defects. The users of data will have to adapt to the idea of versions, like the users of software have. The maintainers of the dataset might release five different versions of it while you're writing your analysis code, so it can't be a painful process to incorporate the revised data into your project. With software we have shared libraries and dynamic libraries, supported by autotools and such packages. Our code has interfaces and a branch that promises backwards compatibility. What would that look like for data? And what is the data version of the dependency hell that software developers know all-too-well (M 1.5 depends on N 1.7 and P 2.0, but P 2.0 requires N 2.0, and upgrading N to 2.0 br

"This paper investigates the conditions of the manufacture of low-cost technology in China with the examples of 'pirated' VCD players, 'no-name' DVD players, and Shenzhen's development as a techno-urban city. It emphasizes the significance of the cultural logic of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and argues that the various transformations and deflections that are derived from ubiquitous OEM experiences have gone beyond the original model of an authorized OEM, experiences that are to some extent embodied in the transgression of brand name and patent hegemonies, which are mainly controlled by high technology companies. OEMs have been associated with China's current imperative and uninhibited development of low-cost technology capitalism. 'Made in China' signifies the production of any product, legal or illegal, for transnational high technology giants or domestic technology manufacturers. Learning to 'become an OEM' in China has partly resulted in excessive technological mimesis that may be part of an unauthorized, underground economy that is based on low-cost technology. Based on the Shenzhen experience, part of this study will show industrial production-oriented OEM cultures in which illegal operations and counterfeit trade are incorporated, even in city projects that are shared by municipal governments and Chinese technological companies, and undergo spatial restructuring in the development of the economy, consumerism, and urbanism. "

Consider three questions. How would one decide if there was too much telecommunications surveillance in the United States, or too little? How would one know if law enforcement was using its surveillance capabilities in the most effective fashion? How would one assess the impact of this collection of information on civil liberties? In answering these questions, a necessary step, the logical first move, would be to examine existing data about governmental surveillance practices and their results. One would also need to examine and understand how the legal system generated these statistics about telecommunications surveillance. Ideally, the information structure would generate data sets that would allow the three questions posed above to be answered. Light might also be shed on other basic issues, such as whether or not the amount of telecommunications surveillance was increasing or decreasing.

"When Canada started a consultation on implementing these treaties in June, 2001, one of the first books I read was Jessica Litman's book "Digital Copyright". The website for the book is Digital-Copyright.com, and the similarity to the Digital-Copyright.ca name is not a coincidence. This book is the journey in the United States from 1993 and the Bruce Lehman Working Group, through the policy-laundering of their harmful ideas through WIPO in 1996, to the passage of the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998. This is likely the best book to understand how the USA got their DMCA, and by extension why this harmful policy is now being pushed into Canada. It should be noted that even Bruce Lehman has stated publicly that his Clinton-era policies didn't work out well. Probably the best resource for understanding how the DMCA has harmed (and continues to harm) the United States is to read the DMCA archives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This includes the paper Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA from April, 2006."

"This [three-strikes law] is such a good idea that it should be applied to other media as well. Here is my modest proposal to extend three-strikes to the medium of print, that is, to words on paper. My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print. As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year."

Asha Achuthan has an interesting series of posts over at the CIS website, a work in progress that she writes will: * lay down the historical and geo-political contexts for the use of technology in India * engage with existing concepts like context, postcoloniality, organicity, and exclusion that have come into use with the critical responses to technology in India * offer a conceptual vocabulary that explains the tools being used to engage with the question, and * suggest strategies for testing of the hypotheses being set forward in the paper, as well as parallel modes of generating 'critical debate' on them.

Researchers at Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a new paper urging federal agencies to focus on improving the availability of raw government data rather than building better user-facing web sites. They predict that if the data is made available in a structured format, private parties will develop innovative sites to view and manipulate it.

Account of a professor finding it difficult to get permission to use material for education "I couldn't get permission to use a particular article and it turns out that the publisher of the journal is a colleague of mine," the professor said. "So I called him ... he was perfectly willing to give me personal permission to use articles of his journal."