Category: Free Culture

Flattr

Some of you may already have noticed the Flattr button on the bottom of each article, which I embedded last week. Flattr is an easy tool for online microdonations, founded by former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter “brokep” Sunde. This short video explains how it works:

The idea is simple: As a Flattr user you charge your account with a small sum – five or ten bucks, maybe – which you intend to spend during a month. You can then “flattr” sites which have embedded a button, like I did. The monthly sum you have designated is then equally split among all sites you have flattered, with the company retaining a 10% fee. If you have 5 Euros to spend and click on ten different buttons, each site owner will thus receive 45 cents. If you don’t flattr anything for a month, the money you intended to spend will be donated.

Flattr is not the first service of its kind. E.g. there is Kachingle (“Social cents for digital stuff”), which works on a very similar model. But the Swedes seem to be the best player on the field, and their service has already enjoyed a certain success, at least in Germany. Many blogs, such as my former and current employers netzpolitik.org and Spreeblick, have embedded the button as well as leftist newspapers taz and Freitag.

Despite this early success, there is still a lot of doubt as to whether Flattr will eventually end up as a viable source of income for bloggers, online journalists, netlabel musicians and others who publish creative stuff on the ‘Net. Some argue that in the end, a small circle of netizens will end up flattering each other with peanuts. That’s at least a possible scenario.

But something I like about Flattr is their stress on the fact that there are no different user types in the system. If you want to embed a Flattr button on your blog, you first have to charge your own account to be able to flattr other people’s stuff. This comes from an understanding of the social web as it should be: Everybody a creator, everybody a consumer.

Enthusiasts have spoken of a new age of “prosumers” (a portmanteau from “producer” and “consumer”), as those who are engaging in this post-industrial hybrid behaviour have been called. As a matter of fact, they are still an avantgarde, at least in most of the world (South Korea seems to be on the forefront of this development). Take it as Flattr’s utopian moment, I like the way they are embracing the advent of a new read/write culture.

This blog is written without financial interests in mind and published under a very free Creative Commons license. If my articles are useful to you and you want to give back, come flatt(e)r me.

Flattr is still running in beta and you need an invite to join. I still have some, so if you would like one, write me an email to [myfirstname] at [thisdomain] or contact me on Twitter.

Jovano, Jovanke: Songs from the old times, sounds of today

I own a copy of an album called “Adio querida” by a Czech group, “Gothart”. It’s about ten years old, we bought it at a medieval fair when I was still a kid. It is full of songs from Macedonia and Bulgaria, of Romani and Sephardim. Old, traditional folk songs that have been sung by generations over generations.

I love this album very much. Not only because of the melancholy and the lightness of its songs, but because it is handcrafted music. It is music from another age. An age when music was not a self-contained record, but an ever-changing process of singing and listening, dancing and whistling.

Simply put, it’s music from a read/write culture. For someone grown up in a society still dominated by the paradigms of the industrial era, the era of pop stars being hyped, their faces staring at us millionfold from ad spaces and CD racks, their music repeated every minute on top 40 radio stations, this age-old music is a revelation.

And today, there’s hope to get it back. An article on Global Voices reports on efforts to preserve Macedonian folk music. It is a great project, but to preserve folk music, we must subject it to an endless cycle of renewal, must sing it, changing its lyrics according to our mood, injecting in its melody the beat of our days.

Folk music is a commons: Its rhythms and tunes and lyrics are free for everybody to use. There is no copyright restricting what we do with it, its authors are dead and long forgotten. It’s non-competitive, one can’t use it up. You got nothing to lose.

The songs of today, in the contrary, are “owned” by labels. But the youth is reclaiming the music. Every cover on Youtube, recorded in a messy room by a 15 year old on a cheap guitar, brings us a step farther from a read-only culture to a read/write one. The old communities in which music would be lived together have vanished, but new ones are springing up on the Web every day.

A “cult of the amateur”? Indeed: An everyday celebration of music by people who love what they do. And don’t dare to think about monetization. You wouldn’t pay a friend for accompanying you to a party, would you? Music is there to be sung and played. Do it!

Video: “Jovano, Jovanke“, a Macedonian folk song, performed by an (apparently Brazilian) enthusiast. Lyrics on pesna.org, the project introduced in the Global Voices post.

Wikipedia: How do you reform a horizontal organization?

Yesterday, I attended a discussion at the office of Wikimedia Germany on Wikipedia’s notability guidelines. There has been a heated debate going on in Germany for a few weeks now, provoked by a series of controversial deletions. So yesterday’s meeting was thought to be an opportunity to articulate criticism and exchange ideas.

There was a lot of anger aimed towards the behavior of Wikipedia’a administrators in general, which I think I don’t need to write about here (for my German readers: I have covered the discussion for netzpolitik.org). One thing that I think was notable is Pavel Mayer’s understanding of notability as a minority right: “If a [strong enough] minority deems something notable the majority doesn’t have the right to say ‘that’s not notable’.”

But a lot – I would even tend to say most – of the criticism was aimed at those attendees that are active members or even administrators of Wikipedia in some kind of accusation. You could always hear the undertone saying “Why don’t you do something about this?”

Which would have been absolutely o.k. if it had been at a meeting with politicians or members of an administrative body. But it was Wikipedia which we were talking about here, and while Wikipedia has some kind of hierarchy (there are about 300 elected administrators for the German language version, elected by those members who have written a certain, but small number of edits), it has no president, no CEO and no king – nobody who could pass a directive to get the ball rolling.

So what has to happen within a community that consists of 600.000 members, 7.000 of which are more or less frequent contributors, to reform a project that has become both very complex and hieratic on its way to success?

Some important obstacles to renewal were already named during the debate. Leon Weber, an active Wikipedia contributor himself, criticized: “He who proposes changes will be cut short.” Long-standing members of the community will position themselves against reforms. And while they may not have formal administrative powers (Wikipedia’s administrators may only execute its rules, but do not have additional rights to invent or abolish them), they do have their influence on the community.

This informal power comes from knowing other active members just as well as being known among them oneself. Reacting to criticism that long-standing Wikipedia contributors could get away with deeds that would newbies get banned, Martin Zeise, an administrator himself, argued that while this was indeed a problem, there was no way to change it. People would always be more forgiving to those who they recognize as an individual – to the bad of newbies who are just an unknown name and an IP number.

At this point, the seemingly non-hierarchical Wikipedia has to deal with the problems of traditional top-down organizations. A homogeneous (young, white, urban, educated, male) caste of long-standing members is blocking of needed reforms. These people have seen the project’s rise to success. They therefore position themselves against radical change, acting on the assumption that what has lead to prosperity will continue to do so.

It was again Leon Weber who pointed this out. In the beginning, when Wikipedia was still struggling to gain credibility, rigorous notability guidelines helped keeping the number of possible articles low and therefore enhanced the quality of those articles meeting the requirements. But nowadays, that’s not timely any more, Weber said: “One has to lower the notability guidelines”.

It is a problem of scaling. While some rules may be of general importance – such as copyright – others are not. They need to be adapted, either because the project has changed (with a stronger community and many articles that are basically completed, lower notability guidelines would be fine), or because its environment did (Wikipedia in German does not deem blogs admissible sources. When it was founded in 2001, blogs were still a tiny niche, but since then, this medium has emerged and is now used by scores of people working according to journalistic standards).

A vivid community should manage this change on the way. In some cases, this might be hard to achieve – software that is continuously enhanced by adding functionalities will at some point develop a performance problem. Radical steps might need to be taken from time to time, like a general relaunch.

Social problems cannot be solved this way. The German-speaking Wikipedia community has waited far too long to face the challenge of adapting itself to changing circumstances. Anne Roth, well-known in Germany for blogging her family’s life under surveillance, pointed out Indymedia Germany as an example for a once vivid open publishing platform she co-founded eight years ago that after a development “similar to Wikipedia’s” she now describes as “a dying community”.

“One cannot try to get through the storm safely without changing anything”, Anne Roth warned. Whether the German Wikipedia community will manage to take the necessary steps is to be seen. If yes, it could set an example how those internet-empowered horizontal organizations that have become an important part of our life can cope with the challenges of renewal.