I’m looking forward to the stories that may be unfolding these days here at SVG Open.

Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of “Standards and their Stories”, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. Among other things, this introductory chapter makes a point for the invisibility and pervasiveness of standards

standards are so pervasive that they have become taken for granted in our everyday environment, they may become completely embedded in everyday tools of use.

We have to listen to infrastructure and bring imagination to understanding its components and how they work.

With time, this process can lead to what Callon calls “irreversibility” [...] functional irreversibility–what would it take to change the meaning of a red light to “go” and a green light to “stop”?

The strangeness of infraestructure is not the usual sort of anthropological strangeness [...] Infrastructural strangeness is an embedded strangeness, a second-order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place.

“If everything is both neutral and imbued with values at the same time, how can we separate instrumentality from ideology? This is essentially what I take the distinction between Free and Open to be about. Free is an ideological standpoint, the idea that users of software should have the right to look under the hood, to know exactly what their software is doing and to make changes to it, should they so choose. Free is about freedom, which is an admirable thing. Free takes on the idea that freedom can be built into code and its licensing schemes. Open, on the other hand, speaks to the instrumental. It speaks to the idea that companies don’t want to put the word Free on their products, for fear that people will fail to make the distinction between freedom and monetary freeness, as they do.”

ginger coons coming to terms with Open, Free and Libre. Apparently something we all go through, but hers is eloquent and frank like we know her: http://www.adaptstudio.ca/blog/2010/08/coming-to-grips-with-my-own-opinions-about-open-libre-and-free.html

On our (virtual) bookshelves:

Download the list as .csv file: OSP-library_030810

The OSP-library is a modest pile of books that we think is relevant to our practice. Some we have read and others we should. We’ll keep adding titles; suggestions welcome!

After testing several ways to catalogue the collection, we settled with LibraryThing for the time being. It’s not ideal … though it is a good project (they allow users to export collections as .csv file (book data, no tags), use multiple sources for bibliographic data and have a sensible privacy policy) the software nor data is under a free license.

We tried Alexandria and than exported our booklist as a static html page but the amount of times the software crashed drove us insane. Also it is a bit disappointing that Alexandria almost completely relies on data from amazon.com. A rewrite is on it’s way so we are looking forward to that. We most of all want to use http://www.openlibrary.org, a project initiated by http://www.archive.org. We like their concept “a wiki page for each book” and the site contains a fair amount of information already. For posts on individual books, we started to use a plugin that can pull data from http://www.openlibrary.org. But we’ll need a bit of patience before jumping ship: the team is currently working on adding the indispensable feature that allows us to make lists. And the ability to import data from file would be nice too!