Mitch Kapor's Blog

I’ll again be co-teaching a graduate course on open source at UC Berkeley this fall in the newly-christened School of Information (formerly SIMS). The lead professor is my old friend and colleague Pamela Samuelson. The class is open to all grad students at Berkeley. we expect a mix from the I-School, the law school, and perhaps some from computer science and business.
The course focuses on the social, economic, and legal aspects of open source. It’s fairly small and participatory. For instance, students edit the Wikipedia as a class assignment and write an essay about their experience.

Monday will be the first session. Link to home page here. Link to syllabus here. This year the class will be webcast and open to public for viewing. Details will be posted when I have them.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told CNET in an interview that the German-language version of Wikipedia will get an experimental overhaul in the next few weeks designed to cut down on vandalism, edit wars, and misinformation. The technique is adapted directly from open source software development projects. Anyone can submit a change to an article, but it will have to be reviewed and approved by an editor with commit privileges.
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I gave the opening talk on Saturday at the convention. Lots of great energy from the participants. Here is a nice writeup that is close to a full transcript, on one of the SL blogs.

Update: ZDNet blog coverage here.

This is a cool tool which lets you preview images, hyperlinks, and diffs (changes) as popups in the Wikipedia. Get it here.

Almost verbatim rendering of my talk at Wikipedia 2006.  Thank you, Andy Carvin.

My initial post about the startup I am incubating was terse to the point of inducing some confusion, so here is some amplification.

A few months we (Todd Agulnick and I) created a Firefox extension called Foxmarks that synchronizes bookmarks, e.g. between a person’s home and office computer. You can find it on addons.mozilla.org . It’s been quite successful with about 40,000 people using it each and every day.

The web site for the extension, which is a wiki, can be found here.

The blog for the Foxmarks extension is here.

I designed Foxmarks to scratch my own itch itch and to see where it led, suspecting there might be something interesting in the data.

We used the bookmark corpus we collected to create a proof-of-concept system for a new search-related startup which is what I blogged about previously.

We want to get to a beta of the search site as soon as we can. It will be ultimately driven by a variety of user-generated data and content, including but not limited to the Foxmarks extension.

By the way, we have been careful to write a privacy policy that protects individual data but lets us aggregate the data to provide useful new services. In our proof-of-concept system, we don’t even incldue a URL unless several people have bookmarked it.

Before we open anything to the public, we will enable existing Foxmarks users to remove their data from the corpus if they choose to. We do take privacy seriously. We have already evolved the policy in response to user comments about its earlier version and will continue evolve it as needed.

Finally, we are hiring. See this and this. Be part of something great. No fooling!

P.S.  Work on Chandler by the Open Source Applications Foundation continues. We just released 0.7 alpha 3.  For us intrepid dogfooders, it has some big advances including background synchronization and performance enhancements (native performance on Intel MacBooks).  I continue to be involved and committed.

If you look carefully you can see the driver of the  “Air Exchange: Clear Air Specialists”  truck holding a lit cigarette.  I knew that  fancy camera on my mobile phone would come in handy some day.

As part of Mel’s efforts to reach out to Jews and liberals, I hear he is going to re-release “The Passion of the Christ” under a new title.  He’s going to call it “An Inconvenient Crucifixion.”