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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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 Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 12:55 am Post subject: Archiplanet Beta |
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Archiplanet all-buildings beta now online for wiki-based viewing, adding, and editing:
http://www.archiplanet.org/
Post, edit, and find the facts and photos on your favorite structures of all kinds, anywhere, from your own cottage to the latest skyscraper to your nation's capitol.
Archiplanet is a community-constructed content site for all the buildings, building users, and building creators on Earth, hosted by ArchitectureWeek and GreatBuildings.com.
"Community-constructed" means you create this site, with background support from the Archiplanet staff. Archiplanet uses the same open source software as the famous Wikipedia, so any visitor can easily edit or create almost any page at Archiplanet. Comprehensive change-tracking and community reciprocality support the dramatically open approach.
Last edited by Kevin on Tue Jul 25, 2006 10:17 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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csintexas
millennium club
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 1766
Location: USA
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| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:16 am Post subject: |
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I don't understand. Why would anyone give Artifice full rights to publish their work by posting them on archiplanet?
"When you add content - text, image, or other media - to Archiplanet, you, the original author, retain the copyright to your contributions, and there is no limitation to your creator's rights. By contributing content here, you also grant full rights to Artifice, Inc. to publish those contributions.
"Full rights" for publishing content (text, images, and other media), granted to Artifice by the author by the lawful posting of that content at Archiplanet, is a perpetual license to Artifice and our assigns for publishing at Archiplanet and in any other publications in any media worldwide. "Archiplanet" is a trademark of Artifice, Inc. Artifice, Inc. is a right-livelihood company and we hold this intellectual property in trust for the world community."
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Chris Stewart
Modern Texas Home Project |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 10:24 am Post subject: creative community projects, part one |
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Chris, thanks for posing a crucial question! Consider for a few moments, why you post messages here at DesignCommunity.com. Out of a sense of helping others, and learning yourself, and sharing ideas, and feeling connected to other people? Out of a sense that helping this community, ultimately, will help all of us?
A short, practical answer to your question is that this is the best way we've been able to figure out, to get some good stuff done: an evolving, comprehensive collection of simply all buildings of interest worldwide. And, based on a lot of experience, we think a lot of people will be happy to help.
A more complete and philosophical answer follows, in several parts:
There are many reasons people will contribute to creative community projects, both in a wide community interest, and in a more specifically self-interest. The publishing rights to Artifice at Archiplanet are simply to allow the site publisher flexibility in developing, sharing, and supporting the collection.
Community-created content is actually one of the biggest movements in the world today. In this kind of project, many people who have some typically narrow expertise or interest, or a relatively modest amount of time, pool together their many small contributions to create something much greater together.
Are you familiar with open source and Creative Commons-type community projects and licenses? When people contribute to community projects like the famous Wikipedia, or the Apache software that runs this web server (and most mid-sized servers on the Web), they are typically giving full rights not just to the site publisher, but to everyone!
Typically, the individual contributions to these community content projects are too fragmented, too intermittent (being done quite at the convenience of the contributors), and/or too small on their own to have significant financial value as separate bits. And beyond that, honestly, some people don't care about money or even prefer not to mix it up with things they love.
Working together, a community of contributors can create something truly great and truly useful to their whole community, and to the wider community of humanity.
Last edited by Kevin on Mon Jul 17, 2006 10:52 am; edited 5 times in total |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 10:38 am Post subject: creative community project, part two |
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I understand, you might say, but Wikipedia and Linux and Apache and many other creative community projects are created under special licenses that may give publishing rights to everyone, but also require a particular form of enforced reciprocality.
For text contributions, a key issue is that the wiki approach leads to works of mixed or shared authorship. In Archiplanet specifically, we are putting in literally thousands of Artifice copyright pages, drawn from the web's number one general architecture site, from the top architecture magazine online, etc.
So, we could just release all this information into the 'required-reciprocal-free' universe. Or going the other way, we could simply say no one gets republishing rights, and that what goes in the wiki, stays in the wiki.
But we can't, currently at least, afford to just turn all the stuff we're contributing into universal freeware. Nor does it make much sense to ask a community to recreate this mountain of content that dozens of people have already worked on for more than 15 years now.
Our stuff is pretty darn free as it is - anyone with a web browser can access any of the text for free, at all our sites - and we plan to keep it that way, as long and as much as we can - but when it comes to republishing by others, we draw a bright line.
Yet our experience suggests its important for someone to have republishing rights, to allow the future of a great collection to be ensured. For instance, when the original GBC was created on CD-ROM, during 1990 to 1994, there was no web yet. And we've spent a lot of time and energy during the last ten years recreating and recollecting and otherwise making up for stuff that was in the original disc (2200 photos, 2400 drawings, 1200 pages of text) that we weren't allowed to put on the web.
Is this thinking too far ahead? The original Oxford English Dictionary was an incredible, amazing community-created content project. (You can read the inspiring story of those labors in the front of the dictionary.) More than 100 years later, though now arguably a bit over-commercialized under the supervision of the Oxford University Press, with that support it is also still going strong. And it continues to be a true cornerstone of the English language.
There needs to be a fair and effective feedback of value over time to all the participants, for the ecology of creation to sustain and grow. In my observations, the community ecology and the balancing of rights that makes it work come to a related but different place for smaller, more niche projects than for giant universal projects.
With projects like Linux or Apache or Mozilla that have a virtually universal footprint, there's so much participation that the companies that provide essential commerical services around the edges can operate successfully from or at those edges. With smaller projects, for example, those serving one industry instead of essentially all industries, there may need to be a slightly stronger underpinning for the professional anchorpoints of a project. This at least is a lesson I've drawn from observing community-creation projects that succeed, and those very many that also fail.
As the Archiplanet wiki grows, and contributions from many mix with the seed content offered by Artifice, the articles will be mixed authorship content, including a lot of our stuff. We think that holding the rights to publish these evolving shared works in Artifice, the site editors, is a reasonable and fair approach, that will allow the sites to succeed and grow in their essential purpose of sharing the development of building culture.
For images, there isn't the same kind of mixing as with text. Individual authorship and rights can be tracked image by image. We've implementing the details of this cooperative licensing approach in the wiki at the image upload page.
The Archiplanet rights approach is intended to support our communities of partnership both with the millions of free site visitors, and with the thousands who contribute their own effort and creative content for the advancement of the collection.
By the way, there are now some 20,000 architecture firms listed in the wiki. (There's sometimes a direct benefit to contributing content.) Take a look, and see if you're in there - fix things up if you are - and add your firm if you're not yet!
http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Category:Architecture_Firms
(this posting is a work in progress during the Archiplanet beta phase)
Last edited by Kevin on Wed Jul 26, 2006 6:05 pm; edited 12 times in total |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject: creative community projects, part three |
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For reference, these are the six levels of rights and licensing options we've mapped out for Archiplanet image contributions:
| Quote: | I authorize Artifice to publish this image:
A - at Archiplanet only, and please decline third-party licensing inquiries.
B - in any Artifice publications, but please decline third-party licensing inquiries.
I authorize Artifice to publish this image* and I authorize Artifice as a non-exclusive licensing agent for this image and:
C - I choose to receive 50% of net invoice royalities collected for this image by Artifice.
D - I choose to donate my share of licensing royalties collected for this image to Artifice for the support of Archiplanet.
I authorize Artifice to publish this image* and I authorize Artifice as the exclusive licensing agent for this image and:
E - I choose to receive 50% of net invoice royalities collected for this image by Artifice.
F - I choose to donate my share of licensing royalties collected for this image to Artifice for the support of Archiplanet.
*in any Artifice publications |
From the licensing options menu at: http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Special:Upload
(this posting is a work in progress during the Archiplanet beta phase) |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 1:19 pm Post subject: |
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Chris, et al., has this discussion so far answered some of your questions? What are you wondering that I haven't covered? What's the next question?
Meanwhile, please feel free to add pages at Archiplanet with factual information about any of your favorite built projects and structures, as well as your firm or any others. |
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Mark Waldo
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Posts: 2
Location: Philadelphia
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:08 am Post subject: Writers posting to wikis |
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Quickly though, isn't the issue this: a magazine is able to get content without paying writers?
It's not hard to cynically view archiplanet.org as a wiki that a magazine has set up so it can troll for article content without paying writers some standard fee (e.g. $1/word).
But writers beware - this is the deal with any public wiki.
Most wikis - including Wikipedia - are there for the article mining by magazine editors. If you are a writer who wants to be paid rather than have their work used for free, then you need to be careful about posting to any wiki.
After reading the previous posts in this thread, I believe that Artifice's primary intent with the wiki is to get information moving. If they want to make money, I am sure that there are better ways to do it than involving yourself with architects. Right there the money making potential is starting to look grim.
I also appreciate that Artifice, Inc is open about the opportunity that anyone putting their writing into a publicly accessible wiki is creating for editors.
So what to do? My solution is this. I write in wikis and I have a blog (http://metrozoe.blogspot.com) that I write in. But not everything I think goes in these places. I am also writing a book about process in architecture offices. A lot of that content I hold back from putting on line. Although I believe in sharing information, I'm also interested in actually getting paid for my ideas at some point.
So be savvy about anything you write online.
BTW here's the quote at archiplanet.org that is generating this discussion:
"By contributing content here, in addition to retaining your creator's rights, as part of this shared authorship you also grant non-exclusive rights to Artifice, Inc. to publish those contributions." |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 11:41 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for posting, Mark! It is good to get this stuff out and talk it through.
| Quote: | | Quickly though, isn't the issue this: a magazine is able to get content without paying writers? |
No, not at all.
| Quote: | | It's not hard to cynically view archiplanet.org as a wiki that a magazine has set up so it can troll for article content without paying writers some standard fee (e.g. $1/word). |
Based on what? I wonder if you reach this view so quickly based on prior experiences and outlook, rather than based on Archiplanet?
I can hardly even imagine ArchitectureWeek just taking an article from Archiplanet and publishing it in the magazine. For one thing, notwithstanding all the value that community-created content can bring to the community, there's just not the kind of accountability of authorship in the wiki format that we look for in the professional magazine.
More generally, I wonder how much you know about the history and the culture of this particular publisher, and of community-created content through history, as opposed to publishers in general or in the abstract?
| Quote: | But writers beware - this is the deal with any public wiki.
Most wikis - including Wikipedia - are there for the article mining by magazine editors. If you are a writer who wants to be paid rather than have their work used for free, then you need to be careful about posting to any wiki. |
Whoa. Here I think you are simply getting into urban legend. Can you document any instance of a serious legitimate magazine (i.e. a "real" magazine, online or on paper) taking an article from Wikipedia, and then publishing it as a regular magazine article?
I doubt it, and any editor who oversaw such a thing would be laughed out of the business.
| Quote: | | After reading the previous posts in this thread, I believe that Artifice's primary intent with the wiki is to get information moving. If they want to make money, I am sure that there are better ways to do it than involving yourself with architects. Right there the money making potential is starting to look grim. |
This seems like an interesting point, though I confess I'm not quite sure what it is. If you're acknowledging that there's a large non-commercial component in what we're doing, you're right, and I appreciate it. Please see our About Artifice page for some direct statements of what we're about and where we're coming from.
Money isn't everything, and short-term money is even less.
| Quote: | | I also appreciate that Artifice, Inc is open about the opportunity that anyone putting their writing into a publicly accessible wiki is creating for editors. |
Thank you for recognizing our openness. But nonetheless, the part about "is creating for editors" is off base.
| Quote: | So what to do? My solution is this. I write in wikis and I have a blog (http://metrozoe.blogspot.com) that I write in. But not everything I think goes in these places. I am also writing a book about process in architecture offices. A lot of that content I hold back from putting on line. Although I believe in sharing information, I'm also interested in actually getting paid for my ideas at some point.
So be savvy about anything you write online. |
For sure. Always an important point, and especially so for (those few) people who expect to get personal income based on their writings.
As a side point, I think most writing in wikis is not contributed by professional writers. The wiki is about pitching in together to create a whole greater than its parts.
| Quote: | BTW here's the quote at archiplanet.org that is generating this discussion:
"By contributing content here, in addition to retaining your creator's rights, as part of this shared authorship you also grant non-exclusive rights to Artifice, Inc. to publish those contributions." |
That's an absolutely accurate quotation, as a stand-alone legal particle.
To accurately subject that particle to a larger cultural and strategic analysis, you need to take it in its actual cultural and strategic context, which is frankly discussed here (see the previous posts in this thread), in the Archiplanet wiki, and is embedded in the path and history of Artifice.
No one is forced to contribute to Archiplanet or to post in these forums, a kind of giant collective blog in their own right. You've published some interesting points in your own blog, and if that's the right place for your voice and audience, good for you!
Others may have a different sense of the balance between their occasional contributions to a larger whole, and the degrees of personal recognition they need for them. Our whole culture owes great gratitude to the generosity of creators who have come before us, and to those untold thousands who continue to contribute today.
A cynical, not to say paranoid perspective can provide a nice low center of gravity for a defensive position. But I can hardly even imagine where your points about magazines and wikis are even coming from.
There's a real generosity of spirit afoot in the world, and breathing it together, people around the world are creating great things together. That is every bit as real - in fact, demonstrably more real - than some of the cynicism.
In fact, while it still might not make sense to contribute writings you want to get paid for to a wiki, it might make more sense at Archiplanet than at others. That's part of the point of our specific tweaks to the normal wiki contribution terms.
At most wikis, your contributions are released to you, the wiki publisher, and everyone, as long as it's non-commercial. (You could still sell your words to third parties, but the financial opportunity would be diluted by the universe of creative commonses.)
At Archiplanet, your contributions are released to you, and the wiki publisher. No additional publishing rights are granted to any third parties by contributing words at Archiplanet. (You can still sell you words to third parties, with the financial opportunity diluted only by the rather smaller "universe" of Artifice.)
Additional publishing rights may be granted to third parties for use of images, but if they are, you get an industry-standard cut of the royalties. Read carefully: it's a square deal.
So why don't we do a cut of potential royalties for words contributed to AP, like we do for pictures? Primarily because we don't see how. The words in a wiki blend over time into well-marbelized mixed authorship. Over time, there's no singular or quantifiable creator to specifically reward. For words in the commons of Archiplanet, that commons of our words is the creator's reward. And in the long term we hope a a safer, sustainable, more beautiful world...
On another tack, I wonder what you think of software engineers who contribute to open source software? You're reading this now due to the generosity of (mostly professional) contributors to Unix, Apache, pHpBB, etc.
We welcome your thoughtful, beneficial contributions to world culture in whatever channels you choose to spread them. |
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Mark Waldo
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Posts: 2
Location: Philadelphia
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| Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:27 pm Post subject: Yipes |
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I think you took my post incorrectly. I meant it to support you. I saw elsewhere that you were getting beat up a bit. First I presented some views that might have been critical of you and then just countered them to your favor. Or at least that was my intent.
As far as what I think of shareware and free code and so on, I think it's great. I worked in tech from '95 to '01. My final position was as the VP for Internet Development at Zezame - www.zezame.com.
The fact I think people miss is that the people who give away code do it in between making money on other coding they are doing - whether it is being paid to code software for a large company or helping an individual set up a bulletin board. This, of course, is all done in between gaming.
....that was a joke....
So in the software world there is a balance between giving away coding time and billing for it.
So, thanks for bringing it up. I think it's a good model for those who write for a living. |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1095
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Mark, thanks! I really appreciate your comments. We're feeling our way together into some dramatic new shared possibilities - it is confusing at times, and very exciting! |
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