The panel I helped organise on the philosophy of the commons at iCommons' annual iSummit in Dubrovnik went down really well. It got some nice writeups on the iCommons web site (one, two, three) and spurred lots more discussions throughout the event. In fact it was so much fun, and got so many people talking from the audience, that David Berry and I are thinking of editing a collected volume of articles on the subject! It has also really made me want to go and do a PhD again, though I've no idea where I might do it, nor whether I'd look at this sort of stuff or focus on more practical green political issues.

As usual, the best bits of the summit were in between scheduled panels, talking mainly with people from openDemocracy, academics, activists and some of the really great artists (I had the pleasure of finally chatting with Joy Garnett). By the time our panel came around my brain was completely thrown so my talk was a bit impromptu. Given that this confusion remains, here are some sketchy thoughts on where I'd like to take my chapter, where I want to focus my thoughts.

First, I've been trying to translate the typical discourse of free culture into one that makes more sense. In my talk I spoke a bit about the way in which the free culture movement has inherited the free software movement's tendency to label things as "free" and "non-free" without thinking through the arguments that made Stallman & co. arrive at those terms. As Andrew Rens pointed out, it's particularly sick to tell a South African, whose country went through a painful 50-year struggle against apartheid, that they have the wrong meaning of "free"! I find it completely nonsensical to say "that piece of art isn't free". So here are some translations:

• free culture -> free cultural practice
• free content -> free relations with cultural artefacts
• digital commons -> a commons of cultural activity; spaces in which cultural activity unfolds freely, in which self-realisation is possible / facilitates / encouraged / etc.
• enclosure of the digital commons -> enclosure of domains of cultural practice

Second, I want to synthesise various strands of work that I've done over the years to better reflect this new discourse: my MA dissertation on a Lockean argument for free culture; my undergraduate dissertation on the hacker ethic, alienation and meaningful work; my recent short writings about Lessig's shifting CC ideology and real cultural freedom. Lots of thinking to be done in spare moments!

I've organised a session at the annual iCommons summit, this year being held in the lovely Dubrovnik, Croatia. The panel and audience will debate the philosophy of the commons; here's the blurb: "What do we mean by ‘free culture’? Is it just a reaction against copyright, or a broader positive movement for the arts? Should we take our inspiration from the free software movement, and if not what philosophical and tactical differences should we account for? Debate over the Creative Commons non-commercial licenses, and the diversity of approaches on show at the iSummit, suggest we have plenty of disagreements to resolve or reinforce!" With the session I hope to stimulate some critical thinking about the commons, and some reflection on what we are working to build, promote or attack.

The argument I will present is based upon my MA Philosophy dissertation and a few years of "in the trenches" work with free culture projects like Remix Reading and Free Culture UK. It's also something I'm currently working up into a book, which I'll finish if I can find a publisher interested in it. My main aim is to sound a note of caution for those working on definitions like Freedom Defined and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Read on for a synopsis of my argument...

Various events and bits of work have got me thinking about complexity. Why do we often love the details when they're least helpful, then seek out simple answers when comprehensiveness is most needed?

Two quick examples.

Free software is generally available free of charge, a nice side benefit of the low costs of distribution combined with the freedom to share copies. Even at the launch of the National Open Centre, talking to people in good positions to understand the complexity of decisions regarding IT infrastructures, I hear arguments like "free software has a lower TCO because there aren't licensing costs". Those savings can be significant, but no responsible person or organisation is going to base their decision on such a factor, especially in smaller organisations where it becomes relatively minor. Free software advocates are best off talking about freedom -- how the free licensing puts you in control of your systems, how it frees you from vendor and format lock-in, and how you can work with and participate in the communities to meet your needs rather than waiting for the next release cycle to come round.

This big idea, this framework, sets the conditions for a healthy market that is in equal parts competitive and cooperative, and delivers the specific details that are attractive to people. It often means lower costs, more flexibility and better technology.

Another example - I've been working recently on BioRegional's response to the Building greener homes consultation. To tackle the ecological footprint of new homes we need to look at their place in the regional and national ecological context. How do they relate to existing housing stock that can be retrofitted, and to commercial and other building stock? How can planning and building regulations go beyond the building fabric to address lifestyle issues such as personal transport, thereby amplifying the effect of building fabric improvements? These details are lost because the government has succumbed to worthy but narrow-sighted lobbying from certain green groups in favour of decentralised energy. So the consultation exalts on-site energy generation, and suggests we deal with energy use in new homes in isolation.

A big idea - regional and national ecological footprint strategies - could provide the framework to tackle the carbon footprint of new homes most effectively. For example, if on-site energy generation isn't feasible, then the planning department should look to fit its energy needs within the local/regional energy strategy, rather than forcing developers into the "all or nothing" game that the consultation could lead to.

Both cases make me think that people are really quite good at adopting the right solutions when the questions are framed correctly. Get the big picture right, with all the detailed analysis and synthesis required, then design markets and through smart regulations. The rest will follow, as competitive and cooperative approaches emerge organically.

Radical libertarians would have us believe that a completely unfettered market can deliver solutions, which is of course complete hogwash, any applied economist will tell you as much. Mainstream politicians love to tout technology as the saviour to our problems without any real evidence, whilst some deep greens fail to account for its potential. At the Reith Lecture tonight Jeffrey Sachs talked a great deal about technology delivering solutions to climate change that would cost less than 1% of the global economy -- hardly realistic! We are stuck with politicians, academics, NGOs and all the rest advocating details in absence of a framework, complexity without coherence.

Aaron and Adrian have kicked off an interesting discussion about value on Planet KDE. Having an MA in philosophy, I thought I'd follow up on Adrian's quandary, that both Aaron and Andrew Cowie are right about value in software.

To begin with, a very simple answer to the quandary is that they are discussing different conceptions of value. Andrew Cowie is interested in the exchange value of his code, which is a feature of market economies and dominates the developed world in late capitalism. Aaron is more interested in use value, which preoccupies many Marxian, anarchist and liberal thinkers who reject the supremacy of the market. An object can have both exchange and use value, as well as other kinds of value, and sometimes those considerations coincide. So, for example, useful software is more likely to sell than useless software.

The problem is that life is never as simple as many free market economists would have us believe. There is a connection between exchange and use value, but it's not a direct correlation. To begin with, both the creator, passive users and fellow programmers will have different ways of judging the use value of the software. The KDE4 snapshots are of no use to me, but of significant use to Aaron and Adrian. But the dynamics of free software communities mean that the snapshots probably don't have much exchange value for Aaron or Adrian - that is they wouldn't pay for it - and neither would minor bug fixes, even if they have considerable use value.

Things are further complicated by the fact that, especially in free software communities, we are interested in political and moral considerations, not just economic or technical.

Thomas Scanlon developed an interesting theory of value, saying that it is underpinned by reasons (for philosophers, normative considerations are prior to the domain of intrinsic value). Scanlon defines a reason as "a consideration that counts in favour of some attitude or action" (other philosophers might lend more weight to moral considerations, e.g. John Broome says that a perfect reason is "an explanation of why you ought to" do something). We can then argue that things or actions have value because we have good reasons for them. This may sound pretty obvious, but it rejects a common belief that things may be inherently valuable.

Bastardising his work, then, we can say simply that Aaron and Andrew have different reasons that count in favour of sharing or witholding code. They aren't just different in the sense of different business models, but also in that Aaron brings in wider ethical, political and technical values, themselves based on a complex and (one would hope coherent) set of reasons.

A common challenge for free software advocates is in ensuring that exchange value coincides with our ethical, political and technical values. That is, can we still put food on plates and roofs over heads whilst sharing and developing code in open communities?

Further reading: Reasons, values and agent-relativity, by R. Jay Wallace.

In a slightly silly New Statesman article, Edward Skidelsky writes: "Environmentalism is, in truth, a conservative ideology. The passion that animates it is one of return, not progress. Its current association with the political left is mere window dressing". Is the trendy neologism - that the Greens are the new home of true-blue conservatives - correct? Not at all, to think so is to completely misunderstand Green political philosophy.

Bertrand Russell once wrote a 5,000 word essay in praise of idleness, but I don't have the time to match his dedication to the lazy. In between postgraduate study, political activism, community projects and a modicum of social life the closest I usually come is gardening or neighbours.

Yet Russell's tract fascinates me, the slow food movement invades my dreams, my Taoist inclinations tut at my hectic striving. So I present here my own ode to idleness, a reflection on my own pursuit of passivity.

I attended an interesting seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute today given by David Weinberger, a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center. He spoke about the "new" shape of knowledge in the digitised world, where it is able to escape the organisational restrictions previously imposed by our physical world. Whilst his talk was interesting, particularly in the way he drew trendy technological developments around some basic philosophical questions about knowledge, it was a bit evangelical for my taste. It reminded me of a previous, somewhat anecdotal blog entry I wrote on the value of blogs. So what follows are some reflections, worries and criticisms from his talk.

Software is a tool, a compilation of code that directs computer hardware, a program that empowers people to work more productively. Before Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project, many outside of hacker communities would have reasonably asked: why on earth is the ethics of software distribution philosophically interesting?

A jumble of thoughts here. First, for those lucky hackers enjoying the Malaga sun at aKademy, a few thoughts about promoting KDE there. The first is a request to put a link to any photos you stick up on this wiki page). The second is to try and write up any interesting developments on your blog, the wiki, or better yet as an article submitted to the Dot, LWN or any other publication you think you might get it published in. If you're not a very confident writer then leave stuff in your blog or the wiki and others can pick your thoughts up and mangle them into an article; I'm thinking of writing a summary of the big stories for Newsforge, for instance, so I'll depend upon plenty of good info coming out.

Last year we got tonnes of press coverage. We can get plenty this year even without the little press team that Fab, Michael and myself ran last year if everyone has promotion in the back of their minds.

Feeling old

Seeing the first photos dribble in has only made the overcast weather in Reading (UK) worse. The town is full of kids here to see rock! (say that with a gruff voice and the devil's hand thingummy) at the Reading Festival. Wandering around in my hippyish clothing I get paranoid that people will mistake me for one of them - I live here, damnit! Hmm, my cantankerous response makes me feel old, which is made worse by the fact that I haven't heard of half the bands playing, and dislike most of the others. It reminds me of last year at aKademy 2004 when several people were surprised to meet a 21 year-old Tom - they thought I was at least 40 from my emails! Now back to pulling out some more carrots from my garden to the soundtrack of the finest free culture podcast around...

Free software

Well actually, after one more ramble. I've been mulling over various ideas in preparation for my MA, including an essay I want to write that will make a start at defining a moral argument for free culture. Basically Stallman's position is quite confusing and ambiguous. He leans towards a Kantian position, saying that it is our moral duty to release software under a free license because one cannot consistently will that somebody would abridge your freedoms by not doing so. But he also talks of the bad consequences of not sharing freely, a feature that most other writers I've come across emphasise almost exclusively. Lessig constructs consequentialist legal arguments, and only seems to think that we should share more because a commons is necessary in parallel with proprietary cultural products.

Well, although I've always adopted Stallman's insistence that free software is an ethical position rather than a practical or technical one (a-la Eric Raymond), I'm unsure where I stand on this ambiguity. At the moment I'm inclined to say that nobody has a natural right to dictate what you can and cannot do with information they produce, but that society can forgo certain freedoms if the consequences are better than the alternative (as is the spirit of most copyright law). OK, so if we're concerned with advocating rules such as "you may restrict society's rights to use, copy and modify your information if the consequences are better than unfettered rights" then we need to determine what consequences we're interested in.

There are obvious technical and political consequences that are often discussed - proprietary software may be worse, I need to modify the software I use, I need to be sure nobody is spying on me, my government shouldn't be tied to one software vendor, and so on. But when you step into the world of culture, these don't always apply, and even where they do most current free culture schemes have nothing to say. For instance, Creative Commons licenses say nothing about releasing the source files to a piece of music, so a musician looking to remix may have the right but not the ideal resources to exercise that right. This is where I'm then inclined to talk about virtues instead - Creative Commons at least promotes sharing, creativity, commonality and so on.

So here's my idea at the moment: we start with the claim that nobody has any natural property rights over non-rivalrous goods like information. We then say that society can extend property rights that are conditional, according to rules of consequence. There are then three categories of consequences to consider: those that concern human rights (political, economic, social, cultural); those that concern our everyday needs (technical, practical, etc.); and those that concern virtues conducive to human flourishing (sharing, creativity, etc.). We can then say that the current UK copyright term of life plus 70 years is unethical because it protects no human rights, and it only meets the everyday needs and promotes the virtues for a small minority of the population.

On that final note, if you're in the UK and you agree that the current copyright terms are daft, consider adding your testimony to Free Culture UK's new petition, which we'll present to MPs around the country and to the Minister for Creative Industries and Tourism (currently James Purnell MP).

A major contradiction has been brewing in my mind sometime, that bubbled to the surface in my dissertation but received little attention. It is between the need for society to have positive direction, both for sustainability but especially to be able to overcome the problems we face today, and the impossibility of impressing direction upon people without falling into a kind of totalitarianism of the mind and spirit. I think (as usual) that hackers and other free, productive communities show the way to an extent insofar as they move the locus of attention from revolutionary change throughout society to revolt and transformation in individuals and communities. Let me explain some thoughts that I'm only really beginning to understand myself...