The Basement Interviews by Richard Poynder
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The following is re-posted from Bloomsbury Academic.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Basement Interviews by Richard Poynder
Common Knowledge, Common Good:
Architects and Advocates of the Free Knowledge Movement
"A few years ago I could see an increasing number of "free" and
"open" movements beginning to develop. And while they all had
different aims, they appeared to represent a larger and more
generalised development than their movement-specific objectives might
suggest.
"Indeed, I felt that they looked set to exemplify the old adage that
the sum of some phenomena is always greater than the constituent
parts. But if that was right, I wondered, what was the sum in this
case?
"I was also intrigued as to why they were emerging now. For while it
was apparent that these movements ? including Open
Source and Free software, Creative Commons, Free Culture, Open
Access, Open Content, Public Knowledge, Open Data, Open Source
Politics, Open Source Biology, and Open Source Journalism etc. ? all
owed a great debt to the development of the Internet, it was not
clear to me that the network was the only driver.
"The genesis of the Free Software Movement, for instance, could be
said to lie in the specific culture of the Artificial Intelligence
Lab at MIT in the 1970s, rather than the Internet. And at that time
software programs were still generally written as part of large-scale
centralised projects, and distributed on floppy disks or tapes. So I
suspected that the Internet was not a sufficient explanation on its
own.
"Additionally, I was curious about the individuals who had founded
these movements: What had motivated them? Why did they feel so
passionate about the cause that they had adopted? What did they think
the various movements had in common (if anything) with one another?
What was the big picture?
"All in all, it seemed to me to be good material for a book; a book
that I envisaged would consist primarily of a series of Q&A
interviews with the key architects and advocates of what I had come
to call the Free Knowledge movement ? people like John Perry
Barlow, John Gilmore, Michael Hart, Richard Stallman, Eric
Raymond, Linus Torvalds, Jay Rosen, Lawrence Lessig, Joe
Trippi, Harold Varmus, Vitek Tracz, Stevan Harnad, Paul
Ginsparg, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Richard Jefferson, Michel
Bauwens etc.
"I eventually started publishing the interviews on my blog, as The
Basement Interviews. And much to my pleasure I began to receive
positive feedback almost immediately. I also felt the big picture was
beginning to emerge, although the project remains ongoing for now.
"Many of those who have contacted me have urged me to seek out a
publisher. A publisher, they insist, would be able to market the
interviews in ways that ? whatever the advantages of self-publishing
on the Web ? I was not able to do. Besides, they added, it would be
great to have access to a print copy of the collected interviews.
"Others were less sure. As one reader who emailed me put it, "Now the
interviews are in the blogosphere they will surely find their own
audience."
"What do you think? I'd be interested to hear. I'd also be interested
for suggestions as to who is missing from my list of interviewees.
Who else, that is, do you think of as a key architect or advocate for
the Free Knowledge movement that has not been mentioned here? I can
be contacted at richard.poynder_at_btinternet.com
"Further details about The Basement Interviews can be accessed here
"The interviews thus far can be read by clicking on the links below:"
1. Michael Hart, the founder of Project
Gutenberg
2. Richard Stallman, the founder of the
Free Software movement
3. Eric Raymond, a co-founder of the Open
Source Initiative
4. Jay Rosen, a leading proponent of Open
Source journalism
5. Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the
Free Culture movement
6. Cory Doctorow, a cyber activist and
specialist in copyright and digital rights
management
7. Vitek Tracz, the first Open Access
publisher
8. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, a
co-founder of the Public Library of Science,
a former director of the US National
Institutes of Health and now one of the
co-chairs of the Council of Advisors on
Science and Technology in the Obama
administration.
9. Richard Jefferson, the leading
advocate for the Biological Open Source
Movement
10. Stevan Harnad, the self-styled
archivangelist
11. Peter Suber, the de facto leader of
the Open Access movement
12. Michel Bauwens, the creator of the
Foundation for P2P Alternatives
____________________________________________________________________________
Richard Poynder writes about information technology,
telecommunications, and intellectual property. In
particular, he specialises in online services; electronic
information systems; the Internet; Open Access; e-Science
and e-Research; cyberinfrastructure; digital rights
management; Creative Commons; Open Source Software; Free
Software; copyright; patents, and patent information.
Richard Poynder has contributed to a wide range of
specialist, national and international publications, and
edited and co-authored two books: Hidden Value and Caught
in a Web, Intellectual Property in Cyberspace. He has
also contributed to radio programmes.
Received on Tue Jan 27 2009 - 11:19:13 GMT
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