Joi Ito's Web

Just arrived in Japan after a visit to Chicago, Dubai and Singpore - three major hub cities. It was interesting to contrast them. Obviously, Chicago isn't a hub in the same way as Dubai and Singapore are hubs, but there are similarities.

My apartment in Dubai still isn't ready. It's starting to feel a bit like home, especially thanks to all of my friends there, but I'm sure I'll feel a lot more settled in when I have a my own space and all of my "stuff" moved in. Planning to spend more time there when it cools down again in the fall. ;-)

Uploaded my photos to Flickr and Picasa but going to try using Fotopedia widgets to post them here.

One of the groups in the Royal Film Commission Online Media workshop worked on a video of the workshop itself. There will be a more lengthy and hopefully Arabic subtitled version of the workshop going online after some editing by the RFC. This video is a student-made video which describes the workshop and the various groups and their projects.

Some participants in the RFC Online Media Creativity Workshop

I've been in Jordan since Sunday and enjoying myself a great deal. I arrived just in time to participate in the last day of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East session at the Dead Sea. I was able to talk to some of the management of the World Economic Forum about Creative Commons and thanked them personally for making their photographs available under a CC-BY-SA license on Flickr.

I gave a talk at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship for the Entrepreneurs Week program. Thanks to Princess Sumaya and the team at the QRCE for making it a lot of fun and exposing me to some energetic entrepreneurs.

The main purpose of my trip is to run a workshop, with the help of my trusty regional CC rep Donatella, organized by the Royal Film Commission held at the SAE Institute Amman with addition help from the Jordanian Media Institute in selecting participants. This is the result of discussions with Princess Rym, who chairs the RFC and the JMI, and her team during my last trip to Amman.

Although we're still on day three of a 5 day workshop, I want to thank everyone at the RFC especially Mais who has been amazing. Also, thanks to the SAE for the state-of-the-art space and the super-helpful tech guys helping us sort things out. Most importantly, I want to thank all of the students who signed up and apologize to those who weren't able to get in. We had limited space and had to turn down most of the people who applied. We had applications from throughout the region and it was a really hard job making the selections.

I'm really happy with the group that we currently have for the workshop. We have an enormous amount of background, cultural and age diversity and it's really great seeing everyone working together full of energy and creativity. I'm also glad that this is turning into a peer to peer workshop with everyone pitching in to teach and help and I'm definitely learning as much as I'm teaching.

We're all heads down working on our projects and trying to get as much done as we can during this brief period, but you can watch our rather unedited progress on the blog we have set up. We're also twittering and you can follow the conversation at the #rfconlinemedia tag. Hopefully we'll continue some of the work even after the workshop is over.

Finally, I want to thank Donatella (and Mika) for all of their hard work pulling this crazy schedule together.

I still have four more days here so I'll try to write a wrap-up post later.

Muneaki Masuda

Muneaki Masuda, the CEO of CCC Co., Ltd. recently invited me to join his board and I officially joined yesterday.

I've known Mr. Masuda for about a decade having been in various study groups and working groups together. He and CCC/Tsutaya built the rental video franchise industry in Japan in the 80's and now runs the largest syndicated point system in Japan with about 30M users.

My role on the board will to help out with Internet things and International things.

More details later...

I spend a lot of time on conference calls and am constantly traveling internationally. I've been messing around with various configurations for my personal phone setup. I received requests on Twitter to share the details of setup and why I chose it, and I thought I'd solicit input on improvements as well.

At one time, I was running an Asterisk server at home, on my laptop and at the office and had them connected together. The box at home was connected to my home phone and the office box was connected to the office phone numbers. Asterisk is an open source PBX system that allows you to connect to all kinds of devices that use SIP and IAX as well as service providers that allow you to purchase dial in and dial out services into various countries. I had dial-in and dial-out accounts with a termination service provider, VoicePulse. Also, because it is a PBX, Asterisk itself can do voicemail and conference calls. On Asterisk, I used Zoiper as my client software because it let me used IAX, the Asterisk protocol that I like better than SIP.

Asterisk was super flexible and great in many ways. As I tried to simplify the maintenance, cost and total number of machines that I had, I found that the overhead of running my own Asterisk server and the cost of getting local phone coverage in all of the countries where I need to connect to was too much. I think that if I had a few more people and a physical office in a few more countries, I'd switch back to an Asterisk solution for everything.

After I shut down my Asterisk server, I tried using Skype and SkypeOut to dial into conference call services like FreeConference.com. I found Skype to be reliable sometimes and SkypeOut to be reliable less. It seems to me that SkypeOut has dropped in reliability since I was using it when it first came out, but it might just be the countries I was trying to use it from. What was particularly frustrating was that the DTMF didn't make it through most of the time and I couldn't even get into the conference calls because it didn't recognize the code I was punching into Skype/SkypeOut. Also, as I have begun to communicate with people in countries that have sketchier Internet access and are spread around a lot more, I find that Skype conference calling isn't reliable enough. Since many of the calls involve a ton of coordination to set up and are scheduled for only a short time, reliability is super-important and I need it at approximately 100% for my critical calls.

There are a number of services that provide SIP access to PSTN. In the past I have used Vonage and VoicePulse for dial-out to the US from my Asterisk box, but someone recommended BroadVoice which has a flat rate 35 country plan so I signed up with them to try dialing directly instead of via Asterisk. I'm using EyeBeam, the paid version of X-Lite as the SIP client on my Mac and it seems to be working fine. The connection seems to be basically reliable and stable dialing into the conference call services. I got a script that connects it to Apple Address Book which is nifty. On the other hand, I don't really like the interface on the client itself.

I'm still using FreeConference.com for US only conference calls and using Intercall for calls that require International dial-in numbers. I've used MCI and ATT in the past for these global dial-in services and Intercall seemed to have comparatively reasonable rates. The main problem is that even "reasonable" is not really cheap. Also, Intercall and all of the conference call services except for the expensive MCI (I think it was MCI) system that I used, none of the conference call services seem to have a good web interface to let you do things like mute individual callers, dial out, identify participants, etc.

I've used WebEx and use Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro a lot when I am doing a webcast or have a presentation which has some of this functionality, but I'm really looking or a system more focused on voice and PSTN integration that is low-cost and light-weight, but with a web interface. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

I use a Mac so the client software I mentioned and Skype reliability might be different for a PC.

I've been wondering what the proper notation for my comments when retweeting was.

I'd been using either:

RT @foo blah blah (me: foobar)

RT @foo blah blah | foobar

The first seems to be excessive in terms of characters and the second is ambiguous unless there was some sort of convention.

I Just twittered:

Have we decided on the proper notation for commenting on a retweet?

And got the following responses so far:

j0anna: @Joi I prefer it appended at the end, rather than the beginning! Distracts from the content at the beginning, gives credit where due at end!

kevinmarks: » @Joi: Have we decided on the proper notation for commenting on a retweet? « I use these French quote marks, but that's just me

danlatorre: @Joi clearer to [comment] RT [tweet] than RT [tweet] | [comment], which is confusing. Use the "RT" as the demarcation, saves chars.

manukumar: I like comments before the re-tweet. Like this :) RT @Joi: Have we decided on the proper notation for commenting on a retweet?

Ed: @Joi I/We have used {} since the beginning.

JoshAuerbach: @Joi I think it's clearest when the commentary precedes the RT notation. Otherwise, I go with "Me: ..." in parentheses.

builtbydave: @Joi "commenting on a RT", is that commenting on content of RT, or commenting to someone's RT (e.g or the original author)?

EthanZ: Microformat development in 140 chars or less | @Joi Have we decided on the proper notation for commenting on a retweet?

andresb: @Joi I use an old IRC convention: <-- LOL. Fond memories. @shirky adds (Me: whatever) and I guess it's pretty easy to identify

kenbrush: @Joi said: Have we decided on the proper notation for commenting on a retweet? -- I like the said/-- notation I employ here

Ed: @Joi However, oft the purist opinion, comes from the original. @Jack suggest "retweeted quote"- @Username | editorial in {} behind that

Jakewk: @kwerb @joi I (and others) use "<" Showing my comment applies to what was before...

Clearly we don't have a consensus. I should have used a hashtag so we can follow this more easily on Twitter. How about #rtnotation? (I probably should have linked to the actual tweets instead of twitter ID's but I need to get this posted before people twitter even more..)

BTW: This was about 20 minutes of twitter I think...

When I wrote my post about Dubai bashing, I was responding mostly to email and twitters from friends who had read the New York Times article and others asking me, "Are you alright in Dubai? I hear there are cockroaches coming out of the faucets and that the airport is full of dumped cars." I would have to reply saying, "I'm fine." It seemed like the rate of negative press about Dubai was increasing and that there was an aggressively negative tone and lack of context in the reporting.

In my blog post, I focused more on sending a message to my friends saying, "I'm fine. The demise of Dubai is exaggerated." I linked to an article which, among other criticisms of Dubai, reported on the mistreatment of migrant workers in the UAE.

There has been a outpouring of criticism about my blog post, some from my closest friends, criticizing me about glossing over the human rights issue as if they weren't important. I still believe that the article by Hari is unfairly negative in tone and lacks context. However, I do apologize for any implication that human rights in not a serious issue.

I have read the Human Rights Watch report, Building Towers, Cheating Workers - Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates which was very informative. I am in touch with various people and will focus some attention on gathering first-hand information about the issue. I promise to write something about this as soon as I feel I am informed enough to have an reasonably accurate view. My personal opinion is that in order to be effective, I need to understand the context, including the situation on the government side, before taking a strong stand.

I've spent a great deal of my life involved in activism - calling ministers liars on TV, marching in the streets with megaphones and protesting and arguing every government policy in Japan that I felt strongly about. I'm not afraid to take a stand on issues I believe are wrong.

It's just that I've learned over the years that strategy, context and an understanding of the situation on the recipient side of the message you are trying to send is essential in causing change. Thoughtful and persistent pressure by organizations like Human Rights Watch, combined with contextual local activism is, in my view, the foundation for positive long-term change and I will pledge to try to find a way that I can contribute to improving the human rights situation in the UAE, as well as every other location I have the ability to affect.

Cross-posted from the Creative Commons Blog:

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons -- until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you're logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

Click on "vote now" and you'll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia's licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Here's a great "propaganda poster", original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!

I highly recommend any company or organization that works with user generated content to send someone to this bootcamp by the best in the field at this stuff. For lawyers and non-lawyers alike!

EFF Bootcamp

Does your company have to contend with the maze of laws dealing with user privacy and publishing user content? Want to do the right thing by the online community that gives your business value, and still fulfill your legal obligations?

On May 11, 2009, EFF will reprise its successful one-day session for Internet companies that handle issues arising from users and user-generated content. From DMCA to CDA to ECPA, the law surrounding Internet content can be confusing, especially for the folks who have to decide on the fly whether to let something stay up or take it down, or whether to give their customer's name to the FBI agent on the phone. We will also have additional sessions on Open Source licensing and employment law for start-ups and small Internet companies. The event is co-sponsored by the Golden Gate University School of Law Intellectual Property Law Center.

I wasn't going to write a blog post until I had more experience, but I reached the limit of what I can say in 140 character Twitter responses. Everyone has been sending me links to the Guardian article and the article in The Independent about the treatment of workers in Dubai. They come in the wake of an increasing flow of articles bashing Dubai. The New York Times article sort of broke the damn in terms of sensationalizing all of this I think. Just like the Desert Blogger, I've never seen cockroaches coming out of the faucets. ;-P The Desert Blogger has a good response to these articles.

I'm still new to the region so I can't speak definitively as a native, but I do know that the picture that is sketched is pretty biased and I think could be rightly called "bashing". As far as I can tell there is a crunch going on, just like everywhere else, and the government and businesses are trying to figure out what to keep and what to shut down. There are a lot of solid businesses and a lot of solid business people in Dubai and like anywhere else, consolidation and downsizing is taking its toll.

Having said that, the parking lots are not full of homeless foreigners and dumped cars. The mood is the same, if not maybe slightly more upbeat than the US or Japan these days. Instead of taking an hour and a half to get across town, it takes half an hour, instead of 3 days in advance reservations for the lounge/bar at The Address, it's 2 days and you can usually get a table at the nice restaurants with less than a hour wait now... usually. The real estate and development part of Dubai seems to be getting hit the hardest, but it looks the shipping and "the hub of the Middle East" parts of Dubai seem to be doing OK.

I don't want to appear like I'm defending human rights offenders. As a board member of Global Voices, WITNESS and a supporter of a number of Human Rights organizations, I spend a TON of time on human rights issues. We NEED to talk about human rights. However, human rights issues are resolved by understanding how and what kind of pressure to put on who in order to cause the change. While broad understanding of human rights is important, I don't find that sprinkling them on articles as part of a negative press pile-on is really, comparatively speaking, that productive.

The author of the article in The Independent defends his position and says that critics of his article are suffering from 'what-aboutery'. It's not a bad rebuttal, but I'm not sure the article was really intended to try to make things better for those oppressed workers, but rather just to piss on Dubai some more along with everyone else. I didn't see a "what you can do to help" button or mention anywhere in the article. Just a bunch of finger wagging.

In contrast, and as an example (and I'm sure some people will call this what-aboutery), if you look at the WITNESS coverage of the issue of slavery in rural Brazil, it's written as a call to action against this human rights violation.

Fixing human rights violations require people in that country or countries that have influence over that country to speak up. Shouting at people who don't really listen to you anyway, isn't very helpful. In fact in can be counter-productive. That's why Japan needs to speak up about Burma, the Chinese need to speak up about Africa and Americans about things like Guantanamo Bay.

Again, I'm not in favor of censorship, nor am I in favor of ignoring human rights violations. I'm just not super-supportive of not-very-constructive finger-wagging-because-it's-fashionable-right-now journalism. If you care, write about the people who are trying to fix the problems.

When I was in Israel and Palestine recently, I was impressed most by the Palestinians who were trying to cause change in Palestine and the Israelis who were trying to change the way Israelis think. In my 2005 thread about the Anti-Japan protests in China, what impressed me the most were the people who were reflective of their own society's problems after the discussion, not those criticizing their enemies.

I don't want to sound too defensive about Dubai or the Middle East in general, but one thing I've learned from my still brief time is that it's much more complicated than it appears. Just calling Muslim law and governance "medieval" and writing it off is ignorant. It's very different and isn't in sync with what many of us might think is "fair". They treat bounced checks and drug smuggling very seriously. Moving to the Middle East casually and assuming that everything should be just like home is dangerous and I wouldn't recommend it. However, I knew about the drug thing even before I visited and I learned about the "bounced checks land you in jail" thing on my first day.

In summary, I think that if you're looking for fast money or a "rags to riches" dream, I would recommend against going to Dubai. On the other hand, if you're looking for a safe place to park while you explore opportunities or culture in the Middle East, I think Dubai is fine, for now. The food is good, there are great people, the culture is diverse, most of the infrastructure works and the laws are, relatively speaking, friendly to foreigners compared to the rest of the region. That's why I moved there and so far I'm not regretting my decision.

UPDATE: Xeni posted this on Boing Boing and there is a thread of comments there.

UPDATE 2: A followup post.