The LogiLogi Foundation

Just got back from the ECAP (European Conference on Computing and Philosophy) 2009 in Barcelona. Though it was quite a broad conference, and the quality of the presentations sometimes varied, I found it to be a fascinating and definitely recommendable event. Last year I also attended and presented at it, in Monpellier. A video of this is now available in ogg format, (and flv, slides of 2008 are here).

Drawn from the interesting talks of this year was first of all a keynote by Luciano Floridi on the relationship between information and knowledge. Then there was a talk by Kevin Warwick, on what it is like to be a robot (and he’s the guy that actually tried it out!). Then there was a talk by Philip Brey on the proper role of information in society. And there was more, notably also a track on Singularity.

Then there was “our” track on computer-supported cooperative work. Two presentations (apart from ours, naturally :) in it were especially relevant to LogiLogi. The first being the one by Dominique Luzeaux, on Wiki-Debate. Their logical relationships and emoticons for comments were especially nice (though a bit overly-complex for voluntary users imho). The second was the presentation by Luc Schneider. It especially went into the LiquidPub project, and the ideas behind it, which are strikingly similar to those behind LogiLogi. So we are not alone, and judging our company, likely on the right track.

Besides this, interest in cooperation was expressed by at least two parties. But more on this when things become more concrete. The slides of our presentation can be downloaded here

The FOSDEM was pretty amazing. The Friday night Beer-event was overwhelming to say the least, and on saturday morning there was a very interesting keynote talk on the future of ‘Free and Open’ with many applications moving into the cloud by Mark Surman, of the Mozilla Foundation.

And there were many other good talks, of which for us quite a few were on sunday in the Ruby and Rails developer room.

I arrived there before 10 in the morning, after having had another interesting evening at the Gnome beer event (as for being dwarfish or involved in the Gnome project, I’m quite tall, and only a normal user of the windowmanager). But I had some good chats there, and of course good Belgian beer, especially the Früli strawberry beer.

...anyway, but back to Sunday. A particulary good talk was the one by Peter Vanbroekhoven on the object model of Rails.

We also gave our presentation on sunday, on LogiLogi, the importance of freedom on the Brave New Web, and on the three Rails plugins: Thorny Form, Magick Corners and Body Builder. The sheets can be downloaded here (as pdf, sources here).

Some further good news is that LogiLogi will be presented at the Philosophers Rally 2009 – The Future of Philosophy conference which is held in Enschede on the 12th and 13th of May. This is a conference by and for philosophers, so we are really looking forward to this presentation, and to discussing LogiLogi with them.

Over three days we will be releasing Rails Plugins extracted from LogiLogi.org in a little Plugin Triathlon. And then on Sunday, the fourth day, we will present the three of them (at least two, three if time permits) in the Ruby and Rails room of the FOSDEM in Brussels. And the first one is released today. It is Thorny Form

Thorny Form is a Rails plugin for unobtrusively protecting forms against form-SPAM. It adds extra fields like a honeypot and some others which can then be checked before the form-data is used in your application. It is not an unbreakable solution, but it is likely to continue to work for quite some time. The following joke from Ned Batchelders blog nicely sketches why:

Jim and Joe are out hiking in the forest, when in the distance, they see a huge bear. The bear notices them, and begins angrily running toward them. Jim calmly checks the knots of his shoes and stretches his legs.

Joe asks incredulously, “What are you doing? Do you think you can outrun that bear!?”

Jim replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

To use Thorny Form you just need to change two lines per form. First in the view form_for has to be replaced by thorny_form_for (remote_form_for by remote_thorny_form_for). Then in the controller you have to add a check for spam in the shape of self.thorny_form_free_of_spam?. See the full Thorny Form docs for a code example and installation instructions.

Yesterday we were at the Software Freedom Day kickoff in Baarn, the Netherlands. We gave a presentation there on Freedom on the Brave New Web, and on LogiLogi.org, and a bit on our current efforts to make it usable to the max. It went well, and there also was a nice discussion afterward.

The slides of our presentation can be found here. A video might also become available, and in any case here is already a pre-view of the new UI we’re (Bruno, Wybo & Charles here and there :) making (full size here):

And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street-music, a fast and cheap metro sytem, good food & bars, and did I mention the weather ? Hmoah! :)

Anyway, enough about urban paradise: the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference was organized by the Free Knowledge Institute: the creators of the SELF-platform: a site for collaboratively creating teaching-materials. And this platform was a topic many interesting presentations were on: especially their approach to diffs, and the Gnowledge-system that runs their concept-map are worth a look (had good conversations with both their creators).

Besides our own, which went well again :) (slides are here, sources in svn), another interesting presentation was by the Vibal Foundation (ran by a publishing-house) from the Phillipines. They run a bunch of interesting projects, like a Wikipedia-like site with more relaxed rules, and do this in the spirit of their local needs and circumstances, like being a formerly oral culture. Also the talks by Stephen Downes and Anne Østergaard were interesting.

And last but not least there was a speech of Richard Stallman again, at the beginning of the conference, on the first day. During the question-round he was ehm; quite harsh and sometimes even hostile (must admit that some in the audience were a bit so too). But afterwards we did get a chance to talk a bit: what it comes down to is that while Stallman does see possibilities for freedom in Web-/ Software-as-a-service-communities, he believes this freedom to be a lesser, and thus not a good (or no) freedom to strive for. In this sense he still thinks one should not rely on another’s machine to “do calculations with ones data”, with which, I think we disagree on 2 points:

• First of all this “lesser freedom of the web” is not so much less. As we proposed it: all code of the web-app under the Affero GPL, all content under a CC-By-Sa license, and rights for the user-community over the running application. Freedom on these 3 planes allows the community to determine it’s course, and to leave and start anew (exodus/fork) in case this fails or there is no agreement possible. Pretty close to the rights of citizens in good societies I would say.
• Secondly the web is good and useful, and can do things desktop pc’s can’t do. For example be accessed on any device and machine, anywhere, give users ease of not having to install and update the software, model social networks that can be collaboratively extended, and allow for all kinds of rating, tagging and sharing. In short the web is not evil, the web is just social, and when the serf-like conditions that many Web2.0 app-users are under now (they’re even being sold wit the app, as serfs were sold with the land in historic times) are replaced by social freedoms, the web will be a better place.

In short: social software requires social freedoms. Discuss it with us on LogiLogi.

The RMLL was a really cool & interesting event. The atmosphere rocked, and there were plenty of good & interesting people around :) Sadly enough I could not speak with many of them, and follow even fewer talks, as the RMLL was French, very French. I did not expect this as they announced it as an international event. But I should have guessed it as they used the word “mondial”, instead of “global” ;) Anyway, their friendliness made up for this, really. Very friendly & caring pplz at the event. Definitely go there if you can, even if you only speak Arabic.

Besides ours on LogiLogi ;), there was one especially interesting presentation, it was on Sophie. It is a desktop app, and meant for creating books. They can contain video’s, be scripted, auto-play through timelines, act like presentation-slides and be exported to the web. Interesting, but no web-app of course…

We gave 2 presentations at the RMLL 2008, the first was on Tuesday the 1st and it was about LogiLogi, our plans to split up LogiLogi into separate webservices, and 2 debates that we were going to have during the week via LogiLogi. The first of the debates was about the future of Free Software on the Web 2.0. And the other about LogiLogi itself. Our second presentation was a short introduction to LogiLogi and a report on the results of the debate. The slides can be downloaded here and here – the second, on the Future of Free Software on the web. The video of our presentations will be available in some weeks, and both our presentations were also broadcasted live in entire France via the Freenews TV-channel! They will be there all summer in their program-loop :-)

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation was also at the conference. I had a chance to quickly discuss our/my ideas on Free Software on Web2.0 with him. As he thinks very differently about them. According to what seems to be his view, one should only use one’s own computer for one’s own “calculations”. Sad. We think the web is not evil, freedom at the Web-community-level is possible, and that it matters. He told us he would be at our presentation to take part in the live debate, but he could not make it in the end because of an interview.

Hope we can discuss this later, at the FKFT in Barcelona, where Stallman and I will meet again. Freedom on the Web should not be ignored. Currently our views are quite far apart, like on this picture.

The LogiLogi discussion platform is still our main project.

The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).

The first was Discovery/Talia. It is a project that comes very close to LogiLogi in terms of what it wants to achieve, but it takes a different approach. It is being developed in 2 stages/environments. The first is a web-platform (in Rails) to be used for multiple sites containing philosophical sources, like the works of Wittgenstein and Hegel. These sites are to be maintained by specialists that function as gatekeepers. The second part is a desktop- application for writing philosophical texts, and for annotating and sharing them. This bit of the project is comparible to LogiLogi in it’s aims. We look forward to it’s development. And we are currently discussing posibillities for cooperation.

The second was PReE, by the Electronical Textual Cultures Lab. Also being developed in Rails, it focuses mainly on making existing texts available, but it also wants to have features like the easy annotation-system that LogiLogi has. Sadly enough PReE is not yet online or available, but we are now also in contact with them.

Our presentation was on saturday, and it went well. We got many good questions and references. The slides of our presentation can be downloaded here. And you can find the tex sources in our repository.

In all it was a great conference, and surely worth the trip to Oulu, Finland. There were quite some cool people around, and after the conference we had an excursion that basically was a long bus-trip on which we had many interesting conversations. By the way, a good thing about the city of Oulu is that they have city-wide free wireless for everyone. Hope it spreads :-)

The ECAP08 was held in Montpellier, France, from 16-18 June. It was a very exciting, fast and inspiring conference, about the cross-roads of philosophy and computer-science/informatics. Talks ranged from the philosophy of information, gender and information- ethics to (ideas about) applications for philosophers.

And in this last category 3 interesting live systems were presented. The first was wiki-debate, the platform affiliated with the conference. While in principle an interesting approach (especially their visualisations are nice), I think the basic commenting feature suffered from a combination overcomplexity and lack of time on the side of the conference participants. The next was co-here. This system is beautifully designed and really looks Web2.0ish, but imho it is too much focused on enforcing simple, linear logical relations, at least for my line of philosophy.

Last but not least there was of course our presentation on LogiLogi Manta. The (classroom-sized) room was packed with people, even some had to stand in the back. We received some good questions and references and many positive reactions. The sheets can be downloaded here. And the video should also become available in some time.

We have good news again, and this time there is no first of April in sight. Our submission to the European conference on Computing and Philosophy has been accepted! So besides our general presentation at the Digital Humanities 2008 in Oulu, Finland (June 25-29) we will now also be presenting in Montpellier, France (16-18 June). The presentation we give at ECAP will especially be about the philosophy behind Manta.

So if you are from the warm European south you will now also be able to attend a presentation about LogiLogi Manta!

And last weekend we also gave a presentation for the Dutch Linux User Group in Utrecht. It was in – you guessed – Dutch, and not just about LogiLogi Manta, but also about the importance of Free Software for the web. It was quite fun to give a presentation to an audience like this, and for it to be in Dutch for a change :) Anyway, for those capable of reading Dutch, the sheets are online here.

Freedom matters, not just for software like your Operating System or Firefox, but also for live web-applications. And with more and more functionality and social uses of software moving to the web it will soon only matter more.

About this was my talk at the T-Dose conference of one and a half week ago. I only now come to write about it as my (Wybo’s) father died just 10 days before the conference, and I’ve spent much time with my family since then. And yet even after this unsettling confrontation with the uncertainties of life, freedom for the Web still matters to me.

The presentation first goes into the nature of Web 2.0, and why freedom matters there. Then follows an intermezzo about our project LogiLogi Manta, which is nearing completion. After that it tells about the tendency of many – and especially a certain well known search-engine from Mountain View – to be open at every level except where it would matter most; their own level. Then the distinction is made between 3 planes of freedom for the web; code, data, and community- rights. Two of these 3 levels of freedom go beyond the already much more widely acknowledged importance of Free Software.

So if you have 30 minutes to spare, I would say; have a look at the presentation for yourself. A video is online here in the Ogg-format (If you’re not Dutch you can skip the first 2 minutes of the video, my talk is in English as of that point), and here is a different video in mov-format. A google-video is upcoming ;)

The sheets can be browsed or downloaded as a pdf.

Besides this the conference was great with interesting people like Bas de Lange of Software Freedom Day and Oliver Cleynen of GNU/Linux Matters. Oliver held a talk that is of interest too in the context of Freedom and Freedom for the Web. It can be viewed here