Thoughts and Tips from the 2013 Open Data Week
I participated to the 2013 Open Data Week in Marseille to lead a workshop on an idea I had a couple years ago, one that seems to be more and more ready to seriously take off every month:
Girl Scouts, other equal opportunity employers and... software discrimination
Casual browsing (more on this below) just brought me to the website of the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada (GSSN). As many other organizations of all kinds, in the USA and elsewhere, they are, as clearly stated in their official Application for Employment:
an equal opportunity employer. All applications for employment will be considered without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, citizenship, disability or marital status.
Some questions and suggestions to all commoners
I’m just back from the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. A great event, in which I took lots of general notes synthesized in another post that I’ll publish tomorrow. This one, instead, contains just questions and suggestions from me that I already shared at the conference, or I’d like to share with everybody interested in Commons. A separate post contains my critique to certain arguments against copyright I heard at the same conference.
On copyright being useless because it's recent
I just attended the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. During the Knowledge stream of that event something came up that has bothered me for a long time: the assertion that copyright is useless also because it’s just a few centuries old, and artists were doing just fine even before, thank you very much. Here is what I would have repeated, if there had been more time during those sessions.
I find this particular argument against copyright very, very weak, to say the least, and I’d really like to see it go, for at least three reasons: