First, though, I want to describe some of the exciting project highlights from the last few weeks. Because C4 is a multi-disciplinary institution, different projects end up affecting different audiences, so I wanted to put them all in one post.

GrassrootsMapping.org
Jeff Warren's project continues to spread, with new maps made in New York, China, and several other places by people with no MIT connection. We have so many continuing uploads from communities in the Gulf that we recently had to purchase new RAID storage. Good Magazine recently wrote about this growing project.

At MIT, we know that research was worth conducting when it spins off into a new enterprise. C4 researchers Jeff and Sara Anne Wylie have done just that, creating a new organization that tries to help communities by generating scientific information. Called the Public Laboratory of Science and Technology, it drives innovation that pushes grassroots mapping in new directions. Check their recent projects, like hacking cameras to view photosynthesis and make spectrograms to detect whether the photos that Gulf communities have been taking are really of BP's spilled oil.

VoIP Drupal
VoIP Drupal, a project that research scientist Leo Burd has been working on for more than a year, was announced at DrupalCon last week. Several telephony developers have signed on to develop the VoIP side of the project, and they join famous Drupal group Civic Actions, which has been contributing on the Drupal scripting side. In brief: I'll be very surprised if "this isn't a big thing":http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/03/voip-drupal-kicks-off-at-drupalcon072.html.

Sourcemap
Another great project from C4 that is in the process of spinning off is Sourcemap, by Leo Bonanni and Matthew Hockenberry, which recently formed an independent governing foundation. Always popular with journalists and enviro-geeks, the project is now being taken on by businesses. One big development is that Office Depot is officially using Sourcemap on some of their product packaging.

Also, the University of Montana's School of Journalism collaborated with us over the past term by using Sourcemap as part of a class on online news. Our collaborators, Professor Lee Banville and American Public Media's Public Insight Network, wanted to connect journalism students in Banville's class with tools and technologies that construct perspectives and develop narrative frameworks for the web. In practice, this ranged from ideas on crowdsourced feedback and commentary to devices like web mapping that drive new presentations of stories.

BrownBagToolkit / Junkyard Jumbotron
The first part of research scientist Rick Borovoy's project on face-to-face information sharing has launched, and was immediately picked up by BoingBoing and Gizmodo. Check out this video explainer:

Junkyard Jumbotron from chris csik on Vimeo.

extrACT:
In mid-November, we launched the third stage of our extrACT project, WellWatch. A dozen communities in PA and NY have expressed interest in the system, so we are conducting a one-week training tour across the state in March.

Between the Bars
The world's first blogging system for the incarcerated, who aren't allowed access to the Internet, attracted 400 prisoner users from 18 states before we had to suspend service (for reasons best explained later). Inventor Charles DeTar is now on a clear path to relaunch the system in the next few of weeks.

Cronicas de Heroes
Alyssa Wright created Hero Reports for NY, as an alternative to the City's "see something, say something" campaign. Making citizens suspicious of each other is not the first step toward creating a safer, more civic city. Last December we launched a Juarez version of the project called Cronicas de Heroes, which continues to bustle. Over 700 heroes have been acknowledged, and the press continues to make up for lost good news from a city that usually only gets attention when something bad is happening.

Alyssa and Yesica Guerra, who directed the Juarez implementation, were invited to and presented at TEDActive, the global do-gooder wing of the famous TED conference. New communities are asking to run Hero Reports, from Monterrey to South Wood County, Wisconsin. Just last week the project was cloned in Kazakhstan without any help from us!

As you can see, things can get pretty busy here at C4. Several other projects are in the works and should be launched in the next few months. Stay tuned to Idea Lab for updates.

Junkyard Jumbotron from chris csik on Vimeo.

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media has done a variety of breakthrough civic systems with phones. Examples range from Leo Burd's What's Up platform to the Call4Action class and its cool student projects.

We at C4 love these projects, but working with phones has always been a bear. A lot of programming is necessary. In many cases, people start with the phone and end up building custom infrastructure that begin to represent an actual content management system. Projects like Ushahidi or our earlier txtMob are really just simple CMSs with a few custom features for texting inputs.

So Leo Burd has been working on making the Drupal CMS more friendly for the billions of people around the world who only have access to basic telephony rather than smart phones and the web. Leo is launching the first release of the voice over Internet protocol Drupal platform at DrupalCon next week.

Here's what Leo wrote about this exciting project:

VoIP Drupal is an innovative framework that brings the power of voice and Internet-telephony to Drupal sites.

VoIP Drupal can be used to build hybrid applications that combine regular touchtone phones, web, SMS, Twitter, IM and other communication tools in a variety of ways, including:

* Click-to-call functions
* Voice- and SMS-based Go Out to Vote campaigns
* 2-1-1 and 3-1-1 lines
* Phone-based community surveys
* PTA reminders
* Story recording / playback
* Group voicemail
* Geo-based callblasts aimed at specific streets or locations
* And much more!

In technical terms, the goal of VoIP Drupal is to provide a common API and scripting system that interoperate with popular Internet-telephony servers (Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Tropo, Twilio, etc) dramatically reducing the learning and development costs associated with the construction of communication systems that combine voice and text technologies together.

The following VoIP servers are currently supported:

* Tropo, through the voiptropo.module (available soon)
* Twilio, through the voiptwilio.module

This project is under continuous development. If you would like to get involved in the project or ask questions, discussion is taking place on the VoIP Drupal Group. You can find more information in the VoIP Drupal Handbook.

The VoIP Drupal platform has originally been conceived and implemented by C4, with major contributions from Civic Actions.

First on the scene were a variety of technologists who were addressing the problem of people finding -- how to bring separated people back together, both for peace of mind and for social capital. Several sites started offering this service, like the American Red Cross FamilyLinks and the custom-made Haitianquake.com.

By Friday, Google stepped in with its offering, and because of their capacity most everyone agreed to standardize around it, even though it lacked some of the functionality of other systems, and had only a few dozen people in its database (compared to Haitianquake's 6000). Similar utilities are still springing up -- the Miami Herald and the New York Times came out with their own -- but developers are lobbying these and other organizations to contain the spread. Silos will only make it more difficult for people to find each other. The tool to use is http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/. Blog it, yo.

Also just launched by Ushahidi, is an effort to create a sort of 911 for Haiti, based on SMS messages. The SMS shortcode 4636 is now live, and messages are being queued. A web interface then allows Creole speaking "dispatchers" -- from anywhere on the Internet -- to take the SMS messages off the queue to organize and tag them.

The SEIU, with tens of thousands of Haitian American members, is setting up command centers in four North American cities and its members will be actively dispatching, but any Creole speaking web user can volunteer. Once the messages are coded, they will generate feed outputs that can be used by various organizations (including journalists, humanitarian relief workers, etc.). Messages are just starting to come in: no doubt the biggest problem starting Sunday will be what to do with all the data.

There is now talk of doing a similar "mechanical turk" style translation interface as well, allowing Haitian Americans to act as real-time mediators between aid workers and citizens. Voice systems are requisite in a country with 50% illiteracy, but also significantly harder to create and more computationally demanding.

A list of some of the software initiatives:

http://haiti.crisiscommons.org/atrium/home

And volunteers:

http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake

And organizations:

http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod/or/organisation

For example, I attended a session on government and data and sat next to a deputy CTO from the White House. I was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What's not to like?

As I write this, I'm sitting in a huge room in the third sub-basement of the Grand Hyatt in D.C. Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer is speaking, so it's a good chance for me to reflect on what I have seen so far.

Tim O'Reilly is pushing the idea of Government as operating system or platform. I interpret this to mean that if Government allows "OS calls" or "APIs," then civil society and commercial services will be able access government in new ways. Think of the strategy behind Google Maps: Google releases the API, offers some hosting, and as a result tens of thousands of developers create mapping applications. If an API was released for accessing a government process or service, users would be able to read (and perhaps write) back to it. It's a big idea, and I'll need some time to follow it through completely. Does the idea break down, and if so then where? What happens if the intention or interest of the government suddenly changes? What would writing look like, and would it be subject to misuse? Isn't writing already being done by lobbyists, and do we really want to make that process simpler?

Regardless of the details, something is clearly going on here, sixty feet under street level, in a vast but unreal ballroom. An unholy alliance of free/open enthusiasts, D.C. suits, information activists, spooks, soldiers, and entrepreneurial techies are thinking about government and the Internet, and moreover they are experimenting.

One of my favorite examples of a successful government "hack" is called Amver and it's from the Coast Guard. It was started as a decidedly pre-2.0 app -- or even .4beta! -- in 1958. Amver is a voluntary, opt-in system for ship captains, asking that they simply let the Coast Guard know their departure and destination, and to report their location every 48 hours. That's it. The Coast Guard then keeps track of this, and when any vessel is in danger, it extrapolates the nearest ships and knows whom to contact to ask for help. Amver was used in the recent Air France crash -- indeed, 190 rescues have relied on Amver so far this year. Recently, Coast Guard developers created a graphic-only Web input interface, a virtual spinning globe like the one in Google Earth. This single, banal new feature has significantly increased their capacity simply because so many users of the system speak so many languages.

Why do I like this project? It's a reminder of how much can be done with information, it's opt-in, and it is deathly serious. Also, it demonstrates how important it is to be language inclusive.

Another great moment at the conference was the announcement of the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America contest winners. GovPulse, for example, won second place by making the Federal Record readable.

Other notable highlights:

• EPA functionary Kim Balassiano's MyEnvironment, a location-based portal for all the EPA data in your area. (Personally, I would have named it EveryBlockTox.)
• Mikel Maron's work with Open Street Map. This is the humanitarian wing of the incredible OSM project. It maps places like Gaza, Afghanistan, or the largest slum in Africa. An audience member next to me asked, "Isn't Google already doing that?" The answer is no, absolutely not. Check Google's map of Kabul versus the one offered by OSM; there is no contest.
• George Clack of the U.S. State Department, who ran a competition for short documentaries answering the question, "what is Democracy?" Using YouTube, they allowed the public to vote on the best video. he videos are kind of tragic, but it is laudable that State is engendering dialog about democracy in contrast to the old approach of "making the world safe" for it. Clack was one of the several people in government who argued that government needs to learn how to let go online. It's okay if users of government sites have opinions, if they contradict your message, if they give you feedback. O'Reilly had a great line in this spirit: "Government does not regulate your political or personal opinions on the roads that it provides and maintains, so why should it be so worried about its Websites?"

And of course there were some lowlights:

• The very same State Department project. They had to throw out two thirds (!) of their finalists because the submissions used music under copyright. The intellectual property lobby is hampering our ability to conduct diplomacy, and thus damaging our national security.
• A presentation on Second Life diplomacy. Like most Second Life presentations, I had a great deal of trouble understanding what was actually happening, or how the use of bad 3D graphics helped or hurt the dialog. It did not take long for the presenter to start echoing the worst cyber-utopian spiel that we have heard since virtual reality made its debut: that this new media would finally create a massive global consciousness... If this is the new face of diplomacy I am cleaning out my bomb shelter.
• Are You Safe. This is an iPhone app that uses crime report databases to show urban "danger zones" and help people navigate through a city. We must have seen at least five such projects throughout the conference, all of which walk a dangerous line between being useful, ethically complicated, and potentially disturbing. There are laws that prevent this sort of information being used by real estate agents because it leads to more segregation an less social mobility. I question the utility, though, as well as the ethics. Does such an application in any way reduce crime? Does the app differentiate gang-on-gang, domestic, or other relational violence from professional robberies against strangers? Moreover, would Wall Street have shown up bright red and glowing over the five or six years preceding the mortgage crisis, during one of the longest and largest crimes in American history?
  

In many cases, the successful applications demoed at Gov2.0 reflected collaborative, two-directional implementations. They were often done by real organizations (the state of Utah, BART, the Coast Guard) that already have a working model of needs and users. The worst applications were often done by coders who moved into a new topic and created naive, first-order projects.

Most developers are thinking from databases outwards: they are simply hoping to visualize (or, if they are a behind the curve, "mash up") government databases. These projects offer quick, high returns, but in many cases actual users and uses are not well conceived.

Finally, fewer of these developers are designing around actual mechanisms of social change that might improve the situation they are visualizing. Nor are they imagining how to impact government with the data they are making usable. They should listen to Philip Ashlock, who gave the simple, pithy advice: "The goal is read/write government."

I mentioned earlier how sincerely interested a number of government people, most of whom are new to their jobs, are in accelerating public access. But data is slow in coming; systemic change will take a long time, and it is crucial to remember that not all administrations are as invested in transparency as this one is right now. So I was happy to see that a few of the projects are aimed specifically at expanding the data that's available, with or without goodwill from D.C.

Among these folks, the hero in the room is Carl Malamud who runs http://public.resource.org. Carl is a radical who crowbars open the U.S. government. In the mid-90s, with some urging from information activism god Jamie Love, Carl put the SEC's EDGAR database online against all odds (read the full story at http://public.resource.org/sec.gov), and has been continuing this mission in one form or another ever since.

Recently, Carl strolled into libraries around the country and managed to collect about 20 percent of PACER, the Federal court record system. PACER costs money to search because the government uses a commercial "value added" (to themselves, apparently) provider. But the government also allowed free access at a few libraries, at least until they noticed that Carl was downloading in bulk. After they closed the Malamud loophole, Carl provided that 20 percent to Steve Schultze and other insurgents at Harvard's Berkman Center and Princeton. This second team developed a Firefox plugin that allows lawyers who need to do PACER searches to do so for the regular fee. But as these lawyers access data it is cached by the plugin and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The next time someone searches PACER for a previously accessed court case, the plugin will intervene and access the now public and free cached data, rather than the private, official-but-expensive data. Steve admitted that his goal in building the plugin was simple: he wanted the plugin to be useful for as short a time as possible. If it works, it will show the government that it should be providing the information for free.

This is great information activism: building applications that provide services but also imply and, through their use, coerce further openness with the goal of a better society. In a sense, these projects are "sticky" -- they function but also transform.

If anyone has a good name for these new sorts of applications, please suggest it in the comments!

Here is a brief video (by film makers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams) that gives a sense of the flavor of FNFCM09.

Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look like activism. The word activism is a site of some contention: frankly, for many it evokes "those damned hippies." In our research on civic groups that form spontaneously in the face of adversity, we have seen how people become -- often against their will -- interpellated into activities like fact-finding, document digging, attending public hearings, and public story telling, activities that overlap with many of the those practiced by investigative or beat journalists. We met one software engineer who was working to protect his suburb from corporate development and pollution; he was genuinely upset because he had been written up in a local paper with the caption "activist" under his photo. He told us, "I'm not an activist, I'm a software engineer!" Unwilling or not, in many cases these activists are the ones following an issue and documenting it for the public record. There are clearly many pitfalls to this configuration, just as there are pitfalls in journalism. And certainly, the idea of activist reportage leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many journalists trained in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century.

Of course, the notion of a free press was not always synonymous with impartiality. Newspapers were critical in helping spur and organize the abolitionism movement of the 19th Century. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a pastor, also published the Alton [Illinois] Observer, a newspaper that would now probably be described as a shrill blog, where he extolled the radical idea that slavery should be abolished and people have the same rights regardless of their appearance. For this editorial position, mobs attacked his offices and destroyed his printing presses three times. The delivery of his fourth printing press to a river-front warehouse in Alton led to a raging riot: Lovejoy was shotgunned to death at the age of 35, his still-crated press dismantled and the pieces thrown into the mighty Mississippi.

I would assert that this sort of freedom of press was at least as important to constitutional framers as the right to a stable daily with comics and movie reviews; any discussion of the future of communities and information should question, embrace, or challenge these historical examples at least as much as the examples from recent US history. We can also travel slightly outside American borders and see in stark relief, from Mexico to Korea to Zimbabwe, how activist journalism can be a critical part of the struggle for a free and just society. Our collective recollection of newspapers as stable, reputable, major limestone-and-mortar operations resembles the model of a mid-century GM or IBM far more than they do many of the contemporary institutions that are currently thriving. That isn't to say that we should only value fast companies or that we are beyond stable enterprises, simply that such institutions will probably not look like they used to.

For better or worse, we need to accept that the people most invested in finding out what is happening to a community are often going to be the ones with a vested interest in the outcome. We need to concentrate, then, on how to ensure that the community hears from all the vested interests; not just the richest or most powerful. And we need to discover how to best match information activism with positive social change.

Call for Action Class

This semester I had the privilege of co-teaching a class titled Call for Action: Mobile Technologies and Social Change with the talented Nadav Aharony and the help of David Reed, Katrin Verclas, Ethan Zuckerman, and others. We took Jack Knight at his word, not just that "We seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition" but also that we "rouse them to pursue their true interests." Bestirring sounds quaint, like something one might do to one's mint julep. Rousing is more active, and understanding how technology can help to rouse and support action was a major theme in the class.

Throughout the semester we looked at a variety of methodologies and texts for guidance and inspiration: In political science we looked at Charles Tilly, who made a career of understanding social conflict and change. In Sociology we looked at Manuel Castells, who argues that mobile technologies have created a space for new configurations of the citizen in public space. Closer to home we worked with David Reed, one of the creators of the Internet and a quiet but effective information activist. We worked with and tested Nadav's comm.unity system, and ad-hoc communications platform for smart peer-to-peer networks that prevent information from being centralized and controlled. And we had visits from Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, Nick Matthewson of Tor, and others.

With an experimental class, one never know what the next week will bring. The final week, however, brought many remarkable projects, including:
•A system for Venezuelan doctors to covertly export data about the Dengue epidemic ravaging their country, despite Chavez's recent law forbidding medical professionals from mentioning the disease
•Code that allows for SMS steganography, i.e. the hiding of messages in messages. With this unique algorithm, a few messages like "b sure 2 bring home teh milk, honey!" can be encoded to contain a shorter message like "MDC meeting at Universalist Church 2100 hrs"
•An application that scrapes government web sites for impending timber sales and clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest, mapping them and notifying activists to organize and stage demonstrations
•SMS and iPhone app protest system that allows demonstrators to crowd source their experiences and organizers to better understand what is happening on the streets

One student, who apparently never sleeps, completed two projects in May and even deployed one in the field, resulting in 1,000,000 SMS messages being sent throughout Mexico. The texts initiated a an interactive questionnaire, asking a diverse group of Mexicans about their experience with the flu. A total of 56,000 filled out their experiences, and the resulting data, while a little noisy, seems to perfectly match the rate of infection determined by other, slower, less distributed methods. Andrés argues that this may be the best technique for monitoring early outbreaks, since cellphones are far more common across location, age, and income in Mexico than other epidemiological inputs.

Andés wasn't content with a million text messages, or the top-down nature of the swine flu project, so he also launched a project to help Mexicans report and learn about voting fraud in the elections scheduled for this July 5. By matching Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS with public (or semi-public) government geographic databases, Cuidemos El Voto allows citizens to report or be notified about voting fraud at their individual polling place. With resolution down to a few blocks in the capitol, the system also notifies journalists and accredited elections monitors, allowing them to immediately locate and document fraud.

Residents out west, in some of the most scenic and (until recently) unspoiled parts of the US have called their regions a "national sacrifice zone" where their health, welfare, and environment are being traded for energy that used in other parts of the country. In many cases rural and suburban communities lack the experience, knowledge, or political capital to hold industry accountable. Industry can cut corners, use unspecified and dangerous chemicals, and negotiate substandard agreements with the people whose property and livelihood they are impacting. ICT systems that record an individuals' experiences, make them accessible, and allow these individuals to network and organize can help rectify the knowledge gap. Film maker Paula Aguilera followed some of our fieldwork and put together this video:

LRC is part of the larger ExtrAct project, which we've been working on for about a year, building out our technical infrastructure while doing field research and meeting with stake holders. The central clients for our systems are landowners, who generally have the least to gain from extraction, and the most to lose, and often don't have a choice about whether to get involved or not. But we've also met with subcontractors, lawyers and journalists, doctors and veterinarians, epidemiologists and toxicologists, geologists and environmentalists, industry representatives and government functionaries. LRC is a relatively simple web application, designed for citizens' first encounters with industry, allowing them to record and rate their experiences with industry representatives. We pushed to release the LRC application first as a response to the massive scramble for drilling rights (the oft-reported Marcellus Play) that is happening around the east and south east of the United States. Future ExtrAct applications will be designed around other phases in a citizen's relationship to extraction -- a relationship that is complex and that can last a lifetime.

Over the next months we'll be meeting with community groups around the country, introducing them to LRC and integrating their suggestions into the next components of the ExtrAct suite. These community groups are typically formed after locals realize that standard means of seeking to control their environmental, political, and economic environment -- like litigation, legislation, and regulation -- don't seem to be working. These community groups are our beta testers, have been actively involved in development, and after they have had a chance to populate LRC we will open it to the general public.

Other applications in ExtrAct aim to help impacted citizens use the data that industry and government disclose already, but is difficult to access or understand. We also hope to help communities to record and organize their own data on their situation, data that is often far more detailed and accurate than anything currently available. The accumulated local knowledge will feed back to other community members, but with luck will also be profoundly important to experts like epidemiologists, lawyers, and regulators. Most importantly for these communities, distributed over half the states in the country, is how the software can help mix local, geographically specific information with support for collective action both across and between communities. For instance, many communities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York are undergoing the kind of scramble for leases and drilling rights that communities in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming have lived through for 20 years. What can these Eastern communities learn from their Western cousins? How can they help each other? Can these different communities collaborate to build a more complete understanding of the massive corporations that are working across and between them?

Over the next few weeks, several members of our multidisciplinary team will post followups that describe different parts of our project. First up is Sara Wylie, an anthropologist who has done nearly three years of ethnography in affected communities, and co-founded the ExtrAct project. This is her first time making a new technology, but her background is in both laboratory biology and Science & Technology Studies (STS). If you don't know STS, it's a remarkable field that does empirical work to understand how technologies are created, how they affect society, and how society affects them. In many cases, technical discourses are completely unrelated to democratic ones, and trying to understand how they can be rejoined is central to many scholars, including Sara. She'll write about her work in listening to communities, and describe the unique qualities of natural gas development.

We are looking forward to describing the project as it continues, and to responding to your comments.

Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture.

Except that maybe you can. I believe that in many cases, the urge to find a business model is orthogonal to one of the most important social changes today, one that is reformulating labor, technology, and product in unexpected ways.

Let's take a step back and explore how we usually imagine a business. Conventional wisdom dictates that, in order to create a product, there needs to be a profitable business (a firm), or similarly a well-funded non-profit with paid staff. The firm is a mixture of capital, labor, knowledge, and technology. The firm does the work of creating a product, in the way the Washington Post Company puts out the Washington Post newspaper. (Or, at least, still put it out when this post went online.) The firm's profits provide the capital needed to sustain the enterprise, and the actual work on the product is done within the firm. All this is so obvious that it hardly seems worth repeating, but therein lies the problem: the business model that assumes a firm is so ubiquitous that many people unknowingly conflate the firm with what it produces. They think that a product needs a firm, and even that each tends to scale with the other.

While the model in which a firm produces a product is common and viable, some of the biggest product success stories in recent history don't actually come from businesses. That's not to say that no one is making money from these products; there is plenty of green in these fields. But there isn't a one-to-one mapping between business (in the sense of a firm) and product. These new products are generated under the alternate organization of knowledge, labor, and capital called the free software model.

Free software has already had a profound impact on the world of IT, and its impact is being felt in other domains as well. Many people have heard of free software, Linux, or "open source," or may have downloaded the Firefox web browser. But few understand how free software is made. I believe that the way free software projects are created and maintained could be a great model for the future of news.

Let's look at one tried and tested free software project: the Apache HTTP server. HTTP servers are the bit of software that lives on hardware servers, taking requests for web pages and then dishing them out. Since 1996 Apache has dominated the intertubes, and currently has 50% of the global market. It is a complicated, comprehensive piece of software, the necessarily fast and secure engine that serves most major web sites. Apache HTTP is not made by a business, nor is it even made by a non-profit; rather, it's made according to a free software model. True, it's technically hosted by the Apache Foundation, a 501c(3). But the Foundation was formed in 1999 -- three years after the product was launched, and after the server had about 60% of global share. The non-profit Apache Foundation was created to help manage the project, but little of the code is generated by employees of the Foundation. Moreover, Apache Foundation now hosts dozens of different projects other than the HTTP server, some that are nearly as successful.

So while the Apache Foundation clearly has a plan -- perhaps even a business model -- the product itself is co-produced by literally hundreds of other businesses and individuals. Apache HTTP and other massive free software projects are the fruit of the labor of a group of committed, er, "committers" -- people who are trusted to create and modify the project's source code and upload it to the community code repository. Their changes may well be integrated into to the next release of the software. A list of current Apache Foundation committers -- roughly 2000 -- can be found here, and the "trunk" (main version) of the server they're building together is here.

Why do these people work on a software project that isn't cutting them a paycheck? They might be working in a big company that uses Apache HTTP, and are paid by their company to tailor it or add functionality. Some have their own business or consultancy that is competitive precisely because they know Apache inside and out -- and they continue to work on Apache in their down time. Some are individuals who work all day programming for a company that takes their work and gives them a paycheck, but keeps the rights to their work and "manages" their contributions. These programmers then go home and program for a free software project, an egalitarian enterprise that they see as a contribution to society. There is no one personality type that describes a free software project committer; indeed, there's no one model of a free software project.

Different free software (and free culture) projects have quite different labor, funding, and management structures. Wikipedia is largely maintained by non-programmers. Ubuntu (an alternative to Windows or OS X, currently used by millions of people) has a multimillionaire founder and front man, is backed by a private company, and borrows from an older product called Debian for much of its technical foundation. The Python Foundation coordinates Python (my favorite programming language), and its sponsor page has a list of corporate logos that would overwhelm a racing car. None of the products of these collaborative initiatives runs off of a single traditional business, though many people are making money from and through these products.

The projects I've mentioned so far are large, with hundreds or thousands of contributors. But the free software model isn't just for big projects. By far, the majority of free software projects are not massive; they solve a smaller problem, and have one, two, or three contributors. They may see little use, and need little improvement. But some of these projects are huge, and have scaled incredibly: Wikipedia's english edition, love it or hate it, has 2.5 million articles, and has incorporated edits from 220 individuals in the minute that I wrote this sentence. (The Wikinews project has, in contrast, been something of a dud. Indeed, it fails in the way that much contemporary American journalism fails, by trying to create a neutral point of view. But while the Wiki* projects share some similarities to free software projects, they are also different, and I don't think we can generalize much from Wikinews' shortcomings.)

These free software projects are based not in business units but in communities. Granted, in virtual, distributed communities rather than geographic ones, but communities nonetheless. None of these projects could have existed before the Internet, but projects like Debian also have quasi-Masonic systems of induction, including personal meetings and cryptographic signatures for all the trusted committers. Anyone who can contribute working code can join, and if they aren't too sociopathic they can rise within the enterprise. The more people involved in a project, the more "eyeballs on the code," meaning the less chance of a security hole, stale code, or inefficiency. This leads to great product: after all, Microsoft and Sun didn't cede the leading market position in web servers for over a decade because they decided they didn't want it. Apache was just plain better.

It's understandable that so many entrepreneurs default to a standard business model rather than the free software model -- even when they are creating web sites that will be served off of Apache HTTP. In many ways, the impact of free software is misunderstood or underestimated, in no small part because corporations like Microsoft have actively tried to block or obscure free software's success. But part of our unfamiliarity with free software models is because they are relatively new and quickly evolving, and their impact has mostly been felt in the guts of computers and networks. Every web user has "experienced" Apache HTTP much more than they have YouTube or Facebook -- easily thousands of times more -- but most of them didn't know it because Apache is doing its work transparently. Wikipedia and Ubuntu are, nonetheless, recent proof that it's possible to create goods and services that aren't just for hypergeeks, and even business schools are starting to take notice of how these remarkable products were made and are sustained.

At the Center for Future Civic Media we're not only looking at a journalism model, or even a firm-oriented business model. Indeed, many of our projects borrow the labor/knowledge/capital models of free software, activism, or other community-based enterprises. In the nearly two hundred years since LLCs and corporations started, they have produced most of the products we touch or use every day. But there's a new alternative to that model, and it's one that might lead to stronger, healthier, more informed communities.