I?m in the Cerritos Public Library, waiting for the second day of the Information Commons meeting. There are several other bloggers here who are ?covering? the discussions. Eli Edwards, who posts great comments on my blog and has a terrific one of her own, is posting detailed notes. Jessamyn West, who has been running librarian.net since 1999, is here, but she has been deferring to Eli and Fred Stutzman to blog about the conference. Rick Emrich, the founder of Commons Blog , is also here. I don?t go to a lot of techie conferences, so it tickles me that posts are appearing online as people talk.

The library is astounding. It?s new and cost the city $47 million. Disney designers from nearby Anaheim helped to plan it, and it?s a kind of public-sector Disneyland. The children?s section, for example, contains a full-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex and a huge salt-water tank with sharks and a coral reef. There?s a lighthouse big enough to sit inside and various high-tech gizmos such as tv screens that show the visiting kids in various exotic settings. There are also books.

Each section is ?themed? in similar ways. There?s a baronial, gothic library with vaulted stone ceilings, leather chairs, leather-bound books, and a fake electric hearth. The large Asian book section is supposed to look like Shanghai circa 1930 (when Indiana Jones visited).

I wish I could take my kids here; they could have fun for a whole day. I?m impressed that a smallish community would put so many resources into a public facility devoted to learning (whatever you may think of their taste). However, this is a conference about the ?commons,? and it strikes me that the Cerritos Library is almost antithetical to the ideal of a commons. The model here is a democratic-consumerist one. The city hired expert librarians to spend $47 million of public funds in the private sector to purchase tailored experiences for individual patrons. Because everything is finished to a high sheen, planned to the last millimeter, and high-tech, there are few ways for citizens or groups to contribute. In fact, the typical urban public library?with its dirty, peeling, whitewashed walls and aging collections?may actually make a better commons. Often the walls are covered by children?s art, the new purchases are funded by bake sales, and the special events are organized by neighbors. (My wife, for example, runs a weekly “Children’s Book Bingo” event at our local library every summer.)

I don?t think it?s fair that Cerritos should have a $47 million library unless the libraries in South Central Los Angeles are also well equipped, which they probably aren?t. However, paradoxically, the people of this affluent community may have bought themselves out of the commons and deprived themselves of the satisfactions of public work.

I’m on my way to Cerritos, CA (in eastern Los Angeles County), where the new public library has won awards as a model community center or “information commons.” This weekend, the American Library Association is holding a conference there. The subject is the commons, and I look forward to discussing intellectual property, the role of information in communities and civil society, the physical design of libraries, the place of youth in public libraries, and related topics. I will have a chance to present our work building a (strictly virtual) information commons for Prince George’s County, MD.

The Cerritos conference is mentioned on Commons Blog, where there’s also a relevant bibliography.

LIBRES (Library and Information Science Electronic Journal) has just published an article of mine entitled “What Should be the Role of Government-Supported Medical Websites?” I begin by noting that low-budget medical websites with crackpot advice can sometimes score higher than MedlinePlus on Google. MedlinePlus is a major product of the National Library of Medicine, which has an annual budget of $250 million and is supported directly by the National Institutes of Health. NIH, in turn, has a budget of $20 billion and employs 18,000 people, including 5-10 Nobel Laureates at any given time. The openness of the Internet means that official, white-coated medicine (as embodied by NIH) is losing its monopoly–and that is not necessarily a good thing.

I ask whether we should take various modest steps to push Web-searchers toward official portals like MedlinePlus. I conclude that we should, although this is not an easy question, since government sites have been known to manipulate medical information for political reasons, and drug companies have excessive power over the medical profession.

Peter Suber immediately noticed my article. Peter is probably the world’s leading advocate of open-access publishing. Material is open-access if it is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” LIBRES is an open-access publication: peer-reviewed, but available free on the Internet. Therefore, Peter monitors it. I asked him how he could track so many sites so efficiently, and he told me that he uses WebSite Watcher to “crawl” through 100 sites each day and notify him of all changes.

Peter says he agrees that government websites like MedlinePlus are great, but they would be better if NIH required all of the work it funded to be open-access. There is a serious proposal to make that happen: see Peter’s FAQ page.

Right now, my email inbox contains announcements of three important civic initiatives:

Community news services housed in local nonprofits, “information commons” based in libraries, large-scale deliberations on important issues … this could be the beginning of a true civic revival.

The Summit Collaborative’s Marc Osten and Katrin Verclas have written an important new paper entitled “The Power of the Internet to Engage a Generation.”

The paper provides a bold vision for how to use digital networks to encourage civic participation–although the authors note that “technology alone will most often not motivate young people to become deeply engaged. Any initiative that relies upon technology as a tool for engagement requires complementary offline components as well.”

Many young people have grown up online and “staked out the Internet as an alternative space for socializing, communicating, and information sharing–away from the eyes of parents and other adults.” The voluntary network of the Net fits many young people’s “anti-institutional” ideals. In some ways, their values are new (radically libertarian), but in other ways, their “ideas are a return to earlier concepts of grassroots politics. … David Weinberger suggests, ‘That is why the web, for all its technological newsness and oddness, feels so familiar to us. And that is why it feels like a return even though it is the newest of the new. The web is a return to the values that have been with us from the beginning.”

However, the potential of the Web for reinvigorating citizens’ networks is partly unfulfilled. Various advocacy groups use data mining and tailored messages to mobilize people, but these techniques (even when entirely well-intentioned) can be manipulative and can segment people into narrow, unreflective groups. There are tools for “augmented social networks” that give users more flexibility and discretion to find others with similar–or different–views and to develop reputations for tustworthiness. However, these tools tend to be proprietary, which means that they don’t work together and they cannot be adapted for new social uses.

Thus Osten and Verclas call for a new suite of open-source tools for strengthening diverse networks among young people. These tools would help youth to create discussion spaces and self-publish; to identify other people by interest; to contribute to large stores of data (such as maps); and to meet one another offline. Osten and Verclas also discuss the need to identify and support youth who are serving as leaders or “network nodes.”

A longer paper could go into much more concrete detail, but this is a great outline for further discussion.