I’m delighted to announce that a student of mine, Tina Sherman, passed her dissertation defense today. I don’t want to “scoop” Tina by revealing her findings. However, she interviewed about two thirds of the leaders of all the self-described “public interest” groups that work in the fields of communications and information technology. These are the groups that lobby or litigate–ostensibly in the interests of the public–on issues like the number of TV stations that a company can own, the availability of licenses for local, “low-power” radio stations, the basic rules governing the Internet, the number of years that copyright protection lasts, and the amount of money that we spend equipping schools with computers. Tina also interviewed several foundation executives who fund these advocacy groups. Her research portrays one fairly typical subset of the “public interest community,” roughly 30 years after Ralph Nader, John Gardner, and their peers created the first of these groups. The results are important and troubling.

The Post‘s “Outlook” section is completely devoted to opinion articles. Yesterday, the Outlook editors chose to reprint a portion of a blog. They didn’t use the word “blog.” Instead, the article began:

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, director of the Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa, is a visiting scholar this year at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Policy Studies. He writes a monthly newsletter about Middle East politics that he sends to 300 people in 23 countries. It also appears on the Web at almagor.blogspot.com. His comments in the newsletter about Israel’s recent assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin prompted a spirited exchange with several recipients. The following excerpts are published with the writers’ permission.

Anyone who is familiar with blogs will recognize the style of the entries that follow. They are too articulate to be transcriptions of unrehearsed speech, yet they are informal. At least some of the participants appear to know each other, and all adopt a familiar tone (“Hi Steve”). The writing is personal and vivid. The participants appear knowledgeable, but they express opinions rather than present information. They are an international group, and their occupations are very diverse, yet they converse as peers. The reprint in the Post is actually more typical of blogs than the original material on Almagor’s website, for Almagor lists his sources (including academic articles) and writes fairly long essays.

I haven’t noticed any previous occasion when a great American newspaper chose to reprint portions of a blog as part of its editorial content. Of course, more people are already visiting the most popular blogs than reading any article in the Post. Nevertheless, I presume that newspaper editors retain a sense of professional superiority over bloggers, so the appearance of a blog in the “Outlook” section is a symbolic moment.

Working mainly with high school students, we have begun building a community website. Our ultimate goal is more ambitious: to make the website part of a whole independent, non-profit association called an “Information Commons.” The Commons would cooperate with peer associations in other communities, sharing software and ideas.

One of our latest ideas is to provide web hosting and design services to selected nonprofits that want to be nested within the Prince George?s Information Commons website. We would also offer several features to these local nonprofits–and to others that prefer to maintain independent websites.

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Here’s an idea that some colleagues and I are going to try to promote at the University of Maryland. The University (or perhaps the University and Prince George’s County, where we are located) would launch a peer-reviewed journal for high-quality research on the community. Anyone would be eligible to submit articles, maps, datasets, and images, but submissions would be peer-reviewed and publication standards would be high. The central administration of the University would promote the journal as a prestigious publication venue for faculty. Although this website would not have the status of a major disciplinary journal, its quality would be high and it would advance several core purposes for the University (see below). Therefore, the central administration would ask departments to treat it as the equivalent of high-status specialized publications for tenure and promotion purposes.

In order to increase the value of the publication for community residents, it could be linked to a website that also provided: research summaries written for lay audiences (perhaps in Spanish as well as English); basic information about the County; links to other online resources; and open forums for public discussion.

Goals:

Universities are experimenting with new forms of free, open-access digital publication, motivated by the soaring costs of journal subscriptions and the enormous positive potential of free, online publishing. For example, the University of California has created the exemplary California Digital Library, and MIT provides its course materials free for the world to use, gambling that this giveaway of high-quality material will enhance its reputation. To the best of our knowledge, no other university has developed a free online publication focused on its own community, and this could become a model.

Any group that was involved in establishing this journal would need to discuss and answer the following questions:

What is the geographical scope: Prince George?s County; the Washington Metro area, or the State of Maryland?

What is the disciplinary reach: The social sciences? The social sciences and the humanities? All the liberal arts? The liberal arts and the fine arts?

(Bloomington, IN) The category of “scholarly communications” includes books and journal articles; datasets, maps, images, and software; and informal exchanges such as discussions at meetings, emails, blogs, gossip, and even resumes and letters of recommendation. Almost all of this material can now be digitized and stored perpetually for anyone to use. Knowledge is a “non-rivalrous” good; if I take some, there isn’t less for you. In fact, it is often cumulative: knowledge is worth more the more it is used, and each item becomes more valuable the more other items are also available. Thus knowledge can function as a “commons,” a public resource. On the other hand, there are problems. The main one is probably the “provisioning problem”: finding a way to pay for, or otherwise encourage, the creation of free goods.

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