Some of us folks with New Yorkers for Fair Use have been planning an informal meetup with Andy Oram over dinner on August 30th, and we thought we'd put out a call and see who'd like to join in an informal chat with him about his various interests. Send an email to Seth Johnson at seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org or Jay Sulzberger at jays@panix.com by this Saturday, August 18 so we can see how many want to join in. At that point we'll select a location based on the response, somewhere in Manhattan.

Details

Here are some links to some of Andy's articles for you to get a sense of his areas of interest. Below that there's a bit of a blurb with some questions he suggested, along with his bio. Andy Oram is a longtime editor with O'Reilly Media, and writes on numerous concerns related to technology, software, communications policy and information freedom.

You can see a list of his articles at: http://praxagora.com/andyo/professional/article.html .

First, some links of interest: Online Media/Tech Support:

• Splitting Books Open: Trends in Traditional and Online Technical Documentation
• Characteristics of New Media in the Internet Age
• How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers: Results of Recent Data Analysis
• Do-It-Yourself Documentation? Research Into the Effectiveness of Mailing Lists
• Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey

The Internet:

• Network Neutrality and the False Idol of Innovation
• Network Neutrality and an Internet with Vision
• An Open System Promotes Diversity of Content
• Gee, When Did We Give Away the Internet? An Analysis of News about WSIS
• A Nice Way to Get Network Quality of Service?

Various

• The Desktop I'd Like to See
• (On DRM) Never Again to Validate One's Experience
• A Free Software Agenda for Peer-to-Peer
• Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
• Why I Do Not Install Filters on my Children's Computer

Open Standards/ODF

• The Massachusetts Open Document Adoption: No Conflict of Interest
• How a Standard can Kill a Standard (OOXML versus ODF)
• Open Standards Alliance: Make Your Voice Heard

And Here's a Possible Blurb:

An informal gathering with Andy Oram, Editor at O'Reilly Media ----------------------------------------

...to discuss open content and collaboration, funding models for content, and the economics of digital networks (and numerous other things)

Date: Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Time: 7:00 pm

Place: TBD

Discussion will be kicked off by topics such as:

* Why do people contribute free content, and what can society or businesses do to increase participation and quality?

* In an age where many people can't afford books or don't want to read them, how do people learn technical skills?

* What characteristics distinguish the arts in digital media from twentieth-century and pre-twentieth-century media?

* How can writers earn a living from content in an age of free redistribution?

* How will new stages of high-bandwidth networking be funded (can advertising carry the cost?)

Biography

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy specializes in free software projects and software engineering. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever released by a U.S. publisher on Linux, the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer, and the recent best-seller Beautiful Code. Andy is also a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and writes frequently on policy issues and trends related to the Internet and to technical innovation and its effects on society. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents, business aspects of open source, and telecom issues are among the topics covered in his articles at: http://praxagora.com/andyo/professional/article.html

He is currently doing research on free, online, technical documention, along with experiments in new tools, as described at: http://praxagora.com/community_documentation/

An article he wrote about art on the Internet, titled "Characteristics of new media in the Internet age," is maintained as a wiki at: http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Chapters_for_Characteristics_of_new_media