 cloud. So this is a generative commons agreement call on Wednesday, June 2, 2021. And Bollier's book is, oh, here we go. I have a whole separate thought. Let me just share my screen real quick. And Bollier's book, here's David Bollier, Information Commons Project, New America Foundation, a bunch of other things. And then I've got his books here because he's a very prolific writer. And I created a sub thought for people who have written a lot of stuff. And the wealth of Think Like a Commoner, that's the book. I think I got a third or a halfway through Think Like a Commoner, which was really good. I just didn't make it through. Actually, a really great person to include in this conversation is Neil Gorinflow, who founded Shareable, and is still running Shareable. And Shareable has this magic skill that half the time when I find some new and interesting topic, it turns out the best article about that topic, which I think is relatively new and hot, has already been written by somebody at Shareable, which is a great trait. But so they were saying, you know, here's a bunch of books to read, The Zero Marshal Cost Society by Rifkin, The Purpose Economy, Capital in the 21st Century, I guess Piketty, The Entrepreneurial State, but I am digressing. So the idea here is to create something that the idea also is to create something that is a realistic agreement in the state of overprotection of intellectual property that exists in our world right now. So for example, courtesy of I think it's the 1976 Copyright Term Extension Act, or at least the Copyright Act of 1976, everything is copywritten by default, which is sucky that you don't have to apply for copyright on stuff. And then courtesy of a more recent act, I'm forgetting which one, I can look it up. It used to be, oh, sorry, this is about patents. But we've had part of this conversation before, patenting used to be first to invent, now it's first to file. Excuse me, which is completely praised. It's just, to me, it's a nutty thing that somebody has more lawyers and is quicker to file a patent that first to file wins. Lorelei, do you want to explain more about that? Yeah, sure. I want to say just for context, so I'm a patent agent. Oh, okay. But I have a history of having been through conventional fields and then I've gotten more liberal, more expansive. And so I use my knowledge. So I'm a patent agent, and I worked at a law firm, IP law firm, and I worked in-house, where I'm the only thing close to counsel. So I've done patents and trademarks and copyrights for them. And then I've sort of advised a lot of other people on trademarks. So I'm not yeah, I'm not so current and blah, blah, blah, but I know a bunch of things. And then also I worked as a consultant for Holo for a while, and I'm the one that helped them find the attorney that helped them sort out how to balance what to have, how to protect things publicly and what in their case they needed. The strategy they use is to keep some things private as we have enforcing people to use licenses. So I helped sort that out with them. Again, I'm only so deep into it. We had an attorney doing it, but I know a bunch of that. So I can be useful as a reference for some of these things or digging and finding things. And my yes, but about patents is that I believe that even though it's now first to file, which has the USB and alignment with the rest of the world, still when you invent something you have to include, or not when you invent something, when you patent something, when you apply to patent something, you have to include everyone that is an inventor. If you don't, you can get your rights taken away. So if this person invented it and you heard about it from them, but you then go file the application, if that person can prove or someone else can prove that you got it from them and you didn't include them and it's you lose your rights. If it's in the process, you may have to add them and they have as much rights them as the people that filed and they can choose to give it away. So there's still some outs. Oh, okay. So you have, you are forced by the law to include the actual inventors. Let's pretend that you're not the actual inventor. So you're forced to include and if you don't include them, you lose the right, you lose the patent, right? Right. If you're out of integrity and you're dishonest, you can lose all your rights. If it can be demonstrated that they invented this first, then you can't claim that as the invention really. You can only claim the improvement that you made and this part can still be like, there's a, there's some, yeah. But also importantly, because you have to include them, they then get the same rights that you have when you file. All inventors in a patent application have equal rights unless they've chosen to assign their rights to someone or something, an entity. Okay. So often when you go to work for an organization, they make you sign an assignment that you'll give everything to them. Yep. If that's not happened, everyone owns the rights and one inventor can say, hey, I'm giving it to the world for a penny. Right. And which is, which is what happens when you get employment that any standard American corporation, you sign away your rights to, to all the things you invent and they, they own full, full and clear, whatever. Right. Yeah. So as a consultant, I have to be careful when I work with a client that I'm, yeah. And so, so that's fabulous. And I didn't know that about first of all, which is like really actually important. And I feel so, so thank you because you have like 10 X the knowledge I have at least. That's still true. I don't have any reason to think that's not still true. I can still plug around and double check. I think that's the case. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think what we want to do, that's sort of in the spirit of OGM, we want to invent as little as necessary, basically only invent patchy stuff that connects things and umbrella ideas that make things that bring things together and so forth. So if there's a body of work like Creative Commons that already exists, awesome, great. We point to it and we say, we love this. Bring it in. If it has deficits, we point, we might suggest improvements or whatever. I don't, you know, I haven't pushed any, pushed Creative Commons that hard. And there's, I guess there's an interesting debate between CC zero and CC one, where CC zero is the public domain and what does that mean? And again, that's sort of a conversation beyond my pay grade. But there's a piece of the generative Commons agreement that also wants to be about participation itself. And so, you know, if you have intellectual property of your own that you want to mind, as you enter this conversation, what steps should you take? Right. And I'm unclear how that works. And as a guy who's had a lot of ideas and not patented a single one of them, I'm interested in this conversation a lot because I feel kind of make it invulnerable because those ideas might be taken away. So, or just used or misused, even worse. So I think a piece of our conversation might also be about who else ought we invite into the conversation over time to figure this out. Another piece of the conversation can be what are the existing pieces that are out in the world right now that are close to this or useful components to it and how do we include them, etc. And I'm going to suggest that we use the Mattermost Chat, the generative Commons channel, which I'm going to put a link to in our chat here. Hank, are you in the Mattermost? Yes, you are, I think, right? Yes. Okay, so I put the link to that chat in this chat in the Zoom chat, but let's use that chat as our persistent chat for this call so that we have a nice ongoing record. And I will then pause because I just said a few things that are worth discussing here. I think anybody have any instincts on all these things? Go ahead, Bill. Bill, your brow is kind of furrowed. I think you have a thought coming up. Hey, whatever. Might have been born this way. So the one thing, this is a huge topic. I did a bunch of reading since last week. And then I went back and read some old stuff I had on Commons and on Stom and some others. I read Joe Cronelli's paper about the creative computing thing, which was interesting. Mostly I was trying to figure out, after listening to last week's call, how are we going to get to a workable state here? And the piece I read in the Armstrong, that little science article I got posted, this sort of like, how do you manage the Commons? You got to deal with, how does everybody get real information? How do you manage conflict? And you just have to figure that out. And you got to set up some work practices that can be, you know, I don't want to say, you know, set up some ways of working that can be put into practice, including like, Bill, you shouldn't have done that. Because remember, we had this long conversation about how we just do it this way. So I'm a little, I guess the question is, where do you want this, this kind of big, you know, as big as a pumpkin conversation to go? Because there's a number of other conversations going on like in the KM4Dev world, you know, the Knowledge Foundation for Development, people have been, they're doing a lot now on dealing with colonialism and in the developing world. I've been involved with a lot of scientific data in developing countries. I spent 10 years doing that with some international NGOs. So there's an enormous amount of, and then there's always open access to the scientific information that's being generated, you know, partially precipitated by, hello, you know, SARS-2. Do you have any information you can share? You know, so my only concern is that this could get so big and unwieldy that still for, you know, those of us that, you know, we walked into this, we walked through the semi-permeable OGM boundary. Now what's, you know, what's this, what's the deal here? Yeah. Because I think you've been talking about, I want, you know, we want, you know, even Pete Kaminski came up with it. We want a deal that isn't so enclosed or overprotected or hyper, you know, but in another, we have to admit the fact, you know, we're stuck in this freaking, you know, I ain't ran neoliberal hypercapitalist, basically view or frame of how, you know, the world operates is just mobile. And so I think challenge is how can we manage ourselves in a way we would be happy with, you know, and so that's just, for me, it's like, can we get to, and I, for me, in a way, it's like, we're going to set up a set of rules, you know, okay, you want to talk about it? Let's talk. Yeah. Otherwise, be sure to put on the blue shirt when you go into this room. See, that's on, it's rule 16. Right. So I mean, that's a little facetious, but you know what I mean. Because of the current regimes that are out there and the way they've been foisted across the world, and because that's a hot topic in lots of places about decolonization and about basically sovereignty and a bunch of other things. I think you're, A, you're right, this is a huge thing that they could just keep unpacking and unfolding. My thought is that a good intention is to create a working set of definitions and a working thing we can point to that includes open questions and says, hey, right here, this is a spot that could use a lot of work. It's not done. This is sort of best guess on this part of it or something. And that maybe our work together on this would, would, would lead to something that that is sort of obvious, but missing. Right. And then Lynn Ostrom's principles kind of say that boundaries are really important for commons. So it's just throwing stuff in the commons a good, a good strategy. And I think that a piece of our advice somehow in here should be, if you really want information to be very durable and difficult to corrupt, I discovered there's a group doing work called ethical commons. And they're trying, and these are experienced open source people who discovered that a lot of their code was being used for missile systems or tobacco or whatever. And they were trying to figure out how do you create a poison pill agreement where if there's misuses of the technology, those are somehow prevented or hindered or something like that. And that sounds like a really difficult task to me. But, but when you're sharing a bunch of stuff openly, how does that work? And then, and then there's this interesting frontier also of Lorela, thank you. That's, that's, wow. When you're, when you're sharing a bunch of information and you're being as open as possible, there are a bunch of participants who either are at risk or are uncomfortable being public, publicly visible, et cetera, whose participation should be shielded, protected, whose privacy should definitely be protected, et cetera. And so how do you work really openly yet honor everybody's wishes in the party? Right. So, so those things seem, and I'm already creeping a bit beyond a general commons agreement into a general sociability and collaboration agreement, right? Because the moment it's, it's about people's privacy and how open or closed do you get for that we're outside of just the commons part of it? Although in some sense, there's a commons of trust and trusted collaboration as well. Lorela, did you want to jump in? I wrote this in there a bit and say that so part of the solution that Holo used just in the consideration is that if, if one person or group right is working on something and they want to ensure that it's available for the public, it's important to publish. So if it gets into right privacy and like what people want to keep quiet and what people are willing to publish, it's important to publish so that it's because when one publishes things in the U.S. after publishing, it makes it clear that you're connected to it as an inventor and it also there's a time lapse that goes by and then you can't even file. And it's important that you publish though in two ways. It's important that patent examiners can easily find it. So you have to publish in places where they look and then into publishing places where the relevant people in the world will notice it. So they see that you're up to it and that you're publishing it, right? And that you're claiming that you're doing something with it. So that's an example of something that matters. So it's not only what the various people want, it's also about looking at what their intentions are with that knowledge. So they're using strategies that achieve that aim and that gets into the whole public private conversation. What did that turn into for Holo, for example, like what did that mean that they have, where did they cross post to cover their bases that way? And this is where I hired the attorney and I was involved in some of the conversations but not everything and I have some notes and I have to go back and sort some of it out. Some of it are the blogs that they've written and made sure that their blogs are showing up in the right kinds of places and things like that. And then trying to know the patent examiners. They did decide to file one application and so that's one easy way that that gets to a place where patents see it or patents under see it. I remember I'm remembering a specific conversation. Let me go take a look through my notes. I remember there were maybe two or so places and we talked about where to publish. Yep. There's also a whole conversation we had we had last week about defensive patenting and the need for defensive patenting and that certainly puts patents in the place where patent examiners would find them. It's expensive and then there used to be a way that you could publish things with a patent office just to publish it and you can't do that anymore. Really? No, you can't do it anymore. They closed that down a number of years ago and Hullo specifically did it not just as a defensive patent. They also did it with a patent to connect it to their license so they could write what the licensing terms were and they could report everyone to use their licensing terms which kept some of their tools public and kept certain things private for individuals so that no one could develop an app that would take users data and own it like it had to be set up in a way that users data was their own. Wow. All of which sounds really complicated and thorny. Yeah, if we're not doing technology and all that it doesn't have to be as messy, but the the concepts that they used are informative. Right. Well, I mean, we're moving into we're not doing a blockchain alternative, but we would very almost certainly be using platforms like blockchain, Holochain, whatever at some point for some of the things that OGM is trying to do. And we're doing massive data sharing of different kinds, you know, open link data. And I'm interested in sort of the legal aspects of open open link data because I think that's kind of that's the territory we're treading into as well. And unfortunately, this does unpack really quickly into complicated issues. And I should say too, I'm a biologist historically, so my patent agent sphere is more there like I needed a software to help conceptually, but that's why it's written out my space. Yep, some more life sciences patenting and all that. And more historically, I did more biotechnology as we're in the patent world. So basic inventions of like, you know, objects and, but yeah, so it's some chemistry, so biology chemistry is kind of biotechnology stuff. I have an innocent question about that because I don't know much about it. But in the recent rush to produce COVID-19 vaccinations, was there a rapid patenting process that went on? To what extent did the different companies and universities involved make use of each other's research? Do you know anything about that? I mean, I only asked people who said that biotechnology is right. Yeah, I don't know. I've not looked into it. That's why I stopped officially working in that field back in like, I mean, in the science itself back in like 90, I forget even I have to go back and sort it out, but something like 90 safe five or it was a long time ago, 95 and 96. So I understand the basics, but I'm not current. And to establish any rights that they're developing in developing those new vaccines, all they have to do is file the applications to get the date. And you can file an application when you invent part of it, and then a month later they've got something else file another application and they can wrap those together in a full application. So yeah, as long as those companies were doing along the way, which they probably did. And I didn't hear anything about any data sharing and the whole controversy of sharing with countries that need help like India is that it's not only the intellectual property that's filed, right? It's all kinds of other proprietary stuff. So it's complex to share technology in the system. And there's a couple articles criticizing Bill Gates for his intervention with the original intentions or at least demands that vaccines be open sourced. And then he sort of flipped it around and made it so there was advanced purchase commitments basically made, which meant that the companies could keep their patents and didn't have to share all that stuff out. And it's gotten really, really messy and complicated. And it's a it's a bad month to be Bill Gates. Yeah. Yeah, for a variety of reasons. So my my my personal interest in this is the application of generative commons or open patents or however we want to call it in terms of addressing pressing societal challenges. So if it turns out that in one year, at least four or five, well, looking at the Chinese ones, let's say six or seven successful vaccines were developed and then they're all going to be exploited for commercial profit. I think that's a step but possibly a step in the wrong direction with teachers, people of all lessons. And I'm just wondering, can we come up with some sort of best guesses or possible guidelines that could lead people away from wanting to exploit their intellectual property if it's dealing with a pressing societal issue like the next let's say well a COVID-22 or an aspect of climate change. Yeah. In the best of all worlds, everybody would behave like Jonas Salk can say would you patent the sun and not try to patent these things. Unfortunately, with things like mRNA transcription, the mechanism they've figured out potentially makes coming up with the next 50 vaccines much easier and much quicker. Once you can sequence some aspect of the invading virus, you can move very, very quickly like the vaccines that we're using now were in test in trial very quickly. And then the question was, can we make it at scale and does it pass trial? Does it do the statistics work out? But that the creation of the vaccine was very fast. Therefore, disclosure of the whole mechanism turns the whole industry upside down. Like if everybody sort of gets to play. And as Lorelai said, I think I'm extrapolating from what you said, but if disclosing that how a particular vaccine is made also implies then disclosing like a lot of the process and technology and other sorts of inventions behind it because otherwise you can't make the thing, then the entire secret about how to make the new cronuts is like out. And then everybody in their puppy will be making cronuts and there's no and then there's this, I think, sort of fake assumption that without semi-permanent lockup or Jack Valenti's forever minus a day kind of lockup on ideas, nobody will be motivated to actually make these things and therefore society will not benefit from them, which I have always thought was a really bogus argument because plenty of people have made a good living from shared IP. It's the risk that they publish things that they hadn't published any other way, that they're publishing things that wouldn't normally get published by the patenting process for 18 months. So it gets published earlier. It could be that they're really giving away the best way to make something, which technically you're supposed to do when you file a patent application. However, there are all kinds of strategies for disguising it in the patent application or you come up with an improvement afterwards. It's not in the application, but the application is still covered as that improvement. So they're all kinds of things they end up would be giving away. Did you read Rembrandt's in the attic, Lorelei? I'm sorry, did I what? Read the book Rembrandt's in the attic. No. It's a good sort of junior varsity level book about intellectual property overprotection. And the case study that stuck in my head was Gillette and the razor. And Gillette, and there's a concept in there, which I've probably not knew to the book, but it's called a patent wall. How do you build a series of patents to basically wall off competitors and prevent them from doing stuff? And so, for example, Gillette invented a kind of slow motion photography, slow motion micro photography, so that they could watch a razor as it cruised over the skin. They patented that as well so that other researchers couldn't look as closely. And then as patents expire, you tweak it a little bit, you patent again, you sort of keep the patent moving in perpetuity by making tiny changes to it and refiling, which happens. And Gillette, like, why am I paying two and a half, three bucks per cartridge for something that very likely costs them 50 cents or less to make? Like, how did, how did we get into a monopoly-ish situation with razor blades? Right? Part of it is, right, is if they come up with some attachment, no one can make the other pieces that go with things, right? And then it really, it's about marketing. It's about convincing people that something is better, whether or not it's better, so that there's that big burden of, right, the marketing to get over. Exactly. And now my razor has either five or six blades. I forgot how many. And it's like, well, why? What? And I think it's like Google is an example, but if you go and look at like the kinds of patents that Google is filing, there are a bunch of big places like that in the Microsoft is one of them, right? There's so many patents and so many things and like it's unbelievable. It's the whole, like, you know, I think some people, as soon as ideas are available, right? They're patenting, but Patent Office isn't able to find everything. There are lots of places they don't search, so they don't realize people that don't really own, they're not inventors. And yeah, the whole mess. And they also, you all know. And they also grant a lot of bogus patents or unnecessary patents. And then there's also process patents and a bunch of, you know, patents around genes, which were discovered, but not invented. And there was the contrary, right? Because they're isolated, right? So the whole isolating something out of the natural environments. It's a good invention. Right. Right. And there's the whole, what was it? What was it? My the BRAC gene that a biotech company was patenting and preventing everybody from doing research on breast cancer. But crazy stuff. Okay. So what smells doable as part of an agreement that is a work in progress that becomes, and I'm just going to put a stake in the ground, becomes both a handy mechanism for understanding better the conditions, you know, on the ground and how to, what's an appropriate way to act given that we're trying to improve commons and work openly. So what's the minimum set for that? But also, I'd love to give it a slightly second duty of putting a stake in the ground about how stupid and broken current intellectual property regimes are worldwide and what might be done about them more productively. So, which is kind of a political statement, I don't know. And that may be over burdening this project entirely, but it feels to me like that's an important part of what we're doing or looking at. Bill, go ahead. Yeah. So what you said really makes sense to me because I think if, you know, OGM here puts together some, you know, practicable working process for managing this, it will just by its existence illuminate the ridiculousness of what is going on. I mean, just by the fact, we really don't want to do this, but we have to create this kind of blah, blah, blah set of rules or definition of, you know, that's going to, you know, and the only reason we do this is because, you know, this stupid rule here from the World Trade Organization, which, you know, since we're in the world and we don't really want to be in prison or like say, okay, well, we don't want to be in a courtroom all the time. So I think that possibly by trying to do something we think is more generative and in the direction of where we would feel better, maybe, you know, leverage your ideas about trust in really being the, you know, kind of the framework for how we actually, you know, get along, that it will, you know, it will bump into this other ridiculousness. I mean, we can't not do that even if I say, look, everything I write is free. I don't really care what you do with it, you know, and I can say that and, you know, I could be fooling myself, but whatever. Yeah. So, you know, in one way, so I'm not sure, I'm sure you'll get the, you'll get the critique, the critique of the current situation just by basically publicly and semi-explicitly doing something different. Yeah. Just triggered a bunch of other thoughts in my head. One of them is that because this is called a generative commons agreement, it very likely needs a little deepening on what commons are, how they work, some of the, you know, flashing to Ostrom and so forth. But also, I think there's a little trope here about debunking the tragedy of the commons meme, which aided our brains years ago when Garrett Hardin wrote his famous essay from in 68, I think. Yeah. So that's the little summary I sent from 2003, that paper that Lenin and Deets and, you know, these people put together, they actually in the first part of it, it's got four references about, you know, this is where Garrett Hardin's oversimplified blabla was oversimplified. Yeah. Can we like move on now? That was like, you know, and the other thing, I read Joe Cronelli's paper about creative computational creativity. Yeah. Which was really interesting because he left it in the thread here last week about, well, here's something that I've written about, you know, my Ostrom thing. And he actually is pretty specific in the first parts of that paper about defining, you know, he's talking about production of knowledge or ideas or information. So he's definitely in the information space. And he just has a list of, you know, here's a, he looks at this big list of 12 things and turns it into eight things. But he does layout, here's what you need, we needed to define, you know, who is a producer, who is what, what are these kind of concepts and categories of that we actually need to be explicit about. So I'm looking, I said, well, that might be a place to start because then you could get real pushback. Yeah, that sounds like good material to include. Laurel, have you ever heard the phrase design from trust? Have you been in any conversations around that? Design from test. Trust. I link I just put in the matter most chat design from trust.com. Just adjust two things above your post right now. Oh, design from trust. Design from trust. Yeah. So let me explain it for a second because it's it's it's related. And it actually might make a really good test case for this conversation. So my journey to today starts when like 30 years ago, I realized I didn't like the word consumer. That led me to realize that we'd consumerized every aspect of human activity, not just consumer goods like toothpaste and floor wax, but our educational system are where we live, our houses are now our retirement accounts, they're not just homes, they're like our self image, like, are we good enough? Are we beautiful? Like every day our educational system has been consumerized, everything our health care system were treated as consumers of health care instead of as humans who have who are trying to be healthy. And that led me to the fact that consumerization as a process or a verb involves huge breaches of trust. You're busy like dumpster diving my data, you're remixing it, you're trying to manipulate me to do stuff. All of that is just a given we've normalized all this really weird behavior. And and it also helped me realize that in industry after industry or domain after domain, we lost faith in humans. And so I got a whole batch of people in my brain that I that I call my contrarians who are my heroes. And one day long ago, probably in late 90s, I realized, oh my God, all my contrarians are telling me the same thing is that we're we don't trust people. Right. And so Christopher Alexander, a cranky inventor, but still brilliant, invents pattern languages as a way of giving clients a lot better vocabulary to have a higher level conversation to be part of the design conversation for homes and villages, instead of just merely being sort of clients at a distance. And that is your he's trusting them to participate at a much better level. So for me, pattern languages are an example of design from trust is and design from trust. The working at the start of that is, let's assume people have good intent. Let's assume most people, not all people have good intent. Is that the pattern language? Fabulous. Wow. On the desktop. Peter. And I've met a couple of architects whose MO is when they meet a new client, they give them a copy of the book, and they say, if you like this, we can probably work together. So Wikipedia is an example of design from trust open source software, the internet is an example of design from trust, because, you know, in the old ITU, you had to be a big corporation proposing a new protocol, then you got to run it because you own the patent side of blah, blah, blah. Whereas with the, you know, ITF, it's a rough consensus and running code and a bunch of other things, which are really lovely explanations of how design from trust works. So with Angel Acosta, I've entered a conversation around this, and we just had a webinar a couple of weeks ago that was lovely, because he comes out of the contemplative tradition. And I'd never thought about design from trust from the contemplative angle. I was always thinking about it from this other kind of practical angle. And I realized how much design from trust has to do with racism. And that the intentional breaches of trust and the intentional instigation of mistrust in the other with a capital O, and a bunch of other stuff there, that's just this like huge body of stuff. But early in my conversation with Angel about design from trust, he said, oh, you should immediately trademark this. And I went to zoom and I'm like, looked around and I'm like, I don't have a lot of loose cash to go pay a lawyer or do the zoom thing. I don't know. And that got me sort of starting to think about, oh, what is my duty to this idea? And I'm in the process now, like a month from now, I want to hold a mini design from trust summit, because I've had interest lately, because the idea is like 15 years old. But I've had interest lately from three or four different individuals from different parts of my life, who are all saying there's there's a pony here, you know, are you thinking of doing something about it? What could we do, etc. And maybe it turns into a course, maybe it turns into a consultancy on top of open global mind, which is actually one of my hopes is that there is a practice that we develop, and just like design thinking the world back in the 90s and zero and naughties, maybe design from trust can be the way that we help reset the world and fix stuff. Please. Just a comment about trademarks. Yes. So I don't have training and trademarks. I've just learned a whole bunch doing a bunch of work in house and with other clients that you have the URL is good because you have some documentation of when you're first using it. Trademarks work by the geography in which you use it. And I don't know how you get it clear that you're using it broadly and a broad geography so that you can have someone else come in and trademark it and keep you from working in various states in the US. Right. Oh, even even by state, I thought it was like pretty broad across the US. No, it's just well, if you finalize a trademark with the US patent trademark office, you're claiming the United States, so that it's clear it's the United States. But I think that because trademarks are state specific, it certainly used to be that if you have a business like in Colorado and you're using it in Colorado, I don't know how you prove that you actually have it available nationally and that you work with people nationally and you could have someone trademark it and they get it all the other states and you still have the right to use it because you were using it first, but you then only can use it in the geography where you were using it. Holy crap. I don't know how it improves it like trademark wise that it's global. Wow. Okay, so but applying for a US trademark implies US. Yeah, and it's national. So that would be again, it's so I don't know how one does that in trademark. So okay, so that would be a reason and then and then I think the implication was also then you have to apply for trademark in other countries like like in the EU or maybe otherwise there are maybe other ways to demonstrate that one's already using it there so that hopefully no one else can go file and prevent you right. Perfect. Thank you. And anyway, so there's this like shiny little pearl of an idea that I'd like to play out in a bunch of different ways, which I think makes a good sort of guinea pig for our process. It's like, okay, what could be done about this? How do we do it right? What could help? And hey, people plan a profit is still around like there's there's a bunch of people who are who use it as a foundation for for benefit kind of structures. There's a couple of measures that try to do, you know, are you benefiting people plan a profit? It didn't die, but it kind of got washed aside in the in the great wave of other sustainability and resilience and thrive ability kind of initiatives, I think, if anybody else. It's true, but I mean, this can also be looked at in terms of generations and generations and moons. But I mean, so many of the of the people in the western world are still living in the greatest good era. And I mean, we can sit back and then I mean, I mean, older people like myself can can sit back and say, well, yeah, younger people seem to have more more attention for benefiting the planet. But I think if we really want to make this a decade of change as the United Nations and various other important NGOs have suggested, then the comments and the the generative comments and all sorts of somewhat dysfunctional or obsolete issues around IPR, the patent system, pre-competitive sharing of knowledge whatsoever, need to be rethought. So I would totally agree with what you said earlier, Jerry, and what Bill in his comment after that reinforced, not only will you be getting pushback on these issues, you should address them heads on, because there are important issues. And in fact, pushback, it only means the possibility of dialogue. And without the possibility of dialogue, you get pronouncements from on high. And that's exactly what we don't need. Exactly. And if we discover that there are people, I mean, there's people out there using bad legislation to create good things like using corporate personhood to give rights to nature and animals and things like that. And for me, those are really clever hacks of the system. If I had a magic button, one of the things I would wipe out is corporate personhood. Or if they insist on being people, I'd make sure that there's a death penalty or something like that. The idea that corporations have all the rights, but none of the responsibilities of humans is just weird. But it's where we've gotten to with corporate capture, basically, regulatory capture. But I think there's sort of controversy is where we locate humans who are doing a really good job of taking on these things but have one yet. I would let the OGM-y thing to do is to help them like be better known, explain themselves more clearly, link what they've done and what they have and bake it into other things that are related so that they're just easily at hand. And Laurel, I get that you have to bounce. Thank you a lot for being here. You've been essential to this conversation. I appreciate your being here. Do should I just create this conversation for next week at the same time and then we see who else we can invite into the conversation? Is that a good idea? A bad idea? For me, it's a good idea. Yeah, I think you should try and see what happens because there were quite a few people last time. Yeah, it may not be a bad time. There was a lot of issues brought up. So it would be interesting to see what next steps can gel here because I think me and Hank just said it, we just really need to move it forward. You'll find out who says, stop that or whatever. Laurel, is the time good for you? Yeah, I always have to leave Wednesday morning early. So starting earlier is even better for me, but yeah, I can come for at least part of it. Okay, good. I usually find it like 7 a.m. Pacific is my kind of earliest start time. I've done some calls at 6, but then I'm getting up at 5 and change. I'm like hunting for my brain. But thank you. And Laurel, I forget what time you're in. What geography? I'm in Pacific time. I just happened to wake up at like 4 today too. I knew I had other work I had to do first. So I've been working since like 4.30. Oh man. Okay. Again, thank you for being here. So what's a, just before we wrap the call, what are some sort of guidelines we might use to make this manageable? Because clearly the more we push to be complete or to think through the different issues, the more this thing explodes in front of us into like lots of difficult things. But I think there's also a bunch of satisfying pieces that we could include that aren't that messy. So how to put a handle on this so that feels doable and also kind of time-bounded. You got to go? Okay. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Well, it's been going on a while. I always believe in first lots of divergence and then converging. And you know, what do we want out of it? Do we want a one-page manifesto? Do we want 99 theses to nail on the White House door? So it's interesting to think about together what we went out of it and then try to make a structure so that each time we talk somewhere within the one page with the 99 theses or the comic book or the whatever it is, something get filled in and then every once in a while ask people to take some steps back and reflect on what we've gotten, what we're missing and all we go in the right direction. That's how I would say it. Agreed. And just by the way as a side note, I'm involved a little bit in the birth of the Clutrain manifesto because two of the four Clutrain authors met at my first retreat in 1996. And I had, you know, Jerry's Weekend Retreats and so Chris Locke and Doc Searles met at the first retreat and where we talked a bunch about consumerism and our allergic to that and all of that kind of thing. And you just mentioned sort of comic books and all that. I'm a huge believer in alternative manifestations, alternative representations of good ideas and like people like The Oatmeal. The Oatmeal is a freaking genius. His infographic comic cartoon about Nikola Tesla is one of the best biographies of Tesla I've ever seen, right? It's like really good. Hank and John Green, the Vlogbrothers, their eight minute video about sexual preferences and sexual identity is the best explanation of that that I've seen any place and it's directed at tweens. It's directed at sort of youngish people, right? And it's like, well, there's this and then there's this and then Hank, I don't know. And they've got their own little style. But that's how you communicate these issues. And I think that that a piece of this project might well be finding those who've already done something like this and magnifying it, but then, you know, setting up a couple more things like this and challenging some of these great artists to come in and do this work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a set of pop songs about it. There's a song in Latin America called La Vinciuca, which is about a bug that gives you sleeping sickness. And the lyrics of the song tell you what the bug looks like and that it sleeps, that it nests up in the corner of the patch of the, you know, where your roof meets your wall and how to get rid of it. And the song is basically, you know, a social lesson in how to reduce sleeping sickness. There's also an albino singer from West Africa who sang a lot of songs about racism and bias and stuff like that. It's really like popular music is a great vector. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it depends a bit on what the message is. But as far as I'm concerned, one of the things that would interest me in it is being provocative in the work in progress definitions and inviting lots of other people into much broader conversation after Open Global Minds has initiated it. No, I agree. So here, so there's two things. So one is what can we put together that actually can be put to use for what OGM is now moving to do in terms of, you know, guilds, projects, sovereigns, whatever is moving out into the world we're like, okay, now I've got, you know, 200 shekels and I'm gonna spend it on the blah, blah, blah. Even though I don't believe in capitalism, I'm still gonna go down to the coffee shop and give them some money because, you know, I want coffee. So I think that might help. I really wanted to go back to Joe Cronelli's paper because he broke this out from a knowledge information producer thing. And I think he posted the paper in this chat, in matter most. In this channel last I'm just scrolling up. I'm just scrolling up. He had some comment about here's my Ostrom like, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I it's a little complicated. I got to read the second time. It's a little confusing to me, but the initial stuff about here's how Ostrom talks about things, you know, if you're going to manage a comment, you got to pay attention to bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I think we should probably take that as a starting point because I think that, you know, Lynn Ostrom and her colleagues really did map out these are, you know, things you cannot avoid. Like conflict management, you're not going to avoid it. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, exactly. I found Joe's link. It's up. How do you tell the date? The trouble is, you know, academics have all these things. They publish papers and journals, and when you print them out, there's no date on them. I'm like, I would like to shoot everyone who doesn't date. Yeah, well, the date of his publication is 2016. Yeah, the date of his published 2016. But I was just looking for the date of his post to the chat because there's a timestamp. There's a timestamp, but not an easy date stamp. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, well. And the link he gave us is just a footnote link, huh? I don't know how I got his paper. I followed that and I got to something. I don't know how I got it, but I was able to get it without going, it's outside of firewall, I think. Okay, cool. If it is, and I would write to him and say, all right, all right, Cronelli. Yeah, share. But anyways, you know, he had several points that I thought might spark a useful conversation, you know, because we've had this conversation, well, what do you mean by this? What do you mean by a producer that's like, you know, I mean, following Hank, that's exactly the conversation we need to have. Yeah. Or we just have to say, well, we're really not going to talk about that. We're doing some other kind of this. But if you're going to manage a commons and create something that we're going to call a commons, you know, Jerry brought up earlier, there's going to be a boundary. What is it? How would you know when you crossed it? And unfortunately, we need to mine the boundaries a lot, because there's people busy taking advantage of these things, etc., which is ironic and sad, because one of the precepts of design from trust is assume good intent. And so do you all know that have you all heard anybody explain the difference between being defenseless and being undefended? I think I might have mentioned that a decade ago, I read something about that. Oh, really? I've been using that term. It's lovely. So Hank, in case so being defenseless means you really can't defend yourself. So somebody could come up and whack you and you just have no defenses. Being undefended is like putting your arms down or when we wave, and when we shake hands, those are apparently gestures that I'm not holding a weapon. But being undefended means I'm perfectly capable of defending myself, but I choose to put down my defenses to lower my guard, whatever the expression you want. And that is a gesture of trust. And it's an invitation to a safer space, etc., etc. But it also presupposes training in being able to defend yourself. So one of the things I love about Aikido is that it's a defensive martial art and that before you ever get into a fight, the first thing you do is you try to not have a fight. You try to do anything possible to further not to be conflict. And in order to do that, you might need to sort of drop your defenses for a while. Yeah, no, I think that well, that's really, you know, it comes up also psychologically. I mean, psychoanalytically too, about being undefended. Because I also think that's the other, well, I guess I'm on it. I'm on Bill's Neofrity and Melanie Klein psychoanalytical tear right now. Interesting. Good. Anyway, but so I think that's what, you know, so what was the phrase that Angel said you should trademark? Design from trust. Oh yeah, I just give that up. I would just say it every time you talk about things, I would just say, here's what I do. Yeah, I'm interested in design from trust. What does that mean? You know, that's just everything Jerry shows up. When I talk about trust, I also talk about this. Yeah, you know, forget the trademark. It's just, you know, it's a, you know, it's a jerryism, whatever. You just say it a lot. Yeah, I thought that the main ages ago. So yeah, and I think you just, you know, just keep using it. That way, if anybody says, well, I'm going to trademark it. Yeah, well, good luck, man. Yeah, with any, with any luck, it starts showing up in the world because the people I'm convening are interested in standing it up as something. And I'm not exactly sure what things it'll, it might turn into. Well, I had a friend of mine who did a lot of work on what we, he was calling, you know, the trustworthiness of computing. I mean, he's, he said, like probably my closest friend, he's in his 80s now and we talk every week, but he is, you know, he said, that's just the disaster of working with computers is that, you know, we're put in a position where we're expected to have some kind of put some trust into this machine because we don't have, we require it in order to accomplish something. You know, and so the idea about, you know, designing computing systems that would be trustworthy is really interesting. Which is its own sort of huge separate domain, right? It's like trusted computing means stuff. And then there's this delicious irony that Microsoft and Intel had a trusted computing initiative back in the day where the people not being trusted were you and I, because that was all on the behalf of copyright owners. It was all to protect movies and books and records. So it was a complete misuse of trust as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. Good. I don't know. I'm with you. I mean, I would just, I just assume the best of people even though I'm very often, you know, disappointed, but you know, well, there you go. Yeah. This is called, you know, called, you know, human life in the 21st century on earth. Exactly. And then the two approaches are totally legitimate, like, you know, the opposite approaches. Some people start with assuming everybody's fine until proven wrong. And then other people start with everybody's kind of like suspicious until they've proven themselves somehow to be trustworthy. And those are both legitimate approaches. But it turns out that assuming the good tends to be a lot more productive because sometimes it's self fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes, sometimes approaching somebody by looking for the, by assuming that they're a genius and well intention turns into that because you've made room for that. Right. And assuming the opposite eliminates that from the room somehow magically. So it's really interesting. You know, I think you have to have your intent. I mean, my wife and I have dogs, we've gotten really into dog training. And so the issue with dogs is like, you know, you want to go for a walk and have a nice walk? Most people say, well, put that intention in your mind. You know, don't like, you know, and then go for a walk with the dog. The dog will like pick up on the fact that, you know, I mean, I was in Paris years ago. And my friend, I was, you know, went out to dinner and people in Paris, I don't know if they still do it. You know, he brought his little dog with it. Wasn't on a leash. The dog sat down at every street corner, came into the restaurant, curled up underneath the table and went to sleep. Yeah. And that's because in France, people expect dogs to behave like that. Right. Right. And they're kind of raised like that. And then the society is organized that way, et cetera, et cetera. You know, we're here, people, they have no expectation of that. And, you know, dogs are, I mean, it's unfortunate for the dog that they're pretty much crazed because. Yeah. Yeah. And a side note on that. And I'm wondering who's, if anybody's compared sort of dogs and horses here, because it turns out that horses, and I am no horse person, but it turns out that horses are insanely sensitive, extremely, exclusively sensitive to human emotions. And I don't know if they're picking up auras or energies or what. But there's a, there's a form of therapy called family constellations, which does not involve horses. It involves, you have a client and a bunch of people, the client picks a situation from their life. They then write down the names of the participants of this, of the system on slips of paper. The volunteers who are in the constellation randomly pick little slips of paper, put them in their pocket, don't even look at them. And then the therapist basically says, okay, everybody stand in the room relative to the client in the way that feels right. And one person might go to a corner and face the corner. Another person might stand right behind the client and look angry, whatever. And weirdly, it turns out that the people have gone and picked up poses that represent the people on the slips of paper that they picked up. And then it turns out that this appears to work with horses. So there's an equine family constellations thing that I've found, which, and I've done no fact-checking on this, but horses are exclusively attuned to this. And sort of maybe wrapping this together. One of my favorite examples of design from trust is horse whispering, which is also known as animal gentling, which is the opposite of breaking horses, right? So in the US, what we've done for generations and elsewhere is you break the will of the horse so that you can ride it. And you do that on purpose and it's violent. In other cultures, they don't do that. And for example, in the Pampas in Argentina, the Spaniards bring horses to the New World. There are no horses in the Americas before Columbus. Then some of these horses break free and all of a sudden there's some feral horses. And Patagonian natives find these horses and haven't seen the Spaniards, don't know how to ride, don't know any of this, and proceed to create something that is now known as Doma India. Doma is taming. And Doma India is animal gentling. And there's performers who do it. And the people you see doing a shoulder stand on a horse that's upside down on its back, that's Doma India, right? And they've made friends with the animal and they've built a relationship of trust. It's like, yes, that's entirely doable and it works great. And why are we doing this other thing? Because we think it's necessary. And because that's how my granddad did it, let's pretend, right? And so we have that everywhere. We've got all these assumptions about how we have to do things that are unnecessary. Well, I mean, I think this for me just rings a bell because the things I learned about dog training, you know, the modern way of training dogs, at least in the United States, is not the punitive way. It's the positive reinforcement way, right? Which is your reward, the behaviors you like. Is this clicker training or is this other stuff? Well, a clicker is a way to teach a dog. I mean, you always need some kind of a mark word that whenever you use say that word, the dog gets a treat. So that they automatically will like, oh, yeah. So there's some, you know, there's some kind of classical conditioning around that. But clickers can be good, mostly because dogs are their clock speed is fast. I mean, as our trainer once told us, he said, look, if your dog has two seconds while you're standing still, that's a lot of time. You just help put a dog in a sit and just look the way into it. They're like, man, I can do a lot. Got a lot going to happen now. Yeah. And for us, it's like, oh, that's just two seconds. So, you know, but the thing is that, you know, so you reward the behaviors you want, you kind of ignore sometimes you have to have a consequence for behavior you don't want, but it's not punitive. Like for our dogs, when they were younger, and they would really just, you know, either get really cranky or decide, I'm going to be demanding and bark and stuff. We just put them in a dark bathroom, close the door for 30 minutes. So our trainer is like, says to her dogs, oh, is that your choice, your behavior? Here's my choice. You can stay in the dark room. So the dog gets to learn. That's not what I expected to happen. Yeah. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I was trying to protect you. Or I was trying to get a treat or whatever. Right. You know, so, but you haven't like punished it. I mean, you haven't away, but you haven't like hurt it. Yeah. Yeah. You just gave it a consequence that was like, hmm. But you've withdrawn stimulus and attention. But I was in a big corporation of stuff and we do the same stupid thing in business. So rather than rewarding behaviors from employees we like and pretty much ignoring or just sort of, no, we just kind of, we're constantly yelling at people or punishing people or doing other stuff. And then we wonder why people like, I really don't want to go to work today. Yeah, exactly. There's a freaking abusive place. There's also a ton of people who are performing what David Graber would call bullshit jobs or what I would also think of as sort of like immoral jobs. I see advertising, I see the advertising business as a breaking of trust. I see it as constantly, it's espionage, it's manipulation, it's a whole bunch of things. There's a sliver of advertising that's about, hey, we have this thing and you might want to buy it and here's why it's good for you. This is a tiny sliver of a huge industry. And so people to my mind, like on Madison Avenue, like Mad Men and all that, those are kind of not ethical jobs. And a lot of people understand that, some people perform the mental gymnastics that they understand how the system works so they're immune to it when they step outside their office door and they're just another person on the street. But they know how the system works, so they're kind of immune to it. I think that's just kind of mental gymnastics. But I think most of these people know that they're in the business of manipulating people to get stuff they probably don't need. And that's not great. And that's a big industry. Yeah. And it also hires really, really smart and creative people. If you thought you were going to write the great American novel or if you thought you were going to be the next Jackson Pollock and that didn't quite work out, where you go is advertising. Yeah, my wife worked in her company that they worked with a lot of ad agencies in New York at really senior levels. And she said there was one agency that was having difficulties. That this might be offensive, but she just said to me, my wife's Jewish, and the guy just said, your problem is we need more chicks, Jews and queers. He's like, we need, we need basically more. That's a odd way to ask for diversity. Yeah, but it was there was a certain kind of they were like, everything was like kind of flat, boring. Yeah. Justin, it was like, no, we need more Jews in here. But, you know, but Susan said that she was really impressed with the quality of the intellect and sensibilities of the people she met in there. A lot of smart people. Yeah. A lot of smart people. Yeah. Applying themselves to that stuff. So, well, it was a lot of smart people by result to financial derivatives too. So, yeah, exactly. Oh, God. I was going through that yesterday with a friend. We were, we sat down outside and had nachos and compared notes on a bunch of stuff. And I learned about a bunch of books and thinkers I hadn't heard about before, which is it's always like, you know, stump the band. And I'm always thrilled to be finding new stuff and putting it in my brain. But all these things are all interconnected. Yeah. Anyway, so I just, you know, I mean, it's great to sit around with you gentlemen. So what can I say? But how can we like move this? It'd be interesting to see what happens moving forward. Yeah. That last one ended, you know, there were a little bit of, there was a few sparks at the end. Well, I know I sent you a note, Jerry, but I was exactly at the end. Pete was like, well, we should automatically share the domain at generativecommons.org. And we should just have a shared address. And I'm like, oh my God, my life's complexity just skyrocketed. And I don't even know who's going to show up for the next call, right? Yeah, I thought to myself, the Lydwish readers, the Lydwish genius, because then a bunch of people said, oh, I'll volunteer. And they're all overbooked people. I'm like, stop doing that. Stop volunteering when you know you really don't even have a cycle for the call run right now. Right, right. So let's do a little thinking about next week's call. I will send an invite right now. I'll set up next week's call and put it on the Mattermost chat. And then I'll put a couple of questions in the chat, like who else should we invite to these calls? Who's done interesting work that could contribute a whole bunch and save us time and tell us why this mission is impossible? Or say, hey, I'm so glad you're doing this. I thought of doing this before, but didn't have anybody helping or whatever. So let's figure out that. Let's figure out what some of the bodies of work are to include. Yeah, I think this, for me, fits in like the next call. We should have like a primary test. We're going to meet for this hour. Here's what we're expecting to do. It could be share information, but you know, but here are some questions we'd like, you know, yeah, we'd like to try and answer or, you know, but here's the task when the time's up, we'll be done with that. But I think if the meeting has a primary task for its event, that will help people either decide. Yeah, exactly. And help you get, you know, some feedback on, well, you know, what do we take this? Sounds good. I think that's a key point, Bill. What questions do we want to ask and what questions do we want to answer? And maybe even when do we want to answer them? Is this an ongoing, interesting conversation or do we want some sort of output, be it the manifesto or comic strip in 10 months time or whatever? Right. Yeah, I would like to go, you know, in a short period of time, we're going to have like, here are the rules, here are the like, from the people that know about managing commons, here are the things we need to address. Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's, you know, nail that on the door to see what happens. Exactly. Yeah, we can say we have 90s, 99s, you know, it's a bit much. Yeah, it's a long read. I don't know that I ever made it through the 95 that the crew trained on. So. Yeah, right. Yeah, I know, I don't know. Yeah, right. But some simple means carry really well. So I think that that's an art is figuring out what those are and how to make them work. Good. So, so that's good. So we also all set up the call for next week. We I'll put a couple questions. If you want to collaboratively create an agenda for next week's meeting on the chat, that would be great because I'm not, I'm not a great agenda maker, partly because I'm really good at broadening and not so good at narrowing. And agenda making is often like, let's limit options and let's do this. And then also, I was convinced yesterday that the language of guilds and quests is probably not our best framing here. And so, yeah, the guild has too much historic baggage and a bunch of other reasons why guild may not really work well. The idea behind the guild of a group of people who are behind a craft or a skill, that's fine. But not so much the word guild. And then quest is to, in particular, Michael Grossman said, when I first heard that OGM had this framing of guilds and quests, I was like, oh, here's some unserious world of Warcraft players who are busy to sort of doing stuff. And that that really sort of sank in. I'm like, oh, okay, let's, let's pick slightly more, more serious language somehow. So, yeah, I think we can't ignore the, the, you know, associations that come with, even if we're trying to change exactly, you know, how we use words, right. And I was trying to pick up some of the good stuff of guilds and also martial arts dojos and things like that. So, yeah, we can add it to what Hank said. I think the question is, one could be questions, you know, there are questions we want to explore. So that's like open-ended. There are questions we would like to answer. So just, you know, to try and be as explicit as possible. Yep. And, you know, we're going to take an hour. So we're going to, you know, we're going to use a time. We're going to use, I used to tell on a project. And we had a, you know, I was working on a software project in Xerox. And the marketing guy went, we don't have much time. I said, yeah, time is our ally. So what do you mean? I said, we don't have much time. That means we're going to do less. That is good. So use the time box to really, you know, help. And so the thing, the thing I think the time-bounded project, which I would, the thing formerly known as a quest, the time-bounded project, I think, is to create a, some kind of document that doesn't answer all the questions and has some embedded big questions, but that is a good starting point. And maybe part of that time-bounded project is to set up a challenge for an artist or a cartoonist or a songwriter or somebody to jump in and say, hey, here's an expression of, of what's in that work product. That to me is time-bounded. A different from what you can achieve in one hour of meeting toward that project, which is a different time-bounding. No, I like that. I mean, Hank's just written this down. It's really great. I mean, I think, you know, yeah, I think that could just be it. I mean, it's sort of in a way the agenda for next time. Oh, interesting. Is just to set up the challenge? Well, first of all, we might leak. Go ahead, Hank. Yeah, I was going to say probably that's too fast to set up a challenge. It might emerge in my feeling. If we do something like the first four questions, that's a lot in an hour. And if a challenge emerges, fine. And if it doesn't, that would be something for the time after that. Cool. Yeah. All right. That sounds really good. You can set it up in an inimitable Jerry style. All right. Here's where we're going to come one, come all, and keep smiling. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Anyway, Hank, it was great to meet you. Same here, Bill. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thanks for showing us. Appreciate it a lot. Be well. Yep. Live long and prosper. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye.