—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government releases some data, people turn the data into something useful.

Then a guy named Peter Orloff emailed Peterson to say that he was from NextBus Information Systems, he had all the data copyrighted, and Peterson would have to arrange some sort of revenue split if he wanted to keep offering his app. After some research, Peterson says he found that NextBus Information Systems had no real connection to NextBus and was very unlikely to own the data (although there is a dubious legal claim), so he ignored Orloff and went on selling the app. So Orloff went to Apple and demanded that they stop selling Routesy, claiming that it violated his copyrights. Apple pulled it down, and Peterson couldn’t do anything about it—although he got lots of supportive emails, and says that “It’s really heartwarming to see so many people so passionate about using public transportation.”

The thing is, though, Orloff doesn’t seem to have a valid copyright claim. Muni says the data is public and sharing is encouraged. When Eve Batey, a reporter from SF Appeal, confronted Orloff about the copyright issue, he gave a series of truly bizarre excuses. (Article headline: “Muni Arrival Data App Killer Fears Attacks From Enraged Data/Transit Fiends.”)

This actually looks similar to the DMCA notice-and-takedown regime for ISPs. Under the DMCA, copyright holders can inform an ISP that they’re hosting an infringing work, and the ISP must disable access to the site if it wants to retain a blanket-like immunity against a claim for contributory copyright infringement. The site creator can, however, send a counter-notice protesting that the copyright claim is invalid, and the ISP may then restore access to the work unless the copyright holder files a lawsuit within 14 days of the counter-notice. Although there are disagreements over the DMCA standard, which was a compromise between the ISPs’ interests and the copyright holders’ interests, is it relatively clear and workable.

Apple, I think, would do well to adopt some kind of similar standard for claims against existing apps. They certainly ought to have a way for app creators to lodge a counterclaim against protestors. Apple apps are, and will increasingly be, big business, and so people with both good and malicious intentions will be very concerned about copyright. (It doesn’t even need to just be copyright: recall the groups that rallied to get BabyShaker off the iPhone because it was incredibly tasteless.) This is just another aspect of the problem that Apple is trying to be an omnipotent gatekeeper, but without the manpower to be omniscient—to investigate each app for security, copyright, and tastefulness.

More generally, I think we’ll soon need clear standards on the rights and responsibilities of mobile carriers, hardware providers, and OS creators. Who will be given broad, ISP-like immunity, and who won’t? Mobile computing is going to be too important to have very powerful ad hoc gatekeepers with conflicting, overlapping, or unrealistic roles.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites or websites that aggregate apps, subject to their own corporate policies if it’s not a personal device.) It’s a great read — go check it out.

A couple things struck me about this:

—The technical side of developing has gotten infinitely better since Tim Wu’s 2007 account of mass confusion and interoperability problems, but a developer is still looking at significant tradeoffs between portability and capability.

—There are plenty of stories out there about how the iPhone can turn the hobbyist developer into a millionaire after a week of work. For most developers, though, the app and its marketing will require a lot of TLC. It doesn’t sound like Watkins has been overwhelmed by the marketing responsibilities, but he has had to become savvier about the sales side of app development. A sample of his early strategy: “I did some googling and saw MobiHand [a site that collects apps] but decided it must be less popular than Handango since I hadn’t heard of it. (Not exactly bullet proof reasoning.) So, I went with Handango for my first sales.”

Still, it’s definitely easier than marketing standalone software for a PC. In that sense, the app stores are very useful, prompting innovation from people who aren’t willing to commit to developing/marketing as a full-time job.

—Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo speculated that iPhone might crush its competition by co-opting most of the development community. If the apps available for the iPhone are much better than the apps available for other smartphones, people will stick with iPhones even if another phone has better hardware. As Manjoo points out, it would be the reverse of the situation that allowed Windows PCs to dominate.

But Watkins’ story makes me think that another platform could attract developers if the owners aggressively pursued them with great technical support, more capabilities, a favorable revenue split, help with marketing, etc. If I were in charge of Palm Pre sales, I would be thinking really hard about how to get the best developers.

Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet.  The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS.  As Dom Sagolla explains:

Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message.

Of course, 140 characters is now part of the lore and essence of Twitter.  It’s as sacrosanct as McDonald’s having two arches (despite starting with only one) or a Swiss Army knife folding up.  (An April Fool’s joke had the company appearing to offer “Twitter Premium” with 160 characters and 50,000 instant followers.)

But there could be good reason to stretch the limit — or allow for a slightly more nuanced set of data behind a tweet — and not just because 140 characters might cut off key information (to be sure, an Onion-ey link) and have only half a thought re-tweeted before it’s fully completed.  In fact, the “retweet” — expressed as “RT @[source] [source's original tweet]” — is a great case study on why.  As danah boyd et al explain, retweeting is one of several “behavioral conventions” arising from Twitter users themselves.  Twitter itself does not have a special “RT” functionality; it’s just two letters that many people have come to use to say that they’re repeating something they saw elsewhere — and giving attribution for it.

With the 140 character limit, though, the “RT” and attribution have to fit too.  An original tweet that’s already near the limit will have to be shortened for it to work.  And if someone retweets further, the cycle continues.  Danah & Co. have some great examples in their draft of ways in which that retweeting can inadvertently distort or even negate the original message.

Twitter has already shown a willingness to adopt users’ conventions.  The use of @___ at the beginning of a tweet to communicate with a user became so common that it made sense for Twitter to put a special link on each user’s home Twitter page to view “@replies” from others.  For retweeting, Twitter could choose not to count RT @___ against the 140 character limit.  That could cause some tweets to be truncated when forwarded to SMS, or divided into two messages, which was an original reason why the limit was adopted.  But that might be worth it at this point.  Or, Twitter could start implementing metadata for tweets.  Already it records a timestamp and source for a tweet (since people can inject tweets into the system in so many different ways, not just at twitter.com.)  Retweets could become part of that metadata, not necessarily fully transmitted as part of the full message itself.  That way, the 140 character limit could be maintained, but people could still follow the genealogy of an idea, right back to its source — just the way that the “in-reply-to” link on twitter.com lets someone unravel an entire conversation with just a click.  And being able to lengthen a tweet in special circumstances could, if applied to URLs, also help avoid the need for the risky phenomenon of URL shorteners.

Twitter is a foundational technology.  By that I don’t mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block.  Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — say, PC operating systems, or Internet protocol — it’s evolving comparatively slowly.  Even MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, hasn’t changed all that quickly.  Too much is built on top of it, both technologically and in users’ practices, to change it hastily.  So that’s one reason just to let it sit as is.  But by giving a little more breathing space for attribution — to let people more readily build on others’ ideas through retweeting — Twitter could help assure an even wider spectrum of use, even if its founders didn’t happen to think it could be used so comprehensively or seriously.

One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser.  And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial is that it’s a “generative” technology, i.e. one that can be repurposed by its user at any time by simply installing new software.  Without it, those in Iran wanting to get to blocked information would be mostly restricted to visiting Web sites that aren’t blocked and hoping that they can connect to those that are — the way that Twitterfall can be used to tweet even if twitter.com is blocked, or visiting an anonymizer like anonymizer.com.

Of course, those can be blocked too, and often are.  Twitter’s ancillary sites are working — to the extent they still are — only because the censors have their hands full at the moment.  But the PC changes the equation on both sides: within and outside of Iran.

Inside Iran, people can load new software on their PCs to try to get around blocks.  Find a copy of something like the xB browser online, or modify your current browser to work with software like Tor, and you can try directing all your Web access through intermediaries that aren’t blocked.  If you find one that works, all your surfing can end up unblocked.  If people were using today’s mobile phones for Internet access instead of PCs, this wouldn’t be possible, because most mobile phones, even if they can hook up to a wireless Internet access point, won’t run outside code, or only run outside code approved by the vendor.  (The jury’s still out on how easily one can install outside code on a phone running Google’s Android OS.)

Even more important than the options available to someone inside Iran are the options for those everywhere else.  Many people have been eager to show support for those in Iran who want to evade the government clampdown on news, both in and out.  Thanks to the PC they can do more than color their personal avatars green.  If you have a PC and want to help, you can find instructions on how to download software that will turn your PC into a way station between Iranian citizens and the rest of the Net.  Two minutes ago you were playing Quake, and now you’re donating bandwidth and computing cycles to the free movement of bits — and you can even go back to playing Quake again.  And discussions are under way to reconfigure the just-released free Opera browser so it can serve as a proxy. [Update: Al Billings at Mozilla is thinking through the same questions for Firefox.]

That’s extraordinary.  The computing machines we buy are descendants of the old hobbyist machines of the 1980’s, which assumed people would get them so they could tinker with them, and those vestiges turn out to be crucial at a time like this.  We’re lucky to still have so many home PCs out there.  Our work ones are often locked down — your neighborhood IT department would have a heart attack if it found you running a proxy server, since it would worry about the security of the corporate intranet.  Most schools don’t allow their students to run new code in a computer cluster, and libraries are locked down, too.  (Indeed, all three of these places typically have their own content filters installed!)  Thanks to the PC, people can help forge new civic technologies — ones that succeed to the extent that people are willing to participate in them.

Perhaps soon we’ll see even more profound ways to transform access to the information grid.  Researchers have been puzzling through “wireless ad hoc mesh networking,” which allows devices to connect to each other without needing an Internet Service Provider to run interference.  If anyone is connected to the larger Internet, everyone else nearby — and everyone near everyone else nearby, etc. — can connect.  This is the method used by the One Laptop Per Child project to allow the PCs they are sending to kids in developing countries to share data with one another even if there’s no Internet drop point available.  Imagine that technology redeployed to this situation — and it can be, if someone writes or adapts the right software.  Our PCs have radios in them that can talk to one another, not just to an “official” access point; you may even recall seeing others’ computers in your wi-fi access list when trying to find a way to get online while on the road.  A little tweak here and there and it can start working — for school kids in Brazil, for hurricane refugees running laptops on battery power, and for citizens in Iran facing otherwise-limited Net access.

A green avatar is just the beginning — so long as we maintain our somewhat accidental ubiquitous infrastructure of generative, reprogrammable boxes, a legion of hackers ready to reprogram them to social ends, and a citizenry ready to donate some bandwidth and cycles to a good cause.

This blog isn’t that active — I haven’t quite figured out the right rhythm, and what should count as blogworthy enough to post.  The past couple days have been active, though, with the events unfolding in Iran.  I’m part of OpenNet, which tracks Internet censorship around the world, and we just released an update to our study of Internet filtering in Iran.  There’s also the Herdict project, designed precisely for situations like these, so people can report filtering as it happens.  And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter and its cousins — how much social media is making a difference in what’s happening.

Apart from blogging I’ve been interviewed some by the media, and alas, one of the more provocative quotes — just featured by Andrew Sullivan — was to BBC and picked up by an Economist blog.  It was provocative for its wince-inducing inanity and self-importance:

“It’s just too early to say but my expertise tells me what is going on is extremely interesting.”

It’s reminiscent of the classic Newsweek article ending: “The future is uncertain but one thing is clear — if things don’t get better they could certainly get a whole lot worse.”

Sigh.  I think what I had in my mind was a real tension.  On one hand there’s the excitement about what these new technologies are doing — such as the story of people like Austin Heap rallying people around the world to convert their laptops to proxies to help Iranians get Net — and the knowledge that we’re still in the middle of the situation and we’ll need time to really sort out what’s been happening, and how much of a difference social technologies are making.  (When experts aren’t busy saying nothing, they’re often overhyping …)

I guess I’ve gotten my comeuppance for calling Twitter inane.  In the meantime, I’m as glued as everyone else to what’s going on, and how many people are becoming a part of it.  Go, civic technologies!  My expertise tells me I should stop writing now …

We’ve just released our OpenNet Initiative 2009 study of Internet censorship in Iran, including new data from the most recent rounds of testing there.  We’ll try to augment some of the findings there with data coming in over the past few days, including reports to the Herdict Web network blockage tool.

If you’re finding there are Web sites you can’t access, please consider filing a report at Herdict — or downloading the toolbar.

…on Star Trek, Charlie Brown, and Wikipedia:

(Text available here.)

That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks as part of his blog’s extraordinary coverage of the events now taking place in Iran.  The NYT has a story out with a roundup of the use of social media during the crisis, while Publius at Obsidian Wings worries that Twitter can be blocked just like any other service.

Our OpenNet overview of the Internet in Iran dates from 2005, but it’s still largely true.  (An update is in the works.)  Iran has been able to impose a finely grained Internet filtering regime, not having to deal with the sheer volume of traffic that, say, China has.  It’s able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs.  All Internet traffic is routed through a server farm that applies the filtering.  (The government used to run U.S. company Secure Computing’s (since acquired by McAfee) SmartFilter software.  Secure Computing denied selling the software to Iran; see Wikipedia’s summary.  Today Iran runs its own home-grown filtering software.)

So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter users’ feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others.  But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site.  It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules.  More than most, Twitter allows multiple paths in and out for data.  Its open APIs make it trivially easy for any other Web service provider to insert a stream of tweets in or to capture what comes out.  Thus Twitterfall can provide a waterfall of tweets — all viewable by going there instead of to Twitter.  Anyone using at Twitterfall can tweet from there as well.  You can hook up your Facebook status in either direction, so that when you tweet it automatically updates your Facebook status — or the other way around.

The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful.  There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com.  And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally censorship resistant than most other Web sites.

Less really is more.

Publius points out that Iran could simply cut off all Internet access, or at least all access for most people there.  Maybe it’ll come to that.

My brother Jeff, who loves music more than I love the Internet, just played in a Bob Dylan tribute show, and there’s now video available:

I was sorry to be on the wrong coast for it.  I’ll be visiting at Stanford again this fall — a great piece of West Coast life for me is to be able to see my brother’s shows.

I was asked to give the commencement talk at my old high school this year.  I wrote it out ahead of time, so figured I’d share it here –

Jonathan Zittrain
Shady Side Academy Commencement Speech – 5 June 2009

Good morning, Shady Side, and a hearty congratulations to the class of 2009!

It’s fantastic to be back on campus. I confess that when I was a student here I had good days, bad days, and, well, surreal days. I began at David Mancosh’s Middle School, where a scrappy production of Lord of the Flies enjoyed a daily run for over two decades. My first mistake was to be a skinny nerd with the name ZITTRAIN. I compounded the error by wearing my school backpack over both shoulders. I was alerted to my lack of fashion sense when someone drop kicked it from behind while I was wearing it. It sailed about six inches off the ground, taking me with it like a parachute in an updraft, and I landed with it upside down across my stomach.

From then on I carried my pack slung over my right shoulder and staggered into classes like Latin. We were given quizzes nearly every day, tasked with translating insanely convoluted sentences. We’d then visit the teacher’s desk one by one to look over his shoulder as he graded our respective quizzes, a dot on each clause as he parsed the sentences, and an angry red circle around mistakes. What happened if you managed to get through with only dots? A 99 out of 100. (There were numerical grading scales back then. Today I understand you have feel-good grades ranging from W00T to EPIC FAIL.) Anyway, no one earned 100 in this teacher’s class. 99 was the best you could do. I think the intended lesson was that no one can ever be perfect. The Latin phrase is Personam Loserum No Matter Whatum.

I’ve since drawn a larger lesson: throughout life you will encounter people in positions of authority over you whom you believe to be lunatics. How you handle these situations will in part determine how happy you can be. Sometimes you can fight it; sometimes you can persuade the other person of your view; sometimes you just have to live with it; and sometimes it turns out that you’re the lunatic. Feeling powerless over something you care about is one of the toughest situations to encounter, and such situations don’t lessen in adulthood. I remember being surprised in my twenties to discover that adults are basically just like you, only older. As of today, even as you begin the odd cycle of school life and trade in your senior status to become a frosh again, you’re part of the general club of humanity that enjoys certain freedoms while still having to reconcile to limits.

Of course, don’t underestimate the freedom half. Once you’re out from under your parents’ watchful eyes (and I assume even the boarders among you had some form of authority not far away here), you realize that in college or whatever your next stage of life is that you can do whatever you want. By this I don’t mean that you can have anything you want. Rather, you are about to become as free as one can be to make your own decisions without immediate contradiction or discipline from a parent, teacher, or boss. There were many things I loved about college, and among the best was the realization I could have Lucky Charms whenever I felt like it: breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack. That’s and, not or. (You can substitute your own forbidden vice here.) It was like being thrust suddenly into the universe of a Charlie Brown television special, where adults make only the rarest of appearances, and when they do, they blat like foghorns for about ten seconds and then promptly leave.

Well, we can learn something from Charlie Brown, namely the constraint that accompanies seeming freedom. Wikipedia calls him “the great American un-success story.” Despite the absence of adults Charlie Brown remains an existentialist speck, buffeted by forces from an absurd world beyond his control. He reacts to what befalls him rather than seizing the initiative. It’s like the life of a dog: the dog accepts whatever he sees without needing to understand it. People enter and leave the field of vision. Cars drive. Elevator doors close and ten seconds later they open on a new landscape. Life is random, and what we remember of it is quirky.

For example, there was one particularly colorful sixth grade math teacher – perhaps he’s here today – who was mild mannered but for one cardinal (or is it ordinal?) offense. He’d pose a problem and the called-upon student would timidly offer something like: “Six oh four?” Silence. The bad kind. Then: “Ohhh-EW-uh?! OHHHHHH?? OH IS A LETTER! ZERO IS A NUMBER!” with a pound on the blackboard enough to raise chalk dust on the other side of the wall in dear old Mr. McMillan’s English class.

I remember the rule about zero and OH and nothing else from that entire year of mathematics. Little things like this, whether remembered or not, are the dark matter of our universe: invisible but dominating. They comprise the bulk of who and what we are. People weave in and out of your life every day, usually entirely forgettably, and you in theirs. The attendant working the register at Target. The server at the local restaurant. The cell phone addict who sits next to you on a flight. Most of life is a stitching together of these moments of seeming insignificance, of shopping and eating and waiting and being annoyed, a vast expanse of mental prairie that connects the clusters and spires of the life milestone set pieces that we think make us distinct. In today’s words, life is largely Twitter, and I wonder if any of us will remember more than 140 characters from, say, this speech.

The set pieces are the graduations, weddings, funerals, and I suppose statistically speaking for at least one or two of us, the indictments. Those milestones may seem more salient, because by definition they happen rarely and summon more of our attention. Moreover, we aren’t prepared for how to handle them by our own experience; the closest guides we have, oddly enough, are the ways in which they are worked into our popular culture to make it seem less like dull prairie. That’s why there are no bathrooms on the starship Enterprise. Compare how many crises and killings and funerals and first kisses and indictments you’ve seen on TV instead.

The fact is that we can become prisoner both to our regular life scripts, the somnambulant routines we fall into in the day-by-day, and to the melodrama we inherit from Hollywood writers to cover the notable pieces. What Shady Side gave me on the day-by-day was an appreciation of the obtuse, the angular, the colorful byplay that gave me more to remember and that challenged me to establish my own identity when so little seemed within my own control. And what it gave me on the bigger picture was a chance to cultivate a passion, and to see that the world wasn’t just me and those who crossed my field of vision. It was us, a bunch of people trying to make sense of things, whether teacher or student, loser or bully. And these labels aren’t doled out, one to a person. Instead they are fluid roles that each of us take on at one time or another.

To escape the backpack kickers I retreated further into nerd-dom. I was lucky enough to be given time on a school TRS-80 personal computer during free periods. Near the computer was a looseleaf notebook with a series of tutorials about programming. I don’t know where it came from, but it walked me through learning basic computer science. The text was both comprehensive and witty – it anticipated my questions just as I had them. Only when I entered the Senior School did I meet the author of that book – someone who teaches philosophy here as well as computer science, one of so many teachers whose care and patience with students has been transcendent.

My nerdiness took a turn for the social as PCs became networked. I participated in local bulletin board systems and later on CompuServe, a proprietary pay-by-the-hour service with user forums on various topics. Six weeks later my parents got the first charge from CompuServe on their credit card. I had to tell my online friends that I couldn’t afford it anymore – I hadn’t admitted I was only 13 – and I was offered free time in exchange for becoming a “sysop,” a system operator who would help people find answers to their questions, and mediate disputes. Thus I came to explore how online communities could govern themselves even as the basic social structures of high school eluded me.

We have such examples today, magnified that much more by the reach of the Internet, as many of you know and as your parents fear. The underlying fabric of the Internet itself depends on a sense of community. For Internet routing to work – for data to get from point A to point Z – it passes through any number of intermediate locations, each of which moves it one step closer to its destination. How does each location know in which direction to pass a packet of information? There’s a map, not maintained by some central authority, but generated on the fly by each participating way station. It’s as if each of you were alone on a mountaintop, and could only see those who were one peak away. To build the map, you start saying what you see to others nearby: you say to the person on your right, “Here’s what I see to my left.” And you tell the person on your left what you see to your right. They can then tell those near them what they’ve heard from you, and vice versa. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you have the makings of a distributed map, based on gossip. One day the government of Pakistan sought to filter out YouTube from its citizens. It told its Internet Service Providers to block access to YouTube. One small ISP carried out the order by sending a small lie to its subscribers and neighbors: it announced that it was in fact YouTube. Its subscribers’ packets were then drawn there like a magnet, where the ISP could throw them away, since the point was to block YouTube.

But it didn’t stop there. Within a few minutes word had ricocheted around the Internet that YouTube had moved, and if you were here in Pittsburgh trying to reach YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and not coming back – and there was nothing that YouTube, one of the most popular Web sites in the world, and its owner Google, the most powerful company in the world, were particularly privileged to do about it. So how was the problem solved? It’s as if the Bat Signal went up, and the call was answered by NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group, an informal mailing list of nerds, some of whom work for various ISPs. NANOG members diagnosed the issue and promulgated a fix. It’s as if your house were to catch on fire. The bad news is that there’s no fire department. The good news is that some of your neighbors promptly come over with garden hoses and put the fire out, expecting neither payment nor recognition for their help. It’s an extremely powerful civic defense system, powered in large part by goodwill. Though I wonder how vulnerable the Internet could be during a major Star Trek convention, when NANOG members are otherwise occupied and no one is minding the store.

Speaking of scifi, consider another example of community governance: the case of Star Wars kid. He took a school video camera borrowed for a class project, put it on a tripod, and demoed some light saber moves using a golf ball retriever. His friends discovered the video and place it online, where it became one of the biggest viral hits of all time. He wanted none of this – in fact, he was utterly mortified by it. No matter; mash-ups and derivatives were made from the original video, including Matrix and Lord of the Rings versions, and he became a laughingstock at school.

A modicum of compassion and respect turned up in an unlikely place. Wikipedia naturally has an article on Star Wars kid. Each article on Wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page, and debate raged about whether to include his name in the account of his humiliation. The Wikipedians argued earnestly and then decided by vote – not unanimous – to leave the name out, and to this day the Wikipedia entry omits it. They’ve since had to address questions like the weight of precedent, so those who disagree with the decision know how soon the issue can be reopened, and how to achieve enforcement – namely by tapping the efforts of even those Wikipedians who disagree with the outcome, but respect the system that produced it. They help keep the project going through challenges small and large. Indeed, at all times Wikipedia is about 45 minutes from utter destruction, such as from spammers who would like to turn every single article into an ad for a Rolex watch. There’s just a thin geeky line of unpaid volunteers who care to save it that keeps it functioning. Again: the Bat Signal goes up, and well-meaning, reasonable people answer it, usually not wearing spandex. It’s been fascinating to watch Wikipedia fashion and institute a form of law, in the best sense of law as an enterprise emanating from people trying to get along and be fair, understanding that they will not always agree.

My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong.

For the world you are entering – really the one you’ve been in all along – is one swimming in received wisdom, accepted uncritically. Too easily we farm out the hard work of knowing whether our society is on a sustainable path to policymakers, experts, or the media. It’s like: Katie Couric will tell us if there’s anything genuinely worth worrying about. But these channels of authority are overwhelmed, dysfunctional, and in some cases outright corrupt.

What will reinforce them, or even take their place, is something you can help build, with tools that even ten years ago were unknown. The key is to move from the reactive, desultory world of Charlie Brown to one in which you appreciate that you are generally at least as empowered as the next person, and to realize the ethical dimension that accompanies the day-by-day as well as the landmark events in life. As my best friend at Shady Side put it, reflecting on what he knows now that he and I had missed in high school, one of the best ways to evaluate your success is the effect you have on a room of people – family or strangers – when you enter. Does it become brighter or darker? That’s something you can choose, even though too often it’s just a script followed without much thought. Enterprises like Wikipedia urge us to ask the same question in our virtual lives, knowing how often they touch real ones.

We are at a time of great uncertainty. The economy is in the tank, after most talking heads told us things were fine. We’re told that global warming will wreak havoc on our planet, and we are the cause. Things went right from “too early to tell” to “too late to do anything about it.” The best among us are afraid of being found out for the frauds we suspect we are, because part of leadership is to exude a confidence and stability that isn’t always truly felt. (The worst among us are Bernie Madoff, who’s just a fraud.)

But you are at a time of great promise. In your immediate future you’ll literally be handed a catalog of humankind’s knowledge and asked to select four or five subjects to study for months at a time. And you’ll have an amazing amount of free time; Shady Side is far more rigorous than college. You can use it to find and pursue your passions, and to greet with joy and mischief new friends and relationships. (On the mischief front, I confess that Jon Beckerman and I were responsible for running the flag lampooning the headmaster up the flagpole and cutting the halyard. It flew for a week, until a bucket truck that said “Bob’s Erections” on the side came to take it down. We also were the ones who dropped a bean down the drain of each of those tiny sinks in the science lab tables. About a week later the stalks came up, and we tied a sign to each faucet that said DO NOT DISTURB – EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS.)

As you forge and savor the interpersonal connections that make all the difference between simulating a successful life and living one, you’ll be ready to improve the world in the only way that it really ever happens: to answer a Bat Signal that calls to you. I hope without needing spandex.

Congratulations, good luck, and see you on Facebook!