Snip: The suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire killed at least two Marines and four others were missing and presumed dead. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female.

The ambush late Thursday also suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city from insurgents seven months ago.

The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women “in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities,” a military statement said.

I’m consolidating blogs: in future you can find my posts about civic engagement, online dialogue and related topics on Otherwise Engaged.

The BC Citizens’ Assembly is taking its experience on the road. The New America Foundation is hosting a discussion next week titled Can the U.S. Take Lessons from a Canadian Experiment in Democracy?. It will be held Tuesday, June 7 at 3:30 PM at the New America Foundation, 1630 Connecticut Ave, 7th Floor, Washington DC. RSVPs are requested.

I’m presenting on two different panels at OD2005. My main paper (in room 380x at 2:40 on Saturday) is on “Found” Enagement: Lessons from Hacktiivsm and Blogging. I’ll be talking about the increasingly fuzzy boundary between formal consultation and spontaneous activism, and how online deliberation can learn to incorporate spontaneous participation the way offline deliberation incorporates activism. This paper is partly based on the research I did for my dissertation on Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation.

And at 1:10 on Saturday I’ll be part of a panel on Collaboration Tools for the E-Deliberation Community (in room 041), which will look at how e-deliberation researchers and practitioners can facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration. I’ll be talking about the DO-Consult listserv for people working in the field of online consultation and dialogue. I’ll also talk about some of the tools you see on the conference blog — like CiteULike and del.icio.us — and how they can help us coordinate our work.

I’m heading to Stanford this week for the 2005 Online Deliberation conference. I’m currently setting up a conference blog that puts some of my recent investigations into tagging to work as a tool for collaboration and dialogue among conference participants.

OD2005

The folks over at Technorati have come up with a proposed XML standard, dubbed Attention.xml, aimed at ranking RSS feeds (like those generated by blogs) so that all us poor overwhelmed blog readers can make better, smarter, more efficient choices. Check out what it does with your own list of blog subscritions here.

I’ve been checking out Drupal, a web-based content management system that could provide an interesting platform for online engagement projects (especially those with a limited budget — Drupal is open source).

For those who don’t know Drupal, it describes itself as a “dynamic web site platform which allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage and organize a variety of content, Drupal integrates many popular features of content management systems, weblogs, collaborative tools and discussion-based community software into one easy-to-use package.”

One interesting Drupal implementation at the edges of civic engagement is Civic Space. Civic Space aims more at grassroots organizing and campaigning than at consultation per se, but it’s an interesting starting point for organizations who are looking for a version of Drupal that is a little more tailored to civic engagement needs.

Lawrence Lessig has drawn a line in the sands of intellectual property. He declares today that:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

I couldn’t be more delighted by his resolve. If academics of Lessig’s stature refuse to publish the absurdly restrictive copyright agreements required by so many academic publishers, it may put pressure on those publishers to develop more reasonable agreements. The question is how to best accelerate that process, and in particular, how to restructure the academic incentive sytem so that it becomes possible for more academics to make the same choice Lessig has.

Refusing to publish under restrictive agreements is a good option for senior academics with tenured positions at prestigious universities — academics whose future does not hinge on each publishing opportunity, in other words. But for junior academics, the price of challenging copyright can be much higher.

I recently withdrew from a forthcoming “Handbook on Internet Security”, to be published by Wiley Publishing, because the publishing agreement required me to relinquish my copyright. Given that the contribution was to be based on core material from my dissertation — which like many recent Ph.D.s, I hope to publish in fuller form — there were practical as well as principled reasons to refuse to sign the agreement. But if I were on the academic job market or in a tenure-track position, that foregone publication opportunity would be an advantage lost. Junior academics simply can’t afford to turn down publication opportunities.

Given the enormous publication pressures within academia, it’s simply not reasonable to expect individual (especially junior) academics to drive the process of change through individual adherence to the kind of policy Lessig himself has adopted. (Though kudos to anyone who is prepared to take that step.)

A more effective strategy might use some combination of social and institutional pressure. For social pressure, how about a system for rating the copyright agreements of different scholarly publications? A searchable online directory that lets academics find the most copyright-friendly journals in their field would encourage scholars to send their works to those journals, improving their quality, prestige, and hopefully, subscription base — thereby creating a market incentive for better copyright policy.

And at an institutional level, why shouldn’t academic libraries factor copyright policies into their purchasing decisions? I’d love to see university librarians adopt policies whereby journal subscription decisions systematically favour journals that give fair rights to their contributors.