Joining Spirits with Aiki Framework: The New Web Engine for Open Clip Art Library
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Phillips, Jon
In the past, applying a free software development style to web applications blocked development on the Open Clip Art Library. The project has nearly joined the #FAIL list multiple times. Since web sites are centralized pieces of software running continuously, there is a need for secure access to the live code. This forces a division of managing a running website, merging software changes from developers, and keeping development on the software progressing healthily. To complicate matters, a site like Open Clip Art Library has an active base of librarians and artists uploading and editing new clipart. The new Aiki Framework aims to solve all these issues.
 So I'm going old school today. This is how I used to present when I first started doing this kind of thing. I was inspired not to use open office anymore. So what I'm talking about is IKEE framework. And IKEE framework is an evolution of various things I've been working on. And also I want to say thank you to the organizing team. Thank you to Fimke and everybody. Like, give a round of applause. Thanks to Tight Pants. Tight Pants, man. Thank you. Yes, without you. So I'm looking at this IKEE framework. And I want to frame things a little bit in terms of a trajectory. This trajectory takes us through various things. We all began our journeys through free software, open source, and into graphics in different ways. I choose to look at it as a freeing of myself, particularly in studying art and culture. And this is me. I try to smile as much as possible. I don't know if it's like from upbringing or I think it's actually my grandpa. I think it's genetic. But I consider myself a free person. I do what I want. I make things that I believe in come real. So I'm a free person. And because of this, I can work on free software. I can make something that I think come real. The example is Inkscape. When we were building Inkscape, when we started building Inkscape, there was not a free drawing tool. It didn't exist. We made this come real because of various different people's alignments at the time. Myself being in grad school and on a fellowship, so I had time to work on this. And we made something great. And it still goes on. Moving from that, I became interested in how to also have free content. Because with Inkscape, there was so much great artwork that was being made. But how do we know where this artwork is? How do we see the quality of the work? Where does it go? And that led several of us to create the Open Clipart library and various other things that build this content space up. And the really good side effect of this, of Open Clipart, was actually that I got a job at Creative Commons. So luckily, no one asked me anymore. They're like, how do you get a job in open source and free software? I'm like, just do what you love. You'll get something out of it. There's some water, too. Oh, there's water there. So in looking at Creative Commons, I've been articulating this concept of the Freedom Stack. The Freedom Stack, emanating out from free people, we have a stack of different hardware and content, thank you, that we can look at and see if we can actually create clearly what we, as free people, have in our minds. Right? If, for example, I have an idea to build a building a certain way, I want it to look exactly like that building, or better than that building. But part of this framework is that unless we have free tools, we will not be able to get to that very clear idea. And not only will we not be able to get to that idea, we won't be able to get to it efficiently. There are many roadblocks in the way. So with the content side of things, we have Creative Commons. That allows for the solution. That allows for content to spread freely, because individuals license it a certain way. With software, we have the GPL and other licenses that allow for us to share our source code legally. Now, whether or not these licenses have had, if they are enforced or enforceable, in some ways doesn't necessarily matter as much to me these days. The main thing that I realized by Creative Commons licenses and free software and open source licenses that allows for a community to emerge. In some ways, when I look at the Creative Commons logo, I think of it as simply a social club, a social network. And I think the same way the GPL allowed for a certain kind of social network to emerge. So if you look here, we have two major problems. We have networks and hardware. And the amazing thing is that these are actually closer to us as individuals and are the most problematic, non-free spaces in this stack. So what I'm working on mostly now is with status.net, identica, and freeing up the network and free network services, which we'll talk about in probably a five minutes when that five minute flag gets raised. Actually, we should hand out different minute flags and just keep raising them at different times. I told myself I was going to be the person who makes the biggest interruption on the five minute and on the one minute. So when that happens, you'll know. Because tight pants, man, and I are in a, we came up with a plan. It's going to be a performance at the five minute mark. So status.net is really looking at this free network service problem. And there are other services too. There's, and other software. There's MongoDBs, a really cool NoSQL engine that is AGPL license. Then there's also some other projects as well, which I'm getting to. So with status.net, you can have your network, your free network service. You can move your data wherever you'd like it. There's a license that allows companies or tries to keep companies from hiding their code behind a network socket. But then also on the hardware side, there's now new cool projects like Copy Left Hardware Projects, like the Qi hardware, NanoNote. Has anybody heard of the NanoNote? You see this? It's like $100, $99 little mini computer. And the goal is to be 100% copy left from top to bottom. So we use Inkscape. We use GIMP. But we use completely proprietary hardware, like Apple MacBooks. And yes, they're really sweet and everything. But they're still problematic. There's software that runs on chips that is then burned into Asics. So this software is completely closed, nearly 99.99999% of all code that's made on FPGAs that's burned into Asics is not copy left. This is a problem. So that's another problem that I articulate here. Zoomable interface. So now getting back into what you guys are really interested in, which is graphics. So when we started Open Clipart Library like four years ago, I went to the Wayback machine and I pulled up some nice images of this. And it's pretty horrible, actually. But the funniest part is when we created this, we actually look how many years have gone by. And we didn't have any of those. And we didn't have thumbnails. Like how do you have a website of Clipart without images for this long? It's kind of sad. And Niku here and other people are like, they were drinking the Haterade, as we like to say in the USA. How can you have this site but no thumbnails? So it was a thorn in my side for a long time. And the problem came down to, so when you develop software, let's say Inkscape, you're working out here. There's all these people who are distributed around the world, and there's this source code. And people can commit to it. And now if I get, it's a lot easier to commit to this one thing we call trunk or the master repository. With network services, you have two sources. You have a live running website, and you have then the software that runs on there. So to be a developer, you want to be able to hack on this code easily. But as a system admin, you want to be able to have secure access to a server so it doesn't shut down. Someone doesn't get access as shouldn't. Like with Inkscape, you write one patch and you get S-E-N commit access. You get commit access real easily. On a web server, you don't really want that. And not only that, if you have a hosting company, they probably won't really like that either. So this is the problem with OpenClipArt Library. So we created myself and a fellow named BazelSafati from Syria. We created a cool software called IKEE framework. And IKEE really, the philosophy is somewhat rooted in the concept of chi, or this idea of energy that flows through all things, that's a really cheesy way to describe it. I really don't like this sitting thing, man. It's really bumming me out, actually. Man, you guys have been sitting here the whole week, and I've heard very few laughs. I'm really not happy about this. I think we need to stand up and do some jumping jacks or something. Maybe we should go on a run afterwards. What do you think? No. So IKEE then is actually a Japanese martial arts. And the concept means I, means join, and chi means spirit. So let's say it's joining spirits. So we're joining the spirits of these two places of focus together. And this software is all AGPL licensed, so it's back to this free network service idea. So the source code itself, if you run this and you make a plugin, then you need to contribute it back into the commons. So the idea is that it will scale up quicker in terms of growth and use. IKEE framework is quite interesting because it builds upon some of the concepts that we've learned by using WordPress, Drupal, and other engines. OK, there's very simple things when you design a web page. There's like a header, right? There's a sidebar. There's a logo. There's a content section. There's a footer. So the idea is to really look at building websites in terms of widgets. And not only that, it's doing what many say you should not do with PHP, which is running database calls and allowing people to edit the code on the site directly and giving out levels of authentication on the site to different users. So you can think of something like Open Clipart Library, where there are artists who are contributing artwork. You can also think of another class of users called librarians. The librarians are helping tend to the clipart, tagging it, doing other things. You want to be able to give different levels of access to be able to create and to tag. And or even more hardcore users can write direct SQL calls and build widgets and other types of software right in the interface. The other thing, there's very quick access to AJAX through jQuery, so you can do really slick, quick interfaces. And by creating these widgets, you create a system of using URLs and cascading widgets to build websites rapidly. So a way to look at iKey Framework is you have a URL slash a widget. The site gets all the widgets from the iKey widgets that contain the URL. You process, there's an iKey markup that's very simple, markup language inside of the widgets. And then the page is rendered. It's very quick. And because of this, we now have the new open clipart. Finally, after six years, we have thumbnails. So you can see here already the site is growing quite quickly. Now, in the world of Web 2.0, my friends at YouTube, he was telling me that right now at YouTube every second, there's 24 hours of video that's uploaded. It's quite amazing, right? So with open clipart, one of the amazing things is even though there's over 30,000 clipart are all quite high quality. And my personal belief is that's because the tools that are being used and the people using it are focused on this type of quality. And the community as well is really focused on building something really interesting. Here's another factoid. Flickr has 0.004% of all users actually upload images. Can you imagine that? So this kind of concept of a read-only right, read-only or right-only culture, read-right culture, there's most of the people who are simply reading. It's actually kind of similar to a database. Most database calls are reading, right? They're not rights. So it's very interesting to look at this. The open clipart community is an uploading community. So let's check this out. You can see that since the site is launched, this is when we launch right about here. And it's gone off the charts in terms of uploads. Also, here's because this is a community project that I can easily show you the stats. The site is linked on Wikipedia now. It's used in major news publications. You see cliparts on the streets. You see them in bookstores randomly. Because all the clipart's public domain is spread freely, you don't have to attribute the author like you would with the Creative Commons attribution license. So the idea is the barrier is as low as possible for this artwork to spread, and it has. So most of this traffic is due to the Wikimedia project linking to cliparts, which is really great. Also, you can see these are the stats now. We're clearly hitting the target on the website of the different links inside of the page. But so open clipart's still growing. And there's still lots of work to get done, and there's still lots of roadmap items to hack on. There's a whole new class of people that have come on to the project because of this. And I encourage you all to check out the site and see what's happening. Here's the project itself. So if you have your own website or for your own project, you need to build something rapidly, or you're looking at building a web application, you can do this really quickly. I've been thinking about doing a photo site. We talked about doing OpenFontLibrary with IKEE eventually. But the other thing I want to say is you guys should check out OpenFontLibrary's new site. It's so cool right now. I know several we've been looking at. It's running on CChost. But the great part is with IKEE is very quick to port over old software to this new web interface. Let me keep moving here. So if you want to contribute as well, everything's in Launchpad. Other sites that are running IKEE right now, this is Discover Syria. Anybody gone to Syria here? You have? No, not yet. Anybody want to go to Syria with me soon? Yeah? All right. We can get on like a train. No, airplane yet. Also the open color site is built with IKEE framework. And here's a new one that I've just seen that's pretty interesting, which is readthebible.de. It's a German Bible. And of course there's a new project, Shareism, that myself and Christopher Adams are working on that's running on this. Shareism is another kind of concept like Qi hardware building on the idea that the more you share or the more you give, the more you get back. But also in the development space, there's been others. This is a developer, Ronaldo Barbicrano, who has developed IKEE Press. And the idea behind this is to hijack WordPress. And so here you can see really quickly, you have a WordPress database, the crufty old WordPress code that slowly renders HTML pages with IKEE Press. IKEE Press is actually a plugin to the IKEE framework. And simply it just does direct SQL calls to the database and then renders the pages. So you get like a massive speed up like 10, times or something like this. So you could actually use the WordPress back end to edit, but you get the speed up of using IKEE framework to render the page. And ideally you would eventually just shift completely to using the IKEE framework. What is that? We've been hearing that the whole week. Is that a cell phone? Who put their phone on that? Can you go smash that? No. I feel like I have to lighten up. I feel like I have to like perch it up with my shoulder or something. So the final thing I wanted to go into a little bit is, I'm going to talk a little bit about, kind of rant a little bit, about building community and business. And the interesting thing I found about, finally I'm freed from the microphone. Let's give a round of applause to the microphone. So building community and business. Okay, so in the trajectory, in my trajectory and working in this community, I've been concerned about projects and how to actually grow and sustain them. And I think what's interesting about what we've done on our projects is that we've built really interesting code, really interesting communities, but they haven't grown as quickly as a large company or even a medium-sized company that can help build the applications. With Statusnet now, working on Statusnet projects, it's quite interesting. We're moving at such a fast pace in the development of the code because there is investment, there's capital. We can take a more military-style approach to this. So in my own projects now, I formed a company called Fabricators. The idea is to have a free community alongside of a company. And when you have this model, you have both the benefits of the free software project and also the company to build the thing. So with IKEE Framework, what we're doing is a similar thing. So there's ickyframework.org, and then soon there's going to be ickylab.com, and ickylab.com will support the efforts of the community. So that's what I want to do. I think from the work that Tom did, the great work that Tom's done, obviously from the film and everything, you can see how great of a project that they've built, various projects have learned from that and I've learned from that. And so I wanted to say an end with this and just say thank you to everybody here for all the great work that everyone's done. And also I wanted to say this has been the most amazing LibraGraphics meeting. I think because we've been focusing on the software and we've also been focusing on content. There's been a lot of good content discussions and also having a theoretical base, like a metaphor man. A metaphor man was really helpful and even tight pants man was really helpful in moving the discussion forward. So thank you. APPLAUSE Oh yeah, I forgot about that. He never made it to the five minute paper. The performance is that if someone asks a question. Questions for John. Hey, I think the iKey framework is a very neat project. I like the idea of storing the controllers in the database, though I think still like a problem to solve is how that relates to the versioning, but you know, it will solve. But I was thinking like what's your thought on, I think there's quite a bit of a dilemma. Like you use a license which is more like copy left than like the liberal like MIT like licenses. And I think there's really a lot of development going on by professional web developers now on the Django frameworks and all of these things that are like very liberally licensed. And I think they can actually work on that with the money of their company because these are so liberally licensed. But at the same time, of course, that causes also, well, you say it causes a lot of code to stay behind the scenes and I guess it does, but at the same time it does encourage a lot of collaboration from the world of professional web developers. What's your thought on that? How would that impact the IK family? So particularly, so I mean in the next session we're going to really get into this a bunch more. But there are way more web programmers out there. There's way more people who know HTML, CSS, JavaScript than know C. Right? There's a lot more people. So this is what's really allowed for this web explosion and application development and browsers and standards. This is allowed for this massive growth. I mean also what's also helped this is investment and start-up investment. This has really powered this whole web 2.0 evolution. But we can't forget, I've been kind of bummed out. I've been going to a lot of conferences this year to talk about Statusnet and I realized that going to some of these conferences there's this kind of similar discussions all the time. And this is another reason why I think this conference is awesome because we had new discussions and there was like a focus on what we're going to do and this excitement. A lot of the Linux conferences are about newbies like, oh, we need to install a wiki, we need to install this, we need to do this. And what I consider is stability. So what that says to me is there's a stability. Linux is a stability layer. The web is free software. It's done. It's done. That's solved. On top of it now are closed web apps mostly like 99.99999. The tools that are being used are free software as well. And the languages, PHP, these are all free software. But the web applications themselves are not. So AGPL license really helps this. It helps that, like Google for example, right? Okay, Google is using, what are they using for Gmail? Why can't we take the Gmail software and get it and go and run it on our own web server? We don't have that software. The license, and they're using GPL software, AGPL license really allows for, okay, you made a change to this. You need to give it back. It's on a network service. It's a small provision in the license. Why would commercial developers who earn their work making these closed applications want to work on a framework and license like that? So, okay, so, it's like back to the same question of why you'd want to use free software. Okay, so I think there's a few reasons why. One is if you have a really great piece of software like Statusnet and you want to build a business, the license is not important at all. It's about how good the software is. The license, the AGPL license is really a commitment to the community and to the software developers to know that if they contribute some patch or some plugin that the code will still be available and that they're in many ways are also getting into a larger ecosystem because of this. But I don't think that you are going to get a lot of web developers to use a software just because of the license. And I also don't think that you're going to get a lot of people to use software purely because of the license either. No, it's just that I've seen on like if you look at websites of web applications, like I saw for example on the KPHP site, like they make really a huge point of the fact that they use a very permissive license because that gives developers the confidence that they can use it for commercial projects and sell the technology to their large corporate clients. So the strategy with Statusnet with IKEE and with free network services and free network service companies is to be as completely open as possible. Okay, how do you compete against Twitter, right? You can't. The only way you could compete is to be completely open from top to bottom. So it brings the commitment to the religious sect, to our friends, to the people who are really passionate about software and to build this kind of social network I talk about. So there's another thing too which is, so like okay, with a free network service like IKEE, you have the problem of both trying to get developers but also to have a business. On the business side, AGPL and free network service doesn't mean anything. Open source means something. That's buzzwordy. That's for like CIOs and the C-level class. So trying to convert developers using an AGPL license is still early on. I mean Google still doesn't support AGPL license inside of code hosting because they think of it as insignificant. But as there's now like 22,000 Statusnet sites online and IKEE sites are growing, I mean there's like 20 or something. But when you start to have something that's really scaled up like WordPress, okay, WordPress has millions of WordPress installs. That is an amazing company actually. They have 60 people that work there. They have a mega business. The people who work there are really smart. So if you have something like Statusnet like IKEE, the idea is that you will scale up like this and it's good software and at that point when there's enough people using it, then they'll start figuring out, okay, free network service means I can make more money as a developer and then you get more developers in. Thank you very much, John.
 So I'm going old school today.  This is how I used to present when I first started  doing this kind of thing.  I was inspired not to use open office anymore.  So what I'm talking about is IKEE framework.  And IKEE framework is an evolution of various things  I've been working on.  And also I want to say thank you to the organizing team.  Thank you to Fimke and everybody.  Like, give a round of applause.  Thanks to Tight Pants.  Tight Pants, man.  Thank you.  Yes, without you.  So I'm looking at this IKEE framework.  And I want to frame things a little bit  in terms of a trajectory.  This trajectory takes us through various things.  We all began our journeys through free software,  open source, and into graphics in different ways.  I choose to look at it as a freeing of myself,  particularly in studying art and culture.  And this is me.  I try to smile as much as possible.  I don't know if it's like from upbringing or I think it's  actually my grandpa.  I think it's genetic.  But I consider myself a free person.  I do what I want.  I make things that I believe in come real.  So I'm a free person.  And because of this, I can work on free software.  I can make something that I think come real.  The example is Inkscape.  When we were building Inkscape, when we started building  Inkscape, there was not a free drawing tool.  It didn't exist.  We made this come real because of various different people's  alignments at the time.  Myself being in grad school and on a fellowship, so I had  time to work on this.  And we made something great.  And it still goes on.  Moving from that, I became interested in how to also have  free content.  Because with Inkscape, there was so much great artwork that  was being made.  But how do we know where this artwork is?  How do we see the quality of the work?  Where does it go?  And that led several of us to create the Open Clipart  library and various other things that build this content  space up.  And the really good side effect of this, of Open Clipart,  was actually that I got a job at Creative Commons.  So luckily, no one asked me anymore.  They're like, how do you get a job in open source and free  software?  I'm like, just do what you love.  You'll get something out of it.  There's some water, too.  Oh, there's water there.  So in looking at Creative Commons, I've been  articulating this concept of the Freedom Stack.  The Freedom Stack, emanating out from free people, we have a  stack of different hardware and content, thank you, that we  can look at and see if we can actually create clearly what  we, as free people, have in our minds.  Right?  If, for example, I have an idea to build a building a certain  way, I want it to look exactly like that building, or better  than that building.  But part of this framework is that unless we have free  tools, we will not be able to get to that very clear idea.  And not only will we not be able to get to that idea, we  won't be able to get to it efficiently.  There are many roadblocks in the way.  So with the content side of things, we have Creative  Commons.  That allows for the solution.  That allows for content to spread freely, because  individuals license it a certain way.  With software, we have the GPL and other licenses that  allow for us to share our source code legally.  Now, whether or not these licenses have had, if they  are enforced or enforceable, in some ways doesn't necessarily  matter as much to me these days.  The main thing that I realized by Creative Commons  licenses and free software and open source licenses that  allows for a community to emerge.  In some ways, when I look at the Creative Commons logo, I  think of it as simply a social club, a social network.  And I think the same way the GPL allowed for a certain  kind of social network to emerge.  So if you look here, we have two major problems.  We have networks and hardware.  And the amazing thing is that these are actually closer to  us as individuals and are the most problematic, non-free  spaces in this stack.  So what I'm working on mostly now is with status.net,  identica, and freeing up the network and free network  services, which we'll talk about in probably a five  minutes when that five minute flag gets raised.  Actually, we should hand out different minute flags and just  keep raising them at different times.  I told myself I was going to be the person who makes the  biggest interruption on the five minute and on the one  minute.  So when that happens, you'll know.  Because tight pants, man, and I are in a, we came up with a  plan.  It's going to be a performance at the five minute mark.  So status.net is really looking at this free network  service problem.  And there are other services too.  There's, and other software.  There's MongoDBs, a really cool NoSQL engine that is  AGPL license.  Then there's also some other projects as well, which I'm  getting to.  So with status.net, you can have your network, your free  network service.  You can move your data wherever you'd like it.  There's a license that allows companies or tries to keep  companies from hiding their code behind a network socket.  But then also on the hardware side, there's now new cool  projects like Copy Left Hardware Projects, like the  Qi hardware, NanoNote.  Has anybody heard of the NanoNote?  You see this?  It's like $100, $99 little mini computer.  And the goal is to be 100% copy left from top to bottom.  So we use Inkscape.  We use GIMP.  But we use completely proprietary hardware, like  Apple MacBooks.  And yes, they're really sweet and everything.  But they're still problematic.  There's software that runs on chips that is then burned  into Asics.  So this software is completely closed, nearly 99.99999%  of all code that's made on FPGAs that's burned into Asics  is not copy left.  This is a problem.  So that's another problem that I articulate here.  Zoomable interface.  So now getting back into what you guys are really  interested in, which is graphics.  So when we started Open Clipart Library like four years ago,  I went to the Wayback machine and I pulled up some nice  images of this.  And it's pretty horrible, actually.  But the funniest part is when we created this, we actually  look how many years have gone by.  And we didn't have any of those.  And we didn't have thumbnails.  Like how do you have a website of Clipart without images  for this long?  It's kind of sad.  And Niku here and other people are like, they were  drinking the Haterade, as we like to say in the USA.  How can you have this site but no thumbnails?  So it was a thorn in my side for a long time.  And the problem came down to, so when you develop software,  let's say Inkscape, you're working out here.  There's all these people who are distributed around the  world, and there's this source code.  And people can commit to it.  And now if I get, it's a lot easier to commit to this one  thing we call trunk or the master repository.  With network services, you have two sources.  You have a live running website, and you have then the  software that runs on there.  So to be a developer, you want to be able to hack on this  code easily.  But as a system admin, you want to be able to have secure  access to a server so it doesn't shut down.  Someone doesn't get access as shouldn't.  Like with Inkscape, you write one patch and you get  S-E-N commit access.  You get commit access real easily.  On a web server, you don't really want that.  And not only that, if you have a hosting company, they  probably won't really like that either.  So this is the problem with OpenClipArt Library.  So we created myself and a fellow named BazelSafati from  Syria.  We created a cool software called IKEE framework.  And IKEE really, the philosophy is somewhat rooted in the  concept of chi, or this idea of energy that flows through  all things, that's a really cheesy way to describe it.  I really don't like this sitting thing, man.  It's really bumming me out, actually.  Man, you guys have been sitting here the whole week, and  I've heard very few laughs.  I'm really not happy about this.  I think we need to stand up and do some jumping jacks or  something.  Maybe we should go on a run afterwards.  What do you think?  No.  So IKEE then is actually a Japanese martial arts.  And the concept means I, means join, and chi means spirit.  So let's say it's joining spirits.  So we're joining the spirits of these two places of focus  together.  And this software is all AGPL licensed, so it's back to  this free network service idea.  So the source code itself, if you run this and you make a  plugin, then you need to contribute it back into the  commons.  So the idea is that it will scale up quicker in terms of  growth and use.  IKEE framework is quite interesting because it builds  upon some of the concepts that we've learned by using  WordPress, Drupal, and other engines.  OK, there's very simple things when you design a web page.  There's like a header, right?  There's a sidebar.  There's a logo.  There's a content section.  There's a footer.  So the idea is to really look at building websites in  terms of widgets.  And not only that, it's doing what many say you should not  do with PHP, which is running database calls and allowing  people to edit the code on the site directly and giving out  levels of authentication on the site to different users.  So you can think of something like Open Clipart Library,  where there are artists who are contributing artwork.  You can also think of another class of users called  librarians.  The librarians are helping tend to the clipart, tagging it,  doing other things.  You want to be able to give different levels of access to  be able to create and to tag.  And or even more hardcore users can write direct SQL calls  and build widgets and other types of software right in  the interface.  The other thing, there's very quick access to AJAX through  jQuery, so you can do really slick, quick interfaces.  And by creating these widgets, you create a system of using  URLs and cascading widgets to build websites rapidly.  So a way to look at iKey Framework is you have a URL  slash a widget.  The site gets all the widgets from the iKey widgets that  contain the URL.  You process, there's an iKey markup that's very simple,  markup language inside of the widgets.  And then the page is rendered.  It's very quick.  And because of this, we now have the new open clipart.  Finally, after six years, we have thumbnails.  So you can see here already the site is growing quite quickly.  Now, in the world of Web 2.0, my friends at YouTube, he was  telling me that right now at YouTube every second, there's  24 hours of video that's uploaded.  It's quite amazing, right?  So with open clipart, one of the amazing things is even  though there's over 30,000 clipart  are all quite high quality.  And my personal belief is that's because the tools that are  being used and the people using it are focused on this type  of quality.  And the community as well is really focused on building  something really interesting.  Here's another factoid.  Flickr has 0.004% of all users actually upload images.  Can you imagine that?  So this kind of concept of a read-only right, read-only  or right-only culture, read-right culture, there's  most of the people who are simply reading.  It's actually kind of similar to a database.  Most database calls are reading, right?  They're not rights.  So it's very interesting to look at this.  The open clipart community is an uploading community.  So let's check this out.  You can see that since the site is launched, this is when we  launch right about here.  And it's gone off the charts in terms of uploads.  Also, here's because this is a community project that I can  easily show you the stats.  The site is linked on Wikipedia now.  It's used in major news publications.  You see cliparts on the streets.  You see them in bookstores randomly.  Because all the clipart's public domain is  spread freely, you don't have to attribute the author like you  would with the Creative Commons attribution license.  So the idea is the barrier is as low as possible for this  artwork to spread, and it has.  So most of this traffic is due to the Wikimedia project  linking to cliparts, which is really great.  Also, you can see these are the stats now.  We're clearly hitting the target on the website of the  different links inside of the page.  But so open clipart's still growing.  And there's still lots of work to get done, and there's still  lots of roadmap items to hack on.  There's a whole new class of people that have come on to  the project because of this.  And I encourage you all to check out the site and see what's  happening.  Here's the project itself.  So if you have your own website or for your own project,  you need to build something rapidly, or you're looking at  building a web application, you can do this really quickly.  I've been thinking about doing a photo site.  We talked about doing OpenFontLibrary with IKEE  eventually.  But the other thing I want to say is you guys should check  out OpenFontLibrary's new site.  It's so cool right now.  I know several we've been looking at.  It's running on CChost.  But the great part is with IKEE is very quick to port over  old software to this new web interface.  Let me keep moving here.  So if you want to contribute as well,  everything's in Launchpad.  Other sites that are running IKEE right now,  this is Discover Syria.  Anybody gone to Syria here?  You have?  No, not yet.  Anybody want to go to Syria with me soon?  Yeah?  All right.  We can get on like a train.  No, airplane yet.  Also the open color site is built with IKEE framework.  And here's a new one that I've just seen that's pretty  interesting, which is readthebible.de.  It's a German Bible.  And of course there's a new project,  Shareism, that myself and Christopher Adams are working  on that's running on this.  Shareism is another kind of concept like Qi hardware  building on the idea that the more you share or the more  you give, the more you get back.  But also in the development space, there's been others.  This is a developer, Ronaldo Barbicrano,  who has developed IKEE Press.  And the idea behind this is to hijack WordPress.  And so here you can see really quickly,  you have a WordPress database, the crufty old WordPress  code that slowly renders HTML pages with IKEE Press.  IKEE Press is actually a plugin to the IKEE framework.  And simply it just does direct SQL calls to the database  and then renders the pages.  So you get like a massive speed up like 10,  times or something like this.  So you could actually use the WordPress back end to edit,  but you get the speed up of using IKEE framework  to render the page.  And ideally you would eventually just shift completely  to using the IKEE framework.  What is that?  We've been hearing that the whole week.  Is that a cell phone?  Who put their phone on that?  Can you go smash that?  No.  I feel like I have to lighten up.  I feel like I have to like perch it up with my shoulder  or something.  So the final thing I wanted to go into a little bit is,  I'm going to talk a little bit about,  kind of rant a little bit, about building community  and business.  And the interesting thing I found about,  finally I'm freed from the microphone.  Let's give a round of applause to the microphone.  So building community and business.  Okay, so in the trajectory, in my trajectory and working  in this community, I've been concerned about projects  and how to actually grow and sustain them.  And I think what's interesting about what we've done  on our projects is that we've built really interesting code,  really interesting communities, but they haven't grown  as quickly as a large company or even a medium-sized company  that can help build the applications.  With Statusnet now, working on Statusnet projects,  it's quite interesting.  We're moving at such a fast pace in the development  of the code because there is investment, there's capital.  We can take a more military-style approach to this.  So in my own projects now, I formed a company called Fabricators.  The idea is to have a free community alongside of a company.  And when you have this model, you have both the benefits  of the free software project and also the company to build the thing.  So with IKEE Framework, what we're doing is a similar thing.  So there's ickyframework.org, and then soon there's going to be  ickylab.com, and ickylab.com will support the efforts  of the community.  So that's what I want to do.  I think from the work that Tom did, the great work that Tom's done,  obviously from the film and everything, you can see how great  of a project that they've built, various projects have learned from that  and I've learned from that.  And so I wanted to say an end with this and just say thank you  to everybody here for all the great work that everyone's done.  And also I wanted to say this has been the most amazing  LibraGraphics meeting.  I think because we've been focusing on the software and we've also  been focusing on content.  There's been a lot of good content discussions and also having  a theoretical base, like a metaphor man.  A metaphor man was really helpful and even tight pants man was  really helpful in moving the discussion forward.  So thank you.  APPLAUSE  Oh yeah, I forgot about that.  He never made it to the five minute paper.  The performance is that if someone asks a question.  Questions for John.  Hey, I think the iKey framework is a very neat project.  I like the idea of storing the controllers in the database,  though I think still like a problem to solve is how that relates to  the versioning, but you know, it will solve.  But I was thinking like what's your thought on,  I think there's quite a bit of a dilemma.  Like you use a license which is more like copy left than like the  liberal like MIT like licenses.  And I think there's really a lot of development going on by  professional web developers now on the Django frameworks and all  of these things that are like very liberally licensed.  And I think they can actually work on that with the money of  their company because these are so liberally licensed.  But at the same time, of course, that causes also,  well, you say it causes a lot of code to stay behind the scenes  and I guess it does, but at the same time it does encourage a lot  of collaboration from the world of professional web developers.  What's your thought on that? How would that impact the IK family?  So particularly, so I mean in the next session we're going to  really get into this a bunch more.  But there are way more web programmers out there.  There's way more people who know HTML, CSS, JavaScript than know C.  Right? There's a lot more people.  So this is what's really allowed for this web explosion and application  development and browsers and standards.  This is allowed for this massive growth.  I mean also what's also helped this is investment and start-up investment.  This has really powered this whole web 2.0 evolution.  But we can't forget, I've been kind of bummed out.  I've been going to a lot of conferences this year to talk about Statusnet  and I realized that going to some of these conferences there's this kind of  similar discussions all the time.  And this is another reason why I think this conference is awesome  because we had new discussions and there was like a focus on what we're going to do  and this excitement.  A lot of the Linux conferences are about newbies like, oh, we need to install a wiki,  we need to install this, we need to do this.  And what I consider is stability.  So what that says to me is there's a stability.  Linux is a stability layer.  The web is free software.  It's done.  It's done.  That's solved.  On top of it now are closed web apps mostly like 99.99999.  The tools that are being used are free software as well.  And the languages, PHP, these are all free software.  But the web applications themselves are not.  So AGPL license really helps this.  It helps that, like Google for example, right?  Okay, Google is using, what are they using for Gmail?  Why can't we take the Gmail software and get it and go and run it on our own web server?  We don't have that software.  The license, and they're using GPL software, AGPL license really allows for,  okay, you made a change to this.  You need to give it back.  It's on a network service.  It's a small provision in the license.  Why would commercial developers who earn their work making these closed applications  want to work on a framework and license like that?  So, okay, so, it's like back to the same question of why you'd want to use free software.  Okay, so I think there's a few reasons why.  One is if you have a really great piece of software like Statusnet and you want to build a business,  the license is not important at all.  It's about how good the software is.  The license, the AGPL license is really a commitment to the community and to the software developers  to know that if they contribute some patch or some plugin that the code will still be available  and that they're in many ways are also getting into a larger ecosystem because of this.  But I don't think that you are going to get a lot of web developers to use a software just because of the license.  And I also don't think that you're going to get a lot of people to use software purely because of the license either.  No, it's just that I've seen on like if you look at websites of web applications, like I saw for example on the KPHP site,  like they make really a huge point of the fact that they use a very permissive license because that gives developers the confidence  that they can use it for commercial projects and sell the technology to their large corporate clients.  So the strategy with Statusnet with IKEE and with free network services and free network service companies is to be as completely open as possible.  Okay, how do you compete against Twitter, right? You can't.  The only way you could compete is to be completely open from top to bottom.  So it brings the commitment to the religious sect, to our friends, to the people who are really passionate about software  and to build this kind of social network I talk about.  So there's another thing too which is, so like okay, with a free network service like IKEE, you have the problem of both trying to get developers  but also to have a business. On the business side, AGPL and free network service doesn't mean anything.  Open source means something. That's buzzwordy. That's for like CIOs and the C-level class.  So trying to convert developers using an AGPL license is still early on.  I mean Google still doesn't support AGPL license inside of code hosting because they think of it as insignificant.  But as there's now like 22,000 Statusnet sites online and IKEE sites are growing, I mean there's like 20 or something.  But when you start to have something that's really scaled up like WordPress, okay, WordPress has millions of WordPress installs.  That is an amazing company actually. They have 60 people that work there. They have a mega business.  The people who work there are really smart. So if you have something like Statusnet like IKEE, the idea is that you will scale up like this  and it's good software and at that point when there's enough people using it, then they'll start figuring out,  okay, free network service means I can make more money as a developer and then you get more developers in.  Thank you very much, John.
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