• Code on github: https://github.com/rgrp/pywordpress
• Python Package Index: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pywordpress/

Along with a wrapper for the main functions it also provides various helper methods, for example to create many pages at once. This is somewhat of a belated announce as the first version of this was written almost a year ago!

Usage

Command line

Check out the commands::

wordpress.py -h 

Commands::

create_many_pages: Create many pages at once (and only create pages which do not already exist).
delete_all_pages: Delete all pages (i.e. delete_page for each page in instance).
delete_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.deletePage
edit_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.editPage
get_authors: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getAuthors
get_categories: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getCategories
get_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPage
get_page_list: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPageList
get_pages: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPages
get_tags: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getTags
init_from_config: Class method to initialize a `Wordpress` instance from an ini file.
new_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.newPage

You will need to create a config with the details (url, login) of the wordpress instance you want to work with::

cp config.ini.tmpl config.ini
# now edit away ...
vim config.ini

Python library

Read the code documentation::

>>> from pywordpress import WordPress
>>> help(WordPress)

License

MIT-licensed: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

CKAN and the theDataHub

• Finalized separation of software and site: CKAN = data hub software, theDataHub.org = community data hub site
• Worked heavily to develop CKAN as a product e.g. much improved website http://ckan.org/, nascent partner programme and more
• Major milestone with CKAN v1.5 release just 2 weeks ago. Result of 6 months of development with major new features.
• theDataHub has also been much improved with move to new servers, a new theme (default in CKAN v1.5) and deployment of ever more extensions
• Some personal items:
  • DataExplorer
  • UX work – http://wiki.ckan.org/UX
  • data package manager (dpm) and work on Data Packages spec

OpenSpending

• Two major point releases of OpenSpending software v0.10 and v0.11 (v0.11 just last week!). Huge maturing and development of the system. Backend architecture now finalized after a major refactor and reworking.
• Community has grown significantly with now almost 50 OpenSpending datasets on theDataHub.org and growing group of core “data wranglers”
• Spending Stories was a winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spending Stories will build on and extend OpenSpending.

Open Bibliography and the Public Domain

• The Public Domain Review goes from strength to strength
• BibServer has had a ground-up rewrite and can be seen online at http://bibsoup.net/
• Additional support from JISC for a second phase of JISC Open Bibliography project

Open Knowledge Foundation and the Community

• In September we received a 3 year grant from the Omidyar Network to help the Open Knowledge Foundation sustain and expand its community especially in the formation of new chapters
• Completed a major recruitment process in (Summer-Autumn 2011) to bring on more paid OKFN team members including community coordinators, foundation coordinator and developers
• The Foundation participated in launch of Open Government Partnership and CSO events surrounding the meeting
• Working groups continuing to develop. Too much activity to summarize it all here but some highlights include:
  • WG Science Coordinator Jenny Molloy travelling to OSS2011 in SF to present Open Research Reports with Peter Murray-Rust
  • Open Economics WG developing and Open Knowledge Index in August
  • Open Bibliography working group’s work on an Metadata guide.
  • Open Humanities / Open Literature working group winning Inventare Il Futuro competition with their idea to use the Annotator
• Development of new Local Groups and Chapters
  • Lots of ongoing activities in existing local groups and chapters such as those in Germany and Italy have
  • In addition, interest from a variety of areas in the establishment of new chapters and local groups, for example in Brazil and Belgium
• Start of work on OKFN labs
  • Alpha website at http://labs.okfn.org/
  • Dashboard sprint

Meetups and Events

• Regular OKFN organized Open Data meetup in london
• Open Government Data Camp

Talks and Events

• Attended Open Government Partnership meeting in July in Washington DC and launch event in New York in September
• Attended Chaos Computer Camp with other OKFNers in August near Berlin
• September: Spoke at PICNIC in Amsterdam
• October: Code for America Summit in San Francisco (plus meetings) – see partial writeup
• October: Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw (organized by Open Knowledge Foundation)
• November: South Africa – see this post on Africa@Home and Open Knowledge meetup in Cape Town

General

• Partcipation in meetings of the UK Public Sector Transparency Board
• Annotator has seen ongoing coding and growing use – including very promising integration of Annotator with textbooks thanks to Ewald Zietsman of Siyavula
• Co-coded PyBossa – an open source platform for crowd-sourcing online (volunteer) assistance to perform tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence (e.g. image classification, transcription, information location etc)

I’m contributing to a “primer” session on The Perspective of Open Data Communities and then giving a conference talk on Collective Costs and Benefits in Opening PSI for Re-use in a session on PSI Re-use: a Tool for Enhancing Competitive Markets where I’ll be covering work by myself and others on pricing and regulation of PSI (see e.g. the “Cambridge Study” and the paper on the Economics of the Public Sector of Information).

Update: slides are up.

Community, Openness And Technology

PSI: Costs And Benefits Of Openness

I’ve posted the slides online and iframed below.

Outline

Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data with significant uptake in government, research and elsewhere.

Bibliographic records are a key part of our shared cultural heritage. They too should therefore be open, that is made available to the public for access and re-use under an open license which permits use and reuse without restriction (http://opendefinition.org/). Doing this promises a variety of benefits.

First, it would allow libraries and other managers of bibliographic data to share records more efficiently and improve quality more rapidly through better, easier feedback. Second, through increased innovation in bibliographic services and applications generating benefits for the producers and users of bibliographic data and the wider community.

This talk will cover the what, why and how of open bibliographica data, drawing on direct recent experience such as the development of the Open Biblio Principles and the work of the Bibliographica and JISC OpenBib projects to make the 3 million records of the British Library’s British National Bibliography (BNB) into linked open data.

With a growing number of Government agencies and public institutions making data open, is it now time for the publishing and library community to do likewise?

How is it different?

‘Real’ property like an apple, a car or an acre of land can only ever be used by one person/entity at one time — in economist’s terminlogy they are ‘rival’ goods. Giving someone exclusive rights over them therefore does no harm — only one person can have it and via trade we can ensure the person who values it most ends up with it ¹. Here, creating property rights leads to an efficient outcome (at least in our simple case — in more complex setups we would need to think about complementarities, transaction costs etc).

By contrast, a copyright in, for example, a particular text confers not simply control over this or that particular book containing the text but over every instance of such a book. This is the very essence of a monopoly: being sole supplier of some good!

And it has all of the standard consequences of the monopoly: prices rise relative to what they would have been and access is reduced relative to its efficient level in which the price equals the cost of reproduction (i.e. we have a “deadweight” loss).

Furthermore, this cost of monopoly can be particularly serious when we have extensive “reuse” — i.e. new work builds upon old — as the monopoly inhibits not only access by users but the creation of new creative work.

The difference then between “normal” property and “intellectual property” is the difference between giving someone control of one apple (the apple they bought say) and control of all apples. The latter results in significant harm and inefficiency while the former does not.

Now, of course, the fact copyright is a monopoly does not mean it is per se bad. After all, we are deeply concerned with the incentives to create and the copyright monopoly helps provide such incentives.

We may therefore be willing to tolerate the ex-post costs of a monopoly because of the ex-ante benefits it provides in incentivizing and rewarding the creation of new work. But this is fundamentally a trade-off and one which gets worse as the monopoly is extended — a completely different situation from that with “real” property.

This point is made elegantly by Macaulay (opposing a copyright term extension in the 1840s):

“It is good that authors should be remunerated, and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil: but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

This is not something one would write about normal, ‘real’, property.

Substitutes (or, what exactly is a Monopoly)

Some people, particularly rights-holders, tend to argue that copyright isn’t a monopoly because of the existence of close substitutes (Helprin does this too where he tries to distinguish expression and ideas). In a strict sense this is simply false: a monopoly is the control over all (or most) of a market in a particular good (in this case the copies of a given cultural work). If entity X has monopoly in apples, the fact that I can buy oranges instead of apples does not change the fact that X has a monopoly.

However, in a broader sense this point is correct: the “proximity” of substitutes will clearly affect the demand curve a monopolist faces and therefore the price they can charge (in the extreme case when substitutes are perfect the ‘monopoly’ of course disappears).²

This is the point lying behind the copyright/patent distinction — the argument being that copyrighted works have much closer substitutes than patents (whether this actually true is unclear to me: what substitutes were there for Harry Potter? Many patents have relatively close competitors etc).

Nevertheless the fact remains that a copyright still acts like a monopoly in permitting the owner of a copyright to raise price above what it would have been (if not there’d be no point in having it — at least the “economic” rights portion). Furthermore, one has to be cautious in one’s logic here: the existence of close substitutes may lessen the harm of a copyright monopoly but it also reduces the benefits (the revenue incentives).

To put it most bluntly:

If copyright isn’t acting like a monopoly then, while causing little harm, it’s also not doing much good.

Specifically, if substitutes are sufficiently close that the copyright holder can only raise prices (much) to a very small degree above reproduction cost (and hence we can say no monopoly exists), then the benefits of the copyright, in terms of increased revenues to the copyright holder, must be commensurably small.

Colophon

I wrote the original version of this post over 3 years ago but failed to hit publish for reasons unknown. It’s creation was motivated by being pointed at this article by a Mr Helprin (who later fleshed out his thesis into a book). Discussions over the intervening years, especially with those advocating the extension of copyright, have only made it clearer how important it is establish the basic point that ‘copyright is a monopoly and isn’t property’.

Today we’re announcing a simple new app (also submitted to World Bank Apps competition) that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what ‘YourTopia’, they would like to live in:

http://yourtopia.net/

As well as having a very simple function: to tell you what country is closest to your ideal, the app also has a very serious purpose: to help us develop a real empirical basis for the measures of development that are used to guide policy-making.

Is health more important than education, or GDP, is the amount of R&D more important than amount spent on primary education? Help us find out what the world thinks!

You can see the app in action in the following video, or head over directly YourTopia and answer the 2-minute quiz.

More Information

Development Economics has for a long time recognised the deficiency of GDP as an indicator of human development but with little reception in policy-circles. Recently, however, the debate changed and no month passes now without a high-level report on “Development beyond GDP”.

OKFN’s new Open Economics Group has now constructed an application to test two solutions to primary problems in this debate, and it is participating in the World Bank’s competition “Applications for Development“.

Measures of human progress beyond GDP either use so-called dashboards of indicators (e.g. WDI) or composite indices (e.g. HDI or MPI). An openness-problem with the first approach has been that dashboards were so complex that the public was de facto excluded from the debate. The second approach tried to simplify through combining different dimensions into a single index but then suffered from arbitrary assumptions on the choice of weights applied to indices and choice of proxies for different development dimensions.

These are significant problems and so we’ve created Yourtopia, as the first application that produces a composite index of human development (OpenHDI) without arbitrary choices of indicator-weights and proxy choices.

We circumvent these problems simply: by letting the user participate. Rather than the researcher selecting proxies and indicator-weights we let the user choose. The resulting index of human progress is then personalised and contains no arbitrary assumptions by construction.

While the constructors of the HDI, for example, was always attacked for their assumption that human progress just depends on education, health and income and that these each carried the same importance, we now let the user decide which dimensions of progress are important and how they compare to each other.

Get Involved

We’d love to improve YourTopia in lots of ways and we need help with design, coding (python or javascript), and writing (from both an economists and a layman’s point of view!) (for example what does GNI in PPP terms mean to most people — we need translators from jargon to English!).

If you’re interested in helping please send either join the open-economics mailing list or just send a mail to info [at] okfn [dot] org.

Colophon

• Code: https://bitbucket.org/okfn/openhdi
• Data: From world bank data store – details
• Mailing list: open-economics

• [Update] http://yourtopia.net we’ve renamed to YourTopia
• http://openhdi.org/ – stub website (it’s what we’ll make today and tomorrow!)
• http://okfnpad.org/openhdi – planning pad
• http://bitbucket.org/okfn/openhdi – source code and data

The idea is to look at ‘development beyond GDP’ by collecting weightings on particular aspects of ‘development’ (health, education, gdp, inequality) from users and using that to build our own human development index.

We first talked about this a few months ago at the open economics online meetup. Dirk Heine and Guo Xu then put together an excellent demo version: http://eutopia.guoxu.org/ and now we’re working to take that to the status of a full app!