Geek Gestalt

Beth Noveck is deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. Her path to that role began with putting together the first academic conference on virtual worlds and led her to create what may be the first open social networking project in American government history, a re-working of the U.S. patent review process known as peer-to-patent.

(Credit: Flickr user Joi Ito)

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.

Can you chart a logical path from a 2003 academic conference on the legal issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games to Barack Obama's first executive action as president?

Beth Noveck can.

If you're not familiar with her--and few outside her specific professional and social circles would be--Noveck, a 38-year-old lawyer originally from Toms River, N.J., is Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Precisely what "open government" means probably depends on whom you ask. But in her official role in the current presidential administration, Noveck framed it as an attempt to make our federal institutions embrace technology in a bid to share information with the public.

"Open government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent," Noveck explained, "that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory."

On January 21, as many in Washington, D.C. were still shaking off hangovers from the inaugural parties the night before, Obama, in his first official action as president, signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open government, a short document that declared, "We shall work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."

Noveck (see video below) was a principal contributor to the memorandum, and the first member of the Obama-Biden transition's Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform team, which advised the president-elect on ways to incorporate technology into his larger reform goals. So one could say that the new president's adoption of these concepts was a very high-profile validation of years of Noveck's work on a wide range of issues revolving around technology policy and using technology to help craft policy.

Indeed, her work over the years has won her not just an office in the White House, but the professional admiration and praise of some of the biggest names in technology.

"With a compelling blend of high theory and practical know-how," Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a back-cover review of her 2009 book, "Wiki Government," "Beth Noveck explains how political institutions can directly engage the public to solve complex problems and create a better democracy."

Or, as former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown put it in talking about the "constitution" of new technological systems, Noveck "has a very long history of being one of the most advanced thinkers on how...you change institutions to make a big difference."

State of Play
Noveck earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard University and then both a law degree from Yale Law School and a doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck. Throw in a fellowship at Oxford and it's easy to see that she was headed toward a career in academia. While she worked for a time as a telecommunications and Internet attorney, she eventually settled into a position on the faculty of New York Law School.

It was there that Noveck first began attracting public attention. In 2003, not long after the virtual worlds Second Life and There.com launched, and as massively multiplayer online games like Everquest were becoming established in the mainstream, Noveck put together the first State of Play conference as a place to talk about whether these relatively new digital fun houses might actually be used to help change the world.

"My supposition is that virtual worlds are going to be the best training ground for teaching the practices of democracy, not simply simulations that passively demonstrate something," Noveck said at the time. "They offer a playground for complex social interactions and collaborative decision making, according to a set of rules defined by the game space."

It might have been tempting to laugh, but Noveck's brainchild attracted lawyers and academics from some of the best schools in the country, eager to talk about what they saw as one of the newest and most exciting fields of study.

After all, outside of a few research papers and articles, almost no one had ever bothered to put any real thought into the idea that virtual worlds could foster real society, and all the legal, financial, intellectual, and social opportunities and problems that come along with that.

"It was the first conference that took virtual worlds seriously," said Dan Hunter, today a New York Law School legal studies professor, but back then at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It felt like the Woodstock moment for all these people and...a catalyst for people to start writing about it and for people like me to start looking at the legal and governance side of it."

Added Hunter, Noveck "managed to realize what no one else had (understood) all that clearly, that there was an opportunity to bring people together, and that there was a nascent movement there....(That) was kind of characteristic of her. She's really fast at picking up on movements and ideas people can come together around."

Peer to patent
For Noveck, being the prime instigator of a burgeoning intellectual field of study was a career boost. But it was likely another big move of hers that got her to the big time.

In 2005, still at New York Law School and still running State of Play, she began thinking about a different, though related, set of issues.

In her Introduction to Intellectual Property course, she put students through a grueling look at the American patent law process. One glaring hole, she knew, was that while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employs thousands of trained examiners, few are versed in the cutting edge of technology and scientific research.

"(An examiner) does not necessarily have a Ph.D. in science, and there is little opportunity on the job for continuing education," Noveck wrote in "Wiki Government." "As an expert in patent examination, she is not and is not expected to be a master of all areas of innovation."

This problem clearly bothered Noveck, and it was partly responsible for a huge backlog causing lengthy delays in the patent review process.

Inspired, Noveck crafted a blog post, Peer- to-Patent: A Modest Proposal, in which she argued forcefully that the patent review system was woefully broken and that if social software--a fairly new concept in 2005--was applied to the process, it could make the system work better. Wouldn't it be better for countless experts to weigh in on applications rather than a single examiner, she argued?

The idea, like so many others born in blog posts, might have died there. But, alerted to her groundbreaking idea, a top IBM intellectual property attorney contacted her and asked to talk. This was no small development. IBM is the Patent Office's single biggest client, receiving more than 3,000 patents a year. If Big Blue thought there was something to her idea, she had found the right partner.

A little IBM grant money later, Noveck found herself pursuing the project and, she wrote in her book, "running the government's first open social networking project."

Other corporate titans followed IBM's lead: First Microsoft, then Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and others. Each offered to submit their patents applications through Peer-to-Patent, and to provide funding. On June 15, 2007, Peer-to-Patent went live as an official U.S. Patent Office pilot project.

Now, the Patent Office is studying the pilot's results. And while it's not clear what the outcome will be, it is certain that Noveck continues to have friends in the right places, in this case, the new director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, who had served as the chair of the steering committee for Peer-to-Patent.

Open Government
As someone with a core belief--and the record to prove it--that technology can help re-shape government, Noveck decided to get involved in the 2008 presidential election as a very early volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign. Through a friend, Seth Harris, who was helping the campaign on labor and employment and disabilities issues--and who is now the deputy secretary of labor--Noveck found herself in a position, and with the access, to apply her unique set of skills.

"He knew that I knew a lot about technology and technology in government, in particular," Noveck recalled, "and helped to make the introduction so that I could share (that) expertise both on the issue of how to use technology in the campaign...and also how we think about technology and governance and the open government work that we are doing now to help shape that agenda."

Noveck speaking with Tim O'Reilly at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

(Credit: O'Reilly Conferences)

Clearly, her efforts were appreciated--and rewarded. And the rest is history.

On December 8, 2009, the Obama administration's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, held a live Web cast to formally announce out the Open Government directive. Stemming from the president's January 21 executive action, the directive spelled out the administration's philosophy on achieving openness, transparency and collaboration.

It called for, among other things, each federal agency making publicly available, within 45 days, three "high-value" data sets; that within 60 days, the White House will launch an online dashboard intended to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive; and that within 120 days, each agency will create its own open government plan geared toward meeting the directive's philosophies.

Examples of projects the administration hopes for that are already in the works are an Army program under which its personnel can use wikis to collaboratively recraft the service's field manuals, and a Federal Aviation Administration program which made flight departure data publicly available, enabling a member of the public to build an iPhone app that lets people see the most accurate departure and arrival information.

Though many people worked on the directive, Kundra and Chopra named, and praised, only one: Noveck. To observers of the administration's open government efforts, this doubtless came as no surprise.

"It's clear that they have very firm intentions and that the administration does have a commitment to making very fundamental changes," said John Wonderlich, the policy director at the watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation. "One of the ways we can see their commitment is that they have brought on someone like Beth to serve as a central point of contact for transparency issues."

Wonderlich also pointed to Noveck's Peer-to-Patent work as proof of her understanding of how to incorporate technology and wide public involvement in at least attempting to make government work better for the people at large.

Out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway
One reason she may be succeeding in government is that she's seen to be bringing new thinking to stodgy Washington.

"The deal is that she's bringing this...out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway," said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who has worked with Noveck since Obama took office on open government issues involving the federal Veterans Administration. "She's one of the hubs of this, people who see how things work in Washington and see how things work in Silicon Valley, and bringing the best of both."

So how does all her work tie together? For Noveck, it begins with the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question of how to apply technological innovations for the greater public good.

"State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion," Noveck said. "And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems....And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer-to-Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit."

On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.

That directive comes as a direct result of President Barack Obama's first executive action, on January 21, only hours after the hoopla from his inaugural parade and parties had died down, when the new chief executive issued the so-called Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

Beth Noveck, director of the Obama administration's open-government efforts

(Credit: New York Law School)

That document, which began, "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government," was a forceful opening move by the new president, and one intended to make good on his campaign call for reform and openness.

For Beth Noveck, Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government and a principal contributor to both the original Open Government memo and Tuesday's formal directive, this is more than just a chance to watch the new administration attempt to reverse decades of ingrained government reticence at letting the public get too close to policy discussions. It is also a chance to take a stab at changing the world.

Noveck, who for years has been a faculty member at New York Law School, had begun volunteering for the Obama campaign in early 2007, offering up her expertise in technology policy and in how to use technology to make policy. And when Obama won the 2008 presidential election, she quickly became the first member of what was known as the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform team, which was focused on thinking about how to actually bring about open government.

She's an accomplished law professor, and someone who gained some notoriety as the organizer of the State of Play conferences, which examined the legal, social, and intellectual issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games. But Noveck may have best secured her place in the Obama campaign and, later, the administration, with her groundbreaking work on the Peer to Patent project. That effort--which began in 2005 and became the subject of Noveck's 2009 book, "Wiki Government"--was aimed at applying the expertise of individual members of the public to the vastly overworked U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Today, Noveck is the director of the administration's open-government efforts, and was the one person that the administration's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra called out by name during their Tuesday event to unveil the directive. Last week, she spoke with CNET about that role, about what her major goals are while in Washington, and about why transparency, collaboration and participation are so important to government working better for the American people.

Q: Describe, in your own words, what Open Government is, and what the administration's goals are for it?
Beth Noveck: Open Government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent--that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory, engaging people in how government makes decisions and policies, earlier in the process, and with the benefit of input from more and more widespread stakeholders, not just people in Washington. And the role of government becomes more collaborative, working together across government institutions, and then across levels of government.

This is something that is pretty much possible today because of the Internet, correct?
Noveck: Absolutely. There have been efforts in every generation to bring about government reform, to create government that works better and more efficiently. But what's really a sea change today is that technology is making available this kind of open collaboration that we've never had before. Now we can get more information up as close to real time as possible and make it available not just on the Internet, but make it available so people can download it, look at that data, mash up that data, and derive greater meaning from it, and hopefully also, hold government more accountable as a result.

What makes you think that the public is ready for this kind of opportunity?
Noveck: Previously, you had only a few ways in which you could engage with government. You could vote in an election. Maybe you could write a comment in response to a rule that a federal agency might put out, like what's the appropriate fuel efficiency for trucks. You could write a letter to your Congressman. Now what we see is the opportunity to do things like get involved in a policy forum, not just by writing a comment that you have to mail to a federal agency in Washington, but by much more easily and quickly responding to a discussion about information technology in health care, and electronic health care records on a Health and Human Services Department blog. You may, for example, have technical skills and take some of the data that's being made available on Data.gov, like the flight record data that the FAA is putting out, and make an iPhone app that allows consumers to track when flights are on time. Which someone did.

The process you're in is not finished yet. What have you achieved so far with the Open Government initiative?
Noveck: We're by no means finished. And what we've been able to achieve is to transition from something that was the work of a handful of White House offices to something that is really the work of every single official across the government. Now, we are moving towards an open-government directive, which will instruct every government agency to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative according to these specific milestones and instructions. And what we're seeing is that across the government, every department and agency has begun already to undertake initiatives to put more data up online, to begin to consult the public in new ways and to get the public engaged in policymaking in new ways, to use new technology to undertake collaboration, and competitions, and initiatives like, for example, Health and Human Services running a competition to design the best public-safety announcement in connection with the H1N1 flu vaccine.

Do you think that this culture shift will become permanent?
Noveck: This is really core to the president's vision of government. This points to the ability to use new technology to hard-wire this kind of reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can't be undone in the next administration, so that we're not simply asking for data transparency now and then we're going to go back eight years from now. Really, the idea is when you're using technology to put information up online, it becomes very hard to take it offline without people noticing it.

Your work was pretty evident in the president's memorandum, correct?
Noveck: We had something called the Technology Innovation Reform Team--which was focused on how do we actually think about bringing innovation into government--as one of the core planning groups that was created during the transition in order to focus on such issues as open government. I was the initial member of that team, and that helped to produce a lot of the early work that we've done, including the creation of the role of a chief technology officer, the creation of a whole set of policies and projects that we've been undertaking over the course of the early stage of the administration. We all worked as a team.

On a personal level, can you talk about what it's been like to work in the White House?
Noveck: This is without a doubt the greatest honor and the greatest challenge of my professional career. Even for someone who likes to be busy and likes to multitask, working in the White House is an unbelievable challenge because of the range of issues that we deal with on a daily basis. It means that I'm working on a Health and Human Services issue at 9 o'clock and at 10 o'clock, talking to the Department of Labor, at 11 o'clock, I'm talking to the Department of Education. The advantage to that kind of breadth is the ability to help foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across department and agencies, so we can say to the Department of Education, this is what Health and Human Services is doing to bring innovation to the way they work. Or, Department of Labor, here's what's going on in some other area of government. So that ability to be at kind of the intersection of information exchange is incredibly valuable.

What is the status today of Peer to Patent?
Noveck: The Peer to Patent team did its own assessment after a two-year pilot, and now the Patent Office is studying it. The chair of the steering committee for Peer to Patent, is now the new undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and the director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, so he is very much a friend of the concept of citizen engagement and participation in Patent Office practice, and so now the office just has to assess for itself how they are going to institutionalize the concept of citizen engagement and participation in the work that they do.

Stepping back to earlier in your career, can you talk about the connective tissue between your work with the State of Play conferences and what you're doing now?
Noveck: Over the last decade, we've seen the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question is how do we take the latest technological innovations and apply them to the betterment and strengthening of our democracy? State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion. And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: Create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems and to do so in peaceful ways and ways informed by the best quality information. And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer to Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit.

An example of featured patent studies that Article One Partners has put out to its adviser community to help research.

(Credit: Article One Partners)

SAN DIEGO--It's been very clear for a long time that the American patent system is deeply flawed.

According to information provided on stage at DemoFall 09 here Wednesday by a company called Article One Partners, as much as 45 percent of all litigated patents are eventually found to be invalid. But the U.S. Patent Office is obviously overwhelmed by the sheer workload it faces, and its investigators' inability to keep up with the research that would help them reject many applications.

There are some solutions in the works, including Peer-to-Patent, a nonprofit system that would spread out the investigative work to a wide ecosystem of subject-matter experts. But clearly, some believe there's money to be made by putting some of this work--at least when it comes to invalidating patent applications or even approved ones--in the hands of a large community.

That's where Article One feels it can make a difference in stopping patent trolls from trying to make fortunes by suing companies for infringement.

The company's model is to farm out potentially invalidating research to a community of "advisers," all of whom can get paid for doing research that makes a difference in investigating applications or existing patents. The company has had its system in beta for about a year and it said that a third of the research done by its advisers has resulted in invalidating evidence.

Now, Article One is formally launching its service, and attacking what it said is a $1 billion market in fighting potentially invalid patents.

It aims to incentivize its advisers by paying them as much as $50,000 to do research and write up sophisticated studies. And this can be deeply valuable work, the company argued. For example, it said, even though RIM paid out more than $600 million to settle an infringement lawsuit, the patents in question were subsequently found to be invalid.

But again, because official patent investigators have only so much mental bandwidth, it is simply not possible for them to come up with the evidence themselves that can help out companies like RIM.

So, in a case like that, a company would put in a request for research on Article One, at which point the advisers can respond with supporting evidence. And the company said it is paying out as much as 5 percent of its profits to the advisers, who are paid if their work helps to invalidate a patent.

If it works on a broad scale, this seems like an extremely important addition to the patent landscape, though certainly not the only one. But as is abundantly clear, the system is broken and needs as much help as it can get, regardless of whether it's nonprofit or profit-based. And given how valuable such work is to large companies, there's definitely a lot of money at stake.

Twitter users are urging each other to change their location settings to confuse censors in Iran.

(Credit: Twitter)

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a reader who had seen my story about Twitter users slamming CNN for its initial absence on the post-Iranian election protests, urging me to remove an image in the story.

The rationale? The image was of Twitter results and included users' account IDs, and the reader was worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any users who were employing Twitter for potentially subversive purposes.

We decided not to remove the image, in part because it had been up for more than 24 hours, and also because we suspected that the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

But now, Twitter users across the world are attempting to turn that dynamic on its head. The best way that the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look and see whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. That's possible because users' profiles allow people to define which city they're from and which time zone they're in.

There's a new thread spreading quickly across Twitter--I found more than 1,300 such posts--urging people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.

Under the profile setting, the plea goes, people should change their location to Tehran, and their time zone and home city to GMT +03:30 Tehran. The idea--and it's not entirely clear if this would work--is that this will simply overwhelm the censors with people who look like they're posting potentially subversive tweets from Iran, and hopefully, protect the actual Iranians who are doing so.

Twitter, of course--as well as other social media services, has been the front line for news about the massive protests--perhaps the biggest in Iran since the revolution in 1979 that toppled the Shah. The service's users--using the hashtag "#IranElection"--have consistently been ahead of the news media on the story. And Twitter convinced its host, NTT America, to delay scheduled downtime in order to keep the service up and running so as to continue to give users a way to spread and receive news about what's going on in Iran.

The question has come up, again and again, about what would have happened in China in 1989 if protesters in Tiananmen Square had had Twitter at their disposal. I think China is more adept at censorship than Iran, but it seems clear that where there's a will, there's a way. And users of the Internet are a lot more clever than bureaucratic censors. I think the word would have gotten out.

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If a major earthquake hits San Francisco, where CBS Interactive (CNET News' parent) is based, how would everyone in the company communicate with each other in the aftermath?

If the folks at Transformyx, a Baton Rouge, La., company, have anything to say about it, we'd all be using their technology, an online service called RallyPoint.

The idea behind the service is to make it possible for everyone in an organization to stay in touch with each other and to get all the relevant information they need after any kind of significant disaster strikes, be it an earthquake, a tornado, a flood or anything else.

Being from Louisiana, Transformyx was inspired to create RallyPoint by 2005's Hurricane Katrina. But the lessons learned in that crisis were that companies need to be able to get their employees--especially managers--as much information as possible about what's going on, both with the people involved, and with any mission-critical data.

Transformyx, which presented Monday morning at Demo 09, is positioning RallyPoint as the first end-to-end crisis recovery and communications system. The idea is that by using the online system, anyone in a company affected by a disaster can get simple access to whatever he or she needs to ensure that everyone is accounted for, and to disseminate communications to relevant people.

The service is designed to handle a wide range of data: text, voice, video, and even communications from government agencies.

In any company using RallyPoint, all employees would be given a card they can carry around that provides instructions on how to use the system, meaning that no one has to memorize instructions. That's important given that in a crisis, people are often unable to remember even the most mundane details of their lives.

The system provides employees with a way to check in, notifying managers of their whereabouts, and similarly, gives those managers all the information they need to know about the discrete group of people they're responsible for. Employees and managers alike can upload messages to the system. Managers using the system can use up to 1GB of storage for documents or video.

Like many Web-based services, RallyPoint has a dashboard interface, and one of the things managers handling a crisis will like is that that interface shows the real-time status of their employees, and even a map showing their locations.

Furthermore, any two members using the system can communicate with each other once they've signed in, meaning that no one has to remember any phone numbers or any other ways to get in touch with each other.

Certainly, this system seems valuable, though it obviously relies on everyone using it to have power and Internet access. In a real disaster, like a Katrina-level hurricane or a major earthquake, that kind of access may not be available.

Still, communications are often available even in a crisis, and even when power disappears. And with most people using laptops, it's likely that people would have enough battery life to at least log in to the system.

What would be nice to see with RallyPoint is a personal widget, allowing family members to use it for their own purposes as well.

It appears that an agreement has been reached between Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and Klutz, the publisher of a book called the 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' to give credit for the creation of the concept of a bristlebot to the original makers.

(Credit: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com)

A kerfuffle that exploded online in the past few days over who created the concept of a "bristlebot," a small robot mashed up with a toothbrush, looks like it has a happy ending after an agreement between a New York publisher and two Silicon Valley "makers."

The controversy arose when a forthcoming book called "The Invasion of the Bristlebots" was discovered at the recent New York Toy Fair, raising the hackles of many who were deeply familiar with the concept of bristlebots, which had first been spread in late 2007 by the Silicon Valley makers, Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay, otherwise known as Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

In a post on how to create a bristlebot on the Make magazine blog in December, 2007, Edman and Oskay wrote:

The BristleBot is a simple and tiny robot with an agenda. The ingredients? One toothbrush, a battery, and a pager motor. The result? Serious fun. The BristleBot is our take on the popular vibrobot, a simple category of robot that is controlled by a single vibrating (eccentric) motor. Some neat varieties include the mint-tin version, as seen in Make Magazine...and the kid's art bot: a vibrobot with pens for feet.

Since that post, Edman said, bristlebots have become one of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' most popular creations, one that has spurred people all over the world to work on their own bristlebot projects, a development that Edman said was "fantastic." The original post also linked to a video (see below) on making one of the little robots that has since been viewed on YouTube more than 2.1 million times.

Given that, and the fact that the book from Klutz publishers (a division of Scholastic) had neglected to offer any credit to Edman or Oskay, or any acknowledgment that someone else had previously worked on bristlebots, upset a lot of people.

In a post on the Make magazine blog Thursday, senior editor Phil Torrone called the Klutz book project, which was authored by Pat Murphy, a "sad day for makers." And Edman and Oskay wrote on their own site: "We were never contacted by Klutz (or Scholastic), which we find surprising, being that we are the instigators of the current brush-based vibrobot movement, and the coiners of the term bristlebot."

For its part, Scholastic initially took a wait-and-see attitude. Kyle Good, vice president of corporate communications, told CNET News in an e-mail: "Klutz is genuinely surprised by this reaction to our book. The development of 'Invasion of the Bristlebots' by the Klutz creative team dates back to at least early 2007 and was developed internally, like other Klutz products. In light of this misunderstanding, we're contacting the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in the interest of addressing the concerns that have been raised."

On Friday afternoon, the two sides talked, and according to Edman, it appears that a resolution was reached.

The book 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' by Pat Murphy, will be published by Klutz and Scholastic in April. While the publisher says the book was already in the works prior to the December, 2007 blog posts in which Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories first wrote about bristlebots, it will give credit to the original makers.

(Credit: Scholastic/Klutz)

"I think they want to do the right thing," Edman told CNET News. "It sounds like they want to give us acknowledgment and work with us to make things right."

Edman said that there were still details to be worked out with Klutz, and that she couldn't go into specifics of the agreement, but she characterized the conversation as a "good call."

In a statement issued by Scholastic late Friday, Murphy, the book's author, also said that the discussion with Edman had been "good" and productive.

"We spoke about our shared commitment to making science and technology accessible to children," Murphy's statement began. "We began a discussion of ways that Klutz could acknowledge the exceptional work that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories had done in bristlebot research--starting with this message and continuing with acknowledgment in the next printing of the book and on the Klutz Web site."

Murphy also said that her bristlebots project did begin inside Klutz.

"At Klutz, the toothbrush robot evolved from the work of another editor and content developer on vibrobots....Sometime in early 2007, his efforts to shrink a vibrobot to a size that would fit on a book led him to strap a pager motor on a well-worn toothbrush. When he left Klutz, I worked on a tight deadline to refine his work and develop ways that kids ages eight and up could play with these Bots. Unfortunately, when working on a tight deadline, I tend to focus inward, rather than looking outward for others who might be able to help. And publishers, unlike the maker community--or the education community, where I spent many years--tend to keep their research under wraps until we're ready to publish."

Still, many in the maker community will find it improbable that bristlebots were created by anyone except Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Yet, even if true, Edman and Oskay didn't have much, if any, of a legal complaint against the publisher, said Michael Barclay, an intellectual property attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

"Concepts are kind of fuzzy things," said Barclay, who was speaking generally and not about the specifics of the bristlebots controversy. "The generic concept of putting a robot together with a toothbrush would be pretty hard to protect....It's very hard to protect an idea."

But to Edman, the dispute was never about the law.

"I'm not at this point concerned with any legal situation," Edman said. "I'm much more concerned with the maker community, and that their rights are protected to continue to do projects like this and not feel that if they put a project out there that somebody's going to come along and use that project for financial gain without contacting the maker. So, is it a legal right? It's more a community ethos, the morals of the community and the community behavior that I'm interested in."

To people like Torrone, who is a passionate advocate for the maker community, the apparent resolution between Klutz and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories seems like a good thing.

"This is great news for makers," Torrone said. "It means there are huge companies interested in what makers create. I'm sure (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) will show how traditional business can work with the maker community to the benefit of both."

Torrone added that he, like Edman, hadn't been looking at the dispute from a legal perspective. Rather, he too had been concerned that the situation might mean that makers can see their work appropriated by others without proper credit, something that might shut off the inspiration of future creators.

"My concern...was about what type of company Scholastic and Klutz wants to be, what world they want kids to grow up in," Torrone said. "They can credit makers and work with them or they can choose to hijack unique inventions without crediting makers. I'm pleased to see Scholastic and Klutz re-evaluated their position once they rediscovered the overwhelming clear-cut evidence that bristlebots came from (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)."

For Edman, the agreement with Klutz is an example of "an opportunity for a company like Klutz to collaborate with a community...and develop ideas with them, rather than the other way around. If we can work in concert, it will be much more successful."

A 'bristlebot' is a combination of a small robot and a toothbrush. There is now a controversy over who created the concept, as an inventor called Evil Mad Scientist first wrote about bristlebots in late 2007, and there now comes a book from Klutz and Scholastic titled 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' which makes no reference to Evil Mad Scientist.

(Credit: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com)

When it comes to whimsy, there's no doubt that the concept of a "bristlebot," a combination robot and toothbrush, is dripping with it.

But there's little whimsy going on right now over a controversy that has arisen with the appearance at the recent Toy Fair in New York of a book from Klutz publishing called "Invasion of the Bristlebots."

That's because in December 2007, the inventors at Evil Mad Scientist posted a how-to entry on the Make blog about something they called "BristleBots," a combination of a robot and a toothbrush:

The BristleBot is a simple and tiny robot with an agenda. The ingredients? One toothbrush, a battery, and a pager motor. The result? Serious fun. The BristleBot is our take on the popular vibrobot, a simple category of robot that is controlled by a single vibrating (eccentric) motor. Some neat varieties include the mint-tin version, as seen in Make Magazine (check the video) and the kid's art bot: a vibrobot with pens for feet.

But as was discovered at the Toy Fair, a new book from Klutz and Scholastic publishing by author Pat Murphy, called "Invasion of the Bristlebots," is covering what seems to be exactly the same ground.

The book 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' by Pat Murphy, is set to be published by Klutz and Scholastic in April. The publisher says the book was already in the works prior to the December 2007 blog posts in which Evil Mad Scientist first wrote about so-called BristleBots.

(Credit: Klutz/Scholastic publishing)

So far, it's unclear what the true origin of the bristlebot is.

In response to a request for comment on this story, Kyle Good, Scholastic vice president of corporate communications, wrote in an e-mail on Thursday that "Klutz is genuinely surprised by this reaction to our book. The development of 'Invasion of the Bristlebots' by the Klutz creative team dates back to at least early 2007 and was developed internally, like other Klutz products. In light of this misunderstanding, we're contacting the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in the interest of addressing the concerns that have been raised."

Afterwards, Scholastic put the same statement up on its public blog.

However, the folks at Evil Mad Scientist seem to be insisting that the bristlebot was their invention. As they wrote on their site Thursday, "We were never contacted by Klutz (or Scholastic), which we find surprising, being that we are the instigators of the current brush-based vibrobot movement and the coiners of the term bristlebot."

For now, this is all the information that is available. Stay tuned, however, as I plan to have a more in-depth story on this controversy on Monday morning.

Facing a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization and a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook on Tuesday night backed down from what many have seen as an onerous privacy policy.

Facebook informed all its users that it has, temporarily at least, reverted its terms of service to the previous version.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET Networks)

The policy had seemed to grant Facebook perpetual rights to users' uploaded content, and the threatened complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had demanded, essentially, that the social-networking service return to its previous terms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post late Tuesday that the company had decided to do just that:

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

Zuckerberg also said that the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration:

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

The move came after Facebook had, earlier in the day, polled its users as to whether it should revert to its previous terms. And in his blog, Zuckerberg said that the company would be asking users to get involved in crafting the next set of terms.

"If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms," Zuckerberg wrote, "you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created--Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input."

Certainly, we'll have more on this as it develops.

But in the meantime, as blogger Leo Laporte put it on Twitter this evening, "Put down the pitchforks and call off the rabble."

A leading privacy advocacy group is preparing to file a federal complaint against Facebook's new privacy policies, a published report said Tuesday.

According to PC World, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is getting ready to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, demanding that the massively popular social networking service return to its previous policies.

It appears that the major thrust of EPIC's--and many others' anger--at Facebook stems from new language in the privacy policy that grants the company seemingly perpetual control over content users post there:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

There are currently more than 46,000 members of a Facebook group set up to protest the new policies.

In a blog post defending the new language, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that it wasn't as onerous as people were claiming, and that:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created--one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

But, wrote PC World, other online services, like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, all have less strict controls over users' content.