I'm Rich Baraniuk and what I'd like to talk a little bit about today are some ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been talked about the last two days.
So many different points of resonance that it's going to be difficult to bring them all up, but I'll try to do my best.
Does anybody remember these?
(Laughter) OK, so these are LP records and they've been replaced, right?
They've been swept away over the last two decades by these types of world-flattening digitization technologies, right?
And I think it was best witnessed when Thomas was playing the music as we came in the room today.
What's happened in the music world is there's a culture, or an ecosystem that's been created that, if you take some words from Apple, the catchphrase -- that we create, rip, mix and burn.
What I mean by that is that anyone in the world is free and allowed to create new music and musical ideas.
Anyone in the world is allowed to rip or copy musical ideas, use them in innovative ways.
Anyone is allowed to mix them in different types of ways, draw connections between musical ideas, and people can burn them or create final products and continue the circle.
And what that's done is it's created, like I said, a vibrant community that's very inclusive, with people continually working to connect musical ideas, innovate them and keep things constantly up to date.
Today's hit single is not last year's hit single.
But I'm not here to talk about music today.
I'm here to talk about books.
In particular, textbooks and the kind of educational materials that we use every day in school.
Has anyone here ever been to school?
(Laughter) OK, does anybody realize there's a crisis in our schools, around the world?
I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but what I want to talk about is some of the disconnects that appear when an author publishes a book.
That in fact, the publishing process -- just because of the fact that it's complicated, it's heavy, books are expensive -- creates a sort of a wall between authors of books and the ultimate users of books, be they teachers, students or just general readers.
And this is even more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world's major languages, and especially English.
I'm going to call these people below the barrier "shutouts" because they're really shut out of the process of being able to share their knowledge with the world.
And so what I want to talk about today is trying to take these ideas that we've seen in the musical culture and try to bring these towards reinventing the way we think about writing books, using them and teaching from them.
So, that's what I'd like to talk about and, really, how we get from where we are now to where we need to go.
The first thing I'd like you to do is a little thought experiment.
Imagine taking all the world's books.
OK, everybody imagine books and imagine just tearing out the pages.
So, liberating these pages and imagine digitizing them and then storing them in a vast, interconnected, global repository.
Think of it as a massive iTunes for book-type content.
And then take that material and imagine making it all open, so that people can modify it, play with it, improve it.
Imagine making it free, so that anyone in the world can have access to all of this knowledge, and imagine using information technology so that you can update this content, improve it, play with it, on a timescale that's more on the order of seconds instead of years.
Instead of editions of a book coming out every two years, imagine them coming out every 25 seconds.
So, imagine we could do that and imagine we could put people into this.
So that we could truly build an ecosystem with not just authors, but all the people who could be or want to be authors in all the different languages of the world, and I think if you could do this, it would be called -- I'm just going to refer to it as a knowledge ecosystem.
So, really, this is the dream, and in a sense what you can think of it is we're trying to enable anyone in the world, I mean anyone in the world -- (Laughter) to be their own educational DJ, creating educational materials, sharing them with the world, constantly innovating on them.
So, this is the dream.
In fact, this dream is actually being realized.
Over the last six-and-a-half years, we've been working really hard at Rice University on a project called Connexions, and so what I'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just tell you a little bit about what people are doing with Connexions, which you can kind of think of as the counterpoint to Nicholas Negroponte's talk yesterday, where they're working on the hardware of bringing education to the world.
We're working on the open-source tools and the content.
So, that's sort of to put it in perspective here.
So, create.
What are some of the people that are using these kind of tools?
Well, the first thing is, there's a community of engineering professors, from Cambridge to Kyoto, who are developing engineering content in electrical engineering to develop what you can think of as a massive, super textbook that covers the entire area of electrical engineering.
And not only that -- it can be customized for use in each of their own individual institutions.
If people like Kitty Jones, a shut-out -- a private music teacher and mom from Champagne, Illinois, who wanted to share her fantastic music content with the world, on how to teach kids how to play music -- Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month.
Tremendous use.
In fact, a lot of this use coming from United States K-12 schools, because anyone who's involved in a school scale back, the first thing that's cut is the music curriculum.
And so this is just indicating the tremendous thirst for this kind of open, free content.
A lot of teachers are using this stuff.
What about ripping?
What about copying, reusing?
A team of volunteers at the University of Texas at El Paso -- graduate students translating this engineering super textbook ideas.
And within about a week, having this be some of our most popular material in widespread use all over Latin America, and in particular in Mexico, because of the open, extensible nature of this.
People, volunteers and even companies that are translating materials into Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai, to spread the knowledge even further.
OK, what about people who are mixing?
What does "mixing" mean?
"Mixing" means building customized courses, means building customized books.
Companies like National Instruments, who are embedding very powerful, interactive simulations into the materials, so that we can go way beyond our regular kind of textbook to an experience that all the teaching materials are things you can actually interact with and play around with and actually learn as you do.
We've been working with Teachers Without Borders, who are very interested in mixing our materials.
They're going to be using Connexions as their platform to develop and deliver teaching materials for teaching teachers how to teach in 84 countries around the world.
TWB is currently in Iraq, training 20,000 teachers supported by USAID.
And to them, this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context is extraordinarily important, because just providing free content to people has actually been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism -- that if you don't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material, translate it into their own language and take ownership of it, it's not good.
OK, other organizations we've been working with, UC Merced -- people know about UC Merced.
It's a new university in California, in the Central Valley, working very closely with community colleges.
They're actually developing a lot of their science and engineering curriculum to spread widely around the world in our system.
And they're also trying to develop all of their software tools completely open-source.
We've been working with AMD, which has a project called 50x15, which is trying to bring Internet connectivity to 50 percent of the world's population by 2015.
We're going to be providing content to them in a whole range of different languages.
And we've also been working with a number of other organizations.
In particular, a bunch of the projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation, who have taken a real leadership role in this area of open content.
OK, burn -- I think this is, sort of, quite interesting.
"Burn" is the idea of trying to create the physical instantiation of one of these courses.
And I think a lot of you received -- I think all of you received one of these music books in your gift pack.
A little present for you.
Just to tell you quickly about it: this is an engineering textbook.
It's about 300 pages long, hardbound.
This costs -- anybody guess?
How much would it cost in a bookstore?
(Audience) 65 dollars.
Richard Baraniuk: OK.
This costs 22 dollars to the student.
Why does it cost 22 dollars?
Because it's published on demand and it's developed from this repository of open materials.
If this book were to be published by a regular publisher, it would cost at least 122 dollars.
So what we're seeing is moving this burning or publication process from the regular, sort of single-authored book towards community-authored materials that are modular, that are customized to each individual class and published on demand very inexpensively, either pushed out through Amazon or published directly through an on-demand press, like QOOP.
And I think that this is an extraordinarily interesting area because there is tremendous area under this long tail in publishing.
We're not talking about the Harry Potter end, right at the left side.
We're talking about books on hypergeometric partial differential equations.
Books that might sell 100 copies a year, 1,000 copies a year.
There is tremendous sustaining revenue under this long tail to sustain open projects like ours, but also to sustain this new emergence of on-demand publishers, like QOOP, who produced these two books.
And I think one of the things that you should take away from this talk is that there's an impending cut-out-the-middle-man disintermediation, that's going to be happening in the publishing industry.
And it's going to reach a crescendo over the next few years, and I think that it's for our benefit, really, and for the world's benefit.
OK, so what are the enablers?
What's really making all of this happen?
There's tons of technology, and the only piece of technology that I really want to talk about is XML.
How many people know about XML?
Oh, great.
So it's the future of the web, right?
It's semantic representation of content.
And what you can really think of XML in this case is it's the packaging that we're putting around these pages.
Remember we took the book, tore the pages out?
Well, what the XML is going to do is it's going to turn those pages into Lego blocks.
XML are the nubs on the Lego that allow us to combine the content together in a myriad different ways, and it provides us a framework to share content.
So, it lets you take this ecosystem in its primordial state of all this content, all the pages you've torn out of books, and create highly sophisticated learning machines: books, courses, course packs.
It gives you the ability to personalize the learning experience to each individual student, so that every student can have a book or a course that's customized to their learning style, their context, their language and the things that excite them.
It lets you reuse the same materials in multiple different ways, and surprising new ways.
It lets you interconnect ideas, indicating how fields relate to each other.
And I'll just give you my personal story.
We came up with this six-and-a-half years ago because I teach the stuff in the red box.
And my day job, as Chris said -- I'm an electrical engineering professor.
I teach signal processing and my challenge was to show that this math -- Wow, about half of you have already fallen asleep just looking at the equation.
(Laughter) But this seemingly dry math is actually the center of this tremendously powerful web that links technology -- that links really cool applications like music synthesizers to tremendous economic opportunities, but also governed by intellectual property.
And the thing that I realized is there was no way that I, as an engineer, could write this book that would get all of this across.
We needed a community to do it and we needed new tools to be able to interconnect these ideas.
And I think that really, in a sense, what we're trying to do is make Minsky's dream come to a reality, where you can imagine all the books in a library actually starting to talk to each other.
And people who are teachers out here -- whoever taught, you know this -- it's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about.
OK, back to math.
Imagine -- this is possible: that every single equation that you click on in one of your new e-texts is something that you're going to be able to explore and experiment with.
So imagine your kid's algebra textbook in seventh grade.
You can click on every single equation and bring up a little tool to be able to experiment with it, tinker with it, understand it.
Because we really don't understand until we do.
The same type of mark-up, like MathML, for chemistry.
Imagine chemistry textbooks that actually understand the structure of how molecules are formed.
Imagine Music XML that actually lets you delve into the semantic structure of music, play with it, understand it.
It's no wonder that everybody's getting into it, right?
Even the three wise men.
(Laughter) OK, the second big enabler, and this is where I told a big lie.
The second big enabler is intellectual property.
Because, in fact, I got up here and I talked about how great the music culture is.
We can share and rip, mix and burn, but in fact, that's all illegal.
And we would be accused of [piracy] for doing that, because this music has been propertized.
It's now owned, much of it by big industries.
So, really, the key thing here is we can't let this happen.
We can't let this Napster thing happen here.
So, what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning.
And what we have to do is find an intellectual property framework that makes sharing safe and makes it easily understandable.
And the inspiration here is taken from open-source software.
Things like Linux and the GPL.
The Creative Commons licenses.
How many people have heard of creative commons?
If you have not, you must learn about it.
Creativecommons.org.
At the bottom of every piece of material in Connexions and in lots of other projects, you can find their logo.
Clicking on that logo takes you to an absolute no-nonsense, human-readable document, a deed, that tells you exactly what you can do with this content.
In fact, you're free to share it, to do all of these things: to copy it, to change it, even to make commercial use of it, as long as you attribute the author.
Because in academic publishing and much of educational publishing, it's really this idea of sharing knowledge and making impact.
That's why people write, not necessarily making bucks.
We're not talking about Harry Potter, right?
We're at the long tail end here.
Behind that is the legal code, very carefully constructed.
And Creative Commons is taking off -- over 43 million things out there, licensed with a Creative Commons license.
Not just text, but music, images, video.
And there's actually a tremendous uptake of the number of people that are actually licensing music to make it free for people who do this whole idea of re-sampling, ripping, mixing, burning and sharing.
OK, I'd like to conclude with just the last few points.
So, we've built this idea of a commons.
People are using it.
We get over 500,000 unique visitors per month, just to our particular site.
MIT OpenCourseWare, which is another large open-content site, gets a similar number of hits.
But how do we protect this?
How do we protect it into the future?
And the first thing that people are probably thinking is quality control, right?
Because we're saying that anybody can contribute things to this commons.
Anybody can contribute anything.
So that could be a problem.
It didn't take long until people started contributing materials, for example, on lingerie, which is actually a pretty good module.
The only problem is it's plagiarized from a major French feminist journal, and when you go to the supposed course website, it points to a lingerie-selling website.
So this is a little bit of a problem.
So we clearly need some kind of idea of quality control and this is really where the idea of review and peer review comes in.
You come to TED.
Why do you come to TED?
Because Chris and his team have ensured that things are very, very high quality, right?
And so we need to be able to do the same thing.
And we need to be able to design structures, and what we're doing is designing social software to enable anyone to build their own peer review process, and we call these things "lenses."
And basically what they allow is anyone out there can develop their own peer-review process, so that they can focus on the content in the repository that they think is really important.
And you can think of TED as a potential lens.
So I'd just like to end by saying: you can really view this as a call to action.
Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge.
All of you here are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge, and what I'd like to do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of its type, because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and educational publishing.
So, thanks very much.
Democracy is in trouble, no question about that, and it comes in part from a deep dilemma in which it is embedded.
It's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions we face that have to do with global pandemics, a cross-border problem; with HIV, a transnational problem; with markets and immigration, something that goes beyond national borders; with terrorism, with war, all now cross-border problems.
In fact, we live in a 21st-century world of interdependence, and brutal interdependent problems, and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy, we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago, autonomous, sovereign nation-states with jurisdictions and territories separate from one another, each claiming to be able to solve the problem of its own people.
Twenty-first-century, transnational world of problems and challenges, 17th-century world of political institutions.
In that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy.
And like many others, I've been thinking about what can one do about this, this asymmetry between 21st-century challenges and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional political institutions like nation-states.
And my suggestion is that we change the subject, that we stop talking about nations, about bordered states, and we start talking about cities.
Because I think you will find, when we talk about cities, we are talking about the political institutions in which civilization and culture were born.
We are talking about the cradle of democracy.
We are talking about the venues in which those public spaces where we come together to create democracy, and at the same time protest those who would take our freedom, take place.
Think of some great names: the Place de la Bastille, Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square in today's headlines in Istanbul, or, yes, Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
(Applause) Those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens, as participants, as people with the right to write our own narratives.
Cities are not only the oldest of institutions, they're the most enduring.
If you think about it, Constantinople, Istanbul, much older than Turkey.
Alexandria, much older than Egypt.
Rome, far older than Italy.
Cities endure the ages.
They are the places where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, marry, pray, play, get old, and in time, die.
They are home.
Very different than nation-states, which are abstractions.
We pay taxes, we vote occasionally, we watch the men and women we choose rule rule more or less without us.
Not so in those homes known as our towns and cities where we live.
Moreover, today, more than half of the world's population live in cities.
In the developed world, it's about 78 percent.
More than three out of four people live in urban institutions, urban places, in cities today.
So cities are where the action is.
Cities are us.
Aristotle said in the ancient world, man is a political animal.
I say we are an urban animal.
We are an urban species, at home in our cities.
So to come back to the dilemma, if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned political nation-states unable to govern the world, respond to the global challenges that we face like climate change, then maybe it's time for mayors to rule the world, for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent to engage in global governance.
When I say if mayors ruled the world, when I first came up with that phrase, it occurred to me that actually, they already do.
There are scores of international, inter-city, cross-border institutions, networks of cities in which cities are already, quite quietly, below the horizon, working together to deal with climate change, to deal with security, to deal with immigration, to deal with all of those tough, interdependent problems that we face.
They have strange names: UCLG, United Cities and Local Governments; ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Issues.
And the list goes on: Citynet in Asia; City Protocol, a new organization out of Barcelona that is using the web to share best practices among countries.
And then all the things we know a little better, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Mexican Conference of Mayors, the European Conference of Mayors.
Mayors are where this is happening.
And so the question is, how can we create a world in which mayors and the citizens they represent play a more prominent role?
Well, to understand that, we need to understand why cities are special, why mayors are so different than prime ministers and presidents, because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum.
To be a prime minister or a president, you have to have an ideology, you have to have a meta-narrative, you have to have a theory of how things work, you have to belong to a party.
Independents, on the whole, don't get elected to office.
But mayors are just the opposite.
Mayors are pragmatists, they're problem-solvers.
Their job is to get things done, and if they don't, they're out of a job.
Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia said, we could never get away here in Philadelphia with the stuff that goes on in Washington, the paralysis, the non-action, the inaction.
Why?
Because potholes have to get filled, because the trains have to run, because kids have to be able to get to school.
And that's what we have to do, and to do that is about pragmatism in that deep, American sense, reaching outcomes.
Washington, Beijing, Paris, as world capitals, are anything but pragmatic, but real city mayors have to be pragmatists.
They have to get things done, they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside and draw their cities together.
We saw this a couple of decades ago when Teddy Kollek, the great mayor of Jerusalem in the '80s and the '90s, was besieged one day in his office by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds, Christian prelates, rabbis, imams.
They were arguing with one another about access to the holy sites.
And the squabble went on and on, and Kollek listened and listened, and he finally said, "Gentlemen, spare me your sermons, and I will fix your sewers."
(Laughter) That's what mayors do.
They fix sewers, they get the trains running.
There isn't a left or a right way of doing.
Boris Johnson in London calls himself an anarcho-Tory.
Strange term, but in some ways, he is.
He's a libertarian.
He's an anarchist.
He rides to work on a bike, but at the same time, he's in some ways a conservative.
Bloomberg in New York was a Democrat, then he was a Republican, and finally he was an Independent, and said the party label just gets in the way.
Luzhkov, 20 years mayor in Moscow, though he helped found a party, United Party with Putin, in fact refused to be defined by the party and finally, in fact, lost his job not under Brezhnev, not under Gorbachev, but under Putin, who wanted a more faithful party follower.
So mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers.
They get things done.
But the second thing about mayors is they are also what I like to call homeboys, or to include the women mayors, homies.
They're from the neighborhood.
They're part of the neighborhood.
They're known.
Ed Koch used to wander around New York City saying, "How am I doing?"
Imagine David Cameron wandering around the United Kingdom asking, "How am I doing?"
He wouldn't like the answer.
Or Putin.
Or any national leader.
He could ask that because he knew New Yorkers and they knew him.
Mayors are usually from the places they govern.
It's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor.
You can run for the Senate out of a different state, but it's hard to do that as a mayor.
And as a result, mayors and city councillors and local authorities have a much higher trust level, and this is the third feature about mayors, than national governing officials.
In the United States, we know the pathetic figures: 18 percent of Americans approve of Congress and what they do.
And even with a relatively popular president like Obama, the figures for the Presidency run about 40, 45, sometimes 50 kayla30@example.org.
The Supreme Court has fallen way down from what it used to be.
But when you ask, "Do you trust your city councillor, do you trust your mayor?"
the rates shoot up to 70, 75, even 80 percent, because they're from the neighborhood, because the people they work with are their neighbors, because, like Mayor Booker in Newark, a mayor is likely to get out of his car on the way to work and go in and pull people out of a burning building -- that happened to Mayor Booker -- or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work because he sees it.
No head of state would be permitted by their security details to do it, nor be in a position to do it.
That's the difference, and the difference has to do with the character of cities themselves, because cities are profoundly multicultural, open, participatory, democratic, able to work with one another.
When states face each other, China and the U.S., they face each other like this.
When cities interact, they interact like this.
China and the U.S., despite the recent meta-meeting in California, are locked in all kinds of anger, resentment, and rivalry for number one.
We heard more about who will be number one.
Cities don't worry about number one.
They have to work together, and they do work together.
They work together in climate change, for example.
Organizations like the C40, like ICLEI, which I mentioned, have been working together many, many years before Copenhagen.
In Copenhagen, four or five years ago, 184 nations came together to explain to one another why their sovereignty didn't permit them to deal with the grave, grave crisis of climate change, but the mayor of Copenhagen had invited 200 mayors to attend.
They came, they stayed, and they found ways and are still finding ways to work together, city-to-city, and through inter-city organizations.
Eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities, which means cities are in a position to solve the carbon problem, or most of it, whether or not the states of which they are a part make agreements with one another.
And they are doing it.
Los Angeles cleaned up its port, which was 40 percent of carbon emissions, and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon.
New York has a program to upgrade its old buildings, make them better insulated in the winter, to not leak energy in the summer, not leak air conditioning.
That's having an impact.
Bogota, where Mayor Mockus, when he was mayor, he introduced a transportation system that saved energy, that allowed surface buses to run in effect like subways, express buses with corridors.
It helped unemployment, because people could get across town, and it had a profound impact on climate as well as many other things there.
Singapore, as it developed its high-rises and its remarkable public housing, also developed an island of parks, and if you go there, you'll see how much of it is green land and park land.
Cities are doing this, but not just one by one.
They are doing it together.
They are sharing what they do, and they are making a difference by shared best practices.
Bike shares, many of you have heard of it, started 20 or 30 years ago in Latin America.
Now it's in hundreds of cities around the world.
Pedestrian zones, congestion fees, emission limits in cities like California cities have, there's lots and lots that cities can do even when opaque, stubborn nations refuse to act.
So what's the bottom line here?
The bottom line is, we still live politically in a world of borders, a world of boundaries, a world of walls, a world where states refuse to act together.
Yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders, a world of diseases without borders and doctors without borders, maladies sans frontières, Médecins Sans Frontières, of economics and technology without borders, of education without borders, of terrorism and war without borders.
That is the real world, and unless we find a way to globalize democracy or democratize globalization, we will increasingly not only risk the failure to address all of these transnational problems, but we will risk losing democracy itself, locked up in the old nation-state box, unable to address global problems democratically.
So where does that leave us?
I'll tell you.
The road to global democracy doesn't run through states.
It runs through cities.
Democracy was born in the ancient polis.
I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis.
In that journey from polis to cosmopolis, we can rediscover the power of democracy on a global level.
We can create not a League of Nations, which failed, but a League of Cities, not a United or a dis-United Nations, but United Cities of the World.
We can create a global parliament of mayors.
That's an idea.
It's in my conception of the coming world, but it's also on the table in City Halls in Seoul, Korea, in Amsterdam, in Hamburg, and in New York.
Mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually constitute a global parliament of mayors, and I love that idea, because a parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us, of you and of me.
If ever there were citizens without borders, I think it's the citizens of TED who show the promise to be those citizens without borders.
I am ready to reach out and embrace a new global democracy, to take back our democracy.
And the only question is, are you?
Thank you so much, my fellow citizens.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)