Sean Daly, who does most of Groklaw's interviews, is himself interviewed, and you can read it on the Fellowship of FSFE site. It's the first in what will be a monthly series of interviews they plan on FSFE fellows. He talks about why he volunteers, and what he believes makes a good interview. I'll put the text here also, so it will be available for our new search aid, Archive Explorer.
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The Smallest Unit of Freedom: a Fellow
Welcome to the first in our series of monthly interviews with a
Fellow of FSFE - "the smallest unit of freedom". We're starting off
by turning the tables
on Seán "The Interviewer" Daly to ask him about his
chosen way to contribute to the Free Software movement.
_________________________________
Ciarán O'Riordan: Hi Seán. Thanks for agreeing to this
interview. You've done a lot
for FSFE and for other
projects such as Groklaw, by
recording events, writing articles, and above all,
interviewing
others. That's not something many people do as a hobby, so how did
you end up contributing in this way?
Seán Daly: Greetings Ciarán. Well, I make a good living working
in IT and a few years ago I started to feel that I should contribute
in some way and not just further my own interests. The free software
movement places a high value on coding, and although I can write a
decent bash or awk script, I'm not at a level to be able to contribute
code. So I took an inventory of things I *can* do, and as a former
tech journalist and audio engineer with some knowledge of digital and
Web video encoding, I had the idea of recording speeches and
conducting interviews. Back when I was a fulltime journalist, I
enjoyed interviewing since it is usually an opportunity to go beyond
official documents and statements and get a feel for the people
involved in change. That's still the case.
Arranging audio and video recordings can be an expensive proposition
for an NGO, I remember asking you what was planned
for the
GPLv3 Barcelona conference and when you mentioned that no budget
was available, I decided then and there to volunteer. You know, any
one of us can make a difference in some way; I had wondered for some
time in what way I could contribute and I've been pleased to have had
the opportunity to make basic decent quality recordings available of
those historic events.
COR: The first time we made contact was
about the
EU vs. Microsoft antitrust case. That's quite a bureaucratic
project, so what made you think it was where you wanted to get
involved?
Seán Daly: I've been watching Microsoft for a long time, as an end
user, as a journalist, and as a corporate buyer. What motivated me
finally was when I saw coverage of the EU Commission antitrust
case. In Europe, Microsoft's foot-dragging in complying with the 2004
Monti Decision concerned me, and I saw that with very few exceptions,
the mainstream and tech media seemed not to cover fully all that was
going on, in particular the important role of the intervenors like
Samba and the FSFE. I felt that since traditional journalists were
missing a vital part of the story, perhaps it was time for a
nontraditional journalist to step up and report on that part. And as
it turned out, they were the single most important part of the story,
since they did not back down.
Others like Novell, RealNetworks, Sun and even the CCIA that
originally were the complainants against Microsoft ended up settling
and withdrawing from the fight, and in some cases taking some of the
vital evidence with them, and it left FSFE and the Samba Team and ECIS
standing on the field holding the ball, so to speak, all alone, but
they kept going to the successful ruling on appeal a year ago. I will
never forget the tension in that Luxembourg courtroom as the thirteen
judges filed out to announce the ruling and then the satisfaction of
Carlo, Jeremy, Volker, and Georg afterwards. It was a privilege to
interview them that afternoon,
and Thomas
Vinje two days later; that coverage was, I think, a missing part
of the puzzle for anyone wanting to understand what was happening.
COR: Since this is the first in a series of Fellowship
interviews, I have to ask your advice: What makes a good interview? Is
it about getting someone to pin down their positions, or about drawing
out unexpected insights? What should an interviewer keep in mind when
designing questions?
Seán Daly: I think it's important to set aside one's personal feelings
on a subject, keeping in mind the goal of understanding more
thoroughly the issues. I mean, I personally am disappointed with
Microsoft, but next time I am interviewing someone from Microsoft, I
want to be fair, so we can understand better. Clearly, every person,
every situation is different, and an interview which should have gone
smoothly sometimes doesn't. Other times, an important bit of news
comes out, and it's important to stay on the ball and follow up right
away.
That said, I think it is absolutely essential to prepare as much
as possible. That means knowing as much about the subject matter as
the previous statements of the interviewee which of course provide
clues as to their positions and interests. Some interviewees are
talkative and relish the opportunity to get their message out. Others
are concerned about making a mistake and are more guarded. There's
certainly an element of risk involved for them, so it's important to
make people feel at ease; the best way to do that is to let them know
they will have a fair shake. Preparing questions takes time and
reviewing questions with another person beforehand helps. I've been
very fortunate with PJ, she's a clear-minded editor.
COR: You've worked with high-profile people and legally
sensitive topics. When a reader sees your interview, they've no idea
what hoops you might've had to jump through to get it done. Is there a
lot of bureaucracy, regulations, and agreements behind interviewing
certain people?
Seán Daly: Yes, I could fill a boring book on that topic! Sometimes I
hit a bump getting accreditation, other times an agreement
mysteriously evaporates or changes. It's the result that counts,
nobody really wants to know if I could only park half a mile from the
courtroom and had to jog in or how many faxes I needed to send. In
adverse conditions, politeness and fairness are your friend, along
with unswerving determination to get the story. To make things simple
for myself, I use very high quality recording equipment and carry
extra everything since Murphy's law applies!
COR: Your interviews often cover topics that are broader or
tangential to Free Software, such as fair use of copyrighted work
(Copiepresse) and preserving competition in the software market (such
as interviews with proprietary software companies who are supporting
FSFE's antitrust case against MS).
Seán Daly: We are living in a critical period in history where
traditional law for copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, is
struggling to keep pace, a sea change is underway with the
increasing importance of free software and open standards, the
efficiency of search engines offers fantastic access to information
while threatening privacy and disrupting existing business models. At
the same time, web-published information is ephemeral, fragile; future
historians may encounter difficulties locating primary sources of
information. PJ takes the opportunity to cover issues in depth which
have been passed over by the traditional media and has encouraged me
when I have suggestions.
COR: I have to ask about terminology. In almost all your
interviews, the interviewees talk about "Free Software" and
"GNU/Linux", instead of using other terms. I know that you
politely suggest this to interviewees beforehand. How have reactions
been? Do people have strong feelings about this?
Seán Daly: It's funny you say that, I'm not sure I've done that
often. It's true though that I prefer the term "free
software" to "open source". In fact, I prefer the
French "logiciel libre" to "free software" because
of the ambiguity of the English word "free". And I'm
uncomfortable not saying GNU with Linux since I use GNU tools every
day -- bash and gawk and so on.
I think that in most conversations and particularly in interviews, an
effort is made on both sides to find common words and phrases. Many
interviewees understand that some words are weighted and take the
trouble to understand why. I'd just as soon avoid taboos, but some
commonly used words are just silly -- I mean, calling illicit copying
"piracy" is so ridiculous considering what has been
happening recently off Somalia.
COR: There's wildly mixed analysis of the music industry's
attempts to control people's computers by making DRM ubiquitous. In
the same week, we can see claims that DRM is doomed, and claims that
it's inevitable. From talking to some of the active groups on this,
and from reading the reactions to your own interviews, how do you
gauge the levels of public awareness and the optimism among the
experts?
Seán Daly: At this point, my impression is that the public thinks that
Digital Restrictions Management is just a fancy way of ripping them
off, making them pay over and over for music or films they have
already purchased in a heavy-handed effort to maintain dying business
models. With music, it seems doomed. But with other works, I think
it's still to be determined. At some point, after everyone realizes
DRM isn't a good way to properly compensate content creators,
hopefully a better method will be found. Initiatives such as
Bandstocks show that new business models are just waiting to be
developed.
COR: You've lived in Europe and the USA, and in Europe you've
talked to politically active organisations and companies. Do you see
differences in how campaigning, lobbying, and raising awareness is
done in Europe and the USA?
Seán Daly: I daresay there are differences in style, but I think it's
mostly the Internet which has radically changed (although not
eliminated) the old lobbyist power lunch.
COR: Let's talk about audio and video file formats. I know you
prefer free formats. How do you go about editing and transcoding?
Seán Daly: I always keep the original rushes and raw audio files and
work on copies when editing audio or video. I interview in stereo with
my voice on one side and the interviewee's on the other. I usually
normalize each channel individually; sometimes a phone interview track
requires a bit of EQ though. I adore Audacity for audio editing, it's
powerful and intuitive and has lots of plugin filters available. Video
is trickier, it's more time-consuming and I haven't found suitable
free software for that yet. Transcoding is actually the easy part,
because there are a number of excellent commandline tools (transcode,
ffmpeg, mplayer, oggenc, ffmpeg2theora, ...) and all you have to do is
run a command adjusting the parameters with trial and error to hit
the sweet spot of acceptable quality at low bandwidth. I always try to
populate metadata fields, the Ogg container is well-suited for that.
Even if search engines (Internet and local) don't crawl that metadata
today, they will someday, and it's always a good idea to indicate
copyright information, CC licence, date and place and of course the
names of the people - open up any of my Ogg files with VLC and you
will see that information. I'm very interested in the BBC's free Dirac
codec which apparently can offer H.264/MPEG-4 AVC quality and
scalability without the patent encumbrances.
I'm disappointed that popular sites such as YouTube discourage the
use of free formats. The day Flash video can encapsulate the Xiph
codecs or Dirac alongside Sorenson, On2VP6 and H.264, these formats
will gain wider acceptance.
COR: I'm a big fan of transcripts, and from helping you a little on some of
yours, I know you like to publish complete transcripts. This contrasts with
many journalists who paraphrase answers. Can you give your reasons for
doing this work?
Seán Daly: Indeed you have and PJ and I are most grateful for that
assistance, you and I have worked an all-nighter more than once! I feel
transcriptions are extremely important because that's how today's search
engines index -- text. I have often listened to fascinating interviews on
podcasts or audio files for which no text was available; what was said
disappears immediately without a transcription -- you can't find it, you
can't absorb what was said. To give an example, EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes
answers questions from journalists at each press conference concerning the
Microsoft case, and often, her responses are very interesting. The wire
services paraphrase what she says but sometimes miss a key point. I have
several times transcribed Commissioner Kroes' Q&A sessions from the EbS feed
(About the MS-EU settlement, Oct
2007 and About the MS fine, Feb
2008). Of course, these are not official; the original EbS audio
recording is there for that. But these transcriptions are the only
source on the Net of these historic events. Web-published transcriptions can
be as long as the interview, there's no space constraint as in a newspaper
or magazine.
COR: And we have to close with the crystal ball
question. You're always looking for a scoop. What projects or bodies
are you keeping an eye on right now? Where do you see that someone's
going to make a move on something you'll want to report on?
Seán Daly: You mean, show all of my cards? I can say that I monitor a
certain number of subjects covered by a certain number of news
sources, from press releases to wire reports to blogs. I am also
subscribed to several mailing lists of interest. Alas, we have to
choose our battles due to limited resources. But we will always prefer
completeness and getting it right over speed and scooping
others. There are two or three untold stories on the back burner which
you will be sure to see some day :-)
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