The Benefits of Open to the Detroit Public Schools

This last winter I had the pleasure of meeting Patti Smith (web, twitter) at one of the local ann arbor coworking events. Patti is a teacher for the blind and seeing impaired at Detroit Public Schools (DPS) and was using a day off to come hang with some of the Ann Arbor new economy types.

Patti’s kids are mostly tweens/early teens and she was lamenting the lack of Braille reading material for them. For whatever reason, companies that publish works in Braille tend to stop offering books beyond basic reading (“See Dick, See Dick Run”). Additionally, when Braille materials are provided, they’re extremely expensive because of their size and the limited market (and often not an option of DPS’s already limited budget). Instead Patti’s been providing reading material for them (including excerpt material from textbooks) by hand typing into an application that connects to her very expensive Braille printer.

For legal reasons she can’t copy the entire contents of a book (and would probably go crazy from hand transcribing the damn thing if she could). Basically, it sucks for the kids (who are limited in what they can read) and sucks for Patti (who is constantly giving up free time to provide new reading material for her students).

The root cause of this issue is the closed nature of written works under copyright law. Braille books are expensive both from a materials aspect and from a licensing aspect. I suspect that it’s fairly onerous to obtain a license to print Braille copies of a book and nearly impossible get the notoriously backwards textbook industry to give licenses for textbooks. From an economic standpoint getting blind kids reading material doesn’t make sense and, if you can do it, you have to pass that expense on to the customer.

Mitten and I introduced Patti to Project Gutenberg as a source of material that she can reproduce without licensing costs and, since it’s all plain text, doesn’t require hand transcription. She was amazed and delighted, especially when we mentioned some out-of-copyright SciFi material from the 60s.

This is a good source for older material, but she also wanted to give her students access to some modern writing for people their age. This moved our conversation into the realm of creative commons, specifically the award-winning works of Cory Doctorow aimed at young adult readers.

Patti went home and immediately printed some sample chapters from Little Brother for her kids. She also wanted to show her appreciation to Cory, so we contacted him via twitter and asked if we could send a sample chapter in Braille as thanks.

Cory was kind enough to reply the same day.

Imagine trying to accomplish this five or ten years ago. Detroit Public Schools would have hired consultants (legal and technical) who would have pointed them towards out-of-copyright works. The School’s lawyers would have spent some time verifying the copyright holdings (to avoid suit), allowing Patti to obtain print copies of these works (if possible). She’d then transcribe the works by hand. Or, best case, the consultant would have spent time on a crusade talking to authors and publishers to get them to freely license modern materials for teens for Braille printing. Even if he was successful, it’s likely the cost in time and money would be considerable.

Think about the whole process in 2009: Patti was able get free consulting and find a solution to a very real problem with, literally, no money changing hands. Open advice, open process, open communications (all the way from teacher Patti to author Cory), open content. End result: Detroit Public School kids get award winning reading material at no cost to the school or any of the people who helped make it happen.

As thanks, Cory gets an artifact he can point to and see “Look! Obvious benefits of open culture” and I get an awesome piece of information art:

If you’re interested in working in the open like this, many of the people involved (centrally and peripherally) are now housed at the Workantile in downtown Ann Arbor where they work on projects both free and paid. Although only semi-officially done there have already been a number of interesting projects coming out of the space (the open software/hardware RFID door opening system is a great example).