John Palfrey

J.D. Amer of Lopico and beyond writes:
“Perhaps this is what web2.0 really means, the building of an entirely
new information retrevial system based on humans and social
interaction. Old methods are new again.”

Truly excellent tellings and retellings of the events from Andy Updegrove and Dan Bricklin.  IBM’s Bob Sutor has posted his remarks.  Dan captured a podcast (2 hours, 20 minutes).  China Martens of IDG News Service had this take on it.  Martin Lamonica of CNet wrote it up, too.  Jeff Kaplan writes
from DC, appropriately set in the context of the Open ePolicy Group’s
work.  If only David Berlind had been here instead of at Syndicate
in SFO…

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is making history by considering a policy that would ensure the long-term integrity of our data. The importance of this process cannot be overstated. The implications of a policy that supports the development and implementation of open standards, if done right, would have substantial positive implications over the long run, here in the Commonwealth but also in other states and countries around the world. The Commonwealth’s leadership in this area could establish a model for others to follow, as it has so many times before on so many issues.

Several things are at stake in the move to such a policy:

* Interoperability: Creating and maintaining an open information ecosystem that achieves interoperability between computing environments, applications, and sources of data – whether created last year or 25 years from now – is the primary motivation for moving to an open standards policy.

* Access and Control: Ensuring that citizens and the state have access to our data and the ability to control our data long into the future, grounded in the knowledge that electronic data is becoming more and more important. It’s about the users — in the parlance of the states, the citizens — after all.

* Choice and Cost: Establishing a truly open standard can ensure that the Commonwealth, over the long-term, has the greatest range of technology choices and the lowest technology costs through competition. An open policy is not one that results in lock-in to a single technology vendor, nor one that precludes any vendor – which may be the most competitive – from participating.

* Innovation: Promoting the continued innovation in information technology, on Rte. 128, in university computer science labs, and in garages throughout the Commonwealth and beyond, supporting economic development in the process.
If there is any single concept that encompasses these themes, it is generativity, the policy prescription that my colleague Jonathan Zittrain calls for in his new paper, The Generative Internet.
A policy for the Commonwealth that supports open standards, if properly conceived and implemented, can help to achieve these goals. To get there, the legislature and the executive branch have a hard job.

That job is not to choose between competing technology vendors, circa 2005, in a fast-changing marketplace. The elephant in the room is the struggle between Microsoft on the one hand and IBM and Sun on the other. But that struggle is not, and cannot be, the real story on open standards policy. It’s essential to bear in mind the state’s proper role vis-a-vis this marketplace — a marketplace which may in fact establish, and re-establish, other open standards over time, all plausibly based off of the same concept of XML. Consider, for instance, the “web 2.0″ version of this discussion and witness the dramatic changes in the syndicated technologies space — with RSS, Atom, OPML, the MetaWeblog API, and their ilk over the past few years — which, to all but a few visionaries, were unthinkable as possible “open document formats” a short while ago. The key is to ensure enough flexibility in the process so that those who know the technologies and the implications of any changes can help the state to adjust its approach on the fly as progress, inevitably, marches on — and such that citizens, or users, are not the ones left behind in the long-run.

Information technologies are increasingly important to our democracy. A policy that seeks to ensure a citizen’s access to information and a citizen’s ability to transform data with as few constraints by those who make technology as possible is a worthy one. These goals should not be pursued by the state without the active involvement of the technical community; the legislator needs to get to know the technology developer, and those who set technology standards, much more intimately if the state is going to play in this game.

The question before the Commonwealth today is not whether to strive for such lofty goals, but rather how to meet the challenge of crafting and implementing a policy that will in fact achieve them over the long run. If the Commonwealth gets this policy right, others will follow. If the Commonwealth gets this right, it will be good not only for our state’s economy but also for our democracy.
Summary of Remarks at An Open Forum on the Future of Electronic Data Formats for the Commonwealth, December 14, 2005 at the Massachusetts State House

John G. Palfrey, Jr.
Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Today I am finalizing what I will say tomorrow morning at the Massachusetts State House’s forum on the Open Document Format procurement policy issue. It’ll be held from 10 - 12 noon in the Senate Reading Room.

I’m trying to read and listen to as many sources as I can in writing up what I’ll say. If you have anything I should pay attention to — an idea, a link, a news source — please feel free to send it my way at jpalfrey AT law.harvard.edu.

Here’s the agenda, as of yesterday (received by e-mail from the State House):

An Open Forum on the Future of Electronic Data Formats for the Commonwealth

December 14, 2005
10:00 AM – Noon
Senate Reading Room, State House

Hosted by: Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies, Sen. Jack Hart & Rep. Dan Bosley, Chairs
&
The Science & Technology Caucus, Sen. Jack Hart, Rep. Cory Atkins, & Secretary Ranch Kimball, Chairs

AGENDA

10:00 Welcome and Introductory Remarks

10:05 Open Standards and the Evolution of the OpenDocument Standard: How did we get here?

John Palfrey, Executive Director
Berkman Center on Internet and Society
Harvard Law School

10:25 Introduction of Panelists

* Bob Sutor, IBM
* Alan Yates, Microsoft General Manager of Information Worker Business Strategy
* Peter Quinn/Linda Hamel, ITD
* Bob Sproull, Sun Microsystems
* Judy Brewer, Web Accessibility Initiative, W3C
* Alan Cote, Secretary of State’s Office

10:45 Moderated Panel Discussion

Noon Adjourn

A new Berkman/Gartner study on the power of recommendations and the impact on digital media sales, by Mike McGuire and Derek Slater, is to be published today.

The final day of our three-day swing through the UK, the second annual
Global Voices conference, was invigorating.  The team of 75+ who
assembled — bloggers and editors from around the world, actor Richard
Dreyfuss, academics like us, the executives from Reuters and
foundations like MacArthur and Soros who are supporting it — comprise
an amazing crew. 

What I found most interesting was the change in tone from last
year.  At the first GV conference a December ago, the idea seemed
intriguing but a bit far out, unfinished.  Today, with 300,000
unique visitors per month and a BOB award as the world’s best
journalistic blog, GV is already an institution.  Its existence
seems obvious, necessary, sensible.  The issues are no longer “how
could we get this off the ground?” and more about the tricky things
that come with success, about growth, about sustainability. 
Amazing what difference a year makes.

Here’s Ethan’s post; here’s what the Guardian’s Jane Perrone said about it; and Rebecca, from the vantage point before the conference.  The live-blog notes are amazingly extensive.

Today we’re 50 miles south of Oxford, in London, near Paddington, for a
small-group session on Internet, filtering, blogging, and human
rights.  It’s amazing group that brings some of the global voices
crowd — gathered here for GV II tomorrow — together with human rights
activists and technologists from the OpenNet Initiative. 
The idea is for those of us who study Internet filtering and
surveillance to learn more from those who do human rights work in the
field and a chance to share some of our research, as well as the
learnings of the GB crowd, with some people who might be able to learn
from it.  We’re especially grateful for the support and funding
from the MacArthur Foundation for this work and to our partners at
Human Rights Watch for their leadership on the HR front.

Today starts a three-day swing through the UK by those of us at the
Berkman Center who work on issues related to Internet &
democracy. 

* Today, we’re with our partners at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)
with about 25 scholars and activists who work on e-Participation. 
The events officially kicked off with a public session at Said Business
School here at Oxford, when Prof. Stephen Coleman delivered an address
on “E-Participation and Power: the Copper Wire and the
Electricity.”  Zephyr Teachout represented us at the Berkman
Center as a respondent; Alex Allen, Permanent Secretary of the
Department of Constitutional Affairs in the UK, also responded.

* Tomorrow, in London, along with Human Rights Watch, we are hosting a session on Internet filtering and human rights. 

* On Saturday, we’re at the Reuters HQ in London’s Canary Wharf for
Global Voices II, the second summit for the extraordinary group of
people who have come together to create what I think is the best world
news blog out there.

These events are meant to be part of the ongoing conversation around
Internet & democracy.  Our last major effort in this regard
was the Internet & Society 2004 conference, “Votes, Bits, and
Bytes,” on which these efforts in the UK are meant to follow
up.  We are very grateful to eBay for its ongoing support of this
series, and to Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation, and Reuters
for their support for the next three days.

Right now, Stephen Ward is setting the stage with a review of the scholarship on e-Participation to date.

In a non-Berkman project, I’ve been working with an exceptional team of people to create something I think is cool: Top 10 Sources,
which we are releasing today. 

One of the unexpected parts of
developing this site was Dan Bricklin’s work in writing up a piece on “The Genre of Podcasting” — an unexpected bonus, and timely, as the history of podcasting is a raging debate at the moment. 

One of the things I’m proudest of related to the Berkman Center is that one of the first, if not the first, series of podcasts grew out of the work here of then-fellows Dave Winer and Christopher Lydon.  This is a story that needs to be told right, wherever it might be redacted.  We should work on it.