re: You only have to look at what happened during and after the “Kathy Sierra” incident early last year; regardless of the specifics of the incident, we have to learn from the communal response. An explicit Blogger’s Code of Conduct was put forward, and was about as successful as plumbic parachutes.
I did a *lot* of research into this, speaking to many of the participants. I have some theories as to why it failed (one of them — Tim O’Reilly introduced it to the wolves of the blogosophere, and not, say, to a closed group who could have better marketed it).
Tim’s conception of the BCoC was to resemble the Creative Commons model of a modular EULA. That’s what I put together for him, calling it Comment Management Responsibility. Tim gave it his tacit approval in the comments of his blog; JZ gave it some tentative support in response to a question at the Yale Reputation Economies Conference in December; other Berkfolks expressed interest in private talks with me, but there’s been no other formal endorsements.
I also put together the Protocol of Online Abuse Reporting. I’ve had a number of positive discussions with Berkman people on this, but again, no formal endorsements have been provided (let alone endorsing the putting forth of a mere proposal).
I don’t mean to be “sour grapes” about this; I welcome this Publius effort and am merely providing the contributors and readers with some of the practical thinking that has been undertaken in the realm of social media governance.
“We want to shine light on the nuances at the margins of decision-making online.”
John Palfrey http://publius.cc/preface/
While we are pointing out watershed moments in history, please mark May 12, 2008 down as the day “the public domain” was ceded without a fight.
On that day, the most revered intellects in the country came together to “foster an on-going public dialogue,” which documents for “the public in meaningful and relevant ways” the “constitution-making moments” and to “create a durable record of how the rules of cyberspace are being formed”–and copyrighted it.
I find David Weinberger puts it best when he says, “The lack of explicit constitutions and explicit rules often is a sign of health.” Yet without any suggestion of deliberate irony, his exposition on “Tacit Governance” is undermined by emblazoning it with an explicit governance document more than twice its length. “Every new rule is a scab covering tender flesh.” Unfortunately, this one is a self-inflicted wound.
When Hamilton, Madison, and Jay signed their essays “Publius” they clearly understood them not as individual works of authorship, but as contribution to the public discourse. I doubt they would have had the same effect on the public consciousness had they been followed with, BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE…
By saying that even our communal discussion and historical record cannot be considered (nor assigned to) the “public domain”, this body has made a “tacit” statement that this copyright concept no longer has any validity.
If a forum with Publius.cc’s stated goals cannot exist in the public domain it should be noted. Then perhaps we can get on to documenting the demise of sections 107, 108, and 109 as well.
I’d like to touch on two things that struck me while reading your comments and references.
One, you make a good point about YOYOW, it does not work well with anonymity. I need to think about that.
Two, you speak of Tim introducing the code of conduct to the “wolves of the blogosphere”, and contrast them to closed groups “who could have better marketed it”. The blogosphere that I am aware of is not a place where a closed group could “better market” something, any attempt to do so will probably elicit adverse reactions.
And I think there’s a reason for it. I think people tend to come together in the blogosphere because they have common interests, not because they have common views. This provides a diversity of opinion that pushes back against groupthink, against herd instinct. As a result, you will find it very hard to find pockets where controlled marketing is possible, there’s too much heterogeneity. Maybe you see this pushback as wolflike.
As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. Markets aren’t liquid when everyone wants to do the same thing; they’re liquid because of participant numbers and the diversity of opinion. And when markets are as populous and as heterogeneous as the blogosphere, it is not easy to “fix the price” or “game the system”.
To my mind, the origins of the word “bankrupt” show the power of tacit governance very well. You gave your word. You let your peers down. So they came and broke your bench. Not because you broke explicit rules, but because you broke tacit rules.
While Esther Dyson clarifies the potential harm that tacit rules can impose on outsiders or the less powerful, she seems to assume that the goals of all online communities are the same. The clarity and mutability of tacit rules are clearly important for reputation and exchange in most scalable communities. However, the bottom-up development of rules may in itself be an important characteristic of smaller and more cohesive identity groups. For example, many feminist groups online make heavy use of message boards and wikis in an explicit attempt to increase the level of control over the group identity by members. This is unlikely to be an important factor for exchange sites that rely on an external system for determining reputation.
Computer code is not constitution. Code is merely bureaucratic, narrow and blind regulation — yes/no, black/white. No need to prettify it merely because it appears in cutting-edge technology in cyberspace.
Constitution at least in the Western liberal context implies consent of the governed and framers who shape law and a Supreme Court that interprets law in a living and organic way. Code is not law; it is wielded arbitrarily by coders who themselves do not submit to the rule of law. Code is essentially a fence — or actually in many cases, a gun.
>Economists would describe this change as a positive supply side shock to liberty
No. Because more than anything, what made that protest possible was the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, not merely new social media or political interest.
o The Constitution helped to create a world people would even want to immigrate to, rather than flee from
o However deeply flawed, it made a border and immigration service that let in at least as many as it turned away, even illegally
o It provided the rights and guarantees of freedom of expression that enabled these students to protest without being arrested or tortured or shot, as they might have been even in some of the nearby countries they or their relatives fled from.
Media without law is untethered and in the hands of a few coders and experts, becomes a tool for totalitarianism.
The blogosphere that I am aware of is not a place where a closed group could “better market” something, any attempt to do so will probably elicit adverse reactions.
Let’s agree that marketing/messaging is not in and of itself a bad thing. Marketing is not the same thing as “gaming the system.” Anti-marketing is still marketing.
Look in the mirror: take this new website. This did not arise sui generis. It was carefully planned by the Berkman Center to get all of these smart folks here contributing essays, and the release was targeted to friends-of-Berkman. These are not mere off-the-cuff blog posts, and it shows.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I welcome it. But I should contrast it to O’Reilly’s off-the-cuff “Blogger’s Code of Conduct,” which quickly became red meat for anyone taking sides between Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra.
My theory of constructive media measures the success of a conversation by the words, rules or codes that come forth. To the extant that there are adovcates on this bench who would like to introduce frameworks for rules into online communities, I offer the abovementioned links.
PN — I don’t doubt that the quick coordination was done with social technology, and it was a bit unprecedented for high school students across so many schools.
But, it’s funny: Doing some Google searches here, the main source people appear to cite, besides media accounts, is danah boyd. But danah didn’t link to any source material. (The Inland Press Enterprisewrote: “Word about the walkout and march was spread by fliers and by bulletins posted on MySpace.”)
Funny, it appears that all of the MySpace pages were just as transient as the paper fliers.
re: “William James, the American philosopher, maintained that thinking is for doing, which to say that our brains don’t exist for purposes of abstract cogitation, they exist to help us decide what to do next.”
I was mildly curious whether this project was going to follow that m.o.
Jon, thanks for your input. I am sure that your references would be of interest to those amongst us that are more inclined towards the use of explicit governance techniques.
I am intrigued by what you mean when you say that you “theory of constructive media measures the success of a conversation by the words, rules or codes that come forth”.
In your theory, does it matter whether the rules or codes that emerge from conversation stay tacit, or must they be explicit? Do you mean all conversation (including oral) or are you only referring to written conversations such as this one?
JP-
In his essay, Clay approvingly quoted William James, “thinking is for doing.” The doing, I presume, must be some sort of lasting construction. And thus any sort of tacit codes that emerge, to quote Samuel Goldwyn, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. New people to the community aren’t as well informed unless the codes are uniformly written down. The Constitution, in the U.S., established our “document nation” (which Alex Wright attributes to Brian Stock). (See more on Constructive Media).
Whether this conversation becomes constructive is up to you and your fellow conversants, what you want to do with this website.
I realize I am missing out on many of the oral conversations at Berkman@10 yesterday and today. As long as someone can take notes– or enough people can review the proceedings– they can be made constructive.
Much of the Internet governance debate, including but not limited to net neutrality, pivots around metaphors that are mistaken as analogies.
In other words, when a comparison, possibly just semantic, is made between the characteristics of the Internet and real estate, many incorrectly infer that because this one characteristic has been compared, and usefully, then logically other characteristics of the comparison are ported over too.
This is irrational. A case I think of where the asset of the metaphor has become a liability.
Thanks for the perspective. I’m at the OECD Future of the Internet Economy summit in Seoul next month, and I will keep a close ear on proceedings to see how often this mistake crops up.
I’m not sure what a “first cost” is, but would be interested to know.
I don’t see how the Open source mention ties in to discussion of the internet. It doesn’t flow well.
The postal metaphor is perfect for the internet… each packet costs the same amount to deliver, orthogonal to the value it has to society. It’s up to the users to use it wisely.
Charging by the maximum capacity, or per bit are the only two pricing models that are acceptable. Uniform rates applied uniformly to all should be our standard.
Nobody should be forced to ride in the back of the bus just because they aren’t the majority (web, email, etc) and happen to be a different on the surface (bittorrent, irc, voip).
Now, as with delivery, you can always pay for a faster route, at a premium. But again, uniform rates applied uniformly should be the rule.
–Mike–
Bob Way, well done for calling this bunch of conservative Harvardians on their unwitting hypocrisy.
It is time to reclaim all published works as first class members of the public domain. Time to cut the illegitimate strings attached to them for their publishers’ benefit.
The Internet reveals copyright for the 300 year old anachronism that it truly is, and at the same time usurps it as a far better means of publishing an author’s work, and, I argue, a better means of enabling their audience to reward them for it.
Contrary to popular belief, the US constitution does not sanction copyright, for its suspension of the public’s cultural liberty is not necessary to secure to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.
These principles are concise and useful. I’ll certainly share them with my on-line learners. They beg for me a question I’ve been recently pondering concering a new-media ethics, and whether this will be formed on the backs of courageous or obnoxious users. How do we teach decent practices as part of a new media literacy? See this example at Iowa, for instance, upon which I also recently blogged: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=35107035121.
re: “We all have an internal ‘trust meter’ of sorts, largely based on education and experience.”
Dan, we’ve discussed this perhaps before. I believe that your statement is conjecture, and probably not completely accurate. My sense is that people’s “education and experience” often includes preordained conclusions, superstition, and myth. There are readers, after all, who firmly believe that most everything in the NYT is propaganda.
Additionally you need to consider chains of trust. The chain of (mostly anonymous)editors who approve a NYT story may not give the same imprimatur as, say, Instapundit or Atrios, whom readers may feel they “know” better.
Recall the Pew study from June 2004 on media believability. Only 23% of Republicans “believe all or most of what” is in the Wall Street Journal. (Americans also believe TV & radio news more than they believe the newspapers.)
It’s OK to talk about the Internet in abstract and metaphorical terms for certain analytical purposes, such as assessing its impact on society and politics and that sort of thing, but when the discussion deals with physical realities such as pricing and regulation, the hand-waving approach isn’t good enough.
Craig Burton is wrong. The distance between any two end-points connected to the Internet is not zero, it’s the sum of the delays in the best path that connects them. If the two hosts are on the same physical wire, the distance is small. If they’re on opposite sides of the globe and in poorly-connected areas, it’s large, and always will be.
The end-to-end architecture has much less significance than is generally assumed at Berkman. The reality of the Internet’s architecture is that the TCP code running in endpoints is just as much part of the network infrastructure as the code that runs in the Cisco routers that constitute the network’s core. And as the vast majority of TCP code is supplied by one company – Microsoft – there is actually less network diversity in the end-points than in the core, at least for purposes of analyzing network traffic.
It’s also incorrect to say that the Internet was “meant” for one pricing scheme rather than another, as it was designed around no pricing scheme at all. It was originally a research network meant to be used by a closed community of users who knew each other and could depend on social systems to control each others’ behavior.
The Internet is physically a machine, a technology, and a device. Like all such things, we can expect it to change over time, to be improved, to evolve, and to change. So there’s very little value in romanticizing this machine as it was – or is thought to have been – in some early incarnation.
Technology drives social change, and social needs drive technology. Our framing of the Internet should never become so romantic that we lose the ability to assess good and bad practices, or that we try to draw lines between them too dogmatically.
Everybody has an interest in allowing the Internet to develop, and it’s simply the height of folly to assume it’s somehow reached the endpoint of perfection in any one of its modules at any particular time.
Jon, I didn’t say people’s internal trust meter is *reliable* — just that we have one. The challenge is to help folks make it more accurate in its responses….
Mike, in a value chain the first item has the first cost.
Richard, several points.
First, the metaphors we use (and, being both necessary and unconscioius, can’t help using). For lawmaking, rulemaking and pursuing business opportunities, they could not matter more. Therefore discussion of them is more than hand-waving.
Second, you make important points about the end points, the Net’s core and the risks of romanticizing ideals. I think it is important for us at Berkman to hear those points, even if we differ in perspective on them.
Third, there is a direction I’m going here where I think our points of view can find convergence. That’s in finding more business for telcos and cablecos than they’ll squeeze out of current business models. I think that greenfields open as bandwidth increases, costs drop and restrictions on use decrease. There are many potential synergies beteween customer ends and carrier means here.
I think we also agree on the virtues of competition. On the poles outside my house are two sources of fiber and one of hybrid fiber-coax. As a result I’m getting 20Mb symmetrical service from the best of those three.
Got a plane to catch. Meanwhile, thanks to all for responding. I’ll be posting more on this and other subjects soon.
The big issue seems to be .. “who” .. may be willing to .. “share” .. the risk of going across the cultural boundaries, which make the identification of the right reasons increasingly complex .. and “how” such activists may be brought together ..
if i understand correctly what i have been reading.
re: “now, as a condition of registering a domain name individuals have to make public their address and other contact information. This seems like a lure for spammers and an affront to personal privacy, and there is no worldwide consensus in favor of retaining this policy.”
Well, you can pay for a proxy as GoDaddy supports.
I followed the debate in the GNSO Whois WG on OPOC (Operational Point of Contact). Here was our brief exchange during the June ICANN meetings. It seemed to me that the larger debate should have received more attention.
I believe there is an alternative (additional) model. The model mimics the dual use public/private broadcasting systems, specifically in the U.K. and in Canada, although I have contemplated that what follows here could also replicate PBS here in the U.S. in connection with broadband.
Here’s the text of a related comment that
I sent to Circle ID in reference to an item on “dual Internets” by journalist, Bill Thompson, who references
Jon Zittrain’s recent book. Please keep in mind that what follows here is a doable model that’s “doable” today BECAUSE its impervious to ICANN and the related network has in fect been layered across the public internet in the dot-com name space for the better part of the last decade.
“It’s entirely possible to build the equivalent of a public/private “red” zone and a “green” zone right now, notwithstanding the DNS.
The “tethering” problem referred to by Jon Zittrain is both structural by design and required by competitive pressures occasioned by so-called “walled gardens”, primarily in the U.S.
“The structural impediment is the DNS itself which maintains and reinforces ICANN’s monopolization of the global Internet on the CORRECT premise that technical oversight of the DNS ensures reliable TECHNICAL management of the root. Arguably in-country authorities could manage that themselves, which they happily did before ICANN existed (c 1998-99). However, the DNS by design nonetheless requires as a technical minimum than anything that ultimately resolves at level one must conform with the DNS protocol (Mockapetris et al).
“Which brings me to Bill Thompson’s reference (after Zittrain) to what amounts to “tethered” and “untethered” Internets: ie., two Internets, one open and unsecured, and one closed and (therefore) secure. The argument for technical management and supervision of the DNS root zone will, perhaps but not necessarily, trump the idea that two separate Internets (tethered and untethered – public and private) are nonetheless a good thing.
Moreover, there’s no logical or even technical reason that precludes this. It’s an artifact of the way that Postel and others originally viewed the model. Moreover, ICANN in its own interest will always argue that two Internets are both administratively and technically incompatible. Both arguments are false. Here’s why that is the case.
“It’s called “Interchangeable Master Channels (IMCs). IMCs are level three networks that consist of uniform and coherent aggregations of level two master channels to which level three sub-channels are attached. Simple as that. Level two is NOT tethered while level three IS tethered and, thus, the security ramifications that stem from what amounts to a private Internet inside of the public Internet where all level two master channels perfectly resolve.
“An example of how IMCs do what they do can can found today, layered across the public Internet in the dot-com name space where the network has been located since before ICANN (c 1997-98). The EXISTING Network does have some limitations: ie., the number of master GENERIC channels (750) that were previously procurred. Be that as it may, the design of the world’s only existing network of IMCs is quite interesting.
“Namely, ALL level two master channels (IMCs) perfectly resolve in the dot-com name space and therefore the dot-com DNS root. All level three “brand channels” (which are interchangeable in real time) are managed. Accordingly, innumerable brand channels (http://brandchannel.masterchannel.com) can simultaneously occupy the level two master channels. The number of existing master generic channels was originally set up so as to accommodate almost every conceivable brand name product or service anywhere in the world and, thus, brand name entities around the world which are the “default” owners of their own brand name channels can support the master public channels to which they are attached.
“The result of this particular model is a contemporary and doable method for creating tethered and untethered (dual) Internets: one public, one private, and impervious to ICANN. Call them “red” zones or “green” zones, or whatever. IMCs exist and can be used.
“The real problem that confronts the model is ICANN itself which will always resist the IMCs innovation because IMCs by design bring no revenue whatsoever to ICANN beyond the level two registration tariff(s). If ICANN would open itself to the fact that numerous IMC networks are doable (and, thus dual Internets; one public and one private, much like TV and radio broadcasting in the U.K. and in Canada), then the issue of tethered or untethered Internets would evaporate. At any rate it’s doable now. Anyone can obtain information about IMCs by simply sending an email with IMCs in the subject line to go2ao@aol.com.”
The key difference between ICANN and earlier coordination efforts on the Internet (notably the IETF) lay in the unity of the domain name system. Earlier standards were voluntary. If you didn’t like the resulting protocol, you just didn’t use it, and hundreds of proposed standards went into the dust-bin through passive rejection.
But the domain name system is not optional. Attempts were made to set up alternate root servers, but none ever became more than an intriguing curiosity.
In a sense, the functions performed by Jon Postel were the first and only true governance, because no one could reject them while staying on the Internet.
The consequences of the non-optional character of participation in DNS were that ICANN was set up in a near-paranoid manner in a back room (precisely to avoid public input into its governance model) and that public input was filtered through a myriad of bureaucratic strata instead of being open in the manner of the IETF.
(It’s worth pointing out that many people find the IETF slower and its results less valuable these days, as the kinds of large players Crawford mentions throw their weight around.)
But for all its flaws, ICANN shows signs of responding to pressure from below. The board has evolved and now has real participants such as Crawford. ICANN’s inconsistent responsiveness to public pressure would certainly not improve were the company cut loose from the Department of Commerce, but it’s not clear whether the responsiveness would worsen either.
This second-to-last paragraph deserves further comment!
“In turn, this sort of lockdown opens the door to new forms of regulatory surveillance and control. We have some hints of what that can look like. Enterprising law enforcement officers have been able to eavesdrop on occupants of motor vehicles equipped with the latest travel assistance systems by producing secret warrants and flicking a distant switch. They can turn a standard mobile phone into a roving microphone—whether or not it is being used for a call. As these opportunities arise in places under the rule of law—where some might welcome them—they also arise within technology-embracing authoritarian states.”
What you’re talking about is commonly called a “roving bug.” (see FBI Taps Phone Mic as eavesdropping tool, 12/1/2006). I’m not sure what you mean by “secret warrants,” but, as in the case of a traditional phone tap, the warrant is kept secret from the suspect. In the FBI article above, these were covered by the traditional wiretapping laws, requiring conventional warrants.
Remember of course, that it is novel that the iPhone has an SDK. Few other phone makers do.
Yes, indeed, suppose that a developer wanted to create an App to determine whether the phone was being tapped. This likely wouldn’t be shareable through the iPhone store. Whether this was a business decision made independently by Apple, or under the power of suggestion by a governmental authority, I don’t know.
Nathan, I’m not sure what you mean by “social networking overstretch,” but I am sure that the current social networking craze is something of a passing fad and an investment bubble. Maybe saying that is re-framing enough.
Long ago, when asked for a quote about “Web 2.0,” I said “It’s what we’ll name the next crash.” Wel, Web 2.0 is becoming passé in the absence of a crash, but as framing went the quote wasn’t too bad.
It’s quite simple. Communications providers can choose whether they’re a common carrier with no discrimination or a discretionary carrier that discriminates. If they feel the market prefers the latter, that’s up to them, but they can’t misrepresent their service.
If the law requires common carriers to discriminate, then fix the law so it doesn’t.
If the law renders discretionary carriers unviable because it requires infeasible discrimination then fix the law so it doesn’t.
I don’t think Mr. Hyde has solidly drawn a line from the Founders to today.
In response to a boycott of an unpopular preacher, Benjamin Franklin did not petition the colonial government to mandate that the churches make him speek; nor did he advocate such during the Constitutional Convention 50 years later. Instead, he put forth the proposition (in deeds, not code) that there should exist a default public alternative.
Indeed that’s been at the heart of U.S. communications policy.
Granted, without a default public alternative, you are at the mercy of private interests. So, our worry here is not that one channel may censor, but that all will– a coordinated group boycott.
The likelihood of this still remains tiny. Because any act of censorship (whether even accidental) will be outed and generally cause due embarassment for the censor.
[I could argue further, and may someday, but will start with this for now.]
These discussions are engaging an relevent and I am impressed by the level of reflection. I am struck by Esthers provokative union of the realities of undocumented students interacting in traditional settings in ways analagous to the lurking tendency in online discussion groups and classroom sites. And in keeping with a subsequent post highlighting the fact that different people and communities will have different priorities. For that reason it would seem that we need to have a flexible attitude. I find in the electronic world of human interactions people are quick to be ofended and presume intentions. That coupled with the ease of simply surfing through and loosing a way back, and of simply listening and leaving means there is not a clear social pressure to fight the hundreds of fears or perfectly sensible reasons for such behavior. Add to that a large sector of novice technocitizens who have been weel informed, or at least hypersensitized to the stranger danger of identity theft and they will employ kinds of subteruge which may seem silly to those more accustomed to apropriate online standards and safegaurds. Here again there needs to be along with our efforts to develop governance even if it is in the most democruitized and organic initiative to have site members articulate their aims and expectations a corralary effort to welcome and inform new users. The crisp clean binary language of computers native to this territoruy of society is not dead to html or support structures that increase the influence of real live human speak to dominate ones travels. That binarry code sets a cultural backdrop that favors efficiency. Again that not being the name of the game within many societies and cultures. Rarely apreciated discussions online have a global potential and if there are expectatyions that there is a way to learn the rules without having to actually learn the rukles. Who wants to go to sites and learn the discussion paramaters yet as much as you may find the discussion you desier you are limited without knowing them. The other problem of codification in this setting is that it imposes often premature and slanted adoption of policy which over structures, misleads, may unreflectively violate some more broadly applied code of conduct or even legal reality which is reasonable to presume binding on that group. In lue of strict and in your face don’ts and dos not to mention the all important dues, there could be a section that is more anonomous yet with participatory elements that requier minimal commitment. This is simply a suggestion lifted from group dynamics in institutions. A church a store a school each has its areana of social performance and hopes to have people come and join in without joining in. This is how norms are organically teased out and raised up for articulation and critique, it enculturates members or reguklars as they affirm their belonging by teaching newcomers what it is to belong there, and it allows people to truely consider if this is a good forum for them rather than decide in advance and soimply gpo to the next site with an animated pop up seducing the web user away from more risky conversation to automated click and go suites where we meet people as we engage not with each other but with site features.
OA is great– anything to make scholarly publications more accessible should be welcome.
I’d only add, as I’ve observed before, that academic writers should push for Andrew Odlyzko’s 1995 vision which called for an academic publishing system effectively managing responses & revised versions. SSRN is not quite there yet. (Nor is Publius.)
This “weblog” format of Publius remains difficult to read, btw.
I thank you for putting what we as NOLA bloggers do into a perspective that, at many times, seems to be pushed to the margins more often than not due to many factors – among them the hold the mainstream media outlets still have on how we get our news and process it. Unless one is right in the middle of what we write about and discuss, it can be hard to understand it all and very easy to push it aside as little more than personal rantings.
What keeps us going, however, are some primary things the rest of what I call the NOLA blogpocheh have taught me very, very well: that sources must be quoted when necessary, that the rants have much more impact when based on fact, and that a network under the right sort of circumstances is a priceless thing. We have initially been bound together through disaster – but ultimately, we are building something that has the potential to last longer than the levees that were meant to protect us and the wetlands that are this state’s lifeblood and are of great significance to the rest of this country, whether they know it or not.
Our levees may still be leaky, our coast may look like Swiss cheese, and our leaders may have abdicated their many responsibilities and obligations to us – but we are learning that we can only overcome when we do it together – when we share, we vent, and/or we celebrate together.
inquiry: I am a mexican student in a spanish university.
The college community holds, as in most of the communities, people with lower capabilities to see (blindnees and its degrees) or lower abilities to hear.
Every student at the community deserves access to books, articles, manuals.
Some academic contents are available to reproduce them in different formats (as Braille, or vocalized lectures), but there are only a few materials.
In this XXI Century, we can have computers that re-code text contents into other formats (as told). Our Bibliotheques do have some of the acquired technology.
But private and public editorials are not interested in sharing their contents in electronic formats, because they argue a “copyright protection policy”.
The issue is: people from the college comunity, as well as people who use local and regional Bibliotheques, would like to read and gather information as any other person in society.
The goal is to enhance large amounts of academic and literate contents, and submit them in the re-code systems for non-exclusion standards.
There is an important view in R. Buckminsterfuller, over the horizons of science.
Since science is a cultural practice, we must see the paths of inventions and knowledge acquisitions. There are senses beneath sciences, and sometimes senses are meaning war commitments, in other cases we can find more humanistic goals.
Buckminsterfuller said that there are two main models to produce science, the weaponry model and the livingry model.
I believe that we can find more models. A democratic model should be one of the prospects. I also sugest to all about a welfare-model for science.
Doc, A few notes in follow up to your Berkman@10 session, where I posited that hoary standby “the commons” as a heuristic, if not a framing, concept of ongoing relevance.
As one session participant mentioned, a discussion of framing would seem to presuppose an acknowledgment of, perhaps agreement on, desired ends. I see that Kevin Werbach states connectivity as an end goal in his Publius piece. That would be one on my list as well: a broadly accessible connectivity.
Connectivity (communication, “cheap talk”) is cited by Elinor Ostrom as a factor contributing to successful governance of CPRs (common pool resources, i.e. shared, rivalrous goods).
Jonathan Zittrain’s 2×2 thinking on the future of the internet maps two similarities to the study of CPRs. First is his quest for models of successful governance in the “communitarian” quadrant, which mirrors a project to which Ostrom and others have dedicated decades of research: synthesizing the design principles whereby CPR institutions are found to successfully govern long-term resource use. Second is the scale at which he locates these models: Wikipedia, say, rather than the Internet as a whole. Similarly, the Maine lobster fishery, rather than the ocean as a whole, is a focus of CPR studies.
George Lakoff has emphasized that the commons is “not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day.” Nor, in Portland, Ore. (where I live), would a meetup of self-styled communitarians fill the space that otherwise serves as a hangout for a group of knitting enthusiasts.
Still, amidst the rapid coevolution of the Net and its norms, we find that terms of relationality and sociality (e.g. reputation, identity) acquire fresh import. Reading the essays by David Weinberger and his respondents on the relative merits of tacit versus explicit governance – the two left-side quadrants on JZ’s matrix – I can’t help but smile. The discussion has come a long way since, say, Thatcher’s “no such thing as society.” Further exploration of that lower-left quadrant could add greatly to a variety of left-right, government-market debates. And perhaps, one day, to our framing as well.
Howard, thanks for following up, and for your excellent observations.
It’s been interesting, over the past few weeks, to find that thinking about framing (and JZ’s quadrants) is beginning to help inform broader thinking — both inside the Berkman Center and out in the world — about Net Neutrality and related conundra. Especially as we take a Long View.
The old left-vs.-right distinctions, and knee-jerkings, don’t quite work. But, as George Lakoff would be quick to point out, they do apply.
I think norms and rules can have a more symbiotic relationship. Norms are social scaffolding – temporary, easy to plan and easy to construct. Rules are the building that grows up under the scaffolding – permanent, the product of compromise, harder to build without erecting the scaffolding first.
In particular, rules remove the risk that personnel or social group changes will change the norms without a process of discussion.
Norms, like partnerships or other personality-based relationships, can shift markedly when a few key people change. Rules can’t – and changes have to put in place more slowly and cautiously. It’s the difference between the US Constitution and the first twenty years of US Presidential Elections.
The importance of shared responsibility is an important one, but I worry that some of the fixes you propose will lead to a surveillance society of perfect control.
ISPs not connecting to the net if they think the computer is compromised? Web hosts liable for malicious code inserted into site? The service providers will have an incentive to over-punish users and play the safe-side which could be to the detriment of the open net.
I wonder, then, if less coercive “nudges” (to use Thaler and Sunstein’s term) could urge all stakeholders, but especially consumers, to embrace best practices.
Our observations of the ‘cybercrime’ laws enacted in various countries are, first and foremost, used as tools for political repression of dissenting opinion. The fact that we have laws to regulate every person and every aspect of society has not made us safer but only created more ‘crime’ which often has no discernible deleterious effect.
The increasing use of cloud computing will mean that threats to efficient data transfer may be managed remotely. But these protections must not include hindrances and roadblocks to free expression especially those promoted by governments and business interests.
A free Internet is the greatest experiment in participatory democracy we’ve yet devised. Let’s keep it that way.
Defenders of anonymous speech have always been hard-pressed to come up with examples of anonymous journalists *after* the Bill of Rights was ratified. That’s right– Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Jay were writing in a time before their free speech rights were guaranteed.
You write:
“Virtually every legislative effort to enforce good speech behavior in [X] has overshot its mark. Many have been overturned on First Amendment grounds.”
You make your argument for X=cyberspace. But, for X=broadcast political advertisements, the McCain-Feingold Act’s accountability prohibitions have been upheld.
Shall we hold you to the prediction that in the long run “everyone” will stop patronizing anonymous gossip sites? Aside from what JM Keynes said about the long run, I’d add that there’ll always be a new generation to read them.
re: “These “digital natives” know much better than we do how easy it is to produce (not just consume) and manipulate information; this automatically makes many of them immune to the trickiest PR stints.”
Unproven conjecture!
From Farhad Manjoo’s review of Rob Walker’s new book Buying In: “Members of a hyper-aware generation often hailed for their imperviousness to marketing are actually turning to brands to define themselves.”
I had actually disagreed with Dan’s piece by pointing out that there’s no good model of a “trust meter” yet. You write: “Wouldn’t new systems for determining one’s online reputation – be that Google’s PageRank , the number of Diggs or some other metric— help address the credibility gap?”
Some metric yet to be devised. Google *possibly* is interested in returning the most trustworthy information. Why do you suppose that Digg is?
I think that there is not enough “I” going on… in otherwords…. people are finding groups that they agree with and ending up with a very narrow-minded view of the world.. the democratization of the media is not really happening as people had hoped.
I just read that one presidential candidate is offering cut and paste arguments on his website so that people and just cut and paste arguments on the various blogs that they comment on. That seems a little too much “us” and not enough “I”.
did you have a look at the interdisciplinary research carried out by FIDIS, of which our group is partner? see http://www.fidis.net. I wrote an article in the book ‘profiling the european citizen’ entitled “cogitas ergo sum. The role of data-protection law…’. The book contains articles on the rule of law in new technologies etc. best, wim schreurs
“I” have been believing – and it would be next to impossible explaining why – that for individuals to be enabled to
(quote) … play the leading role in solving transparency and literacy problems … (unquote)
somebody should start switching from a too concrete “I”-mode to a less concrete (may I say “virtual” or “operational”?) “I vs We”-mode.
To clarify the point i’d like to (be able to) make, i’ll start drafting a collaborative document (in Italian) titled “Real calling Virtual: anybody there?”.
When it’s finished, and if it sanity checks ok in my own language, i’ll come back to offer an English version, for consideration.
Nice essay Ken. It is great how practical the ICT long tail for NGOs is form an economic perspective, now that open source strength is so apparent. While our team works on larger strategy/software projects that are fortunate to have the resources to develop tools right way, the very tools we are being paid to for by more large organizations are finding their ways in to the hands of hundreds of NGOs though the various open source communities we work with. This type of trickle down development is possible with only a little extra resources. Simply, if we build tools (modules) the right way for the paying clients, our code will be nice and abstracted out as much like a frame work as possible. This ensures that it easy to understand, flexible, and reusable for other projects. Best of all it is in the big organizations best interest to release the custom modules back out so that it is maintained by a community and further improved and vetted ect. There are now probably hundreds of small organizations that are using tools originally funded by the World Bank, World Resources Institute or Human Rights Watch, and these big organizations are better off for it since there are extra developers now working on code that is important to them.
It is interesting how this open development process relates to the big top down approach. I still smile when talking to good organizations that are hung up on “big design plans” for there data collection tools rather than seeing the strength of ’small tools loosely joined’ (thanks to open standards) to make data collection more dynamic and effective. Thanks to the trickle down development that I described earlier ’small tools’ are more affordable to make now, and thus it is only more practical to look “loosely joining” tools with smart standards like RSS/RDF/XML/KML with the help of syndication tools.
Well, Norms have rules too. If you look at it from another perspective you will see this. In sociology, or zoology its a very obvious “fact” It’s interesting, animals doesn’t have rules, but humans does. For both goes the threat that braking them leads to consequences. If you break a rule, you might get a fine, or go to jail. For braking a group norm, you will get excluded from the group, very directly or very subtile, all depending.
In this discussion this created an interessting thought, braking a norm in the virtual, digital world of the web, you risk to be left alone, without an audience, outside the “discussion”, outside the collaborative collective? But you might find a new place to “belong” where your way of acting and interacting IS the norm, and you yet again are a part of a group. But for your ideas and actions to be accepted you need acceptance from someone, and if you want to make a difference you still hvae this risk of becoming excluded, and need to moderate yourself. I can’t see why or how this shouldn’t be a “fact” also in a virtual, digital environment. My statment is that we can discuss rules and norms, but is seems to me that it might not be the most relevant subject in order to understand, nor prefere the one above the other, and make use of it to understand behaviors and partisipations on the web.
Dear Ken,
I wholeheartedly agree with a number of your comments here. I have been orking for years with aspects of basic food marketing in so-called developing countries, andam particularly interested in the impact that mobile phones are having on the day-to-day functioning of crop marketing, but find a lot of the “mobiles development” activists too techi, and not enough oriented to simple improvements. I was also a Sussex graduate in the 70s. Regards. Vincent Tickner
I’m not sure I would split the world in two: history from one side, reputation on the other. Websites (and any exchange institution since the 10th century is you believe Avner Greif’s Magrhibi Traders) tend to decide and refine signals and enforce sanctions: eBay has to decide on what time period/how many transactions to average the most visible grade, but they could offer a more detailed representation; one can use labels, grades, decide to filter out certain elements and make other hard to find; every platform decides what to record. . . Your history versus reputation axis is really a question of how much does one condense information into simple stats — but many other aspects are also important: how explicit the projection is? PageRank can’t be transparent, by fear of gaming; eBay though they could avoid it, but had to stop sellers from rating each other for that. Can the users decide on what type of information to report, rather then their value — they can use that to boast their appearance, but would most likely specialise in certain behaviours, encourage by the metrics they chose.
There is a large literature by statisticians on what makes a good measure — and how it can influence policy. I’ll try to find translations if you are interested.
I’m not sure that Google isn’t able to tell a negative link for looking at associated words around it; some people like me love to use a meliorative semantic field to criticize, or apparent stern words to praise — but for most links, “terrible” won’t be good. What to do with criticism, though? Controversy can be the best remedy to Balkanisation, and I sense much more of a threat there, thanks to the web at least in Politics (less so in Academia, at least for younger, Google Scholar-driven grad-students).
However: how is that specific to the Web, ie. a word made of formal, one-way links? Doesn’t any commentator, be it in the press or at a diner party, by lambasting anything take the risk to launch a mob or trigger contradictory reactions?
Some technical solutions exist: meta-tags, no-follow; but aren’t adopted by many. One could imagine to have more structured data (and I’ve seen very encouraging demo) but short of being simpler then HTML, they might never get the same adoption.
You are raising a very interesting point when you ask “what to do with criticism?” The answer is not clear to me either, however, here’s what’s different on the Web: because of the way search engines interact with links, it is possible that well-intentioned (and deserving) criticism might boost the visibility and impact of a harmful posting in different contexts than the one intended by the author of the critique. Example: You are a very popular blogger and you come across a libelous posting about Barack Obama that you really feel deserves criticism. You write an article in your blog about this posting; of course, you include a link. Since your blog is very popular, your link boosts the libelous posting’s Pagerank. This in turn causes Google to list it higher up when other people type “Obama” and helps lots of other people find it. Since these other people do not access the posting through your commentary but directly through Google, they do not benefit from your insights so many of them believe it. In this scenario, your well-intentioned attempt to criticize ends up increasing the damage that this posting causes. Would the right thing have been to ignore the libelous posting? I am not sure. However, this particular side-effect of linking is something that most people who participate in online discussions don’t even think about. My viewpoint is that this and other related phenomena deserve more attention and study.
It seems to me the title of this post should be “Is Reputation Tracking Obsolete?” In that case, the answer would be “for the most part, yes.”
Reputation in its pure form is ephemeral. Reputation management systems seek to establish proxies for reputation assessments. The quality of reputation tracking is going to hinge on three elements, then: (1)relevance of the proxy. How good of an approximation does the online rating mechanism provide? (2)Traffic levels. I’m always entertained by low-traffic blogs that include recommended diary structures and such. Online reputation tracking assumes huge inputs, but given the power law distributions of web traffic, we know that there are only going to be a select few webspaces that obtain that level of traffic. (3)Gaming of the system or lack thereof. And this last one is long-term problematic. Any high-traffic webspace is going to represent valuable online real estate. The perverse incentives are there for actors to try to figure out the rules of the game and then innovate ways to get around them. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in reputations systems for years, and most of the literature seems to be focused solely on eBay. So reputation tracking systems are probably obsolete at this point, because every system is going to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and there haven’t been many new developments (at least that I’m aware of — which is a decent indicator that if something great is out there, it sure hasn’t diffused very widely yet).
What we really need is reputation systems that take advantage of Metcalfe’s Law. As processing speed and memory continue to double — as Information Abundance becomes still more abundant — we need to develop reputation tracking systems that use better proxies. You ask above whether “in a world where all action is recorded, is there still need for reputational information?” I would respond Yes, all the moreso! Reputation data should be broadly understood as a form of filtering and content management. In a world where all action is recorded, reputational information is all the more necessary so we can sort through the mess. But likewise, as more types of data become available, we need to diversify the types of proxies we use for assessing reputation. As the mobile web comes into wider use, whole new classes of data will become available. What we need is to figure out how to sort and use that data, particularly keeping in mind the competing needs for reputational assessment/filtering and privacy. The weaker the privacy norms, the stronger the reputation tracking can be. That tradeoff has steeply decreasing returns at some point, and it’s up to us as public scholars to help identify what that point might be.
Your points about the widespread availability of information on-line are well taken. Reputation, however, is a social evaluation. And the evaluation part is a) hard, and b) not being done well now, as far as we can see.
The challenge in measuring reputation is to model a complex, non-linear social process. Any evaluation of reputation must start with the way our individual beliefs and biases turn fact into opinion. It must also take into consideration the way those opinions (and opinions about opinions) move through social networks. Doing this with classical statistical methods isn’t really possible, since most on-line opinions are highly correlated – voiding the underlying (but often ignored) requirement of event independence.
So we’ve taken some aspects of Bayesian belief revision, and build an algorithm that turns user input about companies and their reputations (stories, votes, comments) into Reputation Scores and an overall Reputation Index for thousands of companies.
We’re in private beta now, but I’ve created an invitation link if you and your readers would like to have a look: http://vanno.com/private/signup/Publius_Project
Otherwise, we’ll be launching to the public in mid-November 2008.
What’s missing in most discussions of online reputation is a workable model for the process by which reputation is created.
According to Wikipedia, “reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization”. I would suggest that any authority relative to measuring online reputation should speak directly to this technical definition – i.e. to reputation being a social evaluation.
To start, this definition tells us what reputation is not. Reputation is not just “the facts”. It’s not, for example, just some combination of how many tons of CO2 a company produces, how much it gives to charity, and how long the average wait is on a service call. Nor is it just an assessment or analysis by a person or organization – no matter how expert he/she/it might be – of a company’s behavior or performance (good or bad). Nor is it just the total of all the media stories and articles that journalists, bloggers and researchers publish about a company’s or an individual’s deeds and misdeeds.
Even if we summed up all the facts, analyses, assessments, stories and articles about a company or an individual, we still wouldn’t have measured reputation. All that information has to be passed through two important filters. First are the beliefs and biases of the individuals (e.g. consumers) who are interpreting the stories, analyses and facts. And second is the complex and non-linear way those opinions move through the larger population.
What comes out the other end of those filters – after that process of social evaluation – is what is recognized as reputation.
The simplest example of the above process at work is gossip. This analogy does not trivialize reputation. Quite the opposite – it ties it to a mechanism on which humans have relied over the eons to establish trust.
Nick, how refreshing to hear from someone who recognises that nature gives us the biggest clues in finding solutions to apparently intractable problems.
Reputation and identity are indeed social constructs, emergent epiphenomena. In the offline world we do not refer to a central authority to ascertain someone’s reputation or identity. We corroborate these things socially, with our peers and acquaintances.
Reputation and identity are problems that should be solved using decentralised, public, peer-to-peer technologies, not centralised, proprietary systems.
I’m not going to wait for any government. I’m going to figure how how much it will cost to bury conduit all the way down my road, in the public right-of-way. And if I can afford it, I’ll put it in, and if anybody I pass wants to buy in, great! If not, then not.
2. Incentivize actions that grow the network (A few ideas: A Meraki-like model w/ tax credits for sharing, subsidies/credits for repeaters, funding for rural wireless tech – extending range and other “Achilles heel” areas, income-dependent incentives to break digital divide (on network equip and computers), etc…)
I wonder why we don’t just skip fiber to the home and build out a wireless infrastructure?
If spectrum really isn’t scarce then we’d have sufficient bandwidth – ubiquitous ultra-high speed wireless. As long as we’re shooting for the moon let’s do it right.
The 700mhz spectrum would’ve been a good swath of spectrum but there are many other underutilized areas that left.
A year ago there were estimates of what it would have cost google to build out a nationwide wireless network and they ranged from 15-20 billion.
I suspect that even if the government encouraged a more robust version and pushed further in to rural zones, even w/ federal level ineptitude, we’d be looking at substantially less than $300B.
And in my opinion it’d be orders of magnitude better than fiber.
But… it’s highly disruptive. Everyone from Coase to Benkler has argued in favor of an open spectrum approach. If the arguments against scarcity are true it’s a no brainer.
Even though the American people would be huge winners the existing and well entrenched telecom players are very likely to fight against it. And they’ve got the $$$ and lobbying skill to put up a strong fight.
History is full of lessons about how What’s Right For America & What’s Right for The People doesn’t always win – see Lessig’s battle against copyright. Another example of a no brainer.
So… my final suggestions:
1. A large scale public campaign in favor of a moon-shoot broadband push (fiber, wireless, whatever).
2. Tie this to whatever area has legs:
- Democracy 2.0: a new level of engagement via net, every citizen connected to their politician.
- Education: Our kids need this – every child should have access to a computer and the net
- Digital Divide: electronic equity…
- Or all of the above (and more)
3. Appease the telecoms
- Find a way to make them tie the noose and put it around their necks
- Even if it involves direct payoffs, somehow we need to find a way to push them out of the game
4. and finally… tie one or more of the above into the California initiative process. Use CA as a testbed, get Soros, Omidyar and others to throw a wad of cash at the 2009 election and see what it does for the CA economy. If it’s a home run, roll it out everywhere.
That’s all I got for now (and it’s likely too much, thanks for enduring…)
-cc
… The government also needs to invest where the market will not, so that services will be available to assist in the economic turn around that has, so far, always followed a down turn.
Texas has very few (grandfathered) municipal telecommunications networks, because they are illegal. This must change because telecommuting, distance learning and official/legal/emergency communication will play a large part in the future of Texas. The rural nature of the vast majority of the state of Texas means that there will never be sufficient customer base to provide a profitable return on investment (ROI) for private telecommunications companies; the government must provide this service.
Here’s a blog post that looks at both the entrenched telco mindset (”the telco is the cloud space”) and the abundance of other infrastructure ideas (such as David Brooks’ on mobility). I just posted a long comment there.
Stephen, I must disagree. Governments can barely get out of their own way (corporations can’t either, but the worst ones go out of business, whereas governments rarely go out of business). I really do NOT want government support for my rural lifestyle. With government involvement comes government strictures — and I think most rural people understand that and will agree with me.
What you’re missing is that my house is where my house is, and I like it being there. Consequently, if I want Internet, then a part of my owning my house is the cost of running telecommunications to it. It’s a cost to me, just as is owning a house. My house cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. If I have to spend another five or ten thousand dollars to bring high speed Internet to my house, that’s in proportion with the cost of my septic system, or my well, or my wood furnace. Do you think the government should pay for them? I hope not! So why should the government pay for my fiber just because it’s not on my land?
Этот блог заслуживает похвалы. Обязательно напишу про него на закрытом форуме вебмастеров. Думаю, вебмастера согласятся со мной. Кстати вы можете присоединиться к сообществу вебмастеров, закрытый форум вебмасетров.
Thanks for your comments Eric and Vincent. I think this topic remains very much open, as it will be for some time to come. Hopefully the focus will ultimately shift, but I don’t know what the catalyst will be or how long it will take.
Lately I’ve been thinking more about the sharing of knowledge around the building of “social mobile” applications for the long tail – a book which would guide people in the thinking behind such projects, and good practice. I’ve just written a piece on this topic as one of my regular PC World articles here:
AS an Attaché I am the liaison to a Work Group to whom Members would fall under your “third camp who see the UN process as pointing to UN control over the Internet and do not accept the legitimacy of this campaign.”
Getting “Governance” right is a timely process, as it pertains many multifaceted social & administrative systems.
Our group chooses a Constitutional Framework to work upon, with elements borrowed from the UN structure.
Admittedly the UN-ITU programs of; WSIS and its IGF extension, are an incredible positive out-reaching gesture, in terms of the UN fostering their own evolution.
It is our position that the UN systemics are of such a design that it precludes itself from becoming a truly viable platform for Internet Governance.
That said, We (WGCIG) continue to discuss and prepare arguments for an approach of governance within a sphere of constitutional means.
There is much to do on development countries on this issue. There seems to be “governance models” only for the top- policy makers since the neoliberal agendas came to us. The question is over the openess of these models.
Our governments do have facilities to taylor their own governance agendas, and the international organizations, such as UN the IMF or OECD sponsor them with no doubts.
But i would like to be listened, as well as many other people from developing countries. We would like to perform some “governance agendas” in our way.
We want some accountability strategies, for the evaluation of public policies, for the sake of benchmarking the constitutional principles, and the human rights principles that have to be done among any governmental agenda.
We would like to create working groups to evaluate the regulation of strategic resources in our economies; we would like to enhance a “watch-dog” strategy for the environmental issues that preclude our governments and foreing investors.
We want a lot of things that can be translated as “governance agenda”; and the question is why the international organizations support the elite agendas, and leave us in the oblivion?
Greetings from Mexico.
This might be nitpicking, since I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but you write: “There was never a moment—never—when the majority of blog traffic didn’t go to highly-educated professionals with degrees from Ivy League-caliber schools.”
The top blog in the progressive blog neighborhood is Dailykos, the top one in the conservative blog neighborhood is Michelle Malkin. (If we’re talking site traffic alone, Huffington Post is #1, but that also has a ton of authors, and plenty of people visiting it for non-political news.) Kos went to Northern Illinois University, which isn’t *exactly* Ivy-caliber. Malkin went to Oberlin, which (as a fellow alum) I’d love to describe as Ivy-caliber, but it should be noted that everyone who attended Oberlin got rejected by Brown.
More to the point, there’s a lot of mobility *within* a community blog like dailykos. We saw that with fivethirtyeight.com, one of the most interesting case examples from this cycle. The two primary authors were anonymous posters on dailykos, posting under the screennames “poblano” and “pocket nines.” Poblano (Nate Silver) attracted an audience based on his outstanding predictive accuracy, got impressed with pocket nines, and they launched their own site, eventually revealing their identities.
Now that hardly suggests that the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment where anyone can attract an audience of millions. But it does point out some important variance in the basic “preferential attachment” argument. Blog structure can have a HUGE impact on outcomes. If you have a community site like DailyKos as your power-law hub, then that means talented latecomers can still rise through the ranks. An individual site like Malkin or Instapundit, meanwhile, offers far less potential mobility. And that may provide the roots of an explanation of why the progressives have developed such a huge lead in online infrastructure. “Googlearchy” isn’t so menacing if the beneficiary of preferential attachment allows for in-site mobility.
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re: You only have to look at what happened during and after the “Kathy Sierra” incident early last year; regardless of the specifics of the incident, we have to learn from the communal response. An explicit Blogger’s Code of Conduct was put forward, and was about as successful as plumbic parachutes.
I did a *lot* of research into this, speaking to many of the participants. I have some theories as to why it failed (one of them — Tim O’Reilly introduced it to the wolves of the blogosophere, and not, say, to a closed group who could have better marketed it).
Tim’s conception of the BCoC was to resemble the Creative Commons model of a modular EULA. That’s what I put together for him, calling it
Comment Management Responsibility. Tim gave it his tacit approval in the comments of his blog; JZ gave it some tentative support in response to a question at the Yale Reputation Economies Conference in December; other Berkfolks expressed interest in private talks with me, but there’s been no other formal endorsements.
I also put together the Protocol of Online Abuse Reporting. I’ve had a number of positive discussions with Berkman people on this, but again, no formal endorsements have been provided (let alone endorsing the putting forth of a mere proposal).
I don’t mean to be “sour grapes” about this; I welcome this Publius effort and am merely providing the contributors and readers with some of the practical thinking that has been undertaken in the realm of social media governance.
Posted 14 May 2008 at 12:44 pm ¶“We want to shine light on the nuances at the margins of decision-making online.”
John Palfrey
http://publius.cc/preface/
While we are pointing out watershed moments in history, please mark May 12, 2008 down as the day “the public domain” was ceded without a fight.
On that day, the most revered intellects in the country came together to “foster an on-going public dialogue,” which documents for “the public in meaningful and relevant ways” the “constitution-making moments” and to “create a durable record of how the rules of cyberspace are being formed”–and copyrighted it.
I find David Weinberger puts it best when he says, “The lack of explicit constitutions and explicit rules often is a sign of health.” Yet without any suggestion of deliberate irony, his exposition on “Tacit Governance” is undermined by emblazoning it with an explicit governance document more than twice its length. “Every new rule is a scab covering tender flesh.” Unfortunately, this one is a self-inflicted wound.
When Hamilton, Madison, and Jay signed their essays “Publius” they clearly understood them not as individual works of authorship, but as contribution to the public discourse. I doubt they would have had the same effect on the public consciousness had they been followed with, BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE…
By saying that even our communal discussion and historical record cannot be considered (nor assigned to) the “public domain”, this body has made a “tacit” statement that this copyright concept no longer has any validity.
If a forum with Publius.cc’s stated goals cannot exist in the public domain it should be noted. Then perhaps we can get on to documenting the demise of sections 107, 108, and 109 as well.
Posted 14 May 2008 at 10:13 pm ¶Jon, thanks for joining the discussion.
I’d like to touch on two things that struck me while reading your comments and references.
One, you make a good point about YOYOW, it does not work well with anonymity. I need to think about that.
Two, you speak of Tim introducing the code of conduct to the “wolves of the blogosphere”, and contrast them to closed groups “who could have better marketed it”. The blogosphere that I am aware of is not a place where a closed group could “better market” something, any attempt to do so will probably elicit adverse reactions.
And I think there’s a reason for it. I think people tend to come together in the blogosphere because they have common interests, not because they have common views. This provides a diversity of opinion that pushes back against groupthink, against herd instinct. As a result, you will find it very hard to find pockets where controlled marketing is possible, there’s too much heterogeneity. Maybe you see this pushback as wolflike.
As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. Markets aren’t liquid when everyone wants to do the same thing; they’re liquid because of participant numbers and the diversity of opinion. And when markets are as populous and as heterogeneous as the blogosphere, it is not easy to “fix the price” or “game the system”.
To my mind, the origins of the word “bankrupt” show the power of tacit governance very well. You gave your word. You let your peers down. So they came and broke your bench. Not because you broke explicit rules, but because you broke tacit rules.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 5:45 am ¶While Esther Dyson clarifies the potential harm that tacit rules can impose on outsiders or the less powerful, she seems to assume that the goals of all online communities are the same. The clarity and mutability of tacit rules are clearly important for reputation and exchange in most scalable communities. However, the bottom-up development of rules may in itself be an important characteristic of smaller and more cohesive identity groups. For example, many feminist groups online make heavy use of message boards and wikis in an explicit attempt to increase the level of control over the group identity by members. This is unlikely to be an important factor for exchange sites that rely on an external system for determining reputation.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 2:04 pm ¶Computer code is not constitution. Code is merely bureaucratic, narrow and blind regulation — yes/no, black/white. No need to prettify it merely because it appears in cutting-edge technology in cyberspace.
Constitution at least in the Western liberal context implies consent of the governed and framers who shape law and a Supreme Court that interprets law in a living and organic way. Code is not law; it is wielded arbitrarily by coders who themselves do not submit to the rule of law. Code is essentially a fence — or actually in many cases, a gun.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 3:14 pm ¶>Economists would describe this change as a positive supply side shock to liberty
No. Because more than anything, what made that protest possible was the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, not merely new social media or political interest.
o The Constitution helped to create a world people would even want to immigrate to, rather than flee from
o However deeply flawed, it made a border and immigration service that let in at least as many as it turned away, even illegally
o It provided the rights and guarantees of freedom of expression that enabled these students to protest without being arrested or tortured or shot, as they might have been even in some of the nearby countries they or their relatives fled from.
Media without law is untethered and in the hands of a few coders and experts, becomes a tool for totalitarianism.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 3:19 pm ¶Bravos, Clay. Well said!
Posted 15 May 2008 at 7:11 pm ¶JP,
Thanks for responding.
The blogosphere that I am aware of is not a place where a closed group could “better market” something, any attempt to do so will probably elicit adverse reactions.
Let’s agree that marketing/messaging is not in and of itself a bad thing. Marketing is not the same thing as “gaming the system.” Anti-marketing is still marketing.
Look in the mirror: take this new website. This did not arise sui generis. It was carefully planned by the Berkman Center to get all of these smart folks here contributing essays, and the release was targeted to friends-of-Berkman. These are not mere off-the-cuff blog posts, and it shows.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I welcome it. But I should contrast it to O’Reilly’s off-the-cuff “Blogger’s Code of Conduct,” which quickly became red meat for anyone taking sides between Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra.
My theory of constructive media measures the success of a conversation by the words, rules or codes that come forth. To the extant that there are adovcates on this bench who would like to introduce frameworks for rules into online communities, I offer the abovementioned links.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 9:11 pm ¶re: Computer code is not constitution.
And Bono is not God– but it’s a handy rhetorical device that is the basis of most cyber-rules discussions.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 10:12 pm ¶PN — I don’t doubt that the quick coordination was done with social technology, and it was a bit unprecedented for high school students across so many schools.
But, it’s funny: Doing some Google searches here, the main source people appear to cite, besides media accounts, is danah boyd. But danah didn’t link to any source material. (The Inland Press Enterprise wrote: “Word about the walkout and march was spread by fliers and by bulletins posted on MySpace.”)
Funny, it appears that all of the MySpace pages were just as transient as the paper fliers.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 11:17 pm ¶re: “William James, the American philosopher, maintained that thinking is for doing, which to say that our brains don’t exist for purposes of abstract cogitation, they exist to help us decide what to do next.”
I was mildly curious whether this project was going to follow that m.o.
Posted 15 May 2008 at 11:21 pm ¶Jon, thanks for your input. I am sure that your references would be of interest to those amongst us that are more inclined towards the use of explicit governance techniques.
I am intrigued by what you mean when you say that you “theory of constructive media measures the success of a conversation by the words, rules or codes that come forth”.
In your theory, does it matter whether the rules or codes that emerge from conversation stay tacit, or must they be explicit? Do you mean all conversation (including oral) or are you only referring to written conversations such as this one?
Posted 16 May 2008 at 6:51 am ¶JP-
In his essay, Clay approvingly quoted William James, “thinking is for doing.” The doing, I presume, must be some sort of lasting construction. And thus any sort of tacit codes that emerge, to quote Samuel Goldwyn, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. New people to the community aren’t as well informed unless the codes are uniformly written down. The Constitution, in the U.S., established our “document nation” (which Alex Wright attributes to Brian Stock). (See more on Constructive Media).
Whether this conversation becomes constructive is up to you and your fellow conversants, what you want to do with this website.
I realize I am missing out on many of the oral conversations at Berkman@10 yesterday and today. As long as someone can take notes– or enough people can review the proceedings– they can be made constructive.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 7:50 am ¶Much of the Internet governance debate, including but not limited to net neutrality, pivots around metaphors that are mistaken as analogies.
In other words, when a comparison, possibly just semantic, is made between the characteristics of the Internet and real estate, many incorrectly infer that because this one characteristic has been compared, and usefully, then logically other characteristics of the comparison are ported over too.
This is irrational. A case I think of where the asset of the metaphor has become a liability.
Thanks for the perspective. I’m at the OECD Future of the Internet Economy summit in Seoul next month, and I will keep a close ear on proceedings to see how often this mistake crops up.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 11:37 am ¶I love your post and I am more of a believer that the net is one of the better metaphors for g-d’s infinity and for that there is no term
Posted 16 May 2008 at 11:46 am ¶I’m not sure what a “first cost” is, but would be interested to know.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 12:00 pm ¶I don’t see how the Open source mention ties in to discussion of the internet. It doesn’t flow well.
The postal metaphor is perfect for the internet… each packet costs the same amount to deliver, orthogonal to the value it has to society. It’s up to the users to use it wisely.
Charging by the maximum capacity, or per bit are the only two pricing models that are acceptable. Uniform rates applied uniformly to all should be our standard.
Nobody should be forced to ride in the back of the bus just because they aren’t the majority (web, email, etc) and happen to be a different on the surface (bittorrent, irc, voip).
Now, as with delivery, you can always pay for a faster route, at a premium. But again, uniform rates applied uniformly should be the rule.
–Mike–
Bob Way, well done for calling this bunch of conservative Harvardians on their unwitting hypocrisy.
It is time to reclaim all published works as first class members of the public domain. Time to cut the illegitimate strings attached to them for their publishers’ benefit.
The Internet reveals copyright for the 300 year old anachronism that it truly is, and at the same time usurps it as a far better means of publishing an author’s work, and, I argue, a better means of enabling their audience to reward them for it.
Contrary to popular belief, the US constitution does not sanction copyright, for its suspension of the public’s cultural liberty is not necessary to secure to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.
See Constitutional Sanction.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 12:08 pm ¶These principles are concise and useful. I’ll certainly share them with my on-line learners. They beg for me a question I’ve been recently pondering concering a new-media ethics, and whether this will be formed on the backs of courageous or obnoxious users. How do we teach decent practices as part of a new media literacy? See this example at Iowa, for instance, upon which I also recently blogged: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=35107035121.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 2:05 pm ¶re: “We all have an internal ‘trust meter’ of sorts, largely based on education and experience.”
Dan, we’ve discussed this perhaps before. I believe that your statement is conjecture, and probably not completely accurate. My sense is that people’s “education and experience” often includes preordained conclusions, superstition, and myth. There are readers, after all, who firmly believe that most everything in the NYT is propaganda.
Additionally you need to consider chains of trust. The chain of (mostly anonymous)editors who approve a NYT story may not give the same imprimatur as, say, Instapundit or Atrios, whom readers may feel they “know” better.
Recall the Pew study from June 2004 on media believability. Only 23% of Republicans “believe all or most of what” is in the Wall Street Journal. (Americans also believe TV & radio news more than they believe the newspapers.)
Posted 16 May 2008 at 5:16 pm ¶It’s OK to talk about the Internet in abstract and metaphorical terms for certain analytical purposes, such as assessing its impact on society and politics and that sort of thing, but when the discussion deals with physical realities such as pricing and regulation, the hand-waving approach isn’t good enough.
Craig Burton is wrong. The distance between any two end-points connected to the Internet is not zero, it’s the sum of the delays in the best path that connects them. If the two hosts are on the same physical wire, the distance is small. If they’re on opposite sides of the globe and in poorly-connected areas, it’s large, and always will be.
The end-to-end architecture has much less significance than is generally assumed at Berkman. The reality of the Internet’s architecture is that the TCP code running in endpoints is just as much part of the network infrastructure as the code that runs in the Cisco routers that constitute the network’s core. And as the vast majority of TCP code is supplied by one company – Microsoft – there is actually less network diversity in the end-points than in the core, at least for purposes of analyzing network traffic.
It’s also incorrect to say that the Internet was “meant” for one pricing scheme rather than another, as it was designed around no pricing scheme at all. It was originally a research network meant to be used by a closed community of users who knew each other and could depend on social systems to control each others’ behavior.
The Internet is physically a machine, a technology, and a device. Like all such things, we can expect it to change over time, to be improved, to evolve, and to change. So there’s very little value in romanticizing this machine as it was – or is thought to have been – in some early incarnation.
Technology drives social change, and social needs drive technology. Our framing of the Internet should never become so romantic that we lose the ability to assess good and bad practices, or that we try to draw lines between them too dogmatically.
Everybody has an interest in allowing the Internet to develop, and it’s simply the height of folly to assume it’s somehow reached the endpoint of perfection in any one of its modules at any particular time.
Posted 16 May 2008 at 7:20 pm ¶Seems, Mr. Gillmor is arguing for the professionalization of citizen journalists. Perhaps we should raise money so they can go to journalism school.
Posted 17 May 2008 at 3:14 pm ¶Jon, I didn’t say people’s internal trust meter is *reliable* — just that we have one. The challenge is to help folks make it more accurate in its responses….
Posted 17 May 2008 at 4:13 pm ¶Mike, in a value chain the first item has the first cost.
Richard, several points.
First, the metaphors we use (and, being both necessary and unconscioius, can’t help using). For lawmaking, rulemaking and pursuing business opportunities, they could not matter more. Therefore discussion of them is more than hand-waving.
Second, you make important points about the end points, the Net’s core and the risks of romanticizing ideals. I think it is important for us at Berkman to hear those points, even if we differ in perspective on them.
Third, there is a direction I’m going here where I think our points of view can find convergence. That’s in finding more business for telcos and cablecos than they’ll squeeze out of current business models. I think that greenfields open as bandwidth increases, costs drop and restrictions on use decrease. There are many potential synergies beteween customer ends and carrier means here.
I think we also agree on the virtues of competition. On the poles outside my house are two sources of fiber and one of hybrid fiber-coax. As a result I’m getting 20Mb symmetrical service from the best of those three.
Got a plane to catch. Meanwhile, thanks to all for responding. I’ll be posting more on this and other subjects soon.
Posted 18 May 2008 at 6:34 am ¶The big issue seems to be .. “who” .. may be willing to .. “share” .. the risk of going across the cultural boundaries, which make the identification of the right reasons increasingly complex .. and “how” such activists may be brought together ..
Posted 18 May 2008 at 4:20 pm ¶if i understand correctly what i have been reading.
Rudolph, not at all. I’m arguing for better media consumption and creation — and for better tools to sort out the good stuff.
Posted 18 May 2008 at 11:05 pm ¶Dan– I’m just arguing that I haven’t come across a good model of individual trust meters yet.
Posted 19 May 2008 at 8:07 am ¶Bravos, Doc! Excellent writing. Metaphors move the world, yours are particularly apt.
Posted 19 May 2008 at 10:38 pm ¶Something to work on, then…
Posted 20 May 2008 at 9:17 am ¶re: “now, as a condition of registering a domain name individuals have to make public their address and other contact information. This seems like a lure for spammers and an affront to personal privacy, and there is no worldwide consensus in favor of retaining this policy.”
Well, you can pay for a proxy as GoDaddy supports.
I followed the debate in the GNSO Whois WG on OPOC (Operational Point of Contact). Here was our brief exchange during the June ICANN meetings. It seemed to me that the larger debate should have received more attention.
Where is this today, btw?
Posted 20 May 2008 at 8:49 pm ¶Interesting post. I’m a big fan of Metaphors We Live By and Lakoff.
How exactly do you re-frame social networking overstretch?
Posted 22 May 2008 at 2:43 pm ¶I believe there is an alternative (additional) model. The model mimics the dual use public/private broadcasting systems, specifically in the U.K. and in Canada, although I have contemplated that what follows here could also replicate PBS here in the U.S. in connection with broadband.
Here’s the text of a related comment that
I sent to Circle ID in reference to an item on “dual Internets” by journalist, Bill Thompson, who references
Jon Zittrain’s recent book. Please keep in mind that what follows here is a doable model that’s “doable” today BECAUSE its impervious to ICANN and the related network has in fect been layered across the public internet in the dot-com name space for the better part of the last decade.
“It’s entirely possible to build the equivalent of a public/private “red” zone and a “green” zone right now, notwithstanding the DNS.
The “tethering” problem referred to by Jon Zittrain is both structural by design and required by competitive pressures occasioned by so-called “walled gardens”, primarily in the U.S.
“The structural impediment is the DNS itself which maintains and reinforces ICANN’s monopolization of the global Internet on the CORRECT premise that technical oversight of the DNS ensures reliable TECHNICAL management of the root. Arguably in-country authorities could manage that themselves, which they happily did before ICANN existed (c 1998-99). However, the DNS by design nonetheless requires as a technical minimum than anything that ultimately resolves at level one must conform with the DNS protocol (Mockapetris et al).
“Which brings me to Bill Thompson’s reference (after Zittrain) to what amounts to “tethered” and “untethered” Internets: ie., two Internets, one open and unsecured, and one closed and (therefore) secure. The argument for technical management and supervision of the DNS root zone will, perhaps but not necessarily, trump the idea that two separate Internets (tethered and untethered – public and private) are nonetheless a good thing.
Moreover, there’s no logical or even technical reason that precludes this. It’s an artifact of the way that Postel and others originally viewed the model. Moreover, ICANN in its own interest will always argue that two Internets are both administratively and technically incompatible. Both arguments are false. Here’s why that is the case.
“It’s called “Interchangeable Master Channels (IMCs). IMCs are level three networks that consist of uniform and coherent aggregations of level two master channels to which level three sub-channels are attached. Simple as that. Level two is NOT tethered while level three IS tethered and, thus, the security ramifications that stem from what amounts to a private Internet inside of the public Internet where all level two master channels perfectly resolve.
“An example of how IMCs do what they do can can found today, layered across the public Internet in the dot-com name space where the network has been located since before ICANN (c 1997-98). The EXISTING Network does have some limitations: ie., the number of master GENERIC channels (750) that were previously procurred. Be that as it may, the design of the world’s only existing network of IMCs is quite interesting.
“Namely, ALL level two master channels (IMCs) perfectly resolve in the dot-com name space and therefore the dot-com DNS root. All level three “brand channels” (which are interchangeable in real time) are managed. Accordingly, innumerable brand channels (http://brandchannel.masterchannel.com) can simultaneously occupy the level two master channels. The number of existing master generic channels was originally set up so as to accommodate almost every conceivable brand name product or service anywhere in the world and, thus, brand name entities around the world which are the “default” owners of their own brand name channels can support the master public channels to which they are attached.
“The result of this particular model is a contemporary and doable method for creating tethered and untethered (dual) Internets: one public, one private, and impervious to ICANN. Call them “red” zones or “green” zones, or whatever. IMCs exist and can be used.
“The real problem that confronts the model is ICANN itself which will always resist the IMCs innovation because IMCs by design bring no revenue whatsoever to ICANN beyond the level two registration tariff(s). If ICANN would open itself to the fact that numerous IMC networks are doable (and, thus dual Internets; one public and one private, much like TV and radio broadcasting in the U.K. and in Canada), then the issue of tethered or untethered Internets would evaporate. At any rate it’s doable now. Anyone can obtain information about IMCs by simply sending an email with IMCs in the subject line to go2ao@aol.com.”
Posted 23 May 2008 at 10:04 pm ¶The key difference between ICANN and earlier coordination efforts on the Internet (notably the IETF) lay in the unity of the domain name system. Earlier standards were voluntary. If you didn’t like the resulting protocol, you just didn’t use it, and hundreds of proposed standards went into the dust-bin through passive rejection.
But the domain name system is not optional. Attempts were made to set up alternate root servers, but none ever became more than an intriguing curiosity.
In a sense, the functions performed by Jon Postel were the first and only true governance, because no one could reject them while staying on the Internet.
The consequences of the non-optional character of participation in DNS were that ICANN was set up in a near-paranoid manner in a back room (precisely to avoid public input into its governance model) and that public input was filtered through a myriad of bureaucratic strata instead of being open in the manner of the IETF.
(It’s worth pointing out that many people find the IETF slower and its results less valuable these days, as the kinds of large players Crawford mentions throw their weight around.)
But for all its flaws, ICANN shows signs of responding to pressure from below. The board has evolved and now has real participants such as Crawford. ICANN’s inconsistent responsiveness to public pressure would certainly not improve were the company cut loose from the Department of Commerce, but it’s not clear whether the responsiveness would worsen either.
Posted 24 May 2008 at 7:57 am ¶This second-to-last paragraph deserves further comment!
“In turn, this sort of lockdown opens the door to new forms of regulatory surveillance and control. We have some hints of what that can look like. Enterprising law enforcement officers have been able to eavesdrop on occupants of motor vehicles equipped with the latest travel assistance systems by producing secret warrants and flicking a distant switch. They can turn a standard mobile phone into a roving microphone—whether or not it is being used for a call. As these opportunities arise in places under the rule of law—where some might welcome them—they also arise within technology-embracing authoritarian states.”
What you’re talking about is commonly called a “roving bug.” (see FBI Taps Phone Mic as eavesdropping tool, 12/1/2006). I’m not sure what you mean by “secret warrants,” but, as in the case of a traditional phone tap, the warrant is kept secret from the suspect. In the FBI article above, these were covered by the traditional wiretapping laws, requiring conventional warrants.
Remember of course, that it is novel that the iPhone has an SDK. Few other phone makers do.
Yes, indeed, suppose that a developer wanted to create an App to determine whether the phone was being tapped. This likely wouldn’t be shareable through the iPhone store. Whether this was a business decision made independently by Apple, or under the power of suggestion by a governmental authority, I don’t know.
Posted 26 May 2008 at 1:13 pm ¶Nathan, I’m not sure what you mean by “social networking overstretch,” but I am sure that the current social networking craze is something of a passing fad and an investment bubble. Maybe saying that is re-framing enough.
Long ago, when asked for a quote about “Web 2.0,” I said “It’s what we’ll name the next crash.” Wel, Web 2.0 is becoming passé in the absence of a crash, but as framing went the quote wasn’t too bad.
Posted 27 May 2008 at 7:46 am ¶It’s quite simple. Communications providers can choose whether they’re a common carrier with no discrimination or a discretionary carrier that discriminates. If they feel the market prefers the latter, that’s up to them, but they can’t misrepresent their service.
If the law requires common carriers to discriminate, then fix the law so it doesn’t.
If the law renders discretionary carriers unviable because it requires infeasible discrimination then fix the law so it doesn’t.
Posted 31 May 2008 at 6:38 am ¶Brilliant contribution to the net neutrality debate.
Posted 01 Jun 2008 at 8:30 pm ¶I don’t think Mr. Hyde has solidly drawn a line from the Founders to today.
In response to a boycott of an unpopular preacher, Benjamin Franklin did not petition the colonial government to mandate that the churches make him speek; nor did he advocate such during the Constitutional Convention 50 years later. Instead, he put forth the proposition (in deeds, not code) that there should exist a default public alternative.
Indeed that’s been at the heart of U.S. communications policy.
Granted, without a default public alternative, you are at the mercy of private interests. So, our worry here is not that one channel may censor, but that all will– a coordinated group boycott.
The likelihood of this still remains tiny. Because any act of censorship (whether even accidental) will be outed and generally cause due embarassment for the censor.
[I could argue further, and may someday, but will start with this for now.]
Posted 02 Jun 2008 at 1:04 am ¶These discussions are engaging an relevent and I am impressed by the level of reflection. I am struck by Esthers provokative union of the realities of undocumented students interacting in traditional settings in ways analagous to the lurking tendency in online discussion groups and classroom sites. And in keeping with a subsequent post highlighting the fact that different people and communities will have different priorities. For that reason it would seem that we need to have a flexible attitude. I find in the electronic world of human interactions people are quick to be ofended and presume intentions. That coupled with the ease of simply surfing through and loosing a way back, and of simply listening and leaving means there is not a clear social pressure to fight the hundreds of fears or perfectly sensible reasons for such behavior. Add to that a large sector of novice technocitizens who have been weel informed, or at least hypersensitized to the stranger danger of identity theft and they will employ kinds of subteruge which may seem silly to those more accustomed to apropriate online standards and safegaurds. Here again there needs to be along with our efforts to develop governance even if it is in the most democruitized and organic initiative to have site members articulate their aims and expectations a corralary effort to welcome and inform new users. The crisp clean binary language of computers native to this territoruy of society is not dead to html or support structures that increase the influence of real live human speak to dominate ones travels. That binarry code sets a cultural backdrop that favors efficiency. Again that not being the name of the game within many societies and cultures. Rarely apreciated discussions online have a global potential and if there are expectatyions that there is a way to learn the rules without having to actually learn the rukles. Who wants to go to sites and learn the discussion paramaters yet as much as you may find the discussion you desier you are limited without knowing them. The other problem of codification in this setting is that it imposes often premature and slanted adoption of policy which over structures, misleads, may unreflectively violate some more broadly applied code of conduct or even legal reality which is reasonable to presume binding on that group. In lue of strict and in your face don’ts and dos not to mention the all important dues, there could be a section that is more anonomous yet with participatory elements that requier minimal commitment. This is simply a suggestion lifted from group dynamics in institutions. A church a store a school each has its areana of social performance and hopes to have people come and join in without joining in. This is how norms are organically teased out and raised up for articulation and critique, it enculturates members or reguklars as they affirm their belonging by teaching newcomers what it is to belong there, and it allows people to truely consider if this is a good forum for them rather than decide in advance and soimply gpo to the next site with an animated pop up seducing the web user away from more risky conversation to automated click and go suites where we meet people as we engage not with each other but with site features.
Posted 04 Jun 2008 at 4:33 pm ¶OA is great– anything to make scholarly publications more accessible should be welcome.
I’d only add, as I’ve observed before, that academic writers should push for Andrew Odlyzko’s 1995 vision which called for an academic publishing system effectively managing responses & revised versions. SSRN is not quite there yet. (Nor is Publius.)
This “weblog” format of Publius remains difficult to read, btw.
Posted 06 Jun 2008 at 4:56 pm ¶Bravo! So much work needs to be done in this area – glad to see some of it coming from NOLA!
Posted 07 Jun 2008 at 10:58 am ¶I thank you for putting what we as NOLA bloggers do into a perspective that, at many times, seems to be pushed to the margins more often than not due to many factors – among them the hold the mainstream media outlets still have on how we get our news and process it. Unless one is right in the middle of what we write about and discuss, it can be hard to understand it all and very easy to push it aside as little more than personal rantings.
What keeps us going, however, are some primary things the rest of what I call the NOLA blogpocheh have taught me very, very well: that sources must be quoted when necessary, that the rants have much more impact when based on fact, and that a network under the right sort of circumstances is a priceless thing. We have initially been bound together through disaster – but ultimately, we are building something that has the potential to last longer than the levees that were meant to protect us and the wetlands that are this state’s lifeblood and are of great significance to the rest of this country, whether they know it or not.
Our levees may still be leaky, our coast may look like Swiss cheese, and our leaders may have abdicated their many responsibilities and obligations to us – but we are learning that we can only overcome when we do it together – when we share, we vent, and/or we celebrate together.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 10:24 am ¶is this item far from my inquiry?
inquiry: I am a mexican student in a spanish university.
The college community holds, as in most of the communities, people with lower capabilities to see (blindnees and its degrees) or lower abilities to hear.
Every student at the community deserves access to books, articles, manuals.
Some academic contents are available to reproduce them in different formats (as Braille, or vocalized lectures), but there are only a few materials.
In this XXI Century, we can have computers that re-code text contents into other formats (as told). Our Bibliotheques do have some of the acquired technology.
But private and public editorials are not interested in sharing their contents in electronic formats, because they argue a “copyright protection policy”.
The issue is: people from the college comunity, as well as people who use local and regional Bibliotheques, would like to read and gather information as any other person in society.
The goal is to enhance large amounts of academic and literate contents, and submit them in the re-code systems for non-exclusion standards.
Do you have any kind of answer.
Thank you
Gerardo Ballesteros
Posted 13 Jun 2008 at 6:38 am ¶There is an important view in R. Buckminsterfuller, over the horizons of science.
Since science is a cultural practice, we must see the paths of inventions and knowledge acquisitions. There are senses beneath sciences, and sometimes senses are meaning war commitments, in other cases we can find more humanistic goals.
Buckminsterfuller said that there are two main models to produce science, the weaponry model and the livingry model.
I believe that we can find more models. A democratic model should be one of the prospects. I also sugest to all about a welfare-model for science.
Thank you
Gerardo
Madrid- Spain
Posted 03 Jul 2008 at 4:27 am ¶Doc, A few notes in follow up to your Berkman@10 session, where I posited that hoary standby “the commons” as a heuristic, if not a framing, concept of ongoing relevance.
As one session participant mentioned, a discussion of framing would seem to presuppose an acknowledgment of, perhaps agreement on, desired ends. I see that Kevin Werbach states connectivity as an end goal in his Publius piece. That would be one on my list as well: a broadly accessible connectivity.
Connectivity (communication, “cheap talk”) is cited by Elinor Ostrom as a factor contributing to successful governance of CPRs (common pool resources, i.e. shared, rivalrous goods).
Jonathan Zittrain’s 2×2 thinking on the future of the internet maps two similarities to the study of CPRs. First is his quest for models of successful governance in the “communitarian” quadrant, which mirrors a project to which Ostrom and others have dedicated decades of research: synthesizing the design principles whereby CPR institutions are found to successfully govern long-term resource use. Second is the scale at which he locates these models: Wikipedia, say, rather than the Internet as a whole. Similarly, the Maine lobster fishery, rather than the ocean as a whole, is a focus of CPR studies.
George Lakoff has emphasized that the commons is “not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day.” Nor, in Portland, Ore. (where I live), would a meetup of self-styled communitarians fill the space that otherwise serves as a hangout for a group of knitting enthusiasts.
Still, amidst the rapid coevolution of the Net and its norms, we find that terms of relationality and sociality (e.g. reputation, identity) acquire fresh import. Reading the essays by David Weinberger and his respondents on the relative merits of tacit versus explicit governance – the two left-side quadrants on JZ’s matrix – I can’t help but smile. The discussion has come a long way since, say, Thatcher’s “no such thing as society.” Further exploration of that lower-left quadrant could add greatly to a variety of left-right, government-market debates. And perhaps, one day, to our framing as well.
Posted 06 Jul 2008 at 5:19 pm ¶Last sentence “But it is a significant challenge…….no matter how important.”
troubles me,
perhaps the clue is “multi-disciplinary” at all costs inspite of its uni-disciplinary importance ???
Posted 08 Jul 2008 at 10:12 am ¶I thought I would share this link that expounds on the examples of New Orleans bloggers I mentioned in my essay http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062708-new-orleans.html?page=1
Posted 08 Jul 2008 at 10:08 pm ¶Great essay. That’s why OneWebDay is so important!
Posted 10 Jul 2008 at 8:31 pm ¶Howard, thanks for following up, and for your excellent observations.
It’s been interesting, over the past few weeks, to find that thinking about framing (and JZ’s quadrants) is beginning to help inform broader thinking — both inside the Berkman Center and out in the world — about Net Neutrality and related conundra. Especially as we take a Long View.
The old left-vs.-right distinctions, and knee-jerkings, don’t quite work. But, as George Lakoff would be quick to point out, they do apply.
Posted 12 Jul 2008 at 11:06 am ¶I think norms and rules can have a more symbiotic relationship. Norms are social scaffolding – temporary, easy to plan and easy to construct. Rules are the building that grows up under the scaffolding – permanent, the product of compromise, harder to build without erecting the scaffolding first.
In particular, rules remove the risk that personnel or social group changes will change the norms without a process of discussion.
Norms, like partnerships or other personality-based relationships, can shift markedly when a few key people change. Rules can’t – and changes have to put in place more slowly and cautiously. It’s the difference between the US Constitution and the first twenty years of US Presidential Elections.
Posted 16 Jul 2008 at 5:54 am ¶The importance of shared responsibility is an important one, but I worry that some of the fixes you propose will lead to a surveillance society of perfect control.
ISPs not connecting to the net if they think the computer is compromised? Web hosts liable for malicious code inserted into site? The service providers will have an incentive to over-punish users and play the safe-side which could be to the detriment of the open net.
I wonder, then, if less coercive “nudges” (to use Thaler and Sunstein’s term) could urge all stakeholders, but especially consumers, to embrace best practices.
Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 3:39 pm ¶Our observations of the ‘cybercrime’ laws enacted in various countries are, first and foremost, used as tools for political repression of dissenting opinion. The fact that we have laws to regulate every person and every aspect of society has not made us safer but only created more ‘crime’ which often has no discernible deleterious effect.
The increasing use of cloud computing will mean that threats to efficient data transfer may be managed remotely. But these protections must not include hindrances and roadblocks to free expression especially those promoted by governments and business interests.
A free Internet is the greatest experiment in participatory democracy we’ve yet devised. Let’s keep it that way.
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 2:07 pm ¶Sigh. Another generic defense of CDA 230.
Defenders of anonymous speech have always been hard-pressed to come up with examples of anonymous journalists *after* the Bill of Rights was ratified. That’s right– Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Jay were writing in a time before their free speech rights were guaranteed.
You write:
“Virtually every legislative effort to enforce good speech behavior in [X] has overshot its mark. Many have been overturned on First Amendment grounds.”
You make your argument for X=cyberspace. But, for X=broadcast political advertisements, the McCain-Feingold Act’s accountability prohibitions have been upheld.
Shall we hold you to the prediction that in the long run “everyone” will stop patronizing anonymous gossip sites? Aside from what JM Keynes said about the long run, I’d add that there’ll always be a new generation to read them.
Posted 03 Aug 2008 at 8:09 pm ¶re: “These “digital natives” know much better than we do how easy it is to produce (not just consume) and manipulate information; this automatically makes many of them immune to the trickiest PR stints.”
Unproven conjecture!
From Farhad Manjoo’s review of Rob Walker’s new book Buying In: “Members of a hyper-aware generation often hailed for their imperviousness to marketing are actually turning to brands to define themselves.”
I had actually disagreed with Dan’s piece by pointing out that there’s no good model of a “trust meter” yet. You write: “Wouldn’t new systems for determining one’s online reputation – be that Google’s PageRank , the number of Diggs or some other metric— help address the credibility gap?”
Some metric yet to be devised. Google *possibly* is interested in returning the most trustworthy information. Why do you suppose that Digg is?
Posted 03 Aug 2008 at 10:18 pm ¶I think that there is not enough “I” going on… in otherwords…. people are finding groups that they agree with and ending up with a very narrow-minded view of the world.. the democratization of the media is not really happening as people had hoped.
I just read that one presidential candidate is offering cut and paste arguments on his website so that people and just cut and paste arguments on the various blogs that they comment on. That seems a little too much “us” and not enough “I”.
Marina
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:04 pm ¶http://www.hotforwords.com/cocomment
did you have a look at the interdisciplinary research carried out by FIDIS, of which our group is partner? see http://www.fidis.net. I wrote an article in the book ‘profiling the european citizen’ entitled “cogitas ergo sum. The role of data-protection law…’. The book contains articles on the rule of law in new technologies etc. best, wim schreurs
Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 8:27 am ¶“I” have been believing – and it would be next to impossible explaining why – that for individuals to be enabled to
(quote) … play the leading role in solving transparency and literacy problems … (unquote)
somebody should start switching from a too concrete “I”-mode to a less concrete (may I say “virtual” or “operational”?) “I vs We”-mode.
To clarify the point i’d like to (be able to) make, i’ll start drafting a collaborative document (in Italian) titled “Real calling Virtual: anybody there?”.
When it’s finished, and if it sanity checks ok in my own language, i’ll come back to offer an English version, for consideration.
Thank you for prompting me to comment
Posted 24 Aug 2008 at 9:14 am ¶Please let le reword my last sentence as:
Thank you for providing arguments which prompted me to comment
Posted 24 Aug 2008 at 9:19 am ¶Nice essay Ken. It is great how practical the ICT long tail for NGOs is form an economic perspective, now that open source strength is so apparent. While our team works on larger strategy/software projects that are fortunate to have the resources to develop tools right way, the very tools we are being paid to for by more large organizations are finding their ways in to the hands of hundreds of NGOs though the various open source communities we work with. This type of trickle down development is possible with only a little extra resources. Simply, if we build tools (modules) the right way for the paying clients, our code will be nice and abstracted out as much like a frame work as possible. This ensures that it easy to understand, flexible, and reusable for other projects. Best of all it is in the big organizations best interest to release the custom modules back out so that it is maintained by a community and further improved and vetted ect. There are now probably hundreds of small organizations that are using tools originally funded by the World Bank, World Resources Institute or Human Rights Watch, and these big organizations are better off for it since there are extra developers now working on code that is important to them.
It is interesting how this open development process relates to the big top down approach. I still smile when talking to good organizations that are hung up on “big design plans” for there data collection tools rather than seeing the strength of ’small tools loosely joined’ (thanks to open standards) to make data collection more dynamic and effective. Thanks to the trickle down development that I described earlier ’small tools’ are more affordable to make now, and thus it is only more practical to look “loosely joining” tools with smart standards like RSS/RDF/XML/KML with the help of syndication tools.
Posted 21 Sep 2008 at 2:09 pm ¶Well, Norms have rules too. If you look at it from another perspective you will see this. In sociology, or zoology its a very obvious “fact” It’s interesting, animals doesn’t have rules, but humans does. For both goes the threat that braking them leads to consequences. If you break a rule, you might get a fine, or go to jail. For braking a group norm, you will get excluded from the group, very directly or very subtile, all depending.
Posted 25 Sep 2008 at 12:45 pm ¶In this discussion this created an interessting thought, braking a norm in the virtual, digital world of the web, you risk to be left alone, without an audience, outside the “discussion”, outside the collaborative collective? But you might find a new place to “belong” where your way of acting and interacting IS the norm, and you yet again are a part of a group. But for your ideas and actions to be accepted you need acceptance from someone, and if you want to make a difference you still hvae this risk of becoming excluded, and need to moderate yourself. I can’t see why or how this shouldn’t be a “fact” also in a virtual, digital environment. My statment is that we can discuss rules and norms, but is seems to me that it might not be the most relevant subject in order to understand, nor prefere the one above the other, and make use of it to understand behaviors and partisipations on the web.
Dear Ken,
Posted 25 Sep 2008 at 11:29 pm ¶I wholeheartedly agree with a number of your comments here. I have been orking for years with aspects of basic food marketing in so-called developing countries, andam particularly interested in the impact that mobile phones are having on the day-to-day functioning of crop marketing, but find a lot of the “mobiles development” activists too techi, and not enough oriented to simple improvements. I was also a Sussex graduate in the 70s. Regards. Vincent Tickner
I’m not sure I would split the world in two: history from one side, reputation on the other. Websites (and any exchange institution since the 10th century is you believe Avner Greif’s Magrhibi Traders) tend to decide and refine signals and enforce sanctions: eBay has to decide on what time period/how many transactions to average the most visible grade, but they could offer a more detailed representation; one can use labels, grades, decide to filter out certain elements and make other hard to find; every platform decides what to record. . . Your history versus reputation axis is really a question of how much does one condense information into simple stats — but many other aspects are also important: how explicit the projection is? PageRank can’t be transparent, by fear of gaming; eBay though they could avoid it, but had to stop sellers from rating each other for that. Can the users decide on what type of information to report, rather then their value — they can use that to boast their appearance, but would most likely specialise in certain behaviours, encourage by the metrics they chose.
There is a large literature by statisticians on what makes a good measure — and how it can influence policy. I’ll try to find translations if you are interested.
Posted 17 Oct 2008 at 8:02 pm ¶I’m not sure that Google isn’t able to tell a negative link for looking at associated words around it; some people like me love to use a meliorative semantic field to criticize, or apparent stern words to praise — but for most links, “terrible” won’t be good. What to do with criticism, though? Controversy can be the best remedy to Balkanisation, and I sense much more of a threat there, thanks to the web at least in Politics (less so in Academia, at least for younger, Google Scholar-driven grad-students).
However: how is that specific to the Web, ie. a word made of formal, one-way links? Doesn’t any commentator, be it in the press or at a diner party, by lambasting anything take the risk to launch a mob or trigger contradictory reactions?
Some technical solutions exist: meta-tags, no-follow; but aren’t adopted by many. One could imagine to have more structured data (and I’ve seen very encouraging demo) but short of being simpler then HTML, they might never get the same adoption.
Posted 17 Oct 2008 at 9:26 pm ¶You are raising a very interesting point when you ask “what to do with criticism?” The answer is not clear to me either, however, here’s what’s different on the Web: because of the way search engines interact with links, it is possible that well-intentioned (and deserving) criticism might boost the visibility and impact of a harmful posting in different contexts than the one intended by the author of the critique. Example: You are a very popular blogger and you come across a libelous posting about Barack Obama that you really feel deserves criticism. You write an article in your blog about this posting; of course, you include a link. Since your blog is very popular, your link boosts the libelous posting’s Pagerank. This in turn causes Google to list it higher up when other people type “Obama” and helps lots of other people find it. Since these other people do not access the posting through your commentary but directly through Google, they do not benefit from your insights so many of them believe it. In this scenario, your well-intentioned attempt to criticize ends up increasing the damage that this posting causes. Would the right thing have been to ignore the libelous posting? I am not sure. However, this particular side-effect of linking is something that most people who participate in online discussions don’t even think about. My viewpoint is that this and other related phenomena deserve more attention and study.
Posted 18 Oct 2008 at 6:21 pm ¶It seems to me the title of this post should be “Is Reputation Tracking Obsolete?” In that case, the answer would be “for the most part, yes.”
Reputation in its pure form is ephemeral. Reputation management systems seek to establish proxies for reputation assessments. The quality of reputation tracking is going to hinge on three elements, then: (1)relevance of the proxy. How good of an approximation does the online rating mechanism provide? (2)Traffic levels. I’m always entertained by low-traffic blogs that include recommended diary structures and such. Online reputation tracking assumes huge inputs, but given the power law distributions of web traffic, we know that there are only going to be a select few webspaces that obtain that level of traffic. (3)Gaming of the system or lack thereof. And this last one is long-term problematic. Any high-traffic webspace is going to represent valuable online real estate. The perverse incentives are there for actors to try to figure out the rules of the game and then innovate ways to get around them. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in reputations systems for years, and most of the literature seems to be focused solely on eBay. So reputation tracking systems are probably obsolete at this point, because every system is going to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and there haven’t been many new developments (at least that I’m aware of — which is a decent indicator that if something great is out there, it sure hasn’t diffused very widely yet).
What we really need is reputation systems that take advantage of Metcalfe’s Law. As processing speed and memory continue to double — as Information Abundance becomes still more abundant — we need to develop reputation tracking systems that use better proxies. You ask above whether “in a world where all action is recorded, is there still need for reputational information?” I would respond Yes, all the moreso! Reputation data should be broadly understood as a form of filtering and content management. In a world where all action is recorded, reputational information is all the more necessary so we can sort through the mess. But likewise, as more types of data become available, we need to diversify the types of proxies we use for assessing reputation. As the mobile web comes into wider use, whole new classes of data will become available. What we need is to figure out how to sort and use that data, particularly keeping in mind the competing needs for reputational assessment/filtering and privacy. The weaker the privacy norms, the stronger the reputation tracking can be. That tradeoff has steeply decreasing returns at some point, and it’s up to us as public scholars to help identify what that point might be.
Posted 22 Oct 2008 at 9:15 am ¶Your points about the widespread availability of information on-line are well taken. Reputation, however, is a social evaluation. And the evaluation part is a) hard, and b) not being done well now, as far as we can see.
The challenge in measuring reputation is to model a complex, non-linear social process. Any evaluation of reputation must start with the way our individual beliefs and biases turn fact into opinion. It must also take into consideration the way those opinions (and opinions about opinions) move through social networks. Doing this with classical statistical methods isn’t really possible, since most on-line opinions are highly correlated – voiding the underlying (but often ignored) requirement of event independence.
So we’ve taken some aspects of Bayesian belief revision, and build an algorithm that turns user input about companies and their reputations (stories, votes, comments) into Reputation Scores and an overall Reputation Index for thousands of companies.
We’re in private beta now, but I’ve created an invitation link if you and your readers would like to have a look: http://vanno.com/private/signup/Publius_Project
Posted 27 Oct 2008 at 9:49 am ¶Otherwise, we’ll be launching to the public in mid-November 2008.
What’s missing in most discussions of online reputation is a workable model for the process by which reputation is created.
According to Wikipedia, “reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization”. I would suggest that any authority relative to measuring online reputation should speak directly to this technical definition – i.e. to reputation being a social evaluation.
To start, this definition tells us what reputation is not. Reputation is not just “the facts”. It’s not, for example, just some combination of how many tons of CO2 a company produces, how much it gives to charity, and how long the average wait is on a service call. Nor is it just an assessment or analysis by a person or organization – no matter how expert he/she/it might be – of a company’s behavior or performance (good or bad). Nor is it just the total of all the media stories and articles that journalists, bloggers and researchers publish about a company’s or an individual’s deeds and misdeeds.
Even if we summed up all the facts, analyses, assessments, stories and articles about a company or an individual, we still wouldn’t have measured reputation. All that information has to be passed through two important filters. First are the beliefs and biases of the individuals (e.g. consumers) who are interpreting the stories, analyses and facts. And second is the complex and non-linear way those opinions move through the larger population.
What comes out the other end of those filters – after that process of social evaluation – is what is recognized as reputation.
The simplest example of the above process at work is gossip. This analogy does not trivialize reputation. Quite the opposite – it ties it to a mechanism on which humans have relied over the eons to establish trust.
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 10:39 am ¶Nick, how refreshing to hear from someone who recognises that nature gives us the biggest clues in finding solutions to apparently intractable problems.
Reputation and identity are indeed social constructs, emergent epiphenomena. In the offline world we do not refer to a central authority to ascertain someone’s reputation or identity. We corroborate these things socially, with our peers and acquaintances.
Reputation and identity are problems that should be solved using decentralised, public, peer-to-peer technologies, not centralised, proprietary systems.
I wrote on this a while ago here:
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 11:51 am ¶http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=69
(Ideating Identity)
I’m not going to wait for any government. I’m going to figure how how much it will cost to bury conduit all the way down my road, in the public right-of-way. And if I can afford it, I’ll put it in, and if anybody I pass wants to buy in, great! If not, then not.
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 5:40 pm ¶What can the new administration do?
1. Open spectrum.
2. Incentivize actions that grow the network (A few ideas: A Meraki-like model w/ tax credits for sharing, subsidies/credits for repeaters, funding for rural wireless tech – extending range and other “Achilles heel” areas, income-dependent incentives to break digital divide (on network equip and computers), etc…)
I wonder why we don’t just skip fiber to the home and build out a wireless infrastructure?
If spectrum really isn’t scarce then we’d have sufficient bandwidth – ubiquitous ultra-high speed wireless. As long as we’re shooting for the moon let’s do it right.
The 700mhz spectrum would’ve been a good swath of spectrum but there are many other underutilized areas that left.
A year ago there were estimates of what it would have cost google to build out a nationwide wireless network and they ranged from 15-20 billion.
I suspect that even if the government encouraged a more robust version and pushed further in to rural zones, even w/ federal level ineptitude, we’d be looking at substantially less than $300B.
And in my opinion it’d be orders of magnitude better than fiber.
But… it’s highly disruptive. Everyone from Coase to Benkler has argued in favor of an open spectrum approach. If the arguments against scarcity are true it’s a no brainer.
Even though the American people would be huge winners the existing and well entrenched telecom players are very likely to fight against it. And they’ve got the $$$ and lobbying skill to put up a strong fight.
History is full of lessons about how What’s Right For America & What’s Right for The People doesn’t always win – see Lessig’s battle against copyright. Another example of a no brainer.
So… my final suggestions:
1. A large scale public campaign in favor of a moon-shoot broadband push (fiber, wireless, whatever).
2. Tie this to whatever area has legs:
- Democracy 2.0: a new level of engagement via net, every citizen connected to their politician.
- Education: Our kids need this – every child should have access to a computer and the net
- Digital Divide: electronic equity…
- Or all of the above (and more)
3. Appease the telecoms
- Find a way to make them tie the noose and put it around their necks
- Even if it involves direct payoffs, somehow we need to find a way to push them out of the game
4. and finally… tie one or more of the above into the California initiative process. Use CA as a testbed, get Soros, Omidyar and others to throw a wad of cash at the 2009 election and see what it does for the CA economy. If it’s a home run, roll it out everywhere.
That’s all I got for now (and it’s likely too much, thanks for enduring…)
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 7:42 pm ¶-cc
… The government also needs to invest where the market will not, so that services will be available to assist in the economic turn around that has, so far, always followed a down turn.
Texas has very few (grandfathered) municipal telecommunications networks, because they are illegal. This must change because telecommuting, distance learning and official/legal/emergency communication will play a large part in the future of Texas. The rural nature of the vast majority of the state of Texas means that there will never be sufficient customer base to provide a profitable return on investment (ROI) for private telecommunications companies; the government must provide this service.
Posted 31 Oct 2008 at 1:30 pm ¶Here’s a blog post that looks at both the entrenched telco mindset (”the telco is the cloud space”) and the abundance of other infrastructure ideas (such as David Brooks’ on mobility). I just posted a long comment there.
Posted 01 Nov 2008 at 7:02 am ¶Stephen, I must disagree. Governments can barely get out of their own way (corporations can’t either, but the worst ones go out of business, whereas governments rarely go out of business). I really do NOT want government support for my rural lifestyle. With government involvement comes government strictures — and I think most rural people understand that and will agree with me.
What you’re missing is that my house is where my house is, and I like it being there. Consequently, if I want Internet, then a part of my owning my house is the cost of running telecommunications to it. It’s a cost to me, just as is owning a house. My house cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. If I have to spend another five or ten thousand dollars to bring high speed Internet to my house, that’s in proportion with the cost of my septic system, or my well, or my wood furnace. Do you think the government should pay for them? I hope not! So why should the government pay for my fiber just because it’s not on my land?
Posted 09 Nov 2008 at 12:39 pm ¶I’ve been told to point to the INEC Declaration on Open Networks. Bummer that it’s a .pdf, but there’s a pointer here.
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 10:58 am ¶Этот блог заслуживает похвалы. Обязательно напишу про него на закрытом форуме вебмастеров. Думаю, вебмастера согласятся со мной. Кстати вы можете присоединиться к сообществу вебмастеров, закрытый форум вебмасетров.
Posted 14 Nov 2008 at 9:09 am ¶Thanks for your comments Eric and Vincent. I think this topic remains very much open, as it will be for some time to come. Hopefully the focus will ultimately shift, but I don’t know what the catalyst will be or how long it will take.
Lately I’ve been thinking more about the sharing of knowledge around the building of “social mobile” applications for the long tail – a book which would guide people in the thinking behind such projects, and good practice. I’ve just written a piece on this topic as one of my regular PC World articles here:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154698/social_mobile_applications_the_missing_book.html
I don’t know if such a book would be possible, but I certainly think it’s missing.
Ken
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 2:59 pm ¶AS an Attaché I am the liaison to a Work Group to whom Members would fall under your “third camp who see the UN process as pointing to UN control over the Internet and do not accept the legitimacy of this campaign.”
Getting “Governance” right is a timely process, as it pertains many multifaceted social & administrative systems.
Our group chooses a Constitutional Framework to work upon, with elements borrowed from the UN structure.
Admittedly the UN-ITU programs of; WSIS and its IGF extension, are an incredible positive out-reaching gesture, in terms of the UN fostering their own evolution.
It is our position that the UN systemics are of such a design that it precludes itself from becoming a truly viable platform for Internet Governance.
That said, We (WGCIG) continue to discuss and prepare arguments for an approach of governance within a sphere of constitutional means.
Solicitor General
Posted 04 Dec 2008 at 10:21 pm ¶WGCIG. com/net/org
There is much to do on development countries on this issue. There seems to be “governance models” only for the top- policy makers since the neoliberal agendas came to us. The question is over the openess of these models.
Posted 08 Dec 2008 at 7:23 pm ¶Our governments do have facilities to taylor their own governance agendas, and the international organizations, such as UN the IMF or OECD sponsor them with no doubts.
But i would like to be listened, as well as many other people from developing countries. We would like to perform some “governance agendas” in our way.
We want some accountability strategies, for the evaluation of public policies, for the sake of benchmarking the constitutional principles, and the human rights principles that have to be done among any governmental agenda.
We would like to create working groups to evaluate the regulation of strategic resources in our economies; we would like to enhance a “watch-dog” strategy for the environmental issues that preclude our governments and foreing investors.
We want a lot of things that can be translated as “governance agenda”; and the question is why the international organizations support the elite agendas, and leave us in the oblivion?
Greetings from Mexico.
This might be nitpicking, since I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but you write: “There was never a moment—never—when the majority of blog traffic didn’t go to highly-educated professionals with degrees from Ivy League-caliber schools.”
The top blog in the progressive blog neighborhood is Dailykos, the top one in the conservative blog neighborhood is Michelle Malkin. (If we’re talking site traffic alone, Huffington Post is #1, but that also has a ton of authors, and plenty of people visiting it for non-political news.) Kos went to Northern Illinois University, which isn’t *exactly* Ivy-caliber. Malkin went to Oberlin, which (as a fellow alum) I’d love to describe as Ivy-caliber, but it should be noted that everyone who attended Oberlin got rejected by Brown.
More to the point, there’s a lot of mobility *within* a community blog like dailykos. We saw that with fivethirtyeight.com, one of the most interesting case examples from this cycle. The two primary authors were anonymous posters on dailykos, posting under the screennames “poblano” and “pocket nines.” Poblano (Nate Silver) attracted an audience based on his outstanding predictive accuracy, got impressed with pocket nines, and they launched their own site, eventually revealing their identities.
Now that hardly suggests that the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment where anyone can attract an audience of millions. But it does point out some important variance in the basic “preferential attachment” argument. Blog structure can have a HUGE impact on outcomes. If you have a community site like DailyKos as your power-law hub, then that means talented latecomers can still rise through the ranks. An individual site like Malkin or Instapundit, meanwhile, offers far less potential mobility. And that may provide the roots of an explanation of why the progressives have developed such a huge lead in online infrastructure. “Googlearchy” isn’t so menacing if the beneficiary of preferential attachment allows for in-site mobility.
Posted 17 Dec 2008 at 2:14 pm ¶