Berkman Center for Internet & Society

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Futurist and consultant John Hagel caught my attention with a talk titled “Shaping Serendipity”. He’s introduced by John Seely Brown, his frequent collaborator. Brown and Hagel are writing a new book together, and a chapter focuses on serendipity. (And as a chapter in the book I’m failing to write is also on serendipity, I made a point of attending…)

Hagel offers a definition of serendipity: “Unexpected encounters that surprise and delight.” He notes that, in telling people about the session, they’d react first with delight, and then with surprise that this could be an idea worth a whole sesson. “What can geeks, nerds and algorithms tell us about serendipity?”

He believes there are techniques we can use to shape serendipity. Deploying these techniques, we can increase the quality and the chance of these unexpected encounters.

To contexualize the idea, Hagel explains that he and Seely Brown are postulating a major shift in business climate between 1965 and today. They’re developing an index that tracks a business environment that looks increasingly competitive and difficult. They suggest that the economywide return on assets (in the US, focusing on publicly traded companies) has decreased sharply from 1965 to the present - return on assets is roughly 1/4 of what it was in 1965. This is true even within the set of highly succesful companies. And looking at the mean years of survival for companies listed in the S&P 500 has been reduced from 75 years in the 1930s to roughly 10 years now. In other words, corporations are under strong and increasing pressure. Competition is intensifying, through digital infrastructures and policy trends that favor competition.

To survive this change, companies need to move from a focus on knowledge flow, rather than on knowledge stocks. Corporations used to develop a sphere of knowledge, then monetized it by producing products. Now they need to embrace knowledge flow, and see that flow as the center of value. This means we’re always learning, always discovering and always refreshing our sphere of knowledge. This requires us to develop pull mechanisms, ways of pulling knowledge in from the world. Search is a basic form of pull mechanism, but it has its limits. How do we find things when we don’t know what we’re looking for, when we don’t know what’s out there?

Hagel suggests that we need to shape ourselves so that we’re attracting people and knowledge that we want to be surprised by. This requires us to adopt a different model for serendipity, one that doesn’t believe that serendipity is about pure chance. Within that model, all you can do is embrace it and be open to it, but you can’t attract more or better encounters. Hagel’s model involves making changes to environments, practices and your preparedness to maximize serendipity.

In understanding environments and serendipity, Hagel posits a conflict between Tom Friedman and Richard Florida. Friedman tells us the world is flat, that location doesn’t matter, and that we can access resources from anywhere in the world at any time. Richard Florida suggests that the world is spiky. More and more people are concentrating in urban settlements, in the US and around the world. If the world is so flat, why are people gathering in these places?

If you’re in a place where there’s a concentration of talent, your chances of serendipity increase radically. People move to cities in part because they realize the value of unexpected encounter. If location didn’t matter, why is travel increasing, globally? Physical environment matters and enhances serendipity.

Virtual environments can create serendipity as well. We have a choice of where we participate in virtual environments. One of the values of social networking sites is the likelihood we’ll encounter an unexpected link via a social connection. Other environments are created explicitly to generate serendipity - a platform like Innocentive, which invites unusual solutions to technical problems, can create unexpected connections. An MIT spin-off company, Sense Networks, is studying traffic patterns based on users who allow their mobile phones to be monitored. They’re able to track the flow of people as a result. If you choose to be tracked, Sense Networks will help you discover what “tribe” you belong to, and where your tribe hangs out.

Hagel cites a pair of people (both friends of mine) who have mastered the art of creating serendipity by carefully choosing their environments. One is Yossi Vardi, an Israeli technology entrepreneur who spends his life attending technology conferences and walking the halls. Another is Joi Ito, a legendary global traveller, who’s relocated from Japan to Dubai because he believes it’s emerging as a key global crossroads.

What a corporation does to enhance chances of serendipity will directly affect their chances of market success, Hagel argues. Creating online spaces that allow your customers and developers to interact, as SAP has done, can help create unexpected encounters. Unlikely online spaces like World of Warcraft can also be great spaces for serendipity, because the guild structure allows for the development of deep, trust-based relationships.

Hagel warns that you can go into these environments and not make connections. You need to learn how to rise above the noise in these spaces and attract attention so that the people you need to find will find you. He suggests that succesful actors find ways to influence conversations without direct contacts - they attract attention and sustain it, which allows connections to form when appropriate for all involved.

This, in turn, requires preparedness. He suggests that people either are disposed to finding encounters to be threatening and distracting, or to embrace and enjoy them. Hagel suggests that this probably isn’t a choice - it’s a perspective people bring to business. But if there is a way to cultivate connections that lead to serendipity is to develop passion around what you’re doing.

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about serendipity over the past year (see here and here) and was intrigued to see how differently Hagel and I are using the term. A questioner in the audience observed that Hagel’s examples all involved finding serendipity by connecting with people, rather than encountering things or information. I’d suggest that Hagel’s examples almost all deal with creating a wider set of weak ties. Hagel explains that he believes this is the most efficient form of creating serendipity - by building new connections, you gain a source of serendipity over a long period of time.

Here’s my concern: building weak ties is great, important and helpful. We know that weak ties are incredibly useful in finding jobs, or in seeking out information within a large and complex company. But if our weak ties are largely to people we’ve got substantial common ground with - and they usually are - are these people really a source of surprise? When I get recommendations from my social circles - via Facebook or Twitter, for instance - there tends to be a lot of overlap in those recommendations. That makes sense - like everyone else, I fall into homophily traps and I flock with likeminded folks. But this means that my weak ties aren’t always the best place to find ideas that surprise and delight me, to use Hagel’s definition. Unexpected, perhaps, but I’m not sure serendipity is the right term to describe these connections.

I’m interested in questions of how we stumble onto information and ideas we’d be unlikely to find within our present sphere of weak ties. One possibility is to radically expand that circle of weak ties - start paying attention to the perspectives and opinions of people far outside our realms of ordinary experience. This isn’t easy to do - it tends to require the assistance of bridge figures, who’ve got connections to our circles and to very different circles. I also wonder whether serendipity always needs to focus on personal connection - I think we often get serendipity from media, from pop culture, from news.

All that said, I like Hagel’s idea that we can change environments to increase serendipity. I’m not sure the strategy of advertising our interests is the most important step, though it’s certainly worked for me in some ways - blog on a topic and you’re bound to find people more knowledgeable on the subject who will correct and steer you. But I’m very glad that such a prominent thinker is looking at the challenge of increasing serendipity, opening the possibility that serendipity isn’t just luck, but something we can analyse, understand and get better at.

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We are in a unique moment of people organizing. At this time, our culture becomes both increasingly tied together and fragmented (danah boyd). Organizers dreamed for years to be able to reach millions of people (YouTube) and they pined for the day thousands of allies could collaborate in synchronizing efforts (Iranelection ish) to agitate for change of culture, industry or policy.

Now we sit in among vast networks of supporters, allies, friendsters and professionals (1000+ at PDF) as committed to our issues as we are, but working together alludes us. change remains just out of reach.

We know much about campaign planning (spitfire strategies) and communications strategy but the underlying alignment mechanisms for marshalling and managing the power in campaigns have shifted beneath our feet (who is momsrising…go Roz!). We are transitioning from an organizational-centric world dominated by good management, ownership, hierarchies and “the firm”  to a network-centric world driven by leadership, transparency, reach and sharing (Ny311, government spending dashboard).

Leaders in broadcasting (newspaper) are being replaced by those focused on creating connections (craigslist). Both will always exist, but there is no doubt networks and network organizing represents a transformative trend.

Today, as movements organize they need a mix of both traditional campaign and communications strategy coupled with network strategy. (Obama)

Common Problems that Many Campaigns Face.

Experience demonstrates that these strategies are less effective without complementing each other. (Gates on education ) The interplay of campaign, communications and network capacities influence the planning implementation and success of each.

Coalitions, collections of groups, and crowds of people often lack the clear vision, campaign objectives and communications plans (PDF…although Sunlight stuff is a nice direction) that help identify the critical networks for further engagement, direction and collaboration. However, even when like minded and allied leaders can agree to connect and collaborate without a unified vision the emergent networks rarely develop the functionally collaborating infrastructure (Green Group) so that the participants can self-organize a clear vision, campaign objectives and subsequently develop campaign and communications plans.

In both scenarios, the coalition without clear objectives and the campaign without the functional network, basic levels of network infrastructure are needed to move forward. However, time after time organizers get stuck with little budget and no plan to solve the fundamental dysfunction in the networks the campaign depends on to achieve success.

The lack of budget and plan stems from a mix of both planning and management issues. There is often an unspoken lack of trust of the base and an unwillingness to trust allies. Yet, there is little investment in the systems that would build performance of far flung collaborative team ( fostering trust in the base).

Organizers that don't trust people to be as committed as themselves therefore design processes to get mild users to support the most committed rather than to actually engage and work effectively with the many-many-many less committed activists. There is a lack of diversity in the "committed base" and most effort is focused on recruiting a more diverse set of people into the same mindset rather than diversifying the agenda and the definition of what the movement is committed to achieve. Many leaders are oddly proud to be disconnected from trends in culture, communication and technology.(not at PDF)

The combined effects of these management biases and systemic gaps create a mess and complete lack of alignment between objectives, organizing, revenue plans, budgets, vision, communications, network organizing and technology plans. The resulting tossed salad of tech tools duct taped onto an organizing effort with no intention of listening, learning, serving and adapting makes a mockery of bottoms-up ownership. (thinking PickensPlan Ning)

On the planning side, many groups have even acknowledged that they are now entering a phase of network building, “taking a network approach” or that they are dependent on networks to create change but when pushed they have no framework for even discussing why, how or what are the elements that make an advocacy network functional.

Unfortunately, groups have no process or limited capacity to identify these conflicts and gaps. As organizers, they have limited experience bridging bottoms up discussions with mangers, funders, planners. Their is not enough circulation of the stories and theories of change that could realign the policy, network and communications activities.

Organizers and tech builders don’t have the materials, work process to help staff better understand organizing in the age connectivity and what is developed by foundations is disregarded and by consultants is trademarked.

We can look at all the pretty tools and see all the activity (online and off) but until the network builders and technologists explain the shift in logic that occurs to more of the organizers embedded across our movement most of us agitating for change will remain as we were only with better websites. 

I had a blast in NYC at PDF.  It was great to take time to step back and look at the broader trends and the ways those trends influence work at Green Media Toolshed and the training I do with Netcentric Campaigns. These events like PDF make me realize how fast the technology is moving in shifting the logic and thinking of the technology leaders and the gap that is emerging between that edge and traditional organizers and current leaders of organizations.

I jogged (yes, me, jogging!) from Tim O’Reilly’s talk to a session on immigration reform at Aspen. I was still late, so I arrived during David Kennedy’s historical perspectives on American immigration. He reminds us that, despite our myths about people coming to the US out of a love of freedom, before World War 1, 44% of immigrants to America went home. Immigration was at a historical high, which dropped sharply between the wars and after WWII. During that period of time, less than 5% of population was foreign born. We tend to think of this as “normal” in terms of our national history, but it may just have been a historical anomaly.

For the last four decades, we’ve been living under immigration reform undertaken in the Johnson administration. We’ve now got roughly 36m Americans who are foreign born - that’s less in percentage terms than we had in 1910, around 13%. Around the world, we’re a less popular destination than we were 100 years ago - then, 40% of global migrants came to the US, while now it’s about 18%. And we’re low in immigrants compared to Canada (19%) or Australia (24%).

People migrate now for the reasons they did years ago. He quotes an old Roman saying, “Where there is bread, there is my country.” The industrialization of an economy tends to send people looking for new lifestyles and often towards becoming migrants. What’s different, in part, is that so much migration is coming from one state, Mexico. There’s the possibility of a “chicano Quebec”, a cultural state within a state. And the notion of illegals is pretty new - before 1924, there really wasn’t illegal immigration to the US since migration was legal.

Alan Greenspan suggest that there are major economic imperatives to act on immigration reform. He’s careful to pull immigration into two problems - one affecting low-skilled labor, and another involving some of our most skilled jobs. In the low-skilled sector of the US economy, there’s a very strong concentration of illegal immigrants. Roughly half of this at-risk group are illegal immigrants. On the high end, 40% or more of our science PhDs are foreign born, and many of the entrepreneurs are foreign born. This is an indictment of our primary and secondary schools, which are inadequate to cope with our labor needs. Greenspan tells us that we tend to overfocus on the low-skill illegals. “If we fail on the high-skill issues, we’re going to have a very hard time reestablishing hegemony.”

Alex Aleinikoff tells us that we’re still a nation of immigrants, but that the system is basically broken. We shifted enforcement of immigration to the worksite, but we’ve got no deterrance there. In the meantime, we’ve got ossified categories of permitting skilled labor, and long backlogs in reuniting families.

We tried to fix the system a couple of years ago, with a Republican president and a Democratic congress. It failed for a set of reasons - strong opposition from the right on legalization (with rhetoric around the idea of “amnesty”), opposition from important constituencies like AFL/CIO who didn’t want a guest worker program, and very little effort to create a “theme” that got Americans to embrace the idea of immigration change.

It may be hard to work on immigration in the current environment. But we’ve got a Democratic congress and President, a recognition of the importance of the Latino vote, and an economic crisis, which can be a double-edged sword. It sounds difficult to legalize 10 to 12 million workers in a situation of 10% unemployment, but with this unemployment, illegal immigration is falling sharply.

Greenspan reminds us that we tend to argue against immigration for economic reasons. We worry that immigrants lower the salaries of American wageworkers. But academics are pointing out that these sectors of our economies are shrinking - we simply don’t have many low-education, low-wage jobs… and there’s a set of jobs we need to fill and might be in trouble if we lost our illegal migrants.

Alexander points out our odd belief that people come here undocumented to avoid paying taxes. This isn’t true, and immigrants pay payroll, real estate and sales taxes. But by legalizing immigration and linking it to taxpaying, we could turn this into a tax and law enforcement issue.

Kennedy (I think) tells a funny story from southern Arizona, a massive fence with a six mile hole in it. “It looks like border patrol by Christo.” The wall ends at the Indian reservation, which won’t let the border patrol build a wall or enforce border security.

As it turns out, walls may have a paradoxical effect. When we tighten border security, transaction costs rise. The effect? People still immigrate, but they stay… and they try to bring in their families. It’s a perverse consequence of increased border security.

We get GREAT questions, including:

- Ambassador Karim Kawar, whose biometrics firm IrisGuard uses iris scans to enforce deportation from the UAE - why is the US using this sort of technology?

- A Kansas schoolteacher wants to know how to give bilingual students more time to graduate

- A Mexican-American advisor to Calderon who points out that we need to think of the US and Mexico in dialog - we supply guns and buy drugs, and we need to take ownership of parts of our border security problems.

Pioneering technology publisher Tim O’Reilly tells us that “government as a platform” is the definition of government 2.0. To explain to a non-technical audience what this means, he explains that his company specializes in finding innovations at the edge and amplifying them, through events, publishing and market research. This involves watching alpha geeks like Rob Flickenger. Tim says he knew Wifi was important when he saw Flickenger on the roof of the O’Reilly building using a cantenna to bring Wifi to his favorite coffee shop. Similarly, they were able to anticipate web services by watching developers build screenscrapers, using other websites as data sources.

Tim helped coin the term “web 2.0″ and offers a definition of the term. “Top internet sites are built on huge databases which get better the more people participate,” This is a new paradigm - “data, not some sort of hardware, is the ‘intel inside’, the source of lock-in” to appealing platforms.

As an example of how this works, Tim points to Google Voice Search. It gets better each time we use it, learning from user input. And it coordinates three databases - speech recognition, a search database and a location database linked by the Internet into a common platform.

Innovators have begun bringing government into this new paradigm. Carl Malamud helped put the SEC online, using a small NSF grant, data from the SEC and a lot of persistence. Fifteen years later this has helped turn into a vast movement for government transparency. In the UK, Tom Steinberg founded MySociety, and introduced tools like They Work for You, which increases parliamentary transparency, and Fix My Street, which allows individuals to report potholes and ask the government to fix them. This has now been picked up by 311 services throughout the US.

Our new president appears to understand this in a deep and fundamental way. His campaign platform was a self-service organizing platform much as Craigslist is a self-service advertising platform. The question is whether we’ll actually see this in governance. Tim reminds us that “government has always been a platform for collective action,” reminding us of Ben Franklin’s quote, “We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang seperately.” Franklin’s version of government invited lots of citizen participation, including ideas like a government matching grant - citizens could raise a certain amount of money, and government would match the funds raised.

Somehow, Tim says, we got lost and turned to “vending machine government”, a model where we put in taxes and take out services. Can we undo this, and build government that enables four types of interaction:

- Government to citizen - providing services and information to citizens
- Citizen to government - citizens report on probelms that need government assistance
- Citizen to citizen - not every problem needs to be solved by government
- Government to government - we need better cooperation within government agencies

Tim suggests that there are some lessons from the technology space that could be useful in building Government 2.0

Build open, expandable systems
The rise of the IBM PC platform had to do with the fact that anyone could build compatible hardware, or that Michael Dell could built his own low-cost machines. The web succeeded because Tim Berners-Lee allowed anyone to use his code and build their own website. This is an example of what my colleage Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity” - the “capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions…”

In open government this might mean open, portable health records, or open data that allows competition by third parties on government contracts.

Build simple systems and let them evolve
The original sketch of Twitter, Tim shows us, was half a sheet of legal paper. The system’s incredibly simple, but there are now 11,000 applications running on top of it, written by third parties. Simple systems like the Internet Protocol can act like hourglass models - they run on a diversity of systems, and support a diversity of applications around a simple protocol.

“Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.”

Design for cooperation
The Unix operating system was built around the idea that we could join together independent programs with no more than a protocol that allows these programs to work together. This allows for a very different school of software development than in Windows, where 90,000 developers need to figure out how to work together. In Linux, thousands of loosely coordinated little groups build the system together.

The notion of governance via loosely coordinated groups is a Jeffersonian one. And a system like the Internet domain name system looks decidedly Jeffersonian (as David Post points out in his new book.) We can build complex systems, like DHS Virtual Alabama, by encouraging people with lots of data to cooperate and share and build complex maps that allow for recovery from natural disasters.

Learn from your users
Google was late to the game in mapping. But Google is used by 45% of all mashups online. That’s because when innovators started building mashups of Craigslist and Google Maps data, Google didn’t shut the door, but hired the first guy to build a mashup, and then released an API to make the task easier.

Fedspending.org was a site built by OMBWatch, an NGO funded by the Sunlight Foundation. Their tool was so good, it ended up obviating a system the government was building for much more money - the government ended up throwing out their system and using theirs instead.

Lower the barriers to experimentation
The government tends to treat projects like the Apollo 11 rocket launch: “Failure is not an option.” It should be. We fail all the time, and we need to learn from it. He quotes Edison: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that did not work.”

Much innovation comes from a single engineer within an entity like the New York Times, putting archives up on an inexpensive, rented server from Amazon. The low cost of failure made it easier to experiment.

Build a culture of measurement
“If it works, do more, if it doesn’t, stop doing it.” We need to watch how our systems succeed and fail, and build systems that respond to user stimuli. And we need good metrics which we can watch carefully. As Atul Gawande demonstrated with his recent, brilliant article on healthcare, we need to ask quesitons like “How do we measure the success of healthcare?”

Google runs auctions almost continually for it ads, taking advantage of “realtime economics”. Walmart runs a system that connects a consumer purchase to an order from a factory within 14 seconds. Realtime data is the backbome of these “living organisms, responding in realtime to stimuli.”

Throw open the doors to partners
Tim celebrates the iPhone ap store, suggesting that it worked vastly better than more controlled models for aplication development on the Blackberry or Nokia phones. Governments need to stop using tools like earmarks, sole source licensing, and no-bid contracts, which lead to a less open ecosystem.

We also need to make sure eople understand what data comes from the government. He quotes an unnamed congresscritter who asked him, “Why do we need NOAA when we’ve got weather.com?” We need to show what the government can provide and what people can build on top of it. The government launched satellites, and many companies built great GPS tools on top of it.

Tim closes with the idea that government needs to be a vehicle for collective action,
a convener first, and a problem-solver second. He references an effort in Kauai, Hawaii where local businesses faced the closure of a state park due to a washed out road. “They could protest - shaking the vending machine - but instead, they coordinated.” They brought in materials and workers and fixed the road within three days.

Fixing complex problems requires figuring out what government needs to do, what private entites can do and what coordinated citizens can do. If we build systems that allow all these behaviors, we’ll see a great deal of positive change through Government 2.0

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Please see John Palfrey’s notes as well for another perspective.

Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute introduces a conversation titled, “Your life in a surveillance society”. The discussants are Jack Balkin, legal scholar and philosopher at Yale Law School and Admiral Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency. Gerson offers examples of surveillance in our lives, including the airport, cameras to detect speeding, but also activities like Twitter. He suggests that there’s an increasing acceptance of devices and mechanisms which we might have past thought as totalitarian.

Balkin rejects the term surveillance, and breaks the term down into the collection of information (which is possible via many different means), the collation of information (because the collection of information alone isn’t all that valuable), the analysis of information and producing new information out of it. The power often comes from collation, not from collection - the fact that a man bought a pork chop isn’t very interesting until we figure out it was Rabbi Bernstein.

We’ve got more powerful tools than ever before for collection, collation, analysis and, ultimately, for control. If you have an information society where problems are solved via information, you automatically have a surveillance society. The question is who’s doing it - the government, private entities, or you and me.

McConnell suggests that money won’t work without surveillance - the ability to operate transactions around the world in under a second implicitly requires surveillance. He suggests that WalMart’s success is based on surveillance, careful watching of their supply chain. In the intelligence community, he tells us, “surveillance” is a passive term, while “reconaissance” has an active connotation, of going out and seeking information.

Balkin is asked whether government or corporate surveillance is more important. He answers, “Yes”. He notes that there’s a relationship between private companies that collate data and sell it to government entities. “When you think surveillance, you think NSA… but you should be thinking about the delivery of healthcare benefits.” We’re primed to think about government information collection as a threat, but we should be thinking more broadly about powerful actors in society. This includes Walmart and Choicepoint… but this might also include the person next to you with a cameraphone, or anyone you interact with online. We should consider “democratic surveillance”, where surveillance tools are placed in everybody’s hands. Democratic surveillance sounds much nicer, but that’s not necessarily the case.

McConnell is asked “Who watches the watchers?” He offers the truism that “we’re a nation of laws, we’re governed by the Constitution” and that oversight needs to be in the law. Asked whether we got the law right in the Patriot Act, he observes that it was passed very, very quickly and is likely to be changed at some point. But he points out that there’s been government abuse of surveillance as far back in history as we know. He reminds us of FBI surveillance of chief Justice Earl Warren under Hoover.

He looks at the complexity of our FISA laws. In 1978, at the heart of the Cold War, the structure seemed pretty easy: if it’s foreign, it’s okay to surveil, but if it’s domestic, it has to be for foreign intelligence interests and needs to be of an agent of a foreign power. But technological change forced a three-year process to change the laws to reflect technological change. That said, “we don’t even know how to think about surveillance.” As such, the danger is that “bureaucracies will define reality in their own interest”, and may prevent the changes we need in telecommmunications as a whole.

Balkin suggests that it’s hard for legislative branch to oversee surveillance. The executive branch tends to stonewall these inquiries, and so “the executive branch is where the action is.” We may therefore need checks and balances and internal policing within the executive branch on these issues.

McConnell mentions that the Navy has never initiated changes internally. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s football program featured a battleship and the legend, “No one has ever sunk a Navy battleship.” The Pearl Harbor attacks moved the Navy from battleships to aircraft carriers. Congressional pressure in the 1980s forced the armed forces into joint command, which made the US military the strongest in the world. With these examples, he suggests that it’s Congress’s responsibility to hold the executive responsible.

Asked a question about tradeoffs between privacy and surveillance, and the willingness of youth to sacrifice privacy, Balkin again parses a question into parts. He suggests that, if you have the benefits of an information society, these security concerns come with the services you demand. You adjust to the information sharing that comes with these new services. He mentions that feelings about privacy have a great deal to do with your age cohort: what technologies did you grow up with, and what do you use? Some of these technologies require trade-offs - Facebook requires some information sharing, but it allows people to do things they never did before. Finally, we experience “privacy myopia” when we encounter tech we don’t understand. We don’t know what GPS in our mobile phones could be used for, so we let it slide and hope that nothing bad happens.

McConnell makes the point that, to participate in the intelligence community, you need to pass a security clearance. To pass a clearance, you subject yourself to extreme surveillance and scrutiny. That work is currently done by contractors - while those contractors are under the same laws as the intelligence community, it’s potentially a concern to all of us.

The panel is asked a question about the US government’s “cybercommand”. McConnell takes ownership of the idea: “The Cybercommand was created because I recommended it.” He argues that we need the capacity to do more than just passive surveillance of bits - we need to seek ways to exploit holes in enemy systems so we can shut down their air defenses. We need to protect banks, so we need to figure out how people are attempting to break these systems and block those attacks before they happen. This need to be a function build on the NSA, McConnell argues, because we need their unique codebreaking talents. He reassures us that domestic surveillance needs to focus on international targets - domestic surveillance must be of foreign targets and needs to be warranted. But he sees a domestic role for cybercommand in supporting the department of Homeland Security. (He doesn’t address whether the militarization of cyberspace is a more appropriate paradigm than crimefighting, or an engineering paradigm of repairing holes.)

Balkin suggests that forgetting may be harder than remembering in our current digital environment. He suggests that we may not want institutions to remember forever - we may want them to have a form of institutional amnesia. He’s challenged on this point from an audience member - why would we want to forget information that could help solve a long-cold murder, for instance? Balkin’s answer involves distinguishing between different kinds of information states. Authoritarian states are information gluttons, in the sense that they want to know everything about you, and information misers, in which they don’t reveal data about their own operations. We want a democratic information state, which is an information gourmet, not a glutton. We need some government collection of data to operate social services, but we don’t want a government to know and remember everything. If it does, we want it to either forget or forgive. And we want it to be an information philanthropist, offering as much information as possible about its own operations.

This morning at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Brian Lehrer show is being broadcast live as we act as breakfast-eating studio audience. The first guest is Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. Lehrer introduces Pawlenty as the Republican’s Obama - young, smart, charismatic and a party leader, who was considered a front-runner for McCain’s running mate.

Pawlenty admits that he didn’t get the result he would have liked in the Coleman/Franken recount, “but the process was fair.” The problems, he says, weren’t with the voting process but with absentee ballots - rather than seeing interest groups encourage people to abuse the absentee ballot problem, he argues that we’d be better served with limited early voting.

Framing Pawlenty as a likely frontrunner against Obama, Lehrer asks how he governor thinks the President is doing. He concedes that Obama inherited a tough situation, but worries that the federal government has allowed spending to get out of control. “They’re not even trying to balance the budget anymore.” Asked whether this spending is necessary for stimulus, Pawlenty argues that most stimulus money isn’t directly benefitting the economy. Asked whether Minnesota considered refusing stimulus money, Pawlenty points out that Minnesota is 5th lowest recipient of federal money.

In reference to the future of the Republican party, Pawlenty concedes, “the Republican party’s in a rebuilding year. We need draft choices, maybe some trades…” Lehrer wonders whether the Republicans simply need some new ideas - Pawlenty’s new idea is a very old one, nuclear power.

Lehrer points out that perhaps Pawlenty’s most radical idea is “unallotments”, unilateral actions by the governor to eliminate spending approved by the legislature. “This has been aroud since 1939, and we believe we’re on solid legal ground,” he says, but concedes that there are likely to be some lawsuits from public interest groups.

Pawlenty is here to talk about educational innovation. Lehrer asks whether Minnesota would sign up to a national educational standards test that’s indexed against an international standard. Pawlenty’s hesitant about signing up, because he’s worried about federalization of education, but he concedes that there’s a problem with state-based standards. He favors a voluntary standard, not a federal mandate. Lehrer quipps, “Republicans don’t like federal standards because they’re federal. Democrats don’t like them because they’re standards.”

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Te heart of Lehrer’s show is a conversation about digital natives and how a new generation is using the internet. The discussants on stage are legendary game designer Will Wright, University of Washington learning expert Dr. Patricia Kuhl and my colleague John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital”. To frame the conversation, Lehrer calls on four high school students at the Ideas Festival as visiting scholars. They tell the audience that they spend hours online a day, at least half on social networks, notably Facebook. One sees a difference between how she uses the internet - a quiet, isolated process - and how a sister from Ethiopia does, favoring personal contact over online.

Lehrer asks John Palfrey whether digital natives are a different species, as one reviewer of his book suggests. He admits that “digital natives” is an uncomfortable term, one that he and Urs Gasser tried to reclaim in the book. He argues that it’s a population, not a species - digital natives are based on access, not just on their generation. He’s especially interested in gaming, because it has a “flattening effect”, crossing socioeconomic groups.

There is, he argues, an emerging global culture of digital natives. And there are common problems for digital natives, problems of privacy and safety. Asked the impossible “a good thing or a bad thing” question, JP suggests that the internet and computers are incredibly powerful tools for creativity, enabling kids to do things that parents find literally unbelievable. On the downside, he worries that kids could get a less good education online because they don’t have navigation skills to find the information they need. This could lead to a problem of “driving a larger digital participation gap.”

Will Wright sees “a tidal wave of change” in how people are using technology, moving into a different way of thinking. Digital natives are surfing the top of the wave. Educational users know they need to be riding the wave, but might be in the middle, while others are being washed over. His games, he concedes, are influenced by a constructivist approach to education. Kids connect to the things they’ve made, and revel in the ability to create.

The students in the audience seem to agree. While none play Spore, they’ve all played Sims, and they admit that they enjoy the building creation aspects, as well as the ability of bringing digital characters into conflict.

Dr. Kuhl is asked how computer gaming is affecting learning. She mentions that there’s an enormous amount of learning that happens in informal settings, implicit learning, rather than through explicit, classroom learning. People learn an enormous amount from reading each other’s intentions - it “feeds the social brain”. Kuhl is running an experiment on language acquisition, seeing how 9 month old children learn second languages. She’s got graduate students who are native speakers of Chinese and Urdu. They play with one set of children for 12 in person sessions. Another set hears the second language on television, a third on tape. She then does brain studies to see whether brain centers are activated by the sounds or words of the language. Kids who learned in person show the same patterns as native speakers of these languages - kids who watched TV or listened to the tape showed no effect. “Under age two,” she says, “don’t put the kid in front of TV to get them into Harvard.”

The scholars in the room tell the audience that they watch almost no television - one admits to being a Top Chef fan. John Palfrey addresses the issue of multitasking, suggesting that most digital natives are watching television while doing homework and using the Internet. Palfrey tells us that “multitasking” isn’t a word kids identify with. He prefers the term “task switching”, moving rapidly between different activities. Students at Harvard Law, he tells us, are often switching between note taking, Twittering, answering email. Those who are focusing on something other than the class - checking email - don’t learn as much, where as those who are using the laptop to research and participate often learn more.

Brooke Gladstone offers a question from the audience, worrying about the lack of in-person connections in virtual environments. Dr. Kuhl acknowledges that the research isn’t definitive, but reminds us that “People need people to learn.”

This 5-minute video has Google Chairman Eric Schmidt describing fundamental change that needs to be made for industries to genuinely be transformed into the future. After describing how most of the money is still going to the incumbents, Schmidt says: “Change has to occur from the private sector; it has to occur from enlightened leadership, and; it has to occur in areas where money is being made. . . .  I would argue that Google is as successful as it is primarily because of the openness of the Internet.”

HT: Jeff Jarvis

The world's largest commercial satellite was launched into space Wednesday, with a mission to provide phone service to cellular "dead zones" in North America. [via Cellular News]

... TerreStar has shown prototypes of the phones, which are similar to BlackBerrys, and like them, would have access to data and e-mail. The phones aren't on sale yet. TerreStar plans to have the system running before the end of the year.

To connect to the satellite, the handsets will need a clear view of the southern sky, just like a satellite dish. When that's not available, the sets will be able to connect to regular ground-based cellular networks. TerreStar has a roaming agreement with AT&T Inc.

Twitter users who lack an audience for their messages can now buy followers. The BBC reports.

Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service.

Followers are available in blocks starting at $87 (£53) for 1,000. The biggest block uSocial is selling is 100,000 people.

... USocial estimated that each follower on Twitter was worth about 10 cents a month to a company that got them to sign up. The money would be made from adverts and sales on websites that followers click through to.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review of Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” he said that Apple will soon be making more money from iPhone downloads than it does from the iPhone itself. The WSJ reports.

He said this to make a point that businesses can still be successful charging for content. But a quick glance at the iPhone’s numbers show that he may have been a little too hasty in his assertion.

... But a bigger moneymaker than the iPhone itself? It’s not even close. Apple doesn’t break out details about iPhone and App Store profits, so it’s difficult to get a precise figure. But Shaw Wu, an analyst for Kaufman Brothers, said his “guesstimate” for Apple’s quarterly App Store revenue is a few hundred million dollars at best, out of $1.5 billion in overall iPhone-related revenues.

On a per phone basis, Wu estimated that Apple gets about $600 a phone, give or take a few, based on a calculation that divides iPhone cash flow by the number of phones it has sold. (Consumers are able to buy iPhones for much less because cellphone carriers subsidize the difference).

Read full article.

Reports from Iran say that SMS text messaging services have been unblocked for the first time since disputed presidential elections. The BBC reports.

Defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi this week called on the government to end its interference in phone networks and the internet.

Correspondents say texting has been restricted since 11 June - the day before disputed elections which saw the controversial re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The lifting of the restrictions has been reported by a number of Iranian news agencies monitored by the BBC, including Tabnak.ir, a conservative website believed to be associated with former Islamic Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezai.

Tabnak said that SMS services, although restored, were still blighted by technical problems.Messages up to three weeks old were being sent out, and some users were receiving multiple repeated messages, it said.

Read full article.

Speech technology is advancing quickly; even smartphones offer apps that let you speak commands and perform voice-activated searches. Now, a new app for iPhone and Blackberry can convert spoken Arabic into spoken English (and vice versa). The mobile app's speed of processing and accuracy is unprecedented for such a complex and different pair of languages. Gizmodo reports via Popular Science reports.

Created by Sakhr and Dial Directions for use by the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and other military customers -- not you -- the app has implications for field personnel who need to understand foreign speech in dire situations. The app also provides a text translation.

Web tools such as Google Translate can convert written Arabic to English, and speech companies such as Tell Me and Nuance convert speech to text, but this mobile app is the first to convert Arabic on a mobile phone.

Monday, July 20 9:00a to 4:30p at The Inn at Saratoga, Saratoga, CA.

Price: Early registration is $1695.

Phone: (888) 438-9510

Age Suitability: 18 and up

A 3 day intensive course on how to start your mobile App business from the ground up.

This course introduces you to proven models for rapidly starting new business with a focus on what works, and what to avoid. You will explore funding and financial models, marketing and legal structures,

Over the course of the class you will build your business plan and leave prepared to start putting it into practice.

Class requires a business background or desire to start your own iPhone App business.

[via The San Jose Mercury News]

• The EveryBlock source code
  EveryBlock released its source code. Holy moly!

In the closing “conversation” today at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Charlie Rose interviews former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and James Baker and current deputy secretary James Steinberg. The conversation, unsurprisingly, begins with the recent protests in Iran.

Secretary Baker saw the protests as encouraging, despite the violence against protesters. The protests were fueled by dissatisfaction, and they may be exposing that the Iranian government is less of a theocracy, and more of a hardline military and security government. This might give us options we otherwise might not have, but we don’t have much we can do on the ground. “I’m the only person here to serve in a Republican administration and I think President Obama has handled this just about exactly right.” In Hungary in 1956, “we called people out but weren’t in the position to help them.” We don’t want to make the same mistake in Iran. And we cannot be the whipping boy for the Iranian government.

The violent crackdown can’t stop us from talking, Baker argues. During the Cold War, the Soviets were “equally committed to doing damage to the US, to wiping us off the earth… and we talked to them for forty years.” He gets strong applause for the line, “You don’t need to make peace with your friends, you need to make peace with your enemies.”

Secretary Albright notes, “For a long time, I thought Iran had won the war in Iraq. That may have shifted. Iran, as Persia, wanted to be regional hegemon.” In their confusion of what they’ve done, she argues, they have changed the dynamic of the whole region.

It’s comfortable to say that we’re never going to deal with this government, but not very helpful. The problems are practial - who do we talk to and about what. And the possibility that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons is a genuine national security problem.

Steinberg acknowledges that the most powerful aspect of the Iranian protests “is that the protests were made in Iran - it wasn’t somehow protesters implementing outside policy.”

Baker suggests that the US has options other than doing nothing. He references “sanctions that really bite, financial sanctions,” and then intriguingly reminds the audience that the US still has thousands of nuclear weapons. “We’ve got all these nukes, it doesn’t take but twenty seconds to reaim ‘em at Iran. We need to let those hardliners know - they may be flaky and crazy, but they don’t want to be blown off the face of the earth.”

Albright notes that it’s a mistake to equate protests in Iran with certain historical precedents. “The people seeking freedom in Europe were pro-American. That’s not what we see in Iran. People want to be noticed, but not necessarily embraced by the US.” She notes that the past embrace of Iranian politicians has weakened them.

Steinberg is clear that the US isn’t reaiming nuclear weapons any time soon. “There’s no question we can deter them. But our fear is Iranian nuclear weapons as a shield, not as a sword,” allowing Iran to take aggresive action in the region without fear of retaliation. And if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it’s likely to provoke other countries to acquire them.

The conversation shifts to Israel, and Steinberg points out that the US is making preliminary overtures to Syria, engaging to a new degree. Baker suggests that Syria is critical because it has influence with Hamas. He remembers a conversation with Syrian officials in the past - he asked whether Syria could get Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist in exchange for the Golan. He believes Syria will do it. The trick may be finding ways to talk to Hamas indirectly - he recollects talking to Palestinians who were obviously speaking for the PLO, but maintaining the fiction that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Albright reminds us that Hamas is so powerful because they actually provide services - we need to acknowledge that they’re more complicated than just a terrorist organization.

We move into a rapid tour of hotspots around the world. Asked about whether the US should restrict air strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Steinberg steers the conversation to nationbuilding. “We’re not going to do nationbuilding - we’re going to allow Afghans to build their own nation.” Baker’s got a different plan - he suggests we should pay off and “flip” members of the Taliban, suggesting that this is a common local practice and will be well-received.

Albright has no easy answers for Pakistan, but has a great line: “I think Pakistan is everything that gives you an international migraine.” She lists problems including corruption, its location, its interconnection to other conflicts, and notes that we’re at a point where we can’t even succesfully deliver humanitarian aid and support to the Swat Valley.

The topic of Russia inspires spirited conversation. Albright notes that in her past trips to Russia and nearby countries, she sees a huge mistrust of the US. She feels that they’re deeply worried about US influence in the “post-Soviet Sphere”. We need to make it clear that NATO isn’t against them, and we’ve got an added complication with missle defense: “I personally wish we’d never gone towards missle defense. It’s hard to persuade the that the missles and NATO aren’t against them.” Albright notes that the new generation in power in Russia, people in their forties, are anti-American for the most part.

Charlie Rose leads the conversation to North Korea via China. Baker reminds us that China owns us, or will soon. “If we don’t do something about our current account deficit, we’re going to be in big trouble.”

Steinberg sees increasing distance between North Korea and China. He believes that the recent provocative acts have been a shock to China as well. “The Chinese are worried about destabilizing North Korea, but are fundamentally committed to seeing the de-nuclearization of North Korea.” They see it as a threat to them - if the program continues, it’s going to change the face of Northeast Asia.

Our world tour includes a quick stop in Europe - though none in Africa or Latin America - before we move on to health care. This quickly turns into a conversation about the difficulty of bipartisanship. Albright offers multiple diagnoses, including the zinger, “With due respect, the Republican party is not exactly functional.” Baker offers a practical suggestion. Given the hatred between Republicans and Democrats in the House, bipartisan initiatives actually need to be written by the President.

Asked about the future, Baker predicts that the US will still be the preeminent power in the world in twenty five years. We’re not falling behind, he tells us, but others are catching up in part by embracing our models. But he worries about our financial future. Albright reminds us that we’re a nation that doesn’t like to go it alone and predicts a future of state to state partnerships. And Steinberg is silent, perhaps because it’s easier to be opinionated on this topic when you’re no longer in office.

Anna Deveare Smith holds a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, who was the inaugural poet at President Barack Obama’s election. Smith notes, “When I heard she’d been asked to compose a poem for the inauguration, I hollered out loud, but I wasn’t surprised.” Smith has brought three poems for Alexander to read, and invites her to pick one - she selects “Absence”, an excerpt from an epic poem about the Amistad, a slave ship that is seized, makes its way to Connecticut, and where US authorities declared the captives on board free Africans, not slaves and property of the Spanish. Alexander’s poem imagines the voyage from the captive’s perspective, the blue notes that come from moaning. It closes:

“in the absence of women in the middle of the ocean
there is no deeper deep, no bluer blue”

Asked about the official role of inaugural poet, the transformation of poetry into a new form of language, with the authority of its inclusion in an inaugural ceremony, Alexander reflects, “Poetry isn’t meant to resolve everything - it’s meant to open us up. And official language doesn’t have the power to do that.”

Alexander is heavily influenced by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and she says, “Gwendolyn Brooks is the bard of the south side of Chicago. She’s the one who should be delivering the poem, because she’s from Obamaland before it became Obamaland…” How do you write a poem for a mall that used to be a slave market? Looking at a stretch of grass edified by Walt Whitman? How do you put this moment in a timeline?

She reads the inaugural poen, “Praisesong for the day“. It’s a praisesong in the West Africa tradition, but it doesn’t invoke Obama. Alexander sees this as a continuation of a campaign that invited people to look beyond the candidate, towards us, to the movement. A praisesong that served one person wouldn’t be true to the moment.

“‘Love’ is the one word we probably won’t hear President Obama say.” We might misrust him if we heard it a lot - it’s not a politician’s word. She quotes “Work is love made manifest”, and the room struggles to remember who the quote is from. “Kahlil Gibran,” someone yells out. “Good. I wanted it to be Gandhi, but I was worried it might have been Britney Spears.”

I’m a bad blogger today, but a good conversationalist. Aspen isn’t bloggable in the same way as a conference like TED or Pop!Tech - we’re in a large music hall without wifi or power, and I’ve got the only laptop out in sight. And I’ve been spending less time transcribing sessions and more catching up with old friends.

But fortunately I ducked back into the “tent” to catch the end of a talk I’d really wanted to hear, a dialog between Secretary Madeline Albright and scholar Hernando de Soto. De Soto is a proponent for property rights. He argues that a key towards economic development is ensuring that people in the developing world can document ownership of their houses and land. This is critical for economic development - in the US, most entrepreneurs fund their businesses based on mortgaging their houses. You can’t do this if you can’t document your ownership…

Secretary Albright connects these issues to the problem of failed states. “Failed states come about when we don’t know who owns things, who’s in charge, or who’s responsible.” It sounds absurd to push for property rights in a place like Darfur, she tells us, but that’s how we prevent state failure and a critical piece of recovery from crisis situations.

De Soto observes that much of the world’s agricultural production is being produced by a small set of nations - the US, China, Canada, Australia - the breadbasket of the world. There’s far more space available in Latin America and Africa, and countries like China are now acquiring huge swaths of land in Africa, as are companies like Unilever and Hershey. (Or Daewoo in Madagascar.) People argue that property rights are a right wing concept and that we shouldn’t be emphasizing them in the developing world. But if we don’t, De Soto argues, we’re going to end up with an African continent owned by large corporations with no rights for the current landowners. This may sound like a right-wing movement, but it’s the way we give people sufficient rights that we don’t end up with peasant insurgencies like the Shining Path.

Albright suggests that we need to consider the role of women in property ownership, including inheritance and property rights. The interlocutor (whose name I didn’t catch, alas) references the participation of women in the recent street protests in Iran - they’ve got more at stake and less to lose than the men do.

DeSoto argues that it’s easier to grant property rights than we think. You’re giving poor people what they’ve already got - “Law is already there in a semotic stage.” He tells a story of visiting with the Indonesian government after spending a vacation in Bali. The government asked him, “How do we find out who owns what? We want to avoid another revolution.” DeSoto’s advice - take a walk. Every two hundred yards or so, a different dog barks. “There may be no records, but the Indonesian dogs know where the borders are.”

We might also look towards models that have worked before. In Colorado, in days past, if you cut down enough trees, you’d have a legal claim to the land. DeSoto tells us, “There’s practice, then you codify it.”

I’m heading for the airport, anticipating meeting up with the Traveling Geeks. Look for posts, pix, maybe streaming video next week.

The social and political impact of the Internet is growing at a rapid pace.  After all of the successes credited to President Obama’s social media campaign network in last fall’s election, we still find ourselves at the earliest stages of development of the social layer of the Net.  Still, some are quick to dismiss the activist power of the Internet and still are not convinced that this medium will continue to change the way the world organizes around issues.

Take a piece in today’s Washington Post by Monica Hesse, which commented on the “trendiness” of online activism and discounted these “click to join” groups as nothing more than numbers on a Facebook page.  This completely misses the impact that social networks have had on increasing the awareness of many issues and building communities around these issues.  As we gear up for our nation’s 233rd birthday, we are reminded of how colonists planted seeds of activism and organized against oppressors from abroad.  Instead of Facebook fan pages, they had militiamen; instead of asking others to click a link, they asked them to help gather supplies; instead of Twitter feeds, they used horses to get messages across.  From top to bottom, they created organization that allowed supporters to thrive in any role or level they chose.  The mother who allowed soldiers to sleep in her cabin, was as vital to their success as the soldiers themselves.  It didn’t matter what a supporter of the revolution was doing, their support alone was enough.

Today there are groups on Facebook aimed at gathering supporters for just about any cause.  Just like any other advocacy effort, supporters join for a variety of different reasons.  That’s where the Hesse piece really misses the mark.  The assumption is made that to participate in any activism online, one must be willing to fight hard and organize physical results to be “worthy” of being a supporter.  This claim ignores the power of community building and the very essence of grassroots advocacy.  My support of a specific issue is not measured by how much I donate or how many rallies I attend.   To discount followers of causes on social networks engaging in conduct that is a “trendy and easy virtue” ignores the impact that supporters have on social networks at every level of involvement.  The person simply receiving message updates on the issue is just as vital to the success of the cause as the top-level organizer who sends tasks and ideas to the group’s followers.

It’s especially disheartening to read about Anders Colding-Jorgensen and his little social experiment of creating a fictional Facebook cause and group just to “prove” how little the followers of a social media group matter.  The time spent on rounding up supporters for a fake issue could have been better spent organizing supporters for a real global issue.

While not all social media activist campaigns are built with the same number of leaders and organizers, every level of involvement in these mediums is important.  These networks are valuable at even the base level of getting information to hundreds of thousands of new supporters, regardless of how involved those supporters might ultimately be.

Rather than simply dismiss the power of social network organizing, we should focus on developing its use further as we have only begun to explore the possibilities of organizing masses online around global issues.  If several thousand people can use a Facebook group to save an outdoor movie festival in Washington and one man can organize millions to take to the streets in Columbia against the FARC then there’s no telling what the future holds for social networking.

News stories are reporting that the federal judge in the Lori Drew “MySpace suicide” case has thrown out Ms. Drew’s conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  Although what Ms. Drew did was horrible, we have long thought that her federal indictment was a gross distortion of the law.

The judge will issue a written order soon, and then we will know exactly why the case was tossed out.  But based on comments the judge made a few weeks ago, we are hopeful that the court will broadly reject the government’s effort to criminalize violations of “terms of service.”  We will report back once the opinion comes out.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about one of the upgrades in the iPhone 3.0 software update that allows the Safari browser on iPhone to be location-enabled. Firefox had previously implented something similar in a beta version of the browser, and now that functionality has been released to the world. Firefox 3.5, released on Wednesday, is fully “location-enabled.”

What this means is that Web sites can now ask Firefox for your location, and the browser can now deliver it. Initially, Google has signed on as the default “location provider” for Firefox. As a Firefox user, suppose you pull up a Web site that wants to use your location. Firefox will gather some information about WiFi access points near you and send that information to Google. Because Google maintains a database that maps WiFi access points to actual physical locations, it can use this information to calculate your location. That location gets sent back to your Firefox browser, and the browser forwards it on to the Web site that originally requested it. The accuracy of the location depends on a number of factors, but can be within a handful of meters in densely populated areas.

Firefox and Google have taken a couple of excellent steps to protect the privacy of Firefox users throughout this process. The location information gets transmitted over an encrypted connection so it can’t be sniffed en route between the browser and Google or vice versa. Firefox doesn’t provide Google with any information about the site that made the location request, so Google doesn’t learn anything extra about your browsing habits. Google also de-identifies the information it receives from Firefox two weeks after it’s collected.

This seems like a pretty solid set of standards that all location-enabled browsers and location providers should be able to meet. While it’s nice to see Google and Firefox take these steps, we’re hopeful that Firefox will be able to expand its pool of location providers, and that new location providers will be able to meet these same standards. There are actually a diversity of ways in which Web users can or will soon be able to obtain their own locations, and as new location providers crop up, users should have the ability to choose their preferred provider.

On the user experience side, the story is somewhat mixed. While Firefox will prompt you for your permission before passing your location on to a Web site, there’s no easy way to see a list of sites you’ve given your location to. If you lose trust in a particular site, you have to go back to the site itself to revoke its permission, which is probably precisely what you won’t want to do. And the mechanism for disabling location-awareness altogether is somewhat complex. We expect to see some more intuitive user controls for these kinds of features as more and more Web sites become location-enabled.

I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival and still trying to get a sense for how this conference works. I arrived late last night and spoke in one of the early sessions this morning, along with Brooke Gladstone and Clive Thompson. Good fun, but it means I’ve only experienced the conference as a speaker, not as a guest.

There are competing sessions during lunch, and I passed through a standup routine by Louis Black to make it into the basement to hear George Dyson talk about Darwinian critic, Samuel Butler. The Butler in question is a somewhat obscure Victorian figure. He wrote novels, translated, and engaged in a fierce, lifelong debate with Charles Darwin. Dyson tells us that George Bernard Shaw observed that a man who managed to alienate both Darwin and the church wasn’t goint to make a lot of friends.

Dyson sees a lot to like in Butler’s view of the world. When Butler fled England - and a debate with his father over the value of baptish - he found himself in New Zealand and was fascinated by a telegraph line that connected a harbor and the town of Christchurch. The experience of being able to transmit news to town that a ship had been sighted radically changed the life of the town, and Butler reflected on the development in a way that anticipated much of the contemporary internet, including e-commerce. His observations were wide-ranging, including reflections on the possible evolution of machines, including the idea that machines might reproduce through humans, much as humans use biological subsystems to reproduce. His critiques of Darwin focused on the question of how Darwinian processes actually came about. He ended up postulating a form of intelligent design that was bottom up - based on the motivations of cellular and molecular mechanisms, rather than on a top-down intelligent designer. In his work, Dyson sees anticipation of Dawkins and the idea of the selfish gene.

Darwin and Butler sparred throughout their lifetimes, though Darwin didn’t directly address Butler’s critiques - his advisory board, however, wrote ferocious criticism of his work, including a memorable passage where Butler is refered to with the drawing of a dog. Dyson worries that we dismiss his thinking, especially about bottom-up strategies of evolution, at our peril.

Asked who’s the most important critic of Darwin today, Dyson cited Carl Woese, who discovered Archaea, a new kingdom of life that includes extremophiles, life that thrives in deep undersea events in environments that appear unsustainable. Woese sees a great deal of genetic transfer across species within the Archaea kingdom - deeply separated orders or families might manifest large, similar sequences. This suggests a model of genetic spread that’s different from conventional Darwinian evolution. It might look more like the way languages borrow from one another. Woese - and Dyson - speculate that Darwinian evolution might just be one possible ways in which organisms share genetic information. It might be have been an earlier form of evolution, and perhaps horizontal genetic transfer, as we see in virii and in Archaea might be more common.

Dyson ends with a slide of his father, poking at eddies in a British stream. “You can poke an eddy with a stick and it will just reform. Perhaps species are like this - we somehow eliminate lions, but we see similar prey behavior in housecats. Maybe species are like eddies, emerging through Darwinian selection, through horizontal gene sharing… but the behaviors inevitably emerge.

Asked about his feelings on intelligent design, Dyson admits that he dislikes the dogmatic response the scientific community tends to have to the line of thought. Intelligent design, he says, shouldn’t be taught as a theory equivalent to Darwin’s, but no scientist should dismiss something entirely out of hand.

Dyson offers the idea that Richard Dawkins errs in believing that you need to be an atheist to be a good scientist. There have been many excellent scientists who are “dual citizens” of the world of science and faith.

The questions close with queries to Dyson about how science should be taught in schools. He remembers a science class where he and fellow students were given a year to study the Grand Canyon and try to determine how old they thought it was. They ran experiments to test erosion, built instruments to test mass, and generally learned how to do science. There were some parents who disliked the class - they pointed out that students didn’t learn much about grods. “But you were extremely well prepared to learn about frogs.”

The afternoon session at Aspen Ideas Festival today is a four hour “conversation”, involving a remarkable set of discussants. To give us a sense for gravitas, we open with “Fanfare for the Common Man”, played on timpani and brass. I guess this is to prepare us for speakers like Attorney General Eric Holder… who, unfortunately, wasn’t able to join us due to a dental emergency. (I’m not making this up.) Instead, we get the new Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, in dialog with Bob Schieffer.

(A reminder for all my readers - I just try to get the notes down - there’s no implied endorsement of anything said or not said here.)

Oren was born, raised and educated in the US - he gave up his US citizenship to become Israel’s ambassador to the US. He explains that this is a long tradition in Israel - the United States forces people to give up US citizenship, not Israel.

Schieffer asks the Ambassador to comment on a rumor today, that Israeli officials have indicated willingness towards a freeze in settlements as part of a larger peace process. Oren won’t confirm this, and reminds us that Israel reserves the right to coninue to expand existing settlements, but doesn’t plan not to acquire new land for settlements. This is not, though, just a negotiation between the US and Israel - he reminds us that this is a negotiation towards the whole Arab world. If there were indications that the Arab world was starting to accept Israel, perhaps there’d be more willingness. He says that Israel is looking for “baby steps”: overflight rights, visas for visiting scholars.

Trying to explain why the settlement issue is so difficult, Oren says, “These are our tribal lands… You can’t say to jews ‘You can’t live in the land of your forefathers.’” On the other hand, “that right can only be qualified by the right of another people,” and he acknowledges that the Palestinians have rights to these territories. The hope is to find mutual recognition, comity, prosperity, a recognition of parallel, opposing claims to these lands.

Oren served in the Israeli armed forces during the operation to move settlers out of Gaza. He talks about how difficult it is to remove people from their homes on land they believe they have a right to.

Schieffer asks about Palestinian reaction to the recent plan put forward by the Israeli Prime Minister - a recognition of a Jewish state, no right of return, and no joint control of Jerusalem. Orem asks us to back up - Israel is acknowleding a Palestinian claim to land, with a requirement that there’s a mutual acknowledgement in turn. Israel is demanding a demilitarized state - it will be allowed a police force, but the fear is that past attempts to allow Palestinian authorities to have weapons have led to attacks on Israel, particularly rocket attacks. And Jerusalem, he says, is not off the table - it’s simply only for the last stage of discussions.

Schieffer wonders why Jerusalem couldn’t be a shared, international city. Oren argues that international cities don’t work, and argues that the city wasn’t possible for jews until Israel took over in 1967. As for refugees, Oren wants to see refugees repatriated to a former Palestinian state, not to Israel, as it would change the Jewish character of the state. He reminds Schieffer that Israel has repatriated jews from around the Arab world who’d been expelled or threatened.

Oren draws a distinction between Palestinian groups seeking the elimination of Israel and a new generation who want economic ties with Israel. He points to security successes, with US forces training Palestinian police, which have enabled parts of the West Bank which had been closed to reopen. And he notes a changing tone in the region - Israel is no longer the enemy to Sunni states - it’s Iran, and Israel is agreed that Iran is a threat.

Schieffer asks point blank, “Will Israel tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran?” Oren sees “multiple existential threats” from a nuclear armed Iran. Not only is there the chance of a direct strike, there’s the possibility of transfer of the bomb to terrorist groups. Israel loses its ability to retailate for terrorism. And he argues that if Iran gets a bomb, other states will immediately seek them as well. “Israel will take whatever actions are necessary to protect its citizens from this multiple existential threat… Israel has the military means to defend itself under all conditions.” (This last line gets applause, perhaps because it’s an elegant dodge to a question of whether Israel has nuclear weapons.)

“The Gilad Shalit story tears my nation apart… the country that tears its heart out over a single soldier is not going to let a government threaten it with nuclear weapons.”

Asked about recent unrest in Iran, Oren says, “This is a regime that shows no compunction in killing its own citizens. It will show no compunctions in killing our or other citizens.” Israel is concerned that a “so-called moderate leader will emerge in Iran, and continue to support Hizbullah, Hamas and continue to seek nuclear weapons.” Only with a change in Iranian policy will Israel be comfortable.

Oren argues that great American leaders, including Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson, were Zionists, and suggests that the US/Israeli relationship is like no other two-state relationship in history. As a centerpiece of US and Israeli foreign relations, it’s not going to change.

Oren ends on a light note, hoping that his next vacation can be in Riyahd. He wants to see a resolution to the settlement issue, a resumption of talks with the Palestinians, and talks with Syria, hoping that Syrian leaders will follow in the steps of Sadat and come to Israel. “The people of Israel have demonstrated again and again that when there is a sincere effort from an Arab leader, Israelis are willing to make enormous sacrifices.” He references Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt as an example.

The federal agencies responsible for administering the broadband stimulus program have announced their initial grant criteria, and the news on the openness front is good.

In comments filed in April, CDT urged that broadband services supported by stimulus money should connect users to the full Internet and the full range of Internet-based content and applications, as selected by users and without discrimination.  After all, the core policy rationale for supporting broadband is that it serves as crucial basic infrastructure, much like roads or electricity.  Basic infrastructure is so important precisely because it enables so much other activity, much of which cannot be anticipated at the time the infrastructure is laid and is initiated by users of the infrastructure rather than the infrastructure’s operators.

In a “Notice of Funding Availability” (NOFA) released yesterday, the agencies (NTIA and RUS) handling the broadband grant programs embraced the view of CDT and other advocates that broadband grantees should be subject to nondiscrimination requirements that go beyond the FCC’s 2005 broadband Policy Statement.  The NOFA says that grantees must “not favor any lawful Internet applications or content over others,” a requirement that “ensures neutral routing.”  This explicit nondiscrimination requirement should provide much better protection against the risk of network operators playing favorites than relying exclusively on the FCC Policy Statement, as some parties had urged the agencies to do.

The NOFA goes on to permit reasonable network management, as it should.  It doesn’t try to spell out precisely what this entails, but the language suggests that technical measures aimed at service quality should be “generally accepted” — perhaps a hint that, as CDT has argued, congestion management techniques should be consistent with basic networking standards.  The NOFA also points to caching and “application-neutral bandwidth allocation” as examples of techniques that would be permitted; hopefully this is meant to suggest that application-specific tactics, like Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic, will be frowned upon.

In any event, however, the agencies will require grantees to clearly disclose their network management tactics.  This too is an important safeguard.

Beyond the actual requirements, the NOFA embraces openness by stating a preference for applicants that pledge to exceed the minimum requirements for openness and nondiscrimination.  In particular, the grant scoring system awards extra points for applicants that provide services on a wholesale basis, enabling consumers to have a choice of retail providers.  This echoes a specific recommendation from CDT’s comments.

Finally, it is worth noting that the openness requirements apply only to Internet applications and content.  Grantees will be required to provide connections to the Internet, but may also provide “managed services such as telemedicine, public safety communications, and distance learning,” to which nondiscrimination requirements would not apply.  This position is consistent with a point CDT has been making from the beginning of its involvement in the Internet neutrality debate.  It is crucial to preserve the open nature of Internet service, but that doesn’t meant that all non-Internet services should be forbidden.  Internet services coexist with cable television services, for example.  So long as they provide a robust level of “plain vanilla” Internet capacity, there is nothing wrong with a future in which broadband providers experiment with more specialized, dedicated-purpose services as well.

It is good to see the broadband stimulus program get off on the right foot regarding openness.  Naturally, administering the program may pose challenges, and the nondiscrimination provisions announced yesterday apply only to facilities built with stimulus funds.  But it is an excellent start, and a strong sign that the Obama Administration’s endorsement of Internet neutrality will be carried forward into actual policies.

Perhaps we finally have the last piece of evidence to help everyone admit that, in regards to the use of social security numbers as an authenticator, the emperor has no clothes.

The National Academy of Science today published a study from Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University demonstrating that Social Security Numbers (SSNs) issued after 1988 can be relatively easily surmised if you have the person’s birth date and place of birth. It seems that, in 1988, the Social Security Administration (SSA) started issuing the numbers sequentially.
Therefore, Acquisti was simply able to take death records published by the SSA and use them to identify the possible range of SSNs that were issued to a person on any given birth date. If you are born in a smaller town, the odds are pretty high that Acquisti could get your SSN on the nose. As this population ages, it will be even easier for anyone to do this.

When I first read Acquisti’s paper, I was mortified by the implications, but thinking about it more it simply confirms what all experts in identity policy have known for a long time — the SSN is a pretty good identifier, but a horrible authenticator. In other words, the number is good in a case when you have two people named John Smith in making sure that you don’t confuse one for the other, but not good at all in helping you assess that one John Smith is who he says he is (eg, the bank that asks for his SSN when he doesn’t have his bank account number readily available).

The SSN is just not the secret that we’ve been taught it was and, at some point, we are all (in particular, corporate entities) going to have to stop treating it as though it were.

This week’s Carnival at Rudy deWaele’s m-trends.org includes a featured review of Mark A.M. Kramer’s  post about Citizens as Sensors. The always very original Rudy illustrates his Carnival with a mobile Medusa - as you can see here from hair her hair.

Given how much advertising we all see, especially online, you know it means something when the entire advertising industry gets together to make an announcement. Today, the advertising industry, as represented by a cohort of trade associations, joined together to publish their own self-regulatory principles, with an aim toward increasing privacy protection for online behavioral advertising.

It’s encouraging to see the advertisers move into the privacy fray here (although not entirely surprising). For nearly a decade, the self-regulatory space has been dominated by the Network Advertising Initiative, which has historically included only third-party ad networks, which comprise just a small sliver of the industry. But when the FTC issued its own suggested self-regulatory principles earlier this year, the guidance from the agency wasn’t limited to any particular advertising sector. The advertising associations appear to have gotten the message, and have tailored their principles in rough accordance with the FTC’s recommendations.

The advertiser principles incorporate many of the ideas that we and others have previously suggested to both the FTC and the NAI. The transparency principle includes a robust framework for providing notice outside of privacy policies, and lays the groundwork for development of a uniform link or icon that would appear on any web site or advertisement where data is collected or used for behavioral advertising. The principles explicitly address business models that may rely on the collection of all or substantially all of a consumer’s Web traffic for behavioral advertising (including ISP-based models), requiring a higher standard for choice than is required of the more traditional Web-based model. And the principles provide for strong enforcement through existing and to-be-created compliance programs.

In some areas, though, the principles don’t go far enough. For example, we had suggested to both the FTC and the NAI that the notion of “sensitive information” needed to cover a broad array of data types, including health information and location data. The advertiser principles cover only a very limited subset of medical information and leave out location data altogether. The principles are also silent about consumer access to the behavioral data collected about them. Google has demonstrated that providing profile access is possible, and we would expect the rest of the industry to follow suit.

But the real test for these principles lies not in their ability to withstand the scrutiny of CDT and others, but in how the advertising industry actually implements them. The advertising and privacy communities have been talking and writing about improving self-regulation for months and years on end. Here at CDT, we’re ready to see how the industry puts all of those words into action. Six months from now is when we’ll know how good or bad these guidelines really are.

• Federal IT [Spending] Dashboard
  Federal government has launched a site allowing users to dig into reports on federal IT spending, highlighting projects which need "attention" or review and providing comparisons to estimates, project phase information and accountable staff.
• Paul Hawken's Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 | CommonDreams.org
  Some of the comments are also interesting.

For the past two days I have been attending the Personal Democracy Forum 09 in New York City. As I said here at SmartMobs after the first day, the event was a sweet spot in the ongoings of political operatives, with many of the key operatives in attendance. (Thanks to Jay Bryant for the image of the operatives.)

Although the organizers strive to balance the annual forum, this is Obama’s year and his euphoric minions dominated things. As an “old pol,” I was fascinated by the rhapsodies to digital organization and tools. Having spent a decade over forty years ago participating in winning election campaigns with none of the stuff they talked about at PdF09, I was looking to learn how the digitization and virtual networking have really changed things, if they have. I am still not sure.

One thing I did learn is that the government sector may well be about to be knocked on its heels by the spontaneous stuff networks do, just as have other major sectors including commerce, entertainment, communication, and more.

One by one the speakers from the Obama administration told us how they are setting up online mechanisms by which citizen opinion will flow in to help in their new way of “governance.” Is that really what is going to happen? Will citizen input be accepted and put to use by the establishment? That is not what happened with the music industry. That is happening not so much with newspapers and other top-down media. That is certainly not what happened in Moldavo’s Twitter Revolution, or Iran. It was interesting to hear one White House panelist describe what her team did when a large number of inquiries about the President’s citizenship came into an open online suggestions tool they were operating out of the White House. She told us she was surprised that such questions would be sent in, and that her White House team took care of it by degrading the Presidential citizen category incoming from the public as they would have questions, as she put it, about aliens from outer space.

There is a general assumption that during the Presidential election last year team Obama used the Internet to open some new sort of way for support to flow to candidate Obama. I know from my own experience that there have long been analog ways to do the same thing. The “I like Ike” cascade in 1952 produced more of a public landslide victory than what occurred in 2008. Political campaigns have always found ways to attract and cluster supporters. Today’s tools are 3×5 index cards gone hyper and viral.

But the Obama efforts they talk about to involve networks in governance may be about to create something that IS completely new. Network science is about emergence. Patterns form in networks from the aggregation of many individual nodes. The sovereignty of the individual node seems very hopeful to me for the future of democracy, not just in the United States, but worldwide. In the political and governance context, nodes in a network are individual citizens. There is no top down from which to exercise control in a network that will force favorable patterns to emerge — a really big bummer for top guys with controlling urges.

There are countless ways to screw up a fragile democracy. Two aspects of the democratic process seem to be especially vulnerable - elections, and term limits. Recent events in Iran have reminded us that elections are surprisingly easy to rig if you’ve got adequate control of electoral commissions. (Ideally, you should never need to rig an election. With state control over media, it should be easy enough to marginalize opponents and consolidate the image of a strong executive. The mistake in the Iran elections may have been the televised debates, which established Moussavi as a credible threat to Ahmedinejad…)

And there are a lot of rigged elections. In Africa, we’ve seen recently seen a thoroughly corrupt Zimbabwean election leading to an uncomfortable power-sharing arrangement, a rigged Kenyan election leading to violence and a bloated power-sharing government, a massively flawed election in Nigeria being accepted largely because it didn’t erupt into violence. Even in Ghana, where the 2008 elections were rightly celebrated for providing a peaceful transfer of power (the rare and celebrated “double alternation“), some of my friends affiliated with the ousted NPP claim that the election was flawed, but their party stood down rather than risk Kenya-style chaos. (I have no way of validating these claims, but I’m fascinated that an election celebrated for its smooth running is being questioned by some participants.)

Recent events suggest that we may need to pay close attention to the moment when leaders realize they’re constitutionally obligated to step down. It’s a legitimate concern in fragile democracies that a leader may be fairly elected, and may then manipulate the levers of power to remain in office indefinitely. (The running African joke about democratically-elected strongmen has the punchline: “One man, one vote, once.”) So many constitutions include strict term limits for executives. And popular leaders often try to ammend constitutions to allow them to rule indefinitely - Hugo Chavez proposed such ammendments to Venezuela’s constitution and was narrowly defeated in a referendum in late 2007.

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is facing the end of his term in office and can’t currently stand for another term due to term limits. He sought a referendum allowing a constitutional change which would allow him to stand again. An hour before polls were scheduled to open, he was seized - in his pajamas - by military officers acting on a Supreme Court order and spirited off to Costa Rica.

That sounds a lot like a coup to me - the military has seized power and ousted an elected leader before the end of his term. On the other hand, the military was acting under court order, which leads to an argument that the presidential ouster was legally mandated. There’s been lively online debate on the topic of coup/no coup - readers on Reddit yesterday morning were greeted with an angry comment, “I am from Honduras. It was NOT a COUP” and a long comment thread debating events. The back and forth on the English-language wikipedia has been fierce enough that the Honduras page is currently protected from future edits (thought the Spanish-language page is not protected at present.)

While the Honduras situation is gaining some media attention - notably because both Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama have protested the events that have transpired - a very similar situation in Niger hasn’t moved beyond the back pages of the newspaper. In Niger, President Mamadou Tandja has been seeking an additional term in office, which has required constitutional changes via a referendum. The constitutional court ruled against his proposed referendum, and earlier this week, he declared he would rule by decree, dissolved the court that ruled against him and appointed 8 ministers who agree with his referendum plans. It’s not technically a military coup, as the military has stayed neutral… but an Nigerois opposition figure has called the situation a coup and been arrested for his troubles.

Mark Leon Goldberg, writing in UN Dispatch, asks “If a coup falls in Niger, does it make a sound?” While Tandja is earning brickbats from ECOWAS and from the EU, the story isn’t getting much play in international media. I can’t find evidence that Obama’s specifically condemned Tandja’s actions (BTW, I do not recommend searching for “obama niger” - it’s depressing, and won’t enlighten you on this story), and there certainly aren’t media pundits demanding an Obama stand on events.

It’s interesting to think about what democratic stresses attract international attention and which fly under radar. Protests in Iran were going to be front-page news, even before demonstrators displayed uncommon persistance and courage. Iran’s a founding member of the “axis of evil” - the Beatles of international media attention - a country that’s always red hot on attention maps. That Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a tech savvy population, many of whom knew how to evade the government firewalls that have been in place most of this decade, helped turn exciting, inspiring political developments into an international media phenomenon.

Other countries can have profoundly strange goings-on and healthy citizen media coverage, and won’t get a fraction of the coverage. See Madagascar, which has been in the throes of a deposed government, where bloggers have emerged as a key alternative to mainstream media. Or Fiji, where the military has been in control since late 2006, the fourth coup in recent years, and where recent restrictions on freedom of the press has been called “coup 4.5″ and turned bloggers into outlaw media outlets. We’ve covered both crises closely at Globa Voices, but we’ve not had the mainstream media interest we’ve received around Iran.

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves - you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population - Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

When you’re keeping tabs on an event like the upcoming election in Afghanistan, a basic street map that plots news stories is quite useful. But what could you do with a map that plots those news stories over voting regions that are shaded by poverty rate, literacy rate, or another human development indicator? The effectiveness of a map increases drastically when you add specialized data to the base layer. In this case, not only would you see the hot spots of activity, you could identify possible explanations for the activity.

The maps we’re familiar with are powered by tile sets – collections containing hundreds of thousands of individually rendered images that stitch together to form a larger map view. Tile sets are useful because they allow users to pan and zoom around a map with a web browser, but creating and maintaining a tile set is challenging. Tile generation demands a considerable amount of computing power and can take days depending on the size of the region being rendered. Finished tile sets occupy many gigabytes of disk space, making storage and distribution difficult.

With the help of Amazon Web Services, we’re building an infrastructure capable of generating beautiful interactive maps quickly. We’re using four Amazon services in this workflow: SQS (job queuing), EC2 (tile generation), S3 (storage), and CloudFront (distribution). The figure below illustrates the design.

Cartoon from Bruno Plante - Tulsa World. Captured in Newsweek, page 14, July 6/13, 2009.

Howdy--I'm Katie, thet newest member of the Cambridge EchoDitto team. And yeah, I say howdy. It's a fantastic word--wait just a second while I go look up the etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary--and although not everyone says it in my recently departed home of Washington State, no one would smirk at a casual "howdy" thrown their way. Here's what the OED had to say about it: Howdy originates from the colloquial slurring of "How do you do"--or, more specifically, "There, how d'ye do now?" first found in Vanbrugh, circa 1697. I'm curious what other people think of howdy-ing. I personally have a soft spot for it; my father, an Idaho mountain man, greets everyone that way. He even tips the bill of his baseball cap. But, I can see that if you don't have that cowboy-mystique worked into your impression of howdy-ing it might sound like a holler from the stands of a greased pig catching contest, or something equally as unappealing. Disclaimer: I've never been to a greased pig catching contest, I'm only assuming it would be unpleasant.

There is something really fantastic about having the Oxford English Dictionary online at your fingertips. I just popped open a tab in mozilla and in seconds found more history of a single word than I could've scraped together in a day from books (excluding, of course, the print OED). It gives you a complete etymological history of a word--starting with the first recorded instance of it in print, with author and excerpt, and then traces its usage all the way to modern day. American English is blessed and cursed by its liquidity--our vocabulary is so fluid that the nuances of a word get forgotten too quickly. In speech that's fine, it's fun, but in writing . . . not so much. When a fiction writer calls his female character a lunatic, it's useful to know the rich history of the word (ie a person heavily influenced by the moon). The informed reader would not be surprised then when said woman transforms into a werewolf and goes on a grotesque hunting spree in the asylum that tried to hospitalize her five years earlier. That's not the greatest example, but you get the idea. Word play is only possible with a depth of knowledge. And there's too much knowledge to hold in our heads, so we've got to have accessible resources. All of this is somehow meandering to me telling you why I'm here at EchoDitto.

I'm not a technology person; I've even been accused of being a Luddite . . .but no worries I'm not that far lost. No, I just prefer sticky notes to emails, books to the Kindle. PS--I didn't tell Joshua that during the interview, so that's on the down-low. Is there any way to block certain paragraphs from certain readers? If so, please snailmail me a letter with detailed instructions.

Even I'll admit that some things are just better online, like the Oxford English Dictionary. It's highly unlikely that I would have run down to the library to look up "howdy" in the bound-version OED; especially since I haven't stumbled upon a public library yet in my week as a Cambridge resident. Plus, well, I'd be embarrassed if someone peeked over my shoulder and saw that "howdy" furrowed my brow. The feel I'm getting from EchoDitto is that they're just a bunch of folks helping conscientious organizations figure out the best way to use the internet. We separate the OEDonlines from the Myspaces. Then we help make the OEDs prettier. I am glad to be working here, figuring out how to use technology in a way that benefits everyone, even people like me.

You could say that with the help of Verizon, RIM's latest Blackberry is going on world tour. In fact, that's exactly what's going on in the latest word that Verizon Wireless will launch t...

Obama Administration - White House News is a new app to keep up to date with President Barack Obama and his Administration.

This app will bring you daily blog entries from the Official White House blog, photos from the Official White House photographers, plus weekly video addresses by President Obama, videos of Press Briefings, Tweets from the White House's official Twitter account, and news articles from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.

(Government content used within this application is in the public domain. This application has not been endorsed by the Federal Government.)

[via What'on iPhone]

A fun piece from TechRadar on "iBores":

If you own an iPhone or if you have friends with Apple's mobile internet device/smartphone, then there is a good chance that you know what an 'iBore' is.

Or, horror of horrors, you yourself are one!

Over half of 18-24 year-olds in the UK claim to know an iBore, according to a Five News study of 2,050 adults aged between 18 and 24.

Most of these iBores tend to live in London and the South East, claims the YouGov study for Five News.

What's more, four per cent more men (29%) than women (24%) admitted to knowing an iBore.

Mobile phone charges will fall for millions of holidaymakers across Europe from today, after new regulations come into force to drive down the cost of roaming. The Guardian reports.

The changes – which were originally approved in 2007 – are an attempt by officials to end what they have called excessive charges.

"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end," said EU telecommunications commissioner Viviane Reding in a statement. "Expect the new roaming rules to make it much cheaper to surf the web on your mobile while abroad in the EU."

Examples of specific costs are available at the European Commission's website.

Cyclists, buses, cars and even pedestrians will become mobile pollution detectors in an initiative launched on Tuesday, reports the BBC.

Led by Imperial College London, the Message project will trial three types of mobile, wireless pollution sensor.

These will measure traffic pollutants throughout the UK, and transmit their data via the mobile phone network.

Scientists say such detailed mobile measurements could help improve the management of air quality.

Four UK universities are collaborating on the project, which will deploy 100 sensors in London, Leicester, Gateshead and Cambridge. Each one will measure up to five different traffic pollutants simultaneously, including carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide.

Other projects where cell phones monitor pollution:

-- Cyclists' cellphones help monitor air pollution - Cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab.

-- Cell phone Air Pollution Monitor - Squirrel is a Bluetooth-enabled gadget that monitors pollution developped by The University of California San Diego and Calit2.

-- Aero Phone measures air pollution - Pantech unveiled an unusual Aero phone - which looks like it might fly away - that measures the air pollution.

-- Cell phones to sense our environment and its pollutants - Tiny environmental sensors in cell phones and turn phone users into roving citizen scientists who continuously sample and respond to their personal environment.

• Our Brains on Music: The Science
  A review of Nova's season premiere episode, airing tonight. It's based on Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, which totally rules.

WSJ.com is surveying iPhone users about their willingness to pay for what is now a completely free product.

The quick survey asks flat out: “If full access to Mobile Reader required a paid subscription, how likely would you be to subscribe?” Answers ranger from “definitely yes” to “definitely no” with some middle ground.

[via PaidContent]

AppsFire which launched in private beta yesterday, allows you to recommend your favorite apps to anyone. TechCrunch reports.

AppsFire is actually an application that you install on you machine. Right now, it only works on Macs, but it's coming for PCs soon. And there will event be an iPhone app, we're told.

Once the software is on your machine, it scans your iTunes folder to find your apps. It then opens a personal webpage on the AppsFire site and places the icons for your apps in front of you, asking you to choose your favorites. Once you do that, you can share them using the social networks, via email, in a widget, or simply get a link back to your AppsFire page.

I am playing a bit of a punk to the wise elders of tech....Gavin and Michael.  I don't disagree with feelings of these riffs against walled gardens, lobster traps and annoying ads but I don't think the advice that emerges works.

I would suggest... 

1. Don't design for yourself. (Perry White reference alone makes this point)
2. Providing your vision, comments, staff time and content and only asking for email name alone is akin introducing yourself online.
3. It is not that big of a deal for people to "skip to homepage" through the splash page. Those pages are the best ways to start collecting information on users.
4. People are not on Facebook or "being pushed to Facebook" by groups. They are there for their friends. They are on Myspace in equal numbers. It is the nonprofits that need to listen and organize where the people are. Going where the people are at is reducing the barrier.

The problem is that many groups look at relationships as "lobster traps". Groups want to engage people to pick their pockets and political capital but want the lightest possible relationship (they can't service many relationships). Groups seldom want those people to talk back. The threat is that it is not controlled or directed in the same way as traditional platforms and the groups lack the skills, tools and organizers perspective to be able to let members serve each other.     


Get Thee Behind Me, Disco Duck! » Digital Diner.

Michael Gilbert (who I think of as my own personal Perry White) suggested I repost my response here, on the Diner. (I think he’s worried that I haven’t posted much stuff in the last few months. Not to worry Michael, it was just a dry spell caused by excessive time travel.

I just posted Crap Detection 101 to my SFGate “City Brights” blog:

Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap - a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Learning to be a critical consumer of Webinfo is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles.

The issue of info pollution has been on my mind since at least 1994, when I wrote “The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons” about the infamous Canter and Siegel - the first Internet spammers. A few years later, I personally confronted the importance of teaching information literacy to 14 year olds when I watched my daughter come of age at the same time online search engines became available. I sat down in front of the circa-1999 computer with my daughter and explained that most of the books she could get from the library could be counted on to be factually accurate. But when you enter words into a search engine, there is no guarantee that your search will lead you to accurate information. “You have to do some investigation before you accept anything you find online,” I warned her.

In a post last week about the Open Translation Tools summit in Amsterdam, I mentioned a “book sprint” that was working to put together a book on Open Translation.
Well, they did it. It was released today, and it’s a damned fine piece of work. (I say that independent of the fact that they used my Polyglot Internet essay as the introduction to the book!)

In five days, a team led by the indefatigable Adam Hyde put together the definitive starting point for people who want to learn what Open Translation is, what tools open translation communities use, what models are working for translation communities, and what the unsolved problems are in the field. The book includes case studies of notable translation communities, including Global Voices, Meedan and Wikipedia, as well as extensive lists of tools useful for localization and translation. It’s available, for free, both as a website and a printable PDF, and will both be published as a paper book, and continue to evolve as a project you can register for and contribute to. (It’s licensed under the GPL version 2.)

As with earlier book sprints, the project demonstrates that it’s possible to make a good stab at a guide to a field of work if you’ve got the right people willing to assemble in a room for five days. The first book sprint was instigated by my dear friend Tomas Krag, who got sick of spending all his time on the road in developing nations teaching people about wireless networking. He knew he’d never write a book by himself, so he held a book sprint, based on the idea of a code sprint, at the annual gathering of the developing world wireless community. Participants spent a long, difficult day arguing over the structure of the book, then went to their respective corners to write, edit, repurpose and recycle content from around the web into a comprehensive guide. The model worked well enough that Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals adopted it and has used it as a strategy for building new books around conferences.

I’m off to the Aspen Ideas Festival tomorrow, which looks exciting, celebrity-studded, and worth my careful blogging. But I seriously doubt that a team of smart and crazy people will get a useful book out of it, at least not in five days.

Chinese authorities today delayed implementation of the much-disparaged Green Dam-Youth Escort filtering mandate, just one day before the July 1 implementation deadline.

Since the Green Dam directive was made public, we have learned that the filtering software does not work as proposed or publicized, may create serious security vulnerabilities, may contain stolen code, and likely violates China’s WTO obligations. The filter targets far more than sexually explicit material and is capable of shutting down a variety of applications when politically sensitive keywords are triggered. Independent analysis has also revealed that security flaws in the software could make millions of PC users in China vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks

It comes as no surprise, then, that the mandate has encountered widespread domestic resistance, including criticism from mainstream Internet users and state-controlled media. Several prominent Chinese bloggers called for a July 1 Internet boycott if the government stood firm on the original implementation deadline, while other online activists have promised far more confrontational countermeasures.

For their part, trade groups representing a wide array of technology companies subject to the directive have worked in concert to push back, pointing out the many issues that such a product mandate raises regarding security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information, and user choice. However, some companies have already taken substantial steps to comply, and it is unclear what additional steps such companies have taken to mitigate the potential harm the software could cause to the privacy and security of their customers.

This directive has been a big test for the ICT sector. Trade associations are right to be concerned about the precedent their response may set: It is not hard to imagine even more intrusive technology mandates down the line aimed at perfecting the Chinese panopticon—directed not only at computer manufacturers but also mobile phone equipment and service providers. And many other countries that strictly control expression and access to information look to China as the shining example of how such technologies can be used as tools for maintaining greater political and social control.

The current combination of domestic outrage, embarrassing technical flaws, and concerted industry push back may (hopefully) persuade Chinese authorities to quietly scrap Green Dam altogether. However, ICT companies should expect that issues that invoke the corporate responsibility to respect human rights will only get harder, not easier. Many governments will continue to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance; companies must have a thoughtful, systematic, and proactive approach in how they will respond. At stake is not only their customers’ faith and trust in their products, but also the human rights of Internet users all over the world.

Happy Conclusion to Remote DVR Case

I noted at the beginning of the month that the Solicitor General had advised the Supreme Court not to reconsider the important Second Circuit case giving the green light to Cablevision’s “remote storage digital video recorder” (RS-DVR). I’m very happy to report that the Supreme Court has followed that advice. Yesterday the Court “denied cert” — meaning that it won’t take the case and that the Second Circuit’s decision will remain the final word on the matter.

This effectively puts an end to the serious threat posed by the original 2007 District Court decision, which held that the RS-DVR would infringe copyright based on the physical location of data storage. As CDT explained in a 2007 policy post and legal brief (http://www.cdt.org/copyright/20070608cdt-cablevision.pdf), the implications of that ruling for cloud computing could have been hugely damaging. Ditto the court’s finding of liability based on transitory buffering — something all digital devices do.

CDT and its allies spent a great deal of time to make sure the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and later the Solicitor General’s office would understand and appreciate what was at stake here. Thankfully, the final outcome is a strong appeals court decision rejecting the idea that using remote storage and buffers should expose service providers to extensive copyright liability. This was a big win, and a major bullet dodged!

With regard to my previous post, "The content published on Flexta's blog originates from textually.org" - with my permission by the way - was not entirely accurate as flexta has other content as well as their own.

The Congressional Research Service is a $100 million a year think tank that researches and writes informative and non-partisan reports on topics suggested by members of Congress. The catch–and the reason you might not have read their work–is that CRS reports are only made easily available to members of Congress. Citizens can request these reports from lawmakers, but without a public index, they can’t request something they don’t know exists. The CRS Reports currently rank first on CDT’s Most Wanted Government Documents. In an ongoing effort liberate these documents, CDT runs Open CRS, an online repository of public CRS Reports. To spotlight these reports, I will be writing “CRS Report of the Week” posts and feature a relevant report each week. These reports are informative in both that they serve as excellent primers to political issues and that they offer a degree of insight into what information is circulating around Congress.

Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative: Legal Authorities, Policy Considerations
#R40427
March 10th, 2009

A standing question about cybersecurity is the respective roles of the executive and legislative branches. President Obama has made cybersecurity a priority in the White House; his commitment to the issue came early when he asked for top-to-bottom governmental review of cybersecurity efforts. Another example of Obama’s interest in making cybersecurity a primary issue is his announcement to create a “Cybersecurity Czar” in the White House. Meanwhile, some in Congress have gone their own way, for example, with the introduction of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Although the executive branch might seem like the logical place to have cybersecurity authority, this CRS Report suggests that the President’s cybersecurity authority could be disrupted (or reaffirmed) by Congressional action.

The central idea is that cybersecurity defies categorization and that it is unclear where authority for executive action is given. The significance of this report is not only that it serves as an excellent introduction to executive action on cybersecurity like the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), but that this is the report Members of Congress read to understand their own authority on the issue. As the report states, “to be legally authorized, the CNCI and any executive-branch action must have some basis in statutory or constitutional law.” The problem is that cybersecurity objectives are likely to be “broad governmental reforms and enhanced partnerships with the private sector.” Current statutory law does not grant these powers. For instance, the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 deals with mostly administrative measures on a smaller scale than what the CNCI needs, while criminal provisions do not deal with preventing cyber attacks. There are holes in the statutory framework–some of the CNCI’s objectives might be covered under the President’s statutory authority, some may not.

The alternative is that cybersecurity could fall under the constitutionally given executive powers–the President is the Commander in Chief and during the inauguration, swears to protect the nation from imminent threats. If cybersecurity is categorized as national security, then the President and Congress share powers. To illuminate this area, the report refers to Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion in Youngstown Steel & Tube Co. Jackson provides a framework for the President’s constitutional authority in relation to Congress. Under the Youngstown framework, the President may implement cybersecurity policy until Congress takes action, due to their shared authority. Cybersecurity legislation could grant or restrain Presidential power. Regardless of legislation, Congress maintains oversight authority.

• %u2018How do we know what to translate?%u2019 Notes from OTT09, Amsterdam|Meedan Blog
  Lovely post from George at Meedan about one of the central problems with the polyglot internet - how do we know what we want to read if it hasn't been translated yet?
  (tags: translation language polyglot xenophilia internet bridging globalvoices meedan)
• NedaNet Resource Page
  Eric Raymond is fronting a group of hackers, calling themselves NedaNet, and attempting to put up proxies and Tor nodes to help people within Iran
  (tags: activism iran iranelection circumvention anonymity proxy ESR raymond opensource)
• In Iran, Journalism Makes Use of Unverified News - NYTimes.com
  Limits on professional journalists reporting from Iran are forcing a rapid change in what material is amplified from social media into mainstream media.
  (tags: iran journalism blogging twitter youtube socialmedia)
• Channel One Television - Home
  Website for Channel One TV, Iranian dissident TV from Los Angeles
  (tags: iran tv television media journalism activism)
• 4207-USA-IRAN/TELEVISION
  Shahram Homayoun of Channel One TV (Iranian satellite TV, broadcast from Los Angeles) explains that his team has been supplying miniature video cameras to Iranian contacts for the past year in the hopes of getting footage of the Iran elections.
  (tags: iran media journalism reporting television satellite)

Obama to the press corps: "Where do you guys get these ringtones by the way?

[via Wonkette]

Fluent News aggregates exclusively made-for-mobile content from the most trusted news sources across the Web. Xconomy Boton gives it a good review (it's not available or even visible from the Swiss app stores where I live).

Stories on Fluent News comes from top news sources, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and CNN.

In their own words: Stay current wherever you are with fast, continual news updates. . All content from your latest sync is also available for offline reading. Our interface organizes content intelligently, grouping similar stories together, which provides breadth of news as well as one-click access to broader coverage of any single story. Easily post articles to Facebook or Twitter or email links to friends.

The content published on Flexta's blog originates from textually.org.

Two years ago this week, I wrote a controversial essay in an attempt to locate divisions that I was seeing play out between MySpace and Facebook. This week, at the Personal Democracy Forum, I revisited these ideas in a new talk:

The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online

Needless to say, this talk provoked some discussion which is why I thought it might be helpful to share it. What you have here is the crib from the talk. Comments are VERY much welcome!

Facebook MySpace youth PDF democracy politics class race

In Barcelona November 21-22, 2009, the first Personal Democracy Forum will convene outside the USA. It will be held, at the Torre Agbar, the striking tower shown in the image with this post. The Barcelona setting is in the calibre of salon that this week’s New York City PdF09 attendees are enjoying in the edgy 21st century opulence of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. The assembled digital types, politicos that they are and mostly incumbents, seem very much home in the handsome halls.

This morning I am returning for the second day of NYC PdF09. The event has hit a sweet spot in political timing — and is fabulous. I will post some more about its smartmobby aspects later.

For now, here are some things that define this sweet spot in the ongoings of political operatives:
Many key players from the winning Obama campaign are present, and telling us why they think they did so well. Lots of government digital types are chewing on how to be better at Web stuff and be more transparent. Sunshine pols are networking and speaking up — again the hot word is “transparency” (ok, sounds good). Republican operative brass are talking about the future with open ears and knowing smiles. One bummer: Mayor Bloomberg showed up only by Skype, missing the sweet spot mark by being too busy to come Uptown.

• Google Launches SMS-Based Services for Africa
  google launches initial version of mobile-based, sms tools for uganda, with eye to other developing markets in africa. hopeful that this will also be the beginning of a development platform for sms apps.
• AdaptiveThemes | Crowd Sourced Drupal Themes
  An interesting business model: profit share the creative, while providing the value-add non-creative aspect of theming in house.
• A Pictorial History of Twitter’s Rise to Pop Culture
  great visual, as summarized by WOMMA: "Twitter has taken the online world by storm in the last few years leaving many asking where it came from and how did it get so big so fast. Well, Twitter went live on July 13, 2006, but it's seeds were sown in the early 80s when real-time text updates were developed for UNIX. The ball kept rolling as SMS text messaging, blogs, and social networking became mainstream. Before you know it, Shaq and Ashton Kutcher are Twitter darlings. The following graphic shows how all the factors melted into the phenomena known as Twitter."
• in-browser screen capture via bookmarklet
  simple screen capture and annotation app - capture any webpage, mark it up and send it off, all from a simple bookmarklet.

New York City is hopping on the iPhone "app" bandwagon. Mayor Bloomberg is hoping software developers will take new data the city's posting online and turn it into applications for fun and profit.

The City is launching what Bloomberg says will be an annual competition called "Big Apps." The Grand Prize winner gets to go out to dinner with the mayor.

[via Wnyc]

The Barnes & Noble Bookstore app let's you shop and read reviews. And you can use your iPhone’s camera to search and shop for millions of books, DVDs, or music CDs.

In their own words:

Search millions of books, DVDs, and CDs using your iPhone’s camera. Just snap a photo of the front cover and we’ll find it for you instantly! Get product details, editorial reviews, and customer ratings – even find and reserve a copy in the store closest to you.

A store locator will help you find the Barnes & Noble superstore nearest you, see upcoming events, and get directions.