Personal Democracy Forum conference: initial themes

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 0

"So what's this conference you're going to?" asked my friends, not braced for an explanation that usually took me more than ten minutes. Ultimately, though, they all ended up excited about the ideas behind Personal Democracy Forum.

These friends care about politics. They take sides on and argue over the issues, and at some level they notice the processes. And although some know what an API was and a few even understood the concept of mash-ups, it's remarkable how completely they had been bypassed by the current movement toward open government, whose importance to the Obama administration was signaled by his release of a memorandum on transparency and open government on his first full day in office.

I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives--no, in this case a movement integrating the public into government functioning, and that therefore creates an external constituency that helps to perpetuate the system; an ecosystem of non-governmental organizations that will react precipitously and aggressively if the government tries to shut them out.

Digging for themes

PDF is appropriately held in New York City, a culturally open megalopolis that is ethnically and politically uncategorizeable. Free speech holds forth on the subways where the exhortations of the homeless prove that the great art of oratory is still alive.

A thousand people signed up for the conference (leading, of course, to more than a thousand Twitterers). At the gorgeous Jazz at Lincoln Center location, the Rose auditorium was totally filled, and the hallway was choked as attendees strove to reach pitifully undersized rooms for breakout sessions.

As a conference with a contemporary, tech-oriented bent, PDF ripples off into all kinds of online resources. At several points the keynotes were held against a real-time twitter feed, goading on the feeding frenzy by showing the accounts of the people who tweeted the most. This focus on immediate response--and on quantity of response--had a specific effect on the consciousness of the audience. The twitter feed reinforced through highlighting and repetition the most provocative sound bites and the statements most clearly relating to current issues at the top of attendees' minds

This is a useful function to play, but the provocative utterance and timely issue is only one superficial level of conference engagement. We all need to take away what we've experienced, sit with it a bit, and look for underlying themes that represent a significant trends that can guide us.

Give a few hours for reflection, I'll use this blog to synthesize three recurring themes I heard during the first day. I'm sure more ideas will settle out as I spend even more time thinking through these two days of meetings.

• The prerequisite: the power for change lies with the public
• The platform for democracy: infrastructure we all need
• Time to tune in: we can't tolerate static
• Miscellaneous insights from speakers and participants

The prerequisite: the power for change lies with the public

It's scary being a politician, let alone the an agency head. These people may seem indescribably powerful to the rest of us, but they live in fear of public pillory triggered by their own missteps.

Jeff Jarvis listed, as one of his four key elements of change, the ability for government to fail without risk of recrimination. David Weinberger approached the same theme from a different direction, talking about how all wisdom is provisional, emerging, and scattered. Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck--who will be speaking tomorrow--have repeatedly made similar statements in the context of bringing the innovation culture of the Silicon Valley to the area around Foggy Bottom.

In my first ramp-up blog for PDF I talked about a four-part cycle for successful public/government collaboration. Perhaps we need to start the cycle earlier, or add some kind of parallel cycle, to recognize that the public has to make the commitment asked by Jarvis: the promise to show forbearance when the government fails and to grant it a mandate to do innovation.

The platform for democracy: infrastructure we all need

If one engages in some deep listening, you can hear beneath all the celebrations of transparency a recognition that success depends on several elements of infrastructure. Early experiments in open government may produce exemplary and even spectacular successes, but the culture won't take hold until this platform is in place.

Computing networking and computer technology are the most obvious requirement. Mark McKinnon, a Republican communications strategist, called for universal broadband during his keynote.

But as audience members pointed out, literacy is another requirement: basic literacy as well as media-savvy literacy and knowledge of the tools that let one participate.

Ethnologist dana boyd took the discussion to the next level by pointing out that even when people do go online and do use social media, they self-segregate by race, class, and educational status. Her case study for this claim was limited (the demographics of MySpace users versus Facebook users) but the statements she culled from young people showed that the digital divide is possibly even deeper online than these social divisions are offline.

I believe that a predilection for different forums and ways of interacting online doesn't have to prevent different races and classes from coming together on issues of common interest, such as health care. But boyd's point that people set up online barriers that make it harder for them communicate across these barriers is salient. She pointed out that we need to recognize that the sites we visit are not the same sites everyone visits, to spend time on the sites of people we want to influence or collaborate with, and to embrace different modes of interaction among different social groups.

Finally, open discussion requires a tolerant environment. Recent events in Iran, as well as the introduction of Internet filtering software in China, show that governments can choke off civil society online; the technology was described as a cat-and-mouse game where both the side of information dissemination and the side of repression learn how to increase their power.

Time to tune in: we can't tolerate static

The last theme I'll highlight from the first day is the sense that we can't stand still. Americans (and particularly young Americans) expect more and more that we can have a say, that we can move quickly and have choices, that we can contribute to decisions and their implementation. We've already seen how many businesses (not all, of course) that fail to keep pace with these expectations are shrinking. If governments don't meet the expectations, people won't be able to replace it the way they replace businesses, but there could be increased feelings of alienation and increased social dissatisfaction.

Miscellaneous insights from speakers and participants

ChallengePost announced today a site that brings together people with needs and problem-solvers, using a challenge model similar to the Netflix prize or the TopCoder software firm. In publishing a challenge, someone can offer money or just recruit people to offer thanks. Respondents may be motivated to solve the challenge by intangible rewards as well as money. ChallengePost offers advice on how formulate a good challenge and judge it expertly, but the form of each challenge is the prerogative of those who post it.

The Digital Literacy Contest tries to develop a generation of problem-solvers who can analyze the streams of government data coming online. They will run contests in high schools and colleges that start with test problems and then move to questions to which they do not have the answers. When several students converge on the same solution, it is published for the public benefit.

Morley Winograd of NDN briefly analyzed Ron Paul's failure in the presidential election despite his sophisticated use of social media. If I understood Winograd, the medium--which is well constituted for bringing groups together--contrasted too much with the message or individualistic libertarianism.

In a forum on participatory medicine, Esther Dyson said of the current health care debate, "We're focusing too much on health care and not enough on health, just as one might complain that the government focuses too much on laws and not enough on getting people to do good things." This was the start of a session that discussed ways patients and doctors could use information sharing to improve outcomes and lower costs.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called in over Skype instead of coming to the conference. Over his call he announced an expansion of the famous 311 service and various initiatives to accept public complaints and provide public data online. I was glad Skype was available for the call, but I find it odd for the government to be using commercial services (Kundra moving staff to Google Docs, YouTube hosting White House videos, agencies going on Facebook, etc.). I can see why the government wants to use available social media for convenience, and it provides a familiar access method for constituents. But eventually governments should develop their own public-domain software, tailored to government needs and open to all.

Blair Levin, who is designing a national broadband plan at the FCC, started out buttering up the audience by making fun of incumbent telephone companies, then gave us a "homework assignment" of reviewing and making improvements to its presentation at the the July 2nd FCC meeting, material for a set of staff workshops in August, and plans to be make in the Fall to do research. A panel following Levin's presentation--matching up a much-applauded representative from Free Press with representatives from the cable and telco industries--looked at the issue of speed. Is it fair to set a single target for speeds? Will the FCC define broadband to more closely match more advanced countries?

Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: adaptive legislation can respond to action in the agora

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 0

This article is the last in a series leading up to the Personal Democracy Forum. The first article was posted on June 16 and the second article on June 19.

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Whole libraries could be filled with writings about the growth of executive power during United States history. The power of the executive branch is likely to increase with technology. But for open government, that growth may be a necessary transition to more public involvement.

As its name indicates, the executive branch is responsible for carrying out the law. The open government movement wants the public to have more say in its own governance, and envisions a more fine-grained implementation of government's role in everyday life. For instance, open government advocates want more citizen input into details such as the siting of physical facilities and the choice of projects for funding. Logically speaking, therefore, the public has more control over implementation if decision-making is shifted from the legislature to the agencies carrying out the law.

Congress should also crack open its hidden chambers; law-making itself could be much more open. It will be interesting to see what comes out of work on a collaborative law drafting project in health care, started by Congressman Anthony D. Weiner of New York. I don't harbor any fantasies, though, that much of his public input will survive the traditional Congressional horse-trading that will follow.

But even the most ideal legislative process ends up with a static document that tries cumbersomely to anticipate every use and abuse of its language. (That's why laws are filled with hedges such as "This passage shall not be construed to...") Legislation is like setting off over rough terrain in a tank. Although the tank can complete the journey, it does so only by flattening everything it encounters.

Some political scientists also think that the executive branch is inherently better suited to understanding and responding to public needs. Here is an intriguing quote from Jane E. Fountain's Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change, summarizing work by Alfred C. Stepan:

Intellectual activities and decisions of civil servants working for long periods on policy questions are arguably more powerful and influential than the sporadic attention of legislators to particular policies.

So I'll take a look at the future of the executive branch, and end this three-part series with speculation about how to build fewer legislative tanks and more Jeeps.

• The executive branch: power and potency
• The legislative branch: how to write laws for an engaged public
• Appendix: the top question asked on Change.gov

The executive branch: power and potency

There's little mystery concerning about why the power of the executive branch tends to grow. Of the three branches of government, it's the one that actually arrives on the scene. It makes decisions about real people and activities on a daily basis and takes responsibility for those decisions.

To act effectively, the executive branch tends to centralize. (Unfortunately, so have many legislative branches in recent decades. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is run by three people, when they're not fighting indictments or running off to seek other positions: the Governor, the Speaker of the House, and the President of the Senate.)

Because knowledge is power, technology will cause the power of the executive branch to skyrocket over the next few decades. Civil liberties advocates already decry surveillance cameras, wiretapping, the subpoening of information collected by private firms, and the computer analysis that the government applies to all the resulting data. But the data currently available is miniscule compared to everything that will be collected by atmospheric sensors, electronic toll collectors, and various other technologies that are starting to be installed. If Microsoft can produce a game machine cheap enough for the consumer market with face recognition, voice recognition, and full-body motion sensing, what can the government do to track us?

So the power that the executive branch takes on in the political realm will be multipled by the potency it obtains from the data it collects and from ever more sophisticated tools for analyzing that data.

(Strangely, the strict constructionists and "original intent" scholars, who bar judges from interpreting the Constitution broadly, don't apply these restrictions to the ever-expanding executive branch.)

I don't know how to halt this expansion of power. We could open-source the Panopticon by demanding that the public have access to all data collected by public cameras and senors. That won't help, though, because the data will still prove useful mostly to large organizations with the time and expertise to analyze it. And do you want to encourage every budding computer hacker in the country to become a data-mining Nancy Drew?

We could call for strict laws to restrict the collection or sharing of data. You'll still suspect that somebody is collecting information on you. But you'll rest easier because the fear of prosecution will keep them from sharing the data with most of the people you are afraid to have know it.

Still, the reasoning in this article suggests that open government advocates should welcome the shift of initiative away from the legislative branch to the executive one. But only if that's a transitional stage to lodging decision-making more in public hands.

In fact, the other two branches of government and the public had better find ways to implement collective participation, because it may be the only alternative to a resurgent Government 1.0.

To make this shift a positive change, we'll need well-established government/public collaborations that run through the whole cycle I described in my first article. We'll need to make sure that everybody is online and has the training to participate in decisions at the level of their competence and interest. We'll also need to refine polls and discussions to give us confidence that the public's most important concerns and desires rise to the top of the forums.

And when all that's in place, we can start to experiment with adaptive legislation.

The legislative branch: how to write laws for an engaged public

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that legislatures could develop laws in a more transparent manner. But that's only a start. If they could rely on public participation during the implementation of the law, they could write laws that embrace such input.

Laws already include feedback mechanisms. Many call on an executive agency to collect information on the effects of the law, run hearings, and release a report after a fixed amount of time so that the legislature can evaluate whether the law is achieving their goals. This practice could be dramatically extended by involving the public in the implementation of the law at the start, though continuous forums. The feedback loop would be reduced from years to weeks.

Laws also include ways to delegate control. For instance. Community Block Grants are offered to municipalities to spend as they see fit. (My town manager spent several hundred thousand dollars of our block grant to improve a park next to Town Hall, which in my opinion showed dubious judgment during an affordable housing crisis.) The idea of delegation could also be extended to more and more facets of law. What if a virtual town hall debated the expenditure of the town's Community Block Grant?

Critics of government solutions to social problems--usually political conservatives--accuse the law of being too rigid. The legislative process has trouble evolving with the times and responding flexibly to new conditions. Well, with provisions for public comment and group decision-making, laws can be as flexible as we want.

Congress needs evidence, though, that public feedback reflects the diverse needs and values of the population. Public participation must be protected against the complementary evils of capture by special interests and tyranny of the majority, which I have termed the problem of stakeholders.

If the public can live with a law it debates and tweaks as well as it can live with a law designed by Congress, adaptive legislation is viable.

And we need this flexibility, because the really big problems we have to tackle are what computer scientists call "massively distributed." Problems of this type include climate change, health care cost control, a food crisis that leads to rampant obesity in some populations and rampant starvation in others, job creation in an era of reduced staffing needs, and more.

The presence of the term "Collaboration" in the Administration's open government initiative reflects their understanding that they cannot solve the problems by themselves. Nor can technology, the market, or educational efforts--they must all work together. The concept of Megacommunity perhaps reflects the size of the effort (I actually find the "mega" part of the term slightly redundant) but may not even be enough to capture the extent of cultural adaptation required. In any case, adaptive legislation could trigger related efforts and bolster their effectiveness.

Appendix: the top question asked on Change.gov

Although Obama's approach to data sharing is a welcome sea change from the previous administration, the most committed members of his constituency press him to show more transparency about things that particularly matter to them, such as the role the Administration is playing in the financial system and what it knows about torture.

When Change.gov opened a public forum for questions at the beginning of Obama's presidency, the first place was taken by a question about prosecuting US officials suspected of promoting torture. Progressives then cried foul when the Administration failed to answer.

But did Obama really fail to answer? On April 16 he released Bush Administration memos that showed irrefutably that highly placed officials had discarded legal safeguards to institute interrogation practices that were described by these memos in gory detail.

Yes, Obama has resisted investigations of torture before and after this moment. But I am convinced that by releasing the memos he launched a historical process that cannot be reversed. The memos were his answer to the question that the public forced on him in January.

He has made the kind of political calculation that is his hallmark, deciding not to confront Republicans directly with a torture investigation. But if decent citizens keep up the pressure, prosecution will ultimately reach any US officials responsible for human rights violations, just as it did Pinochet and Fujimori. Open government applications do not free activists from the responsibility to engage with every accessible locus of power.

What democracy advocates must remember is that open government is not just a discussion forum. It's a maelstrom of intersecting investigations and competing proposals just as complex as the current political process. In fact, open government can succeed only by integrating with a political process that has a twenty-five hundred year history, even though our goal over time is to transform that process.

Now that the Administration wants to dance, we must learn all the steps. Listen closely: the musicians have already struck up their first round.

Twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 7

This article is the second in a series leading up to the Personal Democracy Forum. The first article was posted on June 16.

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There's been a lot of excitement lately about the term "Government 2.0." Strip away the RESTful interfaces and you see that the new practices in government transparency are just intensifications of things democracies have done for a long time: public comment periods, expert consultation, archiving deliberations, and so forth. So let's look back a bit at what democracy has brought to government so far.

Like any telescoped presentation of history, this one reduces the swirling forces that extend and retract their way through the centuries into a couple near-mythological categories. I do this in the service of evaluating the concepts we toss around when discussing government participation.

Government 1.0: empire

Last year, Boston residents and visitors got the chance to see an exhibit of sculptures preserved from the culture that earned a special role in history as the first major power to exert ruthless control over many peoples: the Assyrians. Other dynasties--Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Akkadian--were around before the Assyrian empire, but the Assyrians were the ones that set a new standard for cruelty. The fearful image assigned to them in biblical texts also assures them a special fascination for Westerners.

Most visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts were thrilled by the artistic quality of the wall reliefs, human figures, and everyday objects. Personally, I was depressed by the unrelenting scenes of war and cruelty.

Assyria refined a strategy of subjecting cities just outside their borders and using the resulting booty to raise soldiers and provisions to attack the next frontier. Any populations whose subjugation was in doubt would be uprooted and forced to move closer to the center of the empire, replaced in their old homelands by more compliant subjects.

When the court entertained local dignitaries or foreigners (the lobbyists of the day), they walked through "lobbies" adorned with the scenes of carnage that ended up last year at the center of the Boston exhibit. The depictions of chariots crushing helpless civilians and soldiers impaled on stakes gave visitors a clear message: submit or end up the same way. Thus the Assyrians promulgated a "shock and awe" doctrine four thousand years before US troops brought their own version to the same geography.

This went on, with interruptions, for 1,300 years, and established a practice that guided other empires for thousands of years to come.

Some empires were more humane, of course. Empires could provide their inhabitants with protection and stability through currencies, constables, and courts (remember Hammurabi's Code). But all these policies remained subject to the whim of the supreme ruler.

And that is the distinguishing trait of Government 1.0: unchecked power centered in one individual. The reason emperors could stay in power was that they exploited their hierarchies to delegate both power and wealth. As long as governors maintained loyalty to the emperor, they could exert broad powers in the regions under their control and use those powers to accumulate great amounts of money. They in turn delegated power to those beneath them, and so on down through the hierarchy.

What could be more successful than this carrot-and-stick methodology combining vast rewards with threats of terror?

Government 2.0: democracy

There must be something persnickety about the character of ancient Athens. They couldn't tolerate strong leaders. Almost anyone who ever pulled off a major military victory, proved to be a persuasive orator, or got a corner on political power eventually found himself executed or exiled. (The Athenians invented the idea of "ostracism"--a fiercely democratic institution in their implementation, ironically.) Socrates was just one of the later examples of the propensity Greeks showed for bringing down anyone who was widely admired.

So this seems to be a natural setting for a system that grants a voice to a wide range of citizens. The decisions they reach may not be the best, but they're decisions that the political body can follow through on, having been reached democratically. The losers (if they weren't powerful enough to scare the winners) can stick around and try again at the next gathering in the agora.

Greeks recognized from the beginning the problems of democracy with which we are so familiar today. They knew that many votes were bought outright, and that others could be pulled in by smooth-tongued sophists. They also knew their democracy rested precariously on the labor of the slaves and other disenfranchised residents. And that a democracy could become an oppressive empire, using behavior against people next door that it would never tolerate within the walls of its own city.

I like this disturbing contradiction. That's why my web site, identi.ca account, and Twitter account are named after Praxagora, a character in an ancient Greek play that shows both the flaws and the immense power of democratic systems. The name Praxagora combines "action" with "public forum."

Right or wrong, a democratically reached decision--which if properly done, comes into focus as an emergent property of the assembled masses rather than being imposed by one party or individual--has an irreproachable authority. Socrates didn't like democracy, but if we are to believe Plato (who also didn't like democracy), Socrates insisted on obeying the popular will, even at the cost of his life.

We shouldn't hang a halo around direct democracy. In fact, the trend in technology-driven government transparency is not Athenian direct democracy--despite its idealization by some activists--but a tighter agency/public partnership. Today's experiments in public participation go far beyond electing representatives. But even the traditional American political culture consists of more than bills and vote counts. For instance, the executive branch tends to consult regularly with the public, a topic I'll take up in the next article in this series.

As we don digital media and communications--those somewhat ungainly garments we try to mold to human forms--in order to improve on twenty-five hundred years of flawed Government 2.0, we can learn some lessons from those millennia:

• No individual can be allowed to gather too much power, but every individual needs to be heard and to be protected from arbitrary persecution.
• Those who are excluded from the benefits of society will eventually rise up to wreck it.
• The majority is often wrong, and any political system can be abused.
• Good decisions take time, and a willingness to subject the decisions to constant re-examination.
• We need to rise above rhetoric and pursue the ultimate (if ultimately elusive) truth.

Like any useful technology, digital media and communications can help us realize a vision. Government 2.0 is a very old vision. A recognition of what has been achieved and what still challenges us can guide the development of the proper technology.

For instance, we can learn from history to bring the technology of participation to every member of the population and give them the opportunity to learn it, to subject the results of electronic deliberation to review by authorities governed by outside checks and balances, to highlight experts' reputations so they can wield more influence, and to give participants on electronic forums a few cycles of decision-making to work out processes that make effective use of the technology.

Deploying Government 2.0 technology will teach us more about that technology, and about ourselves.

Next article (Wednesday, June 24): adaptive legislation can respond to action in the agora.

Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: from vulnerability and overload to rage, mistrust, and fear

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 3

The Personal Democracy Forum will hold its sixth annual conference at the end of this month. The theme, "how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society," has been central to O'Reilly's work over the past few years (and a theme on which we're holding a summit of our own in September). Over the next two weeks I'll write three blogs on the Radar site to get some of my current thoughts off of my chest, clearing some space so that when I get to the PDF conference itself, my blogs can focus on its events and statements made by its participants.

This blog covers:

• The government participation cycle: if you want to dance, sir
• Vulnerability: a reason to put brakes on outgoing information
• Overload: a reason to put brakes on incoming information
• Rage, mistrust, and fear: inhibitors of the government participation cycle

The government participation cycle: if you want to dance, sir

The grand vision for government/public collaboration is a set of feedback loops that intensify the influence of the collective will on government policy. A feedback loop might consist of a cycle like this:

1. An agency (or less likely, a legislature) posts data in a downloadable format through a flexible API and announces a call for applications.
2. Companies and public interest groups define goals and put programmers on the task.
3. The public uses the resulting applications to generate data and share it with the agency.
4. The agency sets policy or changes direction in response to the data.

At any step, a failure by any of the responsible actors to follow through will leave the process hanging and discourage future projects in open participation.

This doesn't mean every project needs to include all four steps. The public may benefit from government data without offering feedback, and programmers could put their work under an open source license or into the public domain for the benefit of the government or members of the public without asking them to share more data. Agencies can also use programs to improve internal coordination instead of working with the public. But the full four steps serve as a canonical model for government/public collaboration.

Successful examples already exist for each step. As I write this, Data.gov has 261 data sets and 30 tools; thousands more data sets are promised soon. Appeals for donations of code, such as Vivek Kundra's Apps for Democracy in Washington, DC and the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America, show that coders will play their part, at least in the current atmosphere of enthusiasm for the new initiative. And the public has responded to requests for data.

But at the federal level, we need to dance a few rounds of the full cycle before feeling confident that open processes are fully entrenched. I'll return to this theme in the last section of this article. The cycles of public participation will teach lessons, of course, that feed into a still larger cycle of constant experimentation and improvement.

As public participation moves forward, it's worth remembering that resistance to the free flow of incoming and outgoing information is not irrational. The resistance spring from healthy coping mechanisms learned by individuals and organizations learned over their lifetimes. I have already published and solicited comments on a list of fundamental questions on government participation; in this article I describe two such issues that play a special role in resistance to information sharing.

Vulnerability: a reason to put brakes on outgoing information

A couple months ago, I read a stirring report from a federal agency manager trying to sound out the Administration concerning how much the agency ought to reveal. The manager was stunned and inspired by the response of Bev Godwin, a prominent director at the White House and General Services Administration, who advised talking about the bad things as well as the good and soliciting negative as well as positive feedback.

Vulnerability is the keystone of transparency and openness. Online forums, if they are run democratically and competently, encourage vulnerability through a combination of self-correcting mechanisms:

The right to respond

Anyone criticized in a forum has repeated chances to defend himself at length. If the forum includes a rating system, persuasive arguments and well-chosen facts will float above false accusations as well as flaccid excuses from the accused.

Support networks

Proponents of each side pile on to each debate, turning it into a community issue and diluting the personal biases brought by the people who began the debate. A bit of a mob scene can erupt at times, awakening the risk that the losing side will walk away in a huff while sensitive community members flee the fury. But as long as participants value the community over partisan agendas and prefer honesty to grandstanding, the community comes out stronger, more aware of its options, and ready to integrate what it has learned into further action.

Community memory

Forum members recognize when old debates are re-ignited, and can fill new members in on the history. They can also predict the way prominent participants will line up on an issue. Debates are thus tighter and more quickly resolved.

A propensity for truth

These traits all end up privileging accuracy and making it harder (although not impossible) for bad judgment to prevail through false claims, manipulative demagogy, appeals to group solidarity, and the other tricks used by insincere factionalists.

This list may present online forums in a bit too rosy a light. But they do permit social norms that protect vulnerable people, even if the norms don't function perfectly. The real problem comes when words leave these forums and end up in other environments not subject to the same rules.

Government staff have already witnessed too many negative experiences in traditional, non-virtual settings. They have seen what happens when a comment is taken out of context and bandied about in the broadcast or print media, introduced into court testimony, or used as ammunition in partisan debates. They know that comment posted on the Web can be fodder for the same opinion machine--and are in fact even more dangerous because the Web makes them more visible.

That's not fair. It's very hard for anyone outside an agency to judge why it came down on one side of a debate or what that decision's long-term effects will be. Most agency actions are a complex fermentation blending the data that was gathered, assessments of the data's accuracy, assessments of the possible trends indicated by the data, consultations with the public (yes, outsiders are routinely consulted), judgments about Congress's intent, judgments about the interests of the Administration, and more. But groups with a cause like to ascribe one-dimensional reasons for key agency decisions and mine public statements for corroborating evidence.

This doesn't mean that all agencies are honest and act in the public interest. Plenty of bad government decisions have been made under pressure from well-organized special interests or to pay off political donors. One role of civil society is to expose these influences--that's what open government and the Personal Democracy Forum are all about. So we want more of these online forums. But we also need to protect the agencies whom we expect to use the forums. To encourage the necessary vulnerability, we have to combat those who abuse the results.

Journalism is starting to incorporate its own feedback loops and open its pages. Elections and policy debates are also monitored by the blogosphere. So some forums are becoming friendlier to the cause of vulnerability (the court system is unlikely ever to change). But it will be a long time before it's safe to lay out one's thoughts in an open, self-policing community.

Overload: a reason to put brakes on incoming information

The previous section mentioned the possibility of a "mob scene," and if people putting out information must be able to tolerate being vulnerable, those requesting input from the public have to deal with a potentially low signal-to-noise ratio.

We need not look far for an example. Take last month's brainstorming session on open government, launched by the White House and the Office of Science and Technology. It drew over 1,000 submissions in a single week. (Even more are on the site now, but they arrived after the official close of the session.)

The thousand submissions offered quite a smorgasbord for a group led by the new Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, Beth Noveck, to spoon through. They ended up with many intriguing ideas. But the gathering of ideas was simply a suggestion box, not real crowdsourcing. The web site offered no tools for editing, combining, and culling entries (and there would be inadequate time to use such tools anyway). The only aspect reminiscent of group behavior was a casual and anonymous rating system, which played little role in the results.

And that's a relief. After all, how many Americans would be able to assess the Office of Open Government created by Florida Governor Charlie Crist, or the potential for Cooperative Research and Development Agreements to help convert government data and applications to open source? Both of these projects earned a place in the results, even though the Florida model got only 24 votes and the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements only 46. (Although they might have conceivably been mentioned in an earlier brainstorming session conducted among government workers, I couldn't find them in the publicly posted comments.)

In response to a question about the voting, Noveck wrote me, "We wanted to encourage the National Academy of Public Administration to try different voting techniques. They started out by allowing voting by unregistered users, and later restricted it to registered users. Given the change, we didn't want to disadvantage anyone who participated. Consequently, we viewed the voting as informative but not determinative. On our weblog, only registered users can vote on comments."

As her statement indicates, the second phase of this transparency project has already sprouted more of the checks and balances found in mature discussion forums. We can expect the Administration to wend its way toward systems that gather useful opinions from self-organized groups of qualified commentators, the model pioneered by Noveck in her Peer to Patent project.

But will the White House have the time and resources to establish a foothold for a solid and lasting open government program? That depends on public tolerance for the Administration as a whole.

Rage, mistrust, and fear: inhibitors of the government participation cycle

Everyone knows that productive collaboration can't take place under conditions of rage, mistrust, or fear. Americans unfortunately are suffering from all these feelings right now.

Their rage has been directed at the heads of the financial industry. No peasant at the time of the French Revolution felt more hatred for Marie Antoinette than some of the comments I've seen about AIG. In addition, the current conditions of recession and financial uncertainty breed mistrust toward all three branches of government, and fear toward anyone who could seem to wangle an extra advantage over other Americans.

I'm not going to factor in the recent murders of law enforcement officers, Dr. George Tiller, and others because I'm sure the hate crimes were caused by lots of diverse factors, and it's unclear whether they represent a widespread cultural movement. We have plenty to worry about just by considering problems that will undeniably have a broad impact on Americans.

Over the coming year, lots of homes will continue to be foreclosed (because Congress failed to put a system in place to stop them), a blight that hits many neighborhoods like a dry Katrina. This ongoing crisis will be joined by credit card crisis (because Congress's bill didn't do much to stop that either) and perhaps already a student debt crisis. The Administration has its own challenges, waging two untraditional wars that nobody knows how to win and tinkering with a global financial system that always cracks its casings.

Open government doesn't deserve to be at the mercy of current political controversies. It did not originate with the Obama administration, and it doesn't require a Democratic Party philosophy. The George W. Bush administration took some steps toward open government (often forgotten amongst all the complaints over their unsavory maneuvers and information withholding). The Bill Clinton administration took steps too. But Obama is making it a centerpiece.

This gives us more hope than ever for openness, but ties its fortunes to the larger sphere of activities by the Administration and federal government.

To establish a foothold, openness needs some early, impressive success stories. Federal CTO Vivek Kundra has said his initiatives will prove themselves by saving money, although that certainly isn't his sole aspiration. If the Administration can land a few universally recognized successes--budgetary or otherwise--and especially if it can run through the whole cycle I laid out at the beginning of this article, such efforts will be continued by future Administrations.

Next article (Friday, June 19): twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0.

FCC discusses broadband: the job is a big one

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 1

Around the time I submitted a proposal on the White House's open government dialog site for local forums to implement high-speed networks, the FCC released a 77-page report (in PDF format) that casts some light on the proposal. Their report, titled "Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy," covers a huge range of ground (and retells a lot of standard stories, including the reasons for universal service in broadband and a history of public infrastructure efforts). Some of the impressions I got relevant to local forums are:

• Calls for cooperation between government and "community and local advocacy groups." These seemed to be defined as coalitions representing particular populations, such as minorities and the disabled. The report did not explicitly suggest, as my proposal does, that everyone within a relevant geographic area be invited to the table.
• A recognition that conditions in different areas vary widely. The FCC report mentions such conditions as population density, weather patterns, and income levels. Although fairly long, this section came nowhere near covering the complex collection of issues that communities have to take into account (my own proposal lists a few others). I believe that expert and local residents working together can iron out the needs of the community.
• An appeal for more information, particularly mapping. The report mentions a Congressional bill providing funding for that information. (This bill has been criticized, as mentioned in a comment to my previous posting on the local forum proposal.) But the task of accumulating the information needed to make cost-efficient network decisions is huge. To my mind, the task calls again for collaboration among residents.

  As an example of what residents could do, consider companies that provide data to web sites about response time and availability. To obtain this data, the companies have to visit the sites from many locations around the world; some companies have even contracted with ordinary Internet users to run these tests. Crowdsourcing can make everyone with an Internet connection a data provider.

The report suggests a number of policy changes that will facilitate network development. But it's clear that this country is very far from a plan that brings broadband to everyone. The job's too big; that's why I say communities have to take things into their own hands.

So check my proposal again. A few relevant paragraphs from the FCC report follow.

---

(pp. 29-31)

67 ...in order to be successful in coordinating existing federal programs concerning rural broadband or rural initiatives, it is critical that the federal government collaborate and coordinate with community and advocacy organizations in rural areas.

68 We know that community and local advocacy groups are an essential component to the success of deploying broadband in rural areas. Further, public-private partnerships can play a critical role in bringing broadband to rural areas. Community and advocacy groups and public-private partnerships can function as valuable information sources for local communities, businesses, and consumers in rural areas, and various groups have developed guidance on how to deploy broadband in those areas. For example, the Commonwealth of Virginia has produced an online "Community Broadband Tool-Kit" that provides step-by-step guidance on how a community can deploy broadband services. This tool-kit has information on broadband applications and case-studies from Virginia localities that have successfully deployed broadband facilities. Another group, called Connecting Rural Communities, publishes a guidebook that explains in detail how to bring broadband services to rural communities. The Michigan Department of Information Technology has released its own "Action Plan for Deploying Broadband Internet to Michigan Local Governments," which similarly details how developing goals is essential for building a broadband network.

69 The federal government should collaborate with these organizations and ones like them to fully understand the challenges in deploying broadband in rural areas and develop solutions that overcome those challenges. We suggest that the federal government continue to take a leadership role alongside individuals, groups, businesses and other governmental organizations seeking to fit together all the pieces needed to bring state-of-the-art broadband services to rural areas.

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 9

I've posted a proposal titled Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband) to a forum on open government put up by the White House. I ask this blog's readers to tell other people who might be interested, and vote up the proposal if you like it.

The Open Government Dialog site where this proposal appears is part of the White House's implementation of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that Obama signed on his first day in office. Hundreds of ideas have already been posted. Many are very specific and some look quite worthy, but I think mine stands out for the reasons listed in my justification:

First, one of the Administration's major goals is to bring high-speed networking to every resident of the country.

Second, this goal is fundamental to the other goals in the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. Members of the public need continuous access to the Internet and the ability to handle video and sophisticated graphical displays in order to make full use of the resources provided in open government efforts.

The local community aspect is also crucial, for reasons I list in my justification.

Many readers will note that the people who need my proposal the most the ones who have the most trouble participating in the forums--people who can't afford computers, who have access only to intermittent dial-up Internet access, etc. I deal with this ironic problem in the proposal in several ways (public terminals, face-to-face meetings, partnering with newspapers and television).

Because the formatting came out a mess, I'm reprinting the proposal below.

---

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband)

Municipalities and regions undertaking projects in high-speed networking be encouraged to create online forums that:

• Post regional maps showing the demographic features, geographical features, patterns of network use, and technological facilities relevant to the project

• Accept proposals, provide comment and rating systems, and run polls

• Provide public terminals and low-bandwidth versions of data, so that people who are currently on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide can offer input to help cross that divide

• Are supplemented by face-to-face gatherings

• Collaborate with newspapers and with television and radio news programs to publicize proposals, meetings, and opportunities for public comment

• Create visitor accounts, perhaps with validation procedures for determining local residence, and allow visitors to identify their expertise and credentials

• Provide tools for mapping proposed facilities and for calculating the reach, bandwidth, and costs of proposed facilities

• Provide data about ongoing deployments in standardized, open formats on maps and in downloadable form

The federal-level initiative can support these efforts by:

• Mandating the types of information that participating municipalities and companies should provide, such as the capabilities of current facilities, statistics on current usage, demographic information such as income and connectivity on a neighborhood basis, and detailed implementation plans with measurable milestones

• Funding the development of software tools, such as programs that can estimate the quality of wireless coverage for different terrains, or the time period required to recoup the costs of building out networks

• Providing formats and quality standards for the data provided

• Publicizing successful initiatives, the tools they used, and their best practices

Why Is This Idea Important

High-speed digital networking (also known as "broadband") should concern open government advocates in two ways.

First, one of the Administration's major goals is to bring high-speed networking to every resident of the country.

Second, this goal is fundamental to the other goals in the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. Members of the public need continuous access to the Internet and the ability to handle video and sophisticated graphical displays in order to make full use of the resources provided in open government efforts.

Why do I stress the local nature of these forums?

All networking is (on one level) local. Given the limited resources available for any network deployment, and the trade-offs that must be made during plans, decision-makers need to take into account local demographics, geography, topology, social and economic priorities, and existing facilities. Here are just a few examples the many local issues typically considered:

• Which neighborhoods are already relatively well-served or poorly served

• Where it's cost-effective to string fiber, versus serving a neighborhood through a high-bandwidth wireless solution

• Whether there are existing facilities and lines that could be repurposed or upgraded for high-speed networking

• How many public funds to invest and which private firms to contract with to provide infrastructure or Internet service

• Whether a non-essential service, such as wireless for spots where tourists or businesspeople congregate, could generate enough new jobs or revenue to be worth an investment

• What public and private partners and sources of investment are available

• Whether people in potential new markets have the desire and education to use new network services, and how to create the conditions under which the populations would use the services

Innumerable issues like these require local knowledge and judgment. That is why many innovative and successful initiatives to provide digital networks have been launched by local governments or local private service providers.

Local collaboration to promote network penetration can also build bonds that support local communities in other ways. The global reach of the Internet has long been stressed, but the role of digital networks in connecting people within geographical communities and improving their way of life may be even more important and is beginning to be recognized.

Although complex, the issues are no more complex than many other issues being considered for implementation of the open government directive. With proper organization and support, community members could make these decisions and monitor their implementation.

Local community forums also attract participants more easily than geographically distributed "communities of interest." People are likely to respond to the invitations of friends and neighbors, and to be more loyal to the forums when they know the participants personally. So local forums are good ways to initiate the general public to the notion of transparent and participatory governance.

A note on current federal broadband initiatives

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) includes a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), operated through the NTIA, that creates a 4.7-billion-dollar program to promote broadband, particularly for unserved areas and populations.

The implementation does not involve any of the innovative aspects of the open government directive, such as collaborative online forums and data exposed through open formats and APIs. Like other programs in ARRA, the focus on providing a fast economic stimulus led to a schedule that does not accommodate time to set up and accept comments in this manner. A public comment period was held from March 12 to April 13, 2009, and proposals must be submitted by September 2009.

The FCC adopted the goal of expanding broadband access many years ago, and cites this goal in many opinions concerning competition. The FCC also continues to offer funds for broadband under the Universal Service Fund (USF), which was expanded by the 1996 Telecommunications Act to include Internet access. The USF does not involve public online forums or open data access.

The FCC also plans to publish a national broadband plan by February 2010. Because the funds from BTOP will probably be disbursed by then, this plan could be a locus for the kinds of forums describes in this proposal.

Quick disclaimer: broadband adoption is hard to measure--it depends on such fuzz factors as the minimum speed defined as "broadband," the difference between potential and usual speeds, and uncertainties about actual availability versus official penetration rates--but recent estimates suggest that half of the United States population has always-on, high-speed network access. Although this reflects a substantial increase in recent years, it still leaves the US behind many other developed nations. Further improvements will require more intensive planning and careful resource allocation, as we try to extend adoption to populations with fewer resources or geographical challenges.

Summary of benefits

• When the public can evaluate the options available to their community and the trade-offs required, they can reach agreement on a digital networking policy that reflects the values of many constituents and communities.

• Tools for measuring the impacts of different proposals can help everyone in the community agree on what trade-offs exist, and provide a factual basis for decision-making.

• Technically trained members of the community can use the measurement and visualization tools on the forum to educate those who are less technically sophisticated and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to make valid and appropriate input.

• Progress in implementation can be followed by the public, who can demand accountability in spending and results.

• Collaboration in building local networks can lead to continued collaboration in using those networks to improve economic, educational, and policy initiatives in the communities. They can also give visitors the skills and interests to join larger, national efforts in fulfillment of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government,

• Standardization and information sharing between communities can help later communities reach successful conclusions more quickly and with less wasted effort.

• Finally, the public participation fostered by local forums can educate the public about telecommunications issues that have a national or even international scope, such as expanding major access points, fostering technological innovation, and changing national policies and laws.

Update: FCC discusses broadband

May 27: About the time I submitted this proposal, the FCC released a report titled Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy. See my blog on its relation to my proposal.

Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 1

Journalists, politicians, and foundations are all tinkering with forms of amateur input: inviting bloggers to major events, quoting popular online sites in newspapers, etc. But Capital News Connection has really jumped in full-tilt with Ask Your Lawmaker. A creative combination of public input and ratings with professionals who have their boots on the ground in the US Capitol building, Ask Your Lawmaker is a case study in progress concerning how to get experts and the public to work together.

I heard a talk from CNC founder and executive director Melinda Wittstock this evening at the Ethos Roundtable, a forum for non-profits in Eastern Massachusetts. CNC gets consulting input from Ethos Roundtable organizer Deborah Elizabeth Finn, and Wittstock came looking for volunteer help with such matters as developing a Facebook or iPhone application. As Wittstock said, Ask Your Lawmaker is still working on how to complete the circle of public input, feedback, and outreach.

Step one is the simple form (on the web site's "Ask A Question" tab) for submitting a question to any Congressman or Senator of your choice. Step two is the simple voting mechanism, reminiscent of the pre-inauguration Change.gov site.

At this point, the journalists working for CNC--who have years of experience at leading media sites--take over. They don't merely choose the highest-rated questions. Sometimes a question shouldn't have to wait around and gather votes because the topic is hot. The reporters use their judgment in combination with votes to pick timely and provocative questions, and sometimes direct a question to a more appropriate lawmaker (such as the sponsor of a bill or the head of a committee).

The next step invokes the power of professional journalism. CNC sends its reporters into the Capitol and congressional office buildings daily. Although they have regular routines with their typical journalists' questions, they throw in citizen questions where appropriate and tell the lawmaker how many people voted for each question. Wittstock mentioned that it's very hard for a congressperson to dismiss a question that came from a constituent, especially one that got a lot of votes.

Videos are very hard to make in the Capitol, unfortunately, because filming is severely restricted there by law and the lawmakers are understandably leery of allowing themselves to be filmed any place at any time.

The next step goes from real-time back to the web site, along with conventional radio stations. Questions and answers are taped and transcribed so they can be offered as both audio and text. CNC has contracts with a number of PBS stations who work public questions into regular news broadcasts.

Podcasts and texts are posted on the web site and served through an RSS feed, but you can also follow AskYourLawmaker on Twitter or search for hashtag #ayl. (Right now they're discussing the talk I attended.) This can bring the answers back to those who asked the questions.

Ask Your Lawmaker also offers a feed that visitors can add to their own web sites, and an iframe for each individual report, suitable for embedding.

Most powerful at all, citizens' questions can change policies. Lobbyists harangue lawmakers day after day, but sometimes they're more impressed by a simple question revealing a deep-seated need in their communities. They have been heard walking away from journalist interviews saying to their staff, "Brief me about that issue."

All very impressive for an effort that's so provisional, the journalists run the web site themselves. Several weak points remain before the circle is complete.

• Ask Your Lawmaker doesn't get enough publicity. It may or may not be mentioned on the radio station that reports its results. Hardly any listeners, I wager, realize that questions were generated by ordinary citizens, much less realize that anyone can ask a question.
• The site needs a way to accept questions through SMS. Attendees at this evening's talk speculated about the power of accepting questions for US lawmakers from victims of wars or globalization policies around the globe.
• The site doesn't exploit the potential for social networking to let questioners promote the site. Someone whose question is chosen should be informed when the answer is posted or broadcast on the radio, and should be encouraged to invite her friends and fellow workers to view the answer.

CNC is looking for ways to complete the circle--and will gladly accept volunteer help, as I mentioned--but they're doing a lot in the meantime to firm up their appeal and raise funds. They plan to allow cobranding and to let sites select the length and subject matter of the material they post, just as they now serve up very customized reports to the radio stations they serve. They may start accepting advertising, and they're looking for fun contests that will publicize their work.

Ask Your Lawmaker demonstrates a unique solution to a situation whered for amateur input can augment expert practice and expertise can augment what the public has to offer. In this regard, Ask Your Lawmaker is worth comparing to the landmark Peer-to-Patent project and to two commercial ventures I analyzed a few months ago, uTest and TopCoder. The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing category of its own.

Credit card company data mining makes us all instances of a type

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 19

The New York Times has recently published one of their in-depth, riveting descriptions of how credit card companies use everything they can learn about us. Any detail can be meaningful: what time of day you buy things, or the quality of the objects you choose.

The way credit collectors use psychology reminds me of CIA interogators (without the physical aspects of pressure). In fact, they're probably more effective than CIA interogators because they stick to the basic insight that kindness elicits more cooperation than threats.

So who gave them permission to use our purchase information against us? What law could possibly address this kind of power play?

There's another disturbing aspect to the data mining: it treats us all as examples of a pattern rather than as individuals. Almost eleven years I wrote an article criticizing this trend. The New York Times article shows how much we've lost from what we consider essential to our identity--our individuality.

Update

This article drew six comments in a few hours--thoughtful and valid comments, which have made me set down attitudes into words. Now we can look put the attitudes under a light and see what makes sense, or doesn't, to readers.

The article contained two levels of criticism: a criticism of data mining to build up composite pictures of individuals, and a criticism of the use of data accumulated from routine transactions to manipulate those individuals.

Building up a composite picture

Of course, a company that reaches out and does any marketing has to target people. Someone who bought the O'Reilly book Even Faster Web Sites (sorry about the plug) might appreciate a notification about our upcoming Velocity conference, which was founded by the book's author and covers the same topics. Someone who bought a book on a totally different subject wouldn't want or respond to the notification. O'Reilly does this kind of targeting, like most companies, and until everybody participates in truly frictionless information exchanges, companies will have to continue doing it.

Aggregated information is useful too. Organizations that mine public data for evidence of health epidemics can identify likely sites and investigate them further. The data mining is understood to provide an approximation of the truth.

Where I see a problem is when the increasing quantity of constant information refinement shades over into a qualitative change. There's a difference between a campaign targeted to 500 likely customers and a campaign targeted to one.

At some point the composite portrait starts to look so much like a person that corporate decision makers can begin to believe it is the person. The portrait becomes like a replicant, or like the statues that came to life in myths from Pygmalion to Pinocchio.

Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the classic Eliza program, was shocked to see that people treated his "doctor" program like a human interviewer. There were plenty of computer programs that prompted the user with questions and gave varied responses based on the answers, but none had imitated a person so realistically.

Nowadays, nobody would be drawn in by Eliza. And perhaps companies and customers alike will get used to composite portraits. Perhaps the companies will send their composite to each of us and we can update it to make it more accurate. That will be a very different world, though.

Now we can turn to the next level, manipulation.

Manipulation

I've read numerous accounts in biographies and articles about interrogations, and talked to a couple people who have undergone interrogations. I haven't been on either side of an interrogation, but I've been deposed for a court case. All these situations remind me vividly of the exchanges reported in the New York Times article.

In these exchanges, a well-armed caller is laying, like a silkscreen, a composite over the real person and trying to manipulate the result. It's not exactly a case of asymmetric knowledge (because at least in theory, a customer could also learn a lot about a company and use that knowledge to manipulate it). It's more insidious: an employee carrying out a precise initiative on behalf of a company--a machine in the service of a goal--approaching the targeted customer in an informal manner that brings out a natural, human, empathetic reaction in customer.

Interrogation always takes place in the context of an open or implied threat--there would be no reason for making the contact otherwise--but as I mentioned in the article, the interrogation goes best when the threat is raised only rarely and strategically. A feigned sympathy and heart-to-heart engagement is the path to the most desired outcome.

In a sense, now, the employee has become the replicant. He is using a careful counterfeit of human responses to induce the behavior he or she is paid to induce. This is ethical when dealing with a criminal, although even then US law limits (based on the Fourth Amendment) the gathering of relevant information by the interrogator beforehand. I question how ethical it is in a business situation, especially when exploiting information given by the customer for entirely different purposes.

Encouraging results from Peer-to-Patent

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 0

Congratulations to the organizers of Peer-to-Patent, which is carrying off one of the most audacious experiments in Internet activism in our day. A lot of ink has been spilled about Barack Obama's application of social networking techniques to presidential campaigning (and to Ron Paul's successful fund-raising before that) but Peer-to-Patent makes those achievements seem entirely run-of-the-mill.

The premise behind Peer-to-Patent, which many observers called impractical, was that thousands of experts in technical fields would flock to the site to read patent applications (if you've ever read one, you'd hike the stakes against success several notches right there) and would find prior art that would lead to rejection or restrictions on patent claims.

Well, it's working. A report released by the non-profit project in PDF format reports the data from surveys and an analysis of patents handled during the first year of the project. The sample is small (23 patents) but bears some impressive fruit.

(continue reading)

Hacking TCP/IP To Support Location Aware Services

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 9

I just received a simple proposal (which is usually the best type) from Brian McConnell, an O'Reilly author and old phone hand who has founded several telecom companies. His proposal, which follows, represents a creative linking of the GPS/location domain and TCP/IP. If you thought there was no use for IPv6, read on (but it could work with IPv4 now).

(continue reading)

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