Internet & Democracy Blog

In the last A2K3 panel, entitled The Global Public Sphere: Media and Communication Rights, Seán Ó Siochrú made some striking statements based on his experience building local communication networks in undeveloped areas of LCDs. He states that the global public sphere is currently a myth, and what we have now is elites promoting their self-interest. He criticizes the very notion of the global public sphere – he wants a more dynamic and broader term that reflects the deeper issues involved in bringing about such a global public sphere. He prefers to frame this issue in terms of communication rights. By this he means the right to sek and receive ideas, generate ideas and opinions of one’s own, speaks these ideas, have a right to be heard, and a right to have others listen. These last two rights Ó Siochrú dismisses as trivial but I don’t see that they are. Each creates a demand on others’ time that I don’t see how to effectuate within the framework of respect for individual automony Belkin elucidated in his keynote address and discussed in my recent blog post and on the A2K blog.

Ó Siochrú also makes an interesting point that if we are really interested in facilitating communication and connection between and by people who have little connectivity today, we are best to concentrate on technologies such as the radio, email, mobile phones, the television, or whatever works at the local level. He eschews blogs, and the internet, as the least acessible, least affortable, and the least usable.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

In the A2K3 panel on Open Access to Science and Research, Eve Gray, from the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town, sees the Open Access movement as a real societal change. Accordingly she shows us a picture of Nelson Mandela and asks us to think about his release from prison and the amount of change that ushered in. She also asks us to consider whether or not Mandela is an international person or a local person. She sees a parallel with how South African society changed with Mandela and the change people are advocation toward open access to research knowledge. She shows a worldmapper.org map of countries distorted by the amount of (copyrighted) scientific research publications. South Africa looks small. She blames this on South Africa’s willingness to uphold colonial traditions in copyright law and norms in knowledge dissemination. She says this happens almost unquestioningly, and in South Africa to rise in the research world you are expected to publish in ‘international’ journals – the prestigious journals are not South African, she says (I am familiar with this attitude from my own experience in Canada. The top American journals and schools were considered the holy grail. When I asked about attending a top American graduate school I was laughed at by a professor and told that maybe it could happen, if perhaps I had an Olympic gold medal.) She states that for real change in this area to come about people have to recognize that they must mediate a “complex meshing” of policies: at the university level, and the various government levels, norms and the individual scientist level… just as Mandela had to mediate a large number of complex policies at a variety of different levels in order to bring about the change he did.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Laura DeNardis, executive director of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, spoke during the A2K3 panel on Technologies for Access. She makes the point that many of our technological standards are being made behind closed doors and by private, largely unaccountable, parties such as ICANN, ISO, the ITU, and other standards bodies. She advocates the concept of Open Standards, which she defines in a three-fold way as open in development, open in implementation, and open in usage. DeNardis worries that without such protections in place stakeholders can be subject to a standard they were not a party to, and this can affect nations in ways that might not be beneficial to them, particularly in areas such as civil rights, especially less developed countries. In fact, an audience member comments that even when countries appears to be involved, their delegations are often comprised of private companies and are not qualified. For example, she says that there are only three countries in Africa that have people with the requisite techinical expertise in such state standards councils and that the involvment process is far from transparent. DeNardis also mentions the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards designed to preserve the open architecture of the internet, with the Yale ISP is involved in advocacy at the Internet Governance Forum. DeNardis powerfully points out that standards are very much public policy, as much as the regulation we typically think of as public policy.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Thiru Balasubramanian, Geneva Representative for Knowledge Ecology International presents a proposal for a WTO treaty on knowledge (so far all WTO agreements extend to private goods only). Since information is a public good (nonrival and nonexcludable), we will have a “market failure” if single countries act alone: hence the undersupply of global public goods. The WTO creates binding agreements and thus such an agreement for public goods such as knowledge creates large collective benefits and high costs to acting against them. Such a WTO agreement would outline and influence norms. Why do this within the WTO? There are strong enforcement mechanisms here. Are we really undersupplying open and free knowledge? I can think of several scientific examples. Balasubramaniam doesn’t dig in to what such an agreement would look like and seems quite complex. Thinking about this might provide a coherent framework for approaching free information issues globally.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Building on the opening remarks, the second panel addresses Human right and Access to Knowledge. Caroline Dommen, director of 3D, an advocacy group promoting human rights consideration in trade agreements, emphasizes the need for metrics: how can we tell how open countries are? She suggests borrowing from the experience with human rights measurement. For example measuring the availability of a right, nondiscrimination in access, economic access (is it affordable?), acceptability or quality or the available good. She also suggests using the 4A human rights approach of 1) respect 2) protect and 3) fulfill the rights. There are corollary obligations: 1) non-discrimination 2) adequate process (including redress of violated rights) 3) participation 4) effective remedy.

Marisella Ouma, Kenyan team researcher for the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge Project, says that most African countries have had copyright laws since independence (starting with Ghana in 1957). She is concerned about the educational aspect of access to knowledge and related results of the educational materials access index: the highest ranking is Egypt and the lowest is Mozambique. So, why? What are the issues? Ouma notes that these countries have the laws but not strong policies: she asserts they need a copyright policy that acknowledges the basic fundamental right to education so there isn’t a conflict between property rights and the right to access educational information. She is concerned that people don’t understand copyright law and this makes advocacy of their rights difficult. She is also concerned that policy is not comprehensive enough: For example in Kenya or Uganda, the education policy is limited to basic education. She also describes the sad situation of there being billions of dollars available to build libraries but no money to stock them with information. Something is really wrong here. She notes that wireless internet is important for this, and how many people really have access? So how do they access the knowledge? she asks.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

In the first panel at A2K3 on the history, impact, and future of the global A2K movement, Tim Hubbard, a genetics researcher, laments that scientists tend to carry out their work in a closed way and thus very little data is released. In fact he claims that biologists used to deliberately mess up images so that they could not be reproduced! But apparently journals are more demanding now and this problem has largely been corrected (for example Nature’s 2006 standards on image fraud). He says that openness in science needs to happen before publication, the traditional time when scientists release their work. But this is a tough problem. Data must be released in such a way that others can understand and use it. This parallels the argument made in the opening remarks about the value of net neutrality as preserving an innovation platform: in order for data to be used it must be open in the sense that it permits further innovation. He says we now have Open Genome Data but privacy issues are pertinent: even summaries of the data can be backsolved to identify individuals. He asks for better encryption algorithms to protect privacy. In the meantime he proposes two other solutions. We could just stop worrying about the privacy of our genetic data, just like we don’t hide our race or gender. Failing that, he wants to mine the UK’s National Health Service’s patient records through an “honest broker” which is in intermediary that runs programs and scripts on the data that researchers submit. The data are hidden from the researcher and only accessed through the intermediary. Another problem this solves is the enormity of the released data that can prevent interested people from moving the data or analyzing it. This has broad implications as Hubbard points out – the government could access their CCTV video recording to find drivers who’ve let their insurance lapse, but not track other possibly privacy violating aspects of drivers’ visible presence on the road. Hubbard is touching on what might be the most important part of the Access to Knowledge movement – how to make the access meaningful without destroying incentives to be open.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

I’m at my first Access to Knowledge; conference in Geneva and I’ve never felt so important. Walking to the Centre International de Conférences in Geneva I passed the UN High Commission for Refugees and I’m sitting in an enormous tiered conference room with translation headphones and plush leather chairs. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but this is really my first exposure to influencing policy through any means other than academic idea generation and publication. A2K3 is held literally across the street from the World Intellectual Property Organization‘s headquarters and the focus is changing the global intellectual policy landscape.

So that means there are more lawyers and activists here than I am used to seeing at the usual academic conferences. The introductory remarks reflect this: Sisule Musungu lists the multitude of groups involved such as eIFL, EFF, OSI, for example. Google and Kaltura are the only corporate sponsors. Laura DeNardis, the executive director of Information Society Project at Yale (the group primarily responsible for A2K3) is giving opening remarks. Laura makes the point that technical standards contain deep political stances on knowledge sharing and dissemintation so the debate isn’t just about regulation any more. This means A2K is not just about laws and treaties, but also about the nature of the communciation technologies. Many of our discussions about net neutrality at Berkman note this fact, and in followup remarks Jack Balkin, the founding directory of the Yale ISP, makes this observation. He states that the A2K movement brings attention to much of International Trade Law that flies under most people’s radars, especially how it impacts the free flow of information, particularly on developing countries. A2K is at core about justice and human rights, since more and more wealth creation is coming from information tools in our information-driven world. This is clearly true: think of the success and power of Google – an information company. A2K is at least in part a reaction to the increasingly strong correlation between wealth and access to information. Balkin relates the FCC ruling preventing Comcast from discriminating between packets based on application or content, meaning that this movement is really about the decentralization of innovation: he states that without net neutrality innovation would be dominated by a small number of firms who would only allow innovations that benefit them directly. The A2K movement is about bringing more minds to solve our greatest problems, and this also engenders a debate about control, most deeply the control people can effect on their own lives: “will people be the master’s of themselves or will they be under the control of others?” The internet is a general purpose tool facilitating communication however people see fit, so the internet can be understood as a commons in that we can use it and build on it for our own self-determined purposes.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Today, the new Ushahidi site launched, marking the era of the distributed human rights campaign. Just as Wikipedia allows for the wide-scale participation of collecting the world’s knowledge, Ushahidi now allows for anyone, anywhere, to participate in reporting violence, atrocities and human rights violations. Internet scholar Yochai Benkler calls this phenomenon ‘commons-based peer production’, but what does it really mean?

Until now, campaigns for northern Uganda or Darfur relied on tiny elites in those places to speak for those facing violence. Today, with simply a mobile phone, anyone can actively report incidents of violence to a truly global audience, making it harder for perpetrators to face impunity.

I’ve written and spoke about Ushahidi before. The project started in the chaotic and sad days following the 2007 Kenyan Presidential campaign, when violence escalated out of control in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Then, Ushahidi was an ad hoc tool to allow Kenyans to use mobiles to report incidents of violence, which would then be published on a Google maps based website.

Today, Ushahidi released a platform for use whenever and wherever the next human security disaster erupts. As one of the lead develops, Erik Hersman, recently told me, “Just like a blacksmith, we want to make the hammer, not tell people how to use it.” It is exciting to think that whatever the next emergency may be, decent people will be empowered to both spread the word globally and and keep the perpetrators accountable.

Cross-posted to In An African Minute.

Here in Cambridge the days are growing shorter, the temperature cooler, and tens of thousands of students have descended on the Boston area for the start of another school year. In that spirit, I’d like to share our research plans for this fall here at the Internet and Democracy Project.

We have completed a number of case studies that we will release in the coming weeks. This includes an analysis of the impact of the site Ushahidi, blogs, and SMS on post-election violence in Kenya. Second, we will release a case study on last year’s largely Internet driven protests in Burma, which ultimately failed to lead to political change but whose long term impact remains unclear and debatable. Third, a series of three cases by Urs Gasser and his team at St. Gallen University on the the impact of the SmartVote project, E-Voting, and politicians’ blogs in Switzerland.

We have also been busy this past summer with research into both the Arabic and Russian blogospheres. This work follows our groundbreaking case study with our friend John Kelly on the Iranian blogosphere, which we have translated into Persian and will share in the next week or so. We will participate in a Harriman Institute event at Columbia in October to discuss the Russian blog research, and also plan to release case studies on both Arabic and Russian blogs before the end of fall. Look for sneak peeks here on the blog.

Of course, we will continue to blog frequently and welcome and encourage feedback, news, and contributions from readers that are already doing great work in this zone. You can always access all of our case studies either in the publications box on the right hand side of this blog, as well as the the publications section of the Berkman Center Web site.