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From the NY Times article on Prince Harry being withdrawn from combat:

As a result, the chief of the defense staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, decided “to withdraw Prince Harry from Afghanistan immediately,” the ministry said.

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My MacBook continues to crash, even after the complete reinstall and upgrade to Leopard and even after a local geek shop put in a new motherboard. I’ve been collecting some of the crash reports the Mac generates and would like to crowd-source them to see if anyone can figure what the @!#$%! is wrong. Would I be violating my own privacy by doing so?

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Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately necome #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I'm typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay's book is about, please read Clay's book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size. The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting. Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

Sharing. E.g., Delicious.com has urls, users and tags. It lowers the difficulty of sharing, so the social effects are practically unintended. It’s “me-first” collaboration (cf. Stowe Boyd).

Tagging systems let you share and then aggregate, reversing the traditional order. E.g., the mermaid parade in Coney Island. Since Flickr added tagging in 2005, you can click mermaidparade and get all the photos. The photographers weren’t coordinated ahead of time. Sharing has become a platform for coordination, rather than vice versa.

The next rung up the ladder is conversation, i.e., people actually synchronizing with one another. Clay shows a “communty of practice” at Flickr: High Dynamic Range photography at Flickr. Pre-Web, it would have taken 5-7 yrs from a pro photographer figuring it out to people in the street doing it. At Flickr, it took 3 months because when a photo went up, people could talk and ask how it was done. People post photos, etc. The medium becomes the platform for a community practice where people help one another get better. No commercial incentive.

That’s an example of “every url is a link to a community.” The discussion can turn into a group sharing resources. Clay points to bronzebeta.com, a Buffy site. It came after the Bronze bulletin board shut down. The fans raised money for new software to create their own bronze. They told the designers not to give it any features: no ratings, no identity mgt. They just wanted the system they used to have, a very basic discussion board.

He also points to Aegisub, a project that required a division of labor. It was a huge collaborative effort without a commercial motivation, or an anti-commercial motivation. Their success resulted in making themselves unnecessary.

The fourth rung is collective action. That’s coming. Three stories:

In Jan, 1999, a Northwest flight was stuck on the tarmac fo 7.5 hours. NW signs a toothless bill of passenger rights. Same thing happened last year and it resulted in legislation. What happened? Kate Hanni was on the second plane. She googled for articles about the flight. She comments on all of them, in detail. At the end of each comment, she asked others on the flight to contact her. She’s coopted the media and turned them into sites for coordination. She goes around to legislators’ offices. William James, the philosopher, once said “Thinking is for doing.” We have brains because we’re deciding between courses of action. Now publishing is for acting.

Second, flash mobs started as a critique of hipster culture. The guy who started them said he could get people to do anything at all if you tell them that it’s a protest against the bourgeoisie. It spread to Belarus: They’d go to a square in Minsk eating ice cream in January. Cops arrested them. It was illegal to form groups in October Sq. The kids turned the joke on hippies into a genuine form of dissident action. They provoked the government into reacting, and documented it. Media led to collective action, and the action led to more media. They thought publicity would make a difference, but the West turned out not to care much about Eastern European dictatorships. The tools are very different when deployed in high or low freedom environments. (They’d also done a flash mob where people walked around October Sq smiling.)

Third, a group ran around Palermo putting up stickers protesting the prominence of the Mafia. It was a big story. Now they’re reversing it. They put up a Web site at which businesses can agree to refuse to pay the protection money. If an individual business were to do this, the Mafia would act. They also let citizens search the site for businesses who’d signed.

So, ridiculously easy group forming improves sharing, convesation, collaboration and collective action. Clay is watching now and in the future to see how collective action evolves, for that is the hardest but could be the most important.

Q: Privacy?
A: Privacy cuts across all of this. The higher up the ladder you go, the more important it matters. For sharing, privacy doesn’t matter much, but if we’re going to converse, I at least need a handle. To collaborate, I need to know more. But if we’re going to bind ourselves in collective action, then identity becomes really important. [Hmm. That last point seems wrong. In some collective action, we don't need to know much about others. E.g., a flash mob of kids eating ice cream.] Privacy isn’t all or nothing. Under what circumstances do we want people in a collective action to know one another, but not be known by others. The big change in privacy is not in opt-in or opt-out; it’s that we’ve lost “don’t ask.”

Q: Yochai Benkler is working on whether you can explain this other than by enlightened self-interest?
A: There’s a growing literature on explaining behavior via social motivations. Behavioral economics is unambiguous about the ultimatum game: People will refuse deals that seem unfair, even if they’re in their interest.
Q: But social cohesion is to my benefit …
A: What you’d really like to be in a group that produces public goods but not have to contribute. But the willingness of people to spend resources to keep social cohesion going cannot be rolled up just to individual enlightened self-interest. [Missed some of that. Sorry.]

Q: What are the downsides you see?
A: I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

A: My nightmare is that the advertising budget for print shrinks and we lose newspapers in mid-size American cities. We lose investigative journalism. Every city under a million goes back to endemic civic corruption. The newspaper industry is not ready now to talk about how to save investigative journalism as we lost print.

Q: [couldn't hear it]
A: The social media being used in the presidential campaign is less social than before. Obama excels at fund raising, and public-created media. But no one has proposed a policy wiki. No one has proposed the lateral conversation among supporters. (I’m an Obama supporter.) There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive dissonance among the voters.

Have you looked at the mechanics of collective action?
A: The things that are working now are hard to fake, non-professional surprises. Someone has done something you couldn’t do with a fake grassroots campaign. Most email campaigns to the Senate are of zero value because they’re too easy to fake. [Hmm. It's not that they're hard to fake. It's that they had a cost.] The thing that worries most is the need to be surprising, because surprise is a wasting asset, because you can’t be surprising three times in a row.

Q: [me] Why did you choose the axis of groups that take actions? I can feel I’m a member of the Group That Likes Obama without actually doing anything…
A: I’m interested in the trade-off between individuals and groups. At what point can you not explain behaviors through individual psychology. I was irked by businesses that think they have communities instead of cusomters. The dividing line is between people who change their behavior because they’re in a group and those who don’t.

Q: Mobile streaming and virtual worlds. How do they fit into collective action?
A: The change in things we can do via mobiles will be far broader. And I don’t think there is such a category as virtual worlds. All successful virtual worlds are games. [Tags: berkman clay_shirky here_comes_everybody groups social_software sociology books ]

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Clay Shirky is giving a small talk at the Berkman Center, before giving his bigger talk this evening. His topic this afternoon is “protest culture.” [I'm live blogging, getting it wrong, etc. This is certainly far less coherent than Clay's actual presentation, which was (as always) pristinely structured and clear. His talk will be up at Media Berkman before too long.]

One of the easiest examples of this, he says, started in early 1999. A NW Airlines flight was landed in Detroit and got stuck on the tarmac for 7.5 hours. There was a class action lawsuit that got settled out of court and agreed to a toothless code of conduct. Last year, an American Airlines plane was stuck on the tarmac for 8 hours. A Napa Valley real estate agent got off the plane pissed. She googled all of the traditional media outlet stories. She left comments on them, and asked others on that flight to call her. Within a few days, she’d used the mainstream media stories to pull people together. They put up a passenger bill of rights. Eight months later, the NY legislature passed it. The airlines didn’t know what hit them. The group didn’t create this by suing but by organizing the unorganized. The difference between 1999 and 2006 wasn’t a change in tools but a change in audience density.

Second example: John Geoghan was brought to trial for abusing 130 boys in 2002. A group of people came together in a church, called Voice of the Faithful. By summer they had tens of thousands of members. Organizations don’t usually grow that faith. The Catholic Church responded by not allowing people to organize across parishes. “They were explicitly trying to extend the hierarchy to the laity.” Yet exactly the same thing had happened in 1992: A pedophile priest who had raped 90 boys, the Globe covered it, etc. What changed? For one thing, the Globe wasn’t global in 1992, but in 2002, when the Globe published the story on the Web, it went global. “The audience for the story became larger than the audience for the media outlet.” Also, “Voice of the Faithful is a very Google-friendly name.” Google it and you’re one click away.

Voice of the Faithful is now really suffering. After their initial success, they now have to institutionalize. Should they have dissolved after their initial issue ran its course? If not, they run into other Catholic organizations.

Third: The sf show Jericho was canceled and the fans get upset. But they’ve learned that email is ineffective. The last line in the series was “Nuts!” So the fans decided to send peanuts to the executives. Twenty tons of peanuts. The loading dock at CBS is not optimized for handling 20 tons of peanuts, and “peanuts are not easily deleted.” CBS relented. The Jericho example is a repudiation of the MoveOn model of political engagement, because email is too easy to send. There’s too much astroturfing, so on the Hill, email is discounted, generally. The Jericho found something that was much higher cost than email: People had to pay for the nuts and the shipping.

Flash mobs were synchronized by “Bill” from NY — everyone would go to Macy’s and pretend to be shopping for a love rug for their commune. Bill said that people are so malleable they’ll do anything if you tell them it’s cool. In Minsk, there was a flash mob of kids who all ate ice cream. And then there are photos of those kids being arrested. Eating ice cream is legal, but not being in a group in a square. These kids took a tool designed as a a-political tool in America and used it politically in Belarus, and did it in a way that can’t be stopped: The flash mob doesn’t exist before it flashes into a mob. One of the flash mobs: “Let’s all go downtown and smile at one another.” The kids did these actions to document them; they came with their cameras. The bug in the system is that the kids think the West still cares about oppression there.

“Here’s the conundrum.” A commonality is that these cases are hard to fake; enough people are signing on that you couldn’t just astroturf this. These protests get around the fact that the ease of communication makes protests less effective. And these are non-professional: This isn’t an institution to institution clash. There was no horse trading to do with the airline passengers because they only had a single issue; there was no horse-trading to do. And that’s why Voice of the Faithful worked in the early days; you couldn’t write them off as professional dissidents.” Finally, there’s surprise. The “protein code of protest is mutating faster” than ever. Institutions don’t know how to respond.

“By making it easier for more to participate, you change the calculus of trying to get people excited about improving their lives.” Usually, a handful of people are the instigators. Now, caring a little a bit is enough to get people to participate.

But, Clay asks, how do you lower the hurdle to participate while maintaining the hard-to-fake characteristic?

Working backwards from non-professional, hard-to-fake, surprises. But once you get a tactic that works well, the surprise doesn’t work as well. So, this may favor the people who can wait out surprises. E.g., the success of the Jericho protest may have created anti-bodies that will make TV execs less susceptible to this.

And because there is no institution on the other side, it may surface only the most egregious examples. So, “if investigative journalism goes away in every city of half a million or less, institutional corruption may come back in through the door through which it left when we got good investigative journalism in the 1950s…I’m not convinced that an active blogging community has the same effect as a beat reporter going back down to City Hall to check again on something that doesn’t seem right.”

Finally, human emotion is a lousy filter for reporters. People forward puppy stories, not Abu Ghraib stories. We may therefore get a lighter-weight protest culture. Clay says he doesn’t know where this may go.

John Clippinger: Great. You’re starting to reframe how we think about these things. I agree that you’re going to need persistent institutions. Do you see emergent institutions.?
Clay: I think the reinvention of the media is based on the recognition that every URL is a potential community. Everyone looking at the photos of the kids in Belarus might be able to form a group that can help.

Almost everything that happens on the Net happens in an un-democratic ways, says Clay. We’re blinded to this by the drone of the Internet being democratizing. Credentialed reputations.

Clip: We’re here looking at how to create layers that provide the underpinnings of persistent groups. E.g., the Higgins ID project. Do it on an iPhone.

Clay: The surprise is that the mental models of the users is as important as what’s under the hood. One of the great advantages of Wikipedia is that it had a pedia suffix. There was a shared mental model of what goes into an encyclopedia. It’s now gone beyond it…

Gene Koo: You seem to be opposing institutions and non-institutions, but movements are something in between. To build a long-term strategy, a flash mob mentality won’t work. How do you group a long-term group of people but not so sterile as an institution, that’s what communities organizers think about. Organizers try to get commitment, which maps to hard-to-fake. And part of what you’re describing is authenticity: A movement succeeds when it finds its authentic voice. E.g., the Farm Workers tried to import “We Shall Overcome,” but it failed because it didn’t come from that group. That links to your third point, that human emotion is a lousy thing to mobilize around. Organizers try to find people’s stories and link to the objectives of the group. That’s a more disciplined emotion than the flash in the pan sort of thing.

Clay: What’s happened to the protest march?

Gene: Lack of a tie between the act and the long-term goal. The aim is to threaten a power structure. If it’s just a flash, it doesn’t have that effect. Another aim, though, is to create a group identity.

Clip: There’s a cost. E.g., sit-down protests in the South. Lives were at risk.

Me: The Jericho execs wouldn’t have reacted if people had donated $2 each instead of buying $2 worth of peanuts. This is a non-rational response. Why did the execs respond to the peanuts? And will the culture adapt so we can skip the $2 reaction?

We’re struggling through this. The response was imaginative — self-organized and a thematic response to the show. Part of this was a counting problem — they had missed the people watching over the Net. And the people inside CBS thought they had an opportunity to work with the viewers. They responded in part as an experiment. Can we get past the $2? Well, I like the notion of authenticity. Money is one way to say that this is a hard-to-fake activity. On the other hand, if people can reliably get together and say we’re going to watch the show, and we should be counted, that might be effective. What determines how you get elected is how interested the least interested voter is; you’ve got to swing those people. Pledgebank stuff and ThePoint.com — I’ll do this if 10K other people agree to do this — are interesting social ideas. Can you make a bonded agreement that you’ll act in a particular way.

Sally Walkerman: Advertisers are used to being to surprise us. It’s getting harder. Advertisers therefore get more specific. Protestors can get more specific, too. The peanut protest is an example of that. Protestors will figure out what will surprise their targets.

Clay: Surprise isn’t as much of a wasting resource as I think? Hmm. The protests will get more specific? Is it happening organically?

Sally: Yes.

Wendy Seltzer: I love your point about every URL being a gathering point. Every cease and desist letter can be a gathering point. E.g., wikileaks right now.

Clay: What had been two-party transactions are now multi-party transactions. The message that is hardest to get across to my students that in the early 1990s, if you have something to say, you couldn’t. The C&D is a great example of what used to be 2-way simply because there was no way to turn it into a multi-party transaction, and, as with Groklaw, that can change the course of a multi-million dollar case.

John Kelley: There’s a professional class of activists in DC that’s not doing a very good job of coping with the new way. To them, a measure of effectiveness is whether they can make their budget. How do the people who are professionally organized hear what people are saying?

Clay: Sometimes it’s the role of an institution to ignore some demands of its users. E.g., in ‘03 or ‘04 the Sierra Club had to decide if it needed a stance on immigration. The more you’re channeling the members’ leverage, the clearer you have to be that these are their one or two issues. I suspect that multi-issues organizations will have a harder time. But orgs that coordinate their customers with one another will probably have to learn how to listen better, e.g., IBM WorldJam. We’ll need new organizations to be exemplars before the old will change.

Rob Faris: Is the future single issue movements? Is the Sierra Club dead?
Clay: It will increase the range of what happens. The Net makes it easier to form an institution as well as form a mob. The radical possibility is that we could do group organization at population scale. E.g., what the long tail can conserve is less than what a short-head polluting factory creates. But there’s a possibility that the environmental movement could actually reach everybody. Not everyone should do a little bit, but rather: Only together can we change demand.

Clip: There’s an effort to aggregate markets to create collective actions…
Clay: I sometimes call my book “post-optimistic.” I am no longer a cyber utopian. Instead of the book being structured as “great great great great surprise! Bad!”, I’m overall an optimist but I no longer believe these social changes are fundamentally good with no down sides.

Bruce Ettinger: Why haven’t there been effective protests about the Iraq war?
Clay: Some things are so completely about the issue that the mechanism gets lost. So I didn’t write about Iraq war protests. How did it come to be that in a democracy when an enormous percentage of the population dislikes a specific targeted policy, how were we unable to affect that policy? That was the background question I started with. That’s a big mystery but in a way it has as much to do with the checks and balances in the constitution as it does with any of the social tools. I suppose the mesage is that it’s possible to have a set of institutions so fully entrenched and defeneded from outside influence that there is no mechanism for altering their behavior during the normal course of operations. As an American, this is the darkest hour I’ve lived through. I’m not optimistic that even really imaginative, widely adopted beliefs, even with the social tools, can do much.

Charlie Nesson: What do you think of Lessig’s strategy?
A: God bless him. I’m more interested in what he learns in his first three years than in what he does. I’d hate to have seem him mired in the day to day operations of a congressional office. The inertia in that system will only be broken by fiding some surprising point of leverage. I hope he discovers that point. We haven’t reformed the Electoral College even after the thing we were told wouldn’t have happened and would be a disaster in fact happened and was a disaster. I’m eagerly waiting to see what Larry finds about the points of leverage. I hope he finds a shallow rule is susceptible to popular will in some way. I don’t think the frontal assault will work, and mere outrage won’t move the institution off the dime. (Says Clay.)

[Great talk and conversation.] [Tags: berkman clay_shirky politics here_comes_everybody ]

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Clay Shirky is talking about his ultra-new book, “Here Comes Everybody” tonight at 6pm. Here’s the official announcement:

*Thursday, February 28, 6:00 PM*
Austin West Classroom, Austin Hall
Harvard Law School
(No RSVP required)

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each otheronline and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design indecades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blogafter 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering theIraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensivecomments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound themfrom their positions. A few people find that a world-class onlineencyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing byanyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups tradeinspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to theworld, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Website about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New YorkCity police to take action, leading to the culprit’s arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of socialnetworking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing newthings in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old thingsbetter and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to knowthat the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that existto manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’etre swiftlyeroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are beingdestroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger socialimpact is profound.

See you there!

*I am hoping that this hip and with-it formulation does not mean tonight we will either be having sex with or doing illegal drugs with Prof. Shirky. — The Management[Tags: clay_shirky ]

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1995-6 I was VP of strategic marketing at Open Text, right when it went from search engines to intranet collaboration software. I’m at a CIO ass’n meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, where Open Text’s exec chair, and my old boss (and current friend), Tom Jenkins is giving a talk on Enterprise 2.0. Also, last year I did a paid consulting day at Open Text. So, I am biased in just about every way a person can be biased, from sentimental memories to the possibility of future consulting. With that in mind, here goes:

Tom begins by pointing to the Obama campaign. “2.0 is here,” he says, pointing at Obama’s “community blogs” page. Politicians are breaking out of the confines of the media. But, of course, not just politicians, he says.

Web 2.0 really points to two facts: We have bandwidth and an enormous volume of users. (Web 2.0 was always with us in some ways, says Tom, as I nod vigorously.) In 2.0, everyone gets to talk and everyone gets to listen.

He points to the dangers of a 2.0 world. E.g., a Canadian passport control person blogged about the secret marks on passports. The blog site had been intended to increase productivity, but because it was a public site, a secret was blown. Nevertheless, says Tom, “You can’t bury your head in the sand. In the long term, you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage with companies that do embrace these productivity tools.” Not to mention, you won’t be able to hire and keep under-30s (Tom says).

Tom calls Web 1.5 what happened around 2000. Also around then, the lawyers started getting nervous.

Tom contrasts Web 1.0 and Web 2.0: from inform to engage, from few authors to many, from few contributors to many. In Web 2.0, treats the Web as a platform with “desktop-level bandwidth” (or so).

Tom places metadata at the center of content management [and literally points to me in the audience <blush>]

“Social networking is shaping the minds of our employees,” his slide says. Yahoo, Google, etc., are “pre-training our employees.”

We’re starting to map the business processes to the social and human processes, Tom says. This requires getting past technology lock-ins.

Some random facts from Tom:
We have produced 32 M books in our history. That’s about 600 TeraBytes
100,000 films cumulative history= 20TB
4M songs cumulative history = 8TB
300TB of email per year.
100TB Web pages = 100

Alp Hug from Open Text takes up the talk, to explain how to take advantage of 2.0 technology in the organization while avoiding the dangers, which — what a shock! — happens to map to Open Text’s software and services. [It's good to see Open Text embracing this social software stuff.] [Tags: open_text web_2.0 ]

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Click here for a dystopic taste of the future. (This page will not harm your sensibilities, your computer, or your ability to procreate.)

[Tags: net_neutrality comcast ]

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Comcast has sort of admitted that it stacked the audience at yesterday’s FCC hearing with paid seat-warmers. More here and here.

Since over a hundred people were turned away, this papering of the house is not just a bad joke. Although it also is a bad joke.

[Tags: net_neutrality comcast ]

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I want to pull on just one thread in the argument against Net neutrality: The claim that it’s obvious that some types of applications deserve priority. It’d be crazy not to give priority to Internet telephony packets or to heart monitoring packets. Right?

It seems crazy because it’s a fact that some application types are sensitive to delay and others are not. No denying that.

But given finite bandwidth and an indefinite number of jitter-sensitive, delay-sensitive app types, it’s not obvious that the ISPs are the ones who should make the decision about how to prioritize the packets. That is, it makes sense to give vehicles with sirens priority in the streets, but when an indefinite number of vehicles have sirens, who decides which vehicles get priority? If I’m not a VOIP user and if I don’t care about watching videos over the Net, why should my World of Warfare packets suffer? Why should your interest in high-def ESPN packets shoulder aside my SecondLife packets? Do my in-game chat VOIP packets deserve the same — or greater? — priority than your VOIP business calls? If I’m a Boston researcher who is engaged in some obscure (but important to me) delay-sensitive research with a lab in Japan, why should I have to hope the ISPs will decide to honor my packets’ sirens? Will my physician have to petition Comcast to let my kidney monitoring data have priority? Diabetes monitoring vs. thyroid info? Who decides if routine heart monitoring data should go at the same speed as critical care heart data?

And if I invent a new type of application that happens to be delay-sensitive, who has to approve it to get it onto the priority list?

If the only way to manage this were to rely upon the ISPs, then we’d just have to hope they’d make decisions that are genuinely in the public interest. But, if end-users can instead make those decisions, why not give them the power to say that they want their heart monitoring data to have a huge siren, and VOIP to be a Yugo that needs a valve job? And when their hearts stabilize, let them turn down those packets’ priority. in order to avoid an obvious gaming of the system, only let users change their designated siren vehicles once a month or so. And, I’d prefer that the ISPs not charge for this service — it’s simply a bit of network mgt — because I don’t want to give them an incentive for keeping the system sluggish.

There are some easy ways to present this to users, ways that never use the word “packet” or “jitter.” Let them designate some sites as high priority. Let them specify some application types (telephone calls, on-demand video). Even maybe let them choose “What type of user are you?” from a list.

It’s entirely possible that the solution I’m proposing is technically impossible or too expensive. IANAG (I am not a geek.) Nevertheless, thinking that some packets obviously should have priority doesn’t resolve the problem of figuring out how to prioritize packets. The more you look at it, the less obvious it becomes. [Tags: net_neutrality fcc comcast ]

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I really dislike my live blogging. I do it partly out of laziness and partly because I have a touch of the ol’ OCD. (Laziness because doing drafts is harder than spewing.)

But since I seem to do a fair bit of live blogging, next time I may try Cover It Live, which lets you embed a live coverage tool in your blog. Looks interesting. [Tags: blogging ]

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NOTE: I am live-blogging. Not re-reading for errors. There are guaranteed to be errors of substance, stand point and detail. Caveat reader.

McDowell: Does BitTorrent run differently on different types of network infrastructures?
BT: The engineers do take advantage of architectures. We rely on the basic structure of the Internet to handle congestion controls. The Internet has been doing that well.
McDowell: Is that what BitTorrent DNA does?
BT: It’s a competitive market, so we’ve worked on theability to run well in particular network envrionments.
McDowell: Should you be required to disclose that you don’t work well in particular types of networks?
BT: BT emerged as an open source protocol. We run it like an open standards process. We disclose it all. As issues materialize on particular networks, there’s demand for solutions, and we see a very open process.
Weitzner: The premise on the Internet is that there are standards that work, and the nodes and apps conform to those standards. If Comcast markets as Internet service, it ought to support Internet standards. Apps should be able to assume that they are operating in an Internet-compliant environment. Apps can’t conform when the carriers aren’t conforming and when they’re not given info.
Clark: In the beginning, we thought the apps should adapt to the underlying network. The user ought to decide what’s satisfactory not the app. E.g., a slow file transfer might seem unusable, but users find uses for it. In the end, it’s the user who should decide to hit the quit button. But crossing into paying for a service and expecting to get it requires adapting the net and the apps. We need tools for talking cross layer. There’s space for technical innovation.
Reed: Adapting to categories of networks traditionally have been the role of the IETF. E.g., 20 yrs ago there was a move to asymmetric networks. The community wanted to ban it. More pragmatic folks in the IETF said that it’s a reasonable technology an we have to be able to live with it. But that was the standard Internet, not the Comcast subclass of the Internet. If there are changes through the IETF, networks and apps will adapt. But it’s different when one vendor has a lock on one area and makes unilateral changes.

Now we see videos made by citizens today.

A retired fed lawyer says she needs the Net for her work playing music for cancer patients.

A worker for a small non-profit that makes a small TV app for participatory culture. Comcast’s filtering of BT harms his company and anyone who tries to post without going through a central authority. Comcast is “essentially ruining our system.”

A MIT computer science student sees it as a political issue. What will happen to MIT when it begins writing papers about the negative effects of this type of censorship. It affects the free flow of info.

The Maine Civil Liberties Union likes NN on First Amendment grounds.

Martin: David Clark, you want to change the business model…
Clark: Charging by the byte works poorly. But it might be worth exploring usage caps measured not in peaks but in gigabytes per month. [So, not $50/month for a max of 10Mb at any one time, but $50/month for a total of 5Gb (or whatever) of downloads.] The wireless guys are breaking the ice here. The current all-you-can-eat model has the advantage of encouraging people to try things, but it hides the cost and the value.
Martin: That could make sense in terms of business and maybe address some of the congestion problem. But with BT, it was their uploads that were being blocked, and they were below their limits anyway.
Clark: The ISPs haven’t characterized what acceptable use is. This is understandable because it’s very hard to know exactly what the conditions are going to be. But we can determine fairness of use among users without looking at the particular applications being used.
Martin: Do you think it’s important to distinguish among types of bits, not applications?
Clark: If there’s going to be any discrimination based on QoS, I’d rather have the user determine it. “This telephone call is really important!” Maybe 10% of your bits could be high priority, and you decide.
Martin: Was BitTorrent designed to get around some of the limitations of networks such as the cable network?
BT: The protocol was designed simply to manage large files. It doesn’t behave differently on different types of networks.

Reed explains a bit about how the IETF works. Locking in decisions around apps and QoS stops innovation in its tracks.
Bennett: It takes and months to get a solution through a standards body. Comcast has an obligation to solve it faster and to do the experiments.

Copps: Do we have enough info to proceed?
Clark: From the perspective of the academic the answer is simple: No.
Reed: My colleagues who try to collect data report a systematic shutting down of info.
Copps: Is this a serious problem?
Clark: Yes. E.g., we’re trying to find out if 10% of users generate 90% of the traffic. The only info I could get was from s. Korea. Not a single US ISP would give us the info even fully laundered. We don’t even know if there are consistently heavy users. They say it’s proprietary.
Copps: we really need to grapple with this.
Martin: Does that mean we shouldn’t take action, because we don’t have enough info?
Reed: No one has enough data to know whatt the current or projected traffic across the entire industry is.
Clark: The complaint before you does not require detailed traffic knowledge to make a decision.

Adelstein: How important network mgt practices for our ability to maintain our leadership in innovation?
BT: Incredibly important.
Reed: I spoke with the head of China’s largest portal. He’s got the rights to distribute the Olympics over their Net. That’s in competition with the state TV service. They may pass us with this new tech.
Bennett: If the FCC gets the decision right, you’ll increase the value of the carrier’s infrastructure. If you take the carrier out of it, the blocking will happen but it will be done by the guy down the street. The carrier is acting as a sheriff. If you add enough capacity so that there is no congestion, you’ll have to increase it 10- to100 times.
Clark: I disagree. The network does contain mechanisms to control traffic. The Comcast is a particular, nuanced response to what the Internet’s been doing for years, which is when too much traffic shows up everyone slows down. Being slowed down by our neighbor is right and it’s a good thing, because it means that when my neighbor isn’t there, I can go twice as fast. The question is whether the net is allocating in a way the user thinks is fair. (Should you be able to buy your way out, he asks) If you want to have nuances, you have to be clear about it or people won’t bother to innovate. No one wants to compete with Vonage because the carriers have done certain things.
Sony: Short term solutions should be recognized as having global implications.
Weitzner: The video innovation we’ve seen today is just the beginning. We ought to be working to get past the relatively mundane question of how to transport video in a civilized way.
Clark: There’s a world of innovation waiting to happen when there’s enough bandwidth.
Adelstein: Where is the line between sound network mgt and unsound? Between good discrimination an bad?
BT: I know it when I see it. Comcast is doing what [bac] hackers do to disrupt traffic. Forging data is outside the realm of reasonable.
Bennett: What I found lacking in the petitions against Comcast was any data about the condition of the network when the mgt practices were put into effect. They didn’t provide empirical data about how busy the Net was.
Clark: Using RST indicates that Comcast’s tools were inadequate for predicting and managing.
Bennett: The data is available.
Reed: I checked it out myself. They were indeed sending RST packets. They have to be carefully synthesized. And I discovered that to do that they had to use info from inside packet. I would view that as a pragmatic solution to the problem if someone had analyzed this technique and published a paper that says RST is a good way to solve congestion. But I can’t find anything. There is a bright line around hacking without public data. [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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NOTE: I am live-blogging. Not re-reading for errors. There are guaranteed to be errors of substance, stand point and detail. Caveat reader.

Daniel Weitzner of MIT says the entire Web is peer-to-peer, although not technically. People use the Net in a synchronous, P2P manner. E.g., pages are pulled together from info all over. We depend on the open nature of the Web to enable that.

Richard Bennett (network architect): Does free speech require abandoning the active mgt of net traffic? If so, then we have to shut down the Internet. Is it legit to manage the Net by discriminating by application? The Net and its constituent nets serve different apps. E.g., VOIP needs to avoid jitter. It makes sense to move apps that don’t care about jitter (e.g., email) to the back of the queue. BitTorrent is insensitive to jitter; you care about the time between first and last packet, but not jitter of individual packets….except for apps like Vuze, but RB doubts Vuze’s business viability. If we abandon app discriminatory we have to get rid of IP because it includes info about the app in the packets. Get rid of Wifi because QoS discriminates among apps. Get rid of difference between UDP and TCP. We have to get rid of discrimination within their own homes. Even on Ethernet we have to discriminate among apps, e.g., WoS for audio systems to avoid lipsynching issues If you add capacity to a network, you’ve only moved the bottleneck from the first hop to the second hop. NN would inhibit rural delivery since it depends on wifi. So, sit back. We’ll solve it with more bandwidth and with revisions of the apps that use it, like BitTorrent.

David Clark says that TV is central here because it increases the traffic and it’s a collision of pricing models. We should be partnering, not fighting. Let’s talk about business model. The usage cost to Comcast for a month of user usage might be around $0.50. TV usage is 40 times as much (taking reasonable estimates), i.e., $20/month to cover your user costs. What’s going to give is the all you can eat flat rate pricing. We have to find a way that will be acceptable to the user. David likes selling tiers of consumption.

David says he finds the blocking of particular apps “troubling.” The ISP should not be imposing a value judgment on the consumer. That makes the customer into an enemy.

He says that they put desired-QoS and app bits in the header is so that the user could decide what apps and QoS s/he wants. He says that discrminating in favor of VOIP bits is not a violation of NN but he’d rather let users decide. He’d rather decide where to draw the line through case law than by a policy. So, ultimately he’s against the FCC adopting a policy.

Eric Klinker of BitTorrent explains why BT was invented: To move large files. He lists legit users of BT. Why, even Hollywood studios! If Comcast is allowed to block this class of app, it would stamp out “the most promising technology we have to do to deliver a near infinite” set of content.

David Reed (MIT): Providing Net access implies adherence to protocols and standards essential to a world wide net. Variance damages the Net and all its uses. Industry standard processes exist for disclosure, etc. Comcast’s secretive attempt to provide non-standard mgt is a problem. Access do not create the Internet. They provide access as part of a much large system. The Net is a network of networks that results from voluntary compliance with standards and protocols. You just have to agree to play by the ground rules. These ground rules have been around or 30 years. You have to agree to send on Internet datagrams. [He has a prop!] The content is inside the packet “envelope.” The content is meaningful only to the sender and receiver. The participating networks agree not to alter the contents. When congestion becomes extreme, it’s normal to discard the envelope because the sender is responsible for re-transmitting it. The Net was designed from the beginning to manage congestion. The network cannot eliminate it. It requires the senders to cooperate and slow down. This requires acceptance of standards. This is all part of the standard Internet. But Comcast unilaterally and secretly used its own mgt techniques, doing deep packet inspection and sending RST packets. This violates the expectations of users that the content of envelope will not be read. If the standard methods aren’t adequate, the provider should bring the situation to the IETF. Otherwise, Comcast is not providing access to the Internet, but to a selected portion of the Internet.

Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Network & Systems Architecture Division, Sony Electronics Inc. Sony thinks the Net is the future of delivery of TV. He believes in competition. I can’t tell what he thinks about Net neutrality.

[Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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NOTE: I am live-blogging. Not re-reading for errors. There are guaranteed to be errors of substance, stand point and detail. Caveat reader.

Martin: Comcast didn’t just not publicize its policy of blocking BitTorrent. They actually denied it, right?
Ammori: Yup. We want to know what you’re blocking. And we think there are many better ways to manage traffic

Martin: Why would they lie about this?
Woo: They shouldn’t block any lawful application, much less do so secretly or lie about it. And while we know the carriers have made an investment, we also want to encourage app developers to invest. Who’s going to invest in an app if you fear it could be blocked, and not even transparently?

Martin: Consumers are being asked to buy more and more bandwidth but they’re not being told the limitations. Wu: When you buy a piece of candy you know more about what's in it. [Verizon guy is chuckling] No one in this debate should be against providing more information, unless they have pernicious motives.
Yoo: Yes, transparency should even be the fifth principle. Also, some apps need a different network. Telemedicine can’t take a backseat to anything else. So, network management ought to allow discrimination.
Benkler: Disclosure is an important first step but it only works when there’s market discipline and consumers can switch. But we only have 1.5-2 services, on average. That’s not a lot of competition. You can extract rents from traffic that’s competing with services you, as a last-mile provider, also provide.
Verizon: We believe in transparency. Consumers don’t want the 30-page document so we’re trying to make it more understandable, while still providing the whole thing for those who want it. But every ay we block spam. You don’t want so much disclosure that it prevents us from providing network security.
Martin: Letting consumers know what they’re purchasing seems primary. Were any of the users exceeding the bandwidth that they’d purchased from Comcast?
Ammori: Know. In fact, VOIP providers side with us.
Wu: It’s odd that providers would complain about people using their produce. Users of Vuze want more bandwidth. The oil companies love it when users buy an SUV. There’s something odd about this debate.
Martin: Cable companies argue that consumers get a better deal by bundling channels rather than allowing them to pick their own channels, as I like. It’s odd that when consumers buy extra speed, you block them for using it. Inconsistent?
Comcast: No. First, we sell an “up to” amount of service, as part of shared network, and you’re not allowed to use it in a way that would degrade it for others. Our new disclosure is the best ever.
Martin: Is that the type of application developers need?
Ammori: No, we need to know what they mean by “high periods” and what “delay” means.
Benkler: We need a standard for disclosure.

Copps: I’m nervous. We have a transition to DTV by 2009. Now I’m hearing that by 2010 use may exceed capacity. This is all testimony to need for a national broadband policy. Mr. Ammori, what is the price we’re paiong for not having this kind of national strategy?
Ammori: Other countries have more capacity. The carriers profit from scarcity. We have Third World networks and we’re debating whether we can even manage current traffic. A lot of these problems would go away with genuine competition. We should manage traffic in ways that don’t block content.
Copps: How do other countries do network management?
Benkler: NN as a policy need only arose after we abandoned unbundling. Other countries have competition. You have to share costs and components when the network is high-cost. [E.g., open it up. Let 1,000 ISPs bloom.] We only have to set standards because we don’t have competition.
Wu: Asian countries tend to look at broadband as an infrastructure issue, like highways. There are obviously negative examples as well: China blocking content.
Yoo: Korea got there through gov’t subsidies. Japan overcharges for voice telecommunication. Wireless is likely to make the markets competitive.
Copps: You’re rolling out fiber, Comcast. How will this change network mgt?
Comcast: My engineers tell me that all networks in the world are maxed. We will never solve this problem purely by building capacity. [Yoo nods] We will always have to net mgt.
Verizon: As we put in fiber, the demand grows. Capacity helps and facilitates a “rich and robust Internet experience for consumers” [= sit down and watch your IP TV kiddies].

Adelstein: Japan has 100Mb to the home and they’re not having the NN discussion. Does Verizon use the RST packet for P2P? [Comcast forges a packet that breaks the BitTorrent connection]
Verizon: No. At this time we don’t have a need for it. We don’t have a shared network.
Benkler: If we accept duopoly, which is a weakly competitive market, then without market discipline we need regulatory discipline.
Adelstein: What are non-discriminatory ways to manage traffic?
Ammori: The providers promised not to discriminate.
Comcast: Comcast does not block any web site, app, or proocol. We manage based on objective assessment: during limited times, in limited geographic areas where the congestion is, only uploads, only when a seeding request comes, we only delay and not block, and when we delay a p2p upload until the congestion alleviates. With BitTorrent, a delay merely causes the system to move to a different, uncongested, node. The delay is imperceptible.
Ammori: You can believe Comcast or Vuze about whether they’re being affected. Comcast has lied about this from the beginning. The RST packets don’t just delay; they deny connection. Further, studies show that introducing minor delays hurts user adoption.
Comcast: My understanding that the delay doesn’t block or degrade. The AP experiment did not use BitTorrent the way it’s supposed to be used.
Wu: Comcast cannot deny that AP tried to use an Internet app in a particular way and were blocked. Comcast says that’s because they weren’t using the app the way it should be used. But Comcast shouldn’t be telling us how we may or may not use an app
Comcast: That’s not what I said. They weren;t using BitTorren the way BitTorrent says it should be used.
Benkler: The effect of delays is to say you may not use your computer to support this collaborative network function. Comcast offloads it to another network. But that’s how TCP works. It handles congestion in a non-discriminatory method. Comcast is telling you that you can’t do what other are doing. Delay is blocking in this case.

Deborah Taylor Tate, a commissioner who arrived late because of a plane delay, says we agree on more than we disagree about. We all want to deploy broadband everywhere. And we do have a role in global principles. We all agree that there can be reasonable network management.
Rep. Bosley (a state rep): The disclosures don’t tell me when I’m going to be cut off or delayed. There’s no competition in many parts of the US. We’ve spent $70B in this industry to speed up capacity. That’s not enough and it hasn’t been spen equitably. For that we need a national plan and transparency. We still have dial up in many parts of my area. Our electric system is non-discriminatory and transparent.
Tate: Are there other complaints, beyond the one that’s bee filed?
Ammori: Yes, but this is the key test case. There may be other interference we don’t know about . We don’t know how long Comcast was doing this.
Comcast: Generally, the customer reaction has been positive, not negative. There’s an appreciation of all that we do to maximize the Internet experience by blocking spam and viruses, etc.
Verizon: We haven’t had complaints about net mgt. The focus of our complaints is people want to know when we’re coming and can we deliver more.
Tate: I’m deepl concerned about child online safety, and piracy.
Ammori: We might discriminate among packets, but not by policy or application. We’re not looking for a detailed policy, just a statement that you will not discriminate based on policy or application. Don’t block access to lawful content. With the policy, we’ll figure it out. E.g., BitTorrent has a way to avoid congestion.
Tate: But disclosure would be enough.
Ammori: No, not without competition. You know you’re being blocked and have no option.
Benkler: Your analogy to common carriage is apt. Take minimal rules like Wu’s — no discrimination against lawful apps. Think of Carterphone — a general rule, and a procedure that allows a carrier to notify, say, BitTorrent that it’s generating too much traffic. That would be a model. A model.
Yoo: The shift in Carterphone came in monopoly. We have a duopoly. Duopoly is more competitive. Regulation is expensive. We can have a non-discrimination system, but it will be expensive. Typically, 500 subscribers share a node in a cable system. You could provision it with enough, but that’d be expensive. The more expensive it becomes, the harder it is for carriers to build out to rural areas. That’s the genius of the public safety provision of the 700MHz auction.
Tate: What’s the status of the industry-led p2p protocols?
Verizon: Early in the process.
Wu: It’s good to think about this in terms of common carriage. There are forms of discrimination that are reasonable. Many good ones go on already. FiOS devotes an entire wavelength to TV content. That’s fine discrimination. able does the same thing with their TV service. But we’re worried about the forms of anti-competitive discrimination. The FCC has already said this in their statement that it’s dangerous to have the carriers pick and choose among lawful applications. We’re not saying that all discrimination is bad. We’re saying anti-competitive discrimination is bad.

McDowell begins by noting that he has to pee. Do you think it’s ok to sell more bandwidth than you deliver?
Comcast: P2P during periods of congestion creates degradation for other customers which violates our terms of us. We don’t sell x amount of bandwidth. We sell it subject to not using our service in ways that degrade it for others. [Not the question.]
McDowell: If my neighborhood loves BitTorrent in the evening and it slows down.
Comcast: You’ve exceed according to the terms of service.
McDowell: Wu’s distinction between anti-competitive and non-anti-comp discrimination is important. Would it be less concerning if Comcast didn’t also sell TV?
Ammori: Less concerning. But even when discrimination is not anti-competitive, it still does serious harm. if they blocked BitTorrent even if they weren’t a TV company, it would still harm users and innovation.
Wu: Even if Comcast didn’t have a TV service, we’d still need NN. So many industries depend on these carriers, the carriers start to attract public duties.
McDowell: What would be the practical effect if you were required to carry all p2p at all hours, without discrimination?
Comcast: In the short run, it could be a significant degraded experience for many more customers, as opposed to the very small effect on a small group of people. And the BitTorrent users may be delayed anyway, but by net congestion not by our net management tool.
McDowell: Would more capacity solve it?
Comcast: No. We will always need network management.
McDowell: If that’s the case, would BitTorrent DNA help to rectify it? [DNA is the BT tool for balancing load, or some such]
Ammori: It might be a short-term project, but the carriers would adjust their networks.
McDowell: Does the protocol designer have an obligation to inform customers that it won’t work as well on particular types of networks?
Ammori: Not an obligation. But they should work together, if there’s a non-discriminatory principle.
Benkler: When you have full transparency, people can solve the problems on the edges.
McDowell: Should apps be required to disclose that it doesn’t work as well on some nets?
Benkler: No. Apps operate in an open market.
McDowell: Is NN an issue in Korea? Yes, it is. Only a network operator can provide things like VOIP. Is that what you want?
Wu: No. It’s cautionary as well as a role model. Great on access. Lots of censoring. The US can do better.
Woo: Japan and Europe do a lot of network mgt. They’re more candid about it.
McDowell: How can enhance the supply or demand side of the roll out?
Yoo: Lower the break-even number of subscribers to enable a last-mile provider to make a go of it. Let them use bandwidth more efficiently, including net mgt but not only that.
Wu: Letting consumers buy more of the last mile.

Martin: Can cable companies move some of their TV capacity to Net capacity?
Wu: Yes.
Martin: Doesn’t that creative a negative incentive to allow Vuze, etc.?
Wu: Yes. There’s obvious motive to suppress the next form of TV.
Martin: Does the FCC have the authority to enforce NN principles? Or do you think with Markey that it needs legislation?
Verizon: Yes you do.
Comcast: Not if you say they’re unenforceable.
Martin: Re-ask…
Comcast: You don’t have the authority to impose a forfeiture fine.
[Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Tim Wu, Columbia Law and the coiner of the phrase “Net neutrality” (and, like Yochai, a personal hero of mine) says: Whatever we conclude about Net neutrality we should decide on a simple rule: NN should not include blocking lawful applications

He says the FCC should keep in mind that this discussion is also part of American foreign policy that the technology of censorship are being built into our technology (e.g., deep packet technology). We don’t want America to be known as the home of the filtered Internet. We’ve been presenting ourselves as the home of free speech, free markets, open Internet. We want to keep the Internet as a role model of freedom.

Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School, says the industry is facing uncertainty. We don’t know how quickly traffic is growing. Quality of service depends on what your neighbors are doing on the net. We don’t know how downloads vs. P2P will work out. Network management has a role, he says. He talks about ow the NSF solved a traffic problem by preferring human-to-human sessions vs downloads. And the 700MHz auction allows some types of services to have priority. Conclusion: The FCC should not adopt a one size fits all policy… [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Representative Dan Bosley talks about the need for broadband in western Mass., where he lives, because lack of it hurts the local economy. He compares stifling competition on the Net to stifling competition in grocery stores. He says aspects of the violation of NN remind him of slotting fees at groceries.

He says it’s about capacity, not content. Yes, there’s a lot of traffic. Competition will bring about capacity. Plus, we could use a national broadband plan, he says.

David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation, tells us that Comcast is committed to giving its customers superior Internet access. 60M households get broadband. What is the secret of this remarkable “success” [Mission accomplished!]? The lack of regulation enables competition. we’ve risked huge amounts of money to Users can use whatever VOIP they want, use Vuze and BitTorrent.

ut we do manage our network to maximize the experience. Every network is managed. Our customers want us to fight spam and viruses, and they want us to fight network congestion.

Bandwidth consumption is a real concern. We manage minimally, barely noticeable. This has a huge benefit for our users. We use the least intrsuvie methods.

We inform our users. We have recently clarified our policy on our Web site.

Networks discriminate. A Harvard medical network does in order to ensure the delivery of important data. [But that's the point: If we had competition, we'd have ISPs with different offers and the market could decide.]

Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President – Public Affairs Policy and Communications, Verizon Communications talks about short codes, which I think are SMS’s. He sees to be justifying why they blocked pro-choice text messages. He says they were spam. They’ve also blocked messages that advertised wallpaper with “inappropriate” content and ring tones with inappropriate, um, tones. [Wow. So much for freedom of speech. I think this guy is screwing his own pooch...a turn of phrase that probably wouldn't make it past Verizon's censors.] He acknowledges that blocking the pro-choice message was a mistake that Verizon connected.

He recommends “industry action” — self-policing — to get over these little censorship problems.

[Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press, is first up on this panel. The panel is as long as a march of penguins. This is not about tech, he says. It’s about the future of the Net. Door #1: Open, fast broadband, innovative, etc. Door #2: Providers choose your sites for you [whoops, overstatement], etc. How can there even be a hearing to choose between these two doors, he asks. It’s because big companies are pushing open that door in DC.

Yochai Benkler of the Berkman Center. Two different issues. 1. Net is abut users connected to one another. 2. We need a restructuring of the basic decision to support a duopoly. [Go Yochai!]

1. The Net is about people connected to one another, at least once you stop looking throgh 20th Century business models. The carriers are based around delivering content and services. Only genuine competition will keep the Net open.

2. It was a mistake to enable the ISP consolidation. Net neutrality is important but it is only a partial solution to the failures of the market that is at beast only weakly competitive. We need to make the Net competitive all the way through.

BitTorrent brings together both points, he says. It is a decentralized structure to enable users to support one another, engage in peer collaborative. By myopia or malice, the last-mile firms are preventing competition. The way to ensure real competition is probably some form of unbundling and open access. This is a very American approach. But we abandoned them, instead handing access to two incumbent industries.

[Putting this in terms of the structural changes we need is, imo, exactly right.]

David Cohen [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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The head of Vuze, Gilles BianRosa, is showing a demo of his BitTorrent client. There have been 20M downloads of Vuze in the past 12 months. It delivers high-def TV. He says Vuze enables viewers to find producers and vice versa. He connects live to a science video with gorgeous astronomical videos, although he can’t show it in high-def beause of Harvard’s projector. He hits the play button on the PBS channel. He then drops down into advanced view (= the old Azureus client). He explains that because it’s peer-to-peer, throttling some of the peers clocks it (or lags it) for everyone else.

So, the basic argument is that Vuze is used for legitimate TV time shifting via Net delivery. It uses BitTorrent. Throttle BitTorrent keeps this new form of Net TV to function well. Great example of a insurgent competitor being hurt by packet discrimination, with the implication that the discrimination is coming from companies that should see Vuze as a threat.

“We are not against reasonable network management. We are against network mgt with no boundaries.” Comcast owns the racetrack but also has a horse running in the race, he says. “The market should determine which services should win,” but markets need ground rules.

[Well done.]

Martin: I want to make clear that you have relationships with media companies, so the programming you’re providing is legal.
A: We are an open platform so people can upload what they want, but we feature legal content.

Martin: Your tech doesn’t allow users to exceed the upload capacity they’ve bought, right?
A: No, they couldn’t. [I think Martin's making a point, not really asking.] [Heck, we're not even allowed to use all the bandwidth we've purchased!]

Adelstein: How much traffic does uploading by your users generate?
A: Generally, upload is 10-20% of download capacity.

McDowell: The 1996 Telecom Act is the backdrop for this. We’re talking here about cable companies. Did you try to work around the inefficiencies present with cable companies?
A: We are agnostic about the network. By cooperating we can be more intelligent in distributing the strain.
McDowell: Are you one size fits all even though the networks have different limitations?
A: Of course.

Martin reiterates that Vuze does not allow users to exceed their capacity. They can only use the capacity they’ve purchased. [Excellent. This says something very positive about Martin's stance (imo)] [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Robert McDowell is one of the Rep commissioners. He talks about the Internet as a new medium and calls us consumers. Sigh.

He says the Net has been through transitions. Now we’re facing a new one. He says he likes competitive markets better than “bureaucrats” like him. Thus, broadband networks have to have incentives to deploy new tech. To give them the incentive to extend the Net, they need to be allowed to make money. They do have to give access to all devices.

This is one of the conceptual disjunctions. The carriers claim NN is gov’t regulation of the Internet. Supporters of NN (like me) think that NN regulation would regulate the carriers. The carriers think NN imposes a new regulation. Supporters of NN think that NN preserves the existing architecture of the Net. [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Jonathan Adelstein is the other Dem commissioner. (He also plays harmonica. I’ve seen him do it. He takes lessons from Howard Levy.)

He says that they’re taking video testimony today, and they ought to send it back to HQ via BitTorrent to see how it does. Scattered laughs.

After giving the obligatory reference to his time at Harvard, he goes back to the American Revolution. Just as the Constitution established freedoms, we need an Internet Bill of Rights to secure the freedom of citizens on the Internet. “The beauty of the Internet is that nobody is in charge and everybody is in charge.” (It’s cool to hear three senior gov’t folks in a row get it so right.)

He quotes TBL about the importance of an open Net. He too brings up the issue of consolidation. We’re going to see more competition in wireless, he says, but broadband is 93% controlled by the major providers. He says that at least he and Copps got AT&T to agree to support net neutrality as a condition of consolidation. (This was satisfying if only because after years of saying the net neutrality has no definition, AT&T defined it clearly in a couple of sentences.)

He says he comes here with an open mind, which, frankly, I find a little disappointing ;)

He closes by again exhorting us to create an Internet Bill of Rights. [I know! Let's do it together on a wiki!] [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Copps is one of the two Democratic commissioners. He begins by effusively thanking Markey. (If it’s not obvious, I am not non-partisan on this issue.) He’s glad that the FCC is getting outside the Beltway. Of course, the day will consist of panels of experts chosen by the FCC.

Copps says that the network operators are today making decisions about how Americans communicate. He says that until the FCC opened these hearings today, those decisions were being made in a black box. E.g., in 2007 we learned that one of the wireless providers rejected a text message as too controversial. US carriers hae required manufacturers to disable wifi access in some cell phones. Standard contracts contained provisions prohibiting customers from criticizing them. He says we don’t know that choices like these are unlawful, but they are determining how we communicate. We need a principle of non-discrimination. It would allow for reasonable network mgt but make it clear that the network operators cannot “shackle” the Internet. There ought to be a process for adjudicating claims of discrimination.

Copps makes it clear where he stands: We need to be suspicious of the carriers because they have a history of being devious and manipulative [my summary]. (Commissioner Adelstein, the other Dem, is nodding.) [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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Kevin Martin points to the Four Principles that his predecessor (POwell) propagated. He adds that these are subject to “reasonable network mgt,” which refers to footnotes he added that vitiated the principles. E.g., you can connect any device … so long as it doesn’t “harm” the Net.

He’s addressing the weasliness of thee “reasonable” exceptions he introduces. He says the FCC takes seriously allegations that the carriers have misapplied the exceptions. He says the FCC is willing to step in to correct behaviors.

Good. [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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NOTE: I am live-blogging. Not re-reading for errors. There are guaranteed to be errors of substance, stand point and detail. Caveat reader.

Rep. Ed Markey opens it. He’s been one of the staunchest and most reliable defenders of an open Internet. He recalls his long standing on the Internet’s behalf. He asks us to keep users in mind, preferring their needs to that of the carriers. What a concept!

He says that the carriers should not be thought of as providing Internet services. They provide access. [Right on.] He’s making a nose-in-the-tent argument: If we let the carriers use Net management as an excuse to manage content, they will take this as permission to manage content overall.

He would rather that we have genuine competition and/or sufficient bandwidth. If the lack of bandwidth is making problems, then the Commission “would do well” to examine policies to open up competition.

Oscar reference: We should look back from the future and see that this is no country for old bandwidth. (Better, says Markey, than saying “There will be blood.”)

The beauty of the Internet is its chaos, it’s ability to reinvent itself, he says. He takes a swipe at media concentration — protestors outside are picketing the meeting because of the FCC’s unseemly insistence on permitting massive consolidation.

BitTorrent should not be turned into BitTrickle, he says, to applause and whoops. [The crowd is trying to figure out if they should be holding their applause for the end.]

Attaboy, Ed! [Tags: fccboston08 net_neutrality ]

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I spent yesterday at the NFAIS conference. After I spoke, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group gave an interesting, informative and funny talk, and then there was a kick-ass panel on Web 2.0 in the edusphere. Steve Sieck has done an excellent and pithy job blogging both Lee and the panel (Chris Willis of Footnote.com and Bryan Alexander

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At the end of his very entertaining talk at the NFAIS meeting, Bryan Alexander put up the usual slide with his email address and blog site, and said lightly, “It is of course required by law that the very last thing in every presentation be a URL.”

Nice observation. And behind it is, I think, the sense that we no longer want to announce finality, as if what we just said wraps up the topic in a nice bow. Now it’s not done unless it points to what’s more.

[Tags: bryan_alexander hyperlinks ]

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Howard Rheingold explains why he’s hooked on Twitter. Nice list.

To it I’d only add:

Entertaining: Some people are pretty consistently funny, insightful, two degrees left of comprehensible…

Revelatory: There’s this guy who in the real world is boring enough that people make up excuses to avoid sitting next to him at dinners. But on Twitter he is sharp-edged, pithy and delightful. It’s odd that people can reveal in 140 characters what is hidden at greater length.

Intimate: I’m keeping up with some people I otherwise wouldn’t even get the annual Christmas newsletter from. Hearing the details creates an intimacy that wasn’t there before.

[Tags: howard_rheingold twitter social_networking_software ]

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On Thursday at 6 pm, Clay Shirky is going to give a talk at the Berkman Center (well, actually in the Austin West classroom in Austin Hall a few buildings over, but Berkman is sponsoring it) about his new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” Clay is one of our best thinkers and a great presenter (for example).

See you there! (Details of the event are here. And here’s a

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The Boston Globe today is running an op-ed by me on Net neutrality. (It grew out of conversations with David Reed and Yochai Benkler, but they are obviously not responsible for what’s wrong about it.)

* * *

This Monday, the Berkman Center is hosting an FCC hearing on Comcast’s blocking of BitTorrent. It’s a series of panels that look to be composed of matter vs. anti-matter. Some fantastic people are on board. I hope the panel format works for this.

Immediately afterwards, there is likely to be a Berkman-led discussion among those in the audience, since there’s no room in the hearing schedule for public comment.

[Tags: net_neutrality fcc comcast bittorrent ]

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I give you yet another Million Dollar Idea for free: Color butter substitute so that it can act as a palette, enabling diners to create masterpieces on their toast.

Vincent Van Toast [Tags: butter toast humor ]

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I can’t remember a primary like this one.

[Tags: politics obama clinton hillary ]

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From the DailyKos comes a list of the 113 bills Sen. Obama introduced in the 110th Congress. He introduced 153 in the 109th, says the post.

The list apparently comes from the Congressional site, Thomas. I haven’t checked the DailyKos post’s accuracy beyond doing a search at Thomas for bills Sen. Obama sponsored, and came up with 113. [Tags: obama politics ]

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Session description:

By lowering or bridging barriers, cyberinfrastructure can bring different institutional, enterprise, and policy models into unaccustomed proximity. The result may be powerful complementarities – or it may be competition or conflict. Since the separation between institutional and public policy also blurs, what kind of stewardship should the academy provide for advancing knowledge infrastructure? When should it take the lead in developing standards? How should it account for industry and sector differences? How should voluntaristic and cooperative models fit with market-based models? How should universities navigate/mediate between open and controlled models of knowledge?

Kaye Husbands-Fealing (U of Minn) leads the discussion. [I'm live-blogging which means I'm being sloppy, hasty, uneven, and erroneous.]

Arti Rai (Duke) reports on her study of how U’s have patented software through the 1980s and 1990s. The percentage of sw patents have been increasing, especially since the legal decisions making it easier to patent sw. [Unfortunately, I can't keep my blogging up with her. Lots of info, and I don't know the jargon well enough. Sorry! Here's a paper by her on the topic.]

Eliot Maxwell (Committee for Economic Dev.) Think about openness in terms of access and responsiveness. Responsiveness means people can contribute, distribute, etc. In the continuum of open to closed, the appropriate degree of openness is context sensitive. E.g., you don’t want medical records to be totally open. It’s not about IT but about the ability to get contributions from very different sources. It’s not always just the experts. It’s an attitude as much as it’s an instantiation in the infrastructure. What matters is adopting an ethos of sharing and collaboration, Eliot says. Instead of being the best and the only, the U should think about collaboration as a way out of the zero sum goal. The U should change the tenure system so getting info out onto the Web counts. Maybe U’s — including small liberal arts colleges and community colleges — should study how collaboration works and doesn’t work. We need to make info available, findable, searchable, interchangeable. Also, we need an attribution system since that’s the incentive. We have a technology to doing that, but we don’t always design it into our systems. In 15 yrs, U’s won’t be as associated with a place, about 4 continuous years, or about producing paper.

Brian Kahin (U of Mich) says we’ve been discussing different parts of the cyberinfastructure. We are seeing a rapidly expanding ecology of knowledge. How do you present this to industry, to the board of trustees, to legislators, to prospective students, etc.? Are U’s aligned with their own researchers on the nature and role of knowledge? None that Brian knows, he says. Open access is a paradigm for transformational effect. I don’t see the same thing on the tech side. I see very little interaction between legal scholars on patents and the U’s administration of patents. And this brings up the question of stewardship. What credibility does the U have to speak for public policy? And, we need to think about collaboration science, Brian says. We don’t have a lot of good info. We also ought to be working on strategies for developing standards. How do we have innovation policy when we have so many different models of innovation? Finally, is collaboration the be-all and end-all? On the Net we also see complementarity; that’s part of the Internet and probably should be considered part of the ecology of the cyber infrastructure. [Sorry this is so choppy.]

Q: (Kaye) Eco-innovation looks at the well-being indices and considers how innovation affects the end-users. How can we use the cyberinfrastructure to take the pulse all the way to the end user?
Arti: Erich Von Hippel has done a lot of work on distributed innovation. Users are innovators. Feedback to the researchers would be very helpful.
Eliot: Openness is consistent with that type of feedback. On the Internet, if you make a crappy product, everyone knows it’s a dog.

Q: What is the governance procedure for sunsetting data? Who decides how much data to store?
A: As organically as possible.

Q: Do we really want all projects to be sustainable? Shouldn’t some of them just die when they’re done? And some of them need non-open control of IP
Eliot: Yes, the openness should be appropriate to the project.

Q: It’s easy when talking about data to simply say that it’s a community issue and each community will develop its own ways of sorting these things out. But re-use and recombination of data for purposes far away from their original purpose is very exciting.
Arti: Great point.
Eliot: Maybe funders can help.

Do we really want funders to decide what’s sustainable? Shouldn’t it be a Darwinian process?
Eliot: Not decide. Funders should make applicants think hard about sustainability from the beginning.

Q: We still don’t know what we mean by “cyberinfrastructure.” Are we any closer to agreeing on it? How do we show its value if we can’t agree on what it means?
Brian: We can think of it as an asset (something you’ve already invested in) or as a prospect (where things are going). Those two questions come out in different ways. The asset vision is the Internet. The prospect points to semantics and ontologies that let you do more things with knowledge.
Eliot: I’m less interested in defining what cyberinf is that in what we’re trying to get from it, i.e., to be more collaborative and open.

Q: In my view, cyberinf is not just ICT. We should think of the infrastucture as being collaborative.
Brian: Part of what you’re talking about is virtual organization.

Q: A group of research U CIOs have been meeting to talk about what they can to shape the growth of a national cyberinfrastructure.

Q: We need to be able to talk about this simply and clearly.

[Too fried to blog. Sorry.] [Tags: cyberinf education standards universities patents ]

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Linda Katehi (U of Illinois) asks how we can design an infrastructure that enables and sustain collaborative work. [Standard live-blogging disclaimer holds: hasty, error-free, subjective, unworthy.]

John Wilbanks of Science Commons talks about the cultural infrastructure that enables content to move so rapidly and easily around the Net. He’s posted his comments on his blog. [Thank you!] “We are swimming in cultural infrastructure for content, but not for knowledge.” He is going to argue against having an end goal for the Network. “The end goal is to create a world we cannot imagine.” We shouldn’t even be talking about “papers,” etc. on the Net. We should be talking about namespaces, not just ontologies. “If we can’t use the same names for things, we can’t have knowledge.” Intermediate goals: End to End. We should make it easy to get answers to difficult questions. And we need to build human capacity. We should focus on getting greater throughput so data turns into knowledge and innovation. [Read his remarks on his blog.]

Mackenzie Smith from MIT Libraries asks what a knowledge infrastructure is. Now that John has given us the why, she’s going to talk about the “what.” There are seven layers, she suggests:

1: Repositories.

2 : Data management.

3. Linking (interoperable semantics). We need namespaces and identifiers, and encoding standards (e.g., RDF), and ontologies like Object Reuse and Exchange.

4. Discovery. Finding data on the Web.

5. Delivery.

6. Social.

7. Business models. Policies.

The IT view, Mackenzie says, is what you can plug into the layers. She talks about some of the various tools available.

The organizational view: Different areas of the U are responsible for the various layers. The one layer generally no one is addressing is the business layer.

Chris Mackie (Mellon Foundation) wonders how many infrastructure “successes” are really just “steaming piles of integration.” What’s the right way to do design? Bottom up? Top down? Knowledge needs to emerge and for that it has to be bottom up and open. But that won’t get us where we need to be. We also need it to be top down; we need global optimization. How do we pull these things together?

We cannot allow our cyberinfrastructure to be so top-heavy that it flattens all other organizations, including community colleges, etc. We need the diversity of the educational ecology, Chris says.

Sara Kiesler (CMU) has been studying collaborative research projects. About a third are successful, but about a third are failures, and a third struggle. What surprised her was that the problems in collaborating were not due to differences in how different disciplines approach their work. The biggest problems were inter-institutional. The two institutions have different bureaucratic procedures, regulations and cultures. No one in the institutions watches out for the welfare of inter-institution collaborations. And they don’t like it if the budget goes to the other institution.

John: We need both top down and bottom up. The key is to make sure they use the same standards. Standardize around names and transactions. You want to make it easy to stitch them all together.

Q: This is the first time the full range of institutions has been brought up, probably because the attendees come from major research institutions. So, good to have acknowledged there are other types of educational institutions.

Q: Physicists are used to collaborating. And the funding agencies drove the senior scientists to collaborate. Don’t underestimate the role of the funding agencies.

In the context of U’s, are there any warnings the panel has for us?
Chris: The challenges to collaboration are getting more real all the time. E.g., IP issues prevent some collaborations.
A: There’s the centralize-everything clique, the decentralize clique. Any preferences?
Linda: The totally centralized one doesn’t work in the US.
John: You can’t order people to innovate. You have to build systems that enable explosive innovation, based on standards. Making control the default doesn’t work. Harvard’s Open Access policy switches the default to sharing, with an opt-out. I think that’s the right way, but we don’t have the evidence yet.
Mackenzie: The decentralized model is a little more maintainable.

Sara: The collaborations that succeed tend to be the ones that have some practice doing it.

Q: Collaborative technology is still bad. And IP gets in the way. Also, U-industry collaboration seems to work best when the academic wants to have an effect in the real world.
John: The standard contracts for the life sciences depends on your tax status. Every collaboration with a commercial entity, even at a very early stage, gets complex very quickly. A simple design decision has made this hard.

Q: How do you align interests for collaboration?
Sara: Interdependence.

Q: The right question isn’t decentralized or centralized. It’s what you’re going to do that’s between those two, because neither of those will work.
Mackenzie: Dropping a governance onto a project at the beginning can kill it. There are many approaches.

[I've begun to fade — didn't get much sleep last night, and live-blogging is really tiring... [Tags: cyberinf education standards universities ]

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The NY Times:

“To make connecting with third-party software easier, Microsoft will publish on its Web site key software blueprints, known as application program interfaces, pertaining to its high-volume products used by other Microsoft merchandise.”

API’s explained as software blueprints? Seems like a stretch to me, but I don’t have a better metaphor in mind…

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Jeffrey Lehman of the Woodrow Wilson Center (and chair of Internet 2) says for a long time we’ve opened our universities for people from other countries to study and teach. And we’ve had out-bound programs as well. But in the past decade there’s been an explosion of interest in increasing the outbound activities of US universities. What does the increased outbound globalization mean for cyberinfrastructure? What does it say about university policy? Does it change the mission of the U? To whom does the U owe its responsibility — state, feds, the world, knowledge as an abstraction, or to the highest bidder? Should gov’t funding promote or inhibit the widest dissemination of info as a free, public good? [As always, I'm typing too fast, making mistakes, getting things wrong...]

Pradeep Khosla of CMU (a robotics researcher and a dean) has built five global campuses in the past few years. But there aren’t global universities the way there are global corporations, he says. The products from global corps meet the same standards around the world, but global campuses don’t always meet the same educational standards as the parent U. Education is key but it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. We should focus on globalizing research and use the infrastructure for that. We should also use the infrastructure reduce tuition costs. Universities can do more outsourcing. The governance model is another hurdle. And we should be looking at the IP policies. Finally, we haven’t spent enough time understanding how to assess education in multiple places at the same time.

Lesa Mitchell (Kauffman Foundation) We’ve been trying to understand all the different pathways how innovation moves out of the U and into the commercial sphere. E.g., we built the iBridge network to aggregate research, as per Simon’s comments earlier. About 37 universities have signed up. Kauffman also supports ScienceCommons. Also, we funded BetterWorld, trying to shed light on the innovations coming out of universities. But researchers aren’t rewarded based on this. We’re looking at collaborative models as well, such as Citris and Rosetta Commons: multi-U, multi-industry collaboratives.

Gerald Barnett (UCSC) says computers draw us together in conversation. They’re very social. When we look at IP we shouldn’t think it’s fundamentally about law. It’s about behavior. IP is a social convention that aims to manage the competing interests of groups. Companies are much sophisticated than U’s because companies have decision processes, such as markets. U’s just have principles, which is bad for grounded discussions. If you look at how screwed up the U’s IP policies are, he’s not sure he wants an innovation policy. He wants an attitude. We have an opportunity globally to broaden our models. IP policies are absurd: You probably are not authorized to click on the “I accept” button when you download Acrobat at your U because you’re entering into a contract. We should learn from other countries as they put together their environments. Let’s build models that are normalized, that people understand, as CreativeCommons does. The infrastructure is a bonfire around which we do social things, and we need to adapt our policies to it.

Susan Tuttle (IBM) says in 2007 we passed the America Competes act. What does the USA need to do to compete globally? IBM says innovation has to be: open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global. How does this apply to the U? 1. Open: New approaches to IP? 2. Collaboration: Collaborate with other U’s, with your students… 3. Multi-disciplinary: Often students graduate without the skills we need as a company. Their skills need to be broad and deep. Engineering and Business Depts ought to work together. 4. Global: U’s need to be global.

Q: Students would be happy to collaborate if they could. The presidents and the provosts often don’t get it.
Jeffrey: The problem I hear is that American U’s are structured around the old model of the student as a lone wolf, and that doesn’t map well in the real world where people act as teams. In China, the critique is a mirror image: They say they teach people to march together but there’s little ability to break out from the pack. The obvious comment is to say that there’s truth on both sides. The pedagogic problem is: How do we teach people to be members of effective teams? You have to be able to bring something of your own to the table. But you also need to be able to transform what you bring to the table into a group product, and that’s a separate set of tools. No place I’ve seen has been very good at helping their students to develop all those skills. US universities divide the labor: The U nurtures the individual and industry then nurtures team skills.
Pradeep: You wouldn’t have this impression if you went to CMU. And US universities are not as siloed as people think. We have a broader idea of what education is. We are more formative and less prescriptive than most of the rest of the world.
Susan: Our children are looking at have ten careers by the time they’re done. We at IBM need people who can adapt quickly and be flexible.
Gerald: Students are now the leading practitioners. We need to learn how to learn from them. We need wisdom appreciation for the fifteen year olds. We need to be out in the community seeing what they’re doing. [But hen we do, we think what they're doing is trivial, etc.We're getting older. It's their world.

The tenure system is so conservative and so prone to stove-piping. There's a basic U structure that keeps us from going too far.

A big part of U is the cultural experience of being on campus. Cyberinf lets you deliver the course content, but how do you get the cultural experience?
Pradeep: We shouldn't think of cyberinf as about delivering content. E.g., SecondLife is an experience.
A: Do you expect at-distance undergrad students to spend 20 hours a week on SecondLife?
Pradeep: We should begin at grad level. We don't want to mess with the first four years until we've tried it at the grad level.
Lesa: We've had this discussion with a number of different universities. Should I globalize my U by going somewhere else, or make my U larger?

[I missed some because I was waiting on line to ask a question, but I gave up because there we're running out of time. I was going to ask: Since we think our cyberinf embodies and enables certain values, how do we keep it from being a tool of colonization rather than of globalization.]

Gerald, in response to a question, said that we have to embrace many tones and tonalities, welcoming diversity, not just a single way of doing research.

[I went back into the queue because the moderator decided to take the entire list of questions at once.]

Pradeep: I see no problem with a U furthering it’s own goals because U’s have different strategies. There’s a diversity of strategies. It’s a good tension.

Lesa: The Kauffman Foundation is focusing on K-12. We have a cellphone-as-teaching-tool project underway. We believe you can only make change from outside in.

Gerald: Info tech is the first great revolution U tech in 500 years, says Clark Kerr. The U has many roles, including education, stewardship, economic, etc. We can’t go forward in this world with one-size-fits-all policies. We need attitudes. And we should be looking at how the “tribal chiefs” are directing us.

Susan: We need to recognize global differences. [Tags: conference_coverage cyberinf globalization education ]

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Peter Freeman of the Washington Advisory Group introduces the first panel, on “Cyber-Enabled Knowledge”, by asking how the infrastructure can support the university’s essence as the creator, transmitter and preserver of knowledge. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, typing quickly, and undoubtedly getting things wrong.]

Guru Parulkar of Stanford says that we must build the cyberinf on the right foundation. That’s one that enables many layers. It requires supporting the end-to-end principle because that facilitates innovation. We should make the infrastructure programmable so that providers can give users empowering services. [Seems non end-to-end to me. But I think he's talking about university infrastructure providers enabling experimental services, not having, say, Comcast build services.] It’s not enough to deploy vendors’ infrastructure on campuses. The CIO and researchers ought to get together on this.

Simon Porter, eScholarship Research Center, U of Melbourne, wonders what the world looks like when we can find about all the research going on in our university. We could manage portfolios of research under an overall university agenda. [Hmm. Possibly scary.] They could develop a data research plan. The university could plan its storage needs. The way the research is represented to the public will change: it won’t be left to the researchers to be the lead communicator about the project. There will be a single portal — like Amazon or eBay, perhaps — where you can find out about research. We will be able to evaluate research by the effect it has on other projects. Researchers will be able to cooperate more, especially if there are standards. Crystallographers have software that lets people annotate online models; this is promising.

Q: Simon and Guru both pointed to gaps between network engineering folks and the CIO. What’s blocking progress here?
Simon: It’s not a natural progression. You have to take a leap.
Guru: The infrastructure is so complex, there’s a reluctance to “muck it up.” But at Stanford there’s a lot of openness.
Peter: Market forces will bring about the healing of the gap.

Q: The infrastructure didn’t arrive on a gold cloud all at once. It’s built on standards. In a recent survey, only 30 universities (G7) had courses on standards. Standards aren’t taught or shared at universities.
Guru: I disagree with you completely. Universities should be doing research much before people think about standards.
A [we've been asked not to identify speakers without asking permission :( ]: The U’s are incredibly creative now. I believe the next thing will come primarily out of U’s. Things bubble up, and the standards follow after that.
Simon: Standards are fundamentally important for development of cyberinf.

Q: How do we change the research processes to take advantage of the new cyberinfrastructure. This is not a decision for the CIOs but for the college presidents, etc.
Peter: By acclamation, we agree.

Q: [me] Knowledge currently reflects the old infrastructure: You get published or not. Knowledge is binary, fenced in and managed. How will the new infrastructure change the nature of knowledge itself?
Simon: Especially with shared standards, research can be more open.
Peter: Simon has proposed a specific way to make available info about current reseach projects. That’s key to enabling cooperation and the development of standards.
Guru: The cyberinfs we deploy on our campuses should allow experimentation in networking, cooperation, etc. That type of infrastructure doesn’t exist because we haven’t been asking for that leel of programmability and flexibility.

Q (John Wilbanks): When we try to move from network standards to knowledge standards, we get into semantics. It’s hard to have enduring semantics because they change as research happens. We could have project-based standards and allow people to share what they mean about something, not just sharing the content. So we have to change the idea of standards. [Go John!

Q: Is it the U's role to fund research into infrastructure? You can't make a case to the provost unless you show some dollars coming from somewhere.
Guru: Yes, someone has to pay for it. Maybe vendor partnerships will help.
Simon: If it's strategically important to the U, the U ought to do it.

A: I'm in bioinformatics. BTW, my U doesn't teach any of the standards. Anyway, industry folks tell us we're training students to be like you, not to be what we in industry need. E.g., not team players. How can we make more industry-academic partnerships?

A: There is something big going on that we don't understand. We're good at big networks, etc., but we don't understand how to solve problems for small groups of collaborating domain scientists. Universities don't just store, transfer and develop knowledge...

I direct one of the portals where project-based info can be shared. People keep asking what the incentive is for professors. Right now the reward structures are not geared towards publishing on the Internet. What can be done to fix the incentive system?
Simon: Making info available is always going to be a chore to researchers. But Facebook makes it possible for marketers to find info based on participation by users. We need something equivalent for researchers, surfacing info about projects without requiring additional work by the researchers.
Guru: If it's a problem of aggregation? People are very eager to make their work public. Where is the disconnection?
Peter: It largely depends on the field.

A: I develop provenance metadata in my field. There are problems. Ontologies don't exist yet. They require expertise in RDF as well as domain expertise, and that's hard to find in the same person. The ontologies have to be developed internationally.

A: Maybe there are some Web 1.0 opportunities that haven't been take advantage of yet. E.g., we could make available to any NSF researcher a Web page at the NSF site. That would also provide some authentication.
Simon: It's not a web page. Every researcher needs a persistent identifier. [researcher or proejct??

A: Standards that have followed research experimentation and productization have been the most successful. E.g., Internet, LANs, the Web. The most spectacular standards failure was the OSI in the 1980s because they did it before they had the sw and the experiments.

A: At my [hardware infrastructure] company, we do a lot of rolling out of products internally that are not quite ready. We are probably more willing to risk failure than universities are. And we are seeing more demand for programmable infrastructure hardware.

I urge us to adopt a more expansive, active and empirically-grounded notion of infrastructure. We shouldn’t think of infrastructure as being primarily hardware. 1. The layer model encourages thinking of the hardware as the “real” stuff. 2. We need to be teaching our students the practices by which interoperability is made possible. The standards in ten years will be different, but the tensions and dynamics will stay roughly the same. 3. We should learn from previous attempts to build infrastructure.

A: Infrastructure is extremely important but that occurs in a multicultural environment that we should bear in mind. Second, it all comes down to open access. [Tags: cyberinf research science universities ]

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I’m at conference called “Cyberinfrastructure and University Policy – Enabling Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation” in DC. There are about 50 people here, heavy on senior ICT (info and communications tech) policy folks, but including academics and open access advocates.

Since I feel like a fish out of water here — these folks know way more about cyberinfrastructure than I do, including what “cyberinfrastructure” means — at last night’s reception I asked John Wilbanks of Science Commons what it’s about. (I am a huge John Wilbanks fan, of course.) As I understand it, this meeting hopes to make progress in the infrastructure for knitting together what we collectively know, especially by using universities. That infrastructure includes issues of pipes, rights, and, yes, metadata.

The reception was surprisingly a tie and jacket affair for the men — the attendees seem to be even split among the various genital possibilities — where the word “senior” kept showing up in titles. Lots of interesting discussions.

So, I’m looking forward to a day as a fish out of water.

[Tags: science_commons cyberinf ]

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West Wing helped keep the Bush years from shriveling my hope to the size of a tick carcass by reminding me that government could — at least in some alternative universe — be smart, fact-based, principled, and for the people. So, of course Obama’s rise has reminded me and millions of other West Wing fans of the Matt Santos (= Jimmy Smits) campaign in the last season.

Now it turns out (according to the Guardian) that the West Wing writers based Santos on Obama, at least to some degree.

Go Santos Obama!

[Tags: obama matt_santos west_wing politics entertainment ]

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Dave Winer’s got an interesting idea: Publish MP3s of the briefing calls the candidates give groups of reporters.

Even if they say no, it’ll be fun watching them explain why.

[Tags: politics dave_winer ]

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I just caught up wth Harold Feld’s Super Tuesday endorsement of Obama. In the course of explaining why Obama’s life story resonated with Harold, who comes from quite a different background, Harold posted the following quotation:

“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the foundation. It is from the Lord, and it is wonderful in our sight!” (Psalms 118:22-23)

Wow, that Guy could write!

[Tags: harold_feld psalms ]

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