a href=”http://www.buzzmachine.com/”>Jeff Jarvis led a discussion at PDF among 1,000 people about what government could learn from Google, and, more generally, what a bunch of techies would do to make government better. Jeff’s got this rare cross of skills as a writer, teacher, entertainer and provoker. If you haven’t seen him at work, you should grab the next opportunity. And, yes, Jeff is a friend, so I’m biased. But I’m also right.

So, here’s a way the government is becoming like Google. Remember how a few years ago, Google was grabbing the best and the brightest techies of every stripe? Every time you turned around, someone else you admired had moved there. Now the same thing is happening with the federal government. It’s the glamorous place many of the best and the brightest — including some from Google — want to work. The government is becoming a center of innovation. It may not be as wild as the garages of Silicon Valley and the Charles River, but it’s dreaming big and its heart is pure. These positions are being filled with the diametric opposites of lobbyists. It’s pretty amazing.

Note to self: Re-read The Best and the Brightest to see if there are lessons for the new federal techies.

Tags: pdf09 e-government e-gov egov experts

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Frank Rich: Yes. But someone is going to have figure out how to pay for it. I suspect it will be figured out. There are always these fears during dislocations.

Karen Tumulty: It’s a terrifying time for traditional newspapers, but there are models that work. E.g., I watch Marcy Wheeler’s thermometer.

Dan Gillmor: I’ll channel Clay Shirky. The cost of experimentation has gone to just about zero. There are thousands of experiments, including in business models. We need even more.

Scott Simon: We need to be open to social media. Journalists tend to get jaded. People are now their own editors. A tweeter in Iran said “Tell all your friends: You are the media.” I think that’s true, but there’s work to be done to recreate the best values of journalism all over again.

Rich: We’re so obsessed with new media. Let 1,000 tweets bloom in Iran, but we forget that people are still repressed. The happiness with Iranian’s use of social media has led us to distort the coverage.

Simon: With social media you can overhear people talking with one another, in a way that is very hard with traditional reporting.

Gillmor: The issue of verification can be pretty slippery. We’re having to relearn media literacy. We have to be skeptical of everything … including the NY Times. But we also have to learn how to be not equally skeptical of everything. I’m not worried about supply but we have pretty crappy demand…people who grew up as passive consumers. It’ll take work on our parts, as former consumers and now users, to figure out what to trust.

Tumulty: You may wobble on line but ultimately you get to what the truth is because so many people demand it.

Rich: The people in this room are obsessed with this stuff. We want to find out what’s really going on. But a lot of people, especially those who aren’t upper middle class, don’t have the time.

Andrew Rasiej: People weren’t waiting for the journalists to get news about Iran. The NYT is old by the time it’s printed, especially since now we can sometimes go to the source of the news. It’s not a business model.

Gillmor: Yes. We’re not going to have gatekeepers like before. We now tell one another story. But this is so new. We need to get reputation combined with this.

Rich: But there’s only so much we can absorb. We saw home radios consolidate. Some conglomerate will want to have a big brand, and they’ll set the brand. I think there will be a consolidation. There will always be a component that seeks out minority views…

Gillmor: I don’t see that. The only conglomerate that worries me the is duopoly of the cable and phone companies.

Rich: We’re saying the same thing.

Gillmor: That’s a different kind of consolidation that we’ve seen…

Rich: With the same effect, and from the same people.

Tumulty: We should worry about the Google consolidation. SEO distorts the way you frame things

Simon: Journalism has to make the case for why it’s its own ism. There are left and right invesetigative journalism sites. A real news org sometimes upsets its audience.

Rich: How do we get people to eat their spinach? A lot of people want only celebrity news. That’s always been true. Does this new structure make it easier to have the masturbatory news that they want?

Gillmor: For the first time it’s easy to go deep. Even if it’s celebrity culture, the act of going deeper is instructive to some percent of that group. If we can increase the small percentage of people who create news, that’ll make a big difference.

Rich: People who watch ESPN are not going to start following Iran. And the paradox of the last decade: The whole growth of the new media occurred during a time when the Prez sent us to war on a fiction. Even though some of the fiction came from the NYT, the Prez got away with it. Even though people had more news sources, they were susceptible to a propaganda campaign.

AR: But Gonzalez might still be the attorney general…

Rich: Small potatoes compared to swallowing the war propaganda.

Gillmor: Traditional media still have enormous sway, and it was moreso 5 yrs ago. This isn’t an overnight transition. You’re right that that was a catastrophe. The traditional media walked in lockstep with deceptive people in DC. It’s going to take some time. It’s also instructive that the Guardian web site became enormously more popular because English-speakers wanted the other sides.

Simon: One of the hopes for new media is that it’s easier to be interested in both sports and politics and crocheting.

Gillmor: Traditional media were about producing, creating, distributing stuff. That’s not what we do online. We create it. We make it available. People come and get it. That’s really different. Viewers of Fox don’t have a link to what the other side says. Right wing blogs have links to the people they’re criticizing. If we can encourage people to click that link, people can see there are multiple facets…

Tumulty: But the people who land on that blog are not open to persuaded. The Net reinforces people in their beliefs.

Rich: People didn’t want to believe that Sadam didn’t have WMDs. We shouldn’t assume we’re automatically in a Renaissance.

Simon: There’s a still lot to be said for people seeking out variety. I think they’re not going to be satisfied with narrowcasting.

[I stood on line to ask a question and thus missed some live bloggage. There was a long discussion about the value of covering live events, for which there still seems to be demand.]

Q: [me] What’s the future of the idea of coverage? Coverage implies a value-free decision that we know is value-full, and it doesn’t scale well. [I had to say this twice because I didn't put it well]
Rich: We’ll keep providing it so long as people want it.
Me: I’m suggesting it’s going the way of objectivity: a value no longer valued.
Rich: Papers have never pretended to offer full coverage.

[The session ran over; I had to leave before it ended.] [Tags: media journalism pdf09 ]

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Mark Pesce is talking about the new global power. [I didn't liveblog Michael Wesch's talk because it was too hard to. It's was close to his popular YouTube lecture about YouTube. He got and deserved a standing ovation.]

The distribution of power has changed but it comes with a loss of control, which means our culture might start hydroplaning. We need to watch the collisions, but remember that people are going to get hurt. We need a political science for the 21st century.

Last month, Wikipedia banned Scientology from editing WP. The Scientologists compared WP to Nazis. Scientology is highly hierarchical. WP is a social agreement to share what we know for the good of all. What happens when they crash? Scientology uses law suits. How does Scientology deal with a social agreement. If Scientology wanted to declare war, it would attack the social agreement, wearing away at the bonds of trust. ckobama,

Mark points to the phenomenon of “communication overload.” E.g., the NY my.barackobama site was overwhelmed by supporters, so O supporters moved elsewhere, using older media. We haven’t yet seen a hybrid beast that can operate hierarchically but interact with the ad hocracy. Project Houdini (tracking who voted) crashed on Election Day, overwhelmed by info. These both were “friendly fire” incidents. We need to learn how to crush the gulf.

“The next decade will be completely hellish” for parties and campaigners.

Hyperempowered communities face a mismatch with the hierarchical mechanisms of the state, even with the best of intentions. But the catastrophes are the first sign of success. So, the state has to radically reform its means of communication, moving out of hierarchies, becoming more chaotic. But this is asking the leopard to change its spots.

We need to watch hyperintelligences emerge and see how governments react. The rules of the game are changing. “The best first step is observation.” The O administration provides the “perfect lab.” This will give us the first snapshot of a political science for the 21st century. Powerful, hyperconnected communities wil sometims struggle against or work with hierarchical institutions. But in each case the hierarchical will have to adapt itself to a new order.

[Tags: pdf09 egov e-gov e-government e-democracy ]

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Alec Ross is the Innovation Advisor to Hillary Clinton. He’s bringing Net tools, esp. social media, to the State Dept. He begins by saying that alog of what we’re talking about today is power. E.g., the Roman Catholic Church held power because thye power over the texts. Gutenberg’s press shifted power to nation states. “That has held until now when it’s beginning to fray because of the power of our networks.” [BTW, I missed Randi Zuckerberg's interview. Sorry.]

Diplomacy has largely been a matter of white guys in white shirts and red ties talking with other white guys in white shirts and red ties, he says. Now we need citizen engagement in foreign policy. Alec segments this into gov’t to people, people to people, and people to gov’t.

Gov’t to people: E.g., Obama’s video on the Iranian new year posted straight to the Net, for Iranians. E.g., Obama’s speech pushed onto mobile phones.

People to gov’t: “We’re now looking at the potential of people to push gov’ts.” Here the US gov ‘t may not be the primary actor. E.g., the Moldova “twitter rev.” E.g., the No Mas Farc movement (a Facebook action) that has no charismatic leader but that mobilized 10M to march. “If Paul Revere were a modern day citizen, he wouldn’t have ridden down Main St. He would have just tweeted. And we wouldn’t have known his name. Everyone in our society has the power to be a new Paul Revere.” How can we engage the American public move our foreign policy forward?

People to people statecraft. “We’re just beginning to experiment with this in the State Dept.” E.g., they were about to write a check for $110M for relief in NW Pakistan. A jr staff person suggested making an SMS shortcode that would send $5 to the UN PakistabnRelif agency. She had the idea on Thurs morning, Thurs afternoon Clinton heard about it [which probably means that Alec told her about it], and a few days later it was announced from the White House.

He says that Hillary Clinton has been pushing on this hard, and recognizes that it’s a messy space in which there’s need for room for failure.

Micah: How does this related to hard power?
AR: Over the past 8 yrs, defense has been far too much the way we engage around he world. We need to reaffirm the centrality of the other two pillars: development and diplomacy.

Q: What is the role of the US gov’t is supporting digital activists around the world?
AR: This admin recognizes there are digital activists. We can’t just thrust them into war zones. Sect’y Clinton is supporting grassroots civil society orgs around the world so that they can integrate digital tools into their work.
RF: Officials around the world are on Facebook, not always because they like openness, but because it lets people become fans.

Q: How do you weed out hate speech?
RF: Our terms of service pretty clearly define what hate speech is — it incites violence — and those groups come down pretty quickly as we hear of them. Controversial groups who are not inciting hate and bviolence are left up.

Q: To the extent that there are flashmobs, are there any that you need to be tapped down?
AR: We aren’t always going to agree with the actions that are taken. Sometimes our enemies are going to do things we don’t like. That’s what happens on a participatory, open network. [Tags: pdf09 open_government e-gov e-government egov ]

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Ellen Miller, founder of The Sunlight Foundation, says that after this morning’s sessions at PDF (Vivek Kundra’s announcement, Beth Noveck) “We feel pretty good.”

Sunlight Labs has a staff of 14 and a community of about a thousand. Clay Johnson talks the problem that the government data isn’t always in computable form. Now there’s TransparencyCorps.org, a task queuing service for people who want to help. It’s beginning with three tasks: Earmark reading task, photo uploading task, and find the twitter accounts of your local reps task. E.g., the earmarks are in PDF files which are not easily computer-processible. E.g., “Wal-Mart” may be expressed as “walmart,” Wal Mart,” etc. You get points for doing tasks to level up. Highest level: Transparency Overlord.

TransparencyCorps is open source so you can run your own on your own site. “We ask you not to call it TransparencyCorps because that would be a jerk thing to do.” :)

David Moore with OpenCongress.org announces a complete redesign. “We’re building a social network of actions around Congress.” “Users tracking this bill are also tracking…”

Q: [tim carr of FreePress] Can orgs like mine plug into these?
A: Yes. At OpenCongress, you can use the social info, and you can get at the data via API.

Q: How about for state govt’s?
Clay: We’re working on it. 18-24 months, maybe.

[Tags: e-gov pdf09 transparency ]

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Todd Herman is a conservative who wants his team to be using the new tools better. Conservatives need to understand the rules of engagement better. The ecosystem favors Obama. How is that working and how can Conservatives work it? “Chairman Steele said ‘Take the lid off.” What would you do if you were me?” E.g., he’s excited by Vivek Kundra’s announcement and wants to bring the data to his site where Republicans can comb it for info. But how open should a political be? How open can it be? “Can a political party really be open?” “Can we be as open as Twitter? I would love it if we could.”

He points to a 1997 Republican site: A virtual town. Very 1997-cool. USAToday rated it as more fun than the Disney site. The Republicans “have been here before. There’s nothing genetically stopping us from using them.” He shouts out to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky.

Q: How do you envision this change in tech with the underlying philosophical approaches changing the Rep party?
A: I love that our elected leaders can have pretty direct communication with the voters. I think it’s changing that way. But we need to change the rules of engagement, e.g., away from gotcha.

Q: [jay rosen] Cognitive dissonance while listening to you: You seem to address us as if you didn’t know that the Bush admin had an opacity agenda. E.g., Ashcroft’s 2001 memo saying err on the side of not honoring FOIA requests. So, I’d think the Reps should be asking why it was in favor of opacity.
A: It’s a long conversation. Todd points to some instances of the Obama admin’s lack of transparency. “I’d gladly buy you dinner to have a long conversation about it…”
Jay: Good enough! Where are we going?

You picked on DemocraticUnderground, but missed FreeRepublic. But you asked us socratically what we would do if we were you. What would you do if you were us and saw the way the REpublicans manipulated voter roles?
A: I don’t accept the premise, but my question goes both way.

[Great to have a conservative speaking. IMO, it'd would have been better if he hadn't used it as a way to address his political grievances, and instead solely focused on the issues of tech, politics, governance where we genuinely share interests. But, that's just me.]

[Tags: egov everything_is_miscellaneous e-gov pdf09 e-government e-democracy politics ]

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Beth Noveck talks about the whitehouse.gov/open project that aims at opening up egov policy development to citizen participation. Beth is the White House person responsible for bringing open government to the fed gov’t. The Open project asked for ideas about open gov’t policy. Now it’s in the winnowing phase.

Micah asks if this is open source policy making and where it ends. Beth gives some examples. E.g., the opening up of the patent policy.

The Open project uses IdeaScale software because it has community self-moderation. People can propose ideas (4,205 so far) and rank them (367,000 votes so far). The tag cloud’s largest tag is “birth certificate.” These are people who want to see Obama’s birth certificate. (”Again,” Beth says.) Micah asks if this is a feature or a bug. “Are people freaking out because it’s on a gov’t web site?” Beth: “We gave a platform for people who have a cause.” People flagged and rated comments, “taking back the forum.” In any online community, you see the griefers as part of the lifecycle, she says (wisely).

Micah looks at the Office of Science and Technology Policy blog, which takes public comments. “We have the most wonderful conversations,” she says. “The community itself was able to come in and say that these comments are off topic.” They’ve moved off topic comments to another page; they’re still there. The crucial institutional innovation is the recognition that we don’t have all the expertise. We will make better decisions if we can engage others. She says that the scale of participants is small — hundreds, not thousands — but that’s ok if the quality of the conversation is good.

These online tools are not the only ways to participate, she says. They want to make sure that those who are not as digitally literate are also able to take part. These new ways “supplement and augment” the traditional ways of federal rule making.

We’re now heading into the third phase of the project, using MixedInk, a collaborative writing tool. This lets people suggest language for the policy. This helps drafting, but it also helps educate people about how hard it is to draft policy. MixedInk lets people vote on different drafts, so it’s not a “last one to write wins.”

She says they’re getting suggestions that no small group in the White House could have come up with on their own. They’re hearing impacts on people’s real lives. They’re learning about cool tools. They’re getting amazing suggestions for dealing with the Paperwork Reduction Act.

They’re going to distill and filter, and then put the results back out for public discussion.

[I actually choked up a bit listening to Beth, which I find embarrassing, but what the heck.]

[Tags: e-gov everything_is_miscellaneous egov pdf09 ]

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Craig Newmark: “It’s bigger than us and it feels pretty good.” Craig says he likes calling if grassroots democracy. Policy wonks, nerds, and pragmatists working together. Craig says we should be talking about “nonks” (= nerds + wonks). He salutes the first “nerd administration.”

Craig introduces Vivek Kundra (chief information officer) and Macon Phillips (White House new media director). Vivek makes an announcement. “The federal gov’t spends $70B on info tech” but the initiatives freqwuently fail. E.g., the Census’ ridiculous handheld that has failed, so now we’re back to using paper. [ACK!] Vivek announces the IT Dashboard it.usaspending.gov. It builds on data.gov. It shows provides real-time visibility into your tax dollars. You can share the data, embed it, drill down into it, show you the phto fo the CIO responsible, contact her or him directly, provide feedback, look at the perfomance metrics viewed against theactual performance, who the contractors are. You can get the data itself in mashable form, and you can provide any set of data you pull together as an RSS feed.

He shows tools for comparing and spotting trends; it’s a little like WolframAlpha for gov’t data. “We’re launching a platform that will allow us to tap into some of the best ideas and best thinking.” “We look forward to iterating on this. We’ve launched it in beta.”

[This is the type of big, visible success the CIO needs. Fantastic. He gets, and deserves, a standing ovation.]

Macon Phillips begins by thanking the audience for its work. He asks for more feedback on the White House’s Web 2.0 projects.

Q: [esther dyson] How are you going to aggregate the feedback?
VK: It goes to the relevant CIOs and to me. Macon and I are looking at how we can use media to amplify it and getting it directly to the people making decisions.

Q: IS there a danger in hiring tech people to make tech policy?
VK: The fed gov’t is made up of 4M people and 10,000 systems. It’s great to have access to some of the brightest minds in tech policy. Those who are coming to serve in the interest of their country is extremely people. The percentage of people from the tech industry is a small percentage.
MO: We’re bringing in people who can help us with processes, help us make gov’t more transparent.

Q: 18K computer educators are meeting now, discussing how to teach students to do data mashups, etc. Are you trying to figure out a way to allow educators and students to work with your data?
VK: Yes, students can now solve actual problems. But it’s not just teachers and students. Think about the explosion of research when the genome was made public. Also, when GIS data was made public. We’re building platformsWe’re looking at X-prizes to stimulate innovation.

Q: Tying in Stimulus and bailout funds?
VK: Yes. GAO data is already showing up. It took us 1.5 months to get to 100,000 feeds. We decided to launch with just a few so we could get feedback on what we’re doing.

Q: Is the new office of cybersecurity going to be exempt from transparency?
VK: No. They need internal data sharing, and I’m working with them on transparency.

VK: You want into in open formats, in as raw a form as possible. In its raw format, peole have the ability to slice and dice, and to innovate.

Q: What are the limits of transparency?
VK: We don’t want to harm national security. And we want gov’t officials to feel secure in their internal discussions.

Q: [andrew rasiej] Redefining “public” accesibility of documents as “searchable and accessible online”?
VK: As a principle, that makes a lot of sense. I want to caution on the reality, though. There are over 10,000 systems. The data lives in COBOL-based systems we have to get people out of retirement to help us. Petabytes of data. So, there’s an economic question in making those investments in going back through. So, looking forward we want to make sure the spirit of that definition of “public” is honored… [Tags: transparency e-gov e-government everything_is_miscellaneous egov ]

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Mayor Bloomberg skypes in, slightly Max Headroomy. He touts NYC’s e-ness. Info is key to good mgt. #311. Five new initiatives:

1. 311 has a skype account (NYC 311)
2. Twitter: @311nyc

3. 311 online via nyc.gov
4. Tracking the stats to improve the service. E.g., with Google see what services people are most searching for.
5. New annual competition — Big Apps [clever] — to challenge us to come up with new ways to use data at nyc.gov. E.g., someone should make an iPhone app to check out the cleanliness grades of restaurants (which now will also be posted in restaurant windows).

[Tags: pdf09 pdf e-gov e-government egov experts ]

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On stage at PDF, Mark McKinnon and Joe Rospars, the Net guys for McCain and Obama.

Andrew Rasiej begins the interview by asking Mark about the way the media took up his statement at PDF08 that “John McCain is aware of the Internet.”

MM: This shouldn’t be viewed as left v. right but old v. new. “Joe’s a genius, I’m a woolly mammoth.” I’m not the Rospars of the right, I’m old media. We have our own Joe Rospars. It’s all about democratization. Back in 2000, we were creating content via analog. In 2004, it changed radically. We could create longer content digitally and send it out to millions of supporters. In 2008 we saw the effect of YouTube, which means campaigns are losing control. What Obama did: The real key is not tech but harnessing energy. Create the excitement.

JR: All of the online stuff was integrated with the traditional, offline aspects of the campaign.

AR: The power of the Net crystalized for me when I saw my dad emailing Obama YouTubes to people. How do you convince traditional pols that the online is an opportunity?

JR: It’s not a replacement. It’s an integrated thing. It wasn’t clear from the beginning that it was going to happen. In my job interview, Plouffe said we’re only going to be able to build national campaign, we’re going to have to use the online new media to build the love. The old and new media directors sat at the same table. Obama and Michelle said when we first met that they wanted to run the campaign in a way that would leave the political process better off, even if they lost.

AR: What about bumps in the road, e.g., Obama’s support of the FISA bill?

JR: It was hard. But Obama was the candidate, not the plurality of web sites. So he took the time to write a note explaining his position. It was a testimony to the maturity of the campaign and the supporters. After we sent back the donations disappointed donors wanted back, the majority of those were returned because they appreciated how we handled it.

AR: Now that Obama is running the White House, there seems to be more of a disconnect with bloggers, etc.

JR: I dispute that characterization. This is the most transparent WH ever. And we’re not starting from scratch when governing, as opposed to when you’re building a campaign.

AR: Mark, for the next campaign, how much of it will be tools and how much will be candidate?

MM: It’s 95% energy and ideas, 5% tools. Did Obama revolutionize campaigning? Yes, the way Secretariat revolutionized horse racing… How many Republicans are in the audience? [Look like about ten people out of 1,000 raised their hands.]

AR: What advice would you give MM, JR?

JR: Get new candidates. Even Mark’s language is off: He talks about “embracing technology.” We got millions of people who hadn’t been involved in politics to get out and do something. I don’t see any Republican on the horizon doing this.

MM: I agree with JR. It’s about connecting, interacting with people, fundamental issues that matter to them. The best part is day you’re elected; it gets tougher and tougher from then. I hope Pres. Obama is extraordinarily successful for the sake of country, but the hard stuff is just beginning, and people will get disillusioned, and REpublicans will have an opportunity…

MM: Do you have any thoughts about tech is playing out in Iran?

AR: I’m fascinated by our willingness to accept info we can’t verify.

JR: It’s not the tech. It’s the desire.

AR: Micah and I have been thinking that making info “public” should be redefined as accessible and searchable online. Public shouldn’t mean it’s in a drawer in DC.

MM: Transparency is key to effective democracy.

[I missed some questions. Working on my presentation, which I have worked on obsessively for weeks, making it less coherent with each rev.]

Q: Privacy protection hasn’t kept pace with tech…
AR: Privacy is being redefined by the new generation.

JR: I hope people are using the online tools they used during the campaign to organize smaller group now that the campaign is over.

MM: Info is power and tech is providing info.

AR: Bills ought to be posted for 72 hours after it’s finalized and before it’s voted on.

JR: Blue State’s clients are only 25% political. This goes beyond politics.

MM: Fascinating to watch. Campaigns and companies understand they have to tell better stories, opening up the doors so that all the constituencies understand their business.

Q: What are the risks?
JR: We need to make clear to everyone what we’re doing.
MM: Setting expectations

[I did a particularly crappy job of liveblogging this, mainly because of Twitter and the rewriting of my presentation. Sorry.] [Tags: pdf09 e-government e-gov politics ]

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At Personal Democracy Forum, ChallengePost.com announces itself as a “marketplace for challenges” of theX Prize sort. You can create a challenge at their site, or create a “wish” by using #cpost at Twitter.

[Tags: xprize challenges markets everything_is_miscellaneous pdf pdf09 ]

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Bruce Sterling is doing the wrap-up speech.

He says what’s great about your event is that it matches it’s name. What’s wrong with it is (he says) that it’s the eleventh reboot. “When are you going to have a stable system?” We’re rebooting the reboots.

He s says he’s not into the action vs. words thing because he’s a novelist. He also promises to tell us what the next decade looks like culturally. He begins with an anecdote about the chief designer at Fiat who talked about the Fiat since the 500, a very popular car. The designer told an audience that it succeeded because it’s a 50-yr old design. Bruce asked from the audience: Since the new Fiat 500 is a big success, what’s the future for it? Are you going to release the car that came after the F500. (There was such a car.) No, he said. They were looking at post-consumer alterations of the F500 and they were going to “professionalize” that; they were going to move the F500 into “emergent demographic groups.” “I thought this was a really clever idea” and that this is going to happen a lot, a “scary paradigm of the future.” It’s very hard to construe that as progress, he says. We’ve known since the 12th century what progress is: Master nature, more security, better health, etc. What we’re going to get: No money, scarcity, financial collapse, low-intensity global warfare, and a climate crisis. We’re deliberately moving backwards. Gen Xers in charge when people are “afraid of the sky.”

He says he heard a guy [missed the name] that “future” is an old paradigm. Bruce agrees with him. A mythos of the future, the belief in the future, just won’t be the same. We’re moving into a-temporality. Steam punk + metaphysics. Gibson is working on a book called “Zero History.” But Bruce isn’t ready to talk about this yet. Instead, he wants to talk about what it’ll feel like to live through the next ten years. It won’t be progress or conservativism. We get “transition to nowhere.” No big boom bubbles. Bad weather. Global emergent change.

Divide the future into four quadrants.

1. Crisis capitalism for aging baby boomers. They’re not major actors but they have all the votes. They’ll be more attached to crotchety fantasies.

2. BRICs. Emergent countries emerging into nowhere. They’re globalizing but not progressing . Fundamentalists are in charge but they don’t get anything done except ruin things.

Most of the world is in the first two quadrants. Quadrant 3: Reboot in power. Gen Xers running things. Cultural sentiment: “Dark euphoria.” Things are falling apart, everything is possible, but you never realized you would have to dread it so much. You leap into the unknown, you fall toward earth, and then you realize there’s no earth there. a) Top end: Gothic high-tech. You’re Steve Jobs, you build something beautiful but you’re dying of something secret and horrible. Death is waiting, and not a kindly death. Heroic story, but very Gothic. Or, from the political world: Sarkozy. Brilliant. Ethnic. You have no ideology. He’s willing to run against himself, reboot himself. Obama is a gothic high-tech figure. He’s a Chicago machine politician, an ethnic indeterminate politician with a massive fund-raising routine. Sarkozy comes on TV after the Brazilian aircraft crash because he wants to be on TV. These guys are positioning themselves in the narrative rather than building infrastructure. Their cheerleaders, not leaders.

b) The other side of Reboot in power is low-end: Favela chic. You’ve lost everything but you’re wired to the gill and still big on Facebook. Everything you believe as geeks is Favela thinking. This venue is itself a stuffed animal. The unsustainable is the only frontier you are. You’re old in old-new structure, a steam punk appropriation.

Bruce now promises us some practical advice. “I was shamed by Matt’s 100 hour speech. I know what I ought to be studying. I have to go do it now.” So, here’s some practical advice on bright green geek environmentalism. A general principle, painful for a gothic generation like yours: “Stop acting dead.” You’ve been trained that way; it’s the default for your generation. Hair shirt green just changes the polarity of the 20th century. It just inverts it. It’s not really a different way to live.

How do you know if you’re acting dead. The test: The great-grandfather principle. Would your dead great grandfather do a better job of what you’re intending to do. E.g., saving water. Water is indestructible. But your dead great grandfather is saving more water than you. You can’t save more than a dead guy. Save electricity. Move into a smaller apartment. [Amusing bullshit.] You’re going to be dead much longer than you’re alive. So you need to do stuff that you can do better than your dead great grandfather.

How can you do this, he asks. A geek-friendly approach to consumption. For people of your generation, objects are print-outs. They’re frozen social relationships. Think of objects in terms of hours of time and volumes of space. It’s a good design approach. Because if you’re picking these things up — washing it, storing it, curating it — these possessions are really embodied social relationships: made by peole, designed by people, sold by people, etc. Relationships that happen to have material form. You might argue that you ought to buy cheap things or organic. That’s not the way forward. Economizing is not social. If you economize, you’re starving someone else. You need to reasses the objects in your space and time.

The monarch among objects are everyday objects. Whatever is taking up your time most, or closest to your space. E.g., get the best bed you can get. Get a beautiful, well-designed chair. If you haven’t touched it in a year, get rid of it. Women, get real cosmetics.

It’s hard but it’s doable, he says. It’s very hackerly. Make lists. Four categories: Beautiful things, things that have some emotional meaning, your tools and devices, everything else. Bruce then tells us how to tell which is in which. First two: you’re eager to tell someone about its beauty or meaning. Tools: Don’t make do with broken stuff. You’re not experimenting with it if you’re not publishing the results in a falsifiable form.

This is hard to do. It’s the sort of thing you do when a spouse dies or a child leaves your home. It’s tough. It’s not a thing to do on impulse. But you will become much more of what you already are. [Tags: rb11 reboot11 reboot bruce_sterling pessimism cynicism doom soul-crushing_hopelessness clinical_depression ]

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I went to a fascinating breakout at Reboot at which two government guys came to talk about national policy. The government guys were culturally of the Reboot crowd (or so it seemed to me), and one of them came to his position straight out of a tech start-up. But the group of thirty people in the small, converted men’s room (!) met their openness with pent-up hostility. I was surprised at the anger. The gov’t guys ought to listen (which is what they were doing at this meeting), should not expect ideas for free, need to maybe do nothing, need to get the country over the digital divide, should give grants to small businesses, should stay clear of small businesses, don’t be afraid to lose control, build communities, participate in communities, stay out of communities… My untutored sense was that the Web community felt frustrated that this initiative was so late at getting started. As an American, I was actually impressed with the government folks’ openness and webbiness.

Afterwards, I talked with my friend Morten Kamper. He wasn’t at the session, but he said that there was concern that the government’s broadband committee is comprised of the telcos without sufficient citizen or webizen participation, and that Net neutrality is indeed an issue, as the telcos assume they can prefer some of their bits to others.

BTW, I asked the room if there was reluctance on the part of the government to be transparent, and, if so, where’s the Danish version of the Sunlight Foundation. The general answer I got was: There’s no official reluctance, but it’s going too slowly. And Ton Zijlstra said that in the Netherlands, the official policy is to be transparent but there are cultural resistances.

I also asked, at the beginning, if it was clear that the “broadband policy” they were talking about was actually committed to delivering an open, unfiltered, non-discriminatory Internet. The answer was “Yes,” with an implied, “Why would you even have to ask?” (And the answer to that implied question is: Because it’s not clear in America.)

[Tags: denmark e-gov e-government egov reboot reboot11 rb11 ]

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Ton says the biggest obstacle is one’s own apprehension. He says facilitators cannot give content and participate. Don’t mix and match content and process. Stay in control by letting go. “If you want people to start generating idea, don’t give your own ideas, not even as examples.” “Push everything back into the group.”

Always make the rules clear. When there’s an infraction, don’t assume immediately that it’s out of line. Attract people to the desired behavior.

“Create energy by doing nothing.” Be patient.

Avoid the usual introductory round. Try breaking people into groups of 4-5 where each introduces herself and moves on to the next group.

Worry about the form of work second. First: What is the purpose of the session. Work forms: Open Space, knoweldfe cafe, sticky notes….Find one and then improvise.

Prepare with your ‘client.’

Capture the results, but keep them as close to the work at the session as possible. E.g., photo the flip charts rather than writing up a report. Then “share your shit.” And play.

Audience participation:

Q: How do you handle blabbermouths?
A: You have to get over your hesitancy to step in.

People should remember that not everyone speaks Engish.

The focus on action is good.

Q: [me] Is it appropriate to call on people?
A: Yes, sometimes. I use it to get silent people speaking?

Q:[me] How do you deal with groups ho may feel powerless to speak?
A: you have to know about that ahead of time. You may need to send the managers out, or put them in different subgroups.

Q: What goes on in the mind of facilitators? General energy level in the room?
A: [not Ton] We also think about the space. E.g., we could set the chairs so we’re looking at one another. I do pay attention to the energy in the room.
A: [not Ton] I facilitate smaller groups. I worry about whether they’re happy and attentive.
A: [not Ton] Are people falling into their usual bad habits.

[Lot of conversation. I'm transcribing little of it.]

A: [me] Do you point out the relationships among remarks? E.g., “What you just said enhances/contradicts what so and so said earlier”
A: If it’s more about me bringing my expertise, yes. Otherwise, it gets in the way of the session participants owning the results.

Q: Do you bring into the group what’s being said in the private conversations?
A: Depends.

[Tags: reboot reboot11 rb11 facilitation moderation open_space ]

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Matt Webb is part of a small design company. He’s not a designer.

He collects definitions of design: “Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impost meaningful order” – Victor Papanek. One of his colleagues, Jack Schulze, says “Some people (they are wrong) are about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.” Problem solving is hard but isn’t enough, says Matt. But what is culture? Culture is “the things that make life interesting” (Bruno Munari). “The designer of today reestablishes the long lost contact between art and the public,” said Munari. Art often began as functional objects — drapes, urns — so why shouldn’t our own objects be art?

Matt is going to be a chain of consciousness talk about what makes his life interesting. [My live blogging will magnify whatever choppiness there is.]

He shows faces drawn using an algorithm that bases feature size on baseball stats. (Chernoff faces?) These are macroscopes (John Thackara’s term) . Designers have macroscopes. Macroscopes shows where you are in the big context, human-scale. He shows a Here & There projection of NYC that shows where you are and where you culd be simultaneously. “It’s a kind of superpower.”

In 1959, Sen. Fulton supposed that a tomato in space might be 2D and a million mile square. In 1972, NASA finally released a photo of the entire earth. That’s a macroscope. “We need macroscope ideas.” Even the cleverest people in the world can’t tell us a coherent story of the economic collapse. The scale difference is too huge: If you can see the whole thing, the happenings are invisible, whereas if you can see the happenings, you can’t see the whole thing. People in this room might be able to create macroscopes that could help us understand it.

Now Matt talks about superpowers. In Kalarippayattu “the body becomes all eyes” and you are ready for anything. In a reverse power, your eyes become hands: Anything you can see, you can touch. Among the yoga super powers: To become mute, unheavy, large, levitate, telekineses, self-hypnosis, “the ability to touch the moon with one’s fingertip.” Matt then quotes JFK’s commitment to putting a person on the moon. JFK was a “yogic master with the supernatural power to touch the moon with this fingertip.” It took a million man-hours of technical study, 300,000 Americans and 20,000 corporations. What’s our generation’s equivalent of the moon landing? Might be Wikipedia. Where do we spend our next 100 million hours?

The moon landing came out of a command culture. 300,000 people worked and 12 people went to the moon. Wikipedia came out of a collaborative, participatory culture. E.g., burdastyle.com , twitter.com/andy_house (house reports status), newspaperclub.co.uk (uses excess capacity for producing papers). He reads an extended quote from Ze Frank. “When people start something new, they perceive the world around them differently.” We become aware of how the media manipulate us.

Matt’s challenge: Put aside 100 hours to work on someting. ” When you participate in culture —not solving problems but inventing culture — that’s when life gets interesting.” [Great talk. Posted without being proofread.]

[Tags: reboot reboot1 rb11 culture design ]

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I’m at Reboot 11 in Copenhagen. The theme this year is “action.” It’s a euro-geek festival, and one of my favorite conferences. Lots of techies, designers, inventors, artists…. [Warning: Live blogging this...]

Among the projects: We’re building an autonomous wifi bike at the conference: Solar powered, drive it around and it provides wifi. And they’re going to build a book here based on contributions from the audience. (The room is packed and the conference is sold out.) Also: “Designers for Action”: 20 interaction desighers to help prototype stuff. Also: The show’s child care is going to try out experimental action programs (?). Also: There’s a “hack center” that, among other things, has a self-replicating machine. But the real aim is to send people out into the world to make the world better, especially now that it’s clear that the world needs a reboot.

In fact, the session stops so that all 600 people can post an action item on the wall…

[Tags: rb11 reboot11 ]

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Q: How do you define social media at Whirlpool?
Brian Synder: It has to be defined separately for each area, and we tie it back to business objectives. We track share of voice and favorability. On customer service, we do interesting text mining.
Lee Aase (Mayo Clinic): We use the free tools that are available. “The need for measurement varies inversely with the amount of money you spend on it.” We use the measurement tools to prove the value of what we’re doing.

Q: Your biggest challenge?
Marcel Lebrun (Radian6): We only measure if there’s a practical purpose. Social media are now multi-purpose. We use social media for every possible purpose. So, it’s disrupting everything in the enterprise that has to do with reaching out to customers. But those different practices have different business goals and thus different needs for measurement.

Q: Where it’s going?
Marcel: In the past six months, we’ve gone from explaining what social media is, to businesses understanding that their brand is the sum of all the conversations about it.

[Missed some. Sorry]

Q: How do you measure influencers for a brand?
Marcel: We integrate a bunch of digital breadcrumbs and social metrics. We measure things like how often a person talks about a subject, how much comments, how many unique comments, inbound links, which ones of those are also talking about that topic. Influence is very topic-centric. You sometimes want to see total reach, and sometimes you just want to find the topic geeks.

Q: How do you determine sentiment?
Brian: Synergy1 has humans reading the posts. The Tensity program automates this.
Lee: We eyeball it. And we’re looking for the really positive ones so we can spread the word and engage.
Brian: We look to engage by actually talking about product issues. E.g., an unhappy customer was tweeting about a product arriving damaged three times. We talked with him and redesigned the packaging based on his suggestions. We’ve taught some of our customer care phone folks how to engage via social media.
Marcel: The bulk of brands are at the listen stage. But Dell has a full blogger outreach team, focused on different kinds of users. The measure quantitatively and qualitatively (e.g., stories).

Marcel: The fastest way to get a new feature into a product is to tweet it. The developers get excited. They like being in touch.

[Tags: nms09 marketing twitter pr social_media cluetrain ]

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Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation and David Almacy (Edelman’s public affairs VP and former Director of Internet Operations, White House) are talking about government and engagement.

Clay says he’s a product guy who likes building things. Coming out of the Dean campaign, he co-founded Blue State Digital. When asked why Obama was successful online, he says he replies “Because Howard Dean had bad lawyers.” He could just build stuff there without consulting lawyers. Now, when they try to apply this stuff to governing, the lawyers are involved, and creativity is coming to a screeching halt, Clay says. But, he says, there’s another way: Publishing data. Data.gov aggregates data from the executive branch. Lots of businesses have been built using gov’t data, and this will be a seed bed.

Clay says that Twitter is as important to a political campaign as email. “I’m willing to go on record that in 2012 Twitter will be a bigger fund-raiser for campaigns than email.” Obama raised 80% of his funds through email. E.g., Tim O’Reilly has 200,000 subscribers.

He talks about Apps for America, a contest for apps that do useful things with open data. The new round has people working with the data at data.gov.

Q: [me] How can we encourage the gov’t and others to produce data in open formats?
Clay: I’m more focused on just getting the data out. I don’t care about the format. We should tell them just to do it in plain text, if that’ll get it out faster. Once the gov’t starts pumping it out we can have the debate about which standards.

[Tags: politics e-gov egov e-government transparency ]

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Marc Monseau (Johnson & Johnson): 50% of people change their behavior based on the medical advice they read on line. And most people are looking for info from other people like themselves. But that info isn’t always accurate. That means that the healthcare industry has an obligation to get out into the online world to present accurate info. We have lots of information, and we are companies of relationships: We have close relations with physician groups, patient groups, advocacy groups, gov’t organizations. We can tap into those resources of information and relations. E.g., we have an ADD product. The best info patients receive often come from other parents. at ADHD Moms at Facebook, there’s info, but also the possibility of linking to other patients. We set it up, but it’s unbranded.

Virginia Cox (Consumer Healthcare Products Association) gives an example: Teens getting high on cough medicine. There were 200 videos on YouTube about how to get high that way. So, we used social media to build awareness among mothers. We were completely transparent about who we are. Another example: We recruited five moms because people want to hear from other people like them. We put it on Gather and then on Facebook. We wanted to have them talking. It meant giving up control over what they’re saying.

Earl Whipple (AstraZeneca) says that while you want to provide accurate information, you don’t want to encroach on the physician-client relationship. You also have to be mindful of gov’t regulations, of course. He also notes that the search results are more often coming from bloggers than from sites of credentialed providers. The most controversial posts get pulled up first, frequently, and many people assume that those are the most reliable. Therefore, the question isn’t what’s the risk of engaging in the new social media space; the question is what’s the risk of not engaging.

Q: How are things changing? How authentic can you be?
Earl: The concept of spokespeople is now laughable. People want to hear directly from the content area expert.
Marc: You can be authentic while talking about highly regulated products by being transparent about what you can talk about and what you can’t. People understand we’re under limitations. And we can at least direct the traffic to the right place.

Q: Info across a global world?
Earl: When we put out information, we include who the information is intended for. It’s an unbounded environment.

Q: What is it that you can’t tell people because of regs?
Marc: The FDA limits what pharmas can say about approved products. If people notice a new use for a product, you have to go back to the script and say what’s on the product label. It doesn’t prevent you from engaging. But you can’t get into a detailed conversation about unapproved uses. And if you come across someone who’s had a problem with the product, you have to report that back.
Virginia: There are strict regulations around advertising. Companies have to be careful about what counts as advertising.
Earl: There are many unanswered issues. E.g., if you’re in a genuine dialog and someone brings up an unapproved use, what exactly is your responsibility?

Q: How do you monitor the Five Moms site, for example?
Virginia: We don’t have to monitor it for content. The Moms respond on their own. But we are required to monitor it for adverse reports, etc.

Q: What should all students know about social media and health if their in the communications field?
Virginia:

From the Five Moms Site:

Tips to monitor your kids online.

* Make sure that your children are never online without your permission.
* Be clear with your kids about your rules on Internet use at home and outside of the home.
* Place your computer in an area of the house where you can easily supervise their Internet activity.
* Ask your children about who they talk to and what activities they do online.
* Use parental filters to block access to questionable sites.
* Build an open and trusting relationship with your kids about their online use.

The last point is an unintentional punchline. [Tags: nms09 pr marketing health_care pharmaceuticals social_media social_netowrking cluetrain ]

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I’m at the New Media Academic Summit for a second day. [Disclosure: Edelman PR is the main sponsor of this, and I've consulted to them in the past. In fact, it looks like I'll be doing some more consulting to them.]

Bob Shrum and Tony Blankley are talking. Shrum is a long-time Democratic political consultant and campaign manager. Blankley is his Republican counterpart (roughly). Shrum begins by saying that the Internet can be a tremendous tool for political persuasion. Blankley agrees and says the Net is weakening parties. And, says Blankley, this is the first communication tech that allows us to move from mass to more customized messaging. Congress is better at “sending out than capturing,” Blankley says.

Shrum: Obama has defied conventional wisdom about over-exposure. People now want the immediacy of their leaders. Second, his program is far more ambitious than usual. Blankley agrees that the exposure isn’t overdone, although he notes that O’s negatives have gone up faster than his positives have gone down. (”He’s still doing fine,” he notes.) It’d be better to have a bench of people who can speak, he says. (”Biden is not turning out to be a good communications device.”)

Q: If it’s a new era, why are the experts on the Sunday shows still male and pale?
Tony: I’m not sure it’s a new era. I thought we did see an increase in people of colors among the commentators during the campaign. Who gets booked for these shows isn’t a conspiracy. The bookers see someone on a show and devide to get him for their show. They’re desperately trying to find someone and they fall back on the people they know.
Shrum: The networks are trying, but they’re facing three centuries of discrimination.

Q: Is it now easier to mount an oppositional change?
Shrum: O has organized YouTube, etc., so well that it works in their favor.

Q: [me] Is it a generational change? If so, at the maximum, what does that change consist of?
Shrum: Yes. In fact, we may be at the end of the Reagan era. There may be a fundamental realignment in American politics. But we won’t know for ten years.
Blankley: Obama won in part because he won among the Millennials, because of his use of the new tech. There has been a generational shift in technology usage. Mass communication will just luck archaic. Will there be a new era? Possibly. But it won’t be based on the demographic shift. It will depend on O convincing us that there’s a better way to do politics.

[Tags: nms09 politics ]

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At the Edelman-sponsored NewMedia conference, a panel is beginning on “advancing reputation,” with Mike Slaby (CTO of Obama for America), Debbie Curtis-Magley (UPS), and David Liu (AOL). Premise: Companies can now advance their reputations through the channels they choose, without going through media distributors.

Mike (Obama): A lot of success came from Obama’s skills as a candidate. There was a movement, and our job in the new media departent was how to get the candidate in front of people more. Going into these spaces, you are an equal member with everyone else. It’s not broadcasting. If you tread on people’s space, you’ll piss them off. It’s hard for companies to find a persona and a personality for talking online, but it’s easy with a political campaign because you have a candidate. You have to have one set of values and one story, and you need to talk in the language of your audience. If you’re going to use Twitter, you have to have people in your organization who know how to tweet. And you have to trust your people and the people you’re talking about. We only filtered out comments that were truly, truly offensive. Sean Hannity came after us because someone at our social network made it look like the Black Panthers endorsed Obama on our social networking site, so we set up a profile for Hannity to show him that this was an open space.

We gave out our logos and let people make their own sites. There was an art exhibit of what people made out of this, called “Officially Unofficial.” Some of it I wish hadn’t been made, but so what? It made people feel that the campaign was theirs. This makes marketing people uncomfortable if they’re used to managing messages. You should give up control. It worked for us.

But social media works for politics only if it gets people out into the real world to vote. You have to convert your users into donors, volunteers, and voters. About 30% of our email was doing something in the real world … I’m proud of that.

He adds: Not every business should have a facebook page; it depends on what you’re trying to do.

Also: There are no switching costs online, which is a reason not to build your own social networking site. We had a multi-million person base ready to go, but that may never happen again in politics, and it probably never happens in business.

Q: Why did the campaign refer to Obama as Barack? Wasn’t that too informal?
A: People want an emotional connection. They want to know his story. We needed to talk about him as a person. But now I never refer to him as that. He’s president.

[Tags: newmedia politics obama social_media nms09 ]

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I’m at a conference put together by Edelman PR that mixes academics, media folks, and PR folks. [Disclosure: I have in the past worked for Edelman. I am at the conference for free.]

Richard Edelman begins by saying that the traditional media and PR models are melting. Authority is being dispersed. We’re “consuming” more media than ever. “Digital pennies are replacing print dollars.” TV’s share of media consumption goes down across age groups, from 84% among 65 to 48% for the young. We’re moving to a one-newspaper-per-city model. Wire services are expanding to fill the void. Online sites are breaking news. Online video is improving rapidly.

The implications for PR: Fewer reporters, so “pitch and catch” isn’t efficient. Mass is dead, so it’s hard to aggregate audiences. Less control of message. More “pay for play”: e.g., sponsor names on athlete’s uniforms.

The way forward for PR, says Richard, is “public engagement.” Companies cannot only aim at maximizing shareholder value. Companies need to cultivate social value as well as stakeholder value. The tenets of public engagement include: It’s what you do as well as wat you say. Integrated into search. Engage with influencers of all stripes, beginning by actively listening. “Digital is inherently social and rewards those who are in a community role.” Go to where the conveersation is, and always be truthful and transparency. “Every company is a media company,” as Andy Haywood at CBS says: A company needs to put forward a point of view.

So, 1. PR people need to become advisors on policy, not the folks with the megaphones. Spinning is a “disastrous strategy for the PR industry.” Users want companies to be socially responsible. Companies should engage in “private sector diplomacy” to learn how to behave responsibility “Business has lost the mandate to lead unilaterally.”

2. PR needs to participate in “reputational search”: Finding who has “link love” and engage with them. Also, “social search,” e.g., searches at Twitter. Engage “embassies” inside social networks, to egage in the conversation.

3. Mobilize influentials and amplifiers: democratci and decentralized. Find the people who want to engage in discussion, and then find amplifiers. Ashton Kutcher is not an amplifier because his ideas have reach but not influence.

4. Inform the conversation. Go where the people are. Identify yourself; be transparent. Have a point of view. Be factual, be humble, and be present. If you can create utility, it can be “hugely valuable,” e.g., iPhone Recipe app.

5. “Every company is a media company.” E.g., the J&J Baby Center. British Airways Metrotwin.com for what’s going on in NYC and London. Let users repurpose your content. Do it across the range of platfroms, using best processes such as RSS. Also, sometimes curating works.

6. Be present everywhere. People need to hear/see things 3-5 rtimes before they’ll believe it, because their trust has been violated. Collaborate on FAcebook, entertain on YouTube

7. Democratic and decentralized. Facilitate repurposing. Put up the good and the bad comments.

Richard puts up a 2×2: open to controlled, communication to collaboration. The controlled communication quadrant is the traditional one, and it has its place, he says. In the open collab quadrant contains wikis, etc. Richard’s point is that PR has to expand along both axes.

How to do this? E.g., Shell wants to get people to drive slower, to save fuel. Participants are encouraged to get training. Upon completion, they get a fuel discount. E.g., Wondebra, the “Science of Sexy” video went to #1. [Not sure where the "do" part of that is.] E.g., EnergyTomorrow.org is an advocacy site for API. People can get info and talk, and they can communicate with their Congresspeople via Facebook, et al. E.g., AXE gave away products based on Faebook wall posts. [I presume and hope this is not pay for post.] E.g., the turkey talk line provides mobile texting advice, hosts web chats, partnered with Top Chef…

Richard says it’s evolution, not revolution, even though the changes in the environment are fundamental. Business professors need to make sure their students understand the depth of the change.

Q: A lot of data says broadcasters are not thriving. My students don’t like TV. TV is quaint.
A: Yup.

Q: Edelman hires a lot interns. What are the qualities you’re looking for?
A: Facility in the digital world. Are they participating? Multilingual. Someone who has an interest in purpose, in giving back.

Q: If done well, PR can substitute for journalism
A: Absolutely not. We can create a playing field and let the people become the journalists. We must nevr position ourselves as authorities. We are simply introducing opportunities for experts — with credentials or credentials based on passion — to play. J&J finds experts and highlightts women who have expertise based in their experience, but J&J is not the expert, nor is the PR agency.

Q: Isn’t this issues management?
A: I think it’s broader than that: The future of marketing and of reputation management.

Q: I’m concerned about fraudulent reviews on travel sites, etc.
A: We have to have zero tolerance for that sort of behavior. I met last week with the people who created the MBA oath of ethical behavior. I would love to work with academics on an ethical code for the industry.

[Tags: newmedia pr marketing news broadcast social_media ]

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Dan Gillmor is giving a Berkman lunch on media literacy.

He whips through a history of media, from stone age to now, in about ten seconds. He cycles through a dozen sites doing interesting work, compressing twenty minutes of his normal talk to about 20 seconds. He says he’s no longer very worried about the supply of good journalism.

He says the question of “Who is a journalist?” is the wrong one to ask. Better to ask “What is journalism?” It’s an And, not an Or, situation. NGOs and individuals have been doing good reporting. The best reporting on Guantanamo has come from the ACLU, not from professional journalists. As Clay Shirky says, there’s no barrier any more between ideas and action. Try things out, let them fail, try again. Dan quickly shows some student projects at ASU, where he teaches, ProPublica, NYTimes APIs, etc. “I’m just pretty sure we’re going to get enough journalism.” But, says Dan, that doesn’t solve the quality problem.

He says he is really worried about demand. There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. “The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.” He talks about principles for “consumers” (he puts it in quotes) and suppliers.

For news consumers, he says we need skepticism and judgment. We need to have our “bullshit meter” working all the time. “It’s a mistake to think of credibility as starting at zero.” We should be thinking of it as having a negative starting point. Anonymous comments start with negative credibility. “They’d have to work really hard to get to no credibility.” Sometimes there’s something good in there, but …

Anonymous speech is crucial, Dan says. It’d be a big mistake to try to ban it. “It’s a bad idea” to refuse to stand behind your words in most cases, but it’s crucial when we need it. People should assume that a personal anonymous attack on someone is a lie. Assume it’s false.

Another principle: Do research. Ask your own questions, especially when making big decisions. E.g., Wikipedia is often the best place to start, and usually the worst place to stop. Dan says that WP is getting better and better and becoming one of the most valuable sources of info on the planet.

Another principle: Get outside your own comfort zone. E.g., Global Voices.

Another principle: Question your own beliefs. Dan used to keep a list of things he believes, and every six months he’d relentlessly attack it. E.g., these days he’s thinking Google is getting worrisome, doing things that are “anti-trust worthy” [nice pun!] He needs to revisit and ask if that trend is true.

Finally, we need to learn the techniques by which media is created and manipulates us. Sourcewatch, NewsTrust, MediaCritic (for Phoenix AZ)

The principles for journalists include all of the above, plus: Asking the readers what they know; thoroughness; accuracy; fairness (enabling right of hyperlinked reply); independence; transparency. Dan’s example of the need for transparency: The NYT won a Pulitzer for exposing the Pentagon’s coopting of military experts showing up on TV shows in the run-up to the Iraq War, but the network news did not mention that when covering the Pulitzers. Transparency means “you’ll be believed less but trusted more.”

Dan is creating a users guide, under the name mediactivecom. It’ll be a book and a site. He’s also exploring the nature of books. Perhaps the slower moving stuff will be in the book and the faster stuff will be online. He’ll write it entirely in public.

Q: Is the media organization the right unit of trust? Maybe we trust the NYT for tech reporting but not on Iraq…
A: Yes. There are reporters who I trust and others I don’t so much. And good reporters sometimes get things wrong. We’re looking for people to help us develop systems that combine population and reputation, and reputation is an incredibly complicated word…

Q: Your principles for journalists look like an updated version of the professional code of ethics for journalists. The code hasn’t been updated since 1996. Maybe that’s a framework for you…
A: One of my beefs with the NYT and WaPo is how routinely they violate their own standard. BTW, you’ll notice the word objectivity occurred nowhere in my presentation.

Q: I’m worried that money + anonymity (or fake identity) means that people can be shills. And someone who has to work all day can’t contribute as much to citizen efforts.
A: It’s going to be messy. But we’ll have more good things. Manipulation via money is not a new problem. Relentless media criticism is the best sunlight. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. As far as the inability to participate: There will be various scales. Most people can’t do media criticism all day. They have a life. People are now aware that if the see something newsworthy and they have a cellphone camera, they should record it. They don’t all know what to do next, and that’s an area for education.

Q: At our university, all students must take media literacy. Do you have advice for students.
A: I wonder if it’s too late by college. We need to do this when kids are young. But to teach critical thinking in grade schools would get you fired as a dangerous radical in half the school districts.

Q: (eszter) Even if we agreed that literacy is something we need, it’s not clear whose jurisdiction it falls under.
A: I know of one university that has a course devoted to this required of all students: U NY Stony Brook.

Q: The best media criticism today is on Comedy Central. We need the political will to do this work.
A: The Daily Show has some of the best criticism of television news, but that’s a very narrow part of journalism in terms of its content. You want to see bad news watch local tv news.

(lisa williams) What happens when local newspapers go?
A: I challenge your assumption that there will be no daily paper in the top 50 cities in the US. There’s still a business to be had in print journalism for some period of time (but not forever). The problem is most of these guys have so much debt. If the Boston Globe goes, within weeks there will be two smaller newspapers that will be better than the Metro. They won’t be comprehensive. There will be no lack of information, though it’ll be harder to find the things that trust. Messiness is not something merely to fear.

Q: (cbracy) How do some sites/papers get past zero in credibility? E.g., Talking Points Memo
A: From the beginning, TPM told you who he was, stood behind his works, had some journalistic background. Then, over time, it’s earned our trust.
Q: Rush Limbaugh uses his own name …
A: But an important criterion is that what you say is true. I have nothing against Fox existing. I just despise the slogan “Fair and balanced” because it’s a lie. We’re never going to agree on everything, so the reputation system needs to include knowing the opinion of people who broadly think about the world as I do but also what people who don’t think the way I do, because I want to make sure that I read that to. I prefer the uncomfortable world of nuance and uncertainty than one to which we simply accept the news as given.

Q: (harry lewis) Where is the right place to teach people not to beleive anonymous stuff?
A: The best single thing we could do to have better journalism is to have journalist be covered by some other journalism. It sure as hell made me better. It a smart world, getting burned would not be the way you learn. But for some period of time, people are going to have to be burned by believing something anonymous and telling their friends. It’ll take a generation…

People will miss the current newspapers because they are a unifying force. Also, what about objectivity>
A: Objectivity is a nice ideal that is hopelessly impractical. The principles I outlined add up to something better. No one should ever believe only one media source. And, no, I’m not happy about the dissolution of forces that gave us some common ground. But I see all these self-organize things happening… Before it’s over, everyone will have heard Susan Boyle sing. We have a better chance of figuring things out now that the information accretes over time to a place where there’s more clarity. And, by the way, I do not buy the echo chamber idea; I think that’s easier to do in the era of broadcasting.

Q: (darius) I’m skeptical. Aren’t lazy users aren’t lazy. They work hard all day and then want to be entertained
A: They’re not lazy in their lives, but they’re being lazy in what they believe about the news. The era of mass media has encourage an intellectual and civic laziness that’s dangerous. We all to take more responsibility for knowing what we know.

Q: You’re worried that the demand side isn’t strong enough. Even if every university had a course in media literacy, but the 2/3’s of the country that doesn’t go to university …
A: There’s lot of work going on in media literacy at all levels of education. I avoid the phrase “media literacy” because it works better than Ambien in putting people to sleep. It has to start with parents. Journalists should have been working on this for years; it would have given them a reason for existing.

[Posted without being re-read. Sorry!] [Tags: berkman journalism media dan_gillmor citizen_media ]

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I went first. I talked about exceptionalism, responding to Eli Noam’s challenge at the beginning of the conference that if we’re going to think the Net is going to bring about substantial changes, we have to be able to point to characteristics of it that are different from other technologies that also looked revolutionary but that turned out to be rather prosaic.

Len Downie was executive editor of Washington Post. He’s not going to propose any new form of delivery of the news. He’s not sure the old will die out completely. WaPo is reorganizing itself as a news operation and as a company. They have Facebook and iPhone apps, etc. When it comes to UGC, “this is not a zero sum game.” On WashingtonPost.com you find lots of user comments, participation in blogs, user photos and videos, crowd-sourcing. E.g., Amanda Michel’s “Off the Bus” crowd sourcing, which went through professional editors. (Amanda is now at ProPublica.) They hope the Net will help end the traditional alienation from their readers. And the Net has made their audience bigger than ever before.

The big problem is the loss of classified advertising. Hundreds of millions of dollars lost, hitting local newspapers especially hard. Also, display ads have been driven down. Local news stations are covering fewer stories. There’s less reporting. That’s the problem Len is going to examine in his new academic role at Arizon State.

There are some things the government could do, but not a “bail out,” Len says. Maybe newspapers will become 501C3’s. Maybe they’ll become LC3’s, so they could still be profitable and yet receive tax-exempt contributions. Maybe convert them into endowments, although Len says there isn’t enough money for that: You’d need a ginormous endowment to generate the requisite funds. There are more and more non-profit investigative reporting organizations. There’s a lot going on. It’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen.

Q: How much does investigative reporting cost?
A: At ProPublica, they do it in the best way, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars, mainly for the reporter’s time.

Q: In Germany they’re aggregating news and selling access [I got this wrong] …
A: I’d have to look at it.
Q: Isn’t that what AP does?
A: Don’t get me started. AP is supposed to be a collaborative. If we don’t all charge at the same time, we won’t be able to raise enough money. Alan Mutters [sp] suggests that we all decide on July 4 to start charging. The Obama admin is concerned about the future of news. They’re going to look at loosening anti-trust regs so newspapers can band together, but you don’t want to create another cartel like AP.

Q: If the NYT shut down its presses and went totally online, how would that affect their costs and prices?
A: The Times might save 40-50% of their costs, but it would take away 90% of their revenue. Kindle is great for books but not very good for newspapers. Looking forward to the big multimedia tablets.

Q: The NYT is doing well on the Web. But last year their Web revenue increased just 1%. What’s the future business model?
A: That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Greg Lastowka (law prof, Rutgers) is going to talk about legal aspects of UGC. First question: What is UGC? It’s a fuzzy concept. “User” is an important term because of copyright. Copyright is not about monetizing the works of authors. Copyright is there to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Our Constitutional mention is based on the earlier British Statute of Ann that took control away from publishers and gave it to authors, in order to promote education.

Greg predicts that copyright won’t change very much in the next ten years. Copyright law will probably ignore UGC and be large unaffected by it. UGC will be treated as a problem, it will change the rules somewhat (through litigation), but the fundamental shape of copyright law won’t change in response to UGC (says Greg). Ten years ago, he was more optimistic about it. He thought UGC was a huge social boon that was a very bad fit for copyright law, so copyright law would change to reflect that value. The Web was meeting the goals copyright law was established to meet.

Four changes to get copyright law to fit the Web: 1. Simplify the law. 2. People want credit for their work even when they’re happy to have it spread. People get copyright law mixed up with plagiarism. We should work the attribution right into it. 3. Reform terms of service and their enforcement. 4. Subsidize free access content. Copyright is a subsidy for authors.

Greg was arguing this ten years ago. Not much has changed, although there’s progress in open access to academic work. Why haven’t there been more changes? Maybe because our legislators don’t understand what’s happening. The better, sadder, answer is that Greg’s politics were naive. Copyright law today is realistically about protecting big money incumbents. Dan likes copyright and blockbuster movies, but thinks there should be an ecology that enables them and UGC. We’re unlikely to strike a new social contract that reflects the rights of amateur creators.

Q: To what extent is international trade motivating maintaining strict copyright?
A: Legislators certainly care about it.

Stefaan Verhuist (Markle Foundation) presents his model of UGC: Mediation 3.0. It has three new mediating functions that converge to create a new type of mediation. Those functions can be accelerated and made more valuable by making sure they are cheap, deep, and speed. The success depends on four challenges: the 4 Ps.

Setfaan draws a triangle: 1. Establish relations. 2. Provide a new kind of resource that has value for users and that may be created by the users. 3. Remix. Ensure a relation that creates a resource that may be remixed. Their convergence creates UGC. If you can provide resources that are cheap, deep (the value for its users, related perhaps to a geographical location), and speediness. But it can be hard to be cheap, deep and speedy; that’s the challenge.

The 4 Ps: Privacy (relationship), Property (remix), Public sphere obligations and responsibilities (resource), Push and pull (in the center of the triangle) of information. The push-pull presents the policy challenges.

[Posted without re-reading. Gotta run.]

[Tags: journalism media newspapers copyright copyleft creative_commons marketing ]

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Andres Hervas-Drane
Begins by noting the long tail in the market share of products. There’s empirical evidence that this is happening online. Why there? Standard answer: Supply side. But he wants to look at factors on the demand side that can affect this distribution.

He sets up a case where consumers have difference preferences and come to the market uninformed. In the offline world, search happens through word of mouth. They can search with evaluations or with recommendations. Recommendations come from consumers who searched with evaluations. Word of mouth results in a high concentration of sales.

Almost a third of Amazon’s sales are generated by recommendations. These are generated by users as meta-content, finding consumers who have similar preferences. This is taste-matching and it reduces sales concentration.

Then there are “artistic markets”: that increase the demand for niche producers and results in long term cultural variety.

Peyman Faratin talks about a case study of prediction markets. His main point: Scarcity is at play even in the UGC system. The new scarcity is of attention.

An incentive engineering problem is at foot in prediction markets. When you can’t bet real money, the incentives go down. The reward streams are delayed. You have to search for the market. There are significant transaction costs [which he goes over in some detail, but too hard to capture briefly...sorry]. That’s why prediction markets aren’t going very well; they’re lonely.

Solution: Reward the big hitters. Let them transfer their reputations. Give them content management rights. Rank markets and reputations. “Invisible hand of the algorithm: Recommendations.” Use widgets to let the market come to the user. [I missed the end of this. Sorry!]

Chris Derllarocas talksabout “Your Operations hvae become your New Marketing.” “Every customer is a potential brand ambassador or a lethal bran assassin.” E.g., in 2006, Comcast spent $100 M in advertising, wiped out by the youtube of a sleeping technician. UGC can make or break your business.

Most influential UGC occurs spontaneously and represents non-representative experiences. Companies need to take preventive measures. Consumers use UGC to decide if they should consume a product. Once they have, they decide what to report. Companies need to “Strategically re-engineer the consumption experience to spontaneously provoke the right mix of consumer content.”

Rules: Pay attention to extreme events. Move towards a culture that pays attention to outliers, positive and negative. “Redesign your monitoring practices and career incentives to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” Also, “reasses yesterday’s yield management practices.” That is, make sure you do not systematically produce a small number of unhappy customers” (e.g., but routinely overbooking, or by routinely selling undesirable hotel rooms at very low rates). Also, get to know your power customers, i.e., the ones more likely to be vocal. They should receive “the special teratment that loyal big spenders used to receive ten years ago.” Also, not sock puppetry. Also, maybe have a Chief Perception Officer.

Q: You’re proposing an operational hit since we won’t be selling all the seats or rooms.
A: Yes. That’s the decision to be made. We need to make these decisions holistically. We don’t have the complete answer, There’s room for innovation.

Q: [me] This morning we heard that the population is not nearly as adept at using these tools as some of us (= me) would like to believe. This afternoon we hear about markets that are adept. How did you hear this morning’s research?
A: It varies by market. And consumers aren’t necessarily savvy. The UGC has effect even when they’re not savvy. You need to tier your efforts, taking account of the consumers’ Web savviness.

Q: How’s it work in other countries?
A: We haven’t done that research. Happy collaborate…

Q: How does this apply to B2B?
A: More limited.

Anindya Ghose will talk about combining textmining with econometrics. Firms want to know if there’s any economic value to social networks and UGC. How can they monetize UGC?

There’s economic value embedded in the content. E.g., product reviews, geo locations, online purchase behavior. His software mines the text and assesses the economic value of, say, a positive review and even more particular comments. E.g., “good packaging” lowers the value by $0.56 because customers expect superlatives. Particular keywords have particular monetary effects.

Hypothesis: The increasing availability of UGC is reflected in sponsored search metrics. And, yes, he found a correlation between the frequency with which key words are used in blogs and their cost-per-click on search sites. He’s researching whether there’s some sort of causal effect, but it’s not an easy problem. Hence, UGC can be monetized through sponsored search.

[Posted without re-reading. I have to prepare for my unprepared comments. I'm on a panel that's supposed to be reflecting on the day.] [Tags: ugc ugc3 marketing cluetrain advertising textmining advertising prediction_markets everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Scott McDonald of Conde Nast gives the lunchtime talk. He reminds us of how big CN is: magazines, websites, events, digital apps.

His numbers show that lots of people are creating content.

UGC issues for “traditional” [the quotes are on Scott's slide] media: Brand compatitiblity (vs. “snark/coarsening”. Commoditization of content (all gets treated the same). Value as “listening post” (media can hear their readers). DRM when everyone is an aggregator. Monetization.

Advertisers are reluctant to jump in, Scott says. They worry about brand. UGC video is cheap and plentifu. but it’s not selling. The CPMs are deeply discounted. Ad revenues are not going to UGC and marketing execs are pessimistic about this; only 22% think UGC is a “high-growth opportunity.” 73% of advertisers say they definitely will not run ads on UGC.

So, what are the other models? You can incorporate UGC on a site as a “retention device.” [CNN's turn-the-channel "iReports"?] Authentication fees on microblogging sites? E.g., Twitter charges DominosPizza to assure that it in fact represents Dominos Pizza. How about sponsorships on crowdsourcing sites such as Digg? E.g., at Reddit, maybe a sponsor could be an “amplifier” that announces that each thumbs up counts 5x. [Wha??? Wouldn't that destroy Reddit's credibility?] Finally, there’s cross-platform marketing. Only 10% of visitors to a mag’s site are subscribers. So, cannibalization isn’t a worry. But how do you make money on the web site? Ads only work for very big sites. But,” online subscriptions sales are sweet.” People who subscribe that way have higher value than subscribers through other means: They’ve sought out the mag, they pay with a credit card, they are more likely to take an automatic renewal contract, they get added to the email list, etc.

He points to Conde Nast examples of UGC. Contests for designs, NYer caption contest, GQ tips on good grooming. [These are as much UGC as a man-in-the-street interview.]

He points to Reddit, a CN site. He acknowledges the bad language on the page. It produces no subscription revenues. They’re starting to have sponsored posts that still can be voted up or down.

Q: Are people dropping subscriptions because they can get the content for free online?
Scott: In general, no. The conditions for reading mags are special, e.g., reading one on the subway to create zone of privacy. [A good e-reader will destroy this.] For news mags, that’s more of an issue.

[Tags: ugc ugc3 conde_nast media mainstream_media advertising marketing ]

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John Horrigan of Pew Internet and American Life, gives a “non-Koolaid” presentation. He says that about 12% of Internet users have a blog. The percentage of people doing some form of content sharing is not increasing much at all. The demographics says that 18-24 do the most sharing, and then it goes down in pretty much a straight line. The change over time is not distributed evenly across age groups. Younger adults are turning away from the 6 core UGC behaviors, the 24-35s are increasing. The rest: not much change.

But people are increasingly going to social networkingIf UGC is migrating to rules-based environments, is it a good bargain? On the one hand, good governance can build sustainable mechanisms. OTOH, bad governance is a risk, so you want an open Internet.

Q: A decrease in activity among younger folk? Because they were so heavily involved initially?
John: They’re going to social networking sites instead of maintaining their own sites. But UGC is still an important activity to them.

Q: The changing behaviors as people age and how that will effect UGC?
John: Impossible to answer because we don’t know how the tech will change.

Mainak Mazumdar of The Nieslen Company begins by looking at blogging topics. It’s quite diverse he says. Next: size. Wikipedia has many more topics than Britannica. Also, social networking is very big: Member communities are #4 on most visited lists, after search, portals, and software manufacturers. #5 is email. Social media is big everywhere. (Biggest: 80% of Brazil. 67% in US.) The US is showing comparatively slower growth in “active reach of member communities.” Time spent in CGM has been increasing. So is the time spent on social networking. 35-49 years are the fastest growing audience for social networking sites. Teen consumption of SNS is going down, because they’re going more and more mobile. Mobile will be huge. TV will be big. People are watching more TV. Big media companies are doing well. “Becoming a mother is a dramatic inflectin point and drives women to the Web in search of advice and a desire to connect with others in her shoes” (from the slide).

Is the Net a game-changer for research companies? He compares it to scanner data in the 90s and online surveys in 1990s. In 2000s, perhaps [perhaps??] social networking will once again change the game. Reasons to think the Net is a game-changer overall [i.e., exceptionalism] : Pervasive, sticky, generational.

Q: Is TV watching growing on all screens or just on the living room screen?
Mainak: Time spent watching TV content on a TV.

Q: Maybe SNS have surpassed email because email was used to listserves to serve the social function.
Mainak: We’re talking about how long you spend in Outlook + Web mail. We install monitors that report on how long you spend in each application.

Russ Neuman: Be careful of projecting out from the current tech. It can be disrupted easily.

Q: Older people are entering SNSs. I call them “parents.” To what extent will that change what started out as a youth movement? Is the move to mobile a move out of the SNS as they become mom and dad’s spots? [Oprah is on twitter.]
A: Yes. Some younger teens are going straight to mobile and circumventing the Internet.

Eszter Hargittai talks about the role of skill in Internet use. Yes, young people use digital media and spend a lot of time online, but it’s true that they engage in lots of online activities or that they’re particularly savvy about the Net and Web tools. So, the idea of “digital natives” is often misguided.

She’s particularly interested in the skills people have and need. Her methodology: Paper and pencil surveys to avoid biasing towards those comfortable with using Web tools. 1,060 first year students at U of Illinois. Most of the data comes from 2007, although she has some pre-pub data from 2009. The question is: What explains variation in skill? Gender, education and income predict skill. “The Web offers lots of opportunities but those who can take advantage of them are those who are already privileged.”

This has an effect on how we intervene to equalize matters. You can’t change socio-economic status. And it turns out that motivation doesn’t seem to make much of an effect. You can only be motivated to do something that you already know is a possibility. She shows new data, not ready for blogging, that show that very small percentages of users have actually created content, voted on reviews, edited Wikipedia pages, etc. The number of teenagers who have heard of Twitter is quite low. [Sorry for the lack of numbers. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be reporting even these trends.]

Mainstream media remain strong. Eszter points to the media story about Facebook users having lower grades. Eszter looked at the study and finds it to be of poor quality. Yet it got huge mainstream play. Eszter tweeted about it. She blogged about it. The tweet led to a co-authored paper. Even so, the mainstream probably won’t care, and most of the tweets are still simply retweeting the bad data. The Net is a huge opportunity, but it’s not evenly distributed.

Q: A study found that people online are lonely. It was picked up by the media. The researcher revised to say that it’s the other way around. It wasn’t picked up. The media pick up on the dystopic.

Q: Your data reflects my experience with my students. They don’t blog, they don’t tweet. There’s a class component to this.
Eszter: We measure socio-economic status. Why does it correlate? We’re exploring this. We now ask about parental support of technology use, rules at home about tech use, etc. So far we’re finding (tentatively!) that lower-educated parents tend to have more rules for their kids.

Q: What happens when there’s universal wireline connection?
Eszter: As the tech changes, the skill sets change. The privileged stay ahead, according to my 8 years of studies.

Q: What skills should we be teaching?
A: Complicated. Crucial issue: The evaluation of the credibility of sources. There’s an extreme amount of trust in search engines. That’s one place we need to do more work. And librarians are highly relevant here.

Q: How do people use the Net to learn informally, e.g., WebMD?
Eszter: There are lots of ways and types to do this. But, first you need to know what’s on the Web. You need good search skills, good credibility-evaluation skills.

Cliff Lampe talks about how Mich State U students use Facebook. He presents a study just completed yesterday, so the data isn’t yet perfect. 97% of his sample are FB users (although Cliff expresses some discomfort with this number). Mean average of 441 friends; median = 381. Ninety percent of these they consider to be “actual” friends. 73% only accept friend requests from people they know in real life. Most spend just a little time (under 30mins) at FB per day. About half lets their friends (but not everyone in their network) to see everything in their profile. Almost everyone puts a photo of themselves up. Vast majority have a photo album. About a third think their parents are looking at their page. Overall they think they’re posting for their college and high school friends.

He talks about Everything2.com, a user-generated encyclopedia/compendium that is 11 years old. Why have people exited? Research shows they left because other sites came along that do the same thing better. Also, changes in life circumstances. Also, conflict with administration of the site. There’s a corporitization of some of the UGC sites. He also has looked into why new users don’t stick: They don’t glom onto the norms of the site.

Q: Are reasons for exiting a negative network effect? More than 150 and the network deteriorates?
Cliff: We see that in Usenet. But not so much at Facebook where you’re just dealing with your friends.

Q: Any sites that have tried to drive away new users?
Cliff: Metafilter has a bit of that. Slashdot has a “earn your bullshit” tagline.

Q: Are your students alone or with others when they are online? Are they aware of the technology?
Cliff: The rise of the netbook has had an effect. Most of my students experience social media as a group activity. But a lot of them are not that savvy. They generally don’t know how Wikipedia operates. [Tags: sns social_networking facebook exceptionalism tv wikipedia environment ]

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Dan Hunter of NY Law School begins with an informal talk called “UGC: From Threat He disagrees with Eli Noam that the end game will be commercialization. [Ah, the exceptionalist battle is joined!] He thinks about UGC as amateur media, focusing on the motivation of the users. His question: Is there a role for commercial providers, outside of providing the infrastructure? The content will increasingly be provided by people whose motivations are non-commercial. (He shows Wolf Loves Pork at YouTube.com. Very cool.)

It’s important to not think this is about traditional media forms, he says. It includes virtual worlds, collaborative games. People are living out their lives in these environments. UGC is not something separate from our lives. It is our environment.

Amateur work is crowding out the commercial, he says. E.g., YouTube, music, user reviews at Amazon etc. Most of the money is in the infrastructure, not the content: Blizzard providing World of Warcraft, Google, etc.

Q: Google lost $500M this year on YouTube.
Dan: If you’re suggesting there’s no money in infrastructure…We can’t yet know if that’s a blip, a market indicator, etc.

Q: Two examples that support your case: 1. Orpheus Orchestra has no conductor. 2. YouTube orchestra is collaborative.
Dan: Sites like Wikipedia can be quite bureaucratic. There’s a range of examples, some totally spontaneous.

Q: Wolf Eats Pig actually ends the other way around, which is a bad moral and is very worrisome for Japanese society.

Next, David Card of Forrester Research presents research. [I'm not going to try to capture the numbers.]

Social networking is becoming ubiquitous, but the “creative stuff” is still a minority behavior and is not growing at the same pace as social networking, watching videos, or writing reviews. Budgets for social marketing are still pretty low because the value of it is unproven. [His data actually show that few people can prove profitability from social marketing but a majority think it is valuable]

Social network business models: It will be like air (cf. Charline Li). Or it’s a walled garden. Or it’s a media model. The portal model faces threates from Google and social networking sites. AT SNS’s people view photos and videos, keep up with friends, etc. They’re not consuming much professional content there. Marketers should “tap entertainment media, then build out social marketing promise.” Facebook’s “Beacon” idea was powerful but ineptly handled. [Beacon: When buy something, it asks if you want to share that news with your FB friends.] Money is more likely to come from the audience than from authors; the real social marketing potential is untapped.

Q: Opportunity: Harvesting social networking data for customer relationship management. [Doc Searls: This one's for you! :)]
David: Lots of people do this. P&G. Fox. They bring in the audience to get feedback. “If you get them into real product development, that’s a nirvana.” Although you have to be careful that you’re not handing design to a niche market of your most enthusiastic customers.
Q: Keeping track of the metadata about the types of info makes this huge market of info usable.
David: Do you mean Amazon ought to make its customer available to others?
Q: No.

Q: The virtual is piercing the physical, ending up in offline retail.
A: Interesting.

Q: What guidance for employees active in these spaces, so they feel free to express their ideas but also potentially censorship?
David: Forrester analysts have personal blogs as well as company blogs. Neither are reviewed. We have policies that say you should think about what you’re saying. But if it’s too heavy handed so that employees look like shills, they won’t get a very big audience. You have to play by the rules of the medium — uncensored, rapid response (e.g., WholeFoods responds instantly, even if it’s an intern in a closet sometwhere) — authenticity, etc. It’s a delicate line.

Robert Cohen talks about business adoption of virtual worlds. He points to the broad use of interactive sites by children 7-12, suggesting that we’re seeing a deep change. There are over 100M subscribers to the Barbi site and 100s of millions of Habbo users. This may portend a generational change.

He points to three waves: Content-centric, Surface [he's using a Microsoft chart], and immersive. He’s interviewed 50 vendors about how virtual worlds will be used. It has the potential to affect the way business operates (he says). First, it enhances training and teamwork. Then, more interactive corporations. Over the next tend years we’ll see collaborative corporations (among suppliers and product developers) and “modern guild system firms” (”highly technologically competent firms that come together to collaborate on projects”). He points to oil companies using virtual worlds to model environments for training, exploration.

Q: The press is reporting that SecondLife has stumbled in growth and development. And how can we get from Barbi style product focus to a platform approach?
Bob: There’s controversy about this. BTW, Mitch Kapor is working on putting your photo on your avatar and making the movement more realistic. SecondLife also has bought a company that does business operations. But IBM has shown a way to connect virtual worlds through a firewall. But SecondLife is trying. There’s a lot going on i n Europe.

[Posting without rereading so I can go to the break. Sorry.] [Tags: ugc ugc3.0 user_generated_content exceptionalism virtual_worlds second_life social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Russ Neuman begins with a Firesign ref: Everything you know is wrong. If you project from current media to its future, you’ll be wrong. We always have been (he says). E.g., our early vision of the telephone viewed it as a broadcast medium that would lend itself to demagoguery. [NOTE: Live-blogging. Typing too fast. Believe nothing that you read. Thank you.]

He shows an attempted typology of UGC with 24 categories. It will probably make the same mistakes as our early understanding of the phone. Western Union, which declined to buy the patents, didn’t understand it as a long-distance device.

[Tags: ugc everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 telephone media ]

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I’m at Columbia U’s conference/seminar on “UGC 3.0″ (user-generated content). It’s a mix of academics and businesspeople, which I find appealing. (I don’t find the phrase or slant of “ugc” appealing, however. It often focuses on the stuff rather than on the social participation.) There are about 60 100 people here, sitting in a long conference room. [NOTE: Live blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing stuff. Not doing sepll checking.]

My guess/prediction is that throughout the day, the businesspeople will express enthusiasm for UGC while the academics will tend to splash cold data on it.

Eli Noam begins by wondering if UGC’s importance is going to persist. He points to the fading of other grassroots technologiess that started out with a lot of hype and promise: ham radio, CB radio, homebrew microcomputers. This happens (he says) because as the network size increases and fixed costs drop, and average benefit increase (due to Metcalfe’s law). The point is how you get to the self-sustaining cross-over point when you start at 0. You can regulate the price down, or have a business subsidize it, or you can use a community approach that increases the benefit and lowers the cost. [I'm not capturing his increasingly complex diagram. Sorry.] This tends to make commercialization profitability. So we cycle from community to complementary companies, then competition and then “oligopoly that in the next generation brings back community.”

So where will fiber take this spiral, he asks. First, it will widen choices. Long-tail content. UGC. Richer experience. Historically, the price per bit delivered to the consumer has dropped logarithmically (books to Net), and the richness of the experience (bits per second) has increased logarithmically. Media have gotten more visual because of this. But creating interactive, immersive content requires lots of capital for programmers, equipment, etc. [Yet it also incidentally creates lower-end user possibilities, e.g., machima.] That means, says Eli, that this gives large media companies the edge.

How does UGC fit into this? Mashups. But is it possible to create works of art collaboratively, he asks. [It's certainly possible to create folk art.] Eli points out that schools of art have been somewhat collaborative; people at least influence one another. But art generally seems to need a hierarchy. The closest he can find to a collaborative model are ssome string quartets and rock bands, but even rock bands are dominated by one person (he says). The main examples he can think of are folk art. [aha.] Folk art isn’t leading edge. It’s quaint. So, is UGC just priming the pump for commercial entries, which is the model of the past. To predict otherwise, one would need a model, an historic analysis, data.

UGC will be prevalent in the low end, he says, and an explorer in the high end. But it will be difficult for UGC to remain in the lead. Commercial entities will (Eli says). To say otherwise is to engage in religious thinking.

[Tags: ugc web2.0 mashups ]

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[Note: Live blogging with all the suckiness and unreliability that that entails] Kevin Werbach was co-chair of the Obama FCC transition team, among many other things. Dan Gillmor is interviewing him:

Q: What does a transition team do?
A: You get to participate in a quasi-hostile takeover of a $14T organization. We reviewed the FCC to find out what was going on.

Q: What was going on at the FCC?
A: It’s no one thing. Commissioner Martin ran the agency in a closed, politicized way. He was very distrustful of the staff.

Q: What was broken?
A: I can’t discuss details.

Q: What would you do if you were Chairman?
A: If I told you, I’d ensure I could never have that job. The real opportunity for the FCC is to get ahead of the curve. What will the world be like in 20 years? What will be requirements of the iPhone in 20 years?

Q: Are we going to get to lots more open spectrum?
A: Chairman Powell was thinking about the future of spectrum. That got shoved aside by Martin.

Q: How real is this change, then? Will we see deep change?
A: There will be tremendous change. But people on the outside should keep pushing the Administration to do better. It really matters who wins the election.

Q: What some things that could be done that couldn’t be reversed?
A: Successes are the things that are hard to reverse. The telcos understand that they need to evolve to something else.

Dan opens up the Q&A to the audience.

[harold feld] What’s achievable with spectrum policy with this Admin?
A: NTIA just got its head, so it’s early. The FCC and NTIA need to coordinate. We need to know how spectrum is being used. Do an inventory.

Q: Can you start blogging again…?
A: I’d love to, but it takes too much time. So I’ve started tweeting (kwerb@twitter.com)

Q: Smart grids. What’s going on between the FCC and other bodies in trying to set new standards?
A: I don’t know what’s going on in that, but it’s important. I have a law review article coming out that argues that standards are a form of regulation.

Kevin asks Dan: What would you do as FCC Chair.
A: Resign.

[Tags: kevin_werbach dan_gillmor f2c09 f2c fcc ]

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Tim Denton is commissioner of theCanadian Radio and Television Commission. They held a hearing recently on broadcasting in new media. Can Canadian content be measured when TV is delivered over the Net? Should they be taxing ISPs to create a fund that would go into Canadian programming? Many entertainers testified in favor of the tax. “Not a single group raised the issue of free speech across the Internet.” Tim can’t imagine this being the case in the US.” Tim can’t announce the CRTC’s decision…

[Tags: tim_denton crtc canada ]

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Geoff Daily introduces a panel at Freedom to Connect. [Note: Live blogging. Unedited. Uncorrected. Incomplete. Flat out wrong. Thanks for playing.]

James Salter talks about the Smart Grid. The biggest problems on earth: Over-population and global warming. The second is a subset of the first. James at first thought Al Gore was a hypocrite, but now he’s convinced of the truth of what AG says. (James is a proud Republican.) American residential electric usage has tripled in the past 50 years, and the efficiency has gone down. (Efficiency = peak usage over average usage.) 40% of carbon comes from coal-fired power plants and 33% from cars. Obama says we should get greener by building windmills, etc. But the effective thing he’s doing is installing smart meters. Smart meters are networked. There are 140M lectric meters in the use. Only 6.7M are smart meters so far. He estimates it’d cost $2,500 per house — including fiber to the house — to lower the load factor significantly.

Q: Is fiber required for a smart grid?
A: Nope. But the apps will need more bandwidth over time.

Terry Huval of Lafayette, Louisiana tells about broadbanding the city. In 1998, the Lafayette Utilities System put in fiber for its utilities. In 2000, they were authorized to “establish a wholesale and governmental retail network.” Companies were allowed to resell access to private folks. In 2004, the city proposed fiber to home and business as its fourth utility. But then the “Local Government Fair Competition Act” passed, a bill favoring the incumbents. The Governor stepped in and negotiated a compromise. Then the private telcos successfully sued. In 2005, the public voted 62% in favor of the project. “It was looked upon as a huge benefit to local businesses.” It was viewed as being like electricity. Then, in 2006, tow unknown citizens filed suit. 2007, State Supreme Court ruled 7-0 in favor of the project. The whole process cost $3.5M. In 2009, they’ve started providing retail telecommunication services to residential and smaller business customers, at 20% less than the standard competitor. But the vision is to provide much more than basic TV and phone services. They provide the triple play for $85. For $138 you get 250 channels (including HD) and 30MB up and down Internet. Customers can build their own bundle. E.g., unlimited long distance for $31. Five cents a minute to reach much of the world. He stresses that they’ve listened to the community. So, they’ provide 100Mbps for peer-to-peer, free. “We think it opens up doors for all our citizens and businesses.” They enable Net access through your TV if you don’t have a computer. It’s limited, but they can Google… People love the service overall and consider it, proudly, to be “ours.”

Q: [bob frankston] Among the triple play, which funds what?
A: TV is the driver.

Q; [Todd of the Utopia project in Utah] Will you wholesale access to the network so that others can be ISPs.
A: No. At least not until our bonds are paid off.

Q: [brett glass] Where does Lafayette get its backbone connection?
A: AT&T and Quest, about $50-60/Mbps. It’s an over-subscription-based model. You assume you won’t have all of your sources using all of your resources at the same time.

[Terry now plays Cajun fiddle and sings. Awesome.]

Geoff Daily makes a quick announcement of a new alliance: “All Americans deserve equal access to the best broadband. The best broadband is fiber.” [I couldn't get the URL. Sorry.]

[Tags: f2c09 f2c smart_grid ecology environment global_warming fiber ftth wifi ]

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[Note: Live blogging. Sloppy. Incomplete. Unchecked. Wrong. Flee! Flee!]

Chris Savage talks about “The Re-Birth of Intelligent Regulation and the Chicago School.” The Chicago School overemphasizes the value of individual thought (= “revealed preference theory”). When people make choices, that’s the best way to know what’s good for them (Chris says). But how can people know which wireless plan they want? “Empirical studies of decision making show that people don’t know what they want.” They don’t act rationally. They have trouble when there are too many alternatives, need to assess risk, etc. But, if you can’t assume that people know what they want, there’s no reason to think that the results from markets are good results. Hence, we need to regulate. If there’s no factual basis to think open competition will lead to the best outcome, regulators may have a role in shaping the outcome. But, timing matters and now is the time to make a “more citizen-friendly regulatory system.”

Derek Slater, a policy person for Google (and a former Berkman Fellow). He’s going to talk about MLab. We have all asked “WTF?” he says, especially when an app starts running badly. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t have the tools to get the data that would help us understand that. Broadband policy needs data. mLab provides end-user testing tools. (It’s not just a Google project.) “We call it beta but that’s only because most people don’t now what alpha means.” Thirty-six servers at the moment.

John Peha, chief technologist of the FCC, talks about the “Mythology of Rural Broadband.” Myth 1: There’s less interest in broadband in rural areas. Nope. The percentage of US households with Internet overall and rural are almost the same, but rural has less broadband. They probably don’t like their Internet slow. About one third of rural households have no access to broadband of any ttype (except satellite). Myth 2: Customers are unwilling to pay the cost of the buildout. But there are spill-over benefits, affecting the community and not just the individual subscribers. Myth 3: Rural communities may not gain from the broadband they don’t have access to, but it doesn’t hurt them. Nah. “Reducing the size of a network harms those who remain.” Broadband is becoming the norm, hurting those who do not have it. Myth 4: “Government involvement in infrastructure always helps.” Nope. No “one size fits all” solution. We shouldn’t have the gov’t replicate solutions the market is doing well already. We shouldn’t assume that the market solves all problems. We’re getting some more spectrum in 2009 as the switch to digital TV kicks in, and there’s a new national broadband plan under development.

Q: [tim denton, CRTC commissioner] Expand on your point that we don’t know what market conditions will work, Chris?
Chris: We don’t know. It’s important for people, esp. regulators, to remember that.

Q: How can regulators make policy and maintain technological neutrality since technologies offer different capabilities?
Jon: Tech neutrality is a good thing to aim at.
Chris: I want to challenge that. We’re not neutral about houses that have electricity or not, or cars with airbags or not. The market won’t figure this out correctly, necessarily.
Derek: We need to set the goals and look at the data at what different technologies bring to the table.
Jon: The setting of the goals is the key part of that.

[amy wohl] I am a recovering Chicago economist. When the gov’t tries to fix market mistakes, it often introduces a lag that can create a new mistake. How can we help the gov’t make good decisions?
Chris: Elect the right people.
Derek: Infrastructure is special. That’s the message we need to be building on.
David I: Say more …
Audience: Because infrastructure is being built now but not being designed. [Tags: f2c f2c09 fcc broadband regulation ]

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[Note: All of these conference bloggings are rough notes, wrong, incomplete, poorly paraphrased, full of spellping errors, etc.]

Esme Vos begins by saying that municipal wifi is far from dead. The companies that failed at it generally failed not because they were doing muni wifi (e.g., Earthlink). She talks about some cities where it’s working. E.g., Riverside, Minneapolis, Cleveland. Philadelphia is now succeeding; they got some muni “anchor applications” and is expanding from there. About 50% of logins to the Philadelphia system are Apple products; the Phila project is not a failure. Esme also talks about Lompoc CA, which had been considerd to be a failure, but it’s been turned around.

Sascha Meinrath says his role these days is “to translate geek into wonk.” He says we need “alternative media dissemination and through these networks institute fundamental changes to civil society before it collapses under the weight of its own inequity.” [approx] Public-private partnerships have placed communities in subservient relationships to corporations. “Our very lexicon” about muniwifi revolves around ROI instead of fostering a 21st century civil society.

Ken Biba of Novarum talks about “Municipal Wireless 2.0.” His company measures wifi. What went wrong with 1.0? There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Fantasy business models and overhyped products. What went right? When there was skin in the game, it worked It worked for things like public safety, parking meters, and internal municipal communications. Wireless works as an extension to wire. (Wifi 802.11n is beginning to beat Wimax for bandwidth, he says. Wimax is about as good as 3G. [I'm probably getting this wrong.]) He says “Cellular data has doubled in the last two years.” Now getting 1000-1500kbps download via cellular.

L. Aaron Kaplan (who gave a Berkman talk last week) is giving a presentation on Funkfeuer and community wifi networks in Europe. He shows maps of mesh networks in Vienna, highly scaled, 240 roofs. Repeated in Graz, Bad Ischl, Weinviertel. The longest links are 30km. It’s also happening in Guifi.net Barclona, Djursland, Berlin Freifunk, Athens, Paris Sans Fils, czfree nework.

Dewayne Hendricks says the biggest barrier to wireless is the regulatory environment. “The tools make the rules,” he says. E.g., if you have smart radios, they’re better able to tell what’s going on than rules written on tablets. Look at what’s happening at the grassroots level. What if we went back to the original vision and made the entire spectrum open? Reality is making it harder to stop this movement. The facts are on its side. Remember Metricom? They spent a billion dollars to deploy, and where it was deployed, it was great. They put their radios on light poles. But when muniwifi 2.0 started, no one went back and learned from Metricom’s efforts in getting permits.

Q: [harold feld] How can we talk about these things that doesn’t make it sound like you have to turn a profit in a year?
Esme: Cities like Rock Hill N. Carolina said that they’re installing a wireless meter-reading service, or some such…a muni service. It was easier to get the network in…
Ken: Someone has to pay for it. Find an app where you can show real economic return.
Sascha: I’m business-model agnostic. We just need to get this done.
Isenberg: From the chat: Why don’t we use Verizon or Sprint, etc., to provide muni services, i.e., in police cars or for public safety??
Ken: It’s too expensive.
David Young (Verizon): We’re looking at new pricing models for low-capacity networks.

Q: Will the telcos resurface as worthy adversaries?
Ken: The need for video surveillance is driving the creation of high-capacity networks. You can’t do that on cellular; there’s not enough bandwidth.

Q: What about privacy?
Ken: Once you move into an Internet-connected world, you’re doomed.
L. Aaron: If you import hardware from, say, China, how do you now it’s a secure? The only solution is to build it on your own.
Sascha: Privacy and security are not mutually inconsistent, but there are problems when companise are privatizing your identity and data.
Ken: You could do end-to-end encryption now, but no one chooses to do so. [Tags: wireless wifi muniwifi broadband ]

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Eva Sollberger talks about SevenDaysVt.com, about being “stuck in Vermont” videos. The videos don’t make the newspaper a lot of money but it does help “brand” Vermont and Burlington. Shes done 122 of them over the past two years. Highly edited. Highly viewed. One person, a bunch of videos, making a difference.

[Tags: f2c f2c09 vermont ]

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Check this project: DocBox sits on top of a tv and provides 2-way connectivity so seniors can exercise together under the eye of a trained person

[Tags: f2c fec09 elder_health ]

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Tim Karr, campaign director of Free Press, moderates a small panel: Nathaniel James ( Media and Democracy Coalition) and Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation).

Tim: We’re in a period of turmoil, torn between “two distinct value systems”: Mass media and social media. Now is the crucial time for making the right policies. We’re seeing a perfect alignment of three movements: media reform, free culture, and open government. The principles of the unity of these three movements: Openness (neutral, nondiscriminatory net), transparency, innovation (through copyright reform), privacy, access.

Ellen: As Andrew Rasiej says, technology is not a slice of the pie, it’s the entire pan. (Ellen talks about the origins and current projects of the magnificent Sunlight Foundation.)

Nathaniel mentions that he’s very involved in One Web Day. But his talk is about fighting for the freedom to connect. He says the process of providing access needs to include a diverse swath of the country. The Internet policy process ought to be as participatory as Internet culture itself. “Are we building programs that allow empowerment and peer to peer education?”

Q: Politically, what’s it look like with the new administration and Congress?
Tim: We’re more hopeful. “The more the public gets involved in the sausage-making, the more visionary and courageous our politicians become”
Nathaniel: The Dems and Reps are equally opportunity offenders in this area.
Ellen: When it comes to the new admin, “it’s a delight to be pushing on an open door.”

Q: [googin] We’re seeing an increase in bottom up business, not just in media.

[Tags: f2c egov egovernment transparency f2c09 ]

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At Freedom to Connect, the opening panel, moderated by Joanne Hovis, is on municipal wifi. [Note: Liveblogging. Missing stuff. Typing too fast. Not spellpchecking. No rereading. This is a terribly incomplete and occasionally wrong set of notes.]

Tim Nulty is the former head of Burlington Telecom, and is now the head of a consortium bringing fiber to rural Vermont. He says there are about 45 municipal wifi companies in the US. We pretty much know how to do that. It’s different in rural areas, where the average density is 13 residences per linear mile. About 60% have no broadband. Why should it be harder to replace copper wire with glass the second time around? Why is there this myth that it’s impossible? Because there are incumbents who have a financial interest in saying that it’s impossible because they don’t want to do it [because the margins are lower than they want, which would drive down their overall margins, even while increasing their revenue].

Dirk Van der Woude, program manager for broadband in Amsterdam. They provide boradband as a public service such as garbage collection.

Lev Gonick, founder of One Community, has a million institutional users, via a community network, a 501C3. It has about 4,000 route miles. The governance model is mayor-proof because the infrastructure owns the governance. The goal was not to build-up fiber optics but to enable and transform their communty.

Bill Schrier works on getting Seattle fibered. He says that they’re spending $4B on highway infrastructure, which is 8x what it would cost to bring fiber everywhere.

First Joanne question: Fiber vs. Wireless [which is the topic burning up the backchannel]. Dirk says he pays for fiber at home. Wifi works but is slow, he says. For wifi, you need access points with backhaul that is likely to be fiber.

Bill: What’s the killer app for a network? HDTV. Video teleconferencing.

Tim: Fiber is cheaper and more economic if you intend to be universal. Bringing fiber to his neck of the woods (1,000 sq miles) is $69M. Doing this through wireless, with 2.3 or 2.5gH Wimax, to get close to universality, would be $35M. It costs half as much but brings 1/4 the revenue. The capacity is 1% of what you get with fiber. The right thing economically to do is to put the Wimax on top of the fiber network, at which point it costs $10M, which makes it a great business.

Dirk: In Amsterdam, dwellings are stacked. Getting the fiber to move vertically is a problem.

Mark Cooper: Which comes first, fixed or mobile computing? For connecting the underserved, the killer app isn’t HDTV. It’s connectivity. We want wireless: 1. It gets you further. 2. Mobile computing is a twofer: Mobile computing and basic connectivity that meets the need for connectivity. 3. Mobile computing is future-proof. For this project [stimulus package?] wireless is the right thing to do. 4. Public accountability.

Tim: Rural fiber does not need public money. It can pay its own way. Rural wireless does not pay its own way.

Lev: This is a family dispute. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Let’s move ahead, be pragmatic, etc…

Bill: Wireless and fiber are synergistic, (David I. asks for a show of hands; everyone agrees.)

Q: Fiber is the foundation that supports wireless. Now: Go mesh!

Tim: Mesh is great for thin uses. But for carrying lots of data, it breaks down.

Bob Frankston: We need to change the dynamic. We’re stuck in railroads where you pay for each trip. We need to get to the point where assume connectivity at any speed. The question is the funding model.

Dirk: Cooperate with anyone who wants to cooperate with you, so long as you get the network you want…

Bice Wilson: “Designing the hidden public way,” i.e., the infrastructure of connectivity. There’s a vast network of services that needs connectivity to the entire community.

Lev: That’s what One Community is about.

Bill: In Seattle, that’s where we’re directing our efforts.

Roxanne Googin: Current status…?

Tim: The really important investment is in universal fiber.

Joanne wraps up reminding us of the sense of the room that we want universal connectivity and we want it yesterday. [Gross paraphrase] [Tags: f2c f2c09 wifi broadband muni_wifi fiber connectivity ]

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I’m at Freedom to Connect, David Isenberg’s annual conference on building open, fast, dumb networks. If you go to the F2C site, there should be instructions about how to live stream the proceedings. The twitter hashtag is #f2c09. The room’s backchannel is here.

[Tags: f2c f2c09 telcom wifi broadband net_neutrality ]

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