Dries Buytaert [twitter:Dries] , the founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, is giving a Berkman lunch talk about building and sustaining online collaborations.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
Drupal is an open source content manager, Dries says. In the past twelve years, Drupal has “grown significantly”: 71 of the top 100 universities use it, 120 nations use it, the White House uses it, 2 of of the 3 top music companies use it, the King of Belgium uses it. [Dries is Belgian :) ] The NY Stock Exchange is converting from a proprietary Java solution to Drupal. Five of the 6 top media companies use it. One out of 50 wesbites run on Drupal. Drupal has 10,000+ modules, 300,000 downloads a month, 1.5M unique visitors a month at drupal. org. And it’s free as in beer.
Today he’s going to talk about: history, open source, community, the evolution of software, and how to grow and sustain it.
History
Dries began writing Drupal in his dorm room, more or less by accident. He wrote a message board for the Linux project, in part to learn PHP and MySQL. About a year later he released Drupal 1.0 as open source, as “a full-featured content management/discussion engine…suitable to setup a news-driven comunity or portal site similar to kuro5hin.org and slashdot.org” (as it said in the original annoucement). “It took me about 30 seconds to come up with the name Drupal, a terrible name.”
Three years later (v.4.1) he says it still looked “pretty crappy.” Two years laer,in 2005, 30 develoeprs showed up for the first DrupalCon, in Antwerp. There are now several year. By 2011, it was looking quite good, and 3,200+ developers showed up at DrupalCon. There are now weekly meetings around the world.
There were growing pains, he says. He tells us about The Big Server Meltdown. In 2004, the servers failed. Dries put up a blank page with a PayPal button to raise $3,000 for a server. Within 24 hours, they’d raised $10,000. One of the CTOs of Sun shipped him a $8,000 machine. Then Open Source Labs in Portland OR offered to house the servers. “That’s just one anecdote. In the history of Drupal, it feels like we’ve had hundreds of these.” (There are currently 8 staff members. They organize conferences and keep the servers up. )
But, Dries says, this shows a weakness in open source: you suddenly have to raise $3,000 and may not be able to do so. That’s a reason he started Acquia, which provides support for Drupal.
Open Source
Drupal is open source: It’s gratis, anyone can look at the source code, they can modify the code, and they can share it. The fact that it’s free sometimes let’s them win bids, but open source “is not just a software license. It’s a collaboration model.” “Open source leads to community.” And “ultimately, that leads to innovation.”
Dries shows photos of the community’s embrace of Drupal (and its logo). “Drupal is successful today because of the community.”
Q: How do we know there will be enthusiastic support a few years down the road? How do we know it won’t have a Y2K problem?
A: There isn’t an easy answer. Things can go wrong. We try to keep it relevant. We have a good track record of innovation and keeping the right trends. And a lot of it comes down to keeping the community engaged. We have a large ecosystem. They volunteer their time, but the are all making money; they have an economic interest in keeping Drupal relevant.
Community
“Drupal doesn’t win just because it’s cheaper. It wins because it’s better.” It is technically superior because it has thousands of developers.
Evolution of software
Dries points to a common pattern: From innovation to bespoke systems to products to commoditization. In each step, the reach becomes wider. Proprietary software tends to stop at the products stage; it’s hard to become a commodity because proprietary software is too expensive. This is an important opportunity for open source.
Growing large projects
Is Drupal’s growth sustainable? That’s a reason Dries founded the Drupal Association, a non-profit, in 2006. It helps maintain drupal.org, organizes events, etc. But Drupal also needs companies like Acquia to get it into new areas. It needs support. It needs people who can talk to CIOs in large companies.
Open source Joomla recently hired some developers to work on their core software, which has led some of the contributors to back off. Why should they contribute their time if Joomla is paying some folks? [Joomla's experience illustrates the truth of the Wealth of Networks: Putting money into collab can harm the collab.] Drupal is not going to do that. (Acquia develops some non-open source Drupal tools.)
IBM and RedHat are the top contributors to Linux. What companies might make that sort of strategic investment in Drupal? Instead of one or two, how about hundreds? So Dries created “Large Scale Drupal,” a membership org to jointly fund developments. It’s new. They contribute money and get a say in where it’s spent. The members are users of Drupal. E.g., Warner Music. Module developers can get funded from LSD. Two people run it, paid by Acquia. There has not been any pushback from the dev community because there’s no special backdoor by which these projects get added to the Drupal core. In fact, the money is then spent to fund developers. Dries sets the technical roadmap by listening to the community; neither the Drupal Association or LSD influences that.
Of these collaborative projects often start as small, volunteer-driven projects. But then they become institutionalized when they grow. Trade routes are like that: they were originally worn into the ground, but then become driven by commercial organizations, and finally are governed by the government. Many others exhibit the same pattern. Can open source avoid it?
Q&A
If you’re thinking of starting an open source commercial company, you could do dual licensing, but Drupal has not made that choice.
Q: How much does Drupal contribute to the PHP community?
A: A little. There are tribes: some are active in the PHP tribe, others in the Drupal tribe. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t more interaction. Dries says he’d love to grow Acquia enough so that it can put a couple of people on PHP, because if PHP isn’t successful, neither is Drupal.
Q: Governance?
A: We don’t have a lot of decision-making structure. I’ve always been opposed to formal voting. We work through discussion. We debate what should be in the core. Whoever wants to participates in the debate. Ultimately we’re structured like Linux: there are two people who are committing changes to a core version of Drupal. For every major version I pick someone to work alongside me. When we release the version, he or she becomes the maintainer of it. I move on to the next version and select someone to be my co-maintainer. The 15,000 modules are maintained by the community.
Q: Do your biggest contributors agree to programming standards?
A: We are strict about our coding and documentation standards. I make the final decisions about whether to accept a patch. Patches go through a workflow before they reaches me.
Q: What advice would you give to someone trying to attract people to a project?
A: If people can make money through your project, it will grow faster. We built a community on trust and respect; we make decisions on technical merit, not dollars. We have a darwinian model for ideas; bad ideas just die. See what rises to the top. Include it in the next version. Then put it into the core, if it’s worth it. The down side is that it’s very wasteful. I could tell people “If you do x, it will get in,” but I try to get out of the way. People have taken Drupal in sorts of directions, e.g., political campaigns, elearning platforms, etc.
Q: [me] How important are you to Drupal these days?
A: I think I’m more important as the face of Drupal than I used to be. In the governance sense I’m less important. I was the lead developer, the admin for the servers, etc., at the beginning. The “hit by a bus factor” was very risky. Nowadays, I don’t write code; I just review code. I still have a lot of work, but it’s much more focused on reviewing other people’s work and enabling them to make progress. If I were to die, most things would continue to operate. The biggest pain would be in the marketing . There are a lot of leaders in Drupal. One or two people would emerge or be elected to replace what I do.
Q: What’s hard for Drupal?
A: One of our biggest risks is to keep nimble and lean. It takes longer to make decisions. We need to continue to evolve the governance model to encourage us to accelerate decision making. Also, we have some real technical issues we need to address, and they’re huge projects. Volunteers can only accomplish so much. LSD is perfectly positioned to tackle the hardest problems. If we did it at the pace of the volunteers, it would take years.
Filipe L. Heusser [pdf] is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Open Data for Open Accountability.”
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
How is the open Web been changing accountability and transparency? Filipe is going to share two ideas: 1. The Web is making the Freedom of Information Act (FOIOA) obsolete. 2. An open data policy is necessary to keep freedom of information up to date, and to move toward open accountability.
Lots of people praise transparency, he says. There are multiple systems that benefit from it. Felipe shows a map of the world that shows that most parts of the world have open government policies, although that doesn’t always correlate with actual openness. We continue to push for transparency. One of the cornerstones of transparency policy is freedom of information regulation. In fact, FOIA is part of a long story, going back at least back to 1667 when a Finnish priest introduced a bill into the Swedish parliament. [Entirely possible I heard this wrong.]
Modern FOI laws require governments to react to requests and to proactively provide information. (In response to a question, Filipe says that countries have different reasons for putting FOI laws in place: as a credential, to create a centralized info system (as in China), etc.), etc. Felipe’s study of 67 laws found five clusters, although overall they’re alike. One feature they share: They heavily rely on reactive transparency. This happens in part because FOI laws come out of an era when we thought about access to documents, not about access to data. That’s one big reason FOI laws are increasingly obsolete. In 2012, most of the info is not in docs, but is in data sets.
Another reason: It’s one-way information. There’s no two-way communication, and no sharing. Also, gatekeepers decide what you can know. If you disagree, you can go to court, which is expensive and slow.
In May 2009, data.gov launched. The US was the first country to support an open data policy. Sept. 2009 the UK site launched. Now many have, e.g., Kenya and the World Bank. These data are released in machine-readable formats. The open data community thinks this data should be available raw, online, complete, timely, accessible, machine processable, reusable, non-discriminatory and with open licenses.
So, why are these open data initiatives good news? For one thing, it keeps our right to FOI up to date: we can get at the data sets of neutral facts. For another, it enables multiway communication. There are fewer gatekeepers you have to ask permission of. It encourages cheap apps. Startups and NGOs are using it to provide public service delivery.
Finally, Felipe runs an NGO that uses information to promote transparency and accountability. He says that access to open data changes the rules of accountability, and improves them. Traditional gov’t accountability moves from instituational and informal to crowd-source and informal; from a scarcity of watchdogs to an abundance of watchdogs; and from an election every four years to a continuous benchmark. We are moving from accountability to open accountability.
Global Voices started a project called technology for transparency, mapping open govt apps. Also, MySociety, Ushahidi, Sunlight Foundation, andCuidadano Inteligente (Felipe’s NGO). One of CI’s recent apps is Inspector of Interests, which tries to identify potential conflicts of interest in the Chilean Congress. It relies on open data. The officials are required to release info about themselves, which CI built an alternative data set to contrast with the official one, using open data from the Tax and Rev service and the public register. This exposed the fact that nearly half of the officials were not publishing all their assets.
It is an example of open accountability: uses open data, machine readable, neutral data, the crowd helps, and provides ongoing accountability.
Now Felipe points to evidence about what’s going on with open data initiatives. There is a weird coalition pushing for open data policies. Gov’ts have been reacting. In three years, there are 118 open data catalogs from different countries, with over 700,000 data sets. But, although there’s a lot of hype, there’s lots to be done. Most of the catalogs are not driven at a national level. Most are local. Most of the data in the data catalogs isn’t very interesting or useful. Most are images. Very little info about medical, and the lowest category is banking and finance.
Q: [doc] Are you familiar with miData in the UK that makes personal data available? Might this be a model for gov’t.
Q: [jennifer] 1. There are no neutral facts. Data sets are designed and structured. 2. There are still gatekeepers. They act proactively, not reactively. E.g., data.gov has no guidelines for what should be supplied. FOIA meets demands. Open data is supplied according to what the gatekeepers want to share. 3. FOIA can be shared. 4. What’s the incentive to get useful open data out?
Q: [yochai] Is open data doing the job we want? Traffic and weather data is great, but the data we care about — are banks violating privacy, are we being spied on? — don’t come from open data but from FOIA requests.
A: (1) Yes, but FOI laws regulate the ability to access documents which are themselves a manipulation to create a report. By “neutral facts” I meant the data, although the creation of columns and files is not neutral. Current FOI laws don’t let you access that data in most countries. (2) Yes, there will still be gatekeepers, but they have less power. For one thing, they can’t foresee what might be derived from cross-referencing data sets.
Q: [jennifer] Open data doesn’t respond to a demand. FOI does.
A: FOI remains demand driven. And it may be that open data is creating new demand.
Q: [sascha] You’re getting pushback because you’re framing open data as the new FOI. But the state is not going to push into the open data sets the stuff that matters. Maybe you want to say that WikiLeaks is the new FOI, and open data is something new.
A: Yes, I don’t think open data replaces FOI. Open data is a complement. In most countries, you can’t get at data sets by filing a FOI request.
Q: [yochai] The political and emotional energy is being poured into open data. If an administration puts millions of bits of irrelevant data onto data.gov but brings more whistleblower suits than ever before,…to hold up that administration as the model of transparency is a real problem. It’d be more useful to make the FOI process more transparent and shareable. If you think the core is to make the govt reveal things it doesn’t want to do, then those are the interesting interventions, and open data is a really interesting complement. If you think that you can’t hide once the data is out there, then open data is the big thing. We need to focus our political energy on strengthening FOI. Your presentation represents the zeitgeist around open data, and that deserves thinking.
Q: [micah] Felipe is actually quite critical of data.gov. I don’t know of anyone in the transparency movement who’s holding up the Obama gov’t as a positive model.
A: Our NGO built Access Inteligente which is like WhatDoTheyKnow. It publishes all the questions and responses to FOI requests, crowdsourcing knowledge about these requests. Data.gov was the first one and was the model for others. But you’re right that there are core issues on the table. But there might be other, smaller, non-provocative actions, like the release of inoffensive data that lets us see that members of Congress have conflicts of interest. It is a new door of opportunity to help us move forward.
A: [juan carlos] Where are corporations in this mix? Are they not subject to social scrutiny?
Q: [micah] Can average citizens work with this data? Where are the intermediaries coming from?
A: Often the data are complex. The press often act as intermediaries.
Q: Instead of asking for an overflow of undifferentiated data, could we push for FOI to allow citizens’ demands for data, e.g., for info about banks?
A: We should push for more reactive transparency
Q: [me] But this suggests a reframing: FOI should be changed to enable citizens to demand access to open data sets.
Q: We want different types of data. We want open data in part to see how the govt as a machine operates. We need both. There are different motivations.
Q: I work at the community level. We assume that the intermediaries are going to be neutral bodies. But NGOs are not neutral. Also, anyone have examples of citizens being consulted about what types of data should be released to open data portals?
A: The Kenya open data platform is there but many Kenyans don’t know what to do with it. And local governments may not release info because they don’t trust what the intermediaries will do it.
Alison Head, who is at the Berkman Center and the Library Information Lab this year, but who is normally based at U of Washington’s Info School, is giving a talk called “Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students.” (I did a podcast interview with her a couple of months ago.)
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
Project Information Literacy is a research project that reaches across institutions. They’ve (Michael Eisenberg co-leads the project) surveyed 11,000 students on 41 US campuses to find out how do students find and use information. They use voluntary samples, not random samples. But, Alison says, the project doesn’t claim to be able to generalize to all students; they look at the relationships among different kinds of schools and overall trends. They make special efforts to include community colleges, which are often under-represented in studies of colleges.
The project wanted to know what’s going through students’ heads as they do research. What’s it like to be a student in the digital age? “How do students define the research process, how do they conceptualize it” throughout everyday school life, including non-course-related research (e.g., what to buy).
Four takeaways from all five studies:
1. “Students say research is more difficult for them than ever before.” This is true both for course-related and everyday life research. Teachers and librarians denied this finding when it came out. But students describe the process using terms of stress (fear,angst, tired, etc.) Everyday-life research also had a lot of risk associated with it, e.g., when researching medical problems.
Their research led the project to come up with a preliminary model based on what students told them about the difficulties of doing research that says in the beginning part of research, students try to define four contexts: big picture, info-gathering, language, situational. These provide meaning and interpretation.
a. Big picture. In a focus group, a student said s/he went to international relations class and there was an assignment on how Socrates would be relevant to a problem today. Alison looked at the syllabus and wondered, “Was this covered?” Getting the big picture enables students to get their arms around a topic.
b. Info gathering. “We give students access to 80 databases at our small library, and they really want access to one,” says Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus.
c. Language. This is why most students go to librarians. They need the vocabulary.
d. Situational. The expectations: how long should the paper be, how do I get an A, etc.? In everyday life, the situational question might be: how far do I go with an answer? When do I know enough?
Students surveyed said that for course related research they almost always need the big picture, often need info-gathering, sometimes need language, and sometimes need situational. Students were 1.5x more likely to go to a librarian for language context. For everyday-life, big picture is often a need, and the others are needed only sometimes. Many students find everyday-life research is harder because it’s open-ended, harder to know when you’re done, and harder to know when you’re right. Course-related research ends with a grade.
2. “Students turn to the same ‘tried and true’ resources over and over again.”. In course research, course readings were used 97% of the time. Search engines: 96%. Library databases: 94%. Instructors: 88%. Wikipedia: 85%. (Those are the 2010 results. In 2009, everything rose except course readings.) Students are not using a lot of on-campus sources. Alison says that during 20 years of teaching, she found students were very disturbed if she critiqued the course readings. Students go to course readings not only to get situational context, but also to get big picture context, i.e., the lay of the land. They don’t want you critiquing those readings, because you’re disrupting their big picture context. Librarians were near the bottom, in line with other research findings. But “instructors are a go-to source.” Also, note that students don’t go online for all their info. They talk to friends, instructors, etc.
In everyday life research, the list in order is: Search engines 95%, Wikipedia 84%, friends and family 87%, personal collection 75%, and government sites 65%.
Students tend to repeat the same processes.
3. “Students use a strategy of predictability and efficiency.” They’re not floundering. They have a strategy. You may not like it, but they have one. It’s a way to fill in the context.
Alison presents a composite student named Jessica. (i) She has no shortage of ideas for research. But she needs the language to talk about the project, and to get good results from searching. (ii) Students are often excited about the course research project, but they worry that they’ll pick a topic “that fails them,” i.e., that doesn’t let them fulfill the requirements. (iii) They are often risk-averse. They’ll use the same resource over and over, even Project Muse for a science course. (“I did a paper on the metaphor of breast cancer,” said one student.) (iv) They are often self-taught and independent, and try to port over what they learned in high school. But HS works for HS, and not for college. (iv) Currency matters.
What’s the most difficult step? 1. Getting started 84%. 2. Defining a topic 66%. Narrowing a topic 62%. Sorting through irrelevant results 61%. Task definition is the most difficult part of research. For life research, the hardest part is figuring out when you’re done.
So, where do they go when they’re having difficulty in course research? They go to instructors, but handouts fall short: few handouts the project looked at discussed what research means (16%). Six in ten handouts sent students to the library for a book. Only 18% mention plagiarism, and few of those explained what it is. Students want email access to the instructor. Second, most want a handout that they can take with them and check off as they do their work. Few hand-outs tell students how to gather information. Faculty express surprise at this, saying that they assume students know how to do research already, or that it’s not the prof’s job to teach them that. They tend not to mention librarians or databases.
Students use ibrary databases (84%), OPAC (78%), study areas (72%), check library shelves (55%), cafe (48%). Only 12% use the online “Ask a librarian” reference. 20% consult librarians about assignments, but 24% ask librarians about the library system.
Librarians use a model of scholarly thoroughness, while students use a model of efficiency. Students tend to read the course materials and then google for the rest.
Alison plays a video:
How have things changed? 1. Students contend with a staggering amount of information. 2. They are always on and always being notified. 3. It’s a Web 2.0 sharing culture. The old days of dreading group projects are ending; satudents sometimes post their topics on Facebook to elicit reactions and help. 4. The expectations from information has changed.
“Books, do I use them? Not really, they are antiquated interaces. You have to look in an index, way in the back, and it’s not hyperlinke.”
[I moderated the Q&A so I couldn't liveblog it.]
TAGS: -berkman
Jeff Jarvis is giving a lunch time talk about his new book, Public Parts. He says he’s interested in preserving the Net as an open space. Privacy and publicness depend on each other. Privacy needs protection, he says, but we are becoming so over-protective that we are in danger of losing the benefits of publicness. (He apologizes for the term “publicness” but did not want to use the marketing term “publicity.”)
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
He begins with a history of privacy. In 1890, Brandeis wrote an article about privacy, in response to the rise of Kodak cameras. The NYT wrote about “fiendish Kodakers lying in wait.” Teddy Roosevelt banned photo-taking in public parks. Technology seems often to raise privacy concerns. After Gutenberg some authors did not want their name associated with works. Some say that privacy arose in Britain as a result of the creation of the back stairs. As tech advances, we need to find new norms. Instead, we tend to legislate to try to maintain the status quo.
Now for publicness, he begins by referring to Habermas: the public sphere arose in the 18th C in coffee houses and salon as a counterweight to the power of governments. But, Canadian researchers began The Making Publics Project that concluded that people had the tools for making publics before the 18th C. E.g., printed music, art, etc. all enabled the creation of publics. When a portrait of a Dutch gentleman was shown in Venice, if a Dutch man showed up, he looked like “them,” which helped define the Venetians as “us” (for example).
Mass media made us into a mass. It pretended to speak for us. Online, though, we can each make a public. E.g., Occupy Wall Street, and before that Arab Spring. He recounts tweeting angrily, and after a few glasses of wine, “Fuck you Washington! It’s our money.” Someone suggested to him that there were these new things called “hashtags,” and that this one should be #FUwashington. 110,000 tweets later, the hashtag had become a platform. “People viewed in this empty vessel what they wanted to.” Indeed, the first recorded use of #occupywallstreet was in a tweet that consisted of: “#fuwashington #occupywallstreet.” [Note: It might be #OWS.] Now the public is a network.
We’re going through a huge transition, he says. He refers to the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Before Gutenberg, knowledge was passed around, person to person. It was meant to honor and preserve ancient knowledge. After Gutenberg, knowledge became linear. There are beginnings and ends and boxes around things. It’s about product. There’s a clear sense of ownership. It honors current knowledge and its authors. Then you get to the other side of the parenthesis, and there are similarities. More passing it around, more remixing, less sense of ownership. The knowledge we revere starts to become the network itself. Our cognition of the world changes. The CTO of the Veterans Admin calls the Internet the Eighth Continent. “I used to think of the Internet as a medium,” but now he thinks of it more as a place, although there are problems with the place metaphor. (“All metaphors are wrong,” interjects Doc Searls. “That’s why they work.”) It was a hard transition into the parenthesis, and it’ll be hard coming out of it. It took 50 years after Gutenberg for books to come into their own, and 100 years to recognize the impact of books. We’re still looking at the Net using our the past as our analog.
To talk about publicness, Jeff had to go through “the gauntlet of privacy.” He looked for a good definition of privacy. Control is part of it, but “privacy” is an empty vessel itself. “I came to believe that privacy should be seen as an ethic.” It’s about the responsibility for making ethical decisions about sharing it. People and companies have different responsibilities here, of course. “There should be an ethic that people should be able to know who has access to their information. And it should be portable.” He gives a shout out to Doc Searls’ projectVRM.
If privacy is an ethic of knowing, publicness is an ethic of sharing. Not everything should be shared, of course, but there’s a generosity of sharing that should have us thinking about how sharing can benefit us. “I shared info about my prostate cancer on line, which means I was sharing information about my non-functioning penis. Why would I do that?” He has friends who learned of this because he was public, and some who shared with them great information about what he was about to go through. One guy started out under a pseudonym but then started using his real name. A woman told her story about how her husband died needlessly. Jeff refers to Xeni Jardin‘s posting of her mammogram and how this will likely save some lives. [Xeni, we are all thinking about you! And love you!]
“I am not utopian,” Jeff says, “because I’m not predicting a better world.” But we should be imagining the best that can happen, as well as the worst. There are many benefits to publicness. Bringing trust. Improving relationships. It enables collaboration. It disarms the notion of the stranger. It disarms stigmas: coming outside the closet disarms the old stigma (although, Jeff adds, no one should be forced out of a closet). Gov’t is too often secret by default, and that should be switched; the same is not true for individuals where the default should always be a choice. We should make it clear that the Internet is a shitty place to put secrets. Facebook has made mistakes about privacy, but 800M have joined because they want to share. Zuckerberg believes he is not changing but enabling human nature. By nature we want to share.
Jeff got accused by someone of “over-sharing” which he finds an odd phrase. It means “shut up.” The guy does not have to follow Jeff or read his blog. “I wasn’t over-sharing. He was over-listening.”
Companies should share more because it opens up the ability to collaborate. In What Would Google Do? Jeff speculated about a company that might design cars collaboratively. Many scoffed. But Local Motors is now doing it.
When Google pulled out of China, they did the right thing, he says. But can we expect companies to protect the Internet? Nah. Google did a devil’s deal with Verizon. Gov’t also can’t protect the Net. Jeff went to the E-G8 where he asked Sarkozy to take a Hippocratic Oath “to first do no harm.” Sarkozy replied that it’s not harm to protect your children. There are unintended consequences, e.g., danah boyd’s study of the consequence of COPPA. More than half of the 12 yr olds had Facebook pages, most of which had been created with the help of parents, violating the terms of use. Thus, COPPA is requiring families to lie. COPPA has resulted in young people being the worst served segment on the Net because it’s too risky to build a kid site. We need to protect our children, but we also have to protect the Net.
So, who has to protect the Net? We do. The people of the Net. Jeff went back to the Sullivan Principles (while noting that he’s not equating YouTube censorship with Apartheid) about corporate responsibility when dealing with South Africa. We need a discussion of such principles for doing business on the Net. The discussion will never end, he says, but it gives us something to point at. His own principles, he says, are wrong, but they are: 1. You have a right to connect. (Not that you have a right to demand a connection, but you can’t be disconnected.) 2. Privacy as an ethic of knowing and publicness as an ethic of sharing. 3. What’s public is a public good. The Germans allow citizens to demand Google pixelate Street View, resulting in a degradation of a useful tool. Google is taking pictures of public places in public views. Illinois and MA do not allow you to audio record police officers. Reducing what’s public reduces the value of the public. What are the principles at work here? 4. Institution’s info should become public by default. 5. Net neutrality. 6. The Net must remain open and distributed. “The fact that no one has sovereignity is what makes the Net the Net.”
“I am not a technodeterminist,” he says. “We are a point of choice. We need to maintain our choices. If we don’t protect them, companies and well-meaning and ill-meaning companies will take away those choices.” He points to Berkman as a leading institute for this. “I don’t blame Sarkozy for holding the event. I blame us for not holding our own event, the WE-G8, because it is our Internet.”
Jeff now does The Oprah.
Q: How about Google Plus requiring real names?
A: Anonymity has its place on line. So do pseudonyms. They protect the vulnerable. But I understand that real names improves he discourse. I get the motivation, but they screwed it up. They were far too literal in what someone’s identity is. I think Google knows this now. They’re struggling with a principle and a system. I do understand trying to avoid having the place overrun by fake identities and spam.
Q: German Street View is really about scale. It’s one thing for someone to take a picture of your house. It’s another for Google to send a car to drive down every street and post the pictures for the world. For some people it crosses the ethics of privacy. Why isn’t that a valid choice?
A: But it’s a public view. If you own the building, do you own the view of it? But you’re right about scale. But we need to protect the principle that what is public is the public good.
Q: We have a vacation rental. Any bad guy can use Street View to see if it’s worth robbing.
A: Riverhead LI used Google Earth to look for pools in backyards that had no permits. People were in an uproar. But it could also save children’s lives.
Q: [me] Norms are not the same as ethics. Can you talk about the difference? To what extent should privacy as an ethic of knowing be a norm? Etc.
A: Privacy as an ethic should inform the norms. I’ve been talking about my desire for a return of the busy signal… [missed a bit of this.]
Q: What about the ethics of having info shared for you? As people post photos of each other, enormous amounts of info will be shared…
A: We’re trying to adjust to this as a society. Currently, FB tells me if I’m tagged in a photo and lets me say no. It’s wrong if someone tricks you out of info, or violates a presumed confidence. Tyler Clemente who committed suicide after a picture of him was posted…the failure was human, not the technology’s.
A: Why don’t we share all of our health? We’d get more support. We’d have more data that might help. But health insurance would misuse it. Job applicants being disqualified? We could regulate against this. The real reason is stigma. “In this day and age, for anyone to be ashamed of sickness is pathetic.” The fact that we can use illness against people says more about our society.
A: Part of your message is that publicness is our best weapon against stigma.
Q: [espen andersen, who also blogged this talk] In Norway the gov’t publishes how much money people make. That arose when you had to go down to City Hall to get the info. Now there are FB mashups. So what about info that’s used for unintended purposes? And how about the Data Storage Directive that in Europe requires the storage of data “just in case.”
A: Helen Nissenbaum says the key to privacy is context. But it’s hard to know what the context is in many cases. Apparently Norway is rethinking its policy. But there was a cultural benefit that it’d be a shame to lose. Google threatened to pull Gmail out of Germany because of the data storage requirements. Why in the US does email have less protection than mail.
Q: I’m a member of the group suing the Norwegian govt on the grounds that that law is unconstitituional. But no one ever sets targets.
Q: Public by default, private by necessity: Yes. Where’s the low-hanging fruit for universities?
A: Lessig reminds us that if we only use govt data to get the bastards, govt will see openness as an enemy. We need also to be showing the positive benefit of open data. Universities will be in the next wave of disruption of the Net. Around the world, how many instructors write a lecture about capillary action, and how many of them are crap? The fact that you have Open Course lets you find the best lectures in the world. You can find and reward the best. Local education becomes more like tutoring. Why should students and teachers be stuck with one another? I’m reading DIY U and it’s wonderful. It’ll change because of the economics of education.
A: [I had trouble hearing this long question. He recommended going back to Irving Goffman, and pointed out that Net publicness is different if you're famous.]
A: You’re talking about what a public is. We have thought that the public mean everyone. But now we can create limited publics around things. (Jeff points to a problem with circles in G+ : People think they create private spheres, but they don’t.) FB confused a public with the public; when it changed the defaults, people thought they were talking to a public but were in fact talking to the public.
Q: [me] Norms of privacy help define publics. Are you arguing for a single norm? Why not? [this was my question and I actually asked it much worse than this.]
A: I’m arguing for choice.
Q: Are Americans wrong for being modest in saunas?
A: Nope. [I've done a terrible job of capturing this.]
