My computer froze as I was near the end of live-blogging Aneesh Chopra’s keynote at PDF. (Ubuntu.) I’ll try to recover it later.

The quick overview is that it’s amazing to have a person like him in the White House in charge of the change in culture and change in defaults, from processing forms to releasing info out into the wild so that people with ideas can do something with them. It’s our data, he says.

The shift in attitude is astounding.

Be the first to comment »

Robert Wright’s post about Steve Jobs seems to me to be exactly right: Jobs is an artist who would rather create the perfect product than rule the world. (Doc has been saying for over ten years that the best way to understand Jobs is as an artist.)

I am not completely relieved, however. The AppStore is such an appealing business model that what Jobs created for artistic reasons may spread for economic ones. That’s one reason that the competition from Android is so important.

(By the way, the second comment on the Wright column is great, and is from my old friend Evelyn Walsh.)

4 Comments »

Imagine an alternative universe in which Mark Zuckerberg is born before Tim Berners-Lee, and invents the Web.

• Mark Zuckerberg forms a company and develops the Web as a commercial enterprise.

• MZ owns and controls the HTML standard. Nothing changes in it unless MZ thinks it’s a good idea.

• MZ owns and controls the client — MZ Explorer — that uses that standard. While other apps are permitted API access, the browser is whatever MZ decides to give us.

• Users can only create pages on MZ’s server, subject to MZ’s content policies.

• MZ decides how much about the author of each page is automatically disclosed, and he changes his mind every few months.

• There is no “View Source” so users can easily figure out how to become developers.

• Innovators’ creations are limited to the API access that MZ allows and are subject to the changes in policy and pricing structures that MZ decides on.

• Users have no systematic, assured way of transferring out of the Web all of the pages they’ve created within it. Do they even own the pages they’ve created?

• If the right deal is struck, the Web could be sold to a media company at any moment.

This alternative history writes its own ending: The Web would be a boring, small, and of little consequence. The real Web unleashed a world-changing renaissance because a modest researcher at a physics lab gave it to us as a gift — open and free.

The Web knows how pages are connected. Social networking sites know how people are connected. Both are obviously crucial. But, Facebook, for all its success, is not living up to the potential for social networking sites, not by a long shot. The social networking site that will do for the connections among people what the Web has done for the connections among sites is awaiting its own Tim Berners-Lee — a person or group that understands that control constrains, but gifts liberate.

29 Comments »

Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems.

Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. “Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.”

Also, openness isn’t always the right answer. E.g., an electronic health record should be open enough that doctors can see it and so it can be immediately updated as lab results come in. But, it shouldn’t necessarily be open to other people, insurance companies, or the gov’t. Also, openness can make more haystacks, hiding the needles we need to find.

Elliot began thinking about this when Napster was at its high point. Traditional IP sees control as essential to creating an environment that encourages creation. But, we also want to encourage follow-on creators. There’s not a lot of research about how much incentive first creators need. (And, of course, first creators are themselves follow on creators.) Control is expensive and imperfect. (Think DRM). Open source, on the other hand, thinks value comes by distributing and sharing. But, it can be hard to evaluate all the contributions that come in.

Elliot lists some examples of increased openness, and spends some time talking about the attenmpts to open up clinical trials. (ClinicalTrials.gov and the Journal of Failed Clinical Trials.)

Elliot is also especially interested in higher education, which has been relatively unaffected by openness, although he expects that to change. (It’s easier for Harvard and other research institutions to support open access, he says, than, say, community colleges that have different goals and constraints. ) Elliot sees a rise in open educational resources, which will affect teaching institutions. OER will be increasingly driven by customers, rather than being course materials put up on the Web by a teacher. We will know more about how OERs are being used, they will become more interoperable, and there will be incentives for participation and use.

At CMU and other places, there’s work on harvesting what happens to and around digital educational materials. We need better data on student progress, educational outcomes, and the factors that affect student success. He says we also need research on the cmparative effectiveness of digital edu materials, and best practices. Also, it’d be great to extend fab labs digitally.

Elliot sees progress in opening up research. The Human Genome Project was the seminal event that changed the basic model of research, at least in the bio sciences. Open access journals are growing. But, too many institutions still only count publication in closed journals as a scholarly achievement. We don’t yet have good models for how to reward research that is immediately published.

Intellectual property rules need to be recalibrated to recognize the importance of follow-on innovators, and to enable more use by educators. Bayh-Dole should be modified to enable more open licensing. He would also like to see some “orphan work” legislation.

We should change the default of campus events so that they’re open, unless they’re specifically closed. “We should take advantage of greater openness to improve support services.” The government should fund open access to financial aid materials. NIH-funded research should be open to the public within 12 months should be extended to all non-classified research funded by the 11 fed agencies that spende over $100M in research. And the embargo time should be reudced to 6 months. The government ought to include funds for open access publishing when making grants, Elliot says.

Then there’s openness and transparency about academic degrees. We don’t know what it means to get a degree in something. We need more compatibility, comparability and portability of degrees. The government should encourage accrediting agencies to increase their focus on learning outcomes. (Currently only 19% of accrediting bodies say anything more than that a school is accredited or not.)

Q: [ethanz] You’re conflating openness and judging inputs and outputs. Evaluating schools by outcomes is one thing, but that’s different from openness.
A: Openness has to do with the access to the information.
Q: US News and World Report makes a closed evaluation based on open info. When you go more open, you can get unintended consequences. E.g., no one has done an open search engine, because it’s too game-able. What are the unintended consequences of opening up campus events, for example? E.g., Facebook opening up more and more private data. I was hoping you’d tell us more about where openness is inappropriate.
A: Yes. I’ve been talking about openness because that’s where it’s going.
Q: I agree with your framing of first and follow on innovators and with your general direction. But, the limits are important.
Q: As a historian, your directional arrow seems too one-dimensional. Historically, open and closed have worked hand in glove. E.g., the patent system closes paths but forces innovators to reveal what they have. E.g., the closedness of some medical processes.
A: Changing the default for university events would only be for events that were public anyway. And if I sound like I’m giving a litany of open

Q: [me] Is data more open if it’s been cleaned up and put into standardized formats. It’s more reusable, but it may also mean decisions have been made about it that anticipate some uses and not others?
A: It’s situational. In the long run it’s probably likely that all the slicing and dicing would evolve to a smaller way of using this info, because people would be able to build on that info — that’s just a guess. But, when people are unlikely to agree, getting it out quickly would be more usefl. Standardization has some benefits, but if it’s rigid it’s probably wrong.

Elliot concludes about talking about new means of certification. We’re going to find new ways of certifying people in a global environment. There aren’t educational institutions everywhere, and we have a new generation of self-directed learners. That will allow many more people to be certified.

Q: [wendy] What’s the most effective lever for openness? Is it giving credit for being open?
A: We need to recognize that the closed path is not the only way to build value.

Q: Transparency, openness, and open source are each different.
A: OS is a way of building code. Transparency lets us see, but not by itself affect…
Q: At the level of international relations, we can maybe get transparency, but openness will only come from individual administrations…
A: Transparency would let us see what’s happening. But I want us to be able to act on the info we see.

7 Comments »

Steven Johnson makes one of his typically brilliantly insightful points in his recent NY Times op-ed: The iPhone is a locked-down device, but it has been the site of arguably the greatest burst of software generativity in the computing era, much of it by small developers. This has led Steve to re-evaluate his adherence to the “unifying creed” that “Open platforms promote innovation and diversity more effectively than proprietary ones.” When Dan Gillmor challenged this in a tweet, Steve responded with a terrific blog post, further considering the point.

The argument is over the issue framed by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. JZ defines “generativity” as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (p. 70) Steve suggests that we instead judge generativity by the type of results we see, not by the nature of the software or hardware environment on which they run; a generative platform is “a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents.” So, while JZ assumes that a system’s capacity to produce generative results depends on the system’s openness, the burgeoning of software for the iPhone shows that closed systems can produce wildly generative results.

I think a few things are going on here.

First, Steve is right about the fecundity of the iPhone as a platform, and about its openness to amateur and small developers. But, he’s right because the iPhone is not purely locked down. Apple could exert any control it wants, to any degree, any time it wants, but so far it’s been pretty open. So, the iPhone and the iPad are generative because in practice they generally meet JZ’s criteria. They are, in JZ’s taxonomy, hybrid animals.

But, the fact that there are over 150,000 apps for the iPhone is not the only measure of generativity. Apple has announced it will exclude unruly guests from its party (and Apple gets to define “unruly”), so the unruly don’t even bother to ask for admittance. The AppStore is a ruly environment. Now, there are obviously advantages to the user (as well as to Apple, but we’ll leave that aside for now) in having a device that cannot be disrupted. (“Disruptive” figures large in JZ’s book, but not in Steve’s definition.) For one thing, a ruly device is less likely to melt into a puddle of palm-sized uselessness. But, that’s to say that the iPhone’s limits on generativity are desirable. Steve’s argument is different. He’s saying that the iPhone is generative.

In any case, I think Steve is wrong in his causality. The iPhone has generated 150,000 apps because it’s a cool piece of hardware with a preternaturally appealing UI, useful software affordances built in, and an appealing SDK. Not to mention, it’s got a gazillion users. And the App Store is well-designed for marketing small programs. The iPhone is not wildly generative (in Steve’s sense) because it’s a walled garden; the iPhone could allow other marketplaces for apps to exist without losing its generativity (as Steve notes in an aside).

But, the most important issue is not whether the iPhone is generative. The question is whether Steve is right to renounce the “unifying creed” that generativity depends on open platforms. The argument should not be over whether a particular hybrid device is generative — although it’s helpful to have the case raised — but over the future of the Internet. That’s why JZ raises the issue of generativity in the first place.

JZ defines generativity as part of a polarity. Here’s what he says at the beginning of his book:

…the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. This counterrevolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity—and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability. A seductive and more powerful generation of proprietary networks and information appliances is waiting for round two. If the problems associated with the Internet and PC are not addressed, a set of blunt solutions will likely be applied to solve the problems at the expense of much of what we love about today’s information ecosystem. (p. 8)

The danger is that as cellphones become mobile Internet devices, and as iPods become mobile computing platforms, our new generation of computing devices will be appliances open only at the forbearance of their creators. Those creators may be relatively benevolent, but the question isn’t whether this device or that creator is open. It’s what the future of the Internet and of computers will look like. If appliances become the dominant way of interacting with the Net (and thus how we interact with one another), then no matter how loosely the device creators hold the reins, we are accepting the bit in our mouths. If appliances become the default, then the market for challenging, risky, disruptive, subversive app development is in danger of drying up.

From that point of view, the generativity of the iPhone and the iPad is — to use JZ’s word — seductive. Steve Johnson is right that they have unleashed a torrent of creativity. But it is creativity within bounds. The very success of these devices, driven by the generativity that Steve Jobs allows us and to which Steve Johnson astutely points us, can lead us to the future that JZ fears.

15 Comments »

Holy cow!

The Open Net Initiative, a group that monitors government filtering (= censorship) of the Internet held a book launch at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheik. A poster for the book — Access Controlled — contained the sentence: “The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”

This statement was so objectionable, so outrageous, such a violation of common decency, such a hateful expression, such an offense to the tender sensibilities of UN diplomats that it must not ever be uttered. Security guards were sent to take the poster down.

If the people who want to govern the Internet think that’s beyond the pale of free speech, what the hell are they going to do with the rest of the Internet?

And, by the way, if you want to see what it looks like when UN diplomats take bold action, watch this video of the take-down itself.

[Source, video statement by ONI, BoingBoingage]

(Disclosure: the Berkman Center is a member of ONI.)

2 Comments »

While Apple has blocked the Someecards app because some of the cards have made fun of public figures, Google has asked the app to port on over to Android phones.

(BTW, I got a Droid today.)

3 Comments »

I do like the fact that Google has a “Google Data Liberation Front.” Their mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.” Google announced another positive step in this direction for Google Docs. All this is good, and even if it’s over-marketing Google’s openness, it’s the right value to be marketing.

Still, I wish it were easy to download a backup of my gmail.

LATER that day: Meanwhile, Microsoft is opening up its PST mailbox format.

7 Comments »

The Berkman Center’s study of broadband around the world finds pretty clear correlation between successful broadband access and openness. Here’s a bit of an interview with Yochai Benkler who headed up the study for the FCC:

I think there are two pieces of news that will be most salient for people as they look at this report. The first is a response to the question: “how are we doing?”, and the answer is that we’re overall middle-of-the-pack, no better. The second responds to the question: “what policies and practices worked for countries that have done well?”, and the answer to that is: there is good evidence to support the proposition that a family of policies called “open access,” that encourage competition, played an important role.

The report is now open for public comment.

Elliot Noss of Tucows — agreeing with the Benkler report — has posted about why the state of Canadian broadband is not nearly as healthy as a report from the incumbent providers would have us believe. He concludes: “I want, and there is no reason we cannot have, at least 100mbs full symmetrical bandwidth. It is a global competitive imperative. Telcos, Cablecos, I do not want your lousy bowl of 1.5mbps gruel. Please sir, may I have some more?”

Be the first to comment »

My Blackberry 8830 does what it needs to do. I can type on it. I can take it to Europe. With the Gmail app installed, I can read and delete emails and have them deleted from my gmail inbox. I an view web pages through a keyhole. I can recharge it off of my laptop. I can run the vaguely accurate Verizon GPS on it. I can fit a couple of downloads on it.

But I don’t love. I’m very glad to have it. But it does nothing for my hormone levels.

My eye now is roving. Verizon has announced it will be offering the Motorola Droid in November, which runs Google’s Android operating system. Unless there are some gotchas — if it has half of what we’re expecting, can we call it the Hemodrhoid? — I’m going to be explaining to my BBerry that the problem is really with me, not it, and then making the switch.

I don’t expect it the Droid to be as beautiful as the iPhone. Nor will there be as many apps. But, it will be beautiful enough, and as people write more skins for it, it may get better with age. And there are already more than enough Android apps, which is exactly how many I need.

Most of all, though, there won’t be an AppStore. The AppStore is the seductive angel of death for computing. It enables Apple to keep quality up and, more important, to keep support costs down. But a computer that can’t be programmed except by its manufacturer (or with the permission of its manufacturer) isn’t a real computer. The success of the AppStore is a gloomy, scary harbinger. From controlling the apps that can go on its mobile phone, it’s a short step for Apple to decide to control the apps that can go on its rumored slate/netbook device. And since so much of the future of computing will occur on mobiles and netbooks, this portends a serious de-generation of computing, as predicted by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

So, some of my technolust for a phone I haven’t even seen yet is due to the political hope it promises. Rally ’round the Droid, boys and girls!

Unless, of course, it sucks.

8 Comments »