Posts Tagged ‘berkman@10’

The second day of Berkman@10 was less structured and involved a number of smaller panels and discussions. Haven taken a course in economic and political development, I was particularly excited to see the panels on the developing world’s use of technology.

The “Open World” session was led by a number of people doing work in the area. Key points I took away were the importance of both “hard” topics like infrastructure and policy and “soft” ones like culture and language. Because of the oft-discussed digital divide, there is a “latent ingenuity” in poor countries where people are not given the agency to create or innovate with the same ease of their rich peers. Even where ICT infrastructure exists, it is often costlier; for example, African ICT traffic must flow through third parties (e.g. British ISPs) driving up the cost in net hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you create policies which induce infrastructure construction? These are difficult tasks which Ethan Zuckerman thought were possible to avoid in certain cases. He gave the example of cell phone service in DR Congo where an entrepreneur was able to start with just one tower and built it into a billion dollar business, piece by piece. In other words, where nothing exists, something is better than nothing.

The conversation shifted to issues of access. Frequently Internet access is considered a panacea, but access is not everything: people need skills and abilities – literacy is a major one. While the Internet requires literacy, many times in English as local language content is lacking, mobile devices rely on vocal communication which is more accessible. Also, because people are less likely to trust third party institutions or sources in the developing world, mobile phones offer opportunities to communicate with the social network people already trust. Where people are accessing content, say in Central Asia where Beth Kolko does a lot of research, they want entertainment and sports news, not just agricultural prices or weather.

Finally, on one last issue of infrastructure, Professor Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras lamented the poor state of power sources. Not enough effort has been put into developing inexpensive, reliable power sources which can stand up to the unique tests of the developing world.

The second session I attended was led by Ellen Miller and Micah Sifry who are involved with the important Sunlight Foundation which works to promote government transparency. Please see this post for a lot of the great sources they referenced.

The next session I attended was in much the same vein as the first. It was led by Beth Kolko and Michael Best. It was framed as a debate over the relative benefits of the OLPC versus mobile phones. Is a mobile phone solely a communication and information delivery device, not a platform for deep/rich content, like the OLPC? Or is the mobile phone the best ICT environment for the global South? An audience member for Nokia had interesting commentary about the richness of voice and the difficulty in determining the difference between phones and laptops. Storage, portability and programmability are no longer the domain of just one type of device; a convergence has occurred. Unanswered question: has a convergence of use followed?

Since technical capability may be the same in many cases, what are the policy and ideological implications? Discussion turned to the role of intermediaries. As you know, cell phone carriers exert incredible control over their networks (even though it has lessened slightly recently). With 4/5 of the world owning a cell phone in 5-10 years, do we want these companies to exert such control over the major ICT? Using Zittrain’s framing in his book “The Future of the Internet,” are these devices bound to be sterile (that is without the generative capabilities of PCs or the Internet)? I noted that even though these devices are sold as-is, the presentations of Jan Chipchase suggest that people are quite adept at forcing generativity – opening their phones and forcing new capabilities out. I’ll have more to say about this as soon as I finish Zittrain’s book.

The final session I went to was led by Jonathan Zittrain about “Netizenship” which is his term for the ways in which people vote through their bandwidth or CPU cycles. When people edit Wikipedia or utilize Folding@Home, they are signaling an approval of the goal – universal knowledge or cancer research. Zittrain and a team have created Herdict (not open yet) which will work with the OpenNet Initiative to better quantify and reify the phenomenon of Internet filtering. It is a great example of the entrepreneurial nature of Berkman.

Overall, the conference was eye-opening and enlightening. It gave me a lot of leads and ideas over which to stew. More to come as a result.

Yesterday I attended the 10th anniversary conference of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. The conference is a two day event bringing together the thought leaders in Internet studies and action. The agenda includes workshops, lectures and panels examining “The Future of the Internet” including the political, organizational, commercial and educational aspects.

Here are some rough observations, thoughts and links:

Session 1 was a speech by Jonathan Zittrain about his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (previously covered here). JZ, as he is known, is hilarious and insightful. He sees the rise of ‘sterile’ devices where users cannot invent new uses, such as the iPhone or TiVo, as dangerous to that which makes the Internet so great. ‘Generative’ devices, like your PC or the Internet, allow much more creativity and value-addition. JZ points out that there are ways of non-binding social norm enforcement to combat the threats to privacy and security; these are the solutions he hopes to see.

Session 2 was a session led by John Palfrey discussing the implications for politics. Palfrey wonderfully tied together multiple topics in a succinct matter. He highlighted the work of Ethan Zuckerman, Beth Kolko and John Kelly.

• I’ve been a fan of Ethan’s work for a long time. In addition to the terrific blog he writes, Ethan co-founded Global Voices which aggregates foreign language blogs to give the world a better view of what is happening around the world. In his words, “blogs are a tool for international understanding.” He lamented the lack of readers of foreign voices; that is, people still only pay attention to mainstream media, not the bountiful media coming from the people in the developing world.
• Beth Kolko spends a lot of her time in the developing world studying how the people there use ICTs. She does not see them as a panacea, but does think that if we study the developing world’s use of technology, we will glimpse the future of our uses. I will have more to say about her work tomorrow when I attend a session led by her.
• John Kelly studies how online communities interact. He spoke about mapping the Iranian blogosphere which is shown below. The different colors represent different areas of coverage while the size is indicative of incoming links. I was reminded of Ethan’s recent musings on homophily, which is the tendency for people to surround themselves with similar folks. If you believe, like I do, that humans can understand each other, given the opportunity, homophily can be a worrying trend. I was drawn to the outlying dots, those bloggers who, for some reason, are active across areas of coverage.
  

Session 3 was a conversation between Yochai Benkler and Jimbo Wales about Cooperation. Wales admitted that Wikipedia was the stupidest idea at the time; most people thought it was senseless to think we could cooperate, online of all places, to create a free Wikipedia rivaling the authoritative source of Britannica. However, something worked and the two spent time discussing what that was – neutrality, openness, transparency, share motivation, human agency, among others. The answer to this motivational question is complicated and unclear, but we know it works, so Yochai wants to study it.

The final session was a panel with Berkman Center co-founder Charlie Nesson, Internet visionary Esther Dyson, former FCC chairman Reed Hundt and head counsel of Viacom Michael Frisklas.

• Nesson began by equating Universities with Viacom because they are both large holders and creators of content. However, Universities are unable, for the most part, to disseminate their content due to the high transaction costs from copyright. When he asked Frisklas if, were they starting with a blank legal slate with today’s technological advancements, would he support the current copyright architecture, the Viacom attorney accepted the many problems with the current regime, but acknowledged the pain of switching (mostly to his business…).

• An interesting debate sprung up around Hundt’s comment that although the price of hardware has fallen due to Moore’s law, software has remained constant in cost for 20 years. The relative affordability of hardware is what makes the Internet (and cloud computing) the viable platform for this field. Hundt claimed that his high software cost kept the developing world offline (and that Linux was a response to this). Dyson disagreed, saying that in her experience poor people can steal software easily; it is the still costly computers which keep them offline.
• Importantly, Dyson pointed out the difference between information access and the process of teaching. Open access is not a panacea (but it is a good start, in my opinion).
• Finally, a very good question from the audience asked us to listen to the third world as opposed to pontificate on it from our point of view.

The day was full of thought-provocation and today, which I will write up shortly, has been much of the same. Be sure to check out the Berkman Center and its amazing work.