If I were asked to summarize everything that’s happened at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2007 here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society I would, undobtedly, quote Jonathan Zittrain in one of his comments past Thursday: Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia?

To explain why, I can (1) draw a list of all the applications and/or online resources we used during the course, (2) write a little digression about academic blogging and (3) explain one of my recursive reflections during these days: what is Web Science.

Conferences 2.0

Speaking in public has changed, specially if you pretend the audience to interact. Solemn one way speeches are over; prettily packeted content is too. The full deployment of ways to interact with people and information during the course was astonishing. I might be forgetting some of them, but here comes a rough list:

• Presentation tools, such as PowerPoint or the like. Some speakers also used mind-mapping applications. Some of them uploaded here.
• The Live Question Tool, to publish questions on the fly why listening to the speaker
• Wiki, as the main reference, schedule and content manager of the seminar
• Blogs: many of them.
• Flickr, for the photos
• YouTube and other video streaming platforms to watch some footage
• del.icio.us, for the links
• BibCiter, for bibliographies…
• …and eMule and Ares to share them in PDF or other formats on P2P networks
• H2O Playlists, for academic references in general
• Instant messaging, to keep in touch with people home or students
• Skype, to call home
• One ring to rule them all: OII/Berkman 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme planet aggregator
• One ring to find them: Technorati
• One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them: Google Reader
• Facebook, with his corresponding group, to build and manage the social network
• doppler, for the followup geolocation followup
• Also for followup purposes and appointments Twitter or Upcoming
• In the meantime, some of the attendants are sharing their music tastes through Last.fm
• And, of course, there’s always plenty of e-mail.
• And SMSs
• And phone calls
• All these things on mobile phones, public phones (using fixed liines), handhelds, laptops and desktops either connected via wireless or LAN, some owned, some accesible at public points.
• Somebody even watched TV

And yes, most of them we used simultaneously all of the time, some of them were for post-conference purposes.

The fact: number of business cards delivered? Just one, to Samuel Klein in our visit to the OLPC Foundation.

The anecdote: Karoline Lukaschek asked me to borrow a pen for the card. I gave her a pen drive to download into it the photos on her camera card. Well, she just wanted to sign the greetings card for the Berkman staff. Weird.

Why Academic Blogging

The use and goals of these tools were many, but the main philosophy behind was absolutely the same: disclosure. Disclosure and engage in the conversation. As stated by John Palfrey himself the first day, blogging (and diffusion in general) will be the default; anyone interested in not to be blogged or whatever, should manifest it explicitly.

I still remember the reticences around when the MIT set up the OpenCourseWare project: nobody’s gonna enroll in your courses anymore, they said. Well, the reaction to this Berkman disclosure policy has been twofold and crystal clear:

• For those not being able to attend the course, infinite gratitude (I’ve got e-mails) for sharing the materials, the experiences, the reflections, etc.
• For those aiming to attend the course, no crowding out effect at all but the contrary: the awaiting of a long long year before the call for applications for SDP2008 is out. I’ve got e-mails too.

But besides this unselfish sharing of knowledge (I wasn’t actually being unselfish, but just taking notes on my geeky notebook: WordPress) the real thing has been networking. On one hand, the ones blogging during the seminars have created a densest grid of posts, interlinked ones to others, and by thus enriching one’s own posts about a subject or session.

On the other hand, some posts got out of the circle and were mentioned by some other people such as John Palfrey, Ethan Zuckerman or Doc Searls, to name some of the ones that linked to me. Other faculty linked other attendants as well.

And not just contact, but also good input, as Julen’s on the XXVIIth session about IP incentives and peer production.

Reversely, I could almost close the circle I opened when I first met online Tobias Escher, by meeting in person Helen Margetts and Ralph Schroeder, both working with him. The circle will actually close formally in September in York when I’ll meet Tobias himself.

What Is Web Science

This eagerness to use these many online tools leads me to my next topic of reflection. Because, somehow, I think it can be used as some kind of proxy to measure what has been one of the recurrent subjects of personal analysis these days.

Related to the Internet, in particular, and this ICT enhanced society, in general (informational society, information society, knowledge society… whatever), I believe there are two opposite approaches to do research about it.

The first one, the traditional approach, is taking the changes in the society as a second derivative: I do research in Intellectual Property and I found that the Internet is changing my field of knowledge, the target of my research, hence, I will study the interaction between Intellectual Property and the Internet.

Second, the one I’d call the Web Science approach and is better explained with an example: I want to explore the concept of the Digital Native (I actually do, specially his relationship with the concept of e-Awareness). To do so, I must know about psychology and neurosciences (as Mark Prensky did), about how technologies work (Web 2.0, usability, server-client technical relationships, AJAX), sociological implications (social networks, digital identities), economical (broadband diffusion, mobile penetration), legal (cybercrime, intellectual property, spam), political (civic engagement, hacktivism, e-democracy), education (e-portfolio, personal learning environments, long-life learning, e-learning, game-based teaching), communication (citizen journalism), art and culture (mashups, rip-mix-burn), and the longest et caetera ever.

People I know range from one endpoint to the other, being myself, philosophically, no doubt in one of the furthest edges of the Web Science approach. I don’t think there’s a best or a worst approach, but I also believe that:

1. Some aspects of today’s (and tomorrow’s even more) life can only be fully explained (if possible) through a Web Science approach, e.g. Digital Natives
2. Some other aspects can be perfectly be approached in the traditional way, but will require a “digital effort” that, if not done, no valid conclusions can emerge from such researches. Cybercrime is, all in all, crime, but it will be absolutely necessary to understand what an ISP or an IP is, what and how works digital watermarking or hashing or electronic certificates, the technical difference between phishingh and pharming. Or why e-Democracy and e-Governance will be “2.0″ (and what this exactly means) or they just won’t be. Or why the number of secure servers is a good proxy to measure e-Business (I owe Michael Best pointing me to this last one, thank you!).

And I suspect that, besides our darkest geeky side, most of the scholars signing up to each and every new next killer app of the year just pretend to analyze things from the inside, to learn by doing, to catch up with our recent digital nationality.

The answer to the question Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia? is, under this train of though, quite easy: we were far and outside. In another galaxy. In a dimension made out of atoms and time.

Acknowledgments

I can help but end this series of articles by thanking the people that made possible one of my best fortnights so far, both at the intellectual and emotional levels.

Amar Ashar, Suzanne Henry, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Marcus Foth, Urs Gasser and Ralph Schroeder — the core organizing committee, if I’m not wrong — deserve my highest gratitude, the one you pay by giving them your home keys and a bed in your best room when they’re around town, just that one.

The Faculty leading the seminars is one of that treasures you’d like to keep forever, specially when knowing that they came just for the pleasure of it — and how accessible, willing to share and how good listeners they were.

The attending students — my colleagues… my friends — are responsible for one of my worst headaches (knowledge overload) and heartaches (emotions overdose) ever. Never forgive you about that. I mean it. I just wish the hangover will last for long if not forever… or even get worse.

Last, but not least, I have a huge debt with Tim Kelly, Pere Fabra and Julià Minguillón for their support in me coming here. You all added up to make it possible: thank you, thanks a lot.

More Info

• My SDP Square Metre, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Wrapping up: SDP, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• SDP 2007; My Final Report, by Joris van Hoboken
• Berkman Buzz, week of July 23, by Patrick McKiernan

OII SDP 2007 Reloaded

Organizing a conference on the previous days of the next edition of the SDP. During this year there’ll be a call for papers & review. This should be extended to the whole pool of SDP students since 2003. A journal or proceedings book would be a good output of the whole work. Seminars and workshops could wrap up the conference. Organizing committee: Vero, María, Karoline, Karen, Alla, Chintan, Daithí, Ismael

The idea of this event is:

a) first, to put together a call for papers (works in progress) to get a nice
feedback about the big (and small) questions that were put on the table in the
course of these last two weeks.

b) Second, this event would take the format of a working conference/workshop,
and invite faculty to comment and discuss ont eh work. In addition, we could
have a keynote speaker or two.

c) Tentative dates could be somewhere between May-June 2008. Ideally, the event
would take place in the OII.

d) In the spirit of having an open intellectual debate and collaboration, we’ll
open the call for papers to fellow OII SDP students from past years.

Led by Veronica Alfaro and María Gómez

Conference on the History of the Internet

Title proposal: From Whence to Whither: Intellectual Property, the Internet and what the Past has to offer the Digital Age. A Commemorative Conference in 2008

Led by Ben Peters

Links brainstorm

• Association of Internet Researchers (mailing list, conference)
• H-Net
• FastWeb
• The Web Experiment List
• Tools for Internet-based data collection
• ecourses demo
• The Personal Research Portal
• Robert Tynes (2007). “Nation-building and the diaspora on Leonenet: a case of Sierra Leone in cyberspace”. In New Media & Society;9 497-518
• Hearn, G., & Foth, M. (Eds.). (2007). Communicative Ecologies. Special issue of the Electronic Journal of Communication, 17(1-2). New York: Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS).
  
• The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West, by Christopher Rollason
• Announcing Skim: Stop printing – Start Skimming, by Michael O McCracken
• Brian Fitzgerald (2007) Internet and e-Commerce Law – Technology, Law and Policy
• Jealous Computers
• British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA)
• Socio-Legal Studies Association
• Computers and Writing 2007. Virtual Urbanism
• Computers and Writing Clearinghouse
• Computers and Composition
• Kairos
• Ethan Zuckerman: History of the Internet
• Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
• Discovery Park Learning Center and Games-to-Teach Competition
• iYomu
• That? Oh, that’s the collapsing infrastructure wake-up call; just hit snooze

Credit of the brainstorm goes to all the participants of the course, students and faculty.

In a highly abstracted conceptualization, both the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet consist of two components: the end-devices and the network that connects them. Traditional telecommunications regulation has assumed the presence of a network core that could be engineered to fulfill regulatory goals as well as a vertically-integrated industry structure that could meet regulatory obligations. In my dissertation, I propose to take the case of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the technology that enables voice communications over the Internet, and argue that disruptive trends in technology are eroding the control in the core that was traditionally possessed by network designers and owners. This eroding control in the core has the potential to render the current VoIP regulation inadequate and unsustainable, requiring that future regulatory response be discontinuous from that of the past. This study uses a system dynamics model to study the dynamic complexity surrounding the current VoIP regulation and to understand policy options for preventing undesirable outcomes. The model consists of four sectors: the consumer adoption sector for modeling demand, the industry structure sector for modeling supply, the regulatory compliance sector for modeling the level of compliance, and the innovation sector for modeling innovation trends.

Current regulatory response to VoIP (goals)

• Public Safety
• Law Enforcement Capability
• Equal opportunity
• Economic Development
• Competition

Of those five traditional aspects, just the two first are really developed. Disruptive trends such as VoIP erode assumed control in the core. With eroding control in the core meeting regulatory objetives will increasingly require regulatory responses discontinous from the past.

The functionality is dispersing to the end-deivde,k at the ownership of the Core (who’s in charge of guaranteeing the procedure of the communication) is fragmenting.

The End of Core can cause

• Regulatory misalignment, and thus
• Inefficiency in achieving regulatory compliance
• Regulatory capture by new players
• And may require discontinuing access-centric regulatory thinking… and understanding the value chain
• Circum-innovation, and thus
• arms race between proponents of compliance and non-compliance
• And may require discontinuing command-and-control regulatory thinking… and understanding a collaborative model of regulation

System Dynamics Model: when a desired regulatory compliance takes place, circumvention actinos seem to wider the existing compliance gap. How to control the whole system?

More Info

• Vaishnav On VoIP, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

In this seminar, I discuss my ongoing research topic on how media/brodcasting law is changed – or changes – in relation to new, Internet-based media. While this is not a new issue for scholars of the media or freedom of expression, the current ‘transition period’ is certainly a fertile one for the researcher. Acknowledging the range of recent publications and studies dealing with the US, I focus on the treatment of new media in Canada and the European Union. In this presentation, the relevant legislation, regulations and proposals for reform are discussed, and a range of theoretical approaches are highlighted; I touch on the role of technological determinism in the reformers’ strategies, and note my ongoing engagement with the work of Harold Innis and its relevance to contemporary debates. I conclude with some general observations and questions on the challenges presented by this particular project.

Europe…

• Audiovisual Media Services directive
• Telecoms
• Media Pluralism

…vs. Canada

• New Media Exemption order
• Future Environment report
• Mobile exemption oder
• Diversity of voices

Harold Innis

• time-binding and space-binding
• the bias of communication
• monopolies of knowledge
• Toronto School
• Intellectual father of Marshall McLuhan

Role of Technological Determinism in Law Reform

• The influence/prevalence of technological determinism in the reform process
• Analyse or criticise?
• How much detail?
• How much to explain?
• Content Analysis or Narrative?

Technological neutrality

• No “discrimination” between technologies
• Regulate services not technologies
• Canada: “section 3 mandate”
• Net neutrality — danger!
• “Non-Media-Law” regulation
• Debate at WSIS

My reflections

• I wonder whether, besides the geographical axis, a temporal axis could be added so other historic technology regulation shifts could be brought into the analysis, such as the changes the radio or the television implied for Law. Daithí Mac Síthigh states that it then becomes a problem of scope. Besides this, the shift we’re experiencing is richest enough to be analyzed on its own.

More info

• Internet Glovernance Forum
• Legal (and non-legal) approaches: the regulation of new media, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

Solutions to crisis to actual business model

• Strengthening copyrights
• Strengthening technologycal control
• Alternative compensation system

My reflections

• While the technological solution behind Fisher’s model (2004), at a retailer/private level (i.e. Noank), is quite compelling, the concept itself looks exactly like the Spanish model (1941), the difference being that this sort of a gone-techie Spanish model regards only and exclusively the diffusion of digital content.
• I don’t think that Fisher’s model at a State level (just exactly as the Spanish one, where it is hugely critizised), basing on income taxation, is Pareto Superior but, on the contrary, clearly harms the welfare of some citizens that would be willing to pay for e.g. some kind of music but not for another one, being the possibility that the taxes associated to this last kind of music consumption (plus the sort of music I like) were far higher than the will to pay for music.
• If based on the devices and services, some other experiences (e.g. the canon in Spain) clearly show that it’s Pareto inferior by large, as it taxes lots of people not using those devices for the purposes that caused the taxation (e.g. CDs to store one’s data backups and not music)
• Digital fingerprints have, in fact, some privacy issues, as they can be correlated with IPs
• Rights management agencies (at least in Spain) act somehow like this and they really struggle to make significative estimates of culture consumption. Actually, there’s the danger taht marginal artists are underrepresented.

Readings

More info

• Noank Media
• Noank: A Promise Kept, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

We don’t know who uses Wikipedia, we don’t know what values does it vindicates

How do people actually use/abuse it?

• many kids use it without participating/understanding; are kids plagiarizing
• how easy is to become a Wikipedian: try participating earnestly; experiment with particular forms, like deleting articles; concerns about “going native”

Is wikipedia egalitarian?

• who is participating, excluded
• control of code – control of content
• abuse of those who give freely?

Does peer production make us into the Borg?

• effects of lack of singular authorship

Is Wikipedia accurate?

• citing Wikipedia as a source

Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia? Is Academia losing the sense of what’s important? And what’s important right now? Maybe the health of the Network is an issue that should be urgently addressed (disclaimer: I fully agree, but it’s Jonathan Zittrain who says this at the gates of the publication of his next book The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It ;)

Readings

More info

• Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating, by Jason Calacanis
• Thinking of Wikiing, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

BibCiter

• http://bibciter.net
• by Ismael Peña-López

Free software bibliographic manager. Allows both management of bibliographies and publication on the net (RSS feed included)

Yep

• http://yepthat.com
• by Daithí Mac Síthigh

File manager. Mostly for PDFs you can tag. Mac version only.

LinkedIn

• http://linkedin.com
• by Marcus Foth

Social networking. Really effective as based on degrees of separation”

Dopplr

• http://dopplr.com
• by Marcus Foth

To manage one’s trips. Export to calendar by iCal. Shows who else is going to be in that place.

ClaimID

• http://claimid.com/
• by Fred Stutzman

User centered identity. Avoid inconsistent identities over different websites.

HyperPo

• http://tapor.ca
• by Peter Ryan

Text analysis. Frequencies of words, information about the text.

Dapper

• http://www.dapper.net/
• by Peter Ryan

Data mapper.

del.icio.us

• http://del.icio.us
• by Alla Zollers

Social bookmarking

ma.gnolia.com

• http://ma.gnolia.com
• by Alla Zollers

Social bookmarking. You can have groups

Two metaphors– “the cathedral and the bazaar” – are widely used to characterize the organizational structure of the development model of commercial software and that of OSS. While “cathedral” represents rigid hierarchy and centralized control, the “bazaar” model of OSS represents an egalitarian network of developers free of hierarchical structure. Powerful as they are, these two metaphors may help to spread a rather stylized image of the OSS. Empirical studies of OSS show highly skewed distribution and power law relationships of project sizes, project membership, and cluster sizes of the OSS community, but the underlying mechanisms of those power law relationships remain under explored.

This on-going project extends knowledge on OSS by empirically examining the social structure of the OSS community and the mechanisms of the developer network formation. Two research questions are asked: 1) To what extent is OSS community hierarchical? 2) What attributes of the developers are associated with network structure? A developer network was extracted from the SourceForge.net data archive, in which nodes represent developers and links are defined as co-participation in the same projects. In the presentation I will show some preliminary results from p* network analysis, and also plans for future research.

It does not seem that the two models presented by Raymond (1999) are that polarized:

• the importance of project leadership suggests the presence of hierarchy
• Highly skewed distributino of projects
• Power-law relationshiop
• The “lone” developer

It would be interesting to abandon flagship projects (e.g. Linux) and analyze failing projects too. Also try and go beyond case studies and non-representative samples.

Is Open Source Software (OSS) a network form of organization? does power come from authority, resource control and network centrality? (Astley and Sacheva, 1984). Is power acquired by one’s position in the network?

Or is OSS formed through reputation mechanisms? Coordination mechanisms in a network form of organization come from trust, reputation, status, legitimacy… Do people with reputation/status attract ties? And the contrary, does reputation is achievable through network membership?

My reflections

• Lone leaders might actually be webmasters that just got their admin account at SourceForge just to upload the packager

More info

• Working Paper
• Presentation at the 27th Sunbelt Social Network Conference
• PNet
• Raymond, E. S. (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. (revised edition: original edition 1999). Sebastopol: O´Reilly.

In his consideration of Verkeersbordvrij, Jonathan Zittrain poses the challenge of identifying the technical tools and social structures that inspire people to act humanely online. This presentation engages with the notions of philanthropy and gift giving in virtual communities, seeking to understand the factors that motivate members of Flickr.com to share their images under Creative Commons licensing. It seeks to identify the tipping point at which an individual’s focus is turned from their own ‘life blog’ towards participation in an online community, aspiring to collaborative, commons-based peer production. Investigating frameworks of P2P and integral theory and employing the methods of virtual ethnography, this research explores the way in which the wisdom of the crowd may be harnessed ethically and sustainedly, pointing towards best practice business models for web 2.0.

What’s like the framework that engages collective creation?

Factors influencing participation (4C)

• Convergence – Technical
• Community – Social
• Commons-based Creativity – Legal
• Commerce – Economic

Collaboration is the killer app
User-led development
The ‘produser’ (producer+user)
Life-caching

Motivations to Participate

Hemetsberger’s (2003) Motivational Framework:

• Task- and Product-Related motivation
• Long-term utilitarian goals and social significance
• Internalized group goals and services
• Socio-emotional Relationships

More info

• Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
• Sharing Nicely and Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
• Why Hackers Do What They Do, by Karim Lakhani
• Peer to Peer Foundation, by Michel Bauwen; Cooperation Commons, by Howard Rheingold
• Fostering Cooperation on the Internet, by Andrea Hemetsberger
• ccMixter
• Rachel Cobcroft (2007) Open Your APIs: Flickr’s Perspectives on Play
• Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rachel Cobcroft shares Flickr wisdom, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

The main criticism Talha Syed makes is that it should be possible to shift the debate from the established mainstream (economic) discourse (for or against, but inside the system) and try and move towards new mental maps, new ways of thinking.

Premises of conventional approach

• homo aeconomicus: man is naturally narrowlyh self-regarding material gain
• preferences fixed, invariant
• policy is neutral

Premises of most critics

• heterogeneous rather than unitary motives
• but still relatively exogenous to policy
• policy should be neutral (efficiency)

Further departures

• heterogeneous
• but context-sensitive, exogenous to policy, culture
• normatively, neutrality untenable, undesirable

Pluralist motives

• intrinsic: internal drives and ambitions; enjoyment
• social: activity’s social contribution; peer approval/credit; social recognition/esteem
• extrinsic: prosperity, wealth; social status, hierarchy; power

We should ask ourselves whether it’s true that once you throw money on the table, the economical / homo aeconomicus / extrinsic reasons to create do crowd out the other two categories of motives. It usually has been stated that yes, but there are no serious positive analysis about this. Yochai Benkler might do right in describing what’s happening in the generative Internet, but he somehow manages to shape the whole thing into Liberalism. But, should it have to be this way? Is this the only way? Is there no alternative?

Context Sensitive

What mix of motives flourishes depends on which motives are:

• socially acknowledged, valued
• expressed or pursued by peers, rivals, leaders
• reinforced or undermined by institutional signals

And maybe there’s some room for policy makers and policies to reinforce or give incentives to one or another motive depending on the context given.

Open Science

• Sustaining foundational, exploratory research: markets under-incentive for these; provides a somewhat de-centralized alternative to state direction
• Relatively rapid dissemination: rapid growth; cutting down on reducing duplicative failures and successes
• Quality controls: less internal conflicts of interest; no property barrier to peer review (and strong incentives for it)
• Effective and cost-effective: scientists being motivated partly by pleasures of inquiry and desire for credit and satisfactions of social contribution contributes to effective performance (Henderson & Cockburn, 2001); also is cost-effective
• Intrinsic virtues of these motivations: sustaining such a a motivational culture is arguably worth valuing intrinsically, for its own sake, as part of what constitutes an attractive scientific culture and surrounding society

Crowding out

Raising money incentives can dampen non-monetary motives:

• undermining social meaning of a practice
• undermining responsibility, self-direction
• undermining self-esteem
• reducing overall gain from activity by making unavailable those benefits which simply can’t co-exist with money payment
• corroding non-monetary virtues

My reflections

• I think that for those policies to foster other motivations, we should somehow let entrepreneurs understand those policies as not ways to benefit dumping of one’s market. Actually, most reinforcements of IP rights/regulation are just reactions to, I guess, such a feeling.

Readings

More info

• Henderson, Rebecca; Cockburn, Iain M. (2001) “Publicly Funded Science and the Productivity of the Pharmaceutical Industry” In Adam B. Jaffe, Scott Stern, Joshua Lerner (Eds) Innovation Policy and the Economy. Cambridge: The MIT Press

This talk will focus on how firms and communities are leveraging external sources of knowledge and talent for innovation. We will discuss the practices that are enabling a new paradigm of open innovation and consider their applicability to established firms. The talk will present results from newly emerging research on open source communities and the pharmaceutical industry to develop an understanding about new strategies for innovation. The first part of the talk will discuss how R&D labs in science-based firms are broadcasting their most difficult scientific problems to large networks of scientists around the world and the success they are achieving by tapping into distributed sources of knowledge. Key drivers for success in a distributed knowledge environment will be presented. The second part of the talk will focus on how open source communities are pioneering a radical model for innovation where new functionality and features get developed by a large and distributed community. We will consider the challenges of organizing a distributed innovation process and how firms, large and small, are participating as partners with the various communities.

Joy: No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else (1998)
Hayek: Knowledge is Unevenly Distributed (1945)
Von Hippel: Knowledge is Sticky (1994)

So the question is: how do we build an architecture, a system that attracts this so much knowledge? Users innovate and they do it outside of the R&D laboratory.

Motivations

• User needs: personal and professional
• Community – Freedom – Belonging
• Fun & Enjoyment

Distributed Innovation (1-3, need driven; 4-6, solution driven)

1. Users in the field experience needs way ahead of manufacturers
2. Need is urgent so users go ahead and solve local problem
3. Manufacturers later figure out how to incorporate user innovations into products
4. Firms encounter problems that they cannot solve internally
5. Look outside for help in developing a solution
6. Outisders typically have solved problem in their own domains and can easily port solution to firm’s domain

My reflections

• I wonder if the fact of belonging to a community is, more than a social/emotional need, is an economic/vital need. In an Information Society, being connected is a constant need, specially if you’re a knowledge worker. And connection to the network is established not just by lurking but also by contributing (I owe some of these thoughts to my friend Genís Roca)
• I remember Ferrino’s strategy on hiring Reinhold Messner to improve their products or design brand new ones. The shift has been that all the reinhold messners of the world can do the same at really low costs: Ferrino is based in Italy, so snailmail writing or visiting might not be that comfortable. Of course, you need someone listening on the other side

Readings

More info

• InnoCentive
• Wikipedia (A), Harvard Business School Case on the Wikipedia (under a GNU Free Documentation License

The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration approach (i.e. informational literacy), and putting aside some “real economy” or “analogue society” indicators not strictly related to the digital paradigm. Relationships between subindices would also provide interesting insight for policy makers on which to ground the design of their initiatives.

Michael Best comments that it’ll be interesting to test too the impact of the indices that measure the information society on policy makers and the policies they make up to foster the information society. I guess that maybe the way to do this would be to compare the series of an e-readiness indicator and the series of regulations issued during the same period of time in a country.

More info

• Working bibliography
• Slides for the Presentation

This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of global and local knowledge, theory of absorptive capacity of “community”, community ties theory, and the technique of social network analysis are being proposed.

Main aspects

• Inefficient mechanisms for informatino/knowledge “transfer” (exchange)
• Inadequate investment in research internally
• Use of outdated technologies

Arnold and Bell (2001) argue that the exponential growth of ICTs has transformed the ability to take advantage of knowledge developed in other places of for other purposes.
WSIS Action Plan, Line C-7, item 21 on e-Agriculture.
Faculty and researchers only had access to print copies of serials that were years, if not decades, out of date (Wallace & Jan Olsen, 1980).
Research background: Cornell University TEEAL Project.
Research background: FAO AGORA Project

The study will evaluate

• Link between TEEL/AGORA and researchers/students
• Link between researchers/students and the farmers
• What content do Researchers/Students “transfer”
• How does the social structure of the communities facilitate or retard use of the knowledge?
• With what effects?

Theoretical Framework

• Concept for knowledge sharing – GDN or WB, Szulanski (2003)
• Absorptive Capacity of Communities – Cohen and Levinthal 1990 Xahra and George (2002)
• Theory of Community Ties – Warren (1978)
• Social Network Theory – Perkins et al. (2002)

My reflections

• I guess I’d add some experiences from the Open Access world, specially when dealing about the diffusion of knowledge in open environments and how to measure it

More info

• FGE:
• TEEAL
• AGORA

• How do residents connect with each other to create and maintain social networks?
• How can technology dbe degisned to neotiate a balance between the opportunitiews of interactive services vs. identity, trust and privacy?
• What is the role of content?

What’s community? Social network, urban village, swarm, neighbourhood, me and my friends… Have something in common?

Shift from the “little boxes” model to personalized social networks: more permeable boundaries…

Urban tribes: swarms of interconnected friends, filling the gap between college and married life, fluidity of social networks, place and proximity matters.

Communicative Ecology

• Discursive layer
• Social layer
• Technology layer

global vs. local; collective vs. individual; online vs. offline

Community as Collective vs. Community as Network

• interest in the community vs. interest in the individual
• community activism vs. personal, social networking
• public vs. private
• many-to-many vs. peer-to-peer switchboard
• formal discussion vs. informal chat
• asynchronous vs. synchronous
• permanent vs. transitory
• hierarchically structured vs. networked to the “edge of chaos”
• discussion board, mailing lists vs. instant messenger email, SMS
• Gemeinschaft vs. Urban Tribe

Connectivity does not ensure community. If you build it, they will not necessarily come. On the other hand, social capital rich communities are likely to progress and also to have a preference for “social isolation”.

Readings

More info

• i-neighbors
• Kelvin Grove Urban Village

Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries, by Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman introduces TEDGlobal 2007, which was held in Africa.

African issues about ICTs can be tracked at Timbuktu Chronicles, by Emeka Okafor, or at Africa Open For Business. But TED just focused on Foreign Aid, mainly lead by Bono (see Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda — all via Ethan Zuckerman’s blog).

The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.

Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog analysis and mobile communications analysis is that these last ones they are so difficult to track. But it is an infrastructure that can be used for entrepreneurship, activism, or governance, etc.

Interactive Radio for Justice, for instance, allow users to send SMS questions to the radio, which can feature DRC deputy minister for defence, head of military operations for MONUC. This is a way to close the loop of media system.

mobilemonitors.org also represents another way of making elections more transparent, by calling to the radio and report abuse on voting places. And not just phone, but the pervasive of phone cameras is also a fact that is changing witnessing.

M-Pesa hire air (phone) time. But it is also being used for money transfer: I load the phone with money (say, air time) and a third party “downloads” the phone and gets the money back, with even a bank account intermediating.

Even activists upload speeches in the format of ringtones that can be downloaded and installed on your mobile phone.

Vodacom Congo is a compelling example on how strong is the demand for communications in Africa.

Success of incremental infrastructure in Africa

• built on small (compared to huge projects) investments that quickly yield revenue
• partially user financed and owned
• replacement technology

Already incremental: mobile phones, internet. Possibly incremental: power grids, roads. Problems in the possibly incremental: inefficiency, coordination problems.

Answering a couple of Ralph Schroeder‘s questions, Ethan Zuckerman states that we see that there’s more voice traffic that text on mobile networks. Actually, low literacy is quite an issue for a lot of mobile users.

And concerning the role of the State, so far it seems that the mainstream is just to put some requirements on communication services, such as covering rural areas that otherwise (without State regulation) would remain uncovered. Surprisingly, telecoms end up by finding ways to actually make profit out of these requirements, by making up new business models that take into account those new clusters. But pricing regulation, etc. does not seem to be the most common answer.

Daithí Mac Síthigh expresses his concern that all the infrastructures are owned by the private sector, making it difficult to build upon them national strategies. Ethan Zuckerman’s concern is what happens with those infrastructures if they are owned by a government that you do not trust.

Incremental Infrastructure and the Democratization of Provision, by Mike Best

The question is not if we should give a poor a computer instead of e.g. food, but if there is a role for ICTs in providing the poor with food.

ICT4D – Africa – Innovation

• Technological and engineering challenges
• Supportive public policies and regulatory environment
• Smart businesses, especially SMSs
• Collaborative and socially aware interventions
• Rigorous monitoring, evaluation, assessment

Post-conflict countries are being the ones with highest mobile phone use growth… but it might be because of replacement of fixed phones. So, is the indicator a good one?

A Knowledge-based Rwanda

• Physical infrastructure
• Human capacity
• Peace, security and reconciliation
• Good governance and supportive public policy
• Grassroots opportunities
• Spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship

Where fiber is not available (and not easy to build), wireless technologies come to the rescue: VSAT, GSM/GPRS, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, UMTS, etc.

Readiness Assessment

• Pervasiveness
• Geographic Dispersion
• Sectoral Absorption
• Connectivity Infrastructure
• Organizational Infrastructure
• Sophistication of Use

Conclusions on the e-Readiness Assessment for Liberia

• A strong independent regulator is critical to growth of the overall ICT sector
• The lack of a fiber network in metropolitan Monrovia along with a national fiber backbone limits significantly domestic Internet capacity. A revitalized Liberian Telecommunications Corporation can serve naturally as a network service provider.
• A connection to the submarine cable that travels from Portugal along the west coat of Africa (SAT3/WASC) can be realized perhaps with a link via neighboring Côte d’Ivoire

My reflections

• We’ve seen many successes of mobile phone but… what are the limitations? is there a need to shift to the desktop anyway? or can we stick to mobile communications?

Readings

More info

• Closing The Loop: Zuckerman and Best on Africa and Technology, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Summer doctoral program at Berkman, by Ethan Zuckerman
• Balancing Africa News Update
• The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog (2005), by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance
• To do with the price of fish, by Rob Katz
• The Global Diffusion of the
  Internet Project
• Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
• Wolcott, P., Press, L., McHenry, W., Goodman, S. & Foster, W. (2001). “A Framework for Assessing the Global Diffusion of the Internet”. In Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2(6). Atlanta: Association for Information Systems.