ICTlogy

Lead: Lewis Hyde, Wendy Seltzer, Rob Faris

Recent years have seen the idea of “the commons” as a form of ownership being discussed in a number of areas. Many environmental issues are usefully approached in terms of common assets, from aquifers to wetlands, from the oceans to the atmosphere. People who think about technology find themselves more and more speaking in terms of a commons, especially in regard to broadcast spectrum, the architecture of the internet, and software. Arguments that arise out of biotechnology–about seedlines, patented drugs, the ownership of genetic materials and so forth–also benefit from a clear model of what it means to place limits on the market and hold some things in common. Finally, many of the recent turf battles around intellectual property have hinged on whether creations of the human mind and imagination should be treated as proprietary goods or not.

Peter Barnes, in his new book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons offers a simple definition of the commons as “the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on undiminished to our heirs.” Somewhat more prosaically we might say that a commons is a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource.

This session will provide some definitions, history, and theory about the commons as a form of ownership. Participants will read a chapter from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks that deals with commons-based production in the information economy. With Benkler’s work providing one concrete example of a modern commons, the discussion will open up to consider when the commons might be a useful way to manage our shared wealth, and when it might not.

Possible solutions to underprovision

• Put prices on consumption
• Put direct rewards on provision, such as peer-to-peer networks that reward people that share more files by making downloading faster;
• Put indirect rewards on provision based on a reputation system, as it happens in the free software sector, where you’re more likely to get contracts the more you contribute to the project

But there’s more than underprovision: preserving the integrity of the Commons is also a must, e.g. preservation of the air quality

How to convert private property into Commons?

If information is really non-rival and non-exclusive, how to try and expand the scope of the Commons?

• One way could be to extend Fair Use in a Copyright environment.
• Another example is the Open Access movement, specially when they ask research funders to include the diffusion of results (to the public domain) in their funding strategies.
• Anti-DRM initiatives.

What’s next?

What do we want to live to the public sector? What should be managed by the government? What should be managed by private trusts? It seems that in the Internet the Tragedy of the Commons is subverted and the more people benefits from the Commons, the more the Commons benefit from it.

On the other hand, do we need more IGF meetings or shoud the herd manage themselves (cite by Jonathan Zittrain) and try and deal with spam and so?

My reflections

Readings

More info

• Commons Knowledge, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Hardin, G. (1968). “The Tragedy of the Commons”. In Science, 162(3859), 1243 – 1248. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved July 23, 2007 from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/162/3859/1243.pdf
• Benkler, Y. (2002). “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”. In The Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369–446. New Haven: The Yale Law Journal Company. Retrieved June 12, 2007 from http://yalelawjournal.org/images/pdfs/354.pdf
• Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Eds.) (2006) Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to Practice. Cambridge: MIT PRESS

We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.

MIT Media Lab

We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which has Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.

Jay Silver

We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:

Scratch

Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them.

I’m pretty sure that Jay Silver was right when he said that tools the like of Scratch actually fit on what Ivan Illich wanted to state on Deschooling Society.

What’s Up

It then was turn for Leo Burd’s thesis Technological Initiatives for Social Empowerment: Design Experiments in Technology-Supported Youth Participation and Local Civic Engagement, most commonly known as What’s Up.

The project joins best of both worlds in VoIP, mobile telephony and social software for community building. The idea is that while the Web is quite spread, in most developing countries the ICT revolution is clearly led by mobile phones. Thus, What’s Up presents the usual community site but empowered with VoIP and all kinds of mobile enhanced features, just like SMS posted text and vodcasts.

One Laptop per Child Foundation

XO Laptop (AKA “OLPC” Laptop)

It is actually relevant that our visit at One Laptop per Child Foundation was lead by Samuel Klein, director of content of the One Laptop per Child Project.

A year and a half ago I wrote Negroponte and the Web 2.0 or the Four Classes of the Digital Divide to state that Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to bridge the digital divide will be worthless if digital literacy and provision of content and services did not accompany the infrastructures revolution and diffusion. Having Samuel Klein as spokesman or PR representative makes a tacit statement on what the One Laptop per Child Project is about: it is not about delivering laptops to children, is about opening them the gates of content, which is the real issue.

As he himself explained, every activity has comunity around it, being the goal to build education networks, an example of it the installation of Moodle for some community projects, being the management and coordination of this free software LMS done by the same educational institutions that provide wireless connectivity to the laptops.

The commitment with content can be on the other hand exemplified with the Summer of Content 2007 initiative to provide content to be packeted with the XO laptop.

Samuel Klein strongly encouraged the audience and anyone interested to both contribute to the OLPC Project Wiki and subscribe to the OLPC Project Wiki mailing lists.

More info

• MIT: Media Lab, Stata Center, Press, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• MIT: One Laptop Per Child, by Daisy Pignetti
• ‘$100 laptop’ production begins

Leads: Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty

What connections might we posit between the participatory culture which has grown up around popular media and the ideals of participatory democracy? In the last Presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of blogs, amateur film contests, and social networking software as significant resources for political activism and we saw signs that people were remixing media images for the purpose of creating their own political commentary. What seemed to be cutting edge practices four years ago are emerging as pervasive aspects of the current campaign season (witness the anti-Hillary “1984” advertisement, the Pro-Barrack “Obama Girl” video, and Hillary Clinton’s own spoof of The Sopranos, all circulated via YouTube in an election that is just getting started.) Similar tactics have emerged through the Save Our Internet campaign which was launched to promote Net Neutrality. How do such tactics mobilize our skills as fans, bloggers, and gamers as resources for promoting a more engaged citizenship? What does this suggest about the importance of protecting the rights of citizens to appropriate, parody, remix, and recirculate media content in an age of increases struggle over intellectual property? What might our educational institutions do to insure that young people acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully participate in these debates? How might we understand these trends in relation to a growing backlash against what writers like Andrew Keen are calling “the Cult of the Amateur”?

Activism, civic engagement will not be top-down organized but really grassroots and participatory, active (i.e. spectacles that work only if the people help create them). Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.

Ideals of a Progressive Popular Culture

• participatory
• active
• open ended
• transparent
• transformative

My reflections

• The problem with popular media making politics become something suitable for “consumption” iis that the system gets subverted. In subversion, the supporter becomes the center of the spotlight and is no more supporter but the target. I.e. it is OK to have U2 sing Sunday Bloody Sunday (on anyone else doing such stuff) but it is absolutely unacceptable to have Mr. Bono speaking on behalf of Africa in a most illegitimate way.
• See Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda (all via Ethan Zuckerman‘s blog).

Readings

More info

• WochenKlausur
• ‘Chica Obama’ contra ‘chica Hillary’
• Debate ’08: Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl
• Evangelicals and the Media
• Henry Jenkins Confronts Obama Girl, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 5, by Alla Zollers

Leads: Brian Fitzgerald, Wendy Seltzer, Bill McGeveran*

This session will examine the role of copyright law in the Internet world. It will consider recent cases concerning YouTube, Google and Sony highlighting what the law currently provides and asking – what it should be?

(*) though scheduled, Bill McGeveran could not come

Moral rights: stay with the person, the creator
Economic rights: go to the copyright holder, that can be the creator himself or whoever own these rights. And the copyright system is about permission. Infringement is about seeing what was there before, what is out there now, and guess whether there is any relationship.

Main work for the session is at the Wiki Page for the session

Readings

Legal Texts

• http://www.paidcontent.org/audio/viacomtubesuit.pdf
• http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJ_070504_YTComplaint.pdf
• http://news.com.com//pdf/ne/2007/070430_Google_Viacom.pdf
• http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/08468E0D5E386A2F882572AC0077AD1A/$file/0457143.pdf
• http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/DE8297F56287C0BC882572DC007DACC6/$file/0655405.pdf
• http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2005/58.html

More info

• Limitations on liability relating to material online [US DMCA Safe Harbor provisions]
• Drawing That Explains Copyright Law
• A Fair(y) Use Tale
• Copyright 2010, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 5, by Alla Zollers

Student research seminar: María Gómez Rodríguez

In 2009-2010, the European communications framework will be modified, so that I would like to analyze the different possibilities to approach the control over access and over Internet service providers in Europe, mainly: (i) regulation and (ii) antitrust. The EU communications framework has been a solid base to implement regulation in the member States, however the real implementation of the framework has been dysfunctional, long and, in some cases, not correctly harmonized. The Internet and the telecommunication networks are essential facilities, thus antitrust authorities have jurisdiction to dictate measures to solve any abuse of these essential facilities. Therefore the net neutrality debate in Europe it can be constructed as a continuation of the European broadband jurisprudence, avoiding the problems telecommunication regulation has carried.

New context

• Convergence
• New technologies
• new media
• new content
• neutrality
• standards

European regulation evolution

• Monopoly
• Competition
• Market Definitions
• Convergence

The debate: Internet as a free and anarchic phenomenon vs. Internet as a substantial capital investment

Justified governmental intervention to asure the best use of networks
Jurisprudence conflicts and harmonization difficulties.

More info

• Net Neutrality – an antepost bet?, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

Student research seminar: Seok-Jin Eom

In this presentation, I would like to examine what factors made the different outcomes and performances of e-goverment. Focusing on the roles of consultant in private sector and the institutional arrangement through which their policy ideas and knowledge came into government and were fortified and spread, the Federal Enterprise Archietecture initiative in the U.S. federal government will be anlyzed.

The Korean Government benchmarked the US e-Government initatives, but relayed to a “stove-piped” business reference model: shifting from function-driven to agency centric; and from cross-agency to stove-piped systemic.

What’s missing

• Relations between public and private sector
• Receptivity of ideas from private sector to government
• Social locations of the proponents of new ideas (knowledge-bearing groups / knowledge-generating institutions)
• Carriers of ideas from private sector to government
• Institutional arrangement that have influenced the spread, transformation, reinforcement fo the ideas: institutionalized access points, institutionalized managerial tools