ICTlogy

The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.

From Casual Censorship to Cartelisation? ISP Control of Illegal and Harmful Content
Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law. Law School, University of Southampton

If you want to regulate content, you first go to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). And there is a big difference among information stored for transiently issues (transmission, caching) it becomes hosting, and thus legal issues apply.

A “notice and take down” regime, based on that there is no criminal liability if there is no atual knowledge of illegal activity or information, and no civil liability without actual knowledge or awareness of facts or circumstances from which illegal activity or information is apparent, and there is no active seek or profit.

But what really happens when a notice to take down takes place? What does the ISP do? What can be done? Are ISPs becoming “censors” or “arms of the state”? If they don’t do anything… are they pornographers? The AHRC Centre in IP and Technology carried on a survey to shred some light.

Institutionalisation: ISPs cut down costs of transaction of court procedures, as they easy enable both taking down i.e. pirate content and ID disclosing of major uploaders.

Cartelisation: The Internet Watch Foundation was originally created to defend ISP industry from threatened police action for carrying illegal newsgroup content. Thus, it acts as a self regulation device.

What’s next? potential for perfect invisible censorship? from self regulation to co-regulation? Specially when instead of child porn (the subject of IWF) we go no “not that clear” issues like racism or gender discrimination.

The results of the survey are not (statistically) significant, but (intuitively) quite enlightening. There are quite huge variations in the number of NTD claims received; traditional media usually get “defamation” complaints; etc. But… do they take down content? No, they not automatically do it. Instead of removing a whole website because of just one file (difficult for the ISP to find), they would “NTD” the owner of the site to do it in their place.

And no, ISPs don’t usually ask third parties (i.e. lawyers) if the NTD was legally right or appropriate, partly because there was not corporate people or knowledge about legal issues.

There is also little enthusiasm for “cartelised” behaviour.

On the other hand, main exchange of illegal content happens outside websites, but through instant messaging or P2P networks that make tracking very difficult. Hence, is there any sense on ISPs wasting their time in web filtering? And if this has a cost (as it does) and you have to cut down costs, where would you begin with if your core activity is in selling hosting, not in content controlling? But, surprisingly (from a profit point of view), ISPs actually care for “values”, and they care and collaborate because of personal bounds among flesh-and-bone persons ruling ISPs.

Left to right: Raquel Xalabarder, Miquel Peguera, Lilian Edwards

Liability of middlemen: state of the question 5 years after the LSSICE
Miquel Peguera, Professor of Mercantile and New Technology Law, UOC School of Law

Professor Peguera explains some well-known court cases related to ISP liability in Spain.

One of the main things that he puts clear is that it does not seem that anyone (lawyers, judges, infringers and offended parties) is perfectly aware of how the law works, with stress in the point where there is or there is not liability for ISPs, which is specially sad in the case of lawyers and judges.

The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.

Presentation to the Congress: Jordi Bosch, the Catalan Regional Government’s Secretary-General for Telecommunications and the Information Society

One of the biggest struggles in History has been literacy. Now that that it seemed [at least in developing countries] that we had achieved some “good” literacy level, then comes the Internet and everyone has to get into digital literacy. Indeed, last year [2006] more transistors were produced than rice grains.

Data ownership goes back to the citizen. Data is not a Government property, but citizens’. the big challenge to e-Administration is not putting online all procedures, but making them disappear. An event (i.e. your husband’s death) should automatically activate all kind of procedures (i.e. widow subsidies) without the need of having to apply for them.

Universal access should cover telephony (both fixed and mobile lines), broadband, audiovisual services and content. This access means information, training and, actually, more democratic exercise, transparency, etc.

Keynote speech: The Future of Internet and How To Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford Internet Institute

Jonathan Zittrain

One model of computer: in the hands of experts, you rent a solution, that comes from designing software and putting it into hardware, but you never ever approach neither the machine nor the design of the solution. This is IBM’s model when it was created back in the times of Herman Hollerith when he calculated the US 1890 census. IBM (then the Tabulating Machine Company) had “general purpose” machines that could be reprogrammed for whatever.

Flexowritter represented a second model: one solution, unchangeable, nonreprogrammable, but you could have it home.

Bill Gates made up a general purpose personal computer: it could be reprogrammed by the end user, that had the machine at home.

And the story with Networks is alike. Prodigy and Compuserve would show the user closed content depending on what he wanted (i.e. Weather) and who he was (i.e. Professional).

The birth of the Internet, the network its founders built, was totally open: it had an “hourglass” architecture where any use, any platform, were joined by a common “bypass”: IP, that just moved bits from one place to another.

And collaboration goes on an on. More and more software is built upon a “procrastination principle”: we build it until here and someone will go further. But this kind of collaboration can also be subverted to break others’ barriers to secure their content, etc.

And now the problem is that you can not malicious code, malware, viruses, etc. from operating or entering your own system without being disconnected from the Network… or go out of the generative PC paradigm where everyone could program/contribute with his own code/content. If we are going back to the “main menu”, where all options are predetermined, is this the end of the generative Internet? actually, is this the end of the Internet itself? And same applies to who connects to what . It looks like our needs to “save” our systems, are creating more and more barriers similar to those of censorship (something dealt with at the OpenNet Initiative).

Stop BadWare is about writing a software that should help knowing how some other software works and whether it is making “happier” your computer (and its user).

The generative pattern:

• Origins in a backwater
• Ambitious but not fully planned: procrastination principle
• Contribution welcomed from all corners
• Success beyond expectation
• Influx of usage
• Success is cut short: movement towards enclosure

The solution? For the solution to be true to the generative pattern, it must be originated in a backwater. The Internet is an educative system: it does require to people to give feedback and build along with the others.

See also:

• Three Conversations on Intellectual Property: Fordham, University of St. Gallen, UOC (Catalunya) by John Palfrey

The Economist Intelligence Unit — in co–operation with the IBM Institute for Business Value — has published the The 2007 e-readiness rankings.

One of the caveats the EUI launches is that the ranking methodology has been modified, hence changes in rankings methodology raise the bar of e-readiness leadership, giving more weight to leadership and, thus, strong government role in promotion and adoption of ICT propel Asian countries upward. It is my opinion that stressing leadership role — and, indirectly, the role of the political and legal framework — is a good thing to do, as it is far demonstrated that is one of the most important barriers or catalysts — depending on the sign — when fostering the Information Society.

Another comment on this change in the ranking methodology is that, by doing it, the EUI e-Readiness Raking comes closer to the World Economic Forum Networked Readiness Index. In other words: they seem to be explaining more and more the same thing. Strange as this statement might sound, the following graphic can shed some light on it:

R2 value of NRI vs. EUI regression

The figure shows the R² value to the regression NRI = C₀ + C₁*EUI + ?. We can read the R² value for 2006 — even if the report is issued in 2007, the ranking values are 2006’s — as EUI e-Readiness Ranking explains the 90.7% of the NRI Networked Readiness Index. This is far more than 2004’s value of 0.8235 (say, 82.3%). For those concerned in ICT and e-readiness measuring and indices, this is good news, as approaches seem to be getting closer. As can be seen in the next graphic , the value of the independent variable coefficient (X, in the graphic) seems to be (slowly) approaching the value of 1 while the constant is almost unchanged.

Constant and X-coefficient values of NRI vs. EUI regression

So far, the good news and/or comments. But the EUI also highlights the following findings:

• E-readiness goalposts for countries are shifting.
• The digital divide continues to narrow, even with the model changes.
• Broadband is increasingly affordable, and almost everywhere.

I mostly agree with giving more importance to online content and services. Actually, I fully agree: infrastructure makes poor sense if, because of i.e. low digital literacy levels, this infrastructure is underused and no content or no services are provided online. But, again, I cannot agree that the digital divide is narrowing. On one hand, this is something that The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006 and UNCTAD’s Information Economy Report 2006 already put under quarantine. On the other hand, the EUI just ranks 69 economies, which are, of course, the most developed ones. So, even if it is true that the distance between the highest and lowest scoring countries dropped from 6.08 points to 5.80 points this year it is not fair to generalize this statement for the whole world, leaving out of the analysis more than 120 countries, two thirds of the total. And same for broadband.

Summing up: a good tool that comes to its 8th edition, providing good information along years, and that seems to be showing good results. But an information that should be consumed with caution.

More info

• The 2007 e-readiness rankings page
• The 2007 e-readiness rankings report (1.44 Mb)
• A compilation of e-Readiness bibliography
• A compilation bibliography by the Economist Intelligence Unit
• A compilation bibliography by the World Economic Forum

As already advanced, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been already published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change.

Abstract

Online volunteering is as old as the World Wide Web… or as the Internet itself. It is, notwithstanding, with the growing use of the WWW circa end of 1994 that it starts to become popular. Nevertheless, we believe that neither the concept nor the tasks that can be carried along by online volunteers are clear at all or, in any case, are the result of a wide consensus.

The research we here present analyzed 17 websites devoted to fostering volunteering to find out (a) if there was a broadly accepted definition of the concept of online volunteering and (b) if there was a list of tasks thus designed as the core or ideal competences of online volunteers. According to our findings, in this paper we will, first of all, describe all the different denominations for online volunteers and, closely related to them, try and see what are the profiles and tasks that, tied to these denominations, are usually performed or asked for in those main 17 volunteering websites.

To end, we will take some distance from the object of research and, in a more theoretical level, we will then suggest what the online volunteer profile could be and the main tasks he or she could really carry on related to this profile, the nature of the Information Society and the possibilities of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

In this aspect, our thesis will be that, just like distance and/or online education changed formal education, ICTs are opening volunteering to some people usually excluded from nonprofits because of personal and professional obligations. On the other hand, it seems that these newcoming people enrolled through and thanks to ICTs do come with a brand new profile, a profile whose main added value is knowledge. It will be stated, then, that the online volunteer is a perfect knowledge management actor and that knowledge transmission seems to be is his or her main role in solidarity.

Citation and postprint download

Peña-López, I. (2007). “Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits”. In The Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, Spring Edition – April 2007, (1), 136-152. Vashon: The Gilbert Center.

Here comes the bibliography I’m using to teach my course Technological grounds of the e-Administration belonging to the Master in e-Administration at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Bibliography

Further information

This is not a evolving selection, though it might have slight changes. The up-to-date version of this list can always be consulted here: Fundamentos Técnicos de la Administración Electrónica. Feel free to write back to me with proposals for inclusion in the list and/or corrections for found errors.

It looks like ages since I ended my M.Phil.’s research project e-Learning for Development: a model. During last year (2006) I gave a conference about e-Learning and development based on open access and free software, and I also published a shortest Spanish version of the thesis in UPDATE – Dianova International e-magazine, again focusing on the “open” paradigm.

Even if the full digital version has been online for more than one year and a half, I’ve been having the uncomfortable sensation that — at least from my own point of view — my most important contribution in the paper has not had a lot of diffusion, exposure: provided there is really scarce literature on online volunteering, and most of it is from a practitioner’s approach, I thought my work on the taxonomy and typology of online volunteering provided some fresh air to the subject.

Now, it seems that the time for this issue to have an official coverage has come, and it will be, lucky me, in two ways at the same time.

First of all, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been accepted to be published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, that is going to be presented at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference by Michael Gilbert (along with the people at The Gilbert Center and NTEN, who have worked together to make it happen).

Second, a session devoted to the Journal will take place on Friday April 6th, 2007, at the conference, where some research gathered in this first issue will be presented to the attendants. As I cannot travel to Washington, DC, Michael Gilbert himself will be doing my speech for me using the material and notes I provided him with.

What is an online volunteer, what are the tasks that one would expect him to do, how are volunteering web portals treating the concept of online volunteering or how could this kind of contribution evolve in the future are questions that I try to answer in my paper and will be also shortly dealt with in the live presentation.

I really would like to sincerely thank Michael Gilbert, Katrin Verclas and Christine Dragonwyck for their help, patience and, over all, determination and drive to make things happen, even against all odds ;)