ICTlogy

Presentation: Javier Nadal, Executive Deputy Chairman of Fundación Telefónica

There are few technologies, if any, that have been so quickly adopted as Information and Communication Technologies, in general, and mobile telephony, in particular.

And it is very worth noting that this adoption has not happened in the same way around the globe. Different regions, cultures, communities have and are using mobile telephony in many and very different ways. Thus the need to do thorough research in this field, and see how mobile telephony can empower and develop communities and individuals.

Manuel Castells, sociologist, director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and author of the book.

The three things people value the most are Health, Education and the ability to communicate. And if we consider Education as Communication, we can narrow the priorities to just Health and Communication.

That is why ICTs are such a powerful phenomenon, with pervasive and fast rates of penetration and adoption. And the more important is a phenomenon, the more the need to perform research on it, to analyse it, understand it and, if needed, affect its path.

The book is not a descriptive one, but an analytical one, taking data from Telefónica and CEPAL-ECLAC to be able to perform econometric regressions.

Main conclusions of the econometric analysis:

• There is a proven, statistically significant, systematic, positive effect of mobile phones upon economic growth, especially in poorest countries and especially in poorest regions.
• Inequality is neither increased nor decreased because of mobile technologies. Mainly because adoption rates are so high (circa 80% in general) that any strata of society does have access to mobile telephony.
• There is an impact of mobile phones decreasing poverty.

This last statement is especially proven by the qualitative analyses performed in the book (see below the case studies), which show:

• A positive impact on employment. As many people work autonomously, thanks to mobile phones they can get jobs/works done without the bounds of more rigid organizational structures.
• People find employment more quickly thanks to disintermediation of the job market.
• Increase in security — and the feeling of security — of people: distant communication reduces exposure to different kinds of violence and hazards.
• There is an increase in the autonomy of people, but at the same time increasing the connectivity amongst people and increasing the feeling of community, of a common identity. But not any autonomy, but “secure autonomy”.

If we take the context of schools, it is clear that the educational system is lagging behind the evolution of technology, and educators and policy-makers should definitely rethink their teaching strategies and leverage the power of mobile techonology and mobile (i.e. ubiquitous) access to knowledge [I personally disagree with Castells that laptops at school should be replaced with mobiles: I believe the problem is not the device, but the educational model].

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: despite the high rates of adoption and, thus, the lack of impact in quantitative terms on inequality, what happens in qualitative terms? Are we witnessing evidence for the knowledge gap hypothesis? Castells: absolutely. What we see is that technology adoption is not affecting inequality, but social inequality does affect unequal technology adoption (e.g. poors not accessing broadband). Nevertheless, the inequality of mobile adoption, or the inequality in communications, is not as important as socio-economic inequalities, and that is a very important fact.

Q: how is it that people spend relatively so much in communications instead of “food”? Castells: the main reason is because it is worth it: mobile phones have an impact on employability, for instance, and very important too, on socialization, which, at its turn, has an impact on employability and inclusion in general. That’s why: communications are of crucial importance nowadays and do have an impact on each and every aspect of our lives.

Q: is there a different impact depending on e.g. gender? Castells: there is, but not because of the gender factor, but because the gender factor already made a difference in the “real” world. For instance, in the Peruvian Andes markets are set up by women. Thus, the impact of mobiles on those women was higher than on men, but not because of their gender, but because of their important role on the local economies.

Book Review

The book performs a thorough and deep analysis on how mobile technologies have had an impact on Latin America, both at the economic and social levels. After two initial chapters depicting the framework and context, the book goes on estimating the quantitative impact of mobile telephony on economic growth and poverty alleviation, then moving onto mobile usage in rural areas, social businesses for e-inclusion, technology appropriation and usage among youth.

The table of contents is as follows:

1. Introduction: Mobile communication and development in Latin America in the XXIst century; Roxana Barrantes Cáceres, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Sebastián Ureta.
2. Socio-economic context and ICT diffusion in Latin America; Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Andrea Molinari, Javier Vázquez Grenno.
3. Estimation of the contribution of mobile telephony to growth and poverty alleviation; Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Javier Vázquez Grenno
4. Mobile telephony in rural areas: case study in Puno, Peru; Roxana Barrantes Cáceres, Aileen Agüero, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol.
5. Mobile telephony and inclusive businesses: Proyecto SUMA in Argentina; Hernán Galperin, Andrea Molinari.
6. Appropriation and usage: case study in Brasil; François Bar, Francis Pisani, Carlos Seabra.
7. Mobile youth culture in an urban environmetn: case study in Santiago de Chile; Sebastián Ureta, Alejandro Artopoulos, Wilson Muñoz, Pamela Jorquera.
8. Synthesis of results and conclusions; Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Hernán Galperin.

More information

• El móvil ayuda a crecer en América
• La telefonía móvil contribuye más al desarrollo económico en América Latina que en los países de mayor PIB

In a democracy, we are traditionally faced with two different options: we either can vote a policy or a decision (direct democracy), or we cannot vote and then our representatives (usually selected after an electoral process) vote for us (representative democracy). Indeed, the latter is the most usual, while increasingly more people would rather the former.

[click to enlarge]

Some of the criticisms to representative democracy — and that are usually used to legitimate and claim for more direct democracy — are that:

• We sometimes know better than our representatives what it is good for us.
• We are almost always forced to vote a “pack” of ideas/policies, of which we only partly agree with. Thus, we are not fully represented by our representatives.
• Representative democracy was efficient in an analogue world. In a digital world, that efficiency is, to say the least, questioned, as digital voting comes marginally at zero cost.

Some of the criticisms to direct democracy — and that are usually used to dis-encourage and stop any claim for more direct democracy — are that:

• We sometimes do not master the topic that is voted. Thus, we would incur in insurmountable personal costs if wanting to cast an informed vote for each and every collective decision.
• There are people that do not care, have no time or have no means to be actively involved in politics/voting. Direct democracy then fosters plutocracy.

So, it would be great to be able to have a way to keep the best of both worlds: when we can vote, we’d do it; when we don’t, we’d delegate our vote on our representatives… or on the ones we trust for a specific subject.

Let us imagine a system where direct and representative democracies can live together. Actually, this is what most democracies do have right now. But let us imagine that each and every decision can be taken both ways simultaneously: if no citizen votes, the process takes the form of pure representative democracy; if each and every citizen votes, the process takes the form of pure direct democracy; is some citizens vote, the elected representatives vote only on behalf of the citizens that did not vote, and the final result is calculated by taking into account the individual citizens’ votes and the votes of the representatives, these weighting us much as the aggregate of votes of the ones they represent and that did not vote.

Technologically speaking, the preceding system is a “simple” one to implement: all citizens decide, first place, what is their preferred party and inform the system with their preferences. Once a consultation is scheduled, citizens log in and vote. If they do not vote, the vote goes to the representative that was initially informed in the system. Blank voting is one of the given options and abstention happens when the voter neither votes nor informs a representative in the initial setup of the system. If needed or desired, territorial weighting, district distribution, etc. can be informed and applied during the final counting of votes.

An intermediate layer can be added to this system: the expert on whom we delegate our vote. A citizen may not want their representative to vote for them: e.g. imagine a right wing, pro-environment and atheist citizen deciding whether their preferred liberal party (known for its bounds with the energy industry) should represent them in a referendum on nuclear power. The citizen has concerns or irresolvable doubts on nuclear power and would like their “green engineer” friend to vote for them (but right now cannot ask for direct advice). Same for a referendum on abortion: that citizen cannot decide, but knows the liberal party will vote against based on religious beliefs that they do not share: they’d rather ask their physicist friend working on genomics.

With a hybrid system, the citizen has now three options: voting directly; not voting and letting the elected representative to vote for them; delegating their vote on an expert or a trusted friend or the leader of the local community.

The workings of the system would be as follows:

[click to enlarge]

Note that there are, actually, five options, three of them ending up in the representative democracy as usual. Bear in mind that voting “blank” should be an option of the system. As many others have pointed before, electronic voting systems don’t usually allow for “null” votes (some even include the option in the system, a solution that I do not really fancy):

1. The citizen votes directly and their vote is counted up individually against all other votes (weighted by district if necessary).
2. The citizen delegates their vote, and the delegate (friend, expert, etc.) decides to vote directly. In that case, the delegate is voting per two people (or as much as people delegate on them).
3. The citizen neither votes nor delegates, and their is aggregated to the votes of the elected representative.
4. The citizen delegates the vote, but the delegate is not voting, so the citizen’s vote “comes back” to them and, by default, to the elected representative.
5. The citizen delegates their vote, but the delegate just happened to delegate their vote back to the initial voter: the loop is solved by sending both votes “up” to their respective elected representatives.

There is the possibility that a citizen delegates their vote, and the delegate does it too on a third person. In that case, it is just a matter of iterating the system until it gets to a case between the ones listed above.

There are two questions left open and that have to be solved arbitrarily, though solved before the system begins to work, as the results of the system we have just described can vary depending on how those questions are addressed.

The first one is whether a citizen can change in the system their (a) elected representatives and (b) the people on whom they delegate.

Our opinion is that representatives can only be chosen once every political cycle begins (e.g. once every four years and just after the elections — indeed, setting up the system defaults would be the elections), but delegates should be free to choose for each and every consultation scheduled.

The second one is whether (a) elected representatives know how many votes they have and (b) delegates know it too.

In our opinion, elected representatives should be able to know how many people chose them as default. That would gave them an idea of the potential support they more or less have at any given time, though they have to keep in mind that while citizens can vote directly vote or delegate, data from the initial election of representatives is just an approximation. Indeed, there would be huge incentives in being faithful to the original programme and electoral promises to avoid people to “vote for themselves” and trust their vote to them instead.

On the other hand, there are two reasons for which delegates knowing how many voting power they have got is a not very much convincing idea: the first one is a technical one, as the citizen should either be able to vote at the last minute or change their vote many times before the poll closes. The second one is that it would probably be an open gate to corruption and unfair lobbying, vote selling and other similar practices.

I would be very interested in contributing to an actual implementation of this system, maybe within a social networking site, maybe as an open government website being fed by parliamentary data with which compare with the experiment’s citizen decisions. If you have the possibility to make it happen, please drop me a line.

On July 14th, 2011, I was at the University of Málaga (Spain) where I spoke at the summer course Acción ciudadana y voluntariado en la nueva sociedad global: voluntariado y universidad (Citizen action and volunteering in the new global society: volunteering and university).

My session was called Volunteering from home, the office or the train: online volunteering, social networking sites and smartphones and was preceded by an excellent conference by Luis Arancibia Tapia, where he described how society is changing and how this crisis we are suffering since 2008 is not your usual crisis, but most likely a point of no-return.

That very same point — change and dire transformation of the society — is the one I used to base my speech on. Instead of providing zillions of examples of online volunteering, I tried to explain why is now possible to volunteer online, how are people behaving on the Net and what is the (different) nature of online volunteering and online citizen action.

My conference had four parts:

1. The change of framework: what has been the impact from an industrial to a digital society.
2. The direct macro-impact of that change: how have some concepts and practices in development cooperation been radically transformed due to the digitization of information and communications.
3. The indirect micro-impact of that change: how have some personal practices in development cooperation, volunteering and citizen activism changed, especially in the nature of their contribution to charities and non-profit initiatives.
4. Some examples, a suggestion for a categorization and a comment on the Arab Spring.

Please see below my presentation. You can also visit my bibliographic file for Volunteering from home, the office or the train: online volunteering, social networking sites and smartphones (the original title) for downloads both in English and Spanish.

Conclusions for day 2
Javier de la Cueva, Lawyer.

All the debate around Net Neutrality and the right to be forgotten is about a new container — the Internet and all new technologies at large — and a new container — digital content and services.

And what this container is asking us is to feed is for ourselves, for free and providing personal data in exchange.

And not only are these data consciously provided, by uploading content, of befriending people on 3rd parties’ platforms, but also in a hidden form, by means of cookies, scripts or other devices.

There still is an unanswered question and it is whether technology as an ideology. And the Law should deal with this issue explicitly and bravely. This includes code, that in some aspects is becoming a derivative or procedural law.

And not only whether technology conforms an ideology, but also whether it conforms a new 4th generation of human rights.

An interesting question to explore in the future is whether we can proceed with the concept of habeas data.

We are now fighting the inefficacy of Law, that always arrives late at regulating and, when it does, there are hackers and crackers (conceptually very different) that make many laws irrelevant in practice. Thus, we need global solutions, founded on the Philosophy of Law and Law Theory, so to provide solid and long-lasting frameworks.

More information

• Relato del VII Congreso Internacional sobre Internet, Derecho y Política: Neutralidad de la red y derecho al olvido, by Javier de la Cueva

Track on e-government and e-democracy
Chairs: Ismael Peña-López, Lecturer, School of Law and Political Science (UOC)

Lorenzo Cotino Hueso
The European electronic citizen initiative

The new European normative makes it possible that with the addition of 1,000,000 signatures, the political debate on a certain topic can be initiated in the European Parliament. And one of the good things about this new normative is that it has been designed for the XXIst century, as online participation (i.e. signing) is considered in equal terms as offline participation.

The procedure is the usual one, where an initiative is registered and then signatures are collected within the member states. Once the European Commission validates the firms (the person signing is a European citizen, has not signed more than one time, etc.), then a new legislative process can begin.

Another asset is that the European Commission must provide free software platforms for the collection of signatures in any website. These platforms will work with digital signature, whatever its kind: certificates, tokens, smartphones, etc.

The initiative can be started at any member state and, once the platform is validated, the process of gathering support can begin.

The regulation is written as if it was about data protection, as that is the major issue when providing a (electronic) vote supplying personal data, but the regulation to be applied will be the one of any member state.

Daniel Guagnin; Carla Ilten
Self-Governed Socio-technical Infrastructures. Autonomy and Cooperation through Free Software and Community Wireless Networks

Net Neutrality is the freedom to use a communication infrastructure in all possible ways without constrains. And free software is a matter of liberty, not price, it is about free as in free speech (not as in free beer).

Technology is society made durable: social “programmes” are inscribed in any technology. In expert systems rules are disembedded from the realm of use, and defined by experts. Free software opens up the experitse to laypeople, why proprietary software stays opaque.

Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work freely available and with the compulsory condition that any other work based on it will also be available in the same way.

Community Wireless Networks are based on free software and DIY hardware. They use wireless peer-to-peer mesh network architecture and have collectively organized and owned communication infrastructures.

An example can be the Chicago Wireless Community Networks [in Spain we have the very interesting initiative Guifi.net.]. Chicago Wireless Community Networks is a non-profit project to serve disadvantaged neighborhoods, in cooperation with CUWIN open source programmers. It’s community building through network set-up and maintenance. The Pico Peering Agreement acts as a constitution for peer networking.

That is certainly a new approach to Net Neutrality, as Net Neutrality is, all in all, a battle about the control over infrastructures.

Mayo Fuster Morell
An introductory historical contextualization of online creation communities for the building of digital commons: The emergence of a free culture movement

Online creation communities (OCCs) are a set of individuals that communicate and collaborate mainly via a platform hosted on the Internet with the purpose to create a final outcome of the joint work.

These communities are deeply rooted in the movements of the 1950s like hacking culture, hippies contraculture, action-participation methodologies and popular education, etc.

If the free software projects imply the appearance of OCCs, there is a shift from free software to free culture with the change of millennium with movements like the Creative Commons, the Wikipedia, alternative news media (e.g. Indymedia), peer-to-peer file sharing, open access of scientific research, etc. The explosion of the web 2.0 is greatly powered and fostering at the same time the concept of OCCs.

Infrasctructure conditions:

• Level of freedom and autonomy of the content generators in regard to the infrastructure.
• Level representation of the interests of the community of creators in the infrastructure provision decision-making and provision transparency.

Two main types:

• Autonomy + open = commons logic; they reinforce more collaborative communities.
• Close + dependency = corporate logic. Tend to generate larger communities.

The free culture and digital rights movement has 4 main goals: preserve the digital commons, to make important information available to the public, promote creators, remove barriers to distribution of knowledge and goods.

Lately, the movement has been shifting from free culture to meta-politics. This can be seen in the Change Congress initiative in the US (2008) or the #nolesvotes and #15M movements in Spain.

Georgia Foteinou
Institutional Trust and e-Government Adoption in the EU: a Cross-National Analysis

Why citizens that are used to e-commerce appear sceptic when it comes to using e-government websites? Normally, it is attributed to the poor quality of services, few available services, insufficient infrastructure… but evidence shows that is none of the above, at least not as a strong determinant not to be using those services. In fact, e-government usage is higher than e-commerce in most European countries, even if it has a decline of -4.5% (of all Internet users) over the period 2005-2010. On the other hand, in aggregate, e-government is growing at 30% (accesses) while e-commerce is growing at 75%.

It seems that the digitally reluctant could not be trusting the government, but not of a specific agent, but in government as a whole. This is what data seem to be telling at statistically significant levels.

Jorge Luis Salcedo
Conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property in Internet: comparing the issue networks in UK and Spain

In the issue of the conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property, how is media visibility distributed between the stakeholders in this conflict? What actors have more visibility? This is crucially relevant in mass-mediated democracies.

A first hypothesis is that the regulation supporters (Copyrights coalition and governments) will achieve a greater visibility level on the news channel.

A second hypothesis is that the Digital Rights Activists (DRA) will have a higher visibility on non traditional media (blogs, websites) than the CRC.

3r hypothesis: DRA will have a higher visibility in specific web channels, but not on the entire web.

4th hypothesis: The most visible agents on the news channels are going to get the most visibility as a whole, especially in search engines.

It is very interesting to see how in Spain, DRA have huge coverage in online platforms, in the UK they are even with CRC and both of them having less visibility than the government’s official position. In search engines, though, both UK and Spanish DRA seem to be having the same impact.

The differences may come from different resources from the different stakeholders, a more lax regulation in the UK in downloading matters, the worst reputation that the coalition has in Spain in comparison to the UK’s, including the dynamics of politics in the different countries.

Track on the Right to be forgotten, data protection and privacy
Chairs: Mònica Vilasau Solana, Lecturer, School of Law and Political Science (UOC)

Pere Simon Castellano
The constitutional regime of the right to oblivion in the Internet

It is the principle of consent the one that gives us the legitimacy to claim for a right to privacy or data protection.

Especially related to search engines (though not only) is the legality of a given content another important factor when claiming for our privacy rights or the right to be forgotten.

Jelena Burnik
Behavioural advertising in electronic communications. A benefit to electronic communication development and an intrusion of individual’s right to privacy and data protection

Behavioural advertising tracks Internet users’ activities online and delivers only relevant advertisements, based on the data collected and analysed over a given period of time. It is normally enabled by cookies, that are placed by websites or advertisements on websites.

Behavioural advertising is defended in the name of relevance of advertisements, enhanced user experience, precise segmentation and less money spent on non-relevant audiences, support to free Internet content and a driver of innovation.

But it is a controversial practice that requires a fair balance between the interests of the industry and the rights of individuals. As cookies assign a unique ID with an IP address, there can be concerns on data protection. On the other hand, cookies are normally placed in the computer by default, while maybe a debate on opt-in vs. opt-out of cookie placing and cookie-based tracking should be considered.

A new “cookie” European directive should aim at shifting from an opt-out principle to an opt-in one, and cookies being placed only under explicit user’s concern. But how is the technological solution for an opt-in cookie principle?

In the US, though, what seems to be more acknowledged is an enhanced opt-out model.

But only true opt-in provides for transparency, and self-regulation of the industry will not suffice.

María Concepción Torres Diaz
Privacy and tracking cookies. A constitutional approach.

It is worth noting the difference between privacy, intimacy and personal data. And cookies can harm privacy. So, users should get all necessary information on cookies and tracking so they can decide whether a specific behaviour puts at stake their privacy. In case the user decides to go on, explicit consent should be provided to the service to perform its tracking activity.

We have to acknowledge that new technologies will bring with them new rights and new threats to old rights. Thus, we should be aware of the new technologies so that the law does not fall behind.

Philipp E. Fischer; Rafael Ferraz Vazquez
Data transfer from Germany or Spain to third countries – Questions of civil liability for privacy rights infringement

There are data transfers at the international level continuously. If those data got “lost”, the operator might have incurred in privacy rights infringement.

The European Directive on data transmission, it has been established that there can be data transmission within the European Union (nationally or internationally) or with 3rd countries with adequate level of data protection. There still are some issues with the US and there are other countries which are simply banned from data transmission between them and member states.

Faye Fangfei Wang
Legal Feasibility for Statistical Methods on Internet as a Source of Data Gathering in the EU

Privacy protection steps: suitable safeguards, duty to inform prior to obtaining consent (transparency), consent, and enforcement. Request for concern should be looked at as a very important step towards privacy protection. Consent must be freely given and informed.

There is an exemption clause in the UK legislation, to be used when gathering some data is strictly necessary for a service to run, or for scientific purposes, etc. But the exception clause must be used legally.

Ricardo Morte Ferrer
The ADAMS database of the Anti Doping World Agency. Data protection problems

The ADAMS database stores whereabouts, reporting where a sportsman is during 3 months, for a daily time span from 6:00 to 23:00 and including a full daily 1h detailed report of their whereabouts. Instead of presuming innocence, this database kind of presumes guiltiness.

That is a lot of information and, being the holder an international agency based in Canada, a threat on data protection as it implies a continuous traffic of personal data internationally.

Inmaculada López-Barajas Perea
Privacy in the Internet and penal research: challenges in justice in a globalized society

The possibility that personal information of citizens can be retrieved, remotely, by law enforcement institutions, is it just the digital version of the usual (and completely legal) surveillance methodologies, or is it something new and something that threatens citizens’ privacy?

More information

• Tracking without cookies, by Smári McCarthy.