ICTlogy

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session V

Keynote speech
Helen Margetts
Government on the Web

A shift of paradigm in Government

Dunleavy, Margetts (2006) Digital Era Governance: the dominant paradigm of public governance reform (new public management) is dead. The digital-era governance is nigh… or just happening.

What happened during the New Public Management?

• Disaggregation, into tiny decentralized government and quasi-government agencies
• Competition within the daily tasks of government, its relationships with suppliers, outsourcing, financing, etc.
• Incentivization: via privatization, performance related pay, charging, etc.

What are we likely to see during the Digital-era governance?

• Reintegration, going the way back of atomization that the New Public Management achieved adn that showed not being always efficient
• Needs-based Holism, focusing on the client and client structures, including co-creation and co-production. This can lead to government doing less and citizens doing more.
• Digitalization, of documents, of deliveries, of processes, of communications, etc.

But things are happening slowly: e-government lags behind e-commerce, web-based provision still weak, low interaction at the G2B and G2C levels.

Government on the Web

www.governmentontheweb.org

While most government sites are roughly steady in the amount of visitors they have, Directgov, the global, cross-level, cross-government, portal for e-Government in the UK has a huge increase, which brings interesting reflections both about the successful strategies and also the related threats. Directgov, for instance, as an impressive amount of inbound links, even if outbound links are not much higher than other Government sites. Reasons are many, but an accuracy to define a profile and links from other countries and initiatives are two of the most important. On the other hand, Directgov is one of the smallest (in number of pages and documents) sites of all, being the tax agency and the education department on the other end. A correct strategy would be for these heavy sites to bring their content — or links — to Directgov, acting the latter as a hub and the former ones as the store.

Generally, the cross-government site got and retained more users looking for specific content (15 questions on a survey) than search engines.

Some conclusions

• Sites are well rated and quality has improved, but the design and heavy-text makes can make them being near obsolete in the short run
• Despite the amount of money spent, more should be put in improving the existing information
• Centralization strategy seems to be working

Digital Era Governance

Main characteristics:

• Risk: adding up to the creation of a super-state that the New Public Management began
• Risk: setting up a chaotic, poorly designed, digital strategy that is built on the run
• Use of pervasive information
• De-coupling information analysis from control
• Customer orientation and segmentation
• Proactive
• Isocratic government: help citizens do it themselves
• Co-production: the government sets the frame, the citizen fills it
• Co-creation: government provides capacity or facility, citizens design own projects using it
• Peer production: government benefits from social production
• The change of the public management regime increases the autonomy of the citizen and the level of social problem-solving.
• If the government does not provide the information and services, people would find it anyway

e-Government 2.0

• Rich information and content
• Highly specific “deep” search
• Giving information back to the users about their own use of the service
• Creating part-finished products
• Co-production leading to co-creation
• Customer segmentation
• Broadening the amount of stakeholders implied
• Para-organizations can blossom, where users are into front office

e-Health 2.0

• Performance data freely available
• Managers can be customer oriented
• Direct voice for patients
• Co-production, co-creation
• Patient input replaces controls

Risks of remaining in e-Government 1.0

• Ignore young people
• Text-only communications is under-investment
• People go where they want to go
• Loss of visibility, loss of nodality for not being there

Q&A

Me: Does Web 2.0 poses a threat to representative democracy? Why should I be engaged if it is really comfortable, efficient, to be represented? HM: Engagement has now less costs, and the impact of being engaged is now higher, so the net balance of engagement is much higher, as costs are lower and benefits are higher.

Eduard Aibar: What happens if all skills and human capital is placed at the private sector? where is the limit of outsourcing public services? HM: Is is a threat to the enforcement of the social contract. The Government has a need for public-private partnerships, but should leverage the learnings in its own benefit and also be aware of imbalances.

Eben Moglen: what happens with data security, citizen privacy, spending on privative software, etc.? What happens with the politics of public services? Maybe Google will always be superior to any e-strategy from the UK Government. HM: Incompetence adds to politics in this case, and sometimes personal agendas — Eben Moglen absolutely disagrees.

Mònica Vilasau: is the citizen more concerned about security or privacy when he addresses a government website than when he uses e-commerce? HM: Normally yet, people are more concerned of giving their data away to governments than to private services, maybe because they’re unaware of the benefits of the public service and the government (cleverly, responsibly) using their data.

Michael Jensen: Implications of the process of co-production and co-creation. HM: The citizenry are creating with their searches, with their comments… they are whatever they do. So the Government should not permit himself being set aside from this conversation.

Me: what’s the risk of mashups and websites run by para-governmental organizations? who’s liable for the quality of the information? who’s to assess its accuracy? HM: Of course there’s a risk, but if the Government is publishing the right, correct, needed, information for the citizen, good practices will be more than the bad ones. And these sites put pressure on the Government to issue its official and original information to the wide public in an easy, quick and accessible way. On the other hand, we should distinguish about websites with low level of identification with high level ones, where more “important” transactions take place.

Rosa Borge: What makes Directgov so different? How can these metrics be developed?. HM: Metrics were gathered by coding brand new free software for the research project. The big difference of Directgov it is that it was brand new in many ways, especially the concept. But its main problem is that it is really centralized, and that central office could not now everything about the UK Government. This is being corrected, and is shifting towards a more Web 2.0 approach.

David Osimo: Quite often we see “cool but useless” sites from governments, that are reluctant to give away their information or “power”. What to do about this? HM: There’s a need for a cultural change inside institutions, where they realize that they have to innovate in this area, and begin to listen, and aim towards (an unwanted) change.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session IV

Chairs: Agustí Cerrillo, Law Professor, UOC

Conference
Lorenzo Cotino
Electronic public services: e-government 2.0 The Regulation of E-Government 2.0

Law goes really behind the speed of times. The problem is that Law, or Administrative Law, faces challenging reality: .com can fail, but .gov cannot”.

At the legal level, the big challenge of the Web 2.0 is the integration of content produced by third parties in another platform — or your content put in a platform run by a third party.

Lorenzo Cotino

Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: G2C

• More information
• Transparency
• Participation

Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: C2G

• Best of feedbacks
• Crest of the wave innovation of early adopters
• Law enforcement by citizens: reports, complaints, etc.

Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: G2G

• Share knowledge, bottom up

Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: C2C

• Participative spaces

Incentives of e-Gov 2.0: motivation, fostering, training. P2P training a successful bet.

The role of Law in e-Gov 2.0 is to bring security to the whole system, and guarantee the citizen’s rights. E.g. not all has to be that transparent, as there are privacy issues concerned.

Some rights:

• Guarantee a contact address
• Compulsory information
• Usability
• Feedback mecanisms

One of the biggest problems we nowadays have in the Internet is anonymity: who’s liable for some published content? And not only anonymity, but the easy flow of content from one place/platform to another one. This is a threat for the development of the e-Administration. Though some anonymity can be good in some aspects of citizenship.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session III

Round Table
Content on the internet: regulation or self-regulation?

Chairs: Raquel Xalabarder, Law Professor, UOC

Do we want to give up on the freedom we can have now? Do we want self-regulation or we want more education that leads to more commitment?

http://www.iqua.net, Spanish Internet Quality Agency (IQUA) and CEO Derecho.com

More than self-regulation, what it’s happening is that the liability to apply toughest laws if shifted towards the customer/user or the industry (ISPs and/or carriers).

But this has not been a matter of consensus, nor a widening of the range (from tough to soft) of the regulation spectrum.

Over-regulation puts an extra burden to the industry, making it more difficult for the Information Society to develop in a healthy way.

There’s a big room for metadata to play an important role in self-regulation, without being intrusive while providing good information for both the end user, the competition and the regulator.

Amadeu Abril, lawyer

Collective self-regulation seems another mean to name regulation against competition (i.e. my competitors.

Context matters, really matters, the problem being that exactly the same content is a really different thing when the framework changes. So how can self-regulation be effective with such a slippery landscape?

There’s a big difference between what is legal or not — and this is regulated by the laws that apply in the real world — and what is good or not. And this is another debate. And it was addressed in the TV by defining what was appropriate content depending on the time of the day, but cannot be addressed in the Internet, where both time and space are very relative concepts.

Miguel Pérez Subías, President of the Spanish Internet Users Association.

Self-regulation sounds good when at the individual level. But at the collective level, is it self-regulation? Or is is another thing? Can self-regulation be designed for communities? Besides, “compulsory self-regulation” is just regulation.

A second problem with self-regulation is that it seems to go against all moral and ethics we’ve learned in our childhood: wasn’t sharing good?

Yet another problem: there’s no transition taking place from one mindset to another one. Our mindset and our children’s are way too different and the divide between both has no transition. This poses a problem to any kind of regulatory change or, worse, a real challenge to the transmission of values.

Are we talking about the how’s before talking about the why’s? On the other hand, the debate has been focused on the economic sphere, not in the public (good) sphere. And this has caused many contradictions.

Main conflicts: intellectual property rights, security vs. privacy trade-off, control vs. freedom.

Mónica Ariño, OFCOM

If self-regulation is free adoption from the industry of any form of regulation, this does not exist. Co-regulation is what really takes place: as there is no free adoption of any kind of regulation (self-regulation), the private and public sector try and agree a second best.

For self-regulation to be effective, appropriate incentives have to be designed and these incentives have to be aligned with the public interest.

Norms have to be reasonable.

The participation of the customer is key for a better design of a self-regulatory system.

One of the main problems of self-regulation is the shift in who supports the burden of the responsibility to enforce this regulation. Indeed, there’s been some shifting too from what cannot be done, to list what can be done on the Internet, then subverting the whole rule of Law.

Besides protection, and self-regulation, there’s a tremendous work to be done in the digital and media literacy fields.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session II

Debate
Regulation of audiovisual content in the age of digital convergence

Mónica Ariño, Policy Advisor, OFCOM’s International Team.

What is convergence? What can be said about regulation of content on the Internet and the Internet itself? Privacy, cybercrime, copyright, fair use? Internet access?

A big commitment is how to update broadcasting regulations that where set up in times very different from the ones we’re living in. A first thing to be updated is the concept of media literacy and whether the receiver is media literate.

Another commitment is regulatory cohesion in the international landscape.

Last, maybe the biggest commitment is fighting social alarm about “things” that are “happening” in the Net, especially children exposure to specific content — and people — on the Internet.

So, there seem to be reasons for intervention, though we still have to clearly define where, what and exactly why. In any case, the novelty of it all, and the need to update, seems to be another reason for intervention itself.

What should be regulated and why?

A thing that is clear: Internet is a broadcasting device that competes within a (regulated) sector, such as television or radio. But, in a convergence framework, if TV is moving to other platforms, should its regulation strictly (and without adaptation) follow? Things have changed: scarcity (e.g. of wave spectrum) does not exist anymore, the receiver is also an emitter and a creator, etc.

Freedom of expression has also changed its meaning in this framework… and should not be threaten by regulation, especially bad regulation.

When you subscribe to some content on demand, and the provider is in your same legal jurisdiction, things come easy. The problem is when you can access any content from anywhere.

All in all, regulation should (can) not aim at proving the optimum, a safe Internet, but a second best: to be able to tag some content so the user can approach it with a minimum amount of information.

So, how do we educate audiences?

Some data: all kids and youngsters access the Internet, without surveillance by their parents, who think they are less skilled in Internet issues than their own children are. And them parents don’t even know where to go to get information about content, practices and risks related to them both. Does this give arguments for regulation? Maybe yes.

Self-regulation in some sites (e.g. YouTube) can also be improved, so it is not that opaque, it becomes more flexible and quick, etc.

Filtering software — for seach engines — is another option to help the user contribute to “regulate” access to content.

It is very important that users understand how these tools work, and this is why media literacy is so important. Even more when regulating institutions cannot, by construction, be as flexible and quick in response as the users themselves.

Mónica Ariño, Joan Barata

Joan Barata, Professor of Administrative Law and President’s Office Manager, Catalan Audiovisual Council (CAC).

The case of Spain is even more complicated, as there is no regulation at the TV content level, and if there was, some problems would arise about the jurisdiction of regionally decentralized regulatory bodies.

An added problem: one thing is whether it is relevant or appropriate to regulate, and the other thing is whether regulation can be enforced. Then, if regulation cannot actually be enforced “in the last mile”, does it make any sense to try to (besides is appropriateness)?

And, indeed, how do we cope with gatekeepers that obscurely apply their own procedures to guarantee “proper” content on their platforms?

Until some years ago, regulation bodies defined what was pluralism and so they defined public services to cover this pluralism. But what is now pluralism? What is pluralism when a few platforms get most traffic? Can we still preserve a democratic public sphere where a national authority defines its own collective identity, when the definition of a collective identity is now in private hands?

Q&A

Carlos Alonso: isn’t the need for regulation a social fiction? i.e. we “need” a regulator (for everything). MA: the problem is not only that regulation might be unnecessary, but that the solution given would be a fake, as the regulator is providing something that cannot be effectively enforced. On the other hand, within the limits of actual regulation, the regulator should not intervene in what can or cannot be shown in a specific platform, mainly because of a lack of context: who’s accessing that platform, why, what for, when, etc. The idea that consumers are the ones responsible of their consumption is the one that should permeate.

Eben Moglen: the idea that content must be safe is ludicrous. There will always be somebody offended by some content of by someone. So there is not even a point in content regulation. And this especially applies from the moment that video will become such a “normal” content on the web as it is now text.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session I

Opening

Eduard Aibar, Vice-President of Research, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Pere Fabra, Dean School of Law and Political Science, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Jordi Bosch, Head of the Telecommunicacions and Information Society Department, Government of Catalonia

Keynote speech
Eben Moglen
Living Apart Together: Social Networking in the Free World

Capitalism produces inherently defective technology, mainly because of the short sightedness of the whole process. Global heating and the combustion engine being one of the most present short sightedness examples of capitalism today.

Social networking software might be at stake and be another good example of such defective technology, which will potentially cause social harm in the future as these technologies will deviate from appropriate, optimum, goals.

The Net was created with a socialist ideology: Absence of advertising, absence of surveillance, absence of tracking what one was doing (reading, writing) on the Net, a collaborative philosophy. The Wikipedia is the best example of those principles put in practice.

Social Networking Software (SNS) are tools, owned by private capital, to subvert the essence of the Net for the benefit of capitalism and its capitalists: to include advertising, to add surveillance devices, to know who read what and when, and to focus on the individual and not the community.

Eben Moglen

SNS are, technically, but content management systems (CMS), and are hence not so revolutionary neither in their concept nor in their design. Actually, all the technologies and devices used are freely available to anyone so that many other SNSs can be built at will… without the need to give away your data to the people that are now managing them.

But the fact is that web server managers are using web server logs to watch all the traces a user leaves on a web server — actually, yet another subversion of the socialist design behind the web: web server logs where intended to optimize software and bandwidth use, not for user surveillance —. And datamining is born.

So a model of you — and not a model of people, but a model of you — is drawn each and every day. So the whole interest of capitalism in technology is to stimulate purchases and so increase sales.

So, instead of helping people get their own SNSs on their own web servers, a faustian bargain is made where “free” access to “free” software is given in exchange of personal data… and promise of future purchases. And how do you keep anything secret from anyone?

We should be aware that there is no technical need to keep on with on with this way of behaving, but just convenience, where convenience means you don’t have to think, and others are about to think about you without any restriction.

It’s just possible that in a near future, the possibility of wiping out advertising from web pages — as some web browsers are increasingly trying to — will take off. And then, the Web 2.0 hype will be over, as there’ll be no business to be done by providing “free” web spaces to everyone.

On the other hand, the actual business model of SNSs is not only challenging citizenry privacy, but also the business model of telecoms, whose business of moving along chunks of data, bits and bytes, is no more profitable, and their shift towards premium content is blocked by big media companies that do own content and are investing in alternative ways of distributing it by circumventing telecoms: SNSs.

Q&A

Me: how do we face sustainability of these desirable services if we take out ads and/or paying with our data? EM: The free software model, or the Wikipedia model can help in this. Me: but where’s the limit of volunteer responsibility and commitment? EM: It’s just that we don’t need any business model. In a socialist world, and with existing technology, we can bring good services in other ways and keeping out of the equation the gatekeepers, that insist in wanting to have “their” money.

Mónica Ariño: next step?

EM: Making people aware of the faustian bargain, of what’s been done with their lives without their consent and in constant secrecy. So, what’s the programme of the revolution? The first step is won: free software is a real possibility. Next step is the deterioration of media control, ISPs (“the switches”) control, etc. We have to end the ownership of culture. We have to end network operators. We have to reach an advanced step of development with the ability of every citizen to send and receive information in equal conditions.

Carlos Alonso: how do we spread this ideology all over the rest of socioeconomic sectors… and in a brief period of time (not in 200 years, like the industrial revolution)? EM: There’s a good amount of products and services that are produced at a non zero cost but copied, distributed and consumed at zero cost. So the model does already work. And where products are produced at zero cost, the answer is even more valid. And if we include the long run in the equation, it does fit even better. Because, are we talking about social benefit, profit or greed?

In a seminar I imparted in January — Fostering the Information Society for Development in the Web 2.0 framework: from push to pull strategies — the case of Spain — I suggested that the most developed countries had reached sort of a threshold of installed infrastructures. Of course, this threshold could be pushed up and more infrastructures (or better and cheaper ones) could be installed, but the development of the Information Society would barely rely on that.

According to the data available, I wondered whether the solution might be shifting from push to pull strategies, parallel to the shift that we’ve been living in the web landscape towards the so-called Web 2.0.

This is the chart I then presented:

[click to enlarge]

Now, with data from the World Bank we can draw another picture that seems to back my ideas — or, at least, I’ll make it fit to them.

Finland and Ireland have usually been examples of best practices in benefiting from ICTs to foster their respective economies and welfare. Even with different cultural frameworks, development models and economic approaches, they are both doing well and are a recurrent example. Spain, on the other hand, is the typical example of the “wannabe”: is doing quite well at the economic level, but the development level of its Information Society seem never to take off.

Let’s compare their respective indicators:

ICT indicators comparison between Spain, Finland and Ireland (source The World Bank)
[click to enlarge]

The right side of the chart — including the indicators at the top and bottom — could be considered as infrastructures. All three countries do more or less equally, though Ireland performs sligtly better and the availability of bandwidth is worse in Spain. We could consider also “infrastructures” (human capital) TVs and newpapers, and I guess the inequalities and preferences of each country are quite correlated with their respective educational levels: more newpapers, better education; more TVs, worse education.

But the interesting part is the left part of the chart.

First difference is intensity of use, were Finland does better, though it has worse prices, so affordability, in these cases, does not seem to be the explanation.

What about the other three indicators? Investment (one dare think of R&D to create content and services), intensity of use at businesses (maybe related with possibilities of e-commerce, e-business, B2B, B2C, etc.) and availability of e-Government Services. In other words: demand generating initiatives.

So, it seems that with similar infrastructures, it is demand driven strategies the ones that seem to foster the development of the Information Society. The analysis is quite simple and is not flawless, but all evidences seem to be slowly converging towards the same conclusion.