ICTlogy

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

Leads: Jonathan Zittrain, John Clippinger, Phil Malone, Bill McGeveran, David Weinberger, Wendy Seltzer

Privacy in Atlantis is a Socratic dialogue between figures called the Economist, the Merchant, the Philosopher, and the Technologist. They are gathered by the wise Counselor who must make online privacy law for Atlantis, and they argue their different positions. The result of the dialogue is that there turns out to be a lot less real difference between “market” ideas of propertied rights in personal information on one hand and a “dignity” concept of privacy as a human right on the other hand. So long as the data subject can consent to collection or use of data in both models, both models theoretically face most of the same challenges.
This session will model the Socratic dialogue of the text, and tease out the tensions presented by identity management, online authentication, and data privacy in the digital era.

Dave Weinberger: walking out the street is now an act of information […] because everything is information

John Clippinger: the citizen has the right to remain anonymous

Joris van Hoboken: How can we teach the Internet to forget some of the information about us?

Dave Weinberger: it’s not about my digital identity, it’s about my self

The Problem

people like anonymity [less scrutiny?] as they go about their lives and businesses, but

• without [accountability / identity / traceability] people can do bad things. So how to reconcile?
• people don’t like being humiliated
• people don’t like being under scrutiny
• broadcasting certain facts / images / rumors tied to someone’s identity can humiliate and embarrass them. It can also preventthem from engaging in legitimate but risible activities
• too much knowledge about someone can unfairly disadvantage him or her in a business transaction

The Solutions

• decouple unique physical identity from data
• don’t resort to regulatory solutions?
• how much do user choice/empowerment solutions rely on a high level of sophistication and engagement by people?

Doing nothing or doing something?

Dave Weinberger: we don’t know what we want until we know what we don’t want: ‘no, no, you can’t do that’

[full disclaimer: the socratic dialogue format made the session — actually split in two sessions — richest and quite difficult to freeze in the narrow snapshot of this text]

My reflections

• Digital personnae are public by definition (see Weinberger’s first quotation). But you got the right to remain anonymous (see Clippinger’s). What about separating digital from physical personnae (in all arenas)? I’d pay with my credit card which would be tied to a contract signed by a digital/administrative personna. I (and i.e. a central certificate issuer) would be the only ones to know about the liaison between my digital personna/e and myself. Anybody working on this? At the global level, I mean, not just as Microsoft’s Identity Metasystem? I guess sooner or later you would disclose one of these liaisons with one of your administrative personnae and this would be the beginning of the end.

Readings

More info

• Say Everything, Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll — New York Magazine
• Who Owns Native Culture?, by Michael Birnhack and Niva Elkin-Koren
• The Invisible Handshake: The Reemergence of the State in the Digital Environment, Michael F. Brown, Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College Harvard University Press, September 2003.
• Mentioning someone by name on a web site, by Jonathan Zittrain
• OII Day 4, by Alla Zollers
• The Privacy Non-Principle, by David Weinberger