ICTlogy

Keynote Speech: Tim Berners-Lee

The Web is about people — enabled by technology —, that create networks by linking. Linking is a conscious act that can be analysed: the Web Science Trust is aimed at scientifically analysing how the Web is build, what are the consequences of this or that link, how are people related by means of linked content.

Getting the Internet is not only about getting connected, but about being potentially able to access all good things of life.

It is very important to get people do things locally. It is not about localizing foreign content, of importing services… it is about people doing things home, about people blogging, chatting, being themselves on the Net and doing things. Development starts with local capacity. It is about local ownership, low cost bandwidth and low bandwidth-demanding communications, about local content again and again.

If open data are good for developed countries, why is there no more people pushing for open data in developing countries? It is in developing countries, with usually lower quality democracies, where transparency and accountability are more required. And this includes several activities that developed countries’ governments and international organizations perform in developing countries too.

Open data is about:

• Put the data on the website.
• Data is structured and is machine readable.
• Open format and metadata: XML, RDF.
• Data is linkable, with a unique resource identifier.
• Link your data to provide context.

Indeed, open standards are key not only for government data, but for many other data like education and all ICT-enabled learning, or all business solutions, especially in developing countries where costs of ownership and costs of technological change may be much higher than in more competitive economies.

We still think of mobile phones as mainly voice devices. Data (data plans) are an add-on, you have to ask for it and, of course, pay extra for it. Notwithstanding, having data on the phone is a huge leap forward. Being able to transmit data, easily, quickly, ubiquitously should be the norm, not the exception. And, in fact, this has become technically possible at derisory costs in comparison with the past. Freeing (actuallly) low bandwidth Internet access would trigger the demand without putting at stake the sustainability of the network or of the Internet Service Providers. Mobile data plans should be free for everyone.

And what is incredible in this field is how everything integrates. And when it comes to the Internet, all countries are developing countries.

Discussion.

Q: Major shift in the Web in the following years? A: Mobility and much more data. The Web as a platform will definitely beat desktop/laptop computing power.

Q: What are the limits of Open Government? Wikileaks? A: Open data is actually data that the government has decided to make public. Then, we have to differentiate between transparency and privacy and (required) secrecy or stealing data. How do we define those concepts and what are their boundaries that is a difficult to answer question. Probably there’s both the need for secrecy and the need for a whistleblower.

Salma Abbasi: who’s to decide what is or what is not to be disclosed on the Net? Who’s to rate the content on the Net? A: Everyone should be able to rate the content they find on the Net. On the other hand, you can hire someone/some service to do that for you. So the default should be “all available” and let each one decide what is for them or for their children.

Douglas Namale of Map Kibera asking question of Tim Berners-Lee on internet content & governance

Ugo Vallauri: What is the future of the mobile web, beyond what we just see now in most mobiles? Stéphane Boyera: We are seing, at the same time, a boost of a mobile Internet and a tethering of the Internet in mobile apps and mobile app stores (e.g. iPhone apps). Berners-Lee: the thing is that the backbone is not closed, tethering is not mandatory. Open standards will allow anyone, any device to use specific data or a specific application. So, we have to encourage an open mobile web.

Richard Heeks: openness, transparency and accountability… where is the responsibility to be put? Stéphane Boyera: we have to begin with openness first, open nets is the first step. This will disclose lots of possibilities for people to perform actions upon those open data. Tim Berners-Lee: The value of presenting data open itself is very high. And the possibility to mash them up is incredibly interesting.

Q: What is the future of the Web with concepts like the Internet of things, augmented reality, the semantic web, etc.? A: The future is linked data. It does not seem that it will happen outside of the web with new languages different from the markup languages (or their evolutions) that we have now. So the web may change radically, but the essence of linked data will remain.

More information

Tim Berners-Lee: The 5 Stars of Open Linked Data.

Tim Unwin’s photos of the keynote.

I have recently been involved in both a project on citizen participation and participation at the University. Not surprisingly — to me at least — both projects share much more than what they differ on. Indeed, they both share a very similar infrastructure:

• They are both initiatives of the public sector (in Spain, private Universities are really a minority).
• They both provide core services that have a central source and whose reliability is based on the legitimacy of that source.
• They both address a large community that is interested not only in getting those services, but in participating in their design, including the transparency and accountability of the whole process.

The central source and need to certify the information generally goes in the opposite direction of participatory design and engagement. The former asks, naturally for centralization, the latter for decentralization.

The fall of transaction and replication costs (the two big constrains of the industrial revolution) make it possible to separate management from participation. It’s like if you could have a football game being played in every player’s living room while still being able to have a game and keep an up-to-date scoreboard and stats.

But, as said, centralization attracts both management and activity to your own platform (the learning management system, the government’s portal), while participation centrifuges activity out to social networking sites.

Simplifying things to the max, my landscape now looks more or less like this (please understand Management in a non-restrictive way):

Education

Government

In my opinion, there is enough evidence that centralization of participation will not work any more. Education is asking for an increasing de-institutionalization and government portals won’t get any participation just because they were built. This leaves out cases I and III as possible approaches to create strategies that try to match management with participation.

The problem with case IV is obvious to me and is about the risks of Cloud Computing which, again simplifying, are twofold:

1. The risks of security and ownership, which are still to be fully addressed and fixed by cloud service providers, and which a public service just cannot afford to leave unattended;
2. and the blurring of the institutional identity, which undermines the main asset of a public institution: legitimacy.

I thus advocate for a mixed solution of keeping your main assets centralized while externalizing all the participatory side (see case II):

• The core value stays “home”: data of the students, syllabuses, data from the government, government plans…;
• Centralized, the core information is legit, certified;
• A centralized management is compatible with a decentralized access: open API and open data provide gateways so that access can be remote but management of data still be centralized, secure, private;
• Your staff has to develop skills to outreach your target while focussing on management, which is your core;
• Your staff has to develop skills to monitor and even capitalize what’s happening outside of your platform, but without needing to interfere in off-core activity;
• Participation is not mediated by management needs or management staff, can freely emerge, and can do it where it pleases.
• And, most important, participation has the fuel to fully engage with all the information possible;
• If communication and information channels are open and work in two-ways, the (virtuous?) circle closes and the cycle starts again.

In my Predictions for Social Media in 2010 I revisited the importance of the ePortfolio and the institutional website. As I there said, I plead for the construction of the (e-)portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.