I’ve talked about RtN before. It’s a group of people who are uncomfortable about the extent of control of the Net being exerted by governments and companies, and who want to do concrete things to imp roe the situation. This last point is the kicker – anyone can yell a bit, but doing actual projects is a lot harder. We are trying to the use the features of the Net that have made it so successful, its openness and its innovation culture, to find ways to do things more freely.

The bar camp is for people to come and contribute ideas, meet some fantastic people, and just maybe get energized enough to actually do stuff. There will be sessions through the day starting at 10am (best get get there a bit early) and going on until an after party, starting around 4:30.

There are going to be some very cool people there. And, you never know, we just might make a difference! Come if you want to be part of that.

It’s easy to lament these things. It’s more fun to do something. A group of us are running some projects under the heading Retake The Net to try to put some power back into the hands of ordinary users. Yes, you and me. Retake the Net is putting together a Bar Camp for 29 October 2011.

The project I’m most closely associated with is called the Policy Auction. (That’s a working title and it will change when we launch.) The basic idea is to provide a platform where people can promote policies – things they think the gummint should do – and put up real virtual currency against them. Hence the auction. Maybe it will make a splash – that’s the general idea. And the timing right before an election is no accident.

About half a dozen people are giving up their time to build this thing, and it’s going to be very cool. But not as cool as it would be if you helped, too. We want to hear from Java geeks, visual designers and comms folk.

There’s a meeting of the Retake The Net crew at Betty’s in Wellington tomorrow night (3rd August). I do hope to see you there!

Incidentally, it’s really good to see a major political party actually trying to develop policy in the open on the Internet. I’d love to see them both doing it. Where are you, National?

I wrote a comment on the Red Alert blog trying to explain what I think statements like “Broadband is a Human Right” mean. Here’s an expanded and tidied up version.

Human rights are in some sense a legal fiction since there is nothing in physics or evolution which guarantees them. Rather, they are a way of agreeing a minimum set of standards to dealing with each. So arguments like “show me where Einstein, the Bible or the US Constitution says this” simply don’t address the issue.

However, human rights have shown themselves to be a good way of thinking about how we relate to each other. The UN Declaration of Human Rights (commonly thought to have been drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt) was put together in the late 40s while the world was still reflecting on the treatment of the Jews and other minority groups in Nazi Germany. (Subsequently Stalin and Mao also treated whole classes of people like this, but their nations did not sign up to the notion of human rights.) Setting human rights as a basic standard of treatment of individuals provides a benchmark by which people can measure their governments.

There is an argument that says agreeing to human rights such as freedom from unjust imprisonment is qualitatively different to saying that access to a good or service like food or broadband is also a human right. We can agree that killing people is wrong, but to some it’s a further step to say that you should feed someone who would otherwise starve.

My perspective on this is that human rights are part of the way which we mutually agree to treat each other. I don’t think it would be acceptable for people to starve or freeze to death for lack of food or shelter and I’m happy to give up a proportion of my resources to ensure that. The actual job of distributing those resources is outsourced to the state. So, to me, extending the language of human rights to the basic necessities of life is entirely appropriate.

The question we are now facing is whether access to broadband can be seen as a human right. You can certainly argue that people should have the right to participate in society and the the economy, and I can cheerfully assert that broadband will soon be essential for those things if it isn’t already. So, the question is whether participation in society and the economy is a human right.

It seems to me that these things are real human rights. We are social creatures who can’t survive without the assistance of others. Cooperation is a major distinction between us and animals. If you accept this, then refusing to guarantee access to the tools required to participate is effectively condemning some people to lives of isolation and alienation.

This is nothing to do with whether services that we think should be human rights are provided by the state or by the private sector. And it doesn’t compel providers to serve any given individual. What it does is provides a spur to government to ensure that everyone gets access. Whether government deals with that through regulation, subsidy or direct provision is up to it.

To sum up: I think there is a real case for regarding broadband access as a human right. I’m delighted to see Finland – a country with a great many similarities to New Zealand – legislating for this. Will New Zealand follow suit?

UPDATE: Lawyer and smart person Guy Burgess wrote about Internet as a human right last month. And Juha Saarinen, who speaks Finnish (of course), has commented on what the Finnish government is really doing.

Subsequently I met Anni and Michele of Digitalbrand, who were contracted by Microsoft to run the session. They had recently run something similar for Microsoft in Canberra, and a couple of New Zealand government people had gone over for it. We talked a lot about the difference between a self-organising informal unconference and a formal conference with a set agenda and speakers.

This was certainly not the first informal session to be organised around open government data in Wellington. There have been several self-organised bar camps and there will presumably be more. The government folk and the open data types are used to just rolling up their sleeves and making these things happen. So, we were slightly amused and a little nervous to see how a large corporate would approach the notion.

The day before the session I met with the organisers again, and with Julian Carver of Seradigm who had just allowed himself to be talked into chairing it. It became clear then that there was a tension between the un- and the conference, and Julian spent a lot of time working out how to manage this.

I should say at this stage that my respect for Julian, already high, has gone up hugely. It was controversial that he even accepted the job of chairing (which he did pro bono). Nevertheless he put all his formidable talents into the planning and the day itself. His performance was stellar.

And so on to the day itself – today, although it seems longer ago. There was indeed the the tension between an organised agenda and an unconference-style self-directed group. This was partly managed by calling for lists of topics before and during the session, then self-selecting into breakout groups to brainstorm these topics and report back. Of the attendees I spoke to, some seemed uncomfortable with the informal part of the day, and others with the formal part, so perhaps a balance was a reasonable thing to attempt.

Many of the formal presentations were very good. Hamish McArdle of the NZ Police, Minister Steven Joyce and the idea-per-second Glen Barnes stick in my mind. There was a panel discussion which was probably the best run of any such I have seen. (I did say that Julian was good at this.) And there weren’t any presentations coming in over Skype, video feeds or other potential technical nightmares. But, most of all – especially – there wasn’t any selling. Product and specific technology did not get mentioned. That was good for several reasons, perhaps the most trivial being that Oliver and I had an agreement in advance that he would have to supply me with a beer immediately for delivery offsite if selling occurred. I didn’t collect on that one.

The break out groups produced some interesting material, although a lot of it was reasonably anodyne. It’s clear that there is great enthusiasm to open government data – the NZGOAL framework at SSC is an example – and external encouragement isn’t needed, although welcome.

I was concerned by the output of one group which evaluated open source software as a key plank of open data – it concluded, perhaps predictably, that OSS wasn’t necessary for open data or even fit for government’s purposes. After all, who are you going to sue if it goes wrong? And do people know how much investment commercial software houses put into their products? These rather tired points have been rebuffed many times and no-one saw the point in doing so again at the meeting. That was the prompt for my acerbic tweet Microsoft unconference decides open source no good. Film at 11.

To me, the self-serving bit about the alleged unsuitability of open source was the only serious fly in the ointment on the day. The rest was at least neutral and often worth while. But, the intended beneficiaries of this day were the government folk who are opening up data as part of a move towards more open government, so I asked a few of them how they thought the day went. “Mixed” was a typical response. Like the curate’s egg, said one (hence the title of this post).

My overall conclusion here is that there was an attempt to make an elephant dance, in that Microsoft did at least try to run a session with a fluid agenda. Anything could have happened. The day was sell-free and mostly free of the kind of rancour which has poisoned Microsoft’s relationships with open source and open data people over the last few years. Politely, no one mentioned OOXML, and even when Clare Curran expressed her frustration that the Select Committee’s clear view on disallowing software patents has yet to reach some quarters, she refrained from rubbing the host’s corporate nose in its own support for software patents.

For Microsoft I suspect this was a walk on the wild side. Good on them at least for trying something. From the government’s – well, many of the government folk involved were well-used to informal bar camps. The bar campers wanted more informality and the others felt happier being lectured. From the open source, open data and general “want to help” types such as yours truly – the day gave an opportunity to spread the message wider.

To repurpose an old Data General ad: People are saying that Microsoft’s entry into open government unconferences will legitimise the field. The bastards say: welcome!

Two years ago I went as part of the New Zealand delegation to a meeting in Geneva called to determine the fate of a proposed new ISO/IEC document format standard, called colloquially OOXML or Office Open XML. Despite its name this standard had nothing to do with the OpenOffice word processing and spreadsheet program – which, in fact, uses a well established ISO standard format called ODF. Rather, OOXML was a an entirely different format invented by Microsoft for use by its Office 2007 suite.  Microsoft was very keen that OOXML be made an ISO standard, taking a full page ad in the Dominion Post claiming all kinds of benefits, including, mystifyingly, “provid[ing] choice about which software we use to exchange to documents” and “fostering innovation”.

The OOXML specification weighed in at 6,500 pages. At the time of the meeting in February 2008, national standards bodies had already voted not to standardize it. Their objections covered a huge range of technical problems with the standard, concerns that the standard might be encumbered with patent claims, and a view among some that setting multiple standards for the same thing would hinder the ability of people and businesses to swap documents between different word processors. The meeting I went to was intended to deal with the technical concerns.

By the time we arrived at the meeting 1,500 pages of changes had been proposed to the draft standard. The meeting, which had about 50 countries with an average of three attendees each, then tried to work its way through these changes to see if they could ‘fix’ the technical problems in the draft standard. Needless to say, it didn’t get a long way through and ended up voted to accept a lot of the proposed changes en masse.

I don’t want to imply that the people in the meeting didn’t work hard on that draft standard. We put huge effort into trying sort out its problems. One thing the meeting did was to split the draft standard into two streams, called “transitional” and “strict”. Transitional corresponded pretty much to the original 6,500 pages with its long list of technical problems. Strict included many of the changes in the 1,500 pages of changes and more stuff that we put in during the meeting. Things like accessibility for blind people. There was a lot. It was understood that software should support the strict version (i.e the improved version) of the standard as soon as possible, and the transitional version was just there to get through the next year or so.

Regarding the other two problems of patents and multiple standards: the international standards bodies ISO and IEC said that Microsoft had assured them that were no patent issues and they accepted that. ISO/IEC also said that multiple standards for the same thing weren’t a problem in themselves.

After the meeting and the assurances from ISO/IEC, national bodies had a chance to change their votes. Some did, and OOXML became an ISO standard. End of story.

But, perhaps not. Flash forward to 2010. Many Microsoft Office users now use OOXML document formats. These are the files called .docx and .xlsx saved by Office 2007 and 2008 that older copies of Office can’t open without special plugins. They aren’t saving in the standardized versions of OOXML, but Microsoft assured us in 2008 that with the next release of Microsoft Office they will be. There are formatting problems interchanging files with OpenOffice and other suites, but since Microsoft has such a high proportion of the market this only annoys the few people who dare to use anything else.

So, business as usual. And at least we have a standard, and hopefully competing software will eventually catch up with it. Except for two things: during the meeting in Geneva Office 2007 was brand new. Now the next version – Office 2010 – is coming out in beta around now and it won’t support saving documents in strict OOXML. Just the transitional version with its huge list of technical problems. Sure, it can read strict OOXML, but since nothing saves strict OOXML this is not terribly useful. Microsoft says to wait for the next Office release if you want to save documents in OOXML. That’s going to be two to three years away. For now and until at least 4 years after that meeting, nothing can save OOXML – the standard is purely theoretical.

A lot of people sweated blood to improve OOXML, but it looks like they needn’t have. The meeting in Geneva need never have happened, although of course countries would never have voted for OOXML to be standardized if it hadn’t.

The independent chair of that Geneva meeting, Alex Brown, is clearly very disappointed about the outcome, two years down the track. He now has this to say:

I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced today,
that the division of OOXML into Strict and Transitional variants was
the innovation which allowed the Standard to pass. Enough National
Bodies could then vote in good conscience for OOXML knowing that
their preferred, Strict, variant would be under their control into
the future while the Transitional variant (which – remember – they
had effectively rejected in 2007) would remain purely for the purpose
of accurately specifying old documents.

In other words, the basis on which some countries changed their minds and voted for OOXML standardization turns out not to be real. At least, not yet, two years and another Office version down the track.

And there’s another problem. Remember the concerns about potential patents over OOXML that that ISO/IEC said was a non-issue? It seems that another company called i4i has been suing Microsoft for patent violation on a core part of OOXML (they call it “Custom XML” – it was one of the selling points of OOXML) from the get-go. Some XML specialists are saying that the i4i patent is silly and should never have been granted. Maybe. But it’s won twice in court now. That effectively prevents developers from implementing it, making the standard useless.

This patent suit was filed in March 2007. It had been extant for almost a year early 2008 when ISO/IEC were assured that there were no patent issues. That was the assurance they passed on to us meeting participants. Where does that leave the standard now? According to ISO/IEC:

If, after publication of the standard, it is determined
that licenses to all required patents are not so available, one
option would be to withdraw the International Standard.

I wonder if that will happen?

This whole business leaves me wondering why and how so many people, companies and governments were induced to invest so much effort into the whole thing.

In a Sex Pistols live recording somewhere in my CD collection, Johnny Rotten snarls into an open mic: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” I’m guessing that the world’s standards bodies feel that way right now.

I’ll leave the final comment to Alex Brown:

it seems to me that without a change of direction the
entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Quite. Can anything save OOXML?

ACTA has the potential to change the way we use the Internet and to prevent future innovation on it. It’s hard to say for certain, because the draft texts are secret, To be fair to the New Zealand negotiators, they have (if the leaks are to be believed) argued to reduce ACTA’s impact – its collateral damage – on everyday use of the Internet. And they have asked some specific questions about what they should be trying to negotiate.

I’d like to suggest that as many people as possible send in a submission, even if it’s just “do not on any account agree to anything which would make ISPs liable for something they can’t control”. But ideally, take 20 minutes, review this page, then send your arguments and views to trademarks@med.govt.nz by close of business tomorrow.

To the ACTA negotiators: I bid you welcome. I hope you enjoy our lovely city (hilarious video), and that you take a few days or weeks to explore some more of our beautiful country. You will find most New Zealanders to be warm and friendly people who love to show New Zealand to visitors.

I’ve railed against many aspects of ACTA before – especially the secrecy around it – but that doesn’t change my desire as a proud New Zealander to welcome guests to our country. I’m sure all New Zealanders involved in the wider ACTA debate will agree with me.

That brings me again to the disingenuously-named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, whose contents the public are not allowed to know even though our governments are rushing headlong to sign up to it. It’s clear that this treaty isn’t just about physical goods, but contains a significant section about the Internet.

Make no mistake, the provisions of ACTA will require its signatory governments to limit people’s freedoms. There wouldn’t be any point to it otherwise. And, even though ACTA has been under negotiation since 2008, we still don’t know what’s in it! So, we have the unappealing spectacle of a collection of mostly democratic governments negotiating away their citizens’ rights without letting those citizens know what is being talked about.

Those who promote ACTA say that there’s a lot of information publicly available. That’s a curious kind of ‘available’ from where I’m sitting. We don’t have the draft text. On the basis of leaks, we believe it contains provisions to cut off people’s Internet similar to those rejected after public protest in New Zealand.

Some governments are providing information on ACTA by public briefing. The New Zealand government recently provided a face-to-face briefing to selected people. There weren’t any media in the room, and they wouldn’t allow people to blog or tweet. That seems to be a common requirement around ACTA. Someone who tried to tweet in a recent Mexico ACTA briefing was thrown out by security. Claims that the text of ACTA is no more secret than other trade agreements have been shown to be rubbish. Even the EU Parliament is demanding transparency.

Unsurprisingly, it is only the general public, the ones whose rights get curtailed, who don’t get to see the draft treaty. Industry lobbyists – those who stand to benefit from restricting people’s freedom on the Internet – have a process for getting hold of the text under strict non-disclosure agreements. Cynics might suggest that it’s those lobbyists who are driving the treaty in the first place. It’s no wonder, really, that those who would curtail everyone’s freedoms don’t want us to see that coming before it’s too late. If citizens knew what their governments were doing the treaty they might pressure their governments to get it thrown out.

Maintaining secrecy so your citizens can’t find out what law you intend to pass until it’s too late is a breathtaking abuse of process. Citizen access to the law-making process is part of the social contract underlying modern democracies. Breaking that is just plain wrong, and I’m sure most legislators know that. More pragmatically, pushing through anti-citizen laws under the cover of secrecy can only lead to further undermining the trust of governments by their citizens and disengagement from the political process. It won’t pass unnoticed that the nations can come together and fail to make a meaningful agreement about climate change but they can happily work away in secret to agree to advantage an industry at the expense of everyone’s freedoms.

I’m going to finish with another American quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.

When I was writing this presentation, what struck me most was that the values that have made the Internet successful – openness, thrift, lack of centralised ownership – are exactly those you find in community organisations. It’s no coincidence that the Internet grew to dominate the online world, rather than the privately-owned Compuserve or Prodigy.

I’m hoping to meet a lot of engaged and enthusiastic people at the session today. Perhaps I’ll see you there!

In the more widely published of the two announcements, the Whitehouse has gone to the free and open source Drupal content management system, replacing the commercial one installed some years ago. All the Whitehouse websites including whitehouse.gov have been changed over.

There are stories like this one about the move all over the web. The reasons the Whitehouse staff give are that they are moving to modern, state-of-the-art platform that will allow them a lot more flexibility in how they engage with citizens. They also expect greater security of the software through the open source development model.

In the other story, the US Department of Defense has just issued a policy statement (pdf) telling all its component parts that they should be seriously evaluating open source alternatives. The reasons they give are reduced cost of ownership (well, d’oh!), better security, and that the ability to modify the software gives them the chance to alter it to meet their changing needs.

The DoD also takes aim at that hoary old chestnut, the notion that the GPL might somehow force a company that was was altering free software for its own internal needs to republish the resulting source code. The company can chose to do that, but it absolutely doesn’t have to, unless it wants to distribute software outside the organization.

The real story here is not that open source software is being more widely used, and used by some famous and influential people. It’s that free software released under the GPL – as Drupal is – is more than acceptable for government work; it’s positively encouraged for its low cost, high security, and flexibility.

To close – I’ll alter a slogan published by Data General when IBM entered its main market:

People are saying that the US Government’s endorsement of free software will legitimise it. The bastards say: Welcome!