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Here’s a wordle made up of the Retake the Net website. It’s not fiddled in any way; this is exactly what came out. It shows our priorities.

If you think it’s about time that individuals took back the Net for the things it can do for us and for each other, rather than leaving it to large companies and governments, join us now.

The Net used to be under the radar of governments and corporates. Then it got a lot bigger, governments paid it attention and large companies moved in. Some were beneficial, some weren’t and some were neutral. But the ethos of the individual Net user running the whole show got diluted along the way.

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!

Until Thursday, anyway. Despite the amazing Webstock conference running in my home town of Wellington for several years now, I still hadn’t made it along to one. My loss.

How to describe Webstock 2011? Compared to commercial conferences, it was head and shoulders better than any I had been to, ever. Compared to unconferences and enthusiasts’ meetings, it was way more professional and focussed. But the best description of it was one word – the adjective on the conference pencil (I kid you not) – Awesome! (more…)

It wasn’t long ago that the Knowledge Society and its brother, the Knowledge Economy, were all of our futures. Remember the Knowledge Wave conference? That was almost a decade ago now. It posited that we all had a better future if only we would stop just growing nice things and sending them offshore and focussed more on creating intangibles that we could somehow sell for money than trees, views and milk. The future was going to be one where most New Zealanders were engaged in high-earning activities rather than farming or tourism. Except that it isn’t. Sure, we have a sharply growing technology sector – I work in it myself – which is great for the country. But it’s fanciful to think that will ever displace food and wood as our number one. We just have such a good competitive advantage in that area.

Missing technology trends is not unique to the academics and business leaders who promoted the Knowledge Wave. In the mid 90s I went to a presentation to Ministers by a government department (which I won’t name to save its embarrassment) explaining how it was going to build an entire business on helping New Zealanders and the world find things on the Internet. Oh dear.
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Tomorrow I’ll be talking at NerdNite Wellington. As the title suggests, I’ll be talking to how unprepared we are to confront finite limits.

This article sets out the thinking I’ll be basing my talk on. And here is the Prezi I’ll be using.

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One year ago Finland passed a law declaring access to a broadband Internet connection to be a legal right. What does that mean? There’s a discussion of this over on Red Alert, after Jonathon Penney delivered a really interesting talk at Victoria University entitled “Open Connectivity, Open Data”.

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.

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I spent today at the Microsoft Open Government Unconference in Wellington. It was an interesting experience. On the one hand, I got the impression of a company trying to weave something from the whole “open government, open data” thread which is being spun out of a genuine desire by government folk to share things, and on the other hand there was the disconnect of trying to script the agenda for an “unconference” – a contradiction if ever there was.
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Oliver Bell has posted a thought-provoking article called Information is Currency. He and I discussed some of these ideas over a beverage or two one night in Wellington recently. Reading through Oliver’s article, I find some things to agree and others to disagree with, so I’m taking the time here to write a reflective response.

The value of information depends on several things, including its scarcity and its usefulness to the potential end-user. I’m left wondering if there is information that is inherently valueless. I can think of examples of obscure trivia, but someone, somewhere, always seems to care. It can be argued (and Oliver presumably is arguing this) that search engines monetize obscure information by using it to sell eyeballs to advertisers.

Of course, search engines don’t sell the information itself. They sell a way of discovering it. The information itself has generally already been published for free. The information has value based on the network effect, i.e. that its a published in a standard form using the World Wide Web. The search engines are very much part of this system that imputes value to freely-published information.

So, then, the monetary value of freely-published information derives as much from the great mass of other web sites, from the search engines and from the Internet itself as it does from the information.

However, I’m interested as much in what we can do with information in bulk as I am in in assigning a numerical value to individual chunks. If I write a piece of software, say, is its optimal value realized if I sell licenses to use it or if I simply publish it for others to use as they see fit without monetary recompense? The answer to that question depends partly on who recognizes the monetary value. If we look at value to the community of computer users as a whole, allowing anyone to use the software will have the greatest value. If I look at it in terms of personal revenue-maximization for that piece of software, I would presumably retain the source code as a secret and sell licences to use it on the basis of my perception of each user’s ability to pay. This applies to any information goods, i.e. things that can be copied without using up physical resources.

There are two components to value of information in the Internet age – value derived from maintaining its scarcity and value derived from making it available. Both are highly dependent on usefulness. The former is usually captured by the publisher, the latter accrues to the community.

There may, as Oliver suggests, one day be a market for all kinds of personal information. The individual worth of each piece is likely to be very low. The worth to the community as a whole of pooling its information is likely to represent the major part of its technology and its culture.

It’s my last time on Radio New Zealand National for a while, and I thought I’d use it to address some more a philosophical question than I often do. I’ve written a separate post with my ideas below.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

The Internet is an unmediated form of communication between humans all around the planet. It was designed that way and so far it has stayed that way. It’s different from the telephone, which allows targeted one to one communications, and from broadcasting which is one to many, although it does provide those as well. Through blogging, twitter, even email lists, the Internet has allowed us to build many-to-many communications systems. That’s a first.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Internet is the greatest engine of prosperity since since, say, the telephone or even since mass transportation. It allows us all to interact with people and business around the world without using up fossil fuels and personal resources in travel. It provides businesses with a customer communications channel connected directly to their back-end systems. On the Internet, life is good. And, as I have said on numerous occasions, it only got that way because the Internet is an open conduit for anything people can think of.

It has been recognized by lawmakers for years that openness is the key to the Internet’s usefulness. But, increasingly, that is coming to an end. The Chinese government routinely censors its domestic Internet and forces all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country through a giant gateway it controls. The US allows private companies to remove material placed on the Internet by third parties on accusation of copyright infringement. Australia looks likely to implement a national Internet filter in the name of pornography suppression. The UK is considering a “Digital Economy Bill” which would force Internet disconnections and filter access to websites. Even the New Zealand government is looking at a limited filtering system to combat child pornography.

All this brings me to my point: Can we, humankind, actually stand an open communications medium? One that lets all of us talk to all of us? Along with the huge list of economic and social benefits that brings? Observing the actions of government world wide, I’d have to answer “no”.

It appears that the Internet is just too open and too useful for humanity to come to terms with. Since the Internet is just a communications tool, this means that we, as a species, can’t tolerate open communications between all our members. That’s why I question whether the Internet is just too good for us, whether we deserve it at all.

But then, what can you expect from a species that can’t organize itself to operate in an environment of finite resources? There is no functioning mechanism for us to deal with global environment destruction or fossil fuel exhaustion, for instance. You don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to agree that we don’t have a way of dealing with it.

So, then, we are a deeply flawed race careering off a cliff of our own making. Does that mean we shouldn’t fight – that we should just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? I don’t think so. For me, each of us who recognizes the problems should act as best we can to hold a mirror to human activities. That means calling governments and industries when they try to hold progress to ransom. It means arguing for cooperative approaches to dealing issues that face us. It means not hiding our heads in the sand about limited resources.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. But until we at least accept the questions, neither will any of us.

How we deal with the Internet and its ability for us all to communicate will the question I posed in the title: is the Internet too good for us?