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.

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!

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!The speakers were at the top of their game. Scott McCloud, the graphic novelist. David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay. Singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer. Many, many more. The production values of their presentations were immense. Their competence and sheer brilliance was overwhelming. People kept thanking them for coming down to New Zealand and they said: no, this *is* the premier conference – thanks for inviting us. That’s impressive for a meeting organised from scratch by a few passionate and committed people.

The attendees were smart people from all over New Zealand. Mostly Web folk with some entrepreneurs, security geeks and a few scientists. The conversations over coffee were fascinating.

It’s all still a bit of a whirl. Some impressions:

• The encouragement to get on and do something with the Web, with a lot of concrete advice on how to. Several speakers focussed on this.
• Talks from success stories, and from someone (Merlin Mann) who spent a long time confronting the fear of failure.
• Tom Coates trying to unpack what it all means, how the Web is changing our society and creating our future.
• The conference was in no way associated with Apple, but almost everyone present had a MacBook Pro or an iPad open on their laps. All the speakers had them. Apple has huge mindshare of people who care about technology.
• We were told that at one point there were 657 devices connected to the conference wi-fi. That’s way more devices than people present. Most people had two or three. Despite this, the wi-fi held up pretty well.

I’m left with a huge amount of material to read. I stopped taking notes after a while and decided to rely on the crowdsourced notes taken by others in the meetings and loaded directly and collaboratively into Google Docs. You can find them here.

I need to thank the organisers for doing such a stunning job, for bringing such cool people together, and most of all just for creating such a thing of beauty.

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.

“Content is king!” cried the first wave of entrepreneurs who saw the Internet. It didn’t turn out that way. There are staggeringly successful tech companies out there – Google, Microsoft and Apple come to mind as the front runners – but they don’t make a living by selling content. Whatever that is. Just try asking any newspaper proprietor. And remember what happened to the marriage of AOL and Time Warner?

There are two ways to generate money of intangible sales – content, if you like – which you might call “bespoke” and “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap”. And, of course there is a range in between. Bespoke would be a high-end magazine like the Economist, or a book like Encyclopedia Britannica, which try to cater well for a small but wealthy market. One of those is still around, but I haven’t heard from Britannica for a while. Piling them high would be Microsoft, or even Apple, which produce endless copies of things that people will pay for. (Yes, I know Apple makes excellent hardware, but its that married to its software which sells the product.) Google is somewhere in the middle, but it has two clever innovations: to automate a very personal search experience and to find a third party to pay for it all in the form of advertisers.

One problem with selling knowledge is that you have *not* to deliver that knowledge to people who don’t pay. Not only does this irritate the non-payers, who will often ways to get the knowledge anyway, but it also reduces the overall size of the economy because people don’t get knowledge that might benefit their businesses.

But the key to the Internet is open sharing. Internet protocols are open in the sense that you can download the for free and implement them if you are able. Google makes almost all its services available online for free (to the users). Wikipedia – do I need to go on? These services have permitted the Internet to become a truly vast knowledge exchange – for free. And that’s what drives its expansion and usefulness.

How does that play out for New Zealand? It lets us have a tech sector which has to compete with the rest of the world. It would be nice if we had as large a natural competitive advantage in tech as we do for milk and tourism, but its hard to argue that we do have that. But, we still grow some great companies, partly due to our reasonable if patchy business Internet infrastructure. We can pat ourselves on the back a little and praise our tech entrepreneurs and developers who make this happen. What we mostly aren’t making money from is building barriers to prevent people from accessing knowledge unless they pay. And that’s a good thing.

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

This is an article about how we, the human species, deal with finite limits. There are finite resource limits all around us but, because they are large, we tend to ignore them. When we come up against limits we need to find a way to allocate the limited sources. We have a name for the study of resource allocation: economics.

It’s fashionable – and I’ve been guilty of this myself – to rubbish economics as the “dismal science”, or as a collection of fantasies about human motivation that have to be taken as an article of faith. Douglas Adams was merciless when describing a non-existent place as a “fantasy that people tell their children about at might if they want them to grow up to become economists”. Even the great economist JK Galbraith said that “economics is important, but chiefly as a source of employment for economists”. Some economists couch their results in highly mathematical language which, some might say, conceals the underlying fact that people just don’t behave in the way that economists assume they will. There’s little doubt that academic economics has been used to justify ideological prejudices with bad outcomes for many people.

Even so, there are many useful truths lurking in the economics syllabus. One of them is about how we behave when there are a mixture of public and private resources. It’s called the Tragedy of the Commons. Let’s try a little thought experiment: you live in an Scottish village about three hundred years ago. You and all your neighbours are small farmers. You feed your family through agriculture, maybe a few sheep and cattle, and you trade your surplus for the things you can’t grow. You and your neighbours each have a little land that was left to you by your fathers, and there is some common land that is available for all villagers to use as they wish. Which land do you graze your animals on?

A second’s reflection should convince you that you should graze your animals on the common land until it’s completely grazed out, then switch to using your own land. And that’s what happens, of course. Unless some kind of authority – a village council say, or a local lord – regulates access to the commons, that land becomes rapidly degraded and not fit for use. This is the tragedy of the commons – that without some controls, a finite resource gets overused even when other private resources are available.

We have evolved a very natural-seeming concept which deal with the tragedy of the commons. It’s called: “property”. It’s a way of dealing with the problems of finite resources. The notion is that people will look after something they own and depend upon, and that by enforcing property rights they can keep others from overusing it and degrading it. That’s quite important – this only works if you can prevent others from using it. There are other ways – a third party like a state or a local lord can hold the land in trust for all and allocate access to it on some basis it determines. You’ll notice I have just described capitalism and communism respectively – these both stand or fail for other reasons, but they are valid ways of protecting a finite resource.

Returning to our thought experiment – the poor use of the commons was a real problem, and what tended to happen was something called the enclosures, in which subsistence farmers were forced off their land which was sequestrated by big landlords. It happened most recently in Scotland and Ireland, but it also happened in England some centuries earlier. It was horribly unjust, but it did lead to far more efficient use of resources, partly because it allowed land to be better managed, and partly because it gave economies of scale – one tractor can cover a lot of land – and of scope, where it makes sense to grow the things you are good at and trade them for the things that others are better at. Without that, none of us in New Zealand would ever eat a banana.

It also helped us avoid the Malthusian catastrophe. In the mid-nineteenth century Thomas Malthus predicted dire starvation around the world. He did this by projecting the population increase and noting that it would overwhelm the food supply. In fact, the food supply has increased geometrically along with the population, due mainly to improved agricultural technology – and that wouldn’t have been possible without large-scale ownership of land.

There’s a much more brutal example of the tragedy of the commons – Easter Island. Everybody knows Easter as the island covered in stone heads. How they got there is quite amazing. Easter is very isolated. It’s about five hours flying time from anywhere. It’s not a big island – from the top of the largest hill you can see the sea all round.

Easter was settled by Polynesians a few centuries ago. At the time it had a very poor biota, no grass for instance and very few edible plants. The people mainly ate a diet of fish.

As is common in Polynesian societies, the settlers were divided into iwi, each with a ruling family and a chief. They vied with each other for prestige, or mana. The way in which you got mana for your iwi was to construct statues of your ancestors, from the plentiful volcanic rock, and – this is important – move them to the coastline where they could face the sea. The only way to move them from the quarry where they were made was by using tree trunks as rollers.

There are quite a lot of the statues, called moai, on the island – hundreds at least. They are pretty big, ranging from two to four metres tall. Moving each of them would have consumed the trunks of many trees. You can see what would have happened – the islanders used all the trees, which led to a disaster. Suddenly they had no way to build boats which they needed to catch fish. They couldn’t just leave the island for the same reason. There was starvation, warfare and a population crash. When Europeans found the island there were very few people living on it in a poor state of health due to bad diet.

My point here is that people who cut down the last trees would have know what they were doing. They would have known that their action would lead to starvation and chaos. Yet, it was the logical course – the only sensible thing to do. The person who cut down the last tree would have said: if I don’t do this, someone else will, and we will still all starve but someone else will get the mana. Cutting down the last tree was a rational response if you had no way to protect the shared resource.

We are facing resource limits today. Atmospheric carbon, tuna and oil are all examples of things which we can only use a finite amount of per year, or in the case of fossil fuels, a finite amount ever. But, you don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to accept my main point: that we don’t have a way, as a species, of dealing with limits. There are lots of limits. Unless that is, you believe, like US Representative John Shimkus that none of these limits threaten us because God has already set out how the world will end and that a flood isn’t part of it. Scary, isn’t it. But he rather proves my point. You only need some, a few, one person or country to break the deal and you are back to the Easter Island situation where the logical thing to do is cheat at the cost of the whole of humanity.

As an aside, there are many resources that are not limited. Ideas, creativity, and software are examples of things that cost nothing to duplicate, to publish, to broadcast widely. Yet we devote a lot of effort into controlling copying. Real resources get consumed trying to prevent copying things that would cost nothing to copy. We use the term “intellectual property” to cover a whole range of constructs from software patents to rights over plant varieties, yet these so-called properties don’t have the main characteristic of property – if I take your idea, instead of you losing your idea we now both have a copy. Something new has been created! In economists’ jargon, intellectual property is “non-rivalrous”. Or to quote Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Calling it property is flat out wrong.

We have negotiated international IP treaties to control illegal copying, but we have failed to negotiate treaties on carbon and tuna. We have a problem.

But, you can say, why didn’t Malthus come true? Because of technology. Technology has got us into these scrapes; it can get us out. Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. We have a variety of limits we are running up against and we don’t have a social or economic mechanism for managing them. People use the term “voodoo economics” – what we are really seeing here is more like “Cthulhu economics”.

What options do we have to deal with the finite limits we are increasingly hitting? Here’s a few:

1. World government – unlikely to be popular just about anywhere. See how even a small transfer of power from the UK government to the EU is resisted. And, can you imagine the US signing
2. Space travel – could be good for two reasons, one because it can bring resources back to our planet, and the other because it can get some people off the planet to start wrecking a new one. Unlikely again because even getting to Mars would cost a quarter of the Iraq war budget and I don’t see anyone paying that.
3. A treaty and a protocol that applies to all resource limits as they become an issue. Good luck with that, but it may be our best hope.

Postscript: to read more about this, start with Jared Diamond’s excellent Guns, Germs and Steel. And think!

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!

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.

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.

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?