RConversation

links for 2008-07-31

• China, the Olympics and the Visa Mystery | Stratfor
  "In another two months... it will become clearer whether this was a spate of excessive paranoia or a reflection of a much more significant crisis facing the Chinese leadership — and the evidence increasingly points toward the latter.
  (tags: china olympics politics geopolitics)
• How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs « Lorelle on WordPress
  A good collection of resources for accessing blocked websites.
  (tags: censorship gfw wordpress blogs blogging freespeech internet)

links for 2008-07-30

• Royalty Fees map from Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before
  "Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom."
  (tags: copyright IP creativecommons isummit)
• China 'breaking internet freedom vow' - Asia, World - The Independent
  "The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will launch an inquiry into internet censorship in China after accusations that Beijing was failing to live up to its promises guaranteeing unrestricted online access."
  (tags: censorship china internet chineseinternetresearch olympics freespeech journalism)
• What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami - ReadWriteWeb
  "we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master." ...or what anybody can learn from him, for that matter.
  (tags: ideas literature creativity work)

Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

This is the opposite of a live blog post, despite the fact that I was listed as a live-blogger at last week's Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay (near San Francisco). I am now at the iSummit in Sapporo, which I will write about soon.  For some more timely reporting about what got said in Half Moon Bay last week, try here, here, here, here, and here.

Anyway. Since I don't live in Silicon Valley and don't visit it very often, attending the Fortune Brainstorm was a useful reminder of How "The Valley" views "The Rest of the World." It was pretty clear that the CEO's, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists whose lives and businesses revolve around Silicon Valley really do view the world in two parts: The Valley and Everybody Else - with the latter in concentric layers of tech-unsavvyness, remoteness, non-English-speaking-ness and primitiveness. There was even a session titled "What the Rest of the World Wants." As if you can generalize about "The Rest of the World" beyond the implied Valley+the U.S.+some more advanced parts of Europe, vaguely defined.  (Wish I was talented enough to draw one of those New Yorker-style cartoon maps...maybe Gapingvoid can help us out here?)

As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial."  She thinks that the Silicon Valley patrons of the Fortune Brainstorm are failing to take China seriously, and that this denial will cause them to be "blindsided" by a "truly disruptive force."

Denial? Probably. Hubris? Definitely.

I was struck by the assumption permeating many discussions at Half Moon Bay: that communications technology (mainly, the internet and mobile devices) combined with capitalism will inevitably make everybody in the world more free. Just by virtue of being deployed as broadly as possible. Thus, as these people continue to make millions, they are also saving the world. Which makes them all feel terribly good about themselves.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people at the conference with strong and admirable sense of social responsibility. A new and very worthy Prize for Technology and Development was announced for entrepreneurs whose businesses do good things for poor and/or un-free people in The Rest of The World. I attended a very stimulating session on governance run by Daniel Kauffman of the World Bank and Ross Mayfield of Social Text - both great guys doing excellent work and thinking. In that session, while much general enthusiasm was expressed about the ability of mobile phones and twitter to make people more free and politics more transparent,  we also managed to have a brief discussion about technology and corporate social responsibility, and the issues of corporate involvement with government control and manipulation of populations.

But in several sessions, when I raised my hand to push back on blanket statements made by many people about technology and capitalism being inevitable forces of good, and to insist that whether technology or capitalism make people more or less free depends on specifically how they are deployed, by and with whom, and how transparently and openly that deployment happens, my comments were met by many attendees with rolled eyes and looks of annoyance.

It was thus a relief when Joi Ito and Larry Lessig had a chance to poke holes in the thick layer of self-congratulation. Lessig predicted that the U.S. government will eventually find an excuse (perhaps after some kind of "i-9/11" attack) to clamp down on Internet freedoms in the United States - with the implication that law-abiding U.S. Internet and telecoms companies will have little choice but to go along with it (nor can we be very optimistic that Congress will let us sue these companies for helping the executive branch infringe on our constitutional rights). Joi warned that not all kinds of capitalism lead to greater freedom or spread wealth and opportunities to everybody. "The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion. "We have to do more than just run around chasing deals." (Watch a video of Joi's remarks shot by Tom Foremski at the bottom of this post.)

Which brings me to another conference held in London earlier this month which I didn't attend, OpenTech, and the keynote given by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, along with his companion series of blog posts. The talk is titled Living on the Edge. Here is the blurb summary he posted for it:

Living on the Edge (of the Network) When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? What use is a mobile phone running Apache? Does IPv6 really exist? Can we be ecologically-sound and still run our terabyte home servers? Please? These, and other whining rhetorical questions answered by Danny O'Brien, ORG founder and EFF activist.

His point is that we have come to depend way too heavily on a small number of Internet and telecoms companies to conduct the most private and intimate details of our professional and personal lives. As long as those companies have values aligned with our own and are run by people we think have integrity, we don't see a huge problem. But what if the values cease to be aligned or political circumstances change? See the video embedded at the bottom of this post. Also see the PDF and Open Office presentation file.  In one of his companion blog posts he writes:

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

..and in another titled "Independence day" he continues:

There's also a pressing civil liberty reason to start leaning back towards holding your data close to your chest. Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn't safe. Terms and conditions deny you any recourse for leaked or lost data; courts and Congress both deny citizens the protections of the Fourth Amendment for *any* data that you share with others. That even means data you expect to keep private, or have no way of keeping to yourself (the key case here is United States v. Miller, where the court decided that you have no expectation of privacy in your bank records, because you *shared them with your bank*!) So here's the question: how much of our life that we share with the Web 2.0 giants do we really *need* to share? How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?

...and finally:

It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes? We need to push our service providers to be honest, transparent and not screw us over, which is why I've been involved for the past two years in developing a corporate code of conduct for free speech and privacy (which is likely to go public sometime this Fall). But that's not enough. Power over our communications and identities is much too concentrated in the hands of people who are more accountable to v.c.'s and shareholders wanting profits than to users who want their rights and interests protected. We need to have more choices - which should include plenty of non-proprietary, grassroots, open alternatives. At the iSummit here in Sapporo, many conversations are taking place about how to build a global community devoted to incubating, nurturing and supporting services, tools, and platforms - things that will help ensure that the global information and communications environment really does continue to evolve in a freer, more democratic direction.

Videos:

links for 2008-07-29

• Basic Web Site Design: How To Start Designing Your First Blog Or Web Site - Robin Good's Latest News
  "If you are ready to start designing the "look" of your first web site or blog here are my specific recommendations on how to move in this direction. "
  (tags: tools howto newmedia webdesign teaching)

links for 2008-07-24

• China Sets Zones for Olympics Protests - NYTimes.com
  "demonstrators must first obtain permits from local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues, the authorities announced Wednesday."
  (tags: beijing olympics china freespeech)
• O'Reilly study uncovers multiple reasons for open source's impressive rise | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET News.com
  "there are at least six reasons compelling the rapid rise of open source. Agility and scale, reduced vendor lock-in, quality and security, cost, sovereignty (i.e., Local, not necessarily US-based development), and innovation."
  (tags: opensource freeculture innovation software)
• 我国博客用户规模突破1亿人关口_互联网_科技时代_新浪网
  "中国互联网络信息中心(CNNIC)今日发布《第22次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告》，数据显示，目前拥有个人博客/个人空间的网民比例达到42.3%，用户规模已经突破1亿人关口，达到1.07亿人"
  (tags: blogs blogging china internet chineseinternetresearch)
• Why Apple and China are Simply Incompatible
  "Yes, Apple must and will do business in China. But the company's pristine new Apple store masks the very messy reality of a company like Apple trying to do business in a country like China."
  (tags: china business apple ipod)
• 7?23：昆明爆炸案后续
  新名词：前瓮安时代；后瓮安时代 - media management in the post-Weng'an era.
  (tags: chineseinternetresearch journalism media china internet freespeech censorship)

links for 2008-07-22

• Global Voices Online » China: Bloggers take stand against web activist’s arrest
  Chinese bloggers agitate for the release of Huang Qi
  (tags: bloggers china internet chineseinternetresearch freespeech law humanrights cyber-activism)
• Internet regulator restructured
  "Marbridge Daily has published a translation of an MIIT document about its own internal restructuring..."
  (tags: regulation technology china internet chineseinternetresearch government governance)
• VatorNews - The Opinions of the few
  "How participation inequality blinds the wisdom of crowds and creates the opinions of the few"
  (tags: ideas internet crowdsourcing citizenmedia newmedia)

Fortune Brainstorm Tech: Hopes and fears for the future

I've just arrived in Half Moon Bay for Fortune Magazine's Technology Brainstorm conference. A couple months ago they asked us to submit the answers to three questions: 1) What is the most exciting technology innovation you've seen in the past 12 months? 2) What is your biggest hope or fear for the future, and how does tech relate to it? and 3) What should the top priority be for the next U.S. president?

Fortune Magazine's David Kirkpatrick summarized a number of the answers.  Amazingly and somewhat disappointingly, about half of the participants listed the iPhone as the most exciting innovation they've ever seen...  My own answer was excerpted in a way that obscured my main point.  I should have known better than to answer in more than one sentence.  For what it's worth, here are my full answers:

Q: Most exciting technology innovation of past 12 months?

A: To me it's not tech innovation itself but social innovation in how humans use tech. Internet and mobile technologies long boring to Silicon Valley are only getting critical mass of users in many parts of the world for the first time, and thus their use has only begun to get interesting.

Q: Biggest hope/fear for future? How does technology relate?

A: Biggest fear: instead of all societies getting more free, the freer ones and the un-free ones simply meet in the middle. Technology relates to this in terms of how people's speech and communications are censored/surveilled by governments and companies. It's a global concern.

Q: Top priority for next U.S. president?

A: Avoid hypocrisy and arrogance. Be honest that he's human, that his administration and the U.S. isn't perfect, nor is anybody else, that the people of the world need to work together to solve common problems.

The whole conference will be heavily blogged and twittered. Etc.

Ivan Sigal joins Georgia Popplewell: Global Voices has a new Dream Team

Ethan Zuckerman has done more startups than I have. I'm incredibly lucky that I launched my first one - the non-profit citizen media organization Global Voices - with Ethan nearly four years ago, and even luckier that it has so far been pretty successful. Quitting while I'm ahead, I haven't tried launching another one since..

A number of people have asked me why I - or both of us - didn't try to make full-time jobs running Global Voices. There are lots of reasons. Ethan has a book he desperately wants to write and I've got research and writing I want to do myself - work that simply wouldn't be possible while running an NGO full-time. I also felt uncomfortable with the idea of fund-raising to create a salary for myself as head of an organization I started and whose contributors are largely volunteers.

Another reason, however, has to do with knowing what you're good at and what other people are better at. Ethan and I were the best people possible to launch GV and get it off the ground.  But for running a global citizen media organization long-term, the ideal skill-sets change. We're thrilled to be handing GV over to two people whose skills and temperaments are best suited to GV's next phase, now that the start-up sprint is over and the marathon of building a sustainable NGO has begun.

In Georgia Popplewell, who was promoted from managing editor to Managing Director this spring, we have a cool-headed, efficient, tech savvy blogger and experienced journalist. She has proven that she can keep this completely virtual organization running smoothly and organized, manage all kinds of personalities and culture clashes, put out fires, you name it, all with a smile and a brilliant sense of humor. She is much beloved by the community. She has the patience and tolerance of a saint. She is our bedrock.  We can't imagine what we would have done if she hadn't stepped in to save us (me in particular) from drowning several times over the  past couple of years. Nor can we imagine what we would do without her going forward. Oh, and did I mention she is cool-headed? (It's a quality I tend to lack and thus greatly admire.)

In August, Ivan Sigal will take up the reins as Global Voices' Executive Director. A newcomer to GV, he is a veteran of the nonprofit media world after spending a decade at Internews, most recently as Regional Director for Asia and before that as Regional Director for Central Asia and Afghanistan. A fluent Russian speaker, he is also a first-class photographer, with a forthcoming book of photos and essays from Central Asia and Eastern Europe. He spent the past year as a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, researching how access to new forms of digital media affects people and outcomes in conflict-prone parts of the world. He's been writing about some of his ideas on a great new blog, burning bridge. Ivan not only brings a fresh perspective and new energy to the job, but also tons of experience in non-profit fund-raising, organizational management, and project development at a level that Ethan and I both lack - and which GV has now grown to need very badly. Plus everybody who met him at the Budapest Summit thought he was a very cool and charming guy.

Working closely with Georgia and Ivan are of course Managing Editor Solana Larsen, Rising Voices' David Sasaki, Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy, Portnoy Cheng & Leonard Chien coordinating GV's "Lingua" translation projects, and Jeremy Clarke, our "geek in chief."

It's a dream team.

Like it or not, Ethan and I won't be going away completely. Ethan is Chairman of GV's Board of Directors, and I remain an active member of that board as well - doing what I do best which, in addition to promoting GV to potential supporters and partners, primarily consists of coming up with crazy ideas and lighting fires under people's behinds from time to time...

(Photos by Joi Ito, taken at the Global Voices Budapest Summit)

links for 2008-07-19

• The China Beat: Things We'd Rather You Not Say on the Web, Or Anywhere Else
  "so long as your tongue is tied, we have no reason to bind your hands."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship freespeech)

links for 2008-07-17

• The Truth About Chinese Hackers - Bruce Schneier
  "If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of the
  (tags: hackers china chineseinternetresearch cyberwarfare)
• Global Voices Advocacy » China: Locking down IDC server rooms for the Olympics
  "on the Shanghai-based IDC GEIS technology website, we find the ‘IDC Entry and Exit Management Regulations for the Olympic Period Server Lockdown‘..."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch regulation censorship internet freespeech olympics)