scriptie-melle-gloerich-online-participatie

The era we live in is called the information age. In this age creating information, and transferring it, are the most important thing we do in our (working) lives, compared to previous era’s. In the industrial age we weren’t producing information but tangible things. I don’t want to go into all the differences between those era’s, I just want to draw the background of why mobile phones are in such a central place of our lives. Transferring information is in a telephones’ DNA, it is its reason of existence.
So to answer my own question, what is so important about mobile phones as transferring information machines? It means that every type of information, because when it is digital it is all the same anyway, can be transferred. Everything that is in its essence information will someday be transferred by your mobile phone, because that’s the thing you have on you wherever you are.
So let’s make a short list of what kinds of information already are being transferred or carried by your phone:

1. Voice (created and transferred)
2. (short) Texts (created and transferred)
3. E-mail (transferred and created)
4. Websites (transferred)
5. Videos (created and transferred)
6. (online) Radio (transferred)
7. Music  (carried but also transferred by Bluetooth for example)
8. (GPS) Location (created and now also transferred to internet services)
9. Calendar (created and transferred to for example Google Calendar)

And now a very short list of what is still to come and is worked on by numerous companies to get it working flawlessly.

1. Key/authentication (When will the keys or passports be obsolete?)
2. Money (it is a good time to sell wallet-factory stocks)

These two are not as easily implemented as other options because they are much more vulnerable, that’s why it takes longer. Rabobank already gave mobile payments a go, but not very successfully yet. I have never seen anyone using it, and I’ve only tried it once for the fun of it. I know South-Korea is miles ahead in this department, but my Korean lacks any identifiable Korean.

I’m really wondering what kinds of information I’ve left out in either one of the lists, but especially the last one of course.

I’d like to talk a bit about what intrigues me lately, namely how people with high positions take their decisions. We all like to think that our politicians listen to their constituency when they vote on a certain topic. We also like to think that board members and CEO’s put the company (and shareholders) first when they decide on something. Sadly, we know that this sometimes just isn’t true, but hey, what can you do?

When we agree that their official job is not their only motivation , we agree that in order to understand their choices we need a way to know what else influences them. In Dutch a literal translation of cronyism is ‘friend-politics’ which nicely stresses the way (business)friends have an impact on decision making. It is this part of the motivation that is hard for the public to know. But it using modern technologies, this is not necessarily true anymore.
A really simple tool for this could be LinkedIn. Most of the LinkedIn users publicly state their past jobs, committees, contacts, organizations, universities, etc. etc. Using this data via an API enables us to draw a map of (or list the) connections between the one making a certain decision and the one that profits from this. Adding more info based on articles by respected news sources could further complete these profiles.

Of course, it is easy to get cynical seeing all the connections but  it shouldn’t be used to proof our politicians are corrupt. A connection doesn’t proof a hidden agenda, it is only more likely and it should be investigated further. Doing that, decisions are really getting more transparent and hopefully makes it eventually harder to be corrupt or wrongly informed. This way it is actually an opportunity to be less cynical because when decisions are transparent there is no need to be as suspicious as most of us are now. Just like how newspapers can be more transparent, and more trust-worthy in a link-economy, when they show what information and from who they’ve used for every article.

One condition for all this to work properly is that every vote on every bill should be made public. A list of connections between the 30+ party members and the ones benefitting from the bill is nearly endless.

The point I’m trying to make is that nobody is original and in order to be trusted decisions should be transparent. Especially for the ones that decide on our account. Now we have an opportunity to make these decisions transparant and publicly available we should think about how we’re going to do that.

• To kick things of, here’s one of the most discussed articles in recent times: Tim O’Reilly about his ‘Web 2.0′ James Fallows explores not what Web 2.0 is but what it means. Tim O’Reilly responds and has a nice discussion on his blog about it

• A recent eye-opener was from Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School about how IT is a real game changer in business.

• Another recent article that set the blogosphere on fire for a while is ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ by Nicholas Carr which draws attention on the way we read. This is actually the article that triggered my thinking about long articles.

• Interesting insights on design by Kevin Fox who helped to design Gmail and is currently working on FriendFeed.

• Lawrence Lessig who already stirred things up with his book ‘Free Culture’ now tries to ‘Wikify’ Congress. Although I am not a US citizen (I’m Dutch), this still is interesting because it seems inevitable that something like this will take off.

• Jeff Jarvis writes mainly about how journalism and the printed press is (in need of) changing in order to stay alive in this digital world. When AP tried to bully and charge bloggers for quoting AP news snippets Jarvis nailed on what level Journalism 2.0 needs to be different, especially when it is about quoting and linking to other news outlets. Not really a long article, but several short ones about the same issue. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about the same issue.

• Last but not least, Scoble. He sure knows how to engage with his audience and still deliver interesting articles. In this bit he talks about why Technology Blogs have failed us recently and how he’s going to the root of his desire: blogging about technology, no more no less.

I plan to update or link to and from this post whenever an article comes to mind, so it might be a good idea to reply and keep posted about updates or replies. So, what do you think should be added to this list?

Ok, so I got some nice input from Yuri van Geest who pointed me to both Kevin Kelly and Bruce Sterling:

• Instead of singling out 1 article, I’ll recommend this long list of Kevin Kelly’s writings

• For a relaxing summersday at the swimmingpool, it might be a good idea to print ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ by Bruce Sterling. I like the way Amazon describes it: “It’s a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures–the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians.”

• An article I just got off Friendfeed by David Cohn who has an interesting point on how a crowd of people can sort of hire a blogger to report on a certain topic for a certain time. This allows for an article to get beneath the surface of a subject, just like good reporting in news papers.

Nothing seemed to have changed much, everybody agrees that downloading music you haven’t paid for is not very nice….unless artists like Joss Stone encourage it. So now Joss Stone says downloading her music is fine by her, is it legal? I think it’s less of a burden on our morality. If the artist says it’s okay, who am I to disagree? If artists like Nine Inch Nails are even uploading their music to bittorrent sites is downloading their songs legal or illegal? When authors like Paulo Coelho actively help you find free downloads of their books is downloading them something you can get fined or jailtime for?

What other artists are sharing their work or promote to share it freely like these artists? Maybe a list of those artists, with right next to the download button a button to buy a concerttickets is a good businessplan Or will the future only bring streaming music?

Steps you have to take to pay

1. Open a mobile wallet
2. Transfer money from your regular account to this wallet

After this you can either buy something in a (online) shop or pay friends for that last round of beers with “just one sms” (text message). This is not true in most cases, the only way to pay via just one sms already existed and you first needed to type in your account number and password ON A WEBSITE. So that’s not mobile at all unless you use your mobile phone for surfing the web. If you’re not using your mobile phone for that, it takes 2 text messages.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of your friend, the amount of money and a personal message
2. Receive a confirmation message with a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword within 10 minutes

A similar procedure need to be gone through if you want to pay in a shop, although the explanation on the website is a little ambiguous about the productcode.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of the shop, the productcode of the product you want to buy.
2. You receive a confirmation message with a productdescription, the price and a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword (within 10 minutes?)

Although it seems quite easy, how do you type in the phonenumber of your friend? I don’t know those 10 numbers. Some (read: all) phone companies recognized this problem and implemented a contactlist about 15 years ago on all of their phones. But how do I make use of that contactlist? Most phones don’t have a cut&paste functionality.

Hassles

Ok, so you’ve found out how to pay and you’re okay to pay your mobile phone provider for the text messages on top of this. You seem to enjoy paying in this new, cool way and show it off to your friends. But what’s that, you’re maxed out? Yes indeed, you have to fill up your wallet again and again, it only able to hold 150 euro’s. Seems fine for paying friends and drinks but who actually starts using it will find out this is a ridiculous limit. You don’t want to charge every couple of days, you don’t need to do that with your normal electronic payments, so why now?
This is only a minor hassle compared to the hassle somebody on the receiving side has to go through. Imagine that you receive a text message saying that you received 10 euro’s from a phone number on your ‘mobile wallet’ of which you have never heard. Hopefully the sender put in their name in the personal message, otherwise you have to work your way down your contactlist looking for that number to know who sent you money. But who puts in their name in text messages to friends? They recognize who’s message it is because their phone tells them, so lots of people will forget to say who they are.
Now you finally know who you got the text message from you need to sign up to Rabobanks SMS mobile paying site to actually collect the money. Can I show my phone to somebody at a Rabobank and will they give me my money? I don’t think so. What happens to the money when nobody collects it isn’t clear: does Rabobank keep it, is it put back in the payers ‘mobile wallet’, is Rabobank going to look for me to give me the money somebody actually gave to me?
Rabobank has to sort out these usability issues before I start to use it, and I like to think of myself as an early adopter.

The first real speaker was Jeffrey Sampler, researching at the University of Oxford, who went into explaining how IT does matter in changing the field of almost every industry. Expertise and Information half-life push most industries towards the upper-right corner of the expertise-halflife diagram. This means that industries are rapidly changing and need to update their expertise and information way quicker than they used to. Sampler suggests that looking in the rear-mirror is not a smart move when you’re moving forward at top speed.

Sampler was followed by Forrester Research vice-president Navi Radjou. Radjou said that management styles are changing and an easy way to see how, is to look at an orchestra which resembles the 20th century management style. The 21st century management style looks more like a jazz band with people listining to what’s happening, joining in, and improvise. According to Forrester Research the 5 succesfactors of Global Acting Organizations will be creativity, flexibility, efficiency, altruism and openness. Coming from Forrester he used lots of data. I’m quite sceptical of this data, interpretation is seemingly random and conclusions are both simplistic and overtly extreme. Most managers are probably loving all these statistics but my advise is to not take it all to seriously.

I attended the masterclass Yuri van Geest (Mobile Monday) presented with ‘mobile communities’ as topic. He raced through lots of developments in mobile communication and made a good point in explaning why authenticity is the new way we value things, after price/quality and availability. I thought of it as a Maslow Pyramid of product-value. Being exposed by online profiles like Facebook forces us to be authentic or we are called out on inconsistencies. Too bad he didn’t focus much and rushed through all sorts of examples.

The first seminar in the afternoon was by Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, who argued that IT is getting more and more of a commodity and not an area for competing. 150 Years back energy was a way to compete, whoever made the most efficient power generator had a competitive edge on its rivals. But when energy via electricity became a commodity that everyone could just tap into, businesses couldn’t compete on energy efficiency anymore and moved forward to their core business. This is happing too with IT, Carr says, when more and more datacentres are opened which take over functions that used to be the main job of IT-departments.
This development was charged both by computers getting more powerful in an exponential way for over 30 years and bandwith catching up the last 10 years. Now bandwith is increasing at such a rapid rate, computing doesn’t need to be local anymore. But more than IT getting decentralized this ‘cloud-computing‘ levels the playing field for IT-based businesses. Amazons S3-servers make it very easy for a small company to handle enormous amounts of computing power. Something which Carr didn’t go into, but should be included in my opinion, is that not only the infrastructure is commodified but the fundamental server software too. LAMP-technology (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) which fuels the majority of the webservers is free open-source software. As more and more business are internet oriented this also plays a very important role in the pace of innovation.
So infrastructure as well as the fundamental server software are available for very reasonable prices and don’t need big groups of experts to keep it running, something that hasn’t been the case for very long.

The second masterclass was given by Simon Phipps who has the beautiful profession of being an ‘Eclecticist’ and works at Sun Microsystem as the Chief Open Source Officer. He was unlucky to be in a room just beneath what seemed like a bowling alley which resulted in lots noise. He was very passionate about the Open Source movement and knowing that he found himself in a room full of managers he explained the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) as to keep control over where you spend money on. Instead of paying money up front for software, businesses can now try out OSS from a whitelist and pay experts to finetune it to their wishes which gives way more control and clarity to what will be delivered.

The last seminar of the day was by Patrick Morley, Chief Operating Officer at Telegraaf Media Group (TMG). This seminar was a wake-up call for all those that thought that TMG was still in the business of selling newspapers. Today that is only a very small part of what they are doing and much effort is put into reaching a public via online media like Geen Stijl. Morley talked business and focussed on how media nowadays (try to) make money. Ethics and responsibilty were no part of this.

Looking at the people that attended this day I realized how much these sorts of days are needed. I don’t think that even 1 percent of the attending people blog or understand Facebook or Hyves much. Concluding I congratulate Sogeti in making an effort to let those people realize these changes are very much needed.

Managers, this is a Digital Native without much respect to hierachy calling you out on what your job is about: Managing people in a work environment. Don’t let this day go to waste but ‘Do’ instead of ‘Think about doing’.

edit: A dutch review can be read on Frankwatching.

What’s happening here has it roots in the marginal costs of reporting since the www came around. Blogging took web-publishing to another level and allowed even the most computer-illiterate people publish their stories. The levee of ´closed source´ news reporting is going to break since crowdsourcing or wikinomics principles acknowledge that in the haystack of a few million bloggers are a few needles that are just as good or even better than official news-sites. These bloggers have all the infrastructure to reach a huge public for a few euros a month.

What I´m wondering is what the first non-official news-site will be that is not a sterilized AP aggregator but rather the result of those needles that emerge from a crowd. Sites like boing boing or Digg just don’t cut it. What will really be the News 2.0?

Sidenote: It came to me that I haven’t even considered newspapers or television to be the media where this will happen, I think that says something.

Update 10th of July 2008: Jeff Jarvis has another thought provoking post on newspapers. His point is that they should make their mind up about what they are: journalist and not a distribution network. Google will take care of the distribution and advertising he thinks. This is quite like what Princeton researches argued about the government publishing their information in XML and RSS format: The government should not be a publisher of information on fancy websites but a generator of information, let someone else take care of the publishing.