Author: JP

Curation and the enterprise: part 2

[Note: This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Curation in the Enterprise, and seeks to develop some of the themes introduced there.]

First, a quick recap.

Machines can filter. Only humans can curate.

When a human curates, she does three things. She selects something (or things) from a larger group. She organises those selections cohesively. And she arranges to present those things in such a way that people find it easy to engage with those things.

What I thought I’d do in this post is to look at all this a little more closely, all in the context of the social enterprise.

First, let’s look at selection.

The simplest and commonest form of selection in social networks is the asymmetric follow (a phrase I first heard used by James Governor). You follow someone or something, you subscribe to that someone or something. Elect to receive updates, alerts, reports. That doesn’t mean they follow you.

This can be permanent or temporary, you can undo this relationship at will. Unfollow the person or thing. Even block the person or thing. Stop receiving updates.

The social enterprise comes into its own because you’re not restricted to subscribing to alerts and messages from people alone, you can also follow things. Projects (you receive a status update whenever there’s a change, perhaps even at data element level) bills (you get told when it’s paid) complaints (you’re informed as to where it is in the process) orders (has that order closed yet?), companies (you receive news about competitor product releases, market activity, stock price movements, the lot).

If you find that someone or something is too noisy, just turn it off. Your call.

This is social 101, since you’re able to communicate with a real community, consisting of your staff, your partners, your customers, your products and services. But that’s only the beginning.

Once you’ve selected the publisher nodes you want to subscribe to, you start getting into second gear. Of course you receive direct messages from your network, but you could argue that it’s just email fit for purpose, made to work a little more sensibly. From people you trust, from people you’d like to hear from.

But that’s only the start. You have many more powerful selection tools, based on the network, its participants and the tools and techniques available to assess the information. You can check on what’s popular…. What are your customers talking to you about? What about your partners? Your staff? Separate views, yet compressed into a single whole if you want.

An order, a blog post, a presentation, a complaint, a bill, a sales success story, a promotion, a really clever way to solve a problem, a thank you note…. Each of these in turn becomes a social object, gathering the moss of comments from all and sundry. The rich interaction is captured in one place and congregated around the object in question, simply and conveniently. Threaded mail solved some of this, but only for the contents of the mail itself. In the social enterprise, you don’t have to worry about versioning either (which presentation are you looking at? That’s not what I have on slide 3?) since the “attachment” is always the same one, held centrally.

Selection is not a one-time administrative process redolent of the desktop productivity tools of the ’80s and ’90s. Instead, it is dynamic and responsive, driven by you and your network of choice.

The social enterprise is able to vote up the importance of a topic in a number of ways: direct messages, “hotline alerts”; “re-tweeting” the update, link or post so that more people see it and can engage with it, rather than the linear paths of the past; voting or just “liking” or “thumbs-upping” something; rating it; reviewing it; just by talking about it, making the topic “trend” so that it rises to the top of the pile; raising the frequency of the words used so that they appear in relevant tag clouds; driving engagement through the use of collaborative filtering techniques (people who read this link also read…. People who tracked this complaint also did… And so on).

So the linearity of past communications styles is no longer there; non-linear, non-hierarchical, pattern-based rather than process-based communications take place instead. The likelihood that you see what is important is increased in quantum leaps because people you trust have true 21st century tools.

Just over a decade ago, I had to ensure that the bank I worked for was prepared for the euro. We’d made all the changes, tested them, run them ad nauseum. Soon we were in dress rehearsals, simulating the triple-witch of month-end, quarter-end and year-end as part of going live with the euro. [I wonder which genius chose to make the go-live at such a time…] as the cutover drew near, one of the year-end reporting suites blew up. To cut a long story short, the program causing the problem was reporting on client turnover for a company that had been shut down seven years earlier. But the reports chugged on.

Getting information in an enterprise has never been a problem. More reports than you can shake a stick at, more enquiries than the average sports ticket desk. At least nowadays the outputs are emailed rather than printed, but the emails carry the same curse. Too many of them, with haystacks of information rather than needles.

So the first job of curation is selection, and you should (by now) have some idea as to how that is made more effective.

Let’s move on to the “organisation” aspect of curation in the social enterprise. I’ve already spent a little time talking about the value of tag clouds, of collaborative filtering, of social objects gathering moss via comments and observations, about voting processes, like buttons, thumbs up and down, rating mechanisms…. All these are ways to make the selection process easier, to make the curated information more valuable, more timely, more relevant. So we need mechanisms and conventions to assist us. Not everyone likes hashtags, but some more generally accessible equivalent is likely to be needed. Simple ways of getting collaboratively filtered information have to be built in, still bearing in mind that the filter may be automated, but not the curation.

When it comes to presentation, the world of the social enterprise is replete with mobile devices, multiple devices, mobile apps and native HTML5. So the minimum requirement is that the curated information is made available to the device of choice, and in the form requested. SMS alerts where required, email alerts only when absolutely necessary (why add to the waking nightmare of too much email?) Where and when the information is persisted, archived, retrievable and searchable matters.

I’m still on vacation, sharing these “provisional” thoughts as the rest of the family sleeps. Your comments are welcome, they help me figure out whether I’m making sense or not.

My next post is going to concentrate more on the topic of how to make the curated information actionable, how to learn from what people like Esther Dyson have been saying about search.

Thinking about curation in the enterprise

[Esther Dyson, Clay Shirky, Marc Benioff and David Weinberger, people I consider as friends, have said and written things that have influenced this post considerably; the curated conversations between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, as recorded in This Is Not The End Of The Book, have also been very influential. Finally, Steven Rosenbaum’s excellent Curation Nation helped me bring all this together. Disclosure: I have co-invested with Esther in at least one company, and I now work for Marc Benioff.]

Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.

And distribution had its kingmakers: those who weeded out the vast majority of possibles and probables and selected the content that satisfied their taste, then ordered and organised that content into a cohesive whole, then made that content accessible to the particular audience that mattered.

Curators.

[For some time now, I’ve pondered about the distinction between filtering and curation, and my thoughts on the subject are as follows: curation is what happens when filtering is augmented by humans, sometimes expert, sometimes amateur, always passionate.]

Curation is not just to do with libraries and museums. As Steven Rosenbaum describes in his book, Esther Dyson curated a magnificent conference, PC Forum, for many years. And a great journal, Release 1.0; while the journal lives on, the conference, sadly, is no more.

Talking about conferences, I’m looking forward to Dreamforce next week, the annual Jamboree for those involved in cloud computing. Last year, at my first Dreamforce, a columnist from Barron’s described the event more as a political convention than a tech conference. I have some sympathy with that view, it feels like you’re part of a global movement. And that’s what Dreamforce represents, global transformation in the way enterprises drive, participate in and consume information technology.

This year’s line-up includes, amongst others, Eric Schmidt, Neelie Kroes, Vivek Kundra, Neil Young, Alanis Morrissette and Jay Leno. [You may still be able to get a free pass to the #df11 keynotes and Cloud Expo go to bit.ly/oMPVKw ]

Where was I? Oh yes, curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.

Curation is not something that is restricted to libraries and museums; people curate things all the time, all around us. Every DJ is a curator. Every reviewer is a curator.

In a networked, non-hierarchical world, every one of us is a curator. As I’ve mentioned before, I use twitter as a curation device. The people I follow have a good idea of what I’m interested in, and they make recommendations to me. Sometimes they do it via Direct Messages or DMs, sometimes through @messages others can see, sometimes by ReTweeting or RTing; one way or the other, they make sure I am made aware of the thing they want me to be aware of.

Personal social networks are powerful curation devices, a theme that has been tackled by Clay Shirky time and time again. David Weinberger adds a different twist to it in his writings, looking at the role of taxonomies and folksonomies in this context.

Which brings me on to Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views.

This action-orientedness that Esther refers to is something that Marc Benioff is passionate about, a passion that shows in the way he thinks about enterprise software. Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time.

Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms:

The Signal Booster
The Spreadsheet Jock
The Soulmate
The Sidler

The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide. Useful, but often not valuable; can’t take decisions, hasn’t got the depth of knowledge, runs the risk of exhibiting passive aggressive behaviours and operating weak vetos. A fence-sitter who works hard at joining the winning team when victory is in sight.

The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future, of being anchored, framed and constrained by the underlying assumptions, doesn’t always understand the assumptions, whether implicit or explicit.

The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO. An unfortunate and unintended consequence of Soulmate speak, as they spend time interpreting the CEO’s desires and making those desires unintentional filters.

The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.

All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.

And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise, since valuable information gets mutated, suppressed, discarded. Most of the time this is done without any malign intent, an outcome of weaknesses in the system and in the process.

If they were that inefficient, why did they exist in the first place? Probably because the structure of the firm, the culture of the people and the technology that supported them were all incapable of achieving much else. In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.

But today it’s all different. The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise. And this promise is based on a number of key characteristics:

1. The social enterprise is fundamentally based on networks of connected people, within the enterprise, beyond the enterprise into the supply chain and trading partners, and extending all the way to customers and their customers. And products and services.A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.

2. This reduces the distance between the firm and its customers, between the designer and the consumer; it simplifies the links in the supply chain; more importantly, since it is built around the concept of two-way communication, customers are themselves designers; trading partners are themselves designers. Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.

3. This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low. If you’re looking at a conversation, you can drill into the customer name or the order or the complaint or all of them. Summaries are now just forms of presentation, always with the ability to drill into the detail as required.

4. Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.

5. It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise. Real domain expertise, sometimes with letters after names, sometimes not. Peer-reviewed and peer-ranked expertise. Again something the social enterprise is designed to do. Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.

6. Talking about doing, every customer is different, every product and service is different, every problem is different, every situation is different. This makes the traditional process mindset we problem in itself: we spend enormous amounts of time handling exceptions because the process is inadequate. Processes are just not repeatable enough, the volume of exceptions is too high. As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”.

7. Which is where the social enterprise comes into its own. Because everyone can be an expert. Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.

8. Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.

The social enterprise is about bringing the learning from consumerisation and community action and applying them to an environment populated by a new generation using new technologies, social, mobile, open and cloud.

Not surprisingly, I’ve now heard Marc Benioff speak about his vision a number of times. More recently, I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.

In my next post on the subject I shall spend more time on precisely how these characteristics manifest themselves within and beyond the enterprise: Why social, mobile, open and cloud matter, individually as well as collectively.

In the meantime, comments welcome as always.

On firehoses and filters: Part 2

Note: This is a follow-up to an earlier post on the subject, written in May this year. You may find it worth the while to read that one first. But if you don’t feel like it, no problem. This post is readable standalone.

I love the very concept of publish-subscribe: if you search for the term in this blog, you’ll find I’ve written maybe a dozen posts on the subject over the last six years or so. So I thought it would be worth talking about filters and firehoses in that context.

So let me start with the three “laws” of information filtering that I laid out in that earlier post: (if you want to know why, please read the post; I’ve linked it it earlier in this post)

  1. Where possible, avoid filtering “on the way in”; let the brain work out what is valuable and what is not.
  2. Always filter “on the way out”: think hard about what you say or write for public consumption, why you share what you share.
  3. If you must filter “on the way in” then make sure that the filter is at the edge, the consumer, the receiver, the subscriber, and not at the source or publisher.

Yes, as Clay Shirky put it, we don’t live in an age of information overload; rather, we live in an age of filter failure.

So everyone’s been looking for better filters.

Which is fine.

What’s not fine is when we expect the publishers to do the filtering. Because that allows bad actors to come and spoil the party, whether they’re bad corporations or bad governments.

It’s not the job of the publisher to do the filtering. It should not be the job of the publisher to do the filtering.

But there is a job for the publisher to do. And that is to provide the tools by which subscribers can filter.

Let me expand on this. [Incidentally, when I started using Google+, I raised this issue under the guise of asking for “circles” to be built by publishers as well as by subscribers…. with some interesting discussions and comments as a result].

We live in a world of publish-subscribe, and this world has three facets.

There is an infrastructure, allowing individuals and aggregations of individuals to publish stuff, and to subscribe to stuff.

We exist as publishers, sharing stuff on this infrastructure.

We also exist as subscribers, sharing stuff on this infrastructure.

So now let me look at what I want to do as a subscriber. I want to choose whom and what I “follow” or subscribe to. Most of the time, I expect to be allowed to follow whatever I choose. Sometimes the publisher places a restriction on following, permission is needed. You may just have to ask for permission, register in some form or the other. In some cases registration alone is not enough, there is a gatekeeper who decides whether you qualify. And in extreme cases there is a paywall as well.

Subscriptions can therefore be open or closed, paid or unpaid. But they remain subscriptions. Choices made by the subscriber.

As a subscriber I now receive information. And I’d like that information to have certain characteristics. One, I want that information available to me wherever I am, whenever I am, whatever device I am using. [And I don’t want to have to pay multiple times for the same information as it goes through format transformation]. Two, I want to be able to annotate that information, add notes, tags, links, images, whatever. Three, I want to be able to share that information, via twitter, facebook, google+, chatter, whatever; as in the case of opensource licences, it makes sense that I have to share-alike, share the information with the same constraints under which it was shared with me. Four, I want to be able to filter that information very granularly: for example, I may want to follow a person on twitter, but only for her music tweets; I may want to follow someone else on Google+, but for everything but his music posts. Five, I want to be able to persist the bookmarks, tags, shares, links, pointers, whatever, somewhere, so that I can recreate, “play back”, the shared information, for a specific date or range of dates, and with specific filters.

Simple, isn’t it?

So what should I do as a publisher? Even simpler. As a publisher I need to be able to share what I share in such a way that subscribers can do what I’ve described.

And infrastructure providers have an even simpler job: all they have to do is to provide the tools that publishers and subscriber need to do what I’ve described.

For too long, we’ve kept looking at all this from the viewpoint of the publisher. The publisher in each of us has to work much harder at publishing in a way that makes it easier for others to subscribe. To filter us out when needed. To find us easily when needed. To aggregate us, synthesise us, annotate us, edit us to shreds. Platform-independent, location-independent, device-independent. As private as the information requires us to be, and no more. As public as the information requires us to be, and no more.

So when I tweet, I don’t want to restrict what I tweet about. I want to be able to tweet about food, about cricket, about etymology, about idiocy, about work, about me, about my beliefs, whatever. I want to be able to blog about all these as well. And write books about all this, speak on the topics, and so on.

And I want to be able to do all this in such a way you can find me when you want to, block me when you want to, block me by subject, block me for a time, only follow me for a narrow subset of what I do. It has to be your choice. And the infrastructure I use has to be able to do this. It has to be able to let me do all this, so that you can do what you want out of it.

Which is where the fun begins. Because you don’t think of all this as a winner-takes-all arms race. Because we don’t this of all this as an arms race where we have to choose between the Betamax of Google+ and the VHS of Facebook.

Each of us, as subscribers, will choose how and where and when we will subscribe.

Each of us, as publishers, will choose the environment and infrastructure that most suits us to do what the subscribers want.

So federation and sharing between social networks is unavoidable. A multiplicity of such networks will exist, for cultural, technical and style reasons. One size will never fit all, when we’re seven billion people.

And each social network will come with its tools for sharing, for publishing, for subscribing, for filtering, for helping filter.

For helping filter.

Which is what this post has been about. What do I have to do in order to make it easier for you to find me or block me, find this post or block it, save it or share it, add to it or shred it?

Because you will decide. You will decide whether it’s Betamax or VHS or both or something else as well.

We can only fix filter failure by providing subscribers with better filters, by providing publishers with tools that allow subscribers to filter better.

More later.

 

Private and public thoughts

I must live a sheltered life. Until about a year or so ago, I’d never heard the term “private cloud”. Perhaps I wasn’t looking for it, perhaps I’d inadvertently masked and glossed over every instance of it I’d come across. One way or the other, I hadn’t come across the term.

Which was a good thing. Because it would have confused me no end. For some years now, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the “cloud’, planning for it, preparing for it. For a variety of reasons, reasons I will come to in a later post.

But first, let me share what I think about private and public clouds. And let me start by using terms other than “private” and “public”: instead, I shall use the terms “shared” and “not shared”.

Public is shared. And private is not-shared. It’s as simple as that.

Which means, at the very least, there is an economic distinction to be made here. Let’s take planes as an example:

We have “shared” planes:

And then we have “not-shared” planes:

I’m not here to draw any moral or judgmental difference between shared planes and not-shared planes. What I am here to do is to emphasise the fact that shared planes are fundamentally different from not-shared planes, particularly when it comes to pricing and economics.

It’s not just the economics. There’s a strong sustainability angle at work here. You can share things sustainably and responsibly, but that’s not always the case. Let’s look at shared transportation as an example:

Here the shared state of the transportation is sustainable, and compares well with the not-shared lanes visible:

Here too, the transportation is shared, but somewhat less sustainably, less safely:

 

The economics, sustainability and safety of shared things don’t happen by accident: they are a function of design. You have to design to share effectively. Let’s look at food in this context:

Here’s some food designed to be shared. Lamb stew. In a cooking pot. Ladled out in heterogeneous servings. More people? No problem, just peel a few more potatoes, boil some carrots, add some stock. Stews are designed to be extensible.

And here’s food designed to be not-shared: Lamb again. But this time it’s lamb chops with vegetables, everything counted out precisely, just so much of every dish and no more. Not easy to extend.

 

So where are we? Things that are shared are fundamentally different from things that are not-shared: different from an economics perspective (far cheaper), different from a sustainability perspective (kinder to the environment, safer), even different from a design perspective (more flexible, easier to expand or contract). But all this doesn’t matter if people don’t actually want to share in the first place.

And this is where the new generations come in. They have a different attitude to sharing. They rent their films, their music, their books, their homes, even their bicycles.

 

Shared. Cheaper. More sustainable. Safer. More flexible. And consistent with the values and ethics of a generation less hung up about “owning” things.

When I see the terms “private cloud” and “public cloud” I translate them.

The “public cloud” is the cloud I know: Fundamentally based on sharing, with the economic, environmental, ecological and ethical benefits of sharing.

The “private cloud” is the cloud I don’t know. Fundamentally based on not-sharing, and therefore not-cloud.

Shared and not-shared.

The cloud is about sharing and is shared in concept and design.

The not-cloud is just what it says. Not cloud.

[My thanks go to Floydian for the HOV lane shot; Rosa Jackson for the Navarin d’Agneau; Private Jet Charter for the Learjet interior; Broadway Bistro for the lamb chops; and The Independent/AFP Photo/Geoff Caddick for the London cycles.]

Musing about unheralded heroes and heroines and accidental criminals and IPR

I love Auden’s poetry. I have particular fondness for The Unknown Citizen (or JS/07/M/378, the reference Auden gave to him), so much so that I tend to recall the closing lines of the poem almost weekly in one context or another:

 

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

 

Unknown citizens have fascinated me for decades. The amateur historian in me has a peculiar bent: I’m fascinated by stories of people whose impact on our lives is belied by their relative obscurity, people whose fifteen minutes of fame changed the course of a tiny part of history, while being largely forgotten by history in general. Take Tank Man for example.


Twenty-three years on, we still don’t know his name. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead or where he is to be found. History isn’t good at remembering people when you don’t know their names.

At least Tank Man knew what he was doing.

Sometimes (some would argue I should use the word “Often” here) people have their impact on history accidentally. Take William Huskisson for example. Statesman, Privy Councillor, MP for multiple constituencies, we remember him principally for being the first person to die in a railway accident: he was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket, and died despite being taken to hospital by Stephenson himself. Now there were people who died in railway accidents before that, but they weren’t the ones to make the news.

My passion for unheralded heroes started in a strange way. As a young boy, I was fascinated by what we then called “general knowledge” or “quizzing”, and as a result had amassed a vast quantity of “useless” information by the time I was 18. It all began with the story of Denise Darvall. You see? I’ve just proved something to you.

Most readers will be familiar with the name of Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant. Some may even remember the name of Louis Washkansky, upon whom Barnard operated.  A few will remember that the operation was carried out by Barnard at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. Even fewer will remember that the operation took place on 3rd December 1967.

But who remembers Denise Darvall?

Denise Ann Darvall was the donor of the heart used by Barnard. A 24 year old killed tragically earlier that very day, run over by a drunk driver while she was out shopping for cake. A true accidental heroine, largely forgotten by history.

I could go on and on, but won’t. As you can probably see, I’m fascinated by stories of accidental and often obscure heroes and heroines, how history picks a random few up and puts their names up in lights, yet leaves unnamed and forgotten the many others involved. Every invention, every political event, every scientific idea, has its share of heroes and heroines, often unnamed, sometimes accidental, always obscure.

Sadly there is now a new branch of accidental and obscure for me to study.

The accidental criminal.

I’ve been concerned about digital rights management and intellectual property rights for some years now, deeply concerned. Those concerns rose to the fore during the infamous Digital Economy Act, a process with the singular, perhaps unique distinction of sullying and besmirching the reputations of politicians involved, in all three major parties.

Those concerns are now growing.

This, despite the relatively balanced and even-handed approach to intellectual property rights taken by Professor Ian Hargreaves in his report, commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron. If you haven’t read the report, please do.

Why am I more concerned?

Firstly, because outcomes often tend to be disconnected to what the commissioned report said: we’ve been here before, as I document here. We’ve had consultations and discussions and reports aplenty, all saying largely sensible things, only to find that what actually happens has very little to do with the reports and recommendations; instead, it appears to be based on narrow, biased lobbying.

Secondly, this lobbying tends to be based on very questionable numbers, again something I’ve written about before in Numbers of Mass Distraction. Don’t believe me? Why not read what the US Government Accountability Office has to say on the subject?

Thirdly, the objective of the lobbying tends to be to enact law that is focused on getting the “low hanging fruit” of the accidental downloaders, the unaware, the weak, the unwary. Why? Because it’s easier to bully them.

I’m not here to defend karaoke-loving grandmothers convicted of illegal downloading. I’m not even here to defend grandmother 83-year old Gertrude Walton, sued by the RIAA in 2005. [At least her defence was impeccable. She didn’t just not have a computer, she’d died some time earlier.]

What I am here to do is to ensure that you understand what’s going on.

But more important than all this is the fact that a very questionable industry practice has been spawned, with very questionable practices. The ambulance-chasers of the IP world, nakedly going after, threatening, seeking to criminalise, the unknowing, the weak, the unaware, the unwary. A practice that needs to be looked at very carefully by all governments, in terms of what they do and how they do it.

Which is why I found this paper on the subject, by Kalika Doloswada and Ann Dadich, refreshing, interesting, an unexpected ray of hope. Please read it.

Some of their key takeaways:

  • The preferred vehicle to prevent illegal downloading is litigation, but there’s scant evidence of this working.
  • Where there is litigation, there’s scant evidence of the monies collected making their way to the creators.
  • Technological advances: closed private networks, IP blockers, identity obscuring tools, anonymous file-sharing networks, encrypted systems: make it hard to get to the IT-savvy, particularly the IT-savvy with criminal intent
  • Despite all this, the preferred mode of the ambulance-chaser is to go after, and to criminalise, the low-hanging fruit of the unaware, the unwary, the unable to defend.

I have over 2000 CDs. I’ve paid through the nose for all of them. I own the vinyl for a hundred or two of them, and have owned (and left behind in India) many more.

I have owned hundreds of cassette tapes, all pre-recorded.

I’ve never taped off the radio, copied someone else’s vinyl on to tape, or downloaded something illegally.

I thought I knew the law. Yet I may have repeatedly broken the law (apparently!) by buying a CD and transferring its contents on to ITunes over the years. As the Daily Mail says here:

People like Terry Fisher and Charlie Nesson over at the Berkman Center have been pushing for alternative ways to resolve the publishing/copyright/IPR impasse for some years now. People like Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing have been writing about for years.

It’s time we all got involved: otherwise we’re going to get the future we deserve, with schoolyard bullies using questionable tactics, data and processes to go after the weak.

More importantly, as a result of the lobbying by these people, we’re going to destroy the ability of the digital world to live up to its promise: in education, in healthcare, in welfare, in government, and in business as a whole.

The lawmakers who allow all this to happen (DMCA, ACTA, DEA, Hadopi, et al) will make more bad laws and move on.

The lobbyists who use questionable data to influence the lawmakers will make their money and move on.

The cowboy firms that collect monies through threats and fear and because of the ignorance of those they prey on will make their money and move on.

The industries who need to change will have staved off change for a short while as a result.

Then everything will change. The laws will change. They must change. Because the law does not remain an ass for long.

But criminal records are forever.