The mashable wiki
Wikis are extraordinarily useful but essentially flat resources. It’s tough to conceive of a wiki being made up of structured data; indeed, a key concept behind wiki-ness is that anyone can edit and make the wiki wiser, and we don’t force people to edit in particular ways. So a wiki is just there, like a painting - a dynamic painting, sure - beautiful in its changing coherence, but not something you can treat like xml data.
At least that’s what I thought until earlier this week, when I went to the ITP spring show (always an inspiring event) and saw Fred Benenson’s CauseCaller.
CauseCaller is just so elegant and powerful. It’s based on Semantic MediaWiki, a free wiki extension that allows people like you and me to add data to wikis by filling in forms. The result? Structured, useful data that other applications can use. Fred’s idea was to populate forms with information about politicians - what party, what state, what phone number. Then he hooked those phone numbers through Asterisk - essentially, an online telephone switch that allows you and me to make calls using our computers.
And - presto - you’ve got a phone tree application. You want to forward a cause? You click on the cause you’re interested in on CauseCaller (or you create a cause of your own and associate it with particular politicians), and the application will start calling politicians for you, one by one. You’ll talk to them, hang up, and call the next one. Lots of people have discovered CauseCaller already who don’t know Fred.
The powerful, beautiful thing about this Fred move is that anyone can add more structured (or tagged) data to the wiki. You could add more politicians; state politicians; anyone anywhere in the world you want to reach. The application doesn’t have to be an online phone tree, although that’s a good thing to have. It could be anything riding usefully on top of the wiki. You can change the templates/tagging for the underlying data when you need to.
All very emergent, mashable, simple, open, and interesting.
D stands for slightly desperate
The FCC released a notice yesterday asking many questions - they boil down to something like “How on earth do we go on with the idea of a public-private partnership for the D Block?”
Here’s the background: As part of the structure of the 700 MHz auction that concluded recently, the Commission proposed that the licensee of 10 MHz of commercial spectrum within the 700 MHz range (paired blocks 758-763/788-793 MHz) (the “D Block”) enter into an agreement with the licensee of “public safety broadband spectrum” (763-768/793-798 MHz). The idea is that this highspeed network would cover both the commercial D Block and the public safety spectrum, and the commercial licensee would build out the public safety network in exchange for secondary rights on the the whole thing (preemptible by public safety in emergency situations).
All of this was driven by concern about 9/11 communication snafus, when police and fire departments in NYC couldn’t talk to one another. (Talk: narrowband, push-to-talk technologies.)
Since 9/11, both NYC and the DC area have solved their “interoperability” problems. Now (or soon) their public safety officers will be able to communicate easily.
For some time now, there’s been a push for nationwide highspeed “interoperable” network operation for public safety. So the FCC established rules for the auction of the D Block, and a pretty high reserve price - and the reserve price wasn’t met. There were so many uncertainties for the commercial operator: would public safety effectively act as a reseller, would it demand fees, would it exact so many conditions that the network wasn’t a money-maker for the commercial actor? Now the FCC is asking questions, hoping desperately that they’ll find a way to make this work.
If you read yesterday’s FCC notice, the whole plan seems dubious. Everything is apparently up in the air. What does public safety really need? (By the way, if they just want to talk, the entire idea of a highspeed network seems like overkill.) How will the private party and the public safety actors work together? What will their respective roles be? Maybe the public/private idea just won’t work. And what does it mean to ask for “interoperable” spectrum, particularly when localities are going ahead to form their own protocols?
This proceeding seems like a deeply difficult one - and the Commission is sounding slightly desperate. They may be writing rules for something that no commercial actor may feel is worth investing in — and that may end up not being useful for the public safety actors concerned. They probably want better equipment more than anything else.
Blog break
Going offline briefly. Here’s something from The User Illusion for you, at p.220:
Our actions begin unconsciously! Even when we think we make a conscious decision to act, our brain starts half a second before we do so! Our consciousness is not the initiator — unconscious processes are! . . . [T]his result obviously runs deeply counter to our everyday image of what being a human being involves. Our consciousness dupes us!
It tells us that we can decide on what we do. Yet it is apparently a mere ripple on the surface, a little tin god pretending to be in charge of things beyond its control.
The New Clearwire
The new Clearwire could be game-changing, but the rules of the game may not be quite as Clearwire presents them. I have been wondering since last July whether something significant would happen in the Google/Sprint world. The deal announcement earlier this weekseems to be that key development. (Here’s the press release and here are slides describing the transaction.)
In a nutshell, Sprint will contribute its substantial spectrum licenses in the 2.5 GHz range and its WiMAX-related assets and intellectual property. Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks will invest a total of $3.2 billion. The idea is that this combination of investment and spectrum will allow the resulting “new Clearwire” to get a jump on AT&T and VZ in introducing highspeed mobile internet access - perhaps a two-years’ lead. Part of this time-to-market advantage will come through Sprint’s agreement to allow the new Clearwire to use its towers, fiber network, and IT support. Plus the new Clearwire is saying that it’s using a standard — WiMAX — that was developed in 1995. (More about that below.) Verizon’s preferred standard, LTE, or “Long Term Evolution,” isn’t as longstanding.
It’s clearly exciting to have a potential competing provider of highspeed mobile internet access out there that could cover 140 million Points of Presence (units of coverage - a POP is an access point from one place to the rest of the internet that has its own unique IP address) by the end of 2010. But there are . . issues.
Money. Not to sniff at the $3.2 billion investment of the cable/Google team, but there is already a prediction that the new joint adventure won’t have enough money to carry out its plans. To get to the 140 million POPs, the venture knows it will need an additional $2-2.5 billion. Okay, maybe that’s easy, but it’s a hole. And some people are even saying that the venture is radically under-estimating the amount of money it needs - they’re asserting that even after the additional $2.5 billion comes in, the new Clearwire will need another $5.5 billion to roll out “a mobile WiMax network with supporting backhaul in 50 markets in the U.S.” (”Backhaul” means the part of the wireless network, owned or borrowed, that allows the communication to travel from a cell tower to a central site - either a switch or a node on an internet backbone. There’s apparently a backhaul bottleneck that doesn’t get talked about enough.) So it’s unclear whether there’s enough actual or potential money in the system to make it work.
On the other hand, all of this buzz and interest in WiMAX, as well as Intel’s involvement, make it a possible trigger for gadgets and devices etc. for WiMAX - whose presence could in turn make the venture into an attractive investment opportunity in the years to come.
Technology. There seems to be a good deal of concern about WiMAX itself. Will it work? It’s supposed to cover long distances, but will those high frequencies travel through walls? Won’t it be awfully expensive to get towers (and their antennas) close enough to users to make coverage adequate? Clearwire talks a lot about its test of WiMAX going on in Portland, but that is still a beta installation and no one seems to have definitive results. Techies seems to think that you need lots of wires to make wireless work - wires to provide adequate backhaul and reach rural users — and that using the investors’ cable systems for backhaul won’t work because of all the slow upload problems we know about. Although maybe this will prompt the cable guys to upgrade. At any rate, lots of dubitante out there about WiMAX itself.
Openness. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on from the limited information we have on this transaction, but the press release does say that “Google will be THE search provider and a preferred provider of other applications for the new Clearwire’s retail product.” And”Google will become the default provider of web and local search services, both of which will be enabled with location information, for Sprint.”
How does this fit with Google’s earnest (we thought) efforts in connection with the 700 MHz auction to ensure that VZ and AT&T open their devices and networks to foreign applications? It is true that Google’s own blog posting about the transaction says that the resulting highspeed wireless internet access will “allow consumers to utilize any lawful applications, content and devices without blocking, degrading or impairing Internet traffic,” but how does that square with the assertion of Google-exclusiveness (ex-gloogleness?) for the Clearwire “product” — whatever a “product” is in this context?
So we’re cautiously optimistic, here at the Susan Crawford blog. We hope the thing will fly; we hope we’ll be flying down freeways uploading wildly some day (from the passenger seat), and it’s certainly good to see some disruptive investment in the wireless highspeed access area. But we wish Google hadn’t asked for that excloogle placement as part of the deal.
Internet Week New York
During which OneWebDay will host a panel discussion - and Stephen Colbert will receive a Webby.
More details here.
Consciousness-raising
I have a favorite book: The User Illusion. Yesterday, starting another read of it triggered the realization that it was my first introduction to undecidability, complex systems, the Turner halting problem, information theory, Maxwell’s Demon, and a host of other related concepts, people, and ways of looking at the world and at consciousness. I remember puzzling through its early chapters the first and second time around, about ten years ago. It’s still a challenging book for me, but now I’m familiar with the patterns it describes. I’ve learned something since I started working with this book, by reading many related books.
So I wanted to mark this and remember this day: this book has become part of my consciousness in a way it really wasn’t at the beginning. A friend of mine used to call it “My Big Book of Consciousness.”
Short form
I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, and at the beginning of this month I started writing feverish tweets about OneWebDay progress - I’d been told that was essential.
Well, last night on a call someone said: “I don’t email any more. I don’t IM. I don’t blog. It’s all Twitter.” And then that person made sure that I had a special *OneWebDay* Twitter account, so that people would be following the DAY rather than me. And I dutifully followed her into a wild (for me) world of Twittering - the OWD Twitter account is following almost 700 people, and hoping to soon be followed by just as many. Come watch at http://twitter.com/OWD! I’m watching all the tweets go by, myself.
But that’s just the beginning. There’s Twhirl, for running multiple Twitter accounts (that’s me). There’s Twemes, for aggregating all of those tweets.
And, most beguiling of all, there’s Twistori, to lose a few hours over. (ht: Cory Ondrejka)
I have been blogging since September 2003, and I know I’ll enjoy getting back to it once I have a bit more time to reflect. (Right now, we’re busy here at the Susan Crawford blog.) All those tweets have to link to something. But I can see the tremendous appeal of the short form.
Here’s a fan site - note the long list of twitter-puns.
CFP08
The Yale Information Society Project recently posted its 9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration:
1. Privacy. Protect human dignity, autonomy, and privacy by providing individuals with control over the collection, use, and distribution of their personal information and medical information.
2. Access. Promote high-speed Internet access and increased connectivity for all, through both government and private initiatives, to reduce the digital divide.
3. Network Neutrality. Legislate against unreasonable discrimination by network providers against particular applications or content to maintain the Internet’s role in fostering innovation, economic growth, and democratic communication.
4. Transparency. Preserve accountability and oversight of government functions by strengthening freedom of information and improving electronic access to government deliberations and materials.
5. Innovation. Restore balance to intellectual property rules and explore alternative incentives to better promote innovation, freedom, access to knowledge, and human development.
6. Democracy. Empower individuals to fully participate in government and politics by making electronic voting consistent, reliable, and secure with voter-verifiable paper trails.
7. Education. Expand effective exceptions and limitations to intellectual property for education to ensure that teachers and students have access to innovative digital teaching techniques and educational resources.
8. Culture. Ensure that law and technology promote a free, vibrant and democratic culture, fair exchanges between different cultures, and individual rights to create and participate in culture.
9. Diversity. Limit media concentration and expand media ownership to ensure a diverse marketplace of ideas.
9.5 Openness. Support innovation and fair competition by stimulating openness in software, technological standards, Internet governance, and content licensing.
As Michael Zimmer says, the idea was to post some “guiding principles from which specific tactics can be formulated.” And to get people talking in advance of CFP2008, which will be held May 20-23 in New Haven, Conn.
Pangea Day
Via GlobalVoices, description here. Inspiring. It’s all happening on May 10.
This is the kind of thing I had in mind for OneWebDay, and it’s my hope that (in time) we’ll have a similar uprising around the world on September 22. Access to the internet, and connectivity generally, is becoming more important to life - whether through mobile devices, personal computers, or public kiosks. The idea behind OneWebDay is to facilitate the creation of a global constituency that cares about the future breadth-depth-accessibility of online resources.
Now that Earth Day is over for this year, OneWebDay is getting advice from Earth Day organizers - once Pangea Day runs (hugely successfully), we’ll be talking to them too.
FISA
eWeek reports that House Republicans are planning to force a vote on the Senate’s version of the FISA amendments - the version that would guarantee retroactive immunity to the telcos that cooperated with the NSA.
(Here’s a useful CRS report comparing the House and Senate bills more generally.)
Someone suggested today that I go back and read the Church Committee reports on the NSA’s Shamrock and Minaret programs (link) and the legislative history of FISA. It is astounding how infrequently the Church Committee backdrop to the entire FISA discussion is mentioned. So I’ll mention it here.
Statutory immunity for the telcos would be a belt-and-suspenders effort - AT&T itself concedes that “Current law … provides a complete defense to any provider who in good faith relies on a statutory authorization,” or some other governmental promise. So what’s the downside of judicial review of the legality of the telcos’ actions? We should know what happened and why - there is so much to understand about surveillance in this country. Plug: Eric Lichtblau’s new book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice.
It’s been a busy week - sorry for the sketch-like posts. We’re marching towards the end of classes.