Archive for October, 2006

If you have any interest in internet governance, take a look at igf2006.info.  Everything about the upcoming meeting in Athens (the Internet Governance Forum) is there.  There are more than a thousand people going to this meeting. 

You can sign up for the site using a pseudonym (note to Ann Onymous), and you'll be part of a huge amount of online collaboration in connection with the meeting.  Create your own blog, add or edit a wiki, create a chatroom, a page, a new event — whatever.  Everything known about the meeting is there, and the links to webcasts/audio casts will be up as soon as they're available.

Congratulations and thanks to Kieren McCarthy for getting this site up.  It's ready for use, and it's really useful.

I'll be facilitating a workshop in Sao Paulo about meetings structure and related topics.  I've written a paper that will be posted shortly in preparation for the workshop, and I'll post it here as well.

It's time to step back and evaluate ICANN meetings.  Different groups have very different reasons for attending, and we'd like to make sure that expectations for these meetings are addressed.  As a start, we'll be asking people to let us know why they go to ICANN meetings.  We have about 800 people showing up now, routinely, to week-long meetings whose essential structure hasn't changed in more than six years.  We could probably be doing a much better job at matching the meetings to the goals (many) of the people who attend.

So – think about it.  ICANN’s approach to meetings should be determined by core organizational goals and principles. How can ICANN’s meetings attract more constructive and effective engagement by members of the community? How can they be conducted more efficiently, at lower cost in time and money? How can they enhance the legitimacy of ICANN’s actions? Facilitating remote participation (and online work) is a top priority, but we have many other things to work on as well.  We'll talk about all of this in Sao Paulo.

So the mythical handset I want that (1) has a browser that works for all online content and (2) has wireless access will still not be perfect.  It will necessarily still have a pretty small screen.

Someone said to me a couple of days ago that he didn't think that screen would be immersive enough for virtual worlds.  I wonder about that. 

When you first go into a movie theater (one of the in-person ones that still exist in many cities), you aren't drawn in by the screen at all.  It seems like an artificial incursion on your life — it even feels a little silly, all facing front to watch a rectangular expanse at the front of the room.  People chew popcorn noisily and you notice how old the curtains are that are hanging on the sides of the screen, how cheesy it is to draw those curtains back when it's time to start the film (audible old pulleys straining), and how dingy the room is.

But when the film begins, and if it's any good at all, you forget about all that.  The screen completely fills your vision.  I'm always surprised by how easily I forget that I'm sitting in a room watching a projection. It's a jolt to leave the room and have your sense of space snap back to the here and now.

I have a feeling that there's a tipping point for small screens, and that they don't have to be big to capture us completely.  They just have to be big enough to draw us in.

Which is a good thing, because we'll be playing in virtual worlds that are changing on the fly and feature scheduled happenings.  Or so BusinessWeek asserts this week. We'll recreate the world using presence detection (“my team is here with me”) and timed events (“it's time for us to land that spaceship”) while sitting near a wireless access point.  

We can keep the big laptop screens for weekends.

Hotel internet access here costs 50p a minute.  A minute.  So I am signing off — see you in Sofia.

I'm going to Bulgaria early in the morning for an ICANN Board retreat.  I'll try to blog from there.  But things may be a little slow for a few days.

ICANN sent me a jacket — it is navy blue and has a snappy ICANN logo on it. 

We have a lot to talk about at the retreat, and I'm hoping for the best.

The WSJ has an article today (subscription required) about a bunch of developments in US city wifi. 

MuniWireless.com (running a key conference today and tomorrow in Minneapolis) tells us that there are more than 300 cities across the US that are working on wireless access.  There seem to be widely varying ways of providing service, and the telcos are getting into the act.  From the WSJ article:

“It's all about the extension of the broadband access for our customers,” says Eric Shepcaro, vice president for business development at AT&T.  “It's also about leveraging assets that we already have in place.”

But look at Personal Telco in Portland.  Or Wireless Leiden in The Netherlands. Or everything Sascha Meinrath is doing. And don't miss NYC Wireless.

It would be good to know how well open, public, free, non-registration city wifi networks are doing in the US.  Once I get my mythical phone that is wireless enabled and open-platform (so that any developer can write software for it that allows me to easily use the location-based services I like), I'll need a free, open wireless connection wherever I go.

Is that too much to ask?

My phone is just a phone.  I'm not very attached to it and I've been known to forget about it for days at a time.  It has no net access, it can't take pictures, and its battery runs down very quickly.  I've drowned it twice by accident.

Four years ago, I was very attached to my Blackberry.  It was a small model and all it did was download and send email. I held onto it out of pure sentiment even after it became a dumb object incapable of doing anything but turning on and off. 

What if my phone had non-cellular wireless access, a keyboard, and a nice big screen? If mobile carriers weren't in charge of my access, I could do great things online using my phone. Looking over other peoples' shoulders, I can see that the user experience for internet-enabled phones isn't very satisfying. Many clicks, many steps, many waits.

I'm assuming that we'd have to get away from the mobile carriers because they have the highest walls of any walled gardens. Nothing new shows up unless a mobile carrier gives permission, and you have to pay a lot as a software provider to be admitted to a carrier's “stack” – their club of applications that users can access. Phooey. 

Couldn't a plain old wireless connection on a handset (we'd probably still call it a phone) do a better job?  Sure, we could hang onto the cellular connection for those times when we need to make a phone call and we're whizzing down a highway, but otherwise we could walk away from the control that mobile carriers exert.

If we did walk away, and walked towards wireless networks instead, how open and neutral would they be?  I have a lot to learn about the neutrality of municipal wireless networks as compared to what mobile carriers do. 

It seems to me that this is the future — who wants to carry around a PC unnecessarily?  I'm looking forward to the day (I really am) when I have a gadget that inspires the same affection that my old Blackberry did.

Now that Bill Moyers has done an hour-long program about net neutrality, he should look into CALEA.  DOJ is circulating on the Hill a draft rewrite of CALEA extending it to the internet (and to applications that run on the internet), and it's full of enormous problems. (Earlier entry on this here.)

Among many other problems, law enforcement officials want designers to ask permission before launching.  They want to make sure that innovators notify the Commission of their new applications at the design stage.  This way they'll get the modifications law enforcement wants at an early point, and innovators will avoid retrofitting later. Sounds great, right?  No, it's not.  Extending CALEA to online applications is a huge and destructive step, as I've often said in the past.

This is relevant now because it's likely that the CALEA rewrite will come up for discussion during the lame duck session following the upcoming election.  Go, mainstream media — take a look at this story.

I've been offline pursuing academic dreams for a day or so.  I'm working on a paper that tries to link up economic growth theory, social systems theory, complexity, and telecommunications policy.  It's moving along, and it's fun.  I have a low fun threshold.

In August I went to Berkeley to be part of a gargantuan IP scholars conference (84 papers in three days, or was it two days?) and someone told me about a Berkeley professor who was also interested in complex systems.  I wrote to her and she sent me to a book on autopoiesis (organizationally closed, self-creating systems).  That book had a lot about law as a self-creating functional system in it, and cites to someone I'd never heard of named Niklas Luhmann.

Since then I've been running around (slowly, using books) reading Luhmann and about Luhmann.  He's the social systems theory part of my current exploration.  He asserts that he's not trying to say what society should be, but that he's just describing how it works.  A key part of that description is to point out that society is made up of functional systems of communication (law, economics, politics) that are separate from another, that co-evolve (because they're “structurally coupled,” or interdependent), that create themselves and their boundaries, and that only work with their own materials.

This sounds pretty abstract as a starting point, but I've been finding it illuminating.  It's like the old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a lightbulb:  “Just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.”   The educational system can teach courses about discrimination, but that won't actually reduce discrimination.  The Green Party may be very strong in German politics, but that may just have created more political careers — it may not mean that there are fewer power plants in Germany.  Politics and the economy have a close and interdependent relationship but one can't change the other (unless it really wants to change).

When these systems co-evolve, they may do so in unpredictable, non-linear ways.  There's no telling what effect a particular communication in one system (a new legal statute) may have on politics. It depends how the political system deals with the statute, in its own terms and using its own materials.

All of this is making two common phrases more meaningful to me:  “changing the facts on the ground” and “aligning incentives.”  If it becomes economically prudent for employers to retain employees by having better work policies — if that's more remunerative than letting employees churn through the doors — then they'll change policies.  Protesting about work policies won't do it, because the employment system won't respond.  And law as a system can't predictably change another system unless that system's own materials are changed somehow.

So if you leave a great, inspiring conference about a subject you care about, and you feel vaguely dissatisfied instead of uplifted, it's because the system you wanted to change wasn't in the room.  And that system isn't going to change unless it's ready to.

I've been linking to James Enck's blog for a while now.  Read the Oct. 9 entry — ten things he hates about telcos.  

And Hugh McLeod has a wonderful blog that's been recognized as enormously influential by FT. 

Do you ever look at Nina Camic's blog?  It's great. 

And I always read Tom Coates's blog.  Stylish and compact.

Speaking of compact — that's it for today.  Tomorrow:  universal service.