Dave Briggs

This session’s chaired by Dominique Lazanski, alongside Hamish Nicklin from Google, Nominet‘s Phil Kingsland, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group and Phillip Virgo from EURIM.

They start with a question from the chair:

How does Government regulation help, or hinder, the growth of the digital economy in the UK?

Phil Kingsland replies first, with the observation that trying to regulate something inherently international like the Internet is intrinsically difficult. Thus far we’ve had self-regulation, and much of the contentious activity on the Internet isn’t in itself new behaviour – it’s been happening offline before too, and there are already laws which cover it.

‘Sometimes, bad things happen on the Net’, says Jim Killock, but like Phil he observes that what you do on the Internet is already subject to national law. What’s more, people self-police bad behaviour: just ask Jan Moir. From there, he goes straight to net neutrality, citing Skype as an example. Next up: digital music and price gouging by the established record labels, as a bridge to making the case for copyright reform, and from there to a generalised call for IP reform. We’re hitting all of the ORG talking points in order, and that’s his five minutes.

Hamish from Google has to follow that. He argues that the Internet has been so successful because it’s been free and open; he believes regulation can be a good thing as long as it accords with those principles. Very short and sweet!

Philip Virgo starts with a confession: he was one of the original architects of software copyrights in the UK. He then says he believes that they outlived their usefulness ten to fifteen years ago, which is quite a statement! He then talks a bit about global commerce – he transition from physical to electronic trading actually happened 30 to 40 years ago, and more recently it moved to the Internet. But, then, what is the Internet?

The man’s a quotemaster:

What’s the colour of the underpants of this wonderful emperor we’re talking about?

Anyway, he says it’s impressive engineering, overlaid with governance principles imbued with the spirit of Haight-Asbury circa 1967, overlaid with lots and lots and lots of lawyerese. (Sounds about right to me.) It’s also the latest evolution of the world’s most complex machine in the world – the global telecoms system.

We’re surfing the cyber-crud…

says Phillip. Apparently 22-player online football games are huge in Korea, but the Internet connections aren’t good enough here to support that – so instead, all they can do is download pirated music… (That’s a new argument for net neutrality, I reckon.). He’s worried about the way we’re ceding the lead – particularly in IPV6 – to China; he’s come back to that twice.

Jim Killock really doesn’t like the music industry very much. That’s probably not a surprise!

We’re moving onto the Digital Britain report now. Jim starts; on mandatory disconnections for illegal filesharing, which cropped up in EU legislation:

If you caught someone littering, you wouldn’t ban them from the street, would you?

Quality rhetoric, and he’s understandably riled by the lack of due process. Hamish from Google brings up technological solutions – can you prevent rights violations from happening? YouTube’s rights-detection software is an example here, letting rights holders dictate how their IP is used. Jim’s okay with that within a bounded service, but uneasy with that on a global scale: he calls it mass surveillance of the Internet for copyright enforcement. Spotify comes up; apparently it’s, singlehandedly, drastically cut P2P traffic.

And Twitter intrudes! Hello out there. @glynwintle asks about three strikes: everyone immediately dismisses it. Phillip Virgo now brings up teenagers in Lambeth eking out their money by getting songs from cheaper Chinese music download sites (which he claims may or may not be legal).

Phil brings up the Internet Watch Foundation, and the way they’ve managed to eradicate child abuse images from UK hosting, as a success for self-regulation. In general, in fact. he thinks the public interest is best represented by self-regulation.

Jim is worried that the government doesn’t get to the public interest because they’re too busy listening to industry lobby groups; Hamish wants to see the Internet stay open and free because that’s best for commerce.

And Phillip gets the last word. He talks about the children’s session at the Internet Governance Federation, saying they grasped the issues by the throat:

No-one over the age of thirteen should be allowed to vote on any Internet regulation.

And that’s that! Fascinating session.

Tom Steinberg of mySociety follows Adam Afriyie with the last keynote of the morning session. He starts with an announcement – that, with the Open Society Institute, mySociety are seeding similar organisations in Central and Eastern Europe – and a disclaimer: that his new advisory position with the Conservatives will not influence mySociety. After that, he tells us that he’s going to talk about two of mySociety’s projects: Fix My Street and What Do They Know?

Fix My Street makes it easy to report potholes, smashed phone boxes, broken streetlights and the like. It creates transparency – for example, because it asks people if the problems they report got solved, we know that the fix-rate for reported problems are about 50%. (And if the problem’s not fixed, it tells you which councillors you need to go and speak to!)

It was originally funded by the Ministry of Justice, but that money’s long run out: it’s now paid for out of mySociety’s own pocket. It also, though you might not expect this, has a pretty good relationship with councils, which is a lesson in itself: these kinds of things won’t necessarily be rejected out of hand.

What Do They Know? (funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust) makes it really easy for members of the public to make Freedom of Information requests. That’s important because it empowers people, particularly if they don’t have the might of a full-on newsgathering organisation behind them.

One question he poses is where to take these services in the future. Tom suggests that they need to do a better job of explaining the compromises of government: for instance, in the case of Fix My Street, actually telling people when “we haven’t fixed this yet because we’re doing all of these other important things first”.

Finally, he proposes three conclusions:

• Firstly, that it can be cheaper and more effective to create transparency by putting a nice user interface on top of an existing process rather than re-engineering the entire process. What Do They Know? works on top of the existing FoI infrastructure, so FoI officers don’t have to learn a new system – they can work the same way they always have.
• Public data isn’t a good in its own right: it must have a social impact to have an effect. Almost all the websites mySociety operate need data which is under (trading fund) licenses, so even though the software’s open, you can’t run your own copy of mySociety software without buying copies the data.
• Good sites are made by good people. Matthew Somerville and Francis Irving get name-checks here: Tom argues that until Government can attract really good developers, it won’t have great systems.

And, with that, lunch!

Iain Dale, Mick Fealty, Stephen Tall, Craig Elder from the Conservative Party and Adam Parker from Realwire kicked off the blogger session at Government 2010 with five minutes each. Here’s something on each of those! Mick went first:

To state the bleedin’ obvious, there is a sea-change ahead.

Mick observed that, thus far, the Internet has been very poor at generating nuanced, useful thinking or innovation: online consultancy is viewed as a box to tick rather than as something which helps better decisions get made. However, what blogs and social media have done well is quick, light response – agile responses to changing circumstances.

What he’d like to see is a move from ‘closed-source’ to ‘open-source’ analysis of policy. A lot of policy at Westminster level gets made in think-tanks, but that approach is just too expensive to work for local and devolved governments. Furthermore, think-tanks work in seclusion: they have no room for consultation with, or contention from, the public. He suggest that if that process could take place in fluid, moderated communities in public, then that could change how policy is made for the better.

Next up was Craig Elder, online communities manager for the Conservatives. He says that what’s going on now is “old politics on new media”. There’s a worrying feeling that what’s said on new media is not going to be taken seriously: with, for example, Number 10 e-petitions, everyone points at the Jeremy Clarkson for PM campaign, but that happens because of cynicism about whether anyone’s listening.

He thinks that we can change that through creating the sense that citizens are empowered, particularly through data – for example, online crime maps which let the public see whether the money spent is working. On the other hand, does the number of Ministers on Twitter herald a new age of engagement? Not really – in a sense, it’s “Twittering while Rome burns”. Is this really the best thing that ministers can do?

Trafigura, though is a testament to the interrogrative powers of the blogosphere: proof that there’s potential here, but it’s very early days yet.

Stephen Tall, of Lib Dem Voice, then spoke on the power of unofficial consultations – they get to different audiences from official ones, and some (like Facebook groups) have the potential to convert “slacktivists” to activists. Steve Webb’s been holding surgeries – with 200 participants! – on Facebook, and:

Official council consultations are crap, and no-one responds to them anyway.

Apparently. (He later pointed out that Whitehall publishing only the data it wants published won’t empower people: to do that you have to go local, go in depth, and publish all the data.)

Inevitably, Twitter came up again – the first Twitterer during Prime Minister’s Questions was Jo Swinson, who got flak for abuse of Parliamentary privilege. It’s subsequently taken off, though: there were 96 tweets from MPs during the last PMQs. Still: is this really a worthwhile use of MPs’ time?

Finally, he proposed three tests for whether social media projects are worthwhile. Are you able to get more information out to people in a digestible form? Are you genuinely engaging with them? Are you empowering them? That’s what really works.

And, lastly, Adam Parker, of Realwire, introduced himself as “Jarvis Cocker on Question Time, only without the talent”. Way harsh, especially after his first point: that it’s not social media’s fault if the conversations are dull! If we want people to be engaged, we have to first be interesting. What’s more, not everyone’s on the Internet, not that many people are on Twitter or read Iain Dale’s blog. So, social media’s biggest impact in the short to medium term is going to be where it influences, or sets, the mainstream media agenda.

In particular, when it comes to politicians and parties engaging directly with the electorate, he’s not convinced. Retail brands are being forced to participate in social media in order to defend their market position and brand image. In other words, they’ve got an economic incentive; will social media ever be a real force in politics until it hits politicians at the ballot box?

Here’s some notes from the first two sessions at Government 2010! If, in haste, I’ve accidentally misquoted/misparaphrased, I apologise in advance: there’s a lot more on Twitter, and you can watch the conference live online here.

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The first speaker of the day, Peter Keller of Internet-based pollsters, YouGov, gave the opening keynote.

We all need bullshit detectors; we need to teach our children how to detect bullshit…

— Peter Kellner, YouGov

His speech was part call-to-arms, part cautionary tale; he argues that the Internet has fundamentally changed the relationship between citizens and Government, largely through unprecedentedly rich access to the information used to make decisions in Government — and that this is both opportunity and threat.

He started by suggesting that the ways we use the Internet are analogous to the early days of cinema; we’re largely just using technology to do things we’ve done before. Cinema grew out of its theatrical roots to, eventually, developing its own techniques – real locations, cuts, and so forth and so on. In his view, we haven’t worked out what the interesting new techniques, and new methods, are yet; to paraphrase, “we are now exploring ways of interacting with the public which simply weren’t available ten years ago.”

Taking journalism as an example, the economics of print and the scarcity of spectrum space for broadcasters enforced a technical monopoly over the transmission of information. This meant you couldn’t compete even if you wanted to. It’s only now that the Internet has removed many of the barriers to entry. The result of this upheaval is that none of us really knows what the transmission of information is going to look like in 20 years’ time. Cases like the Trafigura/Carter-Ruck injunction farrago just demonstrate how the Internet has completely changed the rules of the game – both the business rules and the nature of reporting. In particular, he talked about accountability: Yougov is held to account by a small number of bloggers who follow polling in great detail. The effect is that YouGov, and other pollsters are more careful than would have been 20 years ago as a result; they know they’ll get called on it if they screw up!

In government, however the same technical forces have had much less impact. (That set up a fantastic quote – another early leader for soundbite of the day, in fact! – that “Going back to Ancient Greece, representative democracy has had a very long run.”). He then made a fascinating argument: that this is, in part, because elected representatives have had a technical monopoly on access to the data government’s based on. Before now, if you want the statistics which inform the Budget, you had to traipse out to your nearest HMSO, put down £50, and buy the Red Book. Nowadays, anyone can get that data online: like journalism, the barrier to participation in decision-making has been flattened.

That’s an opportunity, but also a threat. In Peter’s view, the political parties haven’t yet got the message that access to information is fundamentally changing how people interact with public services and how people approach politics. For example, we’re getting more choice in public services, but now we can know much more than we used to, and make more informed decisions, thanks to the availability of things like school inspectors’ reports on the web.

To challenge the threat that this poses, we need to fundamentally change how government operates. Government needs to be more candid; to interact genuinely; and we need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater by forgetting the important social roles institutions currently play, which is something you can’t really replace with purely online interaction.

In particular, not all the information online is accurate or fair; Google helps us viscerally experience Gresham’s Law: bad money, or bad ideas, drive out good. We need to be wary that the Internet can be used to spread malice, so we need to equip kids with the critical faculties to find what they need and test what they find – and here’s where Peter Kellner, quote machine, struck again with the line up the top.

There was a lot to chew on in this speech, and I’m certain I’ve missed a lot! I’ll be going back to watch it again later.

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Peter Kellner was followed by a panel on eConsultation chaired by Harry Metcalfe from The Dextrous Web (and, notoriously, Ernest Marples. Unfortunately, Tom Watson couldn’t make it (detained on constituency business), but he was deputised for by a representative of YouGov (who, right now, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for).

We’re sticking PDFs online and asking people to email us. There has to be a better way.

— Harry Metcalfe, The Dextrous Web

One of the prevailing themes here was summed up by a question from Emer Coleman of the GLA; if the Government gets to choose the questions asked, is it really consultation at all? Harry Metcalfe had already argued that you need to consult before publishing a Green Paper, in order to frame the debate; Ewan McIntosh of 4iP pointed out that just because papers are commented on, it doesn’t mean real consultation is happening. Neil Williams of Debategraph went further: with the audience of consultations being largely self-selecting, noisy and vocal minorities will loom large in online debate.

Next up, the bloggers: a panel chaired by Iain Dale, featuring Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole), Stephen Tall of Lib Dem Voice, Craig Elder from the Conservative Party, and Adam Parker of Realwire. That should be interesting — more soon!