I started a post-doc position with the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI), based in Cornell Law School. The project runs a very interesting operation called Regulation Room. It offers a platform and, even more importantly, a process for online public participation in the federal government rule-making process (if you don’t know what rule-making is, you are with the majority of people out there and should definitely go to the Regulation Room, because it has all the explanations). I will be working on collaborative drafting of policy input and consensus building around policy issues; aspects that currently are absent from the platform and frankly not sure will be necessarily a standard part of it. I hope to write about this work as I move along.

Yet, even before I started working on my own piece of CeRI research, just learning about the Regulation Room prompted interesting conversations that easily linked to my interest in the digital divide. The result is a paper I co-authored with one of my new colleagues, Rebecca Vernon, which will be presented later this week at the ”New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband” (CFP) – a workshop organized by the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation.

I am not sure what the policy of the workshop is about publishing the papers, so in the meantime I’ll post the extended abstract. Hope you’ll find the premise interesting. If you are interested in the rest, please email me or just leave a comment.

Between Twitter revolutions and Facebook elections, there is a growing belief that information and communication technologies are changing the way democracy is practiced. But how universal are those effects? In this paper we look into what van Dijk labels “motivational access” in digital divide as an impediment for citizens to actively utilize information and communication technologies for civic engagement. We focus on the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative as our case and conduct an in-depth investigation into its recent efforts to get the public involved in the Department of Transportation rulemaking process using online tools. Recommendations based on this analysis address both national policy frameworks and agency specific regulations.

The digital divide is viewed as major impediment to information-technology-enhanced democratic processes. But if you build it, will they come? Will making broadband more readily available necessarily increase participation in democratic processes? Will making government information available online motivate citizens to engage with government institutions? Will opening up communication channels necessarily yield productive feedback from people? Are the barriers for meaningful civic participation online primarily technological?

Regulation Room (http://regulationroom.org) is a project of Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI). It is an online platform developed to engage the public in the federal agency rulemaking processes. In addition to its technological platform, Regulation Room has developed a set of moderation and outreach techniques to make both the procedures of rulemaking and the content of the rules more accessible to the general public. CeRI works with the Department of Transportation on actual rules the agency is seeking public comment on. As such, it serves as a real-life laboratory to explore uses of technology in democratic processes.

Over the past 15 months, Regulation Room worked on 3 rules that resulted in formal comments submitted to the Department of Transportation. In this paper we unpack what it takes to engage citizens in democratic processes and help them make their participation count. Our analysis suggests that while digital divide defined in terms of physical access and technological literacy may play a role in impeding civic engagement, they may not be the only important factors. In effect, while ensuring that all citizens have broadband access and well-developed technical skills go a long way toward ensuring public participation in democratic governance, it will not result in the desired breadth and depth of participation without further policy changes and investments in new technologies. Practices that evolved around the use of technology on the one hand and the engagement with government processes on the other, play an important role affecting civic online participation.

The paper presents an assortment of lessons and observations from “Regulation Room” and offers policy recommendations that suggest viewing civic online engagement through the lens of socio-technical practice, wherein the technology requirements for citizens to engage effectively in democratic processes are examined in conjunction with the normative assumptions of individuals as they interact with their government through online media.

In other news, which you may have already seen on Facebook, an article I co-authored with Erik Nisbet and Tarleton Gillespie got published in The Information Society and we got some press coverage in Cornell Chronicle. Here is the abstract of the paper:

Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed and interpreted across a range of academic and policy discourses. Second, through a framing experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey, the authors demonstrate how presenting respondents with two different conceptual frames of the digital divide may lead to different perceptions of who is most accountable for addressing the issue. From this, they discuss the dynamic relationship between the construction and communication of policy discourse and the public understanding of the digital divide, as well as implications for effective communication about the digital divide and information and communication technology policy to the general public.

Feel free to contact me if you want to read the entire piece and don’t have access.

The full title of the workshop is “Core Internet values and the principles of Internet Governance across generations” and the idea is exactly that – to have a dialogue between Internet pioneers and young Internet activists on the core of what the Internet stands for.

We had a great group of people.  On the one hand, there were young people from different parts of the world.  On the other hand, there were more senior Internet thinkers and practitioners.  Here is the full list of participants (in alphabetical order):

• Bill Graham, Global Strategic Engagement, the Internet Society (ISOC)
• ‘Gbenga Sesan, Paradigm New Nigeria
• Drew Smith, Student at Elon Univeristy and participant in Imagining the Internet project
• Grace Bomu, Young Kenyan lawyer, secretary of the ICT Consumers Association of Kenya, and cultural activist
• Laura DeNardis, Yale Information Society Project
• Marie Casey, Elected female representative at the ITU Youth Forum of future leaders, Geneva, 2009
• Nii Narku Quaynor, Ghana.com
• Rafik Dammak, Tokyo University
• Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google
• Vladimir Radunovic, Diplo Foundation

Ian Peter, who chaired the last year workshop on Internet Governance, was also supposed to take part in the workshop, but unfortunately he was not able to make it to Vilnius.

I hoped to be able to share a report from the workshop here, but other tasks take priority at the moment and I will be posting the report later.  I do think we had a very interesting and lively discussion, so I thought at this point I will just share the video footage of the event.  If you have a couple of hours to spare, I think you will find this engaging.

As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome!

As we can see, in most cases, our participants searched; this is consistent across both groups and I think was not particularly surprising.  Similarly, the use of bookmarks was equally consistent across both groups, which in my view was more surprising (perhaps since I am not a big bookmark user).

The differences, as you can see, were in the use of autocomplete and reliance on links.  Interestingly, in the Chinese sample, there were significantly more instances of using reliance on links compared to the use of autocomplete.  In the US sample what we see is practically a mirror image of this trend – significantly larger proportion of instances involved the use of autocomplete.

What makes it even more interesting is a glimpse at where do the Chinese participants follow the links from.  We are still organizing that data, but my initial observation is that many of those are coming from websites that basically large repositories of links (for example take a look at www.2345.com or www.114la.com).

All this brings up some thoughts about the role of English in the online experience.  In my view, one plausable explanation of this data can be the knowledge of English language.  I can see how use of the autocomplete function comes more “naturally” to the native speakers, compared to those for whom English is a second language.  The large collections of links that were utilized by our Chinese participants, further support this idea – why would you make an effort of typing in an inconvenient language, when you can go to just one website, where all the links you use are?

There are currently more questions than statements suggested by the snippet above – there is still a lot of work to be done on these data.  Having said that, I’d love to hear your thought about this little observation.  Please share…

You can find the slides from the presentation here.

The idea is very simple.  We are going to have a group of very smart people.  Some of them are internet pioneers from different countries, some of them are established researchers, and some are well known practitioners.  We will also have a group of young, less known (yet) people, whose activism and professional lives are related to the internet in one way or another.  The panel itself is quite large and we are also counting on having a very diverse and engaging audience from the IGF community.

So, the plan is to have a discussion among the panelists and then involve the floor, about core internet values and principles.  The question is not only what those values and principles might be, but whether the perception of these values and principles varies across generations and what that may mean for the future of internet-related policies.

This is where I would really appreciate an input from anyone reading these lines.  What do you think are the core values and principles of the internet where we can find the widest gaps across generations?

One example may be the notion of privacy.  I think since online social networks became popular there is an ongoing debate about how the younger generations’ perceptions of privacy online differ from that of their parents.  We all heard Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that the age of privacy is over.  But is it so for everyone?

What are the core values and principles of the internet that you still hold dear?  Which ones do you think were important in the past, but are no longer important?

Please share your thoughts!

I have more Internet Governance Forum related updates, which I will post soon.  In the meantime, here is the program of the symposium, which will take place on September 13th:

9:00-9:15 Opening

9:15-10:30 PANEL 1: Internet governance theory and issue

Moderador: William Drake, Centre for International Governance of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva

• Peng Hwa Ang and Natalie Pang. Going Beyond Talk: Can International Internet Governance Work?
• Everton Lucero. Global Governance of Critical Internet Resources: A Perspective from the South
• Jean-marie Chenou. Multistakeholderism or elitism ? The creation of a transnational field of Internet governance

10:30-11:00 Poster session and coffee break

11:00-12:15 PANEL 2: State power and Internet governance

Moderator: Rolf Webber , European Law Institute and the Center for Information and Communication Law at the University of Zurich

• Joanna Kulesza. State responsibility for acts of cyber-terrorism
• Jeremy Shtern. Models of Global Internet Governance and the Projection of State Power: The Case of Facebook and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
• Lorena Jaume-Palasi and Ben Wagner. Nosy preferences of Google and China: Modelling an internet governance conflict using Amartya Sen’s liberal paradox

12:15-12:30 Sponsorship slot

12:30-13:30 Lunch – Sponsored by MIT Press. Welcome speech given by William Drake, editor of the MIT Press series on “The information revolution and global politics” and Milton Mueller, author of the newly released book, “Networks and States: the Global Politics of Internet Governance.”

13:30-14:45         PANEL 3: Interaction of technology, operations and governance

Moderator: Meryem Marzouki, LIP6/PolyTIC – CNRS

• Brenden Kuerbis. Securing Internet routing: Influence and control of critical Internet resources through social networks and delegation
• Dmitry Epstein, Qiu-Hong Wang, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Milton Mueller. What’s in the name? A behavioral study of the use of the URLs in China and the US
• Laura DeNardis. The Privatization Of Internet Governance

14:45-15:45         PANEL 4: IGF practice, multistakeholderism and emerging issues

• Nanette Levinson. Evaluating and Analyzing Collaboration In Cross-cultural and Cross-sectoral Perspective: Indicators from The Internet Governance Forum
• Ivar Alberto Hartmann. Universal Access policies and Internet Access as a Fundamental Right: The Constitutional Law Perspective informed by the Brazilian Case.

15:45-16:00         Closing

16:00-16:30         Poster session and coffee break

16:30                    GigaNet Business meeting

POSTER SESSION:

• Charlotte Bogusz. Openness and Privacy v/ Security : The example of filtering measures.2
• Charlotte Bogusz. The promotion of the general interest through ICTs : The French and Senegalese examples
• Daniel Oppermann. Analysing cybercrime from a multistakeholder perspective
• Luiz Costa. The Internet and the Constitutional restrictions on foreign participation in Brazilian Media
• Luiz Costa. A case study on the Brazilian E-Commerce Forum
• Mona Badran. Is internet changing the social life of Egyptian college students and affecting their privacy?
• Rolf H. Weber. Policies for Governing Critical Internet Resources
• Shawn Gunnarson. Securing ICANN’s Accountability
• Sofiane Bouhdiba. Internet governance and Education: the Tunisian Virtual University in the context of the Tunis agenda

I heard similar observations from a number of industry players and also from a government official.  I listened and “filed” these observations, but they were  brought back to life with the recent explosion of the BlackBerry story.  You may know that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and now also India and a number of other countries, are threatening to ban BlackBerry unless RIM allows them access to the encrypted email data of BlackBerry users, stored on the company’s servers.  India gave RIM an ultimatum until the end of the month to comply and the rumor is that the Indian government has similar plans for Google, Skype, and perhaps others.

I wonder how did RIM find itself in such a situation?  Will other global technological companies find themselves in a similar situation soon too?  Peter Svensson writes in Washington Post today:

“Threats by the governments of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to shut down BlackBerry’s corporate e-mail services reflect unease about a technology that the U.S. government also took a while to accept.  The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce. (…) RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, doesn’t have years to wait for foreign governments to adopt the more relaxed U.S. stance toward encryption.”

I assume Svensson is right about his historical perspective; after all, writing about this is his bread an butter.  At the same time, given that all the governments currently having an issue with BlackBerry are in developing countries, I think he is missing the point made by the people I talked to about the Western companies’ attitudes to the emerging markets’ governments.

It did not take the US government years to figure out its stand on encryption on its own.  On the contrary, this position is a result of years of dialogue, argument, and debates between the government and the various interest groups, primarily the industry, through its lobbying activities, and the civil society.  We can see a similar discussion taking place these days around the issue of net neutrality.

It seems to me that until the RIMs, Googles, and Skypes of this world won’t take the regulators in the developing world as seriously as they take the governments back home, we will continue seeing more “BlackBerry” cases.  Until the multinational MICT companies will not engage in a meaningful  way with the local governments in the emerging markets, the barriers to their activities there will continue growing and become more sophisticated, especially when it comes to such a politicized area as information.

So, I wonder if it is the time for these companies to start lobbying in the developing world just the way they are lobbying here.  While I am aware of the potentially harmful influences of lobbying, it is an integral part of the policymaking mechanism and, for better or worse, it also has an educational impact on the policymakers.  At the end of the day, usually those are the governments that are catching up with technology, while the industry is ahead of the curve.

What do you think?  Is it the time to lobby?

Enjoy!

Recent news related

Not so much news at this point, but still an interesting and important development.  Not so long ago a federal court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lacks the authority to enforce net neutrality in a case where Comcast chose to discriminate against BitTorent users on their network.  This is interesting because on the one hand, this decision raises questions about other internet related policy initiatives by the FCC, such as cybersecurity, privacy and consumer-protection policies.  On the other hand, it is highlighting the need to redefine the media landscape in light of the change in the technological environment.  Today, internet service providers (ISPs) are regulated differently from the traditional media or traditional telephone companies that have much more checks and balances.  This ruling can trigger redefinition of the ISPs placing them in a similar category with other companies oversaw by the FCC or perhaps a creation of new category  (yes, i am thinking about something like MICT category).  In the meantime, however, the FCC decided to not intervene.  Here is a good discussion of the issue on NPR.

Another big (old) news was the launch of the iPad, which was met with great hype and many hopes, but also with a substantive amount of criticism.  One article used an example where Apple rejected Pulitzer winner cartoonist’s iPhone app because it “ridicules public figures.”  It is used to raise questions about about the direction Apple is taking and the online experience it is tailoring for us.  Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing voiced his concerns about the locked nature of the iPad and so did David Weinberg.  Harry McCracken, posted a really thorough comparison of iPad to the various other devices.  I will let you judge.

Interesting reports, numbers, and visualizations

“Youth, Privacy and Reputation” (PDF) – The Berkman Center has released a massive literature about “the intersections of youth, reputation, and privacy online, focusing on youth attitudes and practices.”

“Google is way bigger than you realize” (via Bob) – A visualization of comparative sizes of server farms owned by Google, Intel, Facebook, and a number of other large players.

Particular stats:

• Canada – Internet use

Interesting thoughts, ideas, opinions, and discussions

“FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future” – An opinion piece from Cory Doctorow about a recent decision of the FCC to allow “Selective Output Control” technologies in your TV set-top box.

“Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative” and “dear facebook, freedom or friends? that’s not a choice” – Just a couple of examples of people’s reactions to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy settings and the introduction of the global “Like” button.  What do you think?

“How to Regulate the Internet Tap” – An opinion calling for government non-intervention in net neutrality issues.

Digital Divide

“The Digital Divide Will Ensure a Broadband Ghetto” (via Josh) – An interesting discussion, especially in the comments, of the broadband situation in the US.

“Telecom companies seek to make Haiti a mobile nation” – Another interesting debate in the sphere of the digital divide – will the future be wireless or we will still need wires to gain appropriate bandwidth?

“The $99 sort-of-Smartphone” – A report on a US $99 smartphone aimed for the developing market and a short discussion about whether or not this is a sustainable development.  I apologize in advance  for the narration :)

“Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough” (via @rafik) – A NYT article about OLPC, its vision, challenges, and criticism.

“Bridging the Online Language Barrier” – An NPR story on the various ways of dealing with multilingualism online.

MICT regulation

“$4 Million Spent Lobbying Congress on Domain Names” (vai @IGPAlert) – A brief note summarizing the investment of various companies with interest in domain names in their Washington DC activities.  Take a look what they spent the money on.

“The Supreme Court: The Anonymity Of The Talkbacks Should Be Preserved” – The article in the link is in Hebrew and it reports on the Israeli Supreme Court decision to maintain the anonymity of the people leaving comments online.  The claim was to force the ISPs to reveal the identity of the comments’ authors for the purpose of a civil suit, but it got dismissed.  This is an interesting addition to the debate about ISPs as intermediaries in regulation of the Internet content.

“Public Policy Questions for Internet” – A 2005 article outlining an agenda for internet governance public policy debate.  Very long and still surprisingly relevant.

“New” media

“52 Percent Of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists” (via @joeymornin) – A report on a recent study with the observation in the title as well as the fact that most bloggers rely on other blogs and Twitter in their research.

“Twitter Updates, the 18th Century Edition” – A report on the paper written by one of our professors at Cornell, where she is telling a story of 18th century diaries, which resemble Twitter updates.

Simply Interesting, Fun, and Coll Stuff

“BeetleCam: Safari via remote control” – A project from two British brothers photographers where they mounted a camera on a remotely controlled car to take close pictures of animals in Africa; pretty cool!

“SA pigeon ‘faster than broadband‘” – A BBC article about a group in South Africa who compared the speeds of sending information online with sending it with a mail pigeon.  I heard about Yossi Vardi doing the same thing in Israel a few years ago with a similar result.

A TED talk by Jane McGonigal of the Institute of the Future about utilizing games for changing people’s behavior and making the world a better place.  I think she takes way too long to get to the point, but if you happen to listen to the end, I would love to hear what you think (also see the discussion on TED website):

A couple of old videos trying to envision the future of MICT.  It is really interesting to watch them from where we are today (thanks to Josh)

Many people, including those in major outlets are voicing their criticism of the erosion of privacy and introduction of the inverse Beakon.  For example, the Washington Post ran a number of articles on this subject and is reporting on a bill for privacy online being drafted following this outcry, ars technica writes about complains filed against Facebook at the FTC, Huffington Post posted some visualizations of how more and more of our information is exposed to more and more people on Facebook, and the Wired has recently posted a very opinionated piece from Ryan Singer criticizing Facebook’s behavior and calling for an alternative.  What I find amusing in this situation is that all these major outlets (and many others) have wholeheartedly adopted the universal “Like” feature and other Facebook gadgets.  When you come to read their articles, you are welcomed by familiar faces of your friends through some Facebook social feature.

To me it creates a dissonance.

I realize that in many cases these are journalists reporting on a piece of technology-related news and I realize that the opinions of the columnists belong to them and not necessarily to the news outlet. I also realize that the news outlets are involved in financial survival battle and using Facebook advertising and social platform may be an opportunity.  I even appreciate the fact these discussions are taking place and that the mainstream media, the blogosphere, and  even Facebook itself are hosting this debate.  Nevertheless, when I see that Ryan Singer’s super critical piece has two “Like” buttons and almost 3500 likes on Facebook, I understand why over at Facebook they feel so confident and comfortable messing with the privacy of their users.

And what do you think?