Yearly Archives: 2010

Minister Moore and the Myth of Market Forces

Last week was a bad week for the government on the copyright front. The government recently tabled legislation to reform copyright and the man in charge of the file, Heritage Minister James Moore, gave a speech at the International Chamber of Commerce in which he decried those who questioned the bill as “radical extremists.” The comment was a none-too-veiled attack at people like University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist who have championed for reasonable copyright reform and who, like many Canadians, are concerned about some aspects of the proposed bill.

Unfortunately for the Minister, things got worse from there.

First, the Minister denied making the comment in messages to two different individuals who inquired about it:

Still worse, the Minister got into a online debate with Cory Doctorow, a bestselling writer (he won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book last year and his current novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists) and the type of person whose interests the Heritage Minister is supposed to engage and advocate on behalf of, not get into fights with.

In a confusing 140 character back and forth that lasted a few minutes, the minister oddly defended Apple and insulted Google (I’ve captured the whole debate here thanks to the excellent people at bettween). But unnoticed in the debate is an astonishing fact: the Minister seems unaware of both the task at hand and the implications of the legislation.

The following innocuous tweet summed up his position:

Indeed, in the Minister’s 22 tweets in the conversation he uses the term “market forces” six times and the theme of “letting the market or consumers decide” is in over half his tweets.

I too believe that consumers should choose what they want. But if the Minister were a true free market advocate he wouldn’t believe in copyright reform. Indeed, he wouldn’t believe in copyright at all. In a true free market, there’d be no copyright legislation because the market would decide how to deal with intellectual property.

Copyright law exists in order to regulate and shape a market because we don’t think market forces work. In short, the Minister’s legislation is creating the marketplace. Normally I would celebrate his claims of being in favour of “letting consumers decide” since this legislation will determine what these choices will and won’t be. However, the Twitter debate should leave Canadians concerned since this legislation limits consumer choices long before products reach the shelves.

Indeed, as Doctorow points out, the proposed legislation actually kills concepts created by the marketplace – like Creative Commons – that give creators control over how their works can be shared and re-used:

But advocates like Cory Doctorow and Michael Geist aren’t just concerned about the Minister’s internal contradictions in defending his own legislation. They have practical concerns that the bill narrows the choice for both consumers and creators.

Specifically, they are concerned with the legislation’s handling of what are called “digital locks.” Digital locks are software embedded into a DVD of your favourite movie or a music file you buy from iTunes that prevents you from making a copy. Previously it was legal for you to make a backup copy of your favourite tape or CD, but with a digital lock, this not only becomes practically more difficult, it becomes illegal.

Cory Doctorow outlines his concerns with digital locks in this excellent blog post:

They [digital locks] transfer power to technology firms at the expense of copyright holders. The proposed Canadian rules on digital locks mirror the US version in that they ban breaking a digital lock for virtually any reason. So even if you’re trying to do something legal (say, ripping a CD to put it on your MP3 player), you’re still on the wrong side of the law if you break a digital lock to do it.

But it gets worse. Digital locks don’t just harm content consumers (the very people people Minister Moore says he is trying to provide with “choice”); they harm content creators even more:

Here’s what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter.

So that’s Minister Moore’s version of “author’s rights” — any tech company that happens to load my books on their device or in their software ends up usurping my copyrights. I may have written the book, sweated over it, poured my heart into it — but all my rights are as nothing alongside the rights that Apple, Microsoft, Sony and the other DRM tech-giants get merely by assembling some electronics in a Chinese sweatshop.

That’s the “creativity” that the new Canadian copyright law rewards: writing an ebook reader, designing a tablet, building a phone. Those “creators” get more say in the destiny of Canadian artists’ copyrights than the artists themselves.

In short, the digital lock provisions reward neither consumers nor creators. Instead, they give the greatest rights and rewards to the one group of people in the equation whose rights are least important: distributors.

That a Heritage Minister doesn’t understand this is troubling. That he would accuse those who seek to point out this fact and raise awareness to it as “radical extremists” is scandalous. Canadians have entrusted in this person the responsibility for creating a marketplace that rewards creativity, content creation and innovation while protecting the rights of consumers. At the moment, we have a minister who shuts out the very two groups he claims to protect while wrapping himself in a false cloak of the “free market.” It is an ominous start for the debate over copyright reform and the minister has only himself to blame.

Canadian Open Cities Update

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For those who have not been following the news there have been a couple of exciting developments on the open data front at the municipal level in Canada.

First off, the City of Edmonton has launched its Apps competition, details can be found at the Apps4Edmonton website.

Second, it looks like the City of London, Ontario is may do a pilot of open data – thanks to the vocal activism of local developers and community organizers the Mayor of London expressed interesting in doing a pilot at the London Changecamp. As mentioned, there is a vibrant and active community in London, Ontario so I hope this effort takes flight.

Third, and much older, is that Ottawa approved doing open data, so keep an eye on this website as things begin to take shape

The final municipal update is the outlier… Turns out that although Calgary passed a motion to do open data a few months ago the roll out keeps getting delayed by a small group of city councillors. Reasons are murky especially since I’m told by local activists that the funds have already been allocated and that everything is set to go. Will be watching this unfold with interest.

Finally, unrelated to municipal data, but still important (!), Apps4Climate Action has extended the contest deadline due to continued interest in the contest. The new submission deadline is August 8th.

Hope everyone has a great weekend. Oh, and if you haven’t already, please join the facebook group “let’s get 100,000 Canadian to op out of yellow pages delivery.” Already, in less than a week, over 800 Canadians have successfully opted of receiving the yellow pages. Hope you’ll join too.

The Myth of the Open Data Mob: a response to Mike Ananny

Gun Registry vs. "Truth in Sentencing" – when policy is divorced from evidence

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So, this morning Kevin Page, Parliamentary Budget Officer, reports that the “Truth in Sentencing” legislation will cost Canadians $5.1B to implement between now and 2016. Essentially, Canadians will pay an extra billion dollars a year on a program that most experts agree will do nothing to reduce crime or make Canadians safer.

It seems worth looking back at this point at the Gun Registry, which the conservatives bemoaned as been an ineffective boondoggle, but of course it also ended up costing an additional billion dollars a year to manage, and it is equally unclear if it has made Canadians any safer (that said it has helped police officers who use it 10,000 times a day, but whether this help is worth $1B or if that money could have been better spent elsewhere is unclear).

The point here is fear and ideology can do terrible things to budgets (not to mention social outcomes, a billion dollars – not to mention TWO billion dollars – a year on certain social programs could do a lot to prevent crime). In both cases we have policies that appeal to values of a base (tough on guns vs. tough on crime) when in reality this is merely posturing (lets spend money to look like we are stopping gun violence vs. lets spend money to look like we are stopping crime). Tracking guns and locking away criminals feels like it has a direct impact so it must be effective whereas offering more drug and alcohol rehab programs or after school programs is indirect so must be less effective. But notice its what we feel, not what is actually empirically demonstrable. So should we lose all hope in the ability of politicians to pursue effective public policy?

I say no…

While billion dollar lessons are painful to learn (Ontario, e-health and proprietary software is another one that comes to mind) they can be salutary in getting everybody to refocus on what’s effective which means getting back to the evidence. What will be interesting is to see if the Conservative government can adapt. For this government the challenge will be greater as ideology has trumped evidence for most of the past few years. Remember this is the government that has decried Insite, the supervised injection, despite the evidence that it works and even had a Minister (Clement when he was at Health) rant about how the Canadian Medical Association and its doctors were unethical for supporting it. They were of course, just supporting the best medical practice and outcome. So, this could be a long road to travel.

Of course, if they fight the tide, I suspect that the prison boondoggle could turn into their version of the gun registry (especially coming on the heels of the G20 fake lake). But I suspect that ideological fervor in the face of budget realities has a much shorter road… to opposition. So structurally, they’ll be pushed down the road whether they want it or not. Either way, it will make for some interesting political and policy watching.

On Policy Alpha geeks, network thinking and foreign policy

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In the past few weeks the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the Canadian International Council (CIC) both launched new visions for Canada’s foreign policy. Reading each, I’m struck by how much overlap both documents have with Middle to Model Power, the Canada25 report written 5 years ago by over 500 young Canadians from across the country and around the world.

With Middle to Model Power, a group of young people largely self-organized to lay out a vision and selection of ideas around how Canada could rethink its foreign policy. Take a look at this selection from its executive summary, including an overview and the first recommendation:

We submit that Canada should cease assessing its influence on the basis of its size or position within an obsolete global hierarchy. Instead, Canada25 calls on Canadians to look at the world as a network, where influence is based on the capacity of an individual, company, non-governmental organization (NGO) or country to innovate and collaborate. Building on this perspective, we propose that Canada become a Model Power—a country whose influence is linked to its ability to innovate, experiment, and partner; a country that, by presenting itself as a model, invites the world to assess, challenge, borrow from, and contribute to, its efforts.
In pursuit of our vision of Canada as a Model Power, we outline three priorities for action. These, accompanied by some of our recommendations, include:

MAKE CANADA A NETWORK NODE. Enhance the ability of Canadians to create, nurture, and tap into international networks:
• Issue five-year work visas to foreign graduates of Canadian universities • Reach out to Canada’s expatriate community by creating an international network of
Canadian leaders…

You can download the full report here, but you get the idea. Remember this is a group of 23-35 year-olds writing in 2005.

Now, quickly compare this to the summary’s of both the LPC and CIC’s new reports.

The LPC report, called a Global Networks Strategy opens by stating:

Networks define how the world works today, as hierarchies did in the past. Influence is gained through connectedness, and by being at the centre of networks. That is good news for Canada, because we have a reputation for being able to work with others, we have shaped many multilateral organizations, and our population today reflects the diversity of the world. The Global Networks Strategy is designed to leverage these assets. It sets priority areas in which the federal government must collaborate with the full range of players who contribute vigorously – and most often in networks – to Canada’s presence in the world: other governments, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, young Canadians, academia, faith- based groups, artists and others.

And in the CIC report, titled Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked World, has as one of its opening paragraphs:

Canada will never be the most powerful nation on Earth. But we live in a digital age, where might is measured in knowledge rather than muscularity. If we keep building on our openness—attracting the best and the brightest citizens, generating and exchanging new ideas and new ways of doing things and welcoming investment in our economy—Canada can position itself at the centre of the networked world that is emerging in the 21st century.

And, unsurprisingly, the deeper details of the reports offer many similar prescriptions.

So how, on a shoestring budget, can a group of young Canadians many of whom were not foreign policy experts, write a report that identifies an organizing principle that 5 years both a major political party and one of the country’s newest and best funded think tanks would put at the hearts of their own reports?

A few ideas come to mind:

1) The Medium is the Message: Middle to Model Power was not written on a wiki (in 2005 none of us knew what a wiki was!) but it was written over email. The authors were scattered across the country and the process of organizing local events was relatively decentralized. People raised whatever topics that mattered to them, and during the drafting phase they simple sent me their ideas and we batted them around. There was structure, but were were a pretty flat organization and… we were very connected. For Canada25 a network wasn’t just an idea that emerged out of the process, it was the process. It should hardly be surprising that the way we saw the world reflected how we organized ourselves. (When I say that Canada’s digital economy strategy will fail unless written on GCPEDIA this is part of what I’m hinting at). The medium is the message. It’s hard (but not impossible) to write about networks deep in hierarchy.

2) Look for Policy Alpha Geeks in resource poor environments: So why did Canada25 think in terms of networks? How was it that before Wikinomics or GPS or pretty much most other things I’ve seen, did Canada25 organize itself this way? Well, it wasn’t because we were strategic or young. It was because we had very little money. We couldn’t afford to organize any other way. To get 500 Canadians around the world to think about foreign policy we had to let them self-organize – we didn’t have an org structure or facilitators to do it for them. We had to take the cheapest tools (email) and over use them. Don’t get me wrong, Canada25 was not poor. Our members were generally very well educated, we had access to computers and the internet and access to interesting people to interview and draw ideas from. But the raw infrastructure we had at our disposal was not significant and it forced us to adopt what I now see were disruptive technologies and processes. We became Policy Alpha Geeks because we had to innovate not to be relevant, but to ensure the project survived.

3) It’s not about the youth: People presume that our thinking emerged because we were young. This is not entirely correct. Again, I submit that we got to thinking about networks because we were operating in a resource weak environment and had exposure to new tools (email) and a risk tolerance to try using them in an ambitious way. This isn’t about age, it just happens that generally it is young people who don’t have lots of resources and are willing to experiment with new tools. Older people, who frequently have more senior titles, generally have access to more resources and so can rely on more established, but more resource intensive tools and processes. But again, this is about mindset, not about age. Indeed, it is really about the innovators’ dilemma in policy making. Don’t believe me? Well, as lead author of Middle to Model Power I can tell you that the most influential book on my thinking was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock which I read in the month preceding the drafting of the report. It was written in 1970 by an author who was, at the time, 42. In sum, young people can be a good guide, but it is environmental factors that you can replicate, not intrinsic qualities of being young, that allow you to innovate.

Both the LPC and the CIC’s documents are good and indeed, more up to date than Middle to Model Power. But in terms of core organizing principles the three documents are similar. So if you are genuinely interested in this take a look at all three documents. I do think they put forward what could become an emerging centrist consensus regarding organizing principles for Canadian foreign policy. Certainly that was the ambition back in 2005.

Canada's Digital Economy Strategy: Two quick actions you can take

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For those interested – or better still, up till now uninterested – in Canada’s digital economy strategy I wanted to write a quick post about some things you can do to help ensure the country moves in the right direction.

First, there are a few proposals on the digital economy strategy consultation website that could do with your vote. If you have time I encourage you to go and read them and, if swayed, to vote for them. They include:

Open Access to Canada’s Public Sector Information and Data – Essentially calling for open data at the federal level
Government Use and Participation in Open Source – A call for government to save taxpayers money by engaging with and leveraging the opportunity of open source software
Improved access to publicly-funded data – I’m actually on the fence on this one. I agree that data from publicly funded research should be made available, however, this is not open government data and I fear that the government will adopt this recommendation and then claim that is does “open data” as the UK and the US. This option would, in fact, be something far, far short of such a claim. Indeed, the first option above is broader and encompasses this recommendation.

Second, go read Michael Geist’s piece Opening Up Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy. It is bang on and I hope to write something shortly that builds upon it.

Finally, and this is on a completely different tack, but if you are up for “clicking your mouse for change,” please also consider joining the facebook group I recently created that encourages people to opt out of receiving the yellow pages. It gives instructions what to do and, the more people who join bigger a message it sends to Yellow Pages – and the people that advertise in them – that this wasteful medium is no longer of interest to consumers (and never gets used anyways).

War makes facists of us all: Would you like to know more?

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Over the years I’ve taken my lumps from friends for loving Starship Troopers. Most who haven’t seen it assume it is a dumb sci-fi action movie. But listen to the directors commentary and the first two things you’re told is that the movie is about “how war makes fascists of us all” and that the Federal Network “media sequences” are based on US World War II anti-Japanese propaganda films. Now that’s dark.

How dark? Well, I’ve always felt that Starship Troopers was to the film medium what 1984 was to books. Yes both are sci-fi, but more importantly they are bleak looks into how technology and power can merge to create a nightmare future (indeed, on a wild tangent, 1984 may be one of the best arguments for why we need an open web).

So if you’ve never thought of Starship Troopers that way (or any way!) I can’t say enough good things about Scott Tobias’ revisit and analysis of the movie 13 years later. It is brilliant.

In fact, stop reading me, go read him.

Not only a far better articulation than anything I’d have written but it also goes places I’d never gone: Tobias’ observation that Starship Troopers is an allegory for September 11th before it happened is brilliant.

As an aside I also love Tobias’ analysis of Starship Troopers faux network television/internet – the Federal Network:

Yet the key to the Federal Network’s power isn’t necessarily the clips themselves—which feature such great cultural advancements as televised executions (after whiplash-swift justice) and barely censored “censored” violence—but the prompt at the end, “Would you like to know more?” That’s what makes it effective as propaganda: the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of choice, the illusion that people have control over their own destinies.

Sometimes that feels exactly like what we get from CNN/MSNBC and especially FOX News… but then willingly or unwillingly, in the first decade of the 21st century war has already made fascists of us all.

Yellow Pages (and White Pages) are Spam – You can block it

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Update: I decided to create a facebook group to help people stop getting yellow pages. No pressure to join, just another way to share with others the good news and let Yellow Pages know how ridiculous you think they are. No idea if it will take off, but no harm in trying.

Great news! If you live in Canada you can stop the Yellow Pages from delivering their redundant, wasteful over-sized paper weight to your home. Simply fill out this form.

I was renewed in my hunt for such an option after I saw this pile in my friend’s condo. Pretty much everything about this photo makes me angry.

I have not used the Yellow Pages in over a decade and will never, ever, ever, ever use them (even their website which I am decidedly not linking to here) so long as they give them to virtually every Canadian address (I suspect that there are at least 20? 25? million, more? of these things printed every year?

In our world this is spam. It isn’t mail I want, I didn’t ask for it and if I receive it, I delete (recycle) it upon arrival. I only wish the damage done by these books was as limited as online spam.

At least now we can request that it not be delivered. Of course, this solution is far from perfect. Consider that:

1) the fact you have to hand over personal information to a private company to stop receiving a service you never asked for is beyond offensive.

2) this opt out is not permanent. As the Yellow Pages Group FAQ (which is weirdly a PDF and not HTML like the rest of the site) notes:

3. Is my registration permanment?

No. Your registration is valid for two directory deliveries. After that time, you must inform us that you would like to continue to opt-out by completing the same form at http://www.ypg.com/delivery or calling 1-800-268-5637.

3) better still, when, in two years, your opt out expires will Yellow Pages remind you? Or will they simply start sending you yellow pages again? Again their FAQ provides a sad answer:

5. Will Yellow Pages Group send me a notice when the registration period expires?

It will be your responsibility to register again to receive more directories or to be removed from the distribution list after two directory deliveries.

Everything about this company is broken. With luck it will either change or not be with us much longer (also check out its shrinking stock value and declining dividend here).

Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data

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We didn’t build libraries for a literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have public policy literate citizens, we build them so that citizens may become literate in public policy.

Yesterday, in a brilliant article on The Guardian website, Charles Arthur argued that a global flood of government data is being opened up to the public (sadly, not in Canada) and that we are going to need an army of people to make it understandable.

I agree. We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite of hackers and policy wonks. And the best way to cultivate that broad-based literacy is not to release in small or measured quantities, but to flood us with data. To provide thousands of niches that will interest people in learning, playing and working with open data. But more than this we also need to think about cultivating communities where citizens can exchange ideas as well as involve educators to help provide support and increase people’s ability to move up the learning curve.

Interestingly, this is not new territory. We have a model for how to make this happen – one from which we can draw lessons or foresee problems. What model? Consider a process similar in scale and scope that happened just over a century ago: the library revolution.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, governments and philanthropists across the western world suddenly became obsessed with building libraries – lots of them. Everything from large ones like the New York Main Library to small ones like the thousands of tiny, one-room county libraries that dot the countryside. Big or small, these institutions quickly became treasured and important parts of any city or town. At the core of this project was that literate citizens would be both more productive and more effective citizens.

But like open data, this project was not without controversy. It is worth noting that at the time some people argued libraries were dangerous. Libraries could spread subversive ideas – especially about sexuality and politics – and that giving citizens access to knowledge out of context would render them dangerous to themselves and society at large. Remember, ideas are a dangerous thing. And libraries are full of them.

Cora McAndrews Moellendick, a Masters of Library Studies student who draws on the work of Geller sums up the challenge beautifully:

…for a period of time, censorship was a key responsibility of the librarian, along with trying to persuade the public that reading was not frivolous or harmful… many were concerned that this money could have been used elsewhere to better serve people. Lord Rodenberry claimed that “reading would destroy independent thinking.” Librarians were also coming under attack because they could not prove that libraries were having any impact on reducing crime, improving happiness, or assisting economic growth, areas of keen importance during this period… (Geller, 1984)

Today when I talk to public servants, think tank leaders and others, most grasp the benefit of “open data” – of having the government sharing the data it collects. A few however, talk about the problem of just handing data over to the public. Some questions whether the activity is “frivolous or harmful.” They ask “what will people do with the data?” “They might misunderstand it” or “They might misuse it.” Ultimately they argue we can only release this data “in context”. Data after all, is a dangerous thing. And governments produce a lot of it.

As in the 19th century, these arguments must not prevail. Indeed, we must do the exact opposite. Charges of “frivolousness” or a desire to ensure data is only released “in context” are code to obstruct or shape data portals to ensure that they only support what public institutions or politicians deem “acceptable”. Again, we need a flood of data, not only because it is good for democracy and government, but because it increases the likelihood of more people taking interest and becoming literate.

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

This is why coders in cities like Vancouver and Ottawa come together for open data hackathons, to share ideas and skills on how to use and engage with open data.

But smart governments should not only rely on small groups of developers to make use of open data. Forward-looking governments – those that want an engaged citizenry, a 21st-century workforce and a creative, knowledge-based economy in their jurisdiction – will reach out to universities, colleges and schools and encourage them to get their students using, visualizing, writing about and generally engaging with open data. Not only to help others understand its significance, but to foster a sense of empowerment and sense of opportunity among a generation that could create the public policy hacks that will save lives, make public resources more efficient and effective and make communities more livable and fun. The recent paper published by the University of British Columbia students who used open data to analyze graffiti trends in Vancouver is a perfect early example of this phenomenon.

When we think of libraries, we often just think of a building with books. But 19th century mattered not only because they had books, but because they offered literacy programs, books clubs, and other resources to help citizens become literate and thus, more engaged and productive. Open data catalogs need to learn the same lesson. While they won’t require the same centralized and costly approach as the 19th century, governments that help foster communities around open data, that encourage their school system to use it as a basis for teaching, and then support their citizens’ efforts to write and suggest their own public policy ideas will, I suspect, benefit from happier and more engaged citizens, along with better services and stronger economies.

So what is your government/university/community doing to create its citizen army of open data analysts?

ChangeCamp Vancouver, GovCamp Toronto & Open Data Hackathon

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For those in Vancouver, ChangeCamp will be taking place Saturday at the W2 Storyeum on 151 W Cordova. You can register here and propose sessions in advance here. I know I’ll be there and I am looking forward to hearing about interesting local projects and trying to find ways to contribute to them.

I’ll probably submit a brain storming session on datadotgc.ca – there are some exciting developments in the work around the website I’d like to test out on an audience. I’d also be interested in a session that asks people about apps they’d like to create using open data. It will be interesting to get a better sense of additional data sets people would like to request from the city.

Out in Toronto, I’ll be speaking at GovCamp Toronto on June 17th at the Toronto Reference Library. I’m not sure how registration is going to work but I would keep an eye on this page if you are interested.

Finally, on the 17th SAP will be hosting an open data hackathon for developers in Vancouver. A great opportunity to come out and work on projects related to Apps 4 Climate Action or open data projects using city of Vancouver data (or both!). I was really impressed to hear that in Ottawa a 130 people came to the first open data hackathon – would love to help foster a community like that here in Vancouver. You can RSVP for this event here.

Hope to see you at these events!

eaves.ca

if writing is a muscle, this is my gym