Tag Archives: canada 3.0

Canada 3.0 & The Collapse of Complex Business Models

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If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage everyone to go read Clay Shirky’s The Collapse of Complex Business Models. I just read it while finishing up this piece and it articulates much of what underpins it in the usual brilliant Shirky manner.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on Canada 3.0 (think SXSWi meets government and big business) since the conference’s end. I want to open by saying there were a number of positive highlights. I came away with renewed respect and confidence in the CRTC. My sense is net neutrality and other core internet issues are well understood and respected by the people I spoke with. Moreover, I was encouraged by what some public servants had to say regarding their vision for Canada’s digital economy. In many corners there were some key people who seemed to understand what policy, legal and physical infrastructure needs to be in place to ensure Canada’s future success.

But these moments aside, the more I reflect on the conference the more troubled I feel. I can’t claim to have attended every session but I did attend a number and my main conclusion is striking: Canada 3.0 was not a conference primarily about Canada’s digital future. Canada 3.0 was a conference about Canada’s digital commercial future. Worse, this meant the conference failed on two levels. Firstly, it failed because people weren’t trying to imagine a digital future that would serve Canadians as creators, citizens and contributors to the internet and what this would mean to commerce, democracy and technology. Instead, my sense was that the digital future largely being contemplated was one where Canadians consumed services over the internet. This, frankly, is the least important and interesting part of the internet. Designing a digital strategy for companies is very different than designing one for Canadians.

But, secondly, even when judged in commercial terms, the conference, in my mind, failed. This is not because the wrong people were there, or that the organizers and participants were not well-intentioned. Far from it. Many good and many necessary people were in attendance (at least as one could expect when hosting it in Stratford).

No, the conference’s main problem was that, at the core of many conversations lay an untested assumption: That we can manage the transition of broadcast media (by this I mean movies, books, newspaper & magazines, television) as well as other industries from an (a) broadcast economy to a (b) networked/digital economy. Consequently, the central business and policy challenge is how do we help these businesses survive this transitionary period and get “b” happening asap so that the new business models work.

But the key assumption is that the institutions – private and public – that were relevant in the broadcast economy can transition. Or that the future will allow for a media industry that we could even recognize. While I’m open to the possibility that some entities may make it, I’m more convinced that most will not. Indeed, it isn’t even clear that a single traditional business model, even radically adapted, can adjust to a network world.

What no one wants to suggest is that we may not be managing a transition. We may be managing death.

The result: a conference that doesn’t let those who have let go of the past roam freely. Instead they must lug around all the old modes like a ball and chain.

Indeed, one case in point was listening to managers of the Government of Canada’s multimedia fund share how, to get funding, a creator would need to partner with a traditional broadcaster. To be clear, if you want to kill content, give it to a broadcaster, they’ll play it once or twice, then put it in a vault and one will ever see it again. Furthermore, a broadcaster has all the infrastructure, processes and overhead that make them unworkable and unprofitable in the online era. Why saddle someone new with all this? Ultimately this is a program designed to create failures and worse, pollute the minds of emerging multimedia artists with all sorts of broadcast baggage. All in the belief that it will help bridge the transition. It won’t.

The ugly truth is that just like the big horse buggy makers didn’t survive the transition to the automobile, or that many of the creators of large complex mainframe computers didn’t survive the arrival of the personal computer, our traditional media environment is loaded with the walking dead. Letting them control the conversation, influence policy and shape the agenda is akin to asking horse drawn carriage makers write the rules for the automobile era. But this is exactly what we are doing. The copyright law, the pillar of this next economy, is being written not by the PMO, but by the losers of the last economy. Expect it to slow our development down dramatically.

And that’s why Canada 3.0 isn’t about planning for 3.0 at all. More like trying to save 1.0.

Digital Economy Strategy: Why we risk asking the wrong question

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Far better an approximate answer to the right question, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise….

– John Tukey

I’ve always admired Paul Erdos, the wandering mathematician who I first learned about by reading his obituary in the Economist back in 1996 (and later learned was a friend and frequent house guest of my grandfather’s). What I remember best about that economist obituary was how one of his students talking about his genius not lying in his capacity to produce mathematical proofs, but in his ability to ask the right question, which set events in motion so that the proof could be found at all.

It is with that idea in mind that I turn to the Canada 3.0 conference here in Stratford Ontario where I’ve been invited to take part in a meeting with industry types and policy leaders to talk about what Canada must do to become a leading digital nation by 2017. The intent is to build on last year’s Stratford Declaration and develop an action plan.

So what do I think we need to do? First, I think we need to ask the right question.

I think we need to stop talking about a digital as the future.

This whole conversation isn’t about being a digital country. It isn’t about a future where everything is going to be digitized. That isn’t the challenge. It is already happening. It’s done. It’s over. Canada is already well on its way to becoming digital. Anyone who uses MS Word to write a document is digital. I’ve been submitting papers using a word processor since high school (this comes from a place of privilege, something I’ll loop back to). Worse, talking about digital means talking about technology like servers or standards or business models like Bell, or Google or Music Producers and all the other things that don’t matter.

The dirty truth is that Canada’s digital future isn’t about digital. What is special isn’t that everything is being digitized. It’s that everything is being connected. The web isn’t interesting because you can read it on a computer screen. It is special because of hyperlinks – that information is connected to other information (again, something the newspaper have yet to figure out). So this is a conversation about connectivity. It is about the policy and legal structure needed when me, you, information, and places, when everything, everywhere is connected to everything else, everywhere persistently. That’s the big change.

So if a digital economy strategy is really about a networked economy strategy, and what makes a networked economy work better is stronger and more effective connectivity, then the challenge isn’t about what happens when something shifts from physical to digital. It is about how we promote the connectivity of everything to everything in a fair manner. How do we make ourselves the most networked country, in the physical, legally and policy terms. This is the challenge.

Viewed in this frame. We do indeed have some serious challenges and are already far behind many others when it comes to connectivity if we want to be a global leader by 2017. So what are the key issues limiting or preventing connectivity and what are the consequences of a networked economy we need to be worried about? How about:

  • Expensive and poor broadband and mobile access in (in both remote and urban communities)
  • Throttling and threats to Net Neutrality
  • Using copyright as a vehicle to limit the connectivity of information (ACTA) or threaten peoples right to connect
  • Using copyright as a vehicle to protect business models built on limiting peoples capacity to connect to innovations and ideas
  • Government’s that don’t connect their employees to one another and the public
  • It’s also about connective rights. Individual rights to limit connectivity to privacy, and right to freely associate and disassociate

So what are the three things we need to start thinking about immediately?

If connectivity is the source of innovation, wealth and prosperity then how do we ensure that Canadians are the most connected citizens in the world?

1)    a net neutral broadband and mobile market place where the costs of access are the lowest in the world.

That is would be a source of enormous competitive advantage and a critical stepping stone to ensuring access to education and an innovation fueled economy. Sadly, we have work to do. Take for example, the fact that we have the worst cell phone penetration rates in the developed world. This at a time when cellphone internet access is overtaking desktop internet access.

But more importantly, I was lucky to be able to use a word processor 20 years ago. Today, not having access to the internet is tantamount to preventing a child from being able to go to the library, or worse, preventing them from learning to read. Affordable access is not a rural or urban issue. It’s a rights and basic education issue.

Equally important is that the network remain a neutral platform upon which anyone can innovate. The country that allows its networks to grant (or sell) certain companies or individuals special privileges is one that one that will quickly fall behind the innovation curve. New companies and business models inevitable displace established players. If those established players are allowed to snuff out new ideas before they mature, then there will be no new players. No innovation. No new jobs. No competitive advantage.

2)    A copyright regime that enables the distribution of ideas and the creation of new culture.

Here I am in Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, one of the biggest open source festivals in the country. Every year the city celebrates plays that, because they are in the public domain, can be remixed, re-interpreted, and used without anyone’s permission to create new derivative cultural works (as well as bring joy and economic prosperity to untold people). A copyright regime that overly impedes the connectivity of works to one another (no fair use!) or the connectivity of people to ideas is one that will limit innovation in Canada.

A networked economy is not just one that connects people to a network. That is a broadcast economy. A networked economy is one that allows people to connect works together to create new works. Copyright should protect creators of content, but it should do so to benefit the creators, not support vast industries that market, sell, and repackage these works long after the original creator is dead. As Lawrence Lessig so eloquently put it:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.

  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

A networked economy limits the past to enable the future.

3)    A government that uses a networked approach to creating a strategy for a connected economy.

An agrarian economy was managed using papyrus, an industrial economy was managed via printing press, typewriters and carbon copy paper. A digital economy strategy and managing policies were created on Microsoft Word and with email. A Network Economy can and only will be successfully managed and regulated when those trying to regulate it stop using siloed, industrial modes of production, and instead start thinking and organizing like a network. Not to ring an old bell, but today, that means drafting the policy, from beginning to end, on GCPEDIA, the only platform where federal public servants can actually organize in a network.

Managing an industrial economy would have been impossible using hand written papyrus, not just because the tools could not have handled the volume and complexity of the work but because the underlying forms of thinking and organizing that are shaped by that tool are so different from how an industrial economy works.

I’m going to predict it right now. Until a digital economy strategy is drafted using online but internally-connected tools like wikis, it will fail. I say this not because the people working on it will not be intelligent, but because they won’t be thinking in a connected way. It will be like horse and buggy users trying to devise what a policy framework for cars should look like. It will suck and terrible, terrible decisions will be made.

In summary, these are the three things I think the federal government needs to be focused on if we are going to create a digital economy strategy that positions us to be leaders by 2017. This is the infrastructure that needs to be in place to ensure that we maximize our capacity to connect each other and our work and reap the benefits of that network.