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InternetNZ: Censorware: Phone call

September 15, 2009 – 9:29 pm
(As a new councillor for InternetNZ, I will be pitching into the issues of copyright and censorship. I'll blog all my InternetNZ work to keep folks following along at home up with the play. I'll be walking the line between transparency and confidentiality, so I beg your forgiveness in advance if I don't always provide blow-by-blow who-said-what-to-whom accounts of meetings.) Today the members of the policy advisory group (PAG -- what a lovely acronym) looking into the DIA censorware had our first phone meeting. We went over arguments for and against the filter, and attempted to identify the philosophical principles on which a response to the filter could be made. I was struck by how useful David Farrar was: he's obviously spent a lot of time talking to people about this, and was able to play Devil's Advocate when needed. The InternetNZ staff will boil down what we said to ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Tom Steinberg

September 9, 2009 – 3:44 am
Tom Steinberg is my pioneer hero of open government. His group, MySociety, is a British non-profit building things on the web. His things work: fix rate for FixMyStreet is about 50%. That means 10s of thousands of real problems that will get fixed next year. He gave us some lessons that MySociety learned along the way. They're things to watch for in other people's projects. Lesson 1: Great gov2 project combine services that normal people care about (people who don't care about transparency) with transparency. People care about their roads. But you need transparency to get them the site they actually want. Lesson 2: First rule of Government Data Mashers Club is that you do not talk about Government Data Mashers Club in front of your users. Tom said he's a big fan of structured data, but we should be cautious about presenting a site ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Clay Shirky

September 9, 2009 – 3:37 am
Clay Shirky, clad in the world's shiniest shirt, was introduced as "The Oscar Wilde of the Internet" but that was doing him an injustice for Clay is a fantastic combination of thinker and public speaker. He entranced the audience. He gave two examples: Apps for Democracy vs the LA Times Wikitorial. Apps for Democracy was a success, the Wikitorial not. Wikitorial was Times putting editorial online and saying "improve this like Wikipedia does". It lead to: arguments, flamewars, spam, porn, goatse. He talked about social agreements by talking about a study of Israeli daycare pickup times and the effects of fining parents who were late to pick up kids: the rate of late pickups increased, and didn't return to normal after the fines went away. This is because fines broke the incomplete social agreement. The incentives of the market aren't something you can casually add to an existing ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Aneesh Chopra

September 9, 2009 – 3:27 am
Aneesh Chopra is the US Federal CTO. The conversation on stage between him and Tim O'Reilly began with an explanation of the role of the CTO vs that of the CIO (Vivek Kundra). The impression I got was that the CTO has a political role while the CIO is more independent. Mr Chopra spent his time on stage clutching a Starbucks coffee mug and telling stories about the use of technology in healthcare, medicine, and other areas. The big takeway for me was that while administrations change every four or eight years, your open government initiative doesn't have to die with the next regime. If you build something that citizens will get addicted to, the citizens won't let the pols break it.

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Clay Johnson

September 9, 2009 – 2:55 am
The second Clay, hairier and less well-dressed. Head of Sunlight Labs, part of the Sunlight Foundation. I was at his house on Monday night for a turkey cook-off between him and Chris DiBona of Google. Clay won, by the simple expedient of deep-frying his birds. Clay's a good Southerner. Apps for America, contest around data.gov. This is their second contest. (I apologise for not linking here, I'm blogging on the run at the conf--Google will find you the projects I mention here) Rule: any entry needs to be open source. OSI-approved license, just needs to be open source. Second rule: any feed from data.gov, even data.gov itself. Prizes: $10k first prize, $5k second, $2500 third. And a $2500 visualization special category, and ten honourable mentions at $500 apiece. 47 open source projects were created, most still being maintained. Local Spending: HTML5 geolocation to tell you what ...

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Nine to Noon: 12 August 2009

August 12, 2009 – 12:25 pm
I went through two telephones in this Colorado house and neither of them could hold onto the call. Now that's frustrating! Here's what I was going to speak about: I will talk about recent American software company acquisitions and what it tells us about the economy and the future direction of cloud computing. Then I'll tell you how to teach your kids to program. Links: FriendFeed acquired by Facebook (BusinessWeek), SpringSource acquired by VMWare (InfoWorld), Poison for Venture Capital (NY Times), the Scratch visual programming language. FriendFeed and Facebook Facebook's the biggest social network: more than 250m active users, with >120M logging on every day. They get a billion photos each month. It's huge. But a person might belong to plenty of other social networks: Twitter, MySpace, they might have their own blog or two, they put photos on Flickr, .... It's very easy to have a ...

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Nine to Noon: 16 July 2009

July 15, 2009 – 12:35 pm
Listen to my 16 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about Science Foo Camp which was at the Google campus last weekend: discovering new science from huge amounts of data, hormonal traders, personal genomics, and open publishing. Below are my notes. I will update this post with links to audio when Radio New Zealand post it. Correction on the air I said the hormonal trader paper was published in PLoS but it was actually in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Links Theodore Gray author of Mad Science Hormonal Traders Google Translate PlosOne - Public Library of Science Universal Scaling Laws in Biology -- my hero's paper 23 And Me - personal genomics company Science Foo Camp Weekend, at Google, ~150 people, no schedule. Food and drink laid on. Mixture of people: astronomers, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, bloggers, journalists, psychologists, economists. "real invisibility cloak". Nobel prize ...

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Nine to Noon: 2 July 2009

July 1, 2009 – 12:40 pm
Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site. Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I'm talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops. Links http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/leonardo/overview/overview.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilmDN2e_Flc http://onyas.org.nz/ http://it.usaspending.gov/ http://opengovt.org.nz/ EMOTIONAL ROBOTS Ok, so first thing first: there are plenty of robots around us already. I'm not talking about Jim from Accounting whose only conversational gambit is marginal tax rates, but wires and metal machines. They make our cars, they pack our coffee beans, they sort our kiwifruit. But those are industrial robots. There are also military ...

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Nine to Noon: 4 June 2009

June 17, 2009 – 5:03 pm
Listen to my 4 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon show. I spoke about national security and social unrest on the Internets. Links: Guatemala The murdered lawyer National Security GhostNet Guatemala Guate is an unstable country. 36 years of civil war ended in 1996, but the unrest continues. This year has seen something new. My explanation here draws heavily on an article that blogger Xeni Jardin wrote for GOOD magazine, and on her posts for the BoingBoing blog. LAWYER ACCUSES PRESIDENT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE May 10 this year, lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was assassinated. Ordinarily this would be tragic for the family but another of the 6,000 annual murders in Guatemala. But the lawyer left a videotape saying: "If you are watching this message", Rosenberg says on the video, "it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with help from Gustavo Alejos" (Álvaro Colom's private secretary). ...

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Open New Zealand

June 17, 2009 – 4:55 pm
Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand. Glen's built a catalog for open government data, and there's a mailing list on which we're discussing the next project.

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