Nina Power is pissed off that this week's student protests are always compared to ye grande olde protests of 1968.

My generation was pissed off about that thirty years ago.

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There were some lively comments on my previous post, which was really only half-finished, so I’m going to write the other half here. But first, let’s get a few things clear.

I like transparency in government. I think it’s great that people campaign for a more open government, especially here in Canada. I am impressed with the kinds of things some people manage to achieve by scraping through government data.  

Got that? OK. Now here is what’s wrong with Government 2.0.

So, one at a time.

Information is not always democratizing

In comments on the previous post, Kevin Donovan and Fazal Majid both pointed to this article by Michael Gurstein, who asks “who is in a position to make “effective use” of this newly available data?” and answers himself

‘open … Continue reading

– why open data needs a non-commercial-use license, and the lessons of microcredit.

 “Government 2.0” is the initiative to make government data open to the public using Web-based technologies. Leading light Tim O’Reilly describes it as “government as platform”. The idea is that open data – provided in such a way that programmers can write software to read it, analyze it, and transform it – increases transparency and promotes innovation.

Government 2.0 is on a roll. It got a big boost in the US from Barack Obama’s early memo on transparency and open government, and the setting up of the data.gov website. In the UK there is data.gov.uk and David Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative. Even Canada’s notoriously secretive government is consulting about it and many cities have opened up data feeds. And there are other initiatives around the world. Sounds great? Well yes and no.

2.0 Agendas

The rhetoric of Government 2.0 draws heavily from efforts by private citizens and non-profit groups to make government more accountable. It has a civil liberties flavour, with talk of citizen engagement and of citizens’ rights (“giving citizens access to data that is theirs”), … Continue reading

Macrowikinomics opens with the rescue of a young Haitian girl after the earthquake of January 2010. Some of her rescuers were far away in the USA: as soon as the earthquake struck, a group of American volunteers put together a web site using Ushahidi, the Kenyan-created “crisis mapping” software, and together with expatriate Haitians started to turn text messages and tweets into points on a map that could be shared with aid workers. In doing so, they “found themselves center stage in an urgent effort to save lives during one of the largest relief operations in history” [5], and helped to save the seven-year-old.

Macrowikinomics presents Ushahidi a “new paradigm for humanitarian efforts” that

turns much of the conventional wisdom upside down. Rather than sit idly by waiting for help, victims supply on-the-ground data using cell phones or whatever communication channels are open to them. Rather than simply donate money, a self-organized network of volunteers triages this data, translating and authenticating text messages and plotting incidents on interactive mapping displays that help aid workers target their response” [6].

The “Mass-collaboration” approach is a contrast to “the old crisis management paradigm” in which “big institutions … Continue reading

In Mount Hope cemetery in Kitchener-Waterloo, where I walk our dog.

The text reads "Mourn not the dead, but rather mourn the apathetic throng who sees the world's great anguish and its wrongs yet dare not speak."

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This is the first of a several-part series of posts on the new book Macrowikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. This post is a broad statement of what I think of the book: subsequent posts will look at particular case studies. Numbers in [square brackets] are page numbers in the book.

The Internet is a new terrain on which old conflicts of class, gender, wealth and power are being played out, and it’s not clear which contestants this new battleground favours.

That’s not how Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams see things. In Macrowikinomics, their follow-up to the hugely successful Wikinomics, they portray the Internet itself as a revolutionary force for change, carrying us to a radically different future. To them, society has a new set of fault lines and they are technological rather than political or economic. They divide the failing, decaying institutions of a bygone age (musty, industrial, closed, and hierarchical) from the blooming organic forms of the digital world (dynamic, self-organized, collaborative, open, and democratic). It’s get on board or be left behind. In this way the book is at right angles to reality. I don't completely oppose what they say, I just … Continue reading

I am a big fan of CBC's Writers and Company, and Eleanor Wachtel's interviewing in particular.

Her two-parter with John Le Carre is brilliant, with Le Carre's reflections on his father, on the deep state, on the writer's "chip of ice in the heart", on Tony Blair ("We've had a Prime Minister who to my mind committed the biggest crime any Prime Minister – any Leader – can commit: that is, to take a country to war under false pretences.")

Le Carre has this to say about the information society:

"The dissemination of information on a vast scale is not the same as the dissemination of the truth. Thus we still have an extraordinary percentage of the American people who believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the twin towers; that the war against Iraq was a war to avert a threat to the United States. I am appalled by the extent to which the increase in communication adds to the power of manipulation by politicians."

And much more. Listen here and here.

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