My problem is the following: I get to a point where I have 7 or 8 drafts of ambitious yet incomplete blog posts that, if my to-do list is to be believed, will ‘soon’ be published. But my to-do list is not to be believed, not ever. And so these drafts sit and collect their digital dust, impatient and agitated. I tell myself that I will write nothing new until I finish what has already been started. And then I stop writing altogether.

But wait, there are worthy excuses as well, dear internet. Since we have last spoken, Iris and I are now living together, in the same city, for the first time. Not only that, we moved from a small-but-furnished apartment to a larger and very much unfurnished house. Renting a house in Mexico, we quickly discovered, is no simple matter. There are tomes of paperwork to be filled out, and then they must be filled out once again, but this time all with the same color of ink. There are appliances, which have features and price tags that make no sense to your humble author. There are well-intentioned, young men who flood the living room with leaking water when they try to install the internet.

Finding a half-decent couch proved even more difficult. With nowhere to actually sit in the living room, for three weeks we were left with either the office or the bedroom. Work and sleep and very little else … other than the four sets of visitors over the past four weeks. (Delightful, understanding, loving family and friends.)

I am only getting started … though I should clarify that this is all good news that I am “complaining” about. If I were a better person, this would be a blog post about how fortunate I am, and all the amazing people who have helped me along the way, and how I hope to use my fortunate position to do good. But instead I am me. So before I continue with my litany of complaints about my fortunate circumstance, let me first share a photo of this cute lil’ guy:

That’s Coco, our new puppy. He’s wearing a Pacific Northwest hipster-before-it-was-hipster sweater because I gave the poor little guy a winter cold before I abandoned him for the tropical environs of Brazil. Coco means coconut in Spanish, and he does look like a bit of an inside-out coconut, but coco also refers to your brain, as in usa el coco (“use your head”). El Coco (sometimes cuco) is also the hispanic equivalent of the boogeyman, a mythical monster that noiselessly takes away misbehaving children deep in the night. Finally, “rompecoco” is something like “headache,” and coco has already proved adept at causing plenty of rompecocos. Take all of that together and it seems to sum up our new pup pretty well. (Much love to Juan Manuel & Melissa for introducing us to our new housemate.)

But let me not get distracted from my unwarranted ranting. In the midst of all of this change, I wrapped up my previous amazing job in order to start an even more amazing job. I am now a “principal” at Omidyar Network, working on expanding our government transparency work in Latin America. After months of ongoing discussions, all of a sudden it was time to wrap up multiple projects at Open Society Foundations within a few weeks, take two days off to move into a new house, and then ship off to San Francisco to meet my dauntingly cerebral team of colleagues from the US, India, and the UK. My impression is that they all graduated from either Stanford Business School or Harvard’s Kennedy School. Me, I worked in a coffee shop until I was 26.

Just one month in to my new job and I could probably write an entire book about the differences between Open Society Foundations and Omidyar Network, but I’ll shoot for three lines. Open Society Foundations was founded by a billionaire speculator who grew up fleeing the Nazis and dedicating much of his life promoting liberal capitalist democracy as a replacement of communism. Omidyar Network was founded by a young entrepreneur who programmed a website over a three-day weekend that eventually became one of the world’s most profitable Internet companies. The vast differences in their philanthropic approaches are rooted in the vast differences of their formative experiences. If you’re a philanthropy geek and want to know more, I recommend Soros’ LRB essay, “My Philanthropy,” and Omidyar’s essay, “How I Did It,” from Harvard Business Review.

I’m not the only busy body in our new, half-furnished household. Coco, already a neo-luddite, is busy biting into ethernet cables. Iris, in the meantime, has started a company from scratch. With custom designs and (mostly) locally sourced materials, she has created a whole collection of women’s purses and laptop sleeves. If you live in Mexico you can purchase them on Facebook or at the hippest boutiques — like Guru and Conejo Blanco. If you live in the US you can purchase them on Etsy (the laptop sleeves are coming). Lest you think that I only complain about my own fortunate state of affairs, let me also inform you, on Iris’ behalf, that starting a successful business is no easy matter.

I write all this, my patient reader, to say that I am back. That I want to be back. There are those of you who will raise a skeptical eyebrow. Part of my new job is to distribute a significant amount of money. In other words, I am now a “donor,” and becoming a donor usually goes hand-in-hand with becoming a half-human. Of not expressing one’s opinion. Of limiting one’s interactions to exclusive clubs and one-on-one meetings with unfair power dynamics. This is my symbolic effort to say that I am still me and that I will continue to be so. If there is any evidence to the contrary, call me out on it. You’ve always made me a better person, dear Internet, and I’m still counting on you.

This is my second-to-last day in Brazil. Last weekend I finally met a new friend, Greg and his lovely wife, Carolina. In fact, Greg was instrumental in encouraging me to continue to write, to continue to be open. And tomorrow I will be with an old friend, Jose Murilo. Both are intellectual co-conspirators and inspirational conversationalists.

I could use a couple weeks of uninterrupted sleep, but despite all my complaining, life, it must be said, is good. I leave you with a photo of Murilo and me from 2009:

What follows is a hyperlinked version of the weekly newsletter of the Information Program of Open Society Foundations. Next week Becky Hogge will take up the newsletter one again. You can continue to follow new editions at her blog.

News

Global Open Government Partnership launches in New York City

Alex Howard interviews Maria Otero, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, about the official launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York City. The all-encompassing post also documents the partnership’s progress and setbacks, and embeds a copy of the US national action plan.

Study: patent trolls have cost innovators half a trillion dollars

A new study by three Boston University researchers, which looks at market valuation before and after patent lawsuits, has found that “patent trolls” (third parties who litigate aggressively on behalf of patent holders) have cost US publicly traded companies $500 billion in market capitalization since 1990, more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.

India, Brazil and South Africa call for creation of “new global body” to control the Internet

India, Brazil and South Africa have called for the creation of a new United Nations body that would integrate and oversee the ITU, IETF and ICANN. Internet governance expert Milton Mueller says that, while the proposal has no chance of adoption, it reveals the failure of the Internet Governance Forum to internationalize Internet governance.

F.T.C. wants to update rules on children’s online privacy

Marc Rotenberg of EPIC calls proposed updates to US regulation on child online privacy “forward-looking,” but industry and legal analysts wonder how the regulations will be enforced when most online websites ostensibly prohibit children under 13 from using their services. Research by Consumer Reports this year found that 7.5 million American children under the age of 13 were using Facebook despite such prohibitions.

Venezuela to deploy 3 million free laptops

The Venezuelan government has announced that it plans to deploy 3 million “Canaima” laptops to schoolchildren by 2012. Critics say the initiative is merely meant to woo votes of poor families before next year’s presidential election. Robert Hacker, the CFO of One Laptop Per Child, says his organization has come to realize that teacher training is key for a successful deployment.

Internet ruffles pricey scholarly journals

With the rise in costs of academic journal subscriptions and the constraints of university budgets, an increasing number of universities are refusing to renew their expensive subscriptions, turning instead to open access publishing.

OnStar to begin monitoring customers’ GPS location for profit

After reading through pages of OnStar’s latest update to its terms and conditions, Jonathan Zdziarski found that the automobile emergency service, used in the US, Canada and China, has inserted the right to sell user information – such as GPS location, vehicle speed, and seat belt status – to third parties, including law enforcement. The author concludes that legislators should investigate companies like OnStar, Google, and Apple to better understand how they use consumer data.

EFF builds system to warn of certificate breaches

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its ‘HTTPS Everywhere’ Firefox extension to crowd-source reports of rogue SSL certificates in order to detect potential compromises such as the recent DigiNotar certificate hack, which left as many as 300,000 unsuspecting Iranians vulnerable to surveillance of their personal communication.

Omidyar Network to invest $3 million in government transparency initiatives

At this week’s “Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development” conference, Omidyar Network announced $3 million of investments in government transparency initiatives. Recipients include Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Mid-East Youth, and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Digital Media and Learning Competition

The MacArthur and Mozilla foundations have issued a call for proposals for the research and design of certification and recognition schemes to promote lifelong learning. Grants range from $5,000 to $200,000.

Features and Analysis

Cameras Everywhere Report 2011

Based on discussions with over 40 analysts and practitioners in technology and human rights, WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere reports looks at the development of trends in policy and practice at the intersection of human rights, technology, social media, and business. It also lists specific recommendations on how to strengthen the use of video for human rights.

Book: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

Hivos (The Hague) and The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) have published a four-part book which consolidates three years of research and inquiry into field of youth, technology and social change. The book, which draws on dozens of contributions from diverse actors, tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them.

Freedom of the press applies to everyone — yes, even bloggers

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm argues that bloggers and citizens should be afforded the same right to document the work of police officers in public places as any other journalist. The article also points out that state and local police forces need more legal training to understand the rights of citizens who are eager to point their cell phone cameras and law enforcement.

The second revolution of open science

In a talk at the UK Royal Society, Michael Nielsen describes what he calls the “second revolution in open science,” a proliferation of data, models, and software in scientific research that “require scientists to rethink how they share their work.”

Account deactivation and content removal: guiding principles and practices for companies and users

The Center for Democracy & Technology and the Berkman Center have published a new report which explores the dilemmas and recommends principles, strategies, and tools that companies and users alike can adopt to mitigate the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal.

The Netizen Report: inaugural edition

Global Voices Advocacy publishes its inaugural (and sweeping) Netizen Report, an overview compiled by Rebecca MacKinnon of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet.

The forces that led to the DigiNotar hack

Privacy expert Christopher Soghoian analyzes some of the structural conditions which allowed for the DigiNotar certificate authority hacks.

Online ID Verification Plan Carries Risks

Natasha Singer looks at efforts by the Open Identity Exchange and others to develop online identity authentication that can be used by both commercial and government websites. The article cites several privacy advocates including Kaliya Hamlin, Lillie Coney of EPIC, and Lee Tien of EFF.

Diary

ICEGOV2011

September 26-28, 2011
Tallinn, Estonia
The 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic
Governance (ICEGOV) will bring together practitioners, developers and
researchers from government, local municipalities, academia, industry
and civil society from across the world.

Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum

September 27-30, 2011
Nairobi, Kenya
The Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held
at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON). The main theme of the
meeting is: ‘Internet as a catalyst for change: access, development,
freedoms and innovation’.

Open Aid Data Conference and Hackday

September 28-29, 2011
Berlin, Germany
The Open Aid Data conference will bring together practitioners from
various organisations to discuss how technology, the internet, and
particularly open data can help make international development aid
more transparent. A hack day will take place the day before.

Mobility Shifts: International Future of Learning Summit

October 10-16, 2011
New York, NY, USA
An international summit bringing together bring together artists, web
developers, scholars, technologists, teachers, radical librarians,
policy makers, critical legal scholars and learning activists to
discuss digital fluencies for a mobile world and explore learning
outside the bounds of schools and universities.

Contact Summit 2011: The evolution will be social

October 20, 2011
New York, NY, USA
A day-long unconference conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff
to explore how to realise the promise of social media to promote new
forms of culture, commerce, collective action and creativity.

Open Government Data Camp

October 20-21, 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Open Government Data Camp is the world’s biggest open data event. It
brings together civil servants, developers, NGOs and others for two
days of talks, workshops and project sprints.

Open Access Week

October 24-30, 2011
Open Access Week is a global event, now in its 5th year, which aims to
promote Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.

Open Access Africa

October 25-26, 2011
Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania
Event organised by open access publisher BioMed Central bringing
together researchers, librarians and funding bodies to discuss the
benefits of open access publishing in an African context.

Open Education 2011 Conference

October 25-27, 2011
Park City, UT, US
The Open Education 2011 conference brings together this broad
diversity of people to discuss the state of the art in open education
and facilitate creative conversations across a wide variety of
perspectives. Keynote speakers will address topics ranging from major
government initiatives to efforts directed toward replacing
traditional institutions.

McLuhan’s Philosophy of Media Centennial Conference

October 26-28, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
This conference celebrating 100 years since the birth of media
theorist and cultural critic Marshall McLuhan will host discussions
about McLuhan’s ideas from different perspectives and traditions.
Keynote Speakers include Robert K. Logan, Derrick de Kerckhove, Paul
Levinson, Graham Harman and Peter-Paul Verbeek.

Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web

November 4-6, 2011
London, UK
“A gathering of passionate, creative people using the web to bend,
hack and reinvent media.”

Berlin 9

November 9-10, 2011
Washington DC, US
The Berlin Open Access Conference Series convenes leaders in the
science, humanities, research, funding, and policy communities around
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities. Berlin 9 is the first of the annual meetings to take place
in North America.

2nd Annual European Data Protection and Privacy Conference

December 6, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
The conference will bring together European policymakers and
stakeholders for a “full and frank discussion” on issues in Data
Protection and Privacy.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference

March 1-3, 2012
The third-annual The Digital Media and Learning Conference is organized around the theme “Beyond Educational Technology: Learning Innovations in a Connected World.”

Unlike two years ago, this year I won’t have the time to summarize all the interesting presentations and discussions from the Ars Electronica Symposium. Isaac and I divided the day into two parts. In the morning we focused on countries that had already experienced some sort of revolution or mass mobilization. In the afternoon we switched to countries that have been much more successful at resisting dissent despite the best efforts of dedicated activists.

Leading up to the symposium I sent some interview questions out to the morning’s speakers in order to set some basic context. Interviews with Tunisian activist Lina Ben Mhenni and Spanish-Syrian activist Leila Nachawati are both available on the Ars Electronica website. What follows is my interview with Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish professor of information and sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society where she will soon be speaking about her findings from field research in Egypt. You can see a video of her presentation at Ars Electronica on YouTube.

DS: I first discovered your writing earlier this year when you published a critique of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion at The Atlantic’s technology blog. Evgeny was with us at Ars Electronica two years ago where he discussed the concept of “slacktivism” and Max Ringelmann’s research into social loafing. But in your critique you write that Morozov’s “dismissiveness of the ways in which the Internet can be part of a challenge to authoritarianism and promote citizen empowerment” leaves his analysis unbalanced. A lot has happened since January. Over the past seven months, what have we seen as examples of how the Internet has played a role challenging authoritarianism and promoting citizen empowerment?

ZT: I would consider the Tunisian and Egypt uprisings to be key such examples — obviously social media is only one part of a complex picture of events which culminated in the ousting of dictators in these regimes but it’s also clear that these new tools have helped the break regime’s attempts at censorship, help support the public sphere as well as helping activists organize. Often, the last part gets the most attention, i.e. whether activists organized using these new tools. However, it is more than that–the key transformation is the creation of a new media ecology composed of satellite television channels which circumvent monopoly of state’s on the broadcast arena, and, in the case of the Middle East and North Africa Region, help focus the attention of the region to a particular event; cell phones with video capabilities which turn ordinary citizens and activists into potential journalists and create eyes and ears pretty much everywhere and, of course, social media tools which allow of a radically different infrastructure of connectivity. The fact that the state can use these tools to create surveillance is true but represents a continuity with the past as surveillance has been a major part of these regimes for decades. Even surveillance, however, can become less effective if these tools can help support large numbers of people express their opposition as no regime can effectively arrest and jail millions of people for long periods of time. Thus, for small dissident groups and minorities, the dangers of surveillance and selective punishment remain high with or without social media; for countries like Egypt where there was widespread but repressed opposition, mass expression of dissent on social media may make it harder for the regime to prosecute everyone.

DS: Lately I have been thinking a lot about 1968, the “year that rocked the world,” according to Mark Kurlansky. In his book he reminds us that the youth of 1968 were the first generation to grow up with television at home. Sean O’Hagan, writing at the Guardian, writes that the same-day newscast didn’t exist until the previous year. He quotes the political prankster Abbie Hoffman, who helped organize the violent protests at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: “a modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory.” It seems like there was this sense of optimism that television was a liberating technology, and that it would help the protesters achieve meaningful social change. But, in fact, other than attracting media coverage, the youth had very few channels for meaningful policy engagement. In hindsight, the protests of 1968 drew a lot of attention, but achieved very little concrete change. Are we seeing the same dynamic play out today with the first generation to grow up with home computers?

ZT: I am going to disagree here. The 1968 era should be evaluated not just as one year but the period around those years with student activism only part of the story. Television was a crucial part of the story of the civil rights movement and research demonstrates this as well. Television showed millions of Americans the brutality required to keep African-Americans subjugated and made it politically impossible for legal segregation to continue as is. Television also helped spread the civil rights movement especially among Black college students who saw the protests occurring elsewhere and decided to start their own lunch-counter sit-ins, for example. So, it helped extend the reach of the institutional structure of the civil rights movement. As for calling the 1968 protests as having achieved very little “concrete change”, I beg to differ. Yes, we are far short of utopia here but without that era, my life as a female academic would be profoundly different and maybe not even possible–and I wouldn’t call the end of legal segregation small change. For many people who are not wealthy, white or male, a life in the pre-1960s era would be far more impoverished and limited compared to today. Does this mean I don’t recognize the deep problems we continue to face? Of course, not. However, social change is almost always like that. Two steps forward, one step back, some gains, some losses — the key is to look at whether progress is being made and I would find it very hard to argue that the 1968 era was not a crucial turning point for individual rights, for women, for non-white people and even for men who wanted to step outside the limited boundaries of 1950s masculinity. Television has been very reactionary and a force against positive social change as well –and continues to be so– but I believe that it was a factor in the success of a non-violent civil rights movement.

DS: Along with the excitement and jubilation surrounding the revolution in Egypt, there has also been a fair amount of skepticism about its chances of bringing about true democratic consolidation. University of Texas professor Dave Perry called the Egyptian revolution a typical “anti-power” movement. In his words, “the protestors were clearly saying no to Mubarak but what kind of power they were saying yes to was less than clear.” Writing for Al Jazeera, Esther Dyson expressed her concern that Egyptian youth are not yet aware that running a government is not as easy as “running a Facebook group.” And on your own blog, you wrote that so-called “leaderless revolutions “often quickly evolve into very hierarchical and ossified networks not in spite of, but because of, their initial open nature.” Then in May you traveled to Egypt. What did you find?

ZT: In Egypt, I found the youth movement struggling to define their role in the new revolutionary process. The military council remains in power and there are existing institutional opposition movements like the Muslim Brotherhood which are better prepared for electoral politics. The youth movement is debating how to organize, how to proceed, how to be effective in shaping the future of their country. These issues will likely not be resolved in the near future and we will see a significant evolution. However, it’s important to recognize that just a year ago, the youth movement struggled to hold protests of more than a few hundred people and freedom of expression was severely limited. In Egypt, the most profound change I saw was that you could turn any street corner and find people vigorously debating politics and the future of their country. This did not used to happen. People did not openly opine and debate about the future of their country. In that sense, this is not a reversible change and is sign of a profound transformation. It won’t however, culminate in a neat democracy that everyone around the world will like in just a few years. It will be messy, there will be set-backs and I may not personally like all the ideas that end up with political support. All democratic transitions are messy, non-linear and complicated and no reason to assume Egypt would be an exception.

That the earth cirlces around the sun was bad enough, but the real catastrophe confronting the meaning of existence and the existence of meaning was Darwin. Here we are by happenstance, it turns out, the sons and daughters of survivalism and sexuality. There was all of a sudden only one thing to set us apart from the roughly 8.7 million other million species on this planet: our ability to process, document, and share information.

But what is information?

Only now do I appreciate the exceeding difficulty of answering what seems like such a straightforward question. You don’t know it when you see it; you don’t see it at all. Even my usually authoritative-soundng Oxford English Dictionary comes up pathetically short: “what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.”¹

In interviews James Gleick has said that this is a book he has wanted to write nearly his entire life. The sweeping bibliography and index justify the delay. It took me three months to read — albeit with many other books and pauses interspersed. A deep analysis of something as abstract as ‘information’ leaves the reader staring often at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the perpetually perplexing.² Can information exist without communication? Is there such a thing as knowledge, or is some information merely more useful in particular contexts? Is genetic information really information — based on bits, communicated by computers? Can we eventually capture all of the genetic information of the entire biosphere on a single hard drive? And, if so, is that all we are, a humble collection of bits and algorithms? If those algorithms are pre-decided, then is our destiny as well?

The book begins with a quote from Zadie Smith, and it is quite possibly the most unremarkable paragraph she has ever written; except that, when placed in this new context, it speaks directly to an inquietude that now overwhelms us all:

Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them, either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was.

Give that information (sometimes referred to as ‘culture’, ‘facts’, ‘intelligence’, ‘data’, ‘meaning’, ‘dogma’ and ‘knowledge’) is what distinguishes humans from our primate predecessors, it is incredible that there was no technical definition at all until 1949 when Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” giving rise to the theoretical fields of information theory and Information Science, but also to practical engineering approaches to storing information on magnetic tape and communicating it across networks.

As the subtitle discloses from the get-go, this is a book that treats its topic from three different angles. First we are given an overview of the history of information before we knew how to define it. Here there are African drums that talk, optical telegraph towers constructed across France at the height of the revolution, and Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph and famous code.

Next we delve into theory, specifically information theory and its various applications in communication, biology, physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics. At times Gleick seems to exuberantly make the case for information theory as a Theory of Everything.³ This was most economically and mystically expressed in 1989 by John Wheller: “It from bit.” Information is physical, it must be stored on tangible objects, and must therefore obey the laws of physics. “To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information.”

If all of this sounds increasingly abstract, it only becomes more so, until the theory eventually reaches an apex of abstraction: quantum computing, the fundamentals of which remain beyond my cerebral grasp. For me, the most startling and intriguing ramification of information theory is that information is a measure of probability. 1010101010 contains less information than 1010100011, despite their same quantity of digits, as the former can be expressed by “repeat 10 five times” whereas the latter is seemingly random. The significance is that information, randomness, complexity, and computability are four different ways to express the same principle; namely, that ‘information’ refers to that which we cannot predict.

And then I stare at the ceiling.

There are increasing accusations against information theory. It has overstepped its application, some say, limiting our understanding of natural processes by viewing everything through a metaphor of bits. As early as 2000 Paul E Griffiths called genetic information “a metaphor in search of a theory.” Gleick devotes an entire chapter to exploring the math behind claims that information theory is reductionist, beginning with Gödel’s notorious incompleteness theorems and ending with Laplace’s Demon. It is a frustrating chapter; just when the concept of information seems to make so much sense, it turns out not to.

And then I stare at the ceiling.

Finally, we enter the third section of the book, the flood. As information becomes exponentially cheaper to store, it becomes exponentially cheaper to “create.” Hence, as Google’s Eric Schmidt is eager to remind audiences, “every two days we now create as much information as we did up to 2003.” In Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking paper he estimated the size of the greatest store of information known to humanity at the time, the Library of Congress. Shannon estimated that it was probably around a terabyte. He was very close. Today CERN generates 1 petabyte of data per second — that’s 1,000 terabytes per second.

Gleick writes with sympathetic compassion toward those of us who are overwhelmed by the flood. Citing a beautiful essay by David Foster Wallace, he reminds us that making decisions depends on eliminating options, and that we now have more information, more options, to eliminate than ever. He cites psycho-neurological research that shows we often make worse decisions when confronted with more information, even if it is entirely relevant.

But in his review of The Information for the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson is decidedly less sympathetic toward the info-overwhelmed. Wikipedia, he reminds us, is a product of the flood, as is 21st century science.

Ultimately, we are reminded, information is a part of evolution, and it is now up to us to adapt or drown in the flood.

I only have one bone to pick with Gleick’s nearly masterful overview of information, and that is his silent transition from bits to meaning. On one page he is summarizing the difficulties of incorporating classical information theory into quantum computing, and the very next page he describes the birth of Wikipedia.

Wikipedians like to claim that they are organizing all of the world’s knowledge, but ‘knowledge’ turns out to be even more difficult to define than information. We know how to measure economic capital, but intellectual capital is a guessing game. Einstein’s theory of relativity probably contains more ‘knowledge’ than whoever came up with the idea to make a sandwich with peanut butter, honey, and banana — but only in certain circumstances. In other words, “meaning” refers to relevance, which is inherently subjective.

Gleick emphasizes from the very beginning — and throughout the book — that Shannon’s paper and the birth of information theory was only made possible by divorcing information from meaning. But he doesn’t even attempt to draw the fuzziest of lines between the two, though he does seem disposed to the human-centric view of Heinz von Foerster who argued at an early cybernetics conference that it was fundament able to distinguish between the “beep beeps” of information theory and the “process of understanding,” the decoding, that takes place in the human brain. To put it another way, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver.”

1 ☞ Apparently I don’t have the latest version of the OED; in a blog post for the New York Review of Books, Gleick notes that the latest entry for ‘information’ now runs 9,400 words and prompted an essay-length meditation by OED managing editor Michael Proffitt. After all, Gleick reminds us, OED is in the information business, like so many of us.

2 ☞ My intellectual insecurity was somewhat soothed when I saw that Cory Doctorow — voracious reader and perversely prolific writer — frequently “stopped reading it a lot … stopped to stare into space and go ‘huh’ and ‘wow’ and ‘huh’ again.”

3 ☞ “Why does nature appear quantized?” Gleick rhetorically asks before answering himself: “Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate, unsplittable particle.”

What follows is a rough approximation of my brief introductory talk at this year’s Ars Electronica Symposium which I co-curated with Isaac Mao. The presentation is at Slideshare. Videos of all the talks are available on the website.

The Revolutionary Meme

When Ars Electronica first began over 30 years ago, it was one of the only annual events that focused on the impact of technology on society and creativity.

Today there are multiple events that examine technology’s role on all aspects of life, not just every week, but every single day. In fact, there has emerged an entire conference class that does little else except for travel from one conference to another to offer their analysis about technology’s impact on politics, business, marketing, travel, video, subtitling … even pet care. The question is why? When so much information already exists on the internet about the internet, why do we continue to attend these events?

I believe that there are two reasons. First, by our very nature we obsessively seek information and seek to make sense of it. Second, we sense that the pace of history is accelerating and it is thrilling to be part of it, to help write its first draft.

Three years before the first Ars Electronica, a 35-year-old Richard Dawkins published the book The Selfish Gene. According to Dawkins’ gene-centric view of the universe, we humans are mere vessels that allow genes to replicate themselves. We happily oblige these genes in their process, mostly because we enjoy sex so much. In the same book Dawkins coins the term “meme” for a unit of human cultural evolution. Not only are we humans mere vessels for genetic information to replicate itself, but now we are mere vessels for all types of information, each seeking replication and competing for that precious resource, our attention.

Today in many parts of the world we have new terms like Information Addiction and Information Obesity. In the same way that pollen awaits a honey bee, information awaits our information addiction, hoping to be shared, replicated, mutated. Nicholas Humphrey called memes “brain parasites,” lodging themselves in our brains, literally changing the nervous structure and practically compelling us to propagate them among our social networks. 100 years ago this was called word of mouth. Today it occurs every time we log into Facebook and Twitter, every time we compulsively pull out our cell phone to check our email account.

Some information is more memetic than others, it more successfully activates our compulsion to share it with our networks. It is almost impossible to not share a video of Tom Cruise speaking about the Church of Scientology. This year it seems that freedom, democracy, and free speech are popular memes in the Middle East and North Africa. But we must recognize that anti-Islam and anti-immigrant messages are also increasingly memetic here in Europe.

We now create more information every two days than we did since the first cave painting until 2003.

The question for us is this: Why is some of that information so much more successful at seeking replication? Why does some information spread rapidly while other information falls into the abyss of the forgotten? Why does some information inspire us to take to the streets while other information causes us to fall asleep?

The TV Generation

In the 1950s information found a new way to spread and replicate, television. Over the next ten years television would have two profound and paradoxical effects on global society: a sense of social alienation and of global solidarity. In 1967 Guy Debord published Society of the Spectacle, which argued that television and slick marketing engendered a consumer culture in which all that was once directly lived had become mere representation. Mexican intellectual Octavio Paz wrote that reality was beginning to imitate television more than television imitated reality.

Broadcast television was certainly responsible in part for the “mere representation of all that was once directly lived.” But it was also the medium used by young protesters the very next year to attract attention to their protests across the globe. Protest, it turned out, was memetic.

Daniel Ben Cohn-Bendit, one of the organizers of the original Paris protests would later say of his counterparts in other parts of the world: “We met through television. We were the first television generation.” Abbie Hoffman who helped organize the famous 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago said “A modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory.” When the Chicago police attacked the protesters they chanted in unison “The whole world is watching!” And for the first time it was.

In hindsight, the protest movements of 1968 were largely failures. The Franco regime continued in Spain, as did Brazil’s military dictatorship. The demands of Mexican students were never met and justice was never brought to those responsible for their massacre. In August Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and remained there until 1989. The temporary, weak alliance between the French labor and youth movements fell apart before the onset of winter. The Vietnam war continued, Apartheid in South Africa continued, and Charles De Gaulle remained in power.

In 1968, with the help of television, information became even more successful at replication. But it wasn’t able to change policies or end wars.

The Internet Generation

The very following year came the invention of the Internet, the best development for information since written language.

While in the West we soon became obese with information, in other countries the internet permitted information to replicate itself around the filters of censors. In countries like Tunisia and Egypt, where governments long censored radio and television, information was now having a heyday, eager to show us humble humans acts of corruption and police abuse.

Major, social media-fueled protests have taken place this year in Portugal, Tunisia, Spain, Egypt, Senegal, Yemen, Syria, Uganda, Algeria, Oman, Greece, Jordan, Morocco, Mexico, Chile, Wisconsin, Malaysia, and tomorrow 15,000 young people in Mauritius have joined a Facebook page to take to the streets tomorrow to demand for greater civil rights.

Only now are we beginning to witness and make sense of how it is changing us and how we are changing it, but one observation I can make with some certainty is for future historians, what 1968 was to television, 2011 will be to the internet.

The question is will today’s youth be more successful than the youth of 1968 in creating lasting social and political change? Many writers have observed that 1968 was defined by anti-power rather than counter-power. Which is to say that the youth of 1968 were protesting against “the system”, but they didn’t offer any realistic alternative on which to build upon.

Anti-power protests are inherently more popular than counter-power because we humans seem to enjoy protesting against much more than protesting for. Most of the protests this year began as anti-power movements. Today’s speakers will tell us whether new alternatives are now taking shape.

Information seeks to replicate and spread itself further. And we, as information hungry humans are happy to oblige, but it increasingly important that we also seek truth and compromise through discussion and debate.

With that said, I encourage you all to participate during the discussion periods and with the Twitter hashtag #square2. And I am thrilled to introduce our first three speakers …

A few years ago — around the time that the housing bubble went pop — I was having dinner with a group at a swanky soul food restaurant in San Francisco. Just as we were about to order, in walked the boyfriend of one of the girls at the table. Bleached white grin, total captain of the football team. He was purposefully vague about his work until his girlfriend finally declared that he was an investment banker. “But not one of the bad ones,” she clarified, “he just writes the programs to make everything work better.”

I immediately disliked him. I immediately disliked her. Fortunately, I loved my cornbread and fried chicken. I can’t deal with the shirking of responsibility through abstraction; the claim that a system is so complex that our individual actions carry neither weight nor consequence.

It is one of the reasons that I tend to admire geeks and engineers: social awkwardness aside, they want to know how the world works. Never satisfied with “it’s too complicated,” they instead go to great lengths to explain how most of what surrounds us actually isn’t that complicated at all.

With all the bipolar, extreme ups and downs of the market lost week, it’s not a bad time to take a few hours out of our lives to understand what “the market” actually refers to. For years I’ve been following podcasts like Planet Money and EconTalk, which over time have helped me better understand some of the pieces to the finance puzzle. But I was still missing the historical context. Subprime securitization, credit default swaps, forward contracts, short selling — how did we get here?

Finally I discovered Niall Ferguson’s enlightening six-part documentary video based on his book, The Ascent of Money. The entire four-hour video is available on YouTube.

All of those puzzle pieces finally came together for me. From the use of cowrie shells to the invention of paper money. From the birth of modern credit by Vienna’s Jewish community (able to evade usury laws by lending to non-Jews) to the first government bond issued by England to finance its war against France. Then comes the birth of limited liability companies, stock exchanges, and stock bubbles. The instability of the stock market leads to the rise of the financial insurance market, and the concept of insurance leads to the modern welfare state. Then Chicago’s commodity market leads to speculation, hedging, and the modern futures market, which in turn inspires derivatives, options, securitization, and modern hedge fund operations. Speaking of which, here’s a clip with one of the most successful hedge fund investors over the past 30 years, and the man who is ultimately responsible for my monthly paycheck:

A few patterns stand out in the history of finance. First, financial innovation is almost always rooted in the desperate need to fund wars. Wars also break out in reaction to finance, as private lenders convince governments to send battleships on their behalf. Case in point: the world’s first modern narco-state, Britain, which sent warships to China on behalf of traders during the Opium Wars. We also see that all attempts to protect risk eventually fail, even warships. Over the past two hundred years there have been numerous attempts to socialize investment risk — private insurance, the welfare state, derivatives, and the housing market — but none has been able to match the deadly combination of greed and natural disaster. (Case in point: New Orleans after Katrina.)

Ferguson touches on micro finance and Hernando de Soto’s work on property titling, but surprisingly he says very little about the future of finance.

From cowrie shells to commodity futures, I was impressed by how all “financial innovation” ultimately comes down to three basic activities: 1) bartering, 2) lending, 3) insuring. We are used to bills and coins, but finance is actually built on pure information and trust. Which is why a peer-to-peer system of money seems almost inevitable. The first attempt, Bitcoin, has mostly attracted media attention for its use by online drug dealers, but the theoretical impact of the system seems … theoretically revolutionary. I’m far from a libertarian, and I believe in the regulation of financial markets, but the very fact that Bitcoin is inherently resistant to any kind of regulation is what makes it so intriguing.

While August has been a month of ups and downs for Dow Jones and NASDAQ, it’s been almost all downhill for Bitcoin — with some questioning its survival. Even if Bitcoin does eventually fail, I am fairly certain that a more robust, sustainable peer-to-peer currency will eventually “gain currency,” forcing government regulators to respond, and further blurring the lines between the “information censorship” and “financial regulation.”

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria

Next month Isaac Mao and I are headed back to Linz, Austria for this year’s symposium, titled “The Public Square, Squared.” I’m thrilled with the list of speakers and can’t wait to learn from them. A lot has happened since the 2009 symposium on Cloud Intelligence. Here’s a short text I just posted on the conference blog:

Two years ago Isaac Mao and I curated the Ars Electronica Symposium on Cloud Intelligence. Among the many questions to which we sought answers: “Does online activism using server-based tools lead to offline social change, or to increased apathy?” Two of the day’s speakers — Xiao Qiang, a native of China, and Evgeny Morozov, a native of Belarus — offered their “dueling views of digital activism.”

Xiao Qiang called censorship “a form of violence agaist the human spirit” and offered the activism of Ai Weiwei as an example of the inherent resistance of networked, cloud-based activism. No matter how many times the Chinese government has tried to silence Ai Weiwei, his message inevitably re-appears elsewhere on the internet and his list of supporters continues to grow. Evgeny Morozov, on the other hand, claimed that the vast majority of so-called “digital activism” should actually be called “slacktivism” — activism for slackers. Rather than contribute to meaningful social change, we are distracted by campaigns that ask us to change the color of our Twitter avatar or join a dozen online “causes” without providing any substantial contribution.

In the two years following their remarks we have seen ample evidence to support both positions. Xiao Qiang can point to Tunisia where the anti-censorship movement was clearly instrumental in the successful citizen-led ouster of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. (This year we are fortunate to hear the story directly from Tunisian anti-censorship activist Lina Ben Mhenni.) But Evgeny Morozov can point to both Belarus and China as examples where authoritarian governments have been more successful at using Internet tools to surveil their citizens than activists have been at using “the cloud” to demand more rights and hold their leaders accountable.

This September 4th we will return to Ars Electronica with an all-star cast of activists and intellectuals in search of answers to two difficult questions. First, in those societies where major social uprisings have taken place this year (Tunisia, Egypt, Spain), what has been the impact and where are activists now focusing their energy? Second, in those societies that have proven resistant to proposed social change, despite the best efforts of activists (China, Singapore, Germany), how much longer should we expect to wait, and why?

We hope that you can make it to the festival to help us find answers to both difficult questions. Even if you’re not able to participate in person, the entire day’s discussions will be broadcast live on DORF TV and we’ll actively seek questions and comments via Twitter.

Lo que sigue es mi breve intervención en el panel de “A quien le pertenece la información” que se realizó la semana pasada en Campus Party. Un video de la discusión está disponible en YouTube.

Quiero ofrecer una pequeña anécdota para cuestionar como es que entendemos la pertenencia de la información. La anécdota viene de una edición de la revista estadounidense Harper’s del año 1873. Es una crónica totalmente basada en hechos reales, pero he tomado algunas libertades con la traducción al español.

La revista reporta que un señor entra una oficina del telégrafo por la primera vez y le dice al joven que trabaja ahí, “joven, me cuentan que yo puedo enviar un mensaje hasta Washington DC y que va a llegar el mismo día, es cierto?” El joven responde, “sí señor, de hecho llega en unos segundos, que es el mensaje que quieres enviar?” Entonces el señor le pasa la nota al joven. El joven transmite el contenido de la nota en su maquina del telégrafo y cuelga la nota en la pared. Intenta cobrar el señor y el señor le dice, “no mames cabrón, estoy viendo la nota en la pared, no enviaste nada y no te voy a pagar nada.”

Photo de la ofina de telegrafo de Mineral Wells, Tejas, 1927.

Con el invento del telégrafo, por la primera vez todos tenían que aprender que la información no es física. Es decir, no puedes medir información en gramos sino en bits.

Así que no tiene nada de sentido hablar de la “pertenencia de información.” Pertenencia se aplica a los objetos materiales. No hablamos de pertenencia de electricidad — hablamos del acceso a la electricidad.

130 años después y todavía nos cuesta entender la diferencia entre objetos y información. Ayer el gobierno de los estados unidos hizo una demanda contra un joven hacker conocido que se llama Aaron Swartz por haber descargado demasiados documentos académicos. En su comentario a la prensa, una abogada del gobierno estadounidense dijo:

Robar es robar. No importa si usas código o una palanca. No importa si robas documentos o robas dólares.

Una abogada del gobierno mas rico del mundo no entiende que si tu robas un dólar de mi, tu ganas un dólar y yo pierdo un dólar. Pero si tu “robas” mis notas para esta charla, ahora yo tengo las notas y tu también tienes las notas. Lo que queda claro es que la abogada no entiende como funciona técnicamente el Internet. Cada vez que visitamos una pagina web, o vemos un video de YouTube o leemos un documento de algún profesor, esta información es copiada de un servidor a mi computadora. El Internet es una red que permite la copia de Información.

Por esta diferencia fundamental, yo propongo que no hablamos de la pertenencia de la información, sino acceso a la información.

Entonces la pregunta es: ¿Qué son los obstáculos que previenen el acceso a la información?

Una pequeña lista de algunos que me ocurren:

• Acceso a Internet — es más caro acceder el Internet en México que cualquier otro país de la OCDE. México tiene una penetración de Internet de 24.8% de la población mientras en Colombia la penetración es 47.6% y en Argentina 48.9%.
• El derecho de autor — que debería incentivar la creación de contenido en vez de restringir acceso a información y conocimiento. México tiene la ley de derecho de autor más restrictiva del mundo. En la mayoría de los países la vigencia del derecho de autor es la vida del autor más 50 años. Sólo en México es la vida más 100 años. Una ley así refleja que los políticos mexicanos no quieren que los ciudadanos tengan acceso a cultura, información y conocimiento.
• Una cultura del secreto que existe en ambos el sector publico y sector privado. Es la idea que siempre es mejor guardar información en vez de compartir información. Esta misma cultura también se encuentra incluso en la sociedad civil y las fundaciones.
• Idioma y factores culturales de la producción de contenidos — si hablas y lees español hay mucha información disponible. Si entiendes inglés, aún más. Pero si hablas Nahuatl, por ejemplo, hay muy poca información disponible. Además, los que hablan Nahuatl no tienen el mismo incentivo de producir y compartir contenidos porque no tienen la misma audiencia como los que escriben es español. Hace poco Wikipedia publicó una visualización de todas las editas en un sólo día y muestra que desde México más usuario editan Wikipedia en inglés que español.

Estos obstáculos son retos pero también son oportunidades para crear un bien público y equitativo de cultura, conocimiento y información. Tenemos que transformar nuestra mentalidad de quejarnos a una mentalidad de producir y compartir.

As in most countries, unemployment — and especially youth unemployment — is the term that most frequently find its way onto the front pages of Mexican newspapers in recent weeks. The stated concern is that youth unemployment could foreshadow continued economic recession. The unstated concern is that all of these unemployed youth are all of a sudden demanding real democracy; and in doing so, creating major headaches for politicians. Another excerpt from the lengthy, forthcoming essay that I mentioned a few weeks ago:

Out of Work, Losing Hope

A few months before British students began organizing their protest movement on social networks, the United Nations’ International Labor Organization released an extensive report on youth unemployment which warned of a “lost generation” of young people that have given up their search for meaningful work. According to the report, “of some 620 million economically active youth aged 15 to 24 years, 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009 — the highest number ever.” Not only were they under-employed, but many were “over-educated,” having taken out massive school loans while trusting the advice of their parents and politicians that a university degree was the fast track certificate to financial stability.

In 1968, Western youth reacted to social alienation, a by-product of years of economic and middle class growth. Rapid industrialization created factory and office jobs with decent salaries but often numbing work routines. The suburbanization of residential areas stifled self-expression and induced uniformity. Unlike their grandparents who grew up during the depression, or their parents who grew up during times of war, the youth of 1968 had all of their basic needs (food, shelter, safety) met. But their higher needs (a sense of belonging, esteem, self-actualization) were still wanting.

Similarly, the youth of today are also products of extreme, global economic growth. Even taking the 2008 financial crisis into account, the entire global economy still doubled in size from 2000 – 2010. In 2009 The Economist magazine declared that “for the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class.” Furthermore, according to World Bank data, all levels of school enrollment have skyrocketed over the past ten years.

In other words, depending on your definitions and methodologies, a majority of youth across the world are now growing up in middle class homes and attending secondary education. They enter adulthood with greater schooling, skills, and expectations than their parents, but rarely with secure employment. The invention of the automobile created millions of jobs in the 20th century, whereas one of today’s most talked-about companies, Facebook, has just over 1,000 employees. Today’s youth grew up ready to take on the world, but too many are left working in coffee shops and supermarkets. Around the world this phenomenon was quickly adapted by local politicians and pundits. Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter Coy offers an assortment of buzzwords:

In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt, who on Feb. 1 forced President Hosni Mubarak to say he won’t seek reelection, are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths. The hittistes and shabab have brothers and sisters across the globe. In Britain, they are NEETs—”not in education, employment, or training.” In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000 euros a month. In the U.S., they’re “boomerang” kids who move back home after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China, where labor shortages are more common than surpluses, has its “ant tribe”—recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying work.

In Mexico they are called “ninis” — shorthand for “neither studies nor works” — and they have been blamed by pundits for the increase in the country’s violence. One governor even went so far as to propose mandatory military service for all Mexican youth who are not enrolled in school or employed.

Mandatory military service … there’s a great way to increase the country’s already swelling number of human rights abuses perpetrated by the military. According to an article this week in El Universal more than 20% of Mexicans between 12 and 29 years old are neither enrolled in school nor employed. The article goes on to report that state governors are now in a race to seek federal funding for programs that would provide young people with workshops, scholarships, and cultural activities. I wholeheartedly support community-based social spending on youth. I witnessed Medellín transform itself by constructing modern libraries and public soccer fields in the poorest and most violent neighborhoods of the city. The problem is that old, elite politicians rarely understand how to design infrastructure and services for young people.

One suggestion is for government agencies to work with groups like Reboot with design-centric, youth perspectives on creating social services. Another piece of free advice for governments is to look toward the country with the lowest youth unemployment rate in the world, Austria:

In Austria apprenticeship training takes places at two different sites: company-based training of apprentices is complemented by compulsory attendance of a part-time vocational school for apprentices [Berufsschule]. Currently about 40 per cent of all Austrian teenagers enter apprenticeship training upon completion of compulsory education. Upon completion of apprenticeship training about 40 to 44 per cent of all apprentices continue to work for the company where they were trained. All in all about 40,000 companies train approximately 120,000 apprentices, which corresponds to an average of 3 apprentices per company.

Monocle Magazine has a great video on the apprenticeship program in Vienna, with a focus on craftsmanship.

Next week the United Nations General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting on youth with a major focus on unemployment and sustainable development. Unfortunately, the planned discussions seem more concerned with vague platitudes (“access to education, take advantage of new technologies, promote social inclusion”) rather than specific case studies and concrete proposals.

Tomorrow morning representatives from more than 55 national governments meet in Washington DC to kick off what might be a multilateral, 21st century reboot of good old democracy-building, a term tainted by eight years of George W. Bush. Activists and international media soon associated “democracy promotion” with dropping bombs, shuttling suspects to covert CIA prisons, and selectively fostering regime change when it benefits US economic interests. Bush’s second inaugural address laid out his “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” But not really. While soldiers were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration kept cozy relationships with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Obama entered the White House all too willing to leave behind the democracy-building rhetoric. In early 2009 Peter Baker wrote:

Idealists, for lack of a better word, agree that democracy-building should be a core American value but pursued with more modesty, less volume and better understanding of the societies in question … The essential tension for the Obama team is whether to let Bush’s strong association discredit the very idea of spreading democracy.

With only 18 months left in the term, the Obama White House and the State Department seem to have finally crafted a frame through which to pursue a softer, more humble form of democracy-building: open government. Once a grassroots movement that emerged out of meetings between activists and geeks, open government is now being adopted by some of the world’s biggest NGOs and transformed into a tool of diplomacy.

Why this might be good news

Nearly all municipal governments in Argentina use the same accounting software, which includes a handy feature to export the latest government purchases to the municipal website. In theory, citizens could see in real time how their local government spends taxpayer money and which government service providers receive the largest contracts. In practice, any concerned citizen would need to perform a separate search on the website for each government payment, then copy and paste the information into a spreadsheet, and finally analyze it with filters and graphs. The obstacle to greater transparency wasn’t a lack of information, but rather the burden of time. Fortunately a young programmer from Bahía Blanca in southern Argentina used free, open source tools to automate this process and share real-time visualizations of the city’s spending patterns at an independent website called Gasto Público Bahiense, or “Bahia Blanca’s Public Spending.” Citizens were able to see the relationships between the various city agencies and the companies that benefited from service contracts. For the first time residents were able to compare — in real time — the percentage of public spending that went to education, infrastructure, public transportation, etc.

Last week the website stopped working. The city government re-designed their own website and implemented a “captcha” restriction to enter the transparency section. Humans can still access the same information as before, but computer scripts are now prevented from collecting and analyzing the data, a major step backward for open government in Argentina.

Argentine civic hackers were already aware that their platforms depended on the whims of government agencies. Last month I solicited the opinions of several leading Argentine programmers about a workshop on the use of technology in budget transparency. They had contemplated rolling out versions of Gasto Público Bahiense for each of Argentina’s municipal governments, but with extraordinary foresight, they decided that the platform was too dependent on factors they could not control. Instead their plan is to work with the city governments to convince them of the virtues and advantages of open government and budget transparency.

Noam Hoffstater and Alon Padon, two transparency activists in Tel Aviv, would likely support their strategy. In 2009 they recruited volunteers who spent months converting the Tel Aviv city budget from its public PDF format to Excel so that they could analyze and visualize it online. The sad irony is that the city government creates the budget using Excel, but then exports it to PDF so that citizens have more difficulty analyzing spending patterns. The following year Hoffstater and Padon decided that it was a waste of time to develop custom software that automates the process of converting the budget from PDF to Excel. Instead they sued the city, demanding that it publish the budget in a more accessible format. A day before the Tel Aviv District Court was scheduled to hear the case, the city announced that it would publish the 2011 budget in an open format. A few months later and the Israeli federal government also decided to publish its annual budget in an open format online.

I offer these two anecdotes as illustrations of why the grassroots, civic hacker movement must work with government if it wants to make sustainable progress toward greater civic participation and political accountability. In some cases we must offer carrots — in the form of incentives to government officials that provide access to public information — while in other cases we must use sticks — such as lawsuits and critical media coverage.

What to expect from the Open Government Partnership

The International Open Government Partnership (OGP) has been in the works for a long time now, but for a movement focused on openness, it has hardly been transparent in its conception. My impression is that it began as the US-India Partnership on Open Government, which was announced by Samantha Power in November 2010. According to the original press release, the initiative offered “a commitment to work together to advance open government globally.” Something must have gone wrong as the original initiative didn’t advance anything anywhere. A few months later a new international steering committee of eight governments was formed, with India notably absent from the list. Eventually it was announced that Brazil and the United States would co-chair the International Steering Committee, and that the initiative would officially launch at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in early September 2011.

What can we expect from the OGP? According to the press release, it’s a “multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.”

The PR-talk is promising, but there are plenty of reasons to not get one’s hopes up just yet. Tomorrow’s meeting will take place at the US Department of State, an institution that has proven itself incompetent at responding to FOIA requests despite the Obama administration’s pledge to improve responsiveness. As Josh Israel reports:

Last October a package of 43 documents was delivered to the Center in response to an April 30, 2007 FOIA — more than three years after the initial submission. By that point, both the ambassador in question (Ambassador to Jamaica Sue McCourt Cobb ) and the president who appointed her had both departed their posts. Just last month, on June 15, a second, smaller package from State arrived at the Center, this one via registered mail, containing a letter referencing another one of Varsalona’s 2007 case filings.

The letter said the State Department was “undertaking a comprehensive effort” to clear its backlog of requests and was thus writing to “inquire whether you are still interested in pursuing this case.”

The article goes on to point out that the State Department is one of the few federal agencies that has yet to respond to Obama’s open government memo, and that the “median response for complex FOIA requests is 228 days.” In other words, this is not an institution that is accustomed to transparency and openness. (Let’s not even bring up its reaction to Wikileaks.) But it’s not just the State Department; Vivek Wadhwa of the Washington Post recently declared “the death of open government” in the United States following the resignation of the country’s Chief Information Officer and the slashed budget of Data.gov. The United States is hardly in a position to preach to others about the virtues of opening up government.

The same is true of Brazil, the other co-chair of the OGP. As Greg Michener has reported, realpolitik led Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to reverse her support for the expedited passage of a freedom of information law. (Oddly, Toby McIntosh was told that a FOI law was an eligibility criteria for participating countries, which would exclude the co-chair of the entire partnership.)

It is crucial that we judge the Open Government Partnership not by its rhetoric, but by its achievements. Participants of tomorrow’s meeting, which is closed to the press, have been given a 60-page report prepared by 16 organizations that offers general (and at times exceedingly vague) recommendations on achieving greater transparency in particular areas, such as asset disclosures, extractive industries, and procurement. According to the agenda, country delegations meet tomorrow afternoon to “identify concrete steps toward developing and implementing an Action Plan.” That’s right, Action Plan in capital letters. Those countries are then supposed to come back to the UN General Assembly meeting in September with their Action Plan in hand, a clearly outlined list of promises that will lead to greater government openness.

Who will judge the progress made by each country? Sadly, the very same governments themselves. The only mechanism to measure and enforce progress in the OGP is self-assessment, a reflection of the greatest recurring failure of the transparency movement: fake accountability. (Update: I have been told that there will also be an “an independent reporting mechanism.”)

Tomorrow’s meeting should give transparency activists a better idea as to whether the OGP offers a mechanism to put greater international pressure on federal governments — including the United States and Brazil — to become more transparent, or if this is just one more venue for politicians to be politicians. The responsibility is also in our hands. We must use both carrots and sticks to advocate for government openness grounded in reality, not symbolism.