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Do LOLCats help fight censorship? The surprising answer is that yes they do.

This year’s Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism was a feast for media nerds like me. Former CBC reporter and producer Sue Gardner, now executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, made more insightful comments about the future of media, journalism and the way the web is changing our relationship with information than I can recount here. But one comment on the resiliency of the web in adressing would be censors of widely adopted social media platforms really stuck out for me.

Reflecting on the usefulness of Twitter to the Iranian election protests last June, Sue Gardner said (with my added emphasis and links):

Things like Twitter are really hard to censor because they are tools that lots of people use for lots of different reasons. There’s a guy named Ethan Zuckerman, who is a fellow at the Berkman Institute at MIT and he calls this the “cute cat theory.”

So the theory is that if millions of ordinary people use a tool like Flickr, or YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever – and they use it to share cute pictures of cats, or their grandchildren, or party invitations, or snapshots, or whatever – and meanwhile a few activists also use that same tool for other purposes, to share “information that wants to be free,” that people want to suppress: that makes censorship really difficult.

What happens is that if you try and shut down the tool that people are using to share cute pictures of cats they will freak out, right?  Because they want to share the pictures of the cats.

So what that means is that the pictures of the cat lovers provide cover for tools that are also used for, frankly, more important purposes such as for sharing information that would otherwise be suppressed. So the utility, the sort of general broad utility, of something like twitter makes it much much harder to censor.

Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend that you listen to the entire hour long 2009 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, and while you’re at it, subscribe to the CBC Ideas podcast where I found this gem among many others. Lastly, a hat tip to the I can has cheezburger network, including the infamous FAIL Blog, for their enormous lack of FAIL.

I’ve had a few days to digest everything I took in at ChangeCamp Edmonton, an unconference that I attended last Saturday. I still feel inspired.

Choosing from a grid of open discussions about participation and collaboration between citizens and government pitched by attendees on the day, the sessions I attended at ChangeCamp Edmonton emphasized a new openness and transparency between people and the institutions that represent us.

I intend to blog about other sessions I attended, but to start with I need to get these lingering thoughts about Mack Male’s open data session off of my chest:

(for those unfamiliar with open data, check out the related links at the end of this post and the open data wikipedia page)

The problem of privacy

Unfortunately, the conversation seemed to get bogged down with privacy issues, which I agree are a legitimate concern anytime we’re dealing with data relating to individual citizens.

The problem is that even with personal identifiers stripped from the data, resourceful data mining detectives could potentially cross reference many seemingly unrelated databases to piece together enough circumstantial evidence to pin point someone’s identity. This is a legitimate concern and a place where I believe a moratorium on open data relating to individual citizens should exist until these privacy risks can be adequately considered and addressed.

But what about public data?

Nearing the end of our 45 minute session, I looked up from my laptop note taking to make this point:  is this focus on privacy the wrong conversation to be having? Can’t we a make a clear distinction between data about citizens and data about our public institutions and how they function?

In any democracy there is an expectation of transparency for elected officials and public institutions, so let’s get started on open data by opening up data about, and created by, these institutions and making it more accessible.

Creating transparent institutions

I posed a second – mostly rhetorical – question to the group of about 40 people, (which included Government of Alberta and City of Edmonton employees):  If we want to look through the details of specific expenditures in an expense line on a budget for a public office or institution, why shouldn’t that be possible if the technology is available  (which it is) and the cost isn’t prohibitive (which it isn’t)?

Public data is currently released in a heavily formatted, edited and “locked” format like a PDF. We’ve paid for our governments and institutions to collect that data, why shouldn’t they make it available in a format that facilitates editing an analysis by citizens?

Recent complaints from journalists trying to make their way through the federal government’s labyrinth of stimulus spending is another compelling reason why it’s time we demanded data be accessible in an open format from all levels of government.

Citizens as investigators of the “long tail”

Kevin Kuchinski made a great point nearing the end of the initial open data discussion: there are huge amounts of data collected stored on paper by all levels of government already.

The problem becomes obvious with this question: Do citizens file freedom of information requests for fun?

My sense is that the fees, delays and hassle prevent all but the most dutiful citizens from looking through our existing public data in their spare time.

The necessity of combing through reams of paper looking for the proverbial “needle in the haystack” is the why we’ve needed highly dedicated professional investigative journalists to discover important secrets and hold our institutions accountable.

I’m proposing that we implement policies that make it easy for anyone to be Woodward and/or Bernstein in their spare time.

We need to tap into the “long tail” of expertise outside government. But to do so we will need to elect leaders that legitimately value transparency enough to work with citizens to create a wikipedia style community interested in using their spare time to make our public institutions more efficient, transparent and accountable.

I love this goal.

Real transparency has the potential to be more a transformative, non-partisan game changer than, for example, a provincial fringe party electing a new seemingly capable leader ever will. *cough* #WAP *cough*

Some slight reservations

But there’s one dark cloud: Lawrence Lessig’s recent cautionary analysis, “Against Transparency”

Essentially Lessig is saying that open data about public institutions must take place in the context of a movement of people focused on fixing problems as they are discovered, lest open data lead to disillusionment and breed further cynicism and apathy. Luckily, we’re are meeting that bar by bringing citizens together to discuss these issues, one unconference at a time.

Lastly, let me reiterate my thanks to all the participants, organizers and sponsors that made ChangeCamp Edmonton such an enormous success.

Related links

Mastermaq’s open data blog post

DJ Kelly on open data in Calgary

David Eaves on the three laws of open government data

Saturday’s article about secondary suites in the Calgary Herald, “Basement suites hit brick walls – Homeowners leave city open houses frustrated by rules” does a good job pointing out the absurdity of Calgary’s land use bylaw.

To have city council hear individual land use re-designation applications, in a city of over a million people, doesn’t just hurt the people that need affordable housing, or the home owners looking to rent out their basements, it hurts council itself.

This isn’t just an issue of parking, or homelessness, or even of creating more urban density to combat Calgary’s urban sprawl; the secondary suites issue is one of governance – a recognition that city hall exists to serve the needs of Calgarians. With bylaws like these, it’s hardly surprising that many Calgarians are growing ever more cynical about the way our council works, or doesn’t work at all in their eyes. As Dan Gustafson is quoted as saying in the Herald article “it’s to the point of ridiculousness.”

The shameful admission that city council approved only four land use re-designations in the 10 months prior to the launch of their $25,000 secondary suites grant program for homeowners – a band-aid solution at best – is another glaring example of the paralysis gripping our council. This paralysis consistently prevents council from making the right decisions, look no further than today’s analysis that “backroom politics cost taxpayers $2 billion.”

It was hard not to laugh out loud reading Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart’s absurd claim that “these illegal suites […] are destroying our neighbourhoods.” Even more disgusting was her call to ramp up enforcement to “hire the inspectors and get these people out of there” and straight onto the street in the middle of winter. But given her recent inept effort in the Calgary-Glenmore by-election, this kind of ignorance seems more and more commonplace amongst our many mediocre elected officials.

I hope they can prove us wrong by tackling the real problem, a land use bylaw that prevents honest homeowners from securing a legal source of additional income while thwarting the efforts of students and other lower income Calgarians to find a safe, affordable, and legal place to live.

To meet the Calgary Homeless Foundation’s call for 200 new, affordable and legal secondary suites every year (in line with their goal of ending homelessness in our city), it’s going to take vision and leadership on our city council. Sadly, these two things are about as scarce a legal basement suite.

Acting with the legal support of the BC Civil Liberties Association, this week two activists filed a lawsuit challenging a Vancouver bylaw that restricts the right to “distribute material critical of the Games during and around the events.”

BCCLA President Robert Holmes commented on the severity of the punishment for violating Olympics inspired bylaws in Vancouver, Richmond and Whistler that  give municiple workers the power to enter private property to remove “offensive” signs to protect the Olympic brand:

If you think through what people get thrown in jail for in this country, six months in jail is usually reserved for criminals who have a record of several convictions of breaking and entering, but now it’s the government that wants to break in and take down signs that should be part of people’s freedom of expression.

Collectively now: W. T. F. ?!?!

(link h/t cknw.com)

The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year.

It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts around the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation and the weakening of national governments.

The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies.

The New York Times: “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security“

I love the media. I love reading articles, watching clips, commenting on the stories I care about and sharing them with others.

I grew up reading The Leader Post and The Globe and Mail, listening to CBC Radio at breakfast and oscillating between the 6:00 nightly newscasts on CTV, Global and CBC.  After graduating from university,  I worked for a local Calgary magazine called Calgary Living and spent the last 2.5 years in the sausage factory netherworld between public relations and the news media at CNW Group – formerly Canada News Wire – the largest behind the scenes distributor of news releases and other assorted multimedia in Canada.

Over the last several years, my lifelong fascination with all things media began to intersect with another obsession of mine: the Internet.

I first logged on at my father’s office 15 years ago as a wide-eyed 12 year old boy, immediately recognizing how powerful it was.  I could instantly gain access to information on virtually any topic I desired.  I was an early, unashamed Internet addict, spending long hours at my parents’ offices after work hours until we finally got connected at home.

When I downloaded my first MP3 in 1996, I knew a fundamental shift was underway.  Before long I was a full blown copyright criminal; an accomplished music pirate with several thousand songs shared over a personal FTP server on my parents’ cable modem before I was even old enough to drive a car.  I was the first kid in high school to get a CD burner, because what good was all that music if you had to sit in front of your computer to hear it?  I even wrote a few ridiculous articles about burning CDs for MP3.com, (I lied about my age) when it was still the biggest aggregator of music piracy know-how on the net.

Before long, I fundamentally changed the way I consumed content. No longer hampered by the size of my allowance or my summer earnings, I became an aficionado of music.  I discovered bands I never would have come across were I relegated solely to to listening to radio stations and watching Much Music, (I remember when they actually played music videos most of the time).

I was empowered.  The cat was out of the bag. The toothpaste was out of the tube. I was never going back to the old way of doing things.

As it turns out, neither was anyone else. Napster, KaZaa and a litany of other defunct peer-to-peer (P2P) applications eventually gave rise to the mighty torrent.  The content expanded to anything that could be digitized. Books, TV shows, and  full movies, even perfect DVD copies, were suddenly up for grabs.

I remember a close friend’s glee when he downloaded every Beatles song, (studio recordings, b-sides and bootlegs) in one click in 2004.  Five years later, he still has all his favorites on his iPod.

Of course, the exponential growth of computer power, the Internet and the increase in the price-performance of digital technology (e.x. my cell phone is ten times more powerful than a computer purchased for $1000 10 years ago) was the great facilitator of this process.  It created opportunities for revolutionary technologies like the iPod.

The existing archaic copyright laws were no match for the world’s largest copying machine.

It took a while, but the open Internet I watched swallow the record industry as a teenager finally did the same with the media I grew up with. CanWest Global , the owners of The Leader Post and Global television, continues to teeter on the abyss of bankruptcy. CTVglobemedia, (owners of The Globe and Mail) isn’t faring well either. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster,  is facing similarly tough times eventhough advertising revenue is only a component of their bottom line.

Advertising, as the pillar of the broadcast media business model, is crumbling.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched the same Internet P2P technology take over the world of news.  Twitter is now my personal social newswire feed. I follow friends and leaders that share interesting content and share the best nuggets of content I find from all my sources with my own friends and followers across several social media platforms. Furthermore, I find myself taking pictures with the intention of sharing them and feeling inspired to write knowing that someone will actually read what I have to say.  The network of bloggers, professional journalists, academics, and new media professionals I follow provide me with a unique perspective that takes great effort to curate effectively. I use RSS, podcasts, blogs, twitter, along with many of the traditional media sources and networks to stay plugged in to the information world I’ve organized for myself.  Through these methods, I dramatically reduced the amount of advertising I am exposed to daily.

For the record, I am not against copyright laws. But I do think that the Internet and the democratization of technology are helping us recognize that laws of the 20th Century were overly skewed in one direction.

I  believe we need to work to strike the appropriate balance between user-rights and the rights of the content creator. We need professional journalists, musicians, actors, authors, artists, inventors, coders and engineers to have a resilient, vibrant democracy. To have these professionals, we need to find a way to ensure they are paid for their hard work and the intellectual property they produce. Yet, after I began studying copyright more carefully in the last year of my political science degree, I quickly recognized that all culture is derivative, in that it builds on previous work. We are all truly standing standing on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, all of humanity’s future intellectual pursuits will continue to be derived from an understanding of the research and works created by others in the past.

Our system needs to balance the extremes of  “everything is free for the taking!” and “everything idea you see, hear or use is going to cost you!” to ensure we can pay the creators while leaving their content open to be used to create derivative works.

It is in this spirit that recommend my friend Duncan Kinney’s recent article “How hacker investors could save the media.” I love articles like this one that examine how the media must reinvent itself on the open web. Finding new, effective business models is crucial to ensuring we can continue to pay for the  journalists and media professionals necessary to hold the powerful accountable.  Duncan starts from the premise that these organizations must innovate or go extinct and derives a sensible investment strategy for these lumbering behemoths. While web 2.0 is  important and I am optimistic about our ability to open up government and hold our leaders accountable through technological innovation, Duncan rightly points out that in the interim large media organizations are still important because they “have the clout to get access, a legacy of fact-checking and the money to afford lawyers.”  I agree with him, these are not unimportant details.

If you want to learn more about these issues I highly recommend that you read Michael Geist’s blog, listen to TVO’s Search Engine and read anything you can get your hands on by Lawrence Lessig. And while you’re at it, go check out creativecommons.org

One thing is is certain. The toothpaste is out of the inter-tubes and we can’t put it back in.

My friend, former boss, current volunteer team member, and local blogger Doug Lacombe wrote a great piece for techvibes.com about his recent trip up to Red Deer to see Michael Geist speak at Red Deer College. 

Dr. Geist’s Fair Copyright for Canada still serves as the best example of Canadian internet-organized opposition and activism related to a specific issue: the lack of provisions protecting consumers rights in the now defeated Bill C-61. Although I’m a member of Fair Copyright for Canada, I think the most interesting of part of Dr. Geist’s story is the rise of effective internet-organized activism itself as a phenomenon. 

As Doug put it: 

The rise of digital advocacy has been meteoric, to say the least. Web 2.0 or “social media” applications such as blogs and Wikis, Facebook, MySpace and now Twitter have given the power to organize and mobilize to the masses. It’s simply easier and more efficient to find people of like-mind and take action.

In other words, as the internet and social media tools proliferate, the transactional cost of organizing like-minded people into groups begins to approach zero. Getting those people to come out in the real world and “take action” on issues they care about is the real potential of the exponentially growing social web and what Ken Kowalski is worried about: 

• Barack Obama understood that creating meaningful connections through any and every communications medium would produce results on Novermber 4th 2008.
• Local #yyc (i.e. Calgary) twitter users understand it in their (our) frequent meet ups, like Demo Camp  or Third Tuesday Calgary  (which I help organize.)
• The site meetup.com is a social media site with the specific goal of migrating connections and relationships made on the web into the real world.

Doug and I understand the power of these mediums too. That’s why we’re working together to get Calgary Reads, a local non-profit organization dedicated to helping struggling grade two readers, set up in the social media world (Facebook, CR Blog, Twitter) with the goal of helping them promote their annual CBC-Calgary Reads Book Sale fundraiser on May 1-3 . </shamless_plug>

Check out Doug’s Blog: blinking12.ca - social media for the VCR generation