andrewmcintyre.ca

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

I was inspired to sign up and write a post on climate change for Blog Action Day 2009 after reading Alex Abboud’s excellent post entitled “Embracing Post-Modernism.”

My first consideration of the risks of resource depletion, overpopulation and the need for long term thinking and sustainable practices was over a decade ago in grade 10 high school science class. The problem seemed almost as intuitive, even obvious, as it is today.  But for a middle-class 16 year-old eager to begin driving a car, while living in a resource laden country, the problems never seemed as tangible as they are today.

Looking back, it was as clear then as it is now that exponential  population growth in conjunction with an increasing,  resource gobbling,  standard living were leading us down a dangerous road. Advances in technology, medicine and even in social system systems -  the ascendancy of globalized capitalism and its recent failure, for example – are leading us ever closer to a precipice where tough decisions are necessary.

Some are even likening the willful blindness towards living within our means, or more accurately the lack of action taken to rectify our recent collective awakening to accelerating climate degradation, to a massive global ponzi scheme.

I worry most about the cost of inaction, of maintaining the status quo, given the huge uncertainties and potentially destabilizing global security risks we’re all facing as a result of anthropogenic climate change, which is only one of the environmental threats to our continued security and prosperity.

Last night I heard the latest news in what seems to be a perpetual parade of disconcerting stories about the rapid changes in our climate. CBC is reporting that climate researchers now believe we will have ice free summers at the North Pole in only 10 years.  This will have enormous consequences.

So what can we do?

For starters, myopic sloganeering about “local food” as the panacea for addressing climate change is not the magic cure all some make it out to be – though I wish it were.

I recognize that the growing chasm being awareness and action is the real issue here. Most people now accept that climate change is happening and that it is a major problem but few people seem to have changed their behaviour and lifestyles to minimize their impact. As a human being, I am not without fault here either, but I am trying.

So I agree that lifestyle changes are important. When aggregated they can really make an enormous difference. However,  much of the massive change needed to address our climate bankruptcy can only come from new rules, laws and policies on a systemic level.  To put it another way: this is a problem that governments at all levels, from around the world, must immediately work together to address.

A new age of cooperation is required. Right now. Will the COP15 United Nations climate change conference this December be the turning point?

For the sake future generations, let’s all hope so.

The more Kelly explores the issue, the more convinced he is (and he makes a compelling case) that [scale down, microscopic] technological progress is pretty much inevitable. It can be slowed down by bad policy, but it can’t be stopped. And, what’s most compelling to me is that this sort of progress isn’t dependent on anything like patents. It’s happening no matter what. The advancement of technology happens for a variety of reasons, little of which has to do with “protecting” the ideas. In fact, within that “protection” there’s little benefit.

The indispensable Techdirt exploring a deep thought from Kevin Kelly, a personal favorite among Internet experts and prognosticators, noting the inevitability of exponential technological progress even in confronting constraints and “bad policy.”

While on one of my many bike rides of late (apologies for neglecting this blog in the summer!), I listened to this great interview with Robert Kenner on Food Inc., his documentary that opened in Calgary this weekend.

On the Media is one of my favourite podcasts. I never miss an episode. Ever.

So it did not surprise me at all that they followed the Kenner interview by unearthing some excellent background on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to provide some context on the history of the muckracking  exposé versus the food industry.

Over 100 years later, we still exert too little control (or even thought) about what we eat. Myself included. But I hope we can change that.

I will be watching Food Inc. this week as it plays at The Uptown here in Calgary. (Showing: Nightly: 4:50, 7:00, 9:00 & Sat-Sun: 2:20, 4:50, 7:00, 9:00)

Today we learned that CTV will broadcast 60 hours of tomorrow’s Michael Jackson memorial over 10 of its channels.  While reading their press release loudly proclaiming the “super-simulcast,” I cringed with horror. Has anyone turned on a TV in the last week, flipped through the channels, and not had Michael Jackson’s ridiculously tragic life invade their living room?

It gets better.

After a long and nauseating “Save Local TV” campaign by CTV and CanWest (and the even more disgusting counter campaign by the cable and satellite companies – I’m looking at you Shaw and Rogers) today the CRTC decided to bailout the broadcasters to the tune of $100 million for the 2009-10 broadcast year.

Saying the absolutely most ridiculous thing possible, CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C. pronounced that “we have taken steps to ensure that broadcasters … continue to provide Canadians with programming that reflects their needs and interests.”

von Finckenstein will surely soon declare that up is down,  black is white and that money grows on trees. The CRTC is requesting that you submit your comments by August 10, 2009, by filling out the online form.

On the bright side, Ben Mulroney and dead Michael Jackson have real chemistry together.  (as noted by  @robertmcbean)