Participative Web : oecd-pw-session2a

Photos: Second session, stream A

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Chair David Crane, senior Canadian journalist

Paul Misener, Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy.

Will the Internet introduce competition between governments?

Kieren Mccarthy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:42:00 GMT

The second session of the conference was split into two stream. Stream A in the main room was Business 2.0: Creativity and the Internet Economy. As with the first session, there was an intriguing mix of viewpoints followed by a wide-ranging discussion, so the best this blog can probably do is pick out one of the most interesting threads.

And what was perhaps most interesting was the role that governments needed to play in business. The Canadian government’s Michael Binder pulled together much of the discussion with a simple question to the panellists. “The rules that you say governments will need to introduce, would that need to be a global set of rules, or do you think that each country should have its own rules?”

This is an increasingly important topic. The Internet, as people constantly point out, has no understanding of geographic or political borders. What’s online is online. There is also a growing body of people that believe governments will have to change to fit in with the new reality of a global medium and start coalescing into a global body with a single set of rules, laws and guidelines.

Fantasy2.0

This ideology is nothing new. In fact, it is Fantasy 2.0. You can still read the original online - A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. And you should note that it is in plain text and plain HTML code. Fantasy 2.0 will no doubt come with RSS feeds.

The concept of the Internet as being uncontrollable and extra-government no longer holds water (it was most effectively neutered by the book “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World”). And now the hope is that the Internet will somehow force governments to have to work on Internet culture’s terms. It also won’t happen.

But a very interesting and intriguing answer was given by entrepreneur Bob Young, who runs online publishing house Lulu.com.

He said he was a fan of competition and that he would like to see governments competing in the laws they introduce. The laws that end up working most effectively with the ways in which the Internet is changing society and business will end up as market leaders. And as a result, governments that have adopted those laws will attract more business from the global world we have entered.

Monopolies and freedoms

Bob Young also provided a couple of other interesting snippets. He argued that governments’ role was to maximize freedom. Entrepreneurs dreamed and worked every day toward building a monopoly, but it was governments - not business - that made that sort of market control impossible and so provided the driving force of competition.

Another area where governments may need to create new legislation, it was suggested, was identity. What is the right level of anonymity online?

Amazon’s Paul Misener pointed out that identity was not a problem for his company because at some point someone has to buy something or sell something and that means they had to identify themselves through credit cards. But what of the anonymity of blog posts? Young drew a comparison with Speakers Corner in London: “You can say what you want there, but if you incite a riot you will be arrested.”

It is not healthy to have full transparency. Humans are not two-dimensional beings and often the most successful people in our societies are precisely those who are capable of holding different and often conflicting views and opinions at the same time.

Astro-turf

The chair, David Crane of the Toronto Star, reviewed this identity issue by mentioning that his newspaper is obliged to find out that people sending letters to the editor are confirmed as real people before the letter is posted. Without that check, a powerful outlet could easily be manipulated (and in the US there are many famous examples of “astro-turf” letters being used to create false impressions, particularly in politics).

What is the balance to be struck? Can governments really act like businesses in a global market – producing the laws that will attract the customers they want? Is this the grand social change that the Internet will ultimately cause our planet?

In his summing up, David Crane, pieced together the various aspects of this discussion. Governments do have an important public policy role, he said – "not only with laws, but also with incentives". And, yes, "one of roles of government is to be the freedom fighter".

The transcript of this session is now available online here

Session 2, Stream A -- Creativity and the Internet Economy: Business

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:19:00 GMT

STREAM A -- Business 2.0 and innovation: Business use of the participative web

11.10-12.30

TK: 12.10am
PA: 4.10pm
NY: 11.10am
LA: 8.10am

David Crane (chair), Global Issues Columnist, Toronto Star
Bob Young, Founder, Lulu.com
Anthony Williams, New Paradigm and Author of Wikinomics
Paul Misener, Vice President for Global Public Policy, Amazon.com
Daniel Bretonès, Professor, ESCEM School of Business and Management, France
Shenja van der Graaf, Media@lse, London School of Economics

Click here for a rundown of all blog posts covering this session.

The participative web includes new web services, Internet applications and commercial online ventures. On the supply side, the computer and mobile communications industries have high hopes for new web 2.0 applications. Firms are increasingly using the participative web to reach out to customers, to support marketing activities, to improve innovation and product cycles and to tackle research problems. Specific participative web tools are used to share knowledge among employees as well as with external stakeholders. Questions to be addressed include:

How are firms using participative tools for innovation, developing internal capabilities and growth?
How have firms changed their innovation cycle and what are the resulting impacts?
What is the balance between formal closed internal business development strategies and informal open participative ones?

TK	PA	NY	LA
Tokyo	Paris	New York	Los Angeles

Daniel Bretonès

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:29:00 GMT

Daniel Bretonès is Professor at ESCEM School of Business and Management (Groupe ESC Tours-Poitiers in France). ESCEM is an AACSB and EQUIS accredited business school.

He teaches information system management and innovation management. He created in 2005 the ADVISE (ADVanced Information System ManagEment) Master in Information Systems Management in partnership with IBM. He holds a Master and a Ph.D in Business Administration from La Sorbonne University.

Daniel started to implement computer conferencing on a worldwide basis in the field of R&D and marketing with multinational teams on strategic topics in the nineties in a international corporation. His fields of interest other than Web 2.0 include high tech start ups performance and clusters, economic intelligence and knowledge management.

As chief editor of the economic journal "Vie & Sciences Economiques" he organizes conferences on various topics. He is the President of the French PhDs’ in economy association, a non-govermental organization. In April 2007, a conference in the Sorbonne was dealing with "the French economy and the web 2.0 revolution". He is interviewed here.

David Crane

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:21:00 GMT

David Crane is a senior Canadian journalist who most recently was economics editor of The Toronto Star newspaper. In addition to a distinguished career as a journalist, David Crane is engaged in many other activities. He is a member of the National Statistics Council, which advises Statistics Canada. He is on the board of the North American Institute, a trilateral body that promotes dialogue and understanding among the three NAFTA countries.

He is on the President’s International Alumni Council at the University of Toronto. He is also a member of the Canadian member Committee of the Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation Council. He served for many years as a judge on the Ernst&Young Entrepreneur of the Year programme. He also served as a member of the Ontario Science and Innovation Council. He has honourary degrees from two Canadian universities and was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for his contribution to Canadian life. He has written several books.

Paul Misener

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:09:00 GMT

Paul Misener. Both an engineer (B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Princeton University, 1985) and lawyer (J.D., George Mason University, 1993; Distinguished Alumni Award, 2001), Paul Misener is Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy. He is responsible for formulating and representing the company’s public policy positions worldwide, as well as for managing policy specialists in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, Tokyo, Ottawa, and elsewhere.

Once a partner in the law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding, Paul also served as Senior Legal Advisor to a Commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission. Prior to his government service, he was Intel’s Manager of Telecommunications and Computer Technology Policy, and co-founder and leader of the computer industry’s Internet Access Coalition.

In the late 1980s, Paul was a policy specialist for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where he was a U.S. delegate to several conferences of the International Telecommunication Union. Prior to that, he designed radio communications systems.

Shenja van der Graaf

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:58:00 GMT

Shenja van der Graaf is a PhD researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen.

Her research focuses on the organization and management of innovation and technology, especially demand-side innovation, product development, and media uses in media and software industries. She employs her experience in an extensive international network of companies including Hakuhodo Foresight and Ericsson which has resulted in the edited volume 'Information Communication Technologies and Emerging Business Strategies'.

Anthony D. Williams

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:55:00 GMT

Anthony D. Williams is an author, researcher, speaker and consultant living and working in Toronto, Canada. He is co-author (with Don Tapscott) of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio 2007) and Vice President and Executive Editor with international think tank New Paradigm.

Anthony has pursued his interests in the wide-ranging impacts of new technologies on social, political, and economic life for over a decade. His work has been featured in publications such as Business Week, The Globe and Mail, Business 2.0 and Optimize magazine and widely circulated in proprietary syndicated research programs, including numerous influential reports on strategy, innovation, and intellectual property.

Prior to joining New Paradigm, Anthony was a leader in Digital 4Sight’s multi-client research business where he led a global effort to understand how transparency is revolutionizing business and redefining the corporation’s role in society. He was a core member of an esteemed research team that charted a new course for governance and government for twenty top government agencies around the world. Anthony has also consulted to international institutions such as World Bank, where he helped establish a portfolio of initiatives that harness information technology to foster economic development.

Anthony holds a Masters in Research in Political Science from the London School of Economics and is a PhD candidate in the Government Department.

Bob Young

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:50:00 GMT

Bob Young is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, the premier international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 300,000 recently published titles and more than 15,000 new creators from 80 different countries joining each week. Founded in 2002, Lulu.com provides a platform for people to create, buy, sell and control digital content on demand. Young was the co-founder of Red Hat and currently owns the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League and serves as the league’s vice chairman. A 1976 graduate of the University of Toronto, he enjoys fly fishing and collects calculators and antique typewriters, a nod to his beginnings as a typewriter salesman.

Snapshot: What is the conference rundown?

Kieren Mccarthy — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:03:00 GMT

This is cut-down version of the full agenda. You can download the full agenda as a pdf here, or use the links below to learn more about each sessions and those taking part in it.

The conference runs from 9am to 6pm. It is based in Ottawa, Canada, so in terms of time that is Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) which is currently GMT -4 hours. See here for a time rundown according to different cities of the world.

The conference comprises five main sessions - three split into two different stream - running for 80 minutes each and with a five-minute conclusion at the end:

Participative Web conference agenda
Time	Event	People
9.00-9.20 TK: 10pm PA: 3pm NY: 9am LA: 6am	OPENING	Michael Binder Suzanne Huttner John Oxley (Facilitator)
9.20-10.50	The Future of the Participative Web	John Lettice (Chair) Jonathan Taplin Cyrus Beagley Ginsu Yoon Michael Gill
10.50-11.10	Coffee break
11.10-12.30	Creativity and the Internet Economy	Stream A	Stream B
TK: 12.10am PA: 4.10pm NY: 11.10am LA: 8.10am	Stream A: Business 2.0 and innovation Stream B: Research 2.0 - eScience and new ways of interaction	David Crane (chair) Bob Young Anthony Williams Paul Misener Daniel Bretonès Shenja van der Graaf	Walter Stewart (chair) Andrew Herbert Bill St. Arnaud Mario Campolargo Diana Rhoten
12.30-13.45	Lunch	Robert Sutor
13.45-15.05	Creativity and the Internet Economy	Stream A	Stream B
TK: 2.45am PA: 7.45pm NY: 1.45pm LA: 10.45am	Stream A: User-created content: What are the impacts? Stream B: Government 2.0 - Engaging citizens	Michael Leblanc (Chair) Jungwook Lim Andres Monroy-Hernandez Jennifer Corriero Manon Ress	Ellen Miller (Chair) Don Lenihan Alejandro Hernandez Pulido Wolfgang Blau Quitterie Delmas
15.05-16.25	Confidence and Competition in the Internet Economy	Stream A	Stream B
TK: 4.05am PA: 9.05pm NY: 3.05pm LA: 12.05pm	Stream A: Creation, access and competition Stream B: Confidence, privacy and security	William New (Chair) Kiyoshi Mori Urs Gasser Anne Bucher Martin Senftleben	Hugh Stevenson (Chair) Gary Davis Chris Kelly Jennifer Mardosz John Lawford
16.25-16.45	Coffee break
16.45-17.55 TK: 5.45am PA: 10.45pm NY: 4.45pm LA: 1.45pm	Policy Roundtable: Opportunities and Challenges for Policy	Michael Geist (Chair) Sangwon Ko Marc Rotenberg Daniela Battisti Joseph Alhadeff Keith Besgrove Neil Anderson
17.55-18.00	CONCLUSIONS and Priority-Setting for the OECD	Richard Simpson

TK	PA	NY	LA
Tokyo	Paris	New York	Los Angeles

Other snapshots: