Participative Web : oecdwebforum2007

Photos: Session hall

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:40:00 GMT

The striking architecture of the Government Conference Center

The building used to be Ottawa's train station, situated close to Parliament and on the banks of the Rideau Canal.

A question from the floor during the participative web conference.

Photo: Fifth session

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:38:00 GMT

Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa

Photo: Fourth session, stream A

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:35:00 GMT

Chair William New, Editor-in-Chief of Intellectual Property Watch

Photos: First session

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:25:00 GMT

Chair John Lettice, Editorial Director of The Register

Ginsu Yoon, Vice President, Business Affairs for Linden Lab

Michael Gill, Chief Executive Officer, Fairfax Business Media

Photo: Suzanne Huttner

Kieren Mccarthy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:22:00 GMT

Suzanne Huttner, Director of the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Directorate. During the first session.

photos

Richard Akerman — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:50:00 GMT

Above: Ginsu Yoon talking about Second Life

Andrew Herbert (at podium, left) of Microsoft Research Cambridge, presenting in the "Research 2.0" stream

Diana Rhoten (at podium, left) of US NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, presenting in "Research 2.0" stream

Mozelle Thompson (on the left) presenting about privacy, including Facebook privacy (Mozelle was standing in for Chris Kelly of Facebook, who was unable to attend).

Michael Geist (at podium, right) chairing the concluding policy roundtable at the end of the forum

Broad summary of the conference

Kieren Mccarthy — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:59:00 GMT

There was an enormous amount of information and debate during the ten sessions at the conference yesterday. Despite our best efforts as bloggers, we were only able to cover a few threads. So, in an attempt to provide a more overarching and objective summary of the day's events, several of the OECD staff have put together a few points to act as an unofficial review. A more formal and official document will be prepared and supplied to the OECD members, but this should serve as a useful, quick overview of the day.

Full transcripts of every session can be found here.

Programme

Session 1: THE FUTURE OF THE PARTICIPATIVE WEB: CONVERGENCE AND DIVERSITY
Sessions 2: CREATIVITY AND THE INTERNET ECONOMY: BUSINESS AND SCIENCE
Sessions 3: CREATIVITY AND THE INTERNET ECONOMY: USERS, GOVERNMENTS AND CITIZENS
Sessions 4: CONFIDENCE AND COMPETITION IN THE INTERNET ECONOMY: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF THE PARTICIPATIVE WEB
Sessions 5: POLICY ROUNDTABLE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR POLICY

‘Ottawa Consensus’

Profound changes are under way and yet to come in the economy and society, brought about by the participative web.
Not just business impacts
Reinventing government, politics and civic life
Challenge how to balance the needs to govern efficiently and effectively and fairly against the opportunities this set of technologies present and how quickly and unpredictably they change
Difficult to assume what the market place and impacts will be and what policy should look like

Re-emerging roles for government

Access to high speed networks (including wireless) and closing broadband gap, addressing new digital divides
Role for government investment in infrastructure?
Improve access to research and access to education and public information
Fostering new types of media literacy

"Elephants in the room"

High priority for Ministerial and Future work. No clear consensus.

Intellectual property issues
New ways of rewarding creators (ISPs collecting blanket fee?)
Questions around safe harbours and liability of intermediaries
Network neutrality concerns
Competition policy and network effects: monopolistic (?) role of access to content
Interoperability and standards
Digital identity, Privacy, and Control
Intersection between the local physical reality and legal frameworks, and the global differences in cultures and laws
Government role: Way in which government engages with the new participative citizen. Are governments ready? (Are citizens ready?)

in the news

Richard Akerman — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Ottawa Citizen - October 4, 2007 - Officials grapple with ever-evolving Internet

Top executives and government officials from around the world met in Ottawa yesterday to grapple with the issues of an ever-growing, ever-shifting Internet.

From online piracy to questions of how to divide the advertising revenue bonanza, the bureaucrats and representatives of such Internet heavyweights as Amazon.com, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life and Google talked strategy -- even as they admitted that control of the Internet is constantly becoming more diffuse. "A lot has changed over the past 10 years," said Michael Binder, assistant deputy minister of spectrum, information technologies and telecommunications at Industry Canada. "People are now not only using the Internet more, but contributing to its development."

Creation, access and competition? How about legislation?

Kieren Mccarthy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:14:00 GMT

The last split session of the day purported to cover “creation, access and competition” but the real subject took only just minutes to arrive and it was: intellectual property rights.

Chair William New from Intellectual Property Watch argued that “a topic doesn’t really exist until the OECD holds a conference on it”. But Kiyoshi Mori from the Japanese government proved him wrong – somewhat surprising the audience – by going straight into the issue of Net neutrality.

The Net neutrality debate has been raging, and continue to rage, in the United States but so far - despite constant efforts by US business to push it into the international arena – has been largely ignored by the rest of the world.

The reason is that most countries of the world don’t have a similar telecommunications infrastructure to the United States so there isn’t the telco tie-in and subsequent government role that has become entrenched in the US and been behind much of the debate.

P2P hunger

But Mori stood up and revealed some interesting graphs about how P2P networks were rapidly eating up all the new (enormous) bandwidth that Japan offers its citizens. This came as quite a shock to those that have held out Japan as the future – where you can purchase 100Mbit/s Internet connections and so enjoy extraordinary futuristic speeds of data exchange.

It prompted one questioner to ask whether there was a new law: that data rates will expand to fill the available bandwidth.

Mori himself seemed taken aback by the figures and confessed: “At first I thought that if had a wider use of broadband, it would go more smoothly, but the more we installed the more [peer-to-peer data exchange] happened.”

The figures appeared to show that this data exchange – and by implication widespread copyright infringement – is causing congestion within networks. And so Mori spoke of a “new legislative scheme” that would help cover the distribution of legal content and help tackle the infringement of property rights.

Interconnection

The “network neutrality” debate has just begun in Japan, Mori explained, and the first report on the issues had suggested developing new interconnection rules and reviewing current regulations.

When it came to the actual issue of copyright infringement, however, the debate widened. Anne Bucher explained she would not present the European Commission’s line because there currently wasn’t one. And for good reason, she suggested.

For one, she said, policy makers had not anticipated the participative web, the size of the communities, and the vast exchange of information. But secondly, self-regulation had done a good job so far. “One thing is that we do not have massive court cases,” she explained, adding, “my recommendation would be to be very cautious before moving”.

But that said, she was holding out self-regulation as the answer - she also felt that governments “may have to step in” and some point in the future.

DRM

Which moved us onto the efforts by companies to protect their content using digital rights management technology.

Urs Gasser recognised that he was being controversial when he said that in his view “the role of DRM is dead with respect to fighting piracy”. Even the industry recognises that the attempt to stop people sharing information without approval had been lost, he said. It was now all about new business models, he said.

Bucher appeared to agree when she pointed out that recently music companies had responded to users’ wish to be able to move content from one platform to another and produced DRM-free songs.

Wider view

This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last that an issue has grown foggy because of the clear financial incentives that exist for people to push forward certain points of view. The Internet will continue to cause traditional business models to creak and strain.

The hard part is to decipher when the Internet is damaging industries and when it is refreshing them. The OECD has its job cut out trying to find which is which.

The transcript of this session is now available online here

Content: it's like rock n' roll

Kieren Mccarthy — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:13:00 GMT

The first session of the afternoon (stream A) covered the issue of user-created content i.e. what people stick up on the Internet. What became clear was that this subject – like music – produces a generational split.

On the one side, you have the younger generation: excited about the new possibilities, dismissing concerns as people not "getting it" but with a dramatic tendency to over-emphasise its importance. And on the other side: the older, wiser generation, but one that also struggles to understand exactly why people are so excited about it and so is overly cautious and occasionally dismissive.

What everyone can be sure of is that modern technology has allowed people to produce words and videos at an easier and faster rate than ever before, and the Internet has enabled people to share that publicly with as many people as never before. Or, most concisely, user-created content is here to stay.

So what?

The chair Michael LeBlanc kicked off the session with an interesting anecdote – he received dreadful service from a company, so he called to complain and nothing happened. He emailed and they were unhelpful. He tried to find a way of posting a complaint on their website – but there wasn’t a forum.

So he posted his complaint – in strong words – on his own blog. And now that post is extremely visible through Google whereas if he had just posted on the company’s website, it would have been subsumed by other comments. The upshot was that the company called him up a long time later to ask how they could help him and if he would remove the content.

In this context, it’s not hard to see the impact of the user-created content.

My generation

This discussion thread was dropped however when the next few panellists – the younger generation – gave presentations not on the impact that this content has, but on how terrific it was and what they were doing with it on their terrific websites.

The generational gap was then further highlighted when the last panellist took issue with even the term “user-create content” – which by now had inevitably been reduced to down to “UCC”. There is nothing new to this concept, Manon Ress argued, newspaper editorials are user-generated content, and graffiti is user-generated content. The problem, she says, is that this new terminology values all “content” as of equal value when it isn’t.

She also complained that among this wealth of content, there were no databases being created. “Have we seen evidence-based policies?”

But Ress had a different point to make, and that was the way in which this data/content/stuff is stored. If the process isn’t open and transparent and if the standards aren’t open, the information is going to decline and die, she argued. She also had a list of questions that people should consider before they start producing and hosting content: Is the data open and transparent? Can I store it? What is the interface?

It is, of course, the concern of the mature that information is retained, lessons are learnt and then clearly and carefully passed down; whereas the young are too busy enjoying being creative to worry about what the use or value of what they are producing is.

So where did the discussion get to?

“It is easy to make a blog,” LeBlanc summed up. “If a nine year old can start a blog, a government official can certainly start a blog.” Here’s betting that government officials’ content would use open standards and fit neatly into a database.

The transcript of this session is now available online here