ISOC Chapter Leadership Workshop

ISOC Logo

On Thursday, November 10th and Friday, November 11th, I am attending a chapter workshop of the Internet Society (ISOC). Below my (largely unedited) notes on these two days. This might be less relevant for my regular readers. But you might still find something useful here, especially if you are interested in how to create sustainable volunteer based organisations.

Opening of the day, introduction to ISOC.

The European bureau was started about one and a half years ago to help the relationship between ISOC and its members. Looking back on 2011, there have been many European activities around the following topics:

IPv6
Network neutrality
DNS blocking
Copyright
ISOC has been recognized by the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
Human rights and the Internet

The future will be much more complex, so ISOC has put a lot of their plans for 2012-2014 online.

Jacek Gajewski is the new chapter development manager. There are also some next generation leaders in the room.

Currently there are about 84 ISOC chapters all over the world. The number of chapters is still increasing (20% growth in 2011!). Chapters have life cycles. Sometimes they are very lively and then sometimes they become inactive and need to be rejuvenated. There a few basic documents that can help you start and run a chapter. They are developing a dashboard for chapters (draft). There are also several toolkits (examples are Mobilising volunteers or Unravelling the Net Neutrality/Open Internetworking Debate). There are website templates for new chapters. They have many regional workshops for chapters (next year they will have a global INET workshop for the 20th anniversary of the ISOC, April 2012 in Geneva).

Some new services are being developed. An example are the live streams of previous ISOC related meetings.

Every chapter is allowed to apply for event funding once per year. Special projects van also be funded. If you need support as a chapter, you can contact chapter-support at isoc dot org.

Helping associations create value and have long term health

Peggy Hofman and Peter Houstle from Mariner Management have a lot of experience in “helping association volunteers and staff create the greatest possible value for [their] members and in ensuring the long term health and growth of [their] association”. They facilitate the day.

Are chapters structures that can actually do large projects?

The head of the Romanian chapter talked about what he calls “Hobbit Management”. They run the chapter by projects. For every project they define a project leader who is 100% responsible for the project. They try to have a diversity of project leaders. In the European Union there is already a lot of money available for projects. This is maybe why European chapters make less use of the chapter funding that ISOC provides. To be able to deal with the EU, you need to have a real formal organisation and need to have the ability to check off all the points on their checklists. One question he has is whether we can use ISOC Geneva as a proxy organisation that enables local chapters to do EU projects.

Walda Roseman, COO of ISOC, shares with us that there will be an incorporated ISOC entity in each region. This will make it easier to take part in intergovernmental activities and it will create a way for ISOC to receive grant money. They are also planning to help chapters get better at applying for community grants by teaching them how to write grant proposals and by sharing grant program best practices.

The head of the Armenian chapter for ISOC shared some of the projects that the Armenian chapter had been involved with recently. They created and up-to-date regional community Internet center, helped to start up an Armenian Internet Exchange (ARMIX foundation), upgraded an Armenian academic (research) network for IPv6 readiness and is establishing a content creation centre for Armenia. They have a true multi-stakeholder model. I believe that this is something that ISOC NL can work a bit more on. Especially the corporate side is underrepresented in our Dutch ISOC community.

How do we arrive at common ISOC positions and how does an ISOC chapter get their position heard?

There is a feeling that it is difficult to arrive at common positions about certain topics. We were urged to have more bottom-up discussions: we can ask questions on the regional ISOC mailing lists and have a discussion about the topic afterwards.

I suggested that ISOC could be inspired by the way that the online discussion was held around the writing of the GPL v3. They used stet (which is not actively developed any more, the project now recommends Co-ment) that allowed people to comment on parts of the text. The more comments a piece of text go the more red it would become. This could be a way for ISOC to develop its policy in a slightly more transparent way.

A Polish chapter lead showed how they become a real public policy partner in his country. They were forced to start dealing with public policy issues by a set of laws that they didn’t like. His first advice is to take your time. Some policy decision take a real long time. They now became part of the law-making process: they have survived six prime ministers. This allows you to focus on your core values (because you know your counter party will not be around forever). We have a huge advantage over other lobbyists: we do it for a passion. This makes it easy to stay neutral. The first step to get there is: write, write, write. “Publish or perish”. You have to put your position on (digital) paper. Over time you will be part of their mailing list, then slowly you get involved in the real decision making process. If you publish: others may pick up your work and new people will come and join you. What motivates him: the opportunity to work with incredible people that normally you would not have access to. Also “hacking the system is fun”, he is changing the world in his own way. His advice comes with some disclaimers: “Caveat Emptor, your mileage may vary”, but “do try this at home!”

“Call in the young people because they are afraid of nothing” “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it” “You have to be very careful with what your values are”

Homework for me: we need to be more clear about what our values are in the Dutch chapter. What are things that we are willing to really “lobby” for?

Ideas about future ISOC e-courses

Ulkar Bayramova presented her thoughts about future ISOC e-courses. She thinks that is important because courses will give a lot of people access to the knowledge around ISOC, it will bring people together and can find talented future leaders. The courses should be made interesting by the topic (useful in life or career), the methodology (multi-medial, based on peer interactions) and by giving out university certificates at the end of it. It is important to take bandwidth considerations into account. She would also like to give people access to the e-libraries of universities (I personally don’t think that is strictly necessary: this is not an academic course perse and all the information that is needed for it should be open and public anyway).

A participant in the Next Generation Leaders programme gave a couple of ideas for making the courses more widely available. One thing that is very important is localization. She also suggested using SCORM to create personalised learning journeys. I don’t think that would add anything, so will lobby ISOC to stay well away from SCORM and spend their energy elsewhere.

Roseman announced that ISOC will launch a new program next year titled: “Sustainable leadership” with three pillars:

Entrepreneurship
Social responsibility
Innovation

They still need to do thinking around how to run this program efficiently and effectively.

How do you engage people in volunteering?

In break-out groups we tried to answer the following question: “The last time I got someone to do something for the chapter it was because I…” or its counterpart “The last time I personally offered to do something for the chapter it was because I…”.

Our group came up with the following ideas:

Giving them the opportunity to be important, empowering them to be in charge.
Calling it a “Macedodian” ISOC (this only makes sense if you know about this!)
Giving people an opportunity to be connected to another world
By being connected to all the player in the IT field in your country (while staying neutral of course)
Allow people to bring their ideas
Allow access to knowledge and experience (can be important when it is hard to get internships) and provide facilities for training
Access to facilities (e.g. internet access or computers) that they might otherwise not have access to
Ask people to do what they are good at or what they would love to do
Hook into what people were going to do anyway, focus on passion
Create small tasks for other people to do: creating a process/infrastructure that lowers the transaction costs to farm out work to others. Only by giving people the opportunity to participate will they actually participate. This hurts in the beginning!
Use more interactive technology: like an email newsletter via WordPress and the social networks
Because of being a bit more daring and provocative (counter to ISOC default way of operating), maybe even activist
Give away something for free, but get commitment back for it
The opportunity to promote yourself
If they like the topic of an event it is more interesting to get them involved
Look at psychology: empathy, seduction, manipulation, conversion
The opportunity to travel or enlarge their personal perspective in a particular way

Another interesting one that was added by another group was:

Use crisis as an opportunity: always great to bring people together

Research into volunteers has shown that volunteers get activated because of three things:

There has to be passion involved
They will get something back (“what’s in it for me”)
There has to be a “Personal ask”. This is the most important one as people will rarely say “no” to something when they are personally asked. When they have said “yes” once, it is likely that they will say “yes” again.

We also discussed the issue of succession. One truism that came out of that was: The longer you stay in position, the harder it will become to find a replacement.

The new ISOC website

ISOC will launch a new website very soon. It won’t be a static launch, but rather they are ready to get input and iterate. This will also likely mean a new website template (improving this old one) The ISOC Asssociation Management System (AMS) will be made a bit more friendly. There will be a series of webinars explaining chapter how to use the chapter portal (this will include the AMS).

My thoughts and reflections

After spending three days with some of the people at the core of the Internet Society two things struck me pretty clearly:

For an organization that is completely focused on the Internet, it is slightly ironic that in the way that ISOC organizes itself it seems to have taken none of the lessons of the Internet on board. I am not sure how aware its leadership is of this fact and don’t see any easy way to change this, but I do believe it will hinder ISOC’s effectiveness in the long run.
The shift from engineers to lawyers, or rather from technical advocacy to policy advocacy is very palpable. From a the viewpoint of a relative outsider it looks like there is great governance for the technical problems (with many of the technical problems already behind us), whereas there is little or no clarity about policy problems. I have doubts whether ISOC is positioning itself well enough to be able to handle this shift (I believe a clear majority of the people in the workshop were engineers).

Sidenote: Fridtjof Nansen and the Nansen passport

At one part during the workshop we had a discussion about digital IDs. One of the workshop delegates mentioned the Nansen passport which is something I hadn’t heard about before. In the summer of 2010 I visited the Fram Museum and learned about Nansen’s heroic adventures trying to get to the north pole. I didn’t learn there about his work for the League of Nations. Now I have all the more reason to start reading his biography that has been sitting on my bookshelves for a while now.

Access, Trust and Freedom: Coordinates for the Future Internet

I am now in Bucharest, Romania at the INET Conference organised by the Internet Society (ISOC). The Internet Society:

[brings] together Members, Chapters, and partners [and] is at the center of the largest global network of people and organizations focused on ensuring the Internet continues to evolve as a platform for innovation, collaboration, and economic development. By tackling issues at the intersection of technology, policy, and education, [they] work collaboratively to preserve and protect the multistakeholder model of development and management that has been key to the Internet’s success.

The one day conference, titled “Access, Trust and Freedom: Coordinates for the Future Internet” had the following topics:

Internet access in Romania (from a national and international perspective)
Trust and Privacy
Freedom of speech
The future of the Internet

Opening

The day opened with a short speech in Romanian by Emil Zahan, Director of Cabinet of the Romanian Ministry of Communications. I missed picking up the headsets with the simultaneous translation, so I am not sure what he talked about. Neelie Kroes had recorded a video message for the conference. This is now the third time I have looked at Kroes’ big blown-up face talking about broadband access, privacy, e-inclusion and how there has to be a balance in rights and freedoms on the net. I am not sure that this is an effective way of getting her message out or influencing stakeholders.

Protection, Trust, Privacy: Can we have it all?

View on Bucharest from the Eight Floor of the Palace of the Parliament

After a morning session about Internet in Romania (did you know Romania has the fourth fastest broadband access in the world?) and a very quick visit to the baffling and partly obscene Palace of the Parliament, I attended a panel session about trust and privacy.

According to one of the panelist “privacy” is recognized as a universal right in the Declaration of Human Rights, but there is no universally recognized definition of what “privacy” is.

The stage was set by the CEO of Bitdefender who made us all realise that consumers have no idea about how vulnerable they are and where the problem might lie. There was a lot of discussion about whether educating citizens would be helpful. I personally don’t believe this at all and think most of the speakers underestimated the need for solid architecture that enables smart behaviour by users of Information Technology.

The panelist were too diverse to come to any real discussion. One of them was a policy adviser who had to read from a script, the next person was partly responsible for Romania’s network security and he kept warning people that they need to be aware. A technical director from Microsoft assured us that Microsoft is on top of all the Net’s problems (“probably the only major IT vendor”). The only person who was refreshingly straight in making his point was Professor Joseph Cannataci who clearly had a much better understanding of a problem as whole than his fellow panelist and the audience (not that he had any straightforward answers on how to solve the conundrum).

Scenarios for the Internet of tomorrow

Spread over the day the organisers showed the four scenarios for the future of the Internet that have come out of their scenario planning exercise. You can watch the trailer here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInTXcZ4HZM]

All videos can be seen on this page. Which scenario tickles your fancy and which one do you think is the most likely to be the outcome in ten years?

Tomorrow…

There will be a workshop for ISOC chapters. Expect another post!

Digital Civil Rights: a Guest Lecture

Today I had the pleasure of doing a guest lecture for Bits of Freedom at the University of Leiden in a course titled Anthropology of Information Society. I used many examples to try and drive home two points:

Technology is not just a tool, it is not “neutral”
You can help change technology for the better

One thing the students did, was write their own personal data policies (kind of like a reverse terms of service for using a webservice). This is something that I intend to explore further in this blog pretty soon.

[slideshare id=9790836&doc=111020digitalcivilrights-111020081332-phpapp02]

You can also download the presentation as a 12MB PDF file.

Looking forward to any comments that you might have.

Make Sure You Read This: Hackers by Steven Levy

Wow! This is a masterful book.

Levy reports on three different eras that have shaped modern computing:

The group of hackers at MIT in the early sixties who were the first to use computers for anything other than computing things (the first computer game, the first chess computer, the first time that a computer is connected to a robot, etc.) and created a culture, the hacker ethic, in the process.
The people around the Homebrew Computer Club in California in the early seventies who were the first to create hardware at a scale that could work for hobbyists and in households
A group of Apple and Atari enthusiasts (fanatics?) who invented whole new genres of gaming and birthed the modern game industry in the early eighties.

Levy is an excellent writer (you have read In The Plex, haven’t you?) and through his writing I was immediately and completely awed by the brilliant playfulness of these geniuses.

The hacker ethic is something that still today has tremendous value. Levy teases out these principles from the MIT culture that he investigates:

Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust Authority—Promote Decentralization. (From the book: “Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed sys-tems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers.”)
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.

Paragraphs like this:

As for royalties, wasn’t software more like a gift to the world, something that was reward in itself? The idea was to make a computer more usable, to make it more exciting to users, to make computers so interesting that people would be tempted to play with them, explore them, and eventually hack on them. When you wrote a fine program you were building a community, not churning out a product.

made me understand more fully why Richard Stallman is so pained thinking about what we lost. Greenblatt is also pretty vocal:

The real problem, Greenblatt says, is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was built on the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he and his friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goal of building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, ‘Let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads,‘” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people who win are the people who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”

Some things haven’t changed though. Go to places like Fosdem and you realize that the following is still the case:

It is telling, though, to note the things that the hackers did not talk about. They did not spend much time discussing the social and political implications of computers in society (except maybe to mention how utterly wrong and naive the popular conception of computers was). They did not talk sports. They generally kept their own emotional and personal lives—as far as they had any—to themselves. And for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic, which commonly obsesses groups of that composition: females.

There is a lot of hacker wisdom:

[..] An important corollary of hackerism states that no system or program is ever completed. You can always make it better. Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

This book was written in the mid eighties and discusses some topics that are still relevant today. Read the following paragraph and think about the current battle between Android and iOS: hackers insist

[..] that when manuals and other “secrets” are freely disseminated the creators have more fun, the challenge is greater, the industry benefits, and the users get rewarded by much better products.

We also encounter Bill Gates and Steve Jobs right at the start of their companies. I thought it very was very funny how already then they showed something of their later self: Gates was complaining publicly in 1976 how everybody was just copying his version of Altair Basic without paying for it and Jobs was already purely focused on marketing, the user experience and what the actual hardware would look like (even when you opened the Apple 2, it had to look neat and accessible).

We absolutely have to thank O’Reilly for republishing this classic!

Reflecting on Lift France 2011: Key Themes

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Lift France 2011 conference. For me this was different than my usual conference experience. I have written before how Anglo-Saxon my perspective is, so to be at a conference where the majority of the audience is French was refreshing.

Although there was a track about learning, most of the conference approached the effects of digital technology on society from angles that were relatively new to me. In a pure learning conference, I am usually able to contextualize what I see immediately and do some real time reflecting. This time I had to stick to reporting on what I saw (all my #lift11 posts are listed here) and was forced to take a few days and reflect on what I had seen.

Below, in random order, an overview of what I would consider to be the big themes of the conference. Occasionally I will try to speculate on what these themes might mean for learning and for innovation.

Utilization of excess capacity empowered by collaborative platforms

Robin Chase gave the clearest explanation of this theme that many speakers kept referring back to:

Economic Logic of Using Access Capacity by Robin Chase

This world has large amounts of excess capacity that isn’t used. In the past, the transaction costs of sharing (or renting out) this capacity was too high to make it worthwhile. The Internet has facilitated the creation of collaborative platforms that lower these transaction costs and make trust explicit. Chase’s most simple example is the couch surfing idea and her Zipcar and Buzzcar businesses are examples of this too.

Entangled with the idea of sharing capacity is the idea of access being more important than ownership. This will likely come with a change in the models for consumption: from owning a product to consuming a service. The importance of access shows why it is important to pay attention to the (legal) battles being fought on patents, copyrights, trademarks and licenses.

I had some good discussions with colleagues about this topic. Many facilities, like desks in offices, are underused and it would be good to try and find ways of getting the percentage of utilization up. One problem we saw is how to deal with peak demand. Rick Marriner made the valid suggestion that transparency about the demand (e.g. knowing how many cars are booked in the near future) will actually feed back into the demand and thus flatten the peaks.

A quick question that any (part of an) organization should ask itself is which assets and resources have excess capacity because in the past transaction costs for sharing them across the organization were too high. Would it now be possible to create platforms that allow the use of this extra capacity?

Another question to which I currently do not have an answer is whether we can translate this story to cognitive capacity. Do we have excess cognitive capacity and would there be a way of sharing this? Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and the Wikipedia project seem to suggest we do. Can organizations capture this value?

Disintermediation

The idea of the Internet getting rid of intermediaries is very much related to the point above. Intermediaries were a big part of the transaction costs and they are disappearing everywhere. Travel agents are the canonical example, but at the conference, Paul Wicks talked about PatientsLikeMe, a site that partially tries to disintermediate doctors out of the patient-medicine relationship.

What candidates for disintermediation exist in learning? Is the Learning Management System the intermediary or the disintermediator? I think the former. What about the learning function itself? In the last years I have seen a shift where the learning function is moving away from designing learning programs into becoming a curator of content and service providers and a manager of logistics. These are exactly the type of activities that are not needed anymore in the networked world. Is this why the learning profession is in crisis? I certainly think so.

The primacy (and urgency) of design

Maybe it was the fact that the conference was full of French designeurs (with the characteristic Philippe Starck-ish eccentricities that I enjoy so much), but it really did put the urgency of design to the forefront once again for me. I would argue that design means you think about the effects that you would like to have in this world. As a creator it is your responsibility to think deeply and holistically. I will not say that you can always know the results of your design (product, service, building, city, organization, etc.), there will be externalities, but it is important that you leave nothing to chance (accident) or to convenience (laziness).

There is a wealth of productivity to be gained here. I am bombarded by bad (non-)design every single day. Large corporations are the worst offenders. The only design parameter that seems to be relevant for processes is whether they reduce risk enough, not whether they are usable for somebody trying to get something done. Most templates focus on completeness and not on aesthetics or ease of use. When last did you receive a PowerPoint deck that wasn’t full of superfluous elements that the author couldn’t be bothered to remove?

Ivo Wenzler reminded me of Checkhov’s gun (no unnecessary elements in a story). What percentage of the learning events that you have attended in the last couple of years adhered to this?

We can’t afford not to design. The company I work for is full of brilliant engineers. Where are the brilliant designers?

Distributed, federated and networked systems

Robin Chase used the image below and explicitly said that we now finally realize that distributed networks are the right model to overcome the problems of centralized and decentralized systems.

From "On Distributed Communication Networks", Baran, 1962

I have to admit that the distinction between decentralized and distributed eludes me for now (I guess I should read Baran’s paper), but I did notice at Fosdem earlier this year that the open source world is urgently trying to create alternatives to big centralized services like Twitter and Facebook. Moglen talked about the Freedombox as a small local computer that would do all the tasks that the cloud would normally do, there is StatusNet, unhosted and even talk of distributed redundant file systems and wireless mesh networking.

Can large organizations learn from this? I always see a tension between the need for central governance, standardization and uniformity on the one hand and the local and specific requirements on the other hand. More and more systems are now designed to allow for central governance and the advantages of interoperability and integration, while at the same time providing configurability away from the center. Call it organized customization or maybe even federation. I truly believe you should think deeply about this whenever you are implementing (or designing!) large scale information systems.

Blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual worlds

Lift also had an exhibitors section titled “the lift experience“, mostly a place for multimedia art (imagine a goldfish in a bowl sat atop an electric wheelchair, a camera captured the direction the fish swam in and the wheelchair would then move in the same direction). There were quite a few projects using the Arduino and even more that used “hacked” Kinects to enable new types of interaction languages.

Most projects tried, in some way, to negotiate a new way of working between the virtual and the real (or should I call it the visceral). As soon as those boundaries disappear designers will have an increased ability to shape reality. One of the projects that I engaged with the most was the UrbanMusicalGame: a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers hidden in soft balls. By playing with these balls you could make beautiful music while using an iPhone app to change the settings (unfortunately the algorithms were not yet optimized for my juggling). This type of project is the vanguard of what we will see in the near term.

Discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of technology

A surprising theme for me was the well articulated discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of some of the emerging digital technologies. As Benkler says: technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice and not all practices that are becoming feasible now have positive societal impact.

One artist, Emmanuel Germond, seemed to be very much in touch with these feeling. His project, Exposition au Danger Psychologique, made fun of people’s inability to deal with all this information and provided some coy solutions. Alex Peng talked about contemplative computing, Chris de Decker showed examples of low-tech solutions from the past that can help solve our current problems and projects in the Lift Experience showed things like analog wooden interfaces for manipulating digital music.

This leads me to believe that both physical reality and being disconnected will come at a premium in the near future. People will be willing to pay for having real experiences versus the ubiquitous virtual experiences. Not being connected to the virtual world will become more expensive as it becomes more difficult. Imagine a retreat which markets itself as having no wifi and a giving you a free physical newspaper in the morning (places like this are starting to pop up, see this unplugged conference or this reporter’s unconnected weekend).

There will be consequences for Learning and HR at large. For the last couple of years we have been moving more and more of our learning interventions into the virtual space. Companies have set up virtual universities with virtual classrooms, thousands and thousands of hours of e-learning are produced every year and the virtual worlds that are used in serious games are getting more like reality every month.

Thinking about the premium of reality it is then only logical that allowing your staff to connect with each other in the real world and collaborate in face to face meetings will be a differentiator for acquiring and retaining talent.

Big data for innovation

I’ve done a lot of thinking about big data this year (see for example these learning analytics posts) and this was a tangential topic at the conference. The clearest example came from a carpool site which can use it’s data about future reservation to clearly predict how busy traffic will be on a particular day. PatientsLikeMe is of course another example of a company that uses data as a valuable asset.

Supercrunchers is full of examples of data-driven solutions to business problems. The ease of capturing data, combined with the increase in computing power and data storage has made doing randomized trials and regression analysis feasible where before it was impossible.

This means that the following question is now relevant for any business: How can we use the data that we capture to make our products, services and processes better? Any answers?

The need to overcome the open/closed dichotomy

In my circles, I usually only encounter people who believe that most things should be open. Geoff Mulgan spoke of ways to synthesize the open/closed dichotomy. I am not completely sure how he foresees doing this, but I do know that both sides have a lot to learn from each other.

Disruptive software innovations currently don’t seem to happen int the open source world, but open source does manage to innovate when it comes to their own processes. They manage to scale projects to thousands of participants, have figured out ways of pragmatically dealing with issues of intellectual property (in a way that doesn’t inhibit development) and have created their own tool sets to make them successful at working in dispersed teams (Git being my favorite example).

When we want to change the way we do innovation in a networked world, then we shouldn’t look at the open source world for the content of innovation or the thought leadership, instead we should look at their process.

Your thoughts

A lot of the above is still very immature and incoherent thinking. I would therefore love to have a dialog with anybody who could help me deepen my thoughts on these topics.

Finally, to give a quick flavour of all my other posts about Lift 11, the following word cloud based on those posts:

Lift11 Word Cloud — My Lift 11 wordcloud, made with Wordle