Meg Ambrose and Jill van Matre, two lawyers and privacy policy thinkers, hosted a conversation in which from the outset there was the ambition to answer some of the following questions:
Is forgiving and forgetting worth protecting in the digital age?
How does the Right to be Forgotten work in EU member countries?
Does the First Amendment prevent any possibility of a Right to be Forgotten in the US?
How does time change the value of information?
Can anything ever really be deleted from the Internet?
From the online summary of the session:
The digital age has eternalized information that was once fleeting, and the Right to be Forgotten has gained traction in the EU. A controversial aspect of these rights is that truthful, newsworthy information residing online may be removed after a certain amount of time in an attempt to make the information private again. Two compelling camps have arisen: Preservationists and Deletionists. Preservationists believe the web offers the most comprehensive history of humanity ever collected and feel a duty to protect digital legacies without censorship. Deletionists argue that the web must learn to forget in order to preserve vital societal values and that threats to the dignity and privacy of individuals will create an oppressive networked space.
The Starwars Kid: undeletable
They kicked off the conversation with the example of a girl in college who did somebody stupid which was posted on Facebook and surfaced 6 years later. We were also asked to remember our most embarassing moment and then imagine that being posted on the Internet and showing up as the first result on a search for your name. They then handed out a roadmap for the discussion (which I think some of the other discussion sessions could have used).
Forgetting is incredibly important to our emotional health. How human do we want our technologies to be? This becomes more important now that it is becoming harder to keep yourself out of the online context and are forced to live some of your civic life online. Digital life is also core to our expression rights. Somebody in the audience had a disability with his hands. He is now scared to post pictures of himself online being happy, because they might take his disability insurance away if he doesn’t look “disabled” enough.
In general the tone of the discussion seemed to be very pro right-to-forget (so deletionist). One German lady brought in the perspective of her press job. The press is very nervous about how this right will be used to censor the press.
My personal question on this topic relates to the ability to reinvent yourself. This will become much harder once everybody has something like a “Facebook timeline”. The assumption behind this seems to be that people don’t change and that identity is a constant concept. This semi-objective (it still is a subjective lens) digital history might become the single source of truth about who you are.
There are a lot of behaviours and social norms that are coming through that are helping us cope with this situation. There are also options to enforce law with forced technological solutions.
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:
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).
Fridtjof Nansen
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.
[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:
A couple of weeks back I was a guest lecturer at the HvA presenting on the topic of privacy (as part of my volunteering efforts for the brilliant Bits of Freedom). The slides of the talk can be found here. There is no audio to the slides, so I was delighted to be invited by Dennie Heye to be interviewed for the Special Libraries Association podcast and talk about the topics I discussed.
Start the player below to hear how I think the net fundamentally changes the way we have to look at privacy (by being permanent, scalable, replicable and searchable) and what you can do to help shape a free future.
Bits of Freedom is doing important work (and are effective in the way they do their job). I am therefore honoured to ocassionally field some of their speaker requests. Today I presented at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on Privacy and the Internet and had some good talks with the students afterwards.
I am not sure the slides make a lot of sense without the audio, but if you augment them with a visit to some of the links in this bundle, then you might understand a bit better in which ways the Internet’s permance, replicability, scale and searchability (thank you danah) should affect the way we think about privacy going forward.
