Musings & Meanderings

A proposed Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web was posted this morning by Joseph Smarr on Open Social Web.

Joseph’s preamble states that it isn’t carved in stone (the phrase is chiseled in granite), but is intended to spur conversation and debate.

Do I have anything to contribute? On first reading, I’d say that the form and language tiptoe around rights which have already been abrogated by default, but at this moment I still have smoke coming out of my ears. This ‘document’ floored me.

Users, I presume, means all the constituents using the internet and web services? Or is this just for white American entrepreneurial tech insiders?

Why has this document been authored by four men? Four of the 10 men authoring the blog on which it’s posted?

You couldn’t find any women interested enough to participate? Any women prominent enough to consider inviting? Any women interested in the subject of their rights? Are there any powerful American female tech insiders? I’m a Canadian woman and I’m looking for them. I am also a ‘user’.

Women happen to be half of your constituents. Just like men, we aren’t all American. We aren’t all techies. We care about our rights.

—–
later…
Phil Wolff on Skype Journal says,
BORUS is a shallow attempt to codify broader, deeper rights in cyberspace. It’s like petitioning for the right to print an afternoon edition of the local newspaper on paper instead of fighting for Freedom of Speech with heart, guns, money and blood.”

The value of free is in access to knowledge.

Knowledge is gained by learning. Learning is something we actively choose to do and is distinct from education. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a great teacher or two along the way, and this can be a family member or mentor as often as a teacher in a scholastic setting.

The most important components of the freedom we enjoy in the modern western world are free access to information, the freedom to share it, and the freedom to use it. Freedom of information isn’t a property right. Property right is a right to one’s own tangible or intangible human product or creation, not to information.

Should all information be free to everyone? Of course not. Freedom includes a right to privacy, and we should (imo) value our personal information more highly than we generally do. The collection, and also analysis, of highly specialized information by experts is performed as a paid service for whatever their market will bear, and is a human work product. Artistic and creative works are the same kind of product. Each of us also has the right to give our time and our work product to others, including to the society as a whole, where ownership vests in the public trust. If an artist creates a work for the public trust, then no individual has the right to charge for and thereby deny access to it. Anyone, however, is free to study it, learn from it, take inspiration from it, and, together with all the other information they have collected and used as a basis for their knowledge, create something new which they are then free to either donate to the public trust or to own. We, individuals and businesses alike, usually benefit most by doing both.

On the important issue of net neutrality, which most people have never even heard of, we would do well to promote a better understanding of rights.

Free press advocates and free enterprise advocates often have a way of settling on opposite ends of a political spectrum. In my experience, this is usually a construct based on agendas and motivations which most commonly serve to limit freedom. The agendas are usually about control of information (censorship), and the motivations about power or money (or both). Free is a powerful word.

Even if we could take in all the free information available, we would not necessarily become knowledgeable. The value of free information resides not in the information itself, but in what we do with it.

Value is created in the propositions we develop and make to ourselves and to one another, human to human. Every one of us initiating interaction with others is making propositions all the time, often without even seeing them as such. Every time we respond (or don’t) to one another, we are choosing from a wider spectrum of responses than we usually realize. Rarely do we stop and take time to consider that full spectrum, but if we did, we’d be amazed at how many opportunities to create, innovate, and build things are at our disposal all the time.

Free in computers and on the internet can be viewed in as many ways as there are individual perspectives: as a valuable gift or a shared treasure, as a windfall, as getting lucky or getting away with something, as a marketing tool, as stupidity, as a lure, as a trap.

All this free noise sometimes distracts us from what makes freedom valuable. It isn’t the raw information that has value in itself. It’s what we learn from it and what we do with it, the conclusions we draw, the theories we develop and prove, and the propositions we develop and make, that enable us to create value for ourselves and others.

I’ve learned enough about the origins and early days of the internet, read enough about the principles of a free internet, to make me a firm believer in and supporter of open source. The difficulty, of course, is finding time to learn to use it.

As long as the internet remains free, it provides a means of communication, connection and enablement of free speech as well as free enterprise. As long as the majority of its users are free individuals, moreover, they will have the ability to use their freedom to protect it. In the early days of the net, and even fairly recently, this was understood and appreciated by most people who spent time online, but is that still the case?

Of the billion people online today, what percentage knows how to build and operate all the tools they’re using? 2%? 5%? That’s high, but the exact number isn’t important. What is important is that for the overwhelming majority, its ability to understand and become fully empowered by this medium is severely limited.

It is mostly the creations of profit driven corporations that have enabled the size of this population, and, as far as I can see, it is their agendas which continue to drive both adoption by users and most new development.

This is very much in the usual tradition of all development in modern history, industrial and technological, for it takes highly knowledgeable specialists to create new marvels of engineering or technology, and those specialists, by their nature, are employed by the highest bidders, who are invariably private and government interests. The resources of these large entities enable them to pay the largest salaries to brilliant programmers and developers. What is most likely to be developed, therefore, will not enable the individual or benefit society specifically, except through by-products, and, perhaps, or perhaps not, in terms of long term change.

Granted, there are as many new small communities, including not-for-profit, being built daily as there are social media apps, but the majority of these are created on specialized and limited platforms created by small entrepreneurial businesses for that purpose alone. Citizens for Clean Water in XXX City would exist whether they had an internet based community portal or not.

There is a fair sized contingent of socially responsible developers who contribute online tools for individuals and communities, and it has become the norm to offer a basic free version together with paid versions accompanied by more advanced features. These developers are running small business, which may or may not be profitable, but they are essentially a more sophisticated version of the website developer who built a portal for your small chain of local stores, and most are producing a limited community version of a narrow slice of enterprise software without a commerce component.

For any non-tech community or group of any size and complexity, however, the options to develop organically online are almost non-existent. This, I fear, is a factor which marginalizes the free internet to the extent that it may eventually exist only on the fringes, with the mainstream belonging to large powerful entities.

Perversely, it seems that the very developers who pay the most attention to their targeted consumers adhere to the principle that internet use should be mindless and painless, and as a result are directly contributing to disenfranchising the vast majority. We should be learning what we can do and invent ourselves here rather than waiting to be entertained and served, but even those of us actively desiring these opportunities find more obstacles than options to the pursuit of this desire.

eBay, in its early days and before it became a ‘big business’, was such an opportunity to a limited extent. Millions of ordinary, non-tech people joined in, bringing to the ongoing event a kaleidoscope of interests and knowledge, connecting as sellers and collectors, forming into natural communities, creating sole proprietor businesses, and much more. Many gained some technical knowledge, motivated by their new online activities. eBay was originally a platform, not a programming platform such as .net, but a human platform where not just the content but some of the activities were as much defined by individuals and groups as by the developers of the site, who followed as much as they led.

What online site is doing that today? Blogging platforms? Social media sites? The ‘platforms’ for people and their chosen activities are becoming so sophisticated as developers continually try to offer a better targeted product that few users will ever do more than use the basic tools initially provided. This reality is an argument for open source in itself, except that the complexity of building anything to meet and advance current uses and expectations is and will remain too big of a learning curve away from the vast majority of users.

There are any number of projects which could truly enable the majority of users more fully, but there aren’t any that I’m aware of which are a human platform (such as eBay was) as well as a programming platform, where the form and function is being developed in tandem with user activity. Releasing a social app, early and often, isn’t the same thing. The full human platform requires a range of human activity that includes wide varieties of both social and commercial enablement for individuals and groups. Personal and societal balance requires both. We all have to make a living as well as dream, play, and socialize, and we further become a rich and thriving society by contributing to the public trust as well as by taking responsibility for our economic roles.

Can such human platforms really be built? Only if tech and non-tech communities collaborate.

Can that happen? What say you?

—–
later…
Open Peer-to-Peer Design quoting Linus Torvalds:
“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.”

The title isn’t a mistake. You are reading Vera’s weblog, and I still hold the same views about irresponsible and malicious behavior being encouraged and enabled by anonymity online.

The important word there is irresponsible, the opposite of responsible.

I’ve long understood the value of anonymity in many specific circumstances, but that understanding was fairly fragmented until now, because I did not relate to anonymity personally. This was, ironically, despite the fact that I guard my privacy fiercely, and even my personal support of causes is done privately or anonymously. I also have a healthy respect for the potential power of machines (which I’ve been using since 1982-3) in certain hands. People wiser and more experienced than I about the internet, however, support anonymity strongly, and therefore I have continued listening harder than ever to understand why.

Matt’s post on Moderating Internet Forums handed me a final key to seeing the whole picture. Thank you Matt. You have my respect and loyalty. Your voice on the subject of freedom has resonated with me since I first started reading here, and your occasional post on the importance of anonymity was also instrumental on getting me to ‘listen’ even harder.

Anonymity online is not about my identity, about whether I go by Vera Bass or one of my handles. Yes, I have handles …in communities I’ve been part of over the years… where people get to know each other over time and many of us also sign our real names in forum posts, exchange email, etc.

Anonymity protects my privacy and my freedom. This is related not to whether I choose, as I do, to speak openly and stand by my words, it is related to my abilities to protect the rights and privacy of my family and myself.

Last fall, when I first started blogging, I wrote posts, and participated in related conversations as well, protesting the division of the web into an either or experience. My posts such as Them and Us, followed by UsThems, insisted on the viability of a free society where commerce and other pursuits could co-exist naturally, based on mutual respect. Over the past year, and during my prolonged absence, the growth in ‘free’ web services, such as social sites and personalized search engines, has increased dramatically (not surprising given the sale of MySpace and then Youtube more or less a year ago).

Over the same period, the proliferation of these companies has increased the tracking and information gathering on our activities to the point where a blog or web site with ads and other services cycles through dozens of trackers before loading.

Unless we re-claim the permission we have become accustomed to granting tacitly, no company, from Google to Facebook, has any incentive beyond public relations to grant us participation and choice in the information collection processes. When public protest against current practices grows a little too loud, it is typically silenced with a token concession that is usually mostly meaningless. There is no sign so far that initatives such as open ID can gain the massive adoption that would be required to stem this tide.

On Jeff’s post titled What’s Worse Than Crashing?, about how the insidious can be worse than the blatant, I commented that the answer lies in education. Good habits and practices are taught to us by the people around us who care, the same way that I admonished incessantly every one of my family members when they first started using computers, until they formed basic habits, such as saving, backing up, etc. I have always been meticulous about not keeping anything truly critical on the machine I use to surf and blog. I’m a heartless consumer of trees, relying on paper via fax machines and hard records for many highly sensitive things.

There are people with ill-intent, both online and off, although, as my late and much-loved mother-in-law used to say, in her Brooklyn accent and with a half-smile and a cute shrug, “Whaddaya gonna do? …things are tough all over.”. I can’t personally do much about the behavior of predators beyond the scope of my vision, but I can do plenty about my own behavior and about contributing to the education and awareness of those around me.

Now that I finally comprehend anonymity used, not to hide behind, but as an instrument of freedom, and especially free speech, many of the issues of online behavior that were lumped in discrete categories such as Code of Conduct, Policies, etc. are coalescing for me perfectly as citizen rights in a free society.

—–
August 31, 2007

Blogger Blog post on malware in Blogger includes links to two sites on computer safety:
The University of Pennsylvania’s Information Security portal.
US-CERT safety tips.

…even if you don’t personally need to learn more about computer safety, you may have family and friends who could benefit from reading all the pages on these sites. Of course you may have to bribe reward them.

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August 20/06:
Bringing scambaiter SnosKred’s Six Part Internet Safety Primer up out of the comment dungeon.

In today’s post on Edgeio’s paid content widget, Jeff Jarvis includes a little demo, which says,

“There’s nothing of value behind this wall. There often isn’t.” Right.

Further on in the post, Jeff talks about what I call the ‘make it worth the consumer’s while’ internet marketing concept. I’ve been pondering this for some time now, thinking it a potentially good idea, and considering how it could be linked to user ownership of data, but am getting to a point where, no matter how I develop the model, it eventually breaks down and ends up rather lame.

In a comment on the same post, Seth says, in response to current online advertising, “I have an almost reflexive need to hit the back button… unless, of course, it’s my “choice” “. This hits the nail right on the head.

Choice is what could grow like wildfire …a model in which selection and action is initiated by the consumer. I doubt, though, that many marketers/vendors would consider such a model. That means it probably won’t exist unless consumers build it. If we did, I think that a whole lot of vendors would make a whole lot more over the internet. Of course they wouldn’t get to vie for their market position in the same way they do now. What’s more, they’d also have to really respond to their customers.