Russ Savage: Digital Governance/Democracy

Who Will Pay? Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change, and OtherLong-Term Fiscal Challenges:

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 02:41:45 GMT

Bradford Delong writes Notes: Long-Term Budgeting

Yet another book to add to the must-read-soon pile:

Which links to an Economist article, In the long run we are all broke, How to stop governments going bust.

...Most countries' explicit net debt - issued as bonds and traded every day in financial markets - is at manageable levels, relative to GDP. However, embodied in current tax and expenditure policies are a lot of obligations for which governments have not yet had to make explicit provision. This implicit liability arises mainly from future increases in spending on pensions and health care. Include it, and total debt vaults to levels last seen (for explicit debt) in wartime. Governments often fall into bad habits when their debts are so high, usually by resorting to the printing press and using inflation to cut the real value of their liabilities....

So what is to be done? First, governments must look much farther ahead than they do now. An increasing number of western countries are planning their public finances on a basis of three to five years, but this is nowhere near enough, argues Mr Heller. They need to incorporate a long-range perspective (of at least 25 years and preferably more) into their budgets. Second, these projections should be vetted by independent agencies such as America's Congressional Budget Office, because of governments' tendency to see the silver lining and not the cloud....

That links to an IMF publication, Who Will Pay? Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change, and Other Long-Term Fiscal Challenges:

Sun, 02 Nov 2003 01:17:44 GMT

A BUZZFLASH interview with Bill Moyers on today's news media.

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 22:23:20 GMT

THE FUTURE OF NEWS
Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News
The Internet means now everyone is a journalist - or can be.
Dale Peskin, Online Journalism Review, posted: 2002-03-26

Forty years ago Marshall McLuhan observed that we look at the future through a rear-view mirror. He foresaw a time when our small planet would become a connected, ever-changing global village that would immediately and inextricably be altered by the way it is observed and reported.

McLuhan warned that few would notice. We would be changing and moving too fast, he predicted. Our vision for the future would be left to a backward glance through a small window of a moving vehicle....

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:27:59 GMT

MediaCon: Cooper's new book. Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America has published a new book, Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age. The book can be purchased at Amazon (link to come), or it can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons license. [Lessig Blog]

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:16:50 GMT

Toward a paperless government

When Congress passed the Government Paperwork Elimination Act in 1998, proponents talked about the remaking of an enormous paper-bound bureaucracy into the prototypical 21st century organization, complete with e-signatures and the electronic storage of documents.

If you want an inkling of what this involves, consider that the federal government's computer systems stretch back some four decades, thus representing what may be the biggest IT petri dish in the world.

The deadline for complying with the bill came and went last week with little of the fanfare that accompanied the start of the project. CNET News.com caught up with Ray Wells, IBM's top software executive in Washington, D.C., to gain some perspective on how close Uncle Sam is to realizing the ambition of a hard-copy-less system....

By Charles Cooper , Staff Writer, CNET News.com, October 27, 2003

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:08:53 GMT

The New Road to the White House. The blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention. By Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:03:25 GMT

The Fiscal Problem of the 21st Century. Charles Jones, Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, writes about the fiscal challenges ahead.

The fiscal problem of the 21st century, then, is this: Under current policies, the fraction of resources society devotes to health care appears likely to rise substantially over the next 50 years. Reasonable projections suggest that spending on Medicare and Medicaid as a percentage of GDP may well rise from 3.4% in 2000 to nearly 15% by 2075.

[Scott Loftesness]

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 13:00:13 GMT

Evolution, not revolution. Online: The dream of a borderless cyberspace is over. But the net is still rich and complex social place, says Steve Bowbrick. [Guardian Unlimited]

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 11:46:54 GMT

Jonathan Zittrain: Internet & Society - The Technologies and Politics of Control. Jonathan Zittrain is teaching a great course at Harvard Law School.

This course examines current legal, political, and technical struggles for control/ownership of the global Internet and its content. The course will draw upon a growing body of cyberlaw cases and commentary, class members' research, and participation by invited guests, including lobbyists, politicians, journalists, and scholars from the HLS faculty and elsewhere. Course themes include the interaction between emerging Internet self-governance regimes and rule by traditional sovereigns; the expression of conflicting interests of commercial and individual Internet speakers/broadcasters; new modes of control over widely distributed intellectual property ("privication"); and the potential for market giants and other architects of Internet technologies to constrain behavior online in ways governments find difficult to assimilate.

[Scott Loftesness]

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 21:59:09 GMT

eGovernment Maturity. Alan Mather writes frequently about eGovernment in general and particularly in the UK. Today he points to an article on eGovernment in the online section of the Guardian. The article also mentions Alan's blog. Alan has a pretty chart on eGovernment evolution that is analogous to the chart I use for talking about eGovernment maturity. The conclusion that I always make from the chart is that cross agency applications are the thing that governments have to start working on now to reach the next stage. This is the foundation of the message on web services that I'll be taking to the Universal Collaboration workshop tomorrow in DC (traveling today). [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

The Internet: One Way Street or Two Way Street

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 14:06:08 GMT

The Read-Write Web. Dave Winer's First (DaveNet) Essay of the Year is about many things, but it may boil down best to what... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
and
Defining Broadband in Only One Direction. Wall Street Journal: After Internet's Big Bust, Broadband Shift Went On. Much of the new content being developed for broadband... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Autograph (identifier) vs. Signature (identifier with intent)

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 13:40:50 GMT

UETA and Digital Signatures. Many people have never heard of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, or UETA. Even so, if you engage in any kind of transaction on the Internet, even non-commercial ones like downloading open source software, it has affected you. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

"Most of us take our signature quite seriously. At some point in your life you probably practiced writing it so that it looked the way you wanted it to."

Yes, most of us take our signature quite seriously. As Windley notes, at some point in our lives we usually practiced writing it so that it looked the way we wanted it to. Over time we come to intuit the fine grained distinctions of what a signing might imply. We gradually come to understanding that one might sign simply to identify your presence (a meeting sign-in sheet), or a mildly legal signing (accepting the package delivered), or a more serious signing (a car rental) or a really, really serious signing (a will). The level of identity needed and the level of intent implied can vary considerably. And all of this e-signing will evolve much as physical signing has evolved. One reason that notaries came into being was to have an "official" witness for those that could not sign, that could only make their mark with indicated intent without self-authenticating identity.

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 17:58:29 GMT

California disclosure law has national reach. Guarding against ID theft [The Register]

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 11:45:02 GMT

Move to Open Government Electronically. In the next year, the federal government will attempt to give the public easier online access to data and services. By Rebecca Fairley Raney. [New York Times: Business]

"You can complain about government using technology for surveillance, but government can also use it to become more accountable," said Steven Clift, editor of the Democracies Online Newswire.

The requirement to collect public comments online could bring changes to the cultures of regulatory agencies, which typically receive comments only from small groups of highly specialized lawyers who represent consumer groups and regulated corporations.

"To have government be the host of this sort of deliberation is a significant step forward for e-democracy," Mr. Clift said. "It creates transparency around those attempting to politically influence rules and regulations," he said, noting that under the traditional system, "you don't know where your comments go, and you don't know how your comments compare to those of other people."

Lessig on Broadband

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 12:28:29 GMT

Broadband wars I. The battle to build and keep broadband neutral is an important issue to me. I go a couple rounds on the FT.COM site about it here. Maybe it is just me, but these debates are never satisfying. The thrust of Tom Hazlett's final response is that cable is much better than DSL, so don't regulate cable. On cable, see the next post. But even ignoring the logic of the claim, we should not forget: However good cable is, does it begin to match the broadband options available elsewhere. Again, here in Japan: 100 mbs for $50 a month; 12 mbs for about half that. What cable company comes even close to that? [Lessig Blog]

Broadband wars II. If you want to get an idea about how bad the broadband future will be, you need only read this letter from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association describing how good (from their perspective) the broadband future will be. NCTA wrote this letter to the FCC to criticize a letter filed by the Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators. This Coalition, which includes Microsoft and Disney, told the FCC that it needed to assure that broadband remain neutral[~]that carriers not be permitted to discriminate in the service they offer based on the application or content the user wants. This letter from the Coalition was great and important moment in the debate about broadband. I've been critical of Microsoft and Disney in the past, but they deserve all the credit in the world for taking up this fight. If neutrality is lost in the broadband platform, that means the end-to-end design of the internet will be lost as well. And that would profoundly weaken the potential for innovation and growth on the network. The NTCA letter confirms the worst. After arguing at first that they are providing neutral service anyway (a claim which itself is false: have you checked your TOS re: servers?), they then go on to defend their right to discriminate however they wish. And they defend it by pointing to Microsoft: If Microsoft is allowed to cut special deals with partners, why shouldn't the cable companies? The level of ignorance here is astounding. We are four years into this debate, and apparently the cable companies have yet to even understand the argument they are attacking. The difference between Microsoft bundling products at the edge of the network, and the cable companies bundling preferred service in the middle of the network, is the difference between an end-to-end network and the Ma Bell network the internet replaced. This letter confirms that the cable companies do not begin to understand the value of end-to-end neutrality. It confirms precisely the claim of the Coalition: that left to its own devices, the dominant broadband provider in America (slow and expensive though it may be) sees no reason in the world why it shouldn't corrupt the basic internet design. Robert Sachs, president of the NCTA, is an extraordinarily bright man. He is also apparently a very busy man, for there is no way he could have written the letter he signed. The NCTA should spend some more money hiring press people who have taken the time to understand the arguments they want to rebut. Meanwhile, we, broadband users of America, need to wake up to the broadband environment four years of do-nothing-ness have produced. [base "]Open access[per thou] has been a failure in the United States (though a total success in Japan, where competition has driven prices down and service up: 100 mbs at $50 a month); the cable companies are, as we said four years ago, the single dominant provider of broadband in America. Their service is slow; it is getting more expensive; and now they claim the right to corrupt the basic design of the network they increasingly own. My last book was pessimistic: It was not pessimistic enough. [Lessig Blog]

Lessig on Creative Commons

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 12:21:52 GMT

cc launch. After many hours with lawyers, and many productive hours with tech-types, and lots of imagination by many, an idea first suggested by Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred will come to life on Monday, December 16: Creative Commons.... [Lessig Blog]

CC Launches. So just back to Japan after a quick trip to San Francisco to help many many extraordinary people launch Creative Commons. The event was fantastic, especially the Flash that explains our Licensing Project. Watch the flash, and check out the site. We are eager for feedback, and for ideas about where to go next. I can't begin to describe how grateful I am to everyone who made this happen. I am especially grateful to creators who have run with the licenses right away[~]heroes such as Cory Doctorow (who will be releasing under a CC license the entire text of his amazing book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a free, freely redistributable e-book on January 9th. But buy the book as a present. It is the best novel I've read in years), and Peter Wayner (who has licensed his Free for All under a CC license), and Tim O'Reilly (the first adopter of the "Founders' Copyright"). It is no accident that those who understand this are those closest to technology. Our challenge will be to find ways to explain it so other creators get it as well. If you have ideas, or ideas for new projects, please let us know. Our single, overarching aim: build the public domain, by building projects that expand the range of creative work available for others to build upon. Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. And check on this channel for more news as the project develops. [Lessig Blog]

CC for software?. Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. In a careless earlier version of this, I said they won't. Sam Ruby suggests the most I could mean by that is that our energy will be directed elsewhere. Indeed, that's the most I mean. We share RMS's concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. And our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. But creative reuse of creative content is what CC is all about. My apologies for any confusion. [Lessig Blog]

Superb discussion of Government GIS uses

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 20:48:53 GMT

Keeping Score
What's the payback from investing in GIS?
By Bill Lloyd, Government Technology magazine, December 2002

Internet meet Globalization. Globalization, Internet

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 13:30:10 GMT

Play nice. (perhaps the bridge is in the "Here's more from Britt" part)

Ring of Net.

On the NEA (Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it) debate (that started here and continued here) about the nature of the Net, Chuq explains how Linus doesn't really own Linux... or, why he does and doesn't. Not an easy line to draw. It's a yes but no kinda thing.

Which is why it's just easier to use the NEA characterization than to explain its many exceptions. Think of it as a slogan, a tagline or a rallying cry [~] like Land of the free, home of the brave. Yes, there are exceptions; but it has the ring of truth to it. That ring alone makes its point.

Here's more from Britt.

[Source: The Doc Searls Weblog]

From a fascinating piece on economics and (anti-)globalisation, by 1998 Nobel economics laureate, Amartya Sen:

The [anti-globalisation] protest movements are often ungainly, ill-tempered, simplistic, frenzied and frantic, and they can also be highly disruptive. And yet, at another level, they also serve the function, I would argue, of questioning and disputing the unexamined contentment about the world in which we live.

In this sense, the global doubts can help to broaden our attention and extend the reach of policy debates, by confronting the status quo and by contesting global resignation and acquiescence. That, it can argued, is a creative role of doubts, even if some of the presumptions and many of the proposed remedies that go with the protest movements are themselves under examined and unclear.

It is important to recognise that the question-mongering role of doubts can itself be creative and productive, and we have to separate the disruptive parts of the protest movements from their constructive function.

[Source: [ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:34:46 GMT

The U.S. Joins Global Trademark System. After 13 years of ruminating, the United States has agreed to join a global trademark system. By Sabra Chartrand. [New York Times: Technology]

ID card

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 17:02:02 GMT

Comment: The Mother of Reinvention
The real reason Americans detest the idea of a national ID card
by Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2002

Although the Constitution doesn't directly mention it, Americans have always reserved the right to reinvent themselves -- to wade into the waters of rebirth and emerge with new faiths, new livelihoods, new spouses, new sexual preferences, and even new names. The cult of unending self-improvement, our informal national religion, takes as its primary article of faith the idea that who a person was yesterday or happens to be today doesn't determine who he'll be tomorrow. Whether for first-generation immigrants or seventh-generation establishment WASPs, this is the land of clean slates and second chances -- where, for example, a decades-old drunk-driving arrest need not prevent a man from becoming President. It's no accident that most self-help groups use "anonymous" in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

Which may account for some of the hostility to proposals for a new national identity card as a weapon in the war on terrorism....

part of an Atlantic Monthly series described as Technology and Security, August 21, 2002

Network Business Model

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 19:50:03 GMT

It's the neutrality, smarty.
Larry Lessig on Net neutrality: It would be a strange and bad thing if the electricity grid discriminated against Sony television sets by serving reliable electricity only to Panasonic TVs. [source: The Doc Searls Weblog]
Financial Times: A threat to innovation on the web. Lawrence Lessig. But increasingly, the providers of internet connectivity are pushing a different principle. US broadband companies are trying to ensure that they have the power to decide which applications and content can run. [Source: Tomalak's Realm]

Selective Privacy

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 19:38:55 GMT

Frank Boosman: Privacy rings for weblogs. Frank Boosman has a great idea about adding some selective private placement with conditional access to certain portions of a weblog. The tool that I use for this weblog, Radio UserLand, allows me to configure something like that capability -- but it's reasonably hard to do (involves changing selected configuration files, etc). A more general and open solution to this requirement would, I think, be well received and expand the usage of weblogs into new territories. [Scott Loftesness]

Frank Boosman: The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that two of the essential aspects of the future of blogging will be selective privacy and privacy rings -- respectively, the desire and the ability to easily and precisely control access by others to one's data.

digital Architecture

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 12:56:55 GMT

Customizing our software worlds, Jon Udell, InfoWorld, Dec 14, 2002

I've often wondered why we insist on using the word "architecture" to describe the design of software systems. Maybe one reason is that, in a quite literal sense, we inhabit them. "For millennia," Williams writes, "the fact of settlement -- humans living with other humans in a place over time -- has shaped our ideas and practices of work, family, time and space, and society." The transition from nomadic to settled life must have taken generations. Now, of course, we're going the other way.

I've traveled a lot since joining InfoWorld six months ago, but have yet to visit the home office in San Francisco. A number of my colleagues are elsewhere, such as Texas, New York, and Virginia. Like many virtual teams, the "settlement" we inhabit is an artificial world made of business processes and sustained by technology.

We're often surprised by how much people care about the architectures of these artificial worlds.

What better way to unite people spread out geographically for common cause than access?

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 12:43:14 GMT

English countryside doing it for themselves: This story by Ben Hammersley, written in October for the Guardian (but missed by me), tells of how rural areas in England are prompting entrepreneurial efforts, often involving Wi-Fi, to bring high-speed connections to areas that British Telecom says are too far below their radar. In Wales, a community effort inspired by Dave Hughes is rapidly transforming the picture of connectivity, and the secondary effects are apparently already cropping up. What better way to unite people spread out geographically for common cause than access? [source: 80211b News]

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 13:39:01 GMT

On The Horizon: Your Right To Remain Anonymous Is Eroding
Criminal activity on the net is sparking a debate about privacy
By David Post and Bradford C. Brown, InformationWeek, Dec. 9, 2002

Is there a constitutional right to communicate with others anonymously?