The Organization For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is asking the public this question: "How can the Internet make the world a better place?" The results will be shown at their Ministerial meeting on the “Future of the Internet” in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008. The best youtube videos will be shown to ministers and VIPs. It's good that OECD leaders are willing to listen to ordinary citizens' voices, but it's interesting that OECD is partnering with youtube (owned by google). I can understand why OECD is using youtbube -- numbers of existing users, ease of use of the tool, etc -- but it would be better IMHO if OECD used an open and community-driven system rater than one owned by one commercial entity. We'll post the best videos here when they're announced.

Maybe I should name this west coast lunchtime listen ;-) Be that as it may, Clay Shirky gave a talk last month (click on the image to get to the video) at the Berkman Center for internet and Society covering some of the ideas from his incredible new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Web and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio)

A new book is out entitled, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering" edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center's OpenNet Initiative. This is a must-have for libraries -- many of whom deal with filtering at the personal computer level -- in order to inform the public on the more insidious filtering of internet traffic that happens at the country or backbone level. "Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. (Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, USC)"

The site includes country profiles for those countries "in which it was believed that there was the most to learn about the extent and processes of Internet filtering." Read the BBC review and the Review in Nature.

The Center for Democracy & Technology  (CDT) has released a report from a joint project they conducted with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF).  The project  tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights.   Here's the Bill Tracking Report [38 page PDF] which is nicely organized  - it has the legislation indexed by popular name,  topic, Senate Bill and House Bill numbers, and federal agency/department.  For each bill you can see the text in html or pdf and then concise information about the bill as well as the analysis by both the CDT & PFF.  You can also download the  CDT Analysis [PDF]  and the   PFF Analysis [PDF]  of the legislation. In their summary the CDT states that " Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress... would not be effective child protection measures and would raise very serious policy and constitutional problems."

As GPO pushes forward with it's Digital Future System and as the well connected (Internet-wise) Congress moves away from print and towards an exclusively online government information world, they might want to consider this new report published by the Communications Workers of America:

Speed Matters: A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States
http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/sm_report.pdf

According to this report:

The median download speed for the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 61 mbps, or 30 times faster than the U.S. The U.S. also trails South Korea at 45 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, Sweden at 18 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps. The median upload speed from the Speedmatters.org test was just 371 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or too transmit large files such as medical records.

Most people who went to Speedmatters.org to take the speed test used either a DSL connection or cable modem. Very few people with dial-up took the test because it took too long. According to surveys, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of Americans still connect to the Internet with a dial-up connection. So the median speeds in this report are actually higher than if dial-up Internet users had chosen to participate in the survey. In other words, even these dismal statistics paint a rosier picture than the reality.

The report was compiled by people visiting a speed test site and providing their zip codes, so it isn't truly a random sample. Still makes for interesting reading for broadband advocates.

And it should make interesting reading for policymakers who desire to eliminate print. And for people interested in constructing a geographically distributed system of electronic federal publications which could be more easily accessed over urban networks than all users dragging every publication from Washington.

Prof. Lessig put together brief presentations on his blog outlining arguments for five Internet-related proposals that he thinks Congress should enact over the next year. The description for each proposal follows:

Copyright: Orphan Works: Orphan Works legislation is critical. Nonetheless, I strongly oppose the Copyright Office’s “Orphan Works Proposal.” I think it is extraordinarily unfair to current copyright owners, and insanely inefficient. My proposal applies an “Orphan Works Maintenance Requirement” to older works only; the requirement is a form of registration.

Copyright: Remix Culture: Congress should carve a robust exemption to the law for non-commercial remix. Commercial use of such remixes should be regulated by a baseline statutory license.

Network Neutrality: No surprise: I support Network Neutrality legislation. Unfortunately, too many of the reigning proposals are, imho, radically too difficult to enforce. I’ll propose a much simpler rule to enforce that would achieve the legitimate objectives of NN.

Spam: The email system is broken. A bazaar of private remedies to deal with spam now clog the system to defeat many of its original objectives. I’ll propose a modified version of an earlier idea to deal with this problem — a problem that costs the American public many times the total profits of the recording industry, but has gotten but a fraction of Congress’s attention.

Harmful to Minors Material: There’s a simple and minimally burdensome way Congress could protect kids online from material deemed “harmful to minors.” Not perfectly, but certainly better than the current regime. And without constitutional risk.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has once again released a thorough report: this time on a study of the Net's role in the 2006 elections. Here's the summary:

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

A post-election survey shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the internet for political purposes actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

The full report adds a lot of context to this, of course. For example, 31% of Americans gathered info about the races online and talked about the elections via email. And for those under 36 who have broadband, 35% said the Internet was their main source of information about the races. And Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to rely on the Net for campaign news...

In looking through their list of reports, there were several others of interest including:

• Robo-calls in the 2006 campaign
• More Americans turn to the internet for news about politics
• The Internet and Campaign 2004
• The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science
• The Future of the Internet II

And many more. Happy reading!

What is the ‘Global Information Grid’, what is ‘Net Centricity’ (or ‘Network Centric’), and why is it important to the Department of Defense? A starting point to answer those questions is the DoD CIO’s Strategic Plan, released in October of this year, and The DoD Chief Information Officer’s (John G. Grimes) home page. (I went to the Publications and Articles page to find the things I am sharing, today.) From these two resources you can get at the basics of the DOD’s IT transformation -- perhaps the biggest and most ambitious e-Government transformation ever undertaken.

In one sense, the Global Information Grid (or “GIG”) can be thought of as an organizing concept, an abstraction, enabling the DOD CIO to frame and communicate the department’s plans, architecture, and policies for the transformation of its information technology of the future. The GIG consists of everything that DOD IT touches: Capabilities (including weapons systems and programs), Portfolio Management, Governance, Funding and Policy.

A DoD Directive from September 2002 established the Global Information Grid Overarching Policy (available on the DTIC site). That policy statement implements Section 2223 of title 10, United States Code, (b) Section 1401 et seq. of title 40, United States Code, and applies to all DOD components, IT operations, and DoD Acquisitions and procurements of “GIG” assets. It contains the formal definition of the GIG as “The globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities, associated processes, and personnel for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating and managing information on demand to warfighters, policy makers, and support personnel.” The GIG is not just the "Global Information Google" for the DOD: it is a Big Deal to the department and it affects how it does its business.

“Net Centricity” has taken on a kind of buzz-word status. But what it was intended to be was a transformational way of doing things with information in the DOD. Net Centricity is to the GIG what a frame is to a building: it should enable all the parts of the house to connect together. The DoD CIO vision of net centricity is based on the assumption that information is a force multiplier, a source of power. If shared effectively, “(i)nformation can be leveraged to allow decision makers at all levels to make better decisions faster and act sooner. Ensuring timely and trusted information is available where it is needed, when it is needed, and to those who need it most is at the heart of the capability needed to conduct Network-Centric Operations (NCO).” Net Centricity should move the department from dependency on systems and operations “based on individually engineered and predetermined interfaces” to an enterprise that “ensures that a user at any level can both ‘take what he needs’ and ‘contribute what he knows’”. (See “The Power of Information – Overview”).