Cairns Blog

Larry and Eben

Today Larry Lessig gave his inaugural Change Congress speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

I was struck when listening to it by the parallels (superb delivery) and the profound differences to Eben Moglen's talk last year to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law.  Nominally, a speech about the computer industry after GPL v. 3, it was, in fact, a disquisition about freedom and the opportunity to transform law into a collaborative act of creative people.

Not surprisingly, their intellectual approaches to politics mirror their political approaches to intellectual property.

For Moglen, the crusader for open source licensing, it's not about software but about freedom and societal reform writ large.  He wants to upend the intellectual property regime as we know it and the monopoly industries that profit from it.   "If it is easily possible to give to each human being who wishes it everything of utility and beauty at low or zero cost, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything she wants?”

By contrast, Creative Commons focuses on the individual.  Give people the freedom to decide how to dispose of their own intellectual property.  Preserve property but enable the means to give away the rights that we don't want to keep.

Now Powerpoint Goes to Washington, not to get rid of Congress, but to reform it.  Get politicians to pledge not to take money form lobbyists and to commit to public financing for elections but preserve the status quo.  Use wiki-based tools to deploy an army of collaborators to keep the politicians honest and accountable (though, I must add, that is not one of the better visualization tools available by a long shot!). It is the incremental approach, the practical approach, the doable reform.  And like Creative Commons, it'll happen and will take off.

Moglen says “What the Net can do to politics in the YouTube, Wi-Fi, MoveOn, Facebook,the MySpace, FlashMob era remains to be written out in full.”  He wants to move away from a political regime where governance is based on territoriality and, instead, let affiliation drive the legitimacy of governance.  The audience of lawyers was expecting to hear about software contracts and, instead, was treated to a lecture about democracy.  His vision is reflected in the verve he has brought to the free software movement which has fundamentally transformed innovation today.

While Eben is an optimist, inclined to trust people's ability to collaborate and work together, Larry is strikingly a pessimist, full of dismay at the state of the body politic.  Yet while Eben is revolutionary, nay, evolutionary, in his take on government, Larry wants to preserve the status quo (or at least pretends to and it is one way to get things done).

My own view is that we need to combine both: Lessig's orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen's boldness of vision.

We need to stop viewing our institutions of government and governance as static and reified in their current form and, instead, start asking, not how to use technology to make Congress more transparent but how to use technology to make us more powerful.

I don't want to blow up Congress (well, I do but that's for another day) but to extend its intelligence by connecting the power of the network to the structure of the institution and to change fundamentally the way government works.  Michael Schudson writes about the "monitorial citizen" who, because she is so busy and overwhelmed (read: not too bright) should play the role of policing government and making it more accountable.  This is what the Change Congress movement will do using the cool tools.  It's important and useful but it's not enough and does not fully recognize the potential of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  It's pretty pessimistic, not about Congress, but about us.

The idea that all we are good for is to blog about what happens in Washington or even to make maps and mash-ups of when and with whom the politicians went to lunch is to ignore the larger opportunity to get involved with making the science that contributes to our understanding of public health and obesity, analyzing the data about global warming, participating in the drafting of policies about these and other fields and overseeing the work of those who implement them through citizen juries assigned to every official.  I'm all for "change Congress" but then let's really change it for the better!

Really Secret

Craig Newmark sent around the link for Lessig's Sunshine Week lecture today on corruption and transparency.

Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he's launching the ChangeCongress project where he'll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.

Check that link for the webcast and more.

Ironically, I can't access the webcast.  Despite 47 different downloads of various bits and bobs, the webcaster only wants to work with IE, which I don't have.  Too funny.  I'll wait for YouTube.

 

Secrecy

Historian of science, Arnold Pacey has written that the history of science and technology is the story of an evolution toward visual thinking and representations that render human understanding more visible.

It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that Harvard historian, Peter Galison, author of two books I love, Image and Logic, and Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps that make the arcana of particle physics more visible and more intelligible should be making a documentary about secrecy.

As the Harvard alumni newsletter reports appropriately during Sunshine Week

"Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor in the Department of the History of Science and the Department of Physics, and Robb Moss, Rudolf Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, explore the shadowy world of concealment, classification, and cover-ups at the highest levels of American government in their new film, titled “Secrecy.” The film was accepted in the feature documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival in late January, and it will be shown at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday (Feb. 29)."

“There is no doubt that secrecy is one of the central issues of our time,” said Galison. “It raises important questions about how democratic institutions function when things aren’t known. When is government secrecy necessary? What are its problems? What does secrecy do to those who are close to it?”

Photosynth, Infosynth, CivicSynth

The East Village Idiot is a popular blog for “bitching and whining, comically” about New York.  It frequently features postings complaining about such things as the condition of New York City’s streets. 

While the Urban Institute's  National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) provisions data about local conditions top down, New York City’s 311 is, at least in part, a bottom up solution to gathering information. New York City’s 311 service is a telephone hotline to access municipal government services.  In addition to using the hot-line to request information or find out about City benefits, 311 also functions as a complaint hotline to report street conditions, such as broken street lights and severe potholes.  South Korea offers a similar one-stop-shopping for public complaints as does the UK ePetitions website.  The City then reports out annual statistics on the most frequent inquiries on an aggregated and neighborhood basis.

FixMyStreet is a beta project in the UK developed by mySociety.org, a charitable project which builds demonstration websites for civic and community purposes.  FixMyStreet, which also created the ePetitions website, allows a resident to enter a UK postcode or street name, to pinpoint a problem on a map of that area, attach a photo of the broken street light or pothole or protruding tree roots and enter details of the problem.  MySociety then sends the reported broken paving or abandoned vehicle complaint to the appropriate town council for repair and resolution.

Launched almost a decade ago, Connecticut Policy and Economic Council’s CityScan project, does not simply encourage complaining.  It goes beyond the “bitching and whining” of the blogs and the hotlines and online petitions and, though the much older project, did more than simply channel complaints to government like FixMyStreet.

CityScan did one better by actively working with the institutions of local government in Connecticut’s most troubled cities.  Instead of dumping information on them, the group worked out a strategy for collaboration between the institutions of government and community members.  City Scan asked town officials to tell them (not the other way around) the number of derelict land-use sites, graffiti-defaced buildings and run-down parks the municipality will clean up each month.  It them mobilized young people and seniors in their own neighborhoods to use digital cameras and handheld computers to hold the city accountable to its promise. City Scan used the state of the art technology — which at that time were digital cameras and first-generation PDAs — to prepare visual reports and maps created from the data. The City of Gainesville, too, gives citizens the technology to create geographic maps and plot crime incidents from the community policy blotter. City Scan does not view citizens as simply passive consumers of information but as active collaborators in the work of governance.  The CityScan neighborhood groups worked with and held local government officials accountable while collaborating on the clean-up effort. CityScan offered the additional benefit of bringing youth and seniors together towards a common goal.

Projects like CityScan that directly connect the communities to the institutional decision-makers are still the rarity.  Despite technological advances, entrepreneurs are still creating complaint websites and blogs largely because we still cannot imagine for ourselves that WE not government are the locus for social change and innovation. Benedict Anderson in his influential book, Imagined Communities, writes of the need to transcend geography or other equally artificial boundaries and instead to imagine who needs to be part of a community. This is consonant with a systems approach to envisioning who is motivated to want to solve a problem.  By starting with the problem (not with the jurisdiction of a particular agency) and thinking across disciplinary boundaries, institutional scale and silos, we can solve a problem in myriad ways, bringing law and technology to bear in tandem. An environmental effort to improve land use conditions can be tackled both through traditional rulemaking and legislation but change would happen faster — and be less fraught by political manipulations — by also by using software to do the practices of environmental action, including information gathering, evaluation, drafting and organizing collective action.

As CityScan demonstrated, the question of land use is not only an issue for lawyers, government officials or even relevant industries but one that could be addressed to the unlikely community of teens and seniors.  They were able to participate in solving the problem as well as pointing it out. Now imagine adopting an approach like that of CityScan but using the latest tools available to us today, replacing old cameras with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology.

Jeff Jonas beat me to the punch by writing about Photosynth. the coolest tech thing since sliced virtual bread, which we were discussing at Legal Futures.  Take a look at this video about “Photosynth” presented by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at a TED conference last year.   

Breath-taking.

Photosynth seamlessly stitches together photos taken by any photographer with any equipment and at any scale (from detailed to panned).  Photosynth, for example, can assemble a large collection of photos from Flickr or any source, analyze them for similarities (it doesn't need tags) and assemble them to create, effectively, a three-dimensional recreation of a space.  Here's what Microsoft Live Labs, which acquired Photosynth, says about the project:

    * Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
    * Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
    * See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
    * Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
    * Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend

The uninteresting reaction to Photosynth is to say: monumental privacy, copyright and trademark issues.  Oy!  But who cares.

As Jeff writes: "Now imagine the process of stitching together not just digital images … but all available data – across disparate data types (e.g., structured, unstructured text, images, video, audio, etc.)."

This is the future of the multiverse or, as Richard Bartle once put it at the State of Play conference (here more precisely) the Microverse, the ability to create our own virtual worlds.  Its just a matter of time before I can walk through and interact in the spaces created and re-created by photosynth and can integrate more than just visual information.

I can't help but think about the civic applications of this photo-documentation technology, which could create the ability for communities to record and document their own environmental and land-use conditions at any scale.

Photosynth recognizes patterns and edges in order to align the images and create lifelike three-dimensional experiences of a place, allowing easy zooming to show the neighborhood and the smallest details of graffiti and garbage.  Photosynth and the evolving visual technologies make it easy to do photo-documention of a community without any prior coordination or even tagging and labeling of the photos.  Meanwhile the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) furthers the development and use of neighborhood information systems — databases and mapping systems about local conditions — in local policy making and community building.  With partnerships everywhere from Des Moines, Iowa to Camden, New Jersey, the aim is to revitalize local communities.  But NNIP delivers data “top down” and does not involve communities in gathering data for themselves as they could do more effectively with Photosynth.

Because the software itself recognizes that a disparate collection of images are all of the same subject, puts them together, it creates an easy way not only to grow the store of data but to produce accountability and target clean up efforts like CityScan.  Meanwhile Helping Hands: Computer Support for Community-Maintained Artifacts of Lasting Value, a research project launched by Prof. John Riedl of University of Minnesota aims to make it easy for communities to create and maintain valuable resources like Wikipedia.  They deploy a recommender system to help people find parts of the project they will be most able and willing to improve. State laws requiring assessment of environmental impact or impact on community character may offer a useful framework and guideline for collection and a benchmark against which to measure improvements.

Neither law nor technology alone are enough, however, but a systems approach allows both to be brought to bear to create greater effectiveness and opportunities for engagement, not for its own sake, but to solve a problem in the world at scale.

PreCYdent's Web of Law Free Legal Search Engine

Right Coast blogger and author of the article, Web of Law on legal citation networks,  Thomas Smith, launches Precydent.

Here's an interview by Law Librarian Blog with Thomas Smith about the project.

And here's his email, inviting participation:

PreCYdent is a free legal research site that applies new search technology to law, which is much, much more effective at finding authoritative and relevant cases than Westlaw or Lexis.  The idea is that anybody, whether they are a lawyer or not, and whether or not they can afford what the big companies charge, ought to be able to do effective legal research online.

PreCYdent was founded by me and Antonio Tomarchio, a mathematician from the Politecnico di Milano (and my co-author) to remedy the deplorable state of the search technology that lawyers have to use in their online research.  The online legal research industry is dominated by a couple of big players that make billions of dollars a year offering obsolete technology at high prices to lawyers who don't have much choice.  This relative lack of competition is responsible in my view for the backwardness of the technology.

But it also turns out that making search technology that works well in legal databases is really, really hard.  Existing technologies, including Google's PageRank, do not work very well in legal authority networks.  But we created something that does work well.  If you are used to Westlaw or Lexis, I think you will notice the difference right away.  Our tests show we return relevant cases at something like 4 to 5 times the rate of Westlaw and Lexis.  But let us know what your impressions are.

Here's an interesting post about us by a technology blogger in Southern California (as you can tell, it's a candid, non- sock puppet review): http://www.techcoastreview.com/2008/03/precydent-setting-precident.html

We are trying to get the word out about PreCYdent as efficiently as we can.  If you know lawyers or others interested in law, or people interested in web apps and technology, we'd be grateful if you would forward this message to them.  The site is free, and we are not trying to sell anything to anybody, unless you count the ads in the margins.  We are committed to bringing free law to everybody interested in it.

See #3 Info Viz Conference

Wiesbaden, Germany, April 19th, 2008
www.see-conference.com

Golf and IP: March 10

IP SURPRISE!: IP in Unconventional Industries
March 10, 2008 | 4:30–6:00 p.m. | New York Law School, Room A900

GOLF
“Intellectual Property from Tee to Green – Applying the Art of Law to the Business of Golf”
Lecture by James H. Schnare II
Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Nicklaus Companies, LLC

Everyone knows what the “intellectual property industries” are—or do they? Intellectual property today plays a leading role in some unexpected areas. Today’s hoteliers and sommeliers need to know their trademarks and copyrights; game designers and golfers are playing with patents. The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School presents IP Surprise!—a lecture series about the new intellectual property industries.

In his current position and as a member of Haile, Shaw & Pfaffenberger, P.A., in North Palm Beach, Jim Schnare has been responsible for all legal aspects of the planning and execution of a variety of business activities related to the sport of golf and the Nicklaus endorsement and trademarks, including golf course design, real estate development and licensing, golf equipment manufacturing, golf marketing and promotions, and brand licensing and management since 1985. During Schnare’s association with Jack Nicklaus, who was named “Player of the Century” by Golf magazine in 1986, Mr. Nicklaus has built his Nicklaus Design firm into a position of world leadership in golf course design and promotion and has been recognized for the last four consecutive years as “The Most Powerful Person in Golf” by Golf Inc. magazine for his influence upon and contributions to the sport and related industries.

Attendance is open to the public and the New York Law School community on a first-come first-served basis. Seating is limited. Please RSVP at www.nyls.edu/ipsurprise or e-mail ipsurprise@nyls.edu.

ObamaWorks: Ordinary People Start Doing Extraordinary Things

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from an editorial by two Yale students (David Manners-Weber and Justin Kosslyn) who, inspired by the Obama campaign rhetoric, put out a challenge to their peers to take action in their own neighborhoods.  (Incidentally, there's  a new site called The Point, which is designed to help people issue challenges, to others.  I'll do X if 10 other people do Y.)

The Yale article intrigued Princeton graduate student Arvind Murugan, who wrote about the article on a few  listservs which were, in turn, read by Philadelphia area residents who started collaborating through emails and impromptu meetings to launch a grassroots movement dubbed Obama Works.  ObamaWorks is a means to create visible public service projects and inspire collective action.

On March 1, Philly residents will hold a "Philly Sweep" and it is expected that other neighborhood clean-ups will take place around NYU and Yale, too.  As one of the authors wrote me, "I couldn't be more thrilled to let you know that, with the help of people I've never even met, words are getting turned into action."

Manners-Weber goes on to say in his email about my earlier blog posting: "In your post, you wrote of "people collaborating to improve their own social conditions." Well it looks like folks are starting to do just that - within 24 hours, 100 people signed up to participate in the "Obama Philly Sweep," where volunteers will be cleaning up the streets around the Graduate Hospital area."

Here is their press release:

Philadelphia, March 1, 2008...  Within only 24 hours, 100 supporters of Barack Obama signed up for the first Obama Philly Sweep, which kicks off at 2227 Christian St. in the Graduate Hospital area on Saturday, March 1st, at 1:00 pm.  Street cleaning tops the agenda for this community service event - signaling the start of a new breed of political campaign that brings volunteers together around a constructive purpose. The Obama Philly Sweep is the first local event hosted by Obama Works, a grassroots organization currently taking shape in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey.  Obama Works intends to implement Barack Obama’s message of change through community service projects. According to organizer Amirah Naim, the group is “working to transcend our differences and transform our country.”

Obama Works will sponsor additional clean-up efforts in other Philadelphia neighborhoods prior to March 24th, the voter registration deadline for the Pennsylvania primary election.  After the primary, Obama Works will continue to develop and organize a variety of community service outreach projects.