“Net neutrality” and “freedom to connect” might be loaded or vague terminologies; the label “Open Internet” is clearer, more effective, no way misleading. A group of Internet experts and pioneers submitted a paper to the FCC that defines the Open Internet and explains how it differs from networks that are dedicated to specialized services, and why that distinction is imortant. It’s a general purpose network for all, and can’t be appreciated (or properly regulated) unless this point and its implications are well understood. I signed on (late) to the paper, which is freely available at Scribd, and which is worth reading and disseminating even among people who don’t completely get it. I think the meaning and relevance of the distinction will sink in, even with those who don’t have deep knowledge of the Internet and, more generally, computer networking. The key point is that “the Internet should be delineated from specialized services specifically based on whether network providers treat the transmission of packets in special ways according to the applications those packets support. Transmitting packets without regard for application, in a best efforts manner, is at the very core of how the Internet provides a general purpose platform that is open and conducive to innovation by all end users.”
Press release:
Numerous Internet and technology leaders issued a joint statement last night encouraging the FCC to expand its recent analysis of open Internet policy in a newly fruitful direction.
In the statement, they commend the agency’s recent request for input on “Two Underdeveloped Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding” for its making possible greater recognition of the nature and benefits of the open Internet — in particular, as compared to “specialized services.” In response to the FCC’s request, their submission illustrates how this distinction dispels misconceptions and helps bring about more constructive insight and understanding in the “net neutrality” policy debate.
Longtime network and computer architecture expert David Reed comments in a special blog posting: “It is historic and critical [to] finally recognize the existence of ‘the Open Internet’ as a living entity that is distinct from all of the services and the Bureaus, all of the underlying technologies, and all of the services into which the FCC historically has partitioned little fiefdoms of control.”
Another signer, John Furrier of SiliconANGLE, has publicized the statement, stating “the future Internet needs to remain open in order to preserve entrepreneurship and innovation.”
The statement’s signers are listed below. Please reply to me, Seth Johnson (seth.p.johnson@gmail.com), to request contact information for those available for comment.
Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of user-generated content by writing consumer product reviews, uploading travel photos, or expressing political opinions. Some users move beyond such individual efforts to become collaborators, forming tightly connected groups with lively discussions whose outcome might be a Wikipedia article or a carefully edited YouTube video. A small fraction of users becomes leaders, who participate in governance by setting and upholding policies, repairing vandalized materials, or mentoring novices. We analyze these activities and offer the Reader-to-Leader Framework with the goal of helping researchers, designers, and managers understand what motivates technology-mediated social participation. This will enable them to improve interface design and social support for their companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. These improvements could reduce the number of failed projects, while accelerating the application of social media for national priorities such as healthcare, energy sustainability, emergency response, economic development, education, and more.
Recommended Citation
Preece, Jennifer and Shneiderman, Ben (2009) “The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation,” AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (1) 1, pp. 13-32
Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5
Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. I met with Microtask CEO Wili Miettinen and CTO Otto Chrons earlier this week while they were in town for CrowdConf, the first major gathering for the crowdsourcing industry.
The World's First Conference on the Future of Distributed Work
Crowdsourcing is the act of engaging distributed groups of people to complete microtasks or generate information. It represents an expanding sphere of innovation, organization, data collection, and creativity.
Crowdsourcing raises complex questions about the future of work; the technical and organizational infrastructure used to complete large-scale tasks; and the relationships between computers, people, and the networks that connect us.
Phi Beta Iota: What we consider important about this is the clear profit incentive to integrate games and work. This is huge. It opens a number of almost infinitely scalable options that connect dots and people and money.
NPR: The Intelligence Of Crowds In ‘The Perfect Swarm' Talk of the Nation (Sept 10)
In his book The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher talks about swarm intelligence — where the collective ideas of a group add up to better solutions than any individual could have dreamed up, including an example of how UPS reorganized its driving routes using the logic of an ant colony.
NPR: Collaboration Beats Smarts In Group Problem Solving by Joe Palca (Sept 30)
Everywhere you look, from business to science to government, teams of people are set to work solving problems. You might think the trick to getting the smartest team would be to get the smartest people together, but a new study says that might not always be right.
America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue of American Spectator
EXTRACT 1: They [the bi-opoly two parties] think, look, and act as a class.
EXTRACT 2: The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
This excellent piece aligns with one of the most important evolutionary dynamics I've been studying with Michael Dowd, Connie Barlow, John Stewart, and others. That dynamic, which has operated since the Big Bang, is this: In evolution's drive towards greater complexity — that is, towards greater wholes comprised of more densely interconnected parts — the breakthrough dynamics have always been those through which the self-interest of the parts becomes aligned with the well-being of the whole.
This offers some obvious places to focus our efforts to transform our global civilization:
* Internalize economic externalities. Incorporate the true costs (ecological, social, etc.) of a product or service into its price in the marketplace. When this is done, products and services that produce social and environmental damage cost more than comparable products that are more benign. This totally reverses the current destructive dynamic that makes the “free market” so toxic — the current ability of producers to pass on the costs of their toxic activities to nature, taxpayers, future generations, etc. When those costs are “internalized” into all prices, the natural inclination of self-interested consumers, corporations, etc., to seek a low price “magically” (i.e., systemically) aligns their behavior with the well-being of the whole. One familiar example is carbon taxes, which reduce people's fossil fuel consumption while generating both funds and markets to develop sustainable energy sources.
FrontlineSMS is an open-source software that enables two-way text messaging between cheap mobile phones and laptops over cellular (GSM) networks.
FrontlineSMS: Credit
FrontlineSMS:Credit aims to make every formal financial service available to the entrepreneurial poor in 160 characters or less. By meshing the functionality of FrontlineSMS with local mobile payment systems, implementing institutions will be able to provide a full range of customizable services, from savings and credit to insurance and payroll.
FrontlineSMS: Learn (not finished yet) FrontlineSMS:Learn leverages ubiquitous mobile technology—SMS or “text messaging”—to support and strengthen education and training initiatives and human capacity development and make learning opportunities available anytime and anywhere. Using the application knowledge and higher-order reasoning and decision-making skills can be developed, reinforced and assessed leading to improved transfer of learning, increased knowledge retention, long-term changes in behavior and, ultimately, improvements in service delivery.
FrontlineSMS: Legal (new)
These low-cost systems enable remote coordination between informal dispute resolution workers and the formal legal system, improving service delivery, range, and cost efficiency.
In addition to this core platform, FrontlineSMS:Legal is developing additional plug-ins that will add value to local organizations working to provide legal services. FrontlineSMS:Legal products offer several key functionalities:
FrontlineSMS
