08 March 2008
Allowing citizens the choice to use Internet to vote
The campaign "60 ideas for Europe" aims to collect the best sixty ideas and present them to Euripean leaders gathered in The Hague in May.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, I thought a bit (not very much, in fact) and with a prod from Pat Cox, the current President of European Movement International, have decided to throw my idea into the ring. If you like it, please give it a vote (well, 5 votes!) on the "60 Ideas for Europe" blog: Click here
We see a continual decline in voter turnout across most parts of Europe; increased cynicism towards politicians and politics in general; and even lower participation in voting in European elections.
In contrast, more and more people - particularly younger people but the elderly too - are getting involved in online communities and interest groups, and embracing technologies to overcome hurdles, disabilities, fears, absence from home or simply expressing a preference.
We should harness Internet-based technologies to help citizens reconnect with politics, offering them concretely a means to participate in a way that follows the trend in other parts of their lives. Many simply do not have the time or opportunity to vote at their local voting station.
I propose therefore that the Member States - with support from the European Commission - should organise to allow citizens the choice of voting via the Internet at the 2009 elections. What a signal it would give if they were willing to participate in a joint initiative to make this possible in - say - a selected constituency or area in each country as a first step.
It would show that it is meeting a commitment to:
- making the most of technology for public good;
- reinforce public trust in those technologies (they are and can be made safe and secure);
- offering a new channel for participation (beyond polling stations and postal ballots) for people who cannot or do not want to vote in person.
It has been used this year in the US for the Democratic Party primaries and in the Australian general election.
Many member states already have budgets set aside for Internet voting but are waiting for when the moment is right, against a background of often sceptical media and concerns about the safety of the Internet. A cross-EU pilot would address and dispel concerns (and myths) and offer an exciting new channel of participation for the future.
It has to be the way forward and surely it’s just a question of when not whether. So let’s make it now.
Labels: Euro-elections; European Movement; 60 Ideas for Europe
20 November 2007
When will eGovernment really join the 21st Century?
But, hold on a minute.
That such a practice can happen in the first place is surely the mistake, not the cack-handed blunder by some poor sod, who is now going to take the rap.
The core problem is that electronic data is still treated all too often in ways familiar to any 19th Century bureaucrat: data and information is stored on a medium - for centuries, on paper - and then passed around as needed, including being mislaid, misdirected, lost, misfiled or intercepted. Nothing seems to have changed, except that the paper has been replaced by digital media.
When will eGovernment join the 21st Century? Data - whether its personal data, company data, or whatever - are not just streams of bytes that should be able to be copied and moved around at whim. They are valued and valuable assets. The whole chain of errors reflect 19th Century processes (copy a file, stick it in an envelope and send it through the mail - I mean, really!) not the "joined up Government" that the the UK's eGovernment strategy sings about.
Data should be accessible and useable as a service, not as a passive object in someone's programming code. Computing and information architecture paradigms today allow for much more robust and suitable models for data management in the 21st Century. "Data as a Service" means that access to it is governed by policies, transactional controls, real-time authentication and access control, etc. In the latest fiasco, such an approach if applied would have meant:
- a junion official, or whomsoever, would not be able to simple copy data in this manner. The data would not be "sitting around" anywhere in a way that can be simply scopped up and copied;
- if there were a need for a copy (and a backup would seem to be the only legitimate need), this would be managed and executed according to clear policy and end-to-end management of data access: once a data set is copied onto a CD - as seems to have happened in this case - the data resides on a non-managed and non-manageable medium: it simply should not be possible;
- there simple shouldn't be a need for a copy: if another service needs access to certain data sets, let them come, be authenticated and granted transactional access as needed to the original data, as one would do with any half-decent SOA-based system. And what about referential integrity? Has that good old-fashioned database principle been forgotten?
There is a more fundamental issue, and which is still the subject of considereble policy debate: who actually "owns" the personal data in question? Ceratinly the state exercises (a sometimes monopolistic) custodianship in many countries but very few would go so far as to claim that personal data actually "belongs" to a public authority. Unfortunately, state immunity from prosecution means that an individual could not take legal action against abusive access to personal data, in the same manner that one might if a financial institution started messing around with your money. But this is no excuse for inaction. The increased importance and relevance of personal data - and other valued information assets - means that this issue will only become more and more important.
See Pensive's discussion paper on "Personal Data Services Model" that looks at such an approach
Labels: Citizenship, Data Protection, eIdentity, SOA
04 August 2007
We aren’t angels – Andrew Keen book review
"…we aren't angels. We don't always do the right thing. That is why we have enacted laws that help us to regulate our darker impulses and behaviours". This is one of the key arguments that Andrew Keen advances against the so-called "Web 2.0" in his controversial 200-page easy-to-read rant "The Cult of the Amateur – How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy".
Overall I liked the book, and would definitely put myself on the side of those supporting his general theses, rather than side myself with those (many) people who have been savaging his book. But before offering some comments on why I think the book was overall good, here's my take on the negative aspects:
- He demonstrates an at times unsustainable faith in the "old media" – Keen has a strong loyalty to the print media and the professionalism of their trade. This might be justified for the broadsheets in many countries but his argument is an elitist one: we, the people, should trust the professionals because we don't have their depth of knowledge and skill. Whilst I appreciate that he is not arguing that people should dispense with critical faculties and blindly trust what the press tells us, the overall tone comes over as hectoring and at times irritatingly patronising
- In places, his style borders on shallow sensationalism with important points driven home with a series of "shock, horror" examples of the degeneracy of Web 2.0 advocates and practitioners. Maybe we've become all too inured to it but his horror stories of the Web are not news and – if he wishes us to take his alarm seriously – he could do with better examples.
Anyway, overall, I did enjoy the book and it throws up a series of important questions that I think are worthy of mention:
- In the future, will all "content" be free and commoditized or is the view that content still has value and ownership, a view worth defending?
- If all online content is free at point of use, does this automatically mean paying for it somewhere, somehow? Where does the money come from? And into whose pockets will it go? Frankly, this is the most worrying issue: Keen raises the daunting prospect that we'll never be able to buy a piece of music, film or book in the future because it will all be available for free – thus no incentive for anyone to charge for content – but at the price of intrusive, ever-better targeted and non-negotiable advertising. This does keep me awake at night and many apologists of Web 2.0 offended with the supposedly arcane rules of intellectual property, don't seem to care a fig for the costs: the smarter geeky ones will always be able to find workarounds and hacks but ordinary folk are the ones that will be burdened. Think of the simple example today of an increasing number of legally purchased DVDs: not only can I not skip the intrusive anti-piracy warning (D'uh, I've just bought your sodding film) but I am also forced to view through a series of trailers for other films and I cannot skip them. I find this intellectually offensive.
- Time is now our most valuable and only partly tradable commodity and yet there is no way today to negotiate and defend it online (or indeed with many digitized business processes). Time (and cost) savings on the part of Web service providers is often at the cost of the end user.
- In a supposedly "democratized" and "flattened" web-based market of information, it will be the most technologically savvy who will benefit most – knowing all the best tricks to get the best deals. Note, I am not against people leveraging their intelligence and skill to get ahead but this is the first time that mastery of the medium itself – the tool – is as much a key as mastery of the content. And when so many web interfaces are dire, bordering on criminally negligent, then sometimes you do need immense technical skill to access content effectively and safely. So much for an egalitarian Web.
- I don't share his apparent sympathy for the RIAA and MPAA but the big question is surely: how to reverse the vicious circle of increasing piracy and increased digital rights management (DRM). If the music industry wasn't so greedy (still more than €20 for a prime CD for goodness sake and how much do the musicians get?) and accepted more modest pricing, maybe more people would be willing to pay the honest, legal way. Look around the world at cheap public transportation schemes and the rates of fare-dodging compared with high-price ones. Or, more topically, Microsoft's decision to offer genuine Vista to the Chinese market at a much lower price than elsewhere in the world as a discouragement to fraudsters. I simply don't buy Keen's defence that the big industry players are defending the intellectual property of content authors. They are not, they are defending profit margins. That said, intellectual property can and should be defended but the alternative to the big business stranglehold is not the anarchy of piracy.
- Should we shed tears over losses in advertising revenue? This is a tricky one. I loathe advertising, except at the point of sale, but can see Keen's point that advertising revenue keeps many people in work and traditional media afloat. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to stand against certain industries that do more social harm than good: the prospect of accessible content being kept available, but only at the cost of advertising for things that most of us can anyway do without, does fill me with dread.
- Does any moral or political responsibility go hand in hand with ubiquitous Internet access? Internet "freedom fighters" are allergic to any form of public sector intervention but surely the issue of social responsibility should trump their immature posturing?
- There is an insidiousness to the "easy come, easy go" culture ascendant in, for example, gambling but it does not stop there. It seems to imbue the whole ethos of Web 2.0: "OK, our service screwed up big time and you all lost lots of money, sensitive personal data, etc but our brand shiny new improved service sorts that all out. Please give us your custom again…", and we do.
All in all, a worthy, easy read but it only touches the tip of the iceberg and doesn't spend enough effort on addressing the whys and wherefores of an adequate reply to the malaise.
Labels: Citizenship, DRM, Internet, Web 2.0
20 July 2007
The Pensieve is key
Labels: Harry Potter, Pensieve
19 July 2007
Snape the real hero?
The drama of the sixth Harry Potter book centred around the death of Harry's mentor, Albus Dumbledore, at the hand of the most hated teacher at Hogwarts, Severus Snape.
I'm going to go out on a limb here though: Dumbledore had been practically condemned to a slow and painful death by thirst after visiting the lake of the Inferi with Harry in search of one the Horcruxes. So his plea to Snape to "please help" when he was already dying (and knew it) seemed very ambiguous to me: why would a bright wizard like Dumbledore appeal for help to Snape to save him when he ought to know there was no hope? Snape is bound by an unbreakable contract to kill Dumbledore- if he doesn't, he's in a real pickle with You-Know-Who and, if he really is on the side of Dumbledore, this would likely blow his cover and expose him.
So an act of euthanasia, putting his friend Dumbledore out of his misery, and releasing himself from the terms of the unbreakable spell, seemed to kill two curses with one wand.
By why should I persist with the belief that he's really a good guy, given all the grief that he's given Harry over the years? I think the clue was in Book 3 when Harry learns something about his own and his parents' past in his discussions with Sirius. Harry learnt the source of Snape's animosity – that he had continually been made fun of by Harry's father and Sirius. This might explain why Snape hates Harry but it doesn't really prove that Snape is the baddy: Harry's mum, Lily, even intervened to stop Snape-baiting…Curious.
So I put my money on Snape being the real hero, much to Harry's probably disgust – and who knows, maybe a part of his possible downfall, not being able to see beyond his own personal hate? Let's see…
Labels: Harry Potter, Snape
18 July 2007
Harry Potter - the final showdown?
Whilst I scurry around trying to build it, I thought that a blog might at least serve as a primitive brain dump - except that I forget, or don't get around to doing as often as I would like… I'll come back to that problem another time but for now, I felt it important to blog a few entries on my predictions regarding the new book.
Labels: Harry Potter
24 April 2007
A Reference Model for Ontology?
In the work of the Ontology Summit this week in Gaithersburg, USA, our working group tried to get its collective head around the idea of ontologies having "dimensions". These dimensions are intended for use to evaluate the significant presence within one ontology or another of certain characteristics, such as expressive power, intended use, etc.
The problem we had was being presented with each of the dimensions as having some simple relationship to the ontology (an axis) and to each other other (whether co-variant, orthogonal, etc.)
We ended up with a novel approach using a "Concept Map" which will be debated further in the Summit and beyond
17 April 2007
Ontology Summit 2007
If the volume and the quality of the posts to the online discussion forum are anything to go by, next week's two-day Ontology Summit promises to be a exciting and stimulating event. Cutting through the hype of semantic web technologies, this Forum has been valuable in cutting to the quick regarding tight, formal definitions of some of the most fundamental concepts used as building blocks for the most complex systems: in an increasingly inter-dependent and interoperable online world, it helps to be sure that you agree on these definitions, whether it's as simple(!) as "what is an identifier?" or it's looking at good practices in developing business ontologies or indeed whether there is, can be, or should be, a single over-arching high-level ontology that adequately describes the world.
Brain numbing stuff but well worth it.