Category — Social Policy

It was the only right (ethical) choice that I had. You see I went down to google’s new york office tonight to see a colleague of mine speak on the future of the internet. I thought it was an open invite without any specific rules as to what I could do with the knowledge that I found there. I registered and attended until Google asserted the rules.

Sometimes… Google gets it wrong. You see I did not have any prior ruleset to know that they do not allow people to blog or otherwise publish their visit to such talks. They did not send one, it was not in any announcement that I received, and I’ve otherwise not seen one. However, there is a set of rules that prohibit blogging or publishing that they announced before the talk. Google said that if i wanted to blog or publicly discuss the event, I had to get their permission. If I’d have known, I would not have attended or been affiliated with the event in any way. I am a professor, was and still am, and by the very nature of my job, i cannot guarantee that I will follow their rules about publication or blogging. I couldn’t consent to them, so I had to leave. I don’t want to have to ask google for permission to speak about something that I already know a good deal about and am perfectly happy dashing an email off to colleagues to learn more. I don’t want to be obliged to them for any intellectual content or public knowledge at all beyond the general service they provide.

The rational that google said justified this request for secrecy and the privatization of knowledge was one of collegiality. I found that justification to be ironic. Colleagues share within the limits of their judgment. Collegiality is broken as soon as the judgment is turned into a ruleset, as soon as trust becomes moot and i no longer have to trust you, instead i just have to trust that you are following the pre-ordained rules. At that point in time of the announcement of rules, anyone in the room could be called colleagues, afterwards we were all subjects to Google and any collegiality was limited by Google’s rules. We were all constructed as lesser beings, less equal, more likely to damage others. We were ‘other’, and untrustworthy, which is the implication of the ‘no blogging’. If you want people to be friends, to become a community, you have to let them communicate, you have to let them establish the common ground by consent.

Thus I had to leave, as I was not going to be subject of Google beyond what I’ve already contracted. I could not consent to silence. I am surprised that the speaker in question would allow this rule, but not that surprised in the end.

Please if you have a talk where people who take ethics seriously are present, never change the rules after the fact, make them public beforehand.

Now I know 2 things,
1. Google changes the rules of public engagement to suit it’s own interpretations
2. Before I attend any future Google event, I should ask for clearly defined rules to be made public and distributed, so that I can decide to either be complicit or not beforehand.

creativity/machine » i’ve always said that old people rock:
i’ve always said that old people rock

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Doc Jean makes a good point about amateur participation in this post… which also has a rockin video.

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights:
Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier.

Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions — and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.

Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.

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Carl Malamud and his group are doing some good work on freeing and sustaining the freedom of access to public resources

Spy Chips:
This book will make you look at every store-bought item you own or debate owning with a curious skepticism that — after reading the book — won’t seem too unwarranted. It was published two years ago (a cheap paperback came out in the fall), but if you’ve yet to explore the fascinating, potentially paranoia-inducing, world of RFID and you want the cautionary, consumer-advocate perspective about the Radio Frequency Identification tracking being proposed — and used! — by certain companies (for instance, Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart)

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this could be an interesting book.

Program offers teachers summer jobs at IT companies – Jacksonville Business Journal::
A local organization has created a program to place high school and community college teachers in summer internships in a high demand field, with the hopes those teachers will bring first-hand experience back to the classroom.

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this is smart.

Wiki Project Shut Down:
is part of the reason why I was tremendously disappointed to read today that his students have lost contact with a group of students across the country when a parent from the out of state class complained. As I said when I left a comment on Ben’s blog, I was disappointed, but not totally surprised. I knew someone was going to get criticized for hooking their students up with others somewhere for some reason.

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it is truly sad when a parent’s fear… ruins the lives and learning of current and future students.

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?:
Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

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well does it?

Articles:
The Best and Worst Internet Laws
Date: Apr 20, 2007 By Eric Goldman.
Over the past dozen years, the lure of regulating the Internet has proven irresistible to legislators. For example, in the 109th Congress, almost 1,100 introduced bills referenced the word Internet, and hundreds of Internet laws have been passed by Congress and the states. This legislative activity is now large enough to identify some winners and losers. In the spirit of good fun, Eric Goldman offers an opinionated list of personal votes for the best and worst Internet statutes in the United States.

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this is a good read… it covers in a U.S.-centric way some of the most important internet issues of our day.

The Living Edge:
David Sifry has just put up The State of the Live Web, April 2007. To explain the Live Web, he points to a pair of pieces I wrote in 2005. If you’d like a more visual explanation, follow the slides from this talk I gave at OSCON last summer, starting here.

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Doc points toward Dave’s use of some of his work in the live web and more important the communal or collective web as compared to what might be thought of as the individualistic web. Of course, in my view, the www is a policy regime, a device that constrains and constructs relationships, not merely among data, but primarily among humans. The current transformation of the web into user-generation and user-integration is fascinating because it is making possible a much broader mode of awareness, communication, and community construction.

Standardized Childhoo:
In Standardized Childhood, Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller questions the push for universal preschool tied to “public school bureaucracies.” Tax-funded preschools would provide one standardized model for young children, he writes.

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it sounds like bruce fuller is on to something, we should be encouraging social and cultural pluralism in preschool, and not be encouraging one size fits all systematicity, because the plurality of experience will in the long run produce better democratic citizens.