Premise

Institute of Community Studies

The Institute of Community Studies is a venerable organisation, quietly responsible for a plethora of British institutions like the Open University and the Consumers Association. A couple of months ago it was given a huge injection of new life with the appointment of Geoff Mulgan as it's new head.

I suggested immediately after his appointment that a powerful tool to help it along might be a public WiKi. By acting like a communal notebook, the many exciting new projects in genesis can be discussed and evolved, all in a transparent, easy to access fashion. So, with the help of some free hosting from Mythic Beasts, Geoff's been busy writing the core material to get the site started.

The upshot is this - today I'm very pleased to present you with the ICS WiKi. Please dive in, read and get involved - it all starts today.

Still learning from Dean

As the election draws near more and more people are asking me for my advice on using the internet to campaign. My standard answer 'Spend it on TV and print' doesn't seem to be going down too well, so I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to reflect on the further lessons from Howard Dean's experience of the first political dot.bomb.

This has all been inspired by W.B Yeats. Recently, Anno Mitchell reminded me of his famous words about the awkward relationship between ideological fervour and talent, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity". The problem now is that the net gives the 'passionate intensity' crowd the ability to organise and evangelise remarkably successfully, wheras previously the down side of that package (being 'the worst') would have denied them access to the mainstream. What we owe Dean is that fact that this is a phenomenon that we'll be better attuned to detecting next time round.

I do have three bits of advice for campaigners:

1) It's great for organising your troops - work really hard on using it to get the information they need out to them. Let them at your rebuttal machinery. Spend most of your e-budget on this.

2) For the mainstream parties and their outward facing personas, the net still offers depressingly little beyond the chance to sell you message in a highly customised fashion to those people who show up on your site in the first place, most of whom will have already made up their minds. But these systems are worth building anyway, just to catch the odd dilligent floating voter who's sick of soundbites and who wants to know what you actually stand for.

3) Here's my optimisitic bit. Any contest that can be won by a constituency base which is thin but spread over a very large geographic area can be won with the help of the net. This means you can win a funding race, or a non-controversial legal campaign, or any race where it's you vs the status quo (as opposed to between you vs the rest of the country in polling booths). The problem for the next non-proportionally-representative general election is that geograhical density of votes matter, and the net can't deliver those, at least not at the moment.

So, what are you waiting for? Start raising money and start buying newsprint ;)

More on representation

Elected representatives are called as much because they represent something. But what? If representative democracy is different from direct democracy, then what is represented cannot be the same as a a direct record of the will of a group of people as manifested through a vote on a certain issue.

In fact elected representatives allow representation only of whole packages of beliefs, not single issues. The packages are voted for at special 'package' votes, which we call General elections. In this way voters are forced by the institutions of the state to accept some degree of tradeoff or difficult connection between different beliefs. The historical rationale for this is straightforward - if you did not insist on people voting for packages then different groups with passionate beliefs would vote for lots of self-interested but mutually conflicting policies. Sooner or later this would bring down the whole edifice of govenment in a screaming heap.

So we have representation to force packages and compromises on our greedy ways. But just because we need representation, does that mean we necessarily need representatives? Representatives do two things:
1) Ensure that the whole population gets a fair say.
2) Represent packages to vote for.

The first of these needs has in many cases been replaced by representative polling, with all their skews, weights, sample sizes and other trendy tools. And the second is already done more by parties than individuals.

None of this means that we should get rid of MPs. It just means that in the quest for innovation in representation we should start to ask what new combinations of tools, rules and technologies might be able to carry out the function of representation in a more demanding and consumerist era.

Representation

There is an inverse correlation between the passion felt for a policy issue and the ability of direct democratic tools to deal with it.

So all this 'Pop Idol & Big Brother show us the way to reinvigorate politics' is just as specious as we thought. It's all just about building a better direct democracy.

This points to the world's biggest unasked democratic question - where is the innovation in representation?

A question

Western society now consists of two types of key structure - the networked, non-geographically tied social group, and geograpic communities of people who co-exist but rarely communicate. We live our lives in the former, but most civic institutions exist in the latter. By all rights this should cause some pretty serious policy problems. But they're not obvious. What are they?

Whoda thunk? The BBC licence fee is the model for the 21st century

We all know about the debates over the BBC licence fee. The argument splits into two familiar polarised camps. The Pros cite lots of worthy stuff about Lord Reith and public duties. The Antis mix free market economics with naked self interest. It's all as British as tea and crumpets.

What neither camp has spotted yet is that a major technological consensus has been bubbling up over the last year or so which promises to cast the licence fee in a totally new light. The great news for the BBC is this - far from the licence fee being a geriatric institution struggling for relevance in the 21st century market society, it is actually the premier model for the future of the media industry.

As with so many huge changes in media, the story starts with P2P. As the barriers to obtaining anything you want for free continue to crash downwards, media companies and governments around the world are busily trying to put them up again. Typically, this arrives in the form of tougher punishments for file sharing, new technologies to prevent piracy, and laws to ban the circumvention of copy protection.

As we all know, it will mostly fail. It will fail technologically because there will always be more public circumventers than corporate programmers. It will fail politically because the public will eventually tire of the criminalisation of all their friends and families. And most important, it will fail because in economic terms the ICT industry is hugely bigger than the combined size of all media companies. The technology industry has to respond to its customers, and the customers are going to be very clear about their desire for systems that continue to allow P2P. Certainly, DVDs will continue to sell, and wealthier people will pay to download music. In the end, though, "You can't beat free".

This won't happen straight away. There will be two or three complete legislative and technological cycles before the the cracks in this system blow the whole structure apart. Punishments will get stiffer and more desperate. Those caught in the crossfire (companies, artists and consumers) will suffer worse than ever before.

But eventually, the only sustainable economic model for funding media companies will win through. It isn't a work of genius, it isn't top secret, and it isn't even new. Lots of people at the thoughtful edge of the intellectual property debate have already concluded the same, from the EFF to prominent academic lawyer Lilian Edwards. It has already been demonstrated to work through the wildy popular Japanese iMode system, and partly by our own telecoms system.

It is, of course, flat fees on internet access. Call it a tax, a levy, a fee, or a licence, it all comes to the same thing. A once monthly, or yearly sum is charged at the point of access, and money is disbursed to different media companies & content creators depending on the popularity of their works. The political and technological challenges are certainly huge, but the non-viability of other models is what will drive it to win in the end. Just as Churchill said "Democracy is a very bad form of government. Unfortunately all the others are so much worse", so the flat fee will triumph, despite the barriers to getting there.

So finally, back to the BBC. The licence fee, so creaky and antiquated in the World of Sky suddenly looks very different. It looks far more like the world's best example of a mandatory flat fee for media. It looks like the world's best example of how to distribute a single financial pot between different media creators. It looks like how the whole net will work.

Whoda thunk?

Why most conversations suck - a hypothesis

"All states of human knowledge concerning the operation of complex systems can be usefully seen as falling into one of three categorizations: levels 1,2 and 3. Level 1 knowledge is an entirely uncritical interpretation of a phenomenon. Level 1 knowledge is that held by most people (regardless of education) about most systems in their lives, most of the time. Level 2 knowledge is a more sophisticated understanding of the same system. Importantly, it tends to assert that the opposite of the level 1 belief is actually the correct description of the operation of that system. The evidence tends to be a single, albeit powerful source of contrary data. Level 3 knowledge is a real nuanced understanding of a situation, defined as an individual at least having knowledge of the merits of all opposing interpretations. Important: Two people can have level 3 knowledge and still disagree about the issue. It is only their knowledge of the details of the wider debate which define their belonging to this group."

When analogies attack

Some analogies are good. Some are bad. Some are good, but break when they are stretched to make wider points. Why?

The power of an analogy is that it highlights and reiterates the force of a particular aspect of an argument. It does this by making a mental connection with a situation where the point being stressed is normally much more self-evident than in original case. An engineer compares the potential collapse of a ruined building to a house of cards because we all have experience of how tiny forces can lead to total structural failure.

Every analogy breaks down at some point. A ruined building is not made of bricks, and so is in that way not like a house made of playing cards. No analogy can contain total similarity between ideas, and all must break down in some way or another. If the two halves are completely similar, then it isn't an analogy at all, but instead a straightforward synonym. At the other extreme, if ideas are totally 100% incomparable ('grey' and 'F major 7th') then there is also no analogy.

However, between these two boundaries, there exist analogies which are good and bad. But the relationship is not simple or linear. A good analogy is not just one that is close to synonymity, because then it loses the comparative strength born from difference.

Rather, a good analogy is defined by the ability to successfully reinforce the power of the original idea. This means that in all ways that are relevent to this reinforcement, two ideas must be similar. Dissimilarity between ideas will not affect the quality of an analogy if the difference does not undermine the coherance of the connection. An analogy becomes bad if differences can be said to introduce internal inconsistency in situations where the analogy creator might want the analogy to be applied. So if the analogy's author is denied by logical flaws the ability to use their analogy in places where it can reasonably be expected to still apply, the analogy is bad.

Now I have to go away and think about what "reasonably be expected to still apply" might mean when more formally codified.

New Words & New Problems

If the lens with which we see the world is our critical enabler in making changes to it, then we must admit that sometimes new words really are important in allowing that lens to exist. Just because some neologisms are balls doesn't mean that others can't facilitate real change. Here is one suggested useful neologism, and one problem searching for an answer.

'Nomenclinitis' - The malady afflicting carelessly named organisations and projects that traps them into spending at least a quarter of their working hours trying to argue about the meaning of their own name.

Then there is my critical lens which is seeking a name, or rather a trio of concepts seeking three names. The premise is this. There are three broad states of knowledge about the world. The first is the totally uneducated anda animal ("The World is flat - who cares?"). The second is a position of slight smartness which gives people huge self confidence, even though they don't know much about the issue ("The world is actually round, although not everyone knows that!"). The last position is of real expertise, and often re-contradicts both the first ("The world is actually slightly eliptical").

These concepts are crucial for one purpose - to stop people wasting so much time in the second level, and to undermine those dangerous zealots for whom a little knowledge becomes a very bad thing. So we need a trio of terms. Any takers?

Visions of Future Government: 6 - Communications and Media

The early days of the post-academic internet saw a considerable, and to some audiences unexpected, dominance of news media by big offline media brands.
So long as facts remain hugely more expensive to obtain than opinions, these brands will remain dominant. Importantly, this means that they are likely to remains as politically aligned as they have always been. The single biggest factor which determines government communications policy, the political landscape of big media, is consequently likely to remain largely unchallenged by technological factors.

Despite this, technology does promise to have two politically significant impacts on the relation between governments, citizens, and media companies.