Increasingly, the Internet itself has become the venue for protest — the new Mall, so to speak — where online-only activists deploy new technologies to challenge governments and corporations and promote causes mundane and sublime.

Where Have All the Protests Gone?  Online.  Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2007

Jennifer Earl’s article highlights a particular corner of the emerging policy commons — focusing on petitions to put topics "on the agenda".  She points out that the topics and targets will both be very wide — ranging from calling on the Backstreet Boys to do a concert in Asia "besides China & Japan" to lobbying video game manufacturers to opposing the war.  I’d add that we’ll increasingly see a global dimension as activists use online tools to tackle global povery, trade, climate, and more.

 

Amazon is leveraging its data storage product and its Mechanical Turk task allocation service to help locate missing computer science whiz Jim Gray.  Gray has been missing since January 28, 2007 after going sailing alone near San Francisco.  Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, has asked people support the search effort by reviewing digital images of the ocean where Gray is supposed to have been. 

This peer production effort leverages thousands of eyeballs to support the search and rescue effort.  The idea is a lot like NASA’s successful project to identify martian craters.  However, I have to say, this task is much tougher.  The resolution of the images means that the sailboat would be at most 10×4 pixels — pretty small — and white "noise" on the images makes it tricky to spot regular shapes.  I’m not sure I was able to add any value for the images I reviewed.  I’d be curious to hear from others about their experience.

But I don’t want to dissuade anyone from participating — join the search.

The Washington Post reported Sunday from Pearlington, Mississippi that "charity efforts have constituted more than 80% of the home rebuilding completed so far."  The largest home builder has been Habitat for Humanity.  In addition to highlighting the embarrassing government response to Katrina, this makes a huge statement for the power of volunteerism, or to use "new media" terms "social production" or "peer production". 

But peer production isn’t just for social good anymore.  The Post also reports on how Doritos will be running "make-your-own" Super Bowl ads saving millions from production costs and leveraging content from over 1,000 ad-makers gunning for the $10,000 price.

Or check out the Netflix Prize where teams are competing for $1M if they "substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to a love a movie". (Thanks to Ken for this tip.)  According to their Leaderboard, over 19,000 contestents from 130 countries are competing and the best are 2/3′s of the way to the Netflix goal.

What’s so motivating about peer production? In simple terms, the huge labor pool available to be tapped.  We know there are about 1 billion internet users.  If each of them has 1 hour of discretionary time per day to spend on a problem that amounts to half-a-million work years of labor per day!  Put another way, that time amounts to 47 times the daily labor from the entire Federal government civilian work force of 2.6 million people. 

What could you do with that many staff?

Here are the references:

• As Aid Lags, Volunteers Shoulder Rebuilding on the Gulf Coast

• $2 Million Airtime, $13 Ad

• Federal Civilian Employment (Jan 2006)

“We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right.” — Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) – Via Wikileaks.org

The Washington Post leaked the (soon to happen?) release of Wikileaks.org.  Though there is no there there yet, the Post says it will be "a Web-based way for people with damning, potentially helpful or just plain embarrassing government documents to make them public without leaving fingerprints." 

It will be great to see how well this works out.  Is it the kind of tool that can respond to governance dodges like Henry Reid’s recent "dead-of-night legislating" or will we need more specialized responses? 

In any case, it is certain that for the policy commons to be effective, transparency will be a critical dimension and Wikileaks is addressing the transparency need head-on.

The Policy Commons is going to need many components in order to achieve the objective of developing and implementing improved public policies.  Greg Schnippel’s Open Debate Engine, described as "a collaborative wiki-like tool for structured debate on a topic," offers many of them. The genius of Greg’s platform is that it makes it possible to conduct collaborative, distributed, rational discussions. 

The Open Debate Engine provides a rhetorical framework allowing interested folks to tackle an important topic, build on kernels of reference information to create an "argument tree" wherein people structure and justify their thinking and engage in discussion (okay, "debate") with others.  Like a wiki, the framework supports many users, is editable, changes are tracked, and back channel discussions are supported.  The system provides flexible syndication which allows content to be widely and easily shared and monitored.

The framework comes from Greg’s many years in competitive debate where teams argue for and against a specific proposition with arguments supported by extensive research.  His prototype at Spacedebate.org offers two "positions" — that the US should or should not weaponize outer space; each position is supported by a series of arguments; and each argument is supported by evidence.  Definitions and reference materials are tracked for verification.  In a competitive debate the judges would decide which team — "for" or "against" — did a better job in making their case.

I’m convinced that the Open Debate Framework will be a boon for debaters and academics as they organize materials for their work.  I can imagine a whole new genre of virtual debate where teams develop websites like Spacedebate.org which judges evaluate to decide who did a better job of structuring arguments, research, and presentation. 

However, debate decides the winner and loser of the whole argument — we should or shouldn’t weaponize space.  For the policy commons our objective is to define and then implement reasonable policies which are likely to be more fine-grained and which we will improve as we learn more.  Thus, we need a "so therefore now we should…" component in the framework – a way to compare arguments, decide which is more compelling, and recommend what we should do given what we know.  

I expect Greg’s already working on this for release 2.0.

In chapter 9, "Justice and Development," of his book The Wealth of Networks Benkler provides the theory behind and examples for social production helping address problems of international development specifically and public policy more generally.  He says:

The emergence of social sharing as a substantial mode of production in the networked environment offers an alternative route for individuals and nonprofit entities to take a much more substantial role in delivering actual desired outcomes independent of the formal system.  Commons-based and peer production efforts may not be a cure-all.  However, as we have seen in the software world, these strategies can make a big contribution to quite fundamental aspects of human welfare and development.  And this is where freedom and justice coincide.

Let’s call this shared product the "policy commons" — a place where ideas form, grow, and then are improved based on shared experience.  I enthusiastically accept that it is a good idea.  Getting practical — "what does it look like?" and then "how do we get there?"  We’re going to need software and services; content and data; a community of engaged contributors, reviewers, and practioners; probably some standards and norms; and some means of sustainability. We’ll have to cope with language problems, personal vs. commercial vs. public interests, and many skeptics.  Still, it should be worth the effort.

Of course, much related work is already underway.  Please share news of how far along we are and best examples of progress.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a new initiative directing the power of blogs towards reforming political discourse in America. Wales is concerned about the simplification of policy issues into distorted TV sound bites:

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Wales hopes that in depth give and take through wikis, much as happens on many political topics in Wikipedia, will lead to more informed presentation and debate of important issues. The obvious challenge is that wikis work well in allowing groups to collect and co-edit related information. They are challenged when that information is controversial. Wikipedia has well-established (and exhausting) procedures for establishing a "neutral point of view", but in the case of Wikipedia, only about 250 articles are particularly contentious (list here) out of 1.2 million total articles. Presumably nearly every political topic on Wikia will be contentious. Wikipedia, however, shows that the impossible is possible with the wisdom of crowds — let’s hope Wikia also achieves the impossible.