Pioneering technology publisher Tim O’Reilly tells us that “government as a platform” is the definition of government 2.0. To explain to a non-technical audience what this means, he explains that his company specializes in finding innovations at the edge and amplifying them, through events, publishing and market research. This involves watching alpha geeks like Rob Flickenger. Tim says he knew Wifi was important when he saw Flickenger on the roof of the O’Reilly building using a cantenna to bring Wifi to his favorite coffee shop. Similarly, they were able to anticipate web services by watching developers build screenscrapers, using other websites as data sources.

Tim helped coin the term “web 2.0″ and offers a definition of the term. “Top internet sites are built on huge databases which get better the more people participate,” This is a new paradigm - “data, not some sort of hardware, is the ‘intel inside’, the source of lock-in” to appealing platforms.

As an example of how this works, Tim points to Google Voice Search. It gets better each time we use it, learning from user input. And it coordinates three databases - speech recognition, a search database and a location database linked by the Internet into a common platform.

Innovators have begun bringing government into this new paradigm. Carl Malamud helped put the SEC online, using a small NSF grant, data from the SEC and a lot of persistence. Fifteen years later this has helped turn into a vast movement for government transparency. In the UK, Tom Steinberg founded MySociety, and introduced tools like They Work for You, which increases parliamentary transparency, and Fix My Street, which allows individuals to report potholes and ask the government to fix them. This has now been picked up by 311 services throughout the US.

Our new president appears to understand this in a deep and fundamental way. His campaign platform was a self-service organizing platform much as Craigslist is a self-service advertising platform. The question is whether we’ll actually see this in governance. Tim reminds us that “government has always been a platform for collective action,” reminding us of Ben Franklin’s quote, “We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang seperately.” Franklin’s version of government invited lots of citizen participation, including ideas like a government matching grant - citizens could raise a certain amount of money, and government would match the funds raised.

Somehow, Tim says, we got lost and turned to “vending machine government”, a model where we put in taxes and take out services. Can we undo this, and build government that enables four types of interaction:

- Government to citizen - providing services and information to citizens
- Citizen to government - citizens report on probelms that need government assistance
- Citizen to citizen - not every problem needs to be solved by government
- Government to government - we need better cooperation within government agencies

Tim suggests that there are some lessons from the technology space that could be useful in building Government 2.0

Build open, expandable systems
The rise of the IBM PC platform had to do with the fact that anyone could build compatible hardware, or that Michael Dell could built his own low-cost machines. The web succeeded because Tim Berners-Lee allowed anyone to use his code and build their own website. This is an example of what my colleage Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity” - the “capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions…”

In open government this might mean open, portable health records, or open data that allows competition by third parties on government contracts.

Build simple systems and let them evolve
The original sketch of Twitter, Tim shows us, was half a sheet of legal paper. The system’s incredibly simple, but there are now 11,000 applications running on top of it, written by third parties. Simple systems like the Internet Protocol can act like hourglass models - they run on a diversity of systems, and support a diversity of applications around a simple protocol.

“Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.”

Design for cooperation
The Unix operating system was built around the idea that we could join together independent programs with no more than a protocol that allows these programs to work together. This allows for a very different school of software development than in Windows, where 90,000 developers need to figure out how to work together. In Linux, thousands of loosely coordinated little groups build the system together.

The notion of governance via loosely coordinated groups is a Jeffersonian one. And a system like the Internet domain name system looks decidedly Jeffersonian (as David Post points out in his new book.) We can build complex systems, like DHS Virtual Alabama, by encouraging people with lots of data to cooperate and share and build complex maps that allow for recovery from natural disasters.

Learn from your users
Google was late to the game in mapping. But Google is used by 45% of all mashups online. That’s because when innovators started building mashups of Craigslist and Google Maps data, Google didn’t shut the door, but hired the first guy to build a mashup, and then released an API to make the task easier.

Fedspending.org was a site built by OMBWatch, an NGO funded by the Sunlight Foundation. Their tool was so good, it ended up obviating a system the government was building for much more money - the government ended up throwing out their system and using theirs instead.

Lower the barriers to experimentation
The government tends to treat projects like the Apollo 11 rocket launch: “Failure is not an option.” It should be. We fail all the time, and we need to learn from it. He quotes Edison: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that did not work.”

Much innovation comes from a single engineer within an entity like the New York Times, putting archives up on an inexpensive, rented server from Amazon. The low cost of failure made it easier to experiment.

Build a culture of measurement
“If it works, do more, if it doesn’t, stop doing it.” We need to watch how our systems succeed and fail, and build systems that respond to user stimuli. And we need good metrics which we can watch carefully. As Atul Gawande demonstrated with his recent, brilliant article on healthcare, we need to ask quesitons like “How do we measure the success of healthcare?”

Google runs auctions almost continually for it ads, taking advantage of “realtime economics”. Walmart runs a system that connects a consumer purchase to an order from a factory within 14 seconds. Realtime data is the backbome of these “living organisms, responding in realtime to stimuli.”

Throw open the doors to partners
Tim celebrates the iPhone ap store, suggesting that it worked vastly better than more controlled models for aplication development on the Blackberry or Nokia phones. Governments need to stop using tools like earmarks, sole source licensing, and no-bid contracts, which lead to a less open ecosystem.

We also need to make sure eople understand what data comes from the government. He quotes an unnamed congresscritter who asked him, “Why do we need NOAA when we’ve got weather.com?” We need to show what the government can provide and what people can build on top of it. The government launched satellites, and many companies built great GPS tools on top of it.

Tim closes with the idea that government needs to be a vehicle for collective action,
a convener first, and a problem-solver second. He references an effort in Kauai, Hawaii where local businesses faced the closure of a state park due to a washed out road. “They could protest - shaking the vending machine - but instead, they coordinated.” They brought in materials and workers and fixed the road within three days.

Fixing complex problems requires figuring out what government needs to do, what private entites can do and what coordinated citizens can do. If we build systems that allow all these behaviors, we’ll see a great deal of positive change through Government 2.0

Please see John Palfrey’s notes as well for another perspective.

In a post last week about the Open Translation Tools summit in Amsterdam, I mentioned a “book sprint” that was working to put together a book on Open Translation.
Well, they did it. It was released today, and it’s a damned fine piece of work. (I say that independent of the fact that they used my Polyglot Internet essay as the introduction to the book!)

In five days, a team led by the indefatigable Adam Hyde put together the definitive starting point for people who want to learn what Open Translation is, what tools open translation communities use, what models are working for translation communities, and what the unsolved problems are in the field. The book includes case studies of notable translation communities, including Global Voices, Meedan and Wikipedia, as well as extensive lists of tools useful for localization and translation. It’s available, for free, both as a website and a printable PDF, and will both be published as a paper book, and continue to evolve as a project you can register for and contribute to. (It’s licensed under the GPL version 2.)

As with earlier book sprints, the project demonstrates that it’s possible to make a good stab at a guide to a field of work if you’ve got the right people willing to assemble in a room for five days. The first book sprint was instigated by my dear friend Tomas Krag, who got sick of spending all his time on the road in developing nations teaching people about wireless networking. He knew he’d never write a book by himself, so he held a book sprint, based on the idea of a code sprint, at the annual gathering of the developing world wireless community. Participants spent a long, difficult day arguing over the structure of the book, then went to their respective corners to write, edit, repurpose and recycle content from around the web into a comprehensive guide. The model worked well enough that Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals adopted it and has used it as a strategy for building new books around conferences.

I’m off to the Aspen Ideas Festival tomorrow, which looks exciting, celebrity-studded, and worth my careful blogging. But I seriously doubt that a team of smart and crazy people will get a useful book out of it, at least not in five days.

It’s an unseasonably beautiful day here in Western Massachusetts, roughly 30 degrees farenheight higher than it has any right to be, and I was sitting on my front stoop reading when my local census enumerator showed up. We made pleasant small talk about the weather, the remoteness of my house, the challenges of locating houses in our rural area, and then got down to the good stuff - attempting to find my neighbors on her handheld device, so she could ask them their correct mailing addresses.

The device she had strapped to her hand was a Harris HTC, which looks either like the ugliest cellphone you’ve ever seen, or a Palm Pilot designed by the US government. We scrolled through bad, inaccurate maps of the area, which looked like they’d been dumped from an early version of MapQuest, wondering how the ridgeline behind my house had magically been transformed into a navigable road, and talked about the device.

My enumerator was reasonably fond of her HTC - there were serious ergonomic problems, like a power button that tended to get inadvertently pressed when gripping the device, powering it off. And powering on isn’t exactly easy, given a multi-stage security process which requires a fingertip swipe, then a series of three security questions, answered by typing an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. But, all things considered, she was happy for a full-time job, and enjoying the chance to drive around our county on a gorgeous day, attempting to correct government maps and to ensure we all get sent our paper censuses.

I had to find out more about the device in question - how does a company get the contract to build 525,000 handheld computers? And why not just give everyone iPhones or Blackberries instead?

Well, Harris is a huge government and military contractor, which recently announced its intention to swallow Tyco Wireless, another huge government electronics contractor. Given that all their customer testemonials come from military personnel, my guess is that they don’t have much of a consumer products division. Neither do the folks who lost out on the bids, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

They’re not making a whole lot of friends with this new device. Last year, the Government Accountability Office added the 2010 Census to a list of high-risk programs. Basically, it sounds like requirements changed several times, and Harris ended up very late to market, with a somewhat buggy device. This freaked people out, and the Census quickly announced that they wouldn’t actually be using the devices - they’d use them just to conduct the first stage of the census, checking addresses, while the actual census (conducted door to door, of people who hadn’t sent in the forms themselves) would take place using clipboards and paper.

In other words, the relatively lame device my friendly enumerator was carrying, which cost $600 million, doesn’t actually work well enough to use for its intended purpose, is still being used in the field, perhaps so that it can be readied for 2020? Anyone believe that we’ll be able to do better than a half-pound, paperback-book sized plastic brick within ten years?

I haven’t traced the story back thoroughly enough to understand why the US government didn’t use an off the shelf device. My guess is that the requirements (encrypted data streams between device and server, biometric security, a variety of paths towards data networks, mostly via cell networks) were tough for commercial handhelds to meet. But it seems like one pathway might have been to remove the most arduous of those requirements - the biometric sensor - and use a platform whose hardware had been extensively field-tested as a mobile phone, and simply debug a secure communications layer and a data collection application.

Then again, that’s probably why I don’t work on government IT projects anymore.

Two weekends ago, I wrote a couple of scripts designed to let me (and anyone else who was interested) study the emergence of memes on Twitter over the course of days or weeks. I built the tools to study use of the #pman tag during the Chisinau protests in Moldova, but colleagues immediately pointed towards other stories they wanted to track, like the #amazonfail campaign. I’ve got high hopes that we’ll be able to say something coherent about how ideas spread on Twitter at some point in the future.

This weekend, I’ve been innundated with emails from friends warning me about precautions I should be taking to protect myself from swine flu. (There are some pretty good wikis emerging, for those who are interested.) And though I’m not especially planning on going out of my way to avoid human (or porcine, for that matter) contact, it’s been pretty amazing to watch Twitter get flooded with flu posts. I searched for “flu” on Twitter, walked away from my machine to get a beer, and came back to the message “5670 results since you started searching”.

It’ll be worth studying the spread of swine flu on Twitter - Evgeny Morozov is already worried that Twitter is spreading panic and misinformation, and it would be interesting to see if we can find correlations between the actual incidence of the disease, or discover whether media hype has a cycle independent of disease cycles. But who can wait for real data? Isn’t it worth figuring out just precisely how much people are freaking out, right now?

So I wrote a cute little script that quickly calculates what percentage of current Twitter traffic includes a particular keyword or tag. It takes advantage of the fact that Twitter sequentially numbers its posts, and includes this information in search results. This means you can retrieve a page of 100 search results and calculate how many tweets it took to get 100 results. That, in turn, lets you calculate what percentage of tweets, recently, contained the term you’re searching for.

Earlier today, I saw levels as high as 1.5% of all tweets mentioning the word or string “flu”. It’s quieted down by this point in the evening. Here’s a recent comparison of flu terms:
1.003 % flu
0.794 % swine
0.171 % swineflu
0.143 % #swineflu
0.055 % #influenza
0.005 % #flu
0.004 % gripa

(#influenza is in there because it’s been the dominant term in Spanish-language flu posts. gripa is there because my friend David Sasaki wondered why people weren’t tweeting about “gripacochina”.)

Just for comparison’s sake, “redsox” shows up in 0.12% of posts, and we’re in the 9th inning of a very good Red Sox game.

Some interesting data in there - looks like I can safely ignore the #flu tag, in favor of #swineflu. And I’d love to figure out what’s the most common ratio between people referring to a phrase in plain text and to people using it as a hashtag. But it’s hard to generalize anything from single data points - the fun is probably running this tool once an hour or so and watching how it trends over time - perhaps I’ll do that tonight.

I’ve got a cute little Perl script that will take an arbitrary number of terms to search for as command line arguments - if anyone wants to turn this into a CGI program, let me know and I’l send you my code. Too tired to write the CGI tonight…

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it would be shutting down its free webhosting service, Geocities, later this year. The Geocities website sports a banner announcing that new accounts are no longer available, and urging potential customers to try their paid hosting services instead.

As it happened, I was sipping coffee from my Geocities mug while reading tweets that either mourned the demise of the service or, far more often, expressing amazement that the service still exists. The mug is one of my prized possessions from the dot.com years - it’s a gift from Geocities founder David Bohnett, when my friend and business partner Bo Peabody and I visited their corporate headquarters in Santa Monica. (Bo got a Geocities polo shirt, which he promptly tye-died and wore around Tripod offices to taunt us into working harder. He threatened to smash my mug more than once, but I fended off his assaults.)

Geocities was Tripod’s much larger and more commercially succesful competitor. (In one sense - they sold the company for lots more money than we did. I’m not convinced that they ever got any closer to profitability than we did.) And while I’ve got a certain pride in the fact that Tripod and Angelfire, two free web page companies I’ve helped run, have survived longer than our rival, I wouldn’t be surprised to see those companies - both part of Lycos, a company that’s changed hands more often than a joint at a Phish concert - close doors in the near future.

When Geocities was at the top of the web game, we HATED them at Tripod. We spent years in an escalating arms race, competing for users. Both companies offered tools to “move” homepages from one site to another, screenscraping the data in the hopes of capturing customers… and building increasingly aggressive countermeasures. We believed that their vastly superior traffic statistics came from users hosting pornographic sites on their servers, and ran “black ops” to reveal their secret pornographic business plans. Over a decade later, I feel cameraderie, not rivalry, and I’m sad that they’re gone.

Gregorio Espadas sees the Geocities closure as the definitive sign of the death of Web 1.0, with old-fashioned static websites replaced by the dynamic, interactive sites we all know and love today. I don’t think the dividing line is quite that neat. I’d suggest that sites like Tripod and Geocities were the first Web2.0 sites, years before Tim O’Reilly and others had popularized the term.

Web2.0 isn’t a technical shift but a conceptual one, from professionally-generated to user-generated content. This wasn’t an easy shift, nor was it one that we at Tripod were especially happy about. As late as 1998, half our staff was dedicated to designing and editing smart, funny, edgy web articles by brilliant writers like Emma Jane Taylor and Josh Glenn, who’ve gone on to real-world literary success. Unfortunately, their best contributions often generated less traffic than a user’s page of cute cat photographs, and after 18 months of heated argument about the future of Tripod, we ended up ditching most of our professional content and focusing on getting as much revenue as possible from the cute cat content our users were providing, gratis.

We never figured it out. When I left Tripod/Angelfire/Lycos (Lycos bought Tripod, and with Lycos’s money, we bought Angelfire) in 1999, our R&D department was focused on text classification tools, which we hoped would let us identify all car-focused webpages and sell adspace to Ford or Toyota. At the same time, Google began pushing a new model of advertising, one where you paid not for impressions of an ad, but actual clicks on the ad. Google’s model has helped turn them into the juggernaut that they are today, while it gets tougher each day to run businesses supported by banner ads.

There’s two interesting questions that arise for me from the death of Geocities. One is whether ad supported, user-generated content models will ever be viable. Farjad Manjoo had an interesting piece on Slate recently, arguing that Google may be forced to rein in YouTube because it’s been difficult to sell ad inventory on videos of cats flushing toilets. (My example, but his general point.) Manjoo points to a Fortune article by Taylor Buley about Facebook, which reveals that ad inventory on the network is extremely cheap, even despite the network’s access to lots of demographic targetting information. (Ad inventory, targeted specifically to college students, appears to sell for $0.50 on a cost per click basis. That’s a very low rate, compared to ad rates on high-quality professional content on blogs or mainstream media sites.) We couldn’t make targeted advertising work with text analysis on Tripod, and Buley speculates that Facebook won’t be able to do it with careful demographic targetting on Facebook. My guess is that models that offer free services and upsell premium memberships, like Flickr, are a lot more viable in the long term than hosting companies that focus purely on ad inventory.

The other question has to do with the valuation of web companies. It’s easy to laugh at the money companies like Yahoo paid for Geocities - over $3.5 billion in early 1999 - but somewhat harder to know how to value other popular web properties today. What’s Facebook worth? It just turned down funding at a valuation of $4 billion, and various methods for calculating valuation turn in prices from $2 billion to much higher.

We sure as hell thought $3.5 billion was a crazy price to pay for Geocities in 1999. We’d sold Tripod a year earlier for less than $100 million, and we’d used Lycos stock to purchase Angelfire for a small fraction of what we had cost. But these numbers are all pretty meaningless when you’re playing with equity - if your stock is overinflated (as Yahoo’s certainly was in 1999), it’s cheap currency for these transactions. And the late stages of the first dotcom boom became an odd race to acquire as much traffic as possible, whether or not that traffic could be turned into ad sales. In late 1998, Tripod was #8 in the world in terms of traffic, and I believe Geocities was in the top 5 - it was an irresistable target for Yahoo, which desperately wanted to retain its position as the top of the web traffic heap to help prop up its stock price.

So what’s Twitter worth? Whatever it’s worth to an acquirer to position themselves at the top of the social media heap, whether or not the site ever makes a dime.

Later today, I’ll pour a beer into my Geocities mug and toast their demise. It’s my demise, too, and the sort of creative destruction and rebirth that’s made the Internet such a fascinating place for the last fifteen years or so.

Tim Hwang is a researcher at the Berkman Center who works closely with Yochai Benkler on his research on cooperation. But he may be best known for his role in organizing ROFLCon, which David Weinberger describes as “the first gathering of internet memesters”. Tim’s work is important, Weinberger posits, because he focuses on “people who don’t often make it to Berkman, i.e., most of the internet.”

Tim describes himself as “a long-time listener, first-time caller,” and introduces his talk, “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto”, with an apology for the obscure pun. (It’s a reference to Eric Raymond’s legendary essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.) Tim’s interested in the propogation of memes on the internet, and is taking early steps towards a model for studying how these ideas spread. (In a terrifying turn, Tim promises us that he’s working on a documentary about Goatse, hoping to interview the model in the infamous images, as well as internet experts regarding the importance of the phenomenon.)

2008 was a year when internet culture and mainstream culture became profoundly entangled, Tim argues. Several successful books were published based on internet memes, including “Stuff White People Like“, which Tim reports is now in its 15th printing. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade featured a float for the TV show, “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” - midway through a song, Rick Astley appeared on the float, singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. In other words, the Macy’s parade included a rickroll, bringing an Internet meme to an audience of tens of millions.

To understand the spread of these memes, Tim uses a model offered by Benkler - he understands the internet as a physical system, which supports a system built of code, which in turn supports a set of content. This suggests that these memes - a specialized form of content - have a relationship to the hardware and code of the internet, not just to each other, or to past internet memes.

This analysis leads him to posit “the 4chan paradox” - why is 4chan such a fertile birthplace for internet memes? Facebook has a larger number of users and a wealth of tools to allow memes to spread - status updates, chats, abilities to “friend” other users. Given this wealth of tools (Tim describes Facebook as the “stealth bomber” of social networking, given the arsenal of tools at its disposal), we’d expect to see more memes like “25 Things About Me” flourish, and cross from the internet world into mainstream consciousness.

4chan is no one’s stealth bomber or swiss army knife. It’s a brutally simple site - post an image, and people respond with their own images and text. The community encourages anonymity, and there’s not even a profile system to make it easy to see a user’s contributions. In other words, “Facebook should p0wn 4chan in terms of memes created.” Despite the apparent “poverty” of these tools, 4chan has been an extremely fertile environment for memes - Tim traces LOLCats, Rickrolling and the various parodies of “Chocolate Rain” to the 4chan boards.

Tim offers a useful distinction between memes that spread on Facebook and on 4chan. Memes on Facebook are constant - your Wall may be decorated with a piece of ASCII art and a message that “you’ve been hit by the beautiful truck”… but while this message spreads across Facebook, it hasn’t spawned the beautiful motorcycle or the ugly speedboat. 4chan iterates memes - the appearance of ceiling cat leads to the birth of basement cat, and eventually to the LOLCat bible, where LOLCat afficionados are translating the text of the Bible into LOLspeak.

Ceiling Cat creats teh universes and stuffs

LOLCats has expanded to include a programming language, LOLCode and a political movement, LOLBama, which wants us all to know “Yes We Can Has“. 4chan memes spawn communities, like that around the LOLCat Bible or I Can Has Cheezburger.

Tim believes that Jonathan Zittrain’s idea of generativity can help explain the comparative fertility of 4chan in generating internet memes. In his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It“, Zittrain addresses the comparative success of the PC to dedicated wordprocessing machines, or the victory of the open internet to “walled garden” services like AOL. He argues that technology that’s open to third parties allows to an explosion of innovation which increases the value of the core platform.

Tim speculates that generativity applies in social systems as well. Facebook’s uses are defined and unchangeable - your status update is for telling people what you’re doing, your favorite books go here, your collection of virtual flowers is here. There are multiple mechanisms, and they’re non-trivial to master. (She just threw a sheep at me. Now what do I do?) And because Facebook allows communication within groups of friends, but constrains communication to all users, memes become silo’d - they spread through one set of friends, but perhaps not through another. 4chan has no silos, and no defined uses - it’s fertile ground for creating new uses as a result.

Over the next year, Tim predicts that “internet culture is going to do really well because the economy sucks.” He suggests that with lots of people out of work, we’ve got a high supply of potential attention, the critical commodity necessary to create internet memes. Since the collapse of the US stock market, Tim sees increased activity on sites like Twitter, and wonders whether we can see a correlation between more free time and participation. (He wisely notes that correlation is not causation and that there are lots of explanations for this trend. While I think the relationship between site growth and economic collapse is far from causal, I do think there’s an argument that bad economies can lead to increased creativity. See my recent post on economics and maker culture in Argentina.)

What’s next? Tim suggests that we start thinking of the social web as an ecosystem and proposes an early environmental movement. This might involve basic environmental advisories, warning people that certain aspects of their behavior are likely to cause damage to the environment - “If you followback everyone who follows you on Twitter, you will likely make Twitter unusuable.” Other warnings might attempt to document known bugs, like the fact that the “user-generated” Digg site has 60-70% of front page material contributed by 100 users. He suggests we might need “an EPA for the social web” which would “research and distribute information on the health of the environment of the social web.”

As so often happens, David Weinberger has even better notes on the talk, including questions and answers from the audience.

I’ll briefly expand on my question/observation to Tim. I agree that the social web needs to be thought of as an ecosystem, but I’m not sure that environmentalism is a useful paradigm as of yet. The main reason - when we study the natural environment, we’re usually interested in systems that have strong homeostasis effects - we worry when systems are out of balance and take steps to correct them, removing the mercury from the water or trying to prevent CO2 levels from rising.

There’s no homeostasis on the web yet - we don’t know what a stable, creative web looks like yet, which makes it very hard for us to offer warnings or suggestions, even obvious ones, like “Don’t follow everyone on Twitter”. (If you do, you’ll need to use special tools to manage your feeds, and they might actually make you a happier Twitterer…) Until we understand how a creative social web really works, we don’t know what to protect and what to prevent. This makes Tim’s project even more important, but it might suggest that the EPA metaphor isn’t the right next step.

During the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer, my friend Evgeny Morozov decided to study the dynamics of “cyberwar” by becoming a partisan. He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate in distributed denial of service attacks against Georgian websites. Some were simple webpages with a few lines of javascript designed, essentially, to press the reload button over and over. Others were slightly more sophisticated, written as .BAT files, but essentially using the same methodology. (Morozov, to be clear, isn’t especially sympathetic to the Russian cause, and it’s unlikely that his brief stint as cyberpartisan did any significant damage.)

It’s becoming increasingly common for realworld conflict to include a digital dimension, typically attacks designed to disable websites that promote the other side’s cause. In an article last summer, I questioned whether this form of activity really deserved to be called “cyberwar” as it’s not an attack on their forces or infrastructures, more analagous to graffiti than grenades. I got a lot of feedback on that story, including observations from some in the security community that there appeared to be two levels of hacking going on: the “kid’s stuff” that Morozov documented and larger attacks that some felt bore the fingerprints of commercial hacking groups like the Russian Business Network.

Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising to see hackers working in support of Israel and Palestine during the current Gaza conflict. Zone-H.org, a site that tracks website defacement and other forms of hacking, offers some interesting screenshots of US military sites defaced by Turkish hackers in support of Gazans. But what’s got cyberwar geeks buzzing is the “help-israel-win” project put together by a group of Israeli students and hackers.

The group’s website - which is moving around as pro-Palestinian hackers flood it with DDOS attacks - invites partisans to download an .exe file, install it on their computers and start it from a link on their desktop. The website - with instructions available in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian - doesn’t make it very clear what the tool does: “We created a project that unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel. The more support we get, the efficient we are!” In response to apparent user concerns, it includes the reassurances, “The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!”

Bojan Zdrnja of the Internet Storm Center has been analyzing the program and offers some good technical reasons (aside from whatever political reasons you might or might not have) to install the software. The code is obfuscated to make it harder to analyze, but he was able to determine that the program connects to one of thirteen IRC servers, where it waits for instructions for a target to attack. This is the working method used by botnets, collections of computers compromised by trojan horse software so that the botnet controller can unleash massive denial of service attacks. These attacks are usually a form of extortion - this excellent piece by Evan Ratliffe helps explain some of the economics behind the attacks and the measures some are taking to fend them off.

It appears that the “help-israel-win” folks are asking partisans to voluntarily join a botnet, which could be pointed at pro-Palestinian websites. In his analysis of the software, Zdrnja saw no evidence that the botnet was actually attacking anything - his client connected to an IRC room and waited for instructions, indefinitely. He worries, though, that the client has the ability to update itself and might currently be in a dormant state. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine an update that makes the software uninstallable, allowing the machine to be used as part of a botnet aimed at an arbitrary target.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge technical development. By some estimates 1/4 of all Windows PCs are part of one or more botnets, and this new botnet would be quite modest in comparison to the commercial botnets discovered by police and system administrators. What’s interesting is the way in which citizen propaganda and hacking are coming together.

Pro-Israel netizens already have robust tools to allow them to support Israel’s political communication strategy. Give Israel Your United Support offers a downloadable tool that identifies online stories, surveys and other places where pro-Israel comments and votes can be left online. The tool urges partisans to respond to each of these stories - as anyone who’s run a media organization that reports on Israel and Palestine, stories on the conflict routinely generate 5-50x the traffic of other stories, in part due to efforts like GIYUS.

I suspect it’s a small step, conceptually, from downloading a tool that prompts you to post comments to one that controls your computer as part of a DDOS attack. There are, of course, a couple of critical differences. Join “help-israel-win” and you’re breaking the law in most jurisdictions. And you’re giving a group of Israeli hackers unprecedented access to your computer, including the ability to install software which would let them index your hard drive or attack random targets across the web. (Wouldn’t it be ironic if RBN or others had started a project based on nationalist sentiment designed to open back doors in computers to compromise them for commercial purposes?)

I’ll be very interested to see whether this idea takes off, either growing a robust botnet around this project or being adopted by other “cyberwarriors”. Whoever’s using these tools, this looks a lot like the dark side of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group forming”. It’s one thing to form groups to debate and counter opinion online - forming groups to shut down websites looks a lot like gang thuggery to me.

Thanks to Ron Deibert for pointing me to the Wired article on the “help-israel-win” project.

I’ve been in Dubai for the past three days at a World Economic Forum event. WEF is starting a new project called “Global Agenda Councils”, and they’ve invited people to participate in conversations on 68 topics, ranging from the very broad (”Faith”), the very scary (”Pandemics”) and the very prosaic (”The Future of Mining and Metals”.)

(Why 68? According to one account, they wanted 70, to riff on the lucky number seven, but two didn’t come together.)

I suspect that gatherings like this one represent the ultimate nightmare for the world’s conspiracy theorists - seven hundred wealthy, powerful, privileged, important and self-important people gathering in an opulent setting to debate the world’s problems. And more than one person pointed out that there’s something of an irony in asking the sorts of folks here at WEF to address the outcome of the global fiscal crisis - aren’t these the folks who caused it?

To disappoint all the folks who imagine a secret world government emerging from these meetings… don’t count on it. The phrase, “the world’s largest brainstorming session” has been thrown around for the past couple of days, and that may or may not be true, but the emphasis has been on brainstorming and talking. Lots of talking. Three days of talking.

This was a very useful thing within our group. While the folks confronting “the future of the internet” agreed that we’re not facing a crisis, as many of the other groups are, we did agree that there’s two sets of issues worth considering in explaining the state of the current internet: stresses, and fractures. Stresses are widespread strains to the system - a huge increase in traffic due to filesharing and online video, the continuing copyright wars, the professionalization of cybercrime, the increasing effectiveness of DDOS attacks.

Fractures are slightly more subtle. They’re issues that if left unchecked might cause the single, unified internet we know and love to split into multiple internets. These include incompatibilities between the mobile and wired web, the immobility of content trapped in the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook which make it challenging to migrate content, as well as more social issues, like the fragmentation of public space online (the possibility of echo chambers ala Cass Sunstein) and the danger of fragmentation by language, culture and local laws, my current obsession.

The structure of the event demanded that we offer policy recommendations to ensure a healthy future of the internet. This is easy to do, but hard to do in a way that breaks new ground. We spent a difficult and frustrating day simultaneously trying to draft a short set of recommendations and brainstorming on ways that the internet could be a useful tool for the other 67 councils, most of which are working on issues more pressing and challenging than ensuring a vital, creative and generative internet. The brainstorm yielded what I think is a pretty interesting frame, the idea of the internet as a tool for social homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the set of processes that organisms use to regulate their internal environments. If a mammal gets hot, homeostasis systems cause the animal to sweat or pant, trying to cool it off. They work based on feedback mechanisms, constantly monitoring environments and changing behavior based on this feedback. It’s been observed that an emerging “internet of things” will allow for refined environmental monitoring, both locally and globally. On a personal basis, you could have much better control of your personal energy use if you could get a display of every appliance turned on in your house and its energy usage; similarly, we’d likely have a better understanding of temperature fluctuations if we could embed billions of temperature and atmospheric sensors into infrastructure around the globe.

This idea of using the internet as a backbone for feedback mechanisms may have utility beyond the realm of environmental problems. Image a schoolsystem with pervasive internet connections and a mechanism for collecting and listening to feedback from students, teachers, administrators and parents. An enlightened school system might be able to make better decisions and change decisionmaking mechanisms through incorporating opinions from all levels. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, it’s as likely that networked publics will build their own feedback mechanisms and find their own ways to institute change, either cooperating with existing powers or challenging thems.

For the internet to act as a medium for homeostasis mechanisms, it needs to be free, open, uncensored, accessible, multilingual and all other sorts of good things. It also might mean that it makes sense to advocate for universal connectivity in the context of advocating for other problems, believing that systems that aggregate information bottom up and communicate it vertically and laterally could lead towards better problem-solving on large societal issues. A few of my colleagues and I are trying to group-write a short essay on this topic, which I hope to share on this blog later this week.

One of the reasons I was excited to come to the Global Agenda Councils meeting was the chance to visit Dubai. I hadn’t visited previously, and I’ve a wide range of opinions about the city. We got a truly unusual picture of the city, one that gave me a bit of cultural whiplash on Sunday.

The geeks and the sheik. Photo by David Sifry.

After the main conference ended, our group stuck around to meet Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. The sheik had requested our presence for a fifteen-minute audience to brief him on our deliberations. This turned out to be long enough for each member of our party to make a single statement about what we thought might be important about the internet’s future.

I had been thinking about internet censorship that day since encountering a brief story in the Gulf Times about a set of photos of the Obama family watching election results. The story referenced a Flickr URL, and when I tried to load the page, I got the UAE blockpage, alerting me that “the site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy.” In UAE’s defense, they’re transparent about filtering the internet and allow people to request sites be reviewed and unblocked. However, my colleagues at the Open Net Initiative have researched UAE’s filtering closely and argue that it’s inconsistent and strays beyond censoring “un-islamic” topics to blocking political speech. I used my 90 seconds to introduce the idea that the internet is a method for social feedback and that it can’t work in this fashion unless the internet is open, pervasive and uncensored. I have no idea whether the sheik and his advisors realized this was a reference to UAE’s filtering policies - my colleagues did, and I felt better than I would have had I let the opportunity pass.

With no international incidents other than David Sifry beginning his remarks, “Your excellency, Hi!” which reduced several of our team members to laughter, much of our merry band headed downtown to explore the older side of Dubai. We’d spent three days in the Jumeirah Beach hotel and associated properties, which are very beautiful, hospitable and comfortable and feel very much like the newer hotels in Las Vegas. They’re an imagined version of Arabia, very comfortable but entirely divorced from history, and it’s very hard to feel like you’re actually visiting a real place. Walking alongside the creek in old Dubai, I felt myself relax a bit.

Walking around the souks, it’s easier to understand how Dubai came to be - a trade city allowing for interaction between Indian, Persian and Arabian culture. It’s amazingly multiethnic and cosmopolitan in the old town - I had fun trying to identify national origin by face and dress. Walking with Bruce Schneier, he observed, “It’s like one country laid on top of another.” Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, maybe? Or Las Vegas redone by Walt Disney overlaid on the universal souk. I managed to talk our group into dining downtown at one of the outlets of the Evergreen Restaurant, a chain of vegetarian Indian restaurants pitched at the folks who work in Dubai, not at wealthy travellers. We ordered an embarrasing amount of food for six people, all of which was richly spiced, vegetarian and filling - dinner for six cost under $25.

And then to experience true cultural whiplash, we took Afghan-driven gypsy cabs back to our luxurious hotel, cleaned ourselves up as best as we could, and talked our way into the Burj al Arab hotel. Advertised as a “seven star” hotel, the Burj isn’t the sort of place you simply visit and stroll around in - fellow travelers told us that we needed to make a reservation and leave a cash deposit just to tour the lobby. We managed to talk our way into the bar that’s cantilevered high above the ocean, one of the more opulent and absurd spaces I’ve ever entered. And yes, the drink I ordered cost more than the dinner we’d purchased for six.

I came out of the evening feeling a little dizzy, and not just from the gin. Many development economists suggest that a society with a high level of economic inequality is inherently unstable, and it’s pretty clear that the difference between the world of the Burj al Arab and the Evergreen is pretty vast. Then again, the folks who do most of the physical and service work in Dubai are guest workers here on work visas, making it highly unlikely that there’s going to be an effective rebellion of the underclass.

I had a moment of reassurance in a very strange way as I drove home today, not about economic inequality in the UAE, but about Schneier’s observation about places laid atop one another. I was hungry as I drove home from Kennedy and knew from experience that there are few places to stop on the Hutchinson Parkway. So I turned off at the exit for City Island and had breakfast in a truly unique corner of New York that looks more like a coastal town in Maine than like any part of the Bronx I’d ever seen. I was baffled by the fact that I’ve driven past the turnoff to this neighborhood dozens of times and never realized that there was a treelined parkway leading two miles to a rustic beach town, which is part of the city of New York. It’s not the difference between the downtown and the beach hotel in Dubai, but it’s a reminder that places are laid atop one another all the time, not just in the strange, beautiful and unsettling country that is the UAE.

My friends at Ushahidi, an amazing team of creative Kenyans who built a dynamic system to allow for citizen reporting of violence during the post-election period in Kenya, have just rolled out a tool to help document violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The proxy war in Congo threatens to engulf the eastern part of that nation. While the conflict is getting good media attention, incidents are spread over a huge geographic area and there’s great danger that critical incidents will go unreported.

The Ushahidi team has launched a new version of the tool focused on the DRC, and is accepting citizen reports of violence and displacement - as well as of peace and humanitarian efforts - and people in the DRC can file a report by sending an SMS to 0992592111. I hope this effort will help people around the world get a sense for the scope of the DRC conflict and the hundreds of thousands of people it’s affecting.

Many of my friends who are following the US election intensely are supporting Twitter Vote Report. It’s a very cool mashup designed to let people report voting irregularities by sending a message to #votereport on Twitter and using a restricted syntax to report on the experience. The website will visualize the reports as they come in and will be able to store reports of slow voting sites and polling places that experience complaints of malfunctioning machines or people preventing voters from accessing the polls.

A sample report:

Syd Sallabanks: #votereport #early Boise 83716 zip. #good experience to vote early. Boise friends follow http://twittervotereport.com/how-to-help

I can’t help comparing this laudable project to some of the projects I’ve seen in African countries designed to increase voter transparency. Some of those projects have used SMS. Election monitors in Nigeria used Kiwanja’s SMS gateway, FrontlineSMS to monitor the recent presidential election. And SMS likely helped the opposition MDC insist that it had won the first round of presidential balloting this year - election reports were posted outside each polling place, and MDC activists used SMS to report each tally to a central office, where they were tallied and revealed an MDC victory, if not a majority.

But the most effective vote monitoring projects I’ve seen are in countries with a free and thriving indepedent media. In Ghana, talk radio is by far the most important medium for discussing politics. During the 2000 elections, citizens who had trouble at the polls - groups trying to intimidate voters or prevent some people from voting - called talk radio stations and reported their troubles. This was probably more effective than calling election officials or other authorities - since the obstacles to voting were reported live, the radio stations could continue reporting on the situation until authority figures intervened and ensured people could vote. (It’s possible that election authorities might have ignored calls to their offices and claimed they’d never been received.) As it turned out, the 2000 presidential election in Ghana was peaceful and put the opposition party in power for the first time in decades.

The mobile plus radio system works very well for monitoring for two reasons - it’s easy for citizens to use (they just call a radio station, something many of them do frequently to participate in call-in shows) and the reports are immediately available to a large audience (everyone who listens to talk radio, which is, basically, everyone.) I’m not sure that TwitterVote covers the same bases, at least by itself. It’s easy for Twitter users, and certainly possible for those who don’t use Twitter regularly to participate by texting to a shortcode. But the messages directly reach a fairly small audience - there aren’t very accurate numbers for active Twitter users, but Techcrunch estimates the number at under a million, which certainly includes some non-US users. So TwitterVote needs to be thought of as collection mechanism for reports, which can be disseminated through other media.

This, for me, raises the question of why Twitter is the right tool to use for this project. Is it because it’s easy to crate mashups around? Because it’s the tool-du-jour for the digitally experimental set? Or is it a reflection of how impenetrable mainstream radio and television appears to be for most American citizens? The media that continues to be disproportionately important for most American households is still local, broadcast television news, despite declines in recent years and increase in web usage. When we design tools for election monitoring, are we ignoring local news because we expect it to be uncooperative and impenetrable? Or are we just playing with the tools we know and like, whether or not they’re the best way to reach a broad audience?