Category Archives: World View

Right Openness If You Meet the Open Guru on the Road, Kill Him

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Buddha waiting in trafficLet me start by saying how much I love Open Source software, peer production, the tide that raises all ships, Wikipedia, all things “open”. It is part of how I define myself. I love what happens when people share expertise, resources, their spare time. It makes me feel like I am part of something larger. It makes me feel powerful and creative, only my effort and imagination can hold me back. Yet, for some time, I have felt a growing unease with the “open” movement.

I think it started back in 2006 when the South African government established a policy directing the use of Open Source software within government departments “unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior”.

This policy did not achieve its aim of converting government departments to the use of Open Source. If anything it probably alienated civil servants more than it made them converts to Open Source. It made them feel like FOSS was some kind of second class solution they were obliged to use because they couldn’t afford the best. I knew I didn’t like this policy at the time but I couldn’t really put my finger on why except for the basic awareness that nobody likes to be forced to do something, even if its good for them.

Fast forward a year to 2007 and we have Tony Blair saying:

“Open v closed” is as important today in politics as “left v right”. Nations do best when they are prepared to be open to the world. This means open in their economies, eschewing protectionism, welcoming foreign investment, running flexible labour markets. It means also open to the benefit of controlled immigration.

Once again, I respond positively to openness and indeed open vs closed does seem a more practical unit of political analysis than left vs right these days, at least on some levels. However, again I experience a trace of unease and this time I can’t put my finger on it. And in the ensuing 5-6 years we see openness emerging as a western agenda with the implicit assumption that open = good and by extension more open = more good.

I expressed some of my concerns when I wrote about this in 2009. I likened open vs. closed as a kind of yin and yang, two parts that can’t live without each other.  That was close to what I want to say here but I think the problem is bigger now and that analogy misses some critical nuance

More recently I’ve been thinking about “open” in the context of Open Data and how that relates to personal privacy. Clearly more open cannot always equate to more good in this context. If we acknowledge that the need for privacy is contextual, then it is axiomatic that the need for openness is also contextual. The problem with making a virtue of “open” is that it tends to steamroller nuance and context.

I am reminded, as I often am, of the Taoist parable of a farmer and his “good” fortune.  Nothing is inherently good or bad but is defined by the context in which we understand.  The more I think about it, the more I think the crux of the problem lies in an essentially manichean worldview where open is now equated with virtue, where we must fight the forces of closed-ness wherever we find it.

This is wrong in the same way that the Golden Rule is wrong. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What could be simpler? Yet, the angry drunk who enjoys getting into fights in bars has no problem with this rule. It helps him get into more fights. Absolute rules tend not to fair very well in complex environments.

So, let’s consider some other “good” words.  How about “kindness” and “cleanliness”? Any parent or anyone who has been in the wrong relationship knows that you have to be “cruel to be kind” sometimes.  Doing the right thing might actually involve not being “kind”.  So perhaps kindness is not a very good goal.  And cleanliness.  We know it is next to godliness and on the surface of things how could one argue with it.  But a quest for cleanliness actually has led to some surprisingly negative outcomes such as the growth of allergies.  The more we understand about our bodies, the more we realise that what we previously thought of as “unclean” is actually a part of what makes us human.

So, would a “kindness” movement serve us well?  Or a “cleanliness” movement? Well, the answer is not yes or no, it is “mostly”.  Mostly being kind is a good idea and mostly being clean is a good idea but they are bad when turned into doctrine and orthodoxy. The rationale for orthodoxy is that if you don’t keep things pure enough, then it is a slippery slope to the increasing adulteration of all you hold dear.

The problem with purity is that is that it leads to fragility.  In Anti-Fragility, Nassim Taleb argues that all complex systems need to be stressed in order to grow stronger, to reduce fragility. Perhaps open works need proprietary works to stress them into improving and evolving.  As I wrote previously, the evidence from multi-party prisoner’s dilemma simulations would seem to support this, namely that “open” strategies succeed very well in a very closed ecologies and “closed” strategies succeed very well in a very open environments.

So what’s an Open Source advocate to do?  Well, if you were Evgeny Morozov you could rubbish the entire open movement but that doesn’t work for me because I really do see and live the benefits of open all around me.   I think what is needed is a new concept, that of “Right Openness”.  In Buddhist philosophy, one of the principal teachings is the Noble Eightfold Path, which describes the “path” to enlightenment.  Each path begins with the word “right”, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, etc.  What is notable about this is that there is no prescribed behaviour.  There is the overall goal of reducing suffering and being compassionate but the way you achieve that is not specified.  Mostly kindness is a great way of being compassionate but not always.  Mostly openness is a great way of achieving good outcomes in the growth of knowledge  in good governance, etc but not always. One need only look at a for-profit 3-D gun printing initiative to see how “open” as orthodoxy can lead to the wrong sort of outcome.

Let’s take the example of Right Speech. In the west, we value truth and freedom when it comes to speech. Yet, anyone who has uttered the words “Let’s be honest” in a relationship, knows that there are truths and there are truths. Time and geography matter when it comes to truth. Learning the truth about a murder that happened hundreds of years ago, half-way around the world is not the same as learning the truth about a murder that happened an hour ago, next door. The same with freedom of speech. Encouraging someone to help their neighbour is not the same as encouraging someone to kill their neighbour. We know this, yet we still defend freedom of speech when I think what we really mean is Right Speech, speech that does not harm others, that is timely, etc.

What then would Right Openness look like? It would recognise that “openness” is not an inherent virtue but rather a contextual good. What would that look like in practice? Well it would always hark back to the question of the larger goal, whether more equitable sharing of knowledge, good governance, etc.  It would then ask what right openness looks like in that context. It would lead by example, not by doctrine. In the Open Data world, it would embrace privacy issues as being fundamental to effectiveness openness without getting hung up on privacy as a violation of openness.

As we struggle to understand the complexity of the world we live, we look for simple rules to help guide us through the storm.  That’s great as look as we treat them as rules of thumb.  To paraphrase George Box, all rules are flawed, but some are useful.

So let’s hear it for Right Openness and remember kids, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”

–
Photo courtesy Stephanie Davidson 2008 CC BY SA

 

Corporate Narratives, ICTs, and Development

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original image courtesyOnce upon a time, a very long time ago, before even Google or mobile phones and long before Facebook, there was just the Internet. And folk who created the Internet and its early users were filled with wonder at its potential. They foresaw a day when there would be true equality of opportunity because everyone would have access to knowledge, access to markets, and true democracy would reign as everyone had a voice in governance.

For those working in the complex world of International Development trying to bring about more equality in the world, through means misguided or otherwise,  information and communication technologies (ICTs) seemed to offer tremendous potential to accelerate positive change in the world.  And so new aid programs were born that attempted to catalyse development activities through the use of ICTs.

As the Internet optimists had foreseen, ICTs turned out to be very useful for everyone, even and most especially the poor.  But where there is utility, there is money and the communication infrastructure business soon became a multi-billion dollar industry.  Technology companies rapidly outpaced development efforts and soon mobile phone infrastructure had spread across the developing world.

Slightly embarrassed by their own efforts, development agencies leapt on board with mobile and Internet companies to partner in bringing access to the developing world.  A beautiful public private partnership was born. Sounds great doesn’t it?  Everyone go to Davos.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that large technology companies are not in the business of saving the world.  They are in the business of serving their shareholders.  And that means that the story they tell the world about their involvement in the developing world, is one that serves their shareholders.  What do I mean by “story they tell”?  Narrative is the basic unit of human thought and everything we do is constructed in the context of a story that we tell ourselves and that we tell others about what is happening in the world and what our role is in it.  Some years ago I was introduced to a beautiful quotation from Alasdair Macintyre (thank you Steve Denning) that has stuck with me:

“unless we have the critical tools to understand in which story we stand, our praxis runs the risk of prolonging not only the problem but the problem story. Often a problem will be solved only by dissolving the story”

In other words, if you don’t know whether your Hamlet or Rosencrantz or in King Lear or The Comedy of Errors, there is little chance of you successfully changing your role or the outcome of the story.

Corporations have been known to occasionally deviate from the very strictest truth in the stories they tell in order to serve their corporate interests.   An energy company might de-emphasise the danger of certain kinds of energy sources because of the vast profits to be made from them.  A mining company might obscure the provenance of minerals sourced from a conflict zone.  Otherwise upright corporations pay bribes where there is a lot of money to be made and an opportunity to do so without getting caught.  Where there is a lot of money on the table, corporations tend to act first in the interest of their bottom line.

And there is a lot of money in the world of telecommunications and the Internet.  Carlos Slim didn’t get to be the richest man in the world by baking cakes.  This turns out to be a problem because communication networks, thanks to the magic of network effects, naturally tend toward monopolies or at least oligopolies.  This makes it much easier for communications corporations to extract more than their fair share of revenue from the average customer.  Why do they do this?  Because they can, because it is what they exist to do, to maximise profits for their shareholders.

This is not about the developing world in particular.  It is true in the U.S. and Canada.  For an insight into the U.S. watch this chilling talk by Susan Crawford about the state of broadband infrastructure.  Communication companies have the chips stacked in their favour and absolutely require regulation in order to counter-balance the natural tendency toward monopoly.

When it comes to the developing world however there is an amazing dearth of critical discussion about the narrative put forward by communication companies.  Development agencies treat these corporations as if they were their friends.  They are not your friends.  They may have temporarily aligned interests but they are not your friends.  They may be staffed by excellent and well-meaning people but their collective interest, nay their responsibility, is to their bottom line and it is frankly amazing that development agencies have managed to maintain an apparent state of willful naivete for such a long time.

This obliviousness leads to pretty dubious activities like the funding of “mobile apps for development”.  Oh sweet saffron, how the mobile operators must have chuckled when they heard that one.  Honestly, they don’t need your help.  Curiously there is little funding going into supporting good policy and regulation of telecom and Internet markets in the developing world, to ensuring real competition and fair pricing.  There are some stand-out exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.

So when the ITU develops a global next generation broadband strategy and it fails to mention WiFi, do you think it might be because mobile corporations have an interest in promoting their own infrastructure rather?  Do you think that when Google launches a campaign to Save the Internet that it is altruism or self-interest?  When Facebook offers free access on mobile phones, is that because they care about the poor?   Please don’t get me wrong, I am not some whining lefty moaning about how corporations are evil.  Corporations are lovely.  Google, in particular, in serving its corporate interest of having more bits consumed globally is in a position to do some very useful  disruptive things in both the rich and poor worlds.  Disruptive corporations in particular are lovely as they pry out the roots that monopolistic corporations dig in the ground.  However, they are still not your friend.  They need to be watched and called to account when they behave badly, especially when a big fat pile of money is on the table.  And this is what the international development community is signally failing to do.

So what’s the tl;dr?  Fewer apps and more support for ICT policy and regulation, please.  It’s not sexy, it takes a long time, and often it fails to succeed against the massive advantage that huge communication corporations have.  But it is where a more ICTD support should be going.  Naturally I speak with a degree of self-interest.  Simply making WiFi and VoIP legal everywhere would be a big leg-up for Village Telco.  Where would I be without my own little corporate narrative?  :-)

Original image courtesy Philip Martin.

Four Perspective-Changing Books From 2012

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Thinking, Fast and SlowThis is about four books that changed the way I see the world in 2012.  Two were published this year and two are a little older.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Published: Oct 2011

My reaction on reading this book is that it ought to be required reading for entry into adulthood. Kahneman draws on a career of research to reveal how profoundly biased our thinking is even when we are confident of being unbiased. He suggests that the mind is made up of two different thinking systems: System 1 which is quick and dependent on intuition and the emotions; and, System 2 which is slower and uses reasoning and logic. Both systems have their flaws and he does a masterful job of illustrating the many ways in which we can be misled.

It is perhaps not a surprise that, given his experience of human bias, Kahneman is a fan of algorithms.  He argues that in many cases an algorithm will make more consistent decisions on average than humans will. He presents some compelling evidence for this across a range of fields. This is at odds with the work of Gary Klein whose research on the power of intuition was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. Instead of belittling and undermining the work of Klein, he embraces their differences and embarks on a research collaboration with him that is detailed in Chapter 22: Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It. In the end they recognise that their different conclusions were influenced by researching people in very different professional roles e.g. parole board members versus firefighters. It is a beautiful example of collegial respect leading to deeper insight.

This is a very sobering book.  It wasn’t completely new territory.  Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational was a great introduction to behavioural economics but the wealth of evidence presented in Thinking Fast and Slow is almost overwhelming.   The notion of System 1 versus System 2 thinking is also a very interesting and a more nuanced understanding of thinking than simply logic versus emotion.

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Published: Mar 2012
I found Haidt’s multi-dimensional view of morality in The Righteous Mind very appealing.  Intuitively the notion that morals might be more like a sense of taste with more than one axe of exploration e.g bitter, sweet, salty, sour, etc.  rather than simply binary e.g. good vs. evil, is quite a compelling one.  It was particularly timely published in the run-up to the U.S. elections where it was possible to see morality battles every day in the news.  He suggests that the dimensions of morality fall along the following axes:

Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their “just desserts”.
Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgements in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Source: Wikipedia

Interestingly, Haidt comes to the same conclusion as Kahneman regarding the existence  of two different thinking systems in the brain.  He refers to them as  ”seeing-that” and “reasoning-why” systems which is perhaps a little more intuitive than System 1 and System 2.

Haidt has attracted his share of critics but, right or wrong, I have found the notion of a moral matrix to be a very useful tool for looking at problems in a new light.  Take, for example, Open Source software.  There is a very interesting analysis of Open Source that can be made looking at the motivations for contributing to Open Source through the lens of Haidt’s moral matrix.

Further, this book also introduced me to the concept of group selection in evolutionary theory which in turn gave me new insights into the Beinhocker’s Origin of Wealth.  Once again looking at Open Source software, it is easy to understand the success of Open Source approaches through an evolutionary group selection lens.

Since reading it I have found that, once you start looking, you can start to see the morality matrix at play everywhere.  It’s not the only way of looking at an issue but I have found it often offers a perspective I would not have thought of otherwise.

Why Nations Fail

Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson
Published: Mar 2012
Why Nations Fail is another book that has provoked some controversy.  It could hardly fail to given the epic sweep of history that it covers and the retrospective coherence with which the authors fit historical narrative to their theory.

Once again, right or wrong, their theory is a very interesting one that has shed new light for me on challenges within the world of international development.  They argue that a country’s political and economic institutions need to be analysed together and that they can be broken down into two types.  There are “extractive” institutions in which a “small” group of individuals do their best to exploit their political and economic environment for maximum gain and to inhibit the sharing of wealth; and there are “inclusive” institutions which are broadly open and encourage participation.  They argue that inclusive states become wealthier over time and that extractive states, though they may experience short term growth, ultimately make countries poorer.

Given that their theory operates over generations, even hundreds of years, it is very hard to assess the validity of their theory as its predictive power will take some time to asses and even then political/economic systems are complex and, I think, resistant to this sort of sweeping analysis.

However, that doesn’t it make it any less fascinating a work.  Most interesting for me was the notion of trust and how important it was in an “inclusive” state to create the conditions where individuals do fear to invest their time and money in enterprises.  Land rights feature as a particular issue in the book and it made me think about the world of communication infrastructure and the digital domain in general.  I think there is an interesting analysis to be made of “inclusive” versus “extractive” digital infrastructures.  As another way of looking at the problem, I think the notion of “digital land rights”, being able to afford digital land, being confident that you can keep it, being sure of rights of way, etc is a metaphor worth exploring further.

Mindset

Mindset - Carol Dweck
Published: Feb 2006

This is a slightly older book but I only discovered it in 2012. It is another book where the author divides the world into two categories: in this case the author divides people into those with a “fixed mindset” or a “growth mindset”.  To quote Dweck directly:

“In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

I cannot emphasise enough how profound this book has been for me both as a professional and as a parent.  Her thesis is not especially complex and seems obvious in retrospect but then so many brilliant things do.  It has everything to do with how you understand failure.  If you see failure as a personal commentary on your abilities then it can be destructive and disabling.  By contrast, if you see failure as containing the ingredients for learning and growth, then failure can be an enabler.

Intellectually this is obvious but I have never really taken on board in a personal way until I read this book.  Her narrative style and many many examples from a variety of fields helped the idea to sink in.  It has helped me professionally.  As an entrepreneur, I am confronted with failure on a regular basis.  I have never liked rejection.  Who does?  MindSet helped me make a fairly profound internal shift to not judge myself every time an investor or customer said the dreaded word…. “No”.

Interestingly it has been just as useful as a parent.  As my kids struggle with developing mastery in a variety of domains from academics to sports, they run smack into the failure demon.  Mindset helped me help my boys think constructively about failure as a breadcrumb trail to success.  And with that I leave you with this profound piece of wisdom from the children’s classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Happy 2013.

If I Had 50 Million Dollars

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Money TreeIf I had any poetic talent, I would have done this in rhyming couplets set to the music of the Barenaked Ladies but sadly today you are left with my prose.  Hum along with me anyway.

If you work in the area of Open Government, Open Data, Transparency,  or even just ICTs and Development in general, you have probably heard of the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative.  MAVC is a Grand Challenge for Development which brings together the UK Department for International Development (DFID/UKAID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Omidyar Network (ON), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to create a $50 million fund to “support innovation, scaling-up, and research that will deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.”

On Saturday, in response to an increasing number of interactions around MAVC that I’ve had over the last few weeks, I tweeted the following:

which garnered a few reactions.  Most interestingly @wayanvota issued a challenge to speak up and say just what was wrong with MAVC.  I was a little surprised by his reaction as I thought there were some fairly self-evident problems, mostly related to what happens when there is a large pot of money on the table.  It then occurred to me that perhaps this was perhaps not self-evident to all or perhaps even that I was simply jaded and cynical.  My first thought was to blog about the challenges that I think MAVC will face.  But frankly it’s easy to be a critic and anyone engaged in the field of philanthropy knows that it is hard, very hard indeed to do well.  If I had the time, I could pick holes in development initiatives all day.  Like shooting fish in a barrel but not as much fun.

So, perhaps more challenging, more constructive, and more fun would be to say, well *what would I do*. That is to say if someone said, here take this bag of 50 million dollars and go forth to create more open governance in the South.  A challenging prospect.  Achieving impact through the giving away of money is much more difficult than achieving impact in the private sector. Philanthropy lacks that marvellous feedback loop called the market which provides plenty of data for self-correction.  This doesn’t, as some suggest, make philanthropy bad. It just makes it more challenging.  So herewith my suggestion as to how to most effectively spend 50 million dollars on Open Government in the South.

My recipe is very simple.  I would pick 10 universities, one each in 10 countries in the South.  I would endow a chair for Cyber Law and Governance in each university for 10 years giving each university 5 million dollars.  That’s it.  Maybe I’d keep a million or two back to fund and facilitate networking among the universities but that’s it.  Here is my rationale:

  1. Open Governance, if it happens at all, has to be home-grown.  The power imbalance in development assistance hasn’t gone away.  Putting southern researchers in control of the agenda is a start towards mitigating that problem.
  2. Open Governance is still in its infancy.  There is no significant body of evidence of it making a difference in the South.  Granted MAVC plans to fund research, as do others, but what is really needed is sustained dialogue in the south between informed civil society and government.  Think of the role that someone like Michael Geist plays in Canada or Rufus Pollock in the UK.  Universities were and are the critical enablers for them.  We need more of that in the South, that is to say dialogue not solutions.  Solutions emerge naturally from constructive dialogue.
  3. Open Government is complex.  There is a kind of naive optimism around Open Government which comes from the forty thousand foot view that many donors have.  Kenya, the poster child for Open Government in Africa, has experienced its own challenges with Open Government. There are vested interests, entrenched centres of power, contradictory priorities (protection of privacy, cyber security, etc), lack of capacity and many other issues, all of which take time and engagement to deal with.  This calls more for sustained local dialogue, engagement, and capacity building than for entrepreneurs building open data apps.
  4. Most countries in the South have a critical lack of institutions that can engage on cyber governance issues.  It is not just Open Government but digital privacy, surveillance, cyber security, Internet governance and a host of other issues that demand a generation of researchers and policy-makers with the interest and capacity to lead their countries and probably the world to better decision-making on these issues.  Invest in those institutions and you will get Southern leadership on these issues and make it easier for future funders to find the right places to engage.
  5. Policy work is a long game.  Institutions need to know they can commit beyond a few years.  This would allow them the time and resources needed to bring about real change.

My 2 cents or 50 million dollars as the case may be.

 

Cape Town to Lunenburg

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Yesterday I touched down with my family in Halifax, Canada, our new home for the next few years.  Well, actually near there, a small town south of Halifax called Lunenburg.  When you have a foot in more than one country, choosing where to live can be complicated.

In this case, the choice was not so hard.  Our boys are at an age (6,6, and 7) where spending some time growing up closer to their grandparents is going to make their lives a much richer experience.

From a professional perspective this is a little complicated as all of my work with Village Telco, spectrum advocacy, among other things, is focused on affordable access to communication infrastructure in emerging markets.  Managing my carbon footprint over the next couple of years is likely to be challenging.

I am gutted to have left South Africa when there feels like so much unfinished business for me there but I hope to be back there often enough to stay engaged and maintain my dual identity.

If you’re a Nova Scotian and are interested in Africa, hacking, open source, and wireless technologies, I’d love to meet you.  All of the above would be amazing but I’d happily settle for any subset. :-)