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I’m in an airport, beginning a day of transit that seems to bend time in a Time Zonish way, so I haven’t had time to actually read this Pew Internet report, but my understanding is that it challenges the assumption that mobiles, texting, the Internet, and all the rest make us more isolated. It turns out (apparently), that Internet and cell phone users have larger and more diverse social networks than non-users. Which way the causality runs, I don’t know. But the Pew Internet stuff is invariably interesting, so I thought I’d point it out.

Now, it’s off to the airport gate so that I can circle the globe in the wrong direction, reverse the flow of time, and finally remember where I put that Superman comic in 1958.

I’m at IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in Milan. The Europe-wide president of IAB, Alain Heureux, is giving a talk that includes a section on the self-regulatory mechanisms IAB is proposing as it watches Brussels begin to formulate policy.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Alain goes through the following “road map”:

1. Opt out. It’d be a burden on the user to ask for opt in for IP addresses and cookies, so it’s important that there always be opt-out mechanisms. There could and should be centralized pages that explain exactly what the various types of cookies are, what they’re used for, and that give users the ability to turn them on or off.

2. Education and transparency. There should be sites [built by IAB?] that educate the public and that are completely transparent about the practices.

3. Good practices and codes of conduct.

4. Communication.

5. Research. Alain points to a survey of 32,000 customers across Europe (the MCDC), and a consumer benefits study that tries to quantify the economic value that users are getting at all those free sites we love so much.

By the way, attendance at the Italian IAB (pronounced “yob”) continues to increase. It started 7 years ago with 300 people, and this year there are 7,000 attendees, which is up 20% over last year. Pretty impressive given the state of the economy.

Some folks, including Nadia El-Imam, have put together an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 that is going to be presented alongside the declaration of the European ministers at the Malmö ministerial conference in about 3 weeks. They’re looking for signatures.

The Google Operating System blog (independent of Google) has a useful post explaining why it’s a bad idea to send large attachments, even though Google now lets you attach files up to 25MB in size.

The reasons the post gives have to do with how inefficient attachments are for the system: They get expanded and require multiple uncached downloads. But, those reasons won’t carry a lot of water for people who just want to send their 25MB Powerpoint presentation to 35 people who simply have to see it. (Mea culpa. Except these days it’d be Keynote for me … which seems to make much larger files than Powerpoint.) Until we come up with an easier way to send around files — or a way that adds enough other benefits — we’re going to be wrapping our attachment anvils in brown paper and twine, sticking stamps on them, and sending them through the emails just like God and Google intended.

I have to say I enjoyed this message from Bill, urging his fellow Mainers to vote against Question 1, which would undo the state’s gay marriage law. I’m in agreement with Bill’s opinions, but I also admired the writing and rhetoric.

Notes from Pekka Himanen’s conference The Hacker Ethic: The Way Forward after the Current Global Economic Crisis held at the Open University of Catalonia/Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Barcelona (Spain), on November 2nd, 2009.

The hacker ethic is the cultural factor that emerges from the Network Society. If the Network Society is a new social paradigm, the hacker ethic is the culture that results from all the changes that conform the Network Society.

An emphasis to be made is that the hacker ethic is not only about computer scientists, or about geeks and nerds, but it is a wider cultural transformation in the sense of the number and kind of people that might fit the definition. The hacker ethic can effectively be taken out of the technological sphere.

So, in context, if this is a Network Society and this is its culture, what is the role of hacker ethic in today’s economy and today’s crisis? Beyond economic development we need a broader sense of development. And it is likely that this new ethic can be part of the solution, of this broader sense of development.

Fundamental challenges nowadays:

• Clean: Climate change, being radical innovation the way to go forward;
• Care: Welfare society 2.0, as inequality increases and more people are unattended;
• Culture: Multicultural life, how to cope with the increasing cultural crossroads that globalization is creating.

How can innovation turn challenges into opportunities? How can hacker ethic help in creating innovation-based solutions? Hackers can help to discover cleaner energy sources, biohackers will eventually help in creating a healthier society (being DNA the open source of life), cultural hackers can help in creating new and more meanings in multicultural life.

The problem is that the world economic, innovation and scientific centres are not evenly distributed across the world, but mainly concentrated in the US, Europe and some Asian countries. Why are these so much concentrated?

Innovation centre dynamics, or what do you need to have an innovation centre:

• Culture of creativity: hacker ethic
• Community of enrichment, where failing is accepted, where entrepreneurship is fostered, where ideas are economically supported (funded)
• Creative people

Face-to-face communication — added to virtual communication and knowledge exchange — is what creates this climate or environment of innovation. This is what we find in Silicon Valley around Stanford University, or in other innovation centres around the world.

Increasingly, creative, innovative, knowledge intensive jobs are any more at the edges of the economic system, but at their sheer centre. Thus, it is important to know how to enable and foster the creation of such centres, as they are likely to be the solutions — or the solutions providers — for the crisis and for future development.

Ancient Athens went through an important era of huge investments that concentrated a lot of creative activities driven by Plato, Socrates, Pericles, etc. The Agora and surrounding buildings was an infrastructure for communication and interaction that brought together people from different backgrounds. Just like Silicon Valley and Stanford University.

Hacker’s ethic: creativity, that relies on a community of enrichment, that relies on mutual confidence. In this three layer structure, you both (a) feel like part of a big, powerful community and (b) are actually acknowledged as a person (not as a number). And it is a self-feeding logic.

Ismael Peña-López: how do you change mindsets? how do you transform a short-run profit system into a meritocratic, hacker system? Himanen: the most important thing to do is to change education. On the other hand, there are plenty of good examples of applied hacker ethic; there are also good ideas that get funding for addressing the more urgent challenges, and maybe what’s changed is that, instead of having a project, or a business plan, is having a mission.
Castells: it is not about being good or bad, but clever or stupid. All major innovations come from communities and just rarely from individuals or even small teams. All major advances are based on smart collaboration.

Enric Senabre: What’s the acceptance of the hacker in public opinion? Himanen: hackers are not computer criminals; and hackers are not computer nerds. It is about a real ethos. It’s an informational work ethic, a creative ethic.
Castells: The good thing about the term “hacker ethic” is that it challenges many prejudices and ex-ante thoughts at the same time.

Daniel López: How to move forward the concept of “hacker”? What about “craftmanship”? Himanen: Of course, hacker has something to do with craftmanship. But the term hacker is also a self-adopted term by hackers themselves, which makes it special.

Q: Do you consider yourself a hacker, or feel like one? Himanen: yes, it is all about passion, a creative passion, and the way of doing things almost obsessively, though a pleasant obsession.

Q: Is hacker ethic spreading? Is there more people becoming hackers? Himanen: There is some evidence that in two years there’ll be work shortage, as many people will retire. And people will be able to chose their works and do it on a mission-basis or on an environment-basis, more than just wage or other similar conditions.

Ricard Ruiz de Querol: Is the actual crisis a financial crisis? If so, what’s the feeling like in hackers environments about it? Himanen: hacker ethic is a neutral term, it just describes the relationship with work. And it is independent from social values. Notwithstanding, it is difficult that lack of specific social values (e.g. a better world) is compatible with hacker ethic. What, then, would your creativity serve?

Anna Soliguer: How can hacker ethic inspire social movements? Himanen: In some sense, Obama followed a hacker ethic. The thing is how to link participation in social movements with leadership.

Q: Is there any particular reason why hacker ethic is stronger in welfare states (e.g. in Scandinavia)? Are people from the Pirate Bay hackers? Do they pursue a better world? Himanen: Finland, for instance, is a place where, in general, there is this creative environment that is so strongly needed for hacker ethic to emerge (e.g. it took Linus Torvalds 8 years to finish his Masters’ thesis and nobody made an issue about it). On the other hand, if you have some basic needs covered (by a welfare state) you’re not that urged to make profit out of your ideas or personal time.
Castells: most hackers come originally from the US, where not welfare but the idea of freedom is what predominates. The idea being that you can have different economic systems that lead to hackerism, but what is necessary is the aim to create and a system that allows this creation. On the contrary, continental Europe, traditionally the craddle of the welfare state, has not a huge community of hackers.

Ismael Peña-López: Reality has change so much from the origins of the hacker ethic in the late 60s and the early 70s. Will the hacker ethic fade out and disappear? What, then, will happen with the Network Society? Himanen: political involvement is only partly true. People where not that involved in politics but in social rights movements, and, on the other hand, people still are involved, though in different ways: people are not interested in political hierarchies, but other ways of engagement. Indeed, people are increasingly engaged, though in newer ways.
Castells: hacker ethic is not a cause of the Network Society, but a consequence. Hence, the whole world is entirely inside the Network Society and there is no way back. On the other hand, the creativeness of the hacker ethic had to cut through the system during the late 60s and early 70s, to fight against bureaucracies. Nowadays, on the contrary, it is the corporate world who is adopting hacker ethics (e.g. Google), and most big companies are increasingly relying on the passion to create, even Microsoft is doing this. If we forget about the label “hacker”, we will find plenty of examples of “creativity” and “innovation”, which is at the core of hacker ethic.

Begoña Gros: at our schools, we are promoting neither creativity nor passion. What’s it like in Finland? Himanen: curiosity is fostered in Finland. When you’re passionate about one thing, you begin putting questions about that, and this is something that the Finnish educational system is comfortable with. On the other hand, you’re invited to find what you want to do in life, to find a meaning, before going on (e.g. to the job market). The good thing about Linus Torvalds is not only his talent, but the ability to develop things, to help things become important not only for you but for others. This means, notwithstanding, that we have to go on encouraging creativity and innovation at school, so to make a hacker ethic possible amongst students.

From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

So, this is good techie news, but also a bit more.

(Here’s the NYT on the news. And I heard about this from my friend Britt Blaser, whose Open Resource Group citizen-to-government software runs on Drupal. (Disclosure: I volunteer as an adviser to Britt’s group.)

In his latest post — Good Practice in ICT4D Research — Richard Heeks raises the issue on how ICTs can directly contribute to economic growth and poverty alleviation.

The topic also appeared during the Specialized Areas Workshop held at the Fourth Annual IPID ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium which Åke Grönlund conducted. There, the “what poor people need is money” motto constantly came in and out of the conversation.

Being an economist myself, I can only agree with Richard Heeks on his advice to focus on money — economic growth, income, economic sustainability, productivity, competitiveness — when dealing about the role of ICTs in an economy.

But poverty has many causes and consequences. And I personally think that addressing the economic part of poverty is addressing only the material part of poverty, that is, poverty itself: lack of income, inequality, etc. But ICT4D should also focus in the part of the non-material causes, sometimes called the context. Indeed, Heeks somehow points at it too when he writes of the need to speak to development.

In addition to that, there is a third course of action: to change the whole system, the whole landscape, the rules of the game. This is what (some) leapfroggers mean to do: change their whole (or a good part of it) economic system and take the chance of ICTs to base that change on, using ICTs as a locomotive to pull the rest of the economy upwards.

Following an idea I already developed in Fostering the Information Society for Development in the Web 2.0 framework, and partially based on Welzel et al.’s The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis, I think that these three approaches of ICT4D could be schematically put this way:

This would relate to the pure Economics point of view, and would deal with what resources people have at hand — the classical capital, labour, human capital… maybe even land — and how these resources can be altered or improved by means of ICTs — productivity, multifactor productivity, competitiveness, efficiency, efficacy —.

On the other side of the telescope, ICTs and Economics should also deal with the final impact of the transformation of these inputs by means of ICTs: income, wealth, economic growth.

Besides resources, or besides the objective choice, a more “human” approach is possible taking into account subjective and effective choice. It is the realm of values and rights, which quite often are enablers, multipliers or barriers to development. I am convinced that there are three main fields that should be prioritized in any development approach, with or without ICTs:

• Health (which includes Nutrition and Housing, of course), as the basic endowment of personal resources — yes, it is closely linked to the previous approach, but it determines many other things like self-confidence, personal welfare, etc. which are not related to Economics.
• Education, as the main empowerer — again, related with human capital, but here dealt more with feelings and one’s place in the World, one’s ability to lead one’s own development, to take decisions, to riase self-awareness (and e-awareness)
• Governance, as the generic framework where everything else — Economics and Human Development — happens or just does not happen.

Though also related with the economicist approach, what leapfrogging pretends is to (a) circumvent the long path of development by skipping some of its phases and, by doing so, (b) transforming the focus and structure of the whole (national) economy.

It is, in part, what steal, the steam engine, railroads, the automotive industry, etc. did in England first, and then in other places of the world, during the Industrial Revolution. It is about changing the system, not changing within the system.

While I see the role of ICTs and Economic Growth and ICTs and Human Development pretty clear, I am not that sure about the third approach: leapfrogging.

On the one hand, my own data show that there might be, in general, a single path towards digital development. This is neither imperialism nor patronising: this is evidence. The reason being that, despite the fact that there might be other developing paths, the world economy is global, interconnected and, for good or for bad, with a strong set of economic rules already defined for everyone. And if you are in this world — which you are — these rules are, like it or not, affecting you.

On the other hand, I am afraid that ICTs might be having the same treatment in some lower income countries that monoculture had in most Latin American and Caribbean countries or that oil has in most Middle East countries: export economies highly depending on international trade and its volatile prices, and with relatively small impact on domestic economies at large (that is, leaving aside plutocracies and corrupt governments).

It would be sad to realize that, after impressive efforts to adopt ICTs in lower income countries to leapfrog development, we ended up having an elite controlling an international trade-focused ICT Sector, whose only interest is to pay low wages to carry out the offshored, low profile, low added value services that rich countries do not want to do. It might be good in the short run — jobs, currency entries, more money for domestic consumption — but, as History has shown, it might but reproduce the rich/poor system in the long run.

Joe Trippi has an important post about to understand the upcoming election results: The electorate’s Us vs. Them has changed from Our Party vs. Their Party to The Electorate vs. Anyone in Power:

Voters are increasingly seeing themselves as “us” and both parties in Washington as “them.” They are not going to discriminate between the two parties in 2010. The results next Tuesday will likely demonstrate the voter’s frustration with those in power, regardless of party. Far from signaling a backlash against Democratic rule and hope for the Republican Party, the results on Tuesday will signal that in 2010 incumbents in both parties, of all ideological stripes should be frightened.

Notes from the first II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social (II International Conference on the Digital Divide and Social Inclusion held at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid will be hosting at their campus in Leganés (Spain) on October 28th to 30th, 2009.

Education makes a difference in technology adoption. But socialization — or the social factor — is even more important. on the other hand, we tend to focus on content, on knowledge, when assessing the success of education, but just seldom focus on skills and competences; though this should be the goal of the school and of Education at large.

Cognitive processes become useful when applied into action. That’s why the shift from knowledge to competences is so important.

Map of skills:

• reasoning,
• oral expression,
• literacy,
• ICT skills and media literacy,
• informational literacy.

While Internet penetration is still low and increases with a very low speed, mobile telephony has a higher penetration and is indeed more quickly adopted by new users. We should probably leverage mobile telephony to foster access to the Information Society.

Some insights:

• The technological divide is an output of the economic development
• Education is determinant for social inclusion
• Cognitive inequality is cause-effect of the digital divide
• We need inclusive societies, and education is an inequality killer
• Policies of informational inclusion are highly required

Libraries, historically: expensive, based on scarcity, classy or elitist, individualist. Now, content is free, there is abundance, democratization of the access to knowledge, interactivity.

The digital divide is not only lack of access to technology, but the practices. Illiteracy has always been a factor of differentiation and power. But, actually, the concept itself of citizenship has changed in a digital society. To be a full citizen, several literacies have to be mastered: basic literacy, media, technological and informational. We need multiliteracies.

Two opposite approaches when fostering the Information Society: mercantilist vs. aimed towards inclusion for a democratic development. In the words of Paulo Freire: Banking literacy (I’ve got stock of knowledge and can give it to you) vs. problem literacy (you have to feel you need to know things to solve your problems).

Dimensions of skills:

• Instrumental dimension: know how to access information
• Cognitive dimension: know how to transform the information into knowledge
• Socio-comunicational dimension: know how to express oneself and communicate
• Axiological dimension: know how to use information democratically and ethically

Summing up: without a multiliterate citizenry there will be not a democratic building of the Information Society.

How do digital natives behave? Concerning just usage (not their skills) it doesn’t seem that there are many different across ages, being “just for fun” the main reason people access the Internet. Hence, digital natives might not be that savvy when it comes to mastering usage (not tools).

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) offers new opportunities to change the way people learn and, more important, how resources are made available for and used by students. This, of course, puts the focus on students’ competences and, among others, on digital skills, necessary to access digital information.

The library helped in creating a subject on “Search and usage of information techniques”:

• where to find information you can trust;
• ethical use of information, citing and bibliography;
• information retrieving in electronic environments

I think that most definitions on what digital literacy is, fall short in many issues, especially in the community factor and the strategical factor. Please see Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills, by myself prior in this blog.

On the other hand, after a debate on “good” or “bad” uses of the Internet, I strongly recommend reading Neuman & Celano’s The Knowledge Gap: Implications of Leveling the Playing Field for Low-Income and Middle-Income Children and Warschauer’s Laptops and Literacy: A Multi-Site Case Study.