I did a little reporting to get the real story behind the reports of a Facebook burglary spree that supposedly used the service — right after its launch of Places — to find victims who were away on vacation. I emailed Nashua, NH detective Dan Archambault, who told me that only two of the cases involved Facebook and in each case, “one or two of the suspects were Facebook friends with the respective homeowners. They basically had access to the walls and could read that the families were away on vacation. The information was only available to friends and the Facebook Places feature was NOT a part of this. And finally my advice to Facebook users is carefully pick your friends and watch what you post.”
And my advice is don’t believe everything you read. So this was not a case of a criminal using Facebook to find any old random victim. The implication of the coverage is that we were all — all 500 million of us — at risk for being so foolish to make ourselves public on Facebook and make ourselves vulnerable to every criminal out there. No, it’s foolish to make the wrong friends. Always has been. Still is.
I also contacted Facebook, and a PR person there sent back suggestions for how to wisely use the service: “I would recommend creating friend lists to separate people you really trust from others. Then, use the publisher privacy control to
send status updates to appropriate groups (and only them). I actually think it may make sense to tell people you really trust that you are gone through Facebook just as you would in person. Then, they can watch your place for you, feed your cat, etc… As for everyone else, if you wouldn’t tell them in person you were leaving town, you probably shouldn’t use Facebook to tell them. As always, we also recommend people only accept friend requests from others they actually know.”
All sensible.
If only things were so simple for Google, where, according to Gawker, an engineer used his high-level access to the company’s data bases to stalk teenagers. Google fired him. But the damage is done. We spoke about the case on today’s This Week in Google and as Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani said, to keep systems running, someone will always have access to data. Of course, that someone should be trusted. But as this case reveals, you never know whom to trust. So the company must come up with systems to assure trust. Should there be teams that must operate together in failsafe mode to get access to data? You tell me what would work.
The bottom line for both companies is that trust is essential and cases such as these can ruin trust and eventually ruin companies if we cannot depend on them. In the first case, media blew up a story for effect. In the second case, a dangerous vulnerability is revealed.
: AND: Being a journalism professor, I suppose I should point out the journalistic lesson here about reporting.
When this story first came out, it was marked by sloppy reporting that was only repeated and diluted. I read a number of the reports and backed up the line to the Nashua paper trying to find answers to basic questions. Nothing.
For anyone who knows the slightest thing about Facebook — that is, any reporter who uses it — the reporting raised obvious questions. So I contacted Facebook, who gave me the email of the detective, and I asked him: How did the accused use Facebook? In how many cases? Were they friends — that is, connected on Facebook — with any of the victims? Facebook tells me that its Places feature was not involved; true? Finally, what advice do you have for people using Facebook? Plus a few, more-detailed questions about the specifics of how these victims used Facebook.
The detective said this is an ongoing investigation, so he was limited in what he could tell me. But, as you can see, he answered the essential and obvious questions reporters and editors should have asked before. And if they didn’t have answers, they should have said so. I say lately that the key skill of journalists is going to be less saying what we know than saying what we don’t know. That is the essential skill in process journalism.
But all along the chain, nobody wanted to ruin a good story: USE FACEBOOK AND YOU’LL BE ROBBED! Much more fun, isn’t it? Reporting takes all the fun out of it.
Various German commenters in my prior post about my talk in Berlin are taking me to task because I dared hark back to World War II in a discussion of government-required identity cards and how that enables the state to monitor the people — and a discussion of the value of publicness and how that enables the people to monitor the state.
“I really don’t think it it necessary to pull the ‘Nazi-card,’” said one. “Please don’t even in an article about Google make strange references to the Nazi history…” said another. “Can we please let the nazis peacefully burn in hell? K thx,” asks one more. “It’s always the krauts, blitzkrieg and all that,” complains the last.
So apparently Germans are allowed to say Nazi. I’m not.
Let’s examine that. In Friday’s discussion in Berlin, it was the German politicians who alluded to World War II and East German oppression. Thilo Weichert, the privacy commissioner, raised the allusion in his opening remarks: “Of course, we have a Nazi history in Germany and we have the DDR history, which makes clear to us how information can bring oppression.” A reporter in the crowd asked whether in decades we’d believe that “pixelated buildings were taken away from historians and the public, so Germany would look worse than after the war.” Renate Künast, the Green leader in the Budestag, huffed in reply that “the reconstruction of the pixelated buildings is much easier than what the Trümmerfrau [women who cleaned up rubble] did after the war.”
As I said in my post, every time I talk about privacy in Germany, I am reminded by Germans that I must consider the context of the Nazi and Stasi past. It is in this very context that I raise the spectre of police stopping citizens on the street to demand identification for reasons that cannot always be predicted and protected against. It has happened before. It is in this context that I raise the idea that what’s public is a public good that can nonetheless be destroyed by government’s actions. It has happened before. It is in this context that I raise the warning that the people should not give anyone, especially government, the right to hide in public by forbidding us to picture what happens there. It has happened before. And it is in this context that I pointed to what I confessed was the too-obvious — but very, ahem, concrete — metaphor of a bunker just at the corner as a warning of a society that closes inward in defensiveness. It has happened before. But apparently, I’m not allowed to say that. Only Germans are.
(And note well that in my book, I will also spend considerable time talking about another part of German history, Gutenberg’s, and the transition from one way of cognating and expressing the world. Because it has happened before.)
More context: I’m a friend of Germany. I love the place. I married into a German family. I am fascinated by the people. I go there as often as I can find an excuse. I am grateful that my career and the internet have enabled me to make friends and have colleagues there. I hold the nation and its accomplishments in high esteem while I learn lessons from its past. I have studied the nation’s history with shelves of book at home on the subject. I have studied the language but to little avail and I apologize for that every time I am in Germany.
I do not apologize for my affection for Germany. But I must tell you, my German friends, that many Americans expect me to. I get funny looks when it comes out that I took German in school and I am asked why I would do that. People ask about my politics as a result. I know Americans, still, who won’t buy products made in Germany. I defend Germany to them. And part of that defense is to tell them how much the Germans talk about their past and consider it. Tucked all over Berlin are memorials to the victims of that past. At the Topography of Terror exhibit in the remains of the basement of the Gestapo headquarters, the list of those memorials — a plaque of plaques — is amazingly and tragically long.
But in the discussion here, it is as if my critics are saying, “We talk about our past and that is enough. So you shouldn’t.” Or worse, they are saying we should not talk about the past. It is as if they are saying that for me, Nazi is the N word.
But as someone from a nation of oppressors myself, I think we need to examine the etymology and ownership of words of oppression. Here, the American N word was a tool of oppression whose ownership was taken over by its oppressed. As a white American, I may not use it and that is as it should be.
But in Germany, I am hearing that Nazi is a word Germans may use but not others. Sorry, but the word no longer belongs to Germany; in Germany’s hands, it was a tool of oppression. So now it belongs to its victims, to the rest of the world.
If that word is used only as an insult — see: Godwin’s Law — then it is being misused. But that was not the case in the present discussion. Here, all of us — the German government officials and I — were trying to find context in history for changes in our world brought on by digital identity and its impact on privacy and the tools of publicness and their impact on our power in society. That is a perfectly legitimate discussion. It should not be shut down, my German friends, because you don’t like hearing someone else use what you think is your N word.
My points about the past are serious indeed. Beware government using your identity as its tool against you. Beware the precedent of telling Google it may not picture what’s public as that enables those in power to stop the rest of us — the public — from picturing what is public. And beware bewaring too much, talking just about what could go wrong and missing the opportunities change brings because we keep looking back instead of forward.
I was gobsmacked sitting on a stage in Berlin when the privacy commissioner for a German state erupted in an attack on Google—which, by the way, has the highest market penetration in Germany of anywhere in the world (97.4% there vs. 65.4% in the U.S.).
“As long as Germans are stupid enough to use this search engine,” he spat, “they don’t deserve any better.”
This from Thilo Weichert, privacy maven for Schleswig-Holstein, brought to the stage, with me, by the Green Party for a discussion about privacy last week, where we were joined by Renate Künast, head of the party’s delegation in parliament, and Konstantin von Notz, their MP overseeing matters digital.
Before I went to Berlin I asked why the Germans are so bonkers about Google and privacy. But now I wonder whether it’s the Germans or their media and politicians.
Witness that moment: Here a public official charged with representing and protecting the public so cavalierly—no, so hostilely—dismisses and insults his own constituents and thinks he should tell them what to do. I ask him what harm Google has done him. He has no answer. He complains that “Google uses information to manipulate me.” Any more than any marketer … or politician?
Weichert also stood on stage supporting the German government’s move to require digital ID cards with embedded RFID. The Greens don’t agree; they are worried about the card. But Weichert goes farther: He says the ID cards should be used to verify identity on the internet. Now he’s spooking *me* about privacy.
As I listen in German, I hear the card called an “Ausweis” and I shiver just a bit that no one seems to recognize the ghost in the word. In America watching war movies, there was never a more frightening phrase than “Ausweis, bitte” — “papers, please” (see this from Arizona). When I talk about going too far with privacy, Germans remind me about their Stasi and Nazi past. Yet here is the government instituting electronic ID with technology that makes some American go nutty if it’s attached anonymously to pants!
This is the other German paradox — or as someone said at the Re:publica conference in Berlin after my talk about publicness, this is the American paradox: Americans mistrust government more than Europeans even though we have arguably had better governments than they have. And we trust companies more than Europeans even though we have arguably had worse companies.
I heard much mistrust of companies — well, especially one company: Google — in Berlin. “Google is the worst example of openness and transparency and the willingness to serve the democratic needs of society,” Weichert said on stage. He had what seems to be a legitimate complaint, saying that Google refused to meet with him an other privacy commissioners. But then again, a friend in the audience this night was twittering with a Google public affairs person in Germany who was watching the event on the web and was wondering why he hadn’t been invited to respond. Nonetheless, it’s unquestionably the case that Google has a PR problem in Germany.
You’d think Google would be better at PR given that Weichert insisted the company’s decision to end its censorship in China was “nothing but a PR trick.” He went farther, equating Google as an unsurveilled surveiller with China and Iran! “Google’s only interest is to earn money,” he said, as if shocked. That was a theme of the night: Google dares to make money. A Green journalist in the audience complained that Google uses data “to sell me.” I asked what newspaper doesn’t do that. Google, he said, “misuses my data to become too big.” Show me the line marked “too big,” I asked.
So is Google’s problem hostility to business or to America? Weichert denied both. But he complained that “no secret service is more secretive than the Americans’.” (I suspect the CIA would take that as a compliment.) He said the U.S. is focused too much on freedom of information and openness and not enough on privacy.
There may be nascent anti-Americanism but I don’t think that’s the root of this. Is it a misunderstanding of the
ways of the new digital world? Perhaps. Künast, whom I found to be a reasonable politician, launched into an odd discourse on taking pictures of the Bundestag and whether, if those pictures are sold in a souvenir shop online, a share of the profits ought to go to the German people and government since they own the building. Eh?
Maybe the problem is the concept of the public and the idea of control over the public. Künast is talking about controlling ownership and use of what is public. Weichert’s talking about limiting what’s public in public; he gets mad at me mocking the German movement toward a “Verpixelungsrecht” — a right to be pixelated, even for buildings! Weichert says we should all default to private and I ask whether we should default to public. I think that publicness is defined by openness and a lack of restriction. When you diminish what’s public you take from us, the public. For we own what’s public.
There’s additional historical irony having this conversation in Germany, where Jürgen Habermas is credited with defining the concept of the public sphere, though in my book I’ll argue that Habermas corrupted an earlier concept of making publics — plural. The internet returns us to the idea of making public gives us all the power to do so — and I don’t want to see that taken for granted or taken away.
So I argue that we need to protect our tool of publicness. That’s what we should be talking about. There, at last, there is some agreement: to the need to have a discussion about a charter of rights online. I propose mine, knowing it’s inadequate. Künast says government should begin by legislating essential rights.
Well, OK, but I said on stage that, with all due respect, I didn’t want either government or business claiming dominion over the public’s tool of publicness, our internet. I called on John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace. I don’t want Google and Verizon carving up the internet like the Sudetenland without us, its citizens, at that table. I sure as hell don’t want Herr Weichert telling me how I should use his internet. I implore the crowd to take charge of this charter themselves.
If they don’t, if the internet gets locked down and cemented up, I fear it will look like this bunker that — oh, photographic irony — stands just outside the Heinrich Böll Foundation where we are speaking:
That’s a World War II bunker now owned by a millionnaire who built a penthouse on top and put an art gallery into the floors below behind doors that are opened for guided tours by appointment. The metaphor is too obvious even for an American.
What gives me some hope is that folks in the audience — digital folks — are fighting the good fight and they’re doing it with humor. Jens Best started a movement to shoot photos of all the pixelated buildings in Google Street View and link them to those addresses. And here’s a video (watch to the end) about the pixelated man:
At the start of the evening, Künast says that “freedom can comprise anonymity.” Yes, but freedom also comprises publicness. Publicness may be our highest right of freedom — to stand up and say what we think and be who we are and join together and act without fear of oppression. Surely, that should resonate here. That is just the sort of balancing discussion we must have so people know they have a choice and protect that choice. We need to protect their right to be private. But we also must protect the rights of the public.
I challenge Künast — who, rumor has it, may next become the mayor of Berlin (she says nothing) — to make the city a model of openness, a monument to the public and I suggest that her party should call a conference to begin discussion of our rights. Just make it our discussion.
: LATER: Thanks to Stecki in the comments, here is Weichert calling his constituents “dumm” (auf Deutsch) and my challenge (in English):
: LATER STILL: Here is audio of the event. Sorry that it’s a mix of German and English.
“The internet needs you,” I said to Howard Stern when I called into the show this morning as he was ranting about his contract negotiations with Sirius XM and the possibility that he could take his show and more to the net.
Do it, Howard.
“You made satellite radio,” I told him. “You will make the internet.” For Stern is the one media entity who can absolutely, positively get people to pay online — even me, the alleged opponent of all things paid. Today I pay $12 a month for Stern — more, actually, with my internet account and my wife’s and son’s cars. Stern is talking about charging $5 a month and for that we’d get his radio show plus his TV shows plus much more, even music — and no advertising (“why should I hire a sales force?” he asked).
Sold.
Why the hell would I pay for Howard Stern and not pay for news? Because Howard is unique. News isn’t. There’s no end of potential competition for any news provider and its unique value expires in seconds. Not so Howard. Arianna Huffington was wrong when she says that people will pay for business news and porn. There’s no need to pay for porn because there’s no scarcity of people who will strip and shtupp in front of a webcam. But there’s only one Howard.
I wrote about Howard’s potential internet empire here. Fellow Howard fan Doc Searls wrote about the potential here. Way back in 2005, I wrote an open letter to Sirius’ Mel Karmazin urging him to embrace the internet and see satellite as just as transitional delivery mechanism for his valuable content (ignore the fucking spam links on the post). He didn’t listen. Apparently, he’s not listening to Howard, either.
Fine. Even though I’m a Sirius shareholder and even though his departure would lead to a plummet in the stock price (from 2¢ to 1¢), I want him to leave because he will turn the internet into a credible, sustainable, mass entertainment medium. The delivery’s tricky but that will be fixed quickly as we carry connected devices all the time, everywhere: our phones, computers, TVs, cars, tablets, and devices we can’t imagine will all be connected (if the phone companies don’t fuck it up). The critical last six inches for Stern are not his penis but the means by which his show gets from my phone to my car speakers. But it’ll be cheaper to install a bluetooth transmitter than a Sirius radio. If we millions of Stern fans went to the trouble of subscribing to and installing Sirius, we’ll do it with something even easier that gives us the entire internet all the time.
For Stern, the economics have to be extremely tempting. He should not work for a company. (Howard: Don’t get sucked into signing on with another employer!) He should be the company. He can charge us less than half what we pay now. He can build the infrastructure for next to nothing (as he said today, he can build a studio — big deal). All he needs is a billing mechanism (Paypal?) and a bandwidth provider (Akamai?). He won’t need to market; he already is viral. And he gets to keep the profits. Sweet.
For us, we get to listen to Stern whenever and wherever we want. (Howard: Please let us listen to repeats on our own schedule, on demand!) We pay less and don’t suffer through ads for itchy-ball cures.
For the internet, we get to prove to unique entertainers everywhere that they can cut out the middlemen — networks, studios, all that — and create valuable relationships directly with their fans, getting much richer in the process. And that, in turn, forces entertainers, studios, networks, and cable companies to sell us entertainment a la carte, so I can stop paying for the damned 95% of my channels I never watch.
What’s not to love?
Do it, Howard. Leave old technology. Build the next medium, our medium. To hell with all the old media companies that have screwed you and us all these years. This is real freedom.
Let me start with a disclosure: I hope to think that Craig Newmark is a friend. He can be as hard for me to read as James Joyce or C++. But I know him as a decent and genuine man who believes that he is bringing a service to millions of people, saving them billions of dollars that used to go to overpriced, monopolistic middlemen. He doesn’t do it to get rich (I’ve driven by his office and home and they ain’t palaces), which is precisely what bedevils those old middlemen; I’ve watched them try to break him and prove he’s greedy, too, and I’ve watched them fail. When I last had coffee with Craig in San Francisco (on the craigslist tab, I should disclose), he talked about the number of free ads craigslist has given people in terms of economic philanthropy, which is also what he said to my students at CUNY two years ago.
These days, Craig and the company he founded are being demonized in courts of political and media power as sex peddlers. The service — which Craig is quick to point out, he does not run; he means it when he says he is its customer-service representative — just took down its adult ads in the U.S., replacing the link with the word “censored.”
The argument has been that craigslist ads are used to serve human sex trafficking. Except craigslist has been openly and consistently helping police in their efforts to arrest traffickers. The adult ads were paid and more trackable than free personals on craigslist or ads in many other places online and in print. Now the trade, whatever its scale, is only more distributed. Gawker has a guide to post-craigslist paid sex and craigslist has pointed out that even eBay has sold party favors of another sort.
So why are government and media going after craigslist? The same reason, I think, that media and government in, for example, Germany are demonizing Google (even as the German people give Google its biggest market share anywhere in the world). They’re going after the disruptors, the biggest disruptors in sight.
Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year, leaving that money in the pockets of former advertiser-customers. Since Google and the internet have existed, many more billions have left traditional media as Google offered their former ad customers a better deal.
The New York Times today belittles craigslist’s censorship, calling it a “stunt” and “ploy” and labeling as “screeds” craisglist CEO Jim Buckmaster’s defenses of the service—and of free speech—against attorneys general and against ratings-starved CNN ambushing Craig. Nowhere does The Times disclose its own dead dog in this hunt, its loss of billions in classified revenue (in blogs, we’d be expected to, eh?). But the paper does acknowledge that the law is on craigslist’s side even if its enforcers are not and that this is a matter of free speech, which should put The Times and its journalists on craigslist’s side as well.
But they’re not. I’m not suggesting conspiracy; I rarely do. But I do see old power structures huddling together against the cold breath of technologists bringing change. At the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer, I asked Google’s Eric Schmidt whether we were going through a larger restructuring than a mere crisis. He replied that he wished we were but cautioned that, as I wrote then, too much of our resource, people, government help and attention go to the big, old legacy companies rather than supporting innovation (read: disruption). I would have translated that into the idea that instead of bailing out GM and subsidizing and artificially, temporarily propping up house and car prices, government should invest in bringing broadband to every door. I would have hoped that Schmidt might have agreed. Sadly, even he is now listing to the legacy. Google, the big boy, plays with other big boys.
But craigslist is still the weird kid. At the end of its story, The Times quotes someone saying that “Craigslist is not your typical company in the sense that it doesn’t seem to be exclusively motivated by profit.” What a strange, inscrutable child, it is. It’s easier to attack a company that doesn’t act like a company. And it’s easier to attack free speech and liberty when they — and dollars — are spent on nasty sex.
But this is a fight of old establishment power — business, media, and political — against new and disruptive technologists who are writing new rules. This is also a fight over freedom of speech. Last night, I woke up on the couch to see the end of The People vs. Larry Flynt. In this country, we protect bad speech to protect all speech.
Yes, prostitution is illegal. It long has been — the oldest laws cover the oldest profession — but the authorities have been blinking at ads for *cough* escort services in newspapers of many sorts for many years (here are the Village Voice’s adult ads). I’m headed to Berlin and Amsterdam in a few weeks, where prostitution is legal and regulated. Beyond exploitation of children — which every civilized person on earth abhors; as Mike Masnick says, the real enemy, not discussed in all this, is the trafficker — do we really want and need government regulating sex among free-willed adults? But that’s not the issue here. If it were, those attorneys general and CNN and The Times would be going after all those services Gawker lists and some newspapers, still.
Jim Brady, daddy of metro/hyperlocal startup TBD.com, sent me pictures Tim Windsor sent him from our summit on new business models for news at CUNY two years ago. In the session on the new newsroom, Jim got up and started sketching the structure and size — little knowing, as he said in testimony before the FTC a while ago, that he’d end up building it at TBD.com. Jim at the whiteboard:
The detail. Note the reference to a blog network of experts — which TBD wisely built.
For the history books. If there still will be books.
As research for Public Parts, I’ve been reading Jay Rosen’s doctoral dissertation about the creation of publics and the press. As in other research, I’m finding so many wonderful parallels between the changes in society caused by technology today and that which came earlier. Jay writes that “in 1784 William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer and the proprietor of the Merchants’ Coffee-House, announced that his establishment would provide a new service”:
To prevent the many disappointments that daily happen to returned citizens, or others, enquiriing for friends, connections, or those that tehy may have business with; the subscriber has opened a book, as A City Register, alphabetically arranged, at the bar of the Coffee-house, where any gentleman now resident in the City, either as a housekeeper or a lodger, or those who may hereafter arrive may insert their names and place of residence.
Jay says Bradford “was offering a form of news — word of who was in town and where they could be reached…. The need for a written register arises when there are too many connections, too many strangers, too many arrivals and departures for the community to maintain through speech and memory a record of its inhabitants.”
What does that describe? Facebook, of course, and Foursquare next.
I was among those who scoffed when Mark Zuckerberg dubbed his algorithmic aggregation of personal updates a “news feed.” I was wrong. It’s news just as Mr. Bradford’s bar-top register was. Others scoff at the idea of Foursquare: “Why would you want to tell people where you are? We didn’t do that before.” Oh, yes, we did.
I have a little room in my entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY.
I’d especially like a few under- or unemployed journalists looking to start businesses in the class to add to the mix of experience among the students. I’ve also had students from other schools in the past. Tuition is about $1k (sorry; I’m looking for scholarship money for various categories — such as unemployed, career-shifting, journalists and ethnic and community journalists — but don’t have it yet).
In the class, you will create and present a business plan for a sustainable (read: profitable) journalistic enterprise. We will work through:
* Your elevator pitch; the essential description of your business.
* Product plan.
* Needs statement — why does the world need this thing?
* Market research and analysis — who are your customers and what do you know from them?
* Competitive analysis.
* Revenue plan.
* Distribution/marketing plan.
* Operations plan.
* Technology plan.
* Launch plan.
* Investment ask.
At the end of the class in December, you present your plan to a jury of investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, publishers, and technologists (it’s great fun, that day).
The class meets Monday afternoons, 130-430p at CUNY.
If you’re interested, I have just a few spots. Email me at the school: jeff.jarvis at journalism dot cuny dot edu. Tell me what you want to build — an entirely new business or a hyperlocal site. Tell me about you and your experience. I’ll select a few based on the mix of the class and how complementary you, your business, and your experience are with the other students and their projects. If it doesn’t work out this time, fret not. We’re going to launch a larger entrepreneurial journalism program soon. If accepted, you’d need to be in class starting Sept. 13 (we’ve held one class so far).
“Everyone brings their crumbs of knowledge to the task and if they don’t, we’re the lesser for it.” I love that line about encouraging more people to bring more knowledge to Wikipedia, from a conversation yesterday with Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Gardner had just presented the results of a gargantuan, one-year-long strategy project made with about 1k Wikipedians in a few dozen languages producing 26k pages and a lot of good ideas, including expert review of articles; offline, distributed use of Wikipedia; and the wiki-based university, where research and knowledge aren’t lost.
Gardner says they started the project with the knowledge that there would be “a high likelihood of failure.” It was possible, though unlikely, that no one would have come to the party. It was more likely, I’d say, that it would be taken over by fringe interests and nutty ideas. The foundation had to invest in success, hiring a facilitator who understood the dangers and a consultant who gave the project “a bedrock of information.”
There’s a lesson there — a lesson in all of this — for companies and government agencies learning how to do their business in public. It’s possible to collaborate at scale even on strategy. It’s risky. It needs care and feeding. But it can and should be done if you want to work in public, collaboratively, with your constituents, as they will expect.
Among the priorities that came out of the project are expanding and deepening Wikipedia in its developing markets and bringing diversity to its developed markets. Gardner quoted Clay Shirky — it’s a law, you know; we social media people are required to do it once a day — separating “let it happen” from “make it happen” projects; the English-language Wikipedia is the former, Hindi the latter. Again, there’s a lesson there for other enterprises: When you can create a platform that lets it happen, do; but also invest in what’s needed and make that happen.
Wikimedia then has to understand the motives of people who will help in either kind of task. They’ve found that people share their effort on Wikipedia in high-minded support of making the world a better place and they’re more likely to do so because Wikipedia is independent of other interests. They also want to show off their mastery. If you’re a news organization, allowing comments on your articles reaches neither of these motives. Helping people improve their own communities would.
The result for Wikipedia is astounding. All the work of these volunteers in nonmonetary exchanges of effort have created an asset worth an estimated $5 billion with impact on the industry that is probably greater than that. The foundation calculated the value of the effort that goes into just editing of Wikipedia – not research or writing – and after ascribing a low per-hour labor value to the work, they were amazed that it added up to $700 million a year. There’s the economic premise Clay Shirky’s (now I’ve met my quota) Cognitive Surplus: Given the time, opportunity, tools, support, and desire, we can create countless Wikipedias of incalculable worth.
So how does one apply these lessons to government and companies? I asked Gardner whether the Wikimedia Foundation would consult or build platforms for others. She said it’s tempting but it’s not their job. I’d like to do research via CUNY on the lessons that Wikipedia and other such collaborative enterprises can teach journalism. Other sectors would be wise to watch and rethink how they operate — and strategize.
The first reflex of open-government folks, I think, would be to bring this experience to policy-setting. That’s OK, but difficult. I see opportunity to create the means for citizens to take over some tasks of government. Recently — for my book, Public Parts — I interviewed Beth Noveck, head of Obama’s open-government initiative, and she raised another example I liked: The Social Security web site needs to present content in other languages. If users could translate Facebook collaboratively, couldn’t citizens translate the site and its information? For that matter, couldn’t they also translate the English into English, making bureaucratese understandable from a nonofficial distance? Of course, we could. We need someone like the Wikimedia Foundation to invest the effort to help us make it happen.
Companies, too, could use this thinking to, for example, get input into product design. Look at Dell: Customers have, since the start of the web, helped each other with service. Since the start of Dell Idea Storm, they’ve given Dell ideas. There’s a huge middle ground in design and manufacturing that could be helped by customers if they had the platform to do it. No, I’m not expecting to see computers designed by democratically run committee or looking like Wikipedia (now that would be Dell Hell) but I do think that customers could help improve any product if companies have the structure and investment, like Wikimedia, to listen. I also interviewed Local Motors‘ Jay Rogers for the book and he will describe just such a process.
The point, in the end, is that Wikimedia by its DNA operates in public and benefits accrue — not just as product and engagement and promotion and distribution but also as strategy. That’s the next step in creating the truly public company or organization.
One more observation: Among the top 50 web entities, Wikipedia stands alone as a the only public service enterprise there. It has gathered not just content but also people, the Wikipedians who create that content and now worked together on their shared strategy. As we discuss issues that matter to us as a new society, there are lessons in the Wikimedia Foundation’s work an structure. What can more of us do together to protect the high-minded purpose and possibility of our internet?
In our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk losing the benefits of publicness—of the connections the internet enables.
So, in a discussion, we will consider the value of publicness in our lives and communities, in transparent government, and in truly public companies. We will ask what privacy really means and examine its brief history (it was born out of fear of new technologies, especially the dastardly Kodak camera).
We will discuss the ethics of privacy and publicness that should inform our decisions in social and business interactions: what we reveal, what we keep private, and why.
We will look at different cultures’ views of privacy (how the Germans, who get naked in saunas and public parks, care deeply about the privacy of everything … except their private parts).
We will ask what Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Twitter, government, and companies should do about privacy.
We will claim ownership of the public sphere–what’s public is owned by us, the public.
And we will forge a bill of rights in cyberspace to protect the openness of the internet that is our tool of making publics.
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and the upcoming Public Parts, will present his findings and views about publicness—and his own experience revealing his prostate cancer–and then lead a discussion with the entire room—Oprah-like—about the nature of privacy and why it worries us.
The format tells us to list five questions the session will answer. Mine:
What does privacy really mean?
What are the benefits of sharing (and oversharing)?
How can we achieve open government and business?
How can we protect the openness of the internet?
What’s wrong with Jeff Jarvis’ penis?
The hard-on Germany has for Street View gets more ironic and amusing by the day. @larsan sent me a link to German newspaper story that points to all the others who open up even more data than Google. As best as I can translate, that includes:
* Deutsche Telekom’s online phone book let you search on someone and find an aerial view of the house from four angles and a view of the backyard — with, note well, personally identifiable information attached: name and phone number.
* The site Sightwalk has street-level tours of seven German cities, including parks. Knowing Germany, one could probably find naked people there.
* State governments not only take but sell detailed images of property, including monitoring for heat loss.
At the same time, the German government is rolling out mandatory ID cards with RFID tags embedded in them. ID cards sent Brits over the edge; they’d do the same here in the U.S, I’m sure.
But at least I’m starting to see some debate over Street View and privacy nuttiness; saner voices are, if not prevailing at least speaking. Mario Sixtus writes a wonderful column (in German) recounting the inane conversations he has with German friends about Street View. This column says the argument is typically German, that the fight against Street View has no real basis, and that this fight is bringing out the cultural divide between online and offline. This photographer is going to replace pixelated buildings in Street View with real pictures linked to the addresses (take that, fool!). This story points out that Street View has been around in other forms since 1948. And this column asks why Germany is irrational about Google.
That’s really the question: What is it that makes Germans go bonkers about Google? Is it media trying to gain an advantage against their competitor? Is is anti-Americanism? Is it some inner anti-capitalism? I’m serious. I can’t figure them out and I think they should sit down and try to figure themselves out. The Green Party of Germany invited me to come next month to talk about publicness and privacy and I can’t wait to hear their explanations.
In the meantime, the insanity continues. Church leaders are opposed to Street View, saying, “The world belongs to God, not Google.” Oy.
The Times reports this morning on smart retailer Nordstrom making its inventory in warehouses and in stores transparent so a buyer who’s dying for a purse can find it nearby (for immediate gratification), or from the warehouse (for convenience), or at the last store that has it (which will ship to her).
The earlier rendition of this was BestBuy or B&N making it possible for customers to find whether an individual store had an individual item via their web sites; that’s not quite as easy as saying, “wherever it is, just get it to me,” but it was an important step in this direction.
The next rendition of this will be, I think, enabling the customer to search across multiple retailers and order. That will give us what Dave Winer tweeted this morning that he wants: “I wish there was an Amazon store in midtown Manhattan, where I could buy anything that is available for same-day delivery. I’d go there now.”
Well, if Amazon did that, it would be gigantic, expensive, capital-intensive, inventory-filled Wal-Marts peppered all across the country; it would be expensive to build and it wold lose the efficiency and profitabliy that Amazon enables.
But the virtual version of what Dave wants is possible with transparent — and open — inventory, enabling customers to ask, “Who has this item nearest me at the best price? Then I’ll go get it or get it delivered to me today.”
Ah, price. There’s the rub, of course. Such a network would make pricing transparent. It pretty much already is. We can search across individual retailers or use the likes of Froogle and get the lowest prices. There lies the downfall of retail’s margins, taking out the ability to arbitrage opacity in pricing. Now add transparent inventory and the ability to get the item at the lowest price now and the value of retail brands sinks as does its profitability — in an already tough-margin business.
I could imagine a new service — from Amazon or an entrepreneur — that says: Tell me what you want, Dave, and I will tell you where you can find it or I’ll get it to you. That’s the new value-add for those who want to touch an item or get it immediately. The other value-add is support and service (see: Best Buy’s Geek Squad). Putting boxes and shelves and waiting for people to buy them while carrying the cost? That no longer adds value; it only increases risk.
Retail is going to get ever-more efficient. Independent bookstores were killed by the more-efficient box stores. Box stores were wounded by Amazon and the internet. Amazon could be injured by a local value-added retail search-and-delivery service. All this is fine for the customer: more choice more quickly at lower prices.
But I think retail could be headed the way of newspapers: into a pool of endless pain. All over America, I see empty retail shells: the former Circuit City, the closed book box, the folded mom-and-pop. I think there’s much more of that to come.
This is what transparency — in price and inventory — can do to a market.
