Web Apps & Access to Knowledge

Last week, Wednesday was spent at the Carson Workshop, The Future of Web Apps, in London, Thursday afternoon and Friday morning at the OII at for The World Wide Web and Access to Knowledge Workshop. The two experiences could hardly have been more different, and yet …

The Future of Web Apps (Flickr photos here), which saw an impressive line-up and was attended by some 800 people, has been reported extensively on the web. My highlights (links to session notes are on the event wiki and podcasts are promised here; additional notes also available from the wiki): Delicious - Things we've learned, Joshua Schachter; Building Flickr, Cal Henderson; Designing Web 2.0-native Products for Fun and Profit, Tom Coates; Happy Programming and Sustainable Productivity with Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson; How to Build an Enterprise Web App on a Budget, Ryan Carson. There are yet more notes available online: eg, from Simon Willison and Zach Inglis. Tom Coates has published his presentation slides and there's a useful "commentary" on these by Jeremy Zawodny. James Governor has posted about Joshua and Ryan Carson.

Joshua's talk conveyed a lot of experience. Of all the things he said, these stand out: try and build features people will actually use rather than what they ask for (a point echoed by Cal Henderson); there's more RSS traffic on del.icio.us than everything else put together; "del.icio.us popular" is no longer of such interest to him (the bias drifts with the number of users); beware librarians; the value of a del.icio.us item lies in the URL and, of course, in how people tag the item. No auto-tagging.

Ryan Carson's detailed walk through the planning and execution of DropSend was great — both informative and instructive. But it was Tom Coates' talk that really caught my imagination. (He's posted about his reaction to the day here.) Web 2.0 is 'A web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together'. From Simon Willison's notes on Tom's talk:

Result: a network effect of services.

* Every new service that you create can potentially build on top of every   other existing service.

* Every service and piece of data that's added to the web makes every other   service potentially more powerful. Massive creative possibilities. Accelerating innovation. Increasing competitive services. Increasingly componentised services. Increasing specialised services.

The Carson Workshop had something about it of the energy and excitement about innovation that characterised Reboot 7; the OII Workshop was … a contrast. Here, with perhaps two dozen (or so) participants, the emphasis was on the academic study of the net, but bit by bit I found it salutary: it made me think again about the web and attention (see my post of two days ago). Slides (pdf) are available on the OII page for this workshop (here). Matthew Hindman's talk, a critique of the claims made for the internet as a force for democracy, stays most vividly in my memory.  His presentation was clear and forceful and his slides do a good job of relaying its main points. On the one hand:

Democratizing the Flow of Information

• End-to to-end architecture
• Decentralized content creation
• Low barriers to entry
• Common claims:
  • Freedom of the press no longer “limited to those who own one” (Liebling 1946)
  • “Uniquely democratic medium” (CT Sup. Ct. 2005)
  • Sunstein, et al.: Internet = end of broadcasting

On the other:

The Limits of Democratization

• Why are these claims wrong?
  • Some content still expensive to produce
  • Self-perpetuating, winners-take take-all patterns …
  • … in the structure of the Web
  • … in traffic
  • Importance of search engines
  • User preference and (lack of) skill
  • What does the public seek out?
  • How do they search?
  • Emergence of social elites

Questioning the "blogging=increased democracy" line of thought is important: here's Matthew Gertner doing just this on Tuesday of this week ('Just because the web lets us self-publish, it doesn’t mean that getting noticed is any easier. It’s just that nowadays you’ve got to find a way to charm an unruly mob instead of a media establishment gatekeeper like a magazine editor or record producer'), a New York Magazine article of this week on the same ('a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium'), Clay Shirky's latest essay on power laws and blogs ('In February of 2009, I expect far more than the Top 10 to be dominated by professional, group efforts. The most popular blogs are no longer quirky or idiosyncratic individual voices; hard work by committed groups beats individuals working in their spare time for generating and keeping an audience') …

As I said in the session at the end of the workshop, the internet is a very young technology and it is no surprise that gaps exist between some/many of the claims made about it and the present state of play. There's nothing about technology that predisposes it to do good, and it's no surprise that it reflects pre-existing patterns of power and inequality in society. But there is much to be encouraged by: my hastily cobbled together list included the work of Headshift (I remember Lee's talk at Reboot 7: Gcache link here, my pasta/del.icio.us bookmark here), MySociety, ORG, Robert Scoble encouraging Microsoft to be a little more open and answerable (on the impact of blogging on markets and business, see my post of last August), the world of self-expression opened up by blogging but also by services like YouTube (free, in a traditionally costly area), the power of the Long Tail — not to mention the Fat Middle …

When I spoke at the end of the OII workshop, I think I mentioned Patient Opinion and today I came across this from Demos (Molly Webb):

We call it everyday democracy - minding the gap between people and the institutions designed to deliver public services. I'm finding more examples of practitioners in a variety of fields turning to social software tools - in the process they are re-inventing individuals' choices and re-framing the ways each of us involve ourselves in social outcomes.

Patientopinion.org is making the space for a constructive conversation about the provision of health services that doesn't happen within the current NHS institutional arrangements. And I just came across Global Giving. This model aims to connect the leaders of development projects directly with funders, offering an alternative to World Bank or government charity models. (more info in the Washington Post article "Aid Recipients Might Have the Best Ideas About Allocation")

Online tools can enable new models of engagement toward delivering social outcomes. I can't help but be inspired by the 'let's fix it' approach.

*****

The academic study of the internet seems like a world away from the creative buzz of Web 2.0 — but it's no bad thing to be forced to pull up and think about what we're claiming for it. Mike Cornfield, as Steve Schifferes reminded us at the OII, reviewed the role of the internet in the 2003–2004 US election cycle (pdf) and didn't conclude with an easy, black-and-white picture:

Did internet use make a difference in the 2004 presidential race? Yes. The most successful campaigns relied on it to gain advantages over their competitors. The numbers of adult Americans who relied on the internet to learn about the campaigns, to help make up their minds, to help others make up theirs, and to register and vote is simply too large relative to the final margin to think otherwise.

The numbers of American citizens who turn to the internet for campaign politics may dip in 2005 and the off-year election in 2006, in the absence of a presidential election. But a return to pre-2000 or even pre-2002 levels of engagement seems unlikely. As broadband connections proliferate and hum, the old mass audience for campaigns is being transformed into a collection of interconnected and overlapping audiences (global, national, partisan, group, issue-based, candidate-centered). Each online audience has a larger potential for activism than its offline counterparts simply because it has more communications and persuasion tools to exploit. This transformation makes life in the public arena more complex.

The more citizens use the internet, the more they might expect from campaigners and political journalists: rapid responses to information searches; a multiplicity of perspectives available on controversies; short and visually arresting promotional messages; drill-down capacities into referenced databases; more transparency from, and access to, institutions and players. Meanwhile, on the supply side of the political equation, candidates, groups, and parties now have models for how to use the internet to raise money, mobilize voters, and create public buzz. The new benchmarks established in 2004 could well be matched and surpassed in 2008.

In the coming months, well before net-guided election mobilizing recommences in earnest for the 2006 midterm elections, the online citizenry will continue to make donations to campaigns, sometimes in a big rush triggered by a news event. Political organizations with email lists ranging from the millions to the dozens will continue to urge citizens to give money, sign petitions, and tell friends to join. The definition of “activist” might continue to loosen, to include people who do little more than what ten minutes a month at their computers enables them to do; parties and groups will devote more energy and creativity to aggregating these actions into grassroots power. The definitions of “newsmaker” and “news” will also loosen, both because of what grassroots campaigners can do with the internet, and what bloggers, web video-makers, and others with things to say to the public can do through the internet to distribute their messages.
These changes could herald a major reconfiguring of the most public aspects of the American political process. Its contours are as yet unclear. Perhaps one approach to campaigning will dominate in the age of the internet –but it may be the case that several models compete over a period of time, or that each election cycle and political situation summons a unique configuration from each major player. Furthermore, there are innovations yet to come as more internet tools (for advertising, polling, and knowledge-creating) make it out of the lab and early adoption phase.

The only change that would surprise us would reverse the fundamental trend underwriting all the other changes: the cycle-by-cycle expansion of the population of the online citizenry. 75 million Americans at the last election-day peak, and counting.

'might' … 'could' … 'may'. There's a lot to play for, a lot that's uncertain, and anyone interested in democracy should be watching the ways in which a web of data sources — services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together — er … come together.

Technorati tags: OII, Future of Web Apps, Carson, democracy