looking out from down under

The third #publicsphere event was held in Wollongong yesterday (with nodes in Melbourne and Brisbane joining in). With all things that involve an open forum and public consultation, there will be some good bits, and some bits that don’t quite do it for you.

In terms of contributions to the debate in the form of a paper or submission, you really can’t go past the Silicon Beach Lifeguard paper, assembled by Elias Bizannes along with a small army of contributors and editors from the SiliconBeach community. Here’s a video of Elias introducing the paper:

In addition to the paper/submission approach of SBA’s Lifeguard paper, there were also a lot of other good presentations.

Silvia Pfeiffer from Vquence gave a fairly sobering analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing the Australia startup sector. While much of it wasn’t new information for those of us who do this stuff every day, Silvia’s presentation did a brilliant job of assembling a plethora of issues into cohesive lists and constructs, and while I knew about the pieces already, the way she put them together certainly had me coming away with a much clearer picture of our situation. Hopefully her slides will be up on her Slideshare account soon.

Another stand-out presentation in my mind came from @nambor (Rob Manson). After getting the undivided attention from everyone in the room in Wollongong thanks to the coolest set of chops in the room, he proceeded to share how the challenge of succeeding has less to do with “supply side” factors than the (neglected) “demand side” factors. He wasn’t talking about economics (specifically): he was talking about success in technology. The basic thesis is that tech types want to keep pushing supply side – concepts like ‘building a better mouse trap’, ‘build it and they will come’, ‘lets keep innovating’ – while the demand side – taking the time to show tech users how their productivity and lives can be improved by new stuff is really poorly done and needs more focus. This principle, which played then into his main thesis of Diffusion is the Innovation, was then expanded upon. Rather than me butchering it, I’ll just embed his presentation here.

The day itself wasn’t all geek, however. Towards the end, we had a great presentation from Tim Parsons present from a creative perspective. As you’d expect from a futurist in the creative space, the presentation was exquisite. The content itself was great for stimulating some ideas and discussion, and I really thought the sentiment that “Online Culture is the Mainstream”, and not something reserved for geeks anymore, was a great observation, and something I really agree with (since now I’ve got mum on Facebook, and my girlfriend blogging). Anyway, the slide deck is at embedded below (it still looks great, but Tim’s passion in delivering it made it 10x better)

There were many other excellent presentations through the course of yesterday that I haven’t got the time or enough good quotes to include here in this post, but the good news is that the Senator’s team will be uploading the video (which was already streamed, but probably needs to be cleaned up a little and spliced into talks) next week. I’ll update this post then with a few links (including a link to me own impromptu talk on Skills, Talent and Education).

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While it might be compelling political theatre for the hungry Canberra media gallery, a studio audience at Q&A last week made it clear – enough with Ozcar already.

Compared to the debate over the Emissions Trading Scheme, the (frankly separate, and first) debate over the targets we should be setting to reduce greenhouse gasses, the $300Bn of spending going into “stimulus” across our economy which my generation, and my children’s generation, and possibly more, will be paying off, this is a distraction.

Enough already.

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I’ve been planning to write a post on this for ages, but time has gotten away. Seriously. Since March the 26th. That’s the day I felt politics in Australia be changed by the internet.

It was the day Senator Conroy went on Q&A, the ABC”s live question and answer show, where he was inundated with questions – apparently over 2000 of them – from members of the public raising serious concerns about the proposed compulsory, national filtering scheme that Conroy – whether by choice or hospital pass – is the front man on.

My objection to a compulsory filter is on the record, so I really enjoyed hearing from the Senator – someone I’ve met since – try and defend his policy. From my perspective, it seemed like the Senator really didn’t want to defend it on its (lack of) merits; any time a Government in power invokes the names, acts and policies of their predecesssors, it is pretty clear they’re trying to avoid responsibility for the current state of play.

But this post isn’t just some rehashing of some persons opinion on a political matter – God knows there’s enough of that already.

No, the thing that really struck me during this experience back in March was how real time contributions, combined with the unique Twitter backchannel, opened my eyes to the noise, if not influence, of the digerati.

The speed of posts, quality of insight, and general ability to shape and resolve community sentiment online was truly breathtaking. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it will forever remain with me as a memory, something I’ll either look back on as a start of something, or as a glimpse of what might have been.

After the interview on Q&A and the extensive level of real time participation I shared with others involved in the debate, I started to wonder about what it all meant for our society, and the political process that for a century or two has been forming policy, laws, regulations and getting on with governing based on a representative system.

As I see it, there are three potential scenarios.

Option 1: The Digerati and Representational Politics

The first scenario is that we’re going to continue with a representative political process, but influence will move towards messages that are facilitated by the digerati. In this model, a small number of individuals are going to be elected/empowered to represent us citizens. They’ll be responsible for voting on laws and approving regulation, they’ll promise to consult with us and our general levels of apathy will ensure only a minority will engage with the political process beyond the ballot box. The positive thing about this scenario, however, is that more direct interaction, feedback, campaigning and consultation will happen using interactive technologies, today represented by websites, email and Twitter. It will be much easier for members of the public to make some noise and be noticed through the online environment, but at the end of the day you’ll still be trying to convince a person with 46 chromosomes to make decisions you agree with, with the option every 3-4 years of expressing your displeasure and voting them out.

To see this form of political interaction really take effect, more and more of us will need to become political animals. Our social networks, our digital interactions, our posts on Twitter, and more, will become influences on the perspectives, opinions and voting intentions in a more tangible and effective way than the media currently does. If Channel 9 tell me a movie is good, I’m going to take it with a very large grain of salt. If a good friend makes an impassioned plea that a policy is going to hurt their family or the environment, I’m going to give it a lot more credibility because of the shorter social distance. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. Many of the reforms that have our country in a much better place than most of Europe today – surrounding labour markets, trade, and to a (depressingly) lesser extent, welfare, aren’t popular and even though they’re right, perhaps a digerati backed political process wouldn’t have supported/allowed them…

Option 2: The Digital Revolution & Legislative Democracy

This situation is potentially the most revolutionary of all, and involves us, as citizens, voting directly on legislation, regulation, and the policy that frames these decisions. While the consequence of this sort of change wouldn’t mean the abolition of representative politics, it would change the dynamic; instead of voting for chair fillers who make up the numbers, we’d vote for politicians who are then charged with the responsibility of ‘selling’ their policies (or alternative policies) to their electorates. Their approach will need to be interactive and engaging – a bit shock for a number of politicians who are just making up numbers as pay-back from their party machines until they can make it to their generous pension scheme entry ages and retire – but in principle it could work quite nicely.

Of course, there are many potential problems with this model. While you’d be hard pressed to find an impartial citizen who’d vote down a 90% punitive tax on finance executive & worker bonuses for people who just deal in other people’s money without wearing any of the risk if things go pear shaped (as they did last year), there are numerous bills that are pretty dry and boring, and more disurbingly, you’d probably get pretty good support for a nut-job bill that promoted protectionism and increased tariffs, or, even worse, foolish and frankly racist immigration controls. This model certainly isn’t perfect, but then the current system (below) is hardly a pretty picture.

Option 3: Unrepresentative, 1901 Issue Myopia

More than a few of the 3 of you who read this post are probably thinking, “Hey, not everyone is online, not everyone is going to try and get involved. This digerati participation concept is really unrepresentative”. And you’re be right. But I’d argue, with more than 80% of Australian households now having the internet, the options above are a lot less unrepresentative and skewed than the status quo.

The third option I see is a continuation of a myopia where our political representatives remain wrapped in some of the most unrepresentative systems and irrelevant issues than ever, and we continue to be affected and held back by it.

Our current government is the Labor party, an organisation that until recently had it enshrined that at least half of their voting delegates to their national policy setting conference were appointed/sent by Unions. As demonstrated so dramatically in NSW in 2008, when the Labour Government of Day disagrees with these conferences, the results can be dramatic: effectively, the Union movement in NSW took down a Premier and a Treasurer, and put a multi-billion dollar hole in the State’s finances to protect the parochial interests of their members who like the idea of continuing to be employed by a benign employer who wouldn’t make sure things ran efficiently.

To look at what this means for our democracy, it is important to realise that only 60% of our population are in the labour force  (lets say 12.6m out of 21m in Australia). Of that 12.6m, about 650K are currently unemployed, so we’re dealing with closer to 12m workers. Last time I checked, about 15% of these workers were part of Unions (it has been on a downhill slide for a long time now), which means we’re dealing with about 1.8m Australians, a bit over 8% of the overall population, who control more than half of the Government. If you look at the heritage of many of the members of our Government, you’ll see a a long history in labour relations, focused on a 20th Century fixation on industrial relations and a preference in having all people equal, but of course some more equal than others.

The current prevailing model is where around 8% of the community have a dramatic level of control, and only a small fraction of that 8% actually care two hoots; they are just paid up members who have to vote for someone, and they let others run their political campaigns, often without a lot of consideration for the wishes of their broader constituents (I’ve seen this first hand more than once, and it isn’t pretty to see employees left unemployed by their representatives happy because they managed to estabilsh a precendent for others).

The digerati, through either influence and replacing the media function, or through direct participation, certainly isn’t perfect. There are many potential issues to address, and it isn’t like the current gerrymander enjoyed by groups who think industrial relations is actually the business of government – news flash: its the economy, defence, social issues, and not controlling the minute details of employment relationships that matter the most to our nation – are going to give up their narrow ideology easily.

But on the 26th of March, as thousands had their say, and even more participated online, I saw a glimse of the future where we could actually play a bigger part in shaping the country we live in, and the sooner we move beyond being governed by the narrow interests and ideologies of union hacks and lawyers, and instead harness the participatory power and intelligence of our citizens, the better!

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many of our international breathern would be moritifed at a plan where a national goverment tried to enforce a nation-wide internet filter to block specific content.

they do it in china – at what cost? – and the world cries foul. then they consider it seriously in a modern western democracy – with a lot of political pressure within the ruling party – and the mainstream media barely raise a whimper of concern about it.

ok, so snuff films, child pornography and many other ills to be found online are unquestionably bad news. with the ‘mandate’ of universal public distain for this content (the weirdos who are into it don’t speak up and acknowledge it for obvious reasons) the debate gets legitimacy it does not deserve.

the key question being asked at the moment is “who will pay for ISP level filtering”. the natural answer to this is government – they’ve got a fat war chest of a budget surplus and there’s nothing commercially compelling ISPs themselves to offer server level filtering. so the government pays for the filtering, and then presumably controls it as well (you’d have to be a mug to buy something designed to censor and control and then leave the control of it to someone else).

and all of a sudden you’re china.

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a month or so ago, the federal government quietly announced that it would not be approving singapore airlines application for a licence to operate flights from sydney to the united states. given that australian government is in control of our airspace and responsible for our airports (even though they’re mostly now privately owned by companies like macquarie bank), singapore airlines has to get their permission to start flying another route. sensitive to qantas potentially moving a large part of their aircraft maintenance off-shore (as air new zealand and many other top-tier carriers have done) and sacking a lot of australian workers, and knowing that most australian’s aren’t big fans of singapore after the execution of van nugen, the federal government had a politically easy decision to make, and knocked singapore back.

this is a big betrayal for anyone in austalia who travels to the united states.

singapore airlines (or sia for short) could well be the best airline in the world. a long haul flight in economy is never an outrageously pleasant experience; it is squashy, you get all dried out from the air conditioning, and sitting anywhere for 8 hours or more isn’t much fun. but singapore airlines deliver a level of service for economy passengers that you generally only get in from other airlines in business class.

well, now qantas has announced that they’re going to send their heavy maintenance work to asia for at least one 747-400 check, negating one of the major reasons the federal government decided to continue protecting them from competition with sia even though we’ve got a free trade agreement with singapore. this sort of work is very big – as are 747′s – and using the cover of a shuffling of the deck chairs as the reason for the outsourcing (“just this once, we promise”) qantas has effectively used the (non-organised) travelling public as a pawn whose interests should be weighed against those of the aircraft maintenance union (highly organised).
it’s hard to decide who to loathe more here. should it be the government for ripping off the largest number of people without a voice (travelling public, and by association the tourism sector who badly need american tourists who shudder at the thought of a 12 hour flight even though that’s what it takes to get to europe from california)? should it be qantas for milking the sydney-usa route so mercilessly with high prices and poor service? should it be the unions, who’ve traditionally had a strong bargaining position with airlines (baggage handlers are about as valuable economically as hotel bell-hops, yet they recieve exceptionally good pay and conditions because they can bring an airline to its knees in a snap strike)?

either way, the travelling public is going to continue to get screwed any time the government creates an artificial barrier to competition, and hopefully qantas’ actions in going back on their word means the government comes under pressure from the unions and makes the government less likely to shelter qantas next time sia from sin comes knocking…

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ross gittins in the sydney morning herald has an excellent report on the benefits of early childhood intervention. code for better child raising, this report takes an economic, rather than a social or judgemental view of the benefits to society of better parenting, and discusses the role the government can play in reducing inequality and disadvantage in future generation by supporting programs that get involved before kids turn 8.

ross’ interest in the subject has been piqued by work from james heckman from the university of chigago (oh, and nobel prize winner in the field of economic sciences). basically, he has found that getting involved early with programs to support better parenting has massive oonsequences. using a case study of the perry preschool project from around 30 years ago in michigan (capital city detriot, home to eminem and subject of many negative social sterotypes played out in movies like 8 mile), heckman makes the case that early intevention into the development of children is much more effective in influencing lifetime outcomes than better schooling, etc.
if the study is true – and the first 5 years of a child’s life have profound influence on their intelligence, their likelihood to succeed in life and reduce their likelihood to commit crime and be subject of welfare – would society begin to accept that intervention in parenting – one of the few areas of society to still be treated as a social taboo – or would people continue to take the approach that you can’t tell them how to raise their family (but keep the welfare cheques now and in the future rolling in so we can raise the kids to be bogans the way we want to)?

additionally, what, from a macro or policy perspective, do these considerations have on the legitimacy of the indigenous partnerships programs of the australian government?

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there’s been a lot of talk in the press over recent weeks about the changes in australian cross-media ownership rules. considering that most places in the world don’t have laws like this to start with, much less reform, a bit of background is probably helpful.
as i’ve travelled, people from europe and the usa are routinely surprised to find that australia only has a population of around 20 million people. considering the economy of new south wales is roughly the same size as the whole of indonesia, the 4th most populous nation in the world, it is easy to see how we tend to punch about our weight as a country.
given the power of the 4th estate in any democratic nation the government decided a while ago to limit the amount of inflence any one media mogul could have in a given market, defined at the time to be a capital city. this level of government interaction was fairly justified, as the small australian market still managed to breed a number of media powerhouses, most notably rupert murdoch’s news corporation.
while ownership in the print media is quite concentrated, the behaviour of the television networks over the last 10 years or so has robbed australians of the services many other western nations take for granted.

around the year 2000, australia was deciding between competing standards for digital television. the government had announced the release of spectrum suitable for digital television, and it was up to the government, industry and consumer groups to decide which standard would be adopted. with only three commercial tv networks – and thus very oligopolistic control over the television advertising market – the incumbents had a significant incentive to stop others from joining the tv broadcasting club. through a mixture of successful lobbying, weak politics and the timing of a pending election (as well as the incumbents convincing the govt that they’d need to spend an absolute fortune on their broadcasting equipment to move to digital, so they needed to be protected to make it worth their while), the government announced australia would get the hdtv standard, or high definition television.

the promise of hdtv was that you’d be able to get crystal clear picture with 5.1 surround sound. unfortunately, however, very very few programmes were recorded in a quality that could suppoort hdtv, so the best a viewer would get from this new standard was a widescreen format of picture. honestly, i don’t think a lot of people would have cared too much anyway – who really wants to see who wants to be a millionare in 5.1 surround sound?

the reality – and certainly the intention – of hdtv is that it is very, very hungry for bandwidth. one channel of hdtv uses around 10 times more spectrum than a regular digital widescreen channel. this meant that the networks ensured that there wouldn’t be room for new digital services – including interactive tv and the delivery of a news channel or other content more closely resembling the internet, also known as datacasting – to compete with the incumbents. just in case there was a bit of room – and there still is – the government passed laws forbidding datacasting from looking at all like a tv service; ie, no full motion video for more than a certain length of time.

so, basically, australian consumers got screwed, particularly when you compare it to what the british got from their digital tv service (40+ channels free to air, interactive for things like polling and voting; essentially the innovation you’re never going to get from 3 fairly comfortable players in a market).
fast forward to 2006. a federal government enquiry in late 2005 found that digital tv takeup had been woeful – blind freddy could have told you this, since there isn’t much improvement at all between analogue and digital, with no new services from commercial networks. even the promise of perfect picture quality is false in most experiences, since the picture isn’t crystal clear without improving the infrastructure (read aerial) in their homes. the planned 2007 shut off of the analogue network will now be pushed back to 2012 – no surprise there; it would be a brave politician that took away tv from the masses in a country with compulsory voting – and the incumbents have had their monopoly extended too. thankfully, though, this is all becoming a little academic – the incumbents are in for a big change that the government can’t legislate out of the equation, because this time the media competition is international, it isn’t using broadcast spectrum the government regulates, and its fully interactive with almost millions of channels to choose from.

the answer is the internet.

at the turn of the centry, almost everyone was still connecting to the internet via a 56k modem, at least at home. now most houses in australia can get online 25 times faster. in some parts of the country where adsl 2+ has been rolled out, the speeds are more than 150 times faster than an old fashioned modem. these speeds are enabling full screen video to be sent straight to the home via the internet. and products like google video, and their deal with cbs to allow cheap paid downloads of programmes further drives this trend. in australia, where we get the top shows from the usa 3-6 months after their first air in the states, this model of paid subscription further errodes the australian media outlets, in this case channel nine, with their strong relationship with cbs for content. determined fans of csi will simply set aside $2/week to watch the show 3-6 months ahead of when channel nine gives it – and commercials – to them.
so after being loosing the battle for the best by the incumbents in collusion with the government, the australian consumer is standing to win the war, thanks to the internet. the convergence of tv, internet and telecommunications is going to change a lot of things, but it is hard to see the traditional commercial media business doing well in any scenario that doesn’t involve a time machine. as a consumer who’s missed out for so long, the desire for revenge is palpable – the sweetest thing about this revenge is that it is coming from the world at large, and it completely inevidable.
of course, this isn’t the only battle facing the commercial television sector – personal video recorders, or pvr units, are creating a similarly herculean challenge to the models the sector has been using for the last 50 years. but more on that another time…

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