Category Archives: Open government

Photo: Marco Giacomassi

Missing out: why we don’t have an European open data community (yet)

The last weekend of March was SOD14, the second yearly gathering of the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list. The acronym in English may be awkward (it was just too funny to pass on!), but the event was just great. We had 182 people registered over the three days; attendance peaked at the conference on Friday 28, with 139 people in the room at the same time. About 100 people attended the hackathon Saturday 29 and the training session on Sunday 30. We produced 12000 tweets (and, being geeks, we archived them all). Everyone came on their own time and money.

The hackathon was spectacular: we had planned for four tracks, but so many people showed up that we ended up doing seven. We hacked things like data on goods confiscated to mafia bosses, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open data census; we designed a sort of peer-to-peer service for civil servants wishing to release open data; there was a track for lawyers and one for civic monitoring.

Everything , from conference program to hackathon tracks, was built from the bottom-up. Spaghetti Open Data is a community: it has no money, no corporate structure, no leaders, so it can’t help being bottom up.  SOD14 was completely organized by volunteers: though our host city of Bologna and its regional government stepped in with free venues, free coffee and flawless connectivity and two (community-designed and delivered) mini-courses, for a grand total of 1500 euro. The community provided video trailers, logos, jingles and ringtones, t-shirts,stickers and even superheroes; there was a very diverse attendance, (data geeks, data lawyers, developers, data journalists, policy makers, even some open data archeologists) with a strong female presence. SOD14 had the playful energy of the really grassroots events. And when the event was over, people simply retreated to the mighty mailing list: at the time of writing, Spaghetti Open Data has three and a half years of life, 894 subscribers, 1,840 threads, an estimated 20,000 posts (well over 20 a day in 2014). It is far and away the largest open data resource in the Italian language.

So all was well, except that something was missing. There was no Europe in SOD14.

We did our best to stay in touch with our European brothers- and sisters-in-arms. We had our only keynote in English – with Wikimedia Germany’s Adam Shorland telling us about Wikidata. I personally called EPSI, DG CNECT’s initiative for promoting open data across the European Union, and asked them for support – not in the form of money, which we can’t accept anyway, but embodied in someone to come to our gathering and say “you are not alone, we are happy you are doing this work”. Even though we had updated and verified the EPSI scoreboard for Italy during 2013, nobody showed up at SOD14 to say “thank you” in person: they agreed to do so initially, but then they decided they were covered by Matteo Brunati, EPSI’s correspondent for Italy, present at SOD14.

Dear European Commission, as a European patriot and  an open data activist, I feel it is my duty to let you know you’ve wasted an opportunity, and to advise you never to do that again. In SOD14 we were not discussing Italian open data problems. All our problems were at least European. For example, we had a fascinating session about open data in archeology and cultural heritage. Italy is hardly the only European country to deal with these kinds of issues; we are struggling with very conservative cultural institutions here, and could benefit a lot from comparing notes with people doing equivalent work in, say, Greece or France. That’s where you could have made a difference – but didn’t. I could make ten more examples like this from SOD14 alone, and so could you.

Matteo is a high-level civic hacker, and EPSI is very fortunate to have him on board. We, on the other hand, are his home community, and talk to him every day. There is no value added to our event if you just put a different hat on his head. The way you add value to Matteo’s European commitment is to dispatch him to events like ours in Estonia, Belgium or Ireland; and the way you add value to Italian events like SOD14 is to dispatch people like Matteo, but with experience in Denmark and Spain and Austria. It’s horizontal relationships that make a community. I know you know this, because you have been doing Erasmus-like stuff in many variants and for a long time. But horizontal relationships are slow to build, and no one is working on building them now – not even you. And so, things that should be taken for granted don’t happen. Why don’t we have civic hackers from across the continent cooperating in doing some open data project about the European elections? Because European civic hackers don’t get the chance to hang out together all that much. Even TweetYourMEP was built exclusively by Italians. So, there is no such thing as a solid European civic hacking community.

But don’t give up just yet. Europe played a key role in unlocking the supply side of the open data scene. The EPSI Directive was fundamental in nudging less data-friendly governments like ours onto the right path. Europeana is a great idea. You have done well on those fronts: why should you not do equally well in helping unlock the demand side of open data? A year ago, EPSI interviewed me and asked me “what do you think Europe should do around open data?”. And I replied “invest in the community. Give them free venues, free travel and something to do” (this video, at 6:08). I still think that would be the best way to use your EPSI infrastructure. Actually, tell you what: why don’t you go all the way and start an “Erasmus for Open Data” program. A few hundred international exchanges, with people from across the continent actually working together on data projects, would go a long way towards creating the small world network we need to be a community at the European level. Spaghetti Open Data stands ready to help. Are you game?

Copyright in the EU and the Dark Side of online consultations

Imagine you are in Hamburg for 30C3, the thirtieth annual conference of the legendary Chaos Computer Club – the first and the largest association of hackers in Europe. Uncharacteristically, you are being engaged in politics: you take part in a meeting convened on the fly by Ásta Helgadóttir, a young activist of the Icelandic Pirate Party. The person speaking now is Amelia Andersdotter,  a 26-year old Swede, Member of the European Parliament, also a Pirate. She explains that the European Commission is considering a reform on copyright law, and that such reform is at risk of damaging the Internet’s freedom and wholeness. The Commission has recently launched an online public consultation, but taking part in it is so difficult and time-consuming that activists fear only the copyright industry’s professional lobbyists will end up participating in it.

Andersdotter and her staff, helped by many volunteers, have compiled a on online guide to the consultation available in 13 languages, but this is not good enough. For everyone to be able to participate, it is critical that participation is made much easier and more intuitive.The group decides to achieve this building a website that starts from the friction with copyright law experienced by citizens on the web every day encoded in user stories (for example: “I don’t dare to make a remix because of fear of repercussions”). From there, the website guides citizens to share their points of view on these small daily conflicts, and inserts their reflections in the questionnaire as appropriate. All is left to do is for the citizen to download the completed questionnaire and e-mail it to the Commission.

As the meeting ends, a task force of coders and designers fires up their laptops and goes to work. For starters, Stefan Wehrmeyer from Open Knowledge Foundation Germany writes the core code for the new website, and uploads it on a GitHub repository (a familiar collaboration platform for open source programmers) for everyone to be able to contribute. Next, Mathias Schindler from Wikimedia Germany rewrites the questionnaire’s questions in terms of situations that are easy to map onto normal experience of the web. Finally, Juliana Okropiridse, Bernhard Hayden, Christopher Clay and Peter Grassberger of the Austrian Pirate Party kickstart a hackathon to finish the website. Hosted by (Viennese hackerspace) Metalab’s assembly at 30C3, they code all night long. At 8 the next morning, copywrongs.eu is online. The date is December 30th, 2013.

All this has really happened.

How did we get there? How does a fairly technical legal issue like the reform of European copyright law get to be debated, and eventually acted (and hacked) upon, in a hacker conference? To understand this, we need to take a step back.

On December 5th 2013 the European Commission launched an online consultation on copyright law reform in Europe. In the digital age, copyright law has become a contentious issue: adapted to broadcast technologies (printing press, radio and television), it ended up clashing with the Internet’s technological and social infrastructure. Network technology allows to make fast, inexpensive and exact copies of any content (books, music, films, scholarly articles etc.) and to spread them across the planet at the speed of light. On top of that, it allows – and sometimes requires – to do things that have no exact equivalent in the pre-digital world, like linking, caching, or remixing them. Are these things legal? Under which conditions? Predictably, netizens ended up wondering why would these operations – useful, simple, cheap – not be allowed; and digital native teenagers across the globe engaged in them with gusto.

Copyright holders reacted aggressively to what they think is an infringement of their rights. They demanded and obtained from lawmakers harsher penalties for copyright infringement (especially in the USA), and consistently sued young people, even minors, for lots of money – probably trying to scare off other infringers by gunning for some. The debate heated up. Exactly a year ago, on January 11th 2013,  Reddit co-founder and hacktivist Aaron Swartz took his own life at 26 years of age. He was facing prosecution for copyright infringement – he had downloaded a large number of copyrighted scholarly journal articles, using his access as a MIT student). 

Copyright is important, and the opening of the European Commission’s consultation could be good news. But there is a problem. The consultation consists in a questionnaire to download, fill and email to the Commission. The questionnaire is available in English only; takes several hours to complete (it is 36 pages long and consists of 80 questions); is written in legalese; and the window for doing all this is only 60 days, including the festivities break [yielding to requests from citizens, the deadline has now been moved 28 days forward to March 30th].

What sort of citizen do the designers of this consultation have in mind? I can think of only one type of person that fits it: professional lobbyists working for the copyright industry – record labels, movie production companies etc.. Lobbyists are fluent in English; know well the regulation they are trying to influence; and have no problem finding the time to fill a 80-questions questionnaire, since they – unlike most of us – get paid for it.

There is nothing wrong with a lobbyist stating an opinion in the context of an online consultation. But it is wasteful: lobbyists already have their channels. They have Brussels offices, industry conferences, money to hire consultants and experts and deploy them towards their goals. A public consultation – especially one that uses a pervasive channel like the Internet – could and should go the extra mile to enrich the debate, involing a number as high as possible of ordinary citizens.

Why has this not happened? According to Andersdotter, the Directorate General for the Single Market (DG MARKT) keeps a low profile to eschew controversies and conflicts – but in vain, since these are inevitable. “European citizens are in constant tensions with copyright law – says Andersdotter – For example, it is common for teachers of foreign languages to play DVDs or music CDs as a way to make their teaching more engaging, even if they bought them privately [editor’s note: yes, it is illegal]. Or it may happen that a French citizen shares a music video on YouTube with a German friend, but the latter cannot view it because French right holders have a deal with YouTube and German ones don’t. Many Europeans, especially young, have problems like these.” And it’s not just teenagers: in May 2013 LIBER, the European association of research libraries, walked on DG MARKT’s stakeholder dialogue initiative, claiming that “the research and technology communities have been presented not with a stakeholder dialogue, but a process with an already predetermined outcome” (source). The office of the Single Market commissioner Michel Barnier has not replied to our request for comments.

What can we learn from this story? I think there are three important conclusions. 

The first one: online consultation risk playing an antidemocratic role. They can be presented as a gesture of openness and transparency (“it’s on the Internet! Anybody can join in!”) but in truth offer only a new participation channel for interests already represented – a sort of Dark Side of online participation. To prevent this, citizens would do well to demand from their institutions not just to be consulted, but that consultations are designed to maximize participant diversity.

The second one: citizens can play a role in making them better. In the case in point and in other similar ones (remember ACTA?) a smart, tech savvy civil society mobilized to protect a global common, the freedom and health of the Internet ecosystem. Such instant, liquid mobilization produced longer-lasting organizations like Wikimedia and Open Knowledge Foundation, and meeting places like 30C3. Online participation has its Dark Side, but it also has a few Jedi Knights.

The third one: the political space opened by these movements is natively international. Hackers, as no politically relevant group before them, collaborate across state frontiers in a natural, unassuming way. The project to democratize the European consultation on copyright involved people of many nationalities, without anyone ever feeling the need to refer to the positions of one country or another. Interestingly, leadership tends to be allocated to young women like Helgadóttir (23, deputy member of the Icelandic parliament) or Andersdotter herself.

I am fascinated by Andersotter’s trajectory. Elected when she was only 21, she proved incredibly determined, acquiring an impressive competence on international conventions and treaties regulating the Internet in Europe and becoming a reference point for the continent’s open source movement, as well as for the hacker scene in general. She has held her (well documented) ground in favor of Internet freedom, and has not shunned conflict when conflict was in order. She does her best to make the European Parliament more open and welcoming for hackers and activists – for example, she organized a screening of the film about Wikileaks We steal secrets and made it open to the public. Hackers and activists across Europe reciprocate with an almost palpable affection, as if she were – after Lady Ada Byron – a second Queen of the Machines. She could be the first of a new breed of digital native European leaders, grown up between hackathons and The Big bang Theory reruns.

The story I told at the beginning of this post looks more like a scene from Matrix than a story of European politics. And yet, when you think about it, this is exactly the European Union that the founding fathers dreamed of: hackers, designers, civil society activists, elected representatives collaborating across all countries  to broaden the channels of democratic participation on the Union’s policies. If I could offer a word of advice to the next Presidents of the European Commission, Parliament and Council I would tell them: fly close to the hackers, involve them, ask them to help you design the Union’s online consultations. They are building the European agora that you could not give us. And – frankly – their code is vastly better than yours.

 

The open map of unused public buildings, the unMonastery call for residencies, the wi-fi hotspots app: score three for bottom-up smart cities

Here’s three stories from my native country, Italy.

As with all cities, in Bologna the downsizing of the City’s staff and other, more contingent factors, have left a legacy of buildings that the city owns, but does not know how to use – nor, knowing it, would it have the manpower and money to do so). Recently the city produced a georeferenced list of such properties and released it in open format on the city’s open data website. This allows and encourages anyone to download the data, visualize them on a city map and dream up ways to use them better. The city has also activated a dedicate email address to collect suggestions that might come from citizens, business or other entities.

Another Italian city, Matera, has launched an international call for hackers and social innovators. The call makes a radical proposition: become “innovators-in-residence” for a period ranging from one to four months, living in town and interacting with the local community to cook up low- and no-cost hacks for a better city. Anyone can apply, with no limitations on qualifications, nationality or age. The resident hackers will live and work in the unMonastery, a new kind of living and working space that takes inspiration from 10th century monastic life. According to its founder Ben Vickers, the unMonastery’s goal is to “embed expert knowledge into a local community”.

In the very same week, online magazine CheFuturo launched a free map that gives its users access to 24,000 open hotspots scattered across the country. Thousands of citizen helped to build its dataset, simply by using a dedicated hashtag on Twitter and Facebook; validation, dataset cleanup and app development were contributed by the Chefuturo group, at no cost to the taxpayer. The dataset will be maintained by Wikitalia, a NGO for open government (disclaimer: I am a member of its board).

These three Italian stories developed indipendently one from the other. They happened in different places; are trying to solve different problems; their initiators (Bologna’s digital agenda alderman, Matteo Lepore; the director of the Matera 2019 committee, Paolo Verri; and CheFuturo’s editor-in-chief Riccardo Luna) did not coordinate. Yet, they share a common approach, a similar idea of how you get things done. More than that: they share a vision of how to live together in our cities. This: when faced with the most difficult challenges, the best card to play is the citizenry’s collective intelligence. Consequently, it is essential to give citizens information and power of initiative, so that such collective intelligence can be mobilized.

These are small-scale initiatives that – wisely – seek to squeeze tangible results from few or no resources. And yet, they contain a seed for the reversal of a thousands of years old idea of what it means “to govern”. From the hereditary bureaucracy of ancient Egypt’s scribes to the top-down “scientific” collectivization of farming in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and through Plato’s philosopher-kings ruled Republic and Imperial China’s invention of a meritocratica civil service, the art of governing has almost always been rooted in the idea that the governed are unable to make wise decisions. This tradition imagines good government as a far-sighted decision, made in the common interest by a carefully selected élite. Instead, Lepore and Verri decentralize: they don’t try to find solutions to their respective problems; they don’t even try to identify a priori people or organizations that could suggest such solutions (“let’s open up a forum with local business and the university”). They simply inform and enable citizens. Not just their own, either, but those of the whole planet. Why not? The Internet makes this last choice obvious and free. It is very possible for a Materan to come up with a good idea for one of the unused spaces in Bologna, or for a Ghanaian to suggest a useful and realistic project for Matera. It would be senseless to exclude potentially valuable input from the get go. On the other side of this game, you find citizens like Luna, who are able to turn generic aspirations (“we need channels to stay connected while mobile”) into specific actions (“let’s map open wi-fi hotspots! Once we aggregate them, we’ll have made visible a nationwide network that’s already there, only no one knows it”) – and to do so without waiting for anyone’s permission.

A few months ago, I asked myself what we mean by “smart” in smart cities. My answer was that there are two alternative answers. One considers that the smarts of a city is concentrated in its universities and in the R&D labs of its large, hi-tech companies, and gives citizens the role of consumers of the various gadgets that these invent. The other, on the contrary, maintains that the smarts of a city is distributed among all citizens, and works to create spaces for everyone’s creativity to find outlets. The first approach to smart cities produces electric cars, in response to questions like “how can we reduce emissions from cars in the city?”; the second one produces bicycle cooperatives and urban farming, in response to questions like “do we really need cars to get around?”. It seems clear to me that the initiatives of Bologna, Matera and CheFuturo subscribe to this second approach.

From what I have heard, Lepore, Verri and Luna have all read and thought through my post. But whether they did or not is irrelevant: the spirit of radical decentralization in the choices they made is great news for those that, like me, believe that any city’s best tool is promoting the creativity of its citizens. Just as countless smart cities-themed conferences discuss sensors, the Internet of things and large-scale investments to program, thousands of smart citizens get together, experiment, fail, make progress, often collaborating with their institutions. The ones have money and large organizations; the others have many people, and networks to connect them. It will be interesting, in the end, to see which side will have been the smarter.