Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Politics of the RFC
Requests for Comments are the condition of possibility for Internet Politics and today is their 40th Birthday. So do read Stephen Crockers Editorial in the NYTimes.
When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.†R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online.
Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.†Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.
As political scientists we need to ask, what are the strengths and weaknesses of governance mechanisms build on RFCs and code-is-law , do they only work for engineering and standardization problems (not for dilemmas) or can the constitute cultures that can deal with a wider set of collective action problems? If they do, then we need to ask questions about the identity requirements of members of such RFC-communities, etc. A lot of very interesting questions that we are only slowly getting into. David Post outlines an approach to ask these types of questions in part 2 (order) of Jefferson’s Moose, but there are many questions left.
Jefferson’s Moose
If you are looking for a semana santa (easter week) reading, I urge you to order David Post‘s, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford University Press 2009). It is an amazingly beautiful written reflection on the the emerging/emergent new world of Cyberspace.
The book, which I’ve been laboring over for a good 12 years or so, has a (deceptively?) simple premise: to recreate Jefferson’s analysis of the New World, for cyberspace. It sounds pretty outlandish, and I guess it is — but I think it actually works pretty well (though I leave that to you to decide that for yourself). Along the way, we discover some pretty interesting things about the Internet, and about Jefferson — about network design, and Jefferson’s plan for governing the Western Territory, about the protocol stack and the canals of France, about distributed routing, end-to-end design, and the Louisiana Purchase. And about why Jefferson had a moose shipped to him in Paris while he was serving as US minister to France, and why we should care about that.
World 2.0 in Garmisch
tomorrow afternoon we are starting with the world 2.0 course, where we (Erfurt School of Public Policy and Moscow Higher School of Economics) are asking about the emerging/emergent political theories of web technologies… I will keep you posted.
Quick Travel Posting: Vienna Calling
am in Vienna for talks with friends in the interior ministry, the city, the environmental ministry and I am ever more persuaded that Vienna has the most effective municipal government/administration in the world – the question to the world is: is there any data available on this? how could/should it be measured? …and if proven true, how do we carry the experiences generated here into the world (hint: cases!?)
Security 2.0 – BBC doing a DDOS
If you liked our Security 2.0 Case (The Estonian-Russian Cyberwar of 2007), you might want to head over to BBC and watch them do a DDOS.
And Where is 115?
For all of us waiting for the German 115 project to take off, there is interesting news from NYC. As Nick Sbordone, spokesman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication said, 311 “is more a philosophy than a call center,†in that it’s about presenting information to people when they want it, how they want it.
Over the weekend, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer suggested the administration create a mobile 311 application for the mobile generation. The specifics are quite mushy, but the idea is that New Yorkers should be able to to check public school closings, find out about alternate-side parking rules suspensions, and to report potholes. (A lot of the calls to 311 are for basic information, according to the city’s annual survey, available as a PDF.)
Some 311-type functions — like uploading a picture of a pothole or looking at traffic cams — can already be done from a phone through the city’s mobile Web site (which is a redirect from www.nyc.gov, courtesy of Usablenet). The problem is that’s just not branded under 311. It’s splayed all over the nyc.gov site.
As with other cities who have 311 services, like Baltimore and San Francisco, New York’s technologists are putting a lot of the information on the Web to streamline the burdens on the operators.
The Remix Culture Zeigen Show
I had planned not to write about Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Lessig 2008) until it came out as creative commons licensed download (hypocrisy or just good business sense?), but today Larry Lessig posted an incredible youtube mashup by Kutiman that “shows” in the Wittgenstein’ian sense of “zeigen” what our new remixed world will look like…get ready for it! – and buy the book, so that it can come out for free... :)
“…it’s coming from facebook time”
Today, Mark Cuban posed the question “Where does tweet time come from?” and the clear favorite answer was…;)
I spend far less time on Fbook as a result of my Twittering. I trade out of my home office and like having an outlet to the outside world during the day. Comment by Dave — March 11, 2009 @ 2:11 am
I use http://www.twitterfeed.com to RSS my Facebook status to Twitter, 2 birds with 1 stone. Now the real question is, where does Facebook time come from? Although as a telecommuter, it’s not much different from water cooler time in a normal workplace… Comment by Patrick G — March 11, 2009 @ 2:45 am
I pretty much stopped checking/using Facebook, so that freed up some time. Also, I have TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry that I can check during class or while walking/traveling after I check emails. I would imagine a lot of people make use of Twitter on-the-go through a client or SMS. Comment by Geoff — March 11, 2009 @ 7:01 am
Clay Shirky makes a slightly different argument, taking a macro-historical perspective:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society
So the question is, is twitter the gin or the museum?
Learning from the Best
if the changes we are going through are as radical as we are assuming… we might have to freshen up our political philosophy skills… luckily, AcademicEarth is providing video lectures by the best… so just as an example, follow Steven B. Smith @ Yale through 24 lectures of political philosophy (thanks to Julia Damerow for pointing me to the site):
Open Government 101
Jerry Brito wrote a great primer into what we should expect of open government in the 21st century in 2007, Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency, it is available at the SSRN:
If government data is made available online in useful and flexible formats, citizens will be able to utilize modern Internet tools to shed light on government activities. Such tools include mashups, which highlight hidden connections between different data sets, and crowdsourcing, which makes light work of sifting through mountains of data by focusing thousands of eyes on a particular set of data.
Today, however, the state of government’s online offerings is very sad indeed. Some nominally publicly available information is not online at all, and the data that is online is often not in useful formats. Government should be encouraged to release public information online in a structured, open, and searchable manner. To the extent that government does not modernize, however, we should hope that private third parties build unofficial databases and make these available in a useful form to the public.
