Technology and Activism

• Introduction and History.  2m  NB:  the thumbnail images here are links to full size pictures. 
  
• Hi. My Name is Will Herrick, and I'm here to convey some broad strategies to help you construct, maintain, and profit from advanced communication technologies.  I'm also going to indulge myself and cite some technical issues that are important to me that may not mean a thing to you, but I will try to be brief.  My Main Message to you is that I don't think you have a technical problem per se, but instead an issue of institutional will.  It's about how management spends the money.  It's a training and maintenance problem.
• My short history:  Both my parents were chemists. They met working for the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Urey, at Columbia University.  The same event that invited me into the world immolated 78,000 people in a few seconds:  sobering circumstances for thoughtful kid. 
  

• When I lived in Concord Massachusetts, I walked past the Minuteman statue every morning on my way to the Louisa May Alcott elementary school. The basic notions of patriotism and civic responsibility got under my skin at a young age.
  
• I became a wilderness buff in high school, and also spent some of my senior year in independent study with Dr. Martin Fuller, who had two PhDs from MIT, one in Physics and one in Chemistry, together we pursued studies in the Social Responsibility of the Scientist- I was fifteen.
  
• In college, I took a job on the campus paper copy reading, and being a news photographer, then production manager.  I wrote a few stories, but I had Joe Kane and others to put me in my literal place.
  
• After undergraduate work in California and New Zealand, and with an incomplete Masters in Engineering, I returned to the woods of Kentucky, where I still live today.  I write software and support networks for a living.
  
• 
  
• (SKIP THIS UNLESS AV c. 20 seconds/slide ) 
  
• Next I'd like to critique some my own efforts over the years.  The results have been very mixed.  4m.   
• 1969:  The MCST & flunking English.  1974: Newspaper Layout stats.  BEC.  c. 1984: SWEC & Training NGOs. 
  
•   1984:  SpEd: VMP & LAKES.  1988: Landfills and Incinerators.   
  
• 1990: The Voice Box.  WAIT & MedWaste.   Logging and mining regulation.
  
•     1992: The Commonwealth Fellowship, KERA & brain drain. 
•   1995: Seven BBS' & Satellites.   The radio show.  Internet and the last mile.  Garbage billing.
  
• 1998-2000: Kentucky Bottle Bill & other Web sites. CMS'.  The HB1 poster campaign. 
• 2002:  Trash & IGCC:  Trapp.  KRC & the online libraries.  Broadband & leadership.
• 2003; FlipperFax. 2004: ReadTrim. 
•   2005: Secure wireless. #tecactv, for a lark.
  
• (2 m) Some of the sites I've set up have failed due to poor support from the content providers.  None have been hacked or crashed-they just got Stale.  Most web sites are not set up by folks ready to start a newspaper or magazine, although that is the level of attention and support an attractive dynamic site requires. Most groups have just wanted a site that presents their stuff to a larger audience and brings new folks to their organization. Institutions that have a longer commitment may find it hard to retain the staff to sustain the site.  That leads them to outsource it, but that still fails to address the constant need for fresh information.  Keeping a site fresh and tasty-like the newspapers,  is a Real Job that requires talent, commitment, experience, money, content and a group effort. 
• I tend to design to a lower common denominator than many, opting for reliability, speed and a uniform look & feel over the "rich media experience."  The need to build a productive and functional site generally leads me away from the bleeding edge, back to stable platforms and proven tools.  Instead, I try to use computing power and software functions to add value.
  
• Many of my clients have been early adopters, which like television in the US, has cast them in an older technology that they'll need to spend money to update.  To reach the audiences that need less text and more graphics,  both you, the provider, and your audience need more bandwidth  You'll also need content talent (writers), and caliber tools to construct and maintain the graphics.  None of the NGO's I've dealt with could muster the resources to provide the maintenance, content,  and design needed to run a high end site for very long, if at all.  The lesson for me is that content support and site training both need a lot of attention and a consistent design guideline as well as funding.  This is where my interest in Content Management Systems comes from. 
  
•   Soapbox 101.  Activism in Technology:   Opportunities and Suggestions. 10m

• 
• Before I proceed to talk about a number of practical ways that activism can be assisted by available technology and training,  I'd like to talk about the Big Technology Picture, where I think things are looking Very Bad.
• A part of the problem:  three year olds are learning the Internet before they are learning to read.  How do we present our message to get the three year olds, the high schoolers or the college grads.  None of these groups have been seriously targeted for modern telecommunication by the progressives I've dealt with.  If we want to include them, we have to invest the time, understanding, and money to do it.  It takes building a site two or three different ways, with and without graphics, for example.  That's a lot more effort. 
  
• It takes time to grow the user base, so the payoff is deferred.  As well, there is no entirely accurate way to measure site usage-so many of the "hits" are not human eyes on the page at all, but instead, software agents searching  for content, or they are fabricated or spoofed counts making money for advertisers,  or redirected routes that aren't really humans trying to come your site.  One cannot easily measure the real usage or impact.
  
• Archiving and preserving digital data for the long run:  We must bear the burden of not losing our history and evidence. 
  
• Digital data formats are advancing rapidly, and as a rule, the storage media for those data fail quickly or the devices needed to read the data are lost.  Consider the age of some of the records in the recent tobacco or asbestos litigations.  If we are going to preserve evidence for the future, something needs to change. 
  
• Imagine when global warming has flooded the US coasts, and new law allows us to prosecute those who knowingly profited, like we have the tobacco companies.  It's our job today to develop the proof of who knows what, and to preserve that evidence for the coming decades. 
  
• Federal legislation was introduced this week to require the retention of all Internet Server log files for up to two years.  Contrast this with the Kentucky Government's policy to destroy government emails within two weeks.  The author David Brin has followed through on IF Stone's perception of truth and secrecy.  Brin's recent book "The Transparent Society", provides the argument that civil trust can only by preserved allowing the public to watch their own government in the same manner that the government watches them. 
  
• There is now a desperate fear of email, backups, file caches and server log records in some circles of government.   It's an interesting conflict, that governments around the world are inserting cameras and microphones on every street corner, while taking great pains to assure that they themselves are never recorded unaware.  Our current president disavows email, and now our governor's administration has begun to abandon them too.  This is a crippling move on their part, and they will not be able to function well absent the common technologies the rest of us use to good advantage.
• I expect that there will be a quiet effort to change state policy and destroy all digital copies of internal government documents as a rule, rather than retain them as a rule.   We should not permit that, for there lies truth-on-demand, fabrications, conflations, and  deceptions.  While Jesse Ventura argues that the public doesn't want to know the truth, some of  us do.  Someone has to make decisions based on facts, not fabrications.
  

• 
•  Much of the "new" activism in technology has been to sow doubt or obfuscate.  Legitimate market driven research and development has bled over to "Product Protection" (see current SciAm 6/05).  Those of you following the news know that many top advisers in our state and federal  leadership  are vetted by, likely come from, and will return to the industry they are governing-their infidelity to the office and public responsibility is becoming well documented.  Hopefully public outrage at this treacherous betrayal of the public trust will lead to change.
  
• Among some university  researchers, one in six women, and one in ten men report pressure to alter results (per Assoc Univ Teachers: The Guardian, Donald MacLeod, Tuesday March 22, 2005).  Similar reports can be found in Life Sciences (2/10/05: SF Chronicle), and Wildlife research (LA Times 2/11/05).  This is Really Bad:  the integrity of researchers is now in doubt, a circumstance that works for those promoting dangerous and dubious products, and against those trying to accurately and affordably assure public safety and health.
• Conversely, I'd note that there is an equally active campaign to sow political "belief."  The whisper campaigns are an example, as are the political organizing campaigns going on from the pulpit, and the procrustean 'ethnic cleansing' of churches in East Kentucky and elsewhere that coerces agreement by ostracism and disorganization of the dissenters.  I've heard of many local complaints about the politicization of the churches,  and I'm sure that there are thoughtful honest churchgoers that have grave concern for the divisiveness and the exclusions. 
  
• I find the ying/yang of the disbelief/belief initiatives thought provoking.
  
• The Identity Theft problem is bleeding over to the Total Information Awareness problem.  Many of you have become aware of the threats to your financial and retirement security from identity theft, and are taking steps to address it.  However, the appropriate strategies for protecting you are contrary to the war on terrorism and John Poindexter's notion of privacy.  While Mr. Poindexter's TIA was clipped, along with the Office of Strategic Influence (now a rock group!), Poindexter indicated that the US would simply buy the solution from the private sector, to the same effect. Now, apparently, the US hires multi-national firms to provide them with TIA-like services.  Many of these firms are also reporting wholesale theft of their data, but mostly just in those states where they are required to report it.  To close my mention of Mr. Poindexter and technical activism, one of the largest blogs on the web is SlashDot:  News for Nerds.   The Slashdotters took up Mr. Poindexter's gauntlet and within a few hours they produced a website with maps, aerial photos, satellite photos, driving directions, phone numbers, mailing addresses, family members, proximate watering holes appropriate for surveillance, and so on.  Apparently Mr Poindexter's wife does not share his perceptions of privacy, as she was reportedly upset.
  
• Recently, a court in the northern US declared that the mere presence of encryption technology was grounds for suspicion...yet all of you use it daily-it's how you secure the Internet and authenticate your online banking, purchases, and email.  The day of that press release, I had just installed encrypted directories on all my machines to secure my personal and tax information.   You should do that too:  hard drives get sold, machines get hacked, and  computers get stolen.  If you'd encrypted your data, you can be sure it is a lot of trouble and nearly impossible to decode.
• Another example is this week's news is that Microsoft, in the name of shareholder and management profit, censored the words "democracy" and "freedom" from crossing their Internet servers in China.  As the Internet ages, and the memory of egalitarian democracy fades in this country-would a profit motivated Microsoft ban "freedom" here too?  In another example of technical activism that contrasts strongly with market driven censorship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others are writing anonymizers that make locating the author nearly impossible.  While out of favor in a world driven by Terror from Non-State Agents, you will find that one day you'll desire and use these for yourself as the best means to assure your personal information safety from TIA and identity theft.  They will become a common utility like the once-controversial encryption technologies.
  
• The Intellectual Property (IP) Commons & the erosion of public intellectual property has been especially troubling to me:  most folks have no notion of how media companies and large software companies have found common cause in the restriction of public intellectual property rights.  In the face of losing the copyrights on Mickey, Minnie and Goofy, Disney lobbied for and got significant extensions to their exclusive rights to the characters, rather than the scheduled transfer to the public domain.   
  
• Likewise, Microsoft and other software houses began to receive software patents for things like mouse clicks and window structures.  Very poor work has been accepted by the US Patent Office regarding prior art and the legitimacy of some proposed patents.  Both the entertainment and software industries have a long history of standing on the "shoulders of giants."  But now they are trying to close the gates, and lock in their particular industry dominance.  A basic example being the fundamental mouse and window GUI- a Xerox invention taken up by Apple, then Digital Research Inc, Amiga, and Microsoft.  Microsoft has patented everything they could-not just sophisticated technical innovations that they have made, but previously unclaimed common practices-and thanks to the US Patent Office and the public's inattention, these patents are commonly issued. This ossification defeats innovation and market competition. 
  
• Look around the room and most of the folks you see are Windows users.  I've challenged many of you in the past to keep learning and trying new software.  I'd like to close this part by saying that, I believe you could have spent your money over the past decades more wisely by fostering competition and buying into the best innovations of the day, rather than the monolithic monopolistic result you have purchased.  Diversity alone would have made the current Microsoft virus problem  a smaller threat.
  
• In short, there are a lot of buggy whip vendors doing a great job of advertising  or legislating dislocations of market truth to acquire market  instead of innovating and competing. 
  
• The buying of journalists in this country has done great damage to the fourth estate, and like the bent research described above, has cost the honest journalists of the nation much of their deserved authority-again to the advantage of the dissemblers, murkers, and corrupters. Too many honest and important technologies are being spun, and I regret wondering how many duplicitous journalists are taking pay to propagandize under the guise of accurate and honest reporting.
  
• Among our federal reactions to 9/11 has been the decision to cut off the flow of international grad students to the US.  China has taken up much of the slack.  The federal government's policies are squelching America's role in the important research going on in the world today.  The research prohibited in the US is still being done, and will be done regardless of US moral suasions.  All we've accomplished is to assure that it will done somewhere else.  America is poised to become a client nation, purchasing from others what we should be inventing and producing here.  
• I have a friend who now lives in a subdivision she protested against as a college student:  I am confident that many who support cutting medical research to satisfy their moral superiority will be among the clients traveling abroad to buy the very medical relief condemned here.
•  
• Practical Suggestions. 10m
• My Main Message: it's not the tech, it's the institutional will, and the money that management spends.  It's a training and maintenance problem.
• I've been told by David Couch, the state's Director of Educational Technology,  that the biggest impediment to adopting new technology for the KERA WAN and public schools is the lack of trained support staff.  It's the same all over-the biggest impediments to new tech are support and training.
•   In terms of web sites, Content Management Systems address that problem to a degree.  The purpose of a Content Management System is to simplify the construction and automate the maintenance of web sites. 
  
•   They are programs that typically reside on the web server computer & offer a secure WYSIWYG GUI that generates your website from text and pictures that you cut and paste.  They are the "shortest distance" from your desktop to the web & relieve the author from a lot of technical issues.  
  
•   CMS' are really nifty in that they can manage the "look and feel" of your website-keeping a common font and style regardless of what you paste, for example (that is optional, I might add).  CMS' allow a secure means to sublet columns and pages on a website, so more than one person can contribute. 
  
•   The last Really Big Virtue of the CMS is that once you've mastered the tool, you can make many different websites, each unique in their style, layout, and content, but all with a common software and skill base.  That means that folks trained on one site have every technique they need to maintain another.   More available talent for an employer and more work for a trained individual adds up to a good market, so as a group you can make group purchaeses to develop and retain talent.
  
• You should consider the hi quality open source tools: the Apache webserver,  Mozilla, Oo, perl.   This entire presentation, and all of my websites has been done with just these tools.  The fax server, FlipperFax, is written in perl.
  
• Linux is the next Metric System.  It's in major usage in the new IT powerhouses of India, Brazil, and the broadband rich far east.  It is in escalating use on all scales of computing from the $12 MagicFrame, to PDA's, to PC, clusters & distributed processes.  I doubt many here will rush to dump their current desktops, but it is a serious and valid option for your consideration, especially if you are looking at a lot of desktops and licenses.
  
• I'd also commend the Open Source strategies:  of peer review, transparency, net-moderated collaboration and IRC that all work well.  The exploitable error rate in open source software has been measured to be 10e-3 that of closed source.  If you would like an excellant example of this method in action, visit irc://freenode/madwifi where you can see volunteers sharing knowledge to train and support wireless technologies.
• The over 30 set needs to take a page from our old yippy manual, and start trusting the youth of the world, and learn what they've learned.  The Instant Messaging/wifi/VOIP/Blackberry phenom won't go away  just because some politician gets in a jam-Did audio recordings go away just because of Nixon's experience.   
  
• To keep you site visiible on the search engines, establish a machine observable trust system, to wit:  a bunch of websites that all cross link.  It elevates all the sites scoring in the search engines.   If you develop them in an honest fashion, they will rank well in the search engines.  Don't look like phishers or spammers if you don't want to get blacklisted.
  
•   So  it's my suggestion to you that you train your staff on how to build and manage your websites with a collaborative model & common CMS.

• Costs to build and operate websites will vary from NGO to NGO and issue to issue.  These costs will mostly depend on the NGO's own willingness to learn the tools,  and on their goals.
  
• NGO's have some common features and problems:  these are your challenges to overcome if you are to collaborate and share a talent pool of trainers, authors, and support.
• NGOs have a mission, a reputation, and a culture. 
  
• They cannot afford loose cannons, or loose lips, they cannot stray far from their mission, they get grief when they step onto the turf of other NGOs, and they fear offending their donors.  
  
• They may have to compete for dollars with their fellow travelers. 
  
• They cannot reliably fund initiatives beyond their core scope.
  
• They generally don't have the money for production grade software development, or the skills to manage R&D.

• Technicals you employ may bring problems too: many have little political initiative, are too much in love with their toys, or have lousy people skills.  
  
• How to make office and institution technology cheaper. 
  
• Recognize and reward in-house talent & service.  It might not take dollars.
  
• Don't drop the ball:  make your backups.
• Survey the field on a regular basis and try to spot tools and methods that look promising.
  
• Pick your tools carefully. 
  
• Be very clear about the problem.  Be very clear about the solution.
• Skunkworks vs the usual process.
• Do not change design (much) after you've committed, it's create bugs and cost money.
• Hire the right number of people at the start- adding manpower to R&D after the start usually slows it down, as all the beginners have to climb the learning curve before they can contribute to the effort.   This is _Very_Important_.
  
• Pay techs enough to avoid churning & disruption.  If you lose all that training and experience, you'll just have to start over, and change all the passwords.
  
• Consider Open Source stuff- 10e-3 error rate, security designed by phone companies and vetted by 30 years of field installation, free like speech and free like beer.
• How to attract hearts and minds. The active construction of doubt and uncertainty by commercial agents pretty much assures that any message we  try to present will have to endure a very noisy medium, with active jamming and spoofing from the Deaver's and Finkelsteins of the world as our message percolates through the media.
  
• 
• Heroes:  Joe Begley:  "Everybody ought to go to jail once for something that they believe in".
• Market share, mind share and heart share: they all take time.  While starting early maximizes the return,  kids generally aren't gatekeepers, they don't sue, write big checks, drive to the state capitol, or vote:   we need a whole lot more than just the youth.   How do we better organize our effort to shape the perception of the future?
  
• New avenues and media:  text messages, rss feeds,  pods & net narrowcasts.
• Suggested training: 
  
• Netiquette, fire hoses, and synthesis. 
  
• Training the email/IM culture.  Don't flood email.
  
• Maintain your sites and your lists.
  
• Authentication/certificates/encryption.
  
• Suggested Hardware:
• Get a good laptop
  
• Get a good presentation technology. 
  
• If I thought there was money to do it, I'd build a google news-like "synthesis" site harvesting and presenting current postings germane to Kentucky and progressive action.  It might bring cross-fertilization and attract new blood.  It could automate harvest of the postings on the individual NGO's site followed by a little straining, sorting, and filtering.  This leaves the burden on the NGO to maintain their own site.  It should usually return the viewer to the NGO's site for the article of interest.  It dodges a lot of the turf and competition issues. I might build one, but it's a Big Job.
• Imagine a magazine that reviewed Kentucky environmental activities...now try to guess for me how many arenas, like Environment, there are in this crowd of 'progressives', IE:  how many magazines would it take to cover the whole bunch... this is a rough measure of the number of 'synthesis' sites that you might benefit from.
•  Issues Gathering and Quick Synthesis.  15m
• Intro to IG method.
  
• What goals do the attendants have? 
  
• Do you have target audiences?
  
• What's stopping you from achieving them? 
  
• Would it be a good idea to self-organize? 
  
• Can you find the means and will to begin training & design?
• Synthesis
• Conclusion 5m
• The cradle to grave era of full time personal networking is upon us.  We have a challenge to recast our means of community from the geographic locale to a common site in cyberspace,  and to take advantage of the new mechanisms available to the always connected.  What new communities can we build or join?
• We have a challenge and an obligation to better manage our digital legacy.  Pay attention to the age of your media and hardware.  Pay the cost of replicating your data.  Do it in a way that preserves it's authenticity and value as legal evidence.
• The basic training has been the one sure shot. 
  
• Good web sites are hard to do, and take a lot of effort to maintain and support.
• Put money into training.  You can start that now.  If you form a planning group, re-align your training as your planning group comes into productive play.
  
• Put money into scope and design.   Use it to buy a plan to build a group that can scope, plan, implement and support your needs.
• Make a team that reflects your goals and audiences.  Make it a permanent thing, pay them, retain them, and pay attention to them.
  
• I'd suggest that you survey CMS's & training/support options.  Keep the magic behind the curtain as best you can.  CMS' work a lot of magic, and can be managed both centrally and by 'sub-letting' or parceling out the maintenance. 
  
• There are institutions that will facilitate the training.    Much of the training can be done online, as well.
  
• Try to harmonize the CMS' and the training among your groups.  If you can define the common factors in your network services, you can buy training and talent as a group.  In-house support is the best, when it works.   It usually fails because it's a hard job that comes with few rewards, but management can address that: acknowledge the job and pay for it.
  
• Plan to spend long term money on talent and maintenance.  if you are serious, you'll find structural monies and plan for ongoing initiatives.
  
• Try to make it all fun. 
  
• Q&A.  10m

wh

June 17, 2005

• Examples of technology and activism that you may already know:  
  
• The Manhattan Project
• NASA.
• Phil's Pretty Good Privacy: PGP, cypherpunks and the early crypto wars.
  
• The APACHE web server-software that nobody owns exactly, but runs half the Internet.
• GNU/Linux's unique success of gaining market share from MS.
• Hactivism:  EFF, HOPE, etc.
• Lee Todd/UK & the LITF.  University of Kentucky president, Dr. Lee Todd, has been organizing technology fairs, and promoting R&D in solar, recycling, and a whole lot more.  I find it very heartening to see headlines like "'Plastic oil' could improve fuel economy in cars, chemists say" stemming from research done at UK (http://www.physorg.com/news4509.html).  Maybe we can encourage our federal deep pocket types to capitalize on the recent Hybrid car production in Georgetown, R&D like recycled plastics, and Todd's own field of expertise (luminance) to launch more green tech R&D in Kentucky, like solar