#NewLife in Berlin working in Google’s Policy Team

About two weeks ago I started my new job and I thought it would be good to share my first impressions, my vision and motivation.

To start with the basics, I now work in Google’s policy team in Berlin, which is basically my manager Annette and myself (plus Ines in Hamburg).

My scope of work is to promote and co-create reasonable policies in Google products, as well as to work in multi-stakeholder groups to deliberate and help develop sound new media policies for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Thereby my special focus is to liaison and collaborate with colleagues from academics and civil society. In that regard I am really happy that I can build on and extend my engagement for a humanistic conception of the Internet, advocate for Rights and Principles based internet governance regimes, which enable us to enjoy our Human Rights on the internet.

More concretely I am looking forward to (a) work with all stakeholders on internet and society related questions here in Berlin, (b) contribute to the deliberations about and development of policies that are user-centered, maximize individual freedom and balance the sometimes paradoxical overlaps between fundamental rights e.g. freedom of expression and privacy, or access to knowledge and intellectual property, (c) promote transparency and access to information about public institutions (but also of Google as an organization of public interest)

Oh and my managers endorsed that I continue my work with the multi-stakeholder coalition on Internet Rights and Principles as my 20% project! I am really excited about our current endeavors to draft (in collaboration with APC) a Charter of Human Rights and Principles on the Internet (based on APC’s Internet Rights Charter).
However I want to use this opportunity to state that I believe it is time for the IRP coalition to elect a new chair during this years IGF (as stated in our charter). I will be happy to actively participate and continue in the steering committee (if I will be elected).

But back to my new job at Google. In my view Google has brought us some really remarkable services that have not only shaped the way we use the internet, but how we live and work. I have joined them, because I think it is one of the most interesting workplaces, with a true 21st century organizational culture and colleagues who share my passion for the internet. In my experience Googlers have a genuine interest in working with all interested stakeholders to deliberate and collaboratively find ways to (legally and socially) frame the use of its disruptive innovations, which necessitate innovative policies.

Your Data lives forever on the internet

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has been thinking and talking about the inability of the Net to forget for quite a while now (ArsTechnica, 2007, (german) re:publica'08: Keynote: Nützliches Vergessen).
Now his new book came out "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" (Princeton Press)

The balance between privacy and a social online life is not easy to define and implement in practice. Social networking and social media (a.k.a. sharing culture) has become second nature to many of us, while other avoid or even outright reject to "make their private life public".

Allow me to share two aspects, which seem essential to describe and understand (my) social media life:

Networked publics are to be differentiated from the classical terms 'audience' and 'public'. The information I share on internet is interesting and relevant only to a limited group of people, most of which I know personally. One shares information in different groups (publics). And rather than "presenting" to an audience, it is more like a conversation at a (public) party.

The other concept is self-fashioning (wikipedia). A term that was introduced "to describe the process of constructing one's identity and public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards." Originally applied to how people at the court of Renaissance kings used to design and live their roles like in a theatre play. It remindes me of "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (Erving Goffman).
Putting information online is a concious act upon which most of us reflect regularly. The image, the mirror of our lifes we share online is a "positive" is a persona perspective.

impressive statistics about social media use and impact

A friend pointed me to a really nice youtube arguing for the importance of social media using a lot of interesting statisitics (from the US).



you can read all the stats (and links to their respective sources) on his blog.

openDNS - seems to be a decent way of content filtering

last night i met someone from www.openDns.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS). As the name says, they offer a free/open Doman Name resolver and what i thought was quite interesting: they allow for community based (crowdsourced) filtering by categories.

I just signed up for their service to test it. Here is how it works and some reflections:

You select the network you want to have filtered by either choosing one of the categories or doing a custom category filter:

• High - Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters.
• Moderate - Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity.
• Low -Protects against pornography and phishing.
• Minimal- Protects against phishing attacks.
• None - Nothing blocked.
• Custom - Choose the categories you want to block.

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in their category list they have some pretty strange themes to filter like "Educational Institutions", "search engines" as well as really broad ones like "news & media"

once you selected the "evil" content you dont want your children, roomates or workers to see all you have to do is active the filter and no-one in your IP/network will be able to access these pages. In fact you can define custom messages/pages to be displayed for the different blocked categories.

I am not 100% sure how the system works though. I played around with it and e.g. didn't see a reason why weeklygripe.co.uk or even more strange http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ was tagged (to be decided for blocking) as hate & discrimination. In fact i didn't think any of the sites in that category were reasonably tagged.

In their defense it has to be said that from the 5,399,836 sites submitted only 1,034,372 are aproved for blocking right now.

here are some relevant answers from their FAQs

• What Do I Do If A Domain Is Tagged Incorrectly?

If an undecided domain is tagged incorrectly, vote No.

If a decided domain is tagged incorrectly, go to the domain detail page and click the "Flag for review" link.

Community moderators will review all reports.

• Who are the moderators?

Moderators are a mix of OpenDNS employees and trusted community members. Moderators are identified throughout the community by a badge .

**And they invite applications to become a moderator from the community.


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so here are my 2 cents worth of thoughts about this approach

A) I think the way the decisions about blocking are made should be described clearer (who has the final say?) and a wikipedia like discussion page would also be helpful

B) having that said, i think it is a rather transparent, community driven and therefore commendable approach

C) it would add substantial value if there was a "suggested warning" category -- so say nazi propaganda gets flagged and a warning page is displayed when a user tries to enter, but if s/he descides s/he wants to see the page there is a link to enter

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Interestingly Prof. David Casacuberta and myself had envisioned a relatively similar service in our 2007 article "Do we need new rights in Cyberspace? Privacy and the Need for an Internet Bill of Rights ", presented at the GigaNet Symposium 2007 and published in Enrahonar 40/41

Allow me to quote:

"Lets imagine the institution managing the cyber address assignment includes meta-information regarding the content of the information and service provided. This would enable, for example, the classification of content to be only appropriate for mature users as well as the insertion of a informative page advising the user of the quality of the content. This upstream page would also allow for public discourse and collective assessment of content provided at the site. This way there is no enforcement of particular axiological dispositions in the form of restraining the freedom of expression but vulgar and extremist content would be classified and debated."

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Lastly i looked and it seems quite easy/possible to "hack" (=circumvent) the openDNS system. You can go to the sites IP directly, or you can use a proxy server.

Also it seems that openDNS finds pretty interesting (value added) services to complement their core functionality. For example you/the admin can define shortcuts to point to urls; so you can define that the word "mail" points to your webmail etc.

I would be interested what you think about their system. For me it is clear that openDNS is operating in a space that is very relevant to internet governance so i would like to invite them to join our efforts and discussions; and if possible come to the IGF so we can work with them "in real life".

Fotos:: Climbing the Chief:: Squamish - BC Canada

just came back from a really nice climbing trip in canada. Here are some impressions:

Schooling is the best way to fight terror & under development

What i stated in the title is no news, but it is always encouraging to see someone really making a difference and putting theory to practice: Enter Greg Mortenson

Greg is a mountaineer who "climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain in the Karakoram range.

While recovering from the climb in a village called Korphe, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school.

From that rash promise, grew a remarkable humanitarian campaign, in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As of 2009, Mortenson has established over 90 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 34,000 children, including 24,000 girls, where few education opportunities existed before."

Chapeau - it is a reminder that we can all really make a difference if we choose to do so!

Greg has written a book about his venture - read about it @ www.threecupsoftea.com

Values in (technology) Design

I had a very productive meeting with Eddan Katz from the Electronic Fountier Foundation last Thursday. At the end of our conversation we found out that we both have a passion philosophy (of technology) and he recommended me the work on values in (technology) design done at the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Santa Clara University and e.g. by Helen Nissenbaum (Professor @ New York University) as well as Batya Friedman (Professor @ University of Washington).

On my travels up to Vancouver/Squamish i had some time to review their work and i really really like it. It is a super interesting approach to getting Human Rights included into technology planing and policy development.

Please if you know of similar approaches or other peoples work in this area please comment or contact me directly. I am especially interested in cultural differences in technology use & design.
Thanks in advance!

Emotions ~> Values ~> Rights - An Inspiring TED talk

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web:







also the two projects sites are interesting

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.
http://universe.daylife.com/ -- background: http://universe.daylife.com/statement.html


this made me think of Neil Postman's "grand narratives" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Education)

In the second part of the book, Postman proposes 5 narratives as possible alternatives to the current ones:

• "Spaceship Earth" (the notion of humans as stewards of the planet)
• "The Fallen Angel" (a view of history and the advancement of knowledge as a series of errors and corrections)
• "The American Experiment" (the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument)
• "The Laws of Diversity" (the view that difference contributes to increased vitality and excellence, and, ultimately, to a sense of unity)
• "The Word Weavers/The World Makers" (the understanding that the world is created through language — through definitions, questions, and metaphors)

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basically i would suggest to frame our "human rights online" story as a complementary (sub)narrative of this kind. something like "one free and fair global (online) community" what do you think?