Nico Macdonald Reporting

WSIS Day Four, AM: Developments in development

This morning I met Charline Poirier for breakfast. Charline is an ethnographer and user researcher who works in-house at one of the private banks headquatered in Geneva. She had contacted me for help in looking for work in London, and as I happened to be in Geneva we continued our conversation at a creperie, hosted by an eccentric and socially maladjusted woman. Either way, it was nice to meet a person not at the Summit, and connect with someone in person rather than by email.

I returned to Palexpo to attend a UNESCO event entitled 'Media Development in Knowledge Societies'. Sounded intriguing. In fact it consisted of people reporting on UNESCO-funded CMC projects in India, Mali and the Caribbean, followed by a session on media freedom (which I didn't attend). It is interesting to see how ICT (I will use that wretched term for now, and No, I can't remember what CMC stands for) is being used outside the developed world. It is occasionally even inspiring. But it seems a long way from past concepts of development.

When I worked for the Centre for Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT) in New Delhi in 1984 they took the view that with AV tools they could 'raise consciousness' among Indian villagers, helping them see the reality of power relations in their societies. This was fairly radical thinking. It was a few step above the Mother Theresa approach on show in Calcutta (as it was then known). The next step up was the 'teach a man to fish...' school. More radical than CENDIT were groups that politically organised local villagers, political parties (including the various flavours of the CP in India), and semi-terrorists (prominent in West Bengal).

While I am not endorsing violent action, the kinds of development proposed at the Summit represent very low-level and unambitious thinking about human agency and potential. There appears to be an underlying view that there is one kind of technology for people in the developing world, and one for those in the developed. That ICT is somehow sufficient and we can forget about development of real infrastructure. And that there are no issue around context of use or practicality of the kinds of solutions offered. We haven't worked out how to use information technology properly in the developed world and we certainly don't know how to do it in the developing world.

My objection to terms such as CMC and ICT is that they just become verbal fluff, with no inherent meaning. The use of acronyms and other language codes pervades the Summit. As with any language code, it helps speakers show that they are inside the institutional tent, they know the lingo, they are not going to really cause trouble. Here are some of the key terms that litter Summit presentations: civil society, sustainability, inclusion, respect, diversity, digital divide, action research, cultural identity, women's empowerment, traditional knowledge. When I hear these terms, I reach for the off button.

WSIS Day Three, PM: Summit dynamics

The 'New Media and Broadcasting' workshop at the World Electronic Media Forum ground slowly to a halt. The last session -- 'The Food of the Gods' -- lacked interesting ideas and engaging presenters. But maybe it was just the end of the day, and the dispiriting experience of seeing people leave one by one. At the end the event chairs tried to draft some recommendations to forward to WSIS. At least there would be some outcome from our discussions. (Whether my recommendations will get in is another issue.) Overall the event was valuable, and I learned a lot. I was also reminded of the divergence between our experience of the Web and the experience of sound and vision. Maybe Gerhard Stoll was onto something.

In the evening I attended the ICT for Development (ICT4D) Awards, part of the Global Knowledge Partnership awards program. The awards are "aimed at promoting specific, targeted applications of ICTs in four areas: gender, media, poverty reduction and youth". The event was well organised, and a nice change of pace from long sessions of presentations. However there was little said about why people had won awards, or what they had achieved in particular.

The whole focus of the Summit, not just the ICT4D event, seems to be focused on the developing world, and dominated by its representatives. Maybe this makes sense. After all the populations of the developing world are the world majority. I have also been surprised about how much criticism of the event, and the world powers, is tolerated. The event programme even includes a listing for what are effectively counter-Summit events. While people are organising parallel events the main events of the Summit -- the plenary sessions -- plough on. I haven't attended these sessions but have listened to some via the translation headsets. They seem to consist of country representatives reading pre-prepared statements, while the time set aside for discussion is in fact reserved for more statements, from representatives of intergovernmental organisations, civil society and business sector entities. (Fortunately the 3-5 minute time limit still applies.)

My provisional conclusion is that the Summit serves the following purposes:

• minor world leaders get to be statesmen for a day, and tell their parliaments and electors that they are taking part in an important world summit
  
• the key world powers can appear to be consulting other countries, NGOs, 'civil society', and business about an important issue
  
• they can provide a forum for people to vent their frustrations (as long as they do it within a certain language framework and are not over-ambitious or militant about their demands)
  
• the UN can feel important and forward looking again after the Iraq fiasco
  
• everyone else can network and have 'corridor conversations', arrange business and other meetings, have a nice time in Geneva, and generally feel important
  

So, everyone is happy, I think. I appreciate that this sounds horribly cynical, but you will have to trust my reports of how staged and inconsequential this whole event feels. It is really hard to imagine this event having any significant impact on the ground in our use of information and communication technologies.

WSIS Day Three, AM: Broadcasting the future

Today the World Electronic Media Forum decamped to the HQ of the European Broadcasting Union, close to Palexpo, but so badly signposted that I arrived half an hour late. The EBU is another of those inter-governmental organisations that inhabits Geneva, and is beautifully appointed. The conference room has the usual booths for translation, plugs sockets for all EU countries, and Ethernet- and WiFi-based Internet access (though I only discovered the latter at the end of the day).

The workshop was entitled 'New Media and Broadcasting - Time Machine for the 21st Century', with each session rather engagingly named after a HG Wells novel.

Highlights of 'The Shape of Things to Come' included the Swissinfo.com search engine which includes text and time-based media. The presentation from Microsoft's Patrick Griffis concluded by flagging up the possibility of 'broadcast Ethernet', employing unused TV and radio frequencies. The eccentric German technical researcher Gerhard Stoll (ARD/ZDF/IRT) exemplified technological madness in his discussion of the future of audio, allowing no room for any thoughts of social trends or other practical issues. (He could speak English faster than I can, and maintain multiple trains of thought in a second language, so he can't be all bad.)

'When will it all stop, and what are the forces that shape new media change?' was the title of the talk by EBU's David Wood. He argued that there is not one media future to predict, there are many. He contended that the 'butterfly effect' created changes that while initially unnoticed could later be important, and that instead we should look to the attractors for change, rather than the events. He made an empirical case for cyclical platform development, for instance in HDTV (high definition TV), between the EU, US and Japan, where each region improves on the others' achievements, leading to adoption. (Of course this doesn't make sense in the case of a technology that just isn't of its time... perhaps like HDTV.) I responded to him, making a case for prediction based on an appropriate understanding and synthesis of business models, technology possibilities, social trends and human needs, looking at how people want to do things, and what is usable. We really need some industry leadership in forecasting!

'The Day of the Comet' focused on digital TV. Masaru Ideo, of the Japanese broadcaster NHK, talked about their HDTV research, which began in the 60s. He showed a wonderful HD video made, in Antarctica, of a solar eclipse by the moon (the 'black sun'). It had been made to sell the idea of HDTV, and should certainly have done the job. NABA spokesman Michael McEwan gave a detailed and engaging description of US plans for analogue switch-off and adoption of HDTV -- which are much further advanced that I had suspected. His section on the right conditions for successful digital television transition could well be applied to other information technology rollouts.

Gabriel Fehervari of Belgium-based Euro1080 outlined his company's plans to become the first EU HDTV broadcaster. After the session I talked to his assistant, Vicky De Beule, who was much more lucid about the possibilities for HDTV. Using sport and cultural events she outlined a model in which cinemas could be used for live broadcasts of soccer games during the next World Cup, and allow people to watch operas with high quality images and sound. Cinemas need to utilise their daytime downtime, and many older people don't like going out in the evening, so broadcasting cultural events (downloaded asynchronously) during the makes sense. Cinemas will soon have to upgrade to digital projection so the investment in kit for HDTV projection would be amortised more quickly.

The discussion in the session was very useful. Issues brought up included the implications of HDTV for makeup and set design, the need for people to move to 16:9 aspect ratio so that footage can be easily integrated and legacy material viewed appropriately, and the possibility that with better quality images audiences may want slower editing, so they can better appreciate them. Another issue is how people will record and share HDTV shows and the implications for PVRs and VCRs. More generally, people are increasingly combining TV watching with other activities, such as Web browsing, or they have the TV on in the background. This trend mitigates against HDTV, but there may be more trends in its favour. Another question from the audience, and one that should have been addressed, was whether HDTV would change the content and type of programming. Certainly, new technologies don't tend to ape old media forms for long.

'When the Sleeper Awakes' addressed interactivity and the user. Andreas Weiss of German broadcaster ARD gave an excellent reflective talk on the history of media forms and the kinds of discourse they facilitated, and claimed that newspaper readers at the time of the Crimean War were much better informed that those who followed the third Gulf War on TV. Newspapers, he argued, allowed public debate to be broadened, as newspaper reading was a public affair (presumably in coffee houses and the like), and frequently stimulated debate. Radio and TV were powerful, he noted, but less capable than print of communicating complex messages. This point was nicely illustrated with a 1932 quote from Brecht. He concluded that interactive services can be developed to heal these deficiencies.

In the debate I contended that the problems of political discourse were not caused by limits or changes in media affordances and thus couldn't be fixed by them. More likely, trying to use interactive media for social policy would turn people off interactive media. (New Labour's current Big Conversation in the UK may be a case in point.)

Graham Dixon spoke as a representative of BBC Radio 3, and is also a delegate to the EBU. He discussed developments in the BBC's radio models, though noting that their focus was on audiences not technology ("Is this new toys for the boys, or are we delivering?" he asked rhetorically). He added that broadcasters still had a duty to inform, educate, and entertain, and the question was whether they should carry on with this role, or enhance it. He noted how DAB had been taken up as a result of new audiences being addressed, not because people were demanding better quality. Giving presence to radio shows on the Web, and the celebrated BBC Radio Player, had allowed listeners to find other shows and channels that were of interest to them. People were also listening to DAB via appropriately enabled TV sets. He also advertised a forthcoming DAB radio that would allow listeners, in a TiVo-like fashion, to pause live broadcasts.

Nokia's Martin Sandelin focused on broadcast media and phones, citing three mega-trends: the falling Cost of producing unique, personalised content (for instance Weblogs), convergence into one end user terminal that people will carry with them, and the ability to reach people and allow them to interact wherever they are. He noted that mobile phones were the only 'new thing' that people don't leave home without. He discussed the tendency to built radios into mobile phones, and claimed that they "have the perfect interface for radio tuning". He also discussed a concept for 'visual radio' that would include images, text, and notifications. It would tell you the name of the musician currently playing, and let you order ringtone based on the song, or whole song. "A totally new interactive media is being created", he claimed. If the enabling conditions are met, he concluded, half the world (4 billion people) will have a mobile device by 2015, and these would be voice-, data-, radio- and TV-enabled.

Nokia is certainly on a kick with the mobile devices game. It sees the unwired developing world as its market to lose, and it has a point. However Sandelin falls into the same traps as many other convergence-boosters. The mobile phone is the Swiss army knife of connected devices. It is not great at anything (even voice) and people only use such devices in the absence of something better. A key problem is the user interface, which is far from ideal for most tasks. Rather, we need to see integration across devices, allowing people to configure one device from another, and use different devices to access the same material, depending on their context of use. The open standards that allow this kind of activity in the PC world are alien to the mobile phone industry. His banal response was that cellphones already have an embedded Web browser, giving you the experience of a $1000 connected PC on a mobile phone. Right.

WSIS Day Three, AM: Mainlining

Back to the World Electronic Media Forum today, but first a note on connectivity.

This the World Summit on the Information Society, so you might expect that connectivity would be taken care of. The reality is that getting online in Geneva is more difficult than I found it to be in Santiago, Chile. WiFi coverage at the Palexpo conference centre is provided by Swisscom. To get online you must enter a login and password from a prepaid card, and it is hard to find places to buy them. Swisscom kindly supplied one two hour card to each conference attendee, but the two hours runs from the time you first logon, thus limiting its value. And the service is also quite slow. Swisscom does have one cool twist, allowing you to text 'WLAN' from your phone to find out the nearest five WiFi points.

GPRS coverage is patchy in Geneva. Orange has an operation here but its GPRS service doesn't seem to cover the centre of the city. That said, when they work GPRS and WiFi are a great advance on connecting to Compuserve via a hotel phone line at great expense, and having to find the access number in advance of the trip.

The media centre at the Summit is very well appointed (there are about 900 media types here) and have lots of Internet-connected PCs and IP-enabled Ethernet cables available. However the setup uses proxy servers for access, and the ports for POP and SMTP email have not been enabled on the proxy server. Thus the only email access most journos have is Web-based. I discovered today that there are seven connections that circumvent the proxy -- but the word is out.

Clearly we need to get connectivity sorted here in the North, as well as in the South.

WSIS Day Two, PM: World leaders and free societies

This afternoon brought the opening plenary, a super-formal affair where everyone gets 3-5 minutes to make a statement, depending on their status. But heads of state will still get the nod at 5 minutes -- even Tony Blair, were he here. The hall was packed out, so I retreated to the press rooms, where there was a simulcast and live translation. I suspect the hall would have been a good deal less comfortable. A few highlights from the statements:

Finland is ready to offer advice to other countries from its experience, though it can't provide a template. (I guess not every developing country has a floundering wood and rubber products company that can become an international telecommunications equipment manufacturer.) The Azerbaijani president noted that transport flows bring information flows, which meant his country was well placed to be an information hub. The Pakistani prime ministers saluted the pioneers of digital revolution the revolutionaries of the twenty-first century. The Rwandan representative referred to ICTs as an indispensable tool in the achievement of its development goals. He noted that as Rwanda is landlocked they planned to transform the country into a technological hub within the great lakes region, and were developing connectivity in schools using broadband and wireless.

Mohammed Khatemi, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, referred to the Information age as the age of dialogue. He talked of the need to establish knowledge-based societies, and the delegation of power to the people through electronic processes. There has been some wry commentary on this, noting the actions of the Iranian government in restricting Web access to its citizens. The president of Mali also discussed their use of Internet in schools (aided by Swisscom), including Timbuktu. This crossroads city cannot now be used as byword for a remote place -- at least not electronically. The representative from Lesotho emphasised the importance of adapting computer software to local languages, and noted the benefit of open source and free software in addressing this challenge. The Latvian head of state contended that power is increasingly based on access to information. (I suspect this has always been the case, and we just have a very narrow view of what constitutes information and how it is used.) More perceptively she noted that technology is a tool and not a panacea, and emphasised the need to create knowledge from information. At this point I had to leave the cosy confines of the media enclave (comfy leather chairs, free soft drinks and food, unlimited Internet access) to attend a fringe meeting entitled 'Free Software, Free Society'.

This event brought together two superheroes: Stanford lawyer Larry Lessig and free software pioneer Richard Stallman. Unfortunately, due to other commitments they weren't in the room at the same time, speaking instead at either end of a three hour excursion. Lessig was eloquent in his praise for Stallman, and recounted how the Creative Commons movement stole Stallman's idea of the GPL "because we faced the same problem" of the privatisation of ideas. Copyright was intended to stimulate creativity, he noted, claiming that in its original terms it recognised that creativity was always about adding to what people had already created before, and the balance between this and protection had been lost. The Creative Commons model combines three layers: the legal code, a human-readable layer (making the legal code understandable to non-lawyers), and a machine-readable layer (to enable gathering content). When freedom meets private production, he concluded, free culture will prevail. "Freedom itself is an incentive to create."

In the discussion he recounted how astonished he was that there was no discussion at WSIS of intellectual property and the public domain, and recounted how it had been squeezed out of both this conference and WIPO. He reported that Creative Commons is developing a royalty-free cross-licensing model for research, which he claimed is becoming enmeshed in defensively-oriented patent law. (This is a very exciting development.) On strategy he advocated 'doing it': showing great things as the best way to win the argument for importance of the public domain.

I came to Stallman with some suspicion and was partially won over. He is prone to invoke high-falutin terms to discuss scenarios which don't seem to warrant them. "The world of non-free software is a prison", he claims, and he uses the terms freedom and democracy liberally (so to speak). His told us that his confidence that the free software model would be desirable was founded on his experience of the time before software was seriously commercialised thus he "had no doubts that a free software world would be a better place". He outlined the four essential freedoms for which free stood, and discussed the attempts by the US government to make free software illegal in many countries, observing that the EU might be minded to take another tack. He concluded by talking about trusted (or in is terms 'treacherous') computing. While I don't subscribe to the idea that you can embed trust in machines I liked his characterisation that in the trusted computing model the computer will trust what the developer wants it to do -- thus it is treacherous.

I asked Stallman whether free software could really go beyond the development of engineer-oriented products such as Web servers and OSes (the obvious exceptions of OpenOffice and Mozilla being sponsored by Sun and AOL respectively). I also noted that typical free software products are designed for configuration and use by engineers, and questioned whether good user interfaces could be developed for non-techies. Stallman replied that if people wanted to charge for developing a more consumer-focused or niche product that was fine, and that the free software movement's only demand was that they would make the source code public -- thus correcting my misapprehension. Otherwise, he was rather defensive, choosing to pick on my use of the term 'gift economy', even though it was not core to the question. Others pointed out that good GUIs had been developed for GNU/Linux (KDE was referred to specifically) and that UI research and design was underwritten by organisations including the German government and IBM. Perhaps there is another way.

While our meeting was wending its way to its conclusion an enormous row errupted in the adjoining room. I believe the debate there was on 'Media liberties in the information society'. Whatever it was it invoked a passion I have never experienced in any meeting. Clearly people here have a lot to get off their chests, and were happy to take liberties.

WSIS Day Two, AM: An African story

Geneva has a great bus and tram system, and the number 5 goes from the train station (near my lodgings) to the door of the Palexpo centre. Of course with security check (by soldiers in camouflage kit) and the enormity of the halls it takes another 20 minutes to get to where you need to be.

Where I was to be was the World Electronic Media Forum session on 'Media Freedom and the Information Society'. The useless signage defeated me for a time. (Why can't people design spaces for location and navigation?) The event was very formally organised, with speakers standing behind very imposing stage furniture. All official session here are translated into the six UN languages, and the radio/headsets are excellent (made by Bosch), as are the translators.

The MD of Al Jazeera discussed how the station works, and noted that now they were criticised even more by Western governments than Arab leaders, having thought we were on the same side of democracy. Aidan White from the International Federation of Journalists noted that journalists are told they should be independent, then get mixed signals when US condemns freedom of expression. As you might expect his comment was enthusiastically received. He made a nice point that we should talk about professionalism, which puts the onus on the media owners, not responsibility, which governments tend to define.

The final presenter avoided the usual pious cant about the digital divide and told us that Africa needs satellite bandwidth, so "we can tell the African story". (The following day I met someone who was in a consortium to launch a satellite for Africa, that would save the continent half a billion dollars in satellite bandwidth rental fees.) He reflected on the attitude of people in the West who are amazed that he looks forward to returning to Africa, which they imagine as a continent of starvation and violence. He had a dig at another pious bunch, the conservation lobby, noting that an African story would ask how environmentalist try to retain African people as a species of wildlife. I must get a copy of his talk -- it was a breath of fresh air!

As I am coming to expect the AV in the session was choatic, and it didn't feel like anyone was in charge.

WSIS Day One: What's it all about?

Geneva is a city of international institutions, including the Red Cross/Crescent, World Health Organisation, International Labour Organisation, the UNHCR, World Economic Forum, and International Telecommunications Union. The latter is host to the World Summit on the Information Society and, as one of its representatives observed at the opening ceremony, it was the world's first inter-governmental body.

Geneva can be seen as the centre of Europe (though rivalled in this respect by Strasbourg) and is located at the end of the Rhône, making it a natural city for its roles. Compared to most central European cities it is very ethnically diverse, which may be a function of its international status.

As a UN event the Summit is very diverse as well. It really does feel like the world's meeting place, more so than any event I have attended. It is amazing being somewhere cosmopolitan where there is no dominant culture, and where people speak in their native language and represent their countries.

The multi-ethic character extended to the opening ceremony, which featured live singing by a group of pupils from the British/international school in Berne. And most of the examples of ICT success are focused on the developing world.

The Summit is also chaotic. The whole affair is taking place in the seven halls of Geneva's Palexpo centre -- itself smartly located next to the city's airport. No one seems to be in charge and the whole event appears to run unconsciously. Lack of consciousness pervades it, in that no sense is made of the contribution of the parts to the whole.

The shape of the event itself is hard to determine. As well as a formal policy-making and -ratifying element there are a number of parallel conferences (including the World Electronic Media Forum), a large show, and events organised by particular organisations. For a conference on the Information Society it is clear that the event planners can't even organise -- either on- or offline -- the information needed to navigate these various event. It is not a promising start!

I am also keeping a photographic record of the trip. [This URL may change.]