adoption curve dot net

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Big Society In the North, held at the Electric Works in Sheffield. I went along feeling like a bit of an interloper – although I participate in a lot of the techie networks that are in similar orbits, I’m not part of the third-sector quangocracy of organisations that’s involved in these kind of events.

As a result, I couldn’t really contribute that much to the higher-level discussions that were going on – I did more observing than talking. That did give me the chance to lurk around the edges and come away with some general impressions.

I sort of expected that this could have been a gathering of panicking people who are about to have their funding cut – but it wasn’t. Instead there seemed to be a general acceptance that there isn’t any money, anymore, and we’ve all got to get to grips with this. And it wasn’t political – I suspect that this wasn’t a gathering of natural Tory sympathisers, but it was interesting that more than one speaker explicitly ruled out outright opposition. Or indeed the less confrontational approach of just waiting another five years in the hope of a change of government.

There’s a real danger of sounding like a Daily Mail reader channelling the Taxpayers Alliance – and this isn’t intended as an ad hominem judgement of the people in the room last night – but I suspect that this is an area is similar to advertising – half of all the money pumped in is wasted, it’s just that we don’t know which half.

Sometimes it seems that for every person who delivers tangible projects that actually DO something, there about another three who spend their professional lives “coordinating”, “strategising” and producing policy papers. I’ve had enough experience of engaging with public sector funding sources to be very wary of the processes and hoops which have to be jumped through, and I wonder if we haven’t created an environment with an incredible amount of (albeit well-meaning) friction.

I can’t admit to having really understood some of the project pitches that took place – some seemed to be less tangible and more strategising – but one did strike me as having some potential, and something of a tech angle. The App Store is probably a poor title, though, because I’m not convinced that apps in the technical sense are what’s needed.

I see it as being more akin to the online stores that sell boiler-plate contracts – instead of going to a solicitor for a bespoke contract, you can buy one online for £50 and fill in the blanks. This could also get adapted to common things that seem complicated if you’ve never had to deal with them before – indemnity forms for events, what kind of liability insurance should I have for this event I’m putting on, that kind of thing.

And no doubt there *are* some things which are applications – community forums in a box, for example? It would be fairly straight-forward to assemble a toolbox of open source building blocks which could be assembled for specific online purposes on demand.

The official hub for the activities is at the Big Society In The North forum, and there’s much discussion on Twitter with the #bsitnorth tag. Watch this space, as they say…

[Update: Saul has his take on the event on his blog]

There’s a bit of a flap going on right now at the BCS, which you may have noticed if you were wondering why the #bcstransform hashtag was all over Twitter earlier today.

It’s all a bit People’s Front Of Judea, but a partial truncated backstory is that the BCS leadership have been implementing changes to the institution which has resulted in rebranding as the “Chartered Institute of IT”. The direction of focus seems to be away from the membership groups and towards more commercial activity, and some members are up in arms about this.

This seems to have rattled the management. They’ve mailshotted some very expensive glossy brochures explaining why these changes are a Good Thing and today held a “webinar” (their term, not mine) to explain WTF is going on. I’m not convinced that any of this will have helped much, at least not if the collective opinion of Twitter is to be believed.

By way of disclosure, I’m a member, and have been for a number of years. I became a member when they dropped their ridiculous requirement that you needed a Computer Science degree from one of a list of specified “approved” universities in order to join – never mind that you might be the CIO of MegaCorp plc – if you weren’t a CS grad, you weren’t coming in.

By that criteria, Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t have qualified, because his undergraduate degree is in physics.

I can’t say that the BCS has ever really offered me any benefits, other than the occasional sandwich at a branch meeting and access to free-at-the-point-of-delivery legal advice should that be required. I could put “MBCS” after my name if I really wanted to, and put the BCS logo on my business cards. But given the areas of the business in which I work I doubt anyone would know what MBCS stands for – and they’d probably laugh at me for using it if they did.

And all this “transformation” kerfuffle has come at exactly the same time as my pen is poised metaphorically over the renewal form. Do I hand over another £100 for the privilege, or write them off as the Worshipful Company Of Punch Card Operators (© @threedaymonk) ?

My problem is that the BCS seems to be run by people who are secretly frightened of IT, and hope that if they make it boring enough, it’ll go away. And it’s also run by people who seem to be locked into the mindset that if you want to do something, you have to build it yourself.

That’s resulted in things like the Member Network – a custom-built-at-a-cost-that-they-don’t-seem-to-want-to-tell-us-about social network which replicates a significant subset of LinkedIn, and does it badly. It’s hardly used, with most groups having less than a dozen members and no activity.

The other side of the organisation seems to largely consist of flogging certification and exams, and be dedicated to reducing IT to the kind of mind-numbing bureaucracy that the accountancy profession seems to be.

And while there’s an aspiration to be the “voice of the profession”, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of activity around this. If you’re concerned about the encroachment of corporate interests on freedom of expression, or copyright maximalism, then the BCS doesn’t seem to be the organisation for you – it’s other outfits like the Open Rights Group which are shouting about these issues.

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if that’s at least partly due to the way that the BCS seems to be run by the kind of people who work at IBM, Capita, HP Enterprise (nee EDS) and so forth. Or people who wish they did.

The thing is, I can’t think of another field that has the vibrancy, excitement and sense of possibility that IT can offer. The internet is changing society in ways that we haven’t seen since the invention of the printing press. It’s difficult *not* to be enthusiastic about the possibilities that the web offers – and yet the narrative from organisations like the BCS seems to be framed entirely around “governance”, and “risk”, and “control”. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of “what if?” or “how could we” – the glass is resolutely half-empty.

And just occasionally there are flashes of truly terrifying ideas, like the BCS getting involved in influencing the ICT curriculum in schools. This from the kind of organisation that seems inculcated with the tired, monochrome, copyright and corporate interest-driven view of the world that reduces IT in education to “which button to press in Microsoft Office”, instead of enthusing kids about the possibilities that are open to any proto-geek with a vague grasp of code and a hell of a lot of enthusiasm to try things until they stop breaking and something wonderful happens.

You get the sense that the BCS would *never* sanction building an API just for the sheer hell of seeing what people *might* do with your data. Mashups are something that happen in their kitchen, and Facebook is something to be blocked at all costs, lest the workforce live down to Theory-X driven paranoia about slackers and hackers.

You get the drift. The BCS doesn’t excite me. The BCS doesn’t seem particularly relevant to me. And expensive glossy brochures and broadcast-only webinars don’t strike me as engaging in the kind of dialogue that might shape the direction of the organisation into something that *would* be exciting and relevant.

So I probably won’t bother to renew my membership again, and I probably won’t miss it. Instead I’ll continue spend my time at events like GeekUps and Barcamps, where the future is already unevenly distributed.

A few correspondents have pointed out that this list doesn’t include MPs who attended the debate, but then “deliberately abstained” [their words]. There’s a reason for that.

Short of examining the contents of their heads, it’s impossible to know whether someone “deliberately abstained” as a protest against the contents of the DE Bill itself, or whether it’s because they haven’t got the balls to stand up to the party whips.

For the purposes of this list, I’ve made the assumption that your average Labour MP is in fact spineless lobby fodder who would vote for the euthanasia of their own grandmothers if a whip told them to and they thought that there was an outside chance that the Daily Mail would approve. Based on careful analysis of voting records at They Work For You, I await any evidence of the contrary.

Last night, along with most of the geeks in the country, I watched the Digital Economy Bill get rammed through the Commons thanks to a combination of a whipped vote and some supine opposition. It’s not really worth me trying to articulate the combination of rage, frustration and disappointment that I felt, because others have done this far better than I can already. But once I’d had a few hours sleep, while I was walking the dog I managed to gather some thoughts coherent enough to be worth trying to type out.

What’s just been demonstrated is that with enough money and enough knowledge of how politics work, vested interests can completely capture the legislative process. You can see this by the fact that BOTH sides of the arguments around the DEB got something of what they wanted. The BPI wrote entire chunks of the bill, which must count as a success for them. And the anti-Clause 43 campaign managed to get the orphan works provision jettisoned, which surely counts for a victory of sorts against the corporate interests that were lobbying for it.

And this is something that causes me sleepless nights.

Within the lifetime of the next Parliament, it’s likely that global oil production will hit its peak (assuming that this hasn’t happened already). And here in the UK, power generation capacity is likely to fall considerably short of peak demand.

Our entire way of life in the West is soaked – drenched – in oil. It’s not just the obvious things, like petrol or diesel. It’s the less obvious – according to some figures I’ve seen, every calorie of US food production requires 8 calories of crude oil input. Fertilisers. Plastics. Pharmaceuticals. The list goes on and on. To cope with this, we’re going to have to change the way our society behaves in ways which are utterly fundamental. Ways in which I just can’t begin to comprehend.

So what’s this got to do with the Digital Economy Bill, and lobbying?

Because much of these kinds of changes that will be needed are going to be driven by legislation, and the legislation is going to collide head-on with enormous corporate vested interests. Those interests are going to lobby, and lobby at levels which make Mandelson’s dinner with David Geffen look like a Sunday School picnic. And what the DE Bill has shown us is that when the lobbyists get going, the politicians start rolling over. What business doesn’t want, society doesn’t get.

So I’ve got no faith at all that our current political process will be able to deliver the changes that are going to be needed, because they’re in lock-step with the vested interests that will be most harmed by those changes. By the time we’ve managed to overcome the inertia that this will cause, it may well be too late.

I’m emphatically not saying that the Digital Economy Bill isn’t important. It is, and it’s a very clear proxy measure for the kind of culture and society that we want to be. At the moment it looks like we want to be the kind of society that locks anything and everything of value away – that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That doesn’t value creativity, or cooperation, or anything that might conceivably not carry a profit motive. That sounds like a pretty bleak kind of place, even if it’s the stuff of a Murdochian wet dream. And it’s not a place I want to be part of.

But when the power grid starts faltering, copyright is going to look pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. And I hope to Gods that we’ve got a political system that can cope with what our current way of life is going to throw at us in a year or two.

Dear Nick,

Along with several thousand others this evening, I watched something approaching six hours of live streaming from the House of Commons as the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill took place. I was appalled at what I saw, and to judge from the tone of the comments being posted on the Twitter backchannel throughout the evening, so were the majority of the onlookers.

The Digital Economy Bill touches on virtually every aspect of modern life, and has the potential to reverse basic fundamental principles such as the presumption of innocence that our society is built upon. It’s the result of unprecedented levels of lobbying from vested commercial interests. Their arguments are based on skewed figures that are demonstrably false. And the Government has behaved in a way that borders on contempt for the democratic process.

Put simply, if the internet didn’t exist, neither would my means of earning a living. So I am acutely aware of how the *real* digital economy works, and I am acutely aware that the Digital Economy Bill deals with none of the issues that affect me. It is written for and on behalf of the organisations that have failed to adapt their business models into the new environment. It is no more than a Canute-like attempt to hold back technological progress, and it will be about as successful in that respect as Canute was at holding back the waves.

So where were you? As my representative in Parliament, I needed you to be there to make my voice heard. And where were your colleagues? There was only a single Liberal Democrat in the chamber throughout the debate, and his grasp of the issues showed him to be badly-briefed and profoundly out of his depth.

Over the next four weeks, you’re going to attempt to convince me that I should cast my vote for you as my representative in the next Parliament, and that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote *against* the broken status-quo. That in the event of a hung Parliament, you would use your position to fix some of the most egregious flaws in our system of government.

But tonight I’ve seen nothing to suggest that this will be the case, and it leaves me profoundly disappointed in both you and your party.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Duckett