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7:12 PM • Aug 18, 2022

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Because a lot of our social network lives at the phone OS layer (contacts), and because mobile social may be "sticky like nightclubs, not like banks", perhaps the switching costs among mobile social networks are low. At USV, we've been talking about this a lot in terms of how a network's policies (e.g., user privacy, share of economics) relate to its ultimate ability to retain users.  And the idea that perhaps the most sticky networks are NOT the ones that are the most heavy handed in terms of attempting to lock in their users (e.g., by making data export/import hard). This would suggest that in many cases (at least in mobile / social), data lock in is less of a "lock" than you might think, and in fact, there may be something cathartic and cleansing about walking away from your data, i.e., "detoxing".

For the past few weeks, I've been involved with a community effort to draft a declaration of freedom for the Internet.  On Monday, it went live on the web, and is starting to get discussed. It's been an amazing, fascinating and inspiring year in the internet community.  Today, the Verge has a nicely-produced writeup on the Declaration of Internet Freedom which also gets into the story of the last year of internet politics, including the SOPA/PIPA fight.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Internet plays as an election issue this fall, and how we as a community can work to carry our energy and momentum into the next US congress and administration, as well as on the global front. For me personally, it's been an absolute thrill ride, as I've jumped with both feet into an area of policy, politics and advocacy that is both very close to my heart and also very new to me, in the details.  More than anything I've been so honored and excited to be working with an incredible group of people on such an interesting and important set of issues. I feel very lucky. On the one hand it feels presumptuous and self-indulgent to speak about Interent freedom in the same breath as other independence and rights movements from our history.  On the other hand, I believe that we are on the leading edge of one of the biggest global changes we've ever seen, and there are serious issues of freedom and control at stake.  My friend Brad likes to say that the shift to the world of connected humanity and free information is bigger than the industrial revolution -- rather, it's more like the shift from hunter/gatherer to agrarian society in terms of the fundamental changes in how we understand how we relate to our good and to one another. So while the current debate is still more on the side of nerd politics than pop culture, I think that will continue to change.  And it will be important for more of us to think about the values and power structures that are built into the technologies we use every day. I think the Internet Declaration is a good start.  I don't expect it to be the end -- rather, I like it very much as a point of departure for discussion.  The day the Declaration was released, this "fork" was published by the folks at TechFreedom, which is worth a read.  And the version I posted on github already has 15 forks including a translation to Polish. (you've gotta believe that the founders would have used github if they had had the chance). So, happy Independence Day.  Here's to freedom and new frontiers.

broadband is indeed the front-and-center infrastructure of the Twenty-first century. It is dynamic and opportunity-creating to an extent greater than any of the nation’s numerous earlier infrastructure challenges. It is part of the resolution of almost every big problem confronting us: creating jobs, making America more competitive in the global market-place, providing better health care, decreasing our energy dependence, stopping environmental degradation, educating ourselves and our children and grandchildren, and opening the doors of equal opportunity to all. But let’s remember that earlier generations had to respond to infrastructure challenges, too. Turnpikes, roads, bridges, harbors, canals, railways, highways, and electricity. Not to mention plain old telephone service, too—these were all infrastructure build-outs. Each one of them was a huge challenge in its own time. And each one of them helped jump-start the economy; each one created thousands of jobs; each one contributed to making our people more productive and our country more competitive.

This was a major theme of Freedom to Connect and I totally buy it -- fast, open, equal access to the internet is a foundation for everything else.  For education, and for nearly every aspect of our economy (now and certainly in the future).  It is some of our most important national infrastructure.  And we're not keeping up.  To keep quoting Copps:

the Internet was invented here and got its start here. Fast forward 11 years later and we’re Number 12 or 15 or 20 in the world. Some would quibble about which ranking is correct—but none of them is anywhere close to where your country and mine needs to be. I don’t say this because I want us to be able to pin a ribbon on our chest and tout our number-one status. I say it because we’re not coming back—America is not coming back—unless and until we get this infrastructure right.

So, the question is, how do we do it?  This is the trillion dollar question.  Copps' full remarks are worth a read to get a better handle on the philosophical, political and economic context.  Can local communities step up to fill the gap? (Last year, North Carolina said no).  Will disruptive innovations catch fire, bypassing our gridlock?  I am still struggling to wrap my head around the politics and economics of all this.  So I don't have a fully formed perspective yet.  But one thing is undeniably clear: this is really really important.  I'll close w/ one more selection from Copps' talk:

We have available to us the most open, dynamic and opportunity-creating technology ever devised, but its wings are clipped. Less and less are a thousand points of invention and innovation controlling out technology future, while more and more the models of consolidation and bottle-neck control are. This is not to deny the many good things happening out there, but it is to note that the system we have is making it harder for those good things to deliver their full potential. The struggle for an Open Internet is a new chapter in a very old story. It’s the story of gate-keepers and toll-collectors who have always been there when new technologies or businesses come along. Again, that’s something we should expect. It is also something we need to avoid. To put our heads in the sand on this one would have serious long-term consequences.

This is it -- we need to understand and communicate the importance of and potential for this medium.  The big takeaway for me, in terms of framing, from both Copps' talk and Moglen's, is that there's a very clear message to be made about innovation, competitiveness and the economy, and that's where I'll be focusing my attention.

The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me -- for NYC's forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it's beautiful and fun to use.  The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fun sites recently (see change.st, beautiful.st), including the NYC Bike Share location suggestions map that got thousands of suggestions when it launched last year.  A lot of the functionality you see here has been built into the open source Shareabouts app. Second, it's built on top of the OpenTripPlanner -- OTP is an open source, multi-modal trip routing engine that OpenPlans has been working on for a number of years now; originally built for the new TriMet system map, it's also been used in several other countries.  Cibi.me represents one of the more creative ways to use OTP -- as an API which the site talks to via JS. OTP lets you do awesome stuff like use the "bike triangle" to prioritize between safety, speed and flatness. (note that this feature was originally developed by David Emory for the Atlanta A-TRAIN mobility map) Here is Frank Hebbert's write up on cibi.me on the OpenPlans blog. I am really impressed by and proud of the work that OpenPlans has been doing lately.  They are on fire pumping out small, but beautiful, compelling and powerful apps.

“Regardless of your political beliefs, fundamentally, VCs have a fiduciary duty to our investors, and this structure does not enhance shareholder value,” says Ganesan. In the end, he adds, “My LPs don’t fund me to create change; they fund me to create returns.” Still others argue that there are powerful cultural reasons why this patent reform initiative can’t simply be dismissed. “This newer generation of VCs has a much more progressive agenda,” notes economist-investor Paul Kedrosky. “Whereas other VCs take a more orthodox asset management view, which is: ‘These are the dials I have to turn to maximize value,’ [people like Wilson] think you can build a healthier ecosystem for the future.’”

Fred Wilson's point, from the article, and expounded on in his post on the USV blog, is that restricting the use of software and business method patents levels the playing field, and encourages companies of all sizes to compete based on features and experience, not using weaponized patents.  Even if a single company could stand to profit from this type of activity, his point is that getting away from it is good for the ecosystem as a whole. Finally, perhaps the most interesting point is that this is likely to have Netizen Effects. By that, I mean that Twitter's actions should ripple through the Internet ecosystem, as other tech cos, startups and VCs adopt this and similar policies (either for the good or the ecosystem, or simply to compete for engineer love w/ Twitter).  This is where things get really interesting.  It's possible that we could see a major shift in the way internet companies approach this area of intellectual property strategy, as a result of a visible, repeatable, netizen hack. That's exciting and I hope we can figure out how to support more of this kind of thing.

the increasingly complex ways in which young people’s learning ecologies are evolving.  It is the notion that, in addition to happening anytime and anywhere, learning happens across the many different networks that teens’ navigate.  School is an obvious node in a young learner’s network.  But school represents only one node among many others, which includes after school sites, extracurricular activities, online communities, libraries, family, and peer communities just to name a few.

In his visit, he pointed out a few really important points, namely:

• the "learning & civic opportunity gap" we see in poor/marginalized communities is largely a result of what happens OUTSIDE of school, so there is perhaps the greatest opportunity to make a difference there;

• these "informal learning environments" don't have the rigidities of the formal education system, allowing for greater creativity and innovation;

• In "extreme" locations, such as the poorest parts of the world with the least formal infrastructure, traditional school simply isn't possibly, so we must take a more real-world, connected approach.

This resonates with so much of what I've been thinking about, regarding networks, and how they're creating new, connected opportunities across all sectors.  The idea that school is "only one node among many others" is the key idea.  This is such a huge opportunity -- to think about learning as something that can and should happen everywhere, and that can be facilitated and guided by many actors in the network. And of course, this also represents a disruptive force in the world of traditional education, which no doubt cause friction within the establishment (more on that in a minute). The idea of "connected learning" dovetails with another idea I've been following recently, which is "natural learning". The term natural learning comes from the Unschooling movement (a variant on home-schooling) which I got to thinking about this week via this article on opensource.com.  Unschooling is founded on the idea that humans are natural learners, and that the way that we learn in early childhood and adult life -- by exploring, wondering, asking questions, and doing -- is in line w/ our nature.  The unschooling philosophy puts learners in the drivers seat, letting them follow their own curiosity, and using that as the driving force for learning.  Adults (parents and others) act as facilitators, guides, and learning partners.  Rather than pursuing a pre-defined body of knowledge, unschooling is more about learning how to learn, and turning people into life-long learners.  From my personal experience with the unschooled (in the name of Nick Bergson-Shilcock, a life-long unschooler, fantastic human and blogger at unschooled.org), it works. By contrast, unschooling argues that the "structured learning period" that we enter in grade school actually stifles real learning more than it supports it. Quoting from the father of Unschooling, John Holt, via the wikipedia article:

 ...the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know."

I am sure this resonates with nearly everyone who has attended school. It seems that we're entering a period where the values of natural learning and the technologically-enabled methods of connected learning will join together to produce awesome and exciting opportunities.  And seriously important outcomes, such as better access to learning opportunities and communities and deeper civic engagement. And of course, as with most disruptive innovations, we can expect to see three things happen, likely in sequence:

1. Innovations in connected learning will be written off as "toys" -- irrelevant to the "real" learning in schools.

2. Institutions that are threatened by connected learning will resist and fight back (countries, school districts, teachers unions, etc.)

3. Connected learning will prove to be more powerful and significant than anything we've seen before, and the role of formal learning institutions will change dramatically.

This is perhaps one of the most exciting and important areas where networks can make a difference.  I'll be following closely.

• Sending: Using the Quick Compose w/ Gmail and Quicksilver technique, I can now fire up a new Gmail compose window from anywhere (even outside of the browser) by invoking command+shift+m.  Now, when I think "Oh, I need to email Karl about our project", I don't go to the inbox, I go to the compose window directly from wherever I am.  Priceless.

• Searching: Using the Gmail Search chrome plugin, I can go directly to a Gmail search from a new browser tab, by starting out with g+s+ and then my search query.  I get straight to what I was looking for; no trip to the inbox along the way.

• The end result: I'm spending way less time in my Inbox, and doing a better job organizing my time around my real priorities.  I think that's a good thing.  The down side is that I've actually missed a few emails recently, as spending less regular time in the inbox means a bigger pile when you do get there.   But I see that as a manageable problem, and less important than getting past the prioritization-by-inbox routine.

To attack the problem of pimps forcing women into prostitution we need to come up with the most effective ways for the women themselves to be able to reach authorities and for third parties to be able to detect suspicious activity. One idea for the former is providing anonymous access to help via text messages and widely publicizing this .... The obvious idea for the latter is to work with sites like Backpage and not against them.  For instance, it is quite possible that a much better screening system can be created that identifies ads that may involve trafficking based on how the text is written and how the ads are posted.  We won’t know that until we try it out (and big data has gotten very good at picking up even very subtle patterns).

Problem: Copyright infringement (aka piracy) The Internet reduces the cost of distributing audio and video files to practically zero. Old way:  Lock all content down with DRM. Make sharing copyrighted works a felony; prosecute individuals who share file and websites who make it possible.  Apply surveillance technology throughout the network to inspect and block packets transmitting unauthorized works. The problem with this approach is the same: it doesn't work.  And furthermore, it's massively expensive and deeply restricts personal freedoms. Internet way: simplify the buying process.  With increased network access, there is more demand for content than ever.  Make it easy a) for individuals to pay for things and b) for innovators to build products and services on top that grow the audience and the industry.  Rather than lock content down w/ DRM, open it up and create an open standard for rights management. Problem: Mobile app security A number of mobile apps have been getting into trouble recently, taking liberties with their users data. Old way: Use regulation or the app store review process make sure that bad apps don't get through to consumers. Internet way: (quoting from Albert again):

It would be a shame if this resulted in more centralized control over apps and longer review processes.  What we need instead is some kind of peer produced approach to app security.  What I have in mind is something along the lines of what Chris Dixon did with SiteAdvisor for web sites. Some people will (voluntarily?) run software on their mobile handsets that monitors app activity, including which servers these apps communicate with.  The results from these “monitors” are aggregated to provide security rankings for applications.

As we continue to explore the new, connected world, I think it will be useful to keep coming back to this framing -- are the solutions we're proposing equivalent to fighting a tidal wave (unnatural, ineffective)?  Or are they native to the environment, taking advantage of our new strengths and capabilities? Or, as Andy put it: remind ourselves that the Internet is not the problem.  The Internet is the solution. What are other examples of solving problems the Internet Way?  It's our job as the Internet community to help identify them, promote them and explain them.  I'll be keeping track of what I find here.

From the Yak Shaving department Working from the top of the inbox is a recipe for working on stuff that isn't important. But, sometimes you need to write emails.  The problem is, to write an email you need to first go to your email client, which usually means passing by your inbox.  For me, this often means getting distracted by something there, and possibly forgetting whatever it was I was going to write. Here's my solution, using Gmail and the awesome Quicksilver for Mac.  (if you're a mac user and don't use quicksilver, you should) Go to the quicksilver preferences, then go to Triggers.  Create a new "hot key" trigger, and paste "https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=cm&fs=1&tf=1" into the prompt.  Save, then press the "info" icon, and open up the trigger settings. Under "Settings", enter a Hot Key.  I use command-shift-M.  When you're done it should look like this:

Now, no matter where you are on your computer, you can type command-shift-M and get a fresh Gmail Compose window. Now take a deep sigh of relief before your email apnea sets back in again...