Remarkk!

Yesterday in Toronto, I co-hosted and facilitated an open forum on the future of Canada’s open internet with Matt Thompson of http://savetheinternet.com and Steve Anderson of http://saveournet.ca/. The intent of the gathering was to engage Toronto’s tech/web/media community around the issue of network neutrality and to launch a coalition and campaign to preserve and enhance Canada’s digital future.

In March, the net neutrality issue finally made the front pages and broadcast media in Canada, triggered by news of Bell Canada’s throttling of third-party Internet Service Providers’ peer-to-peer traffic. The unilateral action was seen by advocates of a neutral and open Internet as anti-competitive and a dangerous precedent, and it triggered a backlash against Bell Canada. Bell confirmed advocates worst fears in May, when it launched its own online video store after having throttled P2P traffic, much of which is dedicated to video - both legal and otherwise.

Thompson provided some excellent background on the issue drawing from his experience on the U.S. campaign around network neutrality, which is well advanced compared to the debate in Canada. Matt shared the U.S. focused viral video, Save the Internet!, which won a 2007 Webby People’s Voice Award:

Thompson presented a clear description of the principles underlying the neutral and open web and its importance to Canada’s future as an innovative economy and a free society. He also articulated a nuanced understanding that the last-mile monopoly providers (principally Bell and Rogers in Canada) aren’t evil, they are merely doing their job and lobbying for rules that are in their shareholders’ interests. He described that what is really missing in Canada is everybody else - all the many stakeholders that are damaged by a set of norms that currently allows for discrimination of content on the web by these monopoly providers.

Canada needs a plan. Thompson made a passionate plea that the real underlying issue is that the government of Canada’s laissez faire approach (”we don’t regulate the Internet”) shows that Canada has no plan for its digital future. It has no vision about the infrastructure for everything else, and how we’re going to compete in a global digital future when other countries have long passed us by in terms of broadband policy, infrastructure speed, access and costs. Compare this situation against Barack Obama’s Technology policies. and it’s clear that there is a political opportunity to show leadership on the technology file.

SaveOurNet.ca promises to be a vehicle for everybody else. SaveOurNet.ca is intended to act as a broad, inclusive coalition of strange bedfellows: freedom of speech activists and technology entrepreneurs; unions and third-party ISPs; large technology companies and broadcasters.

SaveOurNet.ca needs our community’s help. Effective awareness campaigns like the Save the Internet video, coalition building, media relations, community engagement, participation in CRTC hearings and direct lobbying of elected officials requires dedicated resources - volunteers alone won’t do it. Big players are being lined up to support the effort, including major public sector unions and companies like Google Canada and Teksavvy.

But the campaign needs a vote of confidence from Canada’s web/tech/media and other communities of interest to trigger the pooling of additional resources from larger organizations and foundations. In fundraising terms, SaveOurNet.ca is looking for Angels.

What You Can Do:

1. Sign onto the coalition at http://SaveOurNet.ca/, either as an individual supporter or as an organizational supporter.
2. PLEASE DONATE what you can to the seed fund for SaveOurNet.ca, and then blog about it, share it on Facebook, send to your networks and communities, talk about it.
3. Contact your MP’s office and arrange for a sit-down chat about the issue during their summer hiatus from Parliament. Just booking the appointment will force your MP to get briefed on the issue, which is the first step in educating our elected officials and raising it on the political agenda come the fall.

MP Charlie Angus (NDP, Timmins-James Bay), a former punk rocker, has just introduced network neutrality legislation to Canada’s House of Commons, and he’s putting all the P2P throttlers in Canada on notice. This coincides with the launch of SaveOurNet.ca to rally citizens to the cause of open access Internet.

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For those of you who weren’t able to attend Mesh 2008, you missed another excellent keynote by Michael Geist, this one on Digital Advocacy. Here are the slides synced with audio for your enjoyment.

Bell Canada Associate Director of Media Relations Jason Laszlo made a real boner move, boasting on Facebook of his ability to snow journalists with his network management bafflegab, referring to journalists as “lemmings” in a recent status update. [DIGG] Clearly a super-fun guy in real life (note colourful hat and armband tattoo), he further demonstrated the Bell Media Relations department’s apparent unfamiliarity with modern web tools by leaving his Facebook profile wide-open to the public to see. Oops. [UPDATE: Profile is closed now.]

The blogosphere, 3rd party DSL providers, regular users, technology developers, net neutrality advocates and public sector employees unions have suddenly woken up. This is all thanks to Bell’s politically stupid move to throttle third party DSL providers P2P traffic. The silent, simmering battle is now finally out in the open. Thanks to the indominatable Michael Geist for keeping the embers alive.

How bad is it about to get for Bell and other monopoly last-mile providers in this PR and regulatory battle? Very bad. It’s a perfect storm of factors:

1. CBC was receiving raves for distributing “Canada’s Next Prime Minister” on Bittorrent file-sharing networks, being recognized as an innovator(!) in digital content distribution. CBC’s move effectively killed the argument that bandwidth throttling of P2P traffic only affects pirates.
2. Bell Canada’s wholesale customers are now mobilized against it, into lawsuits and advocacy efforts. TekSavvy, Ontario’s technology community’s preferred DSL provider is leading the charge.
3. The National Union of Public and General Employees (340,000 members strong) has taken on the issue with a letter to the CRTC accompanying a report it produced on the subject of network neutrality.
4. The F2C: Freedom to Connect conference is happening Monday and Tuesday in Washington DC. This will raise the profile of the net neutrality issue in general, as well as many of the other implications of citizen journalism, human rights and beyond. At the ICE08 after-party there was talk of bringing this conference to Ottawa too.
5. The technology developer and startup communities in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver are frustrated with the state of broadband in Canada and can be mobilized to action in ways that will bring the investment community along with them. Anti-competitive broadband policies inhibit innovation and startup growth.
6. The U.S. is making moves to open up the debate on net neutrality legislation. Barack Obama’s technology policy supports network neutrality unequivocally.

Watch this space.

Scoble has an interesting video podcast up at Fast Company reviewing the social media tactics of the U.S. presidential campaigns, which brought my attention to how these campaigns are using leading social media tactics and are a great source for best practices. To paraphrase Scoble, political campaigns have a really strong market signal to engage their audiences - they have 18 months to get to launch or close up shop.

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Scoble’s “social media starfish” is a useful way to conceptualize the multi-headed and distributed network nature of effective social media engagement. Rather than just a shotgun list of tactics and platforms, it’s useful to think about how the different arms work together and facilitate engagement and convergence across media to influence audience behaviour and calls to action - in this case to donate, vote and volunteer.

I’m looking at the lessons of these campaigns for practices that bridge the online, mass media and events spaces in a way to make change. (In case you hadn’t heard, 2008 is the year of change so join your friends in the change drinking game at the next Democratic debates.)

A recurring theme in the “Social Web 101″ presentations I give from time to time is that the social web phenomenon and “new media” in general are fundamentally many-to-many media, and all too often misunderstood by those raised in the mass media era. The social web is fundamentally the web as participation platform, not as distribution platform. This has huge implications to systems of production, expressions of culture, the evolution of our values and notions of citizenship.

So what is the future for participatory democracy in a social web world? What new possibilities are emerging and how do we think about them politically?

Michael Allan is exploring one possibility with an open source software project, Votorola, which embraces the concept of participation and applies it to the electoral system in a radically new way:

Votorola is software for hosting open elections. It implements an electoral system that sits outside of government and beyond the control of parties. Its voter lists are backed by a trust network that is rooted in community neighbourhoods. It enables voters to advance their own candidates for public office, their own policies for executive action, and their own legislative bills for statutory law.

There are a couple of radical ideas in Michael’s design. The first is, the delegate cascade. (Imagine the Iowa caucuses, with infinitely recursive delegate haggling.) The second I’d describe as the unelection (as in unconference), in that elections can take place anytime, all the time, and without official sanction by the state or political parties and with your vote selections made publicly and transparently. (See, I told you it was radical!) More…

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I really don’t give my good friend David Eaves nearly enough link-love. I’m making a conscientious effort to correct that, and now is a good time to start. He and Taylor Owen have co-written an Op Ed in the Toronto Star I recommend, “Failed strategy connects Afghan fields, city streets”:

In the coming months, under the leadership of the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, U.S. private contractors will likely attempt to fumigate poppies in Afghanistan. Around the same time, the Canadian government will decide whether to shut down the Insite supervised injection site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The two policies are inextricably linked and unambiguously bad.

What’s really sad in both cases is how evidence is ignored because of ideological blinders. Fumigation in Colombia failed to achieve its goal (coca production actually increased) and introduced many dangerous and immoral externalities including damaging the health and legitimate livelihoods of local people. Supervised injection sites have proven effective at harm reduction and increased access to appropriate care for addicts.

Ideologies make me sad. They often create blinders to perception, creating more heat than light. At a time when we need better perceptive capacity in an environment of accelerating change, I’d like to believe we are evolving beyond ideology. I believe that part of the disengagement of mainstream people from politics has been the failure of both left-wing and right-wing ideologies to engage their imaginations and address the realities of modern life.

But apparently, humans need ideologies to make sense of their world and their place in it. Maybe we just need new ideologies. We’re accepting nominations for emerging and relevant 21st century ideologies in the comments section. Leave a link to the relevant Wikipedia page!

Via Facebook, I came across a fantastically important idea that makes voting for Mixed Member Proportional representation in the upcoming Ontario election and referendum a no-brainer. Thanks to Howie Chong of Carbon Zero for bringing it to my attention!

Aboriginal voices have little to no expression in the parliaments of this country, which just adds insult to historical injury. Asking mainstream (i.e. “white”) political parties to represent, legislate and regulate uniquely aboriginal issues in our houses of political discourse is a continuing tragedy of the colonial experiment which fails to recognize the legitimate claims of our aboriginal peoples to representation, resources and self-determination.

Those who know me know that I have been a fan of proportional representation for a long time. There are a number of reasons why, some principled and others more instrumental. I want the Green Party voice to be heard, AND the Libertarians. I want a strong social democratic voice in parliament - whether that’s the NDP or some (more worthy?) successor. I want to see our political discourse reflect something of the actual complexity of our population as the visible face of Ontario changes rapidly with migration.

I hope that you will join me in bringing about the first significant change in our political system in decades. And in our first MMP election, I will seriously consider giving my party vote to an Aboriginal Party as a small step towards correcting historical exclusion. It is possibilities such as this that excite me about MMP.

Technorati Tags: canada, electoral+reform, mmp, ontario, proportional+representation, voteformmp

Thought this might be of interest to some:

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new media - a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

This conference is being organized by the New Political Communication Unit in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London.