Today we welcome officially Doc Searls to the Berkman fellowship. He leads the lunch discussion today on his research topics for the year, attention and digital identity.
Welcome Doc Searls, newest Berkman fellow
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Happy Election Day
… to everyone in Massachusetts. What a terrific day it is to have a primary with several contested races: governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state at a minimum, plus some interesting down-ballot races (not for me). It’s a bit cloudy and cool today, but no rain yet. I voted at the Dilboy VFW post in Davis Square, Somerville, for the last time. Just before 9:00 a.m., they’d seen 168 votes, which, as one tiny data point, is apparently great for a primary in that precinct. The races for the nominee for governor and lieutenant governor on the Democratic side are close enough that turnout will decide the winners. Any of the 3 (Gabrieli, Patrick, Reilly) + 3 (Goldberg, Murray, Silbert) could be the nominee by nightfall.
Why I'm voting for Chris Gabrieli today for Governor
The great news for Democrats in Massachusetts, and Independents too for that matter, is that there are three different, strong choices for a nominee for governor in this year’s race. Despite the strength of the Democratic field, the choice, to me, is not hard. I consider it my great good fortune to have gotten to know Chris Gabrieli. I think he’d make an amazing governor. I’m voting for him later today when the polls open.
A few specific reasons:
– I think Chris is right on many of the key issues. His position on the state income tax strikes me as right on: we should roll it back ONLY if there’s a surplus, meaning that local aid is not eviscerated in the process. His Cape Wind stance is right on both process and substance. His views on energy policy are by far the most detailed and persuasive of any candidate. He’s on the right side of the gay marriage debate (and the right side of history). His stem-cell proposal makes sense. In addition to being right on the merits, I think he’s well-positioned to beat Kerry Healey and Christy Mihos in November.
– Chris will attract people into state government who would not have entered public service otherwise. He’s the kind of person who can talk people into joining a team and pulling hard to achieve results. He takes an interest in people and has a talent for putting together the right team for a job. The state would an influx of talent in a Gabrieli administration.
– Chris has devoted himself to improving education in our state. Since he retired from venture capital, he has poured himself (along with Jennifer Davis and other great people) into creating Mass2020, a truly extraordinary foundation in Massachusetts that supports the expansion of educational and economic opportunities for kids in this state. He’s personally invested millions in after-school-related work and leveraged tens of millions more. it’s through his work that cities and towns in Massachusetts are now experimenting with longer school days to keep kids engaged and out of trouble. (I am proud to serve on the board of Mass2020.)
Chris Gabrieli is a fine man. He’s a leader, a visionary, and a committed public servant. Despite his extraordinary success in many facets of life, he’s a genuine, decent, loyal, humble person. He can also be a totally geeky policy wonk, which I think is a great trait in a governor. For the first time in more than a decade, we’d have a full-time, dedicated governor, without designs on some other job. Chris Gabrieli will get the job done well.
Deval Patrick is pretty extraordinary, too. He’s run a very positive campaign, brought a lot of people into the political process, and run a campaign on the idea of Hope. His DevalPatrick.tv channel was a terrific idea, among other intriguing uses of the Internet (and he no doubt picked up support via the highly readable, active blogging of Blue Mass Group). While Chris Gabrieli is my first choice, if Mr. Patrick were to become governor, I’d be excited for the future of our Commonwealth.
For Lieutenant Governor, I’m voting for Deborah Goldberg. She’s terrific — like Chris, I believe she’s committed to the public service for the right reasons. She would be an effective advocate for the cities and towns of Massachusetts. I like her position on climate change, which she’s made a central plank of her campaign platform. I held a sign for Deborah during her very first campaign for selectwoman in Brookline. I’ll be pulling the lever for her at polls today.
Congratulations, Global Voices Community
As Rebecca MacKinnon reports, Global Voices today won the Knight-Batten Award for innovation in journalism. It’s quite an accomplishment, for which literally hundreds of people can take credit. GV has been a runaway success since RMacK and Ethan Zuckerman kicked it off not so very long ago. I’m so happy for everyone whose hard work has made this recognition possible. Thanks are also owed to those loyal, trusting souls who have supported GV and the Berkman Center through funding and high-level guidance for this project, including Chris Ahearn and Dean Wright at Reuters, John Bracken at the MacArthur Foundation, Hivos, and others. The best still lies ahead for the GV community, and the GV experiment, I have no doubt. (Here’s more, from NZ).
H20 Playlist for "Law of the Internet"
Here’s the syllabus for my fall freshman seminar, called the “Law of the Internet,” taught at Harvard College, in H20 Playlist form. Comes with an OPML output, too. (Wondering what H20 is? Check out Go With the Flow.)
Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold on "Digital Kids"
The cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito has a lot to say about kids and learning in a digital era. It’s a great topic, and her work is very important (the MacArthur Foundation agrees; she’s got a multi-year grant from them to study it). She is working with Howard Rheingold, of SmartMobs fame. He blogged it on the Annenberg DIY Media site. There’s a great overview of a recent presentation, plus helpful links, if you are interested in the topic. Via Joichi Ito.
Gabrieli campaign e-mail: Remember John Silber
The Gabrieli campaign sent out a blast e-mail to its supporters (I am one) to respond to the Boston Globe’s latest poll numbers — showing a big lead for Deval Patrick — that says that the Globe has a history of being very wrong in its polling in the lead-up to the primary. I have to say that I wonder about the reliability of ANY telephone polling at the moment. How many people realistically answer their home phone for a survey in this era of cell phones, e-mail, sms, and DO NOT CALL? It must be a self-selecting and skewed group in almost any poll. No doubt pollsters are clever and finding ways to correct for this obvious problem, but I don’t put much stock in the polls, by media outlets or internals for campaigns.
Here’s a partial text of the e-mail to supporters:
Memo: Great new Gabrieli poll numbers
A Gabrieli campaign internal poll shows that our campaign is gaining momentum with just days to go before the primary. Our poll indicates that Chris (30%) is within the margin of error — in a statistical tie — with Deval Patrick (34%), while it has become clear that Tom Reilly (15%) is all but eliminated from contention.
As more and more voters make their decisions, they’re responding to Chris’ common-sense commitment to putting results before useless fighting between Democrats and Republicans. The work that we’ve all done together over the past few months is paying off. That’s why Kerry Healey launched negative attacks against Chris last week. She thinks that the only way to beat Chris Gabrieli is to beat him in the Democratic primary.
Unfortunately, today’s Boston Globe poll misses the mark. The Globe poll — which was conducted mostly before Chris’s forceful response to the Healey attack ads — has a history of being off the mark. In 1990, John Silber trailed Lt. Gov. Francis X. Bellotti in a Boston Globe poll by 23 points just five days before the primary. Silber beat Bellotti 54-44.
Gardner Museum's Podcast Series, The Concert
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, one of Boston’s cultural gems, has released the first-of-its-kind museum concert series podcast, called The Concert. The good people there — including Catherine and Charlotte, who did a TV spot this morning — have decided to use a Creative Commons Share Music license. They’ve had the pro bono assistance of the Berkman clinical program in putting together this release. We’re proud to be associated with their innovative work to bring their music series to many more people than those who can attend in person at the appointed hour (though they highly encourage people to come to the Gardner to hear the concerts all the same!).
Bostonist and Cory at Boing Boing have more.
The Citizen Editor
In the past several weeks, I’ve been playing with a new format that my friends at TopTenSources developed. We’ve seen the Citizen Journalist; this idea is the Citizen Editor. Several of us have been using a new bookmarklet-style tool that makes it very easy to tag a story when you’re reading it, provide a bit of analysis, and have it posted to a dedicated website on the topic. It’s in many ways what lots of bloggers do anyway. I remember Dave Winer showing me an aspect of Manila that renders a river of news and then lets you check off stories that you want to appear somewhere — dead simple and fun; this idea is in the same vein, only using different tools and with a different output.
The one I’ve been playing with, as part of a group of “citizen editors,” is tracking the Massachusetts Governor’s Race. It’s a ton of fun. (There are a variety of perspectives among the group as to whom we support, as with most group blogs, I suppose.) As I read the utterly amazing and surging group of bloggers/MSM commentators — for instance, Blue Mass Group, GOPNews, Boston.com, Adam Reilly at the Phoenix, Kimberly Atkins at the Herald, and several dozen other blogs and news sources each day — I tag some of the best, most relevant sources and pop them into the aggregator for others to see. I think it’s pretty novel. The idea is that someone who is interested in the race, but not spending so much time in the details and reading every blog post, can come to a one-stop shop and scan the Editor’s Picks. Over time, the idea is to use a combination of technical tools to pick the most important stories from the most important sources with an editor or group of editors able to over-ride, make decisions about placement, and provide some context and editorial color. I think it’s pretty neat.
(My disclosures: I am a founder, am chairman of the Board, and hold equity in Top Ten Media, Inc., in my extra-Harvard capacity. And I am supporting Chris Gabrieli for governor and Deborah Goldberg for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.)
Microsoft's Open Specification Promise
Microsoft has just unveiled a new commitment not to assert certain rights against people who develop code based on specifications that Microsoft has developed. It’s called the Open Specification Promise. Warning: the announcement itself, at the top of the page, is written in legalese, though probably pretty readable legalese. The FAQs make things a lot clearer for non-lawyer readers.
The upshot of this announcement is that it will hopefully turn out to be a Very Good Thing. Bravo to the lawyers and the policy people who no doubt worked very hard on it; the promise obviously reflects a huge amount of careful and open-minded thinking. The notion is that Microsoft agrees unilaterally not to come after people based on IP rights that the company holds with respect to a series of widely-used web services, such as SOAP and various of its progeny, WSDL, and so forth (all listed mid-way down the announcement page). From a geeky-lawyerly perspective, one of the things I like a lot is the fact that the requirement of availing oneself of the promise is yourself NOT to participate voluntarily in a patent infringement suit related to the same specification — commitments of this sort could help to create an anti-patent-thicket. (Maybe, down the road, this aspect of the promise might not prove to be as great as I think it could be, but for now, from here, it looks very appealing, in a detente kind of way.)
Why could this promise help? Any promise of forbearance by a huge player — where they say they won’t stand in the way of your innovating on top of the work of others — is certainly positive. More than that, such a promise that is made “irrevocably” establishes a commitment on the part of the company for the long haul. Set aside the legal enforceability of such a promise, the idea has enormous rhetorical force and would make it very hard for the company to backtrack and to go in another direction. Of course, the idea no doubt has good business judgment behind it in an era of dramatic growth in terms of the open development of web services, including those related to security and to web 2.0 apps.
Why might it not be so great? Well, I think it is a great thing, and not just because we at the Berkman Center have been looking into interoperability, with support from Microsoft and others, and learning more about how companies are taking novel steps in this sort of direction. Its limitation might take a few forms, I suppose. The promise itself has limitations — it applies to some specifications and the promise extends only to some possible IPR-related claims, of course, but that seems natural, especially with such a first step. Other possible limitations: 1) Will developers pay attention to it, and in fact believe it? 2) Will this promise itself be interoperable with other such promises? I am reminded of Prof. Lessig’s speech at Wikimania last month, when he talked about interoperable licenses. Hopefully, others will either follow this lead or help developers to understand how this meshes with other similar promises of forebearance in the marketplace. 3) I don’t know well enough whether these are the right specifications to be included in such a promise. Are there other specs that developers would like to see opened up in this fashion?
John Palfrey 