weeknotes
Things I’ve discussed and read, more than done. Open knowledge, infrastructure, public goods, energy, organisations. More interesting posts later this week ;)
Last week started with the first Open Intellectual Property Models of Emerging Technologies meetup of the academic year. The name isn’t perfect; because it’s so long I think most of us just call it Open IP. We’re a research network at CRASSH, meaning we meet every couple of weeks during term and discuss papers, articles or talks; anyone is welcome, you don’t have to be in the University. Our guiding question is the extent to which open technologies result in equitable sharing of knowledge and cognitive or technology justice; I think many of the convenors are motivated to explore how new technologies can help address global challenges, and the ways in which openness could accelerate this or make it more democratic and effective. Last year, we had a lot of fascinating discussions about a mix of theory and practice around the nature of intellectual property and of openness, about emerging technologies and their potential and risks, and about some of the political and economic issues. We resolved in this year’s programme to include more economics expertise, as a great many of the questions we kept coming back to were economics ones.
The discussion last week was lively, as we discussed a couple of papers and a talk by Mariana Mazzucato on technology funding, the state and industry. (I’d also just listened to the recent Exponential View podcast with Bill Janeway, on capitalism in the innovation economy — how markets, investors and the state fit together around innovative technologies — similar territory.) We’re interested in innovation in the sense of something more than just incremental changes to existing products or services, and in emerging technologies, where there’s a reasonable degree of risk (they might not work, or might not work in the context in which they are being applied). We’re also interested in systemic change — this is the sort of thing needed to tackle the big global challenges such as sustainable clean water for everyone. There might be small steps towards that systemic shift, but the wider ecosystem matters, and that’s where ideas of open IP can be powerful.
But the topics we keep coming back to aren’t really about openness or IP. They are about business models, and funding models, for emerging technologies in general. IP may play a role there, large or otherwise, but the real question is how resource is obtained to fund development of a new technology or application of tech, which might not succeed; and how a deployment of such technology is maintained later on. There are many funding options here — state funding, venture capital, other investment markets; and different ways to realise value from an innovation. At the end of the meeting we speculated that we might have chosen the wrong focus for our group — perhaps risk financing models and business models for emerging technologies is our real focus?Looking for options which address the need for greater equality and for viable ways to resource the sorts of technology that could be solving problems for the bottom billion, and creating important public goods (such as biodiversity, or breathable air).
So whilst Open isn’t the answer to everything — far from it — it’s still an important tool. I’ve taken on some new work at the Cambridge Computer Labrecently and getting up to speed has been a good reminder of how effective a light touch IP policy, and a culture of open source, can be at enabling research and translation into significant technical innovations (Xen, for instance).
Also a hat tip to Mia Ridge, for a link to a working paper exploring open and traditional and indigenous knowledge, and the potential clashes between what we think of as IP here in the West, and especially in technology, and other forms of knowledge and conceptions of access and control to them.
Other forms of knowledge, skills and know-how were touched upon in Cassie Robinson’s lovely article about the transition of an agricultural engineering business to new owners. The challenges facing rural communities are often neglected as cities have become a focus for innovation and policy-making, and yet we still depend on them in so many ways. The article poses questions about how to find new, young folks with relevant skills (or developing them), about the deteriorating infrastructure, be it pub or police, and the memory of the ways of doing things which is so uncertain in small, fragile organisations and communities. The detail about rural crime is especially depressing.
It’s another area of poorly maintained public goods — we all want the countryside to exist and to have (some) people in it, and to steward the land; but our current markets and systems don’t work for this. Maybe a topic for the 2019 Festival of Maintenance…
With the IPCC special report, everyone was talking about climate change again. Energy, and other forms of sustainability, are less visible forms of responsible internet technology. Big compute providers think about energy, because the bills are so high if nothing else. But folks making apps and websites and even connected hardware tend not to prioritise this. We included sustainability in Doteveryone’s first conception of Responsible Tech, and it’s still there in the content, consequences and contribution model for which tools are being developed at the moment. Much credit to Chris Adamsfor discussing this sort of thing, and developing the Planet Friendly Web guide, because there are things that smaller tech organisations can do to be more green.
On a similar note, Steve Bowbrick slams into bitcoin (and all blockchains using proof of work). That needs to go too.
Co-op Digital write about failure and organisational behaviour; “perhaps it is actually quite hard to get to the future if you start from where you are today”. I’ve been thinking about large organisations and how they shape what’s possible within them since Ross Anderson’s talk at the Trust & Technology Initiative launch, about how the internal politics in organisations often limits what can be achieved. Even very small organisations can quickly develop enough momentum, or inertia, to make changing direction very difficult. (A problem for me at the Digital Life Collective… still waiting to see what happens there.)
In the early days at Doteveryone, we talked about setting up an organisation with a purpose and how you might do this very intentionally with the expectation that you’d close down once your purpose was achieved. If an organisation is a group of people who come together for a purpose, then it doesn’t have to be something that evolves and sustains. It can be something that gets set up, does the job of providing a structure for a while, and then id disbanded. (Someone wrote about this idea — of very short lived companies, that would allow small teams to operate agile businesses, say, delivering on a kickstarter product, and then wind up again, perhaps in a matter of months. Who was that?)
If your organisation is no longer working well, does it make more sense to try to change direction, restructure the team, adjust the brand — all the internal and external work; or to wind down, and perhaps set up one or more new, fresh things, designed for their specific purposes? How do you value your current assets (formal and informal) and the labour, costs, and emotional labour of either option? It’s not easy. But I wonder whether we too often discount the fresh start option, because we are so used to persisting. Sometimes, surely celebrating achievements, and supporting a team to go on to new things, and winding down with grace and intent, is better than a slow decline.
When should we stop maintaining an organisation?