Disruptive Proactivity

Before I waffle, here’s the useful stuff: We’ve just published the opentech audio. Thanks to David for all his work on recording, and (other) David for handling the programme on the day, and Emily for all the work she did, and all our chairs, especially Dave, Zoe and Siobhan. All the sessions we have audio for are now available (all download links are on that page). We’ve also published a short feedback form to get your comments on the event.

Robin and Heather (session 1A) talked about what happens when you do stuff, and then Tom Loosemore (2A) gave an amazing and wonderful talk about what happens when you do. Both these talks are utterly fantastic. Bill and Ben then talked about why all this is important. Suw and friends then talked about some of the aspects of community and what happens when you do things, and the challenges they faced in relation to Ada day and taking that forwards.

The final sessions we had in the main room talked about persistance and privacy of transient information, location and the measures of environmental privacy. And this was one of the double sessions I most wanted to attend. Unfortunately, due to scheduling constraints, it had to be against ORG and No2ID, which meant that many of those who may have been interested went there.

Gavin Bell talked about how databases are easy to create, can be data-mined, and can have almost no value to people over time because of the huge granularity. Gavin Starks talked about how energy smart meters can tell that your Zanussi fridge has a faulty coolant motor, or that your Playstation3 was turned on between 3:57 and 6:29, and the Sanyo TV was turned on between 6:30 and 7pm, and then a Dell gets turned on till it goes to sleep at 7:48, and a John Lewis hob (but only the 3rd hot plate, and the grill) gets turned off at 7:43. That data has incredible value. There are some reasons to share some of that data with some people, but there are huge reasons not to share it with others – it must be under you control. Sony would be very, very interested in advertising in or before that TV programme, to that school child. Mix that with something like Phorm (especially for broadband via your cable TV provider), and being able to target adverts exceptionally precisely – because a PS3 with the laser shooting attachment probably has a different energy profile to all the one with the Barbie Doll attachment. Big Brother isn’t watching you, but he really wants to watch your energy usage.

This data is incredibly valuable, and there are huge privacy implications.

And there are many people and companies interested in using it for their own profits. As Gavin Starks highlighted in that session, British Gas are recruiting 2500 “green engineers” to install smart meters in every home. Only if they own the data from them. EDF are doing something similar; and Electricite De France (the very same EDF, but the version in France) turns your supply off if you go over a certain limit, no matter how cold it is in January. How do you know that whoever owns your data will do what’s in your interest? Rather than that of their shareholders, profits or customers?

There’s a consultation ongoing about all aspects of smart meters. If you care on any of the issues that they raise, and there are very very many, you might want to comment, and then tell your friends. All your friends.

There’s been an ongoing discussion this week over at Paul Currion’s blog about the benefit of croudsourcing of information in the human rights sphere, most of it criticising probably crazy ideas.

Disaster first responders will need customised tools, and if they find something that will save them time, then it will get adopted. But that’s always going to be harder than giving them a wiki and they solve everything, or possibly, anything. But for Paul’s work, the solutions for first responders wont be the same as for everyone else – the environment is likely too different, as there needs to be some co-ordination, communication and planning. But I wonder, what is there that first responders do that they don’t have time to look at. I suspect there is a huge difference between natural disasters and civil unrest (of which the G20 demostrations could be considered a very tame example). Either way, Paul’s interest is not about crowdsourcing what human rights groups can already do, it’s about helping them do what they can’t.

Paul’s argument is that crowdsourcing wont help that much in the areas in which he deals, as first responders in an incident are overwhelmed, busy and don’t have time to edit wikis or do much that doesn’t give direct benefit. That’s completely true. By their very nature, first responders are there when few others are, when the infrastructure is questionable (in that you may have no idea yet what’s left) and generally the focus is on saving lives; they’re there when there is no crowd. At that point, the only thing that makes those people’s jobs better is better access to more useful information. And that’s not going to be a normal wiki. What it might be (and this is also unworkable), is say, an iphone app that lets them report things “3 bodies by side of road” click, “house burnt out” click, which gets GPS co-ordinates and timestamped, and uploaded over a text message or later when there’s a connection, depending on what they know. This has the downside of the battery runs out somewhere they probably can’t recharge it easily – these problems are very real, nuanced and hard, but the potential is for some novel solutions that help responders help more people faster. That’s probably not crowdsourced, which is a solution to different problems, but if we step away from the real time, and move to an issue based process, there are wider uses which aren’t limited to first responders, but anyone with a cell phone, such as the G20 police ID matching. That’s where crowdsourcing comes into its own.

I spent a few days last week in London, and was around some of the G20 protests with some friends. Those protests were in central London – one of the biggest cities in one of the richest countries in the world, with the most advanced infrastructure and resources, and everything was heavily covered by cameras from the press, the police and individuals. Mostly individuals, who then uploaded their photos to flickr or elsewhere and tagged them appropriately.

I doubt anyone in the UK hasn’t seen the pictures of Ian Tomlinson being pushed to the ground shortly before he died, with some police in the background, none of whom have id numbers visible in the footage (possibly due to active removal, but probably due to camera angles), or today’s new footage. All we have is their faces, in a variety of shots, in a variety of angles, from different places, at different times.

Someone had the great idea of crowdsourcing the deduction of the identification numbers of those PCs. You know what those present look like from the video; you can then get better photos from before/after from flickr, and therefore have high quality photos. Even if you can’t get the ID numbers from that, you then have a decent photo, and can start to look through the huge number of other photos of police on the day to find them (the dog handlers being particularly easy). A massively manual task, that will take huge amounts of time and people, but time is something that the project has at this point. And the task is massively parallelisable with no communication overhead until you find a match – or as someone said on twitter Tomlinson’s Law: Given enough eyeballs, all thugs are shallow.