Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

This is not madness. This is … THE INTERNET!

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:08:42 +0000

The Portuguese government sometimes comes up with some harebrained ideas. The latest is a project to tax devices where I might wish to make a copy of copyrighted work that I have already paid for.

In simple terms I am paying for it twice, or three times. Once directly to the content producer and then once more for every hard disk, computer or smart phone I buy. They promise that the extra tax is going back to the author, somehow. There is a great FAQ on this subject written by Jonasnuts. You should check it out.

Keeping up the good work, she wrote a post called ”Instruction manual to stop the private copy law #pl118”

This is where the madness starts

As if it had not already started, I know …

The idea is to reach out to deputies in government to persuade them to fight the implementation of this tax. So far so good. How can we reach out?

The Parliament’s website has a form you can fill out. Yes, a form. No, you can’t even send yourself a copy of the email you are sending. It’s not like when you go to www.parliament.uk and get to see the email, website and even phone number of public officials. Hell, some of them even share their twitter handle.

After a few outbursts of indignation and tweets to go along, it was time to ask ”Do you think they have heard about this thing called the Internet ?”.

será que eles já ouviram falar na internet @baiavieira ? https://t.co/vL5dioIBRU

— Bruno Amaral (@brunoamaral) November 30, 2014

I bet this is going to get me into trouble

Scratch that. I HOPE this gets me into trouble.

I set up a simple google spreadsheet that in less than a few hours collected most of the twitter handles of deputies. So far, what we found out is that in 231 people, only 27 are on twitter. I am not even going to mention Facebook. By design, Facebook does not allow for the transparency I advocate for the public sector.

If you want to take a look or contribute with information, please feel free. The link to the spreadsheet is below.

https://docs.google.com/a/brunoamaral.com/spreadsheets/d/1-JarcrMyqf77ZdW1ldEUfz_kziFCKkAemjsdK6Nhey0/edit#gid=0

Does the madness stop here?

Hell no. There are 27 people you and me can reach out to on twitter to let them know what we think about being taxed twice for buying copyrighted material. Lets do that. We can even invite them for a cup of coffee and a chat. They are human beings like you and me, this sort of direct dialogue should not be started by filling out a black-hole form in the parliament’s website.

X-Ray of a broken political system

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 22:55:19 +0000

The picture in this post is an infographic built by Pedro Cruz. The circles represent portuguese companies. The bigger the circle, the more politicians where involved in managing it. You can find it here: https://pmcruz.com/eco/

He called it “An ecosystem of Corporate Politicians“, I call it an X-Ray of a broken political system.

The dataset includes data from 1975 to 2013. Which shows that this is not just a problem to be fixed, it’s a whole tradition of mixed interests and loyalties. I, for one, have long ago lost all faith in the political parties available. Whenever there is an election, I get myself out of the house to stand in line, show my ID card and push a blank vote down the ballot box. It’s my way of saying that I care, but that none of the options available make any sense to me.

Now, seeing the way major companies are organised around the political system, I can’t help but feel a bit more of dismay and, this is new, a lot more anger towards the political class.

Three players and no communication

Just keep this in mind, our PM is a social-democrat faced with a country taking financial hits from all sides, he is therefore forced to resolve all these issues of alliances between companies and opposing parties to get anything done. While he does that, we get news from him saying that things are looking up with no clear signal that they in fact are. Taxes are still high, starting a profitable company sounds like pulling off a miracle and some families are at the brink of poverty.

On the other side of things, the Socialist Party is a joke. Their communication strategy is to wait for any action by the social democrats and to counter it with an ideological speech. There is no clear plan, no actionable ideas, just shouts and soundbites against the prime minister.

The communist parties do pretty much the same, trying to rally up the middle and lower class towards demands of better quality of life and most of the time undermining any scarce effort for a joining of hands towards a solution.

As for the President, well, there is nothing I can say about him because I haven’t seen any action on his part. Ever. So he’s the non-playing character of this system.

In this scenario I don’t trust any of the remaining members of our government to be virtuous and make the right decision if they have to choose between the people or their own companies (and well-being).

Hacking it to fix it

Have you ever worked with an old computer? Or even an old software at your job that everybody hates and that stopped being efficient a million years ago?

I am going to take a leap here and say that if you answered any of those questions affirmatively that computer or software was soon replaced with a newer model. Sadly we can’t just throw our politicians out of a window like we did in the past. Also, I don’t expect to see this government passing laws that enforce political independence from private companies.

The solution I see is to raise the bar on political scrutiny. In a balanced social system, this scrutiny would come from journalist and media companies. In this status quo journalists have little resources and whether they want to or not, their publications are in some way tied to some of the major portuguese companies.

In Portugal, Political Scrutiny, good or bad, needs to come from hackers and geeks. People eager to learn and eager to build things that help others. And there are already some good examples out there about what can be done.

One of them is a site where people can view what political promises were made by their mayor.

To help fix this system, we could take that idea one step further and list relevant political actions and laws passed, with names of those involved and the private companies they work with. The goal would be to bring just a bit more transparency to politics. Of course it wouldn’t work forever, but it would at least serve as a deterrent.

What’s the use ?

Probably nothing. This idea will by no means result in a complete fix for the broken system. The only good fix would be a full reboot but we simply can’t afford it. We have however entered a time when we must take matters into our own hands.

Patch it wherever possible,
Build new tools to empower citizens,
Make it more transparent,
Throw away ideology in favour of practical and effective projects.

We have sat on our hands and the political class had their opportunity to show results. It’s about time we take action.

Drink your own poison

Sun, 21 Jul 2013 18:00:42 +0000

A friend of mine used to say that I drink my own poison, and that it is a good thing.

And the other day, in tune with this and my participation in BledCom, Wired published an article titled “If Politicians Had to Debug Laws Like Software, They’d Fix the Bugs“.

It comes down to this, programmers force themselves to use the software they build in order to better identify bugs and come up with solutions faster, it is called Dogfooding.

Applied to politicians, making them deal with the same conditions they impose on us would be a path towards a better society. It is funny, the article does not even question if politicians get special treatment, it is a given.

Opening doors towards a Connected government

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:56:26 +0000

The inspiration for this article comes from two sources. One is Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk on how the Internet will one day transform government.

The other is a story of a friend who built a civic movement. It is more than the story of a man and the way he sees the world. This is also about you and me and the way we can and should influence the world around us.

Basilio lived next to a street with serious problems of accessibility. A two-way car lane and a narrow sidewalk meant that people walking by had to stand against the wall to avoid being run over.

Making matters worse, this street is one of the main pathways to access one of Lisbon’s most central train stations.

He brought to the attention of the relevant stakeholders. The city hall and REFER, the company in charge of the train station. Not seeing any result he took it upon himself to pressure them into action. He built Entrada Norte – a civic movement and created a social media campaign across every channel he could manage: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and YouTube.

It took Basilio two years, the support of neighbors and friends and a number of opportunities to speak to newspapers and TV. Eventually, the street did change, turning into a one-way car lane, with a small fence being put in place to protect pedestrians a sidewalk and extra measures to ensure visibility at night.

How the government failed and Entrada Norte won

Here we are talking about every aspect of Government, from the local and regional bodies to the systems in charge of state affairs. The Entrada Norte civic movement was acting a local level and literally had to fight to get its voice heard. And has it turned out, the solution was actually quite simple to carry out.

The Civic Movement Process according to Entrada Norte
Analysis and research
Contact stakeholders
Media: Newspapers and TV
Local actions (demonstrations)
Meetings with interested parties
Repeat

The reason it took Basilio two years to achieve this victory is a failure in communication between government and the public at a local level, where ironically communication is easier to manage. The social media effort put in place was not taken into account by any government entity and served more as a way to show the relevance and concern of the people towards the problem and thus gain attention by the media and sequentially decision makers, than to alert the government directly.

On a scenario of ideal relationship management by any of the stakeholders, the Entrada Norte movement would have succeeded in half the time or less, and either city hall or REFER would be seen as a true communicative organization for doing so. What could have been a mutual victory turned out to be a defeat due to outdated procedures and lack of awareness towards social media.

Towards a connected government

The concept of Democracy began as an act of participation in public affairs. In ancient Greece, everyone who held the title of citizen could vote and make his voice heard. This model of participatory democracy eventually had to change into the representative democracy we know today. With the rise of the Web and the possibility to adopt new ways to work and collaborate we can explore a new approach to government.

A Connected Government could then be described as an entity that works as an enabler, coordinating efforts and setting priorities of other stakeholders. In its current state, Portuguese Government is more of a controlling entity, it is hierarchical and inefficient to solve problems of a small street.

Act as a network and change the way we work

The hardest change towards a connected government is structural change, it needs to be less hierarchical and have flexible procedures. That is a deep change that if we discussed would extend this article much further.

On a more practical perspective, there are a number of things that a Connected Government needs: – Tools to communicate – Free and open access to information – Research and analysis of big data – Bounty hunters – Geeks

Tools to communicate

As was said already, Social Media and internal communication tools are essential. From Twitter to blogs, Facebook and Wikis. And these tools need to work both ways and not just as a means for broadcasting information.

Free and open access to information

Despite today’s technology governments sometimes still fail to provide the Public with information in a format that is open: can be easily read in every platform, worked upon and even searched or shared as the user sees fit.

In Portugal, a group launched Demo.Cratica.org : a website that gathers and shares information about elected politicians, assembly minutes and other data they felt the government was failing to provide in an open format.

Research and analysis of big data

Simply put, gathering information is expensive and takes time. It is however possible to let citizens contribute with information via their mobile phones, reporting problems and alerting about opportunities and thus allow government bodies to focus on curating and making that information actionable.

GeoDevolutas for example is an independent website where users can login and register vacant housing or buildings that are in ruins.

Bounty Hunters

Government is not the single entity in the public sector, and yet, when faced with a problem to solve it opts to create a research or workgroup to find solutions.

Other organizations sometimes issue a Bounty for solutions of a problem or new projects. Public bounties could be answered by Universities, individuals, private companies or any other stakeholder thus cutting down costs and allowing for a faster process of research.

Geeks

Not everything in an organization can be planned or predicted and communication teams are sometimes faced with challenges in the spur of the moment.

It is then important to have geeks on the team, people who are not only prone to technology but whose desire for an open government will drive them to build quick solutions to communicate in a time of crisis or to serve as a quick fix until a more permanent solution can be found.

Going Further

There are a number of free and open source tools that can help build a Connected Government (or organization), as well as examples of practical projects who only need critical mass to make a difference. I gathered as much as I could in a list of links.

The Slides from BledCom 2013 are also available on slideshare:

BledCom 2013: Towards a connected government from Bruno Amaral

It is your turn, please leave your comment or any questions.

Update: The panel discussion gathered in storify.

Net Neutrality is an important resource for e-Government

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:48:18 +0000

Right now we live in a world where Net Neutrality is a given. This means that you can open any website or webservice just as fast as anyone else on the network, subject only to network congestion or issues of bad reception. The proposition against Net Neutrality would allow your ISP to segment the services and websites you use, giving you faster access to google or any other major player. This would of course mean that you would be paying your ISP for both access to the internet and for faster access to premium websites.

Read Write Web as a pretty good info-graphic explaining in greater detail what Net Neutrality is, and the wikipedia page is also quite useful to understand its implications.

Recently, a leaked document revealed that France may be ready to put an end to Net Neutrality.

I don’t know a thing about the French legislation, however I do believe that there is a correlation between access to information and development. More so, the European Union encourages its member states to have a wide range of online services.

Under the motto, “better online than in line”, more than 90% of all providers of public services across the European Union are now online. The goal is to provide easy electronic access to 20 basic public services (filing income tax or VAT returns, registering new cars or changing car ownership, and so on).
<p>
  Source: <a href="https://europa.eu/pol/infso/index_en.htm">Europa.eu</a>
</p>

To this we had the development of the Citizen Card and the European Commission’s intent to foster e-authentication. All this keeping in mind that there is a need for faster internet access.

Europe needs widely available and competitively-priced fast and ultra fast internet access. The EU aims to bring basic broadband to all Europeans by 2013 and to ensure that, by 2020, (i) all Europeans have access to much higher internet speeds of above 30 Mbps and (ii) 50% or more of European households subscribe to internet access above 100 Mbps.
<p>
  Source: <a href="https://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/10/200&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en">Europa.eu Press Release</a>
</p>

If a European country wishes to follow the guidelines set by the EC and at the same time foster e-Government initiatives, then it must protect Net Neutrality or risk increasing the percentage of citizens with little or no access to information. And given that the trend for more and more e-Government initiatives, the access to information will be akin to the access to the Government.

I fear that if we lose the battle for Net Neutrality we may one day lose any hope of a Participatory Government.