Electromagnetic spectrum is the crude oil of last-mile connectivity, especially in Africa where more traditional kinds of last-mile communication infrastructure are not especially well-developed. As in the oil business, anyone who has gained control of spectrum in the last ten to twenty years has made a great deal of money. But unlike oil, spectrum is something that is much harder to put your finger on. The struggle to understand what kind of thing spectrum is and consequently how it should be managed has led to a lot of disagreement, to the extent that we can’t seem to work out whether it is abundant or running out. In the past couple of years you may have seen articles with titles like these:

Apparently even with our remarkable technical capacity to manufacture smartphones that are more powerful than all of NASA’s computing power in 1969, we still can’t really get to grips with the elusive nature of radio spectrum.  To unpack this problem, let’s go back to basics.

What is Electromagnetic Spectrum and Why Does It Require Regulation?

Spectrum is not actually a thing, it is simply the range of possible frequencies for electromagnetic radiation.  By varying the size and frequency of radio waves, we are capable of sending information wirelessly.  This was first achieved with voice and telegraph but has now evolved into digital communication capable of transmitting anything that can represented digitally from documents to sound to video.

So what does wireless communication look like?  Imagine a still pond into which you have dropped a single pebble. It is easy to see the propagation of waves caused by the stone.  Now imagine twenty people dropping stones into the same pond at the same time.  Can you still see the waves caused by your stone?  Unlikely. This is called interference.  You can no longer see your waves.  While radio waves are not physical waves like water, they interfere with each other in a similar sort of manner.  When the signals from two television stations overlap, you can no longer distinguish the program you wanted to watch.  Counter-intuitively, radio waves are not destroyed when they collide with each other.  They pass through each other.  Thus if you had the magical ability to colour only the waves caused by your pebble, you would clearly see your waves again even though others were dropping pebbles at the same time.  The technical meaning of “interference” is at odds with its more colloquial meaning which is to block or obstruct.  When radio waves interfere they don’t impede each other but they can make the original wave form hard to recognise.

And that brings to the most significant reason why radio spectrum is regulated and that is to prevent interference.  Another reason to regulate spectrum is coordination to encourage people doing similar things and using similar technologies to use the same frequencies. In the early days of wireless communication, interference was an easy problem to solve. The range of available spectrum was vast and demand was comparatively small. Interference could be solved by making sure that people using spectrum in the same geographic region were allocated individual bands of spectrum that were well apart from each other in the spectrum band.  This strategy was reasonably successful for nearly 70 years.

And so things might have continued to this day had it not been for the explosion of demand for wireless spectrum from broadband service providers and mobile operators. In the last 15 years, spectrum has gone from an abundant to an apparently scarce resource. But is it truly scarce? It is certainly true that demand currently exceeds supply but there is debate as to the nature of the scarcity and that debate is rooted in the nature of what spectrum is and how, as a result, it should be treated.

So What Kind of a Thing is Spectrum?

A key consideration when looking at public versus private access to any resource is whether that resource is rival or not i.e. does use of it by one person preclude use by another. Rival goods tend to become private property whereas non-rival goods such as solar power, for example, are public goods that do not require explicit management. And of course there is a range of goods in between which are partially rival such as the oceans and nature in general which are non-rival as long as care is taken to ensure the resource is tended and non-overused. Historically, regulators have been obliged to treat spectrum as a rival good because of interference. In fact, in order to ensure the absence of interference for television broadcasters, regulators were obliged to establish spectrum frequency no-man’s-lands between television channels to reduce the chances of stray interference.  However, the now rapid evolution of both wireless and information technology obliges us to reconsider how we think about spectrum and spectrum management.  Is spectrum a rival resource?  The answer is fuzzier than it used to be.

Technological increases in efficiency

First we have to acknowledge the steady increase in spectral efficiency in wireless technologies. Every year we are able to pack more data into less spectrum with less power. This efficiency is typically expressed as bits per hertz per km2.  While spectrum is not infinite, the trend towards efficiency increase shows no immediate sign of slowing down. In fact, wireless pioneer Martin Cooper has coined a law similar to Moore’s Law in which he argues that spectral efficiency has doubled every 30 months since Marconi patented the wireless telegraph in 1897.  The evolution of radio and antenna design has meant that with increased sensitivity we can now communicate the same information with much less power.  You can imagine old television broadcast transmitters as effectively having to “shout” at the relatively deaf television sets.  But sensitivity is only part of the story.  Engineers are making great strides in mitigating wireless interference. It is increasingly possible to design wireless technologies which are sensitive to other radio transmissions and which can operate in “noisy” environments.  The scenario described above where one might be able to recognise the pond waves from ones own pebble is now increasingly possible through techniques like beamforming with multiple antennas.

Administrative increases in efficiency 

Imagine having a hotel room permanently reserved for you in every city in your country.  No matter where or when you travel, you room is always ready.  Great for you but a bit of tough business for the hotel owner.  This is effectively how early spectrum regulation operated and it was feasible because capacity far exceeded demand.  With the situation now reversed, regulators have had to embrace a more nuanced approach to the different dimensions of spectrum.  Here are some of the different ways in which spectrum can be administered:

More control of radio propagation means that we regulate different for different regions in a country.  This might mean having different spectrum license holders in different areas or it might mean varying the allowable power output based on geography.

The proximity of devices to each other can make a difference.  Low power devices that are nearby each other can operate in the same spectrum as much higher power technology but below its “noise floor“.  Imagine two people talking to each other at a rock concert.  Their conversation doesn’t interfere with a the very loud concert yet they are close enough to communicate with each other “at low power”.  I am grateful to Sascha Meinrath for that extremely apt analogy.  

Some spectrum technologies have a specific orientation, that is to say as opposed to radiating generally, they are pointed in a specific direction.  Satellites are a great example of this.  They obvious point upwards.  This creates an opportunity for re-use of the spectrum in ways that don’t point up e.g. point-to-point terrestrial links.  Another means of reducing interference is to use antenna designs that polarise communication i.e. radio waves propagate orthogonally to each other and so reduce interference.

Spectrum can also be shared in time.  This could happen in big chunks such as someone using television spectrum late at night when the station is not broadcasting to sharing of micro slices of time.  Thanks to computing technology, it is possible for the same spectrum to be automatically shared in tiny time slices which give the appearance of continuous connectivity.

Letting Technology Handle the Administration

To date the regulation of spectrum has largely relied on human management and oversight.  This places a significant burden on the regulator and is necessarily somewhat slow.  New technologies offer the potential for the use of spectrum to be managed dynamically via a database.  This would not only lower the barrier to access but could be used to ensure fair play among spectrum holders.  Allowing computer systems to dynamically assign spectrum on demand could create both spectrum and organisational efficiencies. 

Not All Spectrum Is Created Equal

A final important thing to know about spectrum is that not all wireless spectrum is created equal. At the lower frequency end of the radio spectrum, radio waves tend to have better propagation characteristics than at higher frequencies. This means they have better reach because they are capable of travelling through solid objects with less signal loss. Thus radio spectrum at the lower frequencies are often considered quite valuable because fewer transmitters are required to cover an equivalent area at a higher frequency. There is a trade-off though: the physics of lower frequencies present bigger constraints to broadband capacity than higher frequencies.  So higher frequencies can carry more data but don’t propagate as well while lower frequencies have much better range but are more limited in terms of throughput.

So Is There a Crisis?

Perhaps crisis is the wrong word.  Are we running out of spectrum?  The answer to that seems to clearly be that ongoing innovation and efficiency increases will ensure we don’t run out of spectrum for some time to come.  So no crisis?  Well, not exactly.  We still haven’t worked out a very satisfying means of deciding who gets what spectrum and for how long.  As a result, there is an apparent scarcity of spectrum as debate about how best to make spectrum available leads to delays, confusion, and missed opportunities.  More about that in the next posts in this series.

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Water images courtesy of Snappy.joneS 2006 BY-NC-SA and Marc Dezemery 2006 BY-NC-ND

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If you work in the area of Open Government, Open Data, Transparency,  or even just ICTs and Development in general, you have probably heard of the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative.  MAVC is a Grand Challenge for Development which brings together the UK Department for International Development (DFID/UKAID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Omidyar Network (ON), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to create a $50 million fund to “support innovation, scaling-up, and research that will deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.”

On Saturday, in response to an increasing number of interactions around MAVC that I’ve had over the last few weeks, I tweeted the following:

Boy oh boy.Seems like everyone’s got their hat out ready to catch money falling from the “Making All Voices Count” sky.

— Steve Song (@stevesong) December 15, 2012

which garnered a few reactions.  Most interestingly @wayanvota issued a challenge to speak up and say just what was wrong with MAVC.  I was a little surprised by his reaction as I thought there were some fairly self-evident problems, mostly related to what happens when there is a large pot of money on the table.  It then occurred to me that perhaps this was perhaps not self-evident to all or perhaps even that I was simply jaded and cynical.  My first thought was to blog about the challenges that I think MAVC will face.  But frankly it’s easy to be a critic and anyone engaged in the field of philanthropy knows that it is hard, very hard indeed to do well.  If I had the time, I could pick holes in development initiatives all day.  Like shooting fish in a barrel but not as much fun.

So, perhaps more challenging, more constructive, and more fun would be to say, well *what would I do*. That is to say if someone said, here take this bag of 50 million dollars and go forth to create more open governance in the South.  A challenging prospect.  Achieving impact through the giving away of money is much more difficult than achieving impact in the private sector. Philanthropy lacks that marvellous feedback loop called the market which provides plenty of data for self-correction.  This doesn’t, as some suggest, make philanthropy bad. It just makes it more challenging.  So herewith my suggestion as to how to most effectively spend 50 million dollars on Open Government in the South.

My recipe is very simple.  I would pick 10 universities, one each in 10 countries in the South.  I would endow a chair for Cyber Law and Governance in each university for 10 years giving each university 5 million dollars.  That’s it.  Maybe I’d keep a million or two back to fund and facilitate networking among the universities but that’s it.  Here is my rationale:

1. Open Governance, if it happens at all, has to be home-grown.  The power imbalance in development assistance hasn’t gone away.  Putting southern researchers in control of the agenda is a start towards mitigating that problem.
2. Open Governance is still in its infancy.  There is no significant body of evidence of it making a difference in the South.  Granted MAVC plans to fund research, as do others, but what is really needed is sustained dialogue in the south between informed civil society and government.  Think of the role that someone like Michael Geist plays in Canada or Rufus Pollock in the UK.  Universities were and are the critical enablers for them.  We need more of that in the South, that is to say dialogue not solutions.  Solutions emerge naturally from constructive dialogue.
3. Open Government is complex.  There is a kind of naive optimism around Open Government which comes from the forty thousand foot view that many donors have.  Kenya, the poster child for Open Government in Africa, has experienced its own challenges with Open Government. There are vested interests, entrenched centres of power, contradictory priorities (protection of privacy, cyber security, etc), lack of capacity and many other issues, all of which take time and engagement to deal with.  This calls more for sustained local dialogue, engagement, and capacity building than for entrepreneurs building open data apps.
4. Most countries in the South have a critical lack of institutions that can engage on cyber governance issues.  It is not just Open Government but digital privacy, surveillance, cyber security, Internet governance and a host of other issues that demand a generation of researchers and policy-makers with the interest and capacity to lead their countries and probably the world to better decision-making on these issues.  Invest in those institutions and you will get Southern leadership on these issues and make it easier for future funders to find the right places to engage.
5. Policy work is a long game.  Institutions need to know they can commit beyond a few years.  This would allow them the time and resources needed to bring about real change.

My 2 cents or 50 million dollars as the case may be.

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“mobile broadband could prove the platform for achieving the boost needed to get progress back on track – at end 2011, there were already almost twice as many mobile broadband subscriptions as fixed broadband connections.”

But what does it actually mean and is it really true?  When talking about our mobile broadband future, it is essential to distinguish between devices and networks.  The two things are not necessarily the same thing.

The Future is Mobile Devices

This future I believe in.  Small, low-power wireless devices whether phones or tablets are taking over the way we interact with each other and with content.  New markets and services are being created every day for mobile devices.  The world of app and apps stores are creating new opportunities for innovation and adding value.

The Future is Mobile Networks

This is the future mobile operators would like you to believe in but the evidence is increasingly not in their favour.  Here are some statistics that may change your perspective of our mobile broadband future.

Global Smartphone-originated Data Traffic
January 2012 – Source: Mobidia

A recent study by Mobidia revealed that about 70% of smartphone data traffic travelled via WiFi and not mobile networks.  Keep in mind that this research was not done in Africa, it was done in the industrialised world.  What we are seeing overwhelmingly is WiFi become the default form of data access and cellular access being relegated to those times when WiFi is not available, an increasingly rare phenomenon in the rich world.

The figures are even higher for tablet traffic.  And while we’re at it, since when are tablets “mobile” devices?  Of the fifty million tablets sold in the United States, only 8% have mobile capacity.  The tablet is not a mobile device, it is a WiFi device.  Google’s Nexus7 tablet is WiFi-only.  Both Microsoft’s new Surface tablet and Apple’s new iPad Mini are likely to launch as WiFi-only devices.  Why would Apple and Microsoft do that?  Well, one reason might be to avoid the painful process of negotiating mobile carrier agreements.  Imagine if computer manufacturers had to negotiate ISP agreements to connect a computer to the net.  The latest tablet is also a whole lot cheaper than a smartphone.  Compare a $200 Nexus7 tablet with an $800 Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone.

So what’s my point here?  My point is that the UN Broadband Commission’s recently published report on Achieving Digital Inclusion mentions WiFi exactly twice, both times parenthetically.  Mobile operators would like you to believe that the future of mobile broadband lies in the LTE networks that they are building.  And certainly that is partly true but only partly.  If the Mobidia stats are to be believed, about 30% true.

Mobile operators have no interest in WiFi because they currently have no control over WiFi networks although that is beginning to change in the U.S.  And we get reports like the one from the UN Broadband Commission because the dialogue at the ITU is dominated by operators.  The Broadband Commission itself is chaired by Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world.  The irony of putting the richest man in the world in charge of a commission to connect the poor appears to be lost on the UN.

In any discussion about the mobile broadband future of Africa, WiFi is simply not part of the discussion.  Yet the evidence is before our eyes of the strategic importance of WiFi to our “mobile” devices.  It’s cheap and fast and grew to solve the problem of affordable access by chance not by design.  It happened because WiFi is an open space for technology developers to innovate.  No carrier agreements required.

Also not mentioned in the UN Broadband Commission’s report is the potential of Television White Spaces spectrum, a space for with the potential for massive innovation in rural access.  Another area not controlled by mobile operators.

The benefits of WiFi go beyond just cheaper access.  They also create the opportunity to eliminate the weakness of a single point of failure that mobile networks create.  WiFi infrastructure can make it harder to wilfully shutdown communication in a given geographic region.  The key to resilient networks is plurality of access and WiFi is already embedded in every smart device you can think of.

It would be nice to see WiFi recognised for the powerful role that it is already playing in mobile broadband and to see it figure in national strategic broadband plans for the future.

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So whose fault is it? Where does the blame lie? Lloyd Gedye from the Mail & Guardian interprets the report to mean that ICASA has failed and indeed the reports clearly states that

“The regulation in March 2011 by ICASA of the termination price that operators charge each other to terminate calls on each other’s networks has not had the intended outcome of creating a fairer competitive environment and a reduction in prices for consumers”

But for me this is like blaming a man with a wooden sword for failing to conquer a lion. ICASA is terribly mismatched in terms of its ability to go head to head with the telecoms industry both in terms of independence and resources. So perhaps ICASA has failed but whose fault is that?

Predictably the RIA report provoked a storm of obfuscationese from industry. Vodacom spokesperson, Richard Boorman, says

“Mobile Termination Rates (MTRs) are not an industry-wide cost that the consumer bears — the net cost of MTRs to consumers is and always has been zero,” he said. “MTRs are paid by operators to each other to terminate calls on the other’s network.”

Err what? So it doesn’t matter what mobile operators pay each other, it is always the right price? Holy magical thinking Batman! They also argue that call quality is higher in South Africa and that South Africa’s geography is more expensive to service than countries like Kenya and Tanzania. Having travelled in Kenya and Tanzanian recently, I can say this does not bear out in my experience. And did I ask for higher call quality? Could I please have a cheaper, crappier call option? There is some truth to the argument about geography but not nearly enough truth to explain the call cost disparity revealed in the report. Really this is just the standard litany of excuses that the likes of Vodacom and MTN trot out every time more evidence is presented of market failure in South Africa.

So is industry to blame? Well, yes but it is like blaming the lion for eating the wildebeest.  They are accountable to their shareholders. They employ all the tricks available to them to maximise their advantage, except they don’t have teeth, they have lawyers .  Now when government was a major shareholder in Vodacom, this got to be pretty muddy ground indeed. Happily that is done with. You could wish for industry leaders with a little more vision who see both the social and economic benefits of driving down costs and increasing access but there we would need to blame the shareholders who opt for self-interest.

So, if it isn’t really ICASA’s or industry’s fault, where does the blame lie? The fault lies with government and in South Africa the government of the last eighteen years is the ANC. I hate saying negative things about the ANC. For such a long period in my life, the ANC has represented the spirit of justice, of resilience, of endurance in the face of overwhelming odds that it is hard to bring myself to criticse the ANC openly. But like William Shatner in a corset, sometimes you have to recognise that things have changed.

What have the ANC done wrong? It is quite simple. They have failed to take telecommunications seriously. They have consistently relegated communications as a junior ministry and appointed ministers for reasons other than their competence and vision. The result has been the unhappy, bitter, finger-pointing environment that we have today. And sure, I too am pointing the finger here squarely at the ANC. But the buck has to stop somewhere and I believe that we would be in a very different South Africa had someone with vision and leadership been given the helm of the Department of Communications some years ago.

And things are getting worse. Minister Dina Pule recently announced a full review of South Africa’s ICT policies kicking off with a two-day Colloquium which starts tomorrow in Midrand. On the surface that sounds pretty good and about time. Well, it would be if it had not been outsourced to Deloitte. Outsourcing to large consulting firms is basically an announcement saying I have no idea what to do and will need someone else to blame if things go wrong. Government and industry alike find it hard to resist the siren call of the big-name consulting firm. Pay me. I have the answer you need.

So all of the planning has been handled by Deloitte and some industry insiders. But perhaps that’s not so bad. The incumbents are forever making the point that they are the only one’s deserving of more spectrum because only they really have the capacity to roll out infrastructure nationally. There is a certain simple plausibility to this but really it is like saying money should only be given to the rich because only they know how to manage it properly.

More insight can be found in a new book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. The book is an ambitious, sweeping look at history providing a theory of why some countries have prospered and other haven’t. They divide countries into those with inclusive versus those extractive governments. There is a good review of the book in The Economist and a good interview with Daron Acemoglu on Econtalk. I’ve only just started reading it but one story that has stood out for me is how Venice went from hugely influential city-state to tourist backwater. It is summarised well here:

“Upward mobility drove the city-state’s wealth and power. Its innovative commenda, a partnership in which capital-poor sailors and rich Venetians shared the profits from voyages, allowed those of modest background to rise through the ranks. This fluidity threatened established wealth, however. From the late 13th century the ducal council began restricting political and economic rights, banning the commenda and nationalising trade. By 1500, with a stagnant economy and falling population, Venice’s descent from great power was well under way.”

When a wealthy elite stifle the rise of new players, bad things happen. That is a good description of where the telecommunications industry is in South Africa at the moment. We need to create opportunities for new blood to enter and rise in the telecoms sector. It will be good for everyone in the end. And that’s why the incumbents are NOT best placed to implement South Africa’s broadband future, at least not on their own.

So how can we make this happen? I believe it is simple. The ANC need to appoint new leadership in the Department of Communications and to elevate the ministry to frontline status. It probably needs to be a young minister who understands the potential of the sector and that the digital age is not just a twitter acount managed by a digital consultant.  Stick that in your Colloquium Agenda.

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Postscript for ICT4D funders:  If you want to make a difference in Africa, you should be funding RIAs’ work.  Seriously.

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Creative Commons as a brand has been fantastically successful and is now very widely recognized. While in many ways this success has been beneficial for those interested in free/open material it has also raised some issues that are worth highlighting.

Creative Commons is not a Commons

Ironically, despite its name, Creative Commons, or more precisely its licenses, do not produce a commons. The CC licenses are not mutually compatible, for example, material with a CC Attribution-Sharealike (by-sa) license cannot be intermixed with material licensed with any of the CC NonCommercial licenses (e.g. Attribution-NonCommercial, Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial).

Given that a) the majority of CC licenses in use are ‘non-commercial’ b) there is also large usage of ShareAlike (e.g. Wikipedia), this is an issue affects a large set of ‘Creative Commons’ material.

Unfortunately, the presence of the word ‘Commons’ in CC’s name and the prominence of ‘remix’ in the advocacy around CC tends to make people think, falsely, that all CC licenses as in some way similar or substitutable.

The ‘Brand’ versus the Licenses

More and more frequently I hear people say (or more significantly write) things like: “This material is CC-licensed”. But as just discussed there is large, and very significant, variation in the terms of the different CC licenses. It appears that for many people the overall ‘Brand’ dominates the actual specifics of the licenses.

This is in marked contrast to the Free/Open Source software community, where even in the case of the Free Software Foundation’s licenses people tend to specify the exact license they are talking about.

Standards and interoperability are what really matter for licenses (cf the “Commons” terminology). Licensing and rights discussions are pretty dull for most people — and should be. They are important only because they determine what you and I can and can’t do, and specifically what material you and I can ‘intermix’ — possible only where licenses are ‘interoperable’.

To put it the other way round: licenses are interoperable if you can intermix freely material licensed under one of those licenses with material licensed under another. This interoperability is crucial and it is, in license terms, what underlies a true commons.

More broadly we are interested in a ‘license standard’, in knowing, not only that a set of licenses are interoperable, but that they all allow certain things, for example for anyone to use, reuse and redistribute the licensed material (or to put in terms of freedom, that they guarantee those freedoms to users). This very need for a standard is why we created the Open Definition for content and data building directly on the work on a similar standard (the Open Source Definition) in the Free/Open Source software community.

The existence of non-commercial

CC took a crucial decision in including NonCommercial licenses in their suite. Given the ‘Brand’ success of Creative Commons the inclusion of NC licenses has been to give them a status close to, if not identical, with the truly open, commons-supporting, licenses in the CC suite.

This is a noticeable difference here with the software world, where NC is also active, but under the ‘freeware’ and ’shareware’ names (these terms aren’t always used consistently), and with this material clearly distinguished from the Free/Open Source software community.

As the CC brand has grown, there is a desire by some individuals and institutions to use CC licenses simply because they are CC licenses (this is also encouraged by the baking in of CC licenses to many products and services). Faced with choosing a license, many people, and certainly many institutions, tend to go for the more restrictive option available (especially when the word commercial is in there — who wants to sanction exploitation for gain of their work by some third-party!). Thus, it is no surprise that non-commercial licenses appear to be by far the most popular.

Without the NC option, some of these people would have chosen one of the open CC licenses instead. Of course, some would not have licensed at all (or, at least not with a CC license), sticking with pure copyright or some other set of terms. Nevertheless, the benefit in gaining a clear dividing line, and in creating brand-pressure for a real commons, and real openness would have been substantial, and worth, in my opinion, the loss of the non-commercial option.

Structure and community

It is notable in the F/OSS community that most licenses, especially the most popular, are either not ‘owned’ by anyone (MIT/BSD) or are run by an organization with a strong community base (e.g. the Free Software Foundation). Creative Commons seem rather different. While there are public mailing lists ultimately decisions regarding the licenses, and about crucial features thereof such as compatibility with 3rd party licenses, remains with CC central based in San Francisco.

Originally, there was a fair amount of autonomy given to country projects but over time this autonomy has gradually been reduced (there are good reasons for this — such as a need for greater standardization across licenses). This has concrete affects for the terms in licenses.

For example, for v3.0 the Netherlands were requested to remove their provisions which included things like DB rights in their share-alike provision and instead standardize on a waiver for these additional rights (rights which are pretty important if you are doing data(base) licensing). Most crucially the CC licenses reserve the right to Creative Commons as an organization to determine compatibility decisions. This is arguably the single most important aspect of licensing, at least in respect of interoperability and the Commons.

Creative Commons and Data

From my first involvement in the ‘free/open’ area, I’d been interested in data licensing, both because of personal projects and requests from other people.

When first asked how to deal with this I’d recommended ‘modding’ a specific CC license (e.g. Attribution-Sharealike) to include provisions for data and data(bases). However, starting from 2006 there was a strong push from John Wilbanks, then at Science Commons but with the apparent backing of CC generally, against this practice as part of a general argument for ‘PD-only’ for data(bases) (with the associated implication that the existing CC licenses were content-only). While I respect John, I didn’t really agree with his arguments about PD-only and furthermore it was clear that there was a need in the community for open but non-PD licenses for data(bases).

In late 2007 I spoke with Jordan Hatcher and discovered about the work he and Charlotte Waelde were doing for Talis, to draft a new ‘open’ license for data(bases). I was delighted and started helping Jordan with these licenses — licenses that became the Open Data Commons PDDL and the ODbL. We sought input from CC during the drafting of these licenses, specifically the ODbL, but the primary response we had (from John Wilbanks and colleagues) was just “don’t do this”.

Once the ODbL was finalized we then contacted CC further about potential compatibility issues.

The initial response then was that, as CC did not recommend use of its licenses (other than CCZero) for data(bases), there should not be an issue since, as with CC licenses and software, there should be an ‘orthogonality’ of activity — CC licenses would license content, F/OSS licenses would license code, and data(base) licenses (such as the ODC ones) would license data. We pressed about this and had a phone con about this with Diane Peters and John Wilbanks in January 2010, with a follow-up email detailing the issues a bit later.

We’ve also explained on several occasions to senior members of CC central our desire to hear from CC on this issue and our willingness to look at ways to make any necessary amendments to ODC licenses (though obviously such changes would be conditional on full scrutiny by the Advisory Council and consultation with the community).

No response has been forthcoming. To this date, over a year later, we are yet to receive any response from CC despite having though we have now been promised a response at least 3 times (we’ve basically given up asking).

Further to this lack response, without any notice or discussion to ODC, CC recently put out a blog post in which they stated, in marked contrast to previous statements, that CC licenses were entirely suited to data. In many ways this is a welcome step (cf. my original efforts to use CC licenses for data above) but CC have made no statement about a) how they would seek to address data properly b) mention of the relationship of these efforts to existing work in Open Data Commons and especially re. the ODbL. One can only assume, at least in the latter case, that the omission was intentional.

All of this has led me, at least, to wonder what exactly CC’s aims are here. In particular, is CC genuinely concerned with interoperability (beyond a simple ‘everyone uses CC’) and the broader interests of the community who use and apply their licenses?

Conclusion

Creating a true commons for content and data is incredibly important (it’s one of the main things I work on day to day). Creative Commons have done amazing work in this area but as I outline above there is an important distinction between the (open) commons and CC licenses.

Many organisations, institutions, governments and individuals are currently making important decisions about licensing and legal tools – in relation to opening up everything from scientific information, to library catalogues to government data. CC could play an important role in the creation of an interoperable commons of open material. The open CC licenses (CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA) are an important part of the legal toolbox which enables this commons.

I hope that CC will be willing to engage constructively with others in the ‘open’ community to promote licenses and standards which enable a true commons, particularly in relation to data where interoperability is especially crucial.

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• Summary Slides Covering Size and Value of the Public Domain – Talk at COMMUNIA in Feb 2010

• The Size of the EU Public Domain

  This paper reports results from a large recent study of the public domain in the European Union. Based on a combination of catalogue and survey data our figures for the number of items (and works) in the public domain extend across a variety of media and provide one of the first quantitative estimates of the ’size’ of the public domain in any jurisdiction. We find that for books and recordings the public domain is around 10-20% of published extant output and would consist of millions and hundreds of thousands of items respectively. For films the figure is dramatically lower (almost zero). We also establish some interesting figures relevant to the orphan works debate such as the number of catalogue entries without any identified author (approximately 10%).

• The Value of the EU Public Domain

  This paper reports results from a large recent study of the public domain in the European Union. Based on a combination of catalogue, commercial and survey data we present detailed figures both on the prices (and price differences) of in copyright and public domain material and on the usage of that material. Combined with the estimates for the size of the EU public domain presented in the companion paper our results allow us to provide the first quantitative estimate for the `value’ of the public domain (i.e. welfare gains from its existence) in any jurisdiction. We also find clear, and statistically significant, differences between the prices of in-copyright and public-domain in the two areas which we have significant data: books and sounds recordings in the UK. Patterns of usage indicate a significant demand for public domain material but limitations of the data make it difficult to draw conclusions on the impact of entry into the public domain on demand.

The results on price differences are particularly striking, as to my knowledge, these are by far the largest analysis done to date. More significantly, they clearly show that the claim in the Commission’s impact assessment that there was no price effect of copyright (compared to the public domain) was wrong. That claim was central to the impact assessment and to the proposal to extend copyright term in sound recordings (a claim that was based on a single study using a very small size, performed by PwC as part of a music-industry sponsored piece of consultancy for submission to the Gowers review).

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href="http://manypossibilities.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/africa_google_zero.png"> class="alignright size-full wp-image-1216" style="margin: 0px;" title="africa_google_zero" src="http://manypossibilities.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/africa_google_zero.png" alt="" width="160" height="190" />This is yet another post in a series in which I have the temerity to offer Google my unsought armchair strategic advice on what they should be doing in Africa.

In May of this year, I was title=" Facebook Zero Helps Ideas Multiply at the Bottom of the Pyramid" href="http://manypossibilities.net/2010/05/facebook-zero-helps-ideas-multiply-at-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid/" >over the moon about Facebook launching title="Fast and Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.facebook.com" href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391295167130" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391295167130&referer=');">Facebook Zero, a service which offers free text-only access to Facebook including messaging.  If you click through to an image or other service and you pay but for the basic stuff it’s free.  On this continent, where the cost of access remains a barrier to innovation, that is pretty incredible.

Part of the reason it is so incredible is that Facebook doesn’t have staff in Africa.  They don’t have an African programme or a programme manager for Africa.  The closest office they have to the continent is their European office in Dublin, Ireland.  Yet, they figured out what so many other companies, projects, social movements and development agencies didn’t, namely that the cost of access is the dominant factor for online participation in Africa.  Facebook Zero hits that issue directly on the head.  Unfortunately you get all the rest of Facebook with that which may or may not be ok with you.  Right now though it has the potential to be a serious hearts and minds winner on the continent.

Back in the United States, Facebook has just title="Facebook bigger than Google in the US" href="http://www.gev.com/2010/09/facebook-bigger-than-google-in-the-us/" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.gev.com/2010/09/facebook-bigger-than-google-in-the-us/?referer=');">outstripped Google as the most visited site in the country.  Here in Africa, Google and Facebook are pretty much title="Opera - State of the Mobile Web" href="http://www.opera.com/smw/2010/06/" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.opera.com/smw/2010/06/?referer=');">neck and neck. Google have been doing some  amazing title="Google Blog - New Maps domains in 30 African Countries" href="http://google-africa.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-maps-domains-in-29-african.html" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/google-africa.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-maps-domains-in-29-african.html?referer=');">mapping work; they’ve done some great capacity building of title="Google Internet Camp in Liberia" href="http://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/14768-Google-Liberia.html" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/mybroadband.co.za/news/business/14768-Google-Liberia.html?referer=');">varying title="gKenya event" href="http://sitescontent.google.com/gkenya/" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/sitescontent.google.com/gkenya/?referer=');">types; developed innovative title="Google SMS services in Uganda" href="http://www.google.co.ug/mobile/sms/" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.google.co.ug/mobile/sms/?referer=');">applications; sold some advertising, etc.  Some of the stuff they are doing like the title="Google Global Cache - Whiteafrican.com" href="http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-google-global-cache/" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-google-global-cache/?referer=');">Google Global Cache is making a real difference.  They’re pretty busy in Africa.

But the fact remains that Google does not take Africa seriously.  Let me explain.  First let me say that by Google I do not mean any of the many remarkable Google staff who live and work in Google offices around the continent.  I mean whoever is pulling the levers on Google’s Africa strategy.  Africa is not a profit centre for Google.  Nobody’s job is on the line if Google Africa doesn’t meet their advertising revenue targets.  I think this is done with the best of intentions, perhaps to give Google time to better understand the environment they’re working in or perhaps to allow infrastructure to improve to the point where sufficient traffic exists to class Africa with other regions.  Whatever the reason is, the downside is that then it doesn’t matter if Google’s strategy in Africa fails.  It’s just Africa… failure is expected.

But not necessarily.  If Google were to try something as audacious as Facebook, to zero rate a text-only interface to Gmail and Gchat, a Gmail Zero if you will, that would open up interesting possibilities.  Perhaps one might argue that Facebook is already there with its messaging and chat services.  But I think a Gmail Zero would have a different application.  I can see Gmail as the entrepreneur’s tool of choice.  Facebook is still to much of a walled garden to be as profoundly useful as a standards compliant email account.  That would really get the bits flowing and where more bits flow… more ads flow.

Of course it’s easy to think up ways that Google could make a real difference in Africa.  Spending other people’s money is a piece of cake.  While we’re at it, could we have a better Gmail?  GMail needs to go on a diet for Africa.  A Gmail Lite with some slimmed down javascript would make email a lot more pleasant on slow links.

That’s not too much to ask is it?  Gmail Zero and Gmail Lite.  Two great tastes etc…

From the announcement:

The Public Sector Transparency Board, which was established by the Prime Minister, met yesterday for the first time.

The Board will drive forward the Government’s transparency agenda, making it a core part of all government business and ensuring that all Whitehall departments meet the new tight deadlines set for releasing key public datasets. In addition, it is responsible for setting open data standards across the whole public sector, listening to what the public wants and then driving through the opening up of the most needed data sets.

Chaired by Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, the other members of the Transparency Board are Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University, an expert on open data, Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety, and Dr Rufus Pollock from Cambridge University, an economist who helped found the Open Knowledge Foundation.

In the words of Francis Maude:

“In just a few weeks this Government has published a whole range of data sets that have never been available to the public before. But we don’t want this to be about a few releases, we want transparency to become an absolutely core part of every bit of government business. That is why we have asked some of the country’s and the world’s greatest experts in this field to help us take this work forward quickly here in central government and across the whole of the public sector.”

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• The opening up of a large and important set of transport data (the NaPTAN dataset)
• A commitment to open up a significant amount of Ordnance Survey data from the 1st April (though details of which datasets not yet specified)
• By the Autumn an online e-”domesday” book giving “an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies
• A new “institute” for web science headed by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt and with an initial £30m in funding

This speech is a significant indication of a further commitment to the “making public data public” policy announced in the Autumn.

It’s great to see this as, a year ago it seemed as if government policy was set to largely ignore the research in the Models of Public Sector Information Provision by Trading Funds report (authored by myself, David Newbery and Professor Bently back in 2008) whose basic conclusions was that that government data which was digital, bulk and ‘upstream’ should be made available at marginal cost.

More detailed excerpts (with emphasis added)

Opening up data

In January we launched data.gov.uk, a single, easy-to-use website to access public data. And even in the short space of time since then, the interest this initiative has attracted – globally – has been very striking. The site already has more than three thousand data sets available – and more are being added all the time. And in the past month the Office for National Statistics has opened up access for web developers to over two billion data items right down to local neighbourhood level.

The Department for Transport and the transport industry are today making available the core reference datasets that contain the precise names and co-ordinates of all 350 thousand bus stops, railway stations and airports in Britain.

Public transport timetables and real-time running information is currently owned by the operating companies. But we will work to free it up – and from today we will make it a condition of future franchises that this data will be made freely available.

And following the strong support in our recent consultation, I can confirm that from 1st April, we will be making a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use. Further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.

e-Domesday Book

And I can also tell you today that in the autumn the Government will publish online an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies – a “domesday book” for the 21st century.

The programme will be managed by the National Archives and it will be overseen by a new open data board which will report on the first edition of the new domesday book by April next year. The Government will then produce its detailed proposals including how this work can be extended to the wider public sector.

To inform the continuing development of making public data public, the National Archives will produce a consultation paper on a definition of the “public task” for public data, to be published later this year.

The new domesday book will for the first time allow the public to access in one place information on each set of data including its size, source, format, content, timeliness, cost and quality. And there will be an expectation that departments will release each of these datasets, or account publicly for why they are not doing so.

Any business or individual will be free to embed this public data in their own websites, and to use it in creative ways within their own applications.

Mygov

…

So our goal is to replace this first generation of e-government with a much more interactive second generation form of digital engagement which we are calling Mygov.

Companies that use technology to interact with their users are positioning themselves for the future, and government must do likewise. Mygov marks the end of the one-size-fits-all, man-from-the-ministry-knows-best approach to public services.

Mygov will constitute a radical new model for how public services will be delivered and for how citizens engage with government – making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping. This open, personalised platform will allow us to deliver universal services that are also tailored to the needs of each individual; to move from top-down, monolithic websites broadcasting public service information in the hope that the people who need help will find it – to government on demand.

And rather than civil servants being the sole authors and editors, we will unleash data and content to the community to turn into applications that meet genuine needs. This does not require large-scale government IT Infrastructure; the ‘open source’ technology that will make it happen is freely available. All that is required is the will and willingness of the centre to give up control.

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