Tag: government

Where will the digital leaders come from?

Exactly what is digital leadership?

Last Thursday in Sydney a group of industry groups, telcos and local councils launched their 2030 Communications Visions initiative; a project “to shape a digital vision and set of goals for Australia to achieve global digital age leadership”.

The project is a worthy one, particularly given the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which I’m writing about early next week in Technology Spectator however one thing that bugs me is what exactly is ‘digital age leadership’.

If we look at the rollout of technologies like the motor car, electricity or telephone through the Twentieth Century it was a mix of private companies, community groups and governments that championed the development of roads, mains power and phone systems. People either demanded their towns became connected or raised the capital to do it themselves.

So on one level, the champions need to be us. We have to lead our communities and industries by using the technologies and showing what can be done, that also makes our businesses more likely to succeed in the future.

On another level, we need to consider the genuine leaders of the ‘electrical age’ or ‘motor car age’; people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built businesses that led the world and still exist today.

For countries, it’s no coincidence that the United States is the richest nation on the planet after having most of the leading business in their industries over the last hundred years.

That latter point is really what the Digital Visions project is about; do Australians want to remain a wealthy nation in the Twenty First Century?

Governments have a role in this, as the UK is showing, and political leaders need to be encouraged to take the digital economy however governments can only do so much and successes like Silicon Valley are more a fortunate by product of spending rather than the consequence of strategic policy.

Ultimately, leadership starts with us — we can’t afford to wait for governments, big business or someone else to take the reigns.

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The messy business of metadata

At present we’ve defined metadata too broadly and private information too narrowly which allow governments and businesses to overreach

“We kill people based on metadata,” former US National Security Agency director Michael Hayden told a panel at John Hopkins University last year.

That statement brings sharply into focus the current Australian debate about Telcos being mandated to retain metadata. This information is powerful and can be used in ways not expected by the community.

How metadata is used depends upon how it is defined; one of the worrying parts of the Australian debate is just how nebulous the definition of ‘metadata’ is.

Defining metadata

The basic definition of metadata is that it is ‘data about data’, every packet of data that’s transmitted across the internet is wrapped in information to help the network deliver it to its intended location in a useful form.

Strictly speaking this is where the glib ‘address on the envelope’ line so beloved by clueless politicians promoting data retention comes in; this information is useful but not private as anyone can see it.

That view underlies the defining metadata case, the 1979 US Supreme Court’s Smith v Maryland case, that held telephone numbers are not private information as they’ve been disclosed to the phone company.

Metadata everywhere

With the rise of digital technologies, metadata became much more than just phone numbers and addresses; digital cameras encode photographs with EXIF information that includes details of the date, time camera, shutter speed, focal length and increasingly the location where the photo was taken.

The smartphone you might take that photo with is logging into base stations which telcos are tracking, this is one of the applications law enforcement agencies regularly use to catch criminals, and increasingly near field communications like BlueTooth are being logged by everything from toll gates to bus shelters to track phone usage.

Every email sent has dozens of lines of metadata describing the servers, routing and software used in sending it. Only a tiny fraction of a Twitter message is the 140 character content, the rest is metadata.

This site has hundreds of lines of metadata to tell your browser how to display it and your browser itself is storing dozens of cookies that tell other sites where you’ve been – all of this is metadata.

When we add the Internet of Things to the metadata debate things get even more complex. As home devices, smartcars and wearable technology generating packets of data, it becomes far easier for governments and private enterprise to stitch together a complete picture of an individual even without looking at the actual content of the packets.

The risks for service providers

As Australian ISP iiNet raised in an excellent submission to the Senate committee on data retention, collecting all of this data creates costs and risks for service providers as they have to store, manage and protect massive amounts of data.

Most of that data will never be looked at, but agencies want the information stored because they can. The bizarre thing is that under Australian law, specifically section 313 of the Telecommunications Act, is that a public servant – not just a a law enforcement officer – only has to ask for the information.

For most people the dangers of government surveillance are remote however all of this information is also available to private organisations ranging from health insurers to credit checking bureaus; the real debate is just how much data do we want others to have on our private lives.

At present we’ve defined metadata too broadly and private information too narrowly.

What’s notable in every discussion about increasing government or police powers is the mantra of getting the laws to catch up with technology.

In the case of metadata it may well be the definition of individual rights has to catch up with modern technology, not the powers of government.

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Business class syndrome and travelling hard class

Much of the advice from business and political leaders is through a prism of privilege

“Why are you travelling by train?” I was asked by the expat project manager as I planned a site visit to a factory being built by our company on the outskirts of Bangkok.

For me, that two hour third class train trip was an opportunity to get out of the pampered bubble that is life as an expat in a country like Thailand and get a brief, if incomplete, picture of daily life in a rapidly changing nation.

Travelling Business Class

Business Class Syndrome — a view of the world seen through the prism privileged lifestyle that isn’t shared by most people — is a phenomenon that afflicts many of our business and political leaders who are insulated from the real world.

Over the past three days I’ve been dipping in and out of various economic forums as the B20 and the Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance conference being held in Sydney this week ahead of the G20 Heads of Government meeting being held in Cairns next October.

Both events illustrate Business Class Syndrome as global experts travel the world discussing issues like youth unemployment, third world growth and startup businesses that are beyond their experience.

None of this is to say the speakers at these events were wrong or dishonest, just their ideas — however well informed and intentioned — are developed through a selective view of the world.

Taking the privileged view

That selective view has to be kept in mind when reading the recommendations of such experts. White, middle aged, western men don’t have a monopoly on the planet’s good ideas.

In the case to the Bangkok project managers the expats didn’t really care about what was going on; their job was to build and move on, which they (and I) did.

However I hope those hard seat journeys left me a little more understanding about Thailand than those who wouldn’t leave an airconditioned site hut.

Indian Railways sleeper image by dforest via wikimedia

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Economics for the ordinary person

Economist Ha-Joon Chang believes we should challenge the economic theories that rule our modern governments

“95% of economics is common sense” says economist Ha-Joon Chang in his book The Little Blue Book — Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Economics.

In a presentation at this year’s RSA conference Chang explains some of the underlying themes of his book, particularly the point that the various schools of economics theory are based on their own sets of cultural assumptions and that every group struggles to explain the world, especially when asked to fit Singapore into their models.

Chang’s five points are a call for the average person to understand economics and be prepared to challenge the orthodoxies being trundled out by business and political leaders.

You should be willing to challenge professional economists (and, yes, that includes me). They do not have a monopoly over the truth, even when it comes to economic matters.

As economists have been allowed to become the high priests of modern society — or possibly the court jesters of the corporatist world — it may well be time to challenge them.

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Competing in the global tech race

Some countries’ leaders recognise they live in the Twentieth First Century while others are struggling with Twentieth Century.

Last week I wrote a piece for Business Spectator on the contrast between countries competing for tech investment and skills.

Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny was in Silicon Valley promoting Ireland as an investment and operating location while in London the Queen hosted 350 British tech companies at Buckingham Palace.

Earlier this week President Obama hosted the first White House Makers’ Faire with over thirty inventors showing their ideas.

All of this contrasts with the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent North America where he touted the country was ‘open for business’ by offering mines and toll roads to Canadian pension funds.

It’s clear some countries’ leaders recognise they live in the Twentieth First Century while others are struggling with Twentieth Century.

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If you need government money, do you really have a business?

A business that relies on government funds isn’t really a business.

Australia’s new Federal government handed down its first budget yesterday with savage cuts to scientific research, training and business support.

I dissected the implications of the budget for businesses in a piece for Technology Spectator with the conclusion that modern Australia is turning its back on technology, the young and the entrepreneurial.

None of which will come as a surprise to this site’s regular readers.

Some of the critics of my Tech Spec piece made the point that if your business relies on government grants then you aren’t really an entrepreneur.

I’d tend to agree with that, having spent a few months working for a state agency responsible for business development programs I realised that for most businesses the time cost of applying for and administering a government grant was often greater than the value they received from the programs.

So government grants aren’t the entrepreneurial manna that many people believe.

What’s worse, governments can axe these programs at short notice which leaves the businesses short handed. Which is exactly what happened last night.

Indeed that’s the problem for Australian businesses, each time a government changes the new administration axes the previous one’s programs and this lack of certainty and continuity is one of my concerns about the viability of Australia’s startup scene.

The truth is though, if your business does need government funds to survive then you’re at the mercy of bureaucrat’s whim rather than the rigours of the market.

If you’re comfortable with owing your existence to a bureaucrat then you probably don’t really have a business and you certainly aren’t an entrepreneur.

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Connecting bridges to the internet of things

A project connecting sensors to the Sydney Harbour Bridge shows the potential of the internet of things.

On Networked Globe today I have a description of NICTA’s Sydney Harbour Bridge Monitoring Project where the research agency is rolling out 800 sensors across the structure to reduce maintenance costs.

The project a good example of how cheap sensors and abundant computing power is changing workplaces, connecting the bridge to the Internet of Things makes it easier for asset managers and engineers to understand what is happening to their structure.

While the project promises a lot, it’s only a fraction of what’s possible as the sensors are only measuring movements so there’s a lot more they can do.

The big promise though is for smaller structures than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Around the world local governments are struggling to maintain their assets, if NICTA can develop a feasible monitoring product then many agencies will be looking at how they can reduce their budgets.

While we tend to focus on connected kettles and other household devices when we talk about the internet of things, the real benefits and profits lie in the ‘big iron’ industrial and infrastructure applications.

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