machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman picks up on the damning indictment of my journalist prowess that has since disappeared from my Wikipedia entry:

“It was a crushing verdict: ‘Becky Hogge is a journalist of no particular fame or distinction.’ My ultimate judge was Rajah, an expert on many things, including Cuban judo champions, the Irish indie-pop band The Thrills and the various staff writers and bit-part actors in Seinfeld. My jury was made up of the hundreds of Wikipedians who police entries to the online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit.

”It all started with a little joke here in these pages…”

Read the rest here.

However, as Nick Moreau has kindly pointed out, I read the edit history wrong, and accused Rajah of being behind the judgement, when in fact it came from an anonymous IP address in London. My deepest apologies to Rajah.

I will now take the advice of the Wikipedian who so kindly cleaned up my entry and “write my column on something interesting please, not trivial stuff like this“.

…life imitates art.

This week’s column for the New Statesman focuses on botched government IT projects, and suggests that code commissioned by the government should be open.

“The recent announcement that the Financial Services Authority is investigating iSoft, the troubled computer software company charged with delivering a large part of the new, centralised patient records system for the National Health Service, is just another sorry episode in the government’s Connecting for Health initiative.

”In June 2005, Fujitsu, winner of the contract for southern England, changed horses midstream and dumped its software supplier…”

Read the rest here.

I’ve just seen that TechnoLlama name-checked me on blog day, and I’m chuffed to bits, especially as I get a lot of my most interesting legal titbits from his blog, like this observation on a spurious software patents winning BBC’s Dragon’s Den.

I’m gutted I can’t be at the VI Computer Law World Conference in Edinburgh, which starts today, and which was organised by Andrés, the man behind TechnoLlama.

That’s me.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy centres on a book I discovered while researching a paper I am currently writing for the Ford Foundation on freedom of expression in the networked information age. The book is written by Ithiel De Sola Pool, a prolific scholar of political science and sociology. Although it was written in 1983, it is eerily prescient, and thus rather humbling. I believe it is out of print - a great shame:

“When we are caught in the centre of an emerging phenomenon, in the eye of the networked information age’s storm, only the clearest thinkers can lead us to safe harbour. Historians have the benefit of hindsight, while those writers who have predicted everything from the demise of the English language through SMS messaging to the disappearance of musical innovation thanks to peer-to-peer filesharing will no doubt be silenced in the passing of time.
“A half dozen books have informed my thinking about the effects of the internet…”

Read the rest here.

Last week’s column for the New Statesman was a pithy little number entitled “When world leaders blog…”, which for some reason I didn’t point to at the time. This week’s is on the DEFRA wiki. Coincidentally, the day after my piece was published (that’ll be last Thursday), Guido Fawkes and his gang of merry co-conspirators quietly and totally sabotaged it. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As Bill Thompson reminded me over dinner last week, wikis work in one of two circumstances. Where a close-knit group of people who share a specific goal are the editors (eg organisational wikis), or where a very, very large group of people with differing views but a more general shared goal are the editors (eg Wikipedia). Anything in between is going to be subject to atrophy or sabotage.

So although I’d never style myself a co-conspirator, I’m not going to join the ranks of liberals wringing their hands at the horrid things that nasty Guido and his gang of big buwy fwiends do.

Anyway, those two columns are below. Choose wisely, my friends, the NS will only let you read one for free today. But don’t worry too much, as oD will be publishing my column for them later today, which is all about freedom, and, correspondingly, free.

The DEFRA column:

“A wiki is where ideas go to die. This may sound strong, especially given the success of Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopaedia. I’ve been at several grass-roots meetings which ended with the fatal words: “OK, let’s continue this discussion on the wiki.” Months later, said wiki has been left to wallow in its own incompleteness, its participants presumably left cold by the open questions ossifying on its pages. I can only conclude that ideas are among the class of things that cannot be collaboratively edited.

”So it’s interesting to note the launch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s (Defra) wiki last month…”

Read the rest here. And I don’t think even Senor Fawkes can muster up the 44m signatories needed to fulfil the associated pledge “I will contribute to the DEFRA environmental contract wiki but only if 44,000,000 other UK electors will too“.

When world leaders blog:

“A friend and I used to share a joke about Iranian bloggers. Well, the joke was really on UK magazine editors. Their interest in the vast array of bloggers scrutinising the Tehran establishment came around about once a year, and each time they treated the discovery that Persian is the second most blogged-in language on the web as if they had come across Lord Lucan convalescing in a retirement village in Bournemouth. “What’s hot on the net right now?” the joke used to go. “I know - Iranian bloggers!”

”But early this month a new Iranian voice joined the fray…”

Read the rest here.