News on the Bombay attacks is breaking fast on Twitter with hundreds of people using the site to update others with first-hand accounts of the carnage.

The website has a stream of comments on the attacks which is being updated by the second, often by eye-witnesses and people in the city. Although the chatter cannot be verified immediately and often reflects the chaos on the streets, it is becoming the fastest source of information for those seeking unfiltered news from the scene.

But we simply have to be smarter than this:

In the past hour, people using Twitter reported that bombings and attacks were continuing, but none of these could be confirmed. Others gave details on different locations in which hostages were being held.

And this morning, Twitter users said that Indian authorities was asking users to stop updating the site for security reasons.

One person wrote: "Police reckon tweeters giving away strategic info to terrorists via Twitter".

Another link:

I can't stress enough: people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack, so it is imperative that officials start telling us what kind of information would be relevant from Twitter, Flickr, etc. (and, BTW, what shouldn't be spread: one Twitter user in Mumbai tweeted me that people were sending the exact location of people still in the hotels, and could tip off the terrorists) and that they begin to monitor these networks in disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.

This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack -- during any crisis situation, actually -- the one thing people can do is exchange information. It helps people, calms people, and actually reduces the thing the terrorists are trying to achieve: terror. Yes, there are specific movie-plot scenarios where certain public pronouncements might help the terrorists, but those are rare. I would much rather err on the side of more information, more openness, and more communication.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors.

What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous."

Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it? And that's precisely Shirky's point. His new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's.

Shirky teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, but this is no academic book. Sacrificing rigor for readability, Here Comes Everybody is an entertaining as well as informative romp through some of the Internet's signal moments -- the Howard Dean phenomenon, Belarusian protests organized on LiveJournal, the lost cellphone of a woman named Ivanna, Meetup.com, flash mobs, Twitter, and more -- which Shirky uses to illustrate his points.

The book is filled with bits of insight and common sense, explaining why young people take better advantage of social tools, how the Internet affects social change, and how most Internet discourse falls somewhere between dinnertime conversation and publishing.

Shirky notes that "most user-generated content isn't 'content' at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a sibling is 'family-generated content.' Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -- gossip, little updates, thinking out loud -- but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material. Unlike professionally produced material, however, Internet content can be organized after the fact."

No one coordinates Flickr's 6 million to 8 million users. Yet Flickr had the first photos from the 2005 London Transport bombings, beating the traditional news media. Why? People with cellphone cameras uploaded their photos to Flickr. They coordinated themselves using tools that Flickr provides. This is the sort of impromptu organization the Internet is ideally suited for. Shirky explains how these moments are harbingers of a future that can self-organize without formal hierarchies.

These nonorganizations allow for contributions from a wider group of people. A newspaper has to pay someone to take photos; it can't be bothered to hire someone to stand around London underground stations waiting for a major event. Similarly, Microsoft has to pay a programmer full time, and Encyclopedia Britannica has to pay someone to write articles. But Flickr can make use of a person with just one photo to contribute, Linux can harness the work of a programmer with little time, and Wikipedia benefits if someone corrects just a single typo. These aggregations of millions of actions that were previously below the Coasean floor have enormous potential.

But a flash mob is still a mob. In a world where the Coasean floor is at ground level, all sorts of organizations appear, including ones you might not like: violent political organizations, hate groups, Holocaust deniers, and so on. (Shirky's discussion of teen anorexia support groups makes for very disturbing reading.) This has considerable implications for security, both online and off.

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience -- how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

In the end, a virtual community is still a community, and it needs to be treated as such. And just as the best way to keep a neighborhood safe is for a policeman to walk around it, the best way to keep a virtual community safe is to have a virtual police presence.

Crime isn't the only danger; there is also isolation. If people can segregate themselves in ever-increasingly specialized groups, then they're less likely to be exposed to alternative ideas. We see a mild form of this in the current political trend of rival political parties having their own news sources, their own narratives, and their own facts. Increased radicalization is another danger lurking below the Coasean floor.

There's no going back, though. We've all figured out that the Internet makes freedom of speech a much harder right to take away. As Shirky demonstrates, Web 2.0 is having the same effect on freedom of assembly. The consequences of this won't be fully seen for years.

Here Comes Everybody covers some of the same ground as Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks. But when I had to explain to one of my corporate attorneys how the Internet has changed the nature of public discourse, Shirky's book is the one I recommended.

This essay previously appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

Does Oracle run the world? I would have to say no but Raj (Larry Ellison is his idol) and the 40,000 Oracle customers that descended upon SF last week might beg to differ. What do James Carville and Mary Matalin have to do with enterprise software? Pretty much nothing, except for the fact that they delivered the opening keynote for Oracle OpenWorld. (And that’s the only and last politically-oriented thing you’ll hear from me as we run up to the election). For a surprisingly funny and extensive photo gallery of the eye-popping event, check out cdye1’s photostream on Flickr.

But UB40, Elvis Costello and Seal aside, Oracle OpenWorld did offer training, certifications, and always entertaining speeches by Ellison. Ben Worthen’s favorite – “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant” delivered to analysts on Thursday. From Ben’s slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

So did everyone catch that? Cloud computing is complete gibberish and idiocy, but apparently Oracle’s already been doing enough around it to advertise the fact. I will have my cake and eat it too!

We’ve been pumping out the posts from the shows we went to – let me tell you, live-blogging is hard when you’re trying to share apparently miniscule amounts of bandwidth with 14,000 other attendees – and we have even more to share as we step back, contemplate and describe how some of the announcements, info and especially roadmaps fit into our overall picture over here at ScienceLogic.

For example, we released the results of our annual industry IT survey last week. Twice a year – at FOSE (for Government IT) and at Interop NY (for enterprises) – we take advantage of the fact that we have a big beautiful booth at these shows and offer a fabulous ScienceLogic t-shirt in return for a couple of minutes time with attendees living the problems we try to solve. Instead of telling people what their problems and priorities are, we like to ask.
Interop NY Survey - Trends and Challenges
Detailed Reports on Trends and Comparison to Government IT

And I just had to share this one because it is so bizarre. Are VMware and Paul Maritz guilty of plagiarism? You have to check this out to get even part of the picture. Apparently this guy has posted his slides (we know they are from VMworld 2007 because it says so in the lower-right-hand corner…) which prove that the “virtual datacenter operating system” idea was his idea a year before it showed up on Maritz’s keynote this year. Hmmm. And then after posting all these slides and making all the connections between his presentation and Maritz’s, he says he’s just kidding about the plagiarism. Can anyone sort this out and let me know?

I’ll tell you who wasn’t kidding when I went by their booth at VMworld – a certain chargeback vendor and VMware “partner” who was quite shocked two months ago when they walked into a meeting with VMware about future roadmap. Apparently, the slides they saw (preview of VMware’s announcement re adding extended chargeback capability within vCenter management services) were mighty might similar to slides they had given in a presentation to VMware about their own roadmap. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. And I’ll also say, their strategy to combat this – support for Hyper-V coming early in 2009.

New rules are being proposed, but there’s some debate over them because they would still be restrictive–from Ars Technica:

The new rules, proposed in a letter by Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-MA), would allow members to use third-party sites so long as official content is not “posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information.”

This would be difficult since most third-party sites like YouTube display automatically generated advertisements and related user content next to featured video.

Image by goddam via Flickr

Ah, its almost August.  Football training camps are open and the Yankees and Red Sox are battling. Does it get any better?  For most of this year I thought the Yankees were going to be out of it this year and content to have a rebuilding year.  We have several veteran players who past their prime and whose contracts are up after this year.  We have a some great young talent that need to grow into their potential.  It looked like the Bosox and Tampa Rays were going to run away with the division and wild card this year.

But like inevitable turning of the seasons, sometime after July 4th and then the All Star break, the Yankees beginninng their drive. Those old bones warm up in the heat of the summer and the bats come alive. This year the pitching is carrying them too.  Old pros Andy Pettite and Mike Mussina are joined by Jobba Chamberlin.  Mariano Rivera is still the best closer in baseball.  Just like old times the Yanks went out and fleeced some 2nd division team for a bunch of minor leaguers and added a quality hitter and pitcher right before the trade deadline.  Look around and we are one game behind the Red Sox for the wild card slot and only three games behind the Rays for first place!

I still think Tampa is going to stumble and it will come down to the Sox and the Yanks. Just the way it is supposed to be. I am heading up to NY next Friday, taking my sons to the shrine that is Yankee Stadium to see it in person in its last year.  The rest of the baseball season is going to be very exciting.  Again, just the way it is supposed to be!

Image by goddam via Flickr

Ah, its almost August.  Football training camps are open and the Yankees and Red Sox are battling. Does it get any better?  For most of this year I thought the Yankees were going to be out of it this year and content to have a rebuilding year.  We have several veteran players who past their prime and whose contracts are up after this year.  We have a some great young talent that need to grow into their potential.  It looked like the Bosox and Tampa Rays were going to run away with the division and wild card this year.

But like inevitable turning of the seasons, sometime after July 4th and then the All Star break, the Yankees beginninng their drive. Those old bones warm up in the heat of the summer and the bats come alive. This year the pitching is carrying them too.  Old pros Andy Pettite and Mike Mussina are joined by Jobba Chamberlin.  Mariano Rivera is still the best closer in baseball.  Just like old times the Yanks went out and fleeced some 2nd division team for a bunch of minor leaguers and added a quality hitter and pitcher right before the trade deadline.  Look around and we are one game behind the Red Sox for the wild card slot and only three games behind the Rays for first place!

I still think Tampa is going to stumble and it will come down to the Sox and the Yanks. Just the way it is supposed to be. I am heading up to NY next Friday, taking my sons to the shrine that is Yankee Stadium to see it in person in its last year.  The rest of the baseball season is going to be very exciting.  Again, just the way it is supposed to be!

Dan Munz, project manager of the Collaboration Project commented on the unique work that the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) is doing to bring together government leaders. The Collaboration Project seeks to innovate across government not just down the silos and create a safe place for leaders to have discussions around innovation.

ScienceLogic: What is the National Academy of Public Administration?

Dan Munz: The Academy is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to tackling government’s most complex challenges. We were founded in 1967 by James Webb, the NASA administrator who took us to the moon – he saw that he could consult the National Academy of Sciences for expert technical advice, but had no counterpart in government for expert management advice. That’s been our mission ever since.

ScienceLogic: What is the Collaboration Project? How long has it been around?

Dan Munz: The Collaboration Project is the Academy’s response to two parallel trends we see in government. The first is the government’s need to transform the way it does business. There is a strong demand for change out there driven by a number of challenges that are forcing the government to rethink its mission and structure. Challenges include a public disconnected from government; a multi-sector workforce and increasing reliance on contractors; financial instability; and new types of security threats, just to name a few. More and more, the challenges facing government reach across the traditional boundaries of agency and mission. But government isn’t configured to work that way.

The second trend is the unprecedented opportunity collaborative technology offers to drive transformational change in government. Tools like blogs, wikis, and mashups are changing the way leaders think about problems. They’re focusing not on what they can do just within their offices or agencies, but what voices they need to pull together across government, non-profits, the general citizenry, and other stakeholders to solve these problems. The Collaboration Project’s goal is to encourage this type of thinking and empower leaders committed to use collaborative technology to:

• strengthen citizen civic engagement;
• enhance government transparency;
• improve service delivery and operational efficiency; and
• facilitate coordination and innovation within and between agencies.

ScienceLogic: Why focus on Web 2.0 in the government?

Dan Munz: The question of how web 2.0 will impact federal IT departments is a critical one. Our view is that “the era of big systems” is basically over. Things like disk space, bandwidth, and computing power are basically shifting from being assets to being commodities.

There’s also a shift in expectations. People both inside and outside government – especially Gen-X and Gen-Y – are incredibly frustrated by being able to use lightning-fast apps like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook that don’t even live on their hard drives while the government and other large organizations still operate clunky PCs, space-limited e-mail accounts, and sluggish e-mail servers.

So aside from the opportunity for transformative leadership, the idea of web 2.0 at a government level is very appealing in terms of getting the most out of the IT infrastructure we already have, rather than embarking on costly, large-scale projects in an era of diminishing budgets.

ScienceLogic: How do you build a sense of community at the Collaboration Project?

Dan Munz: Some community feel emerges naturally, from a sense that mass collaboration really is a tool for “doing government” in a whole new way.

The more formal community building mechanisms we have include our web page, where we share insights, news, case studies, and other content – The virtual space serves as an anchor for people, whether they’re experts or beginners, to learn about what we do.

Finally, we are conducting an ongoing series of in-person meetings, usually featuring a leader who has harnessed collaborative technology in what we think is a truly revolutionary new way.

ScienceLogic: How do you hear about cool new government Web 2.0 projects?

Dan Munz: That’s a key question, because part of our mission is to inspire action by finding leaders who have succeeded and highlight their accomplishments. We’ve done that with folks like Kip Hawley, TSA, Molly O’Neill, EPA, and Jim Walker, Alabama DHS.

We also feel that the Academy’s position as a “safe space” for leaders means that we’re a place people can turn to when they hear about an emerging trend or project and want some help making sense of it.

ScienceLogic: What are the most innovative uses of Web 2.0 technology you’ve seen in the government?

Dan Munz: It’s important to distinguish between agencies that are simply adjusting to the reality of web 2.0, and those that are “using” it. Getting a YouTube account for your agency, or putting some photos on Flickr, is a great first step, but we want to inspire leaders to really transform their normal ways of doing business. At the moment a few that come to mind are the EPA Puget Sound Mashup, ODNI’s Intellipedia, TSA IdeaFactory, the PTO Peer-to-Patent Project, and Virtual Alabama, to name a few.

The TSA launched the IdeaFactory in February 2008. TSA set up a collaboration platform with commenting, voting, etc. to form communities in a way to bring people to consensus and offer ways to improve the agency’s performance.

ScienceLogic: Do you see a difference between state and local versus federal adoption of Web 2.0?

Dan Munz: That’s a hard generalization to make – at all levels you see leaders who recognize the potential in this technology to bring new voices into the governance process.

ScienceLogic: What are the obstacles to Web 2.0 adoption by government agencies?

Dan Munz: The three main challenges that we see are in the areas of technology, culture, and policy/governance.

The technology issue is probably the simplest to solve – it’s important to choose a technology that fits the problem you’re trying to solve, but these technologies are usually inexpensive and almost never very complex.

The question of culture is harder, particularly given the way that baby boomers, gen-xers, and millenials are beginning to interact in the workforce. How do you gain acceptance and buy-in among groups that have very different comfort levels with collaborative tools and environments?

Finally, the most daunting challenge might be the questions of policy and governance, if only because those are the things that most commonly prevent leaders from even dipping a toe in the waters of collaboration. Most of the policies, regulations, and statutes governing the way government does business don’t anticipate things like wikis, blogs, or instant messaging. One of our most important missions is helping leaders who just want to get to action navigate these obstacles.

ScienceLogic: Is there any advice you can give to government employees getting started with Web 2.0? Or any places you would point them to for more info?

Dan Munz: It’s shameless plug time! I’d of course point them to our web page, collaborationproject.org, where, among other things, we’ve collected a case library of over 40 instances of collaborative technology being used in the government and non-profit sectors. The library is growing every day and is a sort of “database of record” for what is and isn’t working in terms of collaborative government. I think that would be a great place to start for anyone looking to get started but not really knowing the way.

In terms of advice, the best thing to say is that, once you’ve settled on a problem you want to solve and an audience you want to reach out to, just do it! We believe strongly that there are a lot of organizational and leadership issues that still need to be addressed regarding collaboration in government, but our biggest mantra is about getting leaders to action. The most successful projects we’ve seen are ones that try something daring and new, and discover the true power of what they’ve done as it catches on more and more widely.

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Oakland County, Mich., project officially "on hold": For "on hold," read, "never going to be built." The pilot area in seven communities has been turned off, and MichTel has been unable to obtain the $70-odd million they project needed to build out the county-wide service. The state's ongoing reliance on the automotive industry makes it a hard sell to commit public dollars in advance of a return on those dollars, too.

Virgin Mobile buys Helio: The last vestiges of EarthLink's three-pronged approach to fighting the wireline monopoly appears to be at an end. EarthLink pushed its 50-50 partnership with SK Telecom in mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Helio as one prong; its municipal Wi-Fi division as another; and its DSL business as a third. The muni division is nearly out of operation, and DSL lines continue to fall in quantity quarter over quarter. Dial-up is still their cash cow. Helio lost hundreds of millions to obtain just 170,000 subscribers (that number down from 200,000 at the start of 2008). EarthLink will receive a pittance for its investment, part of the $39 million in stock that Virgin will pay for Helio; SK Telecom will invest in Virgin Mobile to obtain a total 17 percent state. Virgin itself makes just a very tiny sliver of profit. MVNOs buy minutes and data from carriers, and Virgin Mobile involves Sprint as a partner, making it the only tolerably successful MVNO.

From Guradian:

A man goes to an REM concert. The conditions on the ticket banned taking photographs, but Steve Miller and his wife, who were conveniently seated in the middle of the front row in the Royal Albert Hall in March, noticed that everyone around them was taking photographs and the staff weren’t stopping them. So they took some, too - about a dozen nice, bright, clear, good-quality concert photographs. Miller put them up on Flickr, as you do, and thought little more about it.

Then one day in mid-May Alison Clarke, another Flickr user, contacted him to let him know that his photographs were up for sale on eBay. The seller, a user located in Argentina who used the name “willy

penc”, was selling numerous sets of photographs from concerts, along with printed photos of celebrities.

I was recently at a Foo Fighters concert and the same was happening there. Camera phones were everywhere. Not a single muscle twitch from any of the security folks.

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