Sarfarissoq – 'Where the current gets strong'

Last week I had the pleasure to participate in a major conference in Nuuk, Greenland focusing on the future use of IT. Until now the external communication lines into and out of Greenland has been via a satellite with low bandwidth and high costs as a consequence. Later this year TeleGreeland will open 2 brand new high speed sea cables from Nuuk to Halifax and from Qaqortoq to Reykjavik and from there to Scotland. This corresponds to a 60.000 times increase in capacity.

Along the coast of Greenland the radio chain capacity is being increased, so that within a few months every tiny village in Greenland will have similar capacity as Europe and US.

To celebrate this and to open up the eyes for the many possibilities that are now within reach, I participated in the planning and execution of a 3 day conference in Nuuk’s beautiful conference Centre, Katuaq, attracted more than 350 participants from all areas of the Greenland society: The home rule departments which. Municipalities, Health Care and hospital centre, education and university, trade organizations, Media industry. And as the conference also had an exhibition arranged by the InnovationLab from Aarhus, also a lot of schoolchildren visited this to play with the IT Dinosaurs, looking at and trying the new ways of learning, the 3D printers and IBM’s medical ‘hub’ – a Google like interface integrating Medical records, X-ray pictures etc . by pointing on a 3 D model of the human body.

The list of speakers included Flemming Jensen, well known entertainer and former teacher in Greenland. Preben Mejer – A journey into the Future, John Patrick, former IBM Executive and Internet director, Lars Toft from Ericsson on wireless broadband – and then on the second day a split into 5 streams:

e-Trade with Per Rasmussen and from IBM Anders Sabra, demonstrating websphere portal and commerce, e-Home with Birger Hauge from Digimark and Flemming Jensen, e-Government with the CIO from Reykjavik, Hjortur Gretarsson and myself, e-Ducation with Christina Brodersen from Aarhus and e-Health with Peter Lundkvist from IBM Acure.

The break-out sessions attracted even more participants than the first day, also because part of the sessions took place at the University, at the Hospital and at the Greenland Radio TV, KNR.

At the summing up session, the recommendations from the speakers were:

- eTrade: Need for public-private partnership to set up portal to make Greenland visible.

- e-Home: Completely new possibilities with IP TV

- e-Ducation: Low hanging fruits are language teaching, distance learning to teachers and then to pupils to expand and secure quality in education regardless of distance

- e-Citizen and e-Government: Citizen centric portal, speed up digital identity program and use of social networking

- e-Health: Accelerate program for telemedicine, increase network between professionals, patients and relatives, focus on prevention and treatment on chronic diseases for people living in their own homes.

On the 3^rd day we had a special session for the public sector and top industry leaders. Hjortur from Reykjavik addressed the need for Governance in IT in the public sector, stressing the need for a Change Management committee to control operations, a SW Application committee consisting of the top line managers to decide which new projects should start, Identity Management and focus on security standards (ISO 27001/DS484) as well as a light-weight Prince2 Project Management model.

I presented the IBM Government 2020 model as a tool for prioritizing strategies in Greenland and as practical framework for top managers in Public Sector to identify barriers, opportunities and then select IT strategies.

Finally John Strand, the Tele Analyst, commented on the risc of introducing open competition in a market with only 56.000 inhabitants. The result of opening up for competition could very soon lead to a situation where broadband usage in Nuuk became cheaper but where the cost for the small villages would rise. Also the discussion on pricing structure – flat rate versus a controlled volume-based pricing was discussed. The conclusion from John was that as long as TeleGreenland was owned by the public, it would be up to Government to subsidize specific sectors, such as education, and not a decision that Tele should make.

Finally we visited the impressive videoconferencing centre that TeleGreenland has built up based on the Norwegian Company Tandberg. Even at a price of 1.5 Mio DKR pr. Room, this solution could accommodate easily 6 -10 persons having a video conference and saving travel costs and time. In a country that covers an area from Nordcap to mid Sahara and with harsh weather conditions, this seem like a gift – especially if you combine it with all the goodies in a collaboration suite like the Lotus solution.

At the end of the conference, John Patrick’s wise advise was remembered: ‘Make great plans but take baby steps’

The conference was a great success – and the prime organizers, the CEO of TeleGreenland, Brian Buus Pedersen. The CEO for Kompetencekompagniet, Jesper Kreiner and TeleGreenland’s market development manager Anders Læsøe , had good reasons to be very satisfied with the outcome.

Government 2020

Following the trail of Future Research it is worth noticing the report that came out of IBM’s Institute for Business Value in Washington a couple of months ago; The institute’s origin was back in the Price-Waterhouse Consulting Company, and since the acquisition IBM has continued to back the long tradition to publish in-depth studies and projections. Last year, the Institute published the Health 2015 report, which contains a number of interesting and challenging predictions on the pressure of the Health sector, but also by stipulating actions and suggestions to meet these challenges.
This year the report on the status of Government in 2020 has a somewhat surprising result, namely that the World essentially is facing 6 global challenges, which may have different manifestations in individual countries, but nevertheless belong to the same ‘class’ of challenge.
The study, which is based on interviews and studies by a large number of Government specialists in and outside IBM, concludes, that the following 6 challenges are overshadowing anything else in the next decade or more:
Changed demographics (See also UN forecasting) – In industrialized, mature countries an rapidly aging population facing the challenge that the number of persons in the productive phase of their lives are becoming few; at the same time that some/many of the developing countries are facing the opposite problem with still more and more young people. This imbalance will lead to pressure on migrations, social unrest and combined with challenge 2, this trend will be huge.
Globalization (Se also UN Report) – free movement of capital, work, migrations of highly skilled workers from developing countries to developed countries, creating even more challenges for the 3rd World, but also much greater dependencies among nations forcing the Nations to try to get on with each other.
Environmental changes – Global Warming will lead to dramatic changes, combined with lack of fossil fuels, changed climates and rising sea level will lead to growing of the deserts but also to changing agricultural possibilities. Migration because of climate changes can be expected. Floods, thunderstorms, heavy rain and forest fires are likely to occur in higher frequencies than to day.
Social relations and networking across boundaries helped by migrations, by breaking down on all isolationism tendencies and regimes partly because of increased communication facilities will create new opportunities as well as challenges;
Increased pressure on social stability (See earlier Blog on Future Research!) – because of a combination of the first 4 challenges, more social unrest is expected – particularly in underdeveloped countries, countries that suffer from the climate change and countries that can expect a high level of immigration.
Technology and the accelerated speed of innovation will provide both challenges and opportunities; while more inventions in personalized medicine, nanotechnology and biomedical research will help us to cure more diseases, this is going to put an enormous pressure on the budgets, particularly in countries with aging populations – but technology might also hold the promise of changing the dependencies on fossil fuel, lead to new energy and transportation systems .

The idea behind the study is that these challenges, the manifestations and particularly the implications of the challenges are of paramount importance for the degrees of freedom and the need for adequate political strategies, that each county will have to face.

The conclusion, if ever a global conclusion can be drawn from observations like these, seem to be that a large proportion of the experts point to the need for collaboration and new ways to exploit the know how of organizations and individuals. Collaboration across departments, sectors, borders, cultural and linguistic barriers (which already today are being helped by the development of automatic translation tools) need to be broken down, and organizational frameworks as well as technologies that help in this direction. Distance Learning, Telemedicine, Social Networking, public safety and security, automatic traffic regulation are just the beginning of what we need to develop much further.

The State of the Future

Inspired by Ray Strong, the IBM futurist researcher I met at the WMSCII-conference I scanned the internet for some other authorized and public future studies. One of the most impressive is the UN-project called The Millenium Project.
More than this, UN has now taken it to the World of web 2.0 and anybody can now contribute and add comments and viewpoints on YouTube or directly to their website. See the YouTube introductory videos on these 15 global challenges.
United Nations started this formidable project some 18 years ago and concentrated on the 15 global challenges, that you see in this illustration.
The project has attracted a lot of experts and specialists and are trying to make predictions using an enormous arsenal of forecasting and prediction techniques:
Environmental Scanning, Delphi studies, Futures wheel, Trend Impact Analysis, Cross Impact Analysis, Systems Perspectives, Decision Modeling, Technology Sequence Analysis, Relevance Trees and Morphological Analysis, Interactive Scenarios, Simulation and Games, Genius Forecasting, and a few more.

Each year the Millenium Project updates the outlook and evaluation of the so-called State of The Future Index (SOFI) trying to focus on the challenges that have improved and those that have deteriorated. This will result in a ‘wheel’, showing the trend for the challenges. In this wheel, the 6 most important challenges have been mapped since 1990. From this wheel we can observe that UN estimates that both human wealth, intellectual capital (level of education) and health will improve from now on until 2017, where as people’s physical living conditions as well as political and social security status will be extremely challenged; this is due to environmental changes and social and political unrest, that may happen as a consequence of regional climate changes, lack of water, social tensions due to increased migrations.

Other parts of the Millenium Project are focused on Technology, how it will develop and which issues regarding political management and control might result. For this part of the on going study the Scenario method is used, and reading these scenarios will give you the creeps … the Fantasy is beyond the imagination of even Ray Bradbury.

When you have enjoyed these studies, you might wonder what is happening in Europe; I found that the UK ministry of Science most likely is the most advanced in EU, and have now started an ongoing series of so-called Foresight studies. While the UN study is an overall Study looking at the Future in a more holistic way, the Foresight study in UK seem to be much more concentrated on the intermediate term and on technology and technological development as such. But a really interesting collecting of studies, enjoy!

Swedish Surveillance Case - New Comments

According to Computerworld.dk, http://www.computerworld.dk/art/47163?a=newsletter&i=1914, the Swedish MOD Sten Tolgfors has stated in the media that surveillance of all electronic communication is crucial to evaluate and act against external threats and plots directed towards Swedish interests, citizens or authorities. This of course is the reasoning behind the newly accepted and much debated Swedish act, that allows the Swedish Defense Radioservice (FRA) to collect and analyze the content of all electronic communication going in and out of Sweden.

But the Swedish minister added to this general statement, that the way the FRA is operating based on the new law will be in a way where individuals, particularly Swedish inidviduals are not the target for the surveillance, but other states and organisations in other countries with a direct interest in Sweden. Tolgfors further claimed that the only individuals that would have their electronic communication surveilled would be known terrorists or gangsters. He also lifted the curtain or the type of technology used to scan this enourmous amount of data:

'Very advanced search techniques are being deployed,' her said, 'that ensures that only information concerning some of the key variables for which FRA is looking, will be selected and stored. Everything else will pass on.' (Svenska Dagbladet) ( http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_1436287.svd ). He also stated that it would be 'practically impossible' to scan all communnication, and further that a parliamentary committee is looking at ways to clarify the legiaslation and to build integrity measures into the rules, that eventually will govern the practical apllication of the law.

For lay people and for some fanatics this is not good enough, but it clearly illustrates the dillemma that all nations are facing these days: Even if natural disasters are muh more likely than terrorism to kill and injure people, there is a strong political interest in strengthening surveillance to increase the perceived security level. And if you look into it, the Swedish Minister may have a point, depending on how the legislation in it's final form actually will be formulated.

Without amendments a simple permission to capture any communication would without doubt be contractory to the wording and the spirit of the European Human Rights as stated in my earlier blog. This goes without any argument like 'it is not practically possible' - because storage constraints are disappearing, and technology progressing; instead an amendment stating that the surveillance will be made following clear criteria and using advanced techniques to encrypt any linkage until a 'hit' with a wanted list or linkage of message to known criminals occur.

Tools like this actually exist - but the exact wording of the Swedish Law plus the accompanying administrative rules should be discussed the Working Party 29 before the law comes into effect - this advice would help clarify for all European nations where the borderline is between privacy and security. The discussions following the Swedish Act clearly illustrates the need to draw this line in a way that can be communicated also to people without technical understanding as well as to Stefan Engberg.

(Illustration above made by Anders Duus Østergaard - another way of identifying an ugly duckling or? )

Impressions from WMSCI

I enjoyed participating in a remarkable event in Orlando, Florida from June 29th to July 3rd.
It happened to be the 12th consecutive ‘World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics’. http://www.sciiis.org/wmsci2008/website/default.asp?vc=1 .The ‘Multi’ should be taken quite literally: It consists of the RMCI – Symposium on Risk Management and Cyber-Informatics, of the International Symposium of Energy, Informatics and Cybernetics, of MEI, the International Symposium of Management, Engineering and Informatics, of BMIC, international symposium of Bio-Medical informatics, PISTA, The international Conference on Politics and Information Systems (See http://www.socioinfocyber.org/imsci2008/website/default.asp?vc=4 ), Technologies and Applications, as well as eISTA, conference on Education, Information, Technology and Applications.
The idea behind this enormous conference is rather unique; all the participants are speakers at one of the conferences, and you are free to pick and choose from all the sub-conferences. So this is really a place where the audience is extremely active and alive, and all the speakers try to do their best as they are in front of knowledgeable colleagues from universities, industry, governmental and research institutions. (I have participated as a speaker on several occasions, in PISTA as well as RMCI.) And it is indeed a very productive conference: every morning at breakfast 2 lessons are given in plenum and this time covered a wide range from Gary S. Metcalf’s (http://www.interconnectionsllc.com/management.htm )extremely interesting presentation on ‘Patterns of Significance – Complexities between Human and Scientific Decision Making, to prof. Yaroslav Sergeyev’s (http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Sergeyev:Yaroslav_D=.html ) views on ‘The infinity Computer’, and a remarkable overview of the history of Cybernetics by prof. Ranulph Glanville (http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/people/glanville/ ) – plus of course several others.
In my own session – labeled Human Information Systems – I was co-chair together with a Russian born, now US resident, Dmitry Zinoviev, that gave a very interesting presentation on how to describe topology and geometry of on line social networks. This is indeed very useful when we expand on the line, which I produced, the joint paper between me and Michael Hvass, my assistant, on ‘eGovernment 2.0 – how can government benefit from Web 2.0?’. Our paper was later acknowledged ‘Best Paper in Session’, so I was deeply honored.
If you scan through the list of presentations and papers you will be astonished to see the span of the articles – regardless of your line of profession there is bound to be something of interest: From molecular Bio-Engineering, to Energy preservation, to managing risks in banks, preventing terror, assessing risk and warning systems for the mining industry, demonstrating how robots can assist in emergency situations and so on and so forth.
What struck me as one of the most interesting sessions happened to be presented by an IBM colleague, Ray Strong, coming from the Almaden research Lab in California. (See http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ ).

Together with colleagues Ray developed an exciting methodology for technology outlook and future studies. And this is not ‘just’ 5 years ahead: Based on a request from NASA a few years ago, Almaden lab was forced to think of meaningful ways to develop foresight methodologies to look 40 or even 50 years into the future. This of course cannot in any way be accurate forecasts, but the methodology actually develops what Ray calls ‘Sign posts’ , events, inventions or breakthroughs, that mark a breaking point, and once these signposts occur, there is a sort of roadmap attached to it, so it is relatively clear, what a threshold or signpost would possibly open up for. At the Almaden homepage you can find and download general descriptions of this methodology, which we in fact sell as a part of the IBM consulting offering to corporations or Governments that want to look into the future. (www.ispim.org/ispim2008/files/Ray%20Strong.ppt ) Examples such as mobile phone companies, utility companies, energy and oil companies, NASA – of course – and many others have gained insight from this. My friends at the Danish technology Council (See description of Foresigt : www.tekno.dk/pdf/aarsberetning02/aarsberet2del.pdf ) would be impressed, this is more than the traditional foresight methods, although the starting point in any engagement is the creation of scenarios combined with analysis of patent trends and disruptive trends in consumption, production or ecological factors. I intend to follow this development and see how ‘Future Planning’ as a discipline is coming to fruition.

Sustainable Energy for 1000 years – Hot in Iceland

During a stay in Iceland last week I was taken to a Thermo Power plant 27 kms outside Reykjavik that demonstrated the benefits of a country residing on top of volcanoes; Orkuweita geothermal plant is a fantastic building and a not less fantastic story to tell: From a number of drillings down to 1- 1.5 km. beneath earth, the power and heating plant gets 200 degrees centigrade steam and hot water. Water, because the pressure is around 22 BAR. The water is separated from the steam, the steam drives a number of turbines producing 120 Megawatt. The hot water is used to heat lake water from Lake Thingvellir, and this is it’s turn used to heat the houses in Reykjavik and a population of around 170.000.
The hot water from the boreholes is re-circulated and brought back to it’s original depth to keep the pressure. It is estimated that this could last for another 1000 years.
No wonder why the Icelanders are fond of their sustainable energy – and that to the extent that they are not any more so keen on inviting in new aluminium plants as the real environmentalists think it is a shame if all this nice and green energy should be wasted on an industry that simply consumes what it can get. This will probably give Greenland a chance to attract more plants, but that’s another story! See http://www.c40cities.org/bestpractices/renewables/reykjavik_geothermal.jsp
In the meantime it is going to be interesting to see if Iceland can find out ways to export their energy without too much loss. When that day occurs, Scotland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroe Islands will probably be the first to benefit.

In the meantime Iceland is aiming at attracting large back up centers from Google, Yahoo, IBM, MS and whoever is interested in being really green.

Co2 savings? This power plant/heating system saves at leas4 4 mio tons of C02 pr. year.

When neighbours are peeping through your windows..

On June 18 the Swedish parliament accepted a law that enforces the Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarets Radioanstalt) to listen into the content of all electronic traffic going in and out of Sweden.
This is – on a European scale – quite remarkable, as the surveillance directive for tele services so far has only required that the ID’s of telecommunication between sender and receiver to be logged and stored for a limited period of time.

It created a lot of critical articles in Sweden and even demonstrations in front of the Parliament. http://www.vasabladet.fi/story.aspx?storyID=22256 – but the law was passed with only 4 members majority. (See also http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article2712002.ab )
The new law covers e-mails, SMS, on-line traffic as well as phone conversations.
According to Computerworld a similar legislation is on it’s way in UK.
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/46358?a=rss&i=0

This may not be a major issue if not for the fact that some of the major Swedish tele companies like Telia is also servicing customers in other countries, among them Denmark and – behold – the Danish Parliament. http://www.computerworld.dk/art/46613?

At the first glance this seems to be in direct conflict with the European Human Rights declaration:

http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html#P1

ARTICLE 8

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

But in Article 8, paragraph 2, it is stated:

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

So the real question is whether or not the threat level in Sweden (or for that matter, in Europe) has risen to the point where it can said that it is politically acceptable to have a major surveillance of every kind of correspondence from every citizen or company.

To my knowledge this has not yet been discussed in the committee that are the official watch dogs of the Human Rights declaration. The so-called WP29 – Working Party or sub-committee responsible for advising the European Parliament on human rights issues as stated in Article 29, has not yet discussed the Swedish legislation. (See http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559540 for a description of the WP29).

The question is if the Swedish Law is in conflict with the Data Protection Directive 94/96.

As this has not yet been discussed by WP29, it is obvious that we can look at the outcome of a similar case just a few years back where it suddenly came to the attention of the authorities that the data content of data in international money transfer using the Belgium based SWIFT system, was actually decoded by US authorities. This was discussed by the WP29 that concluded that SWIFT had to adhere to the 94/96 European directive on data protection.(See www.cbpweb.nl/downloads_int/Opinie%20WP29%20zoekmachines.pdf )

It seems that the Swedish are on a thin ice, and I expect that the case will be brought up for the WP29. In the meantime, Swedish critics suggests that everybody encrypts their data; this may be OK, but you have to take into account that the Swedish Defense actually owns a 128 Terraflop supercomputer and has asked for additional funding, so ..

In a follow-on article I will dig into the recommendations on protection of personal data as proposed by the PRISE consortium and the result of the EU project to describe policies and best practices when investing EU funds in IT projects that might infringe on individual’s privacy.

http://prise.oeaw.ac.at/