The European Union and web 3.0

Already in October 2008 the European Commission launched a consultation on Web 3.0 to try to position Europe and to communicate a strategy to the member states during 3.rd quarter of 2009 proposing a policy approach “addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to the move from RFID and sensing technologies to the Internet of Things”

This indicates that at the time of the initial consultation, the commission’s view of Web 3.0 was more focused on the ‘internet of things’ than the current understanding of being the semantic network of interrelated data, or as Tim Berners-Lee put it: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

During the Autumn a number of external experts critized the Commission for lack of innovation and understanding of web 3.0. See for instance this blog critizising the Commisioner Vivianne Reading: http://blog.semantic-web.at/2008/09/30/eu-commissions-short-sighted-definition-of-web-30/

So what is the current status of EU’s view on web 3.0?. In January 2009, Gerard Santucci, Head of Unit from DG Information Society and Media, presented his and his unit’s view on the status of the IoT for the conference on the Future of the Internet. At this point the EU seems to begin to focus also on the tremendous amounts of data that could be available – either as a direct result of collected data through the IoT or by making data available online, so Santucci in his paper also stressed the need for security around it: “The exercise of data subject rights in the context of intelligent networked environments will require the creation of complex Identity Management systems, based on interoperability, identification, authentication, and authorisation.”

In May EU hosted a conference on the Future of the Internet in Prague. This was a step towards a much more comprehensive understanding of the potential promises of the semantic web, and an excellent video was presented here. Also the Swedish Government, before their presidency of ERU beginning July 1, 2009, was present and demonstrated through State Secretary Leif Zetterberg a more forward looking attitude, but again no mentioning of the opportunities and issues around the potential for a semantic web in Europe. His focus areas were 1) formulate a new ICT strategy for Europe from 2011-2015, 2) Harmonize use Digital TV Frequencies in Europe as well as creating one common market for telecommunication industry, and 3) aiming at a secure infrastructure. But no words on making public data available or securing interoperability to create a whole new web 3.0 market place. Hopefully the Swedish Presidency will redress this during the fall.

In June the commission launched an action plan to embrace ‘The Internet of Things’ (IoT) including a comprehensive list of sub-action items, 13 in all ranging from Governance of IoT, over Privacy, Risc Assessments, Impact on Society, Need for Standards, Research Needed, Public-Private Partnership for IoT, RFID Issues, Institutional Awareness, International Dialogue to Measurement of the Uptake. But not much information about one of the key issues in the i2010 Strategy for ICT: Creation of a Single European Information Space with a strong emphasis on Content Online, as stated by Ken Ducatel, Head of Unit from DG/INFSO responsible for the follow-on program to the i2010 in a presentation in March 2009.

In May 2009 a group of international experts called upon the EU Commission to increase focus of solving the inherent problems of the current infrastructure and standards in the Internet:

“The Internet was never designed for how it is now being used and is creaking at the seams. We have connectivity today but it is not ubiquitous; we have bandwidth but it is not limitless; we have many devices but they don’t all talk to each other. We can transfer data but the transfers are far from seamless. We have access to content but it can’t be reused easily across every device. Applications and interfaces are still not intuitive, putting barriers in the way of the Internet’s benefits for many people. And, since security was an afterthought on the current Internet, we are exposed in various ways to spam, identity theft and fraud.”

So the experts is trying to put focus back again on some of the key words for web 3.0: Seamless data exchange, re-use of content, open interfaces. Plus – of course – the challenges raised by the mere fact that we are running out of addresses in IPV4 and need to plan for IPV6 as fast as possible.

The timing of this statement is quite crucial as the hearings for the next ICT Strategic plan – the i2015 – is just about to start, and the more consultations with experts and with country spokesmen that point to these problems, the more likely it will be that EU will see the potential of the semantic web within a short time frame.

In some areas, particularly Health Care, it is obvious that a clear use of semantics is a mere necessity for cross border interoperability and for exchange of electronic patient records, a long lasting problem of standardization even within each member country. (Denmark, for instance, has got at least 5 different standards for EPR’s).

In June 2009 EU organized a seminar for ‘Ontology-driven interoperability in eHealth’. This marked a midterm in a 3-year project trying to define the standards needed and the necessary steps towards interoperability in the eHealth area. The Picture above illustrates the problem. In this context the organisations involved cover the key players for web 3.0: CEN, CENELEC, ETSI, W3C, ISO, OASIS and the more health care oriented standardisation committees CONTINUA and IHE. The eHealth domain as well as the eProcurement domain which I mentioned in my earlier blog on web 3.0, seem to be well on their way towards practical results and methodologies that can be deployed by other domains.

While EU is gaining its forces and collecting input from all over on the upcoming priorities, the web 3.0/Semantic web environment is slowly progressing, for each day and month producing simple-to-use, practical tags and definitions. See for instance these 4 examples of practical microformats enhancing exchange of information on personal identity, calendar inputs and other:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1773550/semantic_web_4_fundamental_microformats.html

In the meantime, led by David Osimo, a crowd sourcing initiative is taking place to create the People’s declaration on the i2015. Suggest you visit the page and register and vote for the top priorities. As of to day the top rated recommendation is: release government data in free, open, standard, readily available, accessible formats Or – if you want to participate in an upcoming event on the semantic web and it’s potential, register at: http://iswc2009.semanticweb.org/

Towards web 3.0 ???

Last week W3C opened a conference in San Jose, California, on Semantic technology. Also present at the conference were a number of vendors all hoping to commercialize products within the realm of semantics. I got curious and decided to make some research to see how far web 3.0 had really come; I put a question up on Facebook, but the reactions I got were like this: “ Why are we talking about web 3.0? We haven’t even starting exploiting web 2.0?”

So where are we?

We are definitely moving away from web 1.0, connecting computers, over web 2.0 - connecting people - to what may be called web 3.0 – If that means, that web 3.0 is where you use the value of the web 2.0 technologies plus the semantic tools to find your way into all the crab and get the right and/or most likely answers to your questions. In order to do this, of course you need standards and the status of this work was a major part of last week’s conference.

W3C owns some of the core technologies within the semantic domain, and it is seen as a major turning point these days that the maturity of the basic technologies: RDF – Resource Development Framework, and OWL - Web Ontology Language. Based on the standards developed here and also of course the XML-standards, the semantic query language SPARQL has been developed.

Related, but independently maintained standards such as XBRL, is also moving ahead to help clarify definitions and meanings across systems and boundaries.

The whole concept of semantics is particularly important in a multi-language set up like the European Community, and EU as such have since long promoted the use of semantics as a core technology to provide interoperability across the boundaries of Europe. One of the first pan-European areas where principles of the semantic web are being defined and tested in the area of eProcurement. The PEPPOL Conference in January in Copenhagen kicked off the project, where a number of IT companies and representatives from users are seated. The Danish Ministry of Finance and IBM Denmark are both partners here. A general perspective of the PEPPOL Project can be found here: http://www.peppolinfrastructure.com/20090129ConnectingtoPEPPOL.pdf

PEPPOL is still a development project, although the demonstration phase will appear pretty soon.

But as the multitude of globally available solutions presented in San Jose here in June showed, we may now be on the brink of a real break-through to have a multitude of commercial applications available.

Ivan Herman is responsible for W3C’s semantic programme. He gave a lengthy interview that described his opinion of the status. Her stated it like this:

“Web 3.0 is the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications." (From San Fransisco W3C Conference)

Other blogs and discussion for a on the net have been dealing with the topic for quite some time.

Phil Wainewright: What to expect from web 3.0? , tries to explain what the main differences and concepts for breakthrough in web 3.0 really are. He explains, that web 3.0 consists of

4 Layers: API-Layer – where service providers give access to content and data. He thinks this layer is pretty mature, with almost no profit left for new comers. The next layer, The Aggregation services Layer contains all the goodies of web 2.0 like RSS Feeds etc., and the third and exciting ‘new’ area is the Application Services layer – Where office, EPR, CMS, and other applications and services are buying offered on demand, software as a service. A fourth layer may consist of Serviced Clients, and this may also be an interesting new business area, according to Phil Wainewright.

As an example of one of the application areas he expects to thrive, is the WebEX Office SaaS:

WebEX – example of a company focusing on delivering SaaS using web 3.0

Searching the web I also found Richard MacManus, lecturing about web 3.0:

“Web 1.0 is characterized by enabling reading, web 2.0 = read/write where everybody becomes a publisher – but web 3.0??”

“Unstructured information will give way to structured information, paving the way to more intelligent computing.”

The essence of his expectations is that web sites will be turned into web services, whether or not this should be considered a brand new paradigm is a matter of taste, but in Rachard MacManus opnion:

“There is a difference in the solutions we are seeing in 2009: More products based on structured data (Wolfram Alpha), more real time – made sadly necessary because of the situation in Iran - (twitter, OneRiot), better filters (FriendFeed and Facebook with copies FF)”

So of web 3.0 is all about structuring data and making data available, then some of the new semantic techniques for storing relations between entities - TripleStore Technology – like ‘Peter is friend with Susan’ – or ‘Muhammed is a member of the AK81 gang’ is the way ahead. Much easier than to describe EDIFACT rules in the 90’ties, and if you could really create this links of links of links and use powerful searching tools across the variety of databases, then we will surely see a new level of intelligent computing.

According to Alexander Korts, (april 2009) in his article on The web of Data, creating Machine Accessible Information gives the following example:

“One promising approach is W3C's Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The above image (on top of blog) illustrates participating data sets. The data sets themselves are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

The data sets all grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items of other data sets. The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine.

This in a way makes it reassuring and at the same time illustrates the amount of work still ahead of us before we will reach the ‘promised’ land of web 3.0. Also it shows, that web 3.0 is a journey and not and end in itself. And finally: that we will have to master Web 2.0 techniques and imbed this into all the traditional services and solutions before we get a user friendly and intuitive way of accessing all these data. But most important: It puts a pressure on all Governments (in particular) but also on private companies to make data available. Tim Berness Lee gave a very interesting and inspiring pitch on this matter in February this year: Tim Berners Lee on the next web

Conclusion is that we are still only stumbling at the foot of the mountain, but we have spotted the way ahead.

(And if you are really interested in the topic of Digital Libraries, maybe you should attend the Conference on Semantic Web for digital Libraries in Trento in September. )

Green Cities - Blue Skies Ahead?

This year we are witnessing an increasing level of activity in all institutions and organisations that in some way expect to benefit or to be involved in the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen in December: COP 15 – Copenhagen December 2009

The objectives for the meeting are very high and the effort put into the preparations have been substantial:

• To get all the world's countries to agree on a global target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
• To get the world's industrialized countries to take the lead and reduce their CO2 emissions significantly, while the world's newly industrialized countries and developing countries contribute to a collective solution
• To agree on a global climate regime which does not restrain economic growth and that does not distort competition on the world market.
  
  

The Climate conference is supported by the UN International Panel on Climate Control.

The panel does not in itself represent the latest research, and some critics of their predictions claim that they base the recommendations on scientific work that is by now 2 years old. Others, including the notorious climate commentator Bjorn Lomborg, claims that all the effort and money going into carbon dioxide reduction are more or less wasted. But these days the critics seem to become fewer an fewer as the Copenhagen Fever intensifies;

This month the Copenhagen Climate Council will meet and discuss industries’ role in supporting the sustainability agenda.

And also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its subcommittees are, what the call ‘in full negotiating mode’:

“The Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) will operate in full negotiating mode in 2009 to advance work towards meeting their respective mandates. Important ongoing work under the Convention will also be taken forward in 2009 by SBI and SBSTA.”

But Carbon-Dioxyde submission, pollution and energy waste is first and foremost something that takes place in cities all over the World; so no wonder that this has become a burning platform and has created a lot of both political interest but also a number of real and promising initiatives forward. One of the first of this kind of initiatives in Europe is the so-called Covenant of the Mayors.

This project is strongly supporting the EU plan ’20-20-20’ – EU’s initiative to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% in 2020 as a result of a 20% increase in energy efficiency and a 20% share of renewable energy sources in 2020.

(The big question is if this is enough to reverse the trend towards global warming!)

The Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR), in Malmö, 22-24 April 2009, and discussed the covenant, adding to examples and recommendations and the number of cities and regions that have signed the Covenant is still adding.

Among other pan-European initiatives the Green shift Europe founded in 2008 pointed at a number of possibilities for city administrations, companies and citizens to contribute to achieving the EU targets – and maybe even to go beyond them:

Examples from the Green Shift proposals:

• Energy generation and distribution uses one third of all primary energy. Electricity generation could be made more efficient by 40% and its transport and distribution by 10%. ICT could make not only the management of power grids more efficient but also facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources. Denmark generates half its electricity through decentralised grids, with wind power accounting for 20% of all electricity. As a result, its C0₂ emissions fell from 937 to 517 g/kWh from 1990-2005.
• The heating, cooling and lighting of buildings account for more than 40% of European energy consumption. ICT can continuously monitor data to optimise lighting, ventilation and equipment performance and provide consumers real-time updates on their energy consumption to stimulate behavioural changes. In Finland, this smart metering encouraged consumers to increase energy efficiency by 7%.
• 20% of world electricity is used for lighting. Changing to energy efficient light bulbs could halve today's energy consumption for lighting by 2025. Intelligent light bulbs, which automatically adjust to natural light and people's presence will have an even greater effect.
  
  

The European organisation for cities, Eurocities: Focus on the importance of smarter cities to demonstrate the role that ICT can play in improving the energy efficiency of cities, the consequent reduction in emissions and working towards achieving a more sustainable low-carbon economy and society. Also to coordinate work on the development of a “Green Digital Charter” which would propose an action orientated and measurable framework and to support cities in using ICT to facilitate emissions reductions through improved energy efficiency and innovation.

In working towards a ‘Green Digital Charter’ for cities the main points are:

1. Getting local partnerships of key leaders and stakeholders together in each city to promote the new green agenda
2. Establishing a series of digital applications for improving the measurement, transparency and visibility of energy use and then involving local citizens, service providers and organisations to test-bed projects to deploy these
3. Ensuring the city’s own ICT infrastructure and digital services have the minimal possible carbon footprint.
4. Facilitating innovation to develop new digital infrastructures to enable low carbon activities and to achieve systemic carbon effectiveness
5. Encouraging and promoting low carbon activities through innovative research and development activities and deployment projects

IBM, one of the private companies supporting the Eurocities organisation, is supporting the climate agenda on a global basis, most markedly in the Smarter Planet approach.. Smarter cities are one of the key areas under this heading. IBM’s work in this area can be described in the following 4 different visions:

1. The connected city – making full use of telecommunications and mobile services to facilitate as well personal social networks as well as collaborative working reducing travel and increasing innovative capabilities
2. The sustainable city – instrumentation to monitor and control all sorts of submissions, energy consumption, waste and recycling. This is based on intelligent systems that will help monitor and also to utilise incentive based market systems or personal-incented methods to support saving and managing constrained resources.
3. The integrated City – Most cities are still today operated in silo’s and departments, and parts of the traditional city operations may have been outsourced. The integrated city approach offers capabilities again to have an enterprise view of what is happening encouraging optimization of city services and assist in incident management as well as crime prevention.
4. The entrepreneurial city – deploying ICT solutions that will enable cities’ eco-system integration also taking commuting and collaboration between citizens, work places and consumers’ sites into consideration.

Example: The EDISON Project in Denmark was announced in February 2009. The objective of this project is to make a proof-of-concept that wind-based energy systems are able to offer a major part of the needed energy resources by allowing surplus energy to be stored in batteries of electric cars in peak periods, by operating windmills much closer to predicted storms and to have an intelligent electricity network connected to neighbouring countries to level off production and consumption.

Another example is the Stockholm congestion/Intelligent traffic regulation system; Not only did the variable pricing scheme – combined with an increased frequency of busses and tramway – lead to a reduction of inner city traffic by more than 20%, the level of pollution also dropped sharply. This model, supported by IBM solutions, is now being replicated in a number of cities around the World – from London, to Dublin, to Brisbane.

For the upcoming Eurocities summer event taking place in Reykjavik, Iceland from June 10 to 12, focus will move from the overall political declarations to practical and solid best practices that can be copied between the member cities. The preliminary program can be found here:

http://www.reykjavik.is/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-3567/5628_view-835/

G20 - Fears or Expectations?

(picture: Franklin D. Roosevelt at London Summit 1933)

The upcoming G20 meeting where 85% of the World’s GDP will be present will take place in London where a similar meeting took place in June 1933. The question remains if this G20 meeting will meet the same fate as the former London meeting or a step away from the brink of the sharp economic downturn.

In 1933 the meeting was organized by the League of Nations . The objectives of many Nations were to re-instate the currency link to the Gold Standard, which would secure that prices and wages would fall in parallel with a downturn, and the idea was that this would still enable foreign trade. The objective of some of the leaders – Mussolini, Hitler – was to demonstrate that nationalism and increased spending of re-armament would prove to be a way out of the crisis, while the country that was accused to put a torpedo to the London summit was USA. The new president, Franklin Roosevelt, had put his New Deal on the table back home, and this – very much like the present situation – resulted in a weakening of the Dollar because of huge deficit – in other words: US Govt paid to get out of the crisis by inflating it’s currency. This would be effectively stopped if the Gold Standard was to be reinstated. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise that FDR would work against the scheme – already in his inauguration speech, Roosevelt said:

"I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment,"

This time around the agenda is almost the same - http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/summit-aims/ - but with the added objective to re-start the World on a path towards sustainable growth.

The official UK website for the G20 meeting expresses the hope that the meeting will restore financial stability and avoid further recession. Not all the key players share the optimism – China has argued that it fears the pressure on the dollar value as they have ended up by pouring more than 1000 billion Dollars into US Treasury Bonds. Hence they recommend that Dollars will be replaced as a reserve currency by Special Drawing Rights issued by IMF based on a basket of currencies. Already before Obama put his trillion dollar deficit to the Congress, China expressed fears that the 682 Bn $ portfolio of US bonds would be devalued. . Before the G20 meeting, the comments from Wang Qishan – Vice premier China: http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/global-update/cp-china/active-part - has been moderate, and maybe China has reached the conclusion, that if the Dollar is no longer the World’s currency for reserves, than nothing would prevent the Dollar from falling. So China is facing a catch 22 problem. EU also recommends to hold back the China SDR-scheme for a while.

At the same time tens of thousands protest against the G20 meeting . As people are being fired, the ‘end of capitalism’ is often heard in the crowds. What may be an even worse sign is some experts view that we may have seen the ‘end of globalisation’. See the views expressed by Harold James in this version of ‘What matetrs’. :

"The breakdown has created a political impasse. State rescues of entire banking systems are a necessary and inevitable response to the financial meltdown, but the consequence will be to try to limit banking to national units. Italian taxpayers will not want to see their money used to bail out remote eastern European debtors. The same political logic applies for fiscal stimulus packages, where voters will not want to see foreign producers in effect subsidized."

We may once more witness a situation where US will take the lead in what would this time become a new era of nationalism, disguised as regionalism. Already the rescue packages accepted by the US congress contains element of protectionism, ‘buy American’.

Others remain optimistic. See Recommendations – From Brookings - http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/0326_g20_summit.aspx or to quote from their list of recommendations also pointing to IMF as a potential key player: (See the full report from

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2009/0326_g20_summit/0326_g20_summit_bradford_linn.pdf )

“At least a tripling of resources for the IMF from currently $250 billion to $750 billion through a combination of a generalized quota increase, a sizeable SDR ($250 billion) allocation, a further authorization to borrow under the so-called “New Arrangements to Borrow” (NAB) or ad hoc borrowings from selected surplus countries— following the commitment already by Japan to $100 billion—and other measures to make the IMF a major actor in the global financial system”

The fears in US and UK are that there may not be lenders enough in the World to finance the galloping public deficits. Some UK critics have calculated that if you add the nationalized banks’ debt, this will all add up all debts ever accepted by UK Governments from 1691 to 2008!

Or, as it was put in this article: Public Debts at Armageddon height: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5811186.ece

“With the debts of the nationalised and part-nationalised banks now on the public sector balance sheet, the ratio of public sector debt to GDP in the UK exceeds that of Italy and Japan. And it is set to grow much higher. On the basis of the planned levels of borrowing, it could exceed 65 per cent of GDP in 2010-11. And at that scale of indebtedness, the Armageddon scenario most feared by the Treasury - that there will be insufficient lenders to match the planned level of borrowing - begins to look a distinct possibility.”

The UK recession clearly deepens as UK Public deficit hits all time record – but this time around so does the recession in almost all other countries. This is what gives us the hope that the G20 meeting – even if it may not solve all problems – at least will prove to be the first step on a long journey towards more global commitment and cooperation – including a greater role for the 3^rd World countries. The Financial Ministers met 2 weeks ago and this statement was part of their end comminqué for the preparatory G20 meeting:

"Emerging and developing economies, including the poorest, should have greater voice and representation, and the next review of IMF quotas should be concluded by January 2011,”

Public Services 2.0 – EU Seminar Bruxelles March 16.

The DG INFSO organisation last week arranged a very interesting seminar focusing on the impact of web 2.0 in Government, in particular trying to bring the attendance to the top European politicians to the impact that the new 2.0 technologies could bring to the table.

The main organizers behind the event, led by David Osimo, clearly expressed that their objective is to use web 2.0 as a tool to formulate and expand Europe’s next ICT-strategy and in this way for the first time have the user community engaged in formulating the ‘post i2010’ strategy.

The formal kick off for the revision of the current i2010 strategy will take place in Malmö, Sweden in November, but David Osimo and his colleagues’ aims at setting up a web 2.0 Community already from mid May. The seminar held on March 16. was intended as a show case of what is already going on, best practices from NGO’s, private companies as well as some public cases.

The morning session contained a number of ‘grass root projects’ – typically NGO’s, private persons or small organizations that had developed web 2.0 sites and/or tools to solve specific societal issues: Jack Thurston demonstrated a transparency project on farm subsidies in Europe – Farmsubsidy - as the first results indicated an enormous skew in the sense that all the big land owners obtained the majority of all funds available. David Price, founder of Debategraph, showed an interesting graphical WiKi-tool useful in many public debates.

A very inspiring presentation was made by Emma Mulqueeny – Rewired State – showing a ‘hacker competition’ in UK:

“On Saturday March 7th 2009 Rewired State held "National Hack The Government Day" at the new Guardian offices in Kings Cross. 80 developers created working projects from public sector information between 10am to 6pm, and presenting them to government officials and the media in the evening, before heading to the pub.”

The results was amazing, the top solutions awarded was a complete re-write of the public sectors’ job search solution (Job Centre Pro Plus ) and a site called Fix My Site , where users can suggest changes in public sector web sites to make them easier to use.

James Munro is a director of PatientOpinion by now a sort of icon in the public 2.0 area, originally received a lot of critical statements from the National health Services in UK when patients began rating their experience at the hospitals, but by now a very natural symbiosis between the public and the citizens.

OnRoadMedia is an extremely interesting project aiming at providing social media solutions to educate and train marginalized youngsters, street children, immigrants and homeless. This is a true demonstration on the real value of web 2.0.

Simon Hampton from Google Europe presented an interesting project linking public transportation time tables across Europe to provide a GoogleTransit solution using mash up techniques.

During the lunch break a new movie on the value of web 2.0 and crowd sourcing was shown.

To quote from the film Us Now:

“In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?

New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.
This website features all material being created during the making of the film.”

Afternoon session started with a block focusing on experiences with projects and programmes that could stimulate web 2.0 innovation.

Anna Maybank presented the Social Innovation Camp project – an NGO set up collecting all sorts of ideas and suggestions for web sites or web 2.0 solutions for social innovation. Last round was held in December, and after selecting the most promising ideas, the persons with the bright ideas were confronted with hard core developers and during a couple of days their ideas came to life.

Alberto Cottica from Italy presented the Kublai Project. The idea is to stimulate growth and creativity in the southern part of Italy by offering a collaborative design environment using meetings in second life and a sounding board community to discuss and possibly engage with the owners of the ideas. So in fact it is a combination of a number of web 2.0 techniques: crowd sourcing, second life, social networks, peer coaching.

Wim de Waele represents a Belgian organisation called IBBT - Institute for Broadband Technology and has worked with user driven innovation for some years. It seems to be a European ‘Media Lab’ (like MIT) – and seem to have launched a very substantial number of interesting projects marrying creative ideas with technology experts. Also arts and culture has been targeted, and recently also a project inviting open source programmers (Not only in Belgium but internationally) to participate in collaborative creative projects.

I presented the IBM experiences using the innovation jam-technology. Since 2001 IBM has improved and tested a large scale collaborative jam session technique involving potentially all IBMers on a World Wide scale. The technique has been used also for external projects like the UN Habitat Jam as a preparation for the UN global conference on Urban Dwelling in Vancouver in 2005. The most recent Jam was held in October 2008 engaging more than 90.000 individuals including representatives for more than 1.000 IBM customers. The focus areas were to identity new, innovative solutions, mobilisation of customers, new ways of dealing with the environmental and energy challenges and exploiting globalisation in product development and service delivery.

The final session dealt with Government representatives and their views and experiences using web 2.0. Richard Stirling from the UK Cabinet Office talked about the study he has recently finalized for the UK Government and the Power of Information Taskforce. He also gave a number of private/personal experiences and pointed out a number of areas where the exploitation of web 2.0 by government would be inevitable.

Davied Van Berlon from Netherlands discussed on the role of ‘Civil Servant 2.0’, the changes necessary not only in the technical World but much more the change of culture that is needed also in terms in attitude, ways of working. The Civil Servant 2.0 is a combination of blogs, wikis, social network between civil servants aimed at educating, discussion among peers and by including web 2.0 specialists empower the civil servants and inspiring them.

Jose Alonso is the chair of the eGov group in W3C/CTC. He described projects and ideas to open up the Governments huge collection of data to the general public. One example was the transparency project in Chile where data on all public procurement is on line. The underlying requirement for to open up public archives is of course is to use open document standards like XML, OpenOffice.

Yven Punis, Principal Scientist from JRC IPTS, the EU Research Centre studying web 2.0 finished the day off by a discussion on how the technology might be taken up during the next few years.

David Osimo summed up the day and by using the RSS feed from the conference site you should be able to participate in the formulation of EU’s next version of the ICT strategy when the call for crowd sourcing starts in May. Eventually all of the presentations will be available here as well.

(The conference managed to be on top of the twitter popularity roll for 3 hours when the presentations and discussions were being broadcasted in live video).

Intelligent Energy Systems

On February 24.th it was announced that IBM would join the so-called Edison-consortium.
The EDISON consortium (Electric Vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated Market using Sustainable Energy and Open Networks) consists of IBM Denmark, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Denmark's largest (National-wide) energy company DONG Energy, the regional energy company of Oestkraft, Technical University of Denmark, Siemens, Eurisco (Plant Genetic Resources) and the Danish Energy Association. Due to the environmental benefits of the electric vehicle technologies, the research will be partly funded by the Danish government.
At the Technical University north of Copenhagen a large scale computing system will be established based on websphere, SOA-technology and IBM Blades. The idea is to use this to build advanced simulation and calculation models to determine the optimum time to charge electric car batteries given the surplus from electrical windmill generators. Denmark is one of the foremost countries in the World when it comes to deployment, production and development of windmills. (See Vestas homepage)

This is perfectly in line with the Danish Government’s drive towards a consensus at the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen later this year, and it also matches perfectly with IBM’s declared strategy to support green technologies on a World Wide basis. The Green Agenda at IBM was in fact one of the most solid outcomes of a World-Wide so-called Jam, that IBm conducted with it’s 350.000 employees and more than 400 private and public business partners and customers in October 2008. The results are now being launched as recommendations, programs and new investment areas under the Smarter Planet initiative – including the Green agenda. Read about IBM Smart Planet drive

Sam Palmisano already met with Obama and his staff (click link to see video) during the transition period to advice on how technology could help save energy and how this could be matched with Obama’s vision of a turn around scheme for the US economy creating new jobs.

IBM currently is running more than 20 energy-related major innovative projects around the World, and the first one that was announced was the Island-state of Malta, home of the Templar Knights.
Here IBM won a contract to supply the small country’s energy system with more than 250.000 intelligent meters with the intention to optimize usage of electricity, balance pricing with consumption and help consumers to time heavy use of energy.

Many more projects are bound to come up – also aiming at the consumption of energy within the IT business in itself. With a projection of energy consumption going up 10-30% pr. Year, even the current IT consumption at 2% of all the World’s energy resources will soon be very visible.
The Green Datacenter is bound to be a focus item for any large organisation.

Cyberwarfare – Is the IT-infrastructure protected?

Already during his election campaign Barack Obama stressed the need to improve the protection of US against Cyber Warfare and to set up an organisation to improve protection level.

As cited by Wired in July 2008, he said:

“As President, I'll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century. I'll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a National Cyber Advisor who will report directly to me.

Once the election was over Obama and Biden declared at the transition website for the President elect what would be the policy when they took office. The key areas of an increased effort against cyberwar would be (of course) to defeat terrorism Worldwide, to prevent Nuclear Terrorism, To strengthen American bio-security and to protect information networks.

At the same level the importance of improving Intelligence Capacity and at the same time protect civil liberties (a different recepei than George Bush!) plus the objective to protect American citizens from terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Protect American infrastructure and to Modernize the aging American infrastructure.

Particularly the policy to Protect Our Information Networks seems to be a new approach, as the New President is knowledgeable and capable of understanding what Cyber warfare could really do to a modern society, where most of the infrastructure - from communication networks, Media, to trains and airplanes to power stations, to sewers and drinking water - is controlled by IT systems that may be the target for cyber attacks.

As was stated also by the Frontpage in January 2009, this policy was further defined by these focus areas:

Strengthen Federal Leadership on Cyber Security:
Declare the cyber infrastructure a strategic asset and establish the position of national cyber advisor who will report directly to the president and will be responsible for coordinating federal agency efforts and development of national cyber policy.

Initiate a Safe Computing R&D Effort and Harden our Nation’s Cyber Infrastructure:

Support an initiative to develop next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications. Work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software for our critical cyber infrastructure.

Protect the IT Infrastructure That Keeps America’s Economy Safe:

Work with the private sector to establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience.

Prevent Corporate Cyber-Espionage:

Work with industry to develop the systems necessary to protect our nation’s trade secrets and our research and development. Innovations in software, engineering, pharmaceuticals and other fields are being stolen online from U.S. businesses at an alarming rate.

Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit:

Shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.

Mandate Standards for Securing Personal Data and Require Companies to Disclose Personal Information Data Breaches: Partner with industry and our citizens to secure personal data stored on government and private systems. Institute a common standard for securing such data across industries and protect the rights of individuals in the information age.

Where did Obama get these ideas from? Undoubtedly from having studied what took place in Estonia in 2007, where a Russian led protest against the movement of a Russian war-memorial from the centre of Tallin to some outskirts initiated a denial of service attack that blocked the better part of the Estonian Financial Sector as well as most of the central and local government web sites for weeks. This in turn led to NATO’s profound interest in extending the defence lines of the alliance to include cyber war, so according to Computerworld, May 2008, NATO is launching a centre to detect, prevent and protect member states against cyber attacks.

The official NATO statement can be found here http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/05-may/e0514a.html

But President Obama’s very first task was to launch an in-depth analysis of the security threats against US, due in 2 months from now, according to The Register.:

“This 60-day interagency review will develop a strategic framework to ensure that U.S. Government cybersecurity initiatives are appropriately integrated, resourced and coordinated with Congress and the private sector.”

The importance of the coordination with the private sector is that the threat is not only being seen as directed towards the public net services, and the analysis will be a 360 degrees review. Also it is clearly stated that privacy laws and regulations and respect for personal integrity has to maintained in parallel with an increased level of security against cyber attacks.

Also the German Bundeswehr is building up capacities and a national center consisting of 76 highly skilled specialists to oversee, predict and prevent cyberwarfare. The article in Der Spiegel February 7, 2009, states that the reason for this is an increased number of cyber attacks against German ministries and public websites.

Other very recent examples of cyber warfare was the cyberattack on Israel as a result of the attack on Gaza, and even in the former Russian Republic of Kyrgystan the Government felt the anger of the hackers (presumably either from inside Russia or – worst case – maybe endorsed by Russia) to try to down the feeble Kyrgystani network before consenting anything to US’ wish to have an airbase in the country. As stated by Computerworld UK:

“Since 18 January, the two biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) in Kyrgyzstan have been under a "massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service attack," said Don Jackson , the director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks. “

The attack followed almost similar pattern as a cyberattack against Georgia during the conflict with Russia in 2008. Seems the hackers are getting their act together based on a lot of practice by now!

The Danish Super-blogger Dorte Toft noticed that as 8000 Danish net bank users were locked out of their net bank because they had been affected by the so-called ‘Donadup’ worm this clearly illustrated the vulnerability of the Danish IT Infrastructure. As the work had a clearly identifiable Russian origin, we may be looking into the same family of super hackers as the other recent cases.

In a later blog dated February 8 2009, Dorte Toft notes that Denmark clearly lacks a central organisation to supervise and protect us against massive cyber attacks, and that the way the Financial sector handled the case of 8000 infected PC’s is a clear sign of misunderstood restrictive communication to the general public.

In fact this is not the first time the attention has been brought to the need for a more coordinated defence against cyber attacks in Denmark. In May 2004 the Danish Technology Council published a report on a project called ‘How vulnerable is the Danish IT Infrastructure?’ . This report concluded that the threat is real, it is increasing and it has to be met by a ‘total defence’ view led by a coordinating organisation. A number of other practical suggestions were proposed, but only a few of them seem to have been followed. So it seems that Dorte Toft is absolutely right in her conclusion and it would be about time that the warnings from 2004 are being heard – and followed. It is not enough to rely on a NATO centre, we have to have a coordinating, practical body with sufficient level of expertise and with legal power to coordinate sector organisations like Finansrådet – The Danish Bankers’ Association - but also other sector organisations like the Telesector, the Energy sector, the transportations sector and of course Danish Industry including the IT industry.

It is not a moment too early that the Government and the heavy ministries – Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice – together with the Ministry of Technology - start to do something. They have got a clear advice not only from Teknologirådet /The Technology Council but also from the IT industry ITEK and the Danish Industry Security Committee. And from Dorte Toft as well.