I was reading one of my favorite
thought leaders on system-level IT (Irving Wladawsky-Berger blogs here) and I was compelled to read the paper he referred to and tell you all about it.
The paper is by ID3’s executive director John Clippinger and policy
strategist David Bollier and it was presented at a recent D.C. workshop on the
legal implications of digital media innovation.
The premise of the discussion is
one of my favorite topics to gripe about.
Government is too slow to have any chance of regulating a single fast moving
technology domain effectively. Imagine
what would happen if they tried to govern the whole thing!!!
So Clippinger and Bollier
propose what they are calling Digital Common Law. It is a bottom-up self-regulating approach
that takes the need for big government out of the picture. Let each digital community create its own
rules and regulations, imbed it in the software, and make it transparent to
users. Give users enough control to
manage their own privacy and security.
Make sure the technology infrastructure enables trusted relationships
and permeable boundaries with other systems (I think this means low switching
costs so if you are unhappy with the community you could easily take your
business elsewhere).
Some additional recommendations
they make are to leverage the Big Data approach to get both business and social
value out of the data that the system collects.
And to use bottom-up (even within each individual community) management
so that users have control of the terms.
Disputes could be resolved internally or if necessary at the small
government level.
Irving WB notes at the end of
his blog that he is “struggling to wrap my head around the implications . .
.” If he is, I don’t expect to be able
to explain all of the details, benefits, or dangers of this approach. But I agree wholeheartedly with him that it
has the potential to be transformational.
