Ariel Waldman Spacehack.org
	Kirsten Sanford This Week in Science
	Jessy Cowan-Sharp NASA
	Natalie Villalobos Google
	Tantek ‡elik tantek.com

How can you contribute and collaborate in open science?

You can go outside and look at birds! There are several websites that you can contribute to that will help scientists track bird population.

ScienceForCitizens.net is trying to bring together lots of different open science projects.

Galaxy Zoo is great for people at all different levels. You can classify galaxies from home. It gives you a picture of a galaxy, and you identify and classify galaxies. If you do a lot of them, then you unlock a button that tells the scientists when something about the galaxies looks strange, and they will help you do research on them.

Team Frednet is an open source team participating in the Google Lunar X Prize to build a robot that will go to the moon, get data, and send it back. They need help from lawyers, designers, and project managers, not just scientists.

Websites like infochimps will let you upload data about how you use the web.

Hacker Dojo is one of many hacker spaces throughout the Unites States. Hacker spaces have become a movement for open science.

Fold.it is a protein folding game. Playing the game helps scientists understand different ways that protein can fold.

	Amy Sample Ward NetSquared
	Beth Kanter Beth's Blog
	David J Neff Lights.Camera.Help.
	Holly Ross NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network
	Kari Saratovsky The Case Foundation

Short stories about crowd sourcing

Beth
Beth started a blog called spider school. She was writing about how nonprofits can use the web. She would get emails from people she didn’t know pointing out grammar errors and typos. She decided to start a feature called spider school police and give a digital badge to anyone who found typos or errors.

Amy
NetSquared facilitates offline events all around the world. Amy organizes a group in her city, and she tries to ask people to speak, but people don’t self-select to speak. One month we didn’t have any speakers, so we asked people for recommendations. They came through with programming for a whole year.

Holly
It’s been imperative for NTEN to utilize the community to keep up with technology trends.

Kari
Case Foundation opened up to the public and encouraged them to get involved in the grant solicitation. People provided feedback on applications, and they finally did a crowdsourced vote of who should get grants.

David
David has recruited volunteers. He has also built a website to allow people to tell their cancer stories including stories, video, and artwork.

About the panel
All the content for this session has been crowdsourced, including the powerpoint presentation. They launched a social media for social good case studies. It had a submission form which they opened in January. They had a ranking system so that people could rate the case studies. We selected case studies based on that ranking and the focus of the panel. They didn’t have funding for the panel, and it actually took very little effort to demonstrate to nonprofits how easy it is.

The Hybrid Model
The hybrid model has been a popular method of crowdsourcing. There is some good and some bad that comes in when you start crowdsourcing. The hybrid model has some responsibility with “experts” and some responsibility with the crowd.

Freerange Studios
Freerange Studios did a project called utopia where they did $30K worth of free work. Anyone could enter, the audience narrowed it down to the top twenty, and then they made the final decision for which project they wanted to work on.

Seattle Free School
The Seattle Free School uses social media as the entire operation mechanism. The idea is that it’s free to teach and learn within the community. It’s how they operate and how they grow. They use social media to distribute the roles of the members, so there’s no mail or fliers. It was even created through social media.

Invisible People
Invisible people is very good at story telling, helping people understand that homeless people aren’t different or scary. They crowdsourced who they should interview. The most amazing thing about the project is that he is unafraid to look away from an issue that almost everyone else looks away from.

Open Green Map
Open Green Map helps communities map themselves. Community members can enter any locations they consider to be green, like bike racks, eco-friendly restaurants, etc. The whole project is open source, so you can take the code and use it for any mapping project. They are actually creating change in their community.

Trends in submitted projects
The organizations who participated were not household names. Most of them mentioned that they had no marketing budget, and they relied on the power of social media and their communities.

Open Street Map
Open Street Map allowed people to add streets to a map. It is the main application being used by relief organizations to share which roads are accessible and blocked.

The Uptake
The Uptake covers Minnesota politics, and they livestream and let people comment in real time. Using the time stamp on the comments, the editors could easily find the video highlights and put them together.

When does crowdsourcing suck?
Anytime the legal department is involved. Any time you are writing by-laws or mission statements – things that need to be carefully worded and come from within the organization.

How can we use crowdsourcing to add value to the target population?
Crowdsourcing is one of the values that we have as social change organizations. We have to live by our values, and not just voting online, but actual online collaboration. The community will tell you what sort of research they want to accomplish together.

How do you prevent crowdsourcing from being a resource suck?
Crowdsourcing within a community is already part of the way a community operates. If you’re crowdsourcing to the crowd, you’re probably doing something simple like an online vote.

Netflix prize
Netflix has offered a prize to individuals who can improve their recommendation algorithms.

How do you convince your senior management that some of the best ideas come from outside your organization?
There are huge benefits to build community. You are bringing great people into the process. If your management doesn’t get it, then quit and bring your resources to an organization that gets it.

How do the panelists define crowdsourcing?

Amy
I’m not the best at everything, and I have to trust people outside my brain and empower them. An expert is someone who has a really good network.

Holly
Some problems should be solved by experts, but sometimes experts lack diversity that only large crowds can provide.

Kari
It’s a recognition that you can tap a wider audience than might exist in your own organization.

Jeff
There are smart people outside your organization. You should tap that potential.

How do you get people to work for free?
It provides value to them. They get to work with a community, which makes everyone more effective and efficient. But you shouldn’t ask for people to provide professional services for free. That’s disrespectful.

	Patrick Fox Razorfish
	Becky Gibson IBM

Accessibility is all around us in the real world – curb cuts, access ramps, closed captioning. Accessibility is and should be ubiquitous. Accessibility benefits all of us – we watch closed captions when we’re watching a basketball game in a bar, we use curb cuts for strollers and bikes.

Semantic HTML is the foundation of accessibility. Your markup should indicate where headings, menus, links, etc. are. The essential part of making javascript accessible is to start with a normal page with good markup, and add the javascript afterward in such a way that the page looks normal with javascript turned off.

The sxsw website, for example, is completely reliant on javascript for its functionality. It’s unusable with javascript turned off. Also, rather than identifying the links as links, they are divs with a javascript “onclick” command. They should at the very least have anchor links.

You can use style sheets to show content if the user has javascript disabled, and hide it if the user has javascript enabled.

You should provide both mouse and keyboard events so that users can navigate with keyboard only.

Don’t mess with the functionality of the browser – don’t change how the up and down keys work, how the tab key works, etc.

There is a program called WAI-ARIA that is working on making web 2.0 accessible. It transmits data to assistive technologies (ATs) like screen readers informing the AT what sort of element it is looking at. So if you have a menu with collapsible sections, the AT would recognize that and alert the user.

ARIA also makes items “focusable,” meaning the AT can look at specific elements using tabindex.

ARIA can alert the user if ajax has updated any part of the page. Users can turn off the updates, make them “polite” – meaning that it waits until the AT is done reading or completing it’s current task, or make them “assertive” – meaning that it interrupts whatever is going on.

Examples of ajax updates would be autosaving a blog post and new email arrival. A screen reader user set on “polite” would hear that they have new mail after the screen reader finished reading out the email that it is currently reading.

ARIA works on JAWS 10 and Firefox 3.

To interface with ARIA, your page should have different regions which are identified by a “role” attribute, such as “main,” “banner,” or “navigation.” When the user looks at the page with a screen reader, the screen reader will tell the user what regions are on the page and allow the user to choose a region using the keyboard. The page can indicate to ARIA which regions are “live,” meaning that they might be updated by javascript or ajax. ARIA will watch those regions and alert the user if they change.

However, the page should still determine whether the user has javascript turned on, and serve them a static page if they do not.

Coding for ARIA does take more time, but JavaScript Toolkits have ARIA integrated so that it happens automatically.

Dojo is an open source javascript toolkit that fully supports ARIA.

	Serkan Piantino Facebook Inc
	Alan Schaaf Imgur LLC
	Kevin Weil Twitter
	Christopher Slowe Reddit
	Jason Kincaid TechCrunch

Imgur was released a year ago on Reddit. It was on a shared hosting plan. It lasted two days before the site was terminated for generating too much traffic. The site went down. Imgur moved to Mediatemple. That lasted three weeks, so they moved again, and again. Imgur moved four or five times in four months, scaling up to a better server with more bandwidth. Imgur went to foxhole.net, a content delivery network, because they have servers all over the world. That allowed the devs to concentrate on making the site faster rather than keeping the servers up.

Reddit is running on EC2 using about 50 machines. They have 20 app servers. They got a big speed boost by going single-threaded. They use Postgress and memcache.

Twitter started as a rails application tied to a single MySQL database. They have an open source queuing system, so they can do asynchronous processing.

A lot of the core architecture behind Facebook is still LAMP. They run newsfeed, ads, and search all on separate servers. On Facebook, you’re typically friends with 0-5000 people, whereas on Twitter you can follow millions of people, so they can render everything on the fly where Twitter can’t.

What is Reddit using for indexing?
They roll their own indeces using memcachedb. They are getting a .02% failure rate with that.

At what point are LAMP stacks not enough?
Knowing when a machine needs to be replaced is tough. Facebook has a monitoring system set up with alerts and teams dedicated to figuring out where they will have scaling problems before they have them. Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.

How do you scale search?
Search is really hard. The metric you are measured against is Google, which is a ridiculous standard. Reddit does about two queries per second. Getting quality results is really hard to tweak. It’s very qualitative in terms of what is “good” search.

What was the first thing that blew up?
Imgur had apache blow up first. “It was like trying to hammer a nail with a sledgehammer.” Twitter originally put the whole social graph in a MySQL database, but it was getting into the billions of rows. They had to build their own social graph store. They are in the process of open sourcing it.

What modules is Facebook using to convert PHP to C++?
They built a project called hiphop which compiles all their php down to binary C++. There are whitepapers about it, and it’s open source.

How do you deal with deployment?
Facebook and Twitter use BitTorrent to deploy builds to all their servers, cutting deployment from 12 minutes down to 30 seconds. Reddit cobbled something together in perl.

Why haven’t any of you used proprietary databases?
We prefer to work with open source. As you deal with scaling problems, you have to peak under the hood and see what you can tweak. Calling a vendor is a pain. Oracle is expensive. We like to be nimble and play well with the community.

I’m mostly here because ACLU of Washington definitely deals with issues of creating/curating/editing content. We have dealt with this so far by having weekly standing meetings where the techies enter the content into the website as the writers create it. This strategy does take up more of people’s time and “bandwidth” (i.e. they can’t multitask), but it has significantly decreased missed deadlines, and minimized the endless editing problem, as the writers are less likely to send in edits on something if it’s already up on the site, and they’re less likely to change their mind about how they wanted to phrase something if they just came up with the phrasing five minutes before it’s put up on the site. I’m curious what strategies Brain Traffic uses to skin this cat.

Turns out that “ftw” is “for the web,” not “for the win.”

Content online is like the piles of trash in WALL-E. Most of it is crap, but some of it is cool and interesting, and he collects that, and when he finds a friend, the first thing he wants to share with her is all the cool stuff he’s found. That’s what we all do through social media.

The twitter stream for this talk is freakishly worshipful:

@halvorson is a content goddess and an amazing presenter
Kristina Halvorson lights up my life!
I’ve written “I love you” on my eyelids Indianna Jones-style for @halvorson’s talk.

Srsly. I’m a little worried about these people. Maybe they’ve just been in panels so long that they’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome?

Now she’s bitching about how her clients don’t give her enough time to write content. That’s probably accurate for most copy writers.

Copy is unintuitively complex. It’s easy to gloss over 40 hours of work as “that ‘about us’ part of the site.”

Edward Tufte was a breakthrough because he used design to communicate information without text.

Early in the project management projects, information architects will identify what content they will need, and they think about content the same way they think about features. They look at building a great house with a lot of buttons, but we didn’t engage the people who will be using the site. Content is not a feature. We can’t just check off pages on a spreadsheet and call them done. It requires ongoing care and feeding.

Late, poor, and disorganized content is just a reality of the web. We’ve been taught to just accept that, but we can strategize to minimize these issues.

Make sure there is someone in the organization whose fault it is if the content sucks. Make sure that person is at every kickoff meeting.

Text is much more mutable than pictures or video. We need to focus on every word written on the site and make sure that there is a consistent strategy.

Strategy isn’t just “what is on the website?”, it’s “why are we creating it?” “how is it being created?” “how is it being consumed?” and “what happens next?”

Messaging isn’t a tagline, it’s the understanding that we want to impart on our users when they are done interacting with our content.

The Quicken site doesn’t convey that it will help you feel more in control of your money. It’s just shots of different editions of the software. It’s telling the customer that Quicken wants them to buy something, not that Quicken can actually help them.

The Mint.com site on the other hand has an example graph of expenditures, copy that talks about being in control, saving money, and getting out of debt.

Quicken focuses on Quicken. Mint.com focuses on the user. Content strategy helps you identify what your messaging strategy is, and content will flow from that.

Does your content achieve your business objectives and your user’s goals?

You can’t be reactionary about your content. You can’t put something up just because it’s new or just because what was there before is old. You need a larger strategy.

REI did a great job of creating new fresh content by outdoors experts. The topics are closely targeted to the questions that customers ask in the store.

Room and Board’s mission statement says that they work closely with the builders and users to make sure that the furniture is useful. Their website reflects that by creating content from the people who are interacting with builders.

You can’t just give the writer a wireframe and tell them to go to work. The writer needs to know about the audience and the overall intent, otherwise the writer will include everything that anyone might look for by clicking to that page.

You need to take down old content. The swiffer page on youtube is for a campaign that ended in 2008, a broken graphic, and a notice that the last time anyone from swiffer logged in was 9 months ago. It’s like being invited to a party and finding an abandoned house.

Content strategy forces you to take a cold hard look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Websites exist to house content. The reality of content is that it’s messy. It requires infrastructure to keep it clean and current.

Stuff you can do to fix this problem:

1. Audit. You have to know what content you have online. Where are you inviting people to interact with you? Make a spreadsheet that is the complete inventory of your content. What’s the low hanging fruit? What’s redundant, outdated or trivial?

2. Ask. If you are asked to write copy, ask why, and you will be invited into meetings earlier and earlier in the process so that you can understand why someone thought this was important.

3. Analyze. Take a high level view of your content ecosystem. What are your users actually doing? What are your competitors doing? What are trends in your field? Your content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is affected by many things out of your control.

4. Alignment. The content strategist sits between several different departments and process phases. It is your responsibility to make sure everyone is in line with the larger goals.

5. Assume responsibility. You should begin to see happiness in all the stakeholders. You should see your metrics improving. You should see better SEO.

Tenure is a big problem. Imagine trying to run an organization where anyone who has been there for six years gets to stay forever and you can’t fire them. “Change comes funeral by funeral.”

K-12 is accelerating. Many things that used to be taught in college are being taught in high school and even middle school. Florida has a “senior to sophomore” program, where seniors can get credit for their freshman year at college during their senior year of high school.

Students and especially parents are beginning to have a consumer mindset. They have many choices for schools and programs and a lot of data available to them, which changes the amount of marketing that universities have to do.

The open courseware movement is one part of the attempt at that marketing. Open up courses to the general public, and you will get notoriety among parents and students. Stanford has their courses on itunes. As more apps come online for mobile phones, we are seeing more and more educational apps, which are currently being evaluated and rated by everyone who uses them, which crowdsources the task of finding the really good ones.

Google books, Wikipedia, and blogs are starting to disrupt the textbook industry. Professors understand the textbook problem, and they are likely to send their students to the internet to acquire information that used to require the purchase of a textbook.

Students are starting to share notes online and vote for who takes the best notes and reward them with points or even money.

There are now entire universities that are exclusively online. Business and computer science degrees are the most common. Because of the low cost for implementation, tuition is around $100.

University of Phoenix has 150,000 MBAs studying with them right now. The largest meatspace university programs only have a few hundred. These degrees are taken seriously in the job market.

Professors have begun to become experience designers, who have the opportunity to leverage the internet while also meeting in a classroom. Student success is the ultimate goal. Having a degree is not enough to assure success. They need to have experience blogging. They need to have a substantial professional web presence. They need to be able to speak publicly in succinct, ignite-style format, and in long-form keynote-style format.

Universities are starting to work together so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Some universities are starting to have exchange programs with other universities in different areas of business, silicon valley, hollywood, manhattan, etc.

Bennington has gotten rid of their departments. They are focusing instead on questions. What do we do about water? The university is structured into teams of people with different skills working together, rather than departments which become echo chambers of people with all the same skills constantly working together. The “question” model is much more similar to the workplace environment.

	Alissa Black City & County of San Francisco
	Dmitry Kachaev OCTO Labs/DC Government
	Noel Hidalgo New York State Senate

I had no idea there were state governments that are so open! New York was the first state senate to adopt Creative Commons. They even send out their web traffic bi-weekly via RSS. They have built idea generator applications and put them under a GPL 3 license.

Alissa Black uptalks! She says that they built out a platform for different departments of the San Francisco city government to submit datasets that would be released freely online, but departments didn’t do it. So they then implemented a scorecard for each department. They have an internal city-wide wiki called citypedia! They pushed open source software adoption through the procurement side. They created a policy that says if a department is evaluating a software purchase over $100K, they have to investigate open source.

OCTOlabs created a contest asking developers to create open source government data applications using one of three government APIs. They have found that if you wait to have complete datasets, you will be waiting forever. Partial datasets should still be put up online. There seems to be a dillemma in that the return on investment of open government is very difficult to measure, so it’s very difficult to draw attention to. They are trying to build a community of people who participate in government through various applications and use that as proof that the program is working.

Audience questions are after the jump!
Question time!

How do you address the digital divide?
Nearly all households have phones, so any online systems or in-person town halls have 1-800 phone numbers that households can use to participate. There are also several initiatives attempting to get inexpensive broadband into low-income communities.

Why isn’t there a red state representative on the panel?
California has a republican governor. Lots of red states are working on this issue as well. It’s a bipartisan effort.

What’s the difference between egovernment and Government 2.0?
Egovernment was about distributing government services online. Government 2.0 is about getting government data online.

How have you avoided some of the worst headaches of the work you do?
They try to find “change agents” in each department who can plant the idea that open government and open source software is important.

Can you talk about open311 apis? How are you going to work together to solve interoperability issues?
It’s really hard to collaborate with other city governments. We meet at conferences, so we are able to identify each other and get a channel of communication going. As we create future versions of our software, we will attempt to make them increasingly similar and interoperable.

What have you done to get cities to collaborate?
The open planning project has helped various city governments to collaborate and they facilitate regular conference calls. Once you’ve talked to someone on the phone, it’s more likely that you’ll call them if you have a question or an idea.

Are you using crowdsourcing programs like peer to patent?
Ideascale and uservoice are both sites that New York has used to get ideas from citizens. DC collects feedback online about how people feel about the job that the city government is doing.

How do you deal with the fact that people can organize against every single government initiative as initiatives become easier to access?
Both sides can organize, for or against. The only people who are really skewing the representation are people with a lot of time to come to policy meetings.

Sarah: The internet has had a revolutionary effect on societies worldwide, yet academia seems to have utterly failed at documenting and studying it. Why is this such a difficult field to study and how can we get solid research on the ecology of the web?
Tim: The classic response to this is one you really hear a lot: stodgy old ivory-tower fogies don’t think the internet (and internet culture in particular) is important enough to study. While I think there is some truth in that stereotype, I have to say that I think there’s more to the story than just that — after all, there’s plenty of progressive, “with-it” folks in academia that see the value in exploring this space. In spite of this, the fact that universities remain slow to pick up on digital stuff I think suggests a deeper problem in the organizational element of the whole picture. The hierarchies of authority, the standards around publication, and the flexibility of creating and halting projects, all conspire to make it difficult for academia to keep up with the changing ecosystem of the web. Moreover, academic institutions are locked in a system of grants that often tie their hand with regards to what they can spend money on and invest in, which makes them inflexible and slow. We’ve been trying to experiment with new organizing models with The Web Ecology Project, and have been really excited about how things have been going.

Sarah: #iranelection seems to be the first meme that went globally mainstream. It worries me that the meme was almost entirely dependent on Twitter. They could have been DDoS’d or hacked, or paid to shutdown for a week. Are memes vulnerable to their platforms, or would the meme have carried on elsewhere if the platform went down?
Tim: Luckily, memes often aren’t completely platform dependent, so that the shutting down of any particular online space where cultural phenomena is happening won’t necessarily kill it completely. That being said, it’s true that certain platforms make particular activities /easier/ and that the amount of influence or attention that a space commands (or a given user commands in that space) is significant in powering the spread of a practice or an idea online. The “leakage” of memes depends to some extent on the the ease of users to adopt new platforms or their existing membership across platforms. So, there’s a bunch of variables — all told, it looks like from our research that it depends alot on the particulars of a situation. For the Iran Election, I think odds are it would have appeared elsewhere (though potentially in less visible spaces), given the media attention and the activist activity surrounding the event.

Sarah: Where do you see the future of nonprofits moving? It seems like we have to be increasingly agile to move at the speed of the web, to the point that restraints such as narrow mission statements or hierarchical management structures simply can’t compete. You’re involved in the Awesome Foundation, which has just about the broadest mission statement I’ve seen and zero management structure. Is that the future? Can it get even more agile than that?
Tim: The Awesome Foundation tries to keep it real. How many times have people applied for grants, only to try to cloak their real intentions of “hey wow wouldn’t it be great if…” from the granting organization? We’ve tried to eliminate that, make it easy for people to be honest about what they want support to do. There’s an advantage in that, particularly as we’ve tried to pursue lightweight structures that make it dead simple to apply and get money (we actually give the money directly, in cash). Think there’s two possibilities going into the future. One is to be exceedingly lightweight and broad, essentially what we’ve done with the Awesome Foundation. The other is to go entirely the other way — to craft incredibly narrow, incredibly curated groups. However, both of these disperse anti-foundation foundation models have only experimented with relatively small groups and small stakes so far. I think a big question going forwards is — can this scale? How much larger can these models get in terms of people and dollar amounts before they break down? Or is the future just an enormous, disperse framework of highly nimble granting groups? One thing seems clear: old non-profits seem increasingly slow to jump on supporting emerging efforts at the earliest stage.

Sarah: How do we solve copyright?
Tim: Sure, there’s GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, and a whole host of thought, projects (and arguments of the most vicious kind) that have gone into trying to figure out how to repair the structure of intellectual property more generally. Beyond quibbling about the details or whether so-and-so solution is better than that-or-this proposal, I think what all of them have in common is so key is to view the law as a space to be innovated on and experimented with. There’s an inherent risk-averseness to the law and lawyers, and a norm that limits the extent to which people feel they can craft new entities within the law. Though really, there’s no reason for that — even such established entities as “the Corporation” were the creations of legal innovation (really, legal hacking) at some point. This is what’s kept copyright behind as the entire environment has shifted around it — I think what’s necessary is for a shift in thinking about the law as open-ended to possibility and active manipulation in the same way Creative Commons constructed a new interface with the law, rather than something that’s a closed and static.

Sarah: What is it about the internet that makes some people incredibly vitriolic? What is the driving motivation behind youtube comments and death threats to prominent bloggers? Can we change the motivation structure somehow to make people more humane without sacrificing anonymous speech?
Tim: There’s two parts to this. On one hand, there’s some sense that the vitriol and assholery that typifies YouTube comments are actually just part and parcel of the aesthetics of communication on the web. So, there’s a part of me that says to not feed the trolls, take it in stride, move on, etc etc. On the other of course, this flavor of social interaction on the web is occasionally at odds with getting things done, and as you mentioning can be bordering on real danger in the form of death threats or otherwise. Not to make light of this, but I’ve always been fond of Randall Munroe’s proposal of having YouTube comments read back to you before they are posted. It points at the need to leverage design features in online spaces to adjust and shape human interaction. We’ve been looking into this at the Berkman Center with Yochai Benkler’s work — the general idea is to examine a broad range of cases in a quantitative way, and figure out the relationship between these structural features and how people collaborate (or don’t) together.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community. Today is the last day to vote!

Me

Brian Rowe

Dave Olson

Tim Hwang

Evonne Heyning

ACLU

Creative Commons

Web Ecology Project

Beth Kanter

Katharine Woodman-Maynard

Kelly Sutton

Amy Sample Ward

Leif Utne

Riana is a 2009 graduate of the University of Washington School of Law. She lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has two cats and never enough books. Lawyerly Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are solely her own and in no way reflect the opinions of her employer.

Sarah: The internet evolves so much faster than the law that the law has become virtually irrelevant online. How do we change the process of legislation and litigation so that it can keep up with the internet?

Riana: OK, go ahead and put the hardest question first, why don’tcha. This question assumes that it’s desirable for legislation at the state and national level to keep up with the Internet… I’m very wary of Internet legislation due to enforceability problems and the inherent arrogance of trying to impose local laws on an international system.

Maybe the first thing to recognize is that the Internet is a complex system onto which our traditional legal regimes map imperfectly. We can apply “meatspace” legal schemes pretty easily to some behaviors on the Internet, but the nature of the Internet — the nuts and bolts of how it works, and how the various digital tools and technologies we use work — means other regimes are a bad fit. We can’t take a “one size fits all” approach, so rather than look at it like one monumental entity called THE INTERNET, legislators must take the time to understand the technologies they seek to regulate. This is why I’m glad the current administration has created a CTO position. I would like to see something like that in every state, too, since certain states (*cough* Utah) have a fondness for passing boneheaded laws regarding the Internet.

The Internet (in all its nuances) does move fast. I don’t expect legislators, who have to be jacks-of-all-trades, to anticipate what the next disruptive technology is going to be. We have more than enough laws as it is; existing laws can often cover online behaviors, obviating the need to pass a fancy new law. Legislators need to recognize when there is actually a need for a specific new law, and when they can leave well enough alone. Any time you write a new law, you have the usual problems of what language to use. Narrowly targeting a certain technology in a law means the law can be applied only narrowly. At the same time, using language in a bill that’s too vague or too broad will cover things the legislation wasn’t intended to cover. As I said above, I think if legislators really understand the nuts and bolts of the technologies, they can figure out whether broad or narrow language is called for (after first deciding that there is a need for a new law at all). For example, the federal wire fraud statute was written to cover telephones and TV, but the term “wire” applies just dandy to the Internet. On the other hand, the copyright laws were written for tangible, physical “copies” of books and pictures and so on; MP3s threw a monkey wrench into the situation. So to legislators, I say: first, understand the technology you’re talking about; second, think hard before you decide you need to make another law just for THE INTERNET; third, know your place and don’t get grabby. Exporting your state’s Internet laws to other states gets real awkward real fast, and when it comes to federal law, extraterritoriality is generally a bad idea.

For litigants, “don’t get grabby” is also a good lesson. I place a lot of trust in the judiciary to see how new situations fit within laws written before those situations arose. However, courts must be on the lookout when prosecutors or plaintiffs try to stretch laws to cover conduct that doesn’t fit. Look at the Megan Meier Myspace suicide case: the prosecution got jurisdiction in California, half a continent away from where the events occurred, and they used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which Congress passed in 1984 and meant to cover hacking, to nail the defendant to the wall because they couldn’t actually charge her with murder. The jury went along with the prosecution’s theory, saying that you can be convicted of a federal felony if you don’t follow a website’s Terms of Service! Luckily the judge threw out the verdict and said he would acquit the defendant, Lori Drew, though that’s not final yet. Like I said, I place trust in the judiciary, but for a judge to throw out the decision of a jury is a big deal. So if anything I’d say that litigants need to step off. As said, we have reams and reams of laws in this country; if there’s already a law of general applicability that covers your situation, don’t go misusing some law for your case just because your case involves THE INTERNET.

But your question implicitly referred to the fact that all litigation takes forever and can’t always keep pace with technology. Although it is a threat to my career as a litigator, I hope that alternative dispute resolution looks more favorable to would-be litigants because the Internet is so fast-paced and litigation so glacial. Litigation should be a last resort, not a first resort; working with users, website operators, and ISPs to resolve problems should come first. However, the Internet’s not a polite place. The threat of using such alternative processes rather than litigating is the risk of disgruntled parties doing an end run around due process, like with the abuse of DMCA takedown requests. So we do need safeguards. But the fact that we can’t see each other online doesn’t mean that there isn’t a reasonable human being on the other end of the wire. Just as in “meatspace” legal disputes, freakin’ talk to people before you sue them. Maybe it’ll solve your problem faster than an expensive lawsuit would.

Sarah: How can nonprofits attract young lawyers? The College Cost Reduction Act and the recession seem to be helping, but are there specific perks that appeal to our generation that might encourage people to work for a less money than they would make at a firm?

Riana: First, let’s assume that a) the cost of a law school education is only going to increase and b) our broken health care system isn’t going to get fixed anytime soon. Debt and health care worries, which have a huge impact on American workers as a whole, not just the legal profession, mean that nonprofits aren’t about to be able to compete on salary and health care plans with the Biglaw firms. So there must be other ways to get people to work for less money.

Nonprofits offer way better hours than law firms. That’s the biggest thing. A more laid-back working environment, where you can be yourself and not worry about being bland and well-dressed when you spend most of your time behind your computer, is number two. Offering flex time and telecommuting, so people can arrange their days in the way they personally are most productive; sponsoring volunteer projects, a “green” workplace, and an in-house baseball team; offering child care at work — none of these is alien to law firms. But having your evenings and weekends to yourself, plus being able to actually use your vacation time (and not make it a “working vacation”) — that’s something Biglaw can’t give you. “Our generation” has been denounced for being slackers, unwilling to work hard. We are willing to work hard. We just don’t believe that we need to be slaves to our jobs, or that job performance can be measured by wearing a tie every day and having your ass in the office chair promptly at 9:00.

Also, a nonprofit is inherently about a cause. Working for a nonprofit means you’re working for something you believe in. This is a politically active, engaged generation that bristles at being asked to leave morals behind at the office door. At a law firm, you could end up on case teams representing clients you find morally bankrupt. When I was interviewing with law firms for summer jobs, I definitely took into consideration who their clients were. No, not all nonprofit clients are nice people, even if it’s a good cause you’re fighting for. And yeah, when you work for a cause, not for a paycheck, you’re signing up to get into political infighting, worry about the hit to your organization’s image if you join some wacky organization’s amicus brief, and maybe burn out. A nonprofit has its own problems and politics. Anybody going to work for a nonprofit needs to know that. But I think that there’s a lot to be said for going to sleep every night knowing you’re putting some good in the world through your work, not just helping some company make money. That’s not a value unique to our generation, of course, but let’s try to keep that idea alive while we’re still young.

Last, this is a generation that is ubiquitously connected to people all over the world. A nonprofit can encourage its lawyers and employees to use Twitter, blogging, and other tools to promote the organization – all within the bounds of confidentiality duties, of course! You see lots of companies floundering about what to do with social media — they feel like they should use these tools, but what do they have to say? A nonprofit can muster up attendance at an event, raise money, spread news, ask for help or feedback… the list goes on. We can get the viewpoints of people in other countries, get real-time information, monitor public opinion about the nonprofit’s cause. We already tweet and blog and Facebook our way through our days; a nonprofit can tell us that our social networks are valuable, instead of chastising us for wasting time online that we should be using to bill a client.

Sarah: There seems to be a divide in digital culture between people who believe strongly in a right to anonymous speech and people who think that information is useless unless it comes from a credible (and thus identifiable) source. Can these two viewpoints be reconciled?

Riana: Anonymity is extremely valuable and always has been in the history of speech in America and elsewhere. Likewise pseudonymity, which seems like one way to reconcile these two viewpoints. The Internet has made pseudonyms ubiquitous, and it is possible to build credibility under your pseudonym, for example as a Wikipedia editor or as a book reviewer on Amazon.

This isn’t to say that pseudonyms don’t have their own set of problems. We’ve seen that people can hide behind pseudonyms in ways that range from the fairly innocuous, such as authors’ giving good reviews to their own books on Amazon under assumed names, to the actively harmful, such as Whole Foods’ CEO’s use of “sock puppets” to speak ill of rival chain Wild Oats.

Fortunately, the Internet calls for everyone to participate, rather than merely to read passively. Reputation is what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself. If others can vouch for the information or opinion that you give, that makes your pseudonym-identity more trusted. Yes, you can give your own book a good review on Amazon, then create more sock puppet accounts and give your review the thumbs-up so it looks like lots of users found Joe Reader’s review helpful. But detailed information says more than a thumbs-up. Moreover, any website that makes user-generated content a core competency will invest in ways to reduce and expose sock puppet sneakiness.

Plus, speaking of technology, we have ways of letting other people know that you’re you. We have OpenID for posting to websites. PGP keys for your e-mail. Heck, we have hyperlinking. You want to build credibility? Link to your sources to verify what you’re saying is true. (This gets kind of recursive: you linked to a NYT article; why should I trust the NYT? But let’s not go down that rabbit hole just now.)

Technology isn’t infallible. Your e-mail account could get hacked, whatever. I don’t think that technology, law, or social norms alone can keep speech on the ‘Net free. I think those things have to work together. The courts also act as a safeguard for protecting anonymity online. In fact, today when I was writing this, the D.C. Circuit, which is an influential court despite having jurisdiction over such a small area, handed down a decision containing guidelines for when anonymous online speakers should, or should not, be unmasked: http://arst.ch/6di I think the courts can figure this stuff out (eventually). But as the court opinion notes, standards are all over the place from state to state; in some jurisdictions it’s very easy to unmask your John Doe defendant. That’s why I’m glad we’ve got technologies such as remailers and Tor. If you want to build a reputation online, we’ve got tools for that. But when you want to hide, we’ve got tools for that too. And beyond that, it’s up to everybody as citizens to uphold the tradition of anonymous speech in this country.

Sarah: Does this new generation of law students, who are never offline, communicate differently with each other than previous generations? Is there more collaboration? How has the internet changed the way that students research and process information?

Riana: Sure we communicate differently. We IM each other during class and play Attack! on Facebook against each other. We comment on the lecture we’re sitting in, too. The Socratic method is prevalent in the law school classroom, where you just sit and get lectured at instead of having a discussion where the students are invited to participate. If we can chat with each other online during class, we can comment on the lecture and exchange opinions and ideas even if the professor doesn’t provide time for student commentary.

Is there more collaboration? I don’t know. I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel — I didn’t do group work much in law school. There has, however, been a lot of interest by librarians and professors in enhancing their pedagogy by using wikis and bulletin boards for class projects. I’ve seen those be very useful. We can use wikis to share research, drafts of papers, links to useful resources, etc. We can use bulletin boards to have more discussions outside class, or to post news stories relevant to what we’re studying at the time. Plus, you don’t have to panic over missing a day of class. Professors podcast their lectures; students e-mail their notes to friends who are out sick or caring for a child. Being online helps us help each other out.

As to research and processing information, I think the Internet is a big time-saver but also dangerous. It used to be that if you wanted to find out if a case you were reading was still valid, you had to pore over other tomes to make sure. Now we have little flags on cases in Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis to alert us if there is authority contrary to the case’s holding, or if the case has been overturned, affirmed, whatever. That is a huge time saver.

On the flip side, we get lazy and use Google or Wikipedia when we should use more trustworthy sources. (Back to the recursive question of why should you trust a particular source. Never mind.) Finding something on Google is faster and easier than fashioning just the right query in Westlaw. Yet we rely pretty heavily on Westlaw and Lexis too: having those resources online, for “free” while we’re students, is addictive. When you’re at a real job, a subscription to those databases costs a lot of money. Every query you run costs money. This is public court opinions and legal statutes we’re talking about – government products that are in the public domain! But the databases add features and searchability and then package up these public documents and charge an arm and a leg to access them.

That’s why I’m glad that services such as Public.Resource.Org, which put cases and laws online for free, are on the rise. I think that every 1L research and writing class should make students as familiar with these free online resources as they are with Westlaw and Lexis. If you go work for a nonprofit that can’t soak up the cost of your poorly-formed Westlaw queries, you need to know about the free alternatives. (And you should also keep in mind those things called books, which are found in places called law libraries.)

Sarah: Our generation is, for the most part, happy with exposing their entire lives online. Is privacy dead? Is there any chance of creating a pro-privacy youth movement?

Riana: I think it’s moribund at least. It is my biggest worry. The Supreme Court and courts of appeals have chiselled away at privacy over the past few decades, and laws passed “for your own good” continue the erosion. But services such as Facebook are the biggest threat to the continued vitality of privacy as a core value in America. The legal keystone for privacy is “reasonable expectation” of privacy. All you have to do, whether as a legislative body, a court, or a popular cultural phenomenon, is quietly move the goalposts so that what once was reasonable is now paranoid and uptight. Facebook has shown us how very easy it is to do that. With people my age and younger exposing everything online, we’re in danger of totally losing the ideas about privacy that our parents took to be the norm.

The obvious way to create a pro-privacy youth movement is to show them that what they say online can hurt them in real life. Hey look, you lost your job because your boss saw the photo of you partying on the day you called in sick. But that takes the insidious viewpoint that privacy is only for those who have something to hide. Privacy lets us grow, think, reflect, retire from the busy world and the eyes of others. It has value beyond keeping embarrassing things secret. I think that getting young people in their teen years, right at the point that they’re doing a lot of growing, thinking, and reflecting, is where we need to focus on building a pro-privacy youth movement. We used to keep diaries under the mattress, not on LiveJournal. We can show young people that privacy gives them a way to be sad, to think about crushes, to hash out beliefs and opinions and change their minds; to talk to other people, hold political views, rent movies. To retire from the world and not worry about what other people, or the government, think about you; and also to interact with the people and things around you in a limited way, out of the spotlight. That it’s not just about having something wrong or bad or ridiculous to hide.

But is there a good chance of doing this? I don’t know. Facebook has a lot more money and resources than EPIC does. I admit I think privacy is going to become ever more of a “has-been” in this century. But hey, I’m a pessimist. And working for privacy means more job security for me. So when you’re looking for people to go talk to middle schoolers, sign me up.

Update: In the Lori Drew case Riana mentioned, the judge did finally overturn the jury verdict and dismiss the case.
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The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Riana, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Riana on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community.

Photo credit: Franz Cheng