Real Time Media and its effect on the Releasing and Leaking of Data
Jim is away this week so we asked Cameron to write an article for the blog:
"Both sides of the atlantic have responded with the strongest sense of secrecy and criticism of those who made the leaks but if they were ashamed of what took place they should not have done it in the first place."
That is how Max Mosely characterised the Wiki Leaks issue On @BBCthisweek on 28 November
In recent times political and corporate spin doctors would control the issue of information in order to keep competitive advantage. Conventional wisdom stated that information should be released at the last possible moment before it would be released by another source.
"The world is changing", Mosley noted in the interview.
In 2010 with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and WikiLeaks control is an increasingly outmoded strategy. It seems that release of information early, and often, and in real time, might be a strategy more in tune with our 24x7 information society.
"...freedom of information is here to stay. The debate is about the right to lead. It should be about the right to know. The age of the government knowing best is behind us. In this digital age that does not work, nor should it. What everything ending up on the net does" concluded Mosely, "is to reduce the danger of illegality."
Consider for a moment the idea that by releasing every item of data in real time, all the time, it would be possible to exert better control over the news cycle. After a little noise about the new feed of information the sheer volume of data and perhaps the overwhelmingly mundane nature of it would make it less than newsworthy over time.
The organisation or government responsible for the feed could take principled and modern position by explaining that by releasing data, even if its negative and when they are in no way obliged to means that they are being truly open.
In actuality, this may not be far from where organisations and governments find themselves today in 21st Century Britain. Real time social media combined with the 24 four hour news networks and technologies we now all associate with normal life makes it harder and harder to keep information suppressed for any meaningful period of time.
Accepting that argument requires looking at social media completely differently. No longer thought of as a young peoples toy for organising parties, Nor an annoying fad, but a comprehensive and vital solution to engaging with the thought-to-be disinterested majority.
The Internet today provides the infrastructure for this engagement. One innovation after another has led to the state today where information is published, challenged, rebutted, alternative information provided, and completely different points of view voiced and the Internet, designed in the 70's by the defence department in the US to have no single point of failure, can not be silenced.
WikLeaks
The culture of curation and release of data and information on the internet could be argued to have began with the first collaborated website – Wikipedia. Now at over 16 million articles, it is "currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet". It has spawned countless imitations on specific topics, particularly role playing games or movie sagas, often using the same of its topic followed by "pedia" the suffix of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia, e.g. Wookiepedia - the Star Wars Wikipedia.
WikiLeaks is one of these spawns, although unconnected with Wikipedia except in use of the "Wiki" prefix from the Hawaiian word meaning "fast". WikiLeaks is a website that aims to "provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists". It claims to allow information to be leaked with out fear of reprisals particularly in government or the public sector. Providing an anonymous environment it argues the fear of sharing information is taken away. These kinds of sites mean that there is little to prevent the release of data although the promise of anonymity does not seem to apply to the prisoner in the US alleged to have given the information to WikiLeaks in this case.
Currently the big WikiLeaks story is the release of 391832 documents from soldiers in the Iraq War. It brings up potent points on the attitude and practices of the Coalition forces in the prosecution of the conflict.
The documents released by WikiLeaks have already had a detrimental effect on both the American Government and the UK Government, particularly with both the elected parties pledging for more open government. The Ministry of Defence, (MOD) in the UK condemned the release saying that it put lives at risk but has so far ignored the opportunity to engage by blocking its own personnel from accessing the WikiLeaks web site. Multizone believes that if data like this was available in real time rather than in a massive clump it would not have been of interest to such web sites and would not have generated such a toxic reaction.
The MOD position seems a quite naive line to take given that the UN's special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, told the BBC the US President Barack Obama had an "obligation" to carry out an independent and objective investigation. Things escalated sufficiently over the weekend that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg described the information revealed as "extraordinarily serious" allegations about the behaviour of US and UK troops in Iraq, specifically in handing over prisoners to Iraqi units known to practise torture.
Affirmative action in releasing detailed data at the time of events would have counteracted this.
Real Time Micro Blogging
Social Media is also a key party in the release and leaking of data, because it feed upon and demands interesting user generated content. Social networks like Twitter let anyone have their say, and voice their opinion. Facebook and Myspace were originally all about friends telling their friends about their day. Social Media is evolving and extending further into our business and citizen lives.
Real Time Social Media is all about people posting what they are doing as they do it and what they think as they are thinking it. Twitter is currently one of the greatest ways of doing this, and it is an effective was grade public opinion. While a tweet itself is rather insignificant, lots of others tweeting about the same thing will cause it to trend. You can then measure these by geographical location. An experiment measuring such tweets predicted the outcome of the recent general election at the close of the poll to within a few points. Astonishing stuff.
Twitter was used by Greater Manchester Police recently to publish 24 hours of their 999 emergency calls. While this could have been executed better (if you are interested in this you can read our other articles about #gmp24), it took a massive step forward in changing the public sectors view on social networks and publishing information. The event was planned to counter the perception that the Police are indoors filling in forms all the time.
During the event the Police received a measurable boost in public opinion. It gave people a much more informed view on the volume of calls they have to deal with, and it showed that they gave each one the same level of scrutiny and care. It starkly illustrated that the Police deal with all the issues in our society that nobody else seems to be able to handle, they are the catch-all emergency service it seems, and yet get no funding or credit for that.
It certainly showed they took their accountability seriously as they announced every single call in a paraphrased form, in real time (it is hard to fit a full emergency phone call into 140 characters). The greater manchester police received praised for showing a willingness to try new things with new technology.
Unfortunately for everyone this was only a 24 hour experiment and its value is as a signpost rather than as a continued program of engagement.
What next?
Multizone believes that Governments and the Public Sector must take a positive step forward in the use of real time social media when it comes to important information or data. We can see from the #gmp24 example above, that when the data is released in real time by the organisation concerned, the reception is positive and seen as educating the public to better understand what goes on, the organisation is also seen as taking responsibility when it comes to accountability.
We can also see clearly from WikiLeaks that if data is not released, or is released but distorted, current technologies mean that eventually this will eventually be found out and the deception if there was one laid bare for all to see. The result is a wave of negativity. Perhaps not entirely but partly avoidable.
