Hanging
Out With The Future At Supernova
Kevin Werbach is very well connected.
After a time as an attorney with the FCC, he was an editor
for Esther Dyson’s Release
1.0. He now writes his
own newsletter, The SuperNova Report, and conducts a Werblog, at http://werbach.com/blog/
and
runs a twice-a-year conference, SuperNova.
Kevin was kind enough to invite me to chair a
panel at SuperNova II in Washington (actually Crystal City, VA) on
July 7-9. While most of
the conference is about telecommunications, especially wireless, and
communications policy, my panel was about IT and the Glass House –
so you may be able to guess that although I had lots of pals in the
audience, I was definitely off at one end of the spectrum of
attendees and interest.
This is the kind of conference that is all about
participation. There
were so many ways to participate that sometimes I was dizzy trying
to decide what to do: listen
to the speakers (who varied from pretty good to phenomenal), take
notes, check in on the various blogs and WIKIs (the conference had
its own and a wireless network to connect to), or write your own
entries. You can see
some of this, a kind of index to the electronic conversation, at http://supernova.socialtext.net/index.cgi?Blogging%20Supernova
I was endlessly frustrated because I had taken a
new tablet PC to the conference and its wireless connection could
“see” the network but somehow couldn’t connect. (It turned out
there was a miss-set button in its browser; C’est la vie, I
guess.)
And then there were the discussions going on all
around me – both while people were speaking and during every
break. These folks have
a lot to say and no hesitancy to speak their minds.
My kind of people!!!
What They Had To Say
It’s really hard to summarize because in some
sense you’re only listening to parts of it while you’re
participating in what interests you most but I’d say these were
some of my highlights:
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A general comment that while I am much more of a
control person that this meeting was designed for, I enjoyed
nearly every moment. Serendipity
and organized chaos can be the instigators of lots of
interesting thoughts.
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Lots of thoughts about what we’re doing with
wireless, bandwidth, and the management of the ether. How we might do it better.
Who might do it
better. What is
likely to happen. Note:
not lots of respect for how bigcos
or the government comport themselves.
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Reed Hundt, a former FCC Commissioner, started
off the proceedings
with some musings on how we waste money by the policy
decisions we
make, commenting on how we are continuing to spend a huge
amount of
money rolling out HDTV which the market clearly doesn’t want
while for
an equal-sized investment we could get broadband to the
“last mile” (into
people’s homes), and change how information, entertainment,
education,
and communications is delivered to everyone in our society.
He offered
several interesting scenarios as to how that might happen –
how is almost beside the point, since we have the technology
– it’s the policy, the
discipline, the organizational will that’s missing.
This turned out to be a
great set-up for a lot of what followed.
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A wonderful moment occurred when my friend John
Blair, the CTO of Kenamea seemed to be criticizing the concept of
the Stupid Network, in favor of Smarter Networks (the Internet is,
of course, the ultimate Stupid Network) and David Isenberg, the
writer of the original Stupid Network paper was right there in the
room to tell him off – politely – and set him straight.
They agreed they really were agreeing; it was a semantic
difference. When that
occurs it feels like you’re in the center of an important moment.
A moment when I truly thought it would be
necessary for some of the people in the room (myself included) to
jump out of our chairs and throttle the otherwise seemingly educated
and civil people from the FCC who at the last moment volunteered to
fill in for a missing and under-the-weather speaker.
In doing a panel with Kevin, they answered a question about
why they had not responded to the 700+ thousand citizens who had
written them negatively about their plan to further converge the
control of media in the U.S. one of them said that they were not
legislators and it was not their role to treat these letter writers
as constituents.
At a break, as we gathered around him, trying to
understand his point of view, he said that information from experts
was much more useful than thousands of letters from citizens. We were appalled. I
asked him why they hadn’t surveyed the letter writers to develop
more useful input. He
implied the job was too daunting.
I inquired as why, since any first level statistician could
have gathered a sample and done the job fairly quickly.
The good news is Congress does care that they
ignore its constituents and is reconsidering the whole thing.
Write them.
By the way, we asked the FCC panel about Reed
Hundt’s idea. They
said “we aren’t legislators.
Ask them.”
Just a few moments out of two days full of
comment on social software, changing society, changing policies,
changing technologies. No
wonder I was exhausted – and exhilarated.
Thanks, Kevin.
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