digital economy? – Page 13

17 September, 2015

Reblog> Digital Commons (trans. @patrickcrogan )

Here’s an interesting translation and commentary by Patrick Crogan of the Conseil National du Numérique open letter / petition on the ownership of knowledge:

Digital Commons

I’ve translated a part of a recent open letter /petition initiated by the Conseil National du Numérique in France and signed by 75 prominent professors and leaders of research and cultural organisations. The petition was published in Le Monde on 10 September 2015. The full text is available on the Conseil’s website: http://www.cnnumerique.fr/communs/ . I think there are some acutely made points here about the threats from the privatisation of knowledge by a parasitic knowledge economy, and the general ‘situation’ of knowledge today in the digital transition. I’m not so sure the rosy picture of open access in other western countries is fulfilled in practice currently (and the more nationalistic tones of the petition are understandable but a little regrettable in their competitive tone), but the potential of open access policy and law is clearly an important subject for today.

Promoting the dissemination of culture and knowledge

The commons will soon make their entrance into French law, on the occasion of the future law on the digital announced by Manuel Valls, after consultation with the Conseil National du Numérique. This is to be welcomed: the commons always feed the exchange and sharing practices that underly scientific production and cultural creation.

Science has always been understood as a common. Historically, the scientific method involves a collective construction of knowledge, organized around verification and validation by peers. The massive influx of digital technology into most fields of human activity is creating new situations. Networks facilitate the emergence of large distributed communities which can mobilize to create and share their knowledge. These common knowledges are all deposits made up of the initiatives, creativity and engagement of individuals in a collective goal. In a broader perspective concerning the safeguarding of a way of shared ownership and the collective management of resources according to a “communal” model, they form part of the natural resources managed by all the members of a community. The digital has reactivated this notion that has brought together the dynamics of the two major transitions that our world is undergoing: the protection of the informational commons as part of the digital transition and the protection of the natural commons as part of the ecological transition.

It is therefore time to give a proper legal basis for preserving the commons, and to adapt the law to right existing practices”¦.

“¦ Public domain information is made up of what cannot and what is no longer framed by Intellectual property laws. At present its protection is not very effective. Indeed it is defined in the hollow of the code of intellectual property, which makes it impossible to fight effectively against abusive IP claims over a work– this is what is meant by the term ‘copyfraud’. Examples are numerous: it is common that the scanning of a public domain work, or even simply photographing it, is used as a justification to claim a copyright on this work! Is it not astonishing – and this is a euphemism – that the Department of the Dordogne could claim a copyright on reproductions of the cave of Lascaux, 17 000 years after the death of its creators? Because it limits the distribution and reuse of works that make up the public domain, the copyfraud constitutes an infringement of the rights of the whole community.

Creating a positive law concerning the public domain is also the way to protect any misappropriation of items that cannot be the subject of an intellectual property right, such as information, facts, ideas, and principles. For instance Amazon has successfully filed a patent for photography against a white background”¦.

[[Note: see this post about the Amazon patent: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/amazons-latest-patent-is-sillier-than-the-peanut-butter-sandwich-patent/]]

“¦ Open Access, already adopted by our neighbors, particularly in Germany and the UK, enshrines in law the possibility for researchers who wish to publish in open access research articles that have been funded by public money, after a short embargo period. This measure aims to limit the dependence of public research institutions to major scientific publishers. Currently these are subject to a system of double payment, although since 2012 the European Commission has invited member States to enshrine open access in their legislation.

In fact, researchers funded by public money are mostly obliged, for reasons of visibility and career, to publish in prestigious scientific journals. They are therefore in a situation of dependency to scientific journals that now belong to an oligopoly comsisting of a few large publishers (Elsevier, but also Springer, Wiley, Nature). In order to publish in these journals, the authors are forced to give up their copyright. These same researchers also provide their expertise to shape the editorial choices of the journals. In this respect, the increase in subscription prices of journals does not appear to be justified, especially as the transition to digital has significantly decreased publication costs.

Meanwhile, higher education and research institutions annually spend more than € 80 million for access to electronic resources. And access costs have continuously increased. The access prices have also continuously increased by 7% per year for 10 years”¦. This situation severely limits the advancement of research while weighing on public finances.

But open access does not only aim to reduce expenditures of public institutions– open access has a real impact on the advancement of research, and in some cases on the preservation of public health: The team in charge of Liberia’s response to the threat of the Ebola virus were unable to access certain items because of their high costs, impacting on their ability to identify the virus early and develop faster prevention and care measures.

Other measures are needed to build an open digital environment conducive to research, innovation and creation. The provision to enable the automatic search of text data (text and data mining) is to allow for automated search methods in a very large volume of text or data; it is possible through this process to obtain results that would not have been discovered by another method. This would give new impetus to the entrance of French research into the age of big data and to realize very significant productivity gains. Other countries such as the UK, Japan and the United States have outpaced us in this area.

The real enhancement of cultural heritage occurs through its open use by the greatest number. This is also the historical mission of public libraries, which will largely benefit from these provisions. The circulation of open science helps us to face the transitions that confront us. A positive definition of the public domain and its incorporation in law will benefit the influence and standing of science and culture in the digital age. The United States, the United Kingdom and Germany have already understood this. What are we waiting for, before we also benefit from a wider diffusion of this open science and the new audiences and the new reputation it will bring?

List of the 75 signatories on the version published in Le Monde:

ï‚· Pierre LESCURE, Président du Festival de Cannes, Journaliste

ï‚· Bruno CHAUDRET, Directeur de Recherches CNRS, Président du conseil Scientifique du CNRS, Académicien

ï‚· Denis PODALYDES, Acteur, metteur en scène, scénariste et écrivain franÃ§ais, et sociétaire de la Comédie-FranÃ§aise

ï‚· Bruno LATOUR, Directeur scientifique de Sciences Po

ï‚· BenoÃ®t THIEULIN, Président du Conseil national du numérique

ï‚· Marc TESSIER, Président de Video Futur Entertainment Group et membre du Conseil national du numérique

ï‚· Alain BENSOUSSAN, Avocat Ã la Cour d’appel de Paris

ï‚· Michel WIEVIORKA, Sociologue, Président de la FMSH, Directeur d’études Ã l’EHESS

ï‚· Paul JORION, Anthropologue, essayiste

ï‚· Judith ROCHFELD, Professeur de droit privée Ã l’Ecole de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1)

ï‚· Patrick WEIL, Directeur de recherche au CNRS, Président de Bibliothèques sans Frontières

ï‚· Yann MOULIER BOUTANG, Professeur des Universités en sciences économiques UTC

ï‚· Antoine PETIT, Président et Directeur Général de l’INRIA

ï‚· Nathalie MARTIAL-BRAZ, Professeur de droit Privé, Université Paris Descartes

ï‚· Melanie DULONG DE ROSNAY, Chargée de recherche au CNRS, Responsable du pÃ´le Gouvernance de l’Information et des Communs de l’Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UPMC, Co-fondatrice de l’association Communia pour le domaine public

ï‚· Valérie PEUGEOT, Présidente de l’association Vecam

ï‚· Bernard STIEGLER, Philosophe, président de l’association Ars Industrialis et Directeur de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI) du Centre Georges Pompidou

ï‚· Sophie PENE, Professeur Ã l’Université Paris Descartes

ï‚· Daniel KAPLAN, Délégué général de la Fondation pour l’Internet Nouvelle Génération (la FING)

ï‚· Serge ABITEBOUL, Directeur de recherche Ã Inria et Professeur affilié Ã l’ENS Cachan

ï‚· Pierre MUTZENHARDT, Président de l’université de Lorraine et Président de la commission recherche de la Conférence des Présidents d’Université

ï‚· Dominique BOULLIER, professeur de sociologie, médialab Sciences Po

ï‚· Camille DOMANGE, Chargé d’enseignement Sorbonne Paris I.

ï‚· Christine BERTHAUD, directrice du CCSD, CNRS.

ï‚· Claude KIRCHNER, Directeur de recherche Inria, Conseiller du président d’Inria, Président du comité de pilotage du Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe

ï‚· Jean-FranÃ§ois ABRAMATIC, Informaticien et ancien président du W3C

ï‚· Brigitte VALLEE, Directrice de Recherche émérite au CNRS, rattachée au laboratoire GREYC (Caen Normandie)

ï‚· FranÃ§ois TADDEI, Généticien, Directeur du Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires

ï‚· Albertine MEUNIER, Artiste

ï‚· Claire LEMERCIER, directrice de recherche au CNRS en histoire, présidente du conseil scientifique d’Openedition, membre du conseil scientifique du CNRS.

ï‚· Francis ANDRE, Chargé de mission Données de la recherche, Direction de l’information scientifique et technique, CNRS

ï‚· Alexandre MONNIN, philosophe, chercheur chez Inria, membre du réseaux d’experts d’Etalab

ï‚· Colin DE LA HIGUERA, Société informatique de France, directeur adjoint du Laboratoire informatique LINA Ã Nantes

ï‚· Christine OLLENDORFF, Directrice de la Documentation et de la Prospective, Arts et Métiers ParisTech

ï‚· Nicolas CATZARAS, Secrétaire général de la FMSH

ï‚· Maurice RONAI, Membre de la CNIL, Chercheur Ã l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

ï‚· Fabienne ORSI, Economiste, chercheuse Ã l’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

ï‚· Pierre GINER, Artiste

ï‚· Christian PHELINE, Membre de la Commission d’accès aux documents administratifs (CADA), ancien directeur du développement des médias

ï‚· Valérie BERTHE, Directrice de recherche CNRS et membre du conseil scientifique du CNRS

ï‚· Jean-Pierre FINANCE, président de COUPERIN et du CA de l’ABES, ancien président de la CPU

ï‚· Virginia CRUZ, designer, directrice adjointe de l’agence IDSL et enseignante Ã l’Ecole Polytechnique

ï‚· John STEWART, Chercheur en sciences cognitives, Université de Technologie de Compiègne

ï‚· Cécile MEADEL, Professeure de l’Université Panthéon Assas (Paris II)

ï‚· Brigitte PLATEAU, Professeur des Universités, Administratrice Générale de l’Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble

ï‚· Jean-FranÃ§ois BALAUDE, Professeur de philosophie, Président de l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

ï‚· Hervé LE CROSNIER, Université de Caen Normandie

ï‚· Anne VERNEUIL, Présidente de l’Association des Bibliothécaires de France

ï‚· Sophie ROUX, Professeur d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, ENS

ï‚· Serge BAUIN, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, chargé de mission libre accès aux publications scientifiques au CNRS

ï‚· Margot BEAUCHAMPS, coordinatrice du Groupement d’intérêt scientifique M@rsouin

ï‚· Michel BIDOIT, Directeur de l’Institut des Sciences de l’Information et de leurs Interactions, CNRS

10 September, 2015

CFP> Mapping (from) the minor of big data?

Here’s an interesting call for papers for the Association of American Geographers conference next year (2016), posted to Crit-Geog by Wen Lin…

Call for Papers:

Mapping (from) the minor of big data?
AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco
29 March to 2 April 2015

http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting

Organizers:
Wen Lin, Newcastle University
Matthew W. Wilson, University of Kentucky

“The minor is not a theory of the margins, but a different way of working with material. “¦ It is about the conscious use of displacement.” (Katz 1996, 489)

“Clearly, the technology has the potential to disenfranchise the weak and not so powerful through the selective participation of groups and individuals.” (Harris and Weiner 1998, 69)

Recent years have seen the explosive growth of geospatial data produced and shared by vast, diverse users, facilitated by an array of information and communication technologies and mobile devices. There is a burgeoning body of work attempting to theorize and investigate these processes and practices, with notions including neogeography (Turner 2006), volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007), maps 2.0 (Crampton 2009), vernacular mapping (Gerlach 2014), alt.gis (Schuurman 2015), and a form of geographic big data (Mooney 2015). Significant efforts have been made to examine a range of issues derived from such phenomena regarding ways of mapping, data quality, and associated socio-political implications concerning power, equity and knowledge. Attention has been given to the empowering and emancipatory potential of new ways of mapping and storytelling, while questions have also been raised about possible implications of surveillance, population control, and unevenness of knowledge production.

Yet, there remains much to be known about those mapping efforts that are seemingly on and in the margins of ‘big data’, from those less active contributors, or by actors in relatively marginalized positions. Such efforts may constitute counter-hegemonic knowledge production (Harris and Weiner 1998, see also Elwood 2015) or may be alternatively understood as a kind of minor data (to draw upon ‘minor theory’ in Katz 1996).

This session intends to contribute to these vibrant discussions by engaging with documenting efforts of mappings and data construction that might be of a much smaller quantity in the wake of big data. We welcome papers addressing theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigations of these mapping efforts situated in a variety of contexts. Questions may include, but are not limited to:

How might we engage with mapping the minor in the context of big data?
In what ways are data generated, represented, or curated by those who might be from a more marginalized position in these mapping efforts?
In what ways are geospatial technologies used, reconfigured, or contested in these mapping efforts?
In what ways is knowledge (re)produced in these mappings?
What are the challenges of tracing and documenting mapping efforts from the margins?
What might be the broader implications of these accounts?

If you are interested in participating in this session, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Wen Lin (wen.lin[at]ncl.ac.uk) and Matthew W. Wilson (matthew.w.wilson[at]uky.edu) by Friday, 2 October. Please note that we are attempting to bring alternative perspectives and positions to this discussion, in alignment with this recent manifesto on the gender and racial composition of AAG panels (http://www.knowledgepolitics.org/2015/09/07/the-unbearable-white-maleness-of-aag/).

References:

Crampton, J. 2009. Cartography: performative, participatory, political. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6): 840-848.

Elwood, S. 2015. Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction. Cartographica, 50(1): 45-49

Gerlach, J. 2014. Lines, contours, legends: coordinates for vernacular mapping. Progress in Human Geography, 38(1): 22-39.

Goodchild, M. 2007. Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69: 211-221.

Harris T., Weiner D. 1998. Empowerment, marginalization, and “community-integrated” GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 25(2): 67-76.

Katz, C. 1996. Towards minor theory. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 14: 487-499.

Mooney, P. 2015. An Outlook for OpenStreetMap. In J. Jokar Arsanjani, A. Zipf, P. Mooney, M. Helbich (eds.) OpenStreetMap in GIScience: Experiences, Research, and Applications. Cham, Springer, pp. 319-314.

Schuurman, N. 2015. What is alt.gis? Introduction to the Special Issue. The Canadian Geographer, 59(1): 1-2.

Turner. A. 2006. An Introduction to Neogeography. O’Reilly Media, Sebastapol, CA.

10 September, 2015

Round-up of the Programmable Cities Data & the City Workshop by @mhaklay

A great couple of posts offering an overview of the Data & the City workshop over at NUIM just before the RGS-IBG conference last week, very much worth reading:

Data and the City workshop (day 1)

Data and the City workshop (day 2)

Plus, there are some videos of the first session over on the Programmable Cities website. Here’s Rob Kitchin offering an interesting and informative overview of histories and key issues for studying data in/and cities:

8 September, 2015

Coded language online

By which I mean code as cipher or ‘secret’ (sort of) rather than code as in mark-up…

The UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre and ParentZone maintain a website for parents called parentinfo.org that has recently published a guide to “online teen speak“, with the rationale that parents should know what their children are up to.

There are some entertaining examples and it just goes to confirm I am now ‘old’ because I simply don’t recognise some of this stuff…

Now, in a way I have some sympathy with this rationale insofar as anyone (not just people of a given age bracket) can be naive in their behaviour through mediated communications. Whereas the more established risks of rumour and defamation might feel more distant the risks of the permanence of anything one posts online and its potential to spread unimaginably quickly are much more immediate and can be forcefully, sometimes tragically, felt.

Nevertheless, depending on your political persuasion, one might feel that there ought to be some limits to the oligopticon; that perhaps we ought not to be spying on one another all the time. It is thus striking that the rationale for ‘safety’ (in this case the entirely justified concern for the safety of our children) matches very closely to the sort of libertarian ‘nothing to hide’, radical transparency ideology of both the advertising moguls/data sharks at the helm of corporations such as Facebook and the supporters of technologies such as the blockchain. It is interesting (to me anyway) that the bounds of the conversation around privacy have moved so much in only 10 years… When the Labour government talked about introducing a national ID card around 2005ish, campaigns such as No2ID garnered a lot of support based on an appeal to arguments about personal privacy that are already (perhaps) beginning to seem slightly irrelevant, if one has maintained a use of Facebook, Google, Dropbox, PayPal, loyalty cards etc.

There is, of course, a significant difference between the perceived threats to ‘privacy’ by corporations hoovering up our data and the risk to personal safety from those with malign intentions – and I certainly don’t want to overly confuse the two… but the same rationale for an national identity card – to catch those with undesirable intentions – sits behind the perceived need to surveil our children and, indeed, was the rationale for ContactPoint here in the UK. This takes some very careful and nuanced unpacking (although it has attracted press commentary, e.g.) that I don’t think I’m best-placed to do here, but I wanted to record a reflection on this anyway.

The other thing that occurred to me while reading the press coverage of the guide to ‘teen speak’ was that this really isn’t new. As was made very evident by an episode of Fry’s English Delight on BBC Radio 4 the other week – there is a very, very long history of secret languages, and these are often used by groups that feel in a minority, or are a clique… from back slang, or ‘pig latin’ to medical slang (says the person most likely to be TTFO). But the power of these dialects is that they are secret – so what will a handy guide to them being published online do… we shall see… I’ll wait to hear from friends and colleagues with children that fall within the age group…

As an aside, ParentZone are convening an interesting looking conference in October on the Digital Family… worth a look if you’re that way inclined.

4 September, 2015

Reblog> CFP An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Over on the OII blog for the ‘Connectivity, Inclusion and Inequality Group’, Jo Shaw has posted an interesting CFP for the AAG in San Francisco next year. Andy Merrifield will make an awesome discussant!

CfP at AAG 2016: An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

After presenting our paper on the same theme at ICCG 2015 in Palestine, myself and Mark Grahamare planning a session for the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting in San Francisco during Spring 2016. The session aims to provide a space for discussion and research that seeks to ask what a ‘right to the city’ looks like in our increasingly digital world. Interested contributors should read the call for papers below and drop myself or Mark an email to express interest.

An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Organisers: Joe Shaw and Mark Graham (University of Oxford)
Discussant: Andy Merrifield

Henri Lefebvre (2003:251) once talked of the right to information as a complement to the right to the city. Since then, information communication technologies have become integrally embedded into much of everyday life. The speed of these developments has also obfuscated many changes and processes that now envelop and define the urban experience. This includes changes in systems of abstract spatial representation through geographic information, and the economies surrounding this information as a commodity. The representations which are produced and mediated through this digital information are now contributing to an urban space that is densely digitally layered (Graham, M., M. Zook, and A. Boulton. 2013). These digital ‘abstract’ spaces are essential to the production and re-production of our socio-economic world (Lefebvre, 1991). From Wikipedia to Google Maps and TripAdvisor, the code and content that relates to a building is now potentially as important as its bricks and mortar. These processes raise new questions of spatial justice and the urbanization of information: Which spaces are seen, and which are hidden? How is information produced, for whom, and who consumes it? How does information change material places? Who are the powerful actors in these events, and who are powerless? And finally, is the broader concept of an ‘informational right to the city’ now required? If so, how should it be envisioned and put into practice? This session invites submissions concerned with the production, consumption, and governance of urban geographic information, and it encourages research and reflections that seek to rethink what informational rights we have in our hybrid material/digital cities.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. (D. Nicholson-Smith & D. N.- Smith, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). Henri Lefebvre: key writings. (S. Elden, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman, Eds.). New York: New York.
Graham, M., Zook, M., & Boulton, A. (2013). Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(3), 464–479.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) or Joe Shaw (joe.shaw@oii.ox.ac.uk) by Friday 2nd October 2015. Successful submissions will be contacted by 9th October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.

28 August, 2015

Reblog> Days numbered for barcodes (according to Reuters)

A sort of interesting story from Reuters on an apparent growing demand for information by consumers that they suggest may lead to the demise of the low-fi barcode in favour of QR [really?! still trotting out that old nag?] and RFID… so, nothing people like Bruce Sterling haven’t been saying for quite a while but sort of interesting how it’s couched…

Days numbered for barcodes as shoppers demand more data

BERLIN | BY EMMA THOMASSON

Barcodes are seen on a package in London August 27, 2015. REUTERS/RUSSELL BOYCE

Growing demand for more information about the products we buy could mean the end of the simple barcode – the blocks of black and white stripes that adorn most objects for sale and are scanned five billion times a day.

First used on a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum in 1974 in a store in Ohio, barcodes have revolutionized the retail world, allowing cashiers to ring up products much faster and more accurately, while also streamlining logistics.

But shoppers are now demanding far greater transparency about products, and store owners need more information to help with stock taking, product recalls and to fight fakes. The basic barcode is just not up to the job.

That could mean a costly upheaval for retailers and brands to change packaging and invest in new systems and scanners. But it should also bring benefits as more data helps them manage the flow of goods better.

“The barcode did a great job, but it is now time for succession,” said Capgemini consultant Kees Jacobs, who is working with the world’s top retailers and food manufacturers to try to agree new global standards for labels and product data.

“The current barcode is not sufficient to be the carrier of much more granular information that is needed,” Jacobs said.

The most ubiquitous barcodes allow an eight to 14 digit number to be read by a laser scanner. For example, barcode 4-003994-111000 identifies a box as being a 375 gram pack of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

However, that number does not directly capture any other information that might interest a shopper – such as ingredients, allergens or country of origin – nor does it provide a retailer with useful details such as the batch number or sell-by date.

That data is usually printed on the pack, but consumers increasingly want to read it online, or with a smartphone app such as one that measures calories. Retailers want data that can be scanned for tasks such as quickly locating faulty goods for recall or about-to-expire products for mark downs.

SUSTAINABLE AND SAFE?

GS1, the non-profit organization that assigns the unique numbers in barcodes, has developed a double-layered barcode it calls the “data bar” which can carry some extra details such as expiry date, quantity, batch or lot number.

That has allowed German retailer Metro (MEOG.DE) to launch PRO Trace, a smartphone app that shows, for example, that a filet of salmon on sale at a store in Berlin on Aug. 25 was caught at the Bremnes Seashore fish farm off the coast of Norway on Aug. 17 and processed in Germany on Aug. 21.

The app also displays a map highlighting the fishing area of the catch and a detailed description of the Atlantic salmon.

Metro says the app helps customers at its cash-and-carry stores such as professional chefs from hotels and restaurants, as they can now embellish their menus with information about the exact origin of pricey delicacies such as wagyu beef.

“We are the only ones in Germany that can do this for fresh fish. It’s about trust. Our customers challenge us to offer sustainable and safe products,” said Lena vom Stein, a corporate responsibility project manager at Metro.

Metro set up the tracking scheme to help it comply with European Union regulations aimed at stemming overfishing and started making the data available to customers in 2012. It now extends to meat, and fresh fruit and vegetables will follow.

Other retailers are also opening up, often supplementing the barcode with a pixilated square known as a quick response (QR) code. It can store dozens more data points and can be scanned by a smartphone camera to lead to a web page, but can still not be read by the majority of store scanners.

Dutch retailer Albert Heijn (AHLN.AS) recently introduced “Check Origin” QR labels on locally-grown radishes and blueberries. Scan the sticker on a mobile phone and it plays a film that rewinds to show the journey from the shelf back to the packing factory, then back to the farmer’s field.

Such tools are likely to fuel demands for more transparency. A GS1 survey found consumers are most interested in nutritional and ingredient information, details on allergens, organic certification, environmental impact and ethical standards.

HARMONIZING DATA

Making such a wealth of data accessible via codes that can be scanned is only part of the problem. A bigger challenge is gathering, storing and standardizing the information in the first place.

Fiona Wheatley, sustainable development manager at British retailer Marks and Spencer (MKS.L), says keeping tabs on all the company’s suppliers can be a daunting task.

“Your ability to give your customers more confidence that they can rely upon is proving to be increasingly challenging,” she said, adding that M&S relies on certification schemes such as Fairtrade to help audit smallholder farmers.

David Linich, supply chain expert at consultants Deloitte, advises retailers to find ways to work together to monitor the thousands of producers they buy from: “If you go it alone it can be really burdensome, really cost prohibitive.”

The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), a global network of some 400 retailers and manufacturers from 70 countries, is coordinating efforts to harmonize product data and labeling.

Most firms accept that more transparency is needed after scares such as the 2013 scandal about horsemeat being sold as beef in Europe, but it is still proving hard to persuade them to share data that many see as commercially sensitive.

Capgemini’s Jacobs, who is working on the CGF project, hopes pilot schemes to standardize digital information, like one between rival retailers in Belgium including Delhaize (DELB.BR), Carrefour (CARR.PA) and Colruyt (COLR.BR), could be the precursors to new global data standards.

GS1 already holds data from 30,000 companies on some 18 million products that its industry members share with each other behind the scenes to smooth logistics.

It is trying to persuade its members to let consumers access more of this information, while keeping some of it confidential, such as detailed pricing and stock levels.

Malcolm Bowden, president of global solutions at GS1, predicts agreement could come quickest – within a year – on sharing nutrition data as there are already broadly accepted standards, and calorie and allergen apps are proliferating.

“The will is there. It has to happen. Like any major change, big companies have to have time to think through the implications,” he said.

GS1 is also working to create identifier numbers for individual farms and is trying to harmonize standards on sustainability data, such as a measure of water efficiency for detergents and washing powders currently being piloted.

But making such a wealth of data available will sound the death knell for the barcode. Only a QR code can carry that much information without taking up too much space on packaging.

Longer term, more products could carry wireless tags such as the RFID labels that are being widely rolled out across the fashion industry. These tiny tags, which can be embedded in an object and, unlike a barcode or QR code, do not need to be within the line of the sight of a reader, were long too expensive for everyday goods but their price is falling fast.

Bowden predicts different systems will probably have to coexist for the next decade or so as retailers and logistics providers gradually upgrade their scanning systems.

“I am convinced we will have a day where pretty much all information about all products will be available to all consumers,” he said.

(Editing by David Clarke)

27 August, 2015

BBC’s “Future-proofing” radio programme on blockchain – pretty good!

I happened to be driving at around 8ish last night and the car radio was by default on Radio 4 so I caught a bit of the latest programme in the ‘FutureProofing‘ series. Ordinarily such things tend to annoy me, cos I am grumpy, but listening to the programme about block chain last night I confess I was rather impressed. Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson present an interesting account.

Blockchain is a difficult thing to explain and harder still to attempt to articulate how it might be used, beyond the libertarian goals of particular uses of crypto-currencies. The programme last night excelled in this regard covering lots of interesting angles. They end up having an interesting debate about politics and government.

There’s some interesting interviewees too:

Janina Lowisz (‘blockchain girl’) – ‘ambassador for bitnation‘

Mike Hearn – software developer & bitcoin advocate

Nathaniel Popper –journalist, author of ‘digital gold’

Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof – CEO of bitnation

Steven Lukes – Prof. of Sociology at NYU

Vinay Gupta – of the Ethereum (blockchain) project

26 August, 2015

Silicon Valley’s libertarian capitalism and Burning Man

I’m a fan of Fred Turner’s work – especially his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture that charts the shift from hippy-like communalism to libertarian cyberculture by Stewart Brand and a few other Californian countercultural torch-bearers associated with the Whole Earth enterprise.

In the book Turner outlines the ways in which the rhetorics of a kind of collectivised, networked utopian society became a rationale for a non-hierarchical way of living using internet technologies and a basis for offering strategic business advice about how these new technologies would ‘disrupt’ the status quo of contemporary life (and thus are a business opportunity). The book is, of course, more nuanced than that and it is well-worth a read!

In a separate journal article, around the same time, Turner charts out how a similar logic underlies the Burning Man festival and how this resonates with the core beliefs of those at the top of Google. Peer production and re-finding the social value of your labour using the kinds of communal working models that came out of the counter/cyber- culture nexus emerges as a key value at Burning Man, as people make and share and gain notoriety & kudos accordingly. But the article sort of paints too-rosy a picture of the benevolence and horizontalism of Burning Man.

For, we can also see how the ethos of peer production and forms of free labour has been something that Google has exploited from day one (they don’t make ‘content’, they index it and sell adverts alongside it back to us, who make it). And as the Valley millionaires increasingly use Burning Man as the highlight of their social calendar, and do not sully their own hands in ‘contributing’ to the festival but employ others to do so, we can see how that exploitation spreads…

In a recent article in Jacobin Keith Spencer compellingly articulates how this exploitation of forms of communalism is the basis for the creation of a wealthy elite constructing themselves as the benevolent harbingers of a different kind of society.

Burning Man foreshadows a future social model that is particularly appealing to the wealthy: a libertarian oligarchy, where people of all classes and identities coexist, yet social welfare and the commons exist solely on a charitable basis.

Its worth reading all of the above, but definitely read Spencer’s piece in Jacobin.

25 August, 2015

Amazon as the exemplar of authoritarian employment..?

Just a quick post to park two related things here on the blog in order to return to them…

First: this story on Fusion:

The Amazon Way: Why the data-driven workplace is a nightmare which describes a corporate culture driven by personal and collective analytics that overrule any consideration of hard-to-measure or qualitative considerations… and how that is prosecuted through a hellish kind of managerialism.

Second: This list/story on The Grauniad:

Why the workplace of 2016 could echo Orwell’s 1984 which essentially lists any and all kinds of personal surveillance technologies–currently marketed as ‘quantified self’ and other kinds of self-knowledge tools–and packages them up into some kind of nightmare version of the Amazon managerialism explored above.

What’s interesting? I think its interesting how a particular version/vision of the future of work plays out between these stories that strays close to a form of technological determinism and exemplifies an influential way that ideas about work, and how it may change, are being discussed.

Digital Commons

Mapping (from) the minor of big data? AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco 29 March to 2 April 2015

CfP at AAG 2016: An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Mapping (from) the minor of big data?
AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco
29 March to 2 April 2015