Stuart's blog

A bit of a late post on yesterday’s goings on now, starting with the workshop on a legal survey of Internet censorship and filtering. IFLA representative Dr. Sohair Wastawy was presenting at this session and she concentrated on the situation relating to Egypt and other Arab countries. It was a great presentation, taking in everything from why censorship takes place and how, to trends across the region. I will try to post the slides and the paper online as soon as I can.

Other panelists addressed different regions such as West Africa and Europe, and Robert Guera from Freedom House in the US introduced their latest report ‘Freedom on the Net‘, a survey of Internet freedom in 15 varying countries. It can be downloaded for free here. Good discussions followed, including a good example of public pressure to change overly restrictive Internet laws in Pakistan, and a brief digression on the use of IP law as a censorship tool. Sohair was almost mobbed at the end by appreciative audience members who stepped up to congratulate her on her presentation.

In the afternoon I checked the session on Openness, Privacy and Security in the main hall, with a heavy emphasis on the balance between privacy and security. My favourite speaker on the panel however, Bruce Schneier, made some perceptive comments about how we are actually talking about liberty versus control, and how privacy can actually be a way to more liberty (think of a tall fence, or a door lock). What really stuck with me though was something that I heard mentioned again later in the day in a youth forum on the same issue – that people only really care about privacy and security issues on the Internet once something actually happens to them personally. Until then we seem to be happy spreading our data shadow everywhere. If you are interested in reliving the session, the transcript of the whole thing is here.

Strong words uttered by the editor of the new GIS Watch report, Alan Finlay. The report is being launched here at the IGF in about five minutes, and I urge all of you in an interest in IGF topics to download a copy or get your hands on a print copy as soon as you can. Not least beacuse the kind people at GISWatch asked IFLA to contribute a piece on libraries worldwide from IFLA’s perspective, which you can read if you download the report. Right, off to the reception…

I’ve had a look at few sessions today and will report later, but for now here’s a mention of some controversy which is currently going on at the IGF. The BBC has the full story here but in brief: UN officials apparently took down posters for the new book on Internet censorship ‘Access Controlled’ that was being launched by the Open Net Initiative. This is undoubtedly connected to mention of China’s Great Firewall and Internet censorship in the promotion for the book. There has been a bad YouTube film of the incident circulating, and everyone seems to be talking about it. As Ron Deibert from the Open Net Initiative (quoted in the BBC article) says “If we are not allowed to discuss topics such as internet censorship, surveillance and privacy at a forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the IGF?”

This year’s opening ceremony and session followed the same format as last year: – ministers from the host country (this year including the Prime Minister) welcomed everyone, reminded us of the importance of the Internet, encouraged us to have free and frank discussions etc. ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure, who last year made some rather pointed remarks on ICANN and the future of the Internet, then made a more uncontroversial intervention this year in which he urged a move towards access, use, creation and sharing of information being considered basic rights. In light of the well-known controversy about peer to peer networks I was particularly interested in his mention of ‘sharing’.

After this we had two short keynotes, one from Tim Berners-lee (a busy man today) who launched the World Wide Web Foundation live on stage via a tweet, and one from Jerry Yang, one of the co-founders of Yahoo! who gave us plenty of numbers illustrating the Internet’s growth since Yahoo! began (90,000 new websites per day!).

This was the end of the opening ceremony but we were back in the hall within 15 minutes to hear multiple presentations from various dignitaries from governments, business and civil society, notable for a shared theme of enthusiasm for the IGF and support for freedom of access to information and an open Internet. With the IGF’s mandate up for renewal, the steady stream of endorsements for the Forum, from Viviane Reding at the EU, Rod Beckstrom at ICANN, the US Ambassador to Egypt etc. it’s fair to say everyone here (note that there are some countries, like China, who have previously stated that they do not feel the IGF should continue) wants to the activity to continue. Recommendations will be made to the UN Secretary General, and he will publish his thinking on this next year.

After that it was all about the utter confusion that getting transport anywhere at an IGF involves. This year is exactly the same as last – a total lack of information about hotel shuttle services, website information being completely at odds with the real situation, taxi drivers with no meters who are charging the earth to go five minutes down the road (our hotel is next door to the venue, and it costs 7EURO to go 2 mins in the car. The hotel shuttle can take about 35 mins to do the same journey and there is no guarantee you’ll find it) and, well, general confusion. I did manage to make it to the gala dinner at another hotel but failed to find Sohair and Omnia in the confusion (the dining tables had one candle each, so i could hardly see what I was eating, let alone see my dining companions). Still, the strawberry fruit juices were pretty nice.

Lunchtime on day one. This morning I attended a session on mobile Internet issues which had some interesting points but overall lacked a bit of cohesion. Surprisingly to me, the audience was rather small, despite the hot topic and the presence of Tim Berners-Lee on the panel.

The presentations varied a bit, from a technical discussion of mobile Internet access in Ghana, to what comes after 3G connectivity (answer: 4G. Or something called LTE (Long Term Evolution) which will be rolled out by 10 telecommunications companies in the US next year and will significantly enhance a future online experience where data traffic will be driven by video applications), to what sorts of policies will be needed as things such as m-health, m-payments and m-learning become more popular. In his presentation Tim Berners-Lee emphasised the need for open and neutral networks if the mobile web is take off properly (which he said it will, and most new Internet users in the coming years will come online using mobile – 92% of the mobile handsets sold in the last year had an Internet browser function). Still, my take-home for this session? That in the short term in developing countries, the future belongs to SMS for information dissemination.

The second session I attended was titled Privacy, Literacy and Social Networking. It was organised by UNESCO and while the concepts being discussed were familiar (how to educate Internet users about the privacy rights online and the implications of information sharing via social networks, what sort of regulation is needed to protect users’ rights, how to better harness the technology to embed privacy into applications, generational differences to privacy) the panelists were good and the audience involved. I made an intervention on behalf of information literacy training in school libraries, mentioning this article in the New York Times about how the school library was an excellent place for the discussion of online privacy issues amongst children learning to go online for the first time. I also mentioned the InfoLit Global website that IFLA has put together with UNESCO to provide access to information literacy issues. What I will be following up on is the extent to which privacy is covered in library information literacy training – its clearly a big issue as we move forward into the age of user-generated content and social media.

Some housekeeping: for those of you who wish to remotely attend the IGF, the live text feed is here, and the live webcast is here. Enjoy.

OK, more soonish. Time for the opening ceremony..

And we’re off. Registration successfully completed yesterday and a rendezvous with the other members of Team IFLA: Dr. Sohair Wastawy and Dr. Omnia Sadek. A quick planning session later, and we were ready to go. Right now I’m at the venue, as usual 100s of people in dark suits (despite the heat), and a wide variety of croissants and juices available in the lobby. We divided up the sessions between ourselves yesterday, and I right now I am sitting waiting for the session on Mobile Internet issues to begin. Will report on this and other sessions later, but for now, a quick picture of Team IFLA:

IFLA Team for the IGF2009, l to r: Omnia Sadek, Stuart Hamilton, Sohair Wastawy

So it’s been quite a day to get to this point…up at 4.45am to brave the rather intense security situation at Tel Aviv airport (casualties last time included my nearly-new laptop (dented) and digital camera (broken beyond repair)), at the gate raring to go to Jordan for my connecting flight to Sharm El Sheikh by 6.30am, finally on board the plane at 10am after delays for fog. A quick stopover in Amman and then on to Sharm. I was expecting at least some mention of the IGF on arrival at the airport but – nothing. No helpful people bearing signs, no sign of the promised shuttle service to the hotel, nothing. No cashpoint even! It was at this point I started wondering if I was actually in the right place at all, and had in fact booked myself a holiday by the Red Sea without realising it…

Because, make no doubt about it, this is a holiday destination. It’s a tremendous looking place from the air, with the Sinai mountains on one side and some of the world’s best diving waters on the other. Sharm sits between the two, a sort of oasis of what looks like 2000 different hotel complexes all vying for a bit of the beach. A rather strange place for a global high-level conference on Internet governance*.

But Internet Governance is why we are here, and its a busy few days. My prolonged stopover enabled me to really review the programme and documents (Tel Aviv joins Cairo and Vienna as two other airports I know with free wi-fi, by the way, anyone know any others?). This year looks like a good programme indeed, even if some of the sessions seem to replicate each other a little – there are three copyright-related sessions and I don’t know which to choose. You can check the workshop schedule here and the main sessions here. IFLA will be represented by Dr. Sohair Wastawy from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in one session on A Legal Survey on Internet Censorship and Filtering and I’ll be on the panel discussing the promotion of Freedom of Information in Internet Governance. We also have a whole session on libraries, the cultural sector and copyright, where our colleague Ben White from the British Library will represent, alongside others. I noted from the participant list that we have lots of colleagues from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dr. Sadek from Oman, Sanjay Bihani who was with me last year in Hyderabad, and a gentleman from the Zambian Library Association who I shall definitely be tracking down.

Anyway, more on substance tomorrow. For now I am just glad I am online. I am in an official IGF conference hotel, awaiting the arrival of some of the biggest policy makers and geeks in the Internet universe, and it doesn’t support Macs. I am typing this on a loaned laptop, and have had the poor IT support group of the hotel working all afternoon to try to get my computer online, bless them. They were great, but I’m not impressed with the conference organisers so far, to be honest…

*When work is done, I shall indeed do a very library holiday thing. I will visit this place for a day. Libraryholidaytastic!

Our session at the Minerva conference took place this morning from 11.30 – 13.00. Prior to that I sat in on a session about APENET (Archives Portal Europe) and access to the Swedish National Archives’ digitized collection (AKA the Sondera project)…not something I deal with regularly, but as an ex-Medieval studies student I found the post-presentation discussion very interesting. The idea of crowdsourcing the archives’ users to deal with tricky issues such as unintelligible scripts was very novel to me. Anyone who’s ever tried to read a medieval manuscript, and who doesn’t have amazing paleography skills, will know how difficult it is to interpret the text. By providing an option for digital archive users to post their transcripts of the documents this problem can be tackled, using the expertise of someone infinitely better at paleography than well, most of us.

And this wasn’t the only crowd-sourcing thing I came across today. After our session, which discussed some of the problems of using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on Arabic text, an audience member came up to me and suggested that we might want to look at some of the work of the reCAPTCHA project (”Digitizing books one word at a time”!). This project utilises those verification systems (CAPTCHAs) we have all used at some point, the bit on a website where it asks you to look at a wavvy image of a word and then type it into a textbox. Get it right and you are not designated a spambot and can proceed to register for the charity race or buy that toaster you have always wanted etc. The reCAPTCHA project tries to solve the problem of imperfect OCR in digitisation projects by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. The findings are channeled back to the digitization project. There’s a lot more about the workings of it here. Our audience member suggested it might work for Arabic scripts – I can safely say that no one on our panel had thought of this and its something we could look into…

So yes, the session, despite some inevitable technical problems, went well and we had plenty of questions and interested folk at the end. I’ll be adding the PowerPoint presentation to the IFLA website at some point when I return from this trip, but for now let me say that we heard about projects to digitise Palestinian newspapers at two libraries, the Givat Haviva Peace Library in Israel and the Al Aqsa Mosque library in East Jerusalem. IFLA, through the FAIFE Committee, has been supporting both projects to share experience and expertise to develop best practice in the digitisation of Arabic newspapers. There is still plenty of distance to go before these projects become truly successful, and this will depend on how much more support we can get for the activities – historical Palestinian newspaper collections exist in several archives in Israel and Palestine (they are also found at the Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv, Nablus University and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem) and increased communication and co-operation between these institutions, and those elsewhere dealing with digitisation of Arabic script, would really move the project forward, and perhaps even have an exponential effect on access to information through Israeli and Palestinian libraries and archives. We are hoping that the work between Givat Haviva and Al Aqsa might lead to something bigger.

Thanks today must go to Merav Mack of the Van Leer Institute for all of our panel organisation, Dudu and Samira for coming down from Givat Haviva to give presentations, and Qasem from Al Aqsa for his great presentation also. And to everyone who came up afterwards, lots of new contacts…

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to this blog but I’m hoping to make up for that in the next 10 days or so. It’s time once again for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and this year it’s taking place in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt (yes, the world of international Internet governance conferences is hard). For those of you not familiar with the IGF, I refer you to last year’s introduction here.

Before I start with all that though, I’m off to Israel to give a short presentation at the Minerva digitisation conference. IFLA’s FAIFE Committee has been supporting a small project to digitize Palestinian newspapers and I’ll be talking more about that in subsequent posts.

Right now I am at Amsterdam airport, with a blister on my thumb. Last night at 10.45pm I locked my new suitcase for the first time and promptly changed the three digit combination lock by mistake. Not good. At 11.15pm, after going through over 600 different combinations, I managed to get the darned thing open again. My thumb resents me for the amount of times it had to push the open button…

Anyway, more on the blister later. To the plane…

IFLA and the IPA recently issued a joint statement on Open Access. It’s been endorsed by the American Association of Publishers and some their reaction can be found here.