Response to EU Ombudsman's Consultation on TTIP Transparency

The EU Ombudsman is running a consultation on how to improve the transparency of the TTIP negotiations.  This shouldn't be hard, since there is currently vanishingly small openness about these secret talks.  However, to keep things simple, I have just one very easy suggestion, as my response to the consultation below explains:

My name is Glyn Moody, and I am a journalist who has written over 40 columns on TTIP (available at http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/ttip-updates--the-glyn-moody-blogs-3569438/.) My comments are based on following trade negotiations closely for many years, including those for TPP, TISA and ACTA. Please find below my responses to the consultation's questions.

1. Please give us your views on what concrete measures the Commission could take to make the TTIP negotiations more transparent. Where, specifically, do you see room for improvement?

There is one one very simple measure that would make the TTIP negotiations highly transparent without limiting the European Commission's ability to keep its negotiating strategy secret - something it claims is necessary.

This would be to make all EU documents and proposals public as soon as they are tabled.

There can be no objection that this will reveal the Commission's strategy to the US side, since the latter can, by definition, see all documents once they are on the table. Releasing them to the public would therefore reveal nothing that the US negotiators did not already know. The US cannot object, since it only concerns the EU proposals, and reveals nothing of the US position (not that this should be secret.) In short, no one could possibly object, unless, of course, the real purpose of negotiations being held behind closed doors is precisely to keep the public ignorant of what is nominally being carried out in their name.

2. Please provide examples of best practice that you have encountered in this area.

Negotiations at WIPO go far beyond simply making tabled documents available, as this article explains in detail (http://infojustice.org/archives/30027). Here are the main points:

"The elements of WIPO’s transparency processes are varied. they start with ongoing releases of draft negotiating documents dating back to the beginning of the process."

"WIPO webcasted negotiations, and even established listening rooms where stakeholders could hear (but not be physically present in) break rooms where negotiators were working on specific issues. "

"WIPO set up a system of open and transparent structured stakeholder input, including published reports and summaries of stakeholder working groups composed of commercial and non-commercial interests alike."

"Transparency in WIPO continued through the final days of intense, often all night, negotiations in the final diplomatic conference. When negotiators reached a new breakthrough on the language concerning the controversial “3-step test” limiting uses of limitations and exceptions in national laws, that news was released to the public (enabling public news stories on it), along with the draft text of the agreement."

This clearly shows how complete transparency is possible, and that negotiations can not only proceed under these conditions, but reach successful conclusions.

3. Please explain how, in your view, greater transparency might affect the outcome of the negotiations.

Real transparency - for example, by publishing all tabled documents - would have a profoundly important impact, since it would offer hope that any final agreement would enjoy public support. Without transparency, TTIP will simply be a secret deal among insiders, imposed from above, rather than any legitimate instrument of democracy.

Extending The Spectrum Of Openness To Include The Moral Right To Share

Prefixing concepts with the epithet "open" has become something of a fashion over the last decade. Beginning with open source, we've had open content, open access, open data, open science, and open government to name but a few. Indeed, things have got to the point where "openwashing" -- the abuse of the term in order to jump on the openness bandwagon -- is a real problem. But a great post by David Eaves points out that the spectrum of openness actually extends well beyond the variants typically encountered in the West: 

On Techdirt.

EU Kills Net Neutrality, Threatens Online Openness

I've been trying to fathom what exactly Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for the Digital Agenda, intends to do about net neutrality in Europe for a while. Back in January of this year, I asked: "Will Neelie Kroes Defend or Destroy EU Net Neutrality?", and in June I was still wondering: "What's the Net Net on Neelie Kroes's EU Net Neutrality?"

On Open Enterprise blog.

Celebrate Document Freedom Day; Then We Win

Today is Document Freedom Day:

It is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Mozilla "Undermining the Openness of the Internet"?

One of the core areas that Mozilla is working on is user privacy, and one important aspect of this is controlling cookies. Most people are now aware that sites they visit seek to place cookies - small strings of information - on their systems as a way of tracking when and what they visit on that site. What many may not know is that so-called "third-party" cookies are also widely used: these allow people to be tracked as they move from site to site, and effectively enable a detailed picture of their use of the Web to be built up.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Fighting Lack of Transparency And Engagement With Parliamentary Openness

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new treaties. Most governments, it seems, retain the view that they know best, that the electorate shouldn't worry about all those tiresome details being discussed in secret backroom negotiations, and that since the public will be able to see the result once it's all finished, what's the problem? 

On Techdirt.

Why Microsoft Loves The Rise of (Some) Openness

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how businesses based around giving stuff away were able to make money by replacing far more expensive options. One aspect of that is that open source leaves money in people's wallets. The other side, of course, is that purveyors of more expensive options tend to lose out. That's a pattern that is being repeated across different industries - not just in the software world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Will The Food Industry Ever Swallow Transparency's Bitter Pill?

A fascinating trend in recent years has been the gradual move from a presumption of secrecy to one of openness, transparency and sharing. This began with free software/open source, and has progressively spread to include areas such as open content, open access, open data, open science and open government.
Here's the latest field where people are advocating a more open approach:

On Techdirt.

Open Source, Open Science, Open Source Science

One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of others. That arose a few hundred years ago, at a time of rapid scientific progress:

On The H Open.

In Praise of the World Wide Web, Openness and Sharing

As you may have gathered, the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th birthday recently, since it was publicly announced for the first time on 6 August 1991. I came to it relatively late, at the beginning of 1994, but it has nonetheless been a privilege to watch it grow from relatively humble beginnings as a tool for researchers, to its present central role in modern society.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open for Business in Every Way

For some reason, I seem to be giving talks all over the place this month. I've already written about the one that I presented at the European Parliament at the end of May, and I'll be blogging about my presentation at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin this week in due course (once I've finished writing it....).

But in this blog post I want to expand on some of the ideas I explored at a meeting entitled “The Future is Free”, held in Kortrijk, Belgium, last week. The session was recorded, so there should be videos of the talks at some point: when they're available, I'll add the link.

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Open is the Open Networking Foundation?

Time for some more of that fashionable “open” goodness:

Six companies that own and operate some of the largest networks in the world — Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo! — announced today the formation of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a new approach to networking called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Joining these six founding companies in creating ONF are 17 member companies, including major equipment vendors, networking and virtualization software suppliers, and chip technology providers.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Limits to Openness

Unless you live in certain countries or read certain newspapers, you will have been deluged over the last few days with “revelations” from those US diplomatic cables that have been released by Wikileaks (if you somehow missed all this fun, try this excellent “Wikileaks Cablegate Roundup”.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

MPs' Expenses: They're At It Again

Openness is inherently political, because it dares to assert that we little people have a right to see what the powerful would hide. There's no clearer proof of that point than the MPs' expenses scandal last year. You might think that was a battle where openness prevailed; sadly you would be wrong, as a recent press release from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) reveals.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Limits of Openness?

I've been a long-time fan of the 3D modelling program Blender. No surprise, then, that I've also been delighted to see the Blender Foundation moving into content production to show what the software can do.

Specifically, it has produced a game (Yo! Frankie) and three animated films: Elephants Dream; Big Buck Bunny; and most recently, Sintel. Aside from their aesthetic value, what's interesting about these films is that the content is released under a cc licence.

Here's a fascinating interview with Ton Roosendaal, head of the Blender Institute, leader of Blender development, and producer of Sintel. It's well-worth reading, but there was one section that really caught my eye:

we keep most of our content closed until release. I’m a firm believer in establishing protective creative processes. In contrast to developers — who can function well individually online — an artist really needs daily and in-person feedback and stimulation.

We’ve done this now four times (three films and one game) and it’s amazing how teams grow in due time. But during this process they’re very vulnerable too. If you followed the blog you may have seen that we had quite harsh criticism on posting our progress work. If you’re in the middle of a process, you see the improvements. Online you only see the failures.

The cool thing is that a lot of tests and progress can be followed now perfectly and it suddenly makes more sense I think. Another complex factor for opening up a creative process is that people are also quite inexperienced when they join a project. You want to give them a learning curve and not hear all the time from our audience that it sucks. Not that it was that bad! But one bad criticism can ruin a day.

Those are reasonable, if not killer, arguments. But his last point is pretty inarguable:

One last thing on the “open svn” point: in theory it could work, if we would open up everything 100% from scratch. That then will give an audience a better picture of progress and growth. We did that for our game project and it was suited quite well for it. For film… most of our audience wants to get surprised more, not know the script, the dialogs, the twists. Film is more ‘art’ than games, in that respect.

That's fair: there's no real element of suspense for code, or even games, as he points out. So this suggest for certain projects like these free content films, openness may be something that needs limiting in this way, purely for the end-users' benefit.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

How is OpenStack Stacking Up?

You may have noticed there's a fair bit of interest in this cloud computing thing. You've probably also come across various articles suggesting this is the end of free software - and the world - as we know it, since cloud-based platforms render operating systems on servers and desktops largely moot.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sharing: Crossing the Digital-Analogue Divide

I've been writing about all kinds of openness and sharing on this blog nearly five years now. Before that, I had been covering free software for a further ten years. Although I touch on open hardware examples here, this has all largely been about *digital* sharing.

A key concern of mine has been how this will translate into the "real", aka analogue world. For digital sharing is relatively easy, and it's possible that without such low barriers to sharing, the kinds of behaviours that are becoming common online might not translate into the offline realm.

But it seems like my fears were misplaced:

The results of Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicate that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.

More specifically:

* Sharing online content is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline too. 78% of participants felt that experiences they've had interacting with people online have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. In fact, every study participant who shared content online also shared various things offline. Sharing entrepreneurs are already taking advantage of this by seeding their services in contextually relevant online communities. For instance, online kids clothing exchange thredUP build relationships with prominent mommy bloggers to speed their launch.

* 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase in the next 5 years. While fast growing, this new sector has lots of unmet demand. More than half of all participants either shared vehicles casually or expressed interest in doing so. Similarly, 62% of participants either share household items casually or expressed interest in doing so. There's also high interest in sharing of physical spaces for travel, storage, and work - even with complete strangers.

If confirmed by other research, this is really important. It says that global projects like free software and Wikipedia are not just isolated, geeky instances of collaboration, sharing and altruism: they feed into large-scale, personal and local activities that are inspired by them and their digital cousins (remember social networking is one of these).

I'm obviously not surprised, since I have been working on that assumption. I also have a rough sketch of a theory why this digital sharing might spill over into the analogue world.

As those of us deeply immersed in the cultures of openness and sharing know, engaging in these activities is almost literally effortless: it takes probably a few seconds to share a link, a thought or a picture. It might take a few minutes for a blog post, and a few hours for Wikipedia article, but the barriers are still low.

And the rewards are high. Even simple "thank yous" from complete strangers (on Twitter or identi.ca, say) are immensely gratifying. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that there are some serious hormonal consequences of getting this kind of feedback. For they are sufficiently pleasant that you tend to carry on sharing, and probably more intensely, in part to get that special buzz they engender.

At this point, your brain is positively wired for the benefits of sharing. In which case, you are maybe more willing to overcome the necessarily greater obstacles to sharing in the analogue world. Perhaps the benefits of sharing there are even greater; but even if they are only the same as for the digital realm, they are probably enough for us sharing addicts to carry on. (I'm sure there's a PhD or two in all this stuff.)

Whether or not that is a correct analysis of what's happening at the deepest level within us, this latest research is really good news for sharing, and for humanity's future, which surely will depend on us learning how to share everything - not least the planet and its resources - better. In fact, it was such good news, I felt I really had to share it with you...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Time for some Digital Economy Act Economy

Here's a hopeful sign:

We're working to create a more open and less intrusive society. We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Bill Gates (Hearts) Openness a Bit More

Here's an interesting project: the Open Course Library. These are its goals:

* design 81 high enrollment courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery
* lower textbook costs for students
* provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses
* our college system fully engages the global open educational resources discussion.
* improve course completion rates

Here's some background on the project:

All of the information about the project is online on a wiki. A big part of this project is for our system to figure out what it means to share our digital educational resources. What does it mean to work with publishers in new ways and get them to reconfigure their content into affordable and modular formats? What does it mean to go out and find open textbooks and evaluate them and modify them? What does it mean to understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses vs. copyright? And what do we have to understand re: the legality around how those licenses mesh or don’t mesh? And then how does that affect the final digital thing that we release at the end, and put out in Rice University’s Connexions [repository]?

We’ve been trying to be very open about the process, so we’ve got this wiki online with all the [project] information. You’ll see the project budget up there with the goals and the timeline for the project. We’ve been having town hall meetings this fall—not only going out to the colleges and meeting directly with faculty face to face, but we’ve just finished our third online town hall meeting. We use Elluminate and anybody in the world is welcome to come [to these meetings which] are archived and put up on the wiki as well. As questions [and] concerns come in, we address those and put the answers up on the wiki.

As you can read, there's an awful lot of open goodness in there. That's great news, of course, but it's also rather remarkable because of the following little fact [.pdf]:

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) proposes a partnership between the Washington State Community and Technical College System (CTC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve access to and completion of higher education for low income young adults in Washington State.

...

The SBCTC requests $5.295 million to implement the Washington State Student Completion Initiative (WSSC). This initiative includes four multi-college student completion projects that will yield long term results by breaking down key barriers to completion throughout the Washington community and technical college system.

One of those projects is the Open Course Library. So good to see Bill supporting all that openness...

Opening Our Eyes to the Tilted Playing-Field

One of the subtlest ways of gaming the system is to hack the system before you even play - for example, by building in a bias that means your particular approach is given a natural advantage. That this goes on, is nothing new; that it's happened at the heart of the European Union is profoundly disturbing. Here's the summary of what's now been discovered:

These findings suggest that BAT [British American Tobacco] and its corporate allies have fundamentally altered the way in which EU policy is made by ensuring that all significant EU policy decisions have to be assessed using a business-orientated IA [Impact assessment]. As the authors note, this situation increases the likelihood that the EU will produce policies that favor big business rather than the health of its citizens. Furthermore, these findings suggest that by establishing a network of other industries to help in lobbying for EU Treaty changes, BAT was able to distance itself from the push to establish a business-orientated IA to the extent that Commission officials were unaware of the involvement of the tobacco industry in campaigns for IA. Thus, in future, to safeguard public health, policymakers and public-health groups must pay more attention to corporate efforts to shape decision-making processes. In addition, public-health groups must take account of the ways in which IA can be used to undermine as well as support effective public-health policies and they must collaborate more closely in their efforts to ensure effective national and international policy.

A number of lessons need to be learned from this.

First, that if you want a system to produce fair results, you need to ensure that its framing is fair. Secondly, full transparency is imperative, especially about the relationships between those who are lobbying for changes to a system. Basically, you just can't have too much openness when it comes to setting key policy like Impact assessment.

This is an incredibly important - and impressive - paper, with huge implications for many areas. One that springs to mind is that of environmental protection. Given that the framing of Impact assessments is biased in favour of business and financial issues, it's not hard to see that other viewpoints - for example of examining the implications for animal and plant life, or of the various commons impacted - will receive pretty short shrift. It's also an argument for the economics of externalities to be developed more so that they can be brought into the equation when such one-side reviews are being conducted.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.