Joi Itos Web
Time 2021-10-31 12:04:11Web Name: Joi Itos Web
WebSite: http://joi.ito.com
ID:217084
Keywords:
Joi,Itos,Web,Description:
keywords: description: Joi Itos Web Joi Ito's conversation with the living web. 日本語 Bio The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too Categories: Wired Ideas https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 A version of this piece appeared asWIRED Ideas: The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too on July 30, 2019.
If you looked at how many people check books out of libraries these days, you would see failure. Circulation, an obvious measure of success for an institution established to lend books to people, is down. But if you only looked at that figure, you'd miss the fascinating transformation public libraries have undergone in recent years. They've taken advantage of grants to become makerspaces, classrooms, research labs for kids, and trusted public spaces in every way possible. Much of the successful funding encouraged creative librarians to experiment and scale when successful, iterating and sharing their learnings with others. If we had focused our funding to increase just the number of books people were borrowing, we would have missed the opportunity to fund and witness these positive changes.
I serve on the boards of the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, which have made grants that helped transform our libraries. I've also worked over the years with dozens of philanthropists and investors--those who put money into ventures that promise environmental and public health benefits in addition to financial returns. All of us have struggled to measure the effectiveness of grants and investments that seek to benefit the community, the environment, and so forth. My own research interest in the begun to analyse the ways in which people are currently measuring impact and perhaps find methods to better measure the impact of these investments.
As we see in the library example, simple metrics often aren't enough when it comes to quantifying success. They typically are easier to measure, and they're not unimportant. When it comes to health, for example, iron levels might be important, but anemia isn't the only metric we care about. Being healthy is about being nourished and thus resilient so that when something does happen, we recover quickly.
Iron levels may be a proxy for this, but they aren't the proxy. Being happy is even more complicated; it involves health but also more abstract things such as feelings of purpose, belonging to a community, security, and many other things. Similarly, while I believe rigor and best practices are important and support the innovation and thinking going into these metrics when it comes to all types of philanthropy, I think we risk oversimplifying problems and thus having the false sense of clarity that quantitative metrics tend to create.
One of the reasons philanthropists sometimes fail to measure what really matters is that the global political economy primarily seeks what is efficient and scalable. Unfortunately, efficiency and scalability are not the same as a healthy system. In fact, many things that grow quickly and without constraints are far from healthy--consider cancer. Because of our belief in markets, we tend to accept that an economy has to be growing for society to be healthy--but this notion is misguided, particularly when it comes to things we consider social goods. If we examine a complex system like the environment, for instance, we can see that healthy rainforests don't grow in overall size but rather are extremely resilient, always changing and adapting.
There is more to assessing a complex system than looking at its growth, efficiency, and the handful of other qualities that can be quantified and thus measured.
As biologists know, healthy ecosystems are robust and resilient. They can tolerate reductions in certain species populations ... until they can't. Scholars in ecology and biology have tried to model the robustness and resilience of systems in an effort to understand how to build and maintain such systems. Scientists have tried to apply these models to non-biological systems like the internet and ask questions, such as "How many and which nodes can you remove from the internet before it stops functioning?" These models are different from the mathematics economists use. Instead of relying on aggregate numbers and formulae, they use network models of nodes and links to ponder dynamics among connections in the system, rather than stocks and flows of economies.
Maybe there is something to learn from biologists and ecologists--the people who study the complex and messy real world of nature--when philanthropists are thinking about how to save the planet. We know from ecology and biology, for instance, that monocultures and simple approaches tend to be weak and fragile. The strongest systems are highly diverse and iterate quickly. When the immune system goes to war against a pathogen, the body engages in an arms race of mutations, deploying a diversity of approaches and constant iteration, communication, and coordination. Scientists also are learning that the microbiome, brain, and immune system are more integrated and complex than we ever imagined; they actually understand and tackle the more complex diseases currently beyond our scientific abilities. This research is pushing biology and computational models to a whole new and exciting level.
Many diseases, just like all of the systems that philanthropy tries to address, are complex networks of connected problems that go beyond any one specific pathway or molecule. Obesity is often described as simply a matter of managing one's calories and consequently cast as a lack of willpower on the part of an overweight individual. But it is probably more accurately understood in the context of a global food system that is incentivized by financial markets to produce low cost, high-calorie, unhealthy, and addictive foods. Calorie counting as the primary way to lose weight has been a rule of thumb, but we are learning that healthy fats are fine while sugar calories cause insulin resistance, which often leads to diabetes and obesity. So solving the obesity problem is going to require much more than increasing or reducing any one single thing like calories.
It's our food system that is unhealthy, and one result is overweight individuals.
In such a complex world, what are we to do? We need respect for plurality and heterogeneity. It's not that we shouldn't measure things, but rather that we should measure different things, have different approaches and iterate and adapt. This is how nature builds resilient networks and systems. Because we as a society have an obsession with scale and other common measures of success, researchers and do-gooders have a natural tendency to want to use simple measures (as described in our blog post) and other "gold standards" to gauge the impact of the money spent and effort expended. I would urge us to instead support greater experimentation, smaller projects, more coordination and better communication. We should surely measure indicators of negative effects--blood tests to measure what may be going wrong (or right) with our bodies are very useful for instance.
We also need to consider that every change usually has multiple effects, some positive and others negative. We must constantly look for additional side effects and dynamically adapt whatever we do. Sticking with our obesity example, there is evidence that high fat, low sugar diets, generally known as ketogenic diets, are great for losing weight and preventing diabetes; the improvement can be assessed by measuring one's blood glucose levels. However, recent studies show that this diet might contribute to thyroid problems and if we adhere to one, we must monitor thyroid function and occasionally take breaks from it.
Coming up with hypotheses about causal relationships, testing them and connecting them to larger complex models of how we think the world works is an important step. In addition, asking whether we are asking the right questions and solving the right problems, rather than prematurely focusing on solutions, is key. Jed Emerson, who pioneered early attempts to monetize the economic value of social impact, makes the same point in his recent book The Purpose of Capital.
For the last 1,300 years, the Ise Shrine in Japan has been ritually rebuilt by craftspeople every 20 years. The lumber mostly comes from the shrine's forest managed in 200 year time scales as part of a national afforestation plan dating back centuries. The number of people working at Ise Shrine isn't growing, the shrine isn't trying to expand its business, and its workers are happy and healthy--the shrine is flourishing. Their primary concern is the resilience of the forest, rivers, and natural environment around the shrine. How would we measure their success and what can we learn from their flourishing as we try to manage our society and our planet?
It is heartening to see impact investors developing evidence-based methods to tackle the complex and critical challenges that face us. It's also heartening that capital markets and investors are supportive of investing, and in some cases even accepting reduced returns, in an effort to help tackle our big, complex challenges. We must, however, make changes in the way we fund potential solutions so that it supports a diversity of disciplines and approaches. That, in turn will require new methods of measurement and perhaps we can take advantage of some very old ones, such as the data from Shinto priests who have been measuring ice on a lake for resist oversimplification. If we don't, we risk wasting these funds or, even worse, amplifying existing problems and creating new ones.
Cite Cite DOI https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 APA Ito, J. (2019, August 30). The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too. Joi Ito's Web [Blog post]. https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 MLA Ito, Joichi. “The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too.” Joi Ito's Web, 30 August 2019 https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801. Accessed 31 Oct 2021 Chicago (CMS) Ito, Joichi. “The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too.” Joi Ito's Web (Blog), August 30, 2019, https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 Harvard Ito, J. (2019). The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too. Joi Ito's Web. https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 Vancouver Ito J. The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too. Joi Ito's Web [Internet]. 2019 Aug 30; Available from: https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801 Bibtex@online{Ito2019TheWorldIs, author = {Ito, Joichi}, title = {{The World Is Complex. Measuring Charity Has to Be Too}}, journal = {Joi Ito's Web}, type = {Blog}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.31859/20190830.0801}, urldate = {2021-10-31}, date = {2019-08-30}, year = {2019}, month = {Aug}, day = {30}} Trackback Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government? Categories: Philanthropy
Ethan Zuckerman thoughtfully and appropriately points out that one big missing question in my recent Wired piece on measuring philanthropic impact is whether some of this positive societal change should be in the hands of government instead of philanthropists. He correctly points out that since the Reagan/Thatcher era of the 80s, we've started shrinking the role of government and have started to see big philanthropists and the private sector being called on to do what government used to do. In a post from 2013, Ethan wonders why he doesn't have rail solution to his commuting problem from Western Massachusetts. He suggests that without government, things like railway system are difficult to fund - the market isn't the best solution for many social goods.
I think the idea about whether we should be doubling down on philanthropy or fixing government and increasing government resources is a great question and probably the right one. I think the idea of fixing the government and turning the corner on the privatization is a daunting idea, but something we need to discuss.
Cite Cite APA Ito, J. (2019, August 7). Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?. Joi Ito's Web [Blog post]. https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html MLA Ito, Joichi. “Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?.” Joi Ito's Web, 7 August 2019 https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html. Accessed 31 Oct 2021 Chicago (CMS) Ito, Joichi. “Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?.” Joi Ito's Web (Blog), August 7, 2019, https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html Harvard Ito, J. (2019). Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?. Joi Ito's Web. https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html Vancouver Ito J. Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?. Joi Ito's Web [Internet]. 2019 Aug 7; Available from: https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html Bibtex@online{Ito2019Isphilanth, author = {Ito, Joichi}, title = {{Is philanthropy a bad excuse for limiting strong government?}}, journal = {Joi Ito's Web}, type = {Blog}, url = {https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2019/08/07/is-philanthropy.html}, urldate = {2021-10-31}, date = {2019-08-07}, year = {2019}, month = {Aug}, day = {7}} Trackback Impact Investment Metrics and Their Limitations Categories: Philanthropy https://doi.org/10.31859/20190722.2024
I decided to write my column this month in Wired about impact investing and the opportunity to bring new perspectives to the space. As I wrote the piece and started to negotiate with my truly great editor at Wired, I got feedback that it was a bit dense, jargony and wonky. My colleague Louis Kang was doing a lot of research for the article, so I decided to move the nitty-gritty details from the Wired piece to this co-authored "explainer" essay. This essay, now a companion piece to the Wired column, is an overview of what impact investing is, describing some different ways that we currently measure impact and some of the concerns we have with these measurement methods. The Wired article discusses my observations of this field and provides some suggestions on how we might better measure impact.
- Joi
Impact Investment Metrics and Their Limitations
By Joi Ito and Louis Kang
As the pile of philanthropic money aimed at solving the world's problems grows, the desire for assessment and rigor has pushed experts to develop metrics to measure impact and success.
But our world's biggest problems -- climate change, poverty, global health, social instability -- don't easily lend themselves to measurement. Climate change, poverty, global health and social instability, for instance, are complex self-adaptive systems that are irreducible to simple metrics and mathematics. In fact, it's simple math and the hyper-efficient optimizations of the financial markets that have caused most of these problems in the first place. Consider for example, capital markets that focus much more on shareholders than other stakeholders, which has caused extraction and exploitation of natural resources; the efficient production of cheap calories that has contributed to obesity; mass consumption that has led to climate change; and Internet and social media platforms that have amplified hate speech and new forms of adversarial attacks. Are modern foundations and financial institutions armed with quants and global development principles, such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, enough to tackle such complex challenges? I don't think so.
Philanthropy as a concept has existed for centuries.The U.S. Internal Revenue Service began providing tax benefits for charitable gifts in the early 1900s, and since then, philanthropy has continued to grow and become more sophisticated.
At the MacArthur Foundation, where I serve on the Board of Directors, "impact investing" emerged in the early 1980s as a way to channel capital to communities plagued by underinvestment and spur the growth of revenue-generating nonprofits and social-purpose businesses. Around this time, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank on the principle that loans are more effective than charity to disrupt poverty, and it started by offering tiny loans to impoverished entrepreneurs, which we now know as microfinance. Since then, new types of investment capital and assets, as well as financing and organizational structures and impact measurement practices, have emerged to better engage in the active creation of positive impact. Although the purpose and practice of impact investing are continuously revisited and refined, the core idea is to unlock more traditional investment capital to contribute to solving the world's problems. Today, more than 1,340 organizations manage roughly $500 billion in impact investing assets worldwide.
Many companies now proactively claim to be public benefit companies or are undergoing certification by B-Lab to qualify as B-Corps. These include Patagonia and a company that I invested in, Kickstarter. These companies claim to use, and sometimes disclose, auditable measures of their non-financial societal impact. In addition to companies like these, there is a push among more mainstream businesses to go beyond mere measures of financial success and assess their societal or environmental impacts with a "triple bottom line." Although impact investing has largely been seen as a philanthropic activity, which by definition is prone to accepting little or no return on investment, many traditional impact funds and investors now assert that they are designing investment practices to achieve market level returns on investments and meet positive impact targets. According to one Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) report, 49 such funds have, on average, achieved an 18.9 percent return on equity-based impact investments in emerging markets. Recently, we've seen more established institutional investors, such as Goldman Sachs, KKR and Bain Capital, to name a just a few now active in the impact investing scene.
Texas Pacific Group (TPG) has created an impact investment fund called the Rise Fund with the help of The Bridgespan Group. The Rise Fund has devised a method that attempts to calculate the economic value of impact called the Impact Multiple of Money, or IMM. IMM is one of a growing number of models and protocols, each of which comes with pros and cons, used to assess non-financial impact. The Rise/Bridgespan method generates an economic estimate of the social impact of an investment by first estimating the number of people impacted by it using relevant scientific studies and multiplying that number by the U.S. "value of life" of $5.4 million, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Transportation to quantify "the additional cost that individuals would be willing to bear for improvements in safety (that is, reductions in risks)." This dollar value of the investment's impact is then adjusted by multiplying it by something called the "probability of impact realization," which is an estimated probability of achieving the expected impact calculated based on a review of relevant scientific studies. Using this number, Rise then projects the investment's Net Present Value, or NPV, using an estimated annual discount set by itself. Finally, the NPV is multiplied by the percent of the company's overall equity owned by Rise to figure out how much of the impact Rise is accountable for, which is then divided by the investment amount to determine the IMM (see this HBR case about an alcoholism program that is part of the Rise Fund as an example). For example, if Rise invested $10 million for 50 percent of the equity in a venture, when the NPV is $100 million, Rise determines $50M ($100 million multiplied by 50 percent) is the value of the impact for which it can claim credit. So its IMM would be five times its investment, or $50 million divided by $10 million, the amount it spent to make the investment. In this example, the IMM was five times its investment, exceeding the three times minimum IMM for the Rise Fund.
Robin Hood, which claims to be New York's largest poverty-fighting organization, takes a similar approach to the IMM. It uses a Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) to "assign a dollar figure to the amount of philanthropic good that a grant does" and focuses solely on improving the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Robin Hood's metrics are demonstrated over 163 different cases, which can be found here. For example, the BCR of Robin Hood's support for a substance abuse treatment program was calculated by first counting the number of individuals who received the treatment as reported by their grantee. Robin Hood staff then estimated three factors: what percent of these individuals received the treatment solely because of their support; how much the QALY was reduced due to substance abuse, and how much the QALY was improved due to intervention. Suppose the treatment program reached 1,000 people, and Robin Hood estimates that it is only accountable for 10 percent of them. Of those 100 people, QALY reduction due to substance abuse is 10 percent and QALY improvement due to intervention is 20 percent. Robin Hood multiplies 100 by 10 percent, then by 20 percent and finally $50,000 (the QALY value as determined by its staff) to argue that the BCR of the program is approximately $100,000.
Not all of the new approaches attempt to measure impact using a dollar value. My college classmate and collaborator on many projects, Pierre Omidyar, has been an influential leader in impact investing through the work of his organization, the Omidyar Network (ON). The ON funds companies and intermediaries that also provide some social benefit. Over the years, the ON has developed and articulated a variety of methodologies to describe how it measures and categorizes opportunities and risks in funding socially beneficial companies. It has also recently experimented with Acumen's "lean data" approach which seeks to allow rapid iteration in social enterprises in the same way start-ups iterate. Acumen has developed software tools to survey beneficiaries of impact investments and calculate an average Net Promoter Score (NPS), which reflects a combination of many factors. NPS is a method originally developed to measure customer satisfaction in marketing. Via Acument's platform, the ON surveyed 36 investees and 11,500+ customers the investees reached across 18 countries, meaning it received an NPS score of 42 (For comparison, Apple's NPS is 72). And with its surveying capability, the ON contends that its investments improved the quality of life of about 74 percent of its customers.
Having reviewed various impact measurement techniques that are practiced today, now ask yourself: IMMs, BCRs, and NPSs -- do these numbers truly reflect what impact means? Understanding impact through measurement has importance, but we must be careful not to oversimplify complex systems into reducible metrics and lose sight of the intricate dynamics of the world. "Of course, many of us who want to see impact investing attain real scale would welcome the simplicity of an 'Impact Earnings Per Share' calculation or other simplified way to compare relative impact of competing investment opportunities -- but being able to advance a simple metric and having a metric framework that actually helps us assess our true impact and value contribution are two different things," Jed Emerson, who invented the framework Social Return on Investment (SROI), recently told me. "As we know from the history of economics and finance, a single metric can't reflect more nuanced aspects of value or impact. Simplified metrics tell us how we are thinking today but not what we truly seek to know."
Impact measurement is still a nascent field. Understanding impact is fragmented, sometimes misguided, and often inadequate. This makes evaluating and generating impact highly inefficient. We need more clarity and transparency, as well as robust scholarship to study and maximize the impact of philanthropy and impact investing. To address this, I've started to discuss and develop new methods to measure impact. My early thoughts and suggestions are introduced in this upcoming Wired article.
A version of this piece appeared asWIRED Ideas: Space Exploration and the Age of the Anthropocosmos on May 30, 2019.
I would like to suggest a new word.
Anthropocosmos, n. and adj. Chiefly with the. The epoch during which human activity is considered to be a significant influence on the balance, beauty, and ecology of the entire universe.
Based on ...
Anthropocene, n. and adj. Chiefly with the. The era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth. --The Oxford English Dictionary
As we become painfully aware of the extent to which human activity is influencing the planet and its environment, we are also accelerating into the epoch of space exploration. Not only will our influence substantially affect the future of this blue dot we call Earth, but also our never-ending desire to explore and expand our frontiers is extending humanity's influence on the cosmos. I think of it as the Anthropocosmos, a term that captures the idea of how we must responsibly consider our role in the universe in the same way that Anthropocene expresses our responsibility for this world.
The struggle to protect the commons--the public spaces and resources we all depend on, like the oceans or Central Park--is not a new problem. Shepherds grazing sheep on shared land without consideration for other flocks will soon find grass growing thin. We already know that farming and the timber industry deplete the forests, and the destruction of that commons in turn affects the commons that is the air we breathe. These are versions of the same problem--the tragedy of the commons. It suggests that, left unchecked, self-interest can deplete resources that support the common good.
Joi Ito is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, and his association with the magazine goes back to its inception. He is coauthor with Jeff Howe of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future and director of the MIT Media Lab.
The early days of the internet were an amazing example of people and organizations from a variety of sectors coming together to create a global commons that was self-governed and well-managed by those who built it. Similarly, we're now in an internet-like moment in which we can imagine an explosion of innovation in space, our ultimate commons, as nongovernment groups, companies, and individuals begin to drive progress there. We can learn from the internet--its successes and failures--to create a generative and well-managed ecosystem in space as we grow into our responsibility as stewards of the Anthropocosmos.
Like the internet, space exploration has been mostly a government-vs.-government race and a government-with-government collaboration. The internet started out as Arpanet, which was funded by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency and operated by the military until 1990. A great deal of anxiety and deliberation went into the decision to allow commercial and nonresearch uses of the network, much as NASA extensively deliberated over opening the doors to "public-private partnership" leading up to the Commercial Crew Program launch in 2010. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that put men on the moon, a multibillion-dollar effort funded by US taxpayers. Today, the private space industry is robust, and private firms compete to deliver payloads, and soon, put people into orbit and on the moon.
The state of the development of the space industry reminds me of where the internet was in the early '90s. The cost of putting a satellite into orbit has gone from supercomputer-level costs and design cycles to just a few thousand dollars, similar to the cost of a fully loaded personal computer. In many ways, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab are like UUNET and PSINet1 --the first commercial internet service providers--doing more efficiently what government-funded research networks did in the past.
1 Disclosure: I was at one point an employee of PSINet and the CEO of PSINet Japan.
When these private, for-profit ISPs took over the process of building out the internet into a global network, we saw an explosion of innovation--and a dot-com bubble, followed by a crash, and then another surge following the crash. When we were connecting everyone to the internet, we couldn't imagine all the possible things--good and bad--that it would bring. In the same way, space development will most likely expand far beyond the obvious--mining, human settlements, basic research--to many other ideas. The question now is, how can we direct the self-interested businesses that will undoubtedly power entrepreneurial expansion, growth, and innovation in space toward the shared, long term health of the space commons?
In the early days of the internet, everyone pitched in like people tending a community garden. We were a band of jolly pirates on a newly discovered island paradise far away from the messiness of the real world. In "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," John Perry Barlow even declared cyberspace a new place, saying "We are forming our own social contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours." His utopian idea, which I shared at the time, is now echoed by some of today's spacebound entrepreneurs who dream of settling Mars or deploying terraforming pods on planets across the galaxy.
While it wasn't obvious how life on the internet would play out when we were building the early infrastructure, back then academics, businesses, and virtually anyone else who was interested worked on its standards and resource allocation. We created governance mechanisms in communities like ICANN for coordination and dispute resolution, run by people dedicated to the protection and flourishing of the internet commons. In short, we built the foundations on which everyone could develop businesses and communities. At least in the beginning, the internet effectively harnessed the self-interest of commercial players and money from the markets to develop open protocols, free for everyone to use, that the communities designed. In the early 1990s, the internet was one of the best examples of a well-managed commons, with no one controlling it and everyone benefiting from it.
A quarter-century on, cyberspace hasn't evolved into the independent, self-organized utopia that Barlow envisioned. As the internet "democratized," new users and entrepreneurs who weren't involved in the genesis of the internet joined. It was overrun by people who didn't think of themselves as pirate gardeners tending the sacred network that supported this idealistic cyberspace--our newly created commons. They were more interested in products and services created by companies, and these companies often didn't care as much about ideals as in making returns for their investors. On the early internet, for example, people ran their own web servers, and fees for connectivity were always flat--sometimes simply free--and almost all content was shared. Today, we have near-monopolies, walled garden services; the mobile internet is metered and expensive; and copyright is vigorously enforced. From the perspective of this internet pioneer and others, cyberspace has become a much less hospitable place for users as well as developers, a tragedy of the commons.
Such disregard for the commons, if allowed to continue into planetary orbit and beyond, could have tangibly negative consequences. The decisions we make in the sociopolitical, economic, and architectural foundations of Earth's near-space cocoon will directly impact daily life on the surface--from debris falling in populated areas to advertisements that could block our view of the skies. A piece of space junk has already hit a woman in Oklahoma and an out-of-control Chinese space station caused a lot of anxiety and luckily fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean.
So I think the rules and governance models for space are extremely important to understand to mitigate known problems such as space debris, set precedents for the unknown, and managing the race to lunar settlements. We already have the Outer Space Treaty, which governs our efforts and protects our resources in space as a shared commons. The International Space Station is a great example of a coordinated effort by many competing interests to develop standards and work together on a common project that benefits all participants.
However, recent announcements by Vice President Mike Pence of an "America First" agenda for the moon and space fail to acknowledge the fact that the US pursues space exploration and science with deep coordination and interdependence with other countries. As new opportunities are emerging for humans to develop economic activities and communities in orbit around the Earth, on asteroids, and beyond, nationalistic actions by the Trump administration could undermine the opportunity to pursue a multiple stakeholder, internationally coordinated approach to designing future human space activities and ensure that space benefits all humankind.
As space becomes more commercial and pedestrian like the internet, we must not allow the cosmos to become a commercial and government free-for-all with disregard for the commons and shared values. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Media Lab PhD student and director of the Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative2 Ariel Ekblaw suggested we need a new generation of "space planners" and "space architects" to coordinate such expansive growth while enabling open innovation. Through such communities, we can build the space equivalents of ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force, in coordination with international policy and governance guidance from the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.
Disclosure : I am one of the two principal investigators on this initiative.
I am hopeful that Ariel and a new generation of space architects can learn from our successes and failures in protecting the internet commons and build a better paradigm for space, one that will robustly self-regulate and allow growth and generative creativity while developing strong norms that help us with our environmental and societal issues here on Earth. Already there are positive signs: SpaceX recently decided to fly low to limit space debris.
Fifty years ago, America "won" the moonshot. Today, we must "win" the Earthshot. The internet connected our world like never before, and as the iconic 1968 Earthrise photo shows, space helps us see our world like never before. Serving as responsible stewards of these crucial commons profoundly expands our circles of awareness. My dear friend Margarita Mora often asks, "What kind of ancestors do we want to be?" I want to be an ancestor who helped make the Anthropocene and the Anthropocosmos periods of history when humans helped the universe flourish with life and prosperity.
A version of this piece appeared asWIRED Ideas: It’s OK That Amazon Will (Likely) Get the .amazon Domain on May 25, 2019.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
--Winston Churchill
I was on the board of the International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2004 to 2007. This was a thankless task that I viewed as something like being on jury duty in exchange for being permitted to use the internet, upon which much of my life was built. Maybe people hate ICANN because it seems so bureaucratic, slow, and political, but I will always defend it as the best possible solution to something that is really hard--resolving the problem of allocating names and numbers for the internet when every country and every sector in the world has reasons for believing that they deserve a particular range of IP addresses or the rights to a domain name.
I view the early architecture of the internet as the most successful experiment in decentralized governance. The internet service providers and the people who ran the servers didn't need to know how the whole thing ran, they just needed to make sure that their corner of the internet was working properly and that people's email and packets magically found their way around the internet to the right places. Almost everything was decentralized except one piece--the determination of the unique names and numbers that identified every single unique thing connected to the internet. So it makes sense that this is the thing that was the hardest thing to do for the open and decentralized idealists there.
After Reuters picked up the news on May 20 that ICANN handed over the top level domain (TLD) .amazon to Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com, pending a 30 day comment period, Twitter and the broader internet turned into a flurry of conversations criticizing the ICANN process. It brought out all of the usual conspiracy theorists and internet governance pundits, which brought back old memories and reminded me how some things are still the same, even though much on the internet is barely recognizable from the early days. And while it made me cringe and wish that the people of the Amazon basin had gotten control of that TLD, I agree with ICANN's decision. I remembered my time at ICANN and how hard it was to make the right decisions in the face of what, to the public, appeared to be obviously wrong.
Originally, early internet pioneer Jon Postel ran the root servers that managed the names and numbers, and he decided who got what. Generally speaking, the rule was first come first serve, but be reasonable about the names you ask for. A move to design a more formal governance process for managing these resources began as the internet became more important and included institutions such as the Berkman Center, where I am a faculty associate. The death of Jon Postel accelerated the process and triggered a somewhat contentious move by the US Commerce Department and others to step in to create ICANN.
ICANN is a multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization originally created under the US Department of Commerce that has since transitioned to become a global multi-stakeholder community. Its complicated organizational structure includes various supporting organizations to represent country-level TLD organizations, the public, businesses, governments, the domain name registrars and registries, network security, etc. These constituencies are represented on the board of directors that deliberates on and makes many of the key decisions that deal with names and numbers on the internet. One of the keys to the success of ICANN was that it wasn't controlled by governments like the United Nations or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), but that the governments were just part of an advisory function--the Government Advisory Council (GAC). This allowed many more voices at the table as peers than traditional intergovernmental organizations.
The difficulty of the process is that business and intellectual property interests believe international trademark laws should govern who gets to control the domain names. The "At Large" community, which represented users, has other views, and the GAC represents governments who have completely different views on how things should be decided. It's like playing with a Rubiks cube that actually doesn't have a solution.
The important thing was that everyone was in the room when we made decisions and got to say their say and the board, which represented all of the various constituents, would vote and ultimately make decisions after each of the week-long deliberation sessions. Everyone walked away feeling that they had their say and that in the end, they were somehow committed to adhere to the consensus-like process.
When I joined the board, my view was to be extremely transparent about the process and to stick to our commitments and focus on good governance, even if some of the decisions made us feel uncomfortable.
During my tenure, we had two very controversial votes. One was the approval of the .xxx TLD. Some governments, such as Brazil, thought that it would be a kind of "sex pavilion" that would increase pornography on the internet. The US conservative Christian community engaged in a letter-writing campaign to ICANN and to politicians to block the approval. The ICM Registry, the company proposing the domain, suggested that .xxx would allow them to create best practices including preventing copyright infringement and other illegal activity and create a way to enforce responsible adult entertainment.
It was first proposed in 2000 by the ICM Registry and resubmitted in 2004. They received a great deal of pushback and continued to fight for approval. In 2008, ICM filed an application with the International Centre for Dispute Resolution and the domain came up for vote again in 2009, when I was on the board. The proposal was struck down in a 9 to 5 vote against the domain--I voted in the minority, in favor of the proposal, because I didn't feel that we should deviate from our process and allow political pressure to sway us. Eventually, in 2011, ICANN approved the .xxx generic top-level domain.
In 2005 we approved .cat for Catalan, which also received a great deal of criticism and pushback because the community worried that it would be the beginning of a politicization of TLDs by various separatist movements and that ICANN would become the battleground for these disputes. But this concern never really manifested.
Then, on March 10, 2019, the board of ICANN approved the TLD .amazon, against the protests of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization and the governments of South America representing the Amazon Basin. The vote was the result of seven years of deliberations and process, with governments arguing that a company shouldn't get the name of geographic region and Jeff Bezos' Amazon arguing that it had complied with all of the required processes.
When I first joined MIT, we owned what was called net 18. In other words, any IP address that started with 18. The IP addresses 18.0.0.1 through 18.255.255.254 were all owned by MIT. You could recognize any MIT computer because its IP address started with 18. MIT, one of the early users of the internet, was allocated a whole "class A" segment of the internet which adds up to 2,147,483,646 IP addresses--more than most countries. Clearly this wasn't "fair," but it was consistent with the "first come first serve" style of early internet resource allocation. In April 2017, MIT sold 8 million of these addresses to Amazon and broke up our net 18, to the sorrow of many of us who so cherished this privilege and status. This also required us to renumber many things at MIT and turn our network into a much more "normal" one.
Although I shook my fist at Amazon and capitalism when I heard this, in hindsight the elitist notion that MIT should have 2 billion IP addresses was also wrong and Amazon probably needed the addresses more.
So it was with similar ire that I read the tweet that said that Amazon got .amazon. I've been particularly involved in the protection of the rights of indigenous people through my conservation and cultural activities and my first reaction was that, yet again, Western capitalism and colonialism were treading on the rights of the vulnerable.
But then I remembered those hours and hours of deliberation and fighting over .xxx and the crazy arguments about why we couldn't let this happen. I also remember fighting until I was red in the face about how we needed to stick to our principles and our self-declared guidelines and not allow pressure from US politicians and their constituents to sway us.
While I am not close to the ICANN process these days, I can imagine the pressure that they must have come under. You can see the foot-dragging and years of struggle just reading the board resolution approving .amazon.
So while it annoys me, and I wish that .amazon went to the people of the Amazon basin, I also feel like ICANN is probably working and doing its job. The job of ICANN is to govern the name space in an open and inclusive process and to steward this process in the best, but never perfect, way possible. And if you really care, we are in that 30 day public comment period so speak up!
Category Archives Monthly Archives<<< Thank you for your visit >>>
Websites to related : Home | VVA Chapter 290
keywords:
description:Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 290 Central Minnesota JOIN HERE About VVA Chapter 290 Central Minnesota Chapter 290 stands
keywords:flowers, perennial, perennials,
vivaces, stauden, perenne, perenni, perrys, plants, gardening,
Vermont
description:information, l
keywords:
description:
Bully Buddies Rescue Society HomeAboutVolunteeringDonationsToad's Fountain of YouthAdoptionsAdoption Info
keywords:figure skating, skating, ice skating, olympics, winter olympics
description:
The Judges' Table The Judges'
keywords:
description:
Saturday, November 16, 2013 finale in alaskaYes, I'm alive! I started grad school back in Se
keywords:
description:
La Agricultura y Ganaderiacultivo del banano martes, 9 de noviembre de 2010 Cultivo del bana
keywords:fashion, store, E-commerce
description:Default Description
keywords:
description:
Barangay 599 (2010-2013) Brgy. 599 Zone 59 D-6 Manila
keywords:
description:
keywords:
description:JobisJob réunit des milliers d'offres d'emploi des plus grands moteurs de recherche spécialisés,tout est sur JobisJob.Trouvez
Hot Websites