Martin De Saulles's Blog

The Portable Panopticon

Martin De Saulles — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:11:50 +0000

David Horner and I gave a lunchtime seminar to colleagues yesterday on our new paper, “The Portable Panopticon: morality and mobile technologies” which we will presenting at ETICA in Spain in April. It seemed to go well with some good questions and comments from colleagues at the end. Katie Piatt has blogged it (thanks for the photo, Katie) and made some interesting observations and suggestions about how we might adapt to the widespread diffusion of smart phones and the potential ethical issues that might raise.

Slides Here

Abstract of the paper below:
“James Moor has argued that we need ‘better ethics’ for emerging technologies. What he means by ‘better ethics’ is: firstly, that ethical analysis of technologies should not be a post hoc activity but rather something dynamic which is done in tandem or anticipation; secondly, that the ethical response to emerging technologies and the formation of appropriate technologies requires collaboration between ethicists, technologists, policy makers and so on; thirdly, more sophisticated ethical analysis will be required. Moor argues that emerging technologies, whilst the product of new technological paradigms, need to be matched by analyses forming new ethical paradigms. Broadly, we need frameworks to identify radical emerging information and communication technologies and appropriate frameworks for identifying and analysing new moral issues. In this paper we argue that the development and widespread use of mobile technologies constitute if not a revolution then a subrevolution that may have widespread social and ethical impacts. We define mobile technologies as the set of hardware, software, and network infrastructure that greatly extend the conventional functionality of the mobile phone. Current and emerging applications include video, photography, high-speed internet access, social networking and GPS location services. We aim to present this suite of technologies within the framework of Moor’s three stage model of technological development. We locate mobile technologies in the ‘permeation’ phase of development when we might first begin to detect the lineaments of novel ethical challenges. We argue more specifically that one of these challenges is a new and important phenomenon: what we describe as the ‘portable panopticon’. The concept of the panoticon has been broadly used to designate the potential for centralised surveillance and all that that connotes for privacy. We suggest that with mobile technologies we face a more distributed threat to personal privacy. What differentiates this threat from conventional conceptions of the panopticon is its decentralised nature. This arises from a combination of the increased power and functionality coupled with the widespread, individual ownership of these mobile devices.”

What an opportunity

Martin De Saulles — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:55:54 +0000

Interesting piece in the latest Computer Weekly which reports on research from Gartner about the “4 roles that will define IT departments of the future”. They are:
1. Litigation support manager
2. Enterprise information architect
3. Digital archivist
4. Business information manager

Those last 3 look a lot like the work currently done by many library and information professionals. If Gartner is right, perhaps the future for the LIS profession is brighter than many are predicting.

PostRank Top Blogs Awards

Martin De Saulles — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:09:21 +0000

There are some very interesting results in the PostRank Blog Awards. Using a range of metrics this seems to be a fairly robust and comprehensive attempt to rank the influence and popularity of blogs across a wide range of subject areas. For me, the post interesting information in these results is the quantification of the points of engagement for the blogs they have evaluated. This is presented as either on-site or off-site engagement with a breakdown of the off-site tools used by readers to engage with blog content. The clear driver of most off-site engagement is Twitter with Delicious generally coming second. Perhaps more interesting is how this varies with the audience of different blogs. The winning blog in the Poetry category had 99% on-site engagement while the winner in the Web 2.0 category only had 9% on-site engagement. Not terribly surprising, but it shows the importance of understanding your users when developing a marketing strategy for your blog.

Technological change and the information professional

Martin De Saulles — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:25:14 +0000

A piece I wrote for the CILIP Library and Information Gazette has just been published. In it, I look back at some of the key changes to the information world over the previous 10 years and anticipate what the future might hold for us.

A waste of money?

Martin De Saulles — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:24:42 +0000

Top-down or bottom-up? What is the best way for new technologies to be diffused throughout an organisation? Of course, it depends on the technology, the organisation and what you want to achieve. Some recent dealings I have had with the NHS have made me think more carefully about this. Having spent quite a lot of time with a sick relative in various hospitals over the last few months I am astounded that despite more than £5 billion being spent on the NHS IT Programme, the effective sharing of patient records between hospitals and GP’s does not seem to be working. We have been taking photocopies of medical documents with us to appointments as the various specialists we have seen do not seem to be aware of tests that their colleagues in other hospitals have carried out. I thought the NHS IT Programme was supposed to do away with all that – but then the computer was supposed to result in a paperless office. So the top-down approach does not seem to be working very well for the NHS. What about the bottom-up approach? For me, this is the interesting part. Before Christmas I ran a 5 day training programme on Web 2.0 technologies for 15 NHS librarians and information professionals. I really enjoyed their enthusiasm for learning about new services like Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, blogs and wikis. As an example of a NHS librarian using a blog for professional purposes we looked at Sue Jennings’s blog for the Lancashire Care Library and Information Service. I interviewed Sue to find out more about the blog, why she set it up and what the benefits have been. Sue, who had never posted to a blog before she set this one up, told me that the blog had allowed her to promote her unit’s services to their clients in a way that would have taken years to do without it. Visit the blog and you’ll see the types of information she posts. The blog is hosted for free at Wordpress.com and the only investment is her time spent posting updates on new information sources she thinks her users would be interested in. This is a great example of a low-cost/free Web 2.0 technology that is making a difference to healthcare provision. I’m not naive enough to suggest that Web 2.0 holds the answers to all the problems of the NHS but there must be some lessons to be learned here. Perhaps one of the first lessons is, don’t try to control everything and everyone. Despite the enthusiasm of my NHS students, most of them had to carry on their experiments with Web 2.0 at home – many of the IT service managers in their NHS trusts blocked access by default at work to blogs, wikis, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc. We still have a long way to go.

(Photo courtesy of YoNoSoyTu)

Thanks, Jim

Martin De Saulles — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:38:58 +0000

Although this is rather late in the day, I would like to pay my respects to Jim Hennessy who died in April this year. Seeing his obituary in CILIP Update, reminded me what a lovely man he was. I only knew him as a lecturer and my personal tutor when I studied at the then Brighton Polytechnic from 1990 to 1992 but I have warm memories of his classes and our tutorials in his smoky office. His lectures on information policy introduced me to a range of fascinating ideas and ways of thinking about the world which have stayed with me over the last 20 years. Without Jim I would not have been introduced to the work on ICT policy research that was going on at SPRU up the road in Falmer. That introduction and his reference supporting my application secured me a place on their MSc in Science and Technology Policy and a subsequent DPhil from SPRU. I regret losing regular contact with Jim when he retired to Devon but remembering his kindness, mischievous humour and refusal to be part of the "system" still brings a smile to my face. Thanks, Jim.

SLA to keep name

Martin De Saulles — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:32:39 +0000

The result of the voting by SLA (Special Libraries Association) on whether to change its name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals was announced yesterday with a majority voting not to change. This is an excerpt from the official announcement: “The Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced the results of its association-wide vote on a new name today. Voting in record numbers, SLA members failed to approve a proposal to change the organization’s name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. 50 percent of those members eligible to vote participated in the referendum, with 2071 voting yes and 3225 voting no.”

Personally, as a member of the SLA I am disappointed and had voted for a change. Although the proposed new name was not without its faults (being rather wordy was one of them), I felt it recognised the diverse range of roles that many SLA members have and the need to emphasise the strategic importance of information and the people that manage it. Following this decision, I imagine that the organisation will continue to move away from spelling out the SLA acronym. The only mention of the “L” word on their website this morning was at the bottom of the page in very small print.

Future of Online

Martin De Saulles — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:49:38 +0000

I managed to get up to the last day of the Online 2009 exhibition yesterday. It was little different to any of the previous Online events I have been to over the last 15 years. The main difference seemed to be smaller stands from the large information vendors with the central space of the main floor being a cafe area. I'm sure this space was normally taken by an exhibitor. It made me wonder whether this was simply a result of the recession or whether the days of large exhibitions like this are numbered. Before the web, exhibitions and trade magazines were a major source of information for purchasers to find out what new products were being offered by information vendors. B2B magazines such as IWR and Information Today have clearly been hit by the plethora of useful information now available on blogs, company websites and filtered RSS feeds from a variety of sources. Perhaps exhibitions are going the same way. The cost to companies of running a stand at online must be significant in terms of fees and staffing. Of course, many exhibitors will say that they pick up a lot of business at these events and I'm sure for some of them that is still the case. However, with all the other communication channels open to them, I'm not convinced the economics will make sense for a lot longer. Having said all that, I enjoyed catching up with a number of people at the exhibition which, for me, made it all worthwhile.

I also saw a pelican in St James's park on the way home.

The weakest link

Martin De Saulles — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:43:37 +0000

Every morning when I turn my work laptop on I'm greeted with this message. Like most organisations we're inundated with phishing emails asking people to give out their user names and passwords. Inevitably, one or more of my colleagues have responded to these emails and their accounts have then been hacked and used for spamming. As a consequence Hotmail and other large providers have blacklisted emails coming from our domain. This has been a real problem for us as many of our students use Hotmail as their primary email account.

Hopefully, this enforced message will change people's behaviour. However, it makes me wonder how much of a problem this is going to be in the future as we conduct more of our business in the cloud and rely on password-protected hosted services to communicate and collaborate. Part of the answer must lie in better education of users.

Making money from free information

Martin De Saulles — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:47:31 +0000

Making money by selling digital information is becoming increasingly difficult as end users increasingly rely on free sources for their personal or business needs. 2 recent posts from the Alacra blog (links at bottom of this post) are fascinating and offer an insight into how the company has developed a commercial (based on a "freemium" model) information service that combines the knowledge of selected financial bloggers with their own proprietary databases of companies and M&A activity. I was particularly interested in the comment by Steven Goldstein of Alacra regarding the need to use both automated systems to create a scalable system and human editors to compensate for inaccuracies in their semantic tagging system:

" Finally, we rely upon human review of the results. While technology is critical, in that it allows the product to scale, technology alone will only reach accuracy levels of 80-85%. That may be sufficient for some products, but when we’re pushing out alerts to users, we believe the bar is higher. So, we have a 24-hour team of editors who review the tagged events to ensure they are accurate."

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/the-alacra-knowledge-base-a-rose-by-any-other-name.html

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/tagging-the-heartbeat-of-alacra-pulse.html