On March 30 the BBC broadcast a 40 minute talk from Martha Lane Fox. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is an odd beast, a peculiarly British, indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are “an entrenched monopoly” in British broadcasting.

Cameron Neylon

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Martha Lane Fox (Photo: The Cabinet Office License: OGL v1.0)
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On March 30 the [BBC](http://www.bbc.co.uk/ "BBC"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="homepage"} broadcast a 40 minute talk from [Martha
Lane
Fox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Lane_Fox "Martha Lane Fox"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"}. [The Richard Dimbleby
Lecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dimbleby_Lecture "Richard Dimbleby Lecture"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"} is an odd beast, a peculiarly British,
indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an
establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring
marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are "an
entrenched monopoly" in British broadcasting.

 

Indeed one might argue Baroness Lane Fox, adviser to two prime
ministers, member of the House of Lords, is a part of that
establishment. At the same time the lecture is a platform for
provocation, for demanding thinking. And that platform was used very
effectively to deliver a brilliant example of another very British
thing, the politely impassioned call for radical (yet moderate) action.

[The
speech](https://marthalanefoxblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/dot-everyone-making-britain-brilliant-at-the-internet/)
calls for the creation of a new public institution. Dubbed "Dot
Everyone" such an institution would educate, engage and inform all
citizens on the internet. It would act as a resource, it would show what
might be possible, it would enhance diversity and it would explore and
implement a more values based approach to how we operate on the web. I
have quibbles, things that got skipped over or might merit more
examination, but really these are more the product of the space
available than the vision itself.

At the centre of that vision is a call for a new civics supported by new
institutions. This chimes with me as it addresses many of the same
issues that have motivated my recent thinking in the research space. The
[Principles for Open
Infrastructures](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/)
I wrote with Geoff Bilder and Jennifer Lin, could as easily have been
called Principles for Institutions -- we were motivated to work on them
because we believe in a need for new institutions. For many years I have
started talks on research assessment by posing the question "what are
your values" â€" a question implicit in the speech as it probes the
ethics of how the internet is built in practice.

I was excited by this speech. And inspired.

And yet.

One element did not sit easily with me. I emphasized the British
dimension at the top of this piece. Martha Lane Fox's pitch was to "make
Britain brilliant at the internet" and was focused on the advantages for
this country. By contrast the first of the Principles for Open
Infrastructures is that these new institutions must transcend geography
and have international reach. Is this a contradiction? Are we pushing in
different directions? More particularly is there a tension between an
institution "for everyone" and one having a national focus?

The speech answers this in part and I think the section is worth quoting
in full:

> We should be ambitious about this. We could be world leading in our
> thinking.
>
> In this 800th year anniversary of [Magna
> Carta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta "Magna Carta"){.zem_slink
> target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"}, the document widely upheld as one of
> the first examples of the rule of law, why donâ€™t we establish
> frameworks to help navigate the online world?
>
> Frameworks that would become as respected and global as that rule of
> law, as widely adopted as the Westminster model of parliamentary
> democracy.

Clearly this new institution, "our new institution" as it is referred to
throughout, has international ambitions. But I don't imagine I am the
only person to find something almost neo-colonial in these words.
Britain has sought to export its values to the world many times, and
been remarkably successful. But in the past this has also been
paternalistic. The very best possible assessment of what was in many
cases well intentioned imposition of British values is equivocal. Lane
Fox sets up the "good" values of Britain against the lack of values that
inhere in the big commercial players building the web. What is it today
that make "our" values those that should inspire or lead any more than
the, now questionable, values of the past?

To be clear I am absolutely not suggesting that these are issues that
have escaped the speaker's notice. Martha Lane Fox is an outstanding and
effective campaigner for diversity and inclusion and the section of her
talk that I have taken out of context above comes after a substantial
section on the value of inclusion, focused largely on gender but with a
recognition that the same issues limit the inclusion and contribution of
many people on the basis of many types of difference. In truth, her
views on the how and the why of what we need to change, on *what those
values are,* are highly aligned with mine.

But that's kind of the point.

If we are to have a new civics, enabled by the communications
infrastructure that the web provides, then diversity will lie at the
heart of this. Whether you take the utilitarian (not to say neo-liberal)
view that inclusion and diversity drives the creation of greater value,
or see it as simply a matter of justice, diversity and inclusion and
acceptance of difference are central.

But at the same time the agile and flat governance models that Lane Fox
advocates, to be fair in passing, for our new institution arise out the
concept that "rough consensus and running code" are the way to get
things done. But *whose* consensus matters? And how does the structural
imbalance of the digital divide affect *whose* code gets to run first?
This seems to me the central question to be resolved by this new civics.
How do we use the power of web to connect communities of interest, and
to provide infrastructures that allow them to act, to have agency, while
at the same time ensuring inclusion.

At its best the web is an infrastructure for communities, a platform
that allows people to come together. Yet communities define themselves
by what they have in common, and by definition exclude those who do not
share those characteristics. My implicit claim above that our
institutional principles are somehow more inclusive or more general than
Lane Fox's is obviously bogus. Our focus is on the research community,
and therefore just as exclusive as a focus on a single nation. There are
no easy answers here.

The best answer I can give is that we need multiple competing centres.
"Dot Everyone" is a call for a national institution, a national
resurgence even. Alone it might be successful, but even better is for it
to have competition. Martha Lane Fox's call is ambitious, but I think
it's not enough. We need many of these institutions, all expressing
their values, seeking common ground to build a conversation between
communities, domains, geographies and nations.

The tension between facilitating community and diversity can be a
productive one if two conditions are satisfied. First that all can find
communities where they belong, and secondly that the conversation
*between* communities is just and fair. This is a huge challenge, it
will require nothing less than a new global infrastructure for an
inclusive politics.

It is also probably a pipe dream, another well meaning but ultimately
incomplete effort to improve the world. But if the lesson we learn from
colonialism is that we should never try, then we should give up now.
Better is to do our best, while constantly questioning our assumptions
and testing them against other's perspectives.

As it happens, we have some new systems that are pretty good for doing
that. We just need to figure out how best to use them. And that, at
core, was Martha Lane Fox's point.

 

 


Martha Lane Fox (Photo: The Cabinet Office License: OGL v1.0)  On March 30 the BBC broadcast a 40 minute talk from Martha Lane Fox. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is an odd beast, a peculiarly British, indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are “an entrenched monopoly” in British broadcasting.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

.everyone or .science? Or both? Reflections on Martha Lane Fox’s Dimbleby Lecture