Policy Bloggers Network and European Internet Foundation: 2025 Vision

A few months ago, I was conducting some research on international mobile phone trends and came across the Open Gardens Blog. Open Gardens is maintained by Ajit Jaokar, the founder of the London-based publishing and research company futuretext which focuses on emerging Web and mobile technologies. I reached out to Ajit and we started discussing the possibility of building a virtual bridge across the Atlantic to share insights and ideas. As a consultant to the European Internet Foundation, he indicated that members were interested in hearing varied perspectives and recommended that we create a “blogger carnival.”

This coming Tuesday, September 29, Ajit has an event with the EU Parliament where plan to launch the Policy Blogger’s Network. He asked me and several other bloggers around the world, including GovLoop founder Steve Ressler and National Science Foundation Fellow Mark Drapeau, to respond to four questions. Those questions – and my answers – are found below.

1. What do you think are the most important digital technology trends in the world today and why? (No more than 3 please).

As never before in history, humans across the planet have access to vast amounts of knowledge and information at their fingertips almost anytime, anywhere. To make an important distinction and explain this notion of ubiquitous access, I view knowledge as the sharing of content from human to human. Social media – blogs, wikis, and social networks – have enabled people to query and counsel one another with increasing speed and effectiveness. Whether it’s consumer to consumer inquiries about the quality of products or services or citizen to citizen links that lead to unanticipated election results (think of both the US and Iran in the last twelve months), people are connecting with one another in extraordinary ways. What’s most remarkable is the speed with which trust is established in these online conversations. The crowd believes in its collective wisdom and readily anoints its own tribe leaders – people whose voices in the past were muffled by traditional media’s control over content and distribution channels. In the virtual realm, individuals value one another’s opinions and generously share experiences and insight.

Information, on the other hand, is what we find when we turn to search engines and databases. Enter keywords into Google, Bing or Internet Explorer and it spits back related content. However, unlike the social media described above, this content does not include an immediate human interaction upon discovery. But even these vehicles are becoming more sophisticated as we move toward a semantic web where the threads that weave content together – both knowledge and information – will be unraveled and reconstituted in ways that will make this ubiquity even more extraordinary and valuable. At the same time, the tools that enable us to obtain this content will be increasingly smaller to enable rapid, mobile access. Very little information will be stored on personal machines. It will exist in a virtual cloud that further promotes the potential for anytime, anywhere access.

2. What do you think will be the most important impacts of digital technologies on Europe’s economic life by 2025 and why?

This trend toward ubiquitous access to knowledge and information will have a profound impact on where and how people work, making a mobile lifestyle much more commonplace. If an individual has uninterrupted, universal access to the content they require to perform their work-related tasks and desires a balance between personal and professional activities, why would s/he travel to a designated place for a structured period of time? Both public and private institutions will have a distributed workforce and wonder what to do with the vacant buildings that once forced workers to waste hours each day in commuting to mostly urban, centralized structures. Obviously, this phenomena will have a greater impact on knowledge workers. Countries that offer less expensive labor pools will continue to engage in the lion’s share of manufacturing and production jobs, though the ability to contribute as a knowledge worker from anywhere in the world will lead to greater competition for these positions.

3. What do you think will be the most important impacts on Europe’s political and/or social life by 2025 and why?

People will return to their neighborhoods and we will see a renaissance in civic engagement. People will have more time to interact with one another in communities – both physical and virtual. With the move toward greater transparency and accountability in government, citizens will come to expect greater input into legislation at earlier stages. They may even begin to wonder why they have representatives in elected positions such as parliament or congress when collaborative technology provides the power for anyone to introduce and vote on proposed legislation. Moreover, effective governments will spend less money on people in paid positions providing services to citizens and more energy and resources enabling citizens to serve one another. Power will shift away from a privileged few to a more democratic system where influence resides with individuals and organizations who can capture the attention of the masses through new media and harness their collective strength to initiate change.

4. In view of your answers, what do you think are the three most important policy issues Europe’s political leaderships need to address today?

a. Support legislation that urges mobile communication and Web-based technology providers to integrate and collaborate.
b. Incentivize private and public sector organizations to implement a more mobile, home-based workforce, where appropriate.
c. Address the legal and security issues that present barriers to more widespread use of collaborative technology.