Social change and economic impact are not things that can be extrapolated out of a piece of hardware. New technologies are unrealized potentials – building blocks whose eventual impact will depend on what is designed and constructed with them. The shape they ultimately take will be determined by our ability to visualize how they might be applied in new contexts.

From Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal 1995 McKinsey Quarterly article on Innovation’s uncertain terrain.

It’s probably the neatest summary of my attitude to technology and why without re-imagining the society that surrounds them, all the windmills, solar arrays and miracle-engineered crops won’t do the jobs our technologists and policy wonks think they will.

Pic (cc) Final Gather

Ireland you messed up. You got greedy and now you owe big banks in Germany lots and lots and lots of money.*

Payback is tough, but maybe today’s Irish Times leader points to a solution. A post-Fukishima Germany is rethinking its energy mix. Ireland, you haven’t even fully thought out yours in the first place, but look west and you’ll see an answer both yourselves and Frau Merkel may find to your liking. What’s more, the interconnectors running energy off the island of Ireland and into mainland Europe are close to coming online which means you get to enter a market formally reserved for big boys and girls only.

Supply and demand, debt for wind. Easy no? Oh, and as an upside, you get to turn your desolate western ports into green jobs incubators. Sorta like Dong Energy is doing in Belfast. Double win, all across the Atlantic coast.

And here’s a bit of advice Ireland. Get this done quick. Because if you don’t, the smart German electricity companies are going to buy up your waters and do this anyway. Who do you think electrified Ireland in the first place?

* Let’s ignore for the sake of simplicity the complicit and profit making motives of German banks in lending money to greedy Irish developers in the first place.

-EDIT-

Irish ministers were in London this week discussing renewable energy sales. Very neighbourly of Britain to offer to subsidise (I’m guessing) cap-ex projects. Thanks chaps.

Twestival’s global comms centre. Photo (cc) allofoto

Do you work on a campaign, an event or maybe for a global company? How do you communicate minute to minute with your co-workers and volunteers if they aren’t in a cubicle beside you?

Tuesday’s are the fun days at Twestival. I start with a 9.30am Skype call to Twestival Australia and end about 11pm with a call into the US. In between there are Skype and GoToMeeting calls with other regions, maybe a webinar with local organisers, lots of Twitter and Facebook updates, a tonne of e-mail, and maybe a phonecall or two if absolutely necessary. I imagine that’s pretty standard for anyone organising a global event or campaign, it’s coming towards the end of International Women’s Day as I write this and I bet the organisers are still knee deep in digital communications.

The question arrises, or at least it does for me, what’s the best channel to use in different situations. And pertinently for campaigns, or volunteer led (and I mean led) events, how do we convey enthusiasim, excitement and urgency in a digital space without pissing people off who are busting their ass for our cause. In particular I’m referring to those moments when we need to communicate digitally one-on-one or one to a small group. I’ve had to think about this a lot over the last couple of months and it is safe to say Twestival is rubbing my nose in some new insights.

• Twitter: @cian has been active for four years but Twestival has totally opened my eyes to how effective Twitter is at one-on-one active engagement. Particularly with people who want to engage more but aren’t sure how. An email is too much hassle, Skype too invasive, but sending a public @ message shows social recognition, trust and can enthuse in a big way.
• Skype: Simply the best way of pretending your virtual coworker in in the vicinity. You can decide if that’s a good thing.
• GoToMeeting: Want to conference call, share screens and maybe pull someone in to a call whose timezone means she’s already in the pub? Bam. Diary management overhead is high, but maybe you’re an organised type.
• E-Mail: Ugh, want a permanent paper trail, fine, but don’t expect anyone to thank you for it, or be able to find that password you sent three hours ago.
• Facebook: Want to start an avalanche of enthusiastic chatter? Facebook is the goto place. Check out the Twestival Local logo gallery for a prime example of an initiative which allows that 1% of creators to engage the 99% of commentators and observers.

These points are nothing you have not read before, but all too often we shove the right message down the wrong pipe and then wonder why our team of organisers or volunteers aren’t delivering on project goals. We spend a lot of time chin stroking over the right message, whilst doing that it’s vital to consider also the medium. I’d love to hear other insights from the field, tell me what you use in these situations.

Pic (cc) JesseYounger1.

Reading Zygmunt Bauman at the moment. In Consuming Life he lifts this great quote from Mary Douglas‘ In the Active Voice:

Unless we know why people need luxuries (that is, goods in excess of survival needs) and how they use them, we are nowhere near tackling the problems of inequality seriously.

I like that Bauman is ignoring the standard Maslovian psychological approach to consumerism (which seems to my over addled and under educated mind so self-serving and self perpetuating, a form of back slapping almost from marketing types) and bringing the whole discourse out into a much broader societal and sociological space. Because, the consumers’ wants not only affect them, but their relationship to the objects/subjects they are consuming, and the rest of society. Bauman this time:

In the society of consumers, no one can become a subject without first turning into a commodity, and no one can keep his or her subjectiveness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity.

Bauman gives some great examples of how in our networked age, technology is allowing the consumer to be (reflexively?) turned into the commodity. Exhibit A: The call centre software which filters high spending shoppers straight to the head of the queue whilst low-spenders are doomed to spend eternity in the great touch-tone void; “For instructions on how to fix the lump of plastic technology you are paying us £45 per month on an 18 month contract please press ’1′, for all over services, please press ’0′…”

I work for Setanta Sports. Setanta at times is is a company much like a pubescent teenager. Big irregular growth spurts, co-ordinating different limbs can be tough, and every once in a while we’ll go and lock ourselves in our room until fresh investment arrives.

I’ll leave the bigger analysis to our friends in Media Guardian and Enders. They’re getting more right than wrong right now without help from this website.  Just one point on consumer relationships, a point that is in no way uniquely applicable to Setanta.

Here’s a role that every organization that relies on business-to-consumer relationships should have:

With apolagies to my friends in marketing and PR who do a great job, this isn’t about you. This isn’t about “telling a story” or getting a message out. It’s about open ears and interfacing. Taking the message that’s out there and reacting. Read Frank Eliason’s full blog post for reasons why.

Right now there are thousands of conversations on Twitter, GetSatisfaction.com and DigitalSpy about every media brand under the sun. If as a brand we’re not listening, and even more importantly not empowering those we ask to listen, we simply cannont win. This is nothing to do with new technologies and everything to do with new respect for those who pay our wages, our customers.

I spent Saturday at the first (and I hope) annual Africa Gathering conference, an orgy of ICT4D organized by the guys behind Geekyoto and held in Birkbeck College, London.

First up with a BIG statement was Tim Unwin, UNESCO ICT4D chair. His message was loud and clear.

It’s time to stop doing pilot projects and start doing things that are substantive and substantial.

Shades of Tim O’Reilly’s call for us to work on stuff that matters and I couldn’t agree more

The $100 laptop

ICT4D PhD candidate David Hollow had some insights into how the initial rollouts of $100 laptops in five Ethiopian schools. Using qualitative and quantitative research he painted a picture of laptops being enthusiastically received by students but ultimately alienating both teachers and parents. Students are learning how to use their new computers far quicker than their teachers and in many cases both teachers and parents have concluded that the laptops are good for nothing but games

There was a clear message that there simply isn’t enough meaningful content on these laptops. Until there are more textbooks and lesson modules uploaded as standard the laptops are going to continue to be used as glorified digital cameras and MP3 players. In other words it’s not enough to get these laptops into the field. They have to be supported with localized software and content. And it’s vital that parents and teachers are ahead of the training curve. So stick that in your USB drive Negroponte.

SMS on the Frontline

Frontline SMS setup. Super simple.

Ken Banks presented one of the standout presentations, how his SMS management tool, Frontline SMS has been utilized across the content. Frontline creates an SMS messaging hub by allowing a standard phone to be connected to a standard PC using a standard cable.  Why has he been so successful? Because Ken’s given the users the very basics and let them roll with it. He’s trusted them to follow some instructions, souce the gear, but the airtime even though this means the barriers to entry are slightly higher. When users do get everything working they feel massive ownership and become his best evangelists.

It takes big NGOs and government organizations months to build and deploy tech for similar usage, Frontline SMS allows end users such as field doctors and local media organizations bypass the tape and get on with connecting to their audience. And crucially it bypasses local authority structures, very important when monitoring Zimbabwaen elections for example.

Ultimately Ken makes a great point on the direction of technology in Africa. He’s distributing a small software package and letting people run it for themselves.

Mobiles in Africa: The Movie

Martin Konzett of ict4d.at presented this trailer of his current project. The full documentary is released next month. Great to see some humour in the mix.

Old School Networks: ColaLife

The most bizarrely innovative  story of the day was that of Simon Berry, the man behind ColaLife. This is a case of using social media tools here in the UK and around the world to push a cause in Africa. So far so standard, but it’s the cause itself that’s super-impressed me. Simon’s idea is real simple:

1. Lots of kids in Africa die from dehydration related illness.
2. Many can be saved if only hydration salts and medcines could be got to them.
3. Let’s use the existing distribution channels of Coke deliverers to spread the good stuff.

Here’s the video:

Could it be that using old-school distribution channels we’ll create new human collaborative networks? This simple idea has huge scaling potential and it’s something that companies like Coca-Cola should be jumping aboard way before Simon and ColaLife force them. We can apply this to all sorts of distribution channels and supply chains all around the world and the great thing is that the concept works without any hi-tech rocket science. Once the guys in the distribution centres are on board we have a winner.

And the rest…

A couple of interesting points from whiteafrican and Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman. In Africa it’s very hard for people to bounce ideas off each other. Here we do this with tools like Twitter, IRC, Facebook etc. Yet the speed of communication and thus the time it takes to disseminate ideas in Africa remains slower.

That said clearliy technologies, particularly of the open variety have leveled the global barrier to entry for developers everywhere. Technology allows Africans to overcome life’s inefficiencies,  whether that’s government, food or health.

And if there’s one technology holy grail right now is an open mobile payment structure that isn’t tied to any operator or even any country. Achieve this and then the playing field really does level off in a big way. If you’re to believe Erik and the majority of the attendees of AfricaGathering the phone operators have no incentive and are bringing no urgency to this issue. Having a worked with the European and US arms of many of these operators this comes as no surprise.

Finally,  just to show the day wasn’t all serious save-the-world ernestness, Juergen Eichholz gave a quick presentation on Afrigadget and the even better and funnier Afrifail.com. Check them out for some great upcycling action.

“

AfriFAIL [photo (c) flickr.com/photos/jennerm

-Edit

Here are some more blog pieces on the day which I’ve just lifted from Alasdair Munn’s piece on the day. Cheers Alasdair.

• My Take on AfricaGathering in London - Juergen Eichholz
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 1 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 2 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 3 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 4 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: panel discussion
• Karola Riegler’s Flickr Photoset on AfricaGathering

A month ago I was inspired to enter the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. The closing date was mid April so unfortunately if the entered app, Battfone, was a horse it would be still out there running.

But let’s not worry about trivialities like that, changing the world is more important than winning coding competitions and collecting cash prizes. So with that in mind here’s an update to what I’m still trying to achieve with Battfone.

So what’s the big idea?

Here’s the detailed application overview used on the CTW site:

It’s Saturday afternoon and Josh has some downtime so he’s laying back on the couch watching some football. He’s not particularly interested in the result so he’s got his IM open on his laptop and he’s texting his friends planning his Saturday night entertainment.

Then the BattFone goes off. Adam receives a Twitter DM alerting him to a Social Action hot off the wires from Idealist.org. There’s an asylum seeker at the local welfare centre and they need a translator in a hurry. Just so happens Adam speaks “foreign” and so without much ado he’s down there spending less than an hour making someone’s life a lot easier.

Adam is the type of guy who’ll answer a call for help but he’s not always going to go out of his way to look for the needy. That’s where BattFone comes in.

***

We want BattFone to be considered the early warning alert system for the Social Actions. An APB for the API.

We aim to combine the Social Actions API with Twitter and eventually other networks  to create a multi-way Social Actions communications system. Using http://BattFone.me users will register to be alerted via Twitter, e-mail and other means when actions they’ve specified an interest in are created.

BattFone is a filter and alert system to get the right Social Actions to the right Social Actors at the right time.
The right time isn’t always quarter a after midnight during a surfing session. It can be whenever and wherever the Action is created.

BattFone is focused heavily on the end-user. It’s main purpose is to act as an instigator of real world action. We want to take relevant Social Actions off the social networks and put them into the hands of people who will answer the call for help.

We expect BattFone to be most useful in urban environments where rich sets of actions will be targeted at the most focused set of actors possible. As the Social Actions API develops we expect location awareness to play a key role. Right now however we’re working with what we can in this regard.

Great Idea, now go build it

Part of my day job at Setanta involves designing and managing the build of applications far more complex than the one above. So Battfone was going to be a piece of cake, even for a someone like myself who doesn’t usually get their hand covered with code feces. Wrong.

First up was designing a model. The concept is straightforward enough.

1. A user registers interest in receiving Battfone alerts
2. User provides Twitter ID and states what action types they want to help with along with their location
3. Battfone polls Social Actions’ API regulary
4. Battfone matches new Social Actions’ location and action_type with user location and action type.
5. If there’s a match we compose a tweet and dm the lucky user

After taking the app through some bigtime thought revisions the bones remain pretty much as is. The order of that if statement has changed but the result is the same.

So with a model sketched out in too-soft-for-my-liking-HB pencil it was on to the application stack itself. One given was that the app was going to be hosted by Joyent. I’ve had nothing but great customer support there over the past few years and already have a ton of small blogs (including this one) safely housed there.
Next up the stack itself. One of the great rules set down by the guys at Social Actions is that all the apps end up published with an Open Source license. Add to that that to kick off there’s only going to be one developer working on this and there goes a .NET stack.

Second contributing factor was the APIs that were going to be integrated; Twitter and Social Actions. Twitter in particular has a ton of libraries and documented code snippets already built for it. Social Actions is getting there. To utilize these my choices were down to Python, PHP, Java and Ruby. I played around with Python for a while but eventually settled on Ruby. With Rails I could scaffold a working database model (I thought at the time) quickly, not worry about the front end design until way later, and concentrate my efforts on the app brains of matching social_actions with users.

I’d like to have investigated Django a little more. I really like what the guys there are building but there’s simply a lot more Rails examples and tutorial out there right now and if I was going to build this, or at least a proof of concept, on my own I was going to need to tap into the crowd wisdom already on the net.

What’s taking you so long?

I’m going to save an actual code overview for another time. Some big problems I’ve faced so far aren’t issues with my conceptual problems, but simply knowledge gaps associated with using any stack for the first time, in my case Rails. It took the best part of a week of evening to get MySQL’s local paths sorted on my dev environment. Twitter has been turning OAuth on and off for the last month meaning that testing any Twitter functionality has been hit or miss. It’s still out and I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle to re-engineer Battfone to handle password logins that are soon the be deprecated anyway.

Right now I’m at the stage where I have just about every individual class working independently.  I have a scaffolded app running with a few bugs and I’m trying to add in the classes and functionality one by one. I’ve no front end work done but that’s the fun part so I’ll sail through that in a couple of nights.

If there has been one hold back on the API side though it’s been with the location attributes of each social_action coming through the Social Actions API itself. For the vast majority of actions the location attribute is not set at all. This makes sense in many cases, why should a petition for example need a real world location set for it. However in the case where locations are set they are not always easy to parse and match up with a user. I know this issue is still under development on the API side and it hasn’t stopped John Brennan building his fantastic Google Maps mashup at http://www.imdoingmypart.org/community/map.

imdoingmypart.org

I can only commend Joe and Peter from Social Actions who have been super encouraging during the whole process. One of their aims with the competition has been to incubate a developer community around the API and that’s certainly happened.

So onwards!

There’s alot more to come on the onwards applications of Battfone, I’m hoping to have a working version online in the next couple of weeks. You can follow the test Twitter account @battfone to get a good idea of the state of play. And of course if you have any feedback, ideas, offers of free coders and so on please shout.

Because I don’t have enough to do with my time right now I am thinking about entering the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. Closing date is Friday 3rd April so it’s all hands on deck right now.

Needless to say the app I’ve got in mind right now will integrate with the SocialActions API along with the Twitter API and I’m also hoping to add in some magic web 2.0 ingredient, time’s the big issue though. It’s been a while since I waded knee deep into code torrents this rough.

Social Actions are attempting to become the world’s clearing house for actions run by charitable and philanthropic organziations. By the looks of things they’re going about it the right way, building a central API that can communicate with a whole ton of online bodies in the charitable space. Through the Change the Web Challenge they are also incubating an interesting Developers Network here. More power to them.

That’s right, change the web, change the world. Now, back to the code.

There’s a trust deficit in society. Technology can play and is playing a huge role in rectifying this.

I’ve just read Causewired by Tom Watson. The book is Watson’s attempt to summarize the current state of play in the world of online philanthropy, social causes and network based social action organization. Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World as the tag line suggests.

I’ve a lot more to come about the subjects Watson tackles but right now I’m going to take on the subject of trust, particularly in light of the last two posts on this site concerned as they are with Digital Britain and Modern Liberty. There’s a gaping trust void in society right now. Our government clearly don’t trust us and in the midst of a  recession the likes of which none of us have know before there’s a danger that society fragments and turns away from the most needy, and from the most grave causes.

The central thesis of Watson’s book is this:

New Technology and the human urge to communicate will create the basis for a golden age of activism and involvement, increasing the reach of philanthropy and improving the openness of politics, democratic government and our major social institutions.
[BUT, working against this is the current global recession. Governments are running into budget shortfall and cutting spending in all social areas.]

So, just as our governments are failing us by cutting back on spending that increase social cohesion, we are coming up the the technology and the ideas to bind ourselves together in social economies without our governments’ help. I’m going to have to leave my reaction to government responses here to another post, needless to say it’s a big issue.

Whether our governments get it right with initiatives like Digital Britain, Watson’s point is that there’s a whole ton of people in the doing-something-that-matters space that aren’t waiting for their government. And why should they. Private (and open source) enterprise has given an historically unprecedented number of people the tools and inspiration to take action in a whole host of fields.

For now I want to take a look at some of studies in Causewired and see how they are tackling matter of trust.

What technology is allowing us do

A quick overview of what this technology is allowing us to do is in order. Watson’s beat is online philanthropy. That means free giving. And by free I mean free as in speech, not beer. Giving of one’s own volition. So who’s giving and who’s getting? Watson hones in on some prime time examples: DonorsChoose, Fundable, Kiva and Facebook Causes.

Each a very different application or platform but some bigtime shared attributes and functions, not least of which in my view is the way trust is leveraged, certainly in the case of the first three if not quite so strongly with Causes. For those not familiar with these companies it’s worth clicking the above links and checking their about pages real quick. In all of these examples Watson is showing us that the abstraction between the giver and receiver in a philanthropic situation is being removed. If I use DonorsChoose to donate textbooks to classrooms I know what text books and what school is involved. If I loan money with Kiva to a person or project in a developing world country chances are I have a photo and story behind the whole deal. The personalization and directness strengthens the sense of empathy with in turn cranks up the trust motor.

How is this being achieved

Watson highlights the transition from anonymity to real identity on the social web as key.
From Charles Leadbeader in We Think: Freedom is a slippery idea, but I believe that the web will be good for freedom of expression in four respects.

• The freedom to think what we like, to form and express ideas independently
• The freedom to shape our identities, to be who we want to be
• The freedom as consumers to choose and buy what we want
• The freedom to express ourselves through creating things that matter to us.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to suppose that for freedom to exist within a social space the atmosphere of that space must be made up of a large dose of trust. Example: I am only free if I trust my cohabitants to obey the rules of the social space and  thus not impinge upon my freedom. The future threat of the curtailment of freedom may in itself act as that very curtailment.

But freedom within an environment is not enough within itself. After all, if a user can have a trust based relationship only within a closed space how can a movement or cause grow. The trust relationship must expand. That may mean the expansion of the [closed] environment or it may mean the migration of the users and their attached trust outside the environment.

From an interview with Causes’ Sean Parker Watson tells us turning users into propagators is key.

“Deliberate viral engineering, how you turn your users into propagators through careful optimization was very important “

This is illustrated in another case study,  Kiva, the developing world online loan agency. By allowing users to help many causes and many users to help each cause there’s a natural urge for donors to tell more people to donate to their cause and see their cause succeed. Watson likens this to a child collecting baseball cards.

Watson isn’t afraid to be a little cynical in illustrating his point when he mentions the black tie ball philanthropy that continues to pull in big money in New York. Being seen at the ball is a big part of the play.

Causes do not spread just because they are good, they spread because people spread them. This seems simple and rather obvious but it is the secret sauce behind the rise of all the online social networks. In short, people like being asked nicely by other people they know to do things for them; that request validates the relationship.

Bringing all this back to trust

One of the most important observations Watson brings to the table in Causewired is this:

Optimism is inherent in people. Consumers will switch brands for causes, particularly young consumers.

Exampe: Every summer Coke and Pepsi go head to head with youth orientated promotions. Collect 20 bottle tops and get a free iTunes voucher. How about if these were led by social causes instead of iTunes giveaways.

83% of Americans say that companies have a responsibility to help support causes and 87% would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause.

That’s a lot of brand loyalty simply migrating because of people’s innate desire to “do the right thing”. This highlights a couple of glaring facts:

1. The online social philanthropy space is potentially huge
2. Our governments need to be in there getting a piece of the action

Let’s bring this back to trust again. It’s natural to wonder why governments don’t take on this job of turning users into propagators of key services. The private sector is now shining some big fat arc lights down this road, it shouldn’t be hard for our public services to start taking some big steps here. It’s also natural to wonder what we can do to reduce the trust deficit that exists between the government and the rest of us (as outlined here). It our governments aren’t going to trust us on some big issues right away, the least that can be done is the services and applications be put in place so we can trust each other. Then let us do the hard work.

Conclusions

Whilst researching this article I came across this piece by Tom Watson.

…on one hand, people are ever more conscious of philanthropy and its role in commerce and society; on the other, these people are talking to each other more so than ever before.

If you keep talking you can change the world right? And now talk is cheap, easy and global. In theory the more we talk, the more we get to know each other and empathize, the more we trust. In the UK right now the government, through Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, is attempting to map out the digital future. It believes at the end of this future there is a Digital Dividend, the spoils of which will greatly benefit all of society. Lord Carter could do worse than spend a few hours reading Causewired and learning how that dividend is already being created.

There’s two massively important movements taking place right now in Britain, here are some important connections between them. I’ve already written a little about the Digital Britain interim report but more importantly Charles Leadbeater has written a lot and put it all together in a handy portable pdf. Download it here.

The original report either isn’t aware of, or Lord Carter, it’s author, didn’t have the balls to ask some big questions. Leadbeater does. There’s far to many to list here, go read the document, however I will highlight one important conclusion.

It strikes me, as it has done Leadbeater, that the government on the one hand is proposing what they think is an ambitious drive to take the UK’s new media industry and infrastruture forward into the next quarter century. Yet they don’t want to involve us, the public. Moreover, they patently don’t trust us.

Reading Digital Britain one cannot help but feel the government finds the opportunities for people to self-organise through the web all too unsettling for its more technocratic, controlling tendencies. Digital Britain conveys none of the excitement that many young people feel about the world of semi-structured free association that mutual media is creating. This interim report, written behind closed doors in an era of open communications, is little more than piece of space filling to persuade us the government has a vision for the future when in reality it seems to have none, at least not yet. (A model of what can be done, even in government, is the parallel The Power of Information report, which is fully of exciting recommendations for how government can open up its information for citizens to use in novel ways. )

The government say that the UK must be allowed compete with the most advanced nations on Earth and to do this we must have an advanced IT infrastructure. But to use an advanced infrastructure, to create an advanced infrastructure, we must have entrepreneurs, thinkers, dreamers and digital literates. And they must be given tools and those tools imparted with trust.

– –

This basic mistrust of us the people is the reason the Convention on Modern Liberty not only happend this weekend, but was much needed. What could have been another umbrella demo by the SWP and their ilk has the potential to be a real political movement. Here’s why.

Henry Porter quotes David Cameron in today’s Observer. Scarily I agree with him:

“When academics look back on Labour’s time in power,” he said, “the erosion of our historic liberties will surely be one of its most defining, and damning, aspects. Things we have long thought were part of the fabric of liberty in this country – such as trial by jury, habeas corpus with strict limits on the time that people can be held without charge, the protection of parliament against intrusion by the executive – have been whittled away.”

And Nick Clegg from the same article is a little less dramatic but a little more on point:

“We are the most spied-upon country in the developed world, with a million innocent people’s DNA on a criminal database, more surveillance cameras than anywhere in the world, parents snooped on by council officials checking up on where children spend the night, and ceaseless attempts by government to limit our freedom of expression. That’s why the work of the Convention on Modern Liberty is so important in highlighting the liberties we have lost and inspiring a new alliance in Britain to take our freedoms back.”

Both of these quotes go back to the trust issue. Nobody highlighted this issue better than Philip Pullman in his address to the convention. If Clegg highlighted the problems above, Pullman took the higher road and asked us what sort of society we WANT to live in. For if we don’t know the answer to that what have we got to complain about and what have we to aim at.
Courage, virtue, intellectual curiousity, modesty and honour are five big optimistic virtues that are pulled out and analyzed. You won’t find me arguing.

Just imagine for a moment a nation with the courage, with the modesty, with a simple wakeful clarity of mind that are so
near at hand, so easy to find, if only we knew. Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like. Imagine a nation that cherished these things as a kind of natural blessing, something obviously good that needed no justification, something like sunshine or kindness or clean water. Or honour.

Now what have these things to do with freedom and the threats to freedom we have been hearing about today? What has the virtue of delight to do with virtue of liberty. Everything. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia of furtive hatred and low-level panic, every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation and of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal and I say weapon, advisedly: we have a fight on
our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight”, said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant. The fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

That really is a big concept yet one that you won’t find on the manisfesto for government of any of the major parties. At least not yet you won’t. That could change.