Jonathan Zittrain, digital rights guru

A digital rights guru joins the conversation on crowdsourcing

Craig Walker interviews Jonathan Zittrain via email May 19-20

Professor Jonathan Zittrain teaches at Oxford University, and is a principal at the Oxford Internet Institute. Professor Zittrain holds the Jack N. And Lillian R. Berkman visiting professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Professor Zittrain Has focusing on digital property, privacy, and speech how private middle people have played in Internet Architecture. His projects has included The Open Net Initative,Chilling Effects, and H20, a group to develop better education technologies.

Craig Walker: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit its true potential?

Jonathan Zittrain: I think the phenomenon -- I actually hate the name "crowdsourcing" -- is just getting ramped up. For example, I think the privacy debate will be completely upended by social activities made possible by new technologies. The traditional sources of privacy invasion -- government and big corporations -- will be dwarfed by an army of the world's tourists, taking pictures, uploading them, and tagging them -- or having them automatically labeled. Soon we'll be able to ask the Net, "Where was the person in this photo otherwise seen for the past two weeks," and billions of casual photos can provide some answers. Or, "Who are the people attending this protest?" Further, the kinds of systems that allow us to aggregate our behaviors or ratings so that Amazon can recommend books and music or eBay can say whether we're sketchy sellers will be applied to judging people more fundamentally -- "Whom should I meet? Whom should I ignore?"

Q: What do you think motivates your contributors? Is it money or some other incentive?

A: I'm part of a project at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society designed to help people deal with the problem of bad code, which threatens to overwhelm the standard model of generic PCs that can run software from anywhere. It's called Herdict -- verdicts from the herd. It uses the same building blocks as spyware, but with the opposite ethos: it runs unobtrusively on the PCs of participating users, reporting back information about the vital signs and running code of that PC that could help other PCs figure out the level of risk posed by new code. At the moment users are deciding whether to run some new software, the toolkit’s connections to other machines can tell them how many other machines in the herd are running the code, what proportion of machines of self-described experts are running it, whether those experts vouch for it, and how long the code has been in the wild. It can also signal the amount of unattended network traffic, popup ads, or crashes the code appears to generate. This sort of data can become part of a simple dashboard that lets the users of PCs make quick judgments about the nature and quality of the code they are about to run in light of their own risk preferences, just as the drivers of cars use their dashboards to internalize the basics of a car’s speed and health and their radios to get traffic updates on AM radio. The idea is not to replicate the work of security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who seek to bail new viruses out of our PCs faster than they pour in. Rather, it is to provide a common technical and institutional framework for users to devote some bandwidth and processing power for the common good.

Q: Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds? If so, what's the clearest example you know of?

A: I think there's data in crowds. Our challenge -- technical, ethical, political -- is how to assemble, manipulate, and disseminate that data in ways that respect the wishes of those contributing bits and the legitimate interests of those who end up exposed by the crowds' data and the algorithms that turn that data into judgments.

Too many people gloss over the difference between distributed efforts that still end up in a centralized/proprietary system, and those that remain distributed. In the first category is something like Innocentive, which has had a lot of buzz recently. Innocentive is a project by a pharmaceutical company that allows firms to place bounties on the answers to discrete engineering or scientific questions. Freelancers from around the world can offer their answers and collect the bounty. The answers then vanish into the entity that commissioned the question, owned entirely by the private firm. The same model applies to Amazon's "mechancial Turk," where people can solve little problems that defy computer reasoning -- think of a captcha -- for pennies each. I'm not against this, though I suppose at some point it could become a vast, joyless, distributed sweatshop -- I'm not sure how we should think about the prospect of the kids who are getting One Laptop Per Child spending all their time earning money in that way. I'm more excited about distributed mechanisms that allow people to actively commit to participating to a distributed effort, and to learn from other participants as they do it. Wikipedia is the lead example here, but also Pledgebank, meetup, couchsurfing, tripadvisor, Yelp, etc.

Q: What surprised you the most with your project?

A:I fear I've used up my word limit. :)