Euan Semple was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast about a proposal by the British Government to try and ban certain email addresses from social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo in an effort to protect children from online predators. Here’s the video:

When the guest sitting next to Euan - Annie Mullins, the chair of the Home Office Task Force on Child Protection and the Internet - was challenged on whether a government program to encourage these sites to try and block potential predators could actually work (since even though the government has a database of information on child predators, anyone can anonymously sign up for a free email address on sites like Yahoo and Google) she responded that she “learned about this only yesterday, and this is news to us.”

It seems to me one should go on national TV having thoroughly read the proposal one is being interviewed about, no?

Fortunately, Euan’s response was much more informed. When asked about whether the government should be involved in something like this, he responded:

Part of the problem is people expecting the government to sort it out for them and to manage the situation for them…The challenge is to come up with regulations that make sense and that people can have confidence in. And one of the challenges is that the institutions that are trying to come up with these regulations don’t always understand the environment they’re trying to regulate.

One of the hosts referred the Internet as a “sort of unregulated, wild wild west.” - Euan had an excellent backhanded response to this:

One of the things I’m concerned about is that the Internet is portrayed as a scary place; parents are wary of it. Partly through the media they get conditioned to think it’s a scary place…

This is an ongoing problem in the mainstream media, and even more surprising considering the massive investments major media outlets have made in their online presences. When the BBC itself has an immense presence on the Internet, one should think that the TV hosts would do well to sound like they’re in 2008 - not 1998.

As for government involvement in online safety. It’s a good idea in principle, but people within government need to educate themselves about the tools they’re trying to regulate. Otherwise they really have no business pushing proposals that sound good, but require a lot of time and money and don’t address the issue in a meaningful way. That’s just feel-good politics.

We don’t know whether the president has ever personally used a wiki, but his staff at the White House Office of Management and Budget uses one.

Washington Post columnist Stephen Barr explores how the OMB is using a wiki to track earmarks in the federal budget. Earmarking is a process by which members of Congress designate money for specific projects, often in their home states or congressional districts.

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

That’s a great example of the improvement in efficiency that a wiki can bring.

The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress.

And a good example of how a wiki fits into the existing landscape of an organization. Security and Permissions are there, and it’s not an open playground for the public. What’s more, it gives people inside OMB a way to work more closely and make better informed decisions that take multiple viewpoints into account:

Karen Evans, who oversees government-wide technology policy at the OMB, views wikis as a way to provide an opportunity “where everybody gets a say” that then leads to “a very informed decision” by officials.

The wiki permits budget officials to work in real time with one another, rather than sort through e-mail chains wending through the government. It allows officials to hold online meetings when time is short or bad weather makes in-person meetings difficult to schedule. It is open around the clock, so federal budget officials may post comments from home at night or on weekends.

This is good for greater communication, handling issues that come up at odd hours faster, and enabling government to work more efficiently.

Then there’s the networking factor. The wiki features a directory of users, with their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, an important feature in a government where people transfer among agencies or take different jobs every few years.

Tim Karr, Director of SavetheInternet.com wrote to me about a new bill introduced in Congress this week that would guarantee Net Neutrality by restoring it in the foundation of communications law. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (HR 5353) to stop relentless corporate attempts to set up roadblocks on the information superhighway.

The new bill requires the FCC to actively protect the free-flowing Internet from gatekeepers, enforcing protections that “guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.”

I’ve written before about Net Neutrality:

• time to blog about Net Neutrality
• Help make Net Neutrality a law in 2007
• Blogger call tomorrow on internet blocking and Net Neutrality

It’s an issue I feel strongly about, and you should too. The success of the Internet is a direct result of its openness and lack of hierarchy and preferential treatment for any group of users. It needs to stay that way to continue reshaping how we interact. Click here for a quick form to contact your representatives in Congress and ask them to support HR5353.

Dave Atkins of Westwood, Masachusetts wrote last week to tell me about a post he’s written on Using a Wiki to Improve Town Governance. Many people aren’t involved in their local governments because there are too many barriers to participation. Dave’s description of the barriers gets right to the heart of it: [Read more]

Beth Simone Noveck, Director of the Peer to Patent Project, has written an article on Wiki Government for Democracy Journal.

She opens with that line above above, from George Bernard Shaw. It’s powerful, and it was said all the way back in 1911¹. Now that’s not saying that professions are inherently bad, or that they shouldn’t exist. It’s really suggesting that lay people have just as much to offer as experts. [Read more]