Feature: Oxford Internet Institute Launch challenges Global Research Map

'How do we learn fast enough, faster than the world changes?' asked the Master of Balliol College, Andrew Graham, describing the Oxford Internet Institute's (OII) mission in the world and the need for flexibility: 'Otherwise, how are we to be in control of it?' This was just the start to a fascinating day put together by Oxford University and Balliol College to mark the launch of their collaboration in founding the OII with the one-day conference: "Casting a Wider Net: Integrating Research and Policy on the Social Impacts of the Internet".

The founders describe the institute as an independent and multidisciplinary research centre which will focus on the social, economic, legal and ethical impact of the internet, offering objective, independent investigation into issues of community, public policy and governance arising from its spread. In fact, they boast it will be the first truly multidisciplinary internet institute based in a major university. (Multidisciplinary, it shall be noted, as in 'talking across boundaries', not interdisciplinary, which was described during the day as leading to 'mishmash'.)

OII director, Bill Dutton, an American with a strong history in coping with the politics of British academic life and a background in ICT, took up office in July. In his introductory talk, he outlined the institute's goals as generating high quality research; net-working; teaching; and promoting collaboration across different branches of academia, and across policy-makers, business and industry. Areas of priority in research terms will be governance, learning and education, e-science and networks, and households in the networked society.

And many had turned out to hear him. One of the most impressive features of the day was the delegate list. It read like a Who's Who in European internet policy, regulation and promotion, with many counterparts from other continents and a host of British academics. Clearly a number of people beyond the confines of Oxford were taking this initiative very seriously. Graham confessed that, during planning, he had found himself in the happy position of turning down people interested in speaking whom he would very much have liked to hear. That said, multiple panels and parallel sessions harnessed some of expertise of the audience and gave us the chance to offer our thoughts on key issues for the institute to tackle.

Some groups were not represented. In summing up delegate advice to the organisers, it was noted that information science was poorly reflected in the talks and contributions of those present and several people urged the inclusion of as many types of expert as possible in the final line-up of staff. Talking to me after the event, Dutton said that the exact mix of disciplines would be decided by the quality of applicant, with the emphasis on getting a well balanced and first class team, not representing every possible research area. He agreed that the institute might act as a magnet, bringing a prominent research presence to Britain – and Europe – to balance the work being undertaken in the States in this field. As one professor from another institution put it: the creation of the OII 'legitimises certain types of work'.

So, should the HCI and usability community care that Oxford has created this new internet institute? That was the question on my lips throughout the day. Where did research into behaviour, interaction with technology and user-centred design come into the vision?

Well, the morning found most speakers talking economics and regulation in one way or another, particularly with reference to the introduction of broadband. Speed of change was a key area. 'The internet has truncated timescales, except in academia' said one commentator. Concern was expressed that research would not keep pace with developments in technology, that different timescales would be needed depending on the nature of the work, that part of the job of the institute was to look ahead and not study policy for present developments, but those of the future. However, whenever wireless technologies were raised as the way ahead, conversation seemed to drift back to cable-based broadband each time.

BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen looked at the need to educate the population in what to use broadband for, to stimulate demand, and discussed the effect that the Government's policy on competition was having on the roll out of infrastructure. Ecommerce minister Stephen Timms talked about using public procurement to drive the deployment of broadband and identified hospitals and schools as the chief beneficiaries of the Government's push in this area. While Eli Noam of Columbia University delighted his audience with talk of the 'megaband hype and narrowband research' of the dotcom boom era when 'societal mechanisms of evaluation got swept away', and suggested that in order to be 'less wrong' in our analysis and our policy decisions in the future, there were a series of trends to identify and examine which would lead to major impacts.

Only Barbara Simons, former president of the ACM and professor at Stanford University, brought the discussion down to a level of detail that touched on actual use of technology. Talking on "The Crucial Role of Technology Expertise in Policy Making and Analysis", she gave the example of internet voting as a case where policy could be informed by research into use. There had been many problems with voting directly into a computer in American elections. She described the experiments in Florida where:
* the software had been found hard to use,
* there were no recount options,
* more people had come in to vote than had been recorded by the machine and national copyright protection legislation made it impossible to go in and check the mechanisms to see if some votes had been swallowed by a bug.

Then she pointed out that in addition to these drawbacks to computer voting, internet voting introduced the opportunity for
* viruses aimed at altering people's vote,
* 'spoof' sites to draw votes away from the real mechanisms of election, and
* problems on a myriad of computers that were not going to show up in the obliging way that Florida's problems had.

She concluded that there was a danger to society in technological naivety and a failure to explore and learn from present practice. It was important that restrictions were in the social domain controlling behaviour, not technology, but this required an understanding of both. There was a 'desperate need for improvement in channels of communication'.

Later she told me that, as one of the advisors to the new institute, the field of usability and its relationship to policy and development was an area she felt strongly about and was intending to guide upon.

Afternoon sessions divided us up into interest groups around the themes of participation, regulation, public services or structures of living and working. Summaries from each showed that a focus on the social, rather than the economic or political, had dominated them. This went a long way to redress the morning's focus on the effect of policy on economics.

I attended the session on structures of living and working. Short talks included one by Christian Sandvig, a visiting fellow at the OII, in which he told the story of the introduction of telephony to the rural mid-West of America. Back in 1910, telephone companies were reluctant to build out into the country, not just because the cost per user was so high, but also because the farmers 'were stupid and poor and would misuse it, use it to play banjo over'. But the value of the telephone was so great to that community that they built their own lines – sometimes using the barbed wire of their perimeter fences, and sharing party lines across whole towns. Sandvig compared this to the availability of WIFI at present and the disorderly infrastructure of users with local systems (or 'waterlilies' in patches on the pond) who 'don't know or don't care that it spills over' so that others can use their bandwidth. ISPs are reacting by limiting use of broadband in their terms and conditions, while governments are asking whether anything has been stolen if people use the free connectivity available. He concluded that experimentation was not best treated with suppression and criminalisation. There was no evidence that amateurs were always good for the development and spread of a technology, but there was enough evidence to say of these waterlilies 'let them grow a little longer'.

Further into the afternoon, discussion in our session became more general. Two key themes emerged, the first on the change in society caused by increasing use of technology; the second on planning for this. A summary of the points raised in first theme must include:
* the reduction of resources achieved in business by using technology to shift responsibility to individuals does not lessen the amount of work in the whole system and can result in new breakdowns (such as those resulting from poor understanding of the system);
* this transformation can be empowering if the shift results in a more optimal allocation of tasks;
* the amount of work performed will alter as the new ways of doing things lead to further changes in how society tackles tasks;
* especially with respect to disintermediation (the tendency for the internet to remove the middle man), whether it is chosen by or imposed on individuals will be significant;

While those on planning the future use of technology included:
* we cannot plan the system, but we have to plan for a system without a knowledge of what the alternatives may be;
* necessity, compulsion and choice inform the selection of technology and any planning mechanism needs flexibility to accommodate this;
* social interaction is designed into systems, either wittingly or unwittingly and preferably the former. If we embed particular models – as far as we can – then they should be supported by education and also acknowledged: the design was created by particular groups with particular interests and not divinely ordained;
* there is a feeling that technology's pace of change makes for a need for quick decisions, however, most impacts are not felt that fast;
* temporary solutions may be appropriate as the situation is always altering, as is the perception of what is acceptable;
* we should not be distracted by the technical, away from focussing on the social: begin with society and the pull of social issues, rather than push technology at them;
* see technology as a magnifying glass for existing tensions, not the creator of these problems;
* need and use co-evolve and it is not possible to conceptualise new needs before, during or after their appearance;
* it is unnecessary to socially engineer use: make sure that technology is designed so that it can be used, teach people to use it and let them use it as they would wish;
* we do know that, certainly in Britain, an ageing population and a reconsideration of pensions must be planned for;
* public policy should exist to contain the dark side of uses of new technology constructively.

There was also a theme of the personalisation of stored data, with concern that people would be reduced in the transactions of everyday life to data points or commodity exchanges; the least visible bit of the ubiquitous computing environment.

A short summary of these issues was presented at the final plenary. Our chair, Chris Yapp of Hewlett Packard, commented on the extent to which interest in our group had been in living rather than working with technology, reflecting the big change towards domestication that he'd seen over the last three years. Capturing the spirit of our mullings on planning and prediction, he also stressed the need for the institute to establish in which areas it would be possible to do deterministic research and in which not. Damian Tambini of Oxford University called for analysis of people's behaviour to inform policy decisions, saying that much of this research was conducted by commercial interests at present and therefore unavailable. Steve Woolgar, now also at Oxford, reminded everyone that there is no single 'Technology' or single 'Society' that can be addressed by research – it is important to disaggregate, not clump everything together. And Diana Laurillard, embodying the fluidity that the institute aspires to in her move from academia to the Department for Education and Skills, spoke last to say that the public should be empowered to create their own demands.

If your head is now bursting at the number of ideas jostling in this feature, you will be able to empathise with my state by the end of the day. It clearly remains to be seen whether the work of the OII is going to add significantly to the sum of knowledge in the HCI field, or rather use what exists as a stepping stone to recommendations and analysis of practice at a higher level. This would seem to depend on the interests of the final assembly of staff and students, since the field of potential investigation is broad and priorities must be established even within the priorities that Dutton has already outlined.

Will the collaborative dimension of the institute offer anything to inspire multidisciplinary work in other contexts? The challenge that nearly got brushed aside during the morning was significant if the OII is to do something truly new. Someone asked how the institute would stay at the 'bleeding edge' by involving the small businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs where issues first start to impact. Would they be round the table with the rest of the intended collaborators, communicating their vision and sharing their needs? It was not a question that the organisers could easily answer, but then it is not a question that anyone has answered well. This may be a multidisciplinary project, intent on bringing together all the key components of the internet mix, but time is relative... even on a micro-level. A morning in academia is part of a two-year project; to a successful small company, it is hours spent away from meeting the next deadline.

The answer may lie in how the work of the institute is disseminated: whether it can be made terse enough and sufficiently relevant to interest this group initially in learning more. And that is another factor, along with the scope and duration of projects, that will require remarkable flexibility. Time will tell whether the institute can stay that light on its feet.

Associated Link: The Oxford Internet Institute

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