This is cross posted from O’Reilly Radar

I was struck by this photo that appeared Sunday in the New York Times.  It shows a crowd of Egyptian protesters listening to a military announcement.   Try to count the number of people in the crowd who DO NOT have a mobile device recording the action.

Expanding people’s ability to communicate (from printing press to telegraph to telephone to text messaging) is always a revolutionary act.   Communications technologies do not create the conditions for civic action (the unrest in Egypt is due to longstanding political repression) – but they can accelerate the entire process by (1) dramatically expanding the number of people directly involved in gathering, distributing and consuming information  and (2) allowing a positive feedback loop to develop where people  see the effect of their actions in real-time, which simultaneously reinforces commitment and recruits more members into the cause.

We tend to think of these technologies as inherently democratic.  But the rub in all of this is that while these technologies democratize communications they tend to monopolize surveillance and control.    So while more of us are capable of holding an open, peer-to-peer discussion we are doing so with the consent and under the watchful (or subpoena-able) eye of just a handful of corporations or governments.  And when citizen calls-to-action conflict with government calls for quiet, the government holds more of the cards.  Vodafone has shut down cell phone communications in Egypt,  the Egyptian government has effectively shut down Internet communications and there are now calls for Ham radio operators to lend assistance as Egypt is being pushed back down the communications ladder.

In the “rich world” our experience of  technology is often Utopian and our forecasts of negative consequences are framed only through our experience of current circumstance; we simply can’t imagine what it is like to live in a repressive government or believe that we will ever live under one.  But the seemingly benign governments in which we reside are an historical contingency.   If the past provides any lesson it is that governments will wax and wane in their concern for civil liberties and human rights.  Yet our digital profile (purchase history, political and personal associations etc.) will remain.  Through our participation in these technologies we are donating our data to a vast, indelible reservoir whose future utility is unknown to us…

I am actually optimistic about the future of the Internet as a medium to promote civil liberty, free expression, better government and corporate citizenship (if one can credibly use such a phrase).      However I don’t think it happens on its own.   The Internet needs an architecture (legal and physical) to achieve such ends.  Paradoxically I believe it requires some form of regulation to maintain its dynamic, emergent and decentralized properties so that when any government or corporation wants to hit the kill switch – they can’t.

Is access to communications a fundamental human right?  If so, should a corporation have the ability to abrogate that right at the request of a host government?  As we watch the battle between the Egyptian government’s attempts to throttle information flow (including how corporations defy or collaborate with these attempts) and the people’s struggle to maintain access to communications – we are seeing the  contours of a struggle that will exemplify the next decades of political and policy changes as we try to define the increasingly critical relationship between technology and civil liberties.

Related articles

• Vodafone confirms Egypt lock-down (go.theregister.com)
• Still No Internet or Mobile In Egypt (prblognews.com)
• Regime throws information blackout over Egypt – ABC Online (news.google.com)
• Regime throws information blackout over Egypt – ABC Online (news.google.com)

This is a cross-post from my recent article in Forbes:

I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

As we find ourselves tied to mobile devices, coordination will increasingly become the organizing principle that defines how we get work done; we will become a network of spontaneous gathering, loosely coordinated agents in constant contact.

Mobility is not about phones and it is not about computers. Most of us don’t consider how much sensing intelligence is packed into a smart phone. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with on-board sensors capable of gathering huge volumes of data. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally aware (compass) visually aware (camera that can gather visual input of the immediate environment), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. In short, the iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor.

This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but actively accepting input from the world around them. We can track our own behavior, monitor our own health and get things done together (e.g., crowdsource maps of our neighborhood). At the far end of the spectrum, the iPhone is being used as a medical diagnostic tool. Doctors without borders, indeed.

Meet your new laptop. Apple has not only opened a programming interface that allows developers to create applications that reside on the iPhone, the company has recently opened up the hardware interface. This means that, soon, attaching a keyboard and screen (among other things) to your iPhone literally will be a snap.

The staggering increase in processing and storage capacity per-square-inch, allied with the development of flexible OLED screens and palm-sized projectors, will allow our mobile devices to do more than our PCs. The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

The new marketplace here, there and everywhere. Much of the future of commerce will lie in micropayments made at the exact moment of impulse or need–from music to subway tickets and so on. Smart phones now have bar code and QR code readers that allow the phone to act as a scanner (to find the exact product), research assistant (find the best price online, check product ratings) and shopping agent (buy the product on the spot). If you are a retailer, you are now facing a customer with more choices, information and bargaining power than ever before. You will need to rethink your value beyond simply carrying inventory.

In the developing world, where technology constraints often inspire innovation, people are forming alternative currencies, mainly in the form of sharable minutes on their mobile devices. This means, for example, that I can transfer 10 minutes of talk time to your phone in exchange for something of equivalent value–say, a spare part or carton of milk. The most basic peer-to-peer exchange of funds has already gone mobile in certain parts of the developing world.

Getting things done. Mobility is about how your customers are increasingly getting things done–from shopping to reading to wayfinding. Understanding how mobility will change your customer is key to understanding how you will stay relevant.

If you are a product manager, or in R&D, what can the iPhone teach you about product design? What can mobility developments in Africa teach you about constraint-based innovation? If you are in marketing or customer service, what can your younger employees teach you about your next customer? Consider doing a bit of reverse mentoring and prepare to be stunned.

If you are a senior executive, ask yourself how you plan to handle the management challenges as your workforce gets even more disconnected from workplace.

Staying informed about the incredible work occurring at the margins is one of the keys to getting to the future first. Don’t write it off. Embrace the big idea. If you want to talk about it, call me on my mobile. It knows where to find me.