With the help of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies, I organized a workshop on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities foran African Information Ethics”, featuring Johannes Britz (School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee), Rafael Capurro (International Center for Information Ethics, and School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee) and Dennis Ocholla (University of Zululand), along with a very engaged group of conference participants.

The workshop provided us the opportunity to explain our project on engaging information ethics within the African context, outline some of our ongoing efforts, and describe some of the challenges ahead. The audience pushed our thinking and provided new and excellent insights to help us achieve our vision.

The workshop was diligently live-blogged here, I’ve isolated some relevant tweets here, and I’ve pasted my introductory slides below.

I hope to have more news regarding this initiative (future conferences, grants, etc)  in the coming months.

From the announcement:

Access to knowledge (A2K) is about designing intellectual property laws, telecommunication policies, and technical architectures that encourage broader participation in cultural, civic, and educational affairs; expand the benefits of scientific and technological advancement; and promote innovation, development, and social progress across the globe.

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School has already hosted three major conferences on access to knowledge. These helped to lay intellectual groundwork for theorizing A2K as a framework for public policy and to consolidate a broad international A2K movement.

This year, we will again host a major A2K conference, but with a more specialized theme: the intersection between access to knowledge and human rights.

The right to take part in cultural life, to share in scientific progress, the rights to education, health care, and food: all are impacted by policies and movements around intellectual property and Internet freedom.

This conference seeks to lay the groundwork – conceptual and strategic – to build bridges between the A2K and human rights communities pursuing common goals of promoting greater access to knowledge, culture, technology and tools for innovation worldwide.

The two-day conference will feature plenary panels as well as breakout sessions of working groups organized around specific issue areas, including a workshop I have organized focusing on African Information Ethics:

Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics

As our contemporary information society continues to take hold on the African continent, there is a pressing need to recognize and formalize an “African information ethics”, that is, understanding & applying principles of information ethics (access to knowledge, intellectual property, information literacy, intellectual freedom, privacy) within the unique context of the African information and knowledge society. This breakout workshop will explore the challenges and opportunities for the establishment of an African information ethics, discussing issues ranging from the incorporation of African philosophy into Western ethical frameworks, the development of information ethics curricula in African universities, and strategies for focusing attention on how the dilemmas triggered by the growing information and knowledge society within Africa impact the continent’s economic, social, and political development.

Participants:

• Johannes Britz, Dean, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee
• Rafael Capurro, Founder and Director of the International Center for Information Ethics
• Stephen M. Mutula, Department of Library and Information Studies, University of Botswana
• Dennis Ocholla, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Zululand
• Michael Zimmer, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee

The full agenda is here, and registration is now open — hope to see you there!

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

“The (subpoena’s) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

“Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases,” the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

…Crocker…said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena’s law enforcement purpose.

“The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission,” Crocker wrote. “It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else.”

The government later found the customer data they needed for their case by examining the defendants own computer system seized by the authorities. So, instead of just doing some legwork of their own to find the data, the government saw it easier to just ask Amazon to turn over customer records, and potentially set a dangerous precedent in the process. Unbelievable.

A few months ago I started musing about the key differences in privacy perspectives/practices between common access points to (book) knowledge: libraries, bookstores, and Google Book Search. Its nice to see Amazon acting like a library in this case: protecting patrons right to access knowledge anonymously and without undue oversight by government.

I give Amazon further credit for pushing to have the court documents unsealed to make this federal subpoena public. Good PR for them, and a reminder to us all of the importance of ensuring free and unfettered access to knowledge.

• Knowledge is the key to social and economic development;
• Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the societal transformations that they generate;
• New approaches are needed to bridge international knowledge gaps while ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity;
• The Internet and new education technologies provide manifold opportunities for all;
• There is a need to continuously harness new technologies and processes to develop knowledge societies that are people-centered, inclusive and development oriented.

…and it goes on to suggest political and structural changes that are needed to improve knowledge acquisition and sharing, including:

• The impact of technology on the evolution of knowledge societies;
• The concept of universal “knowledge norms”;
• The impact of emerging technologies on models of knowledge acquisition;
• The future role of classical knowledge acquisition structures including those of teachers/trainers;
• The role of public-private partnerships in knowledge acquisition and sharing;

The declaration includes a multitude of other areas that need to be focused on, ranging from “Develop long-term strategies to efficiently harness the enormous potential of new communication and information processes and technologies for developing new approaches to knowledge acquisition and sharing” to “Preserve mother-tongue languages while encouraging competencies in one or more global languages” to “Promote user-friendly ICT applications to make knowledge acquisition and sharing available to everybody anywhere and anytime.”

One focus area that is missing involves the increased ability to track, capture, and aggregate people’s knowledge acquisition activities through technological means. Our technological world has largely moved us beyond sole reliance on oral or written transmission of knowledge to an increasingly digital mode of knowledge acquisition. I no longer visit the local library to read up on a subject; instead, I Google it. More efficient? Yes. Access to more sources and opinions? Yes. But this also means the ability to track the knowledge I hope to acquire has increased significantly as well. (I could spend the whole day in the local library and no one would necessarily know I was there, who I am, and what books I happen to browse from the shelves. When I search Google, it is much easier for them to know all those items.) This relates to some of the privacy concerns latent within the access to knowledge framework, something which needs to be further explored.

This absence notwithstanding, this is an important declaration and I agree with its framers that “leaders in the public and private sectors must embrace change in organizations and people by providing opportunities and incentives to facilitate and motivate, as well as to overcome typical barriers in knowledge acquisition and sharing.”

Assuming the defense goes well (/knocking on wood), I’m also thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Information Society Project at Yale Law School as the Microsoft Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year. While at ISP, I hope to continue to explore the social, cultural, and ethical implications of web search engines, as well as support ISP’s larger efforts in the crucial Access to Knowledge initiative (there is an A2K conference next weekend, for those interested).

Exciting times ahead.

First, Access to Knowledge is a demand of justice.

Second, Access to Knowledge is both an issue of economic development and an issue of individual participation and human liberty.

Third, Access to Knowledge is about intellectual property, but it is also about far more than that.

Continue reading his talk here. Other conference panels will be blogged about here, and you might also find the conference wiki helpful for more notes, background readings, etc.

In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society’s interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.

The landmark A2K conference at Yale Law School will bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South, in order to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade. This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines. The A2K Conference aims to help build an intellectual framework that will protect access to knowledge both as the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.

Here are links to the schedule and list of speakers, which includes Jack Balkin, Yochai Benkler, Geoffrey Bowker, Julie Cohen, Susan Crawford, Niva Elkin-Koren, Mike Godwin, Helen Nissenbaum, and many more.