Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com has kindly agreed to be Chair of the Council, which includes:

• Paul Jacobson, iCommons
• Paul Miller, Talis
• Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
• Rob Styles, Talis
• Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
• Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
• Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons

More detailed biographies are available on the Advisory Council page.

It is our intention that the overall development of the material on the site will continue in the same community based and collaborative manner. The Council’s role will be to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.

This is fantastic news for the definitions projects!

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A lot of value is apparently created by the transport mechanism itself, in the form of per-use access fees: “around three quarters of a billion pounds per year are paid in this way to UK debit and credit card issuers. The interests of bank run schemes do not coincide with the public interest.” These are interchange fees, paid between individual members to cover the cost of services supplied from one member to another.

Inflated interchange fees create a number of detriments. First, they raise the cost to retailers of card payments. … Second, allowing issuers to recover costs through interchange payments weakens the incentive to cut costs through greater efficiency … Third, competition between payment mechanisms is distorted in favour of products with artificially high interchange fees.

Money transmission infrastructures such as ATM networks conduct “network effects”. Initially there is a high entry cost to the builder of a network. People are more likely to join it, the more people they can reach over it, the more value there is to each participating node - in how widely a credit card is accepted, or how widely a videophone is used. Each new user can be given the same level of service for less new cost than the previous one. Once maintenance cost is covered, up until capacity is full, that extra cost is effectively zero.

“Network effects also have profound implications for competition, efficiency and innovation in markets where they arise… Once a network is well established, it can be extremely difficult to create a new network in direct competition.” A very high cost of initial capital investment, at a great deal of redundancy in services “raises entry barriers” to value transmission markets which “in turn leads to higher customer charges and lower levels of service in these markets. It also effects the geographic distribution…” where densely populated areas may become over-served, sparse ones neglected.

Except at times of high congestion, there isn’t a per-access cost impact over and above the maintenance costs of the underlying network. Cost to install, fix and improve services may be significant; but the benefit of being able to join such a network, collectively amongst participants, far outweighs this cost. A per-access fee levied against the ultimate end user may hold back the generation of network effects and act against the economic interests of the whole network.

The Cruickshank report’s analysis suggests a license for entry into “money transmission” networks which reflects the risk involved in trusting other participants to behave consistently, and the high levels of value being committed. The current schemes run by the payments industry have a “mutual governance” model, where the underlying network is operated by a not-for-profit company co-owned by the participating “competing” companies.

Yet the industry associations have formed non-for-profit mutuals on the grounds that some aspects of their business are better run collaboratively. There are many situations beyond payments networks that look like this and which tend to involve the underlying transmission medium for moving things from one place to another. A network - a road network carrying a bus network, or a communications network with public terminals - becomes so widespread and the necessity of interchange with it so complete that the cost of replicating it - where that is physically possible - must tend to be prohibitively more than the cost of joining it.

In a few very congested areas, private toll roads may be viable, but even then following the topology of a main network. Planning and licensing restrictions in the dependencies, additionally limit who can participate in building infrastructure.

What does this look like? Well, it looks a lot like another non-Internet network which the Internet increasing depends on to be of commercial interest, the cellular network. To become a full member of the GSM alliance and therefore entitled to read, and use, the specifications for phone call data exchange, one needs to have a “license” for a slice of spectrum and at least a minimal physical infrastructure of cell towers. A moratorium on new phone mast installation means that new market entrants must sublicense from competitors; even a really significant capital investment cannot do enough. This starts to look like what economists have called a “two-sided” market, where services depend on platforms, and an effective monopoly on the latter allows an entity

I want to claim a strong argument that there is a whole class of enterprises in which competition at the infrastructure layer cannot produce a better result than cooperation, and is likely to produce a worse one. If there really is a class of works which are “natural cooperatives”, I want to find out more about how they are constituted and how their runnings are best expressed in rules. For want of a better word, all these enterprises are some kind of “transport” and that’s what I’m trying to get at in proposing an “Open Transport” session for next year’s Open Knowledge Foundation conference.

An Economist Writes: What’s the best structure in welfare terms for society: standardization (cooperatively via an open or semi-open standard), standardization via monopoly, or multi-platform/network competition? Each of these structures will have different static (how good is it right now) and dynamic (investment in quality and innovation for the future) effects. For example open standards might be great statically but take ages to hammer out (while everyone negotiates) while a proprietary standard might be bad statically but fast to do (and be of good quality — since there are fewer compromises).

Mutual governance may come in for criticism, but perhaps it is rather the governance of mutual governance that is the problem. A revision of the rules describing these sorts of systems ought to be workable; the creation of a status to which these networks can apply in order to get tax breaks etc, and could achieve the same as any regulatory regime which aimed to increase transparency, lower costs and encourage innovation. Surely all participants in the building of transmission networks which move value around - in the form of water and waste, data and energy - must share these aims?

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After an initial plan to partner with a project called WikiBiblio, Jon Phillips of Creative Commons announced that WikiBiblio was going to merge with the Open Library (whom we’ve blogged about before). He also suggested that Public Domain Works becomes a partner - which is currently being arranged.

The plan looks to be to upload the Public Domain Works data to the Open Library, and to use read/write APIs to continue to develop different front-ends for different jurisdictions - each with its own algorithms to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Open Library will be an invaluable resource for open metadata about works in the public domain if all goes to plan!

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I give the most personal, sensitive information that I have to a private US corporation. I have no way of getting the data out, even to back it up. I don’t even pay them for an expected level of service. Yet I still do it, simply because my friends are on there.

Brad Fitzpatrick, who started the blogging-site-before-the-word-blog LiveJournal, is worried about this, and has a plan to do something about it.

Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on …….. People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

(from Brad Fitzpatrick’s site)

Of course, you can just make a Facebook application. But, Brad Fitzpatrick again, that isn’t the wisest thing to do.

Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded.

So instead, Brad is going to make an API, and a set of non-profit run servers. And write a bunch of open source software. And build some alliances. He needs your help, oh lovers of open platforms and controlling your own data. There’s even a Google group to join.

Oh yes, that reminds me, the twist.

Brad Fitzpatrick now works for Google. And there’s a rumour that Google are going to release a social networking API on November 5th. Expect some fireworks.

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The MOU specifies a broad range of rates - from free to thousands of pounds per month - that vary depending on the size, nature and estimated bandwidth requirements of the client. This is a pioneering example of the compatibility of open standards and commercial viability in web services. The AMEE team has had interest from over 60 different organisations since they launched the platform in June - from Defra to the RSA, from a national energy company to an international investment company. Last week they contracted with Torchbox, their first web agency, and today they announced a partnership with EEDA, the East of England Development Agency.

AMEE’s commitment to “sharing and collaboration” is particularly appropriate in the context of carbon footprinting - where relevant data is held by many different parties. In a screencast the developers succinctly state:

We believe sharing is the key to scaling. That to really, really scale, we need to share as much as we can.

They’ve initiated two threads asking for advice and comments on their licensing and access mechanisms for the AMEE code and data. It would be great if members of the open knowledge community could pitch in with advice!

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