The Ed Techie

Increased university costs and admin

One of the common themes you'll see when people complain about rising university costs is the increased cost of administrative staff. This is usually portrayed as simply greed, or laziness on the part of universities, for instance this Wall Street Journal article reports a 37% increase in admin staff from 2001 to 2012. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has little doubt about the lack of value admin staff add, stating: "You can have a university without administrators, but not without students or faculty. The minimization of administrative costs and bureaucracy should be sought in any university reform. A few decades ago, few universities had more than a small centralized public relations staff."

A report detailed in Inside Higher Ed comes to a similar conclusion: "They waste a lot of money on redundant administrative activities and could probably save money in the long run if they made big changes to their structure". And this article suggests that Pennsylvania universities increase in admin spending rose by 53% from 2001 to 2010. And while he doesn't address admin specifically, Clay Shirky tells us that the Golden Age of higher ed is over because it's unaffordable (see David Kernohan's withering response also).

Now, I ought to confess that I'm married to a university administrator, so I may have more than a little bias in my response to this. What most of these articles conclude is that it is simply greed, or unnecessary bureaucracy that has led to this, with of course, the implicit suggestion that if universities were proper businesses they wouldn't put up with it. Now, I get very frustrated with some of the needless layers of process that have been put in place, and often it seems inflexible and all rather pointless, so I'd admit that I'm sure we could do a bit of a streamlining. But between my wife and I we've been through a fair number of these restructurings, as well as seeing other universities do it, and my general impression is that they don't really produce the admin savings people predict. 

One of the common complaints is that "we used to be more efficient and not need as many admin staff". The second part of this is true, we didn't need as many admin staff, but that was because the amount of legislation that universities have to respond to was far less. Think of the following areas, all of which affect universities, and ask yourself whether the associated administration related to them has increased or decreased over the past 20 years:

• Student accessibility
• Finance, tax, charity status
• Health and safety
• Estates and property
• International students and business
• Student recruitment, teaching quality assessment, pastoral care
• Research bidding and reporting
• Employment law

The reason universities have big, complex administration is because they operate in a big, complex world. Probably far more so than most companies who only have a particular focus and are only concerned with legislation that relates to their niche practice. In the 1970s you only needed one administrator in a department because no-one cared about any of this stuff. Now, you'd be shut down, or face criminal charges for failing to respond to it.

As a test of my hypothesis that university administration has increased in complexity, I did a simple bit of research. I went to the legal database Justis.com and searched for legislation that related to universities. Now there are all sorts of problems with this methodology: I didn't analyse each piece, I didn't strip out repeated legislation, I just counted the number of bills.  It doesn't include a lot of things that will relate to universities but not mention them specifically, eg health and safety, and it also won't include all the increased administrative overhead that isn't included in a bill, eg increased demands for reporting on EU funded research projects. So it may well be flawed, but as a simple indicator of the increased administrative burden on universities, it should work to give a general feel for the level of change. My hypothesis would predict a substantial increase. I counted the number of bills from 1974 to 1993 and from 1994 to 2013. The results are shown below:

From 1974 to 1993 there were 262 bills, and from 1994 to 2013, 413, an increase of some 58%. Now I did this in 10 minutes and I suspect it's really a two year research project to really underake it (maybe someone has, please let me know), so I'm happy to be corrected, but I think this gives a good general indication. My guess is that it may underplay the real increase in administration since so much else relates to factors apart from legal duty.

The question then is not so much "why do universities spend so much on admin?" but rather "do we want society to make universities spend this much on admin?". And here people can be a bit hypocritical - they will probably say reduce the admin spend, but then demand robust appeals procedures or sue a university for not taking due care. Which of the areas I've outlined above would you personally be willing to take responsibility for if we reduced the legislation on it? 

The point is that these are issues beyond universities, society can't place an increasingly complex legislative and administrative burden on universities and then complain that they spend more money on legislative and administrative tasks. If higher education were truly privatised and run by companies as some wish, then maybe some of this cost could be reduced, mainly because government ministers would listen to entrepreneurs who complained that needless bureacracy was impeding profits. I'm not sure that would lead to better education necessarily, but it may be cheaper. But can we please stop with the "bloody admin doesn't add anything" message?

Earning the right to preach

I watched the tweets from the WISE13 conference with interest. One that caught my eye (and rather made it water) was Gordon Brown extolling the value of education and its benefits for society. You can see his talk below:

It's a good talk, impassioned and well reasoned. I agree with everything he said. But I find it strange that he is saying it. Brown's record on international development is good, it's something he really believed in. But when he was Prime Minister, he abolished what's called ELQ funding in the UK. This meant that you couldn't get funding to study if you already had an equal or higher qualification. This was enormously damaging for many of the people you want to avail themselves of education - those who have been made redundant and want to reskill for examples. 

I appreciate this is a minor concern compared with global education for all, and particularly the social power of getting girls into school. But it's the principle - you don't get to talk about the wonderful power of education if when you had the chance you looked at the budgets and thought "nah, education's not worth it, we can make a saving there." 

Everyone (well maybe not some of the Taliban) thinks education is a good thing. It's an easy totem to gather around and make impassioned calls for. Education has a lot of social credit. We shouldn't let people use it without having shown their credentials, and Brown botched his chance when he had it to demonstrate that he really believes in the transformative power of education. Of course, compared with what's come afterwards, Brown's crime is minor in comparison, but even so, you don't get to use education now as your platform. Or at least not without some contrition. The same goes for openness - you have to earn that badge through action.

Prospect theory & the panopticon of debt

Last night, after Nick Clegg's semi-apology over student loans (see comedy version with honesty subtitles below), I got involved with a twitter chat with an economist from Demos. He argued (very intelligently) that the loan scheme would actually save the tax-payer $2.5K per student, and that it should be viewed as a progressive tax, and not debt.

I don't know enough about economics to really counter his claim about the savings. It certainly appears that the Coalition were caught out by all universities charging the full fee, which would suggest it isn't being quite the financial success they had envisaged. But the fact/misleading rumour that it was unaffordable was only ever an extra insult/icing on the cake to what was generally perceived to be a damaging policy to higher education. "You've done all this damage, and it's worked out worse than the old scheme anyway" was the cry.

Let's accept for now then that it could theoretically save money in the long term. This doesn't mean it won't severely damage the higher education sector. And here I do feel on firmer ground, because economists (particularly free market ones) tend to ignore those pesky humans in the mix and assume a rational market.

I would like to propose two psychological factors that will come in to play, which I don't think have been modelled in any government plans.

Prospect theory - Tversky and Kahneman conducted a series of influential experiments in the 70s which demonstrated that people give loss more psychological weight than gain - put bluntly losing £20 has more significance than finding £20. People then adjust their behaviour accordingly - they are risk averse. 

In our case this means they will perceive the student loan as debt, and that debt will weigh more heavily than the potential gain of a good job, a rewarding time, or future earnings. They will thus behave appropriately, with two courses of action:

a) Risk aversion - they don't go to university in the first place and take on the debt. This harms the higher education sector.

b) Risk reduction - they act as if it is current debt and seek to pay it off. This harms society more broadly, for instance, they avoid taking on more debt in the form of a mortgage thus impacting the construction sector.

This won't affect all students, just as some people are more risk averse. Some will judge it a risk worth taking and study anyway. Tversky and Kahneman also talk about the 'Value function", whereby the difference in loss between £100 and £200 is seen as greater than the difference between £1100 and £1200. This would suggest that the impact will be felt most keenly for those from less well-off backgrounds as the potential debt is perceived as a larger part of current wealth, it is a bigger risk

It would take a big research project to estimate the impact of this factor on student behaviour, so for now let's take a figure of, say, 20% fewer students applying, given that is a strong psychological factor found in many instances.

The panopticon of debt - the second factor is that of the panopticon. Taken from Bentham's proposal for prison design and adapted as a metaphor for society by Foucault, the panopticon suggests that when all prisoners/citizens can potentially be observed all the time, they act as if they are. As Foucault puts it:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection"

It doesn't matter that they aren't observed all the time, the knowledge that they could be makes them act as if they are. I would suggest future debt acts in a similar way. The knowledge that it could become debt and be paid off makes people act as if it is current debt, even if they never had to pay it off (because their earnings didn't reach a certain level). As with prospect theory the impact of this factor is likely to be felt more keenly in some sectors. Some prisoners in a panopticon prison will calculate the probability of being observed at any one time and overcome their fears, others won't.

This transfers the debt from a national one to an individual one, and at this level its impact is more toxic in the economy. The outcome will be the same as for prospect theory: a reduction in numbers applying and a reduction in spending from those coming out the other end.

Again, knowing the size of the impact of this factor would take more research than I can put into a blog post. But let's say it adds another 10% to our previous 20%, giving a total reduction in student numbers of 30%. Like the impact of these factors, it would not be evenly distributed, so Russell Group unis might see no decline at all, while others might see a drop by as much as 50%. This would surely send some under.

Now, it may be that we think a 30% decrease is desirable, that the higher education sector has become over-crowded. But it would be better to state this as an aim, and to work towards it (universities could do better planning then), rather than hope it occurs as the result of an unpredictable system. It would be interesting to know if any of these factors were considered when modelling the future of higher education? 

How to dismantle a sector, stage 2.

So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students.

I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred:

LMUea culpa - it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for such a case where there is unarguable evidence, so it can take such action. But even if we accept that LMU are at fault, the reaction seems way out of proportion. A warning, a suspension, a fine would have all been reasonable - but revoking it and causing such distress seems a clearly targeted action to create publicity. Which brings me onto my next two options.

Sinister pressure - it was not the result of a direct order or intervention, but rather the outcome of pressure created by Government. As this piece points out, Teresa May is under pressure to hit targets for reducing migration, and student visas are perceived (incorrectly as I understand the process) to be an easy option. It is therefore part of playing to the home crowd Tories to be seen to be taking a firm stance. There is undoubtedly something in this, and combined with an element of dodgy behaviour at LMU it may be sufficient as an explanation. But I want to consider a third option also.

Conspiracy theory - John Naughton reminds us that "Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out." Let's assume people in the coalition aren't stupid (yes, I'm not sure about Gove either, but let's go with it). On the face of it, the LMU decision is stupid. It is over the top, and will cause damage to the sector, when that sector is one of your primary exports. In times of financial crisis you would do everything possible to support such a sector, not undermine it wouldn't you? So, taking John's reasoning, this must mean we haven't figured out what they're doing.

Which heralds in the conspiracy theory. A while ago I blogged that higher education in the UK felt not just like any sector in a crisis, but one which was being deliberately targeted. In that post I was highlighting how the student loan scheme, combined with student number control would damage universities. If we give our conspiracy theory free rein, then having undermined the financial basis for the domestic market, the LMU debacle begins to look like the next stage in this plan, namely to undermine the overseas market. 

Why then would the Government deliberately seek to destabilise an industry? The answer would be that it seeks to gain from that destabilisation. Having seen the problems it encountered by trying to reform the health system through due process and passing legislation, it doesn't want a repeat of this protracted and damaging scenario. A better approach is one of stealth - by financially undermining the existing structures, many universities will go to the wall. This will leave room for the private universities, which they have already made warm noises about (and remember, student number control doesn't apply to these). 

By these commando tactics, the Government could achieve a radically different higher education model, with the high brand universities remaining intact, and the rest of the market provision from private universities, which fits better with a conservative free market model. And all without having a single debate in the House of Commons, or attracting any negative headlines.

Now, I'm not really one for conspiracy theories, and maybe it is a bit far-fetched. A combination of my first two explanations is more realistic. But, if the conspiracy theory is true, I'll make the following predictions:

1. We'll see more universities lose their sponsorship licence, or more likely, a 'toughening up' of the student visa process to continue to make the UK less attractive.
2. Student number control and capping of fees will be used strongly and undermine some universities
3. A piece of legislation favourable to private universities will be slipped through on the back of another bill.
4. Up to 10 unis will go to the wall and others will retract significantly.
5. Unis will be encouraged to partner with private providers.

Of course, if the conspiracy theory is true, then the stance universities & VCs take towards the Government, which has largely been one of cooperation, should change drastically. Just to emphasise, I don't say it is true, but if we see my five predictions above begin to come true, then we should be suspicious. Of course, by then it might be too late.

How to dismantle a sector

I'm not an overtly political animal, unlike many of my colleagues, so maybe this post is misguided or misinformed, but increasingly working in Higher Ed in the UK feels like working in a beleagured sector. Many people will feel like this in the current crisis, so higher ed is no different in that respect, but it now feels like it is not only suffering the same fate as all sectors, but is actually the victim of an ongoing campaign. I sit in many meetings with colleagues, in this university and across the sector, where we end up shaking our heads and laughing with a mixture of amazement and hysteria at the next cumbersome plan that is being foisted upon us.

As I said, I'm not that political, so maybe I've got some of the following wrong, in which case, please correct me. But here is how I interpret the last few years, and some supposition about the next few:

• The student loan scheme is forced through, and the coalition seems to have not considered the scenario that most universities will charge the top rate of £9000.
• The scheme then turns out to be more costly to realise than the existing method.
• In a panic, the government then introduces Student Number Control, so that it can cap the number of loans it gives out and can ringfence that money.
• As I understand it, the situation with part-time students is too complex at the moment (when is a student studying, or in-between studies, what counts as a full time equivalent, etc), so they have avoided student number control at the moment. But it will probably come in to play for 2014.
• However, because it will look politically damaging to allow students to 'buy' their way on to courses, the student control figure will apply, regardless of whether the students are taking out loans or not. Universities could then find themselves in the position of turning away students who have the money to study and who they have the capacity to teach.
• The student control numbers however, do not apply to new private universities because they want to grow that sector.

WonkHE has a lot more insightful stuff on student number control if you want to dig down into it.

And this is avoiding looking at the situation with research. The higher education sector in the UK was a widely respected, profitable and functioning system. It was by no means perfect and certainly wasn't efficient, but it worked. I appreciate it worked because it was funded to an extent by the UK taxpayer, but even in hard economic terms, this shift from Government debt to private debt doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Not all debt is equal - Government debt can be long term and at low interest rates. Private debt creates a liquidity trap in times of economic crisis, because individuals seek to reduce their debt and thus don't contribute to growth, thereby creating more debt. And a nation's debt is best measured by combining Government debt, financial institutional debt, and personal debt. Shifting it to individuals then doesn't reduce the overall debt, it just increases the damage it does to your economic outlook.

Socially it's a poor idea too, in times of crisis society undergoes a seismic shift - people lose jobs in one sector, but retrain, re-educate and create a new one. But if they can't afford to study (or are put off by the austerity rhetoric) then this shift doesn't take place, or is at least limited. 

This may sound like special pleading - "we should be immune from the winds that batter the economy because we have nice beards" - but it isn't. Like many people in the sector, I expected and accepted that higher education would go through a period of increased accountability and efficiency. We weren't prepared though for this sustained assault, combined with a dangerous level of incompetence. 

And all this when you want to shift to being a knowledge economy - strange times indeed.

 

Living in interesting times

As someone whose professional life sits at the intersection of the internet and higher education, the past week has been interesting to say the least, and not a little depressing. I'm not sure I have much to add to what's been said about the two big stories of wikileaks and student fees, but I have woken up on an almost daily basis thinking 'are we really witnessing this?'. So, lest I allow it to slide into normality, I thought I'd record some of my reactions to it all.

Wikileaks

As Clay Shirky has put it, I'm conflicted about Wikileaks - even as an advocate of openness, I know there are things of my own I wouldn't want made open, and I accept that diplomats probably need to have some confidentiality in what they say (and they could be doing work for good as well as ill we should remember). At the same time, I think the possibility of openness and revelation may bring a level of accountability to states that they will have to consider. The long term effect of wikileaks may be to make states less likely to engage in dirty, clandestine work because they know, ultimately, they'll get found out. As John Naughton puts it "Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet."

But what has been a revelation to this naive observer is the naked ferocity of the US reaction. The manner in which they have coerced companies (Visa, Paypal, Amazon, etc) and strong-armed the legal systems of Sweden and the UK (I make no judgement about the allegations, and have no illusions that Assange must be a nice man, but no-one else with a similar allegation would face the same legal treatment) and conducted a global campaign, including some commentators calling for Assange to be assassinated.

As Scott Leslie pointed out on twitter the other day, this is just part of an ongoing anti-internet campaign, but I think the level, and blatantness of this campaign is revealing. If the gloves were ever on, they now seem to be well and truly off. 

Shirky sums it up: "When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of leaking the cables, or of Assange as an individual, I can't help detecting more than a whiff of the conspiracy of sentiment in this. It is not just that information has been leaked, but that it has been done through the internet, by people they don't understand, and who aren't 'proper journalists'. This is when the full anarchic nature of the net comes home to them, and the lack of control they have over it. That they invented it must be particularly galling. If they could shut it down, or control it now, they would. If you think that sounds far-fetched or paranoid, consider what would have been the equivalent if a newspaper had printed the articles:

• Closing down the printing press and forcing any other printers to refuse to work with them
• Forcing all advertisers to withdraw support
• Having the editor extradited for trial
• Making selling the paper an offence

I'm not sure people would accept this, even if they disagreed with the initial publication. The traditional media would certainly be united in condemning it as an over-reaction and as having serious consequences for free speech.

Student fees

As the bill to raise tuition fees was passed yesterday, we saw the third day of the most political, angriest demonstrations since the poll tax. Inevitably the media focus has been on the violence (and the Royals for goodness sake), and ministers have sought to explain in detail how their proposals will mean that students aren't worse off. Either they are deliberately focussing on the detail to distract and confuse, or else they have failed to really understand what the protests are about. This is about more than whether you pay back amount A or A x 3 for fees, but about what kind of society we want to live in. If it is one that doesn't value higher education (particularly the arts and humanities) and views education solely as an individual transaction to gain better paid employment then that will be a society many of us don't want to live in. 

I argued before that during the Iraq war protests, Blair should've asked himself 'what do they know that I don't?', because maybe he was dealing with too much information, and the crowd had extracted the fundamental sense of the situation. If we give some of the politicians involved with passing the bill the benefit of the doubt and think they do believe it is a fair bill, then they should be asking themselves the same question. They must be surprised by the scale and ferocity of the backlash against the bill (the same politicians were complaining about political apathy in the young only a year ago, how they must wish for a return to that apathy). Instead of dismissing this as either a) a violent fringe 'hellbent' on making trouble or b) students not understanding the bill, they should be thinking 'what is the essence they have understood that we have missed amidst all the detail?'.

I would suggest it is this - education should be cherished and promoted for any society to progress.

So between these two we find ourselves in a radically more overtly politicised world, and one where the role of the internet and education are central. Tell me now that educators shouldn't engage with technology.

The network ate my newspaper

(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?)

So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it's been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because

"It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too."

The same might be said of the leaders debates. Having the back channel has been endlessly amusing and inventive with twitpics, hashtags, videos and jokes being shared in real time. It has also been very informative as people have challenged the views represented and sought out facts and shared these.

Over at the BBC Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that

"So far, it's been a much better election for the mainstream media - or the "MSM" as they're described by an often contemptuous blogosphere - than you might have expected. The bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake."

The alternative is also true - ask yourself this, could you really function as a political journalist (or academic) and not have followed this election on twitter? I'm with John Naughton who argues that:

"One of the more comical aspects of the current UK election is the way ‘old’ media (newspapers and broadcast TV) gloated about how they had ‘transformed’ the election from the venerable two-party slugfest into a supposedly more open contest. There’s a note of triumphalism here: “see”, the dinosaurs are braying, “for all this talk of an ‘online election’, the impact of the Net, social networking, twitter etc. it’s really going to be decided by older, tried-and-trusted media”. There may be a lot of cyberchatter on Twitter and Facebook, the political editors jeer, but it’s not showing up on the doorstep."

I think the effects of social networking are quite subtle. I'm not naive, I know that the majority of UK voters aren't on twitter, but this is still fairly new. How will that look at the next election? The thing about social networks is that they are difficult to manipulate. Like John Gilmore's quote about the internet, something similar can be said:

"Social networks dissipate direct pressure and push back"

This means it is much more difficult to manipulate people in a network the way the broadcast media can be manipulated. It requires more energy and when you apply that pressure the network pushes back (usually with sarcastic humour and parody, which is the politicians worst enemy).

So while old media may be congratulating themselves, they have missed the point. This is the election that marked the beginning of the end of their power, they just haven't noticed it. I am reminded of a quote from the (not particularly good) film Deep Impact, in which the President, as played by Morgan Freeman, says to the plucky reporter:

"it might seem that we have each other over the same barrel, but it just seems that way."

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.

G20, media and trust

<Image - G20-London-Protest by Room1834 http://www.flickr.com/photos/0742/3405203655/>

There are so many lessons, pointers, revelations, areas of concern and epiphanies from the G20 protests that blogging about them seems almost superfluous. But to add to the comment mountain, here are my thoughts.

Social vs Traditional media
I listened and watched the coverage on the BBC and Sky, while simultaneously tracking events on twitter and Flickr. At the time the traditional coverage seemed biased against the protestors. Traditional media needs to go after a 'story', a narrative it can use to conveniently bundle events together, and it had decided crowd trouble would be that story. Some of the commentators on the traditional media bordered on the offensive - one business expert bemoaned that the protestors won't achieve anything and it will inconvenience people working in the city. Inconvenience? Bloody inconvenience them? Their behaviour has done far more than 'inconvenience' the rest of us.
Over on Twitter the picture was much more of aggressive tactics from the police and of protestors being penned in. This is just as biased in its way, but what it revealed was that 'the story' emerges from the stream, it isn't determined (or worse, predetermined) by a few.
Subsequently it turns out that the real story, or at least the 'feel' was better conveyed by social media than traditional media.

Policing and accountability
I think it is very easy to portray it as protestors = good, police = bad in this scenario but that is naive and simplistic. It was obvious to me that we would have some such accounts of police brutality at the event by watching the twitter stream where the general sense was of antagonism towards protestors. This should be no suprise really - prior to the demonstrations the police had been told  to expect violence, by police chiefs, but also by various protest groups. It had been set up for the police and protestors as a conflict situation - if you come into any situation expecting that, then you will interpret actions accordingly.

The key then is not a review of police practice so much, but a review how the protest was represented to the police. Senior officers could have pitched it along the lines of  'Our job is to help these people protest safely. They're angry at what has happened and to be honest, we know how they feel, so help them demonstrate, but any signs of trouble and we'll stamp it out quickly.'  That creates a different mindset and relationship with the protestors.

I also wonder if the police send in officers, or use trusted people, to report back to them on what the experience was like from the other side? A sort of customer review. And then to have these people come and brief officers prior to demonstrations. Does anyone know if they do this? One of the issues seems to be that some police have stopped viewing protestors as people with whom they have any connection, and vice versa.

Counter-terrorism

The danger for the police is that we are seeing a politicization of policing last realised during the 1980s. This is largely a result of many of the counter-terrorism laws, which themselves have become political vehicles for maintaining control over the general populace. I'm not particularly radical (you've guessed that eh?), and when many of the laws were introduced I didn't really see how they would affect me. But as John Naughton points out the manner in which photography is now regarded as an illegal or subversive act does not reflect the type of society we expect in the UK.

It is not the groups who always mistrust the police that are a concern, it is when they lose the trust of the general population that problems arise. It makes all aspects of their job much more difficult, and ultimately that isn't good for any of us. If the police become divorced from the general public, and seen more as servants of large businesses and politicians, it will take a very long time, a lot of community inititiatives and lots of money to rebuild that trust, so my advice would be to stop and reconsider their role now.

Policing of demonstrations is now often under the guise of anti-terrorism which gives the police powers to do pretty much what they like. This is tempting - why be constrained when you can be free to do what you want? But they should resist the temptation to go to the anti-terror well too often. Trust in the police had been on the increase, and this after a lot of genuine hard work. Here's a simple rule they should bear in mind, adapted from running:

• Trust is like muscle - it is hard to get and easy to lose.
• Suspicion is like fat - it is easy to get and hard to lose.

Surveillance
After years of being watched and monitored tables are now being turned. Without the video evidence would there have been any enquiry about Ian Tomlinson? And like DRM, trying to control the use of video and photography is an ultimately doomed enterprise - it's too easy, to ubiquitous and too quickly disseminated. Paul Carr has a good piece on this, and how we'll all have to learn to accept there's no such thing as private any more, and why this may not be a bad thing.

So, overall what is all about? Technology and Trust, and the changing relationship between the two. We will have a new relationship with trust because technology demands it.

What the Digital Britain report should have said

As most UK readers will be aware we have Lord Carter's Digital Britain report available which sets out the vision for the UK economy being one that embraces all things digital (after all, jam making aside, we've nothing else left). If you're not from the UK, don't worry, if you haven't got such a strategy already, you'll no doubt be getting one soon, as all countries see the potential of a digital economy to get us out of the hole we are currently in.

The report sets out some commendable aims, such as creating a digital infrastructure, ubiquitous broadband and all that. But where it comes unstuck is in stressing the importance of protecting copyright online and threatening to crack down on file-sharing. Admittedly they were never going to say 'forget copyright, we promote a free for all', but they seem to be limiting their view of the net to one of a consumer channel. Never mind that four out of the top ten websites in the world are based around people sharing and creating content (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Wikipedia).

Charles Leadbeater of We-Think fame has an excellent response, which I urge you to read. He sums it up when he says:

"plans to invest more in digital technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are already in turmoil"

And this is the key to the problem with the Digital Britain report. It is, at heart, a cowardly report. They have listened to the protectionist lobbying of the incumbent industries and sought to create a strategy that will serve their needs. Unfortunately, an internet used as a broadcast channel is a long-dead notion, so it will not serve the needs of a new economy. Their proposal to create a digital infrastructure while simultaneously enforcing more stringent copyright is rather like suggesting an investment in eco-friendly cars while listening to the petro-chemical companies and simultaneously slashing petrol prices.

Here is my alternative conclusion:

"It is obvious that success online is created by empowering users to become creators and sharers of content. We will seek to support this fundamental ethos. We appreciate that this does not directly correspond with the existing models of many media businesses and we will set out a support strategy to help these industries to migrate to new business models and working methods which embrace the possibilities of the digital age."

If you want to have your say, then Tony Hirst and Joss Winn have taken the report and chunked it down handily into paragraphs, which you can then comment on individually at WriteToReply. In other words they've done exactly what the report should be promoting, but seems a long way from understanding.