Inform/Overview

Overview

Inform is a collaboratively-authored resource for helping people explain the Internet and associated technological, cultural, political and social issues to others, specifically policymakers. It will have carefully crafted explanatory strategies, well-chosen metaphors and appropriate supporting presentational material to allow someone with limited time to clue their representative in on Internet matters, and guide them into making and promoting policies which "preserve choice and innovation on the Internet".

Details

Inform attempts to solve the "series of tubes" problem. Technologists and scientists are woefully under-represented in many legislatures, and the pace of change in technology and on the Internet is very fast. Legislators are usually in favour of the benefits the Internet brings but, given the wide variety of subjects about which they are expected to know, often have only limited understanding of the technology, and of how legislative proposals may affect those benefits. Additionally, the Internet is also often a threat to the business models of established companies in the offline world, who may be influential in the political process. This combination leads to a particularly high risk that poor legislation, written and voted for by people who do not fully understand what makes the Internet what it is today (or occasionally, those with a vision of an Internet at odds with Mozilla's goals), will have detrimental effects on it, and stifle future innovation.

By contrast, appropriate and well-crafted legislation could remove barriers to innovation and new business models, promote choice and increase the capabilities of Internet citizens. There is a great potential upside to having well-informed policymakers, who use their technical and social understanding of the Internet to know when and what legislation is (and, perhaps more importantly, is not) required.

The Mozilla-like way to make an impact on this is to enable a grass roots, distributed educational effort whereby individual people and groups help to inform their policymakers, one person at a time. These educators need support. They need a resource which gives them the best available explanations, metaphors, similes and other educational tools to help policymakers understand the Internet worldview. Inform is that resource.

Structure

It is envisaged that Inform will have four types of page:

• Technical
• Social
• Policy
• Legislative

Technical pages would be a best-in-class explanation for non-experts of a technical issue or topic, such as "IP address", "DDOS", or "Bandwidth". The aim would be to produce something which was policy-independent and agreed upon by technologists on all sides - i.e. the technical facts.

Social pages would explain a particular social issue from an Internet perspective, in a way independent of jurisdiction or specific legislation. Examples might include "Privacy", "Pornography", or "Identity". As with technical pages, the aim is for this level of content not to take positions.

Policy pages would build on the previous two types of page and consider a policy issue. Again, it would be explained in a way not specific to a particular jurisdiction or piece of legislation. Examples might include "Cybersecurity", "Network neutrality", or "User content indemnity". It would attempt to explain the different positions on the question, and draw out a "Mozilla view".

Legislative pages would build upon all of the below and draw together the Inform resources relevant to a particular specific piece of legislation in a particular jurisdiction. Examples might include "Marco Civil (Brazil)", "ACTA (International)", or "CISPA (USA)". The page would be a gateway to all you needed to know to engage with and answer the questions of a policymaker who was considering their view on that piece of legislation. These pages would have a shorter useful life than the others, as legislation either fails or is passed.

Some sample content which demonstrates and expounds these organizational and content principles is available relating to the USA's Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). There is one page in each of the above categories; the other three are linked from the CISPA page. Each page has per-section explanatory notes on the right hand side which attempt to explain the rationale for the structure of each page.

The resource will be licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence. The primary language of the resource would be English, with the exception of legislative pages for bills in non-English-speaking countries, which may be but would not need to be. A goal is to support easy translation of the content into multiple languages, although the platform used initially for the content may not have facilities to make this easy.

Users and Collaborators

Building a community around Inform is key to its success. A resource no-one uses is a waste of time, and a resource no-one improves is on its way to becoming a resource no-one uses.

As we establish the culture and style of Inform, we will be able to publicise it more and get wider involvement. Our users would be anyone who wanted to talk to a policymaker; we would hope that a link to the Inform page on a particular bill would become part of the "Further Reading" or "Resources" sections of emails and websites set up by campaigners sympathetic to Mozilla on a particular bill. This would, of course, include Mozilla campaigns where they existed. We would hope that organizations which used Inform in this way would come to see its value and would spend time curating and improving the content which related to their particular areas of activity.

Risks

In what ways could this go wrong?

Lack of interest

It could be that we start building something nobody wants. The way to mitigate this is to make sure the resource is used from a very early stage. We can use it at Mozilla, and perhaps we can bring one or two other sympathetic organizations on board as well. This document can be shown to thought leaders in various organizations external to Mozilla to see if this is something that they would like to see exist, and would consider using. Also, the outlay is mostly in terms of staff time, which can be reallocated at short notice - there are only minimal up-front costs here (Mozilla IT would provide a server and collaboration software).

Edited to take positions Mozilla does not support

In the places where Inform takes a position on a policy issue, there is a risk that the consensus among those doing the editing may not be the same as the consensus among Mozillians. While we should take this occurrence as a signal that we should stop and check that we are on the right track, it does indicate the need for some guidance that we can unite around. So, we can perhaps mitigate this with some high-level "worldview" documents which set out in broad terms the type of Internet that we would like to see, and the principles we apply in trying to get there. Those documents may be Mozilla-specific (such as the Manifesto) or they may be written for Inform.

Unwelcoming and pedantic community

To an extent, 'the Wikipedia problem'. As Inform will be several orders of magnitude smaller than Wikipedia, we hope that we will not need to create the process and bureaucracy on which people who push a community in this direction thrive.

Use Cases Addressed

Educating those who talk to policymakers

This is the primary use case of the material. The goal is not to educate policymakers directly, as each will have their own particular priorities, interests and understanding, and will need an approach tailored to them. Also, "please read this website" is a request unlikely to get much traction. Policymakers with limited time rely on having things explained to them by other people. So instead, we focus on those who talk to policymakers - e.g. their office staff, private citizens, and activist group members - to give them appropriate facts, metaphors, similes and explanations which will resonate and carry weight.

Affecting existing policymaking

By doing the above, we can project our voice into existing policymaking processes.

Stopping bad legislation

And by doing that, we can have an effect on, and hopefully stop, bad legislation. We can help by having explanatory resources ready, and designing the system so that each proposed law has a page pointing to the most relevant resources for the people who are engaging with policymakers on that law.

Non-profit leadership

This resource does not exist at the moment, and is badly needed. By creating it, and by making it a trusted source for ways to explain technology, we can demonstrate leadership in the non-profit space.

Use Cases Not Addressed

Internet into the curriculum

While it may well be possible to use parts of what we create in childhood educational material, and we are choosing an open content licence (CC-BY-SA, which matches Wikipedia) to make that as smooth as possible, we will not take any specific steps to make our content particularly suitable for this use. This is a different audience.