For my excellent “What’s Shaping the Internet?” class with Professor Michael Nelson, we had to write a 6-page memorandum to either President-Elect Obama, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, or some other organization head, using three main policy points.
I chose to advocate for an innovation commons, a push for open-source government interfaces, and a national identity system.
I posted the memo online at Scribd, which hosts my other academic papers as well. Scribd is awesome — it embeds papers within Flash so you can see the original format, and also export to PDF or crowdshare it. I would embed it here but WordPress.com doesn’t let you embed most content. =(
Again, READ THE MEMO HERE.
I know that my memo does not have a conclusion. =) I opted to leave the explanation to the executive summary, so it’s not a proper structure… Memorandums are sometimes the hardest papers to write, because they need to be very brief, concise, and appealing. That’s why our program stresses it so much. But I strayed from it here. Hopefully the content carries the weak structure.
What the Memo Said
My logic in the memo was that the government should create an innovation- and business- enabling environment by ensuring universal broadband access, net neutrality, a hybrid public commons/privately auctioned spectrum, and increased R&D with clustering through universities and companies.
After we get more people online and collaborating, we can call upon them to help build and inspect open-source applications to allow everyone to interface with the government more efficiently as befitting a digital 21st century.
And finally I called for a national ID system to help unify all the databases, ensure personal privacy and access controls, and allow us to fix our own information and use it better within the government.
The national ID system would use a social reputation system, part of which I’m hoping to create through my start-up, Galapag.us — see the research blog if you haven’t already.