The Hub2 evening group (that’s the one I teach) is hosting our open house this evening at 7pm EST (4pm SLT). We’ll be showing off our Greenway design system, Second T neighborhood tour creator, and Local Talk diner. Please come by and give us your ideas and feedback to make Boston Island a truly immersive Second Life and Boston experience!
The eLangdell initiative by CALI/Berkman seeks to enable law professors to create and remix educational materials into cost-effective coursepacks. Looks like Pearson is trying to launch the same idea in the college textbook market. The pilot seems to be running at Rio Salado, AZ: To Cut Textbook Costs, They’re Printing Their Own.
Interestingly, the cost savings (as one commenter points out) is only 50% over the original. I’m actually surprised that they’re cutting the costs by that much — the name of their game, after all, is still profit. If eLangdell ever marches into casebooks proper, I should hope that as a nonprofit institution we’ll be offering much steeper savings.
In the Terminator movie series, an artificially intelligent defense network concludes that the greatest threat to world peace is human beings and proceeds to launch preemptive world-wide nuclear strikes. This Oedipal fear that our silicon-and-code children might one day overthrow us – a favorite among dystopic science fiction authors – may be closer at hand than we’d like to think. Predator drones have yet to evolve to Schwarzenegger clones, but our fears about the inner workings of Diebold voting machines are real and understandable. Thus Professor Danielle Citron’s forthcoming article, “Technological Due Process,” provides a timely examination of an urgent problem challenging our computer-dependent society.
Professor Citron, of the University of Maryland School of Law, has written the opening chapter to an important new field of legal study, one hinted at in Lawrence Lessig’s “Code is Law” formulation and which I had dubbed “Law as Code,” but which until now has not received direct scholarly investigation. Her article, forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review, identifies the need for “technological due process” in software that executes government policies – from public benefits to no-fly lists.
In brief, Professor Citron describes how software code increasingly executes our public laws. Decision support systems, she convincingly argues, quickly become decision making systems. And invariably, the vagaries of the legislative and administrative processes leave large gaps in the specifics of how a given law should be executed. Without firmer guidance from proper governmental bodies, the programmers charged with translating legal code into software code essentially wind up creating law to fill the gaps. (I describe this as “shoving analog pegs into digital slots”). From a procedural – even a Constitutional – perspective, this is a grievously inappropriate delegation of governmental functions to the private sector, not unlike the hiring of Blackwater mercenaries to achieve military objectives. Professor Citron finds, therefore, the need for “technological due process”: safeguards to ensure that software is literally up to code.
In exploring what I’d described as “Law as Code,” and now significantly better-informed by the invaluable analysis of “Technological Due Process,” this fall the Berkman Center started seeking out areas of public law at risk of being improperly executed by unaccountable software code. In my work in legal aid I’d already identified the distribution of federal food stamps as one such area. Here in Massachusetts, the BEACON software system is riddled with errors and misinterpretations of the law. In New York State, Federal District Court Judge Rakoff had similar invalidated similar software allocating that state’s food stamps (445 F.Supp.2d 400). Rather than going after broken code, we’re much more keen on identifying code not yet in place, where identifying and implementing some best practices can go much farther than litigating for change in a system already starved for resources.
“Technological Due Process” points the way to new vistas of research. Perhaps most important among them are questions about how to bring democratic accountability back into the system. From my perspective, at least two paths present themselves. The first lies in the realm of classic administrative law. There is no question in my mind that many instances of government software meet the definition of agency rules: they are rules of execution, prospective in nature, applied uniformly. Meeting that standard is significant: it would subject such code to rigid requirements such as public participation in their creation (notice-and-comment) and judicial review in their actual application.
But as James Grimmelmann, now a professor at New York Law, pointed out when I’d first suggested this approach to the CyberScholars this past spring, many lawyers and scholars perceive ad law as broken. Furthermore, perhaps software is sui generis and deserves its own method of review tailored to its unique nature.
Berkman clinical student and JOLT editor Ryan Trinkle has proven invaluable in guiding our search for review methods native to software. As both a student and practitioner of the coding arts, Ryan pointed out that software quality assurance (QA) might provide some excellent models for how to achieve the due process goals of ad law. We ultimately struck on one potentially elegant merger of QA and notice-and-comment: obligate vendors to include testing suites with their software, and allow the public to submit specific cases that the test suites would calculate. In the case of food stamp software, for example, advocates for domestic violence survivors might submit a battery of both mainstream and “outside case” scenarios and evaluate the results for accuracy. (The New York food stamp laws had specifically tripped up on a category of undocumented immigrants who were also domestic violence victims). The proof of the software, then, would be in its results — and tested publicly before deployment.
Prof. David Super, a colleague of Prof. Citron and visiting this year at Harvard, has also suggested avenues for federal change, namely, the Office for Management and Budget under its “Management” mandate. OMB issues circulars governing how the quality of products and services purchased by the federal government which include software (§277), but most if it pertains to accounting except for §277.18. We might consider contacting the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), whose mission is ensuring good government, and making the dual argument that the software the government currently procures is (a) bad, and (b) burdensome to maintain.
Ultimately we predict that legal and software code will merge as semantic computing becomes more powerful. Indeed, perhaps “legalese” will evolve into an even more technical, even self-executing, language. One way or another this evolution will also call for more specially-trained lawyers who can bridge the two faces of code.
But until then, I think our best hope for democratic accountability over the software that increasingly shapes public life will be robust testing suites as Ryan suggests and further research down the paths that Prof. Citron has broken open for us. And, perhaps, never giving one of our artificially intelligent agents a nuke.
Prof. Eric Gordon (Emerson College) and I are presenting a draft of our forthcoming paper, “Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement,” at tonight’s CyberScholars forum hosted at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The paper provides the theoretical underpinnings of our Hub2 project with Emerson College and the City of Boston, and is slated for publication in Space and Culture.
The Emerson student section of the Hub2 project will be holding an open house for the public to explore and test their work on Tuesday, Nov 6, from 1:00-1:30pm Eastern Standard Time (10am Second Life Time). The undergrad and grad students in that section have developed some really exciting concepts around the Government Center / City Hall space — please come check it out!
My Hub2 class is chugging along, and I thought the halfway point would be an opportune time to “publish” the class agendas for the program so far on the off-chance that they might prove useful to someone contemplating a similar effort. I’m afraid it lacks the level of detail most people would need to run without further design, but at least it provides an initial framework:
In other news, we’ve been meeting with City of Boston and Boston Redevelopment folks over the last week, and in that time have come to sharpen our thoughts on how Second Life can foster more deliberative, community-led processes in urban design. While we are not Second Life boosters, at the moment no other tools combine the ability to collaboratively build and inhabit spaces the way SL does. We plan to describe these affordances in our forthcoming article, but one aspect I just started grasping today is the idea not just of net-locality (the extension of places into virtual networks, à la Red Sox Nation) but also of situated presence. That is to say, most design processes result in some kind of virtual fly-through, but “you” take the form of a disembodied camera (often not even under your own control).
By contrast, virtual worlds enable presence, which has implications beyond just, for example, seeing how easy or hard it would be to walk down the street given a particular arrangement of street furniture. It would also allow purpose — the possibility, for example, of situating community participants in particular roles — whether the child trying to get to school or the truck driver attempting to make deliveries. Indeed, in opening the possibility of robust, situated role-playing, such systems could even offer polarized community members to take other points of view — ultimately, a community would care quite a bit about whether trucks are able to make deliveries to their local shops even though they might also fear the noise or potential for accidents.
With any luck, our discussions with the city of Boston will give us a chance to test out these ideas.
More on this week’s Hub2 class here. I feel like the group has picked up more energy now that we have broken into project teams accountable for specific outcomes. (Somehow I’d forgotten one of the cardinal rules of adult education: make it relevant and make it real from the beginning). Each of the proposals that came out of our three groups seem to tap into the nature of virtual space — moving forward we’ll need to be sure that they also link back to physical places in Boston as well, but that all happens at a later stage.
BP Alternative Energy, a branch of the UK-based oil conglomerate, is reportedly collaborating with EA on the latest installment of the SimCity franchise.
I have long felt that games are a natural vehicle not just for education (see Jim Gee and the Serious Games Initiative) or propaganda (see the Games for Change movement) but for stimulating moral development — not in some kind of proselytizing way, but by helping to develop serious moral reasoning and reflection. Most of this has happened through sophisticated story lines, not unlike good literature, but some of the most untapped potential lies in games’ inherent combination of player agency with what Eric Zimmerman calls “systems-thinking.”
I’ll flesh this idea out over the next few weeks, but for now I want to observe that climate change could well be the ideal subject for such work, and SimCity has been the darling of the games-in-education scholars. SimCity is inherently about systems and, like it nor not, inculcates a certain view of economics and urban development. (The versions I’ve played were decidedly Keynesian, where a winning strategy often entailed lowering taxes during recessions and raising them in the boom years). The question is whether the game works precisely because that inculcation is unconscious on the part of both player and developer, and focusing on conveying a certain view will break the magic circle. The whingers on the Gamespot post referenced earlier seem to think so.
(Interestingly, the comments are almost universally negative, leaning heavily towards climate change skeptics, with the environmentalists generally crying “greenwashing” at BP’s obvious PR move. I suppose that GameSpot readers’ first allegiance is to the game.)
I’ve been falling behind in documenting the progress of the Hub2 Project, so to play some catch up, I’ve posted an update to my official class blog. Read more about Hub2 completing the (I)magine phase and moving on to the (D)esign phase.
Congratulations, Lauren, on the new appointment!
I had the honor of working with Lauren on State of Play Academy, and the Stanford Center couldn’t have chosen a smarter, sharper, or nicer person to head up their work.
