I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in.  Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implications, almost my accident. This was the case both in my early career when I worked in city planning and in my more recent career in technology. When I first started studying cities, my core interest was at the design level.  What makes one building “feel” better than another?  Why are some streets nice to walk along and others aren’t?  What makes one neighborhood feel comfortable, intimate and vibrant, and another cold, lifeless and isolating? My initial idea was: well, they are just designed better.  As if any one person (an architect, say) had the power and vision to create a place that felt a certain way and that fostered certain kinds of activities.  So I studied architecture and urban design. What I ultimately learned was: good design is an important part of the mix, but it’s hardly enough.  Given any physical place, what it “feels” like is as much a result of the policy, political and historical contexts as it is a result of the design itself.   And: it takes a whole lot of effort to align the various forces present in any project in such a way that something interesting and wonderful can happen.  Take any great place, and there is no doubt a history of high drama behind how it got hat way.  For instance, the streets of NYC are nicer to walk around these days because lots of people fought hard to make them that way.  It takes big balls and political toughness to make these kinds of things happen. It’s the same way with technology and the internet. I was drawn into tech from the design side — I liked to design websites and build applications that looked good, felt good, and created a nice experiences.  But yet again, that was just the entry point for drawing me — unwittingly at first — into conversations about things like web standards, open data, network architecture, copyright, patents, privacy, and spectrum policy. It’s easy to look at the things we like on the internet: wikipedia, twitter, kickstarter, etc etc etc, and assume that they are the result of good design alone; and clearly they are the product of tremendous design effort. But they are also able to exist because of the infrastructure — both technical and legal — they’re built on. Clearly I am drawing on my internet centrism here by using cities and the internet as examples, but that’s just what I think about.  I’m sure you could look at other fields and tease out similar connections between design, experience and the underlying policies and infrastructure that make them possible. Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that it’s important for us not to take for granted what we have, to try and understand what it really is that makes things great, and to get upset when we feel like we’re going down the wrong path.

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one. Here are my slides from the talk, and here is the video: (unfortunately there were some audio problems right in the beginning, but the rest is fine)

I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in.  Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implications, almost my accident. This was the case both in my early career when I worked in city planning and in my more recent career in technology. When I first started studying cities, my core interest was at the design level.  What makes one building “feel” better than another?  Why are some streets nice to walk along and others aren’t?  What makes one neighborhood feel comfortable, intimate and vibrant, and another cold, lifeless and isolating? My initial idea was: well, they are just designed better.  As if any one person (an architect, say) had the power and vision to create a place that felt a certain way and that fostered certain kinds of activities.  So I studied architecture and urban design. What I ultimately learned was: good design is an important part of the mix, but it’s hardly enough.  Given any physical place, what it “feels” like is as much a result of the policy, political and historical contexts as it is a result of the design itself.   And: it takes a whole lot of effort to align the various forces present in any project in such a way that something interesting and wonderful can happen.  Take any great place, and there is no doubt a history of high drama behind how it got hat way.  For instance, the streets of NYC are nicer to walk around these days because lots of people fought hard to make them that way.  It takes big balls and political toughness to make these kinds of things happen. It’s the same way with technology and the internet. I was drawn into tech from the design side — I liked to design websites and build applications that looked good, felt good, and created a nice experiences.  But yet again, that was just the entry point for drawing me — unwittingly at first — into conversations about things like web standards, open data, network architecture, copyright, patents, privacy, and spectrum policy. It’s easy to look at the things we like on the internet: wikipedia, twitter, kickstarter, etc etc etc, and assume that they are the result of good design alone; and clearly they are the product of tremendous design effort. But they are also able to exist because of the infrastructure — both technical and legal — they’re built on. Clearly I am drawing on my internet centrism here by using cities and the internet as examples, but that’s just what I think about.  I’m sure you could look at other fields and tease out similar connections between design, experience and the underlying policies and infrastructure that make them possible. Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that it’s important for us not to take for granted what we have, to try and understand what it really is that makes things great, and to get upset when we feel like we’re going down the wrong path.

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one. Here are my slides from the talk, and here is the video: (unfortunately there were some audio problems right in the beginning, but the rest is fine)