WRITTEN ON March 7th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

As the story of the Internet unfolds, how does it change the balance of power?

It struck me when Geoff Mulgan described the UK Feedback plan as “democratisation of change”. And Eric von Hippel‘s ideas of “Democratising Innovation” are, I bet, highly resonant for public services in ways not yet fully explored or understood.

Kevin Kelly talks in his piece The Technium about the expansion of information.

It is (and has been) expanding faster than anything else we create or can measure over the scale of decades. That means that at the very edge of change, where change changes the most, information is leading. Information is accumulating faster than any material or artifact in this world, faster than any by-product of our activities. The rate of growth in information may even be faster than any biological growth at the same scale.

The graphs for mail, photos, phone calls are all the same shape. Overall annual information growth is about 66%. It’s the same as the Moore’s Law rate of growth. The total amount of information on the planet is growing at the same rate as processor speeds. And there’s far more “wild” information than ever gets captured.

Kelly refers to the Hal Varian and Peter Lyman research “How much information?” and Varian’s phrase “democratisation of data”. Presumably there was a time when government held a fairly high proportion of useful data about the country, and had a high percentage of the processing power and capacity. Now we could put the statute law database on an i-Pod (not that DCA has been particularly responsive to that request).

I wonder if government is adding to its useful data at 66% a year? How much of that growth corporate, private or in the commons or public domain? That would probably tell us how the balance of power is shifting.