History is littered with manifestos, the public statements of principles and intentions that announce policies, revolutions or ambitious visions in politics and the arts.

Every political party produces one in advance of an election, and significant manifestos from history include the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 and André Breton’s  Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, which opens with the glorious claim that ‘so strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.’

In the internet age we’ve had the Cluetrain Manifesto, various ‘Internet’ manifestos and of course John Perry Barlow’s famous  Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace which tells the governments of the world that ‘You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’, and is a manifesto in spirit if not title.

The great manifestos demonstrate a clarity of thinking and expression that can galvanise public opinion, reinforce political movements and create new cultural modes of expression,  often because they are strikingly expressed and written in language that motivates and inspires.

Who could fail to be moved by the Futurists’ claim that ‘the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt’ or Cluetrain’s twelfth thesis: ‘There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products.’

And now we have a new manifesto for the modern age of distributed computing. The ‘open computing manifesto’ was launched this week with the support of some very large computer companies including Cisco, AT&T, Sun Microsystems and Telefonica as well as over fifty other players in this growing market, all under the leadership of IBM.

It outlines a set of principles that should underpin the growth of online services and utility computing as we shift from running sofware and storing data locally to an approach like the one we have developed for electricity, generated at large power stations for use wherever it is needed.

The release of the manifesto shows that vendors are starting to think about the need for open standards to underpin distributed services.  Although Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Microsoft, four very big players in the area, are notably absent from the list of supporters and Steve Martin from Microsoft was very critical of the manifesto and the closed way in which it was put together even before it was published, they are all likely to sign up in the near future.

We’re still at a very early stage in moving data and services from our desktops, laptops and local servers into computing utilities, and it’s clear that Google Apps, Microsoft Azure and even Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services are still very immature offerings which will change greatly in the coming months and years, so thinking about standards now could help greatly in future.

There is always a danger that early standardisation in rapidly developing areas simply serves to limit innovation and make it possible for the companies that have lagged behind in their adoption of new models to catch up on a standards-enforced level playing field.  This is the view usually taken by Microsoft when they decide to offer a non-standard service, or extend an existing standard in ways that will only work properly with other Microsoft software.

Even so, locking users in to poor standards can be just as bad as locking them into single vendor solutions, and much as I support open standards I can see the need to hold off on the standards-setting process long enough to decide how they should operate.

However it is equally dangerous to allow proprietary solutions to dominate for too long, as they force customers to stay with existing vendors and limit creativity and innovation simply by restricting the number of players in the field.  Balance and good timing matter.

What we need at this stage is a statement of principles that will resonate with the vendors, the users and the standards body, a document that conveys the excitement of the new computing model while offering a clear path towards future standardisation around agreed principles to ensure that the cloud computing market is characterised by open competition, diverse offerings from multiple players and a committment to customer service, with a clear path for future development based on open standards.

Sadly the open cloud manifesto fails on all of these grounds, offering only a collection of principles that almost anyone would consider obvious and written in the sort of language that graces too many corporate websites, opening with the claim that  ‘the buzz around cloud computing has reached a fever pitch’.

I wasn’t expecting something on the lines of  Marx’s ‘a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre’, but any journalism student could do better.
Surely it is hardly necessary to note that ‘cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap’, or to argue against duplicating or reinventing standards.

In the end this particular manifesto reminded me rather too much of the posters carried by the priests in the sitcom Father Ted when they are protesting against a film the church has declared blasphemous. ‘Down with this sort of thing’, shouts Ted, with Dougal behind him going ‘Careful now!’, a weak offering that lacks real conviction and fails to convince.

Bill’s Links

Manifesto of Surrealism:
Futurist Manifesto:
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
Party manifestos since 1945 – a great resource
open cloud manifesto:
Microsoft criticism:
Father Ted protest:

Most weeks I am fortunate enough to hear about interesting and innovative developments in technology around the world as the in-house commentator for Digital Planet, the World Service technology programme presented by Gareth Mitchell.

We hear about solar-powered wifi in Brazil, computing in Nepal, driverless cars in the USA and silicon chips that can tell when their calculations have been affected by cosmic rays.

We get to interview interesting people like Feargal Sharkey, former Undertone and now a lobbyist for the music industry, author Steven Johnson and head of the Mozilla Foundation Mitchell Baker.

And we find out about new initiatives and projects that could shape the emerging networked world, like One Laptop per Child.

But having a worldwide audience doesn’t stop us being interested in developments closer to home, and last week reporter Anna Lacey went to Park House school in Newbury, where they have been experimenting with the use of mobile phones in school.

Instead of banning phones and giving detention to any student foolish enough to take out their mobile in class, the school has been part of a nine-month research project into whether they can be used effectively in teaching, and the results are interesting to those of us who have seen how our children embrace new technologies.

During 2007 and 2008 Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young from the Learning Sciences Research Institute at Nottingham University and her colleagues explored ways in which students in five secondary schools could use smartphones in class.

They started from the premise that mobile phones are now ‘small, personal computers, providing clock, calendar, games, music player, Bluetooth connection, Internet access, and high-quality camera functions in addition to voice calls and short messaging’, and decided to find out whether they had a role in class.

The conclusions were hardly surprising.  During the nine-month experiment, the range of activities that the smartphones could be used for was impressively broad, from timing experiments to listening to foreign language podcasts to accessing the school’s student support system remotely.  Some students even recorded their teacher reading a poem to use for revision.

Yet all of the schools involved in the project had formal policies in place that effectively outlawed the use of mobiles, even if the policies were often disregarded in practice – as they have been over the years in my childrens’ schools.

The current restrictions are absurd, and will not last much longer.

But there is a difference between letting students use their phones to keep in touch with parents or friends and expecting them to use them in class. Simply bringing down the barriers will not, in itself, transform pedagogic practice and will raise new problems that must be addressed.

For one thing, today’s smartphones, are not actually very good  when it comes to searching the web, editing documents or videoing classroom experiments.

Most, apart from the G1 and the iPhone, are primarily designed to enable users to make voice calls and send texts, and the cool user interface features are there to let their owners download and play music or take and send photos and grainy videos.

Few school students have business-oriented Blackberries, and even simple tasks like sending and receiving emails or reading documents sent as attachments are impossible on the average teenagers’ phone. Simply entering a web address can be a slow and painful business, and doing a proper search for sources could take a whole lesson.

Within the classroom there is also a class divide between those who have the latest models and the latest phones and those from poorer families who may not have smartphones or even any phone at all.  In the research project many of the students were given phones to use, but this is not going to be the case generally.

I was one of the first students at my school to get a pocket calculator, back in the early 1970’s. It was a Sinclair Cambridge that one of my friends fathers had built from a kit, and  used Reverse Polish logic, so you entered 2,2,+ to add two and two.

Of course I wasn’t allowed to use it in class, and couldn’t take it into exams. But having one at home definitely gave me an advantage in maths because I spent less time doing grunt arithmetic and more time thinking about mathematics.

The same thing could easily happen with mobiles. I’m plugged into technology, and affluent enough to provide my children with the kit they need, but there are a lot of kids at school with them who are not so fortunate.

Middle class parents who can afford home computers, fast broadband and even laptops for their children are already giving them an advantage and we don’t want the same to happen with mobiles.
The report authors are aware of this, and they point out that ‘the cost of wireless Internet smart phones means that they are not  ubiquitous among secondary school students’, and note that ‘cost and ownership go hand in hand as  issues to consider.’

However this is just the sort of concern that is likely to be missed as policy develops and guidance is issued. We could easily see a more liberal attitude to the use of smartphones in class without any attempt to ensure equality of access or provide resources for those students who do not already own appropriate devices, and that would only serve to perpetuate the inequalities that already disfigure our education system.

Since we’re unlikely to convince the department for children, schools and families to give every child under 16 their own smartphone, we should think very carefully about how we move towards opening classes up to mobile technologies. Social justice and equality of opportunity need to be balanced against our drive toward digital engagement, in the classroom as everywhere else.

Bill’s Links

Digital Planet:

Solar powered wifi:

Nepal Wireless:

Driverless cars:

Chips detect cosmic rays:

The original study:

Sinclair Cambridge Calculator:

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

Nick Carr coined the phrase ‘miasma computing‘ in response (and I wish I’d thought of it first!), and at GikIII recently the excellent Miranda Mowbray presented ‘The Fog over the Grimpen Mire: Cloud Computing and the Law‘, which organiser Andres Guadamuz called ‘a virtuoso remix of Sherlock Holmes and cloud computing’ that was ‘both endearingly performed and absolutely spot on.’

I’m sorry I missed it, but her slides are here…

And Jamais has done it too…

Man and Computer

(photo from the excellent Tom Catchesides)