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I blogged the other day about my skepticism about the suggestion that the internet needs "governing" by bureaucrats and politicians out there in the "real world". The internet without such governance has provided a way for many more people to express themselves to a wider audience than they ever could have done in physical media. And having given it some more thought I can only conclude that any attempt to impose outside governance on it in the past has been counterproductive.

The BBC reports today from Athens that an Internet bill of rights [is] proposed

See, it's not like the existing charters of rights are upheld in respect of the "real world". Even by some of the "better countries" in the world, like the ones who recently decided that they could define what torture meant in the Geneva Conventions.

Many years ago now, in lawless Finland, there was a fantastic service called "anon@penet.fi". Some chap had been very clever and come up with a mechanism where people who did not want their identity revealed for whatever reason could register and his servers would automatically anonymize anything the user posted to email or usenet. It was very useful. People who were scared of "outing" themselves, people making controversial political points, whistle-blowing on employers or others, used it.

Then the FBI saw something they thought illegal from a poster and demanded to have the logs so that they could match Penet's client users with their supposedly anonymous posts. Rather than give in, I seem to recall he destroyed the database. An early attempt to police or govern the web had resulted in an ingenious facility that could nowadays be being used by dissidents from countries who are scant respecters of human rights, just those countries and practices that the "Internet Governance Forum" is now highlighting, to safely spread word about their countries and bring forward the day those regimes were exposed and changed their ways, closing down for everyone.

But forget China and Syria. The UN is utterly unable to enforce human rights as it is in such regimes. Why does it imagine it can do so by "governing" the internet? Indeed, if you know of IndyMedia in London, you'll realise that the FBI are just as bad - raiding and seizing with the collusion of British police and the Home Office a bunch of servers that happen to highlight news issues that are often, shall we say, uncomfortable for western governments.

Let the geeks get on with finding ways around these attempts to silence us and leave governance to the anarchic but massively people skewed internet itself. Every attempt so far has been heavy handed and counter-productive.

Just a quick post to highlight what the Guardian is saying about what I mentioned last week to celebrate Chami Chakrabarti's appointment as our Chancellor here at Oxford Brookes University:

Tackling gender equality in universities | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Jessica Shepherd reports Tuesday June 17, 2008 - As of this summer, the chancellor of Oxford Brookes University will be a woman. So will the chair of governors. So will the student union president. The vice-chancellor, one of her deputies and one of her pro- vice-chancellors already are....But while higher education may still be thought of as trailing behind other sectors as far as gender equality goes, it is catching up, as Northampton, Oxford Brookes and Winchester show.

In 2006, 42% of senior management posts in UK universities were held by women, while in 2003, 28% were, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. It might not be by much, but the percentage of professors who are female has also nudged ahead from 15% in 2003 to 17.5% in 2006. And it is the new universities, in particular the post-92s such as Oxford Brookes, that are leading the change. How have they done it?

"Women typically wait until they have more papers published than Dickens before they apply for a professorship, while men have a go," says Professor Janet Beer, vice-chancellor of Oxford Brookes. "We've changed this by developing a culture in which people, regardless of gender and ethnicity, feel they can put themselves forward for leadership positions."

Brookes encourages flexible working, career breaks, and offers maternity and paternity leave that is more generous than usual.

It has paid off. The university is soon to have a predominantly female top team, with Beer as vice-chancellor; Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights pressure group Liberty, as its new chancellor; a new chair of governors, the Oxfordshire county council chief executive, Joanna Simons; and a new student union president, Lina Mughal.

A pro- vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor are also female. This leaves just two out of five senior management posts occupied by men - a deputy vice-chancellor and a pro- vice-chancellor.

Read the rest. Good stuff!

Actually - we could go one step further and find that now five out of eight deans, heads of academic schools, will soon be women, though I reckon it's only two out of six (three of seven including the Students Union) in the non-academic directorates. But still, a pretty good balance down as far as second tier management!

So David Cameron is apparently going to explain that we need to learn to understand the "hoodie culture" better - that for many it is a way not of hiding aggression and criminal intent but of "keeping your head down" retreating into anonymity in an hostile world. That instead of opprobrium youngsters need nurturing to make the correct life-choices in a fast moving bewildering (and I'd add very unequal) society.

It reminds me of Germaine Greer's "The Boy" of 2003, a book extolling the real beauty of teenage males that got her some bad press with some decrying her as a middle aged pederast. I recall not buying it myself because I felt it might feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. I heard her explain the rationale behind the book at the time though. What she was trying to do was rekindle a sense of self-confidence; that boys in particular were, through their fashion statements - baggy trousers, hoodies and the like - reacting to being constantly put down, as inherently criminal, as "thickos", as failures in a feminist world that said we can do without men.

For years we have been showered with statistics about how boys are in fact doing worse than girls, at school, at university, at life. Now sure, we've had generations, perhaps millennia, where girls and women were second class citizens, chattels, not worth the same as men, and that had to be addressed. But maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Of course I'm prepared to accept that in fact women are simply just the superior being and that levelling the playing field has begun to allow that inherent superiority to shine through. But even if that is the case, it means we need to pay more attention now to boys and men, to give them the step up to realise their potentials and so on.

When I was a councillor it was a very common complaint that there were "gangs of youths" just hanging around, intimidatingly, frightening old ladies going about their ordinary business at the local shop, the chippie or whatever. Cameron is right certainly in one respect - Labour's, and society as a whole's it seems, response to this has been to criminalise them, with ASBOs, curfews, banning their attire from public places in the name of a surveillance society that wants to record our every move, Big Brother like. It seems sometimes that it's not a case of if you offend, but when you offend, we will be able to spot you (and, by extension, punishment will be swift).

The axiom that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide is Labour's mantra for centralising control of our lives and is making people feel that their privacy is under attack. And if you're young and perhaps just a little bit naughty (weren't we all? As DC should know!) and you don't quite have a full understanding of your rights you are going to be tempted to retreat into anonymity.

A friend of mine took a bunch of kids from his council estate on a couple of overseas trips to Oxford's twin cities of Bonn and Leiden last year. Some of them had ASBOs. Whatever he allowed his name put to in his Labour election leaflets this May (he lost anyway) it made him realise that ASBOs were not really the answer to many of these problems - that a little bit of TLC was what they needed to settle down and make the right kind of choices when faces with them. To have some self-confidence.

And then there was Tom Conti's contribution to "This Week" a couple of years back where he speculated that if we throw huge investment at education, that if we make schools, especially in the early years, places of respite from a hostile world, and, in some cases, hostile home lives, with class sizes of just half a dozen in the most formative years so that the environment is more family than cattle-market, that we will foster a sense of personal responsibility that will eventually feed through into massive savings in currently state provided services (especially health and social services related).

Can we afford not to address these issues? And do it better than criminal sanctions? Respect does indeed begin at home, and when prominent, and one presumes well brought up for want of nothing, young political campaigners have so little respect for the "little people" in the council estates that, when caught short, they feel no compunction about pissing in the alleyways of someone else's neighbourhood, maybe the example from the very top could be a bit better!

Whatever the answer, the youngsters of today are our future. They are ours (well not mine personally you understand - no chance of that!), a part of our communities. If our communities are outlawing them in the formative years, what resentment are we storing up for our future? And boy, do we need more people like this to change things.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, education, young

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.

When I started this blogging lark, I chose Blogger mainly as a way of getting a blog up quickly with as little effort and learning as possible in order to support Chris Huhne for Lib Dem party leader. I'd always intended when possible to move my blog to my own URL here at www.jockcoats.org.uk and my own server and software I could play with.

Since I went and bought another server, and set up a personal site using www.jockcoats.org.uk when I was running for election as university governor (which I've won, by the way thank you for asking, but more on that later no doubt) and since my Blogspot address got hijcaked rather embarrassingly by someone redirecting to a pretty explicit gay porn website at the weekend, I've decided to carry out that move now.

So I grabbed back my Blogspot address and redirect it to here, but if you are reading this and link to my blog at http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/ in your blogrolls and so on, maybe you could change that over to http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/ as soon as you can be bothered. I'm still getting used to the software, so things will probably change quite a lot over the next few days. For information, I'm using Drupal, and its blogapi module to allow me to continue posting through ecto.

Technorati Tags: blogging