Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Sometimes you hear a comment that just make you sit up, listen more intently and think.

One such comment was made in passing during the final ministerial panel session of the OECD meeting in Seoul this week, and it was;

“The policy response to complexity is often non-determination.”, Hon. David Cunliffe, New Zealand’s Minister for Health, Telecommunications and Information Technology.

I think there is a really important lesson in there for the information technology industry. Behaviors that we take for granted, and even enjoy on occasions, are tough for many of our political leaders and decision makers to reconcile.

Many (not all) technologists and software developers are a strange hybrid of engineer and artist, using their talents to design and build solutions and often defending their work and beliefs in the way that any passionate artist would.

As a result we tend to categorize each other into groups who believe one thing, or believe the opposite… if you’re for OpenXML then you must by extrapolation be against ODF, if you’re a supporter of free software then you much be against the traditional commercial software industry.

There are plenty of individuals who don’t fit this stereotype, but if you search the web today they’re hard to find. While for many people this is a highly unfair categorization it is one that plays out in the blogosphere and very often in the professional press. We saw a lot of it during the process to standardize OpenXML where the press worked hard to represent the process as an entertaining war between OpenXML and ODF.

During the process to standardize OpenXML within ISO anybody coming out with a middle ground view was immediately categorized and dismissed as having an interest in one side of the argument or the other. Patrick Durusau is probably a good example that will be understood by those who saw the way he was treated in the blogosphere during the later stages of the process. I sincerely believe that Partick carried a helpful and neutral view of the overall landscape of document format standards, but for some that just was not good enough.

The average politician lives in a world of negotiation, give and take and mediation. I’m sure that many of the arguments put forwards by the software communities are nothing short of confusing and mostly useless in their world. When one side declares that their argument is absolutely correct while the other side of the argument declares that they’re the ones who are absolutely correct it is impossible to make a determination - with no middle ground and no room for discussion or negotiation.

For Information and Communication Technology to reach the potential that we all know it carries we need to see some large scale policy commitments from governments covering issues such as technology availability, privacy protection, security education and strong cyber security policy and legislation.

Those big decisions will be tough for political leaders to make while conflicting arguments continue to be put forwards in the way they are today.

Non determination on these issues is probably our worst nightmare.