1. Introduction
1. Colmcille and the battle of the book
2. Three ideas
3. About this book
2. Digital Decision Making
1. The Riled Maths Professor
2. Introduction to Decision Making
2.1 Know-how (Brushing teeth)
2.2 Rational decision making
2.3 Complexity in decision making: garbage can situations
2.4 Bounded rationality in decision making: satisficing (Radar in WWII)
2.5 Cost benefit analysis: the primacy of economics
2.6 Modelling
2.7 Risk
3. Factors that Influence [digital] decision making
3.1 Personal values and power
3.2 Thinking traps
3.3 Complexity: technology (
3.4 Complexity: situation (Challenger space shuttle)
3.5 Lessig’s Constraints: law, built environment, social norms and economics
4. What is digital decision making?
4.1 The idea of “the environment”
4.2 Digital decision making
4.3 The
4.4 Professional focus on how silence is golden profitable
5 About this book
3. Harry Potter and the full blooded lawyers: interested in IP?
Harry Potter and the full blooded lawyers
Law Lord of the Rings
Professional focus on how silence is [golden] profitable
The birthday song
Wind gone
Peter Pan
Law Protecting Digital Fences Intended to Protect Copyright
The Education Platform Censor
Control through technology
DRM security theatre
Real v Apple
Napster, Peer to Peer (P2P), Grokster
Will you get sued?
What should the copyright holder do?
The Magic of Harry Potter
4. Infodiversity and the sustainability of our digital ecology
Cartoon cutting down the last tree on a desert island
The idea of “the environment”
Systems thinking
Lessig’s four forces
eBay v MercExchange
Access to information – BMJ [and Colmcille] stories?
A second enclosure movement?
Biodiveristy, the Selfish Meme and Infodiversity
Digital environmentalism and the sustainability of our digital ecology The Internet Archive and the healthcare advocates
A digital library of
Information fire hose
Email mountains
Information diet anyone?
4. Canaries in the mine: case studies in digital decision making
The power and the dangers of models.
The primacy of economic models
Seeing patterns where there are none: the bible code.
The importance of understanding. (EG 2nd law) Libertarian paternalism.
Don’t be bamboozled by language.
Information systems in education
Tizard committee
Electronic voting
Medical privacy
Air passenger profiling: Semaphore, CAPPS II, Secure Flight
Biotech patents, spleens and incentives to cure baldness
Part 2 Explaining what’s going on and how to do it better
5. Digital decision making: facts, values and agendas
This short chapter draws a distinction between facts and values and explores power relationships in decision making. Many public arguments involve a mix of all of these but this is not transparent. Arguments get presented as if they are disputes only about facts, whereas they are really about conflicts in values and it is the values of the most powerful actors in the decision making process that achieve primacy. This is significant because disputes that are about facts can, in principle, be resolved by some objective process – one can imagine a kind of impartial court that could adjudicate between the rival claims and reach a judgement acceptable to all. But conflicts about values cannot be resolved in this way. There is no purely objective process by which someone who believes in capital punishment can convince someone who is opposed to it, for example. Section headings:
IP decision making and the strange absence of economics
Critical awareness
Facts, values and beliefs
Tactics of persuasion
Scrutinise the agenda of the most powerful actors
6. Systems, Information Systems & Information Technology
Systems
The technology is just the tool
Information systems v information technology
Radar and the information system that won the war
The Tizard Committee and Churchill’s man: how it could have failed
The admiral and the Nuclear Navy
Multiple perspectives
Human factors
Balance: design, implementation, cross disciplinary communications, users and experts
7. People in touch with people: valuing multiple perspectives
IT in distance education.
Back to the future: technology is just the tool no matter how sophisticated it appears to be.
Stakeholder involvement
The looming IP cloud
8. The Experts v the People versus the Experts and the People
The value of expert knowledge
Economic rationality
Modelling
Risk
Critical thinking
People, experts, understanding and better decisions
The importance of understanding. (EG 2nd law) Libertarian paternalism.
Feynman and the emperor's nose
Part 3 a modest proposal
10. Digital magic and a modest proposal for decision makers
This final chapter rounds off with a suggested framework based on the scientific method, for improving the quality of the digital decision making process in the future. The framework is adapted from the work I’ve done with colleagues at The Open University on environmental decision making and associated writings in the area of complex systems and systems failures. I offer the framework not as an idealistic “ivory tower academic solution” to the current state of affairs but rather as a process that some might find helpful, when framing their own digital decisions. Section headings:
Real world complexity
Problems and opportunities
Investigate, formulate, analyse, assess, act, monitor, evaluate, iterate
A decision making framework
6 questions
Conclusions
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