Book outline

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 (Three Mile Island)

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 Rio and the copyright lawyers: a digital decision making situation

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 Alexandria

Information fire hose

Email mountains

Information diet anyone?

4. Canaries in the mine: case studies in digital decision making

Feynman: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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