Ottawa, ON

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at 2:00 p.m.

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MR. OXLEY: ...geographic social separation.

The people who work for me all work the same way, much the same way. Young people just don't accept that the way we did things 10 years ago is the way we have to. Like my daughter ...

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She doesn't know what life was like before that.

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MR. OXLEY: Thank you ...

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MR. LEBLANC: ... user-created content: What are the impacts?

Mike...?

MR. LEBLANC: ... by 600 per cent, and the initiative was so successful that they cut 11,000 salaries of engineers affected to Client Services because the clients serviced themselves through the forum. So already in '95 this was the birth of what we could call now user-generated content.

Another question that people might ask is: What is the actual influence of the bloggers?

Let me ask you what would be the most influential factor in the purchase decision of a washing machine. Will this be the publicity of the manufacturer? Will this be the journalist that talks about washing machines? Or will this be your brother-in-law that purchased a washing machine?

Well, bloggers and the blogger community is a world-wide network of brothers-in-law. This is why people give so much credit to bloggers, because they can relate to them and they can really understand the concern and what they are seeing.

Now, another thing that is very strange is that at the last provincial election in the Province of Québec there was several parties that had blogs, but the party that won the blog war was a party that had no blog itself. It was Action démocratique du Québec. But they had a lot of users that blogged for them on their own blogs.

All the points and all the political ideas of Action démocratique du Québec were the next day in the newspaper, because journalists read the blogs, read the blogs of the followers of Action démocratique du Québec. So there again is another user impact that finally helped that party that became known in Québec.

Another thing that we have to think about when we think about user-created impact is the effect of that on companies.

I give a lot of lectures and training to companies about their use of blog and blogging and the first question any company always comes up with is: Well, if we open a blog, if we open a forum, people might criticize us. People might start to say they don't like our product or our services and we cannot bear the idea of having such criticism. What can we do?

Now, if you have a bad product and you have a bad service, my point of view is you had better know it. Instead of paying for a focus group you could have it live. Somebody will tell you live "Your product is not that good. You should increase it."

Last year there was a new concept that a lot of people talked about and it was transparency tyranny. I believe we are at that age that every company should be transparent and should be able to live by its product and services and listen to what it has to improve.

Now obviously those types of things are very hard and could be very hurtful for your ego to know that your product is not was good as you are led to believe, but what is the other thing? If you don't leave a space within your company presence, how could it hurt you if somebody bitched about your product elsewhere?

I did it myself. I have a blog at Michelleblanc.com. It is a blog that I'm lucky enough to have something like 80,000 unique viewers a month -- and I blog in French.

One of the companies that I will not name, I purchased my furniture, my business furniture from them. I had very, very, very bad service, a hell of an experience. I phoned them, I said how bad the experience was. They gave me the runaround. I went to their Web site, I tried to find a place where I could put my brief and state how bad my experience was. I couldn't find any place, so I wrote a post saying how shitty their service was.

Now if you go on Google and you write the name of that company, on the first page of Google you see "Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique XXX "quelle service de merde!"

So if they had a space within their Web site that allowed me to tell them how shitty their service was, that comment would have been melted in the overwhelming information that the site provided. But now, since it did not allow me to express my disappointment, I expressed it anyway and it hurts them much more now.

What really surprised me is that two years down the road they never phoned me to tell me "What happened? Can we do something to solve the problem? How can we get rid of that page?" They did not phone me yet, so it is really surprising.

Another thing I want to tell you before I let our distinguished panel discuss further the importance and impact of user-generated content, a year and a half ago you know the blog marketing iSpeak about another blogger's content, another blogger's content, a blogger speaks about my content?

So there was a guy that linked to my content for a couple of times. I went back, I looked at his blog, found it was a very interesting blog, gave him a call and I said "Why don't you take a coffee and discuss business and blogging." We had a lot of fun. We discussed for something like three hours.

Then I said "Why don't we do that as a monthly event and invite other people to join in?" So he wrote a post, I wrote a post. The next time we were 20 people coming from business or the blogging community.

Now that event, that cost nothing to me and that only cost the drink of the people that come to the meeting, they pay themselves a drink, it is now in four countries. It is spreading like wildfire. I never put marketing money on it. For me it's just for the fun of discussing with business people and with bloggers about business blogging.

The event is called Yulbiz. Now you have one in Montréal, you have one in Québec City, you have one in Paris, you have one in Brussels and you have one in Warsaw. We are discussing starting a Yulbiz event in Strasbourg, in Lille, in New York and in San Francisco.

All this did not exist a year and a half ago and now, because of Yulbiz -- one of the three major media corporations in Canada is called Transcontinental. At Yulbiz the idea started to start making publicity for business bloggers. So during one of the Yulbiz events we discussed that possibility.

Transcontinental came with the idea of making -- I don't know the word in English, but it's like a publicity Yul staff. Transcontinental will sell the publicity, the publicity will be on business blog and will directly target business readers which read blogs.

Now, for the last two weeks, the 20 most prominent business bloggers in Québec have a little publicity, which pays a hell of a lot more than global accents. We are all very happy about that. The first one that advertised there is Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, which is a great idea, and it's like a test.

So now business bloggers will be able, on top of attracting customers, of making money with their content, and making very good money. And Transcontinental will give 55 per cent of the publicity it sells to the bloggers and keep 45 per cent to themselves.

To me it's a very great idea and now in Canada business bloggers can start to make money with their content and advertisers can now pinpoint business people that are interested in the content of business bloggers.

So again, it is a very good user-created impact and now that this was organically organized through blogs.

So I thank you very much and I would like to present to you Mr. Jungwook Lim who is the Vice-President of Scientific Innovation at Daum Communications, Korea. For those who don't know about Daum Communications, it's like the equivalent of Yahoo! here.

Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LIM: Thank you, Monsieur, for the nice introduction.

Let me give you some characteristics of a Korean UCC and the Korean market.

This is the history of a Korean UCC. This is the timeline over Korean Internet industry. We actually started the same as other countries. Like, Internet error just started from 1995, but I think there are two distinctions compared to other countries. The one is some kind of -- only spread over broadband Internet.

There are some reasons. Broadband Internet started from 1998, and it started heavily, you know, provided from the 1990s, because of some huge industry competition and the government support and some kind of dense population, because of Seoul, you know, has about one-third of the population in Korea.

So, actually, broadband Internet start to be a key driver for UCC, something like that. So after, dot-com collapsed from 2000, even though we have a lot of some interesting -- you know, some Internet new services, like -- so from the time, people started using Avatar, and with Avatar people expressed themselves in the cyberspace after that, from 2003.

And even before the Web 2.0, and Korea started from something like Web 2.0 service, like, I'm going to give you some examples, like, enable analogy in is a Q and A community service, and the other one such as for story is the Cyworld.

Cyworld is a social networking service started from 1999, and it really took off from 2003. And the Cyworld is like from 2003 and 2004 and all of a sudden in Korea, in twenties and teenagers, just everybody's using the Cyworld and the network and they started express themselves in the cyberspace.

So I think there are some kind of key drivers, and I think the important technological driver is the digital devices. Korea is famous for one of the -- you know, some early market, early adapt to market for some digital devices, like digital camera, personal multimedia player and cellphone.

From only 21st century, these cameras is having a huge market share in the Korean market and personal multimedia player has been, you know, sold very vastly. The cellphone, I think from 2000, almost every cellphone has camera capabilities, and with that people starting to upload their photos to the Internet, and I think that's the start of UCC.

So let me give you two interesting examples about UCC. The first one, in my company's case, is the down blogger news. It's something like helping the bloggers. Anybody's whose familiar with journalism probably knows about the OMI New. OMI News is famous for the (inaudible) journalism, so it's the down blog and uses one of the odd bands to form over (inaudible) journalism.

Anybody who has their blog in Korea can register their blogs to the down blogger news system, so now the number of down blogger journalists registered is about 35,000 right now. They actually posted articles, about 38,000 in a month. Of course, there are a lot of something, they are worthless articles, but there are many, many, and good articles and there's some interesting life stories, and something like that.

So we are actually the editors of the down news system and they are helping with the down editors, you know, some peoples, and they are pick, you know, down interesting articles. And it actually appears the down front page. Down front page has about, you know, some 7 million visitors every day, and it has, you know, some huge power in Korean society.

And this the banking hours of the globe is one example. Recently, Korean Banking Union, they are opposed to cutting the working hours of the bank and they are trying to compare it to the other countries. They are arguing that the other countries' bank, their working hour is short, and so Koreans have to, you know, some cutting the working hours of bank.

So one down blogger, actually, Korean blogger, trying to, you know, some analyze this, and he wrote articles about this and they are asking for sending some comments about other countries', you know, situation. So this Korean blogger collected the comments from the other Koreans living around the world on the working hours and services, over 25 different countries.

Actually, after that, he wrote an article based on the information, proving that the demands of the Korean Banking Union were unreasonable. Actually, they are based on the fact -- on wrong facts. So eventually Korean Banking Union that took the proposal for the time being due to criticism raised by the blogger news. So this is, I think, the good example for how UCC, you know, influence, you know, some society.

And a second one is (inaudible). This is one of the very successful -- you know, some business cases also, and this is one of the first polar-based -- this is the first polar base to question and answer community in Korea, and maybe in the world.

This is capable of giving very specific answers to the various questions. So if you have any some kinds of questions about Ottawa and what to do after this conference, you can just ask him a question in the system and somebody who has that information answers the Internet. And you can easily search that same kind of questions. So it's very easy to find some kind of specific answer.

And they actually started the system from 2002, and actually it became strong actually over competitors like Google. So it's like extracting analysis from users' brains, so it has been very successful. It's like copied by the Yahoo! answer, something like that.

So this is one of the two examples of UCC impact on Korean society. And these days, resumes in the forms of UCC are increasing because companies there, who values the creativity more, they are trying to analyze, you know, some applicants' UCC, like a video or blog and something like that, and read it, and they are trying to decide who's, you know, appropriate for their companies.

Korean UCC also have challenges, like copyright issue in appropriated contents, and so we have a video service and we have a very -- too many, you know, some videos posted every day, but the problem is that a lot of them actually copyright infringement, you know, videos, actually.

So we spend a lot of time, actually, filtering this, and so making system for providing some video filtering system, cue out filtering and provide some human monitoring teams. And we are talking about the government a lot, about making the policies and guideline about this.

Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: Now we will listen to Mr. Andres Monroy-Hernandez, from Lego and Lifelong Kindergarten Initiative at MIT.

MR. MONROY-HERNANDEZ: Hello. I am part of a group at the MIT Media Lab called Lifelong Kindergarten Group and we are interested in technology and education, and how these two areas can converse. As this panel is about how the user united content and Web 2.0 technologies can have an impact in society, I think the kind of work that we are doing in our group is very relevant.

One of the things that we often think about when we think about education is an image like this, where we have a professor or a teacher basically giving data or knowledge to students, the students memorize it, and then you take a test and then that's the end of the process, basically. If you fail, then you have to relearn everything.

However, we all know that this is one of the simplest and not-so-useful ways of learning. Unfortunately, when we think about technology and education, we often think of just perpetrating this model with new technologies. So when we think about, like, how the web can help kids learn, we just think about maybe Wikipedia is a good way for them to get information or just access to information over the web or videos, or interactive content. But we don’t really think about how technology can really change these models, because just delivering information with the web is just perpetrating the same model and replacing the teacher for a computer, which is basically the same thing.

So, when we look at inspiration, we look at places like the kindergarten and we often criticize how bad educations are in different countries and everybody says, like middle school is really bad, elementary school is really bad, but we often don’t hear people criticize kindergarten, and we believe that’s because it works and because at that age people are really learning a lot of different things in a very short period of time. Perhaps it’s not the most advanced things because we are really young, but people explore, the kids explore by playing with Playdough, Lego blocks, or fingerpaint, and as they do that, as they explore their world and play with different things they learn a lot of different concepts like numbers, the concept of time and so on.

But,(inaudible) one of the things that happens) after kindergarten is that it seems that we never have (inaudible) and that’s where we think technology makes a big difference. We will keep the same learning style throughout all the (inaudible) called the Scratch.

Scratch is a (inaudible) language. This is an (inaudible) of the application that allows anyone to be able to program animations, interactive art, video games, anything that you want to created in the ether world, you can create with Scratch.

So these applications, it’s, I could show it to you if I had my computer here, but basically what you do is that you drag blocks from that panel into these panels in the middle, and then can control different things to happen on the screen. So, for example, I can say every time I clap I want a character to be jumping, or when I, say, move my mouse, I want my image to be changing. So, this application was developed as part of a research project of four years where we tested these in different countries with different kids.

One of the things I recently did is that I thought about the idea of, okay, it’s fine, people can create this kind of interactive content. We give people the tools for them to create things, not just consume. But, it is important for them to share. As we have heard here in the conference like the idea of sharing on-line and this, this whole concept, is a very important concept also in education. You don’t just create things alone, you also have to share them with others.

So, as part of my thesis project I kind of focus on these particular portions of the application, which is the share button. This is a very simple button but what it does is that in addition to it allows you to save on your computer or to share with others on your desktop, you can also share it with other people on-line. So, I created a website similar to U-Tube and all these different websites, Flicker and so on, I created a website where kids can upload their creations made in Scratch and share them with the world.

The site was released about four months ago. We have received tons of projects like this one, for example. This is one of the most advanced projects, it’s a video game that some kid from -- I think this kid was from the UK. So, there are different types of animations and video games that people have created, and we have received about 33,000 projects from all over the world, and we have been really surprised because originally this was just my thesis project but it has grown a lot in the past few months, and now we are thinking of better ways of fostering this idea of collaboration.

One of the different things that I believe Scratch presents compared to other on-line media sharing applications is that in a lot of applications you basically go to a community to get inspirational ideas or also to put content out there, so I created a video, I put it on U-Tube and then people can see my video and get inspiration to create another video, and perhaps like a lip-sync video and so it’s like a cycle there.

One of the things that is really hard to do in places like U-Tube or other places like that, is to creatively appropriate or download content and re-mix it to create new content. So that’s something that in Scratch is very simple to do.

In Scratch when you are looking at a project like this one, you can see that you can download the original source code of any project that you see on the website and then build on top of it. So, about 15% of the projects right now, on our site, are re-mixes of other people’s content, which we have been really surprised about and we think this has a lot of promises allowed for the future.

One of the things that we are doing, also, is, that all the content that kids share on-line is shared under the Creative Common Licence attribution and Share Alike type of license. So, you are allowed to do anything you want with content that is uploaded there as long as you share it in the same way. So, we are trying to foster this idea of collaboration and also giving credit to others.

Going back to what kind of statistics we have gotten in the past four months. We have gotten about six million page views, about 900,000 visits, people from all different countries, and 33,000 projects.

One of the interesting things is that about 20% of the registered users are active content creators of projects and more than that are people who are actually posting comments and giving feedback to other kids, creating content on the site.

If we analyse how much code has been created on the site, there are about 500,000 scripts created. So each project is composed of different scripts and there’s lots of code on the website.

There is also this idea of creating a network of friends in the website, so we have friendship connections there.

So, the type of changes that people have done is about 44% of the changes are scripts changes and code changes, which are to the core of what you can actually change on a project.

The distribution of ages on the site right now, the peak is at twelve, but you can see that the youngest generation from eight to around sixteen, which is our target audience, is really the people who are using the website.

Finally, the distribution across gender is not as good as we wished, and this is something that we are working on. Right now, the distribution is like this, but we are hoping to do more changes into the wrapping or the application to promote more participation across gender.

One of the things that I have done is analyse how people correlate gender and number of projects. And one of the things that I found is that there is no correlation between gender and age and number of projects, which means that girls and boys are as likely to work on projects as each other.

And, finally, these are the kind of projects that people have created. There are different trends on the site. People are citing other people’s work, and acknowledging that other people are reaching(inaudible) their content. People are creating content based on what you see on TV, like Deal or No Deal, that kind of application, or also the Transformers or the theme songs, or Hot Reporter.

Finally, people are reaching out to other communities. They are creating their blogs about what they are doing on Scratch. They created Facebook groups, etcetera.

So, I hope you get to visit our site. If you google Scratch on Google you’ll find our website and our software. Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: Thank you Mr. Monroy-Hernandez.

Now, please listen to Mrs. Jennifer Corriero, who is the Executive Director and Co-founder of TakingITGlobal.

MS CORRIERO: All right, well, I wanted to start off with a question for you. If you can just think about a young person that you know, or know of, between the ages of about fifteen and twenty-five, and if you can think of an example of how they would have demonstrated leadership, or a contribution that they have made to the world in some way, whether it be to your own life or to the community or their school, but think about a positive contribution.

I’ll give you ten seconds.

And, if you can turn to your neighbour and just quickly share that example. And I know a lot of you are distancing yourselves from each others, so network, and you have about thirty second each just to share that example. Please go ahead.

You guys are very quiet.

Okay. And are there any of you that are willing to share with the group? Please? Yes? And actually there’s three of you, you guys can just go up to the mic so everyone can hear, and for the translation. Up to three or four can just go ahead to the microphones. I see three, so that’s good.

Okay, so we’ll start with you. And just say your name.

QUESTION: My name is Stephen. I have a cousin, she lives in South Africa and she’s helping bridge communities through the wine culture and sharing expertise through Rhine in a non-profit way.

MS CORRIERO: Okay, thank you.

QUESTION: And she’s twenty-four.

MS CORRIERO: Twenty-four. Great. Okay, over there in the back?

QUESTION: I have a 16 year old daughter who organized a fashion show at her school to raise funds for helpless Huti, specially geared towards AIDS orphans.

MS CORRIERO: Wow, that's great. Thank you.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Bernard Marcou(ph). The guy I know, which is quite extraordinary, is Emera Kevin(ph) lives in Switzerland, he is 18 years old, he has been a long-time Web site designer, is ranked actually an expert in voice over IP. That's not extraordinary.

What is, is that he is actually completely blind. Quite extraordinary. Emera Kevin.

MS CORRIERO: Thank you.

And I was asked to share an example and I will share an example of someone who I know from New Zealand. Her name is Cherie(ph) and in high school she started a club called The Tech Angels and they became the mentors to help implement the use of laptops in their school. She was the head tech angel.

There are countless examples of the contribution I think that all people are making in this question around, you know, what are the impacts of user-created content.

For me what that speaks to is the ability to contribute. My frame of reference is really around the massive potential that exists for young people in particular to contribute to society and how that age where you are in transition from being a kid, you are in a stage of adolescence and you are moving into adulthood, you are developing your own sense of identity and place in the world.

That is such a critical time, a critical stage in one's life to really nurture a sense of creativity, a sense of social responsibility, a sense of place, a sense of community, to be having a sense of inquiry about the world, curiosity for all of these attributes that really help to foster active citizens who can really contribute to shaping society over the long haul.

I think a lot of young people today, there are arguments about whether or not there is enough cultivation of these attributes.

We were talking just before about kindergarten and how we need to go back to that sort of environment where people are really nurtured. I think that those are important values for us to think about and how are we nurturing the youth of our society and how do we continue to have effective mechanisms because there will always be generations of youth.

Now I don't identify as a youth so I consider myself youthful and I think many in the room might also consider themselves to be youthful. I think it is really critical to make sure that there are effective bridges across generations and that we can create avenues for young people to really participate.

So this is the motivation behind my life and my work with taking it global.

We actually created back in 2000 an online community called "TakingITGglobal.org, which is essentially based around the idea of user-generated content with a focus on social responsibility and international development issues, looking at issues around poverty and issues around peace and conflict, culture and identity, environmental issues, and we are trying to actually create an environment for young people to recognize their ability to have a voice and their ability to contribute and to have that contribution be valued and appreciated.

So the site is in 12 languages, all of them translation has been done by our own community, and we have reached -- well, on a monthly basis we reach about a million unique users, though as registered members there are 160,000 that have registered and there is about a million hits that the site received on a daily basis.

The average length per visit on the site is about 30 minutes and only about 10 per cent of the total members have actually contributed the content of the site, so I guess it still does fall within the dichotomy of a lot of people may be registering and being consumers of the information and maybe sharing it with others, but not necessarily all contributing actively to all the content.

I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the features.

The "Make Connection" section is really around the profiles and how people connect to each other. We have discussion forums and blogs. The quote from one of our members:

"Take provides me with the opportunity to interact with others who have similar ideas and interests." (As read)

And really that commonality is around the desire for young people to make a difference. We are not excluding anyone by age, it's just focused on youth.

We have active discussion forums that have a whole range of facilitators, and what has really been interesting is how our policies on the discussion forums and the guidelines for moderation have evolved over the years and how -- we are looking at the impact of policy more broadly here today and I guess one of the questions that we face as a Canadian-based charity that has a very global audience.

I didn't mention, but only 30 per cent of our members are in North America. The next highest region is actually in Africa. The second highest language of our site is Arabic. So you really see a blend of different cultures, values, norms, expectations. So when we are creating guidelines obviously we are going to be compliant with the Canadian law, because that is what we are governed by, but how do we also look at policies that should exist within our site to sort of govern the activity that takes place.

One of our goals as well is to be very classroom-friendly and so how do we ensure that there is sort of the level of appropriateness of content so that we are not banned in schools, which we are not, though we are actually in Alabama.

Sorry, I had to mention that. We are not banned in other countries, but anyway.

The "Take Action" section is really trying to cultivate the -- well, our motto is "Inspire, Inform and Involve". So how do we actually move from the desire to do something to actually cultivating a sense of initiative?

We have a guide to action that can be downloaded and various projects that people post on the site. We have databases of organization, and we map those organizations. Using Google maps for example you can actually spot where they are and sort of zoom in, sort of align the data that we have with other ways to sort of visualize that information.

We also have calendars of events and financial opportunities and scholarships that are all posted on the site.

"Express Yourself", which is my personal favourite section where we have an online global gallery, people are submitting images, they are submitting artwork, and we have allowed the ability for people to integrate content on our site posted from other sites. For example, on your personal profile you can feed in your Facebook profile link or your Flickr photos if you are uploading it elsewhere.

Understanding the issues is really providing that background. We have worked with different groups from many UN agencies like the Millennium Campaign to actually have a whole awareness initiative around the millennium development goals on our site. We have distributed thousands of campaign kits to our members who have run many activities in their communities.

The country sites is a way for people to explore the world and there is also two million city sites that are generated. All the content is very much database-driven so you can access information in so many different ways, by issue, by language, by country.

So I will just close with just highlighting the three areas of impact that we have discovered from our own community.

First is the support and motivation.

Seventy-three per cent of our members who were surveyed said that through their experience with TakingITGlobal, their perception of the ability of youth to effect change in the world has improved. That is so critical, because without a sense of hope and optimism I think that we are all lost.

The second area is around networking and information. Fifty-four per cent say that TakingITGlobal has helped them to become more informed about issues that are important to me. And we have really combined an approach where we are encouraging both user-generated content but also linking to other sources that might not be content-generated by youth, so combining both.

The third area of impact has been around mobilizing and organizing into real-world action. Forty-four per cent of members surveyed say that TakingITGlobal has helped them to have a positive impact in their community.

So these are the areas at large and I look forward to continued discussion.

Thanks.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: Thank you, Ms Corriero, for that very energetic presentation.

Now would you please welcome, Ms Manon Ress, Director, Information Society Projects for the Consumer Project on Technology.

--- Pause

MS RESS: Thank you.

I work for a consumer group and therefore I represent consumer groups. I was very happy to hear about all these consumer-driven activities and I found all of them very exciting.

I'm going to talk to you about something that is much less exciting, which is closer to what consumer groups do actually, it's a kind of user-generated content that is not new but often overlooked, and certainly overlooked in the last documents I read about it. It's about data and databases. I would like to talk to you about some of the future impact and what to do about it for consumer groups.

First of all, I would like to tell you upfront what is my main point. My main point is that I think we should -- all of us and OECD of course should, too -- try to make user-created databases open, compatible now and in the future. I see a lot of databases, like the one we just heard about where kids enter things or NGOs enter good NGOs, but none of these work together. This is a real problem for me.

First, a few remarks on terminology. I'm going to date myself, but this term "user-created content" sounds very business 2005 for me.

In my generation, we didn't talk about content, we talked about books or text or videos or poetry, but content is something a little bizarre for me. I would rather use user-generated stuff.

But content also implies that we treat all contents the same, they are all the same. We should have the same idea about text, video, data, art, games, educational material, and, unfortunately, I think that user-generated content, because we have to get used to that word, have existed long before the Internet, actually. I think that a lot of people here would admit that maybe editorials were user-generated content, when you sign an editorial to a newspaper.

Graffiti, in my generation, in France, we had "Rendez la Bourgogne aux escargots", that was user-generated content. There's also class notes. When I was a student, we used to take notes and we made copies and gave them to other to students.

So what I mean is that there's a history of user-generated content and they were not all treated the same way, and that's sort of in the background of my remarks.

I think that UCC -- let's go to the acronym now -- is well explained in the OECD paper that has been circulating here, and on the web, too, and it actually has been taken almost verbatim by Wikipedia. If you go to "UCC", on Wikipedia, you will see that same document.

The three characteristics, which is the publication requirement, the creative effort, those characteristics seem fine to me. The last one, creation, has to be a creation outside of professional routines and practices, is a little bit of a stretch for me, but maybe it will work better.

I would like to avoid repeating all this praise about the great expansion that we have seen in access to knowledge. I mean, it's obvious that the scale-up of reference materials for kids, since we have been talking about kids a lot, has been incredible.

I think that we also hear a lot about the blogs and the lists of the free software, the uTube, Flickr. There's many, many examples of really great, great UCC out there. And the impact, I think, we all, depending on our angle or our expertise, understand that there's a social, a technical, a political and economical impact. We all understand that there's positive and negative impact.

For example, the expansion of reference materials such as in Wikipedia also gave birth to a lot of questions about quality and credibility of what you found among this UCC, but I would like to focus on one type of kind of boring content, which is data, and databases. It's different from text and movies, even though some people might think here that uTube is almost a database of videos, right, because you can find a video, you can put a keyword and stuff, but it's quite different.

I'm thinking about what I look for when I'm looking for data. And I'm talking about numbers, I'm talking about consumer reviews, prices. My group works a lot on access to medicines, so we have to have a lot of numbers when it comes to the price of medicines all over the world.

We would like the FDA, the U.S. federal agency that regulates drugs, to put down on some kind of website, for example, the drugs that are publicly funded. That would be a great kind of data we would like to have. So that's what I would like to talk about. Because even though I have seen a wonderful thing happening for text and videos, blogger really freed a lot of people from the technical parts of writing and now anybody can do a blog.

I mean, my father can start a blog and he's in his late-eighties, and you see that for videos. I mean, not me and not my father, but my kids, they upload their videos and all that. But I haven't seen any of that for data and databases. Am I the only one who likes to have evidence-based policy?

So I'm just trying to make the case that we need to create tools for people like me, and I'm sure a lot of people here are interested in data and databases.

I would like everybody here to keep in mind that there's a big issue that's looming in the future of the Internet, which is the information decay. I haven't heard too much about it. I think that most of you have read probably Vint Cerf's comments on the BBC Online this summer, where he talked about the information decay, and he says:

"We will also be confronted with a kind of information decay in which digital objects become less and less accessible owing to the age of the software that created it. As an example..."

-- he writes --

"...it is already a challenge to watch video posted on the BBC website in 1997. Imagine trying to watch the same video in 100 years or in 1,000 years." (As read)

Well, I would add to Vint that imagine for data. It's even difficult now. I mean, it's totally not open.

So there are a good example of databases out there, a good one and bad one. A good one, I think is the EMBO EBI, which is a European effort to create sort of a template for scientists to share and compare large-scale genomic data. And that, of course, is funded by the governments.

There's some that are funded by industry, like the Wi-Fi. I don't know if you check on the free Wi-Fi access website to find out where in Ottawa you can get free Wi-Fi, but it's a Fortune 500 website, and it's a database because anybody can go on it and if you find a free hotspot, you can enter it. I don't know how long it's going to be good, of course.

We don't know how long it's going to be good and we don't really know how it's updated and how it works because it's not open. I think that consumers and consumer groups are very worried about this lack of openness.

The first thing that we should ask ourself when we find data is: Is the data open and transparent? Can I use it? How can I use it? Can I store it? In many cases you cannot. Are there privacy issues? Is the data format open? What about the interface? Are there opportunities to change the interface? Is there is a mesh up like we saw with the Google map, you know, and they have different rules in different jurisdictions.

So why do consumer and consumer groups care about openness in databases? Because of the kind of application they need. I think that consumer feedback, like we heard before, is very important, but we would like to have it maybe organized. I'm calling for programmers to design sort of a good template. Wikipedia, which has created a good template for a lot of editors to enter information about everything. A good template for data would be good.

So I think that the OECD articulated in 2004 a very good declaration on access to research data that were made with public funding, and I think that there's some work and some thinking to be made about how to organize all that stuff, those numbers that can be used for a long time.

I will end with one example. A group of people wanted to create a database because they are looking at gender issues. So they asked the public to put down the gender of their publicly elected officials in the U.S. Very soon somebody wants to do it, but add, because it's global, Canada and Australia, and then other countries, because they are interested in gender.

But eventually, if somebody comes in and says, Well, I want to add another variable, what about race, if the database is not an open standards, you can't really work it in, and that would be a pity.

Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: We will now take questions.

In the meantime, I can tell you other people that would be very interested in open database, it's all the market analysts, such as myself, who would certainly appreciate having access to a free database to help us do our job. And I'm sure a lot of governmental analysts would also be very interested in such openness.

Now, talking of open database, another database that has a lot of people worried is the Google database. John Battelle wrote a book and he called Google’s database the database of intentions. Obviously, knowing what Google knows about everybody else, it would certainly be available to consumers, to marketers, and to policy makers.

Now, is there anybody that wants to discuss with us the impact of a user-generated content?

In the meantime, maybe I can have a question for the panel here. There’s one other point that we did not discuss and it’s Virtual World And Its Impact. Do you have any ideas of the impact of user-generated content on virtual world or the impact of virtual world on user- generated content?

MR. MONROY-HERNANDEZ: One of the things that we are exploring recently is also how to develop the same kind of philosophies of using technology for education in a creative way in places like SecondLife. So, one thing that we found is that even though in SecondLife it’s really entertaining to just walk around and hang out with your friends, very few people get into the programming of objects in SecondLife which actually is something that SecondLife is really great about, that it allows you to have a scripting language for programming behaviour of objects. Unfortunately, it is kind of hard for everyone to do these, so we are exploring how we can use things like Scratch so that people can create behaviour on the creations on places like SecondLife, so I think there is a lot of possibilities for places in like virtual worlds for education and not necessarily to just distributing information but also to allow people to engage and to creating things.

MR. LIM: Actually (inaudible) to Sci-world and there’s some famous virtual worlds that have some kind of -- some impacts and problems and in their perspective was some kind of negative site and I think if there is some kind of big social, you know, some kind of issues and the problem and there’s some celebrity has some kind of problem, and there is some famous singers who must have their mini(inaudible) and there is some -- their web pages and they have a lot of mix over their, you now, personal life and there is something -- there are a lot of privacy problems and everything. And sometimes people, you know, some just to flocking into those sites and just are taking and say a bad word, a lot of negative words, and that’s the kind of social issues, this. So we are trying to have some more positive site over Internet but, you know, these days we have a lot of some negative sites. So, we are trying to make it more positive and so we made a policy about some registering their real name in Internet in such a big site.

MR. LEBLANC: We have our first question over there to the right. Yes, sir?

QUESTION: Hi, I’m Sherwin (ph) with Public Knowledge. One of the most common things that I come across whenever people start talking about user-generated or user-created content, usually I hear two words. Usually, in the same sentence I hear u-Tube and I hear Copyright. And I think at the end of Mr. Lim’s presentation he talked a little bit about some of those issues. I was hoping to hear from the panel about how questions of infringement come into some of these efforts, what you do about that, and how you ensure that counter-measures against infringement don’t stifle additional speech?

Thank you.

MR. LEBLANC: Anybody?

MS CORRIERO: Well, I just wanted to comment. Yeah, I guess there’s another -- I guess, when I think of the user-generated content communities copyright also certainly comes to mind as well as privacy.

For the copyright issue, one of the ways we have tried to look at copyright with (inaudible) taking a global and especially, for example, within our global gallery where people are submitting artwork is to allow members to choose what sort of creative content license that they would like to have for their work.

We have review processes for not every -- well, every bit of content has a different type of review so some content is actually pre-screened, some is moderated. There’s moderators and the blogs are just subject to our terms of service.

So, yeah, that’s sort of an approach we’ve taken.

Another sort of thing around policy or regulation is that we try to generally consider or recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so for example if there’s content that would promote hate -- like, not just going against hate laws, but also trying to promote human rights as a principle for the content. And so that creates a lot more responsibility for us to actually moderate the content that exists on the site, and then you spend a lot of time maintaining what you have, and so there’s both a pro and con to that.

MR. LEBLANC: Then, again, the question of a content and a user-generated stuff is a very relevant question, and there are views on both sides.

One of the views that for instance the TV corporations want to protect their copyright and they don’t want their programs to be on u-Tube.

Then, again, persons that put their stuff on My Space and learn after having put so many pages on My Space that their copyright belongs to My Space. And as a matter of fact, they might not have copyright. So there are questions going both way.

My point of view, for instance, I wrote the Disk Industry Association of Canada who bitched about the youngsters stealing their music on-line, and there was a big publicity stunt, harnessing the teenagers, saying that they were thieves and they should not steal music. I said to themselves, maybe they hit the wrong nail. How many fourteen-year-olds have a credit card? So if fourteen-year-olds cannot legally purchase music, what is he going to do? He’s going to get music. So, instead of telling the teens that they steal the music and they infringe the copyright, maybe they should rather force the government to enable debate on-line and permit the teenager that has a lot of money to spend, to at least spend it on the music. Because, to a teenager it’s going to take him much more time waiting for the Napster download than it’s going to take him to just purchase the song.

And then, again, myself, on my blog, I have a creative content license, okay. And I agree to share my content with anybody that also shares the content.

But then, again, I’m very pissed when somebody steals my content and puts it on his website that is a website for money, and it doesn’t give credit to what is told. So, you know, it’s a very difficult and sometimes emotional argument, and obviously it is a legal argument that the specialists could discuss better than I could ever do.

MS CORRIERO: I just wanted to add one thing which is, I think there’s also a difference between using -- stealing content and re-using it for educational purposes like Scratch, for example, versus re-using it for a profit.

MR. LEBLANC: And then, again, just before the advent of Internet there as the late eighties and early nineties, a concept called Scratch Video, okay. Some people would take, let’s say, several episodes of Star Trek, take parts of it and make a new piece of art from gluing together various parts.

Now, this is another aspect of copyright. Are we allowed to re-mix? To what extent can we do a new thing from collecting and gluing together different pieces? You know, it’s not such an easy subject. And there was a big legal argument and legal fights against what was called then Scratch videos, which gave birth to what we see now on u-Tube and user-generated content.

Then, again, in a marketing aspect, you have the word of mouth movement in United States and the ultimate goal of a word of mouth movement is user-generated ads. There are some people that like your brand so much that they will spend their time and money to make you a publicity clip that they will share with the world, and it’s not going to cost you a cent.

Obviously, one of the great benefiters of that type of publicity is Google. One of the clips that went all over the world was two cops coming in a room where (inaudible) une guy put a boom box, started to strip and then his phone rang, he listened to his cell phone and then you see with “Google Map never make an address mistake again.” So, it was a very efficient publicity which Google did not really approve but which they benefited from.

We have another question over there.

QUESTION: Hello, this is Sasha Wunsch Vincent from the OECD. I have one question from a remote participant from France and this is for the consumer group.

This person has the impression that in theory the Internet could be used quite well by consumers to organize and you know through product reviews and other forums of organization, give feedback to manufacturers of products in a sense of a totally different sort of consumer organization to represent their interests, and specifically in telecom's issues against your Internet service provider, et cetera.

But the impression of that particular person is that those technologies are not used to their fullest extent. There is no -- I mean as far as the OECD is concerned I'm not aware of any studies that try to measure the impact of consumer reviews and the organization of consumers on how that feeds back to industry and business.

This is the remote question and I have one OECD question, if I may. This is directed to Jennifer probably, and maybe also to MIT.

For us at the OECD at least this meeting is important to kind of shape the ministerial agenda in 2008. The question I had when I was listening to Jennifer is: If you listen to a 16, 17 year old and if I was asking them what the one or two policy priorities on their minds is for this ministerial, would that be any different from our priorities or would they be the same in the IT area?

Thanks.

MS RESS: Well, in response to your question about the consumer voice I heard that quite a bit. When you look at hotel reviews when you go on a trip you check the Web site and you are not sure these are really done by consumers. Right? So there is a lot of lack of credibility, and that's in the mild case for a hotel review.

You think that when you work like our group on access to medicine we would want something a little bit more sure, because we don't want big pharma to come onto our database of price of medicine and start fooling around with it.

So that takes me to part of the UCC world that we didn't talk about, which is which part is filtered or organized, even loosely organized, and which one is totally unfiltered.

I think that because of Yoki Bandler's(ph) great book on the wealth of the network there's a lot of kind of dream about how things get organized magically and it's just a great creation.

As a matter of fact, good UCC is controlled by its own community. I think that if you think of the MSF database on price of medicine, not everybody can go in there and start messing around with it, certainly not Pharma. So there is a sort of filtering by the community. I think we all are very well aware of that. I mean, if the trade union Web site is being taken over by the corporation, that is not going to work. Right?

So I would say that' is something we have to think about, how the community of users and consumer is actually somewhat in charge. And I think that government certainly has a role to play in that, too, in some countries. In the U.S. I think when you go on Amazon.com and you look at a review of books it's no big deal if it's the author himself who wrote a great review, right, but you can imagine consumer reviews being more important than that one.

MS CORRIERO: Okay. I'm really glad that you ask the question about policy priorities, not because I have the answer, but because I think it's an important question that should be asked to young people.

I wanted to just briefly mentioned that we facilitated the youth caucus for the World Summit on the Information Society and we actually ran different national information society youth campaigns and online consultations and there were a lot of results -- and Industry Canada was one of the supporters of that. There are a lot of results and outcomes that came from this. Of course this was the few years ago.

I think one of the concerns that I have in general with policy processes is that it seems to really involve those who can afford to participate. And we faced a lot of barriers as a youth caucus and in general I recognize this was an issue with civil society at large, the cost to be able to be invited to forums, to pay for forums, especially things that were in Switzerland, it's very expensive there.

So I would say that definitely I think some of the issues might be the same, some of the issues might be different. Certainly I'm sure views around intellectual property are very different. Some young people probably don't even realize that they are infringing it and if they do the cultural norm says that it is okay to download. Frankly, I think -- yes, I think the laws should change around that, and especially when people are reusing things for learning.

But I would also encourage maybe as one of the outcomes for this forum is to consider how there could be some ways forward for teenagers and for young people in general to have an input.

QUESTION: We should even be doing that over your site maybe. We'll think about this.

MS CORRIERO: Sure. Yes.

MR. MONROY-HERNANDEZ: I would like to add also kind of like the same idea.

One of the things that we had on the Web site is we have a forum where kids can post comments. At the beginning we were very sceptical that kids were actually going to engage in discussions in these text-based forums, but we were actually surprised at the level of discussion and the depth of these discussions in these forums.

In particular, one of the discussions about plagiarism and whether or not it's okay to copy somebody else's project. So here it's not just about getting content from TV, movies, et cetera, or music, but also getting content from other kids.

So I think just the idea of engaging youth in these discussions at the level of governments I think will be really, really important for forming policies.

Finally, one of the other things that we hear a lot about from kids is that they often say things like "The school is getting in the way of my education." When they are trying to learn a lot about different things, like for example playing with these kind of technologies, they do engage themselves in like designing, creating, learning math and science, but oftentimes the school content is very rigid and it doesn't let them explore.

So I think that's also one of the changes that could be seen in the policy-making area of OECD.

MS CORRIERO: Actually, yes, just one quote which I can't remember the source, but our education system faces irrelevancy unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how students learn. I have to remember that quote, but I can't remember the source. I will get back to you on that.

MR. LEBLANC: One of the examples I like to give when I say how easy it is to build a blog, one of my friends who is nine years old already has three blogs. Now at his school the teacher made a class blog. And the teacher was very controlling and saying you should blog that way and the class made a reaction blog where they blog themselves on that blog instead of blogging on the school class blog.

So, you know, even if you are young you might have your own opinion about stuff and starting a blog -- if a nine year old can start a blog, a government official or a business person certainly can.

MS RESS: Just to answer Sasha's question about consumer group, I don't know if you ever looked at a site which is consumerreview.com or something. It's the example of a consumer review done by businesses. It's quite interesting to see actually.

That is a good example for me of the need for openness and transparency. That's another reason we need transparency openness. Because when you look at Wikipedia, which is very often accused of all sorts of credibility issues, it is quite an open and transparent process. You can go and see what editor did what. It always comes out. The community actually takes care of its bad actors.

So I think because you need transparency and openness to trust user-generated content it has to be part of the fundamental principles.

MR. LEBLANC: But then again I see paradox with the wisdom of the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd in Wikipedia to me is one of the highest good examples of that wisdom, but when I look at Google video and I look at -- like last summer for two months the video that was number one was a girl caught cheating on the Web. I wonder about that wisdom of the crowd.

So there are paradoxes. There are places where the crowd is very, very good and places where it is very, very bad.

Yet, I have not made up my mind as to what are the circumstances that get the best or the worst of people in that wisdom. I don't know yet.

Maybe somebody has an answer, or maybe somebody has a question.

--- Pause

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Stephan LaGrange(ph), I have a blog on ecommerce but it's not related to that.

This issue is about the impact of user-generated content. What are the risks? Some of the risks were copyright issues, but what about the traces you leave on the Internet and the ethic of what you should write and how long it stays on the Internet and how someone can recover what you said a few years ago and hold it against you. So, basically, what are the risks of that, your generated content?

MR. LEBLANC: Actually, yes, yesterday I was with a couple of people, at another day here that we discussed, and the question of Facebook came out and the question of how does a youngster see his private versus his public life?

Obviously, the metric where you say my private life stops might be quite different depending on your age, but also might be quite different depending of your outlook on Internet.

For instance, to me, Facebook, the fact that my friend talks about his fishing trip, puts pictures of his kids, talks about his cause or his last movie that he really liked, to me that is very good business information.

That permits me to relate to that contact another way than knowing what was his last year gross profit and how many new customers he's got. When I have a business relation with that person, I have a business relation with the person instead of a representative of a company. So to me, knowing a bit of his personal life is very good.

Now, the youngsters, they are very, very outgoing and they say a lot of stuff, and sometimes they don't realize that being that outgoing might be dangerous for your own future. Because some day you are going to look for a job and seeing a picture of you partying at the dormitory and being pissed out of your head might not be good to get you hired.

But then, again, you know, the line to where the public and private life is getting more and more blurred, and that line will, in my opinion, change depending on your views of the use of Internet and also of your age.

Anybody else?

MS CORRIERO: I, actually, just wanted to recognize that is definitely a very important policy issue that should be looked into, especially because, as we heard earlier from IBM, you know, IBM sharing the sort of virtual world guidelines, how do we behave in a virtual world.

People going into these virtual worlds are almost going in -- older generations who haven't really grown up with the Internet, they are entering it with their professional hat on, so they are already thinking of these implications. Whereas, kids that are just going on and creating their profiles on Facebook and adding 300 friends, that can be tagged in any of these photos, that then get fed into -- you know, everyone has access to a lot of information.

Your entry point is at, initially, just a very personal level, so how do you sort of delete maybe some of that history? Because I think some bad potential histories could be following people as they grow up, and I think that could be a big problem.

So that should be something: that people should be able to delete things about them. Because if my friend puts up a photo of me and tags me, it's going to be there. I can take away my name from it, but it's there. And, like, it's just I think we need to protect people on that. That's an important issue.

MR. OXLEY: Actually, I think on Jennifer's comment, user-content created is a challenge on both the positive side and on the negative side. You brought up a good point earlier, it's something from a government perspective and from a policy perspective: how do you balance the choice, and, as Susanne said this morning, the opportunity with the citizens you had out there, as well, too, because privacy is important and so is possibilities?

I really appreciate everybody's great comments and so on. That was wonderful. Thank you so much.

Can we give a big, big hand for the panel, please?

--- Applause

--- Whereupon the session concluded at 3:14 p.m.