Think-tanks turn their sights on IT

I’m at the Beyond the Backlash conference for young, influential Blairite policy wonks, listening to IT experts and representatives of the establishment all sharing their views on the future of technology.

Early on, top government adviser Charles Leadbeater insists on the transformative power of IT.

Berkeley university’s Pekka Himanen says that his native Finland is harnessing this power. He celebrates Linux openness in IT, and he celebrates a welfare state itself open enough to pay students to go to high-quality universities. Finland’s R&D as a share of GDP has risen from one to 3.6 percent, he says – double the western average.

To English ears, Himanen’s is an unlikely idyll. Nevertheless, the audience warms to his attack on Wall Street. Financial markets must be based on trust, he argues. Europe still has trust; but the fear that surrounds financial markets in the US will inhibit innovation there.

Complacent though he is about Europe, Himanen properly highlights a transformation that has already occurred – in the climate of innovation today. Yet the point is not taken up. Instead, much of the day is spent slagging off big companies for charging for Internet services; and backing “bottom up” approaches to IT that would make a Liberal Democrat community organiser blush. The more sensible points about the potential for IT come from establishment figures rather than radical poseurs.

Geoff Mulgan, from the government’s Performance and Innovation Unit, notes how anti-globalisation protesters have not been transformed by their use of the Internet. The Oxford Internet Institute’s William Dutton points out that we don’t always want open systems: mobile phones, after all, get turned off during conferences. E-minister Stephen Timms reminds us that the government will provide 6,000 public Internet access points by the end of the year. He intimates that putting a 2MB line into every primary healthcare facility would help transform electronic patient records, video surgery, and the education of healthcare workers through the proposed NHS University.

However, the most striking proposal for transformation through IT is put forward by BBC public policy director Caroline Thomson. She wants the Beeb to “build communities” through the red buttons on remote control units.

In 2004, the BBC will therefore launch iCan, a kind of Internet-meets-Watchdog-meets-politics: “a driving force for engagement in democracy”. Through iCan you’ll be able to view the league-table performance of your local hospital. You’ll be able to contact your MP, tell a live TV reporter what to investigate, talk to health professionals about your problems, and chat online with other young girls who have engaged in self-harm.

Is that, however, the kind of transformation that any of us in the IT industry have anticipated?

As Lastminute.com’s Martha Lane Fox observed at the conference, innovation is far too important to be left to Etonian venture capitalists to manage.

But as Grateful Dead lyricist and IT libertarian John Perry Barlow argued – of Bush’s interventions in the Internet, but he could have been talking about Blair’s and the BBC’s – “We have all the government we can buy”.