4IP Blog

Andy Duncan (Channel 4’s CEO) was on a panel with Sir Tim Berners Lee and Charles Leadbetter at NESTA on Tuesday, at which Sir Tim’s new web science initiative research was discussed. Sir Tim’s slides are here and the video of the event is available on the NESTA site. Sir Tim later gave an interview covering everything from openness to Google and Gordon Brown to Channel 4 news which you can find on the Channel 4 news site.

The debate ranged far and wide. Sir Tim’s overall thesis was that the web had grown and developed by being free and open, but that as a result it had evolved in unexpected ways and now ought to be properly studied. He likened it to the odd tangle of things that you get when you eventually find the object that’s blocking your sink: underneath it all there’s something with a clear structure (such as a fish bone) but all sorts of accretions have collected round it. So if the web, and the interactions it supports, is to continue to thrive, its organic development needs to be better understood before its too late.

The panel discussion debated whether the first decade or so of the web’s existence has been an unsustainable aberation. Charlie’s recent reading has included a book on the English Civil War, when the Levellers challenged the existing hierarchies, only to have the monarchy restored ten years later. He identified 2Gether08 (which 4IP was part of) as a gathering of modern day Levellers, and wondered if the new ways of thinking and doing that were discussed at 2Gether would continue to flourish, or whether they too would be curtailed as governments and corporations find ways of reasserting themselves. Andy Duncan took up the same theme by highlighting the difficult trade-offs that the web is creating between freedom of speech and protection of privacy, diversity and like-mindedness, and old vs new business models. It’s these challenges which we hope to explore a bit with 4IP, by combining the lessons and scale of a broadcaster like Channel 4 with the vitality and participation of a new generation of creatives and socially minded entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the best lessons for 4IP came from the wrap up remarks from NESTA’s CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum. He made reference to Sir Tim Berners Lee’s boss at CERN who had ‘not said no’ and created the environment in which the web could be invented. His advice for innovation initiatives, and organisations, was to commit to the journey and provide the resource, but not prescribe the outcome at the outset. That’s very much the spirit in which we’re embarking on the 4IP pilot over the next couple of years.