Mercedes Bunz

It has been a day. In fact, yesterday’s Guardian Activate Summit was inspiring, and not only because Alan Rusbridger engaged the grey haired, nice, shrewd koala lookalike Schmidt in a scintillating discussion. After asking Schmidt a question, I felt exited like a small girl on her first day of school. Finally allowed to talk to real adults. Yay!

This sounds a bit embarrassing, but there is a good reason for this: Today, business corporations like Google and not academic institutions manage our knowledge. As knowledge is power, this will affect the structure of our society. We already know that the internet disrupts business. Up next? Politics. Exiting, eh?

When I was hanging around at the canal with the lovely witty programmers of the Guardian having Pimm’s and eating strawberries instead of dinner, we resumed what was said, but it was much later till I understood that the way technology is shaping knowledge at the moment is far more fundamental.

Alan Rusbridger is testing Google Goggles on Eric Schmidt

So let us quickly get through what Eric Schmidt actually said to concentrate on what he said by saying it.

For him mobile, cloud and network are shaping our future; Steve Jobs is a “friend”, “this might shock you”, but he is explicitly opposed to Apple’s closed version of the net; Google is sorry for the wifi-scandal, takes privacy serious, and there is a need for regulation; obviously there are plans for a Facebook-like “Google Me”, because Schmidt said (please follow me into the twisted logic of journalism) he wouldn’t announce a “possible future product” here or on Twitter, so with not denying its existence: “it sounds like yes,” as Alan Rusbridger concluded.

When we were talking about what’s next at the end of a highly inspiring day, there was suddenly this glimpse of a more fundamental shift. The internet will not be the “disruption” that everybody agrees upon by now. You wish! It will be a fundamental eruption of society. I am sure that Heidegger, if still alive, would immediately despise the word “disruption” argueing that it blocks our view.

Let me collect the bits and pieces of that day: The journey started with data.gov.uk, and Nigel Shadboldt presenting his fascinating project. He and the dad of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, are currently making the UK data accessible to the public. By now, people have developed apps for it, so you can find the next dentist or pharmacy, compare care homes, or get a panic attack over the density of minor incidents with the iPhone asborometer, as it helps you to learn about the anti social behaviour orders (asbo) in your neighborhood. Data.gov.uk and the US version presented by Beth Noveck, however, deal with an interesting challenge: Opening data to the public makes it accessible, but not available.

Let’s take this with us to the next chapter of my day. During lunch I had an interesting conversation with my former boss of MediaGuardian, Steve Busfield, about databases, statistics and journalism. Personally, I believe that there is a new journalism to evolve, journalism that is data driven, and will be published as apps and not as texts.

The Guardian is already doing that on the fantastic Datablog with good help of the lovely data visualisations of Information is beautiful. Steve and me brainstormed what that might mean for journalism, and I predicted that apps vs. text might be the next war after print vs. online. Funnily enough our little chat was simultaneously echoed by a tweet of the Guardians’ info architect Martin Belam. Sometimes things are all coming together for you to get it. Thank you things.

When I came home the things were still excited, not only because I had to prepare a radio feature on Eric Schmidt’s talk for the next morning. I went through my notes and the twitter feed, and when I came across a tweet of my colleague Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times, it hit me. As some of you might know, Google allows their employees to work on a project of their own one day a week, and Tim tweeted Schmidt’s answer on what he is doing in his 20% time:

Let me repeat that for you: “Tech is about to upend the way governments work.” Well. We already know that the internet is an effective tool for governments. With the Obama campaign we have seen that the internet can efficiently help politicians to organise people, connect them, and keep them up to date. It might be time to think about: designing crowds. ?

But upend how governments work? I admit, there is something going on, a database revolution happening at our fingertips. There is not only a debate on how power point interferes with politics and influences military strategies. As more and more data is open, gets uploaded and connected, designing statistics and building apps became in a certain way a political act. Surely the interface between the people and the politicians is about to change. But technology is political in itself. It will change, but not upend governments.

How democratic is crowd sourcing really? What were we asking for, and what is it we better don’t want to know? Can it ever be just “the algorithm”? And when do we get enough response, when are we only hearing the loud voices?

Winston Churchill said once “the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself”, and now the statistics get democratised. However, today you don’t even need to falsify anything, you simply make some data visible, while you let other figures sink deep down to the bottom of the information overload.

These are just some thoughts, fairly rough. But why this is so important to me: I think we need to start a debate on how technology is disrupting politics. Organising statistics and publishing knowledge is a political act. Knowledge is more power than ever. And journalism needs to find a new role in here.