21st Century Data: The First 30 Years

00:54 - Cliff Lynch: Thanks for being with us today, we’ll be getting started in about a minute.

01:28 - Cliff Lynch: Thanks for joining us, we’ll be getting started very shortly.

01:52 - Cliff Lynch: All right, why don’t we get started. Welcome, everybody. I’m delighted, you’re here with us today.

01:59 - Cliff Lynch: I’m Cliff Lynch. I’m the director of the Coalition for networked information and you’ve reached the concluding plenary session for the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting, which has been running for about the past month or so.

02:20 - Cliff Lynch: The session concludes the two closing days of plan Aires and Cliff Lynch: We conclude on a very happy and wonderful occasion.

02:40 - Cliff Lynch: The Coalition for networked information awards a prize in memory of Paul Evan Peters Hall was the first executive director, the founding executive director at the coalition. He Cliff Lynch: was enormously.

03:08 - Cliff Lynch: Well known well loved good friend and died suddenly in 1996. One of the things that scene and I and it’s then parent organizations. The Association of Research Libraries edge calm and cause the latter two more recently, turning into Educause Cliff Lynch: Establish established an award in his memory and the key criteria for the award was really lasting major impact on scholarship on the world of networked information on the broader world.

03:58 - Cliff Lynch: We give this award every year to and Cliff Lynch: The awardee is selected are nominated, perhaps by the, by an Award Committee.

04:16 - Cliff Lynch: This year’s award committee consisted of Cliff Lynch: Oh, yes. Just, just to flesh out. You can see how awful. I am with slides just to give you a sense of the kinds of folks who have won that Paul Ivan Peters award. You can see here that are awarded today is in good company. Indeed.

04:45 - Cliff Lynch: This year’s award committee. Cliff Lynch: Consisted of Christine Boardman from UCLA herself a previous Paul Allen Peters Award winner Herbert VONDA sample from dance.

05:05 - Cliff Lynch: Who you heard from earlier in this meeting another previous Cliff Lynch: Paul Evans Peters Award winner john Wilson.

05:16 - Cliff Lynch: The university librarian at the University of Illinois Champaign, Urbana and Joan Lippincott who served on the committee before she became America assistant director Associate Director for CNI Cliff Lynch: I’m very thankful to all of the folks on the selection committee for both their hard work, but also for making such a wonderful, wonderful choice.

05:50 - Cliff Lynch: They have selected Francine Berman.

05:55 - Cliff Lynch: Who Cliff Lynch: Well Chris will tell you more about her. We are very lucky to have with us today. Christine Boardman who, as I said, served on that selection committee and is a prior paul evans Peters Award winner.

06:16 - Cliff Lynch: I will just say that I couldn’t have been more pleased when they came forward with Fran as the selection.

06:26 - Cliff Lynch: And I speak for both john O’Brian, the CEO of edge cause and Mary Lee Kennedy, the executive director of a IRL in in saying all three of us were just delighted and terribly enthusiastic Fran is an old friend and colleague, we’ve worked together on more things than I can enumerate easily Cliff Lynch: She’s done a tremendous amount for our community and for the broader cause of Open Science and open data and many other things and I. Before we hear from Fran, who will give the customary Cliff Lynch: Paul Evan Peters award lecture.

07:28 - Cliff Lynch: I’ve asked Chris if she would be kind enough to just say a little bit about Cliff Lynch: About Fran, from the perspective of not just a friend and a colleague, but also a member of the selection committee, Chris.

07:48 - Thank you. CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Thank you, Cliff. It is indeed a great honor and pleasure to introduce Fran, who is indeed a longtime friend and colleague CHRISTINE BORGMAN: I’ve also worked closely with her as has Cliff probably first when we were together on the board on research data and information and data of the of the National Academies.

08:10 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Fran really exemplifies all of the criteria for the Paul Evan Peters award. She’s made major contributions to scholarly communication through elite.

08:20 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Leadership is the founder of the Research Data Alliance through her work, sharing birdie with with Cliff, as he said the blue ribbon panel on data stewardship.

08:30 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Her service on the board Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities.

08:35 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Humanities Council and so on. So she’s, she’s addressing the fundamental problems that we face and scholarly communication.

08:43 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: And technology and she’s greatly increase the awareness of these problems in a broader community.

08:50 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: I think what’s most important for this award is that she’s taken this deep knowledge of computer science, having director of the San Diego supercomputer center then been Vice President for Research at CHRISTINE BORGMAN: at Rensselaer in addition to all these awards for computer science where she became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE the American associate advancement science and so on so forth. You can read all the rest of her wonderful CHRISTINE BORGMAN: See online.

But I think what’s really exemplary is to say how she’s taken, taken that deep technological knowledge.

09:29 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: And used it more broadly. She finally got her first sabbatical last year because she just wouldn’t let up on all this other work.

09:36 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: And went to Harvard as a Radcliffe fellow to develop work on the Internet of Things. So we’re looking for the bulk of the work that comes out of that.

09:44 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: That. Meanwhile, let us hear from Fran, the exemplary new sippy I have this award and she’s given us so much and she’ll give us more. Thank you. Fran.

09:55 - Cliff Lynch: Welcome, friend, congratulations. I wish you could hear all of the virtual applause that’s taking place over to you.

10:05 - Fran Berman: Thank you so, so much. Fran Berman: I’m still blown away by all of this, I have to tell you all. I’m so grateful to see and I and Arielle and as a cause for this extraordinarily meaningful award.

10:22 - Fran Berman: Chris and cliff, who have been colleagues fellow travelers and inspirations for so many years. It’s so meaningful to have, have you both.

10:34 - Fran Berman: Speak at and introduce me Fran Berman: As we all know, any kind of impact takes a village, and there are so many of you and so many people in the community who have been fellow travelers.

10:48 - Fran Berman: And so many of you who are doing so much. Now I’ll mention some of you in the talk, but I am so grateful for, you know, what everyone is doing and the importance of it all. When cliff.

11:01 - Fran Berman: Called me and told me about this award. I was so surprised. And I started thinking about what I might want to say Fran Berman: As we all know, we live in pretty extraordinary times and the pandemic has really exacerbated many of the things that we think about and Fran Berman: Our community, the community who understand the care about data and digital technologies are more important than ever in this time. And we’re important Fran Berman: If we want to make society thrive and to get the best of the digital technologies and minimize their risk.

So I thought I might talk about the first 30 years of this century, what has gone before what’s ahead of us. And I thought I would start with now.

11:49 - Fran Berman: So here we are. It’s about 10 minutes after three Eastern Daylight Time somewhere in the corona verse Fran Berman: I’m wearing a dress special occasion, but you wouldn’t know it. I don’t know if you’re wearing shoes. We’re meeting in cyberspace via zoom Fran Berman: And it’s a really good time to start thinking about how much data is there, what are we doing with that. How did we get from Y2K at the beginning of this century to Cambridge analytica and beyond.

12:21 - Fran Berman: How did information technology become critical infrastructure and what happens as we’re seeing increasingly now and will certainly be seeing over the next decade.

12:31 - Fran Berman: When data is collected everywhere and algorithms are in charge all really important questions that I think many of us think about all the time.

12:39 - Fran Berman: And so let’s start with the first decade will do this decade by decade. And you can kind of think about the first decade as Fran Berman: Of the this century as the ALMOST FAMOUS data decade. And what I mean by that is data was driving everything, but it didn’t have the kind of recognition and respect. It has now. It wasn’t a first class object.

13:04 - Fran Berman: It drove the presidential campaign, especially Obama’s campaign in 2008. It wasn’t the first time that data we was used back in 1960 Kennedy use behavioral science and and data.

13:17 - Fran Berman: to craft a message on civil rights, but it now is used for every campaign. We all worried about Y2K we all saw Facebook for the first time in that decade we all saw iPhones for the first time in that decade.

13:35 - Fran Berman: Silicon Valley enjoyed incredible growth during that time. And it was driven by data, data, which gave all of these companies a competitive advantage and became de rigueur for anyone who wants to do anything.

13:48 - Fran Berman: In medicine and health. We saw the Human Genome Project. Again, all run by data empowered by data.

13:55 - Fran Berman: In the supercomputing world, which I was very much a part of. There was the race to a panel flop.

14:01 - Fran Berman: And we finally achieved within that decade pedal flop computers. And where was I, I was at the San Diego supercomputer center. So I came on from my job as a professor at UCSD to leave one of the two NSF national supercomputer centers and 2001 Fran Berman: A little bit later on when the program change. We had become a founding terror grid node.

14:24 - Fran Berman: And our mission was really service to the National Science Foundation community and beyond. So we had thousands of users. And it was really important for us to provide services and things they needed Fran Berman: When the supercomputer center was first started in the late 80s. It was modeled after the Department of Energy national laboratories and their supercomputing facilities, but as Dan Atkins and others.

14:53 - Fran Berman: Had said so compelling way at the end of the 90s in the beginnings of 2000 cyber infrastructure was really the important thing for the research community as it moved on.

15:04 - Fran Berman: And it wasn’t just the computers. It was the software was the data. It was the portals.

15:09 - Fran Berman: And so we said about kind of re envisioning what St. SC was all about. And we had decided that in addition to providing you know high level supercomputers what we wanted to do is provide a holistic data oriented environment for everyone.

15:28 - Fran Berman: So the idea is that our vision evolved from data focus super computing Fran Berman: And we had some wonderful people at the center Titan Baru and Reagan more and Phil born and all kinds of people dealing with important data activities.

15:42 - Fran Berman: But we really wanted to go beyond super computing and talk about cyber infrastructure and we decided that we would remake STC to provide a much bigger and more capable environment for doing data focused work then Fran Berman: Then one would have at your local environment, your institution, your university your research lab, etc.

16:06 - Fran Berman: And and we decided what does that mean we kind of want to stretch it out at all kinds of different ways so that maybe you could store a terabyte size collection. But we wanted to provide help in storing a Fran Berman: petabyte size collection. Maybe you could keep several collections, but we wanted to create a large petabyte sized archive, so that the number of collections can be stored Fran Berman: In a stable and reasonable way. Maybe you could store your collection for the life of your grant.

But then you ran out of funding. So we wanted to provide some way to provide a greater timeframe.

16:44 - Fran Berman: We wanted to provide a computing capability and oftentimes when we chose machines. This was not all that popular, by the way.

16:52 - Fran Berman: In a world that cared about whether you were at the top of the top 500 list.

16:57 - Fran Berman: But we often traded flops four bytes. When we thought about data oriented simulation analysis and modeling. So that meant we tried to architect and and create machines that had more cash more memory.

17:12 - Fran Berman: You know, a better environment for data and the most important thing, it turned out, as always, turns out to be the people and the tools that help and so Fran Berman: We really gathered people with expertise in data services data software curation etc and and that this was sort of the driving vision for St SC and it’s amazing staff.

17:42 - Fran Berman: What that meant is that we started creating and attracting all kinds of projects and new collaborators, which really focused on data cyber infrastructure.

17:54 - Fran Berman: And you know, we looked at data storage and data services and data visualization and data management and data preservation and Fran Berman: You know you STC had at any given time about 100 projects or more a budget of 10s of millions of dollars typically between 50 and 80 hundreds of people and all of those people were very involved in looking at data oriented activities.

18:21 - Fran Berman: One of the most exciting things for me and also at that point was a partnership that actually started in the office of the university librarian at UCSD Brian Shaw under Fran Berman: And and Brian is one of the people to whom I really feel like a work such a passion and data and such interesting problems in Fran Berman: In the whole world of data stewardship and preservation. This is Brian’s beautiful guys though library on the bottom and our old wonderful building, although it did have a view of the ocean.

I just like to point that out. Fran Berman: On the top, Brian and I work together. And one of our first conversations were about us RV and Reagan more and the ways in which the library.

19:07 - Fran Berman: And STC were working together, but soon those conversations really expanded. They certainly expanded my own knowledge, but they also expanded our partnership.

19:18 - Fran Berman: And one of the many things that Brian and I did together was something that I’m really proud of, which was a project called chronometer plus Fran Berman: And crew Nautilus with joint project between the UCSD libraries STC and we had wonderful partners and and car and University of Maryland.

19:37 - Fran Berman: Originally as well. And the idea was to decouple access and preservation. So we built. We built a preservation data grid, which means that for all of the Fran Berman: collections that we had different notes would play different roles. And so perhaps the collection, we would make available to users at St se, but maybe in car, University of Maryland would serve as a dark archive.

20:04 - Fran Berman: And and similarly, University of Maryland might be a bright archive for something, but maybe in car provided the dark archive.

20:12 - Fran Berman: One of the things we learned in creating criminalise and and we are we and and I am so grateful to the Library of Congress and Fran Berman: Laura Campbell and Martha Anderson for taking a chance on this and just providing such great support. One of the things that was really interesting to me is that it really brought Fran Berman: To the fore the importance of the social infrastructure one provides when you have these kinds of relationships and so Fran Berman: University of Maryland and car and SEC and UCSD libraries had relationships with each other.

20:52 - Fran Berman: But we wanted to formalize them in some way. We wanted to formalize the trust and the the backup and replication, we would have through service level agreements.

21:03 - Fran Berman: And it really started me thinking about the importance of the social infrastructure that has to pair with the technical infrastructure. When you think about stewardship and preservation of data. And it was very important for that project in particular.

21:22 - Fran Berman: It’s a conversation that I carried on in the conversations I had with Chris Greer Chris was at the NSF at the time, and he and I were talking a lot about, you know, how do you think about Fran Berman: Preservation and Access and stewardship in a way that creates kind of economic stability because in a sense, you’re really thinking about data as a public good.

21:47 - Fran Berman: And we all know that it’s tremendously difficult oftentimes to sustain public goods. So we put together. Chris from his side at Fran Berman: at NSF and and myself as part of the community with the amazing Brian laboy who is co chair with me.

22:04 - Fran Berman: Of the Blue Ribbon Task Force for sustainable digital preservation and access and the charge to that group was to build a comprehensive analysis.

22:14 - Fran Berman: Of, you know, arguably the hardest part the Achilles heel of sustainable digital preservation, which is economics. What’s the economics of the data. How can we sustain it.

22:25 - Fran Berman: What are best practices in that, how should we think about that and what should we recommend for action, and we had Fran Berman: A tremendously successful Task Force, which I’ll talk to you about in a little bit. And we had an amazing event.

22:41 - Fran Berman: Of which this picture is from a bit and you’ll see many old favorites, including cliff in a in a mode that we often see him thinking very, very deeply and then coming out with amazing insights. So, so I was, and you haven’t changed today clip. So this was pretty amazing.

23:00 - Fran Berman: The Blue Ribbon Task Force had a number of people on it. And we asked many people to testify and even more people for advice and it, you know, in my opinion, it was a bunch of superstars.

23:14 - Fran Berman: You’ll see many names on there, which are really recognizable and many names, who have thought really seriously about the economics of data and data as a public good.

23:27 - Fran Berman: Including leaders who we lost many, many years ago, who was such an important champion and contributor to our community.

23:35 - Fran Berman: Chris career started a soften Lucy now and Sylvia Spangler, and Phil Ogden Bogdan kept us going. Don waters helped the Library of Congress and narrow provided in kind support for us. And it was an amazing few years.

23:54 - Fran Berman: We were very excited to kind of look at all things economics. And of course, one of the things that we figured Fran Berman: That we realized as we went through it is there’s really different environments in which data economics has to happen.

24:09 - Fran Berman: And, you know, one way to explain kind of what’s going on is there are really many stakeholders in the data environment. There are those who benefit from the asset.

24:20 - Fran Berman: And those who select to what to preserve those who own it or have rights to it. Those who actually do the preservation and those who pay Fran Berman: Now if your Google you benefit from collecting everybody’s clicks you decide which clicks or you’re gonna collect Fran Berman: You own it. And so you’re happy to pay the data bill for your own collection, which is your competitive advantage. And there is there is great alignment.

24:47 - Fran Berman: Between all of your stakeholder groups and when there’s great alignment, the economic somehow isn’t a bad problem. But if you’re in the research data world, which many of us are Fran Berman: The Community often benefits from the data that we generate our provide we decide the PII decides to select what to preserve Fran Berman: Perhaps our universities or others actually own the asset and and we or others may preserve the asset but that may not go much longer than Fran Berman: The grant itself and then the federal government pays and that a lack of alignment makes things often very difficult to preserve collections of importance to the community.

25:33 - Fran Berman: Our, our crack team on the task force, including a number of economists looked at this from four different scenarios research data, as I’ve said, and Fran Berman: Commercially own cultural content, but they also looked at it from the point of view of publication and scholarly discourse and collectively produce web content.

25:56 - Fran Berman: After a couple of amazing years with discussions that were extraordinary the group came out with a couple of reports.

26:05 - Fran Berman: The amazing Amy Friedlander was editor for the interim report and the amazing Abby Smith Romsey was editor for the final report both of them are incredible documents and Fran Berman: I think now they’re, they’re both on my website and I believe they’re both on Brian. The boys website as well but at one point they were on the STC website and I have to say that SEC told me that they had been these reports had been downloaded more than 120,000 times and so Fran Berman: We really felt like we had made an incredible impact with the Blue Ribbon Task Force and I’m so grateful to Chris and and all of the other people who were involved in it in any way.

26:51 - Fran Berman: Of course, that’s what we were doing what was happening in the rest of the world in the late 2000s data, the trickle of data that had started at the beginning became waves.

27:04 - Fran Berman: And really a tsunami, everybody was talking about big data NSF had started asking people, so what are you going to do with your data and Fran Berman: The community with scourging scurrying to create data management plans data was on the cover of a tremendous number of magazines.

27:25 - Fran Berman: The Large Hadron Collider was spitting out petabytes of data. Many petabytes of data every year. And so really data had become a tsunami and it really brought us into the next decade, which is, you know, everybody learning to surf the data tsunami.

27:45 - Fran Berman: That picture in the middle is a common picture we see every day, we’re all together, but we’re all in our own digital worlds, our cell phones.

27:54 - Fran Berman: This is the, this was the decade we saw Cambridge analytica people were using data for both good and for ill, and it was a tremendous time Fran Berman: For data, of course, there was also the recognition at that time that with more data comes the need for more and better infrastructure.

28:13 - Fran Berman: And many things brought us to that. First of all, the rise of the small scale devices. So it wasn’t just the big computers. It was computers of every shape and size.

28:23 - Fran Berman: Including ones that you put in your pocket. It was the sophistication of cloud infrastructure which had really started being a real thing.

28:33 - Fran Berman: The US government started deciding and and recognizing the fact that stewardship and preservation were tremendously important. We saw the holder and memo in the early 2010s that talked about Fran Berman: You know, research data, we saw the government putting out data with data. gov we saw an interesting Fran Berman: Set of studies in nature, which talked about all of the data that was missing because of insufficient infrastructure and stewardship and preservation and so Fran Berman: So infrastructure was really because data had become a first class object infrastructure was on its way to becoming a first class object.

And in that environment. And now we’re going To go. There we go.

29:21 - Fran Berman: And then that environment we started thinking about, okay, what infrastructure and and this just gives you a sense about why it matters from the point of view of the research community.

29:32 - Fran Berman: So no matter what kind of problem you want to solve. Maybe you want to solve a public health problem, who’s at risk for asthma all over the world where you safest LA or Mexico City or, you know, Arkansas or Malaysia.

29:47 - Fran Berman: You want to be putting together data from various places you want to worry about interoperability, you want to worry about workflows.

29:57 - Fran Berman: When you worry about how we increase agricultural productivity. You want to look at data various crops and terrestrial data and weather data.

30:06 - Fran Berman: When you worry about how accurate the standard model of physics are you want to look at data from the Large Hadron Collider.

30:12 - Fran Berman: Or what will happen in an earthquake. You want to look at seismic data and other kinds of things or data on building structures and and how they withstand it Fran Berman: And what you need to solve those problems which are really the focus of what you’re you’re interested in looking at is a whole bunch of data building blocks.

30:31 - Fran Berman: You need common metadata. So if I talk about length and Diane talks about lane then Diane’s talking about centimeters. And I’m talking about inches. We know we have a problem.

30:43 - Fran Berman: And we need a domain and institutional repositories for that data, we need to understand what’s legal and what’s not. And that gets into some of the privacy things we start seeing Fran Berman: As we go through this decade. What about data workflows. Again, sustainable economic some of the most important social infrastructure data has Fran Berman: And so there’s a number of different data building blocks, one needs and at least in the research environment they’re often a little ad hoc often maybe a little one off because our market isn’t quite big enough.

31:17 - Fran Berman: And so that’s a discussion that many of us had been having for a long time and Fran Berman: It’s a discussion that Ellen Pataki and Chris we’re we’re having in their roles as working for federal R amp D agencies with their colleagues around the world.

31:34 - Fran Berman: So by that time, Chris was at NIST and LM techie, who had worked with me at sts he was at the National Science Foundation.

31:44 - Fran Berman: And they had talked. I’ve been talking with colleagues in Europe and Australia and Canada and all over the world about Fran Berman: Data infrastructure and that they could empower the community, not just the research community, but the community developing the building blocks that the researchers needed Fran Berman: The community of maintains the community of data infrastructure developers, etc.

32:09 - Fran Berman: And so one of the things they came up with in those discussions is something called the data web forum and they wrote a concept paper.

32:16 - Fran Berman: Now, by then I had repotted myself from the San Diego supercomputer center to RPI where as Vice President for Research and Fran Berman: Because we were all friends. They kept sending me various versions of Fran Berman: The data web forum concept paper and I kept saying, well, what about this. And what about this. And by the time we were through with our conversations, by the way.

32:38 - Fran Berman: CNI has this CNI, I think, is the only place, who has a copy of this concept paper. So thank you, Cliff and Fran Berman: And if you’re interested in it, you might want to take a look. But by the time they were interested in talking about it.

32:53 - Fran Berman: I was very engaged with the concept myself and I was very interested in the whole activity and Fran Berman: And I missed my community. Because when you’re Vice President for Research, you have to love all of your domains equally and I missed being with the data community at the time when we were finally Fran Berman: First class object. And so, um, so I stepped down from being the PR and i into my, you know, regular professorship and I decided I would Fran Berman: help out with this by helping co found the Research Data Alliance, which is what the data web forum we renamed we decided this was a better name.

33:35 - Fran Berman: And so on August 2012 I was on the phone with several seven other colleagues basically was a colleague Fran Berman: From the United States and we had colleagues in from Finland and Germany and the UK and Australia and Fran Berman: And by spring of the next year spring of 2013 we had the first already a plenary 250 people showed up from about 40 countries, I think, and Fran Berman: And grew to a community of over 11,000 today. It was, I have to tell you it was thrilling getting to do Fran Berman: You know essentially an international nonprofit startup and and to do it when you really want to focus on impact and outcomes.

34:25 - Fran Berman: And so already started from those days to a community driven organization that was dedicated to the development and use of infrastructure for data sharing and data driven exploration Fran Berman: And we got to, you know, create our own culture and so we tried to create a culture that would really enrich and elevate the data community.

34:48 - Fran Berman: Our organization was very pragmatic. The idea was to solve targeted problems and make tangible progress.

34:56 - Fran Berman: We worked on problems that somebody had but everybody didn’t have to have the same problem. And over time, our members.

35:06 - Fran Berman: Took kind of one of three roles either role as a member of an interest group which were interested in framing the kind of infrastructure that was needed a Fran Berman: Member of a working group, which was interested in building in roughly a year, year and a half, the kind of infrastructure that would be used by someone or an adopter as someone who actually used it. So all infrastructure.

35:30 - Fran Berman: That’s developed in the RTA needs to be used by someone and needs to be adopted and to make their life better. The focus was always on impact and outcomes.

35:41 - Fran Berman: There was no build it and they will come infrastructure was allowed and it had to solve problems and it was very important for us to amplify the usefulness of that infrastructure through further adoption. There’s lots of programs that are already a day today that do that.

35:58 - Fran Berman: Maybe most important I think the role that RTA played is to help build a healthy and thriving data community.

36:06 - Fran Berman: One thing that I’m tremendously excited and proud of is that diversity has always been a priority in the RTA it’s perhaps the only organization. I’ve ever been in.

36:18 - Fran Berman: As a woman in tech, which has half women in leadership at all levels and it’s not just gender diversity, it’s its diversity of professional age.

36:28 - Fran Berman: We have a lot of early career, people who are who are in leadership. We have a lot of people from different countries, we have a lot of people from different professional Fran Berman: Places and so RTA has really been a place where people mix and they mix in a in a really useful way.

36:47 - Fran Berman: RTA has really elevated the recognition of infrastructure and the maintainer of infrastructure. We’re really important people in our community and often don’t get nearly enough credit Fran Berman: And another thing I really loved about RTA is that Fran Berman: There was not no focus on World Domination. The idea was to partner with other kinds of organizations focus on enabling outcomes, no matter where they came from.

37:13 - Fran Berman: And to really improve the community and it was really thrilling to be with a group of very dedicated people who really made RTA an amazing organization.

37:23 - Fran Berman: I borrowed this from the RTA website, they always have all kinds of handy dandy statistics. This pretty wonderful, it shows you the growth over time from, you know, several hundred to over 11,000 people in over 140 countries.

37:39 - Fran Berman: About a little bit more than two thirds of them are academics and researchers. But there’s also a fair number in public administration industry journalism, etc. And we typically have you know roughly 100 minus Fran Berman: Groups interest groups working groups, etc. Working on on stuff you’ll find the outputs. Their, their efforts that are useful to librarians and outputs that are useful to researchers and outputs that are useful to publishers and and all of that kind of stuff.

So Fran Berman: It’s just a, it’s a great organization because I’m a builder and I love building things. It was Fran Berman: A wonderful, wonderful and exciting time and I handed it over to Fran Berman: To we have a succession plan. And today, Rebecca Scala is leading RTA us and our really wonderful set of people are are leading RTA from the International thing and the organization keeps going. And so I’m just so proud and supportive of what that whole community is done.

38:49 - Fran Berman: Well RTA was worrying about infrastructure, everybody else was to and elsewhere in the 2010s, you saw a global recognition of the value of data for just about everything and the importance of infrastructure.

39:04 - Fran Berman: Of course, it’s, it’s hard to find a company. These days, that doesn’t try to use data as a competitive advantage in academia. It was the rise of all kinds of really interesting programs.

39:17 - Fran Berman: In data science and to ask some interesting questions about where do they live Statistics, computer science multi disciplinary. What do we teach them them.

39:26 - Fran Berman: Okay, we might teach machine learning. What about ethics and other kinds of things. And so we are still in a really interesting area or time of experimentation, of course, the Sloan Foundation and the more Foundation has done a lot in terms of Fran Berman: Promoting and furthering the pedagogy in data science in the government. We saw data. gov and especially during the Obama administration and one expects during the Biden administration.

39:56 - Fran Berman: Will see a lot more focus on digital technologies. And I think that’s going to be really important. But of course, none of those hold a candle to what we’re seeing in our real lives and Fran Berman: They if you think about community and communications social media virtual reality e meetings, etc. We are washing it, and especially during the pandemic.

40:19 - Fran Berman: So that brings us to the next decade, which is kind of the Internet of Everything and Fran Berman: You know, we have smart cities we have if you had an avocado for lunch. Last week, it may have been grown on Fran Berman: A smart farm where each of the plants have sensors that tell the farmer precisely how much water or nutrients or fertilizer. It needs.

40:43 - Fran Berman: Maybe your car doesn’t look like that. But it but it’s probably connected to the Internet in one way or another. And so I thought I would talk about this decade.

40:54 - Fran Berman: Starting with where we are today in the corona verse. So this is my cyber world circa 2020 like the rest of you, I am staying put wearing my mask. When I go out and trying out to get a coronavirus Fran Berman: I just finished teaching last week. This is my class, say I tried to hide their name. So, you know, little privacy is not a bad thing, but this is how we taught all semester we talked via zoom. They turned in digital assignments and I gave them digital corrections on them.

41:32 - Fran Berman: You know, every time I got out in my car and I went hiking I pass through an easy pass Fran Berman: Things. So my car was tracked by the internet. I bought things I buy things via Amazon Prime. I got my groceries yesterday via Instacart I entertain myself via Netflix. I’m on my smartphone and million times a day.

41:56 - Fran Berman: Those of you who know me well know that I’m a serious ballet student, which is not to say good and this is how I take my several times a week ballet lessons.

42:05 - Fran Berman: This is my teacher. My leg does not go this high, I just want to point that out.

42:09 - Fran Berman: But that’s the screen that I see and the screen that my teacher sees is the screen behind her and I am one of those boxes. I don’t know if you can see me in this box but um Fran Berman: But she corrects me over the internet from 3000 miles away. And my parents about we’ve gotten a little better over time.

42:29 - Fran Berman: And I’m doing this in my living room. Now, that’s my cyber world, but your cyber world might look different. Maybe you’re driving a much fancier car than I am, which can drive itself sometimes and it’s certainly connected to the Internet.

42:44 - Fran Berman: Maybe you have a much smarter home than I do. Maybe you use an Alexa, or you have a connected Roomba which vacuums Fran Berman: Your house. Maybe you have a smart refrigerator or a smart toaster or other kinds of a smart coffee maker or something like that.

43:02 - Fran Berman: Maybe you monitor your health via these connected devices, maybe you have a Fitbit for when you run or if you have a small one at home, you have a baby monitor and that’s and that’s connected Fran Berman: To the internet so you can do all kinds of analysis with how they’re sleeping. Maybe you have an implantable pacemaker or an implantable connected Fran Berman: insulin pump. And of course, everywhere you go you see these surveillance cameras. So, you know, this is the cyber world we live in, and Fran Berman: All of us whether you take ballet lessons online or go through EZ Pass or drive a cool car.

All of us are part of the Internet of Everything Fran Berman: And the interesting part of the Internet of Everything is that with all of these digital devices which not that long ago were optional with the pandemic Tech has become certainly wasn’t before critical infrastructure. I work via the Internet. My students go to school, via the Internet.

44:07 - Fran Berman: You know, the internet has become a critical part of just about everything.

44:12 - Fran Berman: That we’re doing these days, and it’s not going away. So if you look over the next decade connected technologies are going to become more and more ubiquitous and unavoidable.

44:24 - Fran Berman: Cisco estimates that there are about 50 billion devices connected to the Internet these days. That’s more than six devices for every human on the planet.

44:35 - Fran Berman: And that’s pretty pretty extraordinary. The video surveillance market is in the billions, the economic impact of connected devices in the trillions. We expect all cars to be self driving by Fran Berman: We’re just at the tip of the iceberg and it’s an extraordinary time we live in full of incredible opportunities and incredible risks.

45:00 - Fran Berman: And so what does this mean for the data community. And it turns out that it’s also going to be the generator of an incredible amounts of data.

45:09 - Fran Berman: To navigate this brave new world will need information on to assess the objects and systems and devices that we have Fran Berman: How do I know if I’m safe or secure. How do I know about the sustainability of these devices and systems will need a data on their operation.

45:30 - Fran Berman: We all need to know, you know where that data should reside and who can access it will need data that helps us Fran Berman: Determine accountability and liability and responsibility and to determine ethical outcomes and that data will be will come from the devices, but it will come from a lot of other places as well. Will the data.

45:53 - Fran Berman: Tara allow us to understand what’s happening with these systems. So for them to be transparency. So what kind of information do we need Fran Berman: You know, take your average self driving car. They’re not completely self driving yet, but many of them can drive in many instances, all by themselves.

46:12 - Fran Berman: Typically today’s prototype self driving cars are generating four to six terabytes daily. That’s an that’s an immense amount of data.

46:21 - Fran Berman: And, you know, as we try to understand as we have them in fleets, as we have them connected to one another. They’re going to be generating even more data.

46:30 - Fran Berman: Now for us in the research world, it creates all kinds of new and interesting research problems. So how do we do open science or make data fair or do reproducible.

46:43 - Fran Berman: Research in these dynamic environments. They’re decentralized their heterogeneous, the data is up different types, they’re owned by different people, you know, how do we do any kind of work there.

46:56 - Fran Berman: For the many, many systems that are now more and more autonomous and decision making. How do we create representative training sets that don’t get things wrong and and put us in the wrong.

47:09 - Fran Berman: Space. How do we make sure that our decisions are more towards unbiased and ethical outcomes, rather than biased unethical outcomes.

47:20 - Fran Berman: How do we architect the innovation tech innovative technologies to promote the public interest facial recognition can be wonderful to keep us safe. And it can also be highly intrusive.

47:31 - Fran Berman: And and and those are sort of social decisions right facial recognition is just math biometrics is just math. So how do we decide, you know when it’s appropriate to use them and when it’s not.

47:43 - Fran Berman: And of course, when all of this becomes critical infrastructure, a must have. In order for us to be citizens of our society or students in our schools or workers in our company. You know what extra rules are important and none of this is easy button stuff. None of it.

48:02 - Fran Berman: What we’re finding groups. What we’re finding is that social constructs social infrastructure is absolutely needed to promote the public interest.

48:17 - Fran Berman: Without social infrastructure, you can go a little crazy and and we’ve seen you know people hacking maybe monitors and screaming and babies. We’ve seen Fran Berman: You know crashes have catastrophic failures of self driving cars and Alexis with bugs that shared information they shouldn’t then cyber vulnerabilities and pacemakers and and and Fran Berman: Whole national discussion on facial recognition and what that means is that we really need to couple the technical with the social Fran Berman: We have this wonderful, wonderful capacity for innovation.

We have to make sure that the innovation is good for us. And we do that by creating the correct kinds of social infrastructure that promotes the public interest, not private interests primarily Fran Berman: Oops, I go back now. Thank you. And so, and so one of the things for us to recognize I think especially in our community is that social and policy controls have technical implications.

49:20 - Fran Berman: And when we look at the Public Interest challenges you know which which which protection should we have privacy safety, security, what does that mean Fran Berman: When should public interest prevail and when should private interest prevail, who should own or have rights to data if you’re the subject of the data can you control what happens to it. Is that okay Fran Berman: Who creates the standards and the policy and all of that, at the end of the day, really becomes Fran Berman: Needs to be translated into technical infrastructure right access control policies, the way we collect metadata.

The way we create the architectures of the services and devices. We have Fran Berman: You know when you go to Disneyland. If you want to ride on the roller coaster.

50:05 - Fran Berman: And you’re not tall enough we already know it’s not going to be safe for you. We know that maybe you’ll get thrown out by the seat belt or, you know, the force of going around the corner.

50:14 - Fran Berman: And so there’s a sign and the sign says you must be this tall to ride the roller coaster.

50:19 - Fran Berman: And really what we need now is the equivalent of you must be this tall to ride the Internet of Everything we need to know, you know, when is it possibly going to hurt us. When is it possibly going to help us. What can we do to make it safe and secure for us.

50:35 - Fran Berman: So in the end, you know, it’s all of our responsibility and this is a decade that has just begun. It’s a decade that we this community and all of the people that we work with.

50:48 - Fran Berman: Can really make a difference government needs to take the lead in creating policy and legislation and enforcement mechanisms.

50:57 - Fran Berman: For personal protections for the public. That’s what it means to be to support the public interest.

51:04 - Fran Berman: But business can then take those protections and design them in a really innovative way in terms of products and services.

51:12 - Fran Berman: They can make those products and services more transparent, they can support safe practice.

51:18 - Fran Berman: Those of us in academia, it’s really important for us to be training the next generation of leaders and the current generation of citizens.

51:26 - Fran Berman: We need to be talking about the social implications of technology, everybody in the world needs to know about it. We’re going to live in our time.

51:34 - Fran Berman: What does it mean you know as 5G, a good thing or a bad thing is net neutrality, a good thing or a bad thing is data privacy, a good thing or a bad thing. What cyber security.

51:45 - Fran Berman: You know, these are things that affect the world that we live in. And it’s really important for all of us not to know the guts of them necessarily, but to know what they are and why they’re important and of course says as citizens and members of the public.

51:59 - Fran Berman: We need to also take control of what we’re consuming, you know, we need to ask before we buy and sometimes make decisions not to buy things that aren’t safe for us, or that aren’t private for us. We need to protect our data.

52:13 - Fran Berman: And, and, most importantly, we need to speak up and talk to our people who can make policy and legislation and provide feedback and votes, you know, if we looked at the primaries for the this Fran Berman: Unusual election. We were just in we had many, many, many candidates and their attitudes about technology are important because the people who run our government can make rules about technology that make it easier or harder on the rest of them. So it’s everybody’s everybody’s responsibility.

52:51 - Fran Berman: So with that I wanted to say a little bit more about all of the amazing people that I am so grateful to AND IF I HAVE MISSED ANYONE because I do have pandemic brain these days.

53:07 - Fran Berman: My great apologies. But I have to say that so many of you have been so important to me conversations support partnership.

53:19 - Fran Berman: The great month that I spent with Chris at Harvard a couple of years ago, the great partnership. I’ve had with Cliff, and so many others, it’s really been so important to me. And so I thank you all and I cannot tell you Fran Berman: How blown away. I am at receiving this award. Thank you so much.

53:47 - Cliff Lynch: Gotta unmute if you’re gonna clap.

53:51 - Cliff Lynch: Thank you, friend, that was just tremendous it really was.

53:58 - Cliff Lynch: And remind us of so much that’s happened over this first 20 years of the decade.

54:10 - Cliff Lynch: The look ahead is fascinating and Cliff Lynch: Scary.

54:16 - Cliff Lynch: For sure. Cliff Lynch: Um, I Cliff Lynch: I i’m I’m really just kind of floored by the whole thing.

54:29 - Cliff Lynch: One one issue that I’m, I’m kind of curious about and I worry a lot about lately is resilience Cliff Lynch: As as this as we become more and more dependent on all of this.

54:48 - Cliff Lynch: All of this technical infrastructure is critical infrastructure.

54:54 - Cliff Lynch: I there’s a there’s a tendency to want to optimize for cost.

55:01 - Cliff Lynch: Rather than necessarily optimizing for resilience and I, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, particularly in the context of the Internet of Everything Fran Berman: That’s a really great question, and I think it’s a hard nut to crack.

55:23 - Fran Berman: Because, you know, the solution is shared by all of us. But the problem is also shared by all of us, you know, it isn’t just the private sector being me.

55:33 - Fran Berman: We don’t want to spend more for goods and services and we want them to come to market as soon as possible. And so Fran Berman: You know, in some sense, there’s no incentive for the private sector to spend the extra time making sure that their security or or not to be taking data as a competitive advantage because other people are or to provide something that Fran Berman: That we are okay with and and that’s why you know in my own mind. I think it’s important that government take the lead.

56:08 - Fran Berman: Because if government says, you know, you have to maintain certain standards. And if you think about it, although nothing works perfectly for sure.

56:18 - Fran Berman: If you think about food, you think about drugs, you think about our work environments. The government has set standards about what’s acceptable and what’s not.

56:27 - Fran Berman: We have the FDA, we have OSHA, you know, we have a number of different government agencies whose job ostensibly is to keep us safe if I if I, you know, have Fran Berman: A building company, you know, it cost me more money to get as best host remediation gear for my people. So why would I want to do that.

56:49 - Fran Berman: But OSHA requires me to do that because So working with asbestosis really unsafe, you know, FDA has rules about food. Department of Agriculture has rules about food.

57:01 - Fran Berman: And so you know why we wouldn’t apply these same kinds of rules to cyberspace where things could be just as dangerous to us in a different way.

57:12 - Fran Berman: It’s not clear to me. And I do think we need to come to a time where they won’t work perfectly things will still be hackable. But we will be a lot safer if we kind of architect things. So it gives us basic protections in cyberspace. And I think that’s tremendously important.

57:32 - Cliff Lynch: You know i mean the the sort of discussion about, you know, well, should we really have network connected devices with no provision for updating the software on it.

57:45 - Fran Berman: Right. Cliff Lynch: Out there. We’ve seen that story.

57:48 - Fran Berman: And another another piece of that is, and I didn’t talk about it in this talk because enough Fran Berman: But you know there is a notion of sustainability. If you think about it, if everything has a computer in it. And those computers are using rare earth or lithium batteries or all kinds of things. And then we throw them out.

58:11 - Fran Berman: We have to worry about the kinds of materials that are being used and their depletion Fran Berman: We have to worry about e waste which is mounting and not even counted by every country in the world. And so, you know, our success in cyberspace.

58:28 - Fran Berman: May you know hasten the lack of sustainability, the physical world and not just our social world. And so you really have to think about it in a very holistic way.

58:41 - Fran Berman: And and i think that you know that’s where you know you need adult supervision someone system. And, you know, oftentimes, not always governments have played that role. Sure.

58:55 - Cliff Lynch: Um, well, I have a couple questions coming in. But before I get to those two. I want to give Chris opportunity to reflect for a moment on friends wonderful talk.

59:13 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Sure. Thanks, indeed, that was that was wonderful. Fran see am I yet. Let’s see. Yeah.

59:21 - Cliff Lynch: You’re good. CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Good, excellent.

59:26 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: I think seeing that arc and seeing how much has evolved over this period of time.

59:31 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: One of the things I was going to ask you to reflect a bit more on something we’re both concerned about CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Is how the whole notion of open data has changed over the course of this time.

59:42 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: You know, at the beginning of this period open data was the you know the next best thing. It was going to revolutionize the world. And now we’ve seen all kinds of risks and challenges and problems.

59:54 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: And and unexpected commercialization and other sectors and so on. If you could reflect a bit on how the notion of open data has evolved in terms of CHRISTINE BORGMAN: What should be open to whom and when and why was what restrictions over these several decades. And that would be a good conversation to move on to Fran Berman: Yeah, I’m happy to respond to that. But I want to point out that that as one of the world’s experts and things like that. I believe in hearing your thoughts as well.

Chris Fran Berman: I think the interesting thing to me about open data is especially for us in the research world who have really leveraged open data in a really important way to make it, you know, important Fran Berman: Breakthroughs is that today with data, kind of a wash everywhere and the private sector, being a huge driver.

60:51 - Fran Berman: You know, it’s hard to know how the work we do in the research environment and the proprietary data that’s generated by Fran Berman: The private sector how those can mesh in a reasonable way. So, you know, think about the jobs that both you and I have had, which is to train Fran Berman: Students who will go out in the world and do something important, either in the private sector government or or an academia and Fran Berman: When we think about the kinds of things we teach and the kinds of research, they do we want them to have environments that are similar to a representative of the environment, they’ll deal with in the world.

61:33 - Fran Berman: And so, you know, and we want an open data has been one way that we we’ve been able to do that. But I think as we start looking at the problems that we’re going to increasingly see Fran Berman: When the private sector has so much data. And right now, so much of it is proprietary. I think we’re going to have problems even understanding the kinds of problems, certainly at scale.

61:58 - Fran Berman: That a Google or an Amazon or Apple or Microsoft or any of these companies advisor is going to have and and so I kind of worry about open data in terms of Fran Berman: You know what’s going to be open, under what circumstances is going to be open. How does it impinge on all the discussions, we’re having around privacy and and all of those kinds of things.

62:29 - Cliff Lynch: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a, I think that evolution. That’s a that was such an interesting question, Chris and Cliff Lynch: You know, you talk, you talked about Cliff Lynch: The some of the well known issues around algorithmic bias which actually is a term I hate because what it really is is you train something. Typically, what it is is you train something on data that was that reflected bias.

63:01 - Cliff Lynch: And, you know, the algorithm did exactly what it’s supposed to do.

63:07 - Cliff Lynch: But I wonder, in some ways, whether we’re not going to see open data become a great source of bias in the sense that Cliff Lynch: Well, if that’s the training set, you can get. That’s the training set, everybody will use, you know, if you look at, for example, some of the things that have gone wrong and facial recognition.

63:29 - Cliff Lynch: Part of the issue. There has just been there’s been these big training sets land lying around that people use over and over again.

63:39 - Cliff Lynch: So I think, I think this is a pretty profound set of questions you’re racing there. I want to get before we run out of time, completely. I want to get to two comments and questions that we got in here. The first is from Roger Schoenfeld Cliff Lynch: Who says Fran, thanks so much for this wonderful talk. Congratulations.

64:07 - Cliff Lynch: The world today doesn’t just represent the shift of data and technology to being ubiquitous and critical but also commercialized.

64:17 - Cliff Lynch: Even if we think not about our consumer world, but about scholarship and key fields. For instance, in the social sciences. It’s clear, there’s extraordinary value in data held by commercial organizations.

64:32 - Cliff Lynch: You spoke about the importance of social infrastructure and balancing public and private interests as data becomes more valuable.

64:42 - Cliff Lynch: Could you say a little bit more about the impact of commercialization of the data environment, and particularly in academia, perhaps, how is data commercialization affecting scholarship Cliff Lynch: And if we need to do something to course correct here. Do you have thoughts on what we should be doing.

65:07 - Fran Berman: That’s a fascinating question. And, you know, in a way, it brings up some of the questions which Roger knows well from the beginning of this right and at the beginning when we started worrying about well, Fran Berman: What if we published the data with our publication. Remember those arguments from so many years ago. And because how else would you try to reproduce things understand what’s going on. And today, it’s sort of taken on Fran Berman: A more mature. But, you know, kind of equally difficult set of questions, which is Fran Berman: I think it always gets to the heart of, you know, what’s the economic model that’s going to work.

So if you commercialize things Fran Berman: You know, will that be a better economic model or not. And you know what is the role of publications. These days, and of course you and Fran Berman: And Chris and Roger probably have a much more sophisticated answer than I do. But I do think that it’s really curious that we’ve given time and effort to Fran Berman: Really thinking about these issues for many years. But in some ways, we still don’t have really a good answer to it all and Fran Berman: You know with you if you look hard.

You can often find sort of alternative ways and do an end run around publications, just like we used to do an end run around music companies using Napster right but we still I think don’t have, and perhaps Roger knows Fran Berman: A good solution to this, but I don’t know. I don’t know where commercialization should go with this.

66:57 - Fran Berman: What do you think, what do you think, Chris.

67:06 - Cliff Lynch: Um, yeah. The thought Chris CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Yes, I think it’s a matter of a governance, which is a lot of what data comes back to you and certainly an issue that Bertie, and CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Co data and others have dealt with is whenever you’ve got something that looks like a common good and that is subject to free rider problems which this is certainly is you’ve got to have some way of building a governance model. And that’s where we’ve not gotten far enough.

67:41 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: Into economics and finding a good governance model as these data run across the line of what’s public what’s private CHRISTINE BORGMAN: And and I guess one of the big barriers to researchers sharing their data is they’re concerned about who’s going to use those data to exploit them.

68:00 - CHRISTINE BORGMAN: For purposes that they did not see and who’s going to take the benefit from from that down the line. So that’s, that’s where the governance piece as part of what I was leading to the open data question earlier.

68:12 - Cliff Lynch: I mean, one at one of the areas I worry about as commercialization of data creeps into the Cliff Lynch: The scholarly publishing sphere, for example, is Cliff Lynch: behavioral data and what uses that can be put to. In other words, it’s, it’s not so much the scholarly record itself, but the information about the interaction of prep specific individuals or groups of individuals with that scholarly record.

68:49 - Cliff Lynch: And how that can be monetized.

68:52 - Fran Berman: Yeah, I mean the economics of this are really odd in a way because people things that are ostensibly free really aren’t and things that sensibly costs don’t always cost and so and so, I think, you know, we have a very non transparent and very confusing environment that’s sometimes dangerous.

69:14 - Cliff Lynch: What’s, what’s that old warning if the products free. You’re the product.

69:21 - Fran Berman: Or the product right Cliff Lynch: Um, let me move on to another comment here in question. This is from Don waters.

69:33 - Cliff Lynch: Friend, congratulations on receiving the award. Thanks for such a thoughtful talk in light of the comments about public policy and economic goods. Do you have any thoughts about the size and concentration of the big commercial data gathers Cliff Lynch: Google, Facebook, Amazon and friends and the need for regulation of their activities, including the current antitrust activity. Do you have a view on what kinds of regulations most urgently needed.

70:06 - Fran Berman: That’s a great question because we’re just reliving that now as it plays out aren’t way and Fran Berman: I mean, when I look at that and I do think that Fran Berman: The way that the large scale companies kind of snuff out smaller folks is not a good thing. And so I understand.

70:28 - Fran Berman: The whole focus on monopolization. It will be interesting to see in the next administration. You know what the IFTTT and what the FCC and what all of the various players think about all of this. But I also think it’s really important for us to understand that.

70:46 - Fran Berman: That doesn’t necessarily mean that companies will be more protective Fran Berman: If you break up Facebook. It doesn’t mean that you know if you have 100 companies, instead of one company. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have more privacy. And so I do believe that we need to think about privacy and security and safety and other kinds of digital protections Fran Berman: Not just as part of an antitrust activity. I think we need to create Fran Berman: Some bars where we can expect that products and services will have a certain level of cyber security.

I think we can make rules about Fran Berman: Who can control data and when and we should know about when it’s shared or exchanged with other people and we should know about what’s being collected Fran Berman: I don’t think GDPR straight out is going to be something that will work in this country because we have a very different culture.

71:48 - Fran Berman: But I do think that we should be thinking seriously about our own version of what a GDPR would look like. And because I think that’s really important for us to think about basic protections. That’s not just Fran Berman: It’s not just a monopoly issue. It really is a protections issue. It is a public good issue. It’s an issue about when we can all prevail.

72:14 - Fran Berman: You know, if you go to a foreign country which many of us are yearning to go at this point because we’d like to travel anywhere you never thought you’d hear yourself say that Fran Berman: And you come back through customs, they ask you whether you’ve been on a farm right and to see if you’re bringing various diseases into the country.

72:33 - Fran Berman: Now, it may be that privately. I don’t really want to share where I’ve been, you know, I don’t want to say whether I’ve been on a farm or not, but I tell people, whether it’s been on a pharmacy only way I can get in the country.

72:45 - Fran Berman: For the public good, because I don’t want to be you know someone who brings in things that are, you know, bad for crops or whatever. And you know, those are the kinds of Fran Berman: I think you know standards that we need to set that we where we, you know, promote the public good as as sort of a first class object.

73:10 - Fran Berman: And so, so yes, I think the monopolies are really good things to be looking at, because I do think sort of a thriving environment where people can be innovative with different ways of Fran Berman: Creating competitive advantage and different business models, you know, perhaps I’m willing to pay for more privacy than for my extensively free products.

73:32 - Fran Berman: And so they shouldn’t be crushed by the people giving me the ostensibly free products but but I don’t think that’s going to get us all the way there.

73:44 - Cliff Lynch: Right, well I Cliff Lynch: Done thanks you for that very helpful response. I think it’s about time for me to once again congratulate Fran, and thank her for a superbly thought provoking.

74:11 - Cliff Lynch: Paul of in Peters Memorial Lecture.

74:15 - Cliff Lynch: I think Chris also. It’s not often that you come to do one Paul Ivan Peters award and get to Paul Ivan Peters award winners at the same time. It’s so good to see both of you.

74:33 - Cliff Lynch: I’d like to just take a moment to thank all of the Members who and guests who’ve been with us through this conference.

74:44 - Cliff Lynch: I hope that you found the sessions useful. I hope that you find opportunities to enjoy some of the pre recorded sessions or recordings of some of the sessions. You weren’t able to get to synchronously. I thank the team at CNI for all their help making this happen so smoothly.

75:13 - Cliff Lynch: I feel a little bit weird to wish everybody a happy holidays in Cliff Lynch: The covert universes Fran puts it Cliff Lynch: But I wish everybody safe times and better times ahead, and I look forward to seeing you all in the near future. Thank you so much, friend. Thanks for joining us today. And with that, I declare our full 2020 virtual meeting to be closed. .