Media Lab Europe - Swift’s Grand Academy

Read this and consider if MLE had more in common with Swift’s Grand Academy than a modern research institute.

For five years what passes for the Irish technology press was drinking Medialab Europe’s eclectic koolaid. Very few journalists covering technology in the Irish press spotted that the MLE was a waste of money. MLE provided them with the technological equivalent of a piece of paper with PTO written on both sides. It kept them amused and confused for five years. But surprisingly it was the Irish Times, once a diehard supporter of MLE that uncovered the horrible reality of MLE. It was there that excerpts from reports obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that MLE wasn’t just badly run - it was more badly run than anyone had expected.

A post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog neatly identified the key points from Jamie Smyth’s Irish Times articles. One of the most important points is that the finance and administration unit was young and inexperienced. This was often the single point of failure for many dot.bomb businesses and MLE was in so many ways the ultimate dot.bomb business.

MIT/Medialab did not apparently want to contribute any funds to help out Medialab Europe. Perhaps it realised that MLE was a doomed venture. A few years ago, Medialab Asia had crashed and burned in India where the Indian government had some different view to Medialab about research. The Irish government didn’t seem to think that it had received value for money with MLE either. They were a little slower in waking up to the reality that MLE was never going to be self-financing when it came to research. It was a pure sponsorship play of the kind that only worked well when there is a boom market.

The Irish government commissioned a report on MLE from consultant Dr. Tom Higgins. This report advised that MLE should be linked with universities. MLE’s own management got in on the act and in 2004 it prepared its own report - the grandly titled “MediaLab Europe: Strategic Plan May 2004″ which contained some choice words describing the environment at MLE. The one quote from the MLE management report about the “inmates running the asylum” is particulary ironic given that Nicholas Negroponte pointed to a supposed appreciation that the Irish had for madness being one of the main reasons for situating the MLE in Ireland. Higgins’ report pointed to MLE’s somewhat lacklustre research record and the fact that it had only obtained twelve patents in five years. MLE wanted the Irish government to supply 9 Million Euros to help it out but according to Higgins, the funding that MLE would require was in the region of 35 Million Euros. It would have been quite insane for the Irish government to have funded MLE without significant changes being made. And that seems to have been a problem for MIT/Medialab.

A rescue package was on the table for MLE. It involved funding and significant changes to MLE. The board would be reconstituted as would the management of MLE. An academic programme would be instituted where MIT would be involved in degree courses. Cash payments to MIT would be reexamined. Funding from the Irish government would be capped at 3 Million Euros per year and a change to the whole intellectual property model would be required.

But at the core of all this is the concept of research. Was MLE doing any? Probably. Was it of any use? Maybe. Was it directed research with clear aims and possible commericalisation. Evidently not!

Research means different things to different people. To technologists, scientists and researchers it means identifying problems and possible solutions. To entrepreneurs and business people it means marketable results. An article by Karlin Lillington in the UK’s Guardian newspaper hit upon the differences in expectations :
“This suggests a big problem was mismatched expectations between government and MIT. MLE, a commercialising research partner to fledgling Irish industry? Please. That veers away from the research ethos of Media Lab and points to a wilful ignorance by the Irish, as MLE’s role was always to be a European, not Irish, institution. ”

Well I guess that we Irish just weren’t ready for the soi-disant artistic and intellectual geniuses who ran MLE into the ground and produced hardly much more than a few gee-whiz demos to justify the massive waste of money. Some of the research did apparently work out and twelve patents were applied for during MLE’s five years of operation. Researchers in other Irish institutes that I’ve spoken to found it hard to contain their anger at the money that MLE was getting. These were people doing excellent and relevant research on meagre funds compared to the people in MLE.

The Irish government, faced with increasing questions over the money it had sunk into MLE had questions to answer and their bosses, the Irish electorate were a little concerned at such poor results. We were asking a more fundamental question rather than whether the institution was a European or Irish one. We wanted to know where the hell all the money went and we are not going to take some flashing lights demo as an answer.

With the Irish Times’ FOIA requests and some decent journalism by Jamie Smyth, the Irish public and the world is finding out about MLE and Medialab in a way that would not have been possible had this been an enquiry into Medialab in the USA. The Comptroller and Auditor General confirmed in a reply to Labour Party Spokesperson on Communications, Deputy Tommy Broughan that he had completed a preliminary investigation into the collapse of MLE. The Dail’s (Irish Parliament) Public Accounts Committee is to investigate the collapse of MLE in April and a lot more may come out at this PAC hearings.

MIT got 14 Million Euros from the Irish government for the use of the Medialab brandname, management help and research help. The MLE was housed in a former hops storage for Guinness Brewery in Dublin. A common description of the lack of organisational skills is that someone “couldn’t even organise a piss-up in a brewery”. In the FOIA papers covered by the Irish Times, it was noted that MIT did not want to repay this money.

An e-mail quoted in the Irish Times was quite illuminating. In an e-mail sent in late 2004, Mr Higgins is irritated by the response of the founder of MIT/MediaLab, Nicholas Negroponte, to a set of proposals.

“Nicholas seems to have changed his mind - or not to have made it up. We could have lived with a few queries from Nicholas or even if he needed some clarification of points - but his response is so equivocal that it is impossible to discern a willing and enthusiastic partner working with us on a revised project or to have any confidence in MIT’s commitment to making it work.”

It sounds like Negroponte likes taking credit for success but can’t handle failure. That’s the one thing that distinguishes entrepreneurs from those who merely waffle about it. The entrepreneur handles failure by getting up and trying again.

An article by Brian Lavery in the New York Times quoted an e-mail interview with Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte had hoped that MLE would become a “virus” for spurring research and that it would prompt reviews of legislation like bankruptcy rules that handicap entrepreneurs. Negroponte waffling about things he knows little or nothing about is not new. In fact bankruptcy legislation does not necessarily handicap entrepreneurs. It is quite the opposite in that it limits liability. One of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs in Ireland have is getting funding. Why - because global village idiot operations like MLE waste millions funding in funding the delusions of relevancy of people like Negroponte. However some good may come out of this. The Irish government is intent on replacing MLE with a real research operation. Could this be evidence of an entrepreneurial streak in the Irish government?

Tags: IrishBlogs , Medialab, MLE , Media Lab Europe , MIT

Written by John McCormac on February 26th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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Semantic Web Or Tagged Web

An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about tags and tagging the Irish blogosphere brings the Semantic Web to blogging. The Semantic Web is an attempt to classify the web giving it a clearly defined structure. From a search engine operator’s point of view, a more structured web is a good thing. It would make it easier to create niche search engines and directories and make the web more usable. However it is an academic idea and like most academic ideas, there is a gap between academia and reality.

The reality of the Semantic web is that the web developers have to implement it. It has to be part of the webdevelopment software that the average web developer uses to create that five page brochureware website. Until that universality is achieved, the Semantic Web will remain, mainly, the subject of seminars and course books. But tagging seems to be routing around academia and into the reality of the web.

The rise of tagging on the web has been slow. The Technorati self-categorisation model is interesting. By using an Irishblogs Technorati tag it is possible to include a blog in the Technorati’s Irish blogs. It makes it easier to identify Irish blogs but there is a catch. Not all Irish bloggers use these tags. Any such self identifying movement goes through this phase before it reaches the mass market. The early adopters find it first and then the connectors and super salespeople the “The Tipping Point” book by Malcom Gladwell explains the process well (Amazon.co.uk) (Amazon.com).

Tags: IrishBlogs , Semantic Web, Technorati Tags , Tagged Web

Written by John McCormac on February 19th, 2005 with 4 comments.
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Irish Times Blogging Piece Stirs Up A Storm

An article in the Irish Times technology section by Robin O’Brien-Lynch stirred up a storm of controversy in the Irish blogosphere. Unlike the usual Irish Times technology section article, this one was relevant to technologists and to the general public. And it marked a turning point - an Irish Times journalist actually answered questions and explained an article. Most of the time, the Irish Times technology section goes unnoticed by the web because of the Pay Per View subscription model that the Irish times introduced a few years ago. On the web, only the Irish Times subscribers can see the article. However it was one of the most commented upon tech articles of recent years. It was pushed out of the limelight by another Irish Times controversy. The Irish Times technology section is a one to two page section that appears in the Irish Times newspaper business supplement on Fridays.

According to Robin O’Brien-Lynch, the concept of the article was to see how American political advocacy via blogs could be applied to an Irish General Election. The US Presidential Election was concerned with the election of a president. An Irish General Election, by comparison, has many local aspects at play. And with local aspects comes local politics. That means local blogging with potentially small audiences. It is the kind of article that fits in well with the Irish Times technology section. But from an editorial point of view, the article was flawed as it was trying to compare two very different events. The title for the article “Lots of Irish blogs but few talking about Irish matters” was wrong as well but that was a case of poor editing rather than journalistic inaccuracy.

The Irish Times technology section is in a peculiar position - it is essentially a magazine within a supplement within a newspaper. The old model was that the newspapers reported the news and the magazines did the analysis. That was the old model - the highly competitive market means that a newspaper has to try and cover the analysis market, the opinion market, the news side of the market and product placement/review. The Irish Times technology section does not really cover the news side of things - that is more of a daily issue and technology news has to fight for space with other, more important news. It has bought in news items from Reuters. It has a high-profile techie column from Danny O’Brien of Need To Know fame. It has a weekly column, “Net Results”, from Karlin Lillington. The rest is generic Irish news and commentary that does not make it into the daily newspaper.

Bernie Goldbach makes some very interesting observations on O’Brien-Lynch’s article and as yet, the comments posted on various blogs by O’Brien-Lynch don’t go far enough in addressing them. But they provide enough starting points for a few good articles for the Irish Times and it would be very interesting to see if O’Brien-Lynch will be allowed to follow them up in a series of articles.

The blogosphere has evolved almost in parallel with the normal web. The normal Irish web is business orientated and on search engines, these sites tend to dominate the search results often at the expense of blogs.

The IT article is wrong in considering the Irish blogosphere as being in its infancy. Prior to the advent of blogging software, many bloggers would have had their own personal websites. The blogging software enabled them to update their sites more efficiently than publishing every update with a copy of Frontpage. Many of these sites would have been personal sites on ISPs or free webhosting. Many of these personal websites would never have appeared high in the search results either. That critical evolutionary leap was missed in the article.

The dismissal of the “blogroll” and “who’s reading me” is revealing. Is a newspaper’s obsession with sales figures any less neurotic? Why does the IT include pictures of its columnists? Why should anyone consider the opinion of an Irish Times columnist to be better or worse than that of others? Unlike the bland figures of a sales report, the “who’s reading me” section indicates real readers as opposed to sales.

But more importantly blogging changes the balance of technology journalism. Which would you rate higher - the opinion of a technologist on technology or the opinion of someone with little or no technological background? Many technologists have blogs and comment lucidly and accurately on trends in technology but their blogs are often not about technology in general.

There is something quite terrifying at the heart of blogging for journalists - it provides real feedback from the audience beyond the usual stuff that appears in the “letters to the editor” page. It makes journalists answerable and it can be quite a reality check for columnists to have their mistakes highlighted and their articles questioned. Prior to the web and blogging, a one way process. Blogging added the missing element and changed journalism into a conversation with the reader. FMK explores this change.

What limited the impact of the Irish Times’ blogging article was that the IT is a subscription site - had it been a publically accessible site, the impact and commentary would probably have been greater. Despite this limited readership, the article was quoted all over the Irish blogsphere. O’Brien-Lynch referred to the insularity and backslapping nature of the Irish blogosphere. But this is a case of a journalist completely misunderstanding the nature of the web and blogging. The web is not a newspaper. It is a complex, interlinked set of sites. The blogosphere is a set of conversations in asynchronous time.

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting paper on journalism during the dot.bomb period. In it, one web journalist claimed that reader feedback beyond the usual corrections should not be allowed. One of the recent additions on that site was a blog. Ironically it is probably the most genuine and original content on that site. Blogs and their readership act as a quality filter where like-minded people can provide interesting ideas and commentary and pointers. The danger of blogging for journalists, especially those covering technology, is that they are surplus to requirements it is possible to get the information often from people who are the real experts. It is that democratisation of journalism that is a far bigger story than whether US political advocacy methods can be applied to Ireland.

Written by John McCormac on February 17th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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