Slashdot

While I'm still a couple of weeks away from announcing my forthcoming book No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union in greater detail, I've already started a preliminary version of the Web site that will promote the book:
www.No-Lobbyists-As-Such.com

On that Web site, I also have a blog. Two blogs, that is: one in English and one in German.

NewsForge just reported on the new EU software patent fight. I'd like to point out that it's not yet certain whether I will again be active on the lobbying and campaigning front. As I told ZDNet UK, it's a possibility but not a given. It depends on the level of support that such a renewed effort would get from medium-sized companies.

Within the next few days, there will be an announcement by Norbert Bollow, the activist who created the successful ThankPoland.info campaign about a year ago that enabled tens of thousands of people to thank the Polish government for its courageous interventions against software patents in the EU Council in December 2004 and January 2005. Norbert is going to launch a Web campaign that will draw some attention to certain issues in connection with the implausible outcome of the EV50 Europeans of the Year poll, the subject of my previous two postings here in this Journal.

On the EV50 issue, I first posted this article:
http://slashdot.org/~FlorianMueller/journal/124261
and then updated it:
http://slashdot.org/~FlorianMueller/journal/124263

In this Slashdot Journal entry, I wrote about my difficulties in understanding the proclaimed outcome of the EV50 Europeans of the Year poll, and my concerns about an intransparent and therefore insecure poll.

I have meanwhile contacted the Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, and a high-ranking official of his government's press office. Since Mr. Juncker has an impeccable reputation as a statesman of integrity, chances are that he will also be interested in further elucidation and verification of the result of the EV50 poll, rather than being seen as the "winner" of some intransparent Internet vote.

One of my key points in that aforementioned Slashdot Journal entry was that it's hard to see how I might beat Bono in a category of six for the Campaigner of the Year award, while allegedly losing out to Mr. Juncker in a field of 50 (which was a separate vote on the same ballot, but still). I now got the news that Bono, jointly with Bill and Melinda Gates, has been chosen as this year's Person of the Year by TIME Magazine. I'm very happy for Bono, who clearly deserves this honor! And as far as philantrophy is concerned, I also believe that Bill and Melinda Gates are good choices in this context, although I am nevertheless convinced that the software market (and therefore the entire economy) would benefit from further demonopolization.

Maybe Bono would also have won the EV50 Campaigner of the Year award if I had received the main award, in which case the rules stipulated that the runner-up would receive the respective category award. While there was also some publicity for the nomination of Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali in that category, Bono was the first and by far the most prominent candidate in my category.

I also learned now that Bono's band U2 "was easily the top-grossing act on tour in 2005, with more than $260 million in receipts", according to Billboard magazine (quoted in the New York Times). This further buttresses my theory that Bono must have received a very substantial number of votes, as the "top-grossing act on tour" this year must have had a lot of web traffic, and the main page of U2's official website U2.com called on people to vote for Bono in the EV50 poll (and so did some high-traffic independent fan sites).

If Microsoft sponsors a series of political awards and two of the ten prizes go to vocal opponents of software patents, then one would usually think that it's an amazingly positive outcome. That's just what happened with this year's edition of the EV50 Europeans of the Year. Michel Rocard, one of our key allies among the members of the European Parliament (MEPs), became MEP of the Year. I received the Campaigner of the Year award for my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign. Basically, I had been nominated as a representative of an entire movement that was formed around the FFII. The list of previous winners shows that "my" award went to Pope John Paul II in 2002, and to the then-president of the European Parliament in 2003. Without a doubt, software patent critics have a higher profile than ever.

However, what the organizers proclaimed as the result of the poll is extremely difficult to comprehend. If a computer program were fed with all of the information that is available from the outside and checked an alleged result against that background, then the plausibility test would either reject the entry altogether or would only accept it after asking "are you sure?", "are you still sure?", and "are you really sure that you're still sure?".

That's why I returned the award trophy to the publisher of the European Voice, a sister publication of the vaunted Economist, after the awards ceremony. It was a gesture of protest against an election process that in my opinion was not fair. Since the European Voice didn't announce anything concerning the poll other than the "winners" (not even the total number of votes), I was worried about what happened to tens of thousands of votes that came from our community.

There are strong indications that our audience represented a solid majority of all people who participated in that EV50 poll. The European Voice newspaper, which organized and announced the vote, only has a circulation of about 16,000 copies, a large part of which is distributed for free to the EU institutions in Brussels. Most of the 50 nominees don't actively campaign for votes, and none ever ran an EV50 campaign like ours.

For the first five weeks, voters received confirmation links that contained an apparently sequential ID. We can't prove that it was sequential, but during that period the number always went up, never down, and after about two weeks after the start of the poll, it was slightly above 19,000 and only moving very slowly, on some days by less than 50. We asked different people to vote at different times, and to then tell us the IDs they got.

Among those first 19,000 IDs, there must already have been some number of software patent critics, as several IT websites reported on my nomination on the day the poll started (22 September) and on the following days. However, we only got started with official calls on our supporter base to vote when we had a complete set of voting recommendations online in a dozen languages, which was the case on 14 October (22 days into the voting period). The confirmation ID was still below 20,000, and it then surpassed 38,000 within less than two weeks. We were able to see, on a daily basis, the impact of our mailings on our web traffic and, quite proportionally, on the uptake of that confirmation ID.

The organizers then switched to an encrypted ID, and at that stage, we had some of our biggest promotions yet to come: a news item here on Slashdot and mailings by the FFII to about 90,000 registered supporters. Our web traffic stayed pretty high until the end of the voting period on November 11, and even a few days beyond.

On the first day of the poll, people reported in Internet forums that the voting server reported too many concurrent database connections, and that happened pretty immediately after the mailing of ThankPoland.info to more than 30,000 supporters, after some of my mailings, and especially after a Slashdot report on our electoral campaign.

People in Brussels know about the tremendous numbers of people who we can mobilize via the Internet. At a hearing of the conservative European People's Party, a parliamentarian claimed that he and his German colleagues received 75,000 emails within only two weeks as part of an email campaign. On other occasions, politicians mentioned similar numbers in the tens of thousands of emails that they claimed to have personally received from software patent critics.

In theory, it's still possible that our supporters didn't represent a majority of the electorate. A confirmation ID doesn't mean that the vote got counted, and maybe our computer-savvy audience had a hugely higher rate of people who failed to click on that link (despite the instructions we provided on NoSoftwarePatents.com) than the EU folks who read the European Voice. Then, the uptake of the ID could, by pure coincidence, have been caused by other factors in addition to our own activities. Those other promotions would have taken place in parallel to whatever we did, and they would never have been spotted by Google, according to which (dependent upon the keyword and language one looked up) 75% to 99% of all EV50-related Internet stories reported on our campaign. Of course, there are other ways to reach voters than via the Internet, but it's quite difficult to address a really large audience by other means without someone writing about it on some website. But no matter how unlikely, it is a possibility.

The publisher and the editor of the European Voice told me, by email and at the EV50 event, that there were "many thousands" and then even "dozens of thousands" of paper votes. It's true that the European Voice had a coupon in several issues during the voting period, and I don't doubt that among the readership of the European Voice, we will have had very few votes. However, out of a circulation of about 16,000, a number of people will not have voted at all, and of those who wanted to vote, only a certain percentage will have used the paper ballot instead of the Internet, to which almost everyone in Brussels has access at his or her workplace. But then, those assumptions may be wrong, and the readership of the European Voice may be very special.

What surprised me most when the EV50 results were presented is the combination of awards that our recommended candidates won and those they didn't. I wonder how Mrs. Dalia Grybauskaite would have become Commissioner of the Year if not because of our votes. We recommended her because she was least suspected of ties with the pro-patent lobby, but of the five commissioners among which people had to choose, she was definitely the underdog in the election. Still she managed to beat Günter Verheugen, a vice president of the Commission who had won that award the previous year and is considered the superstar of the present Commission.

It beats me how I could have won over Bono, the frontman of U2, in a category of six candidates, while allegedly having lost to Luxembourg's prime minister Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker in a field of fifty for the main award. Bono received votes from the fans of his music (U2.com and some independent U2 sites called on people to vote), plus from the supporters of his anti-poverty campaign, and on top of all of that, everyone had to make one choice per category, so a number of people will surely have picked him because he was the first and most famous candidate in the category. Therefore, beating Bono in the Campaigner category was one of the highest hurdles in the entire election, if not the highest.

In contrast, it must have been much harder for a candidate like Mr. Juncker to gather a huge number of votes in a field of 50 candidates. He is certainly a well-respected politician in the EU, and he would be a logical choice for a jury to make because he defended the proposed EU Constitution when others already considered it dead (after the referenda in France and the Netherlands). I talked to the president of LiLux, a free software organization in Luxembourg, and he had no explanation how Mr. Juncker could win a popular vote against us because he and the other members of his organization didn't notice any promotional activity for Mr. Juncker. That tiny country only has 470,000 inhabitants, i.e. about 0.1% of the total population size of the European Union.

I know that some people only voted me for me in the Campaigner category, but thought that someone else should receive the main award. For instance, some voted for Mr. Michel Rocard, the other anti-software-patent nominee. However, the emails I received indicated that most of those who we asked to vote did follow our voting recommendations, at least in the fields in which there were candidates who were known for their anti-software-patent stance.

All in all, one would be hard-pressed to find a plausible explanation for the outcome of the EV50 vote. There are some theoretical answers, but they aren't too likely. The organizers decided that total intransparency is in their best interest, so we're left in the dark as to what exactly happened. If this were an official election and not just a poll by a relatively small (but politically important) newspaper, then there would be ways of finding out. In this case, we can have our opinions, but we'll never be able to prove what the outcome should have been.

In the event that an independent evaluation of the poll would have shown that I won the main award (possibly with more than ten times as many votes as the runner-up), then according to the rules someone else (probably Bono) could have won the Campaigner category.

Since the European Voice continued to list me as the Campaigner of the Year, I decided to accept that award anyway, and I've meanwhile asked them to donate the prize money to the FFII on my behalf. Most of our voters only spent a few minutes to fill out the form, and the two category awards for our camp are a significant step ahead that has been worth that kind of effort. I also think that this jury, which picked the 50 nominees, seems to have been reasonably independent. However, I can't say that I'm going to be too enthusiastic about such polls in the future, unless they meet a certain standard of security, and are performed by trusted third parties that are only in the business of organizing such polls.