The Networking Instinct

John Sadler, Managing Director, Genoa Communications Management and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; The Rev. Dr. Robert Pierson, Rector, St. Philip's Anglican Church; Bhavna Patel, Senior Student, Parkdale Collegiate Institute; Michael O'Neil, Country Manager, IDC Canada; Everett Anstey, President, CEO and Chairman, Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.; Doug Hull, Director General, Industry Canada; George D. Anderson, President and CEO, Insurance Council of Canada and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Ashraf Dimitri, President, Oasis Technology; Bob Morine, Vice-President and General Manager, Public Sector, IBM Canada; and Ewan McArdle, Partner, Ridout & Maybee LLP.

Introduction by Bill Laidlaw

The information highway meant something quite different in the 50s than it does today. In that period for me it meant a game my mother played with my brother and I on our regular trips to Myrtle Beach when we read to her the information on all of the billboards on the side of the highway. Information then was what Dave Garroway and Arthur Godfrey were pitching. Remember them?

Today it is something completely different. If you have not embraced it, it will soon leave you in the past. My children today are so informed it puts me to shame. Governments, corporations, educational institutions make it a key strategy for their planning process.

Today we are fortunate to have as our speaker Mr. Gaylen Duncan, President and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Canada. Mr. Duncan's address today will be The Networking Instinct. 1 might add this will not be addressing how we might schmooze better at business functions but is rather the subject of distributed networked intelligence or DNI. This does sound somewhat puzzling to a layman like me but 1 am told that this innovation has had a major impact on mankind's capacity to innovate and solve problems. Apparently only half of the world participates in this network in any capacity.

Today, in celebration of Canada's IT Week, our speaker will discuss the progress we have made in this area and the work that has yet to be done.

Mr. Duncan is a senior executive with a broad range of experience in the public and private sectors. He was appointed CEO of ITAC in 1996. Previously, he held senior management positions with Central Guaranty Trust, Canada Mortgage and Housing, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics and most recently he created his own company Second Step Solutions that specialises in information technology strategies for government.

Gaylen has a PhD from the University of Texas in Austin and LLB from Dalhousie.

In addition to this, he is a member of the National Research Council's Advisory Committee on the Industrial Research Assistance programme, a member of the Round Table on E-Business Opportunities and Co-Chair of the Conference Board Advisory Council on Canadian Connections.

Please join me in welcoming Gaylen Duncan to the Empire Club.

Gaylen Duncan

Whether you celebrated on January 1, 2000 or whether you held out with the rest of us until 2001, the controversy is over. We are now, incontestably, in the early days of a new millennium.

One of the by-products of this change in the calendar is reflection. And that reflection prompts lists. You've seen

them--the greatest leaders of the last 2000 years, the greatest novels, the finest works of art, and so on.

One of the most thoughtful examples of this trend is a book called "The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years," by John Brockman. Brockman is an author and literary agent who operates an invitation-only website called Edge. Edge is designed to give leading scientists and thinkers a place to communicate their ideas in a lively, challenging forum. Brockman likes to get the discussion rolling by posing deliberately ingenious questions like: "Where did the human mind come from?" and "Where did the universe originate?"

In 1999 he posted the question: "What is the single most important invention in the past 2,000 years?" Responses ranged from the predictable--the printing press, the electric motor and the pill--to the obscure. Someone suggested the 33-year English Protestant calendar, whatever that is.

Some contributors went out of their way to champion the banal--mirrors, chairs and the axe. Others favoured the arcane--the universal Turing machine and von Guericke's static electricity machine.

Like any academic discourse, the whole process quickly became a game of one-upmanship. Contributors were deliberately provocative. The artist Henry Warwick, stealing a page from Seinfeld, proposed "nothing." And like good intellectuals, the participants cheated like crazy. They insisted that an idea could be an invention. So fully half the suggestions in the book are not classic inventions at all, but notions like free will, quantum theory and even "the idea of an idea."

They also completely ignored the parameters of the question. Many suggestions like the alphabet, geometry and the numbering system predated Anno Domini. But the preponderance of suggestions clearly favour late entries like the computer, robotics and the Internet.

It's his book, so Brockman gets to place a bet, too. He proposes that the most important invention of the past 2,000 years is something he calls DNI or distributed networked intelligence. This is "the externalised mind--the mind we all share, the infinite oscillation of our collective consciousness interacting with itself, becoming aware of itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to what it means to be human."

Maybe it shouldn't surprise us that the guy who asks the question comes up with the best answer. I like Brockman's contribution for a number of reasons. It's what I would have said. But the poetry and power in the suggestion comes from its place in time. The struggle to create DNI has taken millennia. Its impact was barely recognised until the late twentieth century. Unlike geometry or the alphabet, which have manifested themselves throughout our past, the full implications of DNI await the future. It is a superb bridge between all that went before and all that lies ahead.

It's a very calculated suggestion. The "I," for intelligence, in one fell swoop incorporates every other invention and idea in the book. And the words "distributed" and "network" internalise all the advances in computing and network-building from calculus to the Internet. The sneaky part of Brockman's proposal is that it's a showstopper. DNI represents the full flowering of human achievement so far. Tag, no touchbacks.

In fact, the only objection I can offer is that DNI isn't actually fully invented yet. It is a work still in progress. The network which unites and distributes our collective intelligence is only half-built. It currently embraces less than half of humanity, leaving the other half unable to access and unable to contribute to this collective intelligence.

And that brings me to the thesis of my remarks to you today. Like Brockman, I fervently believe that what he calls distributed networked intelligence is the greatest monument to our species' experiment with civilisationbuilding so far. It is perfectly reasonable to call it the greatest invention not just of the past 2,000 years, but of all our history. But I will argue that it will take a significant amount of inventiveness to complete the task of extending the benefits and responsibilities of DNI to everyone on earth. A huge task still lies ahead.

What I'd like to do with the time you've permitted me is to chart a bit of history of how we got DNI to its present state, particularly in Canada. Then I'd like to examine the implications of leaving the job unfinished. And then I'd like to tell you about some of the things that governments, corporations and individuals are doing to expand the network.

I've titled this presentation "The Networking Instinct" and I would argue that, along with hunger, fear and sexuality, networking, too, is a primal instinct. When you stop and think about it, the first devices for distributed networked intelligence were campfires. Around the campfire, pre-verbal hunters and gatherers learned to share information about good locations for hunting and new techniques for bringing home food. Before we had formal symbols for communications we had an instinct for sharing intelligence. And the preponderance of mankind's technological advancement ever since has been focused on finding new ways to facilitate this instinct.

We invented numbers and letters to encode intelligence and make it easier to transmit. We invented universities, printing presses and moveable type to concentrate this transmission. Some of our most unlikely advances are instruments of the distribution of intelligence. For example, Alun Anderson, editor of New Scientist, argued in Brockman's book that the fifteenthcentury Portuguese caravel was the greatest invention.

He wrote a lively essay on its history and sang the praises of its precociously sophisticated design. But in the end, what use is a caravel lying at anchor in the shipyard? It derives its power from its capacity to brave the stormy seas to link old-world intelligence with the new. Maybe this tendency to boil everything down to communications technology reflects a Canadian world view. The British and the Dutch, close-quartered in teeming European cities, may have seen sailing ships and canoes as instruments of commerce. But we, isolated in geographically dispersed outposts, saw them as more than that. They were the media for news, intelligence and innovation. They provided the vital links to wider humanity that made life in the wilderness bearable and made settlement possible.

As settlement expanded and we dreamed of nationhood, our technological advances to create community became more sophisticated. We built roads and canals. For Canadians, the networking instinct was an imperative. And we built a railroad, that became a symbol of our collective desires and aspirations. A simple transportation system could never seize the imagination of a nation. For Canadians, the railroad wasn't about locomotion; it was about a dream of a network of communities from sea to sea. Canadian history reflects this understanding of the importance of railroads as devices for distributed networked intelligence.

With this deep-rooted appreciation for communitybuilding technology, for its capacity to bridge distance and vanquish loneliness, it's not surprising that Canada today aspires to be the most connected country on earth. The simple truth is that we're good at building networks. And, fortunately, this innate talent positions us well for leadership in a world increasingly focused on connectivity.

We are already one of the most wired nations on earth. More than 98 per cent of Canadians' homes have both a telephone and a television. Nearly 90 per cent of Canadians have access to cable TV And 96 per cent are linked to a digital switch. We are avid users of paging and cellular services. One in every six Canadians now has a wireless phone or device. We are world leaders in our use of the Internet and we are making significant strides in the area of high-speed broadband access. There are approximately 700,000 users of cable modems in Canada, only four years after their market introduction. We boast a world-class telecommunications infrastructure and the world's longest fibre optic network. We have the platform for distributed networked intelligence in Canada. We've built it with private capital and public will.

We also have a community of policy-makers who understand how important networks are to our national identity.

They have, for example, ensured that Canada shall maintain unregulated access to the Internet. They have been quick to grasp the new realities of electronic communications and have implemented timely policies to ensure the protection of personal privacy. They have also ensured a tax regime that encourages, rather than hinders, online commerce. These progressive policies can be found in all levels of government throughout our country.

But the network instinct isn't restricted to Canadian elites. Our culture enshrines connectedness. We are proud that some of the greatest Canadians have made profound contributions towards broadening our understanding of it. We are proud of the contributions of Innes, McLuhan, and Grant and follow with interest those who maintain this intellectual tradition--people like Derek de Kerkhove, Arthur Croaker and my friend Don Tapscott.

Canadians are not only avid users of the tools of connectivity. They are also becoming increasingly aware of the transformational powers that these tools possess.

In 1999, as we were preparing for the millennium bug, ITAC grew concerned about the impact the whole Y2K experience 'might have on our reputation. So we asked Canadians what they thought of us. We asked them to rank four industries in order of their importance to the economy and Canada's future. They ranked IT second to the primary resources industry. That was a little disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. Then five months after Y2K, we went back to check if we'd dropped in their estimation. By May, the IT sector had surpassed the primary resources sector in all parts of the country, even those regions heavily dependent on the resource industry. There is a clear, general recognition among Canadians that the tools for collecting and sharing information are integral to our future success. I think this is another manifestation of just how well-developed the network instinct is in Canada.

But the strongest manifestation of all is the way this instinct finds expression in Canadian behaviour. From Alexander Graham Bell's first long-distance call between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, to CaNet III, it's in our nature to connect. We have long ranked among the world's most prodigious telephone talkers. And we're quickly showing a comparable affinity for the Internet. We have the highest rate of home-computer penetration in the OECD. And, as of March, 1999, all Canadian schools that chose to be were connected to the Internet.

It was a magic moment that spring. A small boat full of technicians and satellite equipment set out across the Northumberland Strait for Pictou Island. They had a meeting with Tracy Langille who teaches at the school on the island. Tracy has a class of three students. They work in a one-room schoolhouse with all the resources she can muster.

Today those resources include access to the wealth of knowledge available via Schoolnet. Not only does Schoolnet contain a huge repository of information and study guides, it also provides an interactive forum for peer-to-peer learning. This means that a student in Tracy's class can connect with a student in a First Nations school in Alberta, and learn first-hand how life on a Prairie reserve compares with life on a tiny island in the Atlantic. Schoolnet is also a catalyst to encourage students and teachers to publish their own materials and create and share their own curriculum online. It is a learning instrument that emphasises the message and the medium in equal measure.

I am pleased to have Doug Hull with us this afternoon. It was his vision and commitment and his inspired unorthodoxy that got Schoolnet built. His energy continues to advance Canada's connectedness on so many fronts.

Doug is one of a growing army of Canadians from coast to coast who are compelled to do everything they can to advance the cause of distributed networked intelligence. They are finding creative ways to foster connectivity even in places where economists and network engineers say it shouldn't grow.

The town of Gore Bay occupies a picturesque harbour on Manitoulin Island. This is "rainbow country." Most of us think of it as a great place to get away to. But for Manitoulin Transport, it's the site of their national headquarters.

Manitoulin Transport specialises in "less than load" trucking, providing service to anyone who wants to ship freight anywhere in North America. It operates all across Canada and competes effectively against larger transport companies.

Competing effectively means delivering superb customer service and controlling costs. These two factors compelled Manitoulin Transport to explore an electronic solution for delivering load information to customers on a 7/24 basis.

Intuitively, an Internet-based system made a lot of sense. But in 1996, when they first began to think about it there was one small problem. Manitoulin Island had no Internet point of presence.

But the transport company's business plan required Internet access. So it teamed up with Ontario Northland IT Solutions to bring the worldwide Web to God's country. By agreeing to acquire a web server and to provide the real estate to house it, Manitoulin Transport changed the economics of Internet service on the island. In essence, the community's largest employer brought the Internet to Manitoulin Island.

The company not only houses the server but it also allows the community Internet traffic to piggyback on the Hyperstream links that it leases from Bell Canada. Today there are 400 households on the island that have an Internet connection thanks to this partnership.

Remote regions are particularly vulnerable to the prospect of becoming have-nots in the digital economy. Fortunately, in many rural communities, champions have emerged to prevent this from happening.

If you travel east from here on the 401, just past the Thousand Islands you'll come to the county of Leeds Grenville. It's a beautiful, predominantly farming community that lies to the south of Ottawa-Carleton. The digital economic boom of Silicon Valley North lies right on its doorstep. But connectivity in Leeds Grenville varies from low to slow. You could say the digital divide starts at the county line.

But Vic Allen wasn't going to let that happen. He decided over four years ago that connectivity was every bit as important in his community as it was in the wired capital to the north.

In April of last year, he created Upper Canada Networks (or UCNet for short). Its mission was to bring the benefits of wireless broadband service to users throughout the county.

Starting with a pilot wireless project at its Kemptville headquarters, UCNet has started installing 17 telecommunications towers and a grid of fibre-optic lines that will ultimately link 212 villages and towns with high-speed, high-capacity access, affordably priced.

What's unique about UCNet is its business model. The company is a not-for-profit enterprise that owes a lot to the farm co-operative movement.

It has significant seed capital from the provincial and federal government, but it must match this by raising $3 million on its own. To do this, the company is selling memberships to businesses, institutions, municipalities and home users.

Vic Allen believes, fervently, that high-speed connectivity will bring immense social and economic benefits to the people of Leeds Grenville-improved educational opportunities, better health care and better business. He believes Upper Canada's service will even benefit the farmers who are the back-bone of the county economy. Through the magic of wireless, they will be able to watch market trends and make crop transactions from the seat of their tractors or from their dairy barns.

Whether we're standing in a field north of Prescott or sitting in front of a trader's terminal at the Toronto Stock Exchange, we are a wired nation. Exploring the potential of the network has become a national preoccupation. Filmmakers are using it to scout locations. Pinchas Zuckerman, the maestro of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, is using it to give violin lessons to students all over the world. Many artists have put down their paintbrushes and chisels to play with new tools like scanners and e-mail. Nancy Paterson, for example is using real-time market data to raise and lower the hem of an installation she calls Stock Market Skirt. The anonymous cyberpunk who said that the Internet changes everything wasn't kidding. Networks are fundamentally changing--for the better--the way we work, live and play. Canada is on the leading edge of this transition. So are many other industrial nations. But as I said earlier in my presentation, this is not pervasive throughout the world.

At one of the earliest meetings of the G7 to discuss the information highway, Thabo Mbeki, then deputy-president of South Africa, delivered a keynote address that stopped the discourse in its tracks. He did this in a room full of the world's most powerful men by simply stating two facts. First, he pointed out that there are more telephone lines in Manhattan than in the whole of sub-Sahara Africa. Then he reminded the audience that half the world's population has never even made a single telephone call. In two strokes Mr. Mbeki defined what has since been called the "digital divide." The digital divide has been charted in a variety of ways. One measure is an ITU tool called teledensity which charts the number of telephone main lines per 100 people. The 1998 teledensity figures showed countries like ours, Sweden and the United States at the top of the pole with 63-67 lines per 100 people. The world average teledensity is 15.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and China chart much lower. But the really troubling part of this indicator is the large number of countries with less than one line per 100 people. These include Haiti, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Tanzania and Uganda.

When we measure Internet use, a similar picture emerges. IDC (International Data Corporatiop) places developed countries like Iceland, Sweden and Singapore at the top of the list along with Canada and the U.S. Others like Qatar, Malaysia and the African countries scrape in at less than 5 per cent of the total population. Infrastructure and availability are key obstacles, but so is cost. The average South African Internet user has an income seven times the national average. Ninety per cent of users in Latin America come from upper-income groups.

In practice, the digital divide reflects the mirror opposite of the benefits I talked about earlier. South Africa is the best connected African country, but even today many hospitals and 75 per cent of schools have no telephone line. AIDS is a huge problem that threatens to disrupt the stability of the whole African continent. The front line of the battle against AIDS are places like Mkuki, which is a community resource centre at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. Unlike hospitals in Toronto, it cannot boast remote diagnostics and consultations; it has no tele-radiology or telephone connectivity--wireless or land line. The nearest public phone booth is in the next major town, 27 kilometres away.

It's an equally bleak picture in education. The Nairobi University Medical School library is considered one of the best in the region. It receives 20 medical journals compared with the 5,000 that can be found in an average North American med school.

In Brazzaville, Congo, the university has only 40 medical books and a dozen journals, none of them more current than 1993. In Harare, Zimbabwe, the one public library has stock from the 60s and 70s and not a single computer screen in the two-storey building. Simple, basic access to the Internet would make an exponential difference in cases like these.

This is what Kofi Anan means when he talks about the digital opportunity. He recently said: "The digital revolution has unleashed an unprecedented wave of opportunity. Used responsibly, it can greatly improve our chances of defeating poverty."

Canadians long immersed in the digital revolution understand intuitively how this can happen.

At the recent State of the World Forum held in New York, Huguette Labelle, the former head of CIDA, noted: "I have seen cotton pluckers in Africa getting one-fifth of the prevalent price because they didn't have access to price information on the Internet and thus were solely dependent on middlemen. The opportunities are there to de-isolate the isolated, to de-exclude the excluded."

For many of us, the digital divide just doesn't make any sense. In my industry, we follow a principle called Metcalfe's Law. Metcalfe's Law, simply stated, suggests the value of a network increases exponentially as the cost of the network increases linearly. Each node on the network mathematically delivers more value than the last. This is certainly demonstrated in terms of network investment. But it is also true in terms of distributed networked intelligence.

This is an important point frequently overlooked in all the discourse around the digital divide. We talk about the need to connect the unwired world based on a presumption that the South will benefit from the knowledge of the North. But the South has a tremendous wealth of knowledge to share as well.

Nairobi University is a case in point. It sits in one of the most disease-ridden environments in the world. People in the region have been treating these illnesses for millennia. Maybe they know something about immunology that we don't. Even if they can't cure the diseases, they can probably describe the symptoms more accurately than researchers in Boston or London.

The South has knowledge the North needs. We can get as smug and self-congratulatory as we like about our tremendous digital networked intelligence. But as long as it only embraces half the world's population, it isn't the achievement that it must be.

As I said earlier, it will take great inventiveness to complete the job. But we simply must do it.

Fortunately, the importance of this task has seized the imaginations of many resourceful, smart people. In the time remaining, I want to share a few of the strategies that drive their networking instincts.

Exploring the digital opportunity has become core business for many international aid agencies. The UN Development Program, for example, has launched three technology access community centres in Egypt. Each centre is equipped with computers and Internet access and is located in a public building accessible to all citizens. The centres offer access, of course, but also training in computer literacy, desktop publishing and technical support. These skills in turn can be deployed for tele-medicine and electronic commerce applications. By offering these tools free to anyone in the community, the skill base for more sophisticated applications and programmes will expand.

Governments, of course, are key players in the drive to bridge the digital divide. A number have made this a national policy priority. The Prime Minister of India for example has declared, "We are determined to remove all the hurdles of policy and implementation in the path of rapid expansion of telecom and the Internet in India. It is our endeavour to create a proper harmony between the traditional economy and the IT-driven New Economy." To this end, and recognising its distinct advantage as the largest source of programming professionals in the world, India has launched an aggressive programme of tax incentives and other measures to lure investment in software development and to expand connectivity.

Estonia is another example. President Lennart Meri has recognised that small can be beautiful for universal access. With a population of only 1.4 million to connect, he's charging ahead. He has created a network of public access points throughout the country and has launched something he calls the "Tiger Leap" programme.

It provides Internet-based learning resources for all Estonian pupils. This has rapidly modernised education in Estonia and made a huge impact on penetration rates. Estonia now ranks among the top 15 countries in Europe for computer and Internet use. Those of us who believe in the democratising power of the Internet will be pleased to learn that this strategy is also credited with a swift transition for Estonia from Soviet economics. It is expected to be the first Eastern-bloc country to earn admission to the EU.

Sometimes governments need help and I'm pleased to say that they can frequently find it from my industry. Cisco Systems, for example, commits significant resources to the Cisco Networking Academy Program. This is a global training programme that teaches students throughout the world to design, build and maintain the networks that will distribute our intelligence in the future.

There are over 3800 Networking Academies in 70 countries worldwide. If you've ever had the good fortune to meet some of their students, you'll understand how strong the networking instinct is among young people.

Another example is how Lucent Technologies, the world's biggest telecommunications equipment supplier, demonstrates its commitment through programmes such as Lucent Links and its Youth Development Program in India.

The Lucent Links programme brings together young people around the world who ordinarily would not communicate with one another, either face-to-face or through technology. The $50-million programme uses technology to engage young people around issues of inclusion, diversity and technology and is designed to help them develop leadership skills and the cultural competencies necessary to live and work in a multicultural community.

The Youth Development Program funds vocational training and the education of homeless youth in India. These young people learn and develop skills which enable them to self-help, and grow into engaged and productive citizens.

Sometimes the drive to bridge the digital divide becomes a personal crusade. I know an IT entrepreneur from Calgary who is a fervent believer in Metcalfe's Law. At the Beijing Plus Five Conference in New York in June, he met a woman from Cameroon who heads a group of 3,000 woman entrepreneurs. They have all been trained in computer technology and the principles of electronic commerce. They have goods to move and a centre to operate from.

Their biggest barrier to entering the global e-commerce marketplace was the prohibitive cost of a satellite connection. Anxious to see if Metcalfe was right, he simply wrote her a cheque. And now the women of ASAFE are about to encounter a market beyond their wildest dreams.

This initiative inspires me. We can look at the digital divide as a vast, impossible task. We can give up and stay home, content with a half-completed network. But this isn't the spirit that has built the network so far. If there's one thing that has characterised the networking instinct, it's tenacious determination to overcome obstacles. The solutions I've outlined illustrate the wide array of approaches to this, from the simple to the complex, from the institutional to the individual. They illustrate that there is no one correct way to finish this job. It calls for a variety of approaches. It will take all our ingenuity and all our commitment to do it.

We are about to begin Canada's IT Week. It is a national celebration of our connectedness and it salutes the creativity, innovation and enterprise of Canadians in the IT field. IT Week will be celebrated in conferences, seminars, open houses and community events all across the country. ITAC along with the IT Week sponsors--Intel, Microsoft Canada, IBM Canada and Pricewaterhouse Coopers--is proud to collaborate with Industry Canada on this initiative.

Canada has a great deal to be proud of. Canada also has the potential to show the rest of the world how to achieve and profit from a high standard of connectedness and technological leadership. So I'm confident IT Week will be a great success.

But I hope that somewhere among all the dialogue that IT Week generates, we'll take the time to consider how far we've come in creating distributed networked intelligence. And I hope we'll also consider how much lies ahead if we are to deliver the benefits of connectivity to all Canadians and ultimately to all humanity. I hope IT Week provides the inspiration for new ideas and new strategies for getting this job done.

We can bridge the digital divide. We must. This unwavering human instinct for networking is an unstoppable force. It has brought us tremendous benefit. But only when the network embraces all of humanity will we have an achievement truly worth celebrating. Let's get on with it.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by George D. Anderson, President and CEO, Insurance Council of Canada and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.