Yesterday, the COO sent round a note to staff; this morning I find myself elevated to the point of wanting to dance. Whenever I leave a job, I get the feeling of a weight being lifted off my shoulders and, shortly after, feel the excitement of future possibilities. This time, it is particularly strong.

I still have a busy meeting in Seoul in just over a week to deal with, and then more work for the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt two weeks after that. But from December I will be free to apply my energies wherever I wish and man does it feels good.

I’ve learnt a hell of a lot over the past two-and-a-half years but with the ending of a big agreement between the organization and the US government (and they said it couldn’t be done), with my boss heading back to Australia, and with a feeling that my ability to effect changes has passed its peak, it is definitely time to move on.

Update: I just found my original post on taking the job. Pleased to see I have managed to stay true to myself, although I may have to evaluate performance against my own goals in December.

What will I be doing?

I have a long list of things that has been building up for a while. My Sex.com book and its film rights, a book on the domain name industry, a book on the cutting edge and revolutionary uses of the Internet. I may write my Great Drunks book. I may write my Rockall disaster book.

I have two business plans. And I have my beloved journalism: the new Internet extensions will be fascinating; I am absolutely itching to get stuck into electric car technology. Two people have been asking me to build their websites for a while. I definitely want to do some consulting on participation and the Internet to save people huge amounts of time and trouble figuring it out for themselves. And I have an overriding desire to do some real good in a broader sense – maybe get into some of the gov2.0 stuff going on.

My head is buzzing with plans; just need to take a week off surfing and fixing up my van and it will all come clear. I’m also getting married to Sapna in April in San Francisco and we will probably move up there in the new year, which I’m also excited about.

So great opportunities lie ahead. In the meantime I need to stop writing this post and get back to the unbelievable list of things to do for the ICANN Seoul meeting.

Below is the note that the COO generously sent to staff yesterday re: my heading off.

Hello all,

Kieren McCarthy has decided to leave his role as general manager of public participation at ICANN.

Kieren has been with ICANN since February 2007, initially working from the UK and then moving to Los Angeles. In that time he has worked tirelessly and won frequent plaudits from the community and Board for improving ICANN’s interactions with its community and lowering the barriers to participation in the organization. He will be leaving at the end of November, following the ICANN Seoul meeting and Internet Governance Forum in Egypt.

Some of Kieren’s achievements have been to revamp the ICANN website, restructure the public comment process, greatly expand and improve remote participation at meetings, produce monthly magazines, encourage and assist the production of a range of other newsletters and updates to the community, introduce professional photography and video, create a meeting question box, and oversee many of ICANN’s web presences including the blog, public participation site, meeting sites, mobile site, and the front page of the main ICANN site.

Kieren has been pivotal in the introduction of ICANN’s translation and interpretation programs, its consultation principles, and its document deadline policy. He has also introduced ICANN to a range of social networking tools, used to improve interaction and communication with the community, as well as a number of innovative sessions at international public meetings, including a joint meeting of representatives of all ICANN’s arms.

Kieren is leaving to work on a range of projects. He will be partly returning to journalism and will continue to cover Internet and green technology issues within California for the foreseeable future.

I’m sure you all join me in wishing Kieren great success in these next projects.

Thanks!

Doug

I embarked on some rather silly Twitter-following very early this morning (all sparked off by Stephen Fry tweeting about Trafigura) and ended up discovering that Eddie Izzard was in Los Angeles for a documentary about his life. I missed a Q&A he gave earlier this week at a screening (bloody shame) but he tweeted that he’d be on some chatshow I’ve never heard of – Kevin Pollak.

As it turns out this is a low-budget, Internet-only chatshow that makes me want to call a few mates, drive up to Hollywood and completely overhaul because there have been some interesting guests but the format is painful. Kevin, bless him, needs an audience to be funny (plus there is a reason canned laughter tracks exist) and he is a truly dreadful interviewer, but if you press play on the show (embedded above) and come back 17 minutes and 20 seconds later you’ll find Eddie Izzard giving a really interesting interview.

Far from going off on his surreal semi-structured humour bursts, Eddie Izzard was actually in a relaxed and chatty frame of mind. I’ve no doubt that having watched a documentary about his rise he had been pondering about his life and existence and clearly had some thoughts running through his head.

What came out though was what a smart, driven person Eddie is. He has retained copyright on his DVDs (he did accounting exams), he carefully and methodically approached his career of choice, he has interesting insights into his profession. And he was clearly willing to talk about personal details: the death of his mother when he was six which, apparently, the film goes into in some detail and is the main driver in Eddie’s life; and the fact that he had had a relationship with the film’s director.

I really wish it had been me interviewing him because he was relaxed, in a small room and willing to open up. It’s rare that such a practiced and polished performer is willing to let his guard down that much. Anyway, we shall never know. It does make me want to get into Internet video though – and do a really professional journalistic job of interviewing interesting people.

Eddie Izzard’s film Believe is at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 cinema on Sunset until Thursday and then it moves to New York. Initial reviews have been very positive.

Much of the credit is going to Twitter so it is fitting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger twittered himself about the “victory” when Carter-Ruck solicitors backed down at the last minute (just an hour before a court hearing questioning the Draconian court order restricting the newspaper from reporting questions asked in Parliament). Soon after, Rusbridger thanked those that had used Twitter to bring attention to the issue and for their great support.

I could go on and on about Twitter – everyone else has – but while this is a very interesting development in modern communication, ultimately the only thing that Twitter brings to the game is speed. I had never heard of Trafigura before yesterday, and this morning, when I went to type it in the company’s name to find out what had happened overnight, I found myself hard-pushed to remember its name – it was traffic-something.

This whole episode was certainly a victory for freedom of speech but it is but one fight is a very much larger war that it is up to journalists and politicians to tackle over a longer timeframe than 24 hours on Twitter. No one will remember Trafigura in even a month’s time. But in a month’s time there will be nothing to stop a firm like Carter-Ruck from doing exactly the same thing all over again on a story that doesn’t garner as much attention.

As the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur also twittered – if the Parliament website didn’t exist and didn’t post the MPs questions, no one would have been any the wiser that this whole thing happened.

The cost of silencing a country? £100,000

The fact remains that a single company was able to silence the entire UK media and prevent it even talking about events in Parliament for a sum of money – the amount it paid to Carter-Ruck. How much does it costs to gag the two pillars of democracy? That’s hard to pin down because it was part of a much bigger campaign but I would guesstimate £100,000 – focused in the right place and with skilled practitioners of course.

This should never have been possible. No gagging order should ever have been approved. The Guardian shouldn’t need to go to court to argue against it. And it shouldn’t take hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens collectively shouting to pressure a company to withdrawing an order. This is a systemic problem and it needs to be fixed.

I see the Liberal Democrats are calling for a debate on this issue – press freedom and libel laws. But will they get the support they need from Twitter-citizens in order to make that debate happen and then to force changes on a legal system very, very resistant to change? I doubt it – I’ve not seen more than a handful of people tackling this wider point or asking people to email their MPs to keep the pressure up (answer: go to They Work For You).

Very few people are in this for the long-haul: they appear when outraged, then don’t stop until people back down, and then they expect the professionals to get on with making sure it doesn’t happen again.

So what are the ways in which this issue can be dealt with? I see several:

• Forcing the High Court to review flaws in its system

This path has already been flagged by the MP at the centre of the recent argument. Along with the main question about Trafigura, Paul Farrelly also asked: “To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what mechanisms HM Court Service uses to draw up rosters of duty judges for the purpose of considering time of the essence applications for the issuing of injunctions by the High Court.”

To prevent these sorts of orders in future you have to look at how they are approved. This gagging order should never have been approved. And it is NOT sufficient that someone can go to court to get it overturned. This idea of approval and then appeal makes sense to the legal profession but it does not work in reality. It is being gamed to the detriment of society.

The legal profession really needs to face up to the fact that the last 10 years of court actions against journalism has not improved the situation; it has made it worse. I would like to see some legal journalists starting to pressure lawyers and judges into debating this and overhauling libel laws in the face of the modern world.

• Parliamentary debates

Everyone likes to beat up on politicians but they remain the people’s representatives and they are the people who write and rewrite laws. This is a difficult subject – which means that unless there is a groundswell of support, and several champions of the cause – it will eventually be dropped by MPs.

But if it becomes a topic of public focus, if votes start coming into the equation, and if there are enough MPs who see and understand it is their duty to have these debates and to make real change for the betterment of the country, then you could see real change.

• Press make libel laws an issue

The press itself needs to organise and work together and make this an issue in the public’s eye. If there is one thing that newspapers in particular and really good at it is taking an issue and running with it.

It needs to be broken down into understandable chunks, people need to be kept engaged, informed of milestones and action points, and there has to be constant effort and resources put behind finding more permanent solutions than Twitter-victories.

Newspapers are currently so enamoured with Twitter and blogging but I wonder how many of them have any understanding of how to harness that power. Do they have any idea how to engage those people that came to their support today? Do they know how to build a campaign with people, rather than just inform people of their campaign?

I’m not sure they do. I might have to see what I can do about that.

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

The Guardian is going to appeal – and it will win – but that’s not the point. This is a dreadful abuse of legal power – undermining the two biggest institutions designed to maintain freedom: Parliament and the press. That a newspaper is not allowed to publish what a representative of the people has asked in the country’s parliament is so bad it’s almost a spoof. And of course, it had to be the biggest offenders of press gagging – Carter-Ruck solicitors – behind it.

For those that don’t know the little world of UK journalism, Carter-Ruck specialise in pressuring journalists for rich and powerful clients to prevent them publishing embarrassing details. They are so renowned at this that the campaigning legendary publication Private Eye refers to them as “Carter-Fuck”.

Anyway, this fortunately is the era of the Internet, so I have found the question in question and posted it above. You can actually read the official version on the Parliament website. It is question 292409. Farrelly – who used to be city editor for the Guardian’s Sunday paper, The Observer – asked a further three questions, all clearly pointing in the same direction:

292952 – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the Court of Appeal judgment in May 2009 in the case of Michael Napier and Irwin Mitchell v Pressdram Limited in respect of press freedom to report proceedings in court.

293006 – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years.

293012 – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what mechanisms HM Court Service uses to draw up rosters of duty judges for the purpose of considering time of the essence applications for the issuing of injunctions by the High Court.

Hopefully many others will feel similarly infuriated and publish these questions and also start digging into what’s behind them.

Update: I’ve done a quick bit of digging on this and have turned up some interesting information on Trafigura and their toxic waste dumping.

The Guardian has been running stories on how the UK-based company tried to cover up an African pollution disaster by offering to pay off those affected. And Farrelly picked up in a Select Committee hearing in June – where you can read one lawyer explaining the legal lengths that the company and its lawyers are going to in order to prevent news of that deal spreading.

And thanks to Andy Chantrill aka Plaggypig for pointing me to this Newsnight investigation into the incident. So you watch a video of it as well.

This was an important moment, not just for ICANN but also for the whole future of the Internet and its domain name system. It has been somewhat simplistically summarized as the United States letting the Internet navigate its own course, rather than decide that somehow one country’s lawmakers had a better idea how to deal with this global communications network than any other country’s. Unless you are an Internet governance addict, that explanation should suffice.

More importantly from a personal perspective, it was an extraordinary achievement after two years of hard work by ICANN’s staff, especially my boss Paul Levins. I recall very clearly people dismissing the very concept of the affirmation out of hand just 20 months ago, and then a fair few people being aggressively anti a new agreement until even just a few weeks earlier.

But in the end, it was a great piece of work, and that was reflected in an across-the-board positive response from the community, the US government, the Senate and House, the European Union, the registries and registrars and, unbelievably, even the most dedicated ICANN haters.

But I’m not going to go into any details here. I just came across some snaps I took with my iPhone on the Wednesday the Affirmation was announced so I thought I’d stick ‘em up while the mood took me.

Although that appears to be a San Francisco telephone number, what happens is that I am able to cause that number to redirect to whatever other numbers I want – which means that I am now longer wedded to a telephone number and I don’t have to constantly update people when I shift home or mobile phone suppliers or numbers.

The service is quite interesting although far from perfect. Someone calls it, it rings a few times and then asks them to leave their name to see if I’ll answer. It then rings me and I can decide whether to accept the call or not. What is quite good is that if a message is left, Google Voice automatically transcribes what is said and then emails and texts me the transcript (so far, I would give the transcript accuracy 7 out of 10).

I had already put in place a system for allowing people to keep in touch with me – kieren.tel. This is a web domain that using the Internet’s own naming system to provide up-to-date info on how to contact me (including phone numbers, emails, addresses, websites etc etc).

All of these new services are creating an interesting phenomenon – the locationless person. It’s an interesting reflection on the modern world where we are constantly moving – not only physically but also virtually. With a way to make sure that people only need one access point, it enables you to switch products and services as and when you want, which in itself adds a big element of competition because companies – and nearly always the worst and most monopolistic ones – have tended to rely on the fear and hassle of switching to retain customers.

No we have freer markets, hence more competition and so more innovation. And, of course, it makes everyone’s lives easier. Now all you have to do is decide which catch-all service you want to use – a dot-tel domain, Google Voice, and ENUM number, of whatever else crops up in the next few years.

One of the things I love about Los Angeles (well, Southern California) is the abundance of the Bird of Paradise and its extraordinary bright orange (though sometimes black) unfurled mohican flower.

So when I moved to my new flat and had room, I bought one, with the salesman telling me it would flower in July/August (i.e. a few months’ time). It’s now mid-September and nothing. But the plant(s) do occasionally shoot out a long green stem that promises to provide one, only to unfurl across its length rather than at the top and reveal another enormous bright green leaf.

Anyway, the shoot in the picture looks promising to me and I am keeping my fingers crossed. Incidentally I am thinking of using the first flower from my plant as the buttonhole thing for my wedding. Not sure how that works – presumably it would have to be very fresh.

One more vaguely interesting thing – this whole post has been put together through a Wordpress iPhone app – interested to see how it fares.

It is one of several endearing moments in this road movie that boasts an impressive cast of actors and possesses touches of brilliance but which ultimately falls down by trying to push the reconciliation of its main characters too fast.

Justin Timberlake stars in his first serious acting role in The Open Road, appearing alongside Jeff Bridges as a father and son rebuilding their relationship despite themselves.

Bridges’ character, Kyle Garrett, is a revered retired baseball pro living off his glory days who agrees to travel with his son Carlton to his estranged wife’s hospital bed before she undergoes surgery. But Kyle is much happier sticking with the unconditional praise he receives from fans than the messy and complex relationships he has left behind.

The film itself draws on the real-world relationship between director, Michael Meredith, and his retired quarterback legend father Don Meredith. And the movie is all the better, and worse, because of it.

In a second touching and subtle scene in a roadside diner, a small comment by Kyle makes it clear he has been quietly following his son’s progress, and Carlton swells invisibly on the screen; while stranded at a gas station, a small piece of fatherly advice is dismissed and yet treasured at the same time, in the way that only a son can feel when receiving passed-down wisdom.

But while Meredith beautifully captures the internal heart-lifts, when it comes to Carlton’s anger and mistrust of his father’s evasive behaviour, the film slips from 3D into 2 and is played out through internal monologues or clumsy explanations, rather than through the same nuanced observations. It’s a shame because in Bridges, the film had found the perfect actor for blending charisma and cowardice.

Bridges is on top of his game and is compelling viewing. Likewise Mara, who slips effortlessly between being distant and despairing, and soft and seductive. The falldown is with Timberlake, who despite showing moments of real depth, often can’t prevent himself from grinning, as if he’s enjoying proper acting so much that he just can’t help but be excited. The disparity between the two jars the viewer awake and means that the film never manages to hook you in.

The set pieces are great – well filmed, acted and directed – but there is not sufficient emotional padding in between leaving you a little uncertain as to why they have all started behaving so differently. You can feel the film’s impatience: it wants reconciliation between both the son and father, and it wants Lucy and Charlton to realise the obvious, and it doesn’t have time to be sat in the back of a red SUV for hours on end, as its characters are.

In the end, it is this impatience that gets the better of the film. The best road movies have you rolling along with the car’s occupants, dealing with the long stretches of nothing, observing the little details and flashing past the lives of others. The Open Road forgets that: even after the mother (played by Mary Steenburgen) speaks to Charlton on the phone to urge him, and, seemingly the film itself, to remember that the journey is the important thing.

The Open Road is a touching tale, made remarkable by its cast, but it opts to take the freeway rather than the scenic route and it is less enjoyable because of it.

7/10

The Open Road website: http://www.theopenroadmovie.com/

This time last year I took the day off and went surfing. I think I might do the same tomorrow. I have taken the day off work and made it as plain as I can that I won’t be doing any work at all. That’s what I think your birthday should be for – to take a day in the year for getting on with whatever you want to get on with.

Currently I’m thinking: surfing and then fixing up my van. Or I may just hang out by the beach and do little, have a few beers and talk to a few of Venice’s lively locals.

Why should any of you care about this? You shouldn’t. And if you are reading this, thinking how lovely it sounds to have a day to spend how you wish. Well, then you need to take a day off. I guarantee you the world will continue to revolve when you get back.

What’s annoying is that I have been happily using the loser – tr.im – and been enjoying the stats it produces. No more – the stats are gone and the ultimate display of the risk of fast-paced information becoming dead information, the short links will stopped working at the end of the year.

Here’s what is on Tr.im website at the moment: “tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

“Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

“There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

“We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”

Interesting that even in these heady hype days of Twitter than no one would pay for Tr.im. Ah well, like the note says, now I’m shifting to bit.ly. I wonder how long it will be able to provide the service before desperately seeking funds.