Here’s one that bit me recently. NSString has a method called stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, which purports to make the string safe for use, say, as a parameter to a URL. There are several characters that are reserved in parameters to URLs – for example the slash character, or the ampersand, because these are characters that are used to delimit the URL itself. Therefore we encode these, and this is done using the percent encoding scheme.

As an example, if you want to use the string hell & brimstone + earthly/delight (and why wouldn’t you?) as a parameter to a URL then you’ll need to convert it to hell+%26+brimstone+%2B+earthly%2Fdelight so that the ampersand becomes %26, the plus becomes %2B and the slash becomes %2F. Note that spaces are encoded as pluses, which is why the original plus sign needs to be encoded.

But stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding doesn’t respect these rules, and actually produces this: hell%20&%20brimstone%20+%20earthly/delight

It fails to encode the ampersand, the slash and the plus, and many (most?) web servers will be confused by that. It encodes the spaces as %20, which is just as acceptable as encoding them as a plus.

In short, it’s completely broken, which is frustrating. But thankfully there’s a lower-level API we can use which, thanks to the magic of Objective-C categories, we can tack on to NSString. This is based on a blogpost by Simon Woodside, which I’ve just turned into a category.

Here’s the category’s header file:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

@interface NSString (URLEncoding)
-(NSString *)urlEncodeUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding;
@end

And here’s the implementation:

#import "NSString+URLEncoding.h"

@implementation NSString (URLEncoding)

-(NSString *)urlEncodeUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding {

	return (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
			   (CFStringRef)self,
			   NULL,
			   (CFStringRef)@"!*'\"();:@&=+$,/?%#[]% ",
			   CFStringConvertNSStringEncodingToEncoding(encoding));
}

@end

And now we can simply do this:

NSString *raw = @"hell & brimstone + earthly/delight";
NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://example.com/example?param=%@",
			[raw urlEncodeUsingEncoding:NSUTF8Encoding]];
NSLog(url);

And the result will be exactly as we hoped:

http://example.com/example?param=hell%20%26%20brimstone%20%2B%20earthly%2Fdelight

Introducing the 10k Feed Board

Drawing inspiration from the recently released Flipboard app on the iPad I set about building an app that allowed you to browse Flickr photos and Twitter searches. You can configure a set of panels with different search criteria, choosing from either a Flickr search, Flickr set or a Twitter search. The app then makes use of Yahoo’s YQL service to retrieve the data and populate the panels for you to navigate around. It takes advantage of the new localStorage feature of HTML 5 compliant browsers to persist your queries, meaning that you can come back time and again without losing your search terms. The drawback here, of course, is that you need a modern browser for it to work – Sorry all you IE users – looks like you’ll have to upgrade to a proper browser (IE9 Dev Preview,Firefox or a WebKit browser)!

Take a look at the 10k Feed Board here, your votes are appreciated! ;)

Beyond the 10k limit

With the competition’s 10 kilobyte restrictions I had to limit the content types to Flickr photos and Twitter searches but I will be taking the concept further to include RSS and Atom feed content – it will then become a nice new way to consume all your feed content.

I will also shortly be blogging about the technical aspects of the app – localStorage; how to consume YQL data; and the associated problems of dealing with multiple feed types.

But how can we take some of the lessons that have been learned and implemented by the start up community and apply them to the agency worldview? Here’s a few thoughts pulled together from what other people are already doing.

1. How to find your users

The first step in the process of customer development is finding them. Cindy Alvarez, Product Manager at KISS Metrics, has some useful thoughts on this over on her blog. Adopt a diverse approach and and don’t be snooty about the methods you use (Facebook ads anyone?). It certainly makes sense to set up a Google Alert and trawl through Twitter for mentions of keywords relating to your problem/solution. If you are working for a pre-established brand, as we often are at Made By Many, she suggests putting out a call on Craigslist and equivalents to find customers of the brand and their competitors. As you do more research you’ll start to map where it is that your users hang out and what channels they are comfortable communicating through – Twitter, forums, comments on blogs, Facebook, plain old email. Basically you are a glorified stalker. You’re also a bit like a bee gathering snippets of user nectar from each point you touch down on, which then feeds back into your hypotheses about your problem/solution.

2. How to pull off the customer interview

Once you know who your users are your next step will be to engage with them to find out what they want. But as Cindy Alvarez points out most people don’t know what they want:

“Customer development isn’t asking customers what they want – it’s seeking to understand what they need, how they work, where their pain points and highest priorities are.  Customers may not be able to articulate what they want, but they can’t hide what they need.”

When you’re looking to validate the hypotheses you’ve developed, a key tool in your armoury will be the customer interview. The kinds of questions you ask and how you phrase them will have a huge impact on how useful these interviews are. Here is a template I’ve taken from Cindy’s blog:

Snapshot from Cindy Alvarez's excellent post

Clearly these are targeted towards the kinds of questions a start up would ask. You would want to tweak the focus if you were testing a campaign idea but I think a lot of the basic premises still hold true – ask open-ended questions, position the customer as an expert and make sure you shut up and listen. In his blog post on customer interviews, Sachin Agarawal, Director of Marketing at Blueleaf.com advises starting your questions as far back as possible so that you don’t assume the problem you are trying to solve is an actual problem for your users

“My magic phrase in every customer development interview is ‘that’s interesting – tell me more’.”

Sachin Agarawal argues that the main aim of the interview is to get your users to talk around the problems you’re trying to solve and, in this instance, tangents are God. Interview questions should be treated as springboards to provoke thought and discussion, not as rigid structures to be adhered to at all costs. It’s likely that the real gems will only be revealed when your users follows their own thought associations rather than those dictated by you. In the same vein, Sachin also advises deliberately misrepresenting an interviewee’s opinion to get them to pinpoint more clearly what they mean.

3. Pivots and how to make sure you’re solving the right problem

The approach to customer development taken by the start ups I’ve been looking into is heavily influenced by their Agile and Lean approach to the whole process. As David Weekly from pbWorks says in this presentation “success is adaptation”.

The simple logic behind this argument is that when developing a product or service you should be guided by the stories of your customers, but more than that, you should expect to be surprised by the users and uses. This is where pivoting comes into play. Essentially you need to to be able to respond to how people actually want to interact with your product or service. You won’t be able to do this unless you are prototyping and frequently testing your ideas with your users.

Pivoting can happen during the early stages of customer discovery and validation, and in some ways it’s easiest at this stage when you’re still feeling your way to figuring out what you want to create (unless of course you’re overly cursed with a ‘vision’). But it’s also hugely important to be able to pivot at a later stage, after you’ve gone through the first couple of iterations to get your product or service (or campaign) out there. And it’s then that it’s hardest to do.

The pivoting case studies I’ve been looking at were all able to pivot even if it meant completely abandoning what they’d first set out to build or entirely resegmenting their audience. KISS Metrics thought they were building an analytics tool for social application developers when actually, after a couple of pivots, they found out they were building a product for marketers (I hope they weren’t too disappointed). You can read more about their lessons learned in this slideshare.

So there you have it, that’s what I’ve discovered so far on how to get to know your customers. If you’re naturally nosey I have a feeling you won’t find it too hard.

We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.

The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.

Here are the things we want to talk about

Good News: Apps, Paywalls, Publishers and Content

News organizations and publishers are walking backwards into the future carrying the cultural and business baggage of 200 years of mass media. Most will die; new models will arise. In the next half decade we expect a wholesale change in the way news is produced and consumed and by the end of this period we’ll know the answer to the question: “If we had never had mass media, what would journalism look like today?” A panel of individuals involved in news innovation looks at the issue from all sides and plots a path from old to new models of sharing what we need to know.

Daddy, You Should Tweet That: Parenting Goes Digital

The parenting web is on fire, with more parents tweeting and more family sites and services launching every month. Social media is fast becoming a huge part of modern parenting, but to what end? Is it here to wreck or revolutionize family time? Is there money to be made in this market, or are savvy parents marketing-proof? A panel of agencies and service designers will explore a series of projects to identify mistakes made, lessons learned, and future directions for the parenting web.

The Last of the Launch-and-Leave ‘Ems

Negotiating the new handover. Agencies are building fewer static campaign-oriented sites and more platforms, communities and services. Cutting the apron strings between agency and digital product immediately after launch doesn’t make practical sense, but maintaining the relationship indefinitely is costly for the client and creatively stifling for the agency. This panel will explore solutions that are most likely to be beneficial to both parties as well as the members of the service they are trying to build: a new plan for launch, propagation and perpetuation.

Your vote will get us to the next round

All of these panels are in the panel picker right now, just waiting for you to register or sign in (free! easy!) and vote for them. If you think these things are worth talking about, please spread the word and rally the troops to make it so. Please also use the comment space on this post or on the panelpicker to share any ideas or links that you think would make these sessions more valuable.

His account accumulated over a thousand followers in a matter of hours as word spread that one of the most well known ad agency creatives in the world had joined Twitter.

However, within a day or so people began to suspect that this wasn’t the real deal. The language was poor and the tweeted quotes hackneyed. “Not the language of Hegarty” people cried via Twitter.

On Monday night I tweeted that I was unfollowing the account. The 1990s management speak and trite ‘creative’ blatherings were too much. This was obviously an imposter. And I think I know who it is…

As soon as I announced the fact I was followed by an Art Director from Brazil. On checking out his account there were a few things that seemed odd.

First, the apostrophes used in the @John_Hegarty account looked to have come from a non-english keyboard. They’re more like acute accents. Exactly the same as those in this Brazilian AD’s stream. And secondly, this guy was retweeting the @John_Hegarty account like mad. Pretty much tweet for tweet. He also seemed to have an unusual obsession with reports of @John_Hegarty on Twitter from other sources.

Stuart did a little tinkering with the Twitter API to see if there was anything we could glean that wasn’t visible on the public accounts.

But a look at the resumé on his portfolio site sealed the deal. He said, as part of his bio, that he was following @John_Hegarty on Twitter. Why would you say that? And so quick after the account’s creation.

So, I think it’s time to out the person who I think is the imposter.

His name is Lucas Zaiden, an Art Director from Brazil. Currently working at Leo Burnett. He can be found at @lucaszaiden on Twitter.

What do you think? Am I right?

Of course, brands have been supporting the arts for ages and there have been some great examples of this, although some backfire as seen recently with BP’s sponsorship of The Tate. And there are those in the arts community who feel that corporate sponsorship has no place, that it sullies the purity of art. But the harsh reality is that the arts need funds, and the most ready source is going to come from the private sector.

At  Camp Bestival last weekend, in amongst the fun and wonder, I was struck by how much harder brands are going to have to work to engage with people, and how this has potential to benefit artists.

One of the best things I experienced at the festival was ‘The House of Fairytales’ field which was made up of a whole range of family activities.

At the entrance to the field, we walked through Passport Control and picked up a passport which gave us access to all of the activities in the field. From there, we progressed through Surrealist, Anarchist, Fabulist, Mixologist, and so on, experiencing some very cool things along the way. And if we completed enough activities in a given ‘house’, we earned the relevant medal.

Sounds involved? Well, yes it was. But it was also a lot of fun and a brilliant way to while away the afternoon for both adults and kids. I looked up The House of Fairytales when I got home and discovered they’re an established artists’ collective:

a child-centred artist led project which draws on an extensive team of artists, performers, writers, educationalists, designers, musicians, film makers, dreamers and philosophers to create magical, parallel worlds where learning is play and play is directed learning.

On exiting The House of Fairytales, I picked up a leaflet promoting The Family Project which turns out to be a Victorinox initiative. Without realising it, I’d been immersed in a brand experience for the past couple of hours. The only clue to it was the subtly branded passport and leaflet. This made me question the value of providing a complex experience for people that is pretty far removed from what a brand represents or usually does. Victorinox are manufacturers of the iconic Swiss Army Knife, plus watches, clothes and luggage. So The House of Fairytales wasn’t an altogether obvious thing for the brand to do, but clearly it was engaging and intriguing enough to encourage me to investigate further.

And that’s where the distinction between sponsorship and partnership comes in. If a brand is smart enough to partner with artists who can engage with the public, create intrigue, memorable experiences and conversational currency, everyone is onto a winning number.

The challenge now though is for individual artists and small art collectives to find partners and sponsors. Arts & Business exists to connect philanthropists and businesses with arts organisations; it does a great job of placing business bods on the boards of arts and cultural organisations.

I can’t help thinking, though, that unless you’re Anish Kapoor or Julian Opie, you’re not going to get very far with a big corporate sponsorship deal and that a grassroots match fund is what’s needed. A service that artists, brands and companies of all sizes can sign up to. From a quick search, I found the UK sponsorship board. Something tells me it needs to up its game if it’s to significantly help artists find sponsors and vice versa. A classifieds board does not a compelling proposition make. If you’re interested in seeing what the arts community are doing to address the cuts, check out artsfunding.ning.com

(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)

Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.

Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.

Why all this failure?

It’s actually simple. Most new products fail because they’re the ‘wrong’ product, not because of project or executional risk. This ‘wrong product risk’ accounts for up to 80% of the total risk according to agile experts Energized Work who were in to do some training last week (the graph above is also from their deck).

So if building the ‘wrong’ product is the biggest risk (by far), then it is foolhardy to leave this risk unmitigated until the end of the process. And yet this is exactly what most people and companies tend to do.

You probably recognise this argument as it’s very much the basis of the excellent thinking being espoused by Steve Blank in his Customer Development Manifesto and more recently Eric Ries with his convincing Lean Startup philosophy. A brilliant albeit lengthy articulation of all this thinking is in Ries’ Stanford talk.

It makes complete sense. It’s about testing and iterating every part of your business model and product, and about getting frequent and fast customer guidance as much and as early as possible. And it’s not simply about asking customers, ‘what do you want?’ – we know they won’t be able to provide a clear or correct response to such a naive question – it’s about testing responses to concepts, prototypes and early product iterations.

This concept seems to be anathema to many entrepreneurs; well, at least to those who want to deliver *their* vision as opposed to solving a customer’s problem.

I suspect the same is true for many agencies, and given Made by Many is very much inspired by web start-up approaches, I have been wondering how agencies – traditional, digital and otherwise – handle this necessarily high degree of customer obsession?

The first obvious difference is that agencies have a harder time getting proximity to ‘real’ customers, because like it or not,  their immediate customer is the client. And say what you will about doing loads of user research, segmentation, employing user-centred design blah, blah, blah, the in-built financial relationship means that many agencies focus on keeping their clients happy, not necessarily delighting real customers (account management hierarchies anyone?).

Of course there should be a direct correlation between these two measures, but it’s not absolute. And anyone who has watched the wonderful systems thinker John Seddon in full flight knows that when organisations set the wrong targets, people employ great ingenuity to reach the artificial targets at the expense of their true purpose.

The other challenge is that the agency model come from a heritage not of building products but of creating communication solutions (i.e. TV and print ads, brochure-ware websites). So we return to the well worn debate about marketing versus products which I’m not going to delve into too much here.

Suffice to say, while you can indeed test and iterate marketing solutions, it’s more about discovering what people *like* or don’t like. This is an ocean away from the product dilemma of what people *want* and might even buy. There aren’t too many people sitting around saying “I wish there was more advertising I could see.”

This has meant that many agencies – certainly the more traditional ones – became truly exceptional at the creative process. That is, generating brilliant ideas for marketing executions.

What I find fascinating is that more progressive agencies are experimenting with some very innovative tools to innovate…  the creative process. Crowdsourcing, collaboration, diversity of input, sketching etc. Nothing wrong with that. We’re doing that ourselves.

At the other end of the scale to the big creative agencies are the production-focused agencies. They get things done, well. They know how to run projects and product development, and the more progressive are ditching the lunacy of a waterfall approach and embracing more agile methods. This is especially true of technology agencies who not only understand an agile iterative approach, but are skilled in building ‘real’ (software) products. Of course they still tend to focus on delivery; that is, the 20% risk.

I think it’s easy to look at just about any agency and see at which point on this scale – creative process experts vs product development experts – that they exist.

The problem, as you’ve probably already identified, is the relative absence of customer obsession. Sure it’s occasionally present in the creative process, and generally likely to be somewhere in a good product development process, but neither focuses squarely on the question of ‘what customers want?’. Instead it tends to get danced around.

What you’re left with is an empty hamburger. A top bun of creative thinking and a bottom bun of product delivery. The missing meat is customer obsession.

(This isn’t really the place for it, suffice to say Made by Many does indeed seek to integrate all these elements, and we’re dead-keen to get even better at the customer obsession based on some of the successful techniques we’re already using.)

This argument is of course certainly over simplified. In fact this entire blog post was based on a visual idea that popped into my head (below).

What I do know is that in agency-land ‘customer focus’ is too often merely rhetoric. Sometimes it’s not even known who the real customers are (!). And when you aren’t driven by the customer, it becomes a complete guess as to when you need to pivot.

So maybe, just maybe, it isn’t rocket science. The brilliant YCombinator understands the simplicity required. When their startups get further funding, they are awarded a t-shirt that reads: “I built something people want.”

Because surely the world already has enough awesome things that nobody wants.

=======

What do you think? Right? Too harsh? Half right? Stories to share on missing the beef? Comments welcome and also love to hear from you @juzmcmuz.

Enjoy.

* Please don’t take that as a cue to harangue me with rubbish viola jokes.

These guys really are the Penn and Teller of agile software development, and I thought the session was excellent. Most of us here have been trying to work in agile ways for  five years or more but this was an opportunity to get better at it by broadening our knowledge and understanding. Another post follows containing some more considered takeaways, but I wanted to share these sketch-notes I made during the day. They petered out towards the end of the day as proceedings became more discursive.

There are 10 pages in total, including a ‘page of evil’ where I tried to capture all of the things that we decided one way or another were EVIL.

See the whole set —->

A security breach/freeing of information (as you like) such as this is pretty much unprecedented, although many are comparing it to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (including Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind that leak).

Just as with the Pentagon Papers, the leak and the subsequent publication of previously classified information are just part of a complex knot of stories. Who leaked this? What do we make of what we read? What next for Afghanistan, for the US military and indeed for ISAF as a whole? — these are only the immediate questions.

Last night I attended the Frontline Club’s sell-out Q and A with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. I wanted to get closer to the story and explore a few of my own questions, specifically — How does a leak like this affect the life cycle of a story and the role of the press? What next for news and investigative journalism if Wikileaks steps in as the official sourcer of unofficial facts? Further, what are the ethics around what Wikileaks is doing — both Assange as an individual and the organisation as a whole?

I don’t believe in censorship and I do believe in freedom of information, but no matter how I look at this, none of it is black and white.

Data versus facts

Each of the 75,000 documents released on Sunday (a further 15,000 will be released in the future) is the — often very brief — report of an incident in the Afghan war. These are snapshots without context. It’s just… data.

Wikileaks made the data available to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel close to a month ago, and each worked independently to verify information, extract stories and put those stories into the context of a larger narrative. The papers published all this in a coordinated move on Monday.

The release of this data has had international aftershocks. Assange mentioned at least one case of previously-reported information now being questioned: in 2006, four Canadian soldiers were killed, reportedly by the Taliban. The data released Sunday tells a different story: that their deaths were a result of friendly fire.

The Canadian military has rejected the leaked report, but as Michel Drapeau, a former colonel with the Canadian Forces, pointed out,

“There’s a wide discrepancy [between reports], and we need to know. One of the reports has to be accurate.”

But does it? It’s very easy to take what Wikileaks has released and call it fact — it’s not. It’s information that’s as likely to be erroneous and inconsistent as that from any other source. What’s more, whilst all 15 megabytes of the raw CSV data are available for free download, the organisation has — necessarily? — stepped into the breach and interpreted much of this data in order to tell a story the public can understand. Few of us have the patience, time, knowledge of military jargon or computing power to interpret it ourselves.

John D McHugh, a war photographer who has spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan, was present in the audience last night and offered a few counterpoints to the Assange’s interpretation of the data. For me, this was welcome: I kept hearing Assange use the phrase “which probably means” and felt very cautious about taking whatever followed as gospel. At one point, McHugh asked how much expertise Assange had in analyzing the data:

“There are mistakes.”

Please don’t feed the journalists

I asked Assange whether he saw the press’s role transforming to one of interpreting and commenting on information rather than sourcing that information themselves and then providing insight and commentary. I referred to a tweet by John Owen, a journalist and a member of the Frontline, where he commended the journalists at the three papers for the job they had done interpreting this information — “finding” the stories in the data and “contextualising” them. I’m not surprised a journalist such as Owen made such a fine distinction, but I wonder whether the public would, or could.

The answer to my question was ‘yes’ — and this both pleases and troubles me. Pleases, because more information — provided that information is fact-checked and provides a legitimate perspective — is always a good thing for the press and the public. But to get to a point where one organisation, however neutral or benevolent or hands-off, provides the press with their source material, well, that makes me uncomfortable.

“We are not about popularising particular material, we are a publisher of last resort. We occupy a vacuum left by the rest of the press.”

Assange’s case for this function is economic: it isn’t that the public no longer wants to read investigative journalism, but that the per-word cost of investigative journalism is too high. Fair enough, Wikileaks brings down that cost by providing information for free and in wholesale quantities. But this marks a break in the food chain of news, which normally starts with journalistic research. The information provided by Wikileaks has a different weight to that which a journalist sources him- or herself.

This isn’t quite a case of the tail wagging the dog, but there’s something about it that makes me very cautious indeed.

Keeping secrets isn’t easy

“If you don’t collect the secret in the first place, you don’t have to keep it.”

Assange acknowledged that keeping secrets is difficult — even harder when you’re keeping them from powerful people or the modern intelligence state. How to proceed?

Well, Wikileaks has all sorts of systems in place — both human systems and digital systems — to ensure sources’ identities are not known, even to the people inside the organisation. He and his colleagues don’t know who is behind the leaks:

“We never know the source of the leak… our whole system is designed so we don’t have to keep that secret.”

This takes the weight off the individuals involved in outing the information, and of course the fewer that know, the lower the risk. But the risk is still there and it is still significant. Bradley Manning is still in custody in Kuwait (apparently done in by a garrulous mother-in-law). Mess with the authorities in Canada or Britain and your wrists will be slapped, soundly so. But mess with them in a variety of other places and your human rights may not be upheld as you would like.

And what from the other side of the table — how does Wikileaks know who to believe, and who to simply ignore? In a slightly contradictory statement (after all, I thought they didn’t know who leaked what?), Assange suggested that the decision to take a source seriously is usually nudged one way or the other by the source’s identity: “it’s the reports by informers that you cannot take at face value”. He suggested that the most reliable information comes from people with less to gain by lying.

There is a certain logic to this: people are unlikely to go through a great deal of effort simply to lie. Wikileaks’ track record defending the veracity of leaked information demonstrates that the organisation has a remarkable sixth sense for these things. But will it last? Can it? Assange seems driven — or pulled — by an external sense of what is, for him, right:

“We are immediately accountable to our sources and to the general public, for our actions. If the public does not support, our role disappears.”

The cost of disclosure

Even with all these procedures and mechanisms in place, sometimes sources get found out. Someone asked about Bradley Manning in relation to freedom of information issues, and Assange noted that “his case is important and interesting” because it forces us to look hard at these issues.

The US military claims to take allegations of abuses — like those contained in the Collateral Murder video — seriously, yet Assange pointed out that their first response was to investigate those who uncovered the potential abuses.

In this case — Manning has been charged with being the source of the Collateral Murder video — the individual thought to have leaked the information is being held, while those who fired the shots were given immunity from prosecution. I can see why Assange is so disgusted with this, and it leads me to wonder where, in the context of war, the greater crime is the unlawful act itself or the act of disclosing it.

The first ethical question: Why?

“It is not just the leak that is important, it is all the events that overflow from it and the government response to it.”

The biggest questions I have are around the ethics associated with all of this — not just with being the leak, but with Wikileaks as an organisation and with Assange as an individual.

I believe people’s actions are directed by their own ethics. Assange is doing what he does because he believes it is right and does good. He is *not* acting out of neutrality, and we should do well to remember that. I’m not taking away from what he or Wikileaks is doing — I believe it is admirable and necessary — but I am concerned that many people take what this organisation reports as a neutral sort of truth: it’s not.

I got into a bit of a debate after the talk with my colleague William, who suggested that the processes in place dehumanise the process of leaking and the information leaked. I disagree: I think the people who make up the organisation do it for moral reasons, and I think the founder is very much entrenched, in an ethical sense, in what he is doing.

So what about what happens next? In many cases, certainly this one, leaked information changes the game. Wars tip on information like this.

Assange asserts that Wikileaks [has] “a harm minimisation policy”. But how does this actually work? In the theatre of war, minimising harm across the board is difficult. Minimising harm on one side is easier, but it tends to increase on the other side.

Assange says that so far, that [harm minimisation policy] has worked — but I wonder whether this is the case. Today the Guardian reported that President Obama had ordered another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. The directive came on the heels of the publication of the Afghanistan war logs and though Obama insists that none of the information contained therein was new to him, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t the law of unexpected consequences.

“We are concerned with human beings’ lives.”

So says Assange when he points out that Wikileaks held back many lines of data it felt might have endangered the lives of those overtly or peripherally involved in the conflict. But I wonder whether that concern stretches as far when those lives are military as it does when they are civilian. Would we all cry more for an innocent Afghan child than we would a thirtysomething US soldier who opted into this life and trained to kill? Maybe. But that’s an individual, ethical issue, and my stance on it or your stance on it isn’t likely to affect a lot of people’s lives. But Assange’s stance is.

The second ethical question: Who decides the the worth of information and human life?

The truth — or as best we can get it, the whole body of facts — is a dangerous thing. As the saying goes, knowledge is powerful. And whose actions — what they choose to do with their knowledge — are not guided by an ethical code of some sort?

Assange makes no pretense at hiding his: he says he likes to crush bastards, but who is to decide who is a bastard and who is just doing his job?

Indeed, there is something of the vigilante about Assange — however impersonal Wikileaks’ channels may be:

“The lady justice has a scale in one hand and a sword in the other, that is how it’s done.”

Assange is, I believe, guided by his ethics. The same can be said for most of us, and certainly for the US army and the other organisations Wikileaks informs on: we do what we think is best, in accordance with our own constructs of right and wrong. Assange goes on to say that rather than to guarantee it will never do any harm, Wikileaks says  it will try to do some good and minimise harm. Why? Well, if you stick to the former way of thinking you are unlikely to act — harm is always possible.

So accepting some means harm as cost for end good seems to be acceptable to Assange and his organisation… but with actions this big, what do the means costs look like, and how high are they?

I got my answer easily enough. Assange referred once to “good police” and repeatedly to “innocents” versus military lives. He also said that when a government claims ‘national security’ as a reason not to release information, he is instantly doubtful. So he will withhold information in the interests of innocents but not in the interests of national security… am I the only one who wonders whether national security might not include a few innocents?

Without doubt, there is a blindness at play here. As much as I admire the man’s guts, intelligence and commitment, I have to wonder at his motivations and whether they have impeded his ability to objectively what-if his way through a situation before it happens.

As an audience member says, for every leak there could be unforseen consequences. What if Wikileaks’s actions speed up ISAF withdrawal, but then warlords fill the vacuum and another civil war occurs. Who benefits? Surely not the innocents!

I challenge anyone to argue that Wikileaks’ actions do not have great consequences. My concern is how we will live with them.

An audience member asked Assange whether he personally believed this leak would cause more or fewer deaths. Assange responded that he thought it would cause less death:

“I hope it will lead to redeployment, a peace settlement, fewer kills.”

We shall see.

Assange acknowledged the worst of these possible consequences — the threat of us racing towards “a reactionary nihilistic regime” as quite possible. But he contended that for an organisation such as his,

“We have a serious role to play that we treat seriously… without the truth we can’t do anything that is sensible.”

But here’s my issue: truth is plastic. There is no one answer. Poor Michel Drapeau just isn’t going to get his answer.

Assange refused to equate military lives to human lives, and national security to human security. I found this worrisome. As the keeper of information that could tip the balance of a war, and bring about military and civilian casualties, Assange’s personal ethics have far-reaching consequences. The State’s interests often directly correlate to the interests of the innocents Assange wants to protect, and I was frustrated that he would not acknowledge this. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

My colleague Tim Malbon had one of the best questions of the night. He asked Assange whether the power didn’t just slightly go to his head:

“How do you avoid getting drunk on the power, how do you keep your feet on the ground?”

And Assange? Well, he’s finding out:

“In the end, we don’t leak anything — our sources do, through us. It’s an enormous responsibility.”

But Tim wasn’t done:

“Do you feel like a hero?”

And here’s where I wondered whether I wasn’t just getting a sanitised version of the facts. Assange said it was weird, doing what he does, and a bit boring, and really all about getting the truth out. I’m not sure I believe that.

It’s brave work, and it is important work, and I respect him for doing it, but I can’t help thinking he does it because this is a truth that measures up with him. And then aren’t we just getting another, differently sanitised (read Jon Snow’s post on this) version of events?

Critical thinking has never been so important.