My name is Erich Kofmel. That's E-r-i-c-h-K-o-f-m-e-l. I have come into possession of court documents made out by the proper judicial authorities in Switzerland seeking to interrogate one "Eric KOFMEHL" – that's E-r-i-c-K-o-f-m-e-h-l – in connection with fraud accusations that an anonymous cyberstalker (using multiple assumed and stolen identities) has for some time sought to imply me in.
I repeat: The suspect in this alleged fraud case, according to the court (moreover referring to a request received from a foreign law enforcement agency), is "Eric KOFMEHL" – not me. A person which according to the cyberstalker does not exist. I tend to assume that the court, after one-and-a-half years of international investigation, knows better.
From the beginning of this "sordid affair" (as one person put it who found themselves harassed by the criminal perseverance of the stalker), the question remained unanswered if someone had stolen my identity or whether it was merely a case of mistaken identities due to an accidental similarity of names. The person initially accused, in various online fora, of defrauding people was said Eric Kofmehl. Until someone, anonymously, made the entirely unproven and wrongful claim that Eric Kofmehl and I, Erich Kofmel, were the same person.
The ensuing anonymous cyberstalking campaign against me hammered home to police and judicial authorities that they should focus their investigations on me. I am not aware that, until now, they have pursued any other leads, namely the anonymous cyberstalker who directed suspicion on me.
Recent events now clarify the matter. How absurd is it to assume that a court (edged on by another foreign authority) would seek to interrogate "Eric KOFMEHL", and make out judicial documents to that name, if such a person did not exist. I trust that the authorities – after one-and-a-half years – have at least (and at long last) established who exists and who does not.
I understand that law enforcement agencies do not know the whereabouts of Eric Kofmehl. They know however how to reach me. Unlike what has been suggested by the cyberstalker, I am not "on the run". I am not about to divulge my place of residence for the simple reason that I am being stalked. As far as I am aware, I have also not been charged with any crime either in Switzerland or the UK or anywhere else.
I hope that the authorities not just in Switzerland, but in other jurisdictions too, will now stop pursuing me and rather focus their energies on finding Eric Kofmehl. The mix-up of identities must stop here.
Regardless, though, I now hold prime evidence in hands that I will be able to introduce into any possible subsequent legal proceedings. The court documents in my possession prove beyond any doubt that the judiciary and relevant law enforcement agencies in Switzerland and beyond know of the existence of Eric Kofmehl – and that he is distinct from me.
These documents will help to exonerate me of all accusations, whether it ever comes to a trial or not.
23 June 2009
Pirate parties against private property and surveillance
Every so often, political movements seem to sweep across Europe that cause people in different countries to form parties of a similar hue, pursuing programmes of an identical (or closely related) nature. The first such movement, in recent times, may have been liberalism, followed by the labour movement and the Greens, among others.
All of a sudden, we see "pirate parties" spring up all over Europe (and, indeed, the world). With the information and communication technologies at their disposal, the spread of this movement is even faster than on previous occasions.
Founded only in 2006, the Swedish Pirate Party already won a seat in the recent elections to the European Parliament – receiving 7.13% of the votes –, after having become the third largest national party in terms of membership (before the Green Party, Left Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats, and Centre Party). In Germany, albeit shortly before the end of term, a member of parliament last week switched allegiance from the Social Democrats to the German Pirate Party, becoming the pirates' first representative in a national legislature.
Pirate parties everywhere seek a reform of their countries' and international laws regarding copyright and patents. They fight against the surveillance state and for a strengthening of the right to privacy, on the Internet as well as in everyday life. They seek full transparency of state actions, government and administration. For now, they abstain from positioning themselves on the left-right political spectrum, in favour of forging alliances with all parties that are willing to support their goals.
There is no reason for pirate parties to remain single topic, though. Concerns with the coming (European) surveillance state encompass all spheres of life, wherever databases are kept to store information about us and infringe on our privacy. Informatics and the Internet permeate leisure and work alike and the state pries on us in private and in public. Labour – the Social Democrats – also started out as a single-topic movement, seeking the improvement of labour conditions, but swiftly transformed itself into a political force to be reckoned with more broadly.
The true significance of pirate parties is under-analyzed and under-theorized, not least due to the fact that they are run mostly by technologists (programmers, developers, IT entrepreneurs, etc.) with little background in social and political thought. Outside Sweden, they are often led by very young people (digital natives who do not remember a time before private computing) with no political experience at all. They are a reaction to real-life problems perceived first by people at the forefront of technological developments, but bound to become of ever greater importance to all of us.
The silly name, Pirate Party, proudly betrays the semi-criminal (at least, not law-abiding) background of this political movement. It has its roots in the Wild West anarchism of the early Internet and (illegal) file-sharing communities that are now being criminalized in most jurisdictions. The German member of parliament accepted into the folds of the Pirate Party is being investigated by the authorities for possession of child pornography (which, as he says, he obtained in the exercise of his duties as his former party's parliamentary spokesperson for Education and Research and New Media).
Whether known or unknown to them (and all their members), pirate parties fight the logic of capitalist market economy, and the laws protecting it, by supporting the pirating of goods (such as music and films), informational self-determination on the net, and open-access policies for scientific research findings. While pirate parties propose to abandon private property in the form of copyright and patents, it will, consequently, be necessary to abandon property at a more fundamental level, in all its forms.
Here the question arises whether the foundation of a political party is the right way – and a traditional party is the right form – to fight surveillance and property. After all – and hardly considered by the technologists behind these parties –, it is democracies that protect private property and, through security scares and fears of crime, give rise to the police or surveillance state (even though the latter may yet prove to be democracy's downfall).
I hold that it won't be possible to fight property and surveillance by democratic means. If pirate parties, in the course of time, grow less radical and become satisfied with introducing safeguards to surveillance and exceptions to property they may be accommodated within the democratic and capitalist system (just as Labour and the Greens were).
Ultimately, however, something more basic is beginning to take shape. The opposition against property and the police/surveillance state will form outside of parliaments and the fight will be fought against democracy and the indifference of the majority.
If the pirates make it their fight they will play a role of utmost historical significance. Otherwise, they will (have to) be superseded.
All of a sudden, we see "pirate parties" spring up all over Europe (and, indeed, the world). With the information and communication technologies at their disposal, the spread of this movement is even faster than on previous occasions.
Founded only in 2006, the Swedish Pirate Party already won a seat in the recent elections to the European Parliament – receiving 7.13% of the votes –, after having become the third largest national party in terms of membership (before the Green Party, Left Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats, and Centre Party). In Germany, albeit shortly before the end of term, a member of parliament last week switched allegiance from the Social Democrats to the German Pirate Party, becoming the pirates' first representative in a national legislature.
Pirate parties everywhere seek a reform of their countries' and international laws regarding copyright and patents. They fight against the surveillance state and for a strengthening of the right to privacy, on the Internet as well as in everyday life. They seek full transparency of state actions, government and administration. For now, they abstain from positioning themselves on the left-right political spectrum, in favour of forging alliances with all parties that are willing to support their goals.
There is no reason for pirate parties to remain single topic, though. Concerns with the coming (European) surveillance state encompass all spheres of life, wherever databases are kept to store information about us and infringe on our privacy. Informatics and the Internet permeate leisure and work alike and the state pries on us in private and in public. Labour – the Social Democrats – also started out as a single-topic movement, seeking the improvement of labour conditions, but swiftly transformed itself into a political force to be reckoned with more broadly.
The true significance of pirate parties is under-analyzed and under-theorized, not least due to the fact that they are run mostly by technologists (programmers, developers, IT entrepreneurs, etc.) with little background in social and political thought. Outside Sweden, they are often led by very young people (digital natives who do not remember a time before private computing) with no political experience at all. They are a reaction to real-life problems perceived first by people at the forefront of technological developments, but bound to become of ever greater importance to all of us.
The silly name, Pirate Party, proudly betrays the semi-criminal (at least, not law-abiding) background of this political movement. It has its roots in the Wild West anarchism of the early Internet and (illegal) file-sharing communities that are now being criminalized in most jurisdictions. The German member of parliament accepted into the folds of the Pirate Party is being investigated by the authorities for possession of child pornography (which, as he says, he obtained in the exercise of his duties as his former party's parliamentary spokesperson for Education and Research and New Media).
Whether known or unknown to them (and all their members), pirate parties fight the logic of capitalist market economy, and the laws protecting it, by supporting the pirating of goods (such as music and films), informational self-determination on the net, and open-access policies for scientific research findings. While pirate parties propose to abandon private property in the form of copyright and patents, it will, consequently, be necessary to abandon property at a more fundamental level, in all its forms.
Here the question arises whether the foundation of a political party is the right way – and a traditional party is the right form – to fight surveillance and property. After all – and hardly considered by the technologists behind these parties –, it is democracies that protect private property and, through security scares and fears of crime, give rise to the police or surveillance state (even though the latter may yet prove to be democracy's downfall).
I hold that it won't be possible to fight property and surveillance by democratic means. If pirate parties, in the course of time, grow less radical and become satisfied with introducing safeguards to surveillance and exceptions to property they may be accommodated within the democratic and capitalist system (just as Labour and the Greens were).
Ultimately, however, something more basic is beginning to take shape. The opposition against property and the police/surveillance state will form outside of parliaments and the fight will be fought against democracy and the indifference of the majority.
If the pirates make it their fight they will play a role of utmost historical significance. Otherwise, they will (have to) be superseded.
17 June 2009
Special issue: Theology and Democratic Futures
Corey D. B. Walker (Brown University) has guest edited a special issue of the journal Political Theology (vol. 10, no. 2, 2009) on the theme "Theology and Democratic Futures":
www.politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/PT/issue/view/663
Walker's introductory essay is concerned with the "revival in scholarly attention to the question of theology across various formations in the North Atlantic academy" and a tendency that "seeks to challenge the binary and dichotomous logic that separates theological formations and non-theological formations while blurring the boundaries between the two in facilitating a critical thinking in which the theological is pressed into service for the elaboration of other radical and subversive non-theological discourses" as well as an opposite tendency "assisting in bulwarking the sui generis gloss of Christianity's theological claims and doctrines" "in contradistinction to other critical and secular theoretical discourses".
While Walker claims that "[t]o think theology is to think democracy, albeit with a more profound and humbling sense of contingency and without guarantees", other contributors to this special issue seem to view democracy more critically, for example within the discourse of "post-democracy" "as a political order of a privatized and privileged politics that is not responsive to the radical democratic aspirations or potentials of the majority", concluding that "[i]t is this post-democratic landscape that should properly coordinate and calibrate our theological imaginations". Authors in this line of thought engage the evangelical right in the US (Andrew C. Willis) as much as the Islamic Law debate in the UK (Vincent Lloyd).
(BTW: The paper by Lloyd was accepted for presentation at the Third Annual International Symposium of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) on "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology" that took place in July 2008 at Sciences Po/The Institute for Political Studies in Paris, France.)
Bruce Ellis Benson argues that "radical democracy is not nearly radical enough and Christianity, when it has entered the 'public square,' has likewise not been nearly radical enough", while Paul Dafyyd Jones' "close reading and dialectical analysis of Schleiermacher and Barth and the projects of liberation theology enable him to project a broader 'theopolitical imagination' that links classical and liberationist theological perspectives in animating and empowering progressive political projects". Peter Goodwin Heltzel's essay interrogates "the theoretical and political dimensions of [Martin Luther King, Jr.'s] Christian inspired project of 'Beloved Community' and Antonio Negri's Spinoza inspired project of 'Multitude' in confronting the reduced horizon for democratic politics in our contemporary conjuncture".
Further articles concern "the case of [US death-row prisoner] Mumia Abu-Jamal" in the light of the works of Giorgio Agamben and Abdul R. JanMohammed and the "state of exception" (Mark Lewis Taylor), "Hannah Arendt's [polytheistic and thus plural] Political Theology of Democratic Life" (Jane Anna Gordon), and "phenomenology as a mode of thought that welcomes the depth and complexity of existence as an analogue for rethinking radically democratic futures" (Rocco Gangle, Jason Smick). As Walker writers: "It is the plural – whether polytheism or phenomenology – that posits the possibility of theology and democracy as open-ended forms whose futures may be less clear but more hopeful than a resurrection of past practices and forms of thought".
This special issue may help to highlight too "the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed" (Mark Taylor Lewis).
www.politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/PT/issue/view/663
Walker's introductory essay is concerned with the "revival in scholarly attention to the question of theology across various formations in the North Atlantic academy" and a tendency that "seeks to challenge the binary and dichotomous logic that separates theological formations and non-theological formations while blurring the boundaries between the two in facilitating a critical thinking in which the theological is pressed into service for the elaboration of other radical and subversive non-theological discourses" as well as an opposite tendency "assisting in bulwarking the sui generis gloss of Christianity's theological claims and doctrines" "in contradistinction to other critical and secular theoretical discourses".
While Walker claims that "[t]o think theology is to think democracy, albeit with a more profound and humbling sense of contingency and without guarantees", other contributors to this special issue seem to view democracy more critically, for example within the discourse of "post-democracy" "as a political order of a privatized and privileged politics that is not responsive to the radical democratic aspirations or potentials of the majority", concluding that "[i]t is this post-democratic landscape that should properly coordinate and calibrate our theological imaginations". Authors in this line of thought engage the evangelical right in the US (Andrew C. Willis) as much as the Islamic Law debate in the UK (Vincent Lloyd).
(BTW: The paper by Lloyd was accepted for presentation at the Third Annual International Symposium of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) on "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology" that took place in July 2008 at Sciences Po/The Institute for Political Studies in Paris, France.)
Bruce Ellis Benson argues that "radical democracy is not nearly radical enough and Christianity, when it has entered the 'public square,' has likewise not been nearly radical enough", while Paul Dafyyd Jones' "close reading and dialectical analysis of Schleiermacher and Barth and the projects of liberation theology enable him to project a broader 'theopolitical imagination' that links classical and liberationist theological perspectives in animating and empowering progressive political projects". Peter Goodwin Heltzel's essay interrogates "the theoretical and political dimensions of [Martin Luther King, Jr.'s] Christian inspired project of 'Beloved Community' and Antonio Negri's Spinoza inspired project of 'Multitude' in confronting the reduced horizon for democratic politics in our contemporary conjuncture".
Further articles concern "the case of [US death-row prisoner] Mumia Abu-Jamal" in the light of the works of Giorgio Agamben and Abdul R. JanMohammed and the "state of exception" (Mark Lewis Taylor), "Hannah Arendt's [polytheistic and thus plural] Political Theology of Democratic Life" (Jane Anna Gordon), and "phenomenology as a mode of thought that welcomes the depth and complexity of existence as an analogue for rethinking radically democratic futures" (Rocco Gangle, Jason Smick). As Walker writers: "It is the plural – whether polytheism or phenomenology – that posits the possibility of theology and democracy as open-ended forms whose futures may be less clear but more hopeful than a resurrection of past practices and forms of thought".
This special issue may help to highlight too "the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed" (Mark Taylor Lewis).
11 June 2009
Universities are the business
In a bold move designed to demonstrate just how far the marketization and commodification of higher education in the UK has gone, British prime minister Gordon Brown last week announced, as part of his cabinet reshuffle, that universities from now on would form part of the business portfolio under Peter (Lord) Mandelson.
Even more surprising and troubling, though, is the utter lack of reactions – whether positive or negative – to this rash decision. No one, it seems, can be bothered. A discussion ensued neither in the media nor on HE message boards or fora. In the current economic climate – with UK high-street chain stores closing down by the day –, few students and academics appear to mind universities being made (even more) subservient to business interests.
What is the logical consequence of all this? Increasingly, I can't help but feel that it would be more honest to "buy" a doctorate, rather than to work for it. What is the value (in a non-material sense) of a degree that comes out of such an environment?
I value my South African qualifications (both achieved with distinction in selective courses and competitive classes with up to 95% education- and knowledge-hungry black Africans) more highly than I could ever value a qualification from a sell-out UK institution.
An institution, such as the University of Sussex, talking left, but peopled mainly by the affluent middle class operating under a government that views students alternately as customers to be fleeced or (would-be) terrorists to be kept under surveillance.
Two years after leaving England, I see no reason to return.
Even more surprising and troubling, though, is the utter lack of reactions – whether positive or negative – to this rash decision. No one, it seems, can be bothered. A discussion ensued neither in the media nor on HE message boards or fora. In the current economic climate – with UK high-street chain stores closing down by the day –, few students and academics appear to mind universities being made (even more) subservient to business interests.
What is the logical consequence of all this? Increasingly, I can't help but feel that it would be more honest to "buy" a doctorate, rather than to work for it. What is the value (in a non-material sense) of a degree that comes out of such an environment?
I value my South African qualifications (both achieved with distinction in selective courses and competitive classes with up to 95% education- and knowledge-hungry black Africans) more highly than I could ever value a qualification from a sell-out UK institution.
An institution, such as the University of Sussex, talking left, but peopled mainly by the affluent middle class operating under a government that views students alternately as customers to be fleeced or (would-be) terrorists to be kept under surveillance.
Two years after leaving England, I see no reason to return.
04 June 2009
Film: The Last Enemy
Anyone willing to acquire a better understanding of the kind of society the United Kingdom is swiftly transforming itself into, can do no better than watch the five-part TV drama "The Last Enemy", produced by the BBC in 2008 and now freely available in full-length videos on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/show/thelastenemy?feature=spotlight
Different from your usual science-fiction movie, the streets of Britain in this mini series look eerily familiar and it's only the small technological changes (spread of ID cards, iris scanning, RFID chips in basically everything, access controls, database integration, and so on) that have turned it into a totalitarian society of total surveillance – or, as the film calls it, T.I.A., Total Information Awareness.
This piece is set in the very near future and the science in it is not fictitious at all. It is all here. Tomorrow, it turns out, is after all just that – tomorrow. A few hours away. Everything shown in this picture already exists, there's nothing futuristic about it. It is just a question of scale and purpose. Even the heavily armed police troops in their protective gear that seem to pop up around every corner can be found now on the streets of London and many other cities.
It is hard to get one's head around it, but only if we understand that the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany was gradual and Germany looked by and large the same in 1930 and 1935 will we understand that the totalitarian surveillance state does not require futuristic architecture, but is at home in the picturesque and old-fashioned stone-built sceneries of the long-lost Victorian Empire as well as present-day council estates.
The synopsis of the film taken from the website of the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): "[After just four years abroad, mathematician] Stephen Ezard [...] returns to London to mourn the loss of his brother, Michael, and enters a society now obsessed with surveillance. Searching to make sense of Michael's death, Stephen uncovers secrets about his brother's life – including a wife he never knew Michael had. Taking a government job to trace leads through a powerful new database [T.I.A.], Stephen exposes troubling revelations and soon finds himself stalked by a rogue agent [...]. But when Stephen stumbles into an international conspiracy, he realizes that the omnipresent and menacing eye of the government has turned on him".
Total Information Awareness is being introduced in this picture with the promise: "With T.I.A., there will be nowhere to hide". No one has the right to disappear or not wanting to be found.
And, as implausible as the name may sound, T.I.A. is actually based on a US-government programme of exactly that name, introduced following 9/11, but since defunded by congress. Parts of T.I.A. continue to be pursued under the responsibility of various government agencies.
www.youtube.com/show/thelastenemy?feature=spotlight
Different from your usual science-fiction movie, the streets of Britain in this mini series look eerily familiar and it's only the small technological changes (spread of ID cards, iris scanning, RFID chips in basically everything, access controls, database integration, and so on) that have turned it into a totalitarian society of total surveillance – or, as the film calls it, T.I.A., Total Information Awareness.
This piece is set in the very near future and the science in it is not fictitious at all. It is all here. Tomorrow, it turns out, is after all just that – tomorrow. A few hours away. Everything shown in this picture already exists, there's nothing futuristic about it. It is just a question of scale and purpose. Even the heavily armed police troops in their protective gear that seem to pop up around every corner can be found now on the streets of London and many other cities.
It is hard to get one's head around it, but only if we understand that the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany was gradual and Germany looked by and large the same in 1930 and 1935 will we understand that the totalitarian surveillance state does not require futuristic architecture, but is at home in the picturesque and old-fashioned stone-built sceneries of the long-lost Victorian Empire as well as present-day council estates.
The synopsis of the film taken from the website of the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): "[After just four years abroad, mathematician] Stephen Ezard [...] returns to London to mourn the loss of his brother, Michael, and enters a society now obsessed with surveillance. Searching to make sense of Michael's death, Stephen uncovers secrets about his brother's life – including a wife he never knew Michael had. Taking a government job to trace leads through a powerful new database [T.I.A.], Stephen exposes troubling revelations and soon finds himself stalked by a rogue agent [...]. But when Stephen stumbles into an international conspiracy, he realizes that the omnipresent and menacing eye of the government has turned on him".
Total Information Awareness is being introduced in this picture with the promise: "With T.I.A., there will be nowhere to hide". No one has the right to disappear or not wanting to be found.
And, as implausible as the name may sound, T.I.A. is actually based on a US-government programme of exactly that name, introduced following 9/11, but since defunded by congress. Parts of T.I.A. continue to be pursued under the responsibility of various government agencies.
03 June 2009
SCIS Technology Ltd and the Royal Society
The Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) has adopted a multi- and transdisciplinary approach to the study of "the individual and society", which includes high-tech disciplines such as (but not limited to) Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Genetics, Ecotechnology, and Informatics.
Three years ago, we set up SCIS Technology Ltd as a commercial venture to attract private research funding in these areas along the American model and to create income and an endowment for SCIS rather than rely on state funding. SCIS Tech offered university technology spin-outs without the bureaucratic hassle of a university – proposing to commercialize intellectual property (IP) created by doctoral candidates and young researchers that (unlink research by more senior academics) does not belong to a university.
As a pre-commercialization incubator, SCIS Tech focused on high-tech ideas and very early-stage research projects with a probable significant impact on individuals and society and expected to lead to the creation of IP and commercial ventures in the future. It set out to facilitate investment from venture capitalists, private equity firms, business angels, high net-worth individuals, corporate social responsibility programmes, and management buy-ins into ideas which at that point only existed on paper or in young innovators' minds.
We explained to potential investors that they would not be able to meet these doctoral candidates and young researchers elsewhere because they were not yet at business-plan stage and often lacked basic funding for their research. SCIS Tech would provide them with financial means at the stage at which it mattered most.
A Senior Consultant instrumental in setting up SCIS Tech was Prof John Higgins, Britain's first Professor of Biotechnology (former Leverhulme Professor, Cranfield University) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the International Institute of Biotechnology.
In early March 2008, the Royal Society – the United Kingdom's national academy of science (and different from the Royal Society of Arts) – announced an investment programme and fundraising drive markedly similar to the one we had proposed with SCIS Technology Ltd earlier. With its superior resources, the Royal Society easily overtook our efforts.
As ResearchResearch.com, under the headline "Royal Society turns to venture capitalism", reported at the time: "The Royal Society says it's going into business, for the first time in its 350-year history. The society has announced that it will create an enterprise fund to support innovation and very early stage research with potential for commercial applications. However, rather than giving money in the form of grants, the Royal Society's financial input will take the form of a commercial investment. The society plans to raise £20 million for the fund, and has already taken £3 million in contributions from several venture capitalists".
As usual, misrepresentation on part of the journalist may be involved here, but note the emphasis on "very early-stage research" that distinguishes the approaches of SCIS Tech and the Royal Society from other such projects. Business incubators and venture capitalists alike normally expect to see clear evidence of research results as well as technological feasibility studies, and ideally patents and other IP, before committing to support any idea financially.
It seems that the focus of the Royal Society may have changed since the initial announcement in a more traditional direction, too (possibly due to the addition of some people with a traditional venture capital background to the fund's governing structures). However, funders of the "Royal Society Enterprise Fund" will, differently from SCIS Tech, now not receive any return on their "investments" – which are to be considered philanthropic gifts.
Rather, it is the fund that will play the part of venture capitalist and invest (donated) monies into promising ideas, primarily in the Physical Sciences and Engineering. Down the line, any profits resulting from such ventures are to replenish the fund and become available for new investments. Unlike most scientific funding opportunities, no mention is made as to what level of their academic careers potential beneficiaries should be at.
Intriguingly, no news has been published on the fund since September 2008 (before the global financial crisis), when its capital had reached £5 million, and their website is still skeletal. Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, writes in the spring 2009 issue of Inside Science, the Royal Society's magazine, though: "The Royal Society Enterprise Fund is now officially open for business and we are looking for support, both to calibrate the quality of the opportunities presented to us and for information about potential new technology companies which need financial backing":
www.royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=6163
I invite Mr Cox to look no further than www.scis-calibrate.org for assistance in calibrating any proposals. Certainly, the Royal Society has at its disposal means and networks we did not have. But I feel vindicated that SCIS Tech wasn't a bad idea after all, just very ambitious.
SCIS has since decided to focus its core capacities on the social- and political-theoretical aspects of new technologies and on the assessment of their likely impact on the individual and society in the twenty-first century.
Three years ago, we set up SCIS Technology Ltd as a commercial venture to attract private research funding in these areas along the American model and to create income and an endowment for SCIS rather than rely on state funding. SCIS Tech offered university technology spin-outs without the bureaucratic hassle of a university – proposing to commercialize intellectual property (IP) created by doctoral candidates and young researchers that (unlink research by more senior academics) does not belong to a university.
As a pre-commercialization incubator, SCIS Tech focused on high-tech ideas and very early-stage research projects with a probable significant impact on individuals and society and expected to lead to the creation of IP and commercial ventures in the future. It set out to facilitate investment from venture capitalists, private equity firms, business angels, high net-worth individuals, corporate social responsibility programmes, and management buy-ins into ideas which at that point only existed on paper or in young innovators' minds.
We explained to potential investors that they would not be able to meet these doctoral candidates and young researchers elsewhere because they were not yet at business-plan stage and often lacked basic funding for their research. SCIS Tech would provide them with financial means at the stage at which it mattered most.
A Senior Consultant instrumental in setting up SCIS Tech was Prof John Higgins, Britain's first Professor of Biotechnology (former Leverhulme Professor, Cranfield University) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the International Institute of Biotechnology.
In early March 2008, the Royal Society – the United Kingdom's national academy of science (and different from the Royal Society of Arts) – announced an investment programme and fundraising drive markedly similar to the one we had proposed with SCIS Technology Ltd earlier. With its superior resources, the Royal Society easily overtook our efforts.
As ResearchResearch.com, under the headline "Royal Society turns to venture capitalism", reported at the time: "The Royal Society says it's going into business, for the first time in its 350-year history. The society has announced that it will create an enterprise fund to support innovation and very early stage research with potential for commercial applications. However, rather than giving money in the form of grants, the Royal Society's financial input will take the form of a commercial investment. The society plans to raise £20 million for the fund, and has already taken £3 million in contributions from several venture capitalists".
As usual, misrepresentation on part of the journalist may be involved here, but note the emphasis on "very early-stage research" that distinguishes the approaches of SCIS Tech and the Royal Society from other such projects. Business incubators and venture capitalists alike normally expect to see clear evidence of research results as well as technological feasibility studies, and ideally patents and other IP, before committing to support any idea financially.
It seems that the focus of the Royal Society may have changed since the initial announcement in a more traditional direction, too (possibly due to the addition of some people with a traditional venture capital background to the fund's governing structures). However, funders of the "Royal Society Enterprise Fund" will, differently from SCIS Tech, now not receive any return on their "investments" – which are to be considered philanthropic gifts.
Rather, it is the fund that will play the part of venture capitalist and invest (donated) monies into promising ideas, primarily in the Physical Sciences and Engineering. Down the line, any profits resulting from such ventures are to replenish the fund and become available for new investments. Unlike most scientific funding opportunities, no mention is made as to what level of their academic careers potential beneficiaries should be at.
Intriguingly, no news has been published on the fund since September 2008 (before the global financial crisis), when its capital had reached £5 million, and their website is still skeletal. Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, writes in the spring 2009 issue of Inside Science, the Royal Society's magazine, though: "The Royal Society Enterprise Fund is now officially open for business and we are looking for support, both to calibrate the quality of the opportunities presented to us and for information about potential new technology companies which need financial backing":
www.royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=6163
I invite Mr Cox to look no further than www.scis-calibrate.org for assistance in calibrating any proposals. Certainly, the Royal Society has at its disposal means and networks we did not have. But I feel vindicated that SCIS Tech wasn't a bad idea after all, just very ambitious.
SCIS has since decided to focus its core capacities on the social- and political-theoretical aspects of new technologies and on the assessment of their likely impact on the individual and society in the twenty-first century.
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