Month: February 2010

Musing about “sharing” and privacy

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media, there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status.  Devices have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.

During all this time, much has been written about privacy and confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago, there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful about sharing such information.

It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this site for example: sailwx.info

A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating, even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same. Sharing creates risk.  I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act

It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro, “from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.

2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five siblings. [So I’m a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society, on paper anyway….You wouldn’t dare use those words in front of my paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence, attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker

5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’. Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly. And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married (over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests, with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.

6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more comprehensive as the concepts of  lifestreaming, and of what Clay Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.

Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s writings on this subject: here’s an example.

7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its inherent “nonrival good” nature, it makes no sense to hoard information and ideas. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.]

8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty,  stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing, people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food, whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.

Just one. The best

I love chess for a variety of reasons. The sheer breathtaking beauty of the game, as evinced here, in “Fatal Attraction”, Edward Lasker v Sir George Thomas nearly a century ago.  The characters it throws up, as in Jose Raul Capablanca and Efim Bogoljubov. And the way chess teaches us about cause and effect in a complex adaptive environment.

By the way, I’ve written about it before, but if you have any interest in chess at all, do play out Fatal Attraction. It’s a mesmerising game.

One of the reasons I like Bogoljubov is the outrageousness of his statements. In that outrage is truth. Examples: Bogoljubov had just won a remarkable game with the black pieces, and was asked how he’d done it. And he said “When I play white I win because I play white. When I play black I win because I am Bogoljubov.” Another time he was asked how many moves ahead he thinks. His answer? “Just one. The best”.

My interest in chess, largely kindled by an old schoolmate, Devangshu Datta, stayed steady through the years largely as a result of my interest in complex adaptive systems. When it came to analogies for root cause analysis and prevention of recurrence, I found chess hard to beat. I could sit down after a game and work out precisely when I started down the wrong path, what real options I had, how I could make sure I didn’t do it again. Chess was also good as a way of learning damage limitation, what to do when you have made a mistake.

I was reminded of this recently with all the brouhaha about healthcare in the US. Somewhere along the line, the focus of discussion appeared to deal primarily with the effciency of the curing process rather than the preventing process. Too often the same happens in the enterprise world. People are so busy getting better at fixing problems that they forget the real point, which is to stop doing what causes the problem in the first place.

Improving the speed and quality at which you fix things is a worthwhile objective: that is, if (and only if) things break down less often as a result. So when you look at repair processes, it is more important to look at why things break down, and to prevent them from breaking down,  than to focus on getting better at fixing things.

For some time now, we’ve been focused on the customer experience at BT. We looked at the way we dealt with customer requests, how often we delivered what the customer wanted, when the customer wanted it and how the customer wanted it. And we would take a close look at how often we got that right. A very close look. Because it affected what we took home.

That extreme focus has now begun to pay off: that’s why CEO Ian Livingston could tell the world last December that our complaint calls had halved since we embarked on the RFT initiative. Halved. In fact, that’s partly how we’ve been able to cut costs sharply.

The complaint calls coming in were a useful proxy for the number of problems we were causing. But we have to be careful. In large organisations, it is normal, understandable, even tempting to create an environment where the focus shifts from preventing problems to curing them. So before you know it, all the energy is deployed in fixing things, and not preventing the occurrence of the problem in the first place. That’s why you have to be careful what you measure, and how you use the measure. Finding out that you’re solving problems faster and faster is a good thing ….. provided the absolute number of problems is going down, and the problems aren’t repeating. Don’t get seduced by the message that you’re fixing things faster, cheaper better. They shouldn’t be going wrong in the first place.

So look ahead, be a Bogoljubov, and play that best right move. Concentrate on making sure you don’t make the mistake in the first place; the introduction of automation is a commonsense way of achieving this. As long as the environment is in steady state, this should be tractable. When you introduce change, then mistakes can be introduced, found, dealt with. As Esther Dyson says so often, “always make new mistakes”.

Of lazy tandoori and “epicuration”

I love tandoori food. And for many years I stayed away from cooking tandoori food for a variety of trivial reasons. Reasons like not having a tandoor, a tandoori oven. Not having a good tandoori recipe. Not being able to understand the recipe. Not looking forward to eating food cooked by someone who didn’t have the right tools, ingredients, recipes or skill. Not wanting to clear up and wash up after cooking such a meal.

As I said, trivial reasons.

And then one day, like learning to ride a bicycle, all those trivial reasons disappeared. In a matter of hours I was cooking tandoori without a tandoor, not worrying about recipes, actually liking what I cooked and looking forward to eating it. And being able t0 wash up quickly and efficiently.

Why was this? How did it happen?

First, it was because of epicurious. The more I used epicurious, the more I knew about how to get to the right recipes. There’s gold dust in there. Like this recipe for tandoori-style grilled meat or shrimp. 6 servings. Active time 20 minutes. Total time 4.5 hours. Eight ingredients for the marinade, nothing complex, very little work to be done with them. A simple recipe that pretty much consisted of : make marinade. leave meat to marinate. cook. So thank you epicurious.

Second, we discovered cooking liners. No more heavy-duty pan scrubbing needed. Easy to clean and wash, totally reusable. Even dishwasher-friendly.

So here’s the story:

Put the first 8 ingredients into a blender. It should look something like this:


The blended marinade should look something like this:


Marinating “protein” should look like this:


At the start of grilling, it should look a bit like this:

Halfway through it should look like this:

And then at the end it should look like this:

Seriously, it works. 20 minutes of activity, and everything happens just as Victoria Granof, the “author” of the recipe, says it should. Thank you Victoria.

For me, it’s not just about the food, which I love. It’s about how preparing such food is becoming more accessible to many of us. How a site like epicurious works, how people share their “content” freely, how the recipes get reviewed and annotated and voted up and down, how the community participates in all this. How someone like me, from Calcutta, can sit in Windsor, Berkshire and use a recipe submitted by a Cordon Bleu trained pastry chef and relating to cuisine closer to my birthplace than hers by an order of magnitude.

The community element is important, but so is the understanding that for subjects like this, community votes by themselves are of no value. These votes need to be tuned to my personal taste and trust levels. Some intelligence, some wisdom, some experience, some “curation” has to be applied.

It’s like book reviews. Sometimes I run out of things to read while at an airport, usually because I didn’t allow for the scale of delay. So I go to the bookstore or equivalent and take a look. There’s no point my looking for any of my favourite authors, I tend to know about their new books and would usually have bought and read them already. Which means I’m truly in the realm of “airport reads”. And I scan the paperbacks quickly, looking for authors I haven’t heard of. When I find one, I tend to check the inside front cover area for soundbite reviews.

But there’s a short cut. If one of those reviews is by Kirkus then I buy the book, no further questions asked. If the review is a “starred review” then I buy everything else by that author available in that shop.

You see, over the years, I trust Kirkus. [If you want to understand about trust and recommendation and their role in building relationships, in buying and selling, in business in general, then go read Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents. Now.]

That’s what it comes down to, trust. Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.

That’s what Victoria Granof did for me. She appears to spend time going around the world collecting recipes and trying them out, sampling cuisines I am interested in, using cooking styles that appeal to me. Slow and relaxed, simple without being mechanical or bland, relying on natural ingredients.

Community input is valuable. Community voting and recommendation mechanisms help control firehoses, and are far better than product advertising. But you need something more. You need the recommenders to be people you trust, because their tastes are similar to yours. Discovering taste similarity is not easy; it can be automated, but you know something? There’s a lot of joy to be had in the discovery process. Because it makes you do something.

Doing is good.

Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day

This is a vote of thanks. An unashamed vote of thanks to someone who made my day brighter, my life brighter, and continues to do so. Jim Croce.

Jim Croce, born January 10, 1943, died September 20, 1973. A wonderful musician, and by all accounts a warm and loving husband, father and family man.

I remember the day when I first heard Jim Croce. I was in a record shop on Lindsay St in Calcutta, doing my usual trawl through new arrivals and trying to sweet-talk the man behind the counter into giving me some of his used publicity posters. [I was fifteen years old then, and music was an integral part of my life. Particularly folk-rocky poetic-singer-songwritery guitary music]. It was a Saturday, the 29th of September 1973. And the man in the shop had a new selection of albums that had come in, and he was sorting through them. I think there were only two companies making records in India in those days, The Gramophone Company of India and Polydor Records. Most of the people I used to listen to were released through Gramophone Company; a few “upstarts” , notably Jimi Hendrix, the Woodstock albums, the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton, were being released on Polydor, so I tended to go through both sets of releases.

It was a Saturday, the 29th of September 1973. And the man behind the counter, who was used to my hanging around there for eons, started unpacking the stuff that had come in. It didn’t matter that the albums were factory-fresh. He still went through the routine of taking each disc out of its polythene inner sleeve, checking for scratches and warp, and then gently replacing the disc. And he’d taken this disc out and was cleaning it lovingly when something about it caught my eye.

That’s all it appeared to have in the centre of the disc. A black and white vertiginous shape that shimmied and shivered. So I went to take a look at the album. It was by this guy I’d never heard of. But he’d written all the songs, played guitar for them, sung on them. Seemed interesting, it was the kind of guy I tended to like listening to. And I really really wanted to see how the label would look spinning around on the shop’s Garrard turntable. So I asked my friend the shopkeeper whether I could listen to the album. In those days, there were no headphones, no listening points or booths. If you wanted to listen to something, you needed to smooth-talk the shopkeeper. Who happened to be a friendly guy. So he put the record on.

September 29, 1973. And I heard the strains of You Don’t Mess Around With Jim for the first time. Predictably enough, he had me on “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim”. So I stayed on, listened to the rest of the album, also called You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, loved it, bought it and went home with it.

I couldn’t stop listening to it. All starting with the foot-stomping raucous tough-guy act of the title song. The gentle optimism of Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day, segueing into the story-song of New York’s Not My Home. Then back to foot-stomping with Hard Time Losing Man, only to be suckered into the incredible soft beauty of Photographs and Memories. And led by hand from there to Walking Back to Georgia to end the side. Then you caught your breath and switched over reverently. The second side started with another gentle story-song, Operator. And then the haunting melodies of Time In A Bottle, written for his son AJ. Then, just in case you were getting too laid back, the rapid-fire Rapid Roy. And you were into the long straight home with Box No 10, another haunting story-song and A Long Time Ago, a beautiful ballad. And finally gentle optimism again with Hey Tomorrow.

September 29, 1973. I was so happy. Those were times when it was easy not to have a care in the world. And then I read that week’s Time or Newsweek. And found out that Jim Croce had died in a plane crash nine days earlier. Yup, there were tears in my eyes. [I was that kind of kid; when I read Love Story, there was a football in my throat; when I went to see the film, the football came back.]

If you haven’t heard Jim Croce, don’t waste any more time. Stop reading here, and go to Amazon or emusic or itunes and just buy this album. You won’t regret it.

Everything I’ve found out about Jim Croce says he was my kind of guy,  the kind of guy I would have gotten along with. I’ve only been to San Diego twice in my life, and both times I haven’t been able to make it to Croce’s Restaurant and Jazz Bar. One day I will. And maybe I’ll have the chance to tell Ingrid Croce just how grateful I am to her husband for enriching my life with his music. Maybe I’ll have the chance to tell AJ Croce just how grateful I am to his father for making this world a better place with his music.

Jim Croce, I salute you. Thank you for the wonderful memories you gave me with your music.

A coda. You can follow Ingrid Croce and Croce’s Restaurant on twitter.