Author: JP

Hidden treasure: Release 1.0 Back Issues

Yesterday, while working on a reference for a particular post, it came to my attention that O’Reilly have “opensourced” all the back issues of Release 1.0.

To me this is fantastic news. On a cursory glance, every issue from 1983 to 2006 appears to be available for digital download, free of charge. I had been a subscriber to Release 1.0 for a number of years, and I’m happy to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Esther and the team. They led the field in identifying key themes and topics, providing a reasoned and in-depth introduction to the topics, giving a truly detailed bibliography and contact information, and doing all this aeons ahead of the competition. They gave me early perspective on many issues that later turned out to be critical.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting a number of the contributors over the years, and count many of them amongst my friends. If you were a subscriber then you know what I’m talking about. If you weren’t, then it’s worth taking a look.

Let me know what you think.

Reviewing books I haven’t read as yet: Part 1

I love this time of year, as everything winds down and I get the chance to spend some real contiguous time with family and close friends. I’ve been very privileged: for many years, we’ve tended to share our vacations with a couple of other families, and the children have all grown up together as a result. As the children have grown older, there have been subtle changes to what we do during such times; in its simplest form,  what happens is that the older children tend to do their own thing a lot of the time, the younger ones are (in their own peculiar way) easy to manage en bloc, and the net result is that the adults get to spend a good deal of time just chilling out.

Companionable silences are common. A lot of reading goes on, with conversation meandering in and out of the soft quiet. Which is great, as long as you prepare for it. That’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I thought I’d share with you…… the books I have stored up for reading this Christmas, the reasons why.

Here goes:

1. David Leavitt: The Indian Clerk I’ve never read any of Leavitt’s books before; he courts controversy both in historical accuracy as well as in treatment of sexual attitudes; he’s even been sued by Stephen Spender for plagiarism, and lost the case. But I just could not resist an ambitious novel based loosely around the real-world interactions between G.H.Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Recently published, it had mixed reviews; I was swayed, however, by the Kirkus review, which said: “The certainty attributed to mathematics is richly contrasted to the uncertainty of human relationships in Leavitt’s unusual and absorbing eighth novel…impressively researched, insistently readable and keenly sensitive…easily Leavitt’s best—and a heartening indication that [Leavitt] has reached a new level of artistic maturity.”

2. Community and Society: Ferdinand Tonnies Been meaning to read Tonnies for a while; skimmed him earlier, when Stephen Smoliar recommended him. But I found him hard going then. Now I’ve found a Dover edition, translated by Charles Loomis, which seems a much easier read. If one must read paperbacks, then Dover’s a good publisher to go with. Good solid opaque paper, wonderful binding, the books last and last. They don’t fox or crack or anything, they just seem to age gracefully. There is something immensely satisfying about reading a Dover.

3. Convergence Culture: Henry Jenkins Been following Jenkins’ works for some time now; I’ve been particularly interested in understanding the power inherent in the 21st century media consumer, ever since some conversations with Dan Gillmor as he was preparing for a Release 1.0 article and then for the book We The Media. Jenkins appears to be doing some seminal work in this respect, and I’m looking forward to doing some delving.

4. William Wilberforce: William Hague I’ve been fascinated by the life of William Wilberforce for many years now, and I’ve read multiple books on his life. This version, issued recently, has had some worthwhile reviews. More importantly, it was given to me as a 50th birthday present by my close friend and pastor Wes Richards, so it’s a must-read.

5. Dirty Diplomacy: Craig Murray Now this is a strange one. I’d never heard of the book or the author. I was put off by the subtitle, which read The Rough And Tumble Adventures Of A Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck On The Frontline of the War Against Terror. But then I saw this mixed New York Times Review by Tara McKelvey, and then noticed the comments on the front cover. “A remarkable achievement” — Noam Chomsky. “A fearless book by a fearless man” — Harold Pinter. I have to read it.

6. The Future of Reputation: Daniel J. Solove I was deeply impressed by the stuff Solove has written on privacy, so any book by him on “gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet” was a slam dunk. No way I can avoid reading it. I think there’s a real collision of cultures coming on the subject of privacy. Solove is one person that spends real time focusing on the real risks of bad information, rather than just scare-mongering.

7. Evocative Objects: Sherry Turkle. I really enjoyed The Second Self, I have re-read Life On The Screen a number of times, so I was bound to want to read Evocative Objects. I think Turkle captures something about human-computer interaction that very few other people do, something that is important and precious. Something about our humanity within that interaction.

More later, maybe tomorrow. And so to bed.

Musing about Generation M and valuing IT skills in an opensource world

The kernel for this post was an innocuous article in the BBC online, headlined Computer knowledge “undervalued”. I read it some time ago, and for some reason it felt like I’d just sat on a saddle with a burr under it. Slowly I realised that there was no saddle, but that the burr remained. A big burr.  And I thought to myself, oops. Double oops. Treble oops with cream on top. Why did I think that? Come for a ride with me.

Imagine there was an enterprise. Any enterprise. Now imagine that that particular enterprise had a bunch of people with “computer skills”. Imagine further that the specific “computer skills” these people had were, shall we say, “proprietary” skills.

With me so far? Okay. Now let’s imagine a bunch of consultants coming along and helping said enterprise “value” these “proprietary” skills, and in some convoluted manner “placing” this “value” “on the balance sheet”. [Why would this happen? Because it’s the sort of d^*mfool thing consultants do.]

Oops. Now, with just a tiny bit of legerdemain, the enterprise’s cost of converting from a proprietary world to an opensource world has just gone stratospheric.

More worryingly, at one fell swoop, the opensource and web-savvy skills of Generation M have been made to disappear. [To be precise, the potential value of their skills has been decimated].

You’re right, it couldn’t possibly happen. No enterprise would be crass enough to do that. [RageBoy, you listening?]

And how do we avoid this thing that couldn’t possibly happen? Simple. We must value opensource skills substantially higher than proprietary skills.

Something to think about. When it comes to valuing computer skills, opensource beats proprietary every time. More optionality, less lock-in, more future-proofing and insurance against obsolescence, lower switching costs, easier retraining, the list goes on.

So. Let’s be careful out there. 

Extra Extra Read All About It

Bored while waiting for the flight to take off. I noticed that India had conceded 72 runs as extras in the current Pakistan innings. If memory serves me right, the previous record was 71….. Unless I missed something in the last year or so.

At this rate I guess I can look forward to seeing the first extras “century” in my lifetime.

Enterprise Blue Zero

I guess most of you have already seen the debate, as captured here,  here, here, and here. Is enterprise software sexy? Should it be? Can it be?

The entire debate is worth a read, the polarisations are fascinating. As and when I finish my Facebook series, I will get around to commenting on the avalanche [nb as per Doc Searls and his conversations with George Lakoff, a blog post is a snowball; it starts with the poster, but then gathers life and pace of its own accord; when this happens with many branches and forks, it seems reasonable to call it an avalanche.]

In the meantime, a few things stand out to me:

1. Outside-in design is an absolute must. We have spent far too long insisting on a distinction between what the employee uses and what the customer uses; as the walls of the organisation increasingly get porous, the distinction becomes false. Where I work, we are spending time and energy seeking to converge the two views, so that the customer and the employee exercise the same codebase. A goodly number of my guys are restricted to having the same applications access as our customers : how else will we know what our customers face?

2. Consumerisation amongst employees is a today issue. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on an applications experience at work that is at least close to the experience they have at home. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on using their own devices and choosing the way they want to interact with their apps. Platform and device agnosticism, with customisable UIs and skins, are must-haves, not nice-to-haves. In order to prepare for tomorrow’s employees we have to act today. Which is what we are doing.

3. Simplicity and convenience can be had at the same time as reliability and security. While Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder have acted in concert to provide us significant productivity gains over the past few decades, human longevity has not moved at anywhere near the same rate. As a result we are far more jealous of our time, and therefore things like boot sequences, boot-up times, management of screen real estate, all these things have really begun to matter. Today. That’s why many enterprises are spending considerable time on user centred design. Where I work, we’ve even changed our internal form and structure to cater for this. We don’t have network, product, process or IT departments. We are a Design department, focused on the user experience.

Searching for things within the humongous database that is the enterprise; searching not on a deterministic basis but on a probabilistic one, with heuristics and learning, preferences and profiling. Syndication or subscription, where individual information element changes are pushed out as if by RSS, rather than through formal structured enquiry screens fullof sound anf fury, signifying nothing. Fulfilment processes that don’t distinguish between booking a meeting room, a flight, a hotel room or a contractor. Conversational support covering blogs and wikis and IM rather than just snail mail and its often appalling electronic counterpart. These are the Four Pillars of the enterprise applications of tomorrow. Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.

Enterprise 2.0 is already upon us, providing us attractive, usable, reliable and secure applications. We just haven’t made the move to adopting it. But it’s happening now, with Generation M, mobile, multimedia, multitasking and here. Now.
An aside. It would appear that much of Web 2.o, from a consumer perspective, is about music and films and entertainment and gaming and pornography.  So what’s the enterprise equivalent of all these? What gets enterprise people’s rocks off?  Spreadsheets and presentations and databases. Go figure.

Enterprise Blue Zero is upon us. More later. I need to prepare for Le Web tonight, given that I intend to be watching Led Zeppelin tomorrow night.Â