Author: JP

My apologies to those who’ve been waiting for Parts 9 and 10 of this series; there have been a number of things on my mind, and I wanted to freewheel along, dwelling on other subjects, while pondering on this. It’s like when you want to remember something and can’t ….. the best way out seems to be to let your subconscious “agent” do the work while you move on to something else … striving to remember only makes the problem worse…. you know what I mean.

Anyway. Ecosystem. A big word and probably meaning many things to many people. If I go “define ecosystem” via Google, the first result returned is this:

The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit.

What was that again? [Or, as my primary school PE teacher Mr Deefholts used to say, while cupping his ear, “How much?”). You may have found that definition more helpful than I did, but I doubt it somehow. But then it looked like a “sponsored” result, so I will move on.

The next definition of ecosystem looks something like this:

An ecosystem is a system whose members benefit from each other’s participation via symbiotic relationships (positive sum relationships). It is a term that originated from biology, and refers to self-sustaining systems.

The third definition goes like this:

e·co·sys·tem (Ä“‘kō-sÄ­s‘tÉ™m, Ä•k‘ō-)
n.

An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.

Elsewhere I found this:

a functional unit consisting of all the living organisms (plants, animals, and microbes) in a given area, and all the non-living physical and chemical factors of their environment, linked together through nutrient cycling and energy flow

And this:

a community of living things and the environment in which they live

Why am I spending so much time on this? I think that there’s a lot for us to learn, a lot for us to understand about what makes a virtual community tick. And we’re going to have to arrive at a common view as to what an ecosystem is, in the context of communities and social networks.

danah boyd, in a related context I was privy to, recently said “I don’t think that you can evaluate a system’s technological worth out of the context of its users and their intentions and expectations”.

I think danah’s bang on the money, as usual; I really like her insights. [danah, I hope you don’t mind me quoting you “out of context”].

Where I work, we’ve been going through the laborious process of bringing together our network, process, product and IT skills into one coherent “converged” unit. We did this because we believed that was the only way to get real focus on improving the customer experience. A customer experience that is comprised of the platforms, the people, the processes and the customer alignment.

Too often, people tend to think of the “platform” as the ecosystem. I think this is wrong. So let’s try and define ecosystem again, in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise, drawing on some of the definitions earlier:

• An ecosystem is a community, an integral functional unit.
• An ecosystem consists of living organisms as well as physical and chemical environmental factors.
• An ecosystem promotes the flow of nutrients and energy.

It is in the context of this definition of ecosystem that I want to look at Facebook and the Enterprise. Most people are comfortable with the social network and community aspects of all this; many are also comfortable with the idea that there are many overlapping communities, and that a person belongs to more than one community.

We have to get used to the fact that every enterprise is a community. That the boundaries of the enterprise extend. That this extension encapsulates the enterprise’s customers, partners, supply chain and customer chain. That neither customers nor supply chain participants “belong” to just one enterprise.

There was a time when enterprises had platforms, the platforms were proprietary, and as a consequence the ecosystems were proprietary as well. In fact we had siloed platforms and siloed ecosystems. That was over a quarter of a century ago. As systems became more open, so did platforms, and as a result the ecosystems became more open as well. This openness created a lot of value, drove a lot of the economic growth we have witnessed, created many new winners and a few new losers. The entire opensource movement is an example of the value generated by open ecosystems.

Take the case of the Indian offshore software industry. When I started working in software, everything was proprietary and siloed. Way back in 1980, there was already a well-established offshore software industry. But it wasn’t much use. The model was broken. So you had things like Tata Burroughs Limited, providing proprietary offshore services to Burroughs customers, only available through Burroughs onsite services, with everyone well and truly locked in. Most of the value stayed with the vendor not the customer, and growth was stifled as a result. Then along came the break-up of Ma Bell, the emancipation of System V, the (coincidental) emergence of the PC, the AT bus and the clone, of X-Open and POSIX and a zillion flavours of Unix, and voila, even before Linux, the seeds had been sown. And today you have Infosys and Wipro and Tech Mahindra.

And IBM, with its zillion different proprietary operating systems and its departmental silos, struggled to continue. Found itself needing to reinvent itself. And did. Around Linux. [By the way, ten years ago, who would have believed that the day would come when Apple would be worth more than IBM? Other than Steve, of course :-). Incidentally, Apple’s case is fascinating in the context of what makes an ecosystem open or closed, why such a “proprietary” stack succeeded. Why Apple themselves appear to be telling the world that 25% of the purchasers of iPhone intend to hack it and use it for a network other than the one it was tied to. Why the dinosaurs of the music industry unwittingly helped Apple along. All to be covered in a separate post. ]

Back to ecosystems. While there have been significant technological advances over the past few decades, one of the biggest barriers to the ecosystem model is itself technological.

The firewall.

I’m no expert, but to me the firewall was designed to form a perimeter around an enterprise, a thou-shalt-not-pass barrier with intensive checks. The concept of the firewall seems to be based on the world consisting of disconnected islands of enterprise. This will change. This must change. The overlapping communities model that is emerging requires it to change.

The borders of the enterprise will have to get more and more porous, until a time comes where the border has disappeared. People will belong to multiple communities, those multiple communities will overlap in many and varied ways. Innovation will blossom at the edges of the communities, as professions collide, as the distinctions between some of the professions continue to blur. And it is up to us to ensure that technology does not become a barrier for such creativity. The historical firewall is just an example of such a barrier. The concept of the firewall will continue, but perhaps it will become more personal. Like identity. Like authentication and permissioning.

I will write more about ecosystems. In the meantime,  I thought I’d share some ecosystem principles, again in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise:

• 1. The ecosystem does not constrain its people, processes or platforms; they are free to enter or leave at will.
• 2. The ecosystem is nourished by information. Information that is created by the actions, conversations and transactions of its people. Information that helps define, shape and grow the ecosystem.
• 3. People must be free to take out whatever they put in. Just like people make deposits and withdrawals in the banking sector, people should be able to make information deposits and withdrawals in such an ecosystem.
• 4. In addition to being nourished by information, the ecosystem thrives on an alternate source of energy. The interactions between the people. The information derived from those interactions, information that is not available except as a consequence of those interactions. This energy is unique to a given ecosystem, and is jointly and severally “owned” by the ecosystem and its participants.
• 5. These interactions are themselves encouraged and intensified by applications. Applications that are built on to open multisided platforms that form the heart of the ecosystem. Applications that are meaningless without the people who use them, or the information they create.  Applications that catalyse value within the ecosystem and assist its growth.
• 6. Within an ecosystem, there’s a lot of NEA about. Nobody owns many things. Everybody can use many things. Anybody can improve many things. There’s a lot of personal responsibility (as in what you say and do and make available) as well as communal responsibility ( as in what actions a community takes). Facebook, in this context, is a provider and enabler of the environment in which an ecosystem is built. It is not the ecosystem. But, in my opinion, it’s a good enabler of ecosystems.
• 7. Within an ecosystem, there’s a lot of YOYOW about as well. You own your own words. You own your own apps, their configurations, their environment, their capacity, their performance, their bugs and their fixes. You own your own data. You own your own relationships.

You own your own you. And with that ownership there comes a set of rights as well as duties. Liberty, not licence.

More later. I’ve rambled on enough. Time for some feedback.

In part 9b I will use the feedback to leaven my heretical mutterings, bringing together the disparate strands of Apple’s success, the role of opensource, contract versus covenant, all in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise. As soon as time permits.

I love guitars. In fact I love musical instruments in general, they fascinate me. Not that I know how to play any of them; they get used by my children and by my friends, and that’s fine by me. While I love music, even my worst enemy wouldn’t accuse me of being particularly talented, musically speaking.

You can recognise talent when you see it. Like in this video. Wow. Amazing guys.

Dandleword: A word or short phrase that conveys depth and richness of meaning, a richness completely out of proportion to the size of the word or phrase. [Don’t bother trying to research this, I made the word up. After all, it’s Sunday.

Those of you who knew me in Calcutta may also remember that I had a signed vinyl copy of the Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd Jazz Samba, signed by Charlie when I saw him play at the Academy of Fine Arts sometime in the late 1970s. “Had” is the operative tense, I have no idea where it is now, and I guess I don’t particularly care …. as long as someone is enjoying it. When you pack 23 years of life into two small suitcases, strange things happen. Must try that again sometime, there is something cathartic about reducing one’s possessions.

Great album, I really loved it, but Stephen’s right: today, thirty years later, what lives in my memory is the enjoyment of the live performance. Not the hundreds of times I’ve listened to the album.  Now that album has many fantastic tracks, but the one it is probably best known for is Desafinado. Which is the kernel for this post, aided and abetted by Kevin Marks’ comment re kangaroo.

Desafinado. What a lovely word, and what a lovely meaning. Slightly out of tune.

Dandle. Another beautiful word.  Majestically conjures up images of babies and knees even before its sound has stopped reverberating in your ear.

When I was a child, there was a lot of Tamil spoken at home. [In fact, I used to think I knew Tamil pretty well. Until I came back to India for the first time, in 1981, and the Indian Airlines air hostess on the domestic leg to Madras said “Nandri”, a word I’d never heard before, not in 23 years of thinking I knew Tamil. Since then I’ve had that particular experience hundreds of times ….. realising I know a lot less than I thought I did.]

Where was I? Oh yes, speaking Tamil at home. As a child, I was fascinated by the amount of information carried by Tamil nouns that described relatives. Words like “periappa” and “chithi” and “athimber” and “ammanji”. They were amazing words. A single word could tell you: the sex of the relative in question; whether that person was related to you via your mother, or via your father; it could even tell you whether the person was younger or older than the parent through whom the relationship was obtained.

[An aside: I guess these words are examples of what they call self-describing packets nowadays. And, given the garrulousness occasionally exhibited, you could even say they were self-interpreting. Incidentally, if words like “periappa” and “chithi” mean anything to you, you may enjoy reading this post, suggesting, of all things,  that Ambi Mama is the leading Brahmin relative. ]

Have you go any favourite Dandlewords? I’d love to hear about them.

A few days ago, I posted something about The Becuase Effect (sic), referring people to Graham Barrow’s question in the Feedback column of the New Scientist. Graham was asking about the frequency of common misspellings, particularly typos, and in a comment on my post he mused about the way such words enter language, whether “becuase” could become an “internet” word.

And that in turn made me think about words or phrases that enter language as a result of an error.

Take the word “hoodlum”. I’ve read many suggested etymologies for the word, but the one I prefer is given below. Sadly, I have not been able to verify it online as yet, but I stand by it, it’s the best one I’ve come across :

Sometime in the second half of the 19th century, I think it was on the West Coast, there was a journalist in the US writing an article on  urban crime, and he wanted to refer to a particular unsavoury character named Muldoon. Not wanting to name the miscreant outright, for fear of immediate retribution, he wanted to try and disguise the name. The particular disguise he chose was a simple one; he wrote Mr Muldoon’s name backwards. So the article was meant to refer to Mr Noodlum. The typesetter could not read the journalist’s writing, and interpreted the “N” in noodlum as an H, so the name appeared throughout the article as Mr Hoodlum.

And everyone was happy, and the world gained a new word to describe an unsavoury character.

It’s not just words that enter the language as a result of an error. Sometimes it happens to the names used to describe city landmarks:

There’s a piece of apocrypha about the way a bridge in Madras got its name. Apparently it was called Hamilton Bridge to begin with; locals could not pronounce the name, so they rendered it “Ambattan” Bridge (dropping the aspirate and the “l” and adding a “b” after the “m”, all very believable). A visiting dignitary heard the bridge referred to as Ambattan Bridge, and asked what “Ambattan” meant. Coincidentally, “ambattan” meant “barber” in Tamil. The dignitary was having none of this vernacular nonsense, so he immediately decreed that the bridge be referred to as Barber’s Bridge.

I’ve never seen the “hoodlum” story rebutted, although alternative explanations have been given. As far as the Barber’s Bridge story is concerned, I have seen a number of articles suggesting that the etymology was suspect, given the dearth of suitably qualified Hamiltons in Madras history. The construction of the bridge seems to predate the existence of any Hamilton associated with the city; at least one suitable Hamilton has been found from a later date, but no Barber. I haven’t checked recently, but I believe Hamilton Bridge continues to exist today. From my viewpoint the etymology I suggest still seems possible, given the prodigious proclivity of planners in the sphere of name-changing. This post gives you some of the views.

I used to think I’ve been a foreigner all my life. My father was born in Calcutta. So was I. But we “came” from the south of India, we were Tamils; you could tell that from our names and, more particularly, our surnames; from the way we spoke; maybe even from our hair or our skin colour. Whatever the reason, a little part of me therefore thought I was a foreigner.

This, despite the fact that Calcutta has been fantastic to me, will always be a place of magic for me. Neither Calcutta, nor its Calcuttans, made me feel a foreigner; I made myself feel that way.

In the summer, for many years, my mother would take me and my siblings off to Tambaram, where her father lived (and taught Chemistry). And when I went there, I felt a foreigner. Even more of a foreigner than I felt in Calcutta. Way way more.

By the time I figured out what my grandmother was saying, that I wasn’t really a Dravidian but, instead, was descended from invading Aryans from a very long time ago, I felt a real full-blown whole-nine-yards foreigner.

So by the time I got to London, I was a foreigner indeed.

A foreigner at home. A foreigner away. A foreigner everywhere. Even if it was just a little bit of me feeling that way, it was there. And it gave me a different perspective. This perspective came into its own when I could afford to travel, and when I started seeing different cultures. I began to feel comfortable everywhere.

Over the years, I’ve been privileged to be able to visit over 50 countries, and felt at home in all of them. And I began to see that maybe I wasn’t a foreigner at all. I was a native. Everywhere. But particularly in places where I’ve spent real time. So I began to think of myself as a native of Calcutta, of Liverpool, of London, of Dublin, and of Windsor: the five places I’ve lived in.

The foreigner in me used to spot cultural differences fairly quickly, more as a defence mechanism than anything else. As the native in me grew older and displaced the foreigner, the defence mechanism became less necessary. And somewhere along the line I began to really enjoy looking at cultural differences, sensing the nuances, feeling the differences.

Which reminds me. Oh yes, the point of this post. Years ago, when I used to market and sell offshore software services, I tended to open sales pitches with a simple cultural point. I said “The English and the Indian cultures can sometimes be seen to be separated by something as thin as toilet paper. The Indians think the English are dirty, because they use toilet paper…..and after a pause, I gently moved on to how 5 star hotels in Dubai (are there any such things, or are they all six- or even seven-star?) learnt to operate between the east and the west. Cue the mini-shower-head on a hose by the loo seat. Enough said. Maybe TMI.

Cultures are strange things. Differences between cultures stranger still.

Which is why I found this post, using simple pictures to show the differences between Chinese and German cultures, really enjoyable. Do take a look, it’s wonderful. Thank you Adino; keep it up. I loved it.

Incidentally, I also really liked what Adino had to say in his About page:

Welcome friends, family and strangers to Adino Online. This is my very own space on the Internet.

“This is a blog for my family, friends and online friends in a journal format. I will update it at least five nights per week with articles like personal observations, photos, news and updates. I will not write about sensitive issues, politics, work, and gossip. I will not reveal any information that will endanger myself, my family, and my friends.”

I will usually post at night. If you have submitted any comments, please be patient until I approve them at night. Please be careful what you say in your comments. Don’t get me in trouble with our government ok?

One last thing, if you want any help setting up your own website or blog, I can help you in exchange for some consultancy fees

I hope you all visit often, and I hope to hear from you in the comments and through email.

I guess that’s one more reason I love the blogosphere. How I can learn about (and from) other cultures.