Author: JP

Eye of the beholder

Take a look at this photo stream. 6EMEIA is a collection of young artists in Sao Paulo, and they’ve been converting mundane objects like storm drains and paving stones into works of art.

Maybe it’s the Calcutta in me, but I love stories such as the one above, where creativity blossoms forth in the midst of adversity, and then manages to thrive despite everything.

Before you ask. This was not a random find…. once every couple of weeks or so I visit The Daily F’log, something I’d come across via StumbleUpon. My thanks to both.

Why do I keep doing this, referring to the process I went through to find something? Because I think it’s important. I find tools like Blog Friends, a Facebook application (albeit not developed by Facebook), truly useful. As we learn more about learning and about teaching, we are going to find ourselves increasingly looking at the “audit trails” of how people learn. As more and more information becomes digital, our capacity to do this increases almost exponentially.

Which reminds me. It will not be long before I write Part 9 of my Facebook and the Enterprise series, looking at the importance of ecosystems. I will be looking more closely at apps like Blog Friends within that post. Then, as signalled earlier, I will close off the series with a post on Privacy; if there is enough interest, I may then write a brief “compendium” post summarising the whole series. Let me know if you’re interested.

Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

I’ve always loved that quote from The Merchant of Venice, I can almost see the face of Godrej Engineer, my form teacher (and English teacher) from way back in 1973, the first time I heard those lines delivered by someone who knew how to.

Talking about marking the music: a reader, commenting on my Victor Wooten bass post, pointed me at yet another incredible Wooten video, a true slap guitar battle; the way Victor redefines the sounds his instrument makes brought something else to my mind: what John Mayall did in Room to Move many many years ago. And, not surprisingly, there’s a video out there of the Mayall session (though not the studio version, which if I remember right was done without any percussion).

These things, like the proverbial London bus, tend to come in threes. And so it came to pass, that while checking out my Facebook news feed, I noticed that Laurel Papworth had posted something that fit right in with Wooten and Mayall, at least insofar as unusual sounds and instruments were concerned. So take a look at Daft Hands to complete the set. [My thanks to Laurel].

The Because Effect from a different perspective

By now regular readers of this blog should have become used to my referring to Doc Searls’ Because Effect; more recently, I essayed a simple definition as well.

Last night I stayed up to read Dov Seidman’s HOW, a fascinating book. While I am still going through it on Pass One, I cannot resist sharing an excerpt from the preface to Dov’s book:

A new vision of HOW requires a new way of embracing why we get up every morning and go to work. I believe the inspiration to do so lives in the thought that there is a difference between doing something so as to succeed and doing something and achieving success. I am in the business of helping companies and their people do the right things in the right way. The mission of my company is to help others and we make a living so doing. We do not help others so as to make a living. The latter speaks to a journey of intermediate gain and the former to a journey of significance, something of long-term value that makes not just money, but a difference. Significance lies in the ability to see one’s endeavours in terms of service to others, to be guided by a desire and ability to connect. In the  vastly different conditions of our hypertransparent and hyperconnected world, I believe success can no longer be pursued directly, that it can best be achieved — and only achieved — through the pursuit of something larger and deeper.

And versus so as.  The Because Effect is all about And. And not at all about So As.

Amazing…

If you get the chance, take a look at young bassist Victor Wooten playing Amazing Grace. I’ve watched a lot of people play bass, and never quite seen anything or anyone like it. Also on my VodPod as usual.

While musing about social networks and privacy…..

I’ve been reading a lot, as you would expect. In this context, I would strongly recommend danah boyd’s months-old article on the subject, titled Social Network Sites: Public, Private or What? I was particularly struck by this quote early in the article:

What it means to be public or private is quickly changing before our eyes and we lack the language, social norms, and structures to handle it.

This is as true within the enterprise as it is amongst individuals “outside” the enterprise. Over the years, as we’ve seen a plethora of communications tools, techniques and devices invade the enterprise space, there’s been a corresponding change in the very concepts of privacy and confidentiality, when placed in the enterprise context.

The persistence, archival, retrieval and searchability characteristics that danah refers to is something I’ve been writing about for quite some time, as part of the Four Pillars approach. When I went down the Four Pillars route in 2004-05, I was quite heavily influenced by my working in a regulated industry.

Which is why I find some of the enterprise pushbacks on social networks mildly amusing. Even without the existence of social networks, there has been a gradual move towards openness and transparency in most regulated industries, with the consequent requirement to record and make retrievable all kinds of conversations. Many firms spend large amounts of money doing just that. So why not consider implementing something that looks remarkably like a social network within the enterprise?

More later.