Author: JP

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

Robert Herrick, Upon Julia’s Clothes

Liquefaction. A word to savour. Sensuously sliding off the surface of your tongue. Liquefaction, the process of liquefying; the process of turning something that was not a liquid into a liquid.

For the last day and a half, I was ensconced with my team at work, seeing where we’re trying to go, reviewing how we’re getting there, working out what we can do better. All made more enjoyable because we had the privilege of Doc working with us.

Jeremy and his team spent some time showing us the things we’d been able to do with Tiddlywiki, and the discussion moved on into one of my favourite subjects, the flow of information. I was stressing the importance of not building walled gardens with our applications, making sure that our applications allow customers to import or export their information simply, and in standardised ways.

Something about that conversation stuck with me, and I pondered on it later. And this is where I went:

At one time all assets were physical. When we wanted to exchange assets all we could do was barter them, albeit at some rate of exchange we could discover or determine. When the idea of money came along, everything changed, and the barter economy went away. Since money could operate as a medium of exchange, it became possible for us to convert our physical assets into something “liquid”.

I was struck by the liquid concept. When we convert physical assets into this thing we call money, then something strange happens, very similar to what happens when, for example, soil liquefaction takes place. Something hard and physical undergoes a structural change. One of the words used to describe this changed substance is cohesionless.

Now money went through a number of iterations along the road from physical to digital, growing up from being a store of value to being a medium of exchange and a unit of account. People wailed and moaned and gnashed their teeth as something physical and real became something representational and digital. One of the words used to describe what happened to money along the way is that it became commoditised. And people did not like it. It didn’t feel like it was theirs. So some held on to the gold, some kept the banknotes under their mattresses, some insisted on cheques forever and a day. But in the end everyone went digital.

Something similar is happening to information. All we can “own” is the conventional representation, the token for whatever we convert into digital form. We don’t own the digital form. It’s just an ocean of bits. You can keep track of what you put in before it became digital water, you can keep track of what you took out as digital water, but while it’s there, it’s just water.

Just water. Not my water and your water. Not text water and video water and audio water. Not black water and white water. Just water. Pure water.

Water which we can use to do many things, which we can mix in different ways, which we can mash up and recombine and repackage. Water which we can do all these things with because we have avoided polluting it.

When money became water, we kept the tokens, the conventional representations and ownership symbols, we kept them out of the water.

We have to do the same with information. With everything digital.

The tokens have to be kept out of the water.

This story, about tiny South Pacific islands and internet domains, intrigued me.

At first glance I thought it was nothing more than digital snake oil, someone trying to make a quick buck by selling an unusual top-level domain name related to an unheard-of island country that can’t be found on the average school globe. At least I’d heard of Tuvalu. But Tokelau?

Well, it exists. There are only 1500 people who live in Tokelau, a collection of  three islands in a remote part of the South Pacific. More than four times that number have emigrated, and the prime reason for emigration seems to be a lack of options, a lack of access.

By becoming a connected nation, they appear to have:

(a) added to their GDP significantly

(b) improved their healthcare access and delivery

(c) made a difference to their education system

(d) allowed their expatriates to remain in touch more effectively

It’s heartening to note that there’s such a clear health-education-welfare pattern.

What else do they do? They talk to each other using internet telephony. They download music and they watch videos. And they have started using social networks.

Sounds about right. There is so much we can do when we get connected.

Connected, not channelled. 

James E. Robinson, III:

Give a kid a firewall and you protect him for a day. Teach a kid to surf and you protect him for a lifetime

In so many places and in so many ways we have to stop the give-mode and move on to the teach-mode. In a completely different context, sometimes I think we get the whole concept of aid wrong as a result: how many studies do we have to read that tell us that a dollar of trade is worth a hundred dollars of aid?

Giving per se is not a bad thing. I tend to think of human beings as fundamentally altruistic rather than selfish, man is a social animal. But sometimes, the process of giving actually creates a dependency; instead, we should be concentrating on developing the people we give to, be it in the classroom or even in emerging nations.

Way back in 1974, I remember a maths teacher of mine telling the class, upon meeting them for the first time:

From today, you will impress me, not by the answers you give, but by the questions you ask

It’s all about education, access, empowerment and opportunity. Whether in education, enterprise or government, the answer’s the same. The web provides us immense opportunity to extend all this. Unless we continue to get it wrong in the context of Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet (which we are wont to do).

Do you read Make magazine? I’ve enjoyed doing so for some time now, been reading it since its inception. To me it’s a bit like reading Popular-Mechanics-meets-DIY-Home-And-Car-Meets-Popular-Electronics, and there is enough that’s off the beaten track to stimulate me. I feel I learn a lot from going through the projects in each issue, even if I rarely get the time to do the actual Making.

This time something else caught my eye. An article headlined The Maker State, thankfully free and unfettered, no paywall in sight. I really like some of the ideas espoused in the article, about the Maker State. Here’s an excerpt:

In a “nanny state”, somebody else — governments, insurance companies, education administrators — decides which projects makers may attempt and which they may not. In the nanny state, experimenters and builders find themselves deprived of the materials, tools and information they need to carry on their interests.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the “night watchman state”. Here, authorities try to keep thugs off the street, keep the electricity on, and that’s about it. You’re pretty much on your own.

Most of us prefer to live, work and play somewhere in the middle. Let’s call it the “Maker State”. In the Maker State, everyone takes reasonable precautions and wears protective equipment. Safe working practices, if thoughtfully incorporated into the act of making things, can become a performance-improving feature, just as athletes wear better equipment to enhance their performance.

Now that’s exactly how I feel about social software in the enterprise. We must take reasonable precautions and implement safe working practices thoughtfully and sensitively, so as to create an environment where performance is enhanced. We need every enterprise to realise that a Maker State is what we need within the enterprise, not a nanny state.

Otherwise we’re going to continue with the madness of hiring intelligent people and then carefully draining every last drop of intelligence from them. Why would we keep telling intelligent people what to do? In a Maker State enterprise, individual and collective performance is enhanced by the application of the right soft-hands working practices rather than the handcuffs and leg restraints of the Nanny State, or the almost-anarchy abdication of the Night Watchman State.

Andres Bianciotto is someone I met via the blogosphere; he commented on something I’d written many months ago; I took the opportunity to take a look at his blog, and when I realised he wrote mainly in Spanish, I decided to link to him. Why? Some similar interests, and maybe a way of improving my Spanish. I like learning by doing.

Not surprisingly, we connected again, via Facebook, more recently.

And today, looking at my news feed, I noticed that he’d recruited someone to a cause.  The act of recruitment was itself unremarkable, but the cause was fascinating. It said Search for Steve Fossett. So I looked into it.

And what I found was remarkable, at least to me. A Human Intelligence Task had been set up using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, simply asking volunteers to assist in looking through satellite imagery in order to help find Steve Fossett. While the prognosis looks grim, we should do what we can. My prayers are with Steve, his family and with everyone involved in the search.

There is so much we can do with the tools we have, once we get rid of the blinkers we’ve worn. There is so much that we can do that has practical and life-enhancing value for so many people, in health, education and welfare. But we can do all this only if we continue to learn how to use the tools, continue unfettered in our experimentation and in the application of our intelligence, both individual as well as collective, towards improving our capability.