Author: JP

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.

I must be Confused. I’ve never been tempted to give my bank account details to strangers telling me they will pay me gazillions to help them embezzle whole countries. I’ve never thought that I could win lotteries without buying tickets, particularly lotteries from countries I’d never heard of. I haven’t fallen for the rest of the Fear and Greed plays that make up most of the spam I get, I am not interested in artificial aids to improve who I am and what I am.

And I am not unusual. I don’t actually know a single person who has fallen for the Nigerian letter scam or sent off for spurious lottery wins.

Spam is an irritant. Not a terminal toxin.  What’s all this to do with Citizendium or with Wikipedia? Let me take you on a little trip into a land of fairy tales.

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re going to solve your spam problem for you. What we’re going to do, we’re going to set up this small committee that looks into every e-mail you get, and we’re only going to send you the ones we think are OK. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about who’s going to be on this committee and how they get there. After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re sick and tired of all the mistakes we see in the news you read. You never know where the news has been, who else has used it. So we’re going to help you. We’re going to set up this small committee, you see, and we’re going to go through all the bits of news that might ever get to you. And we’re only going to let you see the bits we think are OK. Oh, and by the way….. After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy; I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera. We’re really worried about all the blogs you read, all the feeds you get, all the sites you visit. So we’re going to help you…..After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? You have no idea what you might find when you go searching. Ooh baby baby it’s a wild world …. just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware…You need your searching filtered. So we’re going to help you…..After all, we know best.”

After all, we know best. Trust me, I’m a doctor. Would I lie to you? Where is my second-hand furniture salesman when I need one?

There are many things that are wrong with Wikipedia, many things that we can make better. And there are many people out there who know a lot more than I do about this, so I’ll let them speak.

I know one thing. I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.

We’ve had the Cult Of The Expert for centuries now. And we’ve seen how and why it breaks down, why it fails. Small groups of experts can be “gamed”, often without realising it. Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.

Of course this is not true of all experts. There is much to be said for expertise. But there is also much to be said for amateurs. Passionate, unbiased, unbuyable. Willing to admit to their errors. Less prone to ego. Less hung up about losing. Or winning.

Linus’s Law is a very powerful thing. Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. When we see things that are wrong with Wikipedia, the solution is to fix it, not to create a new form of corruption.

I could be wrong. Citizendium may become the most wonderful thing since sliced bread. [I shall resist the temptation to say: For people who like being told which side of their bread is buttered, by people who like deciding which side of the bread should be buttered.]

After all, they know best. 

As for me, I like my inputs unfiltered. I like choosing whose opinion I will listen to, whose recommendations matter to me. I like my facts and my history and my news and my feeds and my searches and my music and my literature and my films and my everything to come to be like a river, as I think Dave Winer first suggested.

And when I have this river firehose elephantine thingie coming at me, I will use friends and their recommendations and their comments and their opinions to cut out the stuff I don’t want and to point to the stuff I do want. Collaborative filtering is a beautiful thing.

And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy me a billy goat. A billy goat called tagging and folksonomies.
I don’t think this way because I have a hang-up about experts. It’s something more basic than that. My nose twitches. I get goosebumps and collywobbles. I start saying to myself, beware the Jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.

As I said earlier, there’s a lot to be said for experts and for expertise. You may think I’m being unfair to experts in general, and you’d be right.

Let me put it this way: We have a choice of being unfair to experts or unfair to amateurs. From what I can see, the experts have had their turn and it didn’t work. So now maybe it’s the amateurs’ turn.

But what do I know? After all, I am Confused.

[My next post in this series is going to be about Citizendium, Wikipedia and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Or, more particularly, why the Cult Of The Expert militates against VRM, and why it was responsible for giving us that appalling concoction CRM in the first place. You have been warned. Do adjust your sets.]