Author: JP

Connected not channelled

I’m taking my family to watch Live Earth at Wembley today; whatever their interests, I’ve always encouraged them to watch things “live” rather than on television. So we land up in the strangest of places every now and then.

This time around, we booked a hotel in London to make a weekend of it, and I woke up at the crack of dawn as I am wont to do.  My wife was reading the paper in bed, and remarked that the concert line-up timings had been published. That triggered something in me, and I decided to try out the Live Earth on MSN coverage.

I guess I wasn’t expecting much. After all, I was on a Mac, on what passes for wireless in a London hotel, about to try and watch something via MSN that was sponsored by Chevy. Shall we say the omens were not good?

This is the site I went to. This is what I saw when I tried, somewhat pessimistically and resigned-to-my-fate-ically :

LIVE EARTH: THE CONCERTS FOR A CLIMATE IN CRISIS

THE CONCERT IS AVAILABLE FOR MOST INTERNET BROWSERS,
BUT FOR THE BEST VIEWING EXPERIENCE, USE INTERNET EXPLORER

We believe you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer. To proceed, choose the single video you’d like to watch:

Australia |  Japan |  China |  Germany |  United Kingdom |  United States-DC |  South Africa |  United States-NY |  Brazil |  World |  Green

To watch all concerts in a single player and at the highest quality, close this window, start Internet Explorer and browse to http://liveearth.msn.com.

In Internet Explorer you can:

  • Simultaneously view updated status for artists at all venues
  • See constantly updated information on all concerts
  • Toggle between any concert venue you wish and watch additional “green” footage

And my heart sang. Some of you may be purists who want a lot more, but I hope and pray this is the shape of things to come.

I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use Internet Explorer to watch an event live on MSN. I could choose another browser. My choice. Connected not channelled.

Far more importantly, I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use their OS. I could choose another operating system. My choice. Connected not channelled.

In the past, whenever I didn’t go “native”, I had a serious degradation in quality; do you remember MSN Messenger on a Mac in the early days?  This time, thankfully, the QuickTime quality was quite acceptable. If I used Firefox and tabbed my way along, I could move from venue to venue, but what I couldn’t do was figure out how to manage the audio sensibly.

This was more like it. Next time around I expect to see other browsers offer more differentiating services, all around the same video content. Connected not channelled.

Anyone at the BBC listening? I cannot believe the decisions they made, especially when they are meant to be a public service.

But back to Microsoft. Maybe Hugh’s Blue Monster is having an impact after all. My faith in humanity is slowly being restored.

How risk management affects agile approaches

As promised, I ordered a copy of Michael Power‘s new book, Organised Uncertainty. And I’ve given it my first riffle-through, preparing my plan of attack for the next wave through the book. It’s a fascinating read for people of my persuasion. [If you don’t know what my persuasion is, then please take a look at The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog, both of which should be accessible at the top of this page, depending on how you got here.]

Power quotes Douglas and Wildawsky as saying in 1982:

Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot: but yes, we must act as if we do.

Later on, Power states ….”More importantly for the purposes of this book, the emphasis of communication was increasingly on the process of risk management rather than on its content.”

I came across early vestiges of this, of the impact of reputational and similar risks on organisations and their management structures, very early on in my project management career. [And I guess I got so frustrated by what I saw that it was only natural that I found my way to The Audit Explosion, and much later on to The Risk Management of Everything. It was only a matter of time before I took steps to meet Professor Power; we had lunch sometime in 2004, and now, having read his latest book at least one, I realise it is time to meet him again.]

Until I read Organized Uncertainty, I never really made the connection between this overgrowth of risk management and the distrust of agile management techniques. I never really understood the Emperor’s-New-Clothes-Syndrome. Now, slowly, light is beginning to dawn, to leach into my landscape.

Once you switch focus from content to process, agile techniques don’t stand a chance. Agile in a “content” perspective leads to the Baconian “A man that starts with doubts shall end in certainties”; agile in a “process” perspective leads to the other Baconian statement “A man that starts with certainties shall end in doubts”. These two positions are polar opposites.

As Douglas and Wildawsky stated, people act as if they know the risks they face despite not knowing them; they then disparage people who act to discover and potentially mitigate hitherto unknown risks. The Emperor’s New Clothes.

More later.

Continuing to learn from my children

Information overload is of the commonest pushbacks against the take-up of social software “behind the firewall” in enterprises. I’ve always believed in “filtering on the way out rather than on the way in”. Now that’s great in theory, but the practice gets harder as the firehose grows in diameter and I get older. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for different ways of visualising things.

Recently I was pottering about at home while my youngest child (Hope, my daughter aged 9) was surfing, and I went to take a look at what she was doing. She was happily using StumbleUpon, one of my favourite tools, to go she knew not where. [Yes I do make sure that inappropriate content is blocked].

And she stopped at this video. As usual, I’ve made it available on my VodPod in the sidebar as well. [Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why I VodPod at the same time as providing the link, the answer’s simple. If you want to find the video link later you would normally have to search through my archives for the right post. Instead, by my using VodPod, you can get here straight from the sidebar.]

I think the Animusic videos are great ways of giving people a chance to visualise music, there’s something vaguely Heath Robinson-meets-Mozart about them. I will ponder over this for a while, trying to consider where else this type of imagery would come in useful.

Visualisation techniques are essential tools when dealing with information firehoses, and (IMO) are far more effective than filtering techniques. When you can add decent collaborative filtering, recommendation and ratings mechanisms to good visualisation techniques, the world is your firehose.

More on 21st century adoption curves

Looks like a week is a long time in politics and in social software. Last week I wrote about using Facebook as a proxy for looking at 21st century adoption curves. So far, I haven’t been able to collect information about usage or about age breakdowns, but I’m sure that will be possible soon enough.

In the meantime, let’s see what’s moved:

So let’s see. Every single classification moved up at least 10% in a week. Overall the apps were up by a quarter, or averaging over 50 new apps a day. The biggest mover was Politics (!), always an interesting trend in social networking. What fascinates me is the top 5: Politics, Events, Business, Education and Mobile. Between them these 5 classifications added about a quarter of the new apps.

Politics, Events, Business, Education and Mobile. Hmmmmm.

More later.

Failing at the edges of the network

David Smith, one of the first people to comment on my blog, remains on my everyday read list. Recently I noticed he linked to something I’d written on risk management, and I moved via his blog to Bruno Guissani ‘s commentary on Aula2006, including his coverage of Clay Shirky‘s session.

There are some real gems in the two posts I’ve referenced above, I urge you to read them. One that struck a particular chord for me was the following, from Bruno’s piece:

Shirky’s argument goes like this: when you explore really new ideas, it’s pretty much impossible to tell in advances the successes from the failures. The business world today is geared towards “optimizing” the innovation processes in order to reduce the likelihood of failure. That’s a significant disadvantage when compared with the open-source ecosystem, which “doesn’t have to care” and “can try out everything” because “the cost of failure is carried by the individuals at the edges of the network, while the value of the successes magnifies and adds value to the whole network”. “Ecosystems such as open-source get failure for free, and that produces some inevitable unexpected big successes – the Linux operating system – that nobody could have predicted but end up changing the world”

The cost of failure is carried by the individuals at the edges of the network, while the value of the successes magnifies and value to the whole network. Sometime ago I commented that opensource people tend to solve problems first and foremost rather than develop complex business models. I think that what Clay says is more articulate and far more elegant.

If you disaggregate the cost of failure it will drop. If you reduce the cost of failure then you increase the capacity to innovate. If the innovation is carried out by individuals at the edge then those costs drop as well. As all these costs drop there is a natural speeding-up. A lovely virtuous circle with the right feedback loops.

My thanks to David and Bruno and Clay, they’ve given me a lot of good food for thought.