Author: JP

Early comments and conversations suggest that I didn’t get my point across when discussing the moods and changes of various armed services organisations with respect to emerging technologies.

The point I was trying to make was this:

An integral, essential part of the web as it is today is its writeability, its “liveness”. When you comment on a blog or add an entry to Wikipedia, what you are doing is uploading text. It is no different from what you do when you contribute a photograph to Flickr or a video to YouTube.

This writeability is key. It is what allows conversations to take place, learning to take place, democratised innovation to take place, culture to form and morph. It is what makes today’s web what it is.

You don’t have to participate. But you must have the right to. That is what makes today’s web different from yesterday’s web. Any organisation which seeks to gain value from today’s web needs to understand this. The web is two-way. So when you want to take advantage of YouTube, you need to understand this two-way-ness. And be part of it.

Sure, there is a difference between text and audio and image and video. To us. But not to the computer. As Bob Frankston keeps reminding me, it’s all bits. Nothing else. Deciding not to allow access to YouTube or Flickr or last.fm is a perfectly reasonable thing for the military to do. But that decision is a two-way decision. Neither up nor down. Or both.

That’s what I meant when I saw the “usual suspects being wheeled out”. Argue about security, sure. Argue about money, sure. But don’t argue about the two-way nature of the web and still expect to gain value from it.

I was reminded of the existence of this during a completely different conversation over at Gordon Cook’s discussion group. Fascinating talk, provides an unusual and lively view of aspects of computing history. I think it’s important for all of us to revisit such conversations and discussions, it will help us do the right thing when it comes to the internet, intellectual property rights and identity.

For people who have the time and the inclination, there’s a hefty slide presentation available via the same link, you may find it worth while to listen to the audio while working the presentation yourself. Don’t be put off by the double misspelling of Von Neumann on the site; the talk is of high quality, as are a number of the other sessions organised by the IT Conversations guys.

Three headlines I saw today, suggesting the shape of arguments to come:

1. Bandwidth leap for British forces

2.  US Military takes Iraq war to YouTube

3.  US blocks soldiers from websites

I find the trend interesting and just slightly worrying. Let me explain why. Of course the military have the right to make judgment calls on the economics and security of technology investments. It’s not just the military, every commercial enterprise has that right.

The trouble is, I fear the reasons for the pushback are different. My suspicion is the following:

Enlightened people in the US military encouraged adoption of toolsets like YouTube. This was a hard and sustained argument, and the outcome was reason for optimism. The same thing seemed to be happening in the UK as well, by the way, I remember a story about a satirical version of the Amarillo video making its way on to YouTube; the video was made by a UK soldier.

Then something changed, and the usual suspects were wheeled out:

• They’re using too much bandwidth, this has got to stop.
• They are meant to be working, this has got to stop.
• What they’re doing is a threat to security, this has got to stop.

The question is, why? What event made the enlightened group lose momentum and give up the high ground? How come the usual suspects were allowed to surface again? This argument is going to surface and resurface at pretty much every major enterprise, so we all need to learn. Any comments or views?

People have been very quick to add the suffix 2.0 to pretty much everything that’s going on nowadays, and as quick to argue about what 2.0 means in each context. I don’t particularly care one way or the other; my interests are in the tools and techniques that emerge, who uses them and why, how culture shapes their usage, how culture is shaped by their usage.

So I land up looking for good examples of “new” tools and techniques, just to see what can be done, what is being done. Many times, these things aren’t new per se, they’re just new to me. Then, as time passes, people get better with the techniques; there comes a point when we start seeing cultural adoption, and then it’s only a matter of time before we see them come into the mainstream.

Here are some examples of stuff I find interesting in this respect:

• showing some of the joys of shockwave animation: you can almost feel the fun Dustball must have had putting this sequence together at cookiedoughrecords
• showing what can be done with stop motion video: Here’s my favourite Tony v Paul session
• showing what happens when books meet the digital age: take a look at Dave Werner talking about Cadence of Seasons

I’m not “waxing lyrical” about them, nor am I claiming these are best-of-breed. All I am saying is that I’ve learnt some things by visiting the links, and I’m sharing them with you just in case you find them of interest as well. The premise is the same as that which drove me into experimenting with Second Life, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft. Unless I see what’s happening, I cannot figure out what else I can do with such stuff, how I can apply the techniques in the context of enterprise information.

It’s strange, but most of the time, the place I land up is somewhere between enterprise information and education. Maybe there’s a reason. Maybe the next generation of enterprise information will actually have a great deal to do with education, as we begin, finally, to reap the rewards of knowledge management.

It’s been an unusual weekend. Spent most of it closeted away with a bunch of very talented people, at an event organised by the Trinity Forum, headlined When No One Sees: The Importance of Character in an Age of Image. It worked a bit like an unconference: a small group of attendees, a core agenda run workshop style, lightly moderated and completely dependent on a participative audience. The format was garnished by some excellent guest speakers at mealtimes, and the surroundings were superb. More of that later.

I was very taken by something said by one of the visiting speakers. Headmaster of one of the larger private schools, he described his job as “being responsible for 1250 teenage boys every Saturday night”.

We were looking at the role of education and educationalists in the formation of character; it was a fascinating debate, bloglike in its tangential nature. At some point in the discussion, he was describing aspects of the pupils’ engagement with theatre and drama, and he made the observation:

We don’t use prompters

I think this is key. A simple decision — doing away with prompting — had a worthwhile impact on the takent and character of the students. They changed the way they prepared; they changed the way they responded when facing a problem; they changed the way they stepped in to help when others faced problems.

We need to keep examining what we do: every time we promote an inspection/repair culture, we tend to implement safety nets; the safety nets encourage slipshod behaviour, and soon we find that all we are promoting is mediocrity.

If achieving mediocrity wasn’t bad enough, we tend to make it worse. Far too often, the mediocrity attracts another foul behaviour, an audit culture where the measurement process becomes more important than that which is being measured.  How else can mediocrity rise?