Author: JP

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

On features and bugs

I told you I enjoyed reading Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg’s recent book; I told you I was going to start reading his blog, Wordyard.

I kept my word. And I’m still enjoying it. To give you a for-instance, here’s a quote from a piece Scott wrote on MySpace and success:

Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.

Maybe we’re really going to see something different after all, as the software industry discovers co-creation and something analogous to user-generated-something-as-long-as-it’s-not-content.

Scott’s comment makes me think. Think about three things.

  1. today’s safety valves are tomorrow’s bottlenecks as we move closer to the customer. Safety is in the eye of the beholder, the customer.
  2. one man’s feature is another man’s bug. As traditional marketing and sales move out of the way, and customers are left to discover value for themselves, we are going to see a number of such unintended consequences.
  3. these two things are going to accelerate as the customer acquires the tools of production and co-creation.

I’m going to enjoy watching what happens to today’s abominations in IPR and DRM as this gathers momentum.

Musing about Agile

I’ve been catching up with my reading, and came across an intriguing post by Kathy Sierra. Headlined What Comes After Usability, it poses some very interesting questions. I quote from her post:

Unlike waterfalls (which run in one direction and don’t back up), spirals can produce software much more likely to match what users want. Spirals support usability, and usability drives the need for spiral development. But what comes after usability? And will new development approaches emerge to support it?

So, I guess I’m really asking two somewhat-related questions.

What are spirals? Kathy’s term for the family of techniques we know as Agile and XP and fast iteration, a term I happen to like. Here’s the context she uses it in:

Development models

Kathy puts forward the suggestion that what comes after usability is Flow, and, as you would expect, makes reference to the Godfather of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and to his seminal book on the subject. By the way, she invites comment and opinion on her suggestion, so please join the fray at her site so that we can all learn from it.

While I was thinking about this, I was doing my usual thing and reading a number of other books and magazines in parallel. And one of the books I’ve been reading is quite unusual; it’s called Dreaming In Code, and it’s written by Scott Rosenborg, one of the co-founders of salon.com. When I saw it was touted as “the first true successor to Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine“, the Data General person in me couldn’t resist picking it up. And seeing recommendations from Steven Johnson and Dan Gillmor made sure I read it. [An aside. As a result of buying the book I’ve discovered Scott’s blog, Wordyard. Fascinating.]

In the book, Scott quotes from an interview he did with Joel Spolsky some time ago. While on the subject of methodologies, Joel is quoted as saying:

“The key problem with the methodologies is that, implemented by smart people, the kind of people who invent methodologies, they work. Implemented by shlubs who will not do anything more than following instructions they are given, they won’t work. Anyway, the majority of developers don’t read books about software development, they don’t read web sites about software development, they don’t even read Slashdot. So they’re never going to get this, no matter how much we keep writing about it.”

Incidentally, Scott makes reference to The Joel Test as part of this discussion, and it made me smile, just as it did when I first read it nearly seven years ago. If you haven’t seen it before, here are Joel’s Twelve Questions:

  1. Do you use source control?
  2. Can you make a build in one step?
  3. Do you make daily builds?
  4. Do you have a bug database?
  5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
  6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
  7. Do you have a spec?
  8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
  9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
  10. Do you have testers?
  11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
  12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Anyone feel up to updating those 12 questions, to make them relevant to today’s context? [Yes, I do realise that the anti-Agile crew will probably insist that no such update is necessary… the same crew who claim that opensource is anti-innovation and anti-capitalist and anti-I-don’t-know-what-else….]

Apologies for the ramble. What point am I trying to make?

Well, let’s start with Scott. One of the points he makes with real vehemence is the importance of constraints. I quote from his book:

Despite the odds — despite complexity and delay and unpredictable change — a lot of software does get written and delivered and, finally, used. Occasionally, it’s even good. Rarely, it actually does something new and valuable. And in a handful of cases, it achieves all of that on schedule.

Very often, in those rare cases, success is a by-product of iron-willed restraint — a choice firmly made and vociferously reasserted at every challenge to limit a project’s scope. Where you find software success stories, you invariably find people who are good at saying no. Like an artist who deliberately limits his pallet to one colour, a poet who chooses to write a sonnet instead of free verse, or a manufacturer who chooses to serve one small product niche, the successful programmer thrives because of, not in spite of, constraints.

if you’re interested in software development, you should read the book. Scott goes on to explain and develop the experience at 37 signals, an experience that really underlines the importance of user stories, in documenting what the user expects to see, touch, feel and do.

Then we move on to Kathy, who speaks about the need to move from usability and into flow, a state where the user is too busy enjoying what she is doing, too busy to critique or snipe at the software. Flow is when the user experience is no longer submerged in the software, but instead elevated to the outcomes that the software make possible.

Which brings me back full circle to a recent post of mine, where I was talking about Patricia Seybold’s new book, Outside Innovation. The excitement and the challenge of customer-created anything.
The excitement and challenge of helping make that happen.

Remember what Peter Drucker said all those years ago, something I’ve quoted before:

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

Customers don’t want software, they want the things they can make and do because of the software.

When we speak of customer experience, it is not about the software, it is about the things they can make and do. That’s where the flow is, that’s where the joy and the magic are. I still remember the joy I had when I played my first Star Trek style game on a Commodore Pet, when I played my first text-driven adventure game on a Burroughs 6800, when I played my first game of Rats on a B20. Ah yes, nostalgia.

Whose joy? The customer’s. Who is in the Zone, who’s experiencing the flow? The customer. Who can define what that experience is? The customer.

Which is why everything we build should be built around user stories.

And that’s why I’m Confused. How come everyone doesn’t use Agile?

Four Pillars: The Power of Context

checkershadow illusionHave you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

  • The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
  • Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
  • The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

7 seconds of fame: a parable for our times

There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.

Ninja KittenThey’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.

Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in the video as well.

They were not happy. They complained to the head office of the company that did the plagiarising. And the company gracefully apologised and settled out of court. The band gave some of the proceeds to charity, and said they would spend the rest on themselves.

So far so good. What makes this a parable for our times?

The plagiarism apparently took place in Argentina, where the theme and the tune were used for a TV ad.

So how did the band find out? Fans of theirs, fans they didn’t know they had, left comments on the YouTube clip.

Wow.

Linus’s Law in operation. Given enough eyeballs……

[An aside: Their music might not be to everyone’s taste, but do take a look at their web site. Why? Here’s an extract from their “bio”

At the dawn of the new millennium a revolution was underway which would change the world for ever.

Joel and Alex Veitch from rathergood.com were men on a mission. Men wild-eyed with the crazed pursuit of their obsession. Men who loved the moon, U-Boats and Zeppelins. But above all else, men who loved kittens. Kittens.. OF ROCK!

Their mission to subjugate the world to the utopian kitteny vision of the future was well underway, but there was one ingredient missing. And that missing ingredient was…… the unstoppable, unbelievable power of rocksteady skanking ska punk pop beats.

Unbeknownst to them, at the same time four battle-hardened, bloodied and weary gaijin Warriors Of Rock staggered from Japan to the shores of Great Britain. Exactly like the Seven Samurai, but with less Samurais.

And less swords

And more musical instruments. (And also they weren’t actually Japanese like the 7 Samurai were)……

Nuff said.