Author: JP

Have you ever wondered why India don’t have a team at the World Cup finals? [Here I am being obdurate and pedantic and loving it…. there is only one Open. And there is only one World Cup. There is absolutely no need to have adjectives before those words. Tautology bordering on treason).

You would imagine that a country with a population in excess of a billion may just be able to scratch up a decent soccer team. If, like me, you were born and raised in Calcutta, you would understand it even less. Because Calcutta is a soccer-crazy city. I would suspect that the brand awareness of East Bengal, Mohun Bagan (the oldest soccer club in Asia, dating back to 1889) and Mohammedan Sporting are individually greater than that of Sony, Microsoft and Apple put together, across the state of West Bengal as a whole.

I was brought up to love sport. And to go watch it. We had no television in the house. In fact, when I left India in 1980, I’d only seen a TV programme three times. And I could remember each occasion vividly. At the USIS, when man landed on the moon in 1969. Watching “I Love Lucy”, one of the first programmes to be screened, and wondering what the fuss was about. And trying to watch a cricket match at a friend’s house some years later while the adults were busy having lunch and arguing about cars and petrol. That was it.

Back to soccer. As a child I’d been told that India had actually qualified for the World Cup Finals in 1950, only to be disqualified later for refusing to put boots on. And I’d filed it under my childhood equivalent of “urban myth”. But later on I found out the truth. One, India did qualify; but only because their  qualification opponents all withdrew. Two, India did not really get disqualified later; they withdrew because FIFA insisted that no player appear barefoot, and the Indian team weren’t having that. That sounds about as believable as the USA-England scoreline that year…. :-) Read all about it in Wikipedia here.
India is currently ranked 137th in the world, and have recently announced some sort of tie-up with Brazil, across a number of fronts, including soccer. Park that to one side for a while.
While studying the nurture-versus-nature debate, I came across The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, published recently. I have not done any more than skim it, I need time. But the elevator pitch appears to be, Nurture Wins. Motivation and Perseverance and Coaching and Training Wins. Every Time. But it takes as long as it takes, usually Ten Years. If you want to see a summary of the book, which resonates with a lot of other things I believe in, you could do worse than read the latest issue of New Scientist, which reviews it here, but all too briefly, the rest is behind a paywall.

So I thought to myself. India. World Cup Finals. Ten Years. Which means qualifying for the 2018 Finals. From 137th to Top 10 in a decade, because of Nurture.

You see, ever since I read Porter’s Comparative Advantage of Nations in 1990 (an aside, try linking to that book!), I’ve always believed I understood why, say, Pakistan produced excellent squash players, why Germany had no real golfers until Langer, why Sweden had no world-class tennis players until Borg. Availability and opportunity. The willingness and motivation may be there, but there needs to be much much more. Opportunity. Availability.

That’s why the web and social software excite me so much. Opportunity. Availability.

Take a look at what Clarence Fisher is saying here. Fantastic stuff. Keep it going Clarence, your post is the kernel for this one.
All this drum-banging about social software is not because I own stock in one or more of the firms that produce them (I don’t. In fact since 1987 I have never owned stock in anything other than the company I worked for). It’s not because I think it’s cool and I want to be noticed. I’s not because I have nothing else to write about.

So why is it? It is because I care for disenfranchised people, and want to make a difference. Particularly because I grew up in Calcutta, I have always felt I understood something about the haves and the not-haves, the contrasts were stark there. And somewhere inside of me, I guess I think of myself as a street kid born into almost-bankrupt almost-nobility, yet with immense privileges and access.
What I see now, and what I have seen for the last twenty-odd years, is the emergence of a whole new set of sharp-contrast urban and suburban societies. But this time they’re in the West, so they don’t get called slums or shanty towns or anything like that. People use euphemisms like inner cities, urban degeneration, sometimes even admitting to terms like “underclass”.

This sharp-contrast society is everywhere. Worldwide. East and West, North and South, developed or not. And there’s a whole generation, maybe two, who are out there, without access or choices, living hand-to-mouth and primarily on their wits. Some angry, some depressed, some apathetic. Many with no options apparent to them but some form of crime.
And their primary fuel? Peer respect and recognition. You can’t blame them. Nobody else appears to care for them or even acknowledges their existence.

I think social software can go a long way in motivating people like that, giving them their dignity and self-respect back, giving them access and options they have never had.

For “education” read “anything you like”. For “disenfranchised inner city student” read “anybody”.

This thing we call social software is huge. It will take time. But it will happen. And we must do what we can to embed this thinking, this paradigm. In enterprise, in education, in government, in healthcare, even in world trade.

Markets are conversations. Conversations happen between people with relationships. Trust and transparency are the glue to relationships. Transactions are a by-product of the market, not the objective.

And social software helps us make this happen.

I read Economics at university. Many years ago. And my father used to keep telling me that the most dangerous phrase he’d ever heard an economist use was “Let us assume that…”.

So when I studied perfect markets and perfect information and rational behaviour, I understood the assumptions and understood that the assumptions were wrong. But it didn’t matter, or so I thought, since all we were doing was building theoretical models.

When it came to “perfect information”, I was naive enough to believe that the only constraints to perfect information existed in the technologies used to transport that information. It was only as I began to understand how organisations worked that I realised just how naive I was.

But there were parts of me that still believed, And so as Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder marched on, and the web became reality, I could see a way of using social software to inch towards perfect markets in some very specific niches.

Two niches in particular.

I wanted to be able to build a list of requirements using a wiki, and I wanted to be able to go through the search, price discovery, and fulfilment stages of purchasing something that meets those requirements via a blog.

Which brings me to this story in the Telegraph blog, pointed to me via Ross and Alexis. Thanks, guys.

When we look at the problems of requirements capture and their consequent impact on project costs and delivery, we need to look at ways to improve this process. We understand about time-boxing and time-placing, we understand about scope creep and requirements creep, we understand about extreme programming, pair programming, fast iteration. So why can’t we see that we can capture, share, iterate and evolve requirements much more effectively using wikis? I’m confused.

There ought to be a law that says “Information tends to go corrupt when hidden, and tends to corrupt those who participate in the process of hiding the information.”

We waste so much in the procurement process for the same reasons. We don’t use the tools we have to discover what’s out there. We don’t make the process a participative one. We make it worse by allowing the tenderers better access to the requirements than anyone else. I’m confused.

As with wikipedia and with the celebrity blogs, there will always be vandals, some in the interests of art, some in the interests of “freedom”, some for the heck of it.

But you don’t shut down record stores because Banksy makes a statement about Paris Hilton.

You don’t shut down museums because Marcel Duchamp puts a moustache on a copy of La Gioconda.

So why do we do this? Why do we have so much fear of perfect information? So much so we blame the tools, the people, everything.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined a cynic as follows:

A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

Many years later, Albert Einstein defined common sense as “the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”.

As I grow older, I realise that however hard I try to keep an open mind, and to learn, I land up with anchors and frames and perspective-biases that I don’t always know I have. Which means that sometimes I have to work hard to ensure that I don’t lapse insidiously into cynicism.

So you can understand why I had to work very hard indeed when analysing the Microsoft Open Specification Promise that was published yesterday. If you’re interested in the subject, then please do check out Kim Cameron’s blog here,  Doc’s piece at IT Garage (where he asks for your opinion as well) and Phil Windley’s blog here, along with Becker and Norlin’s Digital ID World blog at ZDNet.

Microsoft are not known for their pioneering approaches in the opensource world. Identity is one of the three big issues that affects our ability to deliver the promise of today’s technology (the other two are Intellectual Property/Digital Rights and the “internet”, with or without Stevens’ Tubes). A valid solution for identity pretty much needs Microsoft’s support and that of its legions of lawyers.
And so we come to the Open Specification Promise. My early reactions? I think Kim Cameron and his team have done a brilliant job at pulling this off and getting something workable past the lawyers’ cynosure.

If you want to understand it, and don’t particularly feel like wading through “implication, exhaustion, estoppel or otherwise” (and who could blame you?), then skip the legalese and go straight to the Frequently Asked Questions section. I quote from the FAQs:

• The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement specifications through a simplified method of sharing of technical assets, while recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property.
• We listened to feedback from community representatives who made positive comments regarding the acceptability of this approach.
• Q: Why did Microsoft take this approach?
• A: It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever.
• Q: How does the Open Specification Promise work? Do I have to do anything in order to get the benefit of this OSP?
• A: No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to implement the specification(s), as they wish and do not need to make any mention of or reference to Microsoft. Anyone can use or implement these specification(s) with their technology, code, solution, etc. You must agree to the terms in order to benefit from the promise; however, you do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate your agreement to Microsoft.
• Q: What is covered and what is not covered by the Open Specification Promise?
• A: The OSP covers each individual specification designated on the public list posted at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/. The OSP applies to anyone who is building software and or hardware to implement one or more of those specification(s). You can choose to implement all or part of the specification(s). The OSP does not apply to any work that you do beyond the scope of the covered specification(s).

We have a long way to go before we can solve all this. We’re not going to solve all this unless we stop acting like cynics. So let’s get behind Kim Cameron on this and see what happens. That’s what I’m going to do.
An aside: Why can’t legal agreements be written like FAQ sections? Is there a law against it? 

One thing I have found to be consistently true for social software is the immense value of experimenting with every form of it. You don’t know what you can do with “it”, (whatever “it” is) until you try.

I remember being told when I was eight years old that the ancient Greeks had major arguments about aspects of gravity; the arguments centred around a two-stone model, one big and one small. They assumed that the big stone would fall faster than the small one, taking the feather analogy to its extreme. But after that, they were lost. One school suggested that the resultant “stone” was bigger and would fall faster than the big stone. The other said that the small stone would slow down the big stone and therefore the resultant “stone” would be slowed down in comparison to the big stone in isolation.

The detail doesn’t matter. What matters is that they never tried it. Just talked about it.

And it is with this in mind that I recommend you take a look at BizPredict. Thanks to Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 for letting me know.

Whether it’s blogs or wikis or social networks or prediction markets or better tags or identity or intention or whatever, we all need to figure out what happens by playing with it. What governance models work. What privacy issues emerge. What unusual uses humankind finds for all this. What the ecosystems look like, how they evolve.