Author: JP

Following my post on The Economist’s article on truthful inflight announcements, Peeter Marvet pointed me at this story in a Toronto blog. Fundamentally someone at the Economist wrote to a number of bloggers, inviting them to cover and “scoop” the story, as a seeded experiment.

Wow, I said to myself. This is what a connected world feels like. Not sure where Peeter is, my guess would be Estonia. He reads something in a Canadian blog about a magazine published in the UK experimenting with the blogosphere. Wow, I said to myself.
So I read Michael Seaton‘s post, and assumed that the “scoop” link sent to him would open up the DRMed story, so that I could share it with all of you.

Wrong.
I’m glad the Economist is experimenting; but there must be better ways of doing this. Why not just let a few trial stories go out there free-to-ether, stories they think are eminently linkable, and see what happens? See whether they get a spike in digital subscriptions correlated to the linkers’ locations. Whatever.

Update: Michael Seaton commented on this post, and has now provided the entire article on his blog. Thanks, Michael. And thank you again, Peeter. [BTW was I right? Is your blog written in Estonian?]
There is much to learn about all this. We need to move from Seeding-as-Marketing to Recommending-as-The-Only-Way.

Buyers will make their intentions known, either overtly or covertly; marketing has always been about reducing the buyer’s search costs and simplifying the decision to purchase. There is no better way of reducing buyer search costs other than recommendations from trusted networks. Independent trusted networks.

The independence is as important as the recommendation.

I’d never heard of Sharon Weinberger or of Jack Sarfatti until a few days ago, when Chris Locke pointed me at a microwar brewing in the wikipedia space. [Thanks, Chris!]

Sharon makes some interesting observations in a post headlined Jimmy versus Jack. Examples:

• Wikipedia is a great resource, but I have been even more fascinated by a model of dealing with knowledge that could dispense with the elitism inherent in peer review. Wikipedia’s open editing model sounds so wonderfully subversive. But now that Wikipedia has a dominant web presence, it’s finding that allowing the masses to have free reign over knowledge has its downsides.
• I have argued […….] that peer review, though an imperfect system, may be the best system we have for dealing with science–at least as it pertains to science funded by government. I’ve often doubted my own conviction about this argument, and had secretly hoped that Wikipedia offered some alternative–if not for funding science–then at least for propagating science that might be unfairly quashed by peer review.
• In the final analysis, my issue […..] isn’t even whether […..] belongs to […….], but who gets to determine that classification. Wikipedians, [……], Jimmy Wales, or perhaps peer review?
• I don’t have the answer, and neither does Wikipedia,……

My italics. My elisions. My emboldening. And, if necessary, my bad.
Peer reviews can often be like benchmarking. Everyone accepts the intrinsic value, and yet everyone tends to use the process only when they can be sure that the answer is one that suits them.

I’m interested in Sharon’s observation that there is an elitism inherent in peer reviewing, particularly in scientific academia. More than just interested, intrigued. I sense that all her statements are in the same ball-park as my concerns with gatekeepers.

Humour me as I go for a wander. Take the origin of the word “bankrupt”. Wikipedia has this to say:

• The word bankruptcy is formed from the ancient Latin bancus (a bench or table), and ruptus (broken). A “bank” originally referred to a bench, which the first bankers had in the public places, in markets, fairs, etc. on which they tolled their money, wrote their bills of exchange, etc. Hence, when a banker failed, he broke his bank, to advertise to the public that the person to whom the bank belonged was no longer in a condition to continue his business. As this practice was very frequent in Italy, it is said the term bankrupt is derived from the Italian banco rotto, broken bench (see e.g. Ponte Vecchio). Others rather choose to deduce the word from the French banque, table, and route, vestigium, trace, by metaphor from the sign left in the ground, of a table once fastened to it and now gone. On this principle they trace the origin of bankrupts from the ancient Roman mensarii or argentarii, who had their tabernae or mensae in certain public places; and who, when they fled, or made off with the money that had been entrusted to them, left only the sign or shadow of their former station behind them.

I’ve looked at the Shorter Oxford and at Skeat, and they both endorse what I have always thought. The term is understood to have derived from the Italian banca rotta around the middle of the 16th century. Which is consistent with imagery of the merchants of Lombardy breaking the moneychanging bench of one of their peers when he let them down, so that he could not transact any business in the marketplace.

Peer review. Of a sort. Peer-driven action as a result of some community value or more or principle being broken. [I don’t buy the argument, suggested in the Wikipedia entry, amongst others, that the failing banker broke his own bank.]

Let’s move from bankruptcy to Speakers Corner. While there may be many such instances, the one I am most familiar with is the one at Hyde Park.

The rules appear to be simple and consistent. Anyone is allowed to speak. But you cannot trash the monarchy or seek to overthrow the government. Apparently.

So you can speak about pretty much any subject you like. And there are no bouncers or gatekeepers about.  But there are regulars about. Regulars who listen to anyone and everyone, quick to heckle, quick to clap. Who are these regulars? In the context of the All Comers market, their peers.

Destruction of the tools of trade, as in the Lombardy bankrupts. Ejection from the place of trade, as in defenestration. Heckling and jeering, as at Speakers Corner. At some level of abstraction, I guess that even jury trials are a form of peer review.

All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. The bulk of the weakness comes from being able to game the system, which happens as soon as you introduce some formal selection process for the peers, or (much worse) some barriers to selection or entry.
Peer review processes work best when the peers are the men on the Clapham omnibus, or even with Twelve Angry Men.

But we need to keep the selection criteria for peers as open as possible, and the barriers to speaking/publishing/sharing as low as possible.

I need to understand more about how elitism comes into play in scientific reviews. Any offers out there?

Granted, I trained as an economist and financial journalist. Granted, I have a weird sense of humour. I still did not expect to laugh out loud while reading the Economist.

This week’s issue has a wonderful sideways look at what airline in-flight announcements might sound like, if they were truthful. I wish I could share the whole article with you (it’s only half a page) but I guess that it would not constitute Fair Use. Here’s the strangled-at-birth link, for those who are interested. [People at the Economist: want to get more print subscriptions? want to get more oh-so-profitable digital subscriptions? Then let subscribers like me link freely to the content. And see what happens.]

The in-flight announcement proceeds to tear apart a plethora of “marketed” half-truths, quarter-truths and downright lies. It takes no prisoners, scathing over issues ranging from front-versus-rear-facing seats, likelihood of survival in the event of an emergency landing on water, the value of lifejackets and rafts, the reason for banning mobile phones, issues related to CAT and DVT and air quality. I shall restrict myself to one quote on a Fair Use basis: “We are aware that this video is tedious, but it is not meant to be fun. It is meant to limit our liability in the event of lawsuits”.

Don’t take the article itself too seriously. But do take the principle seriously. It’s not about airlines or even air safety.

It’s about being truthful and spin-free.

Something similar can be created for pretty much every market sector there is, be it pharmaceuticals or automobile or even banking and finance. Even government. Even the security services. Even charities.

There are emperors walking around clothes-free right now. Zillions of them. Everyone knows they have no clothes.

Yet the pretence continues.

Why? I’m confused. I don’t like the answers I come up with.

I loved going to school.

Really loved it.

And it’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve really come to appreciate the value of being encouraged to be curious, to question, to challenge and to try things out to see what happens.

In a strange kind of way, growing up in a hybrid Hindu family (father quite progressive, mother from very traditional roots) gave me something that proved to be a real treasure in later years. Learning to pick your fights. The curiosity was tempered by a clear understanding of authority and a consequent patience; this was, if anything, accentuated by my going to a Jesuit school. [And yes, I only learnt about the patience over time, I was anything but patient as a youth].

Remember, this was in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. And that meant something else entered the fray. Passion. If I was allowed only one word to describe Calcutta as it was then, it would be passion. [Amartya Sen, in his delightful book The Argumentative Indian, describes, far better than I could, the essence of that culture and environment that I speak of. Go read the book, don’t let me spoil it.]

[An aside: Some time ago I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for Calcutta. And one of the sentences within it caught my eye. Calcutta is in the state of West Bengal, described in that entry as “the world’s longest-running democratically-elected Communist government“. Democratically elected Communists. An interesting concept. I can’t help but feel that, at least in part, the posters of my youth describe it well, proclaiming the existence of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Pro Lin Piao faction. Take that kind of fragmentation to an extreme and you have Hugh Macleod’s Global Microbrand. Deliciously different.]
Curiosity tempered by patience yet refuelled by passion. That is what my family and my teachers and my city gave to me as my inheritance, and I remain eternally grateful. And it’s probably a key reason for my continuing interest in education.
Now I’ve been out of academia for nearly thirty years, I live in a different culture, have different spiritual beliefs and work in an entirely different profession. And the longer I spend at work, the harder it is for me to understand the real distinctions between work and learning, between leadership and teaching. I know they exist, but at some level of abstraction I don’t know why.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The kernel for the post is really a comment by Mark Berthelemy, suggesting that I delve into George Siemens. [Surprised? I read all comments and, even though it takes time, I get around to reading all the books and links and references that many of you provide. Part of the reason I blog, to learn from you. And I’m grateful.]

I had come across elearnspace before, but somewhere along the line I lost track, probably a bookmark transfer problem that went unnoticed. Given Mark’s prod, I went back and started reading George Siemens again, and went from there to looking at Learning Spaces, edited by Diana Oblinger. [Bill Barnett, if you’re reading this, do you know her?]

I’m still reading through the stuff, will be a while before I can make useful comments. But one thing struck me in my flypast.

In Chapter 7, Linking the Information Commons to Learning, Joan Lippincott makes the following observation:

• Group Spaces: Another major difference between an information commons and traditional libraries is the way they accommodate groups. Traditional libraries have focused on providing quiet space for individual study. Occasionally, a few group study rooms are available, but they are considered a peripheral feature of the library. In an information commons, much of the space is configured for use by small groups of students, reflecting students’ desire for collaborative learning and combining social interaction with work.

Reflecting students’ desire for collaborative learning and combining social interaction with work. That really made me think again about Generation M and work and learning.

So we have these students with a desire for collaborative learning and a wish to combine social interaction with work. And some places of learning have cottoned on to this, and are building learning spaces. And maybe after reading Learning Spaces, there will be more such institutions.

Then the students leave academia and come to “work”. Where they are greeted by cubicles and meeting rooms. If they’re lucky, they get to stay in an “open plan” environment, with row upon row of rabbit warren desk, individually numbered and named, cubicles in all but name. Once you plan it then it isn’t open.

If we want people to collaborate and work together, then we need spaces where they can. If people have meeting rooms then guess what, they will have meetings. And we all know how useful they are.

If we provide them with working-together-spaces then they are slightly more likely to work together, don’t you think. Slightly more likely not to send an e-mail to the person in the next virtual cubicle. Slightly more likely to dry up some of the sources that Scott Adams uses for Dilbert inspiration. [I know, I know, that would be a real shame. Still…]

I think there’s more to be investigated on all this, on how people use (and sometimes misuse, to great effect) what they’re given. But that’s for another post on another day.

I’ve now finished reading the whole essay and all the comments. Fascinating. Lanier says some very interesting things, as do his critics.

• I could regurgitate all the things said and summarise them for you, but that’s not my style.
• I could write a long impassioned response to the essay, pretending to be learned enough to join the luminaries that have already done so. But somehow that doesn’t grab me either.
• I could try rewriting Cluetrain within a single post, but that’s hard for a person whose precis at school was three times the length of the passage to be summarised :-( So I won’t do that.

What I can and will do is try and articulate why I find social software of value, both as an individual as well as when participating in a group, be it family and friends, firm, or even society…..And thereby seek to refute Lanier’s two main points: the apparent loss of valuable individualism and the risk of generating aggregated pap and then making decisions using the pap.

• As an overlay on the internet and the web, social software is first and foremost about connecting people. It allows you to connect to people you don’t know; with collaborative filtering, it allows you to connect to people with similar interests, but not necessarily similar views.
• This is very powerful, since you are able to converse with people who care about similar things; mutual admiration societies, while a risk, tend not to form, because the similarity is about the interests rather than the views held about those interests.
• Networks form as a result, networks bound by relationships between people.  The conversations between connected individuals become micromarkets, a patchwork of distributed, often overlapping, groups. People participate in these markets because there is a strong sense of community, yet with individual freedoms retained, even enhanced.
• This communal bonhomie allows a number of very powerful things to happen; people give freely of their time and of their skill, with nothing to gain but respect and recognition from their micromarket, the peers whose approval they see as valuable; people help each other, work with each other; people teach each other, learn from each other.
• All this is about individuals working together. Not the technology. What the technology does is reduce the barriers to entry, reduce disenfranchisement;  reduce the search costs and connection costs; allow the conversations to persist and be searchable and findable; provide a rich context; have low maintenance costs; where relevant, allow people to work in small groups bringing their communal, often amateur, expertise to bear on lots of small problems. Massively parallel meets EF Schumacher.
• As the people experiment with the technology, new processes emerge; many of these processes are necessarily lightweight and non-intrusive, in order to preserve the individual freedoms as well as the communal value.
• The distributed nature of all this also makes other things happen; it allows a community to respond faster to things as a result of three characteristics; small agile groups; networked non-hierarchical relationships; low barriers to entry.
• The people, the processes and the technology, taken together, are slowly forming a new culture. A culture where traditional governance models are inappropriate, where co-creation is common, where communal ownership is the norm.
• This is not just about Wikipedia or even just about the Blogosphere. Social software is about people and relationships and conversations and markets. Enfranchising people to do things they have never been able to do, some of which their forebears could do (but on much smaller scales).
• Social software is explicitly about the individual and about preserving the individual, but in the context of the groups that individual belongs to. The technology allows us to scale all this, and as a result we need to build better tools. Tools better at publishing, at searching and finding, at connecting, at aggregating, at filtering and even at visualising. Today’s tools are a good start, no more than that.
• The experimentation phase we are in has already paid great dividends, Wikipedia is a good example of that. And there will be a number of serendipitous communal finds as we continue to experiment. Finds that relate to rediscovery of communal arts and crafts, art and music, that relate to new ways of learning and teaching, that relate to new forms of creativity, new ways of being rewarded for individual and collective creativity. Finds that relate to better understanding of ourselves and our ability to look after ourselves, repair ourselves, enrich ourselves.
• We need to continue experimenting. And for that we need open minds, soft hands and a willingness to work together without seeking to polarise opinion through sensationalism.