Author: JP

A dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid. It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man fish.

These are things I have believed in for all of my adult life, influenced by things my father said, things I learnt growing up in India, things I learnt at school and at university amongst the Jesuits.

As a result, many years later, I still think education and enfranchisement are important, whatever the context. If anything, I think they’re even more important than I used to think they were. At some level of abstraction, the only way we can deal with sectarian issues and even with terrorism is via education and enfranchisement. There is growing anecdotal evidence that people who are denied both are more susceptible to joining cults and “movements”.
I think education and enfranchisement are important to each of us as individuals, in our private lives. Important to us in our professional lives, to the firms we work for and work with. Important to us in the towns and cities we live in, in the countries and continents we inhabit.

Education and enfranchisement may not solve all of the world’s problems, but they help.

So I thought I’d start a conversation about these things, with people who could help me learn more about them, who could point me to things I needed to see, and who could say things that let me see things in a different light, with a different perspective.

But how was I to start such a conversation? With a formal education in economics, and a career of over twenty-five years in technology, it made sense for me to concentrate on information and its enabling technologies and the business models used. So that’s what I did. Six months ago.

And that’s why I care about the internet and about connectivity. About intellectual property rights and digital rights management. About opensource software, technologies and platforms. About identity and confidentiality and privacy. About avoiding path pollution and avoiding device and vendor lock-in.
If we get them right, more people will have affordable access to information, more people will be enfranchised to participate in the world.

If we get them wrong, we will waste opportunities we have never had before. Opportunities provided by the continuance of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law. Opportunities provided by the Ohmae Three, Globalisation, Disintermediation and the Internet. Opportunities provided by the democratisation of innovation and the availability of social software. Opportunities provided by telephony becoming software.

Opportunities for whom? For the disenfranchised of today. Disenfranchised because they’re too young. Or too old. Disenfranchised because they’re not connected or unable to connect or unable to afford to connect. Disenfranchised because they’re unable to use “traditional” computers because of physical constraints. Disenfranchised because they’re always on the move. Because they don’t have access to electrical power. Because English is not their mother tongue. Because they’re too shy. Because they’ve never had the opportunity.

If we do the wrong thing about the internet, about intellectual property and DRM, or about identity and its  related issues, then we will miss the opportunity. But only for a while. Nature abhors a vacuum. The opensource community will find a way around the messes we create, the constraints we put in place, the barriers we raise.

If we do the right thing about all this, then we will have a different way of dealing with information. Because the underlying technology has caught up, information need no longer be trapped by its enabling technologies, information can begin to have the social life it was meant to have, as John Seely Brown has reminded us.

And that’s why I blog about Generation M, about Web 2.0, about Four Pillars, about Syndication, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

I wondered about whether I should only blog about all this in the context of the individual, then realised maybe a year ago that all this is true for institutions as well. Education and enfranchisement and Four Pillars are as meaningful in an enterprise context as anywhere else.

The Cluetrain guys called markets conversations, and helped me understand a few things. John Seely Brown and Steven Johnson placed a few other things in context for me about the social life of information and how it flows, how it emerges and moves. Doc and his Lakoff conversation helped me get snowballs.

So blogging it had to be. I don’t read blogs to find out things faster than anyone else; I don’t read blogs to find things to link to and comment on before anyone else; I don’t read blogs because I can’t find any books to read.

I read blogs because they’re participative, they are accessible, they help me learn. I write blogs because I want to participate. In a community. Everyone wants to make a difference, everyone wants to leave a legacy. Blogs are useful in both cases.

Someone I was reading, I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was or where it was, mentioned that conversations can be about events, people or ideas. People-related things tend to be best live and we will always have some form of radio and television, even after we’ve time-shifted it and place-shifted it and mutated it. Event-related things tend to be best in short “factual” bursts and we will always have old media around in some form or the other covering this. Sure, people and event conversations are migrating to the web, but I guess alternative forms will exist.

When it comes to ideas, the blogosphere is hard to beat. What Doc called a snowball is often a sense of revelation for me; I read something and my brain goes Ping, I see it in a different perspective. I experience a different understanding, walk away with a different meaning, all because somebody said something that triggered something else in me. And it helps me learn. When I write something, the comments and feedback and links help me learn as well. And I guess I hope that some readers get that as well from reading what I write.

You may have wondered why I blog about the things I blog about. Now I guess you know. Method or madness? You decide. :-)

I read this story by Hugo Rifkind in the Times today, about a plan for a somewhat different protest in front of Parliament in London. Comedian Mark Thomas has issued an open invitation to all comers, to apply to the police for a “lone protest” licence (which needs six days’ notice and apparently tends to be granted). And then for all the “lone protesters” to turn up next Thursday, in what could be termed an orchestrated cacophony of protest; in order to stay within the law, every person must protest about something different. The law they are not-protesting about banned demonstrations without a licence within a kilometre of Parliament; see related story here. You can almost imagine everyone with individual and personalised tiny gapingvoid cartoons on business-card sized banners….
Smart mobs taking an unusual turn? Let’s see what happens :-)

I now have a name for the boy in the photograph. A location. A date. And a small piece of evidence that may help me find out who has the rights to the photograph, so that I can acquire a large print, or even the rights to the photograph itself. Amazing what the blogosphere and the web can do. More when I know more.
Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time, or maybe sooner, I will be able to move my cursor over any photograph to find out who has the rights to it and how to contact that person or persons; maybe even the price, or a Creative Commons watermark. Wouldn’t that be nice?

There’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of ACM Interactions, titled Digital Libraries for the Developing World. I think it’s a must-read for people interested in education, in opensource or in the developing world. [While I am a member of the ACM, my access to this article was on a public-domain basis using Google, so I believe I’ve done the right thing in linking to it.]
Written by  Ian H. Witten of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, it makes a number of very important points :

• The failure of “traditional” publishing and distribution mechanisms in the developing world, in the context of making useful, often critical, public domain information easily accessible
• The sheer waste this represents
• Why decoupling publishing and distribution costs from intellectual property charges is an imperative as a result
• The sheer complexity of dealing with obsolescent software, obsolete hardware, sparse network and internet connectivity and multiple languages
• The problems of having to design for fixed and removable media
• The problems of having to design for online and offline
• The problems of inadequate power
• The issues that come up in training and maintenance
• Why opensource software becomes an imperative as a result
  

Ian, I am told, is Director of the  New Zealand Digital Library Project, which brought us Greenstone. If you haven’t seen what they do, it’s worth a look.

The issues raised by this article are stark, given the backdrop they are painted against. In the developed world, it is sometimes difficult to see all this with the correct perspective. We get hung up over the commercials related to “the internet” and digital rights and intellectual property. The context provided by Ian is a good and pragmatic explanation of why the internet needs to be saved, why paths shouldn’t be polluted, why we have to get DRM and IPR right, why opensource platforms are critical.

The so-called “commercial” world can learn from all this as well. Necessity and Mother and Invention all in the same sentence. Instead of Not and Invented and Here.

Thank you Ian. Thank you ACM.

Thank you everyone for your comments on my previous post on this subject. I’m working through them and learning from them.

In the meantime, I’d like to extend the conversation on just one theme within the comments:

Motivation.

I think it’s at the heart of the nature-versus-nurture debate.

Imagine going into Google and trying to find something. Imagine being told that you’ve failed because the first item returned was not the item you were looking for (or “meant” to be looking for, under orders of “management”).

Well, that’s what we do. We expect people to get things right first time, or “our way”. We have a blame culture so deeply ingrained in us that we behave that way without necessarily being aware of our actions and their consequences.

Back to Google. And in a roundabout way, back to group selection and evolution. Eric Beinhocker, in The Origin of Wealth, speaks of a “simple, but profoundly powerful, three-step formula — differentiate, select, and amplify — the formula of evolution”.

So that’s what we do when we use something like Google. When we put the search term in and peruse the results, we are in the differentiation stage. Then, when we find what we want, we are at the selection stage. Finally, as we dig deep into the selected result, trace other references, follow other links, we are at the amplification stage. We make the information evolve.

Or you could call it learning.

First you experiment. Little by little, failure by failure. You learn from those failures. Adapting as you go. Until something works, at which point you “scale it out”.

But that’s not what happens in real life. We make a big deal out of the lives of people like Einstein and Edison and Churchill and Lincoln and Franklin, hoping that our children pick something up as a result. Or maybe we use Gates and Jobs as the role models.  These role-models’ lives were littered with little mistakes, little failures, a need to pick themselves up, learn and grow.

But we then surround our kids with Blame Cultures. And Nannification. And Because-I-Say-So.
Every time I hear someone say “Fear and greed” I shudder, because all I see is a manifestation of Stick and Carrot. And we call ourselves civilised and evolved.

Fear and greed are not ways to motivate people. Especially children, but true for all people.

I don’t want to over-generalise, I know there are many exceptions. But that’s what they are, exceptions.

If the fear-and-greed blame culture was not bad enough, consider what else we do:

Nannification.

Now, rather than induce a blame culture, we prevent any mistakes being made. We made the mistakes, so we won’t let you. Wow. We are civilised and evolved, aren’t we?

Life is about about love and about learning. Both these carry risk, both these require vulnerability. We need to teach the connection between an action and its consequences, and the need to take individual responsibility for those actions, not prevent the actions. Instead, the way we’re going, we are well on the way to passing laws that ban driving within five miles of home (since most car accidents take place within that radius) or, even worse, ban spending time with your family and friends (since  most murders are committed by those people). Utter tosh.

And if blame-cultures and nannification weren’t bad enough, what else do we do?

Because-I-Say-So. So let’s get this right. We want our children to be educated, to discover their potential, to learn, to develop and extend that potential. And we send them to school so that they learn all this.
And what do they see at home or at work? Why must I do this? Because I say so. Why does this work this way? Because that’s the way it is. Because.

Children aren’t stupid. Grown-ups aren’t stupid either. We all learn. Part of that learning is to pick up signals from the environment we’re in. And the environment says “Don’t do anything. Don’t make a mistake. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t take any risks. In fact we won’t let you take risks”. Loud and clear, aye-aye sir, ten-four, roger, wilco and out.
Those are the motivational signals we send them. And then we wonder why motivating them is so hard.

Motivation is key. Sure, some element of motivation is innate, some element of emotional intelligence and the ability to plan for and acquire delayed gratification is also innate, some understanding of altruism and group dynamics is also innate.

But I think all this is a lot less innate than people assume it is. Our assumptions are just copouts.

In a book called How Children Fail, written in 1964, John Holt says, when talking about effective schools:

The researchers then examined these schools to find what qualities they had in common. Of the five they found, two struck me as crucial: (1) if the students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families, backgrounds, neighbourhoods, attutudes, nervous systems, or whatever. They did not alibi. They took full responsibility for the results or nonresults of their work. (2) When something they were doing in the class did not work, they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else. They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children.

Wonderful stuff.

They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children.

For teachers read managers or leaders. For children read staff or team.

Flunk the method, not the person.

So that’s what I think about motivation. Yes there is something innate, but even a Tiger Woods needed the guidance and support and encouragement of his parents to become Tiger Woods.

Teach people to believe in themselves. Build them up, not cut them down. Encourage them. Help them discover their potential. Help them reach their potential.

Of course, besides the “innate” argument there are some other real-world constraints. There are some things for which you need certain physical attributes, like height and strength, and not all physical attributes can be acquired or trained for legally. There are some things where the local environment doesn’t have the facilities, and we need breakthroughs there. I believe that this often happens with role models; that there wasn’t much interest in Germans and pro golf until Langer, and not much in pro tennis in Sweden till Borg. So physical attributes and local facilities and role models, if absent, can hamper the nurture process.

But that’s what it is, a hampering of the nurture process. Not something we can cheaply and lazily put down to “nature”,.

Some of you may be offended by the strength of this post, some by the motherhood-and-apple-pie, some by the sickly-sweet-ness. My apologies, this is something I feel really passionate about, and it is not my intention to offend or upset.