Author: JP

What’s the matter with the Information Technology workforce?

That’s the provocative title of a recently published piece I found on First Monday. Some profound thoughts, especially at a time like this, with the future of the internet being debated and new intellectual property wrongs being created.
Example quote:

…..all the licensing and examinations in the world will not protect a profession in which the nature of the work changes when new knowledge enters the field.


I’ve been reading First Monday for some years now, and much of what I’ve read is first rate. Thanks to all at First Monday. One of the first places I saw opensourcing of ideas in practice. 

Four Pillars: New layers of lock-in

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There’s an apocryphal story about India, prohibition and unemployment, one of my absolute favourites. It goes like this:

1977. Elections, out with the old, in with the new. Prime Minister’s a teetotaller, declares the country “dry”. And so it is, except for the odd exception. You could drink if you had a permit. You could only have a permit if you were (a) a foreigner spending welcome foreign currency or (b) if you had a medical condition that required alcohol, and a doctor’s certificate to prove it.

So there was a new industry. Government departments busy churning out permits on the back of doctors busy churning out certificates on the back of patients busy claiming unusual alcohol-requiring medical conditions and underpinning their claims with unwanted soft-currency rupees.

A few years later, everyone’s had enough of this game. The dialogue changes. Let’s remove prohibition. You cannot be serious.  Do you realise how many people work in the permit offices? What are we going to do with them? We cannot shut down the permit offices. Ergo prohibition must continue.
Wisdom of Solomon moment. Archimedes and tub and Eureka. Paul and Road to Damascus and scales from eyes. Newton and apple headache. Lightbulb. All that jazz.
I know.

Don’t shut the permit offices down. From tomorrow everyone can drink.

But everyone needs a permit.

Time for another apocryphal story.

An august group of people concerned about intellectual property rights debate whether to create a new one, a right with a difference. This new one will be designed to benefit people who cannot get a copyright, because a work belongs to someone else (the person or group that created it), or because the information is in the public domain. The new right is not a “copyright,” but a “broadcaster” or “webcaster” right.

I only wish it was apocryphal. Sorry, it’s happening now. Please read James Love’s post on the WIPO meeting, which you can find here. I have a lot of time for what James Love has to say about IPR in general.

The implications are worrying.

Middleman rights that increase the very transaction costs that the web seeks to decrease. Middleman rights that make distribution a bigger source of lock-in than ever before. Middleman rights that enforce the orderly transfer of savings generated from lower distribution costs to… the distributors and not the customers.

Some years ago I remember reading about attempts being made to patent the curative powers of turmeric, ginger, garlic, chillies and the like. Attempts that failed. Attempts that will succeed if WIPO do what they are thinking of doing.
[Gordon, thanks for the tip-off which I saw while travelling.]

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006

I was sad to learn about the death of Jane Jacobs last week.

Her books and approach were (and continue to be) significant influences on me, particularly when I seek to understand how communities work. What damage can be done by (often well-meaning) politicians, developers, financiers and industrialists.

How to keep remembering the humanity that is, and should remain, at the heart of everything we do.

Thank you Jane Jacobs.

A segue from Laocoon

In my last post I quoted Laocoon from Virgil, and it gives me the opportunity of linking to one of my favourite Rudyard Kipling poems: Et Dona Ferentes.

When I read it as a child, I was incredibly smitten with the image of three-castored grand pianos cantering away… and  a little smitten with the rest of the poem as well.

Four Pillars: Time to say goodbye to Laocoon

ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

Laocoon ( in Virgil’s Aeneid)

In those days he urged us to beware the Greeks even when they came bearing gifts. I’ve had the chance to detach myself from anything and everything for a few days, and it set me thinking. Looking hard at the laptop I didn’t have, playing with the software that wasn’t on it.

And it occurred to me that much of the software I was using was proudly badged and branded Beta. These Greeks came bearing gifts I liked.

It also occurred to me that these Beta things worked pretty well with each other. And I mused to myself, maybe we’re not in Web n.0 where n is an integer. Maybe we’re in Web Beta, and our goal is Web Sigma.

Web Sigma. An integrated net of David Weinberger pieces loosely joined, with high cohesion and loose coupling, driven by open community standards and principles. Enabling Cluetrain conversations and Johnson emergence. In modern firms that bring together Malone and Semler and Roberts. [Completely irrelevant aside, except to people like me. Apparently the only financier of the happening on Yasgur’s farm thirty-odd years ago was a John Roberts. Anyone know what happened to him?]

 

Web Sigma. With many of the small pieces appearing to do similar things but with small overlaps and underlaps. With no marginal cost increases as a result of these overlaps and underlaps, this apparent proliferation. [Maybe worrying about proliferation is itself something caused by living too long in locked-in-vendor land].

Changing metaphor and meme occasionally is a good thing for me, helps me think harder about things. I am intrigued by what Web Beta represents, why it’s happening. Is it because software developers have come out of the closet and admitted stuff doesn’t quite work first time around. Or (my preferred take) were software developers never in that particular closet anyway, that we can deal with Web Beta only because we’ve managed to move away from a blame culture?

Web Beta also allows me to give in to temptation, to define things that stop us from getting there as Beta Blockers -)  I could include all the bad aspects of DRM and current IPR regimes and IMS and two-tier internets and badly thought out identity or privacy or security. And I like the coherent smooth continuous integration landscape that Web Sigma conjures up.

Something to think about.