Author: JP

Reminiscing

Now as the years roll on
Each time we hear our favorite song
The memories come along
Older times we’re missing
Spending the hours reminiscing

Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait
I said to myself when we’re old

We’ll go dancing in the dark

Walking through the park and reminiscing

Little River Band, Reminiscing

It’s been a bittersweet week for me.

It was the week I had a really worthwhile session with the group board on Tuesday. I’d spent a lot of time preparing for the session, been coached and advised by many friends and wellwishers within the firm, and it went well. Really well. BT is going places and I’m delighted to be here and part of it. We’re moving along apace with Ribbit, and there’s a real sense of excitement, a real buzz developing. [Disclaimer, for the few of you who may not know: I work for BT; BT owns Ribbit; I chair Ribbit on behalf of BT]

It was the week I learnt that my boss, friend and mentor Al-Noor Ramji has decided to return to his banking roots and leave BT. He’s had an incredible impact here, helping set the direction of 21CN, getting the whole company behind the Right First Time program, moving us down the road in the SDK initiative, all while transforming the back end of the company into Innovate & Design and its sister function Operate.

There are a number of us here who’ve worked with him before; for quite a few, BT is the third company where they’ve worked for him; for at least one person, the fourth; and there are many like me who are two-fers.  That in itself tells you something about the man, his leadership and his ability to inspire. For many of us, working for him is like Hotel California in terms of checking out and leaving.

Some of us went out for dinner with him last Wednesday, and we spent the evening reminiscing about Al-Noorisms; there was laughter and joy aplenty, amidst the unavoidable sadness. We wish him well in his new role at Misys.

It was also the week I learnt that there’d been a tragic fire in Calcutta, bang in the centre of the spaces I occupied during much of my youth and adolescence: the corner of Park Street and Middleton Row.

At least 24 people died, many unable to escape the flames. Horrifying. My heart goes out to all the families affected, it must have been terrible.

I felt slightly confused when reading the reports of the fire. They kept describing Stephen Court, the building whose top two floors were affected, as a “multistorey”. But that’s not the way I remembered it. I could only think of it as having a ground floor and three storeys above it, hardly a multistorey. Turned out I wasn’t wrong: the so-called multistorey was only six floors high, and the top two floors had only been added since I left Calcutta. So what that means is that a building built in 1910 managed quite well, thank you, for getting on a hundred years, while the twenty-seven year old extension pretty much burnt down. Says something.

The building, the location and the restaurant on the ground floor all form a deep and intense part of my nostalgia. But this time around, I want to concentrate on the restaurant. Flury’s.

I was so pleased to find this photograph while searching for something to illustrate the post. I really think that Victoria Bernal captures the essence of Flury’s in many subtle dimensions: its metropolitanness, its sense of being a cool oasis in a hot and busy city, the sheer scale of the place, the incongruousness of finding an amalgam of swiss chocolatier and colonial tea-room in a frenetic and pulsating urban landscape.

Here’s another of her photographs. [Thank you Victoria, I found your whole Calcutta set a delight.]

Flury’s. A place out of time set in a city where no time is out of place. A place known to have been frequented by the Satyajit Rays and Mrinal Sens and M F Husains; even though Ray and Sen spent time at India Coffee House, College St (below), they were also known to like their Flury’s visits. In fact, Husain himself confessed to sitting down on the Flury’s steps waiting for it to open, looking across at the Alliance Francaise where his first-ever exhibition was held in 1951.

[My thanks to lecercle for the photo above.]

It says something about Calcutta that one day you could be sitting comfortably in Flury’s, the next day you could be in the coffee house in College St, and the day after you could be drinking tea out of mud vessels by the roadside at the Maidan.

Memories of Flury’s are many and variegated.

As a child, I remember going there with a sense of wonder and amazement at the sheer range of cupcakes available there; I was particularly fond of an all-chocolate boat-shaped offering, the size of a large finger. I don’t actually remember going there for tea, just queueing up to buy assortments of cupcakes.

Then came callow youth and adolescent time. I remember there was an occasion when a bunch of us were trying to make money selling tickets to the 1977 Mohun Bagan versus New York Cosmos match (the Pele match) using Flury’s and Cappucino (the 24- hour coffee shop that used to be part of Park Hotel) as bases.

It embarrasses me to think about it, but Flury’s was also where I did something quite ridiculous involving tomato sauce and a man in a white suit. I tried to splash my sister with the sauce. She ducked. The white suit became a red-and-white suit. People at the other table graciously accepted my apology. And everyone tried not to laugh while the red-and-white suit’s remonstrations went unheard.

Flury’s remained a key location during university, especially given its location between my then all-men’s college St Xavier’s, and the all-women Loreto College on Middleton Row. It was also a place frequented by the more affluent of the backpacker class, another reason why it was popular amongst young adults.

The location was also close to a whole slew of popular night-time spots: Blue Fox, Trinca’s, Mocambo. I think Peter Cat came late on, and Sky Room went early. There are vague memories of places called Moulin Rouge and Bar-Be-Que as well. But one way or the other, the not-quite-four-way junction of Middleton Row, Park Street and Free School St was a veritable Clapham Junction, everyone in the city centre passed through there, so “in front of Flury’s” became a popular place to meet.

[Incidentally, using these place names reminded me of an earlier post about Hamilton Bridge.]

Which brings me to the end of this post. I have very fond memories of Flury’s, understand why it is now shut, and hope that it opens up again by the time I arrive in Calcutta with my family in December.

Musing about the need for j’adoube in a digital world

For some time now, we’ve all been leaving digital mouse droppings all over the place as we wander around the web. And people have gotten good at analysing what the droppings mean. What you “touched”. When. For how long.

Sometimes this information is actually made available to others, particularly to people who created the digital social object that you touched.

Most of the time the information presented, usually metadata, is anonymised. So I can see how many views a flickr photograph has had, but I can’t tell who did the viewing. This is common practice for many photo sites. Visitor numbers are regularly collected and published in relatively small grain; for example, you can check the number of views, and for that matter the number of watchers, by page in Wikipedia. All very useful and all very anonymous.

But sometimes it is not. Especially when you get the chance to vote or show liking or dislike. So I get told how many people liked a particular post I wrote, when the post is fed via friendfeed and transforms into a facebook note. And I can even find out who did the liking.

When I move to somewhere like LinkedIn, I can see how many times my profile appeared in a search; I can see how many people looked at me; I get to know something about the lookers; sometimes I can even see the name, rank and serial number of the looker.

We now share many things via tools like twitter; what we see, what we read, what we listen to, where we eat, who we spend time with, our likes and dislikes. And for the most part this is useful.

As lifestreaming and the provision of such ambient information evolves further, we will evolve tools that can be used to adjust the information where there is palpable error. Like when I forget to sign out of last.fm and my daughter decides to use my Mac; suddenly I get transformed into someone that listens to High School Musical betwixt and between the Allman Brothers and John Mayall. Or when you use my Amazon account to buy a Christmas present for a sainted dowager aunt.

The ability to correct palpable errors is important; and, because it is understandable, people will come up with the right tools.

Me, I am intrigued by something else. The need to declare intent. In chess, a player declares ” j’adoube ” or “I adjust” in order to signal that he is just adjusting the position of a piece, not moving it.

When a colleague tends to fill in expenses once every three months, and suddenly starts filling them in every week, there is a very good chance that he’s planning to jump ship. Reduction in expense-filling delay is usually a good leading indicator for the arabesque out of an institution.

A more common leading indicator is the polishing up of your CV. So now let’s get on to LinkedIn. Today, if I go and edit my profile, just for the heck of it, the act of CV sprucing-up will be interpreted as a leaving signal.

Even if the intent were to be different.

Which made me think. Maybe we need to have a j’adoube for our digital footprints, a way of signalling innocent intent.

Just wondering.

It all began when the fat man sang

One of my favourite t-shirts, second only to Help>Slip>Franklin’s. [That’s a reference to one of the finest sequences ever played live or laid on vinyl: Help On The Way, Slipknot and Franklin’s Tower, taken in sequence from Blues for Allah.] Both t-shirts, by the way, available from zazzle.

You guessed it. I’m one of those. A Deadhead. And proud to be one. If you check out the end of the About Me section of this blog, written when I started blogging, you’ll find these words:

my thoughts on opensource were probably more driven by Jerry Garcia than by Raymond or Stallman or Torvalds

It’s been a long strange trip for fans of the Grateful Dead recently: For example, the March 2010 edition of the Atlantic Review had an article entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

Image credit: Zachariah O’Hora

The article talks about the inauguration of the Grateful Dead archive at the University of Santa Cruz. Some years earlier, Strategy + Business, a prestigious management journal, published an article entitled How to “Truck” the Brand: Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

Atlantic Review. University Archives. Management Journals. Just what is it about the Dead? A fan site that’s really a social network, one of the earliest to understand the value of social media in bringing the fan base together and giving them a space to inhabit. A dominant position in live music: the Dead have their own tab in the Internet Archive (the only entity, band or otherwise, to have one) and account for 10% of the overall Live Music collection there. A Google Earth mashup that shows you the precise locations and times of Dead concerts. Sites dedicated to trading the music of the Grateful Dead. A shirts Hall of Fame. A gazillion ties. [I should know, I have over 50 of them…]

A long strange trip indeed. So here’s my personal perspective on why the Dead succeeded.

1. It’s all about performance. Unlike most other bands, the Dead were a touring band. They played. And played. And played. Between 1963 and 2007 the Rolling Stones performed live 1597 times, or about 35 times a year. As against that, the Grateful Dead performed live 2380 times between 1965 and 1995, or about 77 times a year. Very few bands keep up that level of performance.

And so it is in business. People care about what you do, not what you claim to have done or how good your marketing is. Particularly now, when the cost of discovering truth is lower than ever before, what matters is how a company performs. Not how it says it will perform. Which is why customer experience has become so important.

2. It’s all about participation. Studio performances are not the same as live music: when you see what gets traded in Dead circles, you begin to understand why. Live sessions are real, organic, they change from session to session. Audiences are not locked away on couches or straitjackets, they participate. Because they can. And they want to.

Companies need to understand this as well, particularly as the analog world shifts to digital. The cost of participation gets lowered. There was a time when I used to get really irritated with management consultants who would bring their powerpoint decks when meeting with me, always in analog, always taking care not to leave it behind. [In case I tried to copy it or, Heaven forfend, amend it, add to it.] What tosh. I’d already paid through my nose for the material.

Contrast that sort of short-term thinking with the vision inherent in Garcia saying “When we’re done with it, they can have it”, when asked about fans taping their shows.

3. It’s all about improvisation. John Lennon, another of my favourites, is reported to have said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans

When you look at the way they performed at concerts, there were many interesting charcteristics. They didn’t seem to have a predefined list of songs or sets; there was a lot of jamming and improvisation within the songs, drawn from a vast array of songs whose “design” made such improvisation possible. Garcia suggested more than once that they made up the song list as they went on, basing it on active feedback from the fans.

Lineups varied; band members performed in other bands or groups; everything about the culture of the band screamed responsiveness, adaptability.

4. It’s all about passion. Quality matters. And quality is a function of passion, of persistence, or practice. What the Dead did they did as a labour of love. Unless you enjoy what you do, there isn’t any point.

When you’re passionate about something, then you take the values inherent in that something and live your life according to those values. They permeate everything you do. I had the privilege of spending some time with John Perry Barlow, erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cattle rancher, founder member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, poet, what-have-you. And he was a perfect example of how his values affected everything he did and does.

If you haven’t done so already, you should read his essays The Economy of Ideas and  The Next Economy of Ideas, along with the oft-quoted A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

In the end, what the Grateful Dead stood for are principles. Principles of openness and participation, principles of performance and passion, principles that allowed them to improvise and respond.

Companies would do well to pay heed.

On comics and teleportation and similar Saturday meanderings into the future

Do you remember good old everyday comics? Not manga, nor the kind of stuff people treasure in polythene wrappers and pay a million dollars for. The stuff you touch and read and laugh at and with. At home, we were brought up on a rich diet of comics; I must have read my first comic book around 1962, and for sure I was reading comics regularly all the way to 1975.

Our reading was fairly eclectic and wide-ranging, despite being drawn solely from the US, the UK and India. Children’s comics were mainly from the US: Sugar and Spike and Fox and the Crow were early favourites, as was Dennis the Menace (the Hank Ketcham version rather than the UK “Beano” version, which, amazingly, made its unrelated debut just three days after the Ketcham version).

Dagwood and Blondie. Sad Sack. Beetle Bailey. The Archie series. Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the rest of the superhero class. The whole Walt Disney thing. Yup, we read them all.

We didn’t spend much time across the pond as it were, that was reserved for the hard stuff. Books. So we read Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton and Frank Richards and Anthony Buckeridge till the cows came home, and topped them off with PG Wodehouse and PG Wodehouse and PG Wodehouse as soon as our hands were big enough to hold his books properly. From what I can remember, the primary UK comics we read were the Beano and the Dandy, along with “Commando” series War comics.

And then of course we had MAD Magazine. What would we have done without MAD? Alfred E Neuman and his crazy gang kept us going during hard times; I have particular and deeply thankful memories of reading Sergio Aragones and Don Martin, on days when everything looked bleak and black and blecch. And there were a few of those.

The only “Indian” comics I remember reading, in English, were the Phantom series, the Ghost Who Walks, and the Mandrake series. [It was only some time later that I found out that the original Lee Falk series was set in some place called Bengali, and where there were pigmy people called Bandars. This would obviously not do in Bengal, where I was born and raised, and where the native was called a Bengali, and where “bandar” meant “monkey”. So, magically, the Indian version of the comic was set somewhere called Denkali, if I remember correctly. Both Phantom as well as  Mandrake the Magician were from the same Indrajal comics stable.]

And of course we had the past, represented by the Flintstones ……….

……….and the future, represented by the Jetsons:

Were you one of those people who sincerely believed that we would be flying around in bubble cars by the turn of the 21st century? I was. As a child I really thought it would happen.

And, after thirty years of commuting, I still fervently wish for a solution. Sometimes I think that the concept of the suburb did more to destroy the fabric of society than any single other “invention”; to my way of thinking, only wars have inflicted more visible damage on society.

I hate commuting. With a passion. I hate the idea that people should travel large distances to work and large distances back, every day, like lemmings. The only people who could possibly gain from that are in the transportation, fuel and insurance industries. Enough said.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Teleportation.

Take a look at this extract from the Wikipedia article:

One means of teleportation proposed in fiction (e.g., The Fly, Star Trek) is the transmission of data which is used to precisely reconstruct an object or organism at its destination. However, it would be impossible to travel from one point to another instantaneously; faster than light travel, as of today, is believed to be most likely impossible. The use of this form of teleportation as a means of transport for humans would have considerable unresolved technical issues, such as recording the human body with sufficient accuracy to allow reproduction elsewhere (i.e., because of the uncertainty principle).

There’s also the philosophical issue of whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies.

Interesting. So what about things that are not human?

I think we’re at a stage where we already have virtual “teleportation” of digital objects. In the digital world, when we take a piece of text or still image or moving image or music, and we “move” it across the ether, what we’re doing is tantamount to disassembling the digital object at one end of a pipe and reassembling it at the other end. Now this is fine as far as purely digital objects are concerned: it’s the reason why Kevin Kelly called the internet a copy machine, why Hollywood and Universal Music want to own the internet and make it work according to their rules, why downloaders seem to get treated worse than modern-day war criminals. It appears easier to go to war hunting for things that don’t exist than it is to go to peace attempting to change hopelessly outdated intellectual property law.

Over the past few years, this virtual teleportation (where digital objects get disassembled and reassembled at two ends of a fast and fat pipe) has shown the capacity to make considerable inroads into the physical world.

We already have the ability to take decent photographs, store them in the cloud and print them off at home, at the edge.

We already have the ability to order books via the web and then to print the books off at home: here’s the “espresso” book machine:

We already have the ability to make physical CDs and DVDs at home, and to print off the artwork.

And then we have the gift that keeps on giving: 3D printers are already here, and slowly getting better: take a look at Reprap:

When you have the ability to express something mathematically, and when you have the ability for the “ingredients” for that something to be drawn from a standardised pool, then there is no reason why the “reassembly” of physical things cannot take place at the edge: at home, at work, wherever. Using further generations of toolkits  like Arduino, this will happen. [Incidentally, we ran a cloud services workshop for the Innovate and Design leadership team a few days ago, where everyone worked with arduinos. The whole thing was set up, supported and stage-managed by Alex and her team at tinker_it. Thank you Alex, thank you tinker_it.]

Soon we will be in a place where the instructions emanate from one end of a pipe, and where standardised components get assembled at the other end. Like feeding in a recipe at one end and having the cooking done at the other end. As long as the components are addressable and accessible and standardised, this is already possible. Soon we will be in a place where remote tailoring is commonplace, where the instructions are fed down a pipe to a machine and standardised inputs in the home, in order to produce clothes at the edge. [How nice to see that the paper is imagined and written by a Calcuttan].

We’re long past the point where all we could do is to query, maintain and repair things digital remotely. The pipes are getting fatter and faster. The devices at the edge are becoming more powerful. There is greater standardisation of input materials. There is a growing ability to express the workings of markets in mathematical models, to simulate the workings of markets via abstractions. [This, I understand, is part of what Salim Ismail and friends are focusing on at the Singularity University].

There was a time when people could build machines, when people could take machines apart and when people could rebuild them. Cars. Radios. Planes. Boats. Amplifiers and turntables. And yes, computers.

There was a time when people designed and built machines that built machines.

You know something? I have this gnawing sense of unease when I write this. I begin to think about something that unnerves me, that unsettles me. And that is this:

when people were heavily involved in the making of things, the things stayed made.

Building things to last is a builder’s instinct. Building things for planned obsolescence is not a builder’s instinct. We need to stop this cycle of constant build-waste-replace-waste. The world is too much with us.

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

One of my favourite Wordsworth sonnets. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. Such powerful words, stated simply.

Human beings love to make things. And that love has been denied for a while, as we moved headlong into more and more efficient manufacture of more and more obsolescence and more and more waste. This is no longer tenable, we have to take our stewardship of the earth’s assets more seriously. And the move to a digital world will help us get there. [I know, I know, the cloud consumes energy. Computers consume scarce raw materials. But these things can be solved.]

I think this human instinct to make things is what drives people like Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty over at Make Magazine, a fantastic read. I think this human instinct is what Cory Doctorow fictionalised so well in Makers. I think this human instinct is what Larry Lessig described so well in Remix.

Taken from the Makers site: Ben O’Steen got his maker on by printing out the entire text of Makers on a cash-register receipt, using a till printer.

Building things is a human instinct.

Taking things apart is a human instinct.

Rebuilding things is a human instinct.

Doing all this in a way that makes the built things last is a human instinct.

When you see battles about copyright and patent, when you see battles about downloads and DRM, when you see battles about net neutrality, don’t assume that the battles are about them, the pinko lefty tree-hugger criminals.

The battles are about you. And your right to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them. The right of your children to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them.

The battles are about the generations that will follow you and me. And their rights to follow their human instincts.

Instincts that are much closer to stewardship and conservation than those of the moguls of Mammon. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The internet was not designed to become an exclusive distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music. There is a lot of value still to be obtained from the internet and from the web, in terms of health, education and welfare. And it is our duty to see that value emerge.

So go read Make magazine, visit the web site. Buy Makers, or read it for free. Understand the cultural and creative implications of Remix. Do something.

We all need to become better stewards of what we have on earth, so that others may enjoy some of it. The “maker” culture is a critical component of this.

A coda. Thank you Jimmy Wales, from the bottom of my heart. This post would have been so much harder to write if Wikipedia didn’t exist. Thanks, Jimbo!

Musing about “sharing” and privacy

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media, there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status.  Devices have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.

During all this time, much has been written about privacy and confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago, there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful about sharing such information.

It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this site for example: sailwx.info

A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating, even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same. Sharing creates risk.  I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act

It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro, “from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.

2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five siblings. [So I’m a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society, on paper anyway….You wouldn’t dare use those words in front of my paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence, attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker

5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’. Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly. And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married (over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests, with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.

6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more comprehensive as the concepts of  lifestreaming, and of what Clay Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.

Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s writings on this subject: here’s an example.

7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its inherent “nonrival good” nature, it makes no sense to hoard information and ideas. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.]

8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty,  stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing, people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food, whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.