Author: JP

On passion

I’m a passionate person. I’m passionate about the people that matter to me, the ideas I believe in, the things that I enjoy. And I make no secret of this. Just read the About Me page on this blog and you will get what I mean. Or for that matter the Kernel For This Blog page.

For a while I had no idea what “moderate” meant, and I’ve spent years learning to temper my passion with patience. Now I do “in moderation”, but I still don’t do “moderate”. Too close to “mediocre” for my liking.

One of the things I really like about the web is that it lowers the cost to me of pursuing some of my passions. I can find out more about them, develop and enhance them. Enjoy them. Savour them, relish them, bask in them. Immerse in them, joyfully, lazily, fully. Share them with others.

Some of these passions are offbeat and strange. What people would call Long Tail. Which is why I find it bemusing that some would seek to disprove Long Tail altogether. Just because you haven’t found a way of making money from it, it does not mean it doesn’t exist. That’s like saying gravity doesn’t exist unless it has an associated “business model”. [What an appalling phrase. People make shoes, not money.]

Anyway, indulge me. Humour me. As I list some of my favourite sites, places where passionate people share their passions with others.

Let me start with someone who needs no introduction, whose illustration adorns the top of this post. Gapingvoid. Hugh Macleod. Someone who’s really passionate about everything he gets involved in; a wonderful amalgam of quiet soft-spoken and hyper-energetic full-on engaged. So I spend time with Hugh whenever I can. Count him as a friend. And one day soon a business partner as well, I hope. Think for yourself. What made Hugh start each of his “acts of futility“? Passion. Pure unbridled passion, without a business model in sight.

Let’s move on to crosswords, another of my passions. Just take a look at this: Yet Another Guide to Cryptic Crosswords. Peter Biddlecombe’s personal paean to his passion. [Well, one of them anyway.]

What strikes me particularly is the first thing you encounter on Peter’s site, where he says:

Like many solvers of cryptic puzzles, I want more people to enjoy them. In these pages, I try to tell you enough about cryptic puzzles for you to start having fun by solving them.

He wants more people to enjoy them. He has found something good, and he’d like to share it. Now that is part of what marks Peter out for me. Passionate people share the things they’re passionate about.

That’s what made reading Kathy Sierra such a joy, as she shared her beliefs and knowledge and wisdom in Creating Passionate Users. The illustration above is an example of the stuff she used to share with us. [Kathy, it’s time to start writing again. What can we do to encourage you? Start a twitter group?]

How can I explain what was in Ian Fieggen’s mind when he started Ian’s Shoelace Site? Just one word. Passion. Here’s an excerpt:

Yes, I’m fascinated by shoelaces. By the act of tying shoelaces. Something a five year old child learns to do simply and easily, and yet something that is not trivial to program a robot to do. [Who knows, it may become part of course 101 at the Singularity University.]

There are still many Deadheads around, the Grateful Dead continue to be a very popular performing band. As I’ve confessed many times, it was their attitude to taping and to bootlegs that opened my mind, not only to different models for the music industry, but also for opensource thinking as a whole. Given all that, just take a look at this: The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Delve into it, go read something like The Annotated “Sugar Magnolia” or The Music Never Stopped (which I wrote about here). Here’s an excerpt from his notes, just focused on the phrase “jump like a Willys in four wheel drive”:

David Dodd is passionate. And enjoys sharing his passion with others. Others like you.

Passionate people don’t just act singly, they can operate in groups. As in the Wolfe Pack, an assembly of people who appreciate Nero Wolfe, the orchid-loving corpulent stay-at-home detective created by Rex Stout 75 years ago. Here’s an example of passion: Tony Auth’s letter to the Pack requesting membership:

Passion abounds on the Web, and here are some further examples of places I love:

I could have written for hours about the things I am passionate about, things that others have invested time in so that I can indulge my passions. My thanks to all of you, wherever you are.

Sometimes the level of detail astounds me. Take for example chess. I’m not quite sure where my love for chess originated, but one thing is certain: it became a passion when I saw this game: Edward Lasker versus George Alan Thomas, “Fatal Attraction”, again something I’ve written about before. I’ve played out the first few moves and taken it to the point where, to me, the sheer joy and beauty of chess began to reveal itself:

What makes someone put in the time to take thousands of games and load them on to the Web so that others can go through the games move by move, using software that’s fit for purpose? Passion. Unbridled passion.

I couldn’t possibly write a post about passion without marking the passing of “Bearders”, Bill Frindall, who gave me, and people like me, decades of joy by sharing his passion for cricket freely and unreservedly. Thank you Bill.

Passion is an intrinsic part of the web. Passion is an intrinsic part of life. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. So, whatever your passion is, indulge it. Find others who feel similarly about it, because they’re they’re. If you need help finding them, comment here, or use human search on Twitter. [ If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @jobsworth there.]

Whatever you do, be passionate about it.

Love’s labours gained

I was delighted to hear of this: Someone called JS van Buskirk in Atlanta, Georgia, has now written Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre in tweets, one play at a time. Here’s the link.

“JS” has done quite a good job: I tried to guess the play by reading her tweeted synopsis (shielding the abbreviated title, of course), and managed to get most of them right. My favourite is probably Henry V:

Bad-ass Henry V kicks France’s butt with a rag-tag army, many long-bows, and excellent speeches. Henry then marries a French princess.

More than anything else, I like the passion portrayed by such an act. The passion that propels someone to take all of Shapespeare’s plays and convert them into tweets, not for fame or fortune, but for the sheer joy of it. Just for the craic, as it were.

And talking about passionate people, what about this story? The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust. Their mission is:

To Build And Operate A Peppercorn Class A1 Pacific Steam Locomotive for Main Line and Preserved Railway Use

19 years. £3m. Making a maiden journey to London today.

Love’s labours gained.

Clay Shirky at the ICA

I went to see Clay Shirky speak at the ICA this afternoon, as part of a tour to launch the paperback version of Here Comes Everybody. And even though I’d heard him launch the hardback (at the RSA, around a year ago), I found what he had to say fresh and compelling.

Clay spent some time extending his “group action just got easier” theme. As a recent example, he took a look at Improv Everywhere and their No Pants Day; as ever, he kept reminding us of the possibilities afforded by group action. In his words “What happens if you take something that people are good at doing, that people like doing, and make it simpler and cheaper?’ “What happens when the medium of communication is global, ubiquitous, social and cheap?”

He then spent some time on the “social” third sector, distinguished from the revenue- and profit-driven private sector and the social-value-creation driven public sector. Comment was also made on the ability of small groups in such social contexts to protect themselves against freeloaders, in contrast to the tolerance shown to freeloaders by larger groups, ostensibly as a result of their inability to defend themselves.

The Gnarly Kitty example was also interesting, with its “in the public but not for the public” stance. Intriguingly, in this context, Clay averred that journalism had morphed from a profession to an activity.

The most interesting part of the debate was when he touched various aspects of Barack Obama’s campaign and early presidency. He walked us through the Will.I.Am video and its impact, particularly when one bears in mind the fact that the Obama campaign didn’t commission the video, pay for it in any way or even endorse it; yet it had a material effect on making people believe that the Obama presidency was actually possible, that it had moved into the bounds of reality.

There’s a lot more I could cover, but I will not be able to do it justice here; you’re better off reading others like Michael Mahemoff, who covered it well here. Better still, go buy the book. In the meantime, I’d like to spend some time on one particular aspect of the session. Clay talked to us about the way marijuana legalisation was voted as No 1 of all the issues facing Obama, as reported here.

He suggested that hen something like this happens, there are really three choices. To act on the suggestions as ranked, seems wrong, in effect letting the gamers win. To cherry-pick from the suggestions seems undemocratic. So we have to do something else, which is to fix the system. And this is hard.

Why is it hard? Well, for one thing, to make this happen properly, we need to fix the treatment of identity. We need to make sure that those who were entitled to vote did so. We need to make sure that those that were entitled to vote did so once and once only. And we need to make sure that the votes so cast are collated and counted fairly and accurately.

He made a really important point here. This issue of identity is not one that is held up by the unavailability of appropriate technology; rather, it is held up by adoption, which is a social and cultural thing.

I discussed with him the possibility of learning from online communities such as opensource, which are usually governed by some version of benevolent despotry: 1000lb gorilla, moderator, core, whatever. While we can learn from such communities, we need to remember that governments differ from such communities in some critical ways: for example, people can leave opensource communities if they don’t like what’s going on; or, where they like some aspect of the output but disagree with the direction, they can fork from them; this is not easily possible with government, there are physical constructs that don’t play out as easily as the virtual or digital aspects.

I left there musing about something which has exercised my mind before in this particular context. Voting alone does not seem enough.

I think the answer has to do with taxes. What I visualise is this:

Each of us is given the opportunity to “allocate” our taxes against the specific initiatives we would like them spent on. In effect each of us would choose from hundreds of initiatives and public expenditure heads, and allocate the tax we pay, in increments, across the initiatives we want to support. The withholding of tax against a specific heading becomes a form of protest. The allocation of tax monies towards a specific initiatives becomes a strong indicator of support.

There are some risks. Prima facie such a system would be biased towards the rich, if the actual sum of money was seen as a vote. To prevent this, each person has exactly 100 units of tax-vote. My tax-vote may be worth more or less than my next-door neighbour, but from a voting perspective it carries the same weight. A widow’s mite is the same as the billionaire’s largesse.

Another risk is in the likely imbalance between the allocation of funds and the usage of funds, as it were. When people withhold funds from initiatives they will definitely gain from, in effect “fractional freeloading.” One way to avoid this is to make everyone’s allocation visible.

Which in turn leads to an interesting question. As we proceed down this route, as we become more and more reliant on the internet to exercise our democratic rights, duties and powers, what price anonymity? Will a person’s vote stay secret? Should it?

One thing is clear. While there are many technological advances in the context of democratic action, there are still many issues to solve. Identity, confidentiality and privacy form one set. Freeloading and the Tragedy of the Commons forms a second set. These are not the only sets, but probably the most important. And they have to be seen in the context of social and cultural change, and not as technical or process barriers.

Transition elements

Been meaning to write about this site for some time, just never got around to it. Take a look at this:

Just looking at the table doesn’t really do it justice, so I would urge you to visit the site. As you mouse over the chart, you get blown-up examples of each type of visualisation. The organisation has laudable aims and also provides a series of online courses; originally, I held off writing about this until I’d actually done one of the courses. And gradually that became a reason to procrastinate. So now I’m writing about it without actually having done any of the courses, in the belief that the chart alone is valuable enough to share.

[Yes, valuable enough to share. Why would you want to share valueless things? Welcome to the abundance economy. One that needs sensible decisions about copyright and intellectual property rather than the shambles we have today. One that begins to recognise what an extreme nonrival good is.]

Why am I sharing this? Because I believe that acquiring “literacy” in the use of visualisation tools and techniques is a Good Thing for all of us. Because I believe that somewhere out there, someone will augment the chart even further, and provide online tools that will help us create and produce the visualisations.  Because I believe that over the next ten years, visualisation will grow significantly in importance, as people recognise the value of such tools and techniques in converting firehoses into capillaries.

Because I believe in sharing the things I like, the things I find useful, valuable.

The Right Thing

When it comes to leadership, I’ve tended to go along with Max De Pree’s definition, paraphrased here. A leader’s first job is to provide vision and strategy; his next is to say thank you. In between those two a leader is a servant and a debtor. So yes, I guess you could say I believe in soft-hands leadership.

From an enterprise perspective, I’ve always felt that true leadership is about Doing The Right Thing, and that the role of control functions is to make sure that Things Are Done The Right Way. Choosing the Right Thing is therefore of fundamental importance, and is often to do with principles and values rather than metrics and measurements. When you start thinking about being 57% right, that’s when you land up in Another Fine Mess.

Which is one of the reasons I was so glad to see this yesterday:

At that point it didn’t look like India had enough runs on the board, and Dhoni was the last recognised batsman. And the captain. Victory was not assured, and he could have stayed on. But he Does The Right Thing. He walks.

And talking about doing the right thing, I was glad to see that the ICC reversed its decision and awarded England the “Darrell Hair” match, as was the case originally. There were no grounds to call it a draw; worse, it was a very dangerous precedent to set. So I am glad to see that the original decision has been reinstated.

Why did it take this long? How come it happened at all? Or, as friend and erstwhile colleague Dom Sayers suggested, is this the last step in the rehabilitation of Hair? And the answer to all those questions is “I don’t know”.

What I do know is this. Doing the right thing is important. And doing the right thing is a key facet of leadership. So well done Dhoni.