Author: JP

Freewheeling about excavating information and stuff like that

Do you remember enterprise application integration? Those were the days.  First you paid to bury your information in someone’s proprietary silo, then you paid to excavate it from there, then you paid again to bury it again in someone else’s silo. Everybody was happy. Except for the guys paying the bills.

I went to see the guys in Osmosoft yesterday, it’s always a pleasure visiting them. At BT Design, our approach to innovation has a significant community focus: Web21C, now integrated into Ribbit, was formed on that basis; both Osmosoft as well as Ribbit  are excellent examples of what can be done with open multisided platforms.

While I was there, I spent some time with Jeremy Ruston who founded the firm and leads the team. Incidentally, it was good to see Blaine Cook there, I hadn’t seen him since he joined BT. Welcome to the team, Blaine.

When it comes to opensource, Jeremy’s one of the finest brains I know, we’re really privileged to have him. We got to talking, and somehow or the other, one of the topics that came up was the ways and means we have to figure out if someone’s any good, in the context of hiring. After all, there is no strategy in the world that can beat the one that begins “First hire good people”.

When you’re hiring people with experience, the best information used to come from people you knew who’d already worked with her or him. Nothing beats a good recommendation from a trusted domain. You can do all the interviews you want, run all the tests you can find, do all the background searching you feel like; over time, the trusted domain recommendation trumps the rest.

Now obviously this does not work when the person has not worked before, where there is no possibility of a trusted domain recommendation. Which is why people still use tests and interviews and background checks.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Jeremy brought up an issue that he’d spoken to me about quite some time ago, something I’m quite keen on: the use of subversion commit logs as a way of figuring out how good someone is.

And that got me thinking. Here we are, in a world where people are being told: Don’t be silly and record what you do in Facebook; don’t tell people everything you do via Twitter; don’t this; don’t that; after all, the bogeyman will come and get you, all these “facts” about your life will come back to haunt you.

As a counterpoint to this, we have the opensource community approach. Do tell everyone precisely what you are doing, record it in logs that everyone can see. Make sure that the logs are available in perpetuity. After all, how else will people find out how good you are?

Transparency can and should be a good thing. Abundant transparency can and should be a better thing, rather than scarce transparency. Right now we have a lot of scarce transparency; people can find out things about you, but only some people. Which would be fine, if you could choose who the people were. Do you have any idea who can access your credit rating? Your academic records? Do you have any idea who decided that?

Scarce information of this sort leads to secrets and lies and keeps whole industries occupied. Maybe we need to understand more about how the opensource community works. Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why BT chose to champion Osmosoft.

An aside: David Cushman, whom I’d known electronically for a while, tweeted the likelihood of his being near the new Osmosoft offices around the time of my visit, so it made sense to connect up with him as well. It was good to meet him, and it reminded me of something I tweeted a few days ago. How things change. In the old days relationships began face to face and over time moved into remote and virtual and electronic. Nowadays that process has been reversed. Quite often, you’ve known someone electronically for a while, then you get to meet them. Intriguing.

Finally, my thanks to gapingvoid for the illustration, which I vaguely remembered as “Excavation 47”. It was a strange title so it stuck. Which reminds me, I have to start saving up to buy one of his lithographs, they’re must-haves.

Hallelujah chorus: time to lay down a generation challenge?

I can’t help smiling at the news that there are likely to be three separate versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in the charts shortly, including two in the top three:

  • The Alexandra Burke version, the X Factor winner’s single (likely to be No 1)
  • The Jeff Buckley version, the one that people my age think is the best version (likely to be No 3)
  • The original Leonard Cohen version, which I still stay loyal to (likely to be No 30 or so)

Three versions of the same song in the charts, twenty-four years after the original was released. Who’da thunk it?

Why was I smiling? Because an imp of mischief got to me. I began to wonder. Shall we use the web to make the Jeff Buckley version number 1? Against all odds? Wouldn’t it be a fitting posthumous tribute to a master musician? Wouldn’t it be more of a good thing for the songwriter? And wouldn’t it be a fun thing to try?

So. Are we up for it? Can we make the Jeff Buckley version number 1?

Incidentally, there have only been two instances where number 1 and number 2 were by the same artists (the Beatles in 1964 and Usher in 2004). There has never been an instance where No 1 and No 2 are the same song, by two different people. We have the chance to help make history while having some fun across different generations: I cannot imagine anyone buying both versions next week….

Dancing to Leonard Cohen and related pursuits

There are many ludicrous things about DRM: the belief that the internet was designed to be a distribution mechanism for film and music and nothing else; the belief that it is okay to treat everyone as a criminal; the willingness to chisel artists through patently unfair contracts, while making out that those self-same artists are victims of the general public, the “criminals”; the belief that the creation of artificial scarcities will not be met by artificial abundances. But that’s not what this post is about.

One of the most ludicrous things about DRM, however, is the benighted attempt to sustain a historical distribution model by time-separating geographies. In the past, both for films as well as for music, it was defensible while remaining unpalatable.

Let’s take film. In order to keep production costs down, each film would have a finite number of prints made, and these prints would have to be sent around the world. So, while I was growing up, by the time a new film made it to India, it was marked by scratches and cuts and noughts and crosses. The condition was not really germane, the real problem was the time. Films arrived in India a long time after they were released in the US or UK.

When it came to music, something similar happened. LPs and singles were stamped locally from masters, and there must have been a finite number of masters made. And as usual India had to wait for the masters to arrive before the records could be stamped and released. As a result, “western” music arrived in India some time after the US or UK release.

We had the Sixties, yes, but not at the same time as everyone else. With the advent of digital media, there is no reason to time-separate markets, no reason for India to see a film later than the US. The primary reason, the protection of historical distribution models, is an outrage. The oft-quoted primary reason, the need to stamp out piracy, is inane: piracy would drop substantially if release was same-time worldwide.

But that’s not the point of this post either.

The point of the post is this: In the Sixties and early Seventies, for all the reasons quoted above, western music arrived late to India. Which meant that, for example, someone like Leonard Cohen was very popular for most of the 1970s.

I was thirteen when the Seventies began. Now I like Leonard Cohen. A lot. I have a signed first edition of Beautiful Losers, I have every album he’s ever made, I count Famous Blue Raincoat as one of my top 25 songs ever. [There’s something haunting, something deeply satisfying, about the lilting cadence of and-then-Jane.Came.By-with-a-lock-of-your-hair. She-said.That-you-gave-it-to-her. The-night. That-you-planned-to-go-clear. Did you ever go clear?]

Yes, I like Leonard Cohen.

It feels strange to think that tonight, as the UK gears itself for that momentous occasion, the X Factor Finals, children born after Cohen’s children were born are going to sing along to songs written by him. Hallelujah has been chosen as the debut song for the contest’s winner.

Actually, this generation has it easy. My generation, we had to dance to Leonard Cohen, whisper sweet nothings to the girls we were courting while trying to figure out how to look “cool” while “dancing” to Cohen.

Brevity

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief:

Polonius, Hamlet, Act II Scene II

I had the good fortune to see the recent RSC production of Hamlet last night. And I really enjoyed it. When I looked around the theatre, there were many youngsters about, including a few of my own. I could not help noticing how bored many of them looked. Bored because they didn’t understand what was going on, bored because they’d never been exposed to the plot.

I guess this was somewhere at the back of my mind this morning, when I took a break from preparing my preach for tomorrow. Whatever the reason, I decided to try and summarise Hamlet in 140 characters, see if I could encapsulate the play in a single tweet:

That was my first attempt. So if you’re feeling bored or creative or mischievous or whatever sometime over the next few weeks, see what you can come up with. Then tweet it, using the hashtag #TwitBard

This isn’t meant to be a literary exercise, there’s nothing serious about it. Just a bit of fun if you feel like it.

On the beach

I was at dinner yesterday with @gapingvoid, @stevecla, @jasonkorman, @dianamaria and @crossthebreeze. It was an enjoyable evening, topped off by late-night drinks at Harry’s Bar.

Over dinner, the conversation meandered across many subjects; at one stage we were talking about reboot, an inspiring conference that takes place annually in Copenhagen. I mentioned my interest in acquiring some of the chairs used during the breaks at reboot, which are available from strandstole.

Which reminded @crossthebreeze, Kris Hoet, to send me the links to a site he’d recommended to me when we last met in Berlin: Strandbeest. A creature of the beach.

Amazing stuff. A site well worth visiting, ideas that inspire, great execution. Go take a look.

My thanks to Kris.