Category: Four pillars

Andres Bianciotto is someone I met via the blogosphere; he commented on something I’d written many months ago; I took the opportunity to take a look at his blog, and when I realised he wrote mainly in Spanish, I decided to link to him. Why? Some similar interests, and maybe a way of improving my Spanish. I like learning by doing.

Not surprisingly, we connected again, via Facebook, more recently.

And today, looking at my news feed, I noticed that he’d recruited someone to a cause.  The act of recruitment was itself unremarkable, but the cause was fascinating. It said Search for Steve Fossett. So I looked into it.

And what I found was remarkable, at least to me. A Human Intelligence Task had been set up using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, simply asking volunteers to assist in looking through satellite imagery in order to help find Steve Fossett. While the prognosis looks grim, we should do what we can. My prayers are with Steve, his family and with everyone involved in the search.

There is so much we can do with the tools we have, once we get rid of the blinkers we’ve worn. There is so much that we can do that has practical and life-enhancing value for so many people, in health, education and welfare. But we can do all this only if we continue to learn how to use the tools, continue unfettered in our experimentation and in the application of our intelligence, both individual as well as collective, towards improving our capability.

I must be Confused. I’ve never been tempted to give my bank account details to strangers telling me they will pay me gazillions to help them embezzle whole countries. I’ve never thought that I could win lotteries without buying tickets, particularly lotteries from countries I’d never heard of. I haven’t fallen for the rest of the Fear and Greed plays that make up most of the spam I get, I am not interested in artificial aids to improve who I am and what I am.

And I am not unusual. I don’t actually know a single person who has fallen for the Nigerian letter scam or sent off for spurious lottery wins.

Spam is an irritant. Not a terminal toxin.  What’s all this to do with Citizendium or with Wikipedia? Let me take you on a little trip into a land of fairy tales.

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re going to solve your spam problem for you. What we’re going to do, we’re going to set up this small committee that looks into every e-mail you get, and we’re only going to send you the ones we think are OK. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about who’s going to be on this committee and how they get there. After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re sick and tired of all the mistakes we see in the news you read. You never know where the news has been, who else has used it. So we’re going to help you. We’re going to set up this small committee, you see, and we’re going to go through all the bits of news that might ever get to you. And we’re only going to let you see the bits we think are OK. Oh, and by the way….. After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy; I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera. We’re really worried about all the blogs you read, all the feeds you get, all the sites you visit. So we’re going to help you…..After all, we know best.”

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? You have no idea what you might find when you go searching. Ooh baby baby it’s a wild world …. just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware…You need your searching filtered. So we’re going to help you…..After all, we know best.”

After all, we know best. Trust me, I’m a doctor. Would I lie to you? Where is my second-hand furniture salesman when I need one?

There are many things that are wrong with Wikipedia, many things that we can make better. And there are many people out there who know a lot more than I do about this, so I’ll let them speak.

I know one thing. I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.

We’ve had the Cult Of The Expert for centuries now. And we’ve seen how and why it breaks down, why it fails. Small groups of experts can be “gamed”, often without realising it. Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.

Of course this is not true of all experts. There is much to be said for expertise. But there is also much to be said for amateurs. Passionate, unbiased, unbuyable. Willing to admit to their errors. Less prone to ego. Less hung up about losing. Or winning.

Linus’s Law is a very powerful thing. Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. When we see things that are wrong with Wikipedia, the solution is to fix it, not to create a new form of corruption.

I could be wrong. Citizendium may become the most wonderful thing since sliced bread. [I shall resist the temptation to say: For people who like being told which side of their bread is buttered, by people who like deciding which side of the bread should be buttered.]

After all, they know best. 

As for me, I like my inputs unfiltered. I like choosing whose opinion I will listen to, whose recommendations matter to me. I like my facts and my history and my news and my feeds and my searches and my music and my literature and my films and my everything to come to be like a river, as I think Dave Winer first suggested.

And when I have this river firehose elephantine thingie coming at me, I will use friends and their recommendations and their comments and their opinions to cut out the stuff I don’t want and to point to the stuff I do want. Collaborative filtering is a beautiful thing.

And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy me a billy goat. A billy goat called tagging and folksonomies.
I don’t think this way because I have a hang-up about experts. It’s something more basic than that. My nose twitches. I get goosebumps and collywobbles. I start saying to myself, beware the Jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.

As I said earlier, there’s a lot to be said for experts and for expertise. You may think I’m being unfair to experts in general, and you’d be right.

Let me put it this way: We have a choice of being unfair to experts or unfair to amateurs. From what I can see, the experts have had their turn and it didn’t work. So now maybe it’s the amateurs’ turn.

But what do I know? After all, I am Confused.

[My next post in this series is going to be about Citizendium, Wikipedia and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Or, more particularly, why the Cult Of The Expert militates against VRM, and why it was responsible for giving us that appalling concoction CRM in the first place. You have been warned. Do adjust your sets.]

Some time ago, while mulling over my thoughts about Facebook and privacy (soon to be the tenth and last post in the Facebook and the Enterprise series) I’d been re-reading danah boyd‘s writings on the subject nearly a year ago. She starts a section called Exposure by saying:

Have you ever been screaming to be heard in a loud environment when suddenly the music stops and everyone hears the end of your sentence? And then they turn to stare? I’m guessing you turned beet red. (And if you didn’t, exposure is not one of your problems.

“She’s talking about lulworths”, I said to myself. And then proceeded to feel quite frustrated, because for the life of me I could not remember why I thought that danah was referring to “lulworths”. Until this morning, when light dawned en route Lord’s and the cricket.

[An aside. Had a great day at Lord’s. Great atmosphere, great company, some excellent cricket, particularly by England. Even if Tendulkar was stopped dead in his tracks, and Dravid wasn’t even allowed to start….. by some truly diabolical umpiring. It was, nevertheless, England’s day, and England deserved to win.]

While writing about going to Lord’s I’d mentioned the word “didcot” from The Meaning of Liff. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, the authors of The Meaning of Liff, describe the book as follows:

In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist. On the other hand, the world is littererd with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.

*And, indeed, in Liff

While thinking about didcots I remembered where I’d seen lulworths. Adams and Lloyd define “lulworth” thus:

LULWORTH (n.)
Measure of conversation. A lulworth defines the amount of the length, loudness and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same time.

Pretty much what danah was describing. Try and read The Meaning Of Liff if you get a chance, it may be dated but it’s fun. Here are a few excerpts:

ABERBEEG (vb.)
Of amateur actors, to adopt a Mexican accent when called upon to play any variety of foreigner (except Pakistanis – for whom a Welsh accent is considered sufficient).

HATHERSAGE (n.)
The tiny snippets of beard which coat the inside of a washbasin after shaving in it.

MINCHINHAMPTON (n.)
The expression on a man’s face when he has just zipped up his trousers without due care and attention.

Incidentally, talking about Minchinhampton, I once had the pleasure of playing the Minchinhampton Old Course many years ago. If I remember correctly, it was the only course I’ve played on whose local rules offered me a free drop if my ball nestled in a cowpat! I managed to eschew that particular experience. They also had some very unusual flags, or what passed for them on the greens. White tubes maybe three foot long, and that’s all. The Old Course is on common land, and cows are free to graze there, to feed on the cloth flags (which they could if there were any), and to decorate the fairways with fresh dung (which they can and do).

Which brings me on to my final point in this Saturday evening stroll. Mondegreen.

Ye Highlands, and ye Lawlands

Oh where have you been?

They have slain the Earl of Murray,

And layd him on the green.

The verses above are taken from The Bonny Earl of Murray, and, as the wikipedia article details, the last line is often recited as “And Lady Mondegreen”. Hence the word “mondegreen”, to refer to aural corruptions. I guess most of the mondegreens I know come from the realm of popular music: perhaps the best-known is “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy” (for “Kiss The Sky”), somehow shoehorned into Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Which is why this site, containing the most famous misheard lyrics, has the url www.kissthisguy.com

A coda. How long before we start seeing “etymologies” for urls? Just a thought.

We all have our foibles.

An aside. I was inordinately pleased to see that the BlackBerry predictive text support actually recognised the word foibles, even though it suggested doubles first. And how do I describe such words?. Surely there must be some word analogous to synonym and homonym that describes words thrown up as alternatives by predictive text systems. Qwertonym perhaps?

This train of thought reminds me of my delight when I first read The Meaning Of Liff, sometime in the early 1980s. It was a little black book, a stocking filler containing words to describe things that we didn’t have words for.

My particular favourite was Didcot, the word suggested by the authors to describe that tiny bit of card that was punched out of my railway ticket by the ticket inspector, who would use a device looking like a stylised nutcracker.

I digress.

It’s a glorious day, the sun’s shining, God’s in His Heaven and all’s well with the world. I’m on my way to the only place I could want to be this morning.

Lord’s. And may the best team win.

What a truly fabulous game cricket is.In the past, there was a part of me that felt purist about the very concept of one day cricket, feeling that it despoilt the true game. Now, some thirty years later, I am grateful. Because it has made the game accessible to many more.

I have American colleagues pretty much queueing up to come, a French colleague openly curious about what makes the game tick. And most important of all, I have a child of mine accompanying me. Something I feel would not have happened but for the one day game. Now he even comes to watch Test matches.

Who knows, maybe the next generation will speak the same way about Twenty-Twenty games?

What matters is access, as Dave the Lifekludger is wont to remind us. The more accessible something is the better.

We shouldn’t worry about the effect it has on the long game, the true game. We are now used to seeing abridged books available for over a century now, yet book publication has probably not been at higher levels.and, if you take the JK Rowlings and Vikram Seths of this world, they’re not particularly short either.

So it’s off to Lord’s I go, ready to watch a day’s jousting between willow and leather, at Headquarters.

Paradise enow.

I had the pleasure of spending some time this morning with Don Tapscott, who dropped in to see me at the office. Don is someone I’ve tracked ever since I read Paradigm Shift maybe fifteen years ago. Fascinating book. He was in the country doing a number of seminars around Wikinomics, his most recent book, and we’d arranged to meet.

The conversation meandered across a wild range of subjects,  all linked, to a lesser or greater extent, to that strange space where the enterprise meets social software.  And one of the subjects we touched on for a while was the power of context. Conversations using social software tend to be wrapped in context, a context that is portable across time and space, with a significant reduction in switching costs as a result.

You only have to use a decent “true” group IM application once to know what I mean. It becomes easy to figure out who’s doing the “talking”, something that isn’t all that easy in audio conferences. For some reason, the socially induced begging-your-pardon pregnant pauses that occur in audio or video conference tend to be minimised in group chat. If the baby needs seeing to, or there’s something on the hob about to go ballistic, you can walk away, attend to the pressing need and return to the conversation with complete continuity guaranteed. You can see what you missed. Where you have global distributed teams, you can even minimise losses due to translation errors, they tend to occur more frequently in speech rather than in “written talk”.

Who spoke. Who spoke before. What was said before. In what sequence. On what subject. For how long. Who interrupted. Who was there. Where was all this. When. Why. Everything. Those are some of the things I mean by conversation wrapped in context. And it will get better. As the tools get better.

Now some of you may be thinking, JP’s completely nuts, there is no better context than live speech, who needs any of this contextual wrapper horse manure? And if you feel that way, I understand. Told you I was Confused. All I can do is to offer you, for your particular weekend delectation, this story of what happens when, for some reason, you don’t have all the context you need in a real live conversation. Enjoy.