Category: Four pillars

…is the title of David Weinberger’s new book. It’s a must-read, go get it now. David is a friend, someone I have immense respect for, but don’t let my bias come in the way. Go buy the book and read it for yourself.

What is it about? I won’t make the mistake of classifying it — otherwise I might as well not have read the book….. So think of these as tag-descriptors:

• It’s a paean to the power of the digital world
• It’s a lesson in the challenges of information discovery and retrieval
• It’s a history of tabulation and classification, sequinned with great anecdotes
• It’s a sequel to Small Pieces Loosely Joined; or maybe the Cluetrain Manifesto; or maybe The Social Life of Information
• It’s a series of blog posts on a common set of themes
• It’s a welcome addition to my library
• It’s what you make it

And no, it’s not a solution to the Mid-East crisis or Global Warming. It’s a book. It’s a very good book. And it is all about information, which is one reason why I love it.

David takes us on a fascinating journey through the history, geography and science of classifying information, interspersed with his wry sense of humour (e.g. defending the state of the space under the average bed: “There isn’t a part of our homes that is truly unordered, except perhaps under our beds, and for many of even that is the site of the spontaneous ordering of dust into bunnies.” Or the way he describes Mendeleev as “unburdened by theory”.).

While doing this, he keeps drawing both parallels as well as differences between the two prior physical orders of collection and classification and the new, emerging digital order. Anecdotes are plentiful, covering plants, species, elements, books and even subjects themselves.

Anyone who is serious about the digital world would do well to read the book; anyone interested in information should read the book; anyone who is interesting in taxonomy and ontology must study the book.

As his arguments come to a crescendo, David espouses four new strategic principles, each of which deserves a set of posts in itself:

• Filter on the way out
• Put each leaf on as many branches as possible
• Everything is metadata and everything can be a label
• Give up control

I found much to fascinate me, and I am currently going through my third “very slow” read. There are tidbits for everyone: the description of the arguments between Panizzi and Carlyle should stir memories for everyone who’s ever been involved in a “we will define a data structure for everything” project; the description of Schachter’s insights compress a great deal of learning into a very small space; the paragraphs devoted to the Linnean Society HQ have a H.W. Fowler-like sense of humour: “It makes sense to bury first- and second-order organisations such as [Linnaean classification] and the Bettmann Archive. Specimens made of atoms are fragile and need protection.”

It’s a good place to go to if you want to understand more about items as diverse, yet related, as tagging, collaborative filtering, listmania, “statistically interesting phrases” and so on.

One of the more intriguing ideas David comes up with is espoused in the following sentence: “Because it can’t be fixed, the Dewey Decimal System is caught in a problem endemic to large classification systems tied to the physical world.” Until I got under the hood of that sentence, I never really accepted the notion of “legacy classification” as being a meaningful problem. Reminds me of the problems in shifting between Julian and Gregorian calendars….or why QWERTY remains in use….

I was particularly taken with the stories related to S.R. Ranganathan and his Five Laws of Library Science (a term, incidentally, that he is credited with first using). Ranganathan’s Laws are:

• Books are for use
• Every reader his/her books
• Every book its readers
• Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff
• The library is a growing organism

When I first saw that, something strange stirred in me. I could imagine my maternal grandfather, Dr SV Anantakrishnan, saying just that, right down to the brusque to-the-point-ness. I was therefore completely unsurprised to find out that Ranganathan was, like my grandfather, also a Professor at Madras Christian College (where I holidayed, with my grandfather, every summer from 1961 to 1971 or so). So I will find out everything I can about the man who gave the world Colon Classification!

I was also intrigued by the way David made me understand something else that is happening, symptomatically shown in the way Wikipedia articles increase in length while Britannica articles shorten. I see something very opensource about that, and will comment in detail later.

For the unconvinced, here are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

We have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organising the world.

The solution to the overabundance of information is more information.

How we draw lines can have dramatic effects on who has power and who does not.

The real problem is that any map of knowledge assumes that knowledge has a geography, that it has a top-down view, that it has a shape.

It’s not who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.

It’s not what you know, and it’s not even who you know. It’s how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power.

Go buy the book. Even better, go read it.

Regular readers of this blog would know how much I care about the Three Is: doing the right thing about the Internet, Intellectual Property Rights and Identity. The weird thing about these issues is that they create conversation on both sides of the work-life fence. And, for some reason, they don’t attract the dogma and intolerance that characterise many political and religious conversations.

I dislike many of the terms used in these conversations: a perfect example is “content”, a word whose sound reminds me of fresh chalk squeaking on a glass-fronted blackboard. Now, one of the commonest phrases in which I hear that appalling word used is the following:

Content is king

And when I gently enquire of the speaker “Over what kingdom?” the usual answer I get is somewhere along these lines:

You don’t get it, do you? The content-owner rules, he owns the customer

The people who say that are right about one thing. I definitely do not get it.  People who choose to call themselves content-owners and pipe-owners (another term I deeply dislike despite Senator Stevens’ attempts) start squabbling over “ownership” of the customer.  Over the years, I’ve seen this manifest itself even within organisations, where power magically descends upon those who “own” the customer.

Pfui.

None of us owns the customer. If anything, the customer owns us. We seem to be taking a long time to understand this and to learn from it.

Yup, it’s time for another Very Provisional Post.

There’s something I don’t get about IT and ROI. Something fundamental. And that thing is: How can we possibly use the tools of a very old paradigm to solve the problems of a very new paradigm?

I guess this is something I’ve been musing about for fifteen years, after reading Paul Strassmann’s The Business Value of Computing.

I guess this is something I’ve wrestled with every time I’ve had to stand up and be counted during budget rounds at the various institutions I’ve worked in. And I’ve been in many such rounds, particularly since 2001, where the tone of the budget discussion was “Go South, Young Man“. And I wasn’t that young either.

I guess it is what was at the back of my mind when I read Nicholas Carr’s article in the Harvard Business Review in 2003, when I read his book a year later, and even when I spent time discussing various aspects of the issue with Andrew McAfee.

I guess I’m getting stupider as I grow older. You see, what gets me is this:

Ever since I read the Strassmann oeuvre, I’ve watched computing grow more distributed, more networked; I’ve seen a move towards more “enterprise architecture”,  more middleware, more platforms. I’ve watched a substantial increase in complexity.

This increase in complexity manifests itself in many ways:

• requirements capture has gotten harder as we made the historical silos merge and coalesce
• estimation has gotten harder, since everything now connects with everything else
• testing has gotten harder, particularly regression and end-to-end testing
• delivery has gotten harder and slower as silo spaghetti entangled us
• fault replication has gotten harder, and as a consequence so has bug-fixing
• and everything has gotten harder as the enterprise boundaries began to extend and even disappear

As IT professionals, we’ve recognised this and tried to simplify the chessboard, exchanging pawns, pieces and even queens:

• using component architecture and reuse to speed up delivery
• using publish-subscribe bus architectures and adapter frameworks to reduce the number of interfaces
• using time-boxing  to ease requirements gathering
• using fast iteration models to  make the gathering process more accurate
• using increasing standardisation and rationalisation to simplify all this
• using consolidation, virtualisation and service orientation to derive at least a modicum of value out of Moore’s Law during all this
• using agile methods in general to speed up all of this

I’ve watched all this happen, watched us learn. But.

During all this time, I haven’t really seen changes in the way we account for our IT investments and expenditures. I’ve seen papers about changes, particularly those suggesting a move towards option theory; I’ve seen articles about such changes: I particularly liked the SMR proposition of Big Bets, Options and No-Regrets Moves. I’ve taken part in long arguments about the processes we use to price and value investments in IT.

But, unlike the IT environment during that period, I haven’t really seen changes in the way we measure the ROI of IT. Just 50-year old lipstick on 500 year old pigs. 

This was a problem in 1987. A bigger problem in 1997. And it’s an absolute killer in 2007.

You see, we’ve moved on. There have been various convergences, convergences of standards, of techniques, even of devices. The opensource community has had its effect, commoditising aggressively up the stack.  We’ve seen telephony become software, we’ve seen the disaggregation and reaggregation of hardware, software and services. [Much of my disagreement with Carr is about timing, not direction. ].

Today we have a new challenge. What Doc Searls calls The Because Effect.

In the past, we could claim there was a direct causal relationship between the investments made in IT and the returns, positive or negative. We had siloed systems so we somehow managed to shoe-horn what we did into 15th century mindsets. As everything became more connected, we couldn’t find the causal relationships any more, so we started wondering whether Strassmann et al were right. Yet we knew they couldn’t be, we could sense the productivity gains, the cycle time gains, the quality gains, even if they were later sacrificed. After all, there were many sacrificial altars: vendor lockin, vendor bloat, the politics of projects, the tragedies of e-mail and spreadsheet, the system of professions.

Last week I was at a conference where there was much discussion about agile methods, and the issue of agile-versus-cumbersome-accounting came up. You know something? I’ve yet to work in a place where people were happy with the finance system. Ever. This, despite finance being one of the first places to be “automated”. I don’t wonder why, I know why. Just ask Sig.

Now things will get harder still. The Because Effect is something we live with already. We make money with X because of Y.  X and Y aren’t unknowns we’re solving for. In many cases, Y is a commoditising infrastructure which enables or disables our ability to derive value out of X, the edge application.

Using traditional ROI techniques, we may drive investment away from both X as well as Y over time, as we continue the shoe-horning madness.  That’s why I read what McAfee and Brynjolfsson researched, why I read what Carr researched. Our measurement tools aren’t up to the job. And the consequences could be tragic.

Just musing. And looking forward to the comments and flames.

My thanks to Chris “Rageboy” Locke for making sure I saw this “map” of online communities:

Interesting map. You can find the original here.

I looked at it with Saturday morning eyes, and was struck by the following:

One, it represents many generations, but the generations are often isolated. Neither Orla, my 21 year old daughter, nor Isaac, my 15 year old son, would recognise Usenet or for that matter IRC, even if they used bits of what they represented. Hope, my 9 year old youngest, would spend time looking for Stardoll and not find it, much like Wikipedia does in the link I’ve shown.

Two, there are some dogs that aren’t barking, and it is worth considering why. Not seeing a Twitter I can understand, maybe that’s just a function of when the map was done. Maybe Amazon and eBay are seen as old hat communities and therefore stuck away in the Mountains of Web 1.0 somewhere in the icy north, yet I think they deserve individual mention. Surely Bebo is large enough to be on the map? Surely CyWorld needs to be represented with a much larger area? And what do we do with opensource communities like mozilla and WordPress, “ecosystem” communities like netvibes and collections of people like LinkedIn?

Three, we need to understand more about the places where the generations meet. Why that is the case. Facebook and YouTube both span multiple generations now, Flickr and last.fm have that effect as well, but I find places like DeviantArt far more intriguing. What is it about the communities like DeviantArt that they became ageless from the start? What can we learn from them?

Of course there is some presenter bias coming through, in terms of what has been placed where and how (or for that matter why Cory alone gets named). Nevertheless, there’s something about the map I find intensely intriguing, and I will be posting on it later. In the meantime, treat it like any other Saturday morning post. I think there is a lot I can learn about the different characteristics of online networks, why some are called social networking sites and others aren’t, why some seem boringly Web 1.0 and others don’t, why some support many modes of conversation and others don’t. When I get invited to a group like Booligan on Facebook, how do I learn from that? How come no one has posted any textbooks there? Lots of questions about how online communities work. Maybe I need to go sit at the feet of Amy Jo Kim, rather than just read her book again and again. Maybe I need to spend more time understanding Howard Rheingold and Steven Johnson. Or maybe I just keep having these conversations with Doc and Rageboy and David.

There’s a cluetrain running through the map. I need to figure out where it’s going. Observations, comments and pointers welcome.

While reading Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside Of Down, [thanks! Kaliya] I was intrigued by his consideration of opensource in a chapter titled Catagenesis, which he defines as “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions and societies in the aftermath of breakdown”.

I quote sporadically from the chapter:

Scientists have found that complex systems that are highly adaptive….tend to share certain characteristics. First of all, the individual elements that make up the systems….are extraordinarily diverse. Second, the power to make decisions and solve problems isn’t centralised in one place or thing; instead, it’s distributed across the system’s elements….Third and finally, highly adaptive systems are unstable enough to create unexpected innovations but orderly enough to learn from their failures and successes. Systems with these three characteristics stimulate constant experimentation, and they generate a variety of problem-solving strategies.

We’re all familiar with just such a system — the internet, and its subsystem, the World Wide Web. In one respect, humanity is extraordinarily lucky: just when it faces some of the biggest challenges in its history, it has developed a technology that could be the foundation for extremely rapid problem solving on a planetary scale, for radically new forms of democratic decision making, and most fundamentally for the conversation we must have among ourselves to prepare for breakdown. So far, though, we’ve barely tapped this potential. The Internet and Web — rather than becoming powerful instruments of problem solving, adaptation and social inclusion — have simply turned into venues for a screaming cacophony of electronic narcissism.

The situation may be changing.

[……..]

So far, though, opensource approaches have been applied to solving technical problems like the creation of complex software or large databases. Now we urgently need research to see if we can use this kind of problem-solving approach — and the culture of voluntarism that underpins it — to address the ferociously hard social, political and environmental problems discussed in this book.

[……..]

But even if opensource methods can’t give us clear and final solutions to problems that are ultimately rooted in politics, they’re still a powerful way to develop scenarios, experiment with ideas and lay plans in advance of breakdown. And, most important, they can help us build worldwide communities of like-minded people who, in the course of working together on tasks, become bound together by trust and shared values and understandings. Such communities would then be better able to act with common purpose in a moment of contingency and to seize the opportunity for catagenesis.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is a lot more erudite and reasoned and articulate than I am.  His words resonate a lot with me, and help define why I blog. I’m fundamentally a renaissance man, and I can see how a blogging culture, a true conversational and provisional opensourcing of ideas and opinions, how this will help us recognise, review, respond to and recover from the catastrophes that Homer-Dixon refers to.