Category: Four pillars

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

On features and bugs

I told you I enjoyed reading Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg’s recent book; I told you I was going to start reading his blog, Wordyard.

I kept my word. And I’m still enjoying it. To give you a for-instance, here’s a quote from a piece Scott wrote on MySpace and success:

Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.

Maybe we’re really going to see something different after all, as the software industry discovers co-creation and something analogous to user-generated-something-as-long-as-it’s-not-content.

Scott’s comment makes me think. Think about three things.

  1. today’s safety valves are tomorrow’s bottlenecks as we move closer to the customer. Safety is in the eye of the beholder, the customer.
  2. one man’s feature is another man’s bug. As traditional marketing and sales move out of the way, and customers are left to discover value for themselves, we are going to see a number of such unintended consequences.
  3. these two things are going to accelerate as the customer acquires the tools of production and co-creation.

I’m going to enjoy watching what happens to today’s abominations in IPR and DRM as this gathers momentum.

Four Pillars: The Power of Context

checkershadow illusionHave you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

  • The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
  • Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
  • The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

Four Pillars: Thinking about sand and broccoli

I’ve always been intrigued by what people actually do in services firms; I’ve worked in them all my life, and I have yet to figure it out completely. Why? Because every time I look, the daily “outputs” of individuals mystify me, yet everyone appears really busy. Weird.

I used to understand how things worked, but lost my way after we discovered “productivity tools” and “end-user computing”. Ever since people started using spreadsheets and presentation tools, all the service industry rules changed for me. And I understood less and less.

Maybe I’m a dinosaur.

You see, I understood how individuals could use the spreadsheets and presentation tools, and I thought it was great. Then, when I saw some semblance of group work in these contexts, I thought I understood, and I hoped it would be great.

But the reality was different.

People spent incredible amounts of time producing the spreadsheets and presentations. People spent even more incredible amounts of time changing these things, arguing about what was in them, comparing the “content” with other sources of the same “content”. People spent time trying to acquire preview copies of spreadsheets and presentations; trying to influence what they contained; trying to differentiate what their particular thing said in comparison to what someone else’s thing said.

These productivity tools became the playthings of politicians. Particularly in large organisations. You know what I mean. It’s a bit like finding out that a GANTT chart was suddenly more important than the code deliverables it represented. [I know, I know, I’ve met those project managers as well….charlatans.]

The playgrounds that were called Meeting Minutes started looking deserted, as the serious players went on to bigger and better things. The power of presentation and graphics. And, particularly in Europe, the power of the spreadsheet. [Many years ago, I remember reading an unusual paper called Britain’s Right and Left Handed Companies, written by a professor from Warwick. His first name was probably Peter, his surname was short, perhaps only four letters, I can’t remember any more. But he looked deeply into this “figures” mentality and its European roots, and how it affected companies, particularly those in the UK]

Yes, I know I’m painting the lily. [Painting, not gilding. Gilding is what one does to refined gold]. But I digress.

Why am I so worked up about this, so much so that, explicitly, I didn’t allow for spreadsheets and slideware in Four Pillars?

Simple. Because these things are often lies. Without substance. They don’t need to be based on anything. Which makes the process of comparison and challenge and validation and verification truly painful. Yet everyone swears by them. Emperors and New Clothes. Everyone swears by them and everyone wastes incredible time using them. Unproductivity tools.

I think of spreadsheets and slideware in the same way I think of DRM. They pollute the path. Why do you think auditors the world over pore over and challenge ‘end user computing”, “desktop computing”, “spreadsheet computing” and their likes?

Which sane person would actually implement business processes that crystallised swivel-chairs all over the place? Let’s face it, that’s what we did. We didn’t learn from all the attempts at “Business Intelligence” and “Data Mining”. We didn’t learn from the prior pain of having implemented stand-alone non-referential systems. We went and enshrined all this in the way we work. No wonder ERP systems never delivered on their savings promises.

This is why I see no space for spreadsheets and presentation tools in Four Pillars.

There’s no point just ranting on about something, no point unless I suggest alternatives, new ways of working.

Plants 7 Bg 082104

So I want to talk about broccoli.

Not really, except for the fractal bit. I think there’s something Small-Pieces-Loosely-Joined about the way we work today, something High-Cohesion-And-Loose-Coupling, that means that everyone deals with fairly well-formed items of work. Not piecemeal Assembly-Line, the way the productivity experts tried to make service industries work for the last fifty years. Somehow, we’ve gone and used concepts of workflow to break up tasks that cannot and should not be broken up, so that we felt happy in our assembly line cocoons and security blankets. Somehow we haven’t cared about the impact on our productivity, because we’ve had spreadsheets and presentations to hide behind. Standalone spreadsheets and presentations.

Now, with Web 2.0 tools and Web 2.0 ways of working, these things are changing. Tasks are becoming more fractal, and the information inputs and outputs are similarly fractal. Who knows, maybe we’re actually discovering what Object should have meant. I think that’s why I found what Sigurd Rinde was doing at Thingamy so fascinating. There was something about the way he looked at enterprise financial information that really jelled with me. He definitely saw through the clothes that weren’t there.

Which brings me to sand. Granularity. Granularity in the context of Four Pillars.

When I looked at the way Search, Publishing, Fulfilment and Conversation work, I realised more and more that there’s something different about the way we interact with information now. There are small pieces, for sure, but the pieces are beautifully formed and whole. Not sliced and diced to nothingness. Not summarised up the wazoo.

Now, when we see a summary of something, we can dig into what it represents. Dig and dig and dig until we go to the source. [In fact many years ago, not long after I started using spreadsheets, I met someone who had a startup in this space. I think it was called Forest and Trees. It may have become part of Symantec, I lost track. But they were on to something.]

Now, there’s no real loss of information as a result of synthesis and summary. No risk of error in multiple transformations. No need to reconcile stuff because you’re looking at the source anyway. No need to employ armies of reconcilers either. No need to spend years arguing about the figures on spreadsheets, or making the authorship of presentations something politically desirable.

Spreadsheets and presentations are like nuclear energy or e-mail. There are good uses and bad uses. The trouble is that for the last few decades, we’ve been in the Bad Use phase, and we need to break away from there. We need to make sure the small pieces stay loosely joined.

[My thanks to PDphoto.org for the wonderful royalty-free broccoli image. They do accept donations, though, which is good.]

Musing lazily about identity

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Who you are is a function of:

  • what you stand for
  • what you belong to (both blood as well as thunder)
  • what you like (and what you dislike)
  • what you’ve done (and what you’d like to do)

Sure there are many other things. Ways to contact you. The size of your wallet. All kinds of things that other people use to “define” you: your age, gender, marital status, number of dependents, address.

Interestingly, these mattered when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into. [If you’re interested in hearing a worthwhile rant on this subject, try and spend some time with Professor Richard Scase, “Futurescase” as he gets called. I’ve relished the privilege.]

Today, the marketers are in trouble. Socio-economic groupings mean jack when it comes to predicting purchase propensity. Long tails weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of.

In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality.

No man is an iland.

We are going to have villages and towns and cities where the computing device is communal. Where that communal device uses opensource software and open standards and open platforms and open open open.

And we’re going to have to work out what identity means there. Not identity from a narrow financial-transaction point of view. But identity in the context of sharing information. Digital information. Letters. Photographs. Films. Music. Books. Whatever.

Communal devices. Communal devices that work when the local power grid goes down. Communal devices that don’t go obsolescent in 18 months. Communal devices that do their bit about global warming.

Communal devices.

Hey, let’s be careful out there. This is why I am so concerned about the garbage that gets one in the name of DRM and IPR. Have you really tried to use a “family” PC after Windows 95? One that three or four people use regularly, who are happy to share their files. If only they could.

An aside, still about identity. When I look at startups, one of the things that I check out very carefully is how the core team got together. Did they grow up in the same neighbourhood? Hang out in the same places? Know the same people? Go to the same university?

I’ve always felt this is important. Unless the core has some independent grounding, some reason to be together, they’re going to come apart when trouble comes their way. And every startup will hit trouble sometime in the early years.

In similar vein, I tend to check out what makes a group come together. Take America. The folk rock band, I mean, the ones who gave us Don’t Cross The River and Ventura Highway. [And Horse With No Name and Sandman, but those are not my favourites…].

Do you know how they got together? They were all sons of US GIs stationed west of London, in Ruislip, Middlesex. Their mothers were all British. They attended the same school. They broke up before they really got started, in 1969. And then came together in time to savour their success.

Just goes to show.