Category: Four pillars

This is a follow-up on something I posted a few weeks ago, with comments from Stu, Ian and TJ. The issue was about moderators becoming some sort of gatekeepers over time and the existence of some sort of continuum across which this happens.

While researching some of the control issues related to Wikipedia, I happened upon some very useful comments from Clay Shirky on all this; he was in turn responding to something Nicholas Carr had written on the “death” of Wikipedia; by following the Shirky link, you should also be able to see Carr’s original piece and his rejoinder to Shirky.

A few quotes from the Shirky piece:

• Openness allows for innovation. Innovation creates value. Value creates incentive. If that were all there was, it would be a virtuous circle, because the incentive would be to create more value. But incentive is value-neutral, so it also creates distortions — free riders, attempts to protect value by stifling competition, and so on. And distortions threaten openness.
• As a result, successful open systems create the very conditions that require [a response that threatens] openness. Systems that handle this pressure effectively continue (Slashdot comments.) Systems that can’t or don’t find ways to balance openness and closedness — to become semi-protected — fail (Usenet.)
• A huge number of our current systems are hanging in the balance, because the more valuable a system, the greater the incentive for free-riding. Our largest and most spontaneous sources of conversation and collaboration are busily being retrofit with filters and logins and distributed ID systems, in an attempt to save some of what is good about openness while defending against Wiki spam, email spam, comment spam, splogs, and other attempts at free-riding. Wikipedia falls into that category.
• And this is the possibility that Carr doesn’t entertain, but is implicit in his earlier work — this isn’t happening because the Wikipedia model is a failure, it is happening because it is a success.

Shirky notes later on in the same piece that “the rise of governance models is a reaction to the success that creates incentives to vandalism and other forms of attack or distortion.“

In the context of the continuum put forward by Ian and TJ, I think this is an important statement, and one that bears further discussion and analysis.

We need to think of governance models as evolutionary responses rather than immune system responses. An evolutionary response adapts to changing external stimuli in order to preserve and extend existence. An immune system response seeks to annihilate the interloper. While both are defensive in nature, I believe the principles by which they operate are as far apart as is possible.

An evolutionary response is open and knows no taboos. An immune system response is closed and knows only taboos.

We need to ensure that as we move across this suggested continuum, we stay on an open-with-as-few-controls-as-are required approach, rather than a this-doesn’t-work-so-let’s-bury-it-in-six-feet-of-concrete approach. What I have seen so far is too often the latter, which is why I brought this up again.

A dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid. It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man fish.

These are things I have believed in for all of my adult life, influenced by things my father said, things I learnt growing up in India, things I learnt at school and at university amongst the Jesuits.

As a result, many years later, I still think education and enfranchisement are important, whatever the context. If anything, I think they’re even more important than I used to think they were. At some level of abstraction, the only way we can deal with sectarian issues and even with terrorism is via education and enfranchisement. There is growing anecdotal evidence that people who are denied both are more susceptible to joining cults and “movements”.
I think education and enfranchisement are important to each of us as individuals, in our private lives. Important to us in our professional lives, to the firms we work for and work with. Important to us in the towns and cities we live in, in the countries and continents we inhabit.

Education and enfranchisement may not solve all of the world’s problems, but they help.

So I thought I’d start a conversation about these things, with people who could help me learn more about them, who could point me to things I needed to see, and who could say things that let me see things in a different light, with a different perspective.

But how was I to start such a conversation? With a formal education in economics, and a career of over twenty-five years in technology, it made sense for me to concentrate on information and its enabling technologies and the business models used. So that’s what I did. Six months ago.

And that’s why I care about the internet and about connectivity. About intellectual property rights and digital rights management. About opensource software, technologies and platforms. About identity and confidentiality and privacy. About avoiding path pollution and avoiding device and vendor lock-in.
If we get them right, more people will have affordable access to information, more people will be enfranchised to participate in the world.

If we get them wrong, we will waste opportunities we have never had before. Opportunities provided by the continuance of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law. Opportunities provided by the Ohmae Three, Globalisation, Disintermediation and the Internet. Opportunities provided by the democratisation of innovation and the availability of social software. Opportunities provided by telephony becoming software.

Opportunities for whom? For the disenfranchised of today. Disenfranchised because they’re too young. Or too old. Disenfranchised because they’re not connected or unable to connect or unable to afford to connect. Disenfranchised because they’re unable to use “traditional” computers because of physical constraints. Disenfranchised because they’re always on the move. Because they don’t have access to electrical power. Because English is not their mother tongue. Because they’re too shy. Because they’ve never had the opportunity.

If we do the wrong thing about the internet, about intellectual property and DRM, or about identity and its  related issues, then we will miss the opportunity. But only for a while. Nature abhors a vacuum. The opensource community will find a way around the messes we create, the constraints we put in place, the barriers we raise.

If we do the right thing about all this, then we will have a different way of dealing with information. Because the underlying technology has caught up, information need no longer be trapped by its enabling technologies, information can begin to have the social life it was meant to have, as John Seely Brown has reminded us.

And that’s why I blog about Generation M, about Web 2.0, about Four Pillars, about Syndication, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

I wondered about whether I should only blog about all this in the context of the individual, then realised maybe a year ago that all this is true for institutions as well. Education and enfranchisement and Four Pillars are as meaningful in an enterprise context as anywhere else.

The Cluetrain guys called markets conversations, and helped me understand a few things. John Seely Brown and Steven Johnson placed a few other things in context for me about the social life of information and how it flows, how it emerges and moves. Doc and his Lakoff conversation helped me get snowballs.

So blogging it had to be. I don’t read blogs to find out things faster than anyone else; I don’t read blogs to find things to link to and comment on before anyone else; I don’t read blogs because I can’t find any books to read.

I read blogs because they’re participative, they are accessible, they help me learn. I write blogs because I want to participate. In a community. Everyone wants to make a difference, everyone wants to leave a legacy. Blogs are useful in both cases.

Someone I was reading, I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was or where it was, mentioned that conversations can be about events, people or ideas. People-related things tend to be best live and we will always have some form of radio and television, even after we’ve time-shifted it and place-shifted it and mutated it. Event-related things tend to be best in short “factual” bursts and we will always have old media around in some form or the other covering this. Sure, people and event conversations are migrating to the web, but I guess alternative forms will exist.

When it comes to ideas, the blogosphere is hard to beat. What Doc called a snowball is often a sense of revelation for me; I read something and my brain goes Ping, I see it in a different perspective. I experience a different understanding, walk away with a different meaning, all because somebody said something that triggered something else in me. And it helps me learn. When I write something, the comments and feedback and links help me learn as well. And I guess I hope that some readers get that as well from reading what I write.

You may have wondered why I blog about the things I blog about. Now I guess you know. Method or madness? You decide. :-)

I read this story by Hugo Rifkind in the Times today, about a plan for a somewhat different protest in front of Parliament in London. Comedian Mark Thomas has issued an open invitation to all comers, to apply to the police for a “lone protest” licence (which needs six days’ notice and apparently tends to be granted). And then for all the “lone protesters” to turn up next Thursday, in what could be termed an orchestrated cacophony of protest; in order to stay within the law, every person must protest about something different. The law they are not-protesting about banned demonstrations without a licence within a kilometre of Parliament; see related story here. You can almost imagine everyone with individual and personalised tiny gapingvoid cartoons on business-card sized banners….
Smart mobs taking an unusual turn? Let’s see what happens :-)

I now have a name for the boy in the photograph. A location. A date. And a small piece of evidence that may help me find out who has the rights to the photograph, so that I can acquire a large print, or even the rights to the photograph itself. Amazing what the blogosphere and the web can do. More when I know more.
Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time, or maybe sooner, I will be able to move my cursor over any photograph to find out who has the rights to it and how to contact that person or persons; maybe even the price, or a Creative Commons watermark. Wouldn’t that be nice?

There’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of ACM Interactions, titled Digital Libraries for the Developing World. I think it’s a must-read for people interested in education, in opensource or in the developing world. [While I am a member of the ACM, my access to this article was on a public-domain basis using Google, so I believe I’ve done the right thing in linking to it.]
Written by  Ian H. Witten of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, it makes a number of very important points :

• The failure of “traditional” publishing and distribution mechanisms in the developing world, in the context of making useful, often critical, public domain information easily accessible
• The sheer waste this represents
• Why decoupling publishing and distribution costs from intellectual property charges is an imperative as a result
• The sheer complexity of dealing with obsolescent software, obsolete hardware, sparse network and internet connectivity and multiple languages
• The problems of having to design for fixed and removable media
• The problems of having to design for online and offline
• The problems of inadequate power
• The issues that come up in training and maintenance
• Why opensource software becomes an imperative as a result
  

Ian, I am told, is Director of the  New Zealand Digital Library Project, which brought us Greenstone. If you haven’t seen what they do, it’s worth a look.

The issues raised by this article are stark, given the backdrop they are painted against. In the developed world, it is sometimes difficult to see all this with the correct perspective. We get hung up over the commercials related to “the internet” and digital rights and intellectual property. The context provided by Ian is a good and pragmatic explanation of why the internet needs to be saved, why paths shouldn’t be polluted, why we have to get DRM and IPR right, why opensource platforms are critical.

The so-called “commercial” world can learn from all this as well. Necessity and Mother and Invention all in the same sentence. Instead of Not and Invented and Here.

Thank you Ian. Thank you ACM.