Category: Four pillars

I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein‘s recent book Infotopia very slowly. For three reasons. Because it’s very good and I want to savour it. Because it needs time to digest well. And because I’m on vacation.

As part of the conversation on opensource software, Cass quotes Woody Guthrie‘s copyright notice, as published in a 1930s songbook:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Wonderful quote. Thank you, Cass. I will comment on the book once I have had the chance to mull over it.

Phil Dawes made sure I didn’t miss this recent piece by Joel Spolsky. BTW, anyone interested in the semantic web should tune in to Phil’s stuff. [Thanks, Phil!]

In classic management speak I guess you could categorise Joel’s three methods as (a) stick (b) carrot and stick and (c) carrot. But that’s oversimplification.

Personally, I think my management methods were influenced more by Max De Pree than anyone else, though Peter Drucker looms large in the background, aided and abetted by Tom Peters. If you haven’t read De Pree’s books, please do.

I first read Leadership is an Art sometime in 1988, about a year after it was published. And it set the tone for my management style ever since; over the years, that learning was augmented by my understanding leadership in the voluntary sector and “quiet” approaches, and I found all this very valuable. I’ve probably given away fifty copies of the book.
The elevator pitch for Leadership is an Art was:

• The first job of a leader is to articulate strategy and vision.
• The second and last is to say thank you.
• In between, a leader should be a servant and a debtor to the led.

I found it very powerful for many reasons, just one of which I feel I must share here. De Pree was CEO of Herman Miller, who make the chairs you are likely to be sitting on right now. A venerable man running a venerable manufacturing concern, showing immense humility and humanity in his management style.

Here’s an excerpt from a Publisher’s Weekly review:

The artful leader, he argues, should recognize human diversity and make full use of his or her employees’ gifts. Further, he believes, a leader is responsible not just for the health of a company’s financial assets, but for its ethics. Advocating management through persuasion, and the exercise of democratic participation rather than concentrated power, he favors covenantal relationships with employees that rest on shared purpose, dignity and choice.

What I found particularly exciting at the time was that De Pree, CEO of a major manufacturing firm, somehow managed to avoid thinking Taylor-meets-Assembly-Line-Any-Colour-You-Like-As-Long-As-It’s-Black. That he understood the value and richness of human diversity, and did not set about seeking to destroy it systematically.

Now, back to Joel’s point. I think there is something subtle, something very important, in his Identity Management approach to managing technology teams.

Participation.

People want to make a difference. Young people want to make that difference quickly and energetically. Older people want to leave a legacy as they ride into the sunset.

They want to make a difference.

When you allow people to participate and make it simple for them to do so, you release their creativity and satisfy their urge to make a difference. In some respects, that’s what opensource is about. And what the critics of altruism fail to grasp.

And this is also what Web 2.0 and the Read-Write Web and The Writable Web and social software are about.

Participation.

Some time ago, speaking at a conference, I wondered aloud why anyone would fight to hire intelligent people and then proceed to prescribe precisely what they should do. I still wonder about that.

Looks like Fake Steve’s been busy acting like Sir Percy Blakeney.

Neil Ward-Dutton kindly pointed me at this site but I didn’t see much happening there. Then I saw the comments and found myself directed here instead. Thank you Neil.

Let’s see how long we can seek Fake Steve there. Looks like he’s still there for now, even if he’s hanging upside down.

I’ve been a fan of Terry Fisher‘s for some time now, even prior to reading Promises to Keep. Thinking about it, I guess it must have been around the time a friend pointed me towards Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities sometime in 2001, though I lost track until sometime in 2004, when Malc pointed me at Chapter 6 of Promises To Keep.

So it was with some eager anticipation that I followed up on Cory’s tip re a paper that Terry co-authored, on The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Materials in the Digital Age. Thanks, Cory!. [While the link is to the abstract, it is possible to download the entire paper via the same link. Wouldn’t it be ironic if you couldn’t do that…]

A few quotes:

From the executive summary:

• We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are amongst the most important obstacles to realising the potential of digital technology in education.

From Part One: The Overview:

• Perhaps no area holds more potential for such transformation than education. Many diverse and exciting initiatives demonstrate how rich sources of digital information could enhance the transfer of knowledge. Yet at the same time, the change in education arguably has been less radical, especially in comparison to mundane endeavours such as selling a used bicycle …..There are many complex reasons for this slow pace of change, including lack of resources and resistance to new practices.
• Digital technology makes informative content easier to find, to access, to manipulate and remix, and to disseminate. All of these steps are central to teaching, scholarship, and study.

If you are even vaguely interested in the use of digital technology in education, you should read the paper. It is rich in content and in context. And written by people who care.

A related subject. I wrote some time ago on DOPA and the issues it creates, and many people better versed than me on the subject have commented since. Now I’d always believed that the Numero Uno reason for DOPA, according to its proposers, was to reduce the risk of mature evildoers preying on young unsuspecting students.

Which is why I found a recent study, published by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, both comforting as well as disturbing. Comforting that sexual solicitation of minors by strangers via the web is down. Disturbing that the strangers concerned are using new and adapted techniques and concentrating on getting photos and videos uploaded by the children. Entitled Online Victimisation of Youth: Five Years Later, it is also well worth a read; you can find a copy of the report here.

This is primarily to let you read and digest at leisure, I will comment more fully once I have had the chance to do the same.

Recent posts and comments by David Churbuck and Johnnie Moore formed the kernels for this post. Thanks, guys.

I quote from David’s post on Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead:

The Dead were the first band to encourage their fans to record shows and share them. As Garcia said, when the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share. The only rule was no selling or profiteering and the fans were self-policing, criticizing anyone who tried to sell bootlegs.

People have often asked me how I dared to state that Jerry Garcia influenced my thinking on opensource more than any other person. There’s no better answer than the quote above.

When the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share. We should call this the Garcia Rule. [David, you seem best placed to get this Rule published :-) no attribution necessary except to Jerry]

Everything else is secondary. Much of the pushback and anger to do with DRM and IPR issues is captured in that sentence. Everyone’s happy to pay for value created. But not to keep paying for it. We want creativity in the regeneration and augmentation of value, in the co-creation of that value, in the distribution of that value. Instead what we have is creativity in the regeneration and augmentation of cost, of billing. Pah.

Which takes me to Johnnie’s comment on my altruism post. We need to claim our right to be altruistic back, I cannot understand how altruism somehow became pinko lefty degenerate.

Human beings’ brains are wired to go “ping” when they understand something, not “ka-ching”. We will land up monetising what we do Because Of rather than With. And maybe sometimes we won’t. Maybe often we won’t.

So I continue to question and challenge things that make it hard for us to go “ping”, to have that bulb light up in individual and collective heads.

• When the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share.
• When the teacher was done with the lesson it was the student’s to share.
• When the writer was done with the book it was the reader’s to share.

There is a set of premises, both explicit as well as tacit, when we exchange value. Any attempt to change those premises post-facto is questionable, to say the very least.

People get paid for doing things, and understand how they get paid for it. Take the copyright argument, this amazing realisation that songs published in 1958 will go out of copyright in a few years time. Did the artists know about this in 1958? I guess so, but maybe they didn’t understand or care. Did they know about it in the 1960s? I guess so, though maybe they were too stoned to figure it out. I find it hard to believe that they’ve suddenly come to this realisation. What they’re doing is breaking the Garcia Rule. We’ve already paid for it.

• An aside: If you bought a fifty-year lease on a house you knew what the premises were. If you landed up living longer than you expected, and the lease was about to expire, you would have to pay more to extend the lease.
• Novelists and songwriters understood the deal they were entering into. If they want to extend the period of copyright then maybe they, the novelists and songwriters, should pay for it. And the payments can be placed into a Creative Commons -like pool and be used for fighting bad DRM and IPR law.
• On the other hand maybe that’s a bad idea, when I see what happens with things like the Universal Service Fund. Or maybe we can avoid that by opensourcing the management of that fund.