Category: Four pillars

Happy New Year everyone.

If you haven’t heard of William Stafford before, you should try and spend some time reading his poetry. Stafford, who died in 1993, was made the US equivalent of Poet Laureate in 1970, and was known for his gentle, pithy style. A prolific poet, he is estimated to have written over 22,000 poems, though only a fraction are available in print.

One of my favourite Stafford poems is At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border, shown below, a good reason to go out and buy a collection of his poems today:

If you like what you see above, there’s also a decent archives site you can find here.

There are many reasons for my liking the poem. Even now, years after coming across it, I can still savour every line. I must admit I have a particular fondness for the ending, the sheer power and imagery of phrases like “hallowed by neglect” and “celebrate it by forgetting its name”.

There’s also a tangential reason for my liking the poem. Stafford’s use of the word “un-national”, a word that resonated quite powerfully in me.

For many years now, I’ve been pondering what it means to be “global”. [As I’ve written before, I was born a foreigner: my name was alone enough to tell people in Calcutta that I wasn’t from there; my colouring and accent were enough to tell people in Madras that I wasn’t from there. And yet, as the name of this blog suggests, I am extremely fond of Calcutta, and consider that the city, and its people, played a critical role in forming and shaping what I am today.]

When I joined BT some years ago, the issue of “being global” came up in conversation with the then CEO, Ben Vervaayen. At the first meeting I ever had with him, Ben brought up the issue, asking me to consider carefully the distinctions between “international”, “multinational” and “global”. And, especially since it was a topic of some personal interest already, I obliged.

And where I got to that evening sometime in 2006 was this: that perhaps a key distinction between “global” and all those other words like “international” and “multinational” lay in the fact that it didn’t contain the suffix -national, that the essence of being global could not be defined in the context of nations. There was a born-foreignness to it, a statelessness as it were.

Some years before that, I’d had the pleasure of discussing some of this with friends and colleagues at Dresdner Kleinwort, particularly Sean Park and Malcolm Dick. Incidentally, if you haven’t watched it yet, you must see Sean’s 2005 AmazonBay video. Amazing. [Disclosure: I’m a venture partner with Anthemis Group].

Particularly around the time that Sean was creating the video, we spent some time discussing the “death zone”, the vulnerable space in the middle as businesses migrated to the extremes of global and hyperlocal; it was here that the conversation first meandered into the “stateless” topic, as we ruminated on the fact that quite a few of the institutions destined for the death zone seemed to be characterised by having national structures and ambitions.

Against this backdrop, I’ve been spending time thinking about the whole national-versus-stateless thing, particularly since it seemed to come up in so many of the areas I was interested in. Our laws and regulations and business practices are intrinsically so national in structure and intent that they get incredibly messy when applied to things un-national. Here are a few examples:

• The attempts, in the US, to patent the healing properties of turmeric, amongst others
• The abomination of region coding and its impact, for example, on Spielberg’s Munich
• The ironic case of copyright problems with cover illustrations for Friedman’s The World is Flat
• Problems with obtaining permission for use of sampled music

These are just simple, random examples that come to mind, where there’s a tension between national law and global products and services. National versus un-national, stateless, global.

More recently, some six months ago, Jay Rosen referred to Wikileaks as the world’s first stateless news organisation. Incidentally, while touching on the subject of Wikileaks: you must read Clay Shirky’s “half-formed thoughts” on the subject, covering some of the issues of international versus stateless.

While in India, I read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, which deals with cyclical development in information and communications industries, sine-curving between closed and open. One of the things that struck me about the book was that each cycle appears to be described in the context of a single country. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth a read. Take a look at Cory Doctorow’s review here.

The internet, the Web, the Cloud, these are essentially disruptive global constructs for many of us. The atoms that serve as infrastructure for these global constructs are physically located in specific countries; the laws and regulations that govern the industries disrupted by these constructs are themselves usually national in structure; the firms doing the disrupting are quasi-stateless in character, trying more and more to be “global”; emerging and future generations have worldviews that are becoming more and more AmazonBay, discarding the national middle for the edges of global and hyperlocal.

We are all so steeped in national structures for every aspect of this: the law, the governance model, the access and delivery technologies, the ways of doing business — that we’re missing the point.

Everything is becoming more stateless, more global. We don’t know how to deal with it. So we’re all trying very hard to put genies back in bottles, pave cowpaths, turn back waves, all with the same result.

Abject failure.

And things are fraying at the edges. For some years now, I’ve been commenting on the internet, intellectual property law and identity, in the belief that these three “i”s are the foundation of the new, global, order. And of course I’ve tended to write about these things in the context of music and film and books and food, because those are the places where I see the cracks in the current foundations, as things move from analog to digital.

But it goes well beyond these. Take fundraising. It’s gone global. I love Causes, what it means, what it stands for, what can happen as a result. To me Causes is essentially global. Yet it has to have national collection processes, tax rebates, bank accounts. For most causes this dichotomy is fine, since so many causes are global. But what happens when you’re trying to raise political funds? Is an IP address a reasonable test of eligibility? Is physical residence?

The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better.

For centuries now we’ve been learning about what happens when barriers to migration get reduced, as people, goods and capital flow more freely across borders. Countries haven’t disappeared as a result; but their powers tend to be modified to suit the borderlessness.

2011 is the year where we’re going to see this accelerate in new ways, as the implications of the copy-machine nature of the internet permeate every facet of our lives, including, but not limited to, government, business, health, education and welfare, rather than the traditional web-was-built-as-distribution-mechanism-for-films-music-and-advertisements hogwash. 2011 is the year we transform ourselves as we accelerate the move from things analog to things digital, as we continue the shifts from static to dynamic, from stabile to mobile, from on-premise to cloud, from individual to community….. and from international to global.

The un-national generation is here to stay. And they’re on the move.

Whatever it is, I hope you’re able to take some time off to relax, to refresh, to recharge yourself.

I’m going to try my best to be offline for a long while. So, in the holiday spirit, I wanted to share a few things with you very quickly.

First and foremost. Wolfgang’s Vault. I’ve been using the Vault for some years now, yet I don’t remember writing about it.The free streaming live music alone makes the site worthwhile; I’ve chosen to be a paid-up WVIP, and for a (shy? not really) retiring hippie like me, the vault is Fort Knox. There’s gold in them thar hills. Take today for example:

Visiting the site, I was greeted by new live videos of The Allmans/Whipping Post, The Band/King Harvest, Ten Years After/Love Like a Man, along with some fresh Zappa. How can you top that?

And all this, a few days after I’d received this book in the post, along with a bonus USB stick carrying some fabulous Airplane tracks. They’re going to be listened to on the way to Calcutta.

To me Wolfgang’s Vault is an extreme nonrival good. My enjoyment of the Vault is not diminished one jot or tittle by the act of my sharing news of its existence. Incidentally, the iPhone app is pretty good as well.

From music to books. I was at Waterstones yesterday, idly looking around, hoping to stock up on some analog reading matter for the journey. And I met Stephen Benatar, who’d set up a table and was selling his books there, largely self-published. What a nice man. We had a chat for a while, I landed up buying four of his books (the only ones he’d got on sale that day), and I like everything I’ve read so far. An interesting talent. I look forward to discovering more of his work.

From books to food. Have you read Alimentum? Fascinating journal, describes itself as “the literature of food”. Read two issues so far, very good.

And finally to an old friend, one I haven’t seen for a while. I will have to correct that.

Hugh MacLeod. Hugh’s usually in good form, often in fine form. Here’s his latest, on the high-end microaudience:

It’s not just tidings of great joy that Hugh writes/draws about, he has this uncanny ability to touch you where you’re still able to feel something. So if you haven’t discovered Hugh yet, now’s the time.

But in the meantime.

Tidings of great joy to all of you.

There I was, quietly reading last week’s Economist, and I came across this article on UK telephone calling habits, drawing from MIT’s Senseable City Lab research on the subject.

Its core finding? Calling habits tend to reflect cultural/political boundaries.

While I’d been aware of the study, I hadn’t seen this particular representation of the data. And it reminded me of something else I’d read about, and written about, a few years ago. There was a paper titled Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns, by Gonzalez, Hidalgo and Barabasi (yes, he of Linked and Bursts fame).

Its core finding? People were creatures of habit when it came to making mobile phone calls. Often from the same place, at the same time, to the same people, for the same duration.

A little while later, a bbc.co.uk headline caught my eye. Facebook connections map the world.

Apparently an intern had been working at Facebook, trying to map friendship pairs relative to cities of residence. The core finding? The friend graph network looked a lot like the political map of the world, with a few glaring exceptions.

When it comes to communications, we’re as predictable as can be. We’re creatures of habit. We tend to speak to the same people. Many of these people have similar cultural, geographical or political backgrounds to us.

That’s enough, I hear you say, mumbling scatological questions about ursines in forested areas. Which is all fine, but given recent events to do with secrets and leaks, I felt it was worth making a few points here:

• 1. If you really want to keep something completely secret, don’t tell anyone.
• 2. If you do want to (or sometimes even have to) tell someone, then only tell people you trust.
• 3. Which means that if you do want to keep a secret online, you must have a way of making sure that all the people you’re telling are people you trust.
• 4. Which in turn means that you have to have a way of figuring out who those people are and whether you trust them or not.
• 5. The more people you tell, the harder it will be to make sure of these things.

Or, as Bruce Schneier so elegantly put it, access control is hard. [If you haven’t done so already, read his article on Real-World Access Control from just over a year ago.]

Trust is a key component of secrets, and for that matter a critical component of privacy as well. When my daughter friends me on Facebook, she trusts me not to delve into her wall and posts and conversations and photographs. She trusts me to respect her privacy. Even though she gives me the right to invade it.

This is nothing new. There are drawers in my bedroom I don’t open, they’re my wife’s things. There are drawers in our children’s rooms that we don’t open, they’re their things.  And they’re private. If a guest should sleep in one of our bedrooms, we don’t expect that guest to be looking into cupboards and drawers.

Respecting privacy is common courtesy amongst friends. We trust each other.

When you trust someone with a secret, you give that person the right to betray you. Trust, like faith, grows only when exercised.

The very concept of bankruptcy comes from a breach of trust, and the consequences of breaching trust. The word bank itself comes from the word banco, meaning bench. Lombardy merchants, the early bankers, gathered together and transacted business while seated on benches. Your word was your bond. You were trusted. And if you breached that trust, they sent the heavy mob after you. Who dumped you unceremoniously off the bench, then, just to make sure you understood what had happened, they broke the bench in half, for good measure. So the banco was rutto. Bankrupt.

Privacy and confidentiality and secrecy have always been about trust.

And yet trust is about one other thing.

Transparency.

Bilateral transparency. Multilateral transparency. And sometimes universal transparency.

We have to be careful. Some of the events that have happened, they happened because of poor design (too many people trusted) poor implementation (too many things to be kept secret) and poor behaviour (too many indiscreet actions).

The events did not happen because trust broke down; the events did not happen because transparency is wrong. Trust models will continue to emerge, will continue to evolve, and we will continue to learn about how to scale them.

We have to be careful. Because there will be a backlash against trust-based models, there will be a backlash against transparency. If we don’t do anything, there will be a reversion to the evils of “lobbying” and “briefing”, behaviours designed to break trust down even further. You know the types, they exist in every government, every firm, every department of any scale. Whispering behind the scenes. Wielding the power of corruption. The corruption of power.

And this world will be poorer as a result.

I like Clay Shirky. He doesn’t say a great deal, he doesn’t write a great deal, but when he does say something or write something, what he says or writes is brilliant. Clay is a web optimist, a class of person who believes that everything the web stands for can create value, and often new value. That the democratisation engendered by the web is a good thing; that communities can do good things that individuals can’t achieve in isolation; that the very concept of expertise is being redefined by the web.

Such views often tend to attract a lot of criticism, often from people threatened by the worldview he describes and ascribes to.

And so it was with his most recent book, Cognitive Surplus. Some people loved it. Some hated it. I for one really liked it, because Clay made me think about something normal and commonplace in a different way, by exposing a small number of ideas in an articulate and enjoyable way. [Disclosure: I count Clay amongst my friends; I count Cory, who wrote the positive review, amongst my friends as well. And I don’t know Nicholas Blincoe.]

I’m not going to review the book here, other than to say I really liked it. I’m sure that you can read many erudite and enlightening reviews elsewhere. All I want to do here is to share one idea that affected me deeply. And that was this: what I found really intriguing was not that cognitive surplus existed, but that it existed because people were doing less of something. In this particular case the principal activity that declined was that of watching TV, but what I found useful was the principle. That a cognitive surplus exists because time gets freed up, and if you have the tools and the motivation, then that surplus gets put to good use.

When I try to learn about social software, I tend to use music and food as analogues, as digital social objects that will help me learn about the particular medium or media. If you’ve been following this blog for long, or if you’ve been following my tweets, you’ve probably noticed that.

And so it was with the cognitive surplus notion. I started looking for sites that would help me understand how people would create collective value in ways that individuals could not, specifically in music and in food. What I hoped was that I would learn something that could be applied at work.

In this context, I’d like to bring your attention to two sites:

The first, setlist.fm, is a wiki-style repository of sets played at music concerts. You get details about a specific song.

You also get details about a particular concert. Most of the time, you can play a video of the song, get the lyrics as well.

Sometimes you can even play the song; sometimes you can watch a video of the song; sometimes you get the lyrics. In effect, what services like foxytunes were trying to do for recorded music, setlist.fm was seeking to achieve for concerts.

Let’s leave music aside for a minute, and move to food. In this context, I found airlinemeals.net truly intriguing:

So now you could check out meals to expect by class of travel, see photos of what you were likely to be served, even get ratings for the meal. And for added measure you had an idea of what the person paid for the fare. You could even travel back in history, do some Retronautical research:

I guess Pan Am made the going great. I guess Pan Am went bankrupt.

What I liked about these two examples is that they shared a number of key characteristics: the problem to be solved could not be solved easily by a small number of people, it needed distributed scale, “edit rights” for a large number of people. The problem could not be solved per se unless people wanted to share something: their memories, their photographs, their mementos and relics: in fact recording devices like cameras and tape recorders are essential equipment in this respect. And out of the cognitive surplus, real value was obtained for many classes of person: archivist, historian, aficionado, experimenter.

Incidentally, there was an example of cognitive surplus use in the weekend papers that made me cringe, that sent shivers down my spine:

Big Brother meets the Twitching Curtain. First you acquire CCTV feeds, probably the most abundant thing in the UK today. Then you add viewers, curtain-twitchers with time on their hands and who are willing to pay for the “privilege” of random voyeurism via CCTV. Finally you add the businesses prepared to pay for the alerts. The viewer pays you. The viewed business pays you. Who knows, maybe the CCTV company pays you as well. I shudder to think what the next generation of such businesses will look like.

Which leads me to my conclusion.

I’ve watched attempts at knowledge management in the enterprise fail for decades, and rationalised the failures in many ways. The technology wasn’t ready. People didn’t want to share. Management didn’t want people to share. And so on and so forth.

That was then. We live in a world where edit and upload rights are getting more democratised every day, even in the workplace. Knowledge management is now less meaningful not because knowledge has waned but because the management of knowledge has become harder, given the historical bias towards making information scarce and therefore more powerful for those who had ownership or access to that information.

But none of this is meaningful unless there is cognitive surplus in the enterprise. Which means people have to admit that they have free time, time they can devote to creating value by sharing what they know, what they have known, what they have collected, what they have archived. The tools are there. The motivation is there. But before it can happen, people have to be willing to acknowledge the existence of a time surplus at work.

This was not a problem for the agricultural sector; this was less of a problem for the industrial sector during an era of manufacturing; but now, as we are full-fledged into the tertiary “services” sector, the possibility looms large that knowledge workers will have time surpluses. Knowledge work is lumpy and non-linear, you can’t apply assembly line approaches.

So that’s where my mind is today. That the lumpy nature of knowledge work means that there are time surpluses at work. That these surpluses are Shirky Cognitive Surpluses. That the people with the surpluses have the tools and motivation to share what they know, knew and “own”. That doing this would make their lives easier; would enhance the lives of their colleagues, their trading partners, their customers. That real productive value is gained by doing this.

Imagine a wikipedia of equipment installed at homes: the positions of meters and stopcocks and telephone lines and fuseboxes; the types of equipment, in terms of makes and models and ages; the dates they were installed, the dates they were serviced. Imagine the amount of time and money wasted because we don’t have this already, the errors made, the damage caused, sometimes the lives lost. So many industries will stand to gain if we had this sort of resource.

Imagine fault reports and customer complaints and cases all being made available for anyone to annotate, the ability to apply Linus’s Law to processes at work. Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow.

It’s been a while since I wrote. I’ve had a lot to think about. This is just a sliver. I’d love to know what you think.

My thanks to Franz St for the photograph of Melk Abbey in Wachau, Austria

The National Geographic Society regularly reviews historic sites all over the world, seeking to recognise those that sustain their heritage, history and sheer ethos despite the passage of time and tourists.

When I think of the word “stewardship”, I think of very similar values. The very word summons a sense of not owning something, of being given the responsibility of looking after something on someone else’s behalf. Of being given the responsibility of looking after that something (or someone) for generations to come, making sure that there continues to be something to look after.

Parenting is a classic act of stewardship, one I keep trying to get better at. And, one day, I hope to learn about grandparenting as well.

Much of what we understand about ecology movements is also related to stewardship. Looking after the earth and all around it is an act of stewardship. Making sure that we do things that are sustainable is an act of stewardship.

Stewardship matters.

Even building software can be an act of stewardship. Recently a colleague of mine tweeted that he was maintaining code written before he was born, code that was performing valuable service today. When I think about the role of software in stewardship, I start thinking about landlords and lessees.

Why? I’ve rented property for many years, I haven’t always been able to afford to buy. Whenever you rent a place, there’s usually a clause that says something like “you should leave this place just as you found it. All expenses to do with restoring the place to what it was like before you got here are payable by you”…. or words to that effect.

I think that principle is at the heart of stewardship. Which is what I was thinking of when I viewed some links tweeted to me by a colleague, Brendan Lee (thank you Brendan! ).

The links were about graffiti, and are well worth reading and watching. They were about Evan Roth and the Graffiti Research Lab. Go take a look, you won’t regret it. There’s a link to a related post here, about turning graffiti into code.

Turning graffiti into code. Now that starting sending me on all kinds of enjoyable wild-goose chases.

What if we could make graffiti non-invasive, no longer persistent while still “permanent”? What if we could could switch graffiti on and off at the touch of a button? Some of the things that Evan Roth demonstrates and talks about suggest this is already happening.

It’s no suggestion, it’s happening now. Augmented reality layers as put forward, for example, by Layar, one of my favourite companies, are classic examples of noninvasive overlays. Now, suddenly, I can see the possibility of walking around historical sites untainted, uncorrupted by modern signage and explanation. The descriptive information is retrieved by smartphone or tablet connected wirelessly to the cloud, and can be designed to enfranchise everyone, without any reliance on sight or hearing or reading ability or even economic power.

It’s happening in many ways now. The ability to become a Retronaut is also designed on this noninvasive basis. Chris Wild’s brilliant invention, the Retroscope, allows us to revel in our nostalgia, steep ourselves in our history, wallow in our culture and geography, all without the need for any “street furniture”.

There is a lot we can learn from Evan, from the people at Graffiti Research; there is a lot we can learn from Maarten and Claire, from the people at Layar; there is a lot we can learn from Chris and from Retroscope. Designing software so that it is neither intrusive nor invasive. No “client installs”. Nothing that ties what you do to a specific device or location or capacity or spend minimum. Software that leaves the environment around you untouched, software that can be undone at the touch of a button, software that lets you behave like a steward in the environment.

Software “estates” today exist in a heterogeneous world, built up over generations; every company has an environment that has evolved like Topsy growing up in the Galapagos. Many of these estates are no longer sustainable or even maintainable, and they will collapse over time. Which is why moving to the cloud is not a nice-to-have option but an imperative.

Noninvasive computing is here to stay. Even in the enterprise. Especially in the enterprise. Because tomorrow’s CEOs will demand it. Which is why I’m here to learn from graffiti and augmented reality and the Retroscope. They show me why the cloud matters.