Category: Four pillars

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.

[Ok, admit it. You were about to tell me that I’d misspelt apocalypse. Perhaps I should have said app-ocalypse instead, but then I’d have had an unsightly hyphen floating around the headline. And then you may not have read this far.]

A few days ago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published an interesting report, titled The Rise of Apps Culture. You can read the entire report here, or look at the survey questions here.

The headline findings may not be particularly surprising to many of you, but are still worth noting:

• 35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them
• Apps users are younger, more educated, and more affluent than other cell phone users
• App use still ranks relatively low when compared with other uses of cell phones
• 29% of adult cell phone users have downloaded an app to their phone
• One in ten adult cell phone users (10%) had downloaded an app in the past week; 20% of cell phone users under age 30 download apps this frequently
• One in eight adult cell phone users (13%) has padi to download an app
• Among cell phone users with apps, the average adult has 18 apps on his or her phone

The findings above were based on a US-wide probability sample of 2,252 adults; the report also contains findings from The Neilsen Company’s Apps Playbook, which was based on a survey carried out in December 2009. It is also worth reading those findings.

I’ve been observing how people use apps on smartphones for some time now, learning by watching. And my initial reactions were somewhat sceptical; people seemed to use apps in faddish waves, then discard them and move on. The core group of apps used seemed to be somewhat smaller and stabler than it seemed. At least that was what I observed. A cynic might have said that the whole app scene was a bit like the Nigerian money transfer letter scam: you only needed a very small percentage of the target audience to be gullible enough to part with their money and you could be very happy indeed.

There also seemed to be some patterns in the nature of apps used; apps that were fundamentally executed solely on the device, which elicited few complaints; apps that needed to interact with servers, which had a higher likelihood of freezing the device, usually as a result of variable signal strength and the problems of state-knowledge. Although games transcended both types of apps, the more popular apps (news, maps, social networking, music and interactive games) all needed to move information between devices and servers, with the concomitant challenges.

Some time ago, I was very taken with an article written by Andrew Savikas averring that “content is a service business”. The views in that article influenced my perspective when I looked at the world of apps, leading me to believe that convenience, not content, was the driving factor in all things app.

So when I looked at the Pew study, I tried to test this theory.

The first place I looked at was the billing relationship, one of the big battlegrounds in the telcosphere. What could we learn from the study in this context? It transpires that downloaders prefer to pay for their apps via:

• Billing from their cellphone provider (34%)
• Credit card (29%)
• PayPal (18%)
• iTunes (12%)

Interesting. Score one for the convenience argument?

Having tested the billing arena, I then wanted to look at actual usage. How do apps do in the league tables for non-voice cell phone activities? Surprisingly poorly. In 9th place, after all the world and his wife: taking pictures, sending/receiving text messages, web access, games, email, video, music and IM all rank ahead. Which suggests again that the driving force is simplicity and convenience.

I’ve been aware for a while about the arguments to do with the “balkanisation” of the web via Rich Internet Applications, accusations piled against Flash initially, later Silverlight as well. You could argue that they are filling voids until HTML5 comes along. But you cannot argue that they have made impacts. The same accusations have been made against the app world, with suggestions that AOL-like walled gardens are emerging again in the guise of apps. But as long as people can belong to all the key social networks, as long as they can take, send and receive photos, videos, mail and text, as long as they can associate the data with location and presence where relevant and when they choose to, balkanisation is actually quite hard.

It all goes back to convenience. Findings related to the practice of culling unused apps bear this out; people guard the real estate on their phone screens jealously.

Data on the percentage of people actually paying for apps, along with the prices they tend to pay, are also very useful. I’ll leave you to read it in the report for yourself.

Incidentally, there was a second, similarly interesting report published by Pew recently, on cell phones and American adults. I was pleased to see confirmation that heavy adult texters also tend to be heavy users of voice.

As the iPad and similar devices permeate the space hitherto held by the smartphone, we’re bound to see significant change. Video will become more important, at least partly as a result of the form factor, both in the interactive sense as well as in the download sense. Every publisher worth the salt will attempt to create app-based walled gardens around their “content”, in the belief that there is a premium to be extracted there. Over time they will learn that the keyword is convenience, not content. Those with a broadcast mindset will enjoy the illusion of control for a while, only to be flattened in the path of the emergent interactives.

The first thing about app stores is they make it simpler for you to find something. Then they make it simpler for you to use the something, usually interactively, and to pay for the something. Period. Of course people will try and fragment the content, but that’s a losing strategy over time, one that has already been proven as flawed in every publishing sector so far.

Yes, it’s once upon a time time. Time for you to become part of Byte Night Bedtime Story, the world’s biggest bedtime stor, and help raise funds for the wonderful work done by Action For Children. Watch the bedtime story unfold via twitter, just follow @BNBedtimeStory. Share it with your children. Share it with your parents. Share it with someone. Everyone. But share it.

Tell people about Byte Night. Tell people about Action For Children. See how easy it is to make a difference. Be part of that difference.

At Byte Night, hundreds of us sleep out rough in order to raise awareness for youth homeless, and to raise funds to help them, via Action for Children. I will also be sleeping out on 8th October, this is something I feel passionately about. If you want to donate, here’s the link: