Category: Four pillars

Musing about “sharing” and privacy

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media, there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status.  Devices have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.

During all this time, much has been written about privacy and confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago, there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful about sharing such information.

It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this site for example: sailwx.info

A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating, even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same. Sharing creates risk.  I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act

It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro, “from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.

2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five siblings. [So I’m a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society, on paper anyway….You wouldn’t dare use those words in front of my paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence, attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker

5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’. Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly. And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married (over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests, with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.

6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more comprehensive as the concepts of  lifestreaming, and of what Clay Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.

Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s writings on this subject: here’s an example.

7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its inherent “nonrival good” nature, it makes no sense to hoard information and ideas. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.]

8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty,  stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing, people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food, whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.

Just one. The best

I love chess for a variety of reasons. The sheer breathtaking beauty of the game, as evinced here, in “Fatal Attraction”, Edward Lasker v Sir George Thomas nearly a century ago.  The characters it throws up, as in Jose Raul Capablanca and Efim Bogoljubov. And the way chess teaches us about cause and effect in a complex adaptive environment.

By the way, I’ve written about it before, but if you have any interest in chess at all, do play out Fatal Attraction. It’s a mesmerising game.

One of the reasons I like Bogoljubov is the outrageousness of his statements. In that outrage is truth. Examples: Bogoljubov had just won a remarkable game with the black pieces, and was asked how he’d done it. And he said “When I play white I win because I play white. When I play black I win because I am Bogoljubov.” Another time he was asked how many moves ahead he thinks. His answer? “Just one. The best”.

My interest in chess, largely kindled by an old schoolmate, Devangshu Datta, stayed steady through the years largely as a result of my interest in complex adaptive systems. When it came to analogies for root cause analysis and prevention of recurrence, I found chess hard to beat. I could sit down after a game and work out precisely when I started down the wrong path, what real options I had, how I could make sure I didn’t do it again. Chess was also good as a way of learning damage limitation, what to do when you have made a mistake.

I was reminded of this recently with all the brouhaha about healthcare in the US. Somewhere along the line, the focus of discussion appeared to deal primarily with the effciency of the curing process rather than the preventing process. Too often the same happens in the enterprise world. People are so busy getting better at fixing problems that they forget the real point, which is to stop doing what causes the problem in the first place.

Improving the speed and quality at which you fix things is a worthwhile objective: that is, if (and only if) things break down less often as a result. So when you look at repair processes, it is more important to look at why things break down, and to prevent them from breaking down,  than to focus on getting better at fixing things.

For some time now, we’ve been focused on the customer experience at BT. We looked at the way we dealt with customer requests, how often we delivered what the customer wanted, when the customer wanted it and how the customer wanted it. And we would take a close look at how often we got that right. A very close look. Because it affected what we took home.

That extreme focus has now begun to pay off: that’s why CEO Ian Livingston could tell the world last December that our complaint calls had halved since we embarked on the RFT initiative. Halved. In fact, that’s partly how we’ve been able to cut costs sharply.

The complaint calls coming in were a useful proxy for the number of problems we were causing. But we have to be careful. In large organisations, it is normal, understandable, even tempting to create an environment where the focus shifts from preventing problems to curing them. So before you know it, all the energy is deployed in fixing things, and not preventing the occurrence of the problem in the first place. That’s why you have to be careful what you measure, and how you use the measure. Finding out that you’re solving problems faster and faster is a good thing ….. provided the absolute number of problems is going down, and the problems aren’t repeating. Don’t get seduced by the message that you’re fixing things faster, cheaper better. They shouldn’t be going wrong in the first place.

So look ahead, be a Bogoljubov, and play that best right move. Concentrate on making sure you don’t make the mistake in the first place; the introduction of automation is a commonsense way of achieving this. As long as the environment is in steady state, this should be tractable. When you introduce change, then mistakes can be introduced, found, dealt with. As Esther Dyson says so often, “always make new mistakes”.

Parallel lives

For the next few days, while I am at the World Economic Forum at Davos, I’m going to be spending my time guesting on the Telegraph blog. My first post went up this morning, and can be found here. Let me know what you think.

Walls and bridges: even more on Facebookisation

Whatever gets you through the night it’s alright, it’s alright
It’s your money or your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a sword to cut thru flowers oh no, oh no
Whatever gets you thru your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Do it wrong or do it right it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a watch to waste your time oh no, oh no

John Lennon, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, Walls And Bridges, 1974

Note: The song was Lennon’s first and only US solo number 1 during his lifetime. (Just Like) Starting Over, the only other Lennon single to make it, didn’t actually make number 1 until after his untimely death.

Do you remember the “high street” banks of the UK in the Sixties or Seventies or Eighties? What wonderfully decrepit institutions. A place where 85% of the space was devoted to “admin”; where customers didn’t exist, only account numbers; where the plysical manifestations of these account numbers, the human beings, were sardine-smashed into the remaining 15%; where staff took lunch breaks to make sure queues were at their highest at the only times customers could come in; where bank managers ruled, and considered it an insult if you actually came in to withdraw some money.

Do you remember?

The key thing that struck me during that time was the enormous amount of space given over to the internal workings of the firm, and the tiny area allowed for the customer.  A tiny area that was usually not air-conditioned, smelled of damp and dank, looked like a check-in queue for prison.

You know something? We still have them now. In most firms. They’re called e-mail systems. [Stowe Boyd, come in, I can hear you calling. Time to tell everyone about your Publicy, Privacy, Secrecy. And your love for e-mail :-) ]

Think of e-mail within a firm as a physical space consisting of 100 square units of “stuff”. Then divide that stuff into two parts. Stuff that stays within the firm. Stuff that goes out of the firm, or comes in to the firm: stuff that crosses the firm’s boundaries. And think of these two kinds of stuff as represented in a ratio.

In many firms, “internal” stuff far outweighs “boundary wall crossing” stuff. Check for yourself. In my experience the ratio is close to 9:1. Ninety per cent of e-mail is generated by the firm and never leaves the firm.

Note: I did not count external spam in this measure. Spam is not mail.

Think about it. The majority of collaborative conversations taking place in an enterprise mail world do not involve the customer. Words fail me. Well actually some words come to me. Words like “unbelievable” and “circle” and “jerk”, but then I’m too polite to string those words into a coherent sentence.

Why do I spend an entire post on this point? Because it is really important. Facebook is facebook because it is multitenant. Multientity. Not to do with a single person or home or firm.

Whatever we do in the enterprise, we need to ensure that the walls of the enterprise do not keep customers out. Think Cluetrain.

Collaborative systems are still evolving, people with collaborative instincts are still evolving. Whatever we do, we must ensure that the model of collaboration we build is a holistic one, one that encompasses staff, customers and supply chain.

Building a walled garden in your own enterprise is the equivalent of taking your computer and burying it in six feet of concrete. [On the other hand, since that is precisely what so many firms are wont to do, perhaps I should not be surprised].

More on the Facebookisation of the enterprise

Note: This is a follow-up post to one I wrote a few days ago, The Facebookisation of the enterprise, given the kind of interest it generated. People seriously interested in the subject may wish to read my nine-part series on Facebook and the Enterprise from 2007. The first part remains my most-read post,  apart from the kernel for this blog: Building Society for the 21st Century, which is a page and not a post. You may also be interested in my Twitter in the Enterprise series, a sample of which is here.

If the IT department was made to behave like Facebook, what would an enterprise look like?

You join the “company”. You do this by using a personal token like an email address, choosing a password for all your activity in the company, then filling in some basic profile info. You’re all set. At this stage no one has given you a computer or a phone or anything like that. You’re Generation M. You come fitted with these things as standard. The first thing the IT department would need to provide is simple self-service signup. Access.

Because you’re in a new “social network environment”, one of the first things you do is look for a way to discover which of your friends is already here. So you look around. You need tools to do this looking around. You’d also like to invite the friends you already had into this space. Importing contacts, address books, that sort of thing. So you need tools to do this as well. The second thing the IT department would need to provide you is a set of directories, and ways of adding to them, searching them, extracting from them.

You don’t want the directory to be a firehose, so you want some ways of managing your lists. Making sure that you can group people the way you want to. Friends, family, group, company, department, location, whatever. So the third thing the IT department needs to provide is tools to classify the elements of the directory.

Knowing who’s around is a fat lot of good if you can’t connect with people. So what does Facebook do? It provides you with ways to send people messages, chat with them, converse, communicate with them. Publish stuff, upload stuff, read stuff, view stuff. The IT department must therefore provide communications tools, that’s the fourth thing.

Everything in business happens because people talk to people. [Even black-box trading is people talking to people, but delayed and via proxies]. It helps if people could plan when they were going to talk to each other. Facebook calls these things events. Meetings are nothing more than events. Tools for scheduling events is the fifth thing that the IT department needs to provide.

[Strangely, telcos used to have a stranglehold on the first few items: directories, groups, modalities of communication. But for some strange reason they never bothered to provide scheduling tools. Microsoft were the first to fix this gaping hole.]

Profiles. Directories. Groups. Events. Things published, like links, videos, photos. Relationships between all these things. None of which is static. Which means there needs to be a way of telling people what’s new, what has changed. Who’s joined, who’s left. Who was born, who died. Who joined up together, who broke up. Hatches, matches and dispatches as they used to be called. Which is why Facebook has a News Feed. The sixth thing that the IT department would need to provide is a News Feed. And ways of managing the firehose.

These are just the foundations. When people use Facebook, they use a series of other applications. Applications built by third parties on the developer platform. Applications accessed via Facebook, using the identity and relationship and profile and activity data provided by Facebook. Applications whose access to that data also requires the permission of the person whose profile it is.

Which is the final thing the IT department has to provide: A developer platform with the appropriate controls and service wrap around it.

Access to the environment, directories, ways to group people,  modalities of communication,the ability to schedule events, the publication of records of changes. And a developer platform that allows people to build edge applications that use this core in a safe and controlled way.

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department?

Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Sometime later this month I want to spend time talking about the semantic web, linked data, the Web Science Trust and related subjects. I will also spend time on publish-subscribe and enterprise buses, on augmented reality. On mobility. On opensource. And bring it all back to Platforms and Stewardship.

In the meantime, I’d love some feedback.