Category: Four pillars

…you got to make the morning last
just kicking down the cobblestones
looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Hello lamppost,
What cha knowing?
I’ve come to watch your flowers growing.
Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in’ doo-doo,
Feelin’ groovy.
Got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.

Simon and Garfunkel, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)

Don’t you just love that song? All fresh and bubbly and oh so sixties.

But that’s not what this post is about. Instead, I wanted to use the first line of the song to talk about Capo. What a wonderful idea.

Take a song. Slow it down. Change pitch if you want. I haven’t done much with it as yet, I only have a trial version, but for sure I’m going to get the real thing. Capo is doing with music what Ribbit is doing with voice. All possible because we live in a digital age.

My thanks to Chris Messina for the heads-up.

[Disclosure: While I have nothing whatsoever to do with Capo, I am for sure involved with Ribbit.]

I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, preparing it, buying the ingredients. I love watching people cook. I love researching food culture and habit and folklore and history.

Yes, I love food. I love everything about food.

One of my all-time favourite dishes is made from ilish maach (a particular type of fish popular in Bengal), where the fish is cooked in mustard oil, with liberal use of mustard seed and chillies. When cooked properly, it looks something like this:

[My thanks to Indranil Sen and Jayashree Roy for the photo and for their wonderful recipe, which can be found here in Palki.]

I didn’t just come across this recipe randomly, I spent some time looking around the web for the right one: I was particularly interested in demonstrating a sense of the rich gravy that dominates my memory of the dish. And along the way I came across this article: The Mustard Oil Conspiracy. I’d read a good deal of Vandana Shiva’s work before, in particular those tracts and booklets related to the join between food and patents, but I hadn’t come across this one before. Unbelievable.

And you know something? More and more, I’m realising the truth of what people like Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and John Perry Barlow and Larry Lessig have been saying all along. Today’s battles about IPR aren’t about commerce, they’re about culture. There’s nothing more cultural than food.

Recent events suggest things are going from bad to worse now; the optimist in me thinks it’s “the darkest hour before the dawn”.

What next? I guess we should wait patiently for people to be arrested for selling kitchen equipment. On the basis that the equipment was used to cook food using “illegally” obtained recipes. Or something as ridiculous as that.

Yes, things will get ridiculous if we let them. Or sublime, as in the case of ilish maach. Our choice.

I’ve been fascinated by the space where communications meets computing for quite some time now, ever since the early 1980s. When I started working for Burroughs Corporation in 1981, I hadn’t really seen a “proper” computer before; my experience of computers was limited to playing hours and hours of the text-based Star Trek on a wealthy friend’s Commodore Pet between 1977 and 1980.

The first real computing experience I had was in working on Burroughs mainframes (specifically the B1000 series and B6000 series) via dumb TD830 80×24 terminals; for me, computers and networks therefore went together right from the get-go. Having been brought up on a traditional journalist diet rich with Smith-Corona and Remington standards and portables, it seemed magical to me that I could type things using a simple “language” (a text management system based on something similar to SGML) into a keyboard on the 1st floor of a building, and documents would come out on gigantic printers on the 9th floor of the same building.

I became used to the concept of a network, of being able to move data around, of being able to attach and detach devices and to address them, to direct stuff to them, to receive stuff on them. I became used to being able to run software on boxes on one floor and to view what was happening on another floor. But the network was limited to the building I was in, the protocols were proprietary, and the devices were dumb and locked down.

A few years later, my astonishment grew. I found out that I could run software in one building and demonstrate it in another using a display unit, a modem and a phone line: I was introduced to dial-up (and, incidentally,  to a world where 4800 baud was normal and 9600 baud was super-fast). The “network” was now more than just one building, the buildings could be miles apart, but everything else remained the same. Proprietary architectures, proprietary devices, proprietary protocols.

Incidentally, it was around then that someone recommended the Steven King film to me, but the video was not easy to find. It is now. And I would recommend that any of you that wants to know a little bit about computers and communications watches the film, Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing, which was made in 1972.

Then a few things started happening all at the same time. First, the PC came along. [At Burroughs, we had networked multitasking colour PCs in 1983-84, from Convergent Corp, running something called CTOS; we marketed them as B20s and B25s, running our own variant BTOS). The advent of the PC meant that there was now considerable intelligence within the device, even if memory was limited and fixed storage almost nonexistent. We were beginning to lose control of the device, which was no longer a dumb slave to the mainframe. But it was only a beginning: the only PC was the IBM PC, and the only operating system was MS-DOS.

Two other things happened, both possibly due to regulatory pressure. First,  IBM seemed to be allowing people to build “IBM Compatible” PCs; the AT bus became the ISA bus, and clones started appearing everywhere. Around the same time, “open systems” began to make their mark, apparently driven by the availability of SVID from AT&T; organisations like X/Open, with their XPG and later POSIX specifications, really started to drive the open systems world forward.

It was around the same time that I started getting interested in “the internet”, I was a fairly late starter. In fact I didn’t even have an e-mail account until that year, nor did I belong to any internet groups or bulletin boards until then. In fact, it wasn’t until much later, 1994 in fact, that I had regular access to the internet, as the Web was emerging. And it took till 1997 before I had regular internet access at home.

So in a relatively short space of time, maybe a decade, I watched dumb proprietary “tied” devices connected to proprietary architectures transform painfully into intelligent open distributed devices that connected to open architectures and operating systems. The computer industry were beginning to lose control of the device.

To my way of thinking, the same thing had already happened to the telecommunications side of the industry, albeit more slowly. First it was “any colour you like, as long as it’s black” Bakelite phones you could only rent from the telco. Then the telco gave you coloured phones, but you still had to rent them. You were “subscribers”, not customers. After a while they started letting you buy the phone, but only from them. It took a long time before you could buy your edge device from anywhere, anytime.

Computers and telecommunications. Two industries with a history of monopoly participants, both losing control of their “device”. The first time around, it wasn’t too painful for either industry. Control of the hardware was soon replaced by control of the software — in the case of IT, this meant locked-down desktops, centralised “builds” for the desktop, complete emasculation of the technology while flying the flag of security and confidentiality. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not.

That was then.

Today, in a converged world where digital natives have entered the workplace, device lockdowns are no longer sustainable. The objective — that of keeping enterprises secure from unauthorised access and keeping confidential information confidential — need not change, it is perfectly rational.

What has to change is the way the objective is being met. The historical way of doing this is pretty asinine when you think about it. I’m going to loan you a Ferrari and then take the wheels off and immobilise the steering wheel and block access to the tank. Because that way you won’t steal the car or hit something or cause any damage.

So now new ways are needed. New ways that begin with services that are delivered on a device-independent basis. Services that work out the hardware and software specifications of the device at the point of delivery, and adjust everything accordingly.

This time around, the converged industry has really lost control of the device. And the customer has gained that control, in the name of choice and preference and style and affordability. And even freedom.

That’s why I’m still excited about the promise of networked IT. Because we’ve lost control of the device. Any fool can make money in a bull market. I’m excited that I’m with a bunch of guys who are going to make money despite the market.

Today, at a time when Facebook announced passing 200 million members, there are still people who think that social networking sites and tools are a fad, an irritation, a waste of time. It doesn’t matter what you tell them: you can mention the role of such sites and tools in the Obama campaign, in the Mumbai terrorist attack, in challenging repressive regimes, in humdrum daily work. They don’t care, all this is just a waste of time. Just like e-mail was, and mobile phones, and BlackBerries. Just like computers were before that. Or for that matter the telephone.

None of them will read this. So I’m not writing it for them.

I’m writing this for you. Because we can show them that there is undeniable value in social networking sites. By using them to raise money for good causes.

Like this one: Gimme Shelter. Let’s show them.

I like reading Andrew McAfee’s blog. I’ve known him for some years now, and count him as one of my friends. Reading his blog is a bit like chewing on good chillies or drinking decent sancerre, there’s a lot of value in the aftertaste. It lingers, pleasurably, and makes you think.

A few days ago he posted this: The Good and Bad Kinds of Crowd. It was all about prediction markets, something I’m deeply interested in. Tom Malone and his crew over at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence are doing some really good work in this field, do take a look if you’re interested in the subject.

Back to Andy’s post. While it was primarily about prediction markets, there was a distinct and separate makes-you-think aftertaste:

Do you have any tips on how to be a good Twitter-assisted public speaker?

So I put that on my back burner. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, primarily in the context of education, and I wanted to step back and think again in the public speaking context.

And forgot all about it.

Then, this evening, I was reading Gary Hamel on The Facebook Generation vs the Fortune 500. Gary makes some useful observations on the reasons for the “versus”. He proposes a dozen “work-relevant characteristics of online life”, which I list below:

All ideas compete on an equal footing
Contribution counts for more than credentials
Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed
Leaders serve rather than preside
Tasks are chosen, not assigned
Groups are self-defining and -organising
Resources get attracted, not allocated
Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it
Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed
Users can veto most policy decisions
Intrinsic rewards matter most
Hackers are heroes

Gary prefaces this list by saying “In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.” And that resonated with me, it resonated with the findings that Andy had made while observing us at the bank during his early Enterprise 2.0 research.

Which brought me full circle to his question. How does a public speaker make good use of Twitter? And this is where I found myself:

1. Twitter is a hecklebot

A hecklebot is “A device that allows audiences to provide feedback to speakers using wireless technology to tie into an open IRC line”.  I’ve been partial to hecklebots ever since I first saw Joi Ito talk about it, use it, demo it in 2004. [I’m convinced that there is a lot of value to be gained in using hecklebots in primary and secondary education, but more of that later. That’s a whole another post.]

2. Twitter is a backchannel

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the field of Linguistics to describe listeners’ behaviours during verbal communication, Victor Yngve 1970.

The term “backchannel” generally refers to online conversation about the topic or the speaker. Occasionally backchannel provides audience members a chance to fact-check the presentation.

First growing in popularity at technology conferences, backchannel is increasingly a factor in education where WiFi connections and laptop computers allow students to use ordinary chat like IRC or AIM to actively communicate during class.

Roo Reynolds has a worthwhile piece about backchannels at the recent SXSW. [Note to self. You were born in the wrong country to be at Yasgur’s farm. You’re past it now,  officially too old to go to Burning Man. You haven’t been to one SXSW as yet. Must try harder.]

3. Twitter allows rich context to be embedded and replayed

If you go to the Roo Reynolds post I refer to above, you will see a link to the video I show a still from. Hearing the podcast is one thing. Watching a Youtube video is a little better. But watching the video with a backchannel overlay is something else. A much richer experience.It’s like smelling the burger van at the soccer ground, you get the ambient intimacy that Clay Spinuzzi talks about.

4. Twitter is my teleprompter

A teleprompter (or autocue) assists presenters by spitting out predefined scripts on to a visual display. What Twitter is capable of doing is something richer. It can make this process interactive, by allowing the audience to influence the “script”.  Think of it as what would have happened if the Cluetrain gang had designed the first teleprompter.

5. Twitter is my ambient tag cloud collector

With tools like Wordle, one could take the RSS feed for tweets related to a conference (ostensibly using appropriate hashtags or equivalent), get them Wordled and shown up on a screen that the presenter can see.

I think there’s a lot that can be done. The hecklebot and backchannel are both great inventions, but they lack one thing that twitter has in spades. Accessibility. You don’t have to be a geek to tweet. Which means that people are more inclined to participate in what you’re doing. [If, as a public speaker, you don’t want people to participate in what you’re doing, I would suggest you take up time-travel. Backwards of course. You’re in the wrong century].

There’s another big thing about using Twitter as the backchannel. Questions and comments are constrained to 140 characters. Which means that the speaker finds them easy to assimilate.

Also, as I’ve tried to show with the Wordle example, the presenter can sense the mood of the crowd by looking at the tag cloud created by the tweets. And tailor what she’s saying accordingly.

The presenter gets valuable feedback loops, questions, directions, atmosphere. Participants get simpler and easier access and embedded context. Absentees get to feel the atmosphere as an overlay on the video. There’s something for everyone.

Just musing.

Incidentally, somewhere in Andy’s post, he mentions that “Pistachio” Laura Fitton will be observing his class and commenting on their tweeting. The last two times I met Laura (who knows more about twitter than anyone else I know), Andy was present at one of the occasions and Chris Brogan(who knows a great deal about social media and public participation) at the other.

So Andy, Laura, Chris, what do you think? Am I making any sense?