Paul Farnsworth, who works with me, told me about the existence of something like this video, where someone has modelled US air traffic. Fascinating. There’s something about traffic flows I really love, something that helps me understand more about what’s happening in a given space. Inflows and outflows, frequency and pattern, time and space dimensions. I’ve added it to my VodPod to make things easier for you. [I think Paul meant me to visit a different site that hosted something similar. I will link to that as and when I get the information from him.]
Musing on organisations and platforms
Some time ago I wrote a few posts about organisations and platforms, and considered the possibility of each firm becoming an open multisided platform. You can find the posts here, here and here.
Over the last month or so, I’ve landed up spending far too much time at airports, partially as a result of a complex travel schedule, primarily as a result of flight delays for a plethora of reasons. And it got me thinking.
Maybe open multisided software platforms are like airports. Maybe soon many organisations will look like airports as well. I know, I know, you think I should keep taking the tablets, but please bear with me. Just for a little while.
An airport is a marketplace, open and multisided. Anyone can go to an airport, embarking and disembarking passengers make up a small percentage of overall traffic. Some people pass through there. Some people work there. Some people, apparently, stay there.
There’s a primary purpose to the community: getting on or off planes that take you places.
And there’s a whole pile of activities that relate to the primary purpose:Â Ticketing, Check-in, Security, Departure Lounges, Arrivals Lounges, Baggage Halls.
There’s also a set of activities that deal with special cases of the primary purpose: Immigration, Emigration, Tax Clearance. Health checks for would-be immigrants, sometimes even holding cells for illegal immigrants.
And there’s the usual feedback loop. Complaints counters. Lost Luggage counters. Whatever.
Since there’s a lot of through traffic, there are a bunch of other things that happen, overlaps with other marketplaces. Airports are shopping malls. They have churches and other places of worship. They have restaurants and food halls, bookshops and nail salons, shoe-shine seats and children’s amusements, ice-cream parlours and pizza palaces. Airports sometimes have luxury shopping arcades with all those brands, the ones that would make great plays at Scrabble. [How come Paul Smith is the only designer I can think of with a “normal” name?].
People come to get and spend and lay waste their powers. So they need banks and cambios and wechsels and whatever, they need toilets and loos and restrooms and whatever. They need places to sit and stand and walk around and amble aimlessly, even to sleep. Sometimes, when flights get delayed, the borders between these places gets a bit fuzzy.
And to make all this happen, people actually work in airports as well. They too need places to call their own, places where they can change out of civvies and into clothes that say to everyone else “I work here”.
Everywhere there is motion. Of a sort. Queues form for no apparent reason, then disappear for similarly invisible ones.
In the old days, airports were fairly basic, there was no concept of customer or service or time or quality. In the old days, airports were about the primary purpose and nothing else. In fact you couldn’t even go there unless you were a departing or arriving passenger. In the old days, airports tended to be locked-in components of an airline’s attempts at vertical integration, a classic monopoly play. In the old days, information about the status of flights and passengers and baggage was sparse and unreliable.
Now the monopolies are beginning to break, and customers are coming to the fore again. Conversing with each other. Occasionally transacting business as well. Fluid and active. Global and open and realtime.
Over time, a bunch of standards evolved to make this simpler and easier. I guess I’m an idealist: I think that airport gates are likely to be similar in dimensions, even if they get manufactured by a host of companies. That escalators and lifts are similar to some extent, even if they compete via a complex array of prices and bundles. That passport sizes have converged over time. That Starbucks looks the same everywhere, as does Hermes or Harrods. That a loo is a loo is a loo.
Some airports are niche, serving a specific and narrow market. Some are satellites. Some are regional. Some are global. Some are domestic. Some are international. Some are everything and nothing.
You can go from airport to airport via coach or train or car, not just plane. You can do this privately or using public services. Airports collaborate and compete with each other.
Some things you can do online and in advance, some things you must do online, some things you can only do physically.
There’s a lot we can learn from airports, things we can apply to software and to organisation.
Open. Multisided.
Cory Doctorow on the Information Age
My partially-self-imposed silence has meant that I’ve got a long list of things I’ve wanted to blog about, a state that Sean has often claimed he’s in. And one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention was Cory Doctorow’s 30 minute session being an Author@Google. Here’s the link; I’ve also put it into my VodPod to make it easier.
He makes a beautiful argument for the Because Effect inherent in the Web, and for the way this generates wealth; somewhere along the line he shows just how Luddite we are becoming as a result of poorly thought out DRM (and similarly poorly-thought-out IPR in general); he takes us on an almost-tangential journey through some of the implications from the viewpoint of world trade and economic development; and he does all this with his trade-mark wry sense of humour (what did our futurists come up with? Not Google. Not even Expedia. But eBooks….).
The Luddism argument is particularly strong, something I’m sure many of you have considered before, something I know I have considered before. What Cory does is bring his storyteller strengths into the exposition of the argument. Delightful.
I’ve known Cory for a while now, not particularly well but well enough to know that we share common viewpoints on many things. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do, just to understand the kind of damage that can be wrought by bad DRM, and just how unnecessary and avoidable this is.
My thanks to Cory for a very entertaining half-hour. (Nb: The clip is actually an hour long when you take in the Q&A session at the end, where for some reason the sound quality dips).
Normal service is not resumed
You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet of late. In terms of posts per day, this is the quietest month I’ve had since I started blogging. Now when you consider the fact that I had a major heart attack last December and still managed to blog pretty regularly, the emptiness of June 2007 takes some explaining. So here goes.
As with many things, it started with something apparently unconnected. Reason One was that I moved home. And it took me a while to get everything sorted out in my new home; for the first time in many years, I had a taste of what it felt like to be Without The Net. It felt strange, very strange.
Which brings me to Reason Two. My wife and I had had many discussions over the years, about the way computers could intrude into family life, in fact actually damage family life, if care was not taken. We’d learnt how to deal with television, to deal with time shifted TV, with video games, and even with computers…. or so we thought. Or so I thought, anyway. My wife disagreed with me. And guess what?
I was wrong. As laptops with wireless connections became the norm rather than the exception, and as social networking sites blossomed, our home lives had begun to change, albeit subtly. I realised that my wife had been right all along, we had been risking something precious in our family life, and it was time to take action.
There was a third reason: since my moving home had “enforced” a layoff from being online for all of us at home, for once I had the opportunity to observe what my children did as a result, and to continue learning from them. Seeing what they asked me to do for them online while connected at work; seeing what they went to friends’ houses to do online; seeing what they didn’t care about; seeing what displacement activities came up, how they spent their time as a result. If anything, everything I’d observed endorsed the call to action.
So.
The action I’ve taken is to spend less time online, to encourage my family to reduce their time as well, and to do other things together as a result; naturally, this means I will post less often. I hope to make up for the deficiency in quantity by raising the quality of my posts. I haven’t stopped thinking, or reading, or talking to people.
Apologies for the lack of warning; it was one of those things that just happened as I thought about things, something I am wont to do every now and then.
of relationships, conversations and transactions
Being Indian, and having lived there for half my life, I’m used to people chatting for a while before getting down to business, as it were.
Relationships first. Then conversations as a result of relationships. And finally, only where necessary, transactions.
Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. (Doc has a Nigerian pastor story that shows how universal this structure is. I will link to it when I have something more than a BlackBerry to use as my internet connection.)
A few hours ago, I read that Facebook now has more “transactions” per day than eBay does. Given that eBay has 8 times the number of participants, this is a fascinating trend.
Normally I would expect conversations to be a multiple of relationships, and transactions to be a subset of conversations.
And that would suggest that the community with more members will have more transactions, especially if they were a birds of a feather community.
Why is this not the case with facebook? Is it driven by the relative youth of the community and their perceived free time? Is it because the marketplace is open and free? Is it because of the high graphic content as a result of the sheer number of photographs? Is it because you don’t need a credit card or a paypal account? Is it because it is easier to use? Cooler? More fun?
Worth thinking about. More later.