Photo courtesy of Dionna Raedeke

 

The act of sharing involves two or more people. At least two.

Sharing involves participation. Active participation. By two or more people. At least two.

Not two anythings. Two people. Not machines. People.

In the past I’ve written about the role of design in sharing; about why people share, and what people share; if you’re interested in the subject, please just search for “share” on this blog and you’ll see dozens of posts. Today I want to concentrate on another, critical, aspect to sharing.

Speed. And intensity.

Any activity that involves two or more people needs to be based on something tacit, an understanding of the reciprocity implied within the relationship(s). We humans are subtle creatures, and our understanding of reciprocity is nuanced, shaded, complex. So the reciprocity is not necessarily either short-term nor crude. You don’t expect that everyone will buy everyone else a drink when there are “rounds” at a bar, at least not in the same evening. But “over time” you expect a balance. You don’t expect that everything you do for someone else is going to be reciprocated in the same currency by the specific recipient: there’s an altruistic pay-it-forward mentality in many of us. We are not, in the main, manipulative creatures; our expectations of reciprocity are probably better described by a sense, an expectation, of “fairness” rather than a mechanical give-and-take. Compromises are involved, trade-offs do happen, but usually not in any simple short-term bilateral space.

Instead, we have this notion of fairness. Sometimes this extends into something even harder to describe, a sense of what is “reasonable”.

So when two people meet and start to build a relationship, when they begin to share things — time, experiences, views, beliefs, ideas, anecdotes, whatever — there is a need to watch for these human notions. Notions of what is fair. And notions of what is reasonable.

[All this has nothing to do with technology. Not yet anyway.]

Most of us seem to be able to pick up the signals to determine what the appropriate levels of reciprocity are, in the context of fair and reasonable. And then we put that learning into practice as we navigate each relationship. It’s a voyage of discovery, one where the pace and the depth of the conversation is  tacitly negotiated by the parties involved.

And relationships grow and flourish as a result.

These things, natural to us in the world of flesh and blood, are much harder to achieve in digital space. But they matter nevertheless.

In a digital relationship, you do have to care about what you share, how much you share, and how quickly you do it. Sharing is meaningless unless what you share is appreciated by the people you share it with.

Appreciated. Now there’s a good word. Appreciation is about estimation of worth, appraisal. It is also about something increasing in value.

When you share something, think about who you’re sharing with, why you’re sharing. Think also about whether the person or people you’re sharing with will appreciate your action.

Because the value of sharing comes in the appreciation.

 

Image courtesy AFP via The Coffee House

 

Monsoon. A word that evokes wonderful memories in me: the welcome smell of parched earth receiving badly-needed nourishment; the happy sound of mud-heavy footballs kicked by mud-heavy children wearing mud-heavy clothes and boots; the joy of splashing through waist-high flooded streets on the way to school in the morning. Monsoons were always happy times for me.

The 1974 monsoon was a bit special, the months preceding the rains were drier than normal, and the monsoon was wetter than normal.

Data taken from Weatherspark’s historical weather records for Calcutta, West Bengal, 1974

I remember the rain for another reason. Physics class. A particular question. And the sheer joy of working on the answer. The question was taken from the Resnick and Halliday Physics books; I think Part 1 was correctly referred to as Resnick and Halliday while Part 2 was Halliday and Resnick. The strange things one remembers after nearly forty years. Anyway, the question was simple. And here I’m paraphrasing:

Drops are falling steadily in a perpendicular rain. In order to encounter the least number of raindrops while travelling from point A to point B, would you travel at (a) your fastest speed (b) your slowest speed (c) some intermediate speed? Explain your answer.

How we loved that question. Boys battled with beakers, twirled their test-tubes, studiously engaged in getting wet while “learning”. Others sprinted from point to point, yet others walked slowly and purposefully, as if they were wearing cement boots. Some preferred discourse to action, so addas formed. Deep discussions on the difference between “encountering raindrops” and getting wet. Lots of arm-waving, lots of pontificating. It was a microcosm of Calcutta traffic, because children from other classes and years went serenely about their business while all this was going on, and miraculously no one bumped into anyone else. Not a drop spilt from beaker or test-tube.

We observed, we imitated, we tried out, we refined, we discussed, we argued. We learnt.

And we laughed.

Incidentally, the question of how to approach travel when it’s raining continues to excite scientists. Take a look at these papers: Whether or not to run in the rain (2012) or Walking or running in the rain: A simple derivation of a general solution (2011) or Is it really worth running in the rain (1987)

Learning from observation and trials. Learning by copying and imitating. Learning in groups. Learning with laughter. The DNA of memories I have of school and of university. Phrases like “How did you do that? Could you show me? Where did you find that out? Can I watch you? It doesn’t happen when I try, what am I doing wrong?” …. these were the phrases of childhood and school, with teachers there to facilitate learning rather than just to teach.

I still learn mainly by watching others and trying things out.

Take cooking. So much of food preparation is about tips and tricks, observation, trial and imitation. Here’s a small list of what I’ve learnt by watching others. Want your whole grilled fish not to warp or tear when you’re finishing it off under the grill for that crisp golden look? Then take a knob of butter, rub it against the grain of the scales so that tiny slivers of butter get under the scales. Then, when you apply intense heat, the skin won’t contract faster than the flesh, and everything looks the way you want it to. Want to peel garlic without the stickiness and the mess? Take the cloves, put them under the blade of a large knife, then slam the blade with the flat of your hand. Hey presto the cloves are peeled. Don’t like the sound of that? Then just put the separated cloves in a cocktail shaker and shake very vigorously for a minute. Same difference. Want to make ultra-thin pancakes for Peking Duck? Roll the flour into a long thin cylinder, maybe half an inch thick. Chop cylinder into 3/4 inch bits. Then take one bit at a time, slice in half, moisten with oil, put the two halves back together. Then take the re-integrated bit and roll it out into a pancake using a standard rolling pin. Steam the result, you’ll find you can peel the pancake into two ultra-thins.

The ability to observe. The ability to imitate. The ability to try it out for yourself. The ability to get quick feedback. Four critical requirements for learning.

We’re in the midst of a digital revolution. Everything that happens can be observed by more people than has ever been possible before. The internet is a copy machine, the ability to share and to imitate has never been cheaper. Tools continue to be invented to make it possible for all of us to be able to try more things for ourselves than we could ever do before.

This digital revolution is a learning revolution. As long as we don’t waste it. Waste happens when we constrain the ability to observe, to imitate, to try out, to get feedback. Particularly when we have the opportunity to make it all affordable, ubiquitous.

Education drives the solution to so many of our perceived problems. Education is so incredibly accelerated, assisted, augmented by digital infrastructure. If we let it.

We who are here on earth today can make a difference to that earth by ensuring that we don’t waste this incredible opportunity, of using digital infrastructure to enfranchise everyone, to provide the opportunity for all to learn.

Battles like SOPA and PIPA and ACTA are not about access to films and TV and music and books and magazines. The internet was not conceived to be a new delivery mechanism for Hollywood.

There will be more SOPAs. More PIPAs. More ACTAs. Because change is difficult, and some are more affected by change than others. We don’t have as many farriers or blacksmiths or fletchers as we used to have. We don’t have as many gramophone manufacturers or tape recorder makers or VHS rental shops as we used to have.

Digital infrastructure disrupts many forms of publishing industry. That very disruption, while apparently affecting those industries adversely, allows for education to scale in ways we couldn’t ever have imagined. Just look at what’s happening with MOOCs.

And the publishing/entertainment industries don’t have to be affected adversely. They just have to learn to create, market, deliver and price differently. Like everyone else is doing.

So when you see the next SOPA or ACTA rear its ugly head, think of the changes that good education can bring about. Changes to do with climate, the environment, water, energy, nutrition. Changes that enable more to be gainfully employed. Changes that teach people to fish rather than to receive fish.

That’s what the battle is about. And you know something? I’m singin’ in the rain. Because it’s over.

I thought I’d continue with the theme of the internet as a complex adaptive and open platform, and use this post to share a number of stories on how people are using the internet in amazing ways:

The internet is a treasure trove of incredible empowerment. In April last year, I read about a boy, whose brother was working as a sweeper on India’s trains, who got lost and separated from his mother in 1986, when he was five. He found her. A quarter of a century later. Using Google Earth. Did the designers of the internet, the Web, Google Earth or the device used actually plan for this eventuality? That someone would retrace twenty-five-year-old steps to reconnect with a parent? No. But that’s not important. What’s important is that the internet could be used this way. That the Web could be used this way. That Google Earth could be used this way. And that the device could be used this way.

More recently I read that someone designed an app that used location/checkin data, in this instance from Foursquare, to help direct blind people. Now that’s augmented reality. Reality augmented by crowdsourced data overlaid on an open platform. Would the app have been perfect? No. Will this particular app succeed? Who knows? Not material. What matters is that the internet could be used this way, that GPS could be used this way, that Foursquare could be used this way. None of these things came for free. None of them needed to be designed this way. It happened because the people involved had a vision. A vision to do good.

A year ago, I read about someone who was checking in on her pet remotely, via the web, and found herself observing a burglar in her home. They caught the burglar.

A week or two ago, I took my family on vacation to a remote island. I didn’t realise how remote it was. We had to land at one of the larger islands in the group, and then take a small propellor-plane for 20 minutes. It wasn’t that simple. The BA flight arrived an hour late. We rushed, got on to the hopper plane, taxied and waited for clearance to take off. Not forthcoming. Why? The control tower hadn’t been able to raise anyone at the remote island airport to confirm that the lights would be kept on until after we landed. The pilot told me I’d better get hotels organised for the family and then fly the next day. I wasn’t having any of that, too much of a palaver. So I did the usual thing. Googled civil aviation at the remote island. Got a number. Called it. When someone picked up, passed the phone to the pilot. And then proceeded to negotiate a small fee for their keeping the airport open until after we landed. Simple ubiquitous connectivity, a browser, a search engine, people prepared to be flexible, and Robert is your parent’s sibling.

Just today, following my The Internet Contrives post yesterday, an old colleague and friend alerted me about something he knew I’d like. A tiny gadget that you slip into your luggage that then lets you track that piece of baggage with your smartphone. It even sends you a message when it comes into short range, so that you “know” when your bag is coming up the carousel.

There’s so much happening, so much that will gain quantum energy when the invention enters connected space. Organ printers. Drug printers. Movements small and large. Bluetooth stickers. Slinky on a treadmill.

Who could imagine such things?

Someone did.

All this was possible only because some people imagined a world where all this was possible. Because they designed things in a way that social, common good could come out of it.

My personal thanks to all those people, those that imagined the internet and the Web and GPS and so much we take for granted. People like Vint Cerf and Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine working on RFC 675. People like David P Reed and his work on TCP/IP and UDP. People like Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. People who saw how open adaptive platforms, that helped provide compute, storage and communications access, could form a foundation that can change the world.

Everything is getting disrupted. Everywhere. Our personal lives and our public lives. Businesses and homes, our education, our health. The way we entertain ourselves. Our work and our play. Even government.

Everything.

Because people had the vision to build open platforms.

 

 

 

In a little border town, it doesn’t matter where, there once lived a man. He crossed the border every day, like clockwork. Each morning the guards would see him wend his way to them, pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure. And each morning, like clockwork, they would put gloves on and sift through the manure. And find nothing. Each morning they would, reluctantly, let him cross. And each evening he would return.

This carried on for decades. They were sure he was smuggling something. But they couldn’t, for the life of them, figure out what. And then one day it was all over. He retired. Hung up his boots. Told them he was calling it a day. And they never saw him again.

Except that this isn’t a real story. So a few weeks later they did see him. He went to say hello. And over a warm cup of tea the guards begged him to tell them what he was really up to, what he’d been smuggling. He smiled at them and said “Wheelbarrows”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been putting forth the idea that 2013 is the Year of the Platform. Particularly the open adaptive platform, modelled upon the mother of all such platforms, the internet.

Yesterday I spent some time explaining why I continue to be optimistic about the internet. It went something like this. More and more people are getting connected to the internet every day. Devices are getting smarter. Costs are going down, availability’s going up. We’ve moved past post and telegraph and radio and TV to everything multimedia. Open source software is now in use everywhere and in everything. Open source hardware is now an affordable reality. And open source specifications are now a force to be reckoned with, as 3D printers head towards affordability. As Steven Johnson reminds us in his book “Future Perfect”, the world as we know will just come to a juddering halt if everything open source disappeared overnight.

And there’s a lot of magic happening as a result. As I said yesterday, everything’s getting disrupted. Everywhere. All the time.

Yet people remain concerned. And rightly so. Because disruptions affect the status quo.

And affecting the status quo just won’t do. Not if you’re a powerful incumbent. So there’s a lot of SOPAing and PIPAing that’s still to come, some ACTAing out, some real WCIT deeds.

During the financial crisis we started hearing that some banks were “too big to fail”. Having observed events in technology for the past thirty-odd years, I’ve realised that some of the incumbents really think they’re “too big to change”, and that they can use their market muscle and lobbying power to put the changes off indefinitely.

They’re wrong.

The internet really does route around obstacles.

The internet contrives.

When I lived in India, I used to marvel at just how the local car mechanics would keep vehicles in working order, usually with no access to spares, often with no access to documentation. They contrived.

The Maker Generation is here to stay. Armed with connectivity and smart devices. Able to use open source software and hardware, open specifications and open data. Able to contrive.

Human beings can do incredible things when they’re given the opportunity and the tools.

Let’s take communications. Do you remember a time before Skype? A time when you needed a mortgage to make a long-distance call? I’m old that way. I do remember those times. People in India needed to make international calls without having to enter some form of bankruptcy. So what did they do? They made person-to-person international calls, then referred to as PP calls. When you made a PP call, the operator would call the other number, ask for the person, and only put you through if the person you were calling was present to take the call. If the other person wasn’t there, then you weren’t put through, and there was no charge.

So what did many Indians do? Simple. They contrived. They used the name-space for the called party to send messages. So you’d call your son, visiting friends a zillion miles away, but instead of asking for him by name, you’d use the space to get a message to him. A call for Dartmouth Smith meant that the boy Smith had received a scholarship place at Dartmouth. And so on and so forth. Today it doesn’t matter any more, international calls are affordable to most places.

More recently, the same thing happened with mobile phones. Prices were too high. So what did people do, in India, in Africa, even in parts of China? They “gave someone a missed call”. Called, and then hung up the phone before the calling party answered. A painless way of letting the other party know to call back. The Missed Call feature had been subverted to make it possible to get over the affordability barrier.

It’s not just about affordability. Connected people with access to tools do the strangest things. Like using Product Reviews to pen literature, satire, humour. Or adopting digital conventions into everyday speech. [I’m still getting over my then 13-year-old daughter looking at me and appending something she said with “hashtag justsayin”.]

People will contrive. The internet will route around obstacles. And every now and then I will share the stories. Feel free to add to that store here, let others know of the routing-around-obstacles stories you’ve come across.

 

 

 

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.

 

 

Remember the song Woodstock? I first heard the Matthews Southern Comfort version, then soon after that the Crosby Stills Nash and Young one, and shortly after that Joni’s original. I must have been all of 13. And today, forty-odd years later, it is still one of the defining songs of that time for me, perhaps even the defining one. Along with everything else that characterised those just-landed-on the Moon times, it made the teenager that was me believe that the world could and would be a better place. That people were essentially good. That we were social people. That sharing was good. That working together good would happen. That, over time, poverty and hunger and war and disease could all be solved, as humans worked together and applied their collective intelligence.

 

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

 

Those were the days. Imagine. [I could probably write the rest of this post trying to string together a series of songs from that era, but I’m going to resist the temptation.] Instead, I’m going to segue over to the Grateful Dead, an ever-growing influence on me in those days. I was very taken with the idea that the band seemed to on the road all the time, that they were always in concert, that for them music was really a performance art. Beyond that, I was entranced by their treating their music somewhat like traditional jazz or for that matter classical Indian music, with regular extemporaneous experimention on a series of themes. And then there was the Tapers Section.

 

Grateful Dead Tapers Section

 

Reading about the Grateful Dead and hearing them, and later on even getting the chance to watch them perform live a few times, I began to understand what Jerry Garcia meant when he said “Once we’re done with it, the audience can have it”. They really saw music as a performance art; more than that, they saw music as culture, alive and vibrant in community. End of segue. [Almost.]

As I grew older, and as the power of the internet unfolded before me, I became convinced that much of what I dreamt of would become possible as a result of that platform. And my love affair with the internet became a commitment for life. Incidentally, take a look at the tabs at the Internet Archive: and then figure out for yourself why the Grateful Dead have a tab all to themselves. [OK, now that’s the end of the segue.]

So, the internet as a platform. I began to believe in it. Reading stuff like the Whole Earth Review and slowly seeing what was happening at the WELL, I began to believe even more. And then came the Web. And mobility. And everything else.

Decades later, I was still that person. I still believed that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity, compute power and storage would help transform all our lives, would improve our ability to learn and educate ourselves, would help us become healthier, would help us live better lives. That is why I wrote Building Society For the 21st Century as the kernel for this blog when I first went public with it.

Today, in 2013, I am still that person.

Today, there are many reasons to be disconsolate. Poverty and hunger are still not history, even though we have enough collectively. Diseases that had been eradicated seem to be making a comeback. Wars have morphed into interminable guerilla engagements with no end in sight. The global economy’s a mess with growth hard to find. Governments seem powerless: democratic ones are largely two-party states with each party hell-bent on destroying the other, rather than serve their citizens; autocratic ones seem hell-bent on retaining power at any cost, including genocide. Millions of children are out of school and hundreds of millions of youth are unemployed. Climate and energy and water and natural resource problems continue to proliferate with no end in sight. Many reasons to be disconsolate.

And yet, today I am still that person, believing in a better world, believing for a better world. A world where enfranchised connected people can work together to make a difference to their education, their health, their welfare, their environment, their government, everything. People with the ability and the freedom to make a difference, to make a dent in their particular part of the universe.

So I thought I’d take a quick look on how we’re doing in terms of being enfranchised and empowered and connected.

Our ability to get connected. The internet. Nearly 2.5 billion people connected, out of the 7 billion or so. 44% of the connected people are now in Asia. A long way to go, but the trend is in the right direction, with millions being added regularly.

 

Our ability to do something with that connection: devices, smart and otherwise. Around 5 billion mobile phones in circulation, with a billion of them smartphone users.

 

 

 

Taken from 2012 KPCB Internet Trends

 

Our ability to do something with that connection: switching away from the scarcity-bound desktop PC/landline world to the mobile device/wireless world:

 

Taken from 2012 KPCB Internet Trends

 

Our ability to build our own devices. Raspberry Pi passes a million. How to build a mobile network basestation using Raspberry Pi.

Our ability to build our own anything. Portable open source 3D printers. The Global Village Construction Set.

Our ability to repair many things, substitute many things. Fixing the future with Sugru.

Our ability to mash all this up and use open platforms to do even more amazing things, some simple, some complex. How Arduino, open source and 3D printing are changing speaker design. Physical social networking with the Good Night Lamp.

The list is endless. Open courseware and MOOCs are now to be taken seriously. Open data is gathering momentum. Open architectures are beginning to pervade publishing, healthcare, even government.

Everything is getting disrupted.

Everything.

Not just for Arabs, and not just at Springtime.

Everything. All the time.

With everyone connected and able to express themselves and to share with each other, the tools of past times are ill suited to serve us. So there’s a lot of pressure on legal and regulatory systems to do with many things: patents, copyright, trademarks, banking and finance, communications, computing, journalism, personal information, freedom of expression, you name it. And all these things tend to get further complicated as the very concept of nation comes under pressure, with Cyrano de Bergerac and Obelix going Russian. People and companies move to where the tax sun don’t shine.

 

Of course powerful incumbents are discombobulated by all this. Dinosaurs were designed for discombobulation.

And of course they try and fight the changes in every way. SOPA. PIPA. ACTA. WCIT. Look where it’s got them. As I’ve said before, it’s over.

Powerful incumbents like being in control, which means predicting the future by preventing it.

But you know what?

I feel/just like a cog/in something turning.

A coda: I learnt, while writing this post, about the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. Do read Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig’s obituaries of Aaron. A sad day.

Coda 2: Here is the official statement from Aaron’s family and partner. Do read it.

A sad day.

But the future will not be prevented.