Thought I would try something out for a while. Every Friday, I will post an unGoogleable question. When it’s an image, I will make sure it’s unTineye-able. If it’s music, I will make sure it’s unShazam-able. [And yes, I understand that something that’s unGoogleable today becomes Googleable tomorrow. That’s the nature of the internet and the Web].

So here goes. Today’s question is simple. Who is this?

 

If this becomes popular then I’ll publish a list of “winners” at the end of every month, along with a year-to-date table. First correct answer via comment here on this blog, on facebook, on twitter or on Google+.

A few days ago, I was reading Chris Skinner’s then-latest post on the Financial Services Club’s blog, headlined Never Mind The Channels, Here’s the B&**&^ks. And agreeing, of course. We are connected not channelled, as I wrote in the Kernel For This Blog seven years ago. And yet, as Chris says, there are still many who try and recreate the segments and channels and isolations of the past, as if nothing has changed.

Yet so much has changed, and changed irrevocably.

I thought I’d try and summarise the changes in a small number of word dichotomies, just to see how they would play out. Depending on the comments I receive, I can always extend the list and, where required, expand on the explanations. So here are the first three:

AND not OR

Channel-like choices are about mutual exclusion. You can choose BBC or ITV. An MP3 file or a CD. A digital download or a DVD. A “pirate” copy or a “legal” copy. Mobile or fixed. Wireless or cellular. A or B. One or the other. Sometimes the choices are binary, sometimes there are a series of choices. But one way or the other, the product and hierarchy mindset tends to think about mutual exclusion.

Customers don’t think that way. Why would they? Mutual exclusion constrains their ability to derive value. Customers prefer to think about AND rather than OR. Customers may listen to an “illegal” download and then go buy the original. Start a conversation via SMS and pick up the phone and talk part way through the conversation. Invite someone to join in, then carry on after they leave. Have LPs, tapes, CDs and MP3s of songs, listening to the highest quality version that’s convenient to listen to at the time. Analog and digital, instant and delayed, original and copy, these dichotomies can be played out in the context of price, often as part of a spectrum. But that does not make them mutually exclusive.

AND not OR is about understanding abundances and scarcities. People listen to their free CD of Prince AND pay handsomely to see him perform in person. Digital copies of Prince’s music are abundant. But there’s only one Prince.

BECAUSE not WITH

Doc Searls has written about this many times, as have I: we call this the Because Effect. When you deal with things that are scarce, you can make money with those things. Scarcity has value. If you have the only Penny Blue you can command your price. But scarcity is not the only way to make money. You can make money out of abundance as well. Linux is abundant. IBM used to make money with its operating systems. Then, when Linux came along, IBM saw a way of making money because of Linux rather than with it. There are many bloggers I know who don’t charge for their blog or allow any advertising. They don’t make any money with their blog. But they still make money because of their blogs.

BECAUSE not WITH is also about understanding abundances and scarcities.

WE not ME

George Bernard Shaw said something along the lines of “If I have an apple and I give you that apple, then you have an apple and I don’t have an apple. But if I had an idea and I give you that idea, then we both have that idea”. Information, and information-like digital goods, are often “extreme nonrival goods” in economic terms. When they are replicated and shared, they are able to be enjoyed by all and sundry. Over the last few decades, many of the things we’re involved with have become standardised and expressible in mathematical terms. Many financial instruments have become dematerialised; compute and storage power have both become virtualised; personal genomes have been modelled sufficiently and can now be sequenced and analysed, allowing us to model personalised medical treatment based around the individual genotype.

When something can be expressed mathematically, the ability to model it increases dramatically, as is the ability to simulate it. As we learn more about the world we live in, as we learn more about ourselves, we’re able to form better abstractions about our environment and our engagement with that environment. As we form better abstractions we’re able to develop standard ways of looking at things, of expressing things. As we develop those standards we’re able to model and simulate aspects of ourselves and of the world around us.

This has significant implications for us in terms of what we can achieve in health, in welfare, in education, in government.

But it needs us to share. It needs us to start each of these processes thinking open rather than closed, abundant rather than scarce, public rather than private. Shared rather than exclusive. WE not ME.

WE not ME is also about our understanding abundance and scarcity.

AND not OR. BECAUSE not WITH. WE not ME. These may seem trivial discussions at present, but in time to come they’re going to form the core of some very serious discussions; so far, the creation of artificial barriers around extreme nonrival goods has been about the amount of money people stand to make as a result of the barriers.

Soon, it will be about the number of people who live. Or die. Because the ideas will relate to how people can replicate medicines cheaply and efficiently; get access to drinking water safely and securely; grow sufficient food affordably and sustainably.

Humanity is about life and death. It is up to us to make sure it is not about life or death.

 

In 1997 I was hired by Dresdner Kleinwort Benson to run their Euro, Y2K and Regulatory Minimum Requirements Programmes. Three classic “mandatory” projects that engendered classic responses: everyone agreed the projects needed to be done, everyone had an opinion on the how and what of each project, but nobody wanted the job of actually getting them done. It turned out fine for me, though: the programmes formed an excellent induction to the bank’s business: its customers,  its culture, its processes, its people, its infrastructure and its systems estate. The three years I spent doing all that helped me enormously with my next role there, as CIO.

Not surprisingly, one of the first things we did was to baseline everything, starting with the systems and applications estate. Questionnaires were sent out, validation fieldwork followed, the database constructed, every system, associated version details, location, architecture, feeds, interfaces, usage characteristics, business sponsors, systems “owners”, the whole nine yards. We had ourselves the basics of a detailed inventory of the systems estate.

I then wanted to apply the Eric Raymond version of Linus’s Law to the inventory, on the basis that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” holds true for “information” bugs as well. Open up the data to everyone in the bank, so that errors and omissions could be identified quickly and efficiently. Simple, no?

No.

Not simple at all.

Someone in information security felt that by making all this data available, I could be providing criminals and terrorists with a detailed set of instructions for a full-throated attack on our estate. It took a few months of robust debate (and a few changes of personnel) to get them to change their minds. What matters is that they did change their minds, the inventory was made available to bank staff, partners, suppliers and contractors; errors and omissions did surface and were dealt with in time. This in turn created a more usable information asset, helped us reduce project risks and costs, and paved the way to our doing everything that needed doing with a minimum of fuss and bother.

I was reminded of this last week when reading Rollie Cole’s excellent post Some Observations on the Practice of Open Data as Opposed to its Promise. If you have the time, do read the whole thing, it’s worth it. In it he analyses the reasons why people hold back from making open data available, the legal and operational issues involved, the heterogeneous nature of the environment at present and the resource implications. He then proceeds to summarise how these issues are being dealt with in pragmatic terms.

I’ve been privileged to know Rollie for a while; we met as readers of Gordon Cook’s excellent Cook Report on Internet Protocol, and belong to a related, and very active, online discussion group. I’ve had a deep interest in open data for a while: during my time as Chief Scientist at BT, I was involved with the Web Science Trust, where Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt et al made me an instant convert; I have remained in close touch with the Trust since.

I love numbers. I can stay awake for long periods with my eyes closed working out the Fibonacci sequence from scratch; I can as easily put myself to sleep very quickly counting sheep in Fibonacci. I marvel at the beauty of the primes; I’m mesmerised by “circulating” decimals.

Not everyone is moved by numbers. For many of the people I meet, what they look for are stories, narratives they can follow. So, given the influence of the people at the Web Science Trust, and given the observations made by Rollie, I thought it was time I collected and published stories about open data.

The first one I want to share with you comes courtesy a friend of mine, Conor Ogle. There I was, gently sipping my green tea while on vacation in Barcelona last week …. I nearly choked when I saw what he’d shared on his Facebook timeline: 20,000 pregnant men on the NHS. I had to know more. So I read the associated article, felt I should delve into more detail, wanted to see the original as published in the British Medical Journal. Didn’t feel like taking a subscription out just for that one article. So I downloaded the BMJ iPad app, waited one week for the “current” issue (April 7th) to pass into “back issue” status, then bought the issue for £2.99, read the whole thing. Here’s the summary:

In an article headlined The importance of knowing context of hospital episode statistics when reconfiguring the NHS, the authors (Lauren Brennan, Mando Watson, Robert Klaber and Tagore Charles) look at data freely available on HESOnline. I quote from their study:

On average, 1600 adults aged over 30 apparently attend outpatient child and adolescent psychiatry services in England each year. Indeed, the number of adults attending outpatient paediatric services since 2003 has increased steadily, with a steep increase, to nearly 20,000, in 2009-10. Adults over 60 are also being admitted to inpatient child and adolescent psychiatry services.

The rest of the article goes on in similar vein. Here’s another extract:

We were quite surprised to discover that many males seem to be attending outpatient obstetrics, gynaecology and midwifery services. Amazingly, between 2009 and 2010, there were over 17,000 male inpatient admissions to obstetric services and over 8,000 to gynaecology with nearly 20,000 midwife episodes.

They had good reason to be surprised. Apparently the term “midwife episode” is used to describe childbirth. So, according to the data, over 20,000 men had babies in 2010.

Now do I believe that over 20,000 men had babies in the UK in 2010. Of course not.

But do I believe that the data suggests that it happened? Unfortunately, yes.

Data. Erroneous data. Data that could be used to make erroneous decisions. Data that may already have been used to make erroneous decisions.

Data that should not be used to make erroneous decisions.

This is not a new thing. When I was at university, we were told horror stories about a couple of failed hydroelectric dam projects based on bad data related to river depth and speed, data that could have been corrected if it had been inspected and commented upon. Flawed reasoning about security led to the loss of lives and of economic and social well-being.

The authors of the article have performed an important public service in pointing out that there may be just a few, shall we say “classification” errors in the source data in HESOnline.

This is the 21st century. In years to come we’re going to have to deal with far larger data sets than we’ve ever dealt with before. Some of these data sets will turn out to be critical to our ability to deal with the problems of the 21st century, not just the ones we can see but also the ones we can’t as yet.

Let’s move to a different example, in the context of climate change: The International Centre  for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has been gathering and making available data on, amongst other things, the status of glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan Region. Quite important, these glaciers. They’re pretty involved in nature’s cycle of getting drinking water to maybe a third of the world’s population. We just haven’t had the tools or the ability to get detailed information about the glaciers in the past; now we can, and the data sets that are generated are immense. Incidentally, it’s heartening to see the number of countries involved in the study, countries that do not form part of the geographical region. Global issues need global participation.

Having accurate data is very important in our quest to solve many of the larger and newer problems we face. Without it, we get posturing and bigotry rather than reasoned and informed debate. Disease control. Climate change. AIDS. Eradication of poverty. The financial crisis. Education. Government. In every case, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the volume of the arguments and the quality of the data made freely available.

Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, is recorded as having said Publish and Be Damned, in response to journalist John Joseph Stockdale’s threat to expose his affair and mistress. The consequences were not of import to us.

Soon, humanity may be dealing with a variant, with consequences of import.

Publish. Or be damned.

When it comes to the open data movement, those are the choices we face. Publish, so we can correct the errors and make better decisions as a result. Or be damned by poor decisions.

And large quantities of pregnant men.

Soon everyone on earth will be connected. It’s over.

People are getting connected. Things are getting connected. Whole communities are getting connected. And when communities get connected, other things begin to happen. They become markets. Entire markets in themselves. And at the same time participants in larger markets. It’s fractal, small pieces exhibiting the same characteristics as the larger whole they form part of.

Life used to be about things physical. And in the physical realm, shops were where you went to inspect and sometimes buy products and services. Shops were collections of products and services; shopping malls were collections of shops, larger aggregates of products and services.

Communities, on the other hand, are collections of relationships. Not products or services.

These relationships in turn lead to conversations. Which in turn lead to transactions.

Relationship before conversation before transaction, as Doc Searls reminded us in The Cluetrain Manifesto. An amazing book, now nearly 13 years old, one that laid out for us in glorious Technicolor what’s happening now in communities and markets. If you haven’t read the book, stop reading this post and go visit www.cluetrain.com and read the book. Better still, go buy the book, it’s worth it. [Disclosure: The Cluetrain Four are my friends. Good friends. And I was asked to contribute a chapter to their 10th Anniversary Edition.]

The Cluetrain Four: David Weinberger, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine and Doc Searls, seen here in a rare “together” time at Defrag (a great conference) a decade after publication of their seminal book.

Customers are now to be found in the communities rather than in the shopping malls. And when they do go to the shopping malls, they remain in community, in relationship with each other. Relationships that are more powerful than the bonds between customer and product or service. Which is why companies are finding that their brands and reputations are now in those communities, exposed to the elements as it were.

Customers acting in community buy in community, not in isolation. Which would not be a problem if customers were homogeneous; but they’re not. Customers are people like you and me. Organic. Amorphous. Sometimes rational, often not. Influenced more by our relationships than by anything else we experience, see, hear, feel. So the community-as-customer is a heterogeneous beast.

Communities have always exhibited some sort of Pareto distribution in their behaviour: some hyperactive participants, some active, some more languorous in their participation, some lurking on the sidelines. Sometimes there’s a visible leadership structure, sometimes it’s more emergent. The open source movement provided considerable opportunity for studying such digital communities, and numerous have been published over the years. For example, here’s an analysis of the developer community using SourceForge  published by Jin Xu and Gregory Madey a few years ago.

The observers, the lurkers, the kibitzers, the languorous, the active, the hyperactive: they’re all part of the community. 1000 lb gorillas and benevolent despots? Part of the community. Moderators and facilitators? Part of the community. “Core” participants? Part of the community. And yes, freeloaders? Part of the community.

Which brings me to my first point.

Everyone in the community is a customer. Some customers will pay, some won’t. Some will engage, some won’t. But they’re all customers. All with the capacity to recommend or pan. All with the capacity to help improve the product, or to kill it. All with the capacity to build deeper relationships between the community and the corporations, or to destroy them.

Which in turn leads to my second point.

Communities expect a range of prices for each product or service. This is not just about “freemium” pricing or related models, it goes much deeper than that. The Kickstarter funding model is a good example. Each product or service will come in a vast array of participation levels, differentially priced. For the sake of argument, let’s call the levels Free, T-Shirt/Mug, Film Clip, Signed Numbered Manuscript, Closing Credits, Opening Credits, Starring Role. Some levels will be abundantly available, some scarcer. So some levels can be infinite in their subscription, while others will be constrained and capped. In addition, where the levels are constrained, communities will expect to be able to trade the participation, sell it on, without fear or favour. [I’ll write about 21st secondary markets in a later post, if there is demand for it].

I guess some of you think this is me in my retired-hippie-tree-hugger-Sixties-Utopian mood, imagining things that will never happen. Which leads nicely on to my third point:

This is nothing new, it’s been happening for a long time. We’ve lived in an advertising-dominated age for many years, where the income from advertising was used to defray the costs of providing products and services to a community. Sometimes the costs were subsidised. Sometimes the subsidy was total. But the principle was the same. A small number of people paid large sums of money, the net effect of which was to make something available to a larger community at a price below what it would otherwise have been. Third party pays. Sometimes the subsidy is from the seller, as with printers and blades. Sometimes it’s from other participants, as in mobile phone operators. Centuries ago we called them patrons. But the principle has always been there. Not everyone pays. Of those that pay, not everyone pays directly.

And this brings me to my final point.

A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer, organic, heterogeneous, messy. You can’t just connect to the paying customers, or to the subsidisers. Every part of the community expects and demands engagement. And they’re connected, they influence each other. The community becomes as important a vehicle for engagement as the individual customer. Together. Integral. Able to act severally as well as jointly.

In summary: when the customer is a community, things happen differently:

• Everyone in the community becomes a customer
• They expect a range of prices for each product or service
• This is nothing new, it’s been happening for a long time
• A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer

Just musing. Views? Comments? Fire away.

When you try and describe the internet (and, for that matter, the Web) what metaphors do you tend to use? Is it a “series of tubes” to you? A place? A river or ocean? Something organic, living, evolving? None of the above? All of the above?

As I began to write this, I thought I’d ask Twitter a question. If you were to try and describe the internet in just one word, what would that word be? And so far, in the first five minutes, the responses have been: magic (twice), progress, illuminating, love, freedom, information, foundations, people, organism, knowledge, data, flow, connection, catalyst, mellifluent. And internet!. Everyone’s using the hashtag #iiow (internet in one word) if you want to go check it out.

So many things to so many people, all at the same time.

So I thought I’d let what’s left of my hair down and classify the internet, tongue firmly in cheek, as if it were a series of quarks.

As with quarks, imagine that the internet comes in six flavours: Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Top and Bottom.

We’ve spent a very long time getting used to the Down internet. Governments and Hollywood and RIAA and your friendly neighbourhood control freak love the Down flavour. Everything flows down, one direction only, controlled, measured. Just the way things used to be. All very shipshape and Bristol fashion, reminiscent of the broadcast-command-control world. Some people think the internet should be like that, and for some time now we’ve seen attempts to regulate the internet as if it were a centrally controllable broadcast network. But that’s over.

As soon as people realised that the internet was bidirectional, that there was an Up internet, all hell broke loose. The broadcast mindset didn’t like it one little bit. Newspapers and wireless radios and television sets were one-way mechanisms and the very idea that anyone could “publish” was at the very least sacrilege, perhaps even treason. Censorship was going to be a real bitch, as was copyright and for that matter most forms of intellectual property rights. Blogs and wikis mushroomed, YouTube came along. The edge was empowered.

So there was Up and Down. At first the only things that went Up and Down were made of text, and small pieces of text at that. So nobody cared. Then, as years went by, images and sounds got into the act. And the pieces got bigger. Some of the publishing industries began to get concerned. Then the images began to “move” and the sounds started concatenating, and music and video began to flow up and down. Now the publishing industries really cared, but it was too late.

We’re just entering the worlds of Strange and Charmed.

The Strange internet is where we start “moving” physical things across the internet. How long before I can share an out-of-circulation super-scarce vinyl album by scanning it and then “faxing” it over the internet so that it’s printed by the recipient on a 3D printer? Nearly six years ago, I read about bioprinters that could “print” cells, in effect create muscle tissue. Meatjets. More recently, just over a year ago, I heard about people “printing” aromas: the age of the smelly printer had arrived. Connect the 3D printer, the meatjet, the smelly printer to the internet and soon we will be transporting stuff that we can smell, touch, even eat, rather than just listen to or read or watch. The Strange internet awaits us.

Spooked? Don’t worry, the Charmed internet has also begun to show up. A few days ago, I came across the term thumbkiss for the first time, to describe what happens when two people some distance apart “kiss” by pressing their thumbs on their mobile phones simultaneously and being able to “feel” the kiss through the vibrations initiated by Pair, the application that brought us the thumbkiss. We’ve had airkisses before the internet; it takes a world of affordable and ubiquitous connectivity and compute/storage power to bring us the thumbkiss. The whole idea, “charming” as it may be, reminded me of something Alex had told me about a couple of years ago, the Good Night Lamp. ” A family of connected lamps that lets you communicate the act of coming home to your loved ones, remotely”. So we’re already at a stage where we send emotions and feelings and warmth and love across the internet.

The Top internet has been gathering strength all this while, all about the power of many, about none of us being as smart as all of us. Connected sideways and many-to-many rather than up or down, collective in intelligence and collective in action. We’ve been seeing the power of the Top Internet topple governments, change corporate strategy, hold up irrational lawmaking. The Top internet is about collectivism, about smart mobs and virtual communities and friend graphs.

The Bottom internet is all about the data, the metadata, the models, the structures, the standards and the protocols that make the other five internets happen. Open data. Closed data. Big data. Small data. As we continue to add collection devices and sensors to the internet, we begin to solve problems of the paradigm we live in, the paradigm our children and grandchildren will make their own. New tools that allow us to collate that data, suitably identified in time and space and overall context, to teach us more about we congregate and how we migrate. How our food and energy and water congregate and migrate. How our diseases and criminals and terrorists congregate and migrate. How ideas and cultures and values emerge and grow and move.

The internet. A series of quarks.