Sea of Joy

….waiting in our boats to set sail/ Sea of Joy

Steve Winwood, Sea of Joy. Blind Faith, Blind Faith, August 1969

Steve Winwood. One of my all-time favourite musicians. Someone whom I heard for the first time in the early Seventies, someone whom I’ve been an ardent fan of ever since. Even went to a pub in Gloucestershire decades ago because I was told he drank there, just to see him in the flesh. He wasn’t touring then. He has, since, resumed touring, and I’ve been fortunate enough to see him maybe half a dozen times since. I was able to see him “live” twice this year, and I shall be doing so again next May. In fact, I took the photograph above while watching him play with Eric Clapton at Wembley Arena earlier this year. But that’s not what this post is about. [Even if I did enjoy being able to link to the concert using setlist.fm; what a lovely service!].

Sea of Joy. One of my all-time favourite songs, taken from one of my all-time favourite albums, Blind Faith by Blind Faith. A song dating back to times when working out the meanings of song lyrics was a hard thing to do…..”Once the door swings open into space, and I’m already waiting in disguise”……There was a time when I used to try, until I heard what might have been an apocryphal tale about the Doors and Mr Mojo Risin’. Erudite people had written erudite essays about what Jim Morrison may have meant in his repeated use of the phrase “Mr Mojo Risin” in a number of Doors songs. Extremely erudite essays about the meaning and role of mojo at the time, in terms of hoodoo and voodoo symbolism and representations of power and sex-appeal. And it is possible that Jim Morrison may have been influenced by all that when he chose to use the phrase as a motet. But. But then I heard the story of a little old lady who wrote in to some magazine some years after Morrison’s death, wondering what all the fuss was about. She said that the Morrisons used to live next door to them when little Jim was growing up. And Jim used to come and play in their yard. And her husband made up the phrase Mr Mojo Risin’ to describe the young James Douglas Morrison, who would have been 67 last week if he hadn’t died so tragically in 1971. Her husband liked crosswords and suchlike. And Mr Mojo Risin’ is a perfect anagram of … Jim Morrison. As I said, the tale is apocryphal. I don’t have a shred of evidence to back the story. And yet I believe it.

But that’s not what this post is about either.

This post is about a sea of joy. Maybe even an ocean of joy. Oceans of joy.

The internet.

I know, I know, comparisons can often be odious. And while pictures paint thousands of words, they come with frames. And anchors. Which can constrain imagination.

Nevertheless.

I’ve always imagined the internet to be a whole heap of rivers, feeding many seas, feeding one large ocean. Living, breathing, moving. A giant organism which is more than just a space. Containing water, that wondrous substance that helps keep us alive. A place where people swim and frolic, laugh and play. An environment of magic, of depth, of beauty we’re still discovering. A place full of life in all its brilliance. A repository of rich resource we can mine and use, sensibly and sustainably. And yet a place where danger lurks, where death too can be found. With pirates. And with pollution.

Despite all that, a sea of joy.

Which is partly why I’ve found recent discussions about Wikileaks intriguing to say the least. For some time now I’ve been talking about having to “design for loss of control”, referred to here and here, here and at the TED Salon here.

Humour me for a moment or two.

Imagine it’s raining outside. [For some strange reason I find this very easy to do. Perhaps it’s because of where I choose to live.] Imagine you go for a walk around your house, with a beaker in your hand, collecting rainwater, getting absolutely drenched in the process. [For an even stranger reason I’ve done this, as part of a school Physics question set by Resnick and Halliday, in 1974….I remember the question as “Drops are falling steadily in a perpendicular rain. You need to get from A to B in this rain. In order to encounter the least number of raindrops in your journey, would you (a) travel at your fastest speed (b) travel at your slowest speed or (c) travel at some intermediate speed you determine? Explain your answer.“]

Anyway, where was I? More importantly, where were you? Oh yes, I had you out collecting rainwater. Imagine you have a beaker full of rainwater. Imagine you take that beaker of rainwater and pour it into a nearby brook, which feeds a river, which empties out into a sea and forms part of the oceans.

For the sake of argument, let’s leave aside the philosophical question of whether you “own” the rainwater you collected. Imagine just trying to find that rainwater in the ocean, something you’re going to have to do if, for some reason, you’re keen on staking a claim to your rainwater.

Hmmm.

The sea is designed to be plentiful, abundant. Quite different from lakes and ponds, which are contained and isolated, controllable. And often stagnant. [No, I’m not going to enter into angels-dancing-on-pins arguments about the Caspian Sea or for that matter the Dead Sea here].

Making things that are abundant by design somehow appear scarce is not an easy task. As I’ve said before, and said many times before, every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time, the artificial abundance will win. Region coding of DVDs and music DRM are simple examples of the principle.

So it is with the internet. When you make something digital, you have something that is cheap to copy. When you connect that digital something to the internet, you have something that is cheap to distribute far and wide. That is why Kevin Kelly called the internet a “copy machine” in his seminal essay, Better Than Free, from which the illustration below is taken. If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and follow the link. It’s a must-read.

So now the internet exists, does it mean no one can keep a secret any more? No. It’s just like in the good old days before the internet: if you want to keep something secret, try not telling anyone.

The internet is designed to share.

There are many things that people don’t want to share, for a variety of good reasons: personally identifiable information; commercially sensitive information; and information demonstrably pertaining to national or international security. Sometimes it’s because the information is held asymmetrically and misused; in polite society we would call this “blackmail”, and in the civilised world this is illegal. Sometimes it’s because the information is considered “private”, and a right to privacy is seen to exist, a right not to be embarrassed because something you said in private somehow makes its way into the public domain. Which is why the recent spate of leaks has caused such consternation. Contrast this with Eliot Spitzer and the Wall Street firms he went after, the whistleblower/leak aspect of all that happened, and the difference in reaction then. Contrast this with Talking-To-Journalists 101, which says Nothing Is Ever Off The Record. In England, thirty years ago, when I was given rudimentary media training, I was told “always imagine that anything you say, everything you say, could be on the first page of the Mail tomorrow”.

Bruce Schneier, an erstwhile colleague and someone whose writings and sayings I pay attention to, wrote a wonderful little piece on the subject, making five simple points:

  • Encryption is not the issue
  • Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them
  • Access control is hard
  • This has little to do with Wikileaks
  • Governments will have to learn what the music and film industries have been forced to learn already, that it’s easy to copy and publish digital files

You should read the whole essay, which I’ve linked to here. Bruce is brilliant, terse and trenchant as ever.

Clay Shirky, another writer I have a lot of time for, writes a very balanced piece here, about the importance of the legal process in all this. Any medium of communication, any method of publishing and propagating, needs to have its principles and guidelines, and over time, its laws and its regulations. Of particular importance is the following paragraph from his post:

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the U.S. trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us, “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Due democratic process is always important; it is doubly important when we’re dealing with an emergent, valuable phenomenon. Such as the internet and all things digital.  Which is why I was so concerned with the apparently trivial all-downloaders-are-thieves approach that Mandelson et al sought to steamroller through via the Digital Economy Act. Which is why I remain concerned now. [Incidentally, I’m delighted that BT was part of the lobby that fought for, and won, a judicial review into the DE Act].

Not that I have anything against secrets per se.

Secrets are important, and there is a place for secrets. There are ways of keeping secrets secret.

Sharing is also important. And there is a place for sharing. It’s called the internet.

And it is really important that there continue to be ways of keeping shared things shared.

Which is why I appreciate the tireless work of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in all this; John Palfrey, and, more recently, Urs Gasser, do a great job there. Which is why I look up to people like Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig as they strive to make sure that the law cannot be confused with genus Equus subgenus Asinus, and that due democratic process is followed when new laws are constructed. Which is why I appreciate the time that people like Doc Searls and Cory Doctorow spend on this. Which is why I appreciate the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; of the Open Rights Group; of Creative Commons; of the Web Science Trust, particularly for their work on open data. People in all these places have somehow found the time and the motivation to devote to this cause. I am privileged to count many of them amongst my friends, too many to list here. You know who you are. Thank you.

You see, it’s not really about Wikileaks. Artificial scarcities will continue to be met by artificial abundances. There will be many more Wikileaks. In many places. At the same time. And some of them will be very damaging. Which is not a good thing. But. There is a right way to stop it. It’s called the democratic process.

The internet is about sharing. It’s about making it easier to copy things and to move them around, to publish at scale. It’s about making it easier for Linus’s Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It’s about the power of democratised access. Access to publishing. Access to editing, to changing. Access to reading. Access to community skills and talent.

The internet makes it possible for us to do things we could never do before, like the World Wide Web itself. Like Wikipedia. Like Craigslist. Like being able to listen to “A symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom” live yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum, as thousands of us were able to do yesterday.

The internet is capable of transforming lives at the edge, making radical impacts on education, on healthcare, even on government. Of course the internet is dependent on all of us having ubiquitous affordable connectivity, something I continue to be optimistic about. It will happen. Perhaps not in the way we thought it would. But it will happen. And there won’t be a digital divide. Because that too would be an artificial scarcity….

Steve Winwood, when he penned Sea of Joy, also had these words to say in the song:

Having trouble coming through,
Through this concrete, blocks my view
And it’s all because of you.

All because of you. The “you” in that phrase is us. We have a responsibility to future generations that the internet is governed the right way, that the right laws are formulated and promulgated, that the right process is followed.

Because there are generations to come….

Waiting in their boats to set sail, Sea of Joy.

A sideways look at cognitive surpluses and knowledge “management”

Doc Searls used to keep reminding me of something he attributed to Don Marti: Information doesn’t want to be be free, it wants to be $5.99. Incidentally, talking about Doc Searls, here’s a bonus for Cluetrain devotees: the first time all four original Cluetrainers were together in one place, at Defrag in Denver last week.

Where was I? Oh yes, information doesn’t want to be free. You know something, sometimes I feel the same about knowledge. It doesn’t want to be free. As Paula Thornton said some years ago, maybe knowledge doesn’t want to be managed either.

Ever since I read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus earlier this year, I’ve been thinking about the book’s implications for “knowledge management” in the enterprise. Which is why I wrote what I did yesterday, and planned to follow up today. Which is what I’m doing here.

Let’s start with knowledge. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to define knowledge in the enterprise as “information about anything and everything that makes our customers’ lives easier; as a corollary, information about anything and everything that helps us make our customers’ lives easier”. I feel that such a definition is in keeping with the ethos of Peter Drucker’s immortal saying “People make shoes. Not money“. If we make our customers’ lives easier, they will thank us for it. With their attention, their time, their loyalty, and even their money.

Using this definition, the management of knowledge can be defined as “the process by which we create, collect and share information that makes our customers’ lives easier”.

So who should be involved in such a process? Who would know the most about what would make our customers’ lives easier?

Our customers.

If you accept that logic, then the customer should be at the heart of any knowledge management system.

Who else? People who deal with the customer. Those who “touch” the customer. Followed by people who know something about the products or services those customers want or sometimes even need. Followed by people who know something about the process by which the products or services get created, delivered and exchanged for value.

Which means pretty much everybody in the enterprise. The extended enterprise. All the way to the customer.

Okay, so that’s the what and the who of knowledge management. Let’s take a look at the how.

One way of defining the how is to look at the things that failed in the past.

  • The right people weren’t involved.
  • Access and edit permissions were hierarchical rather than networked, preserving “expertise”
  • Information was inaccurate; without scale, the costs to correct were too high.
  • Information was missing: only text could be captured, image and sound were missing.
  • Information was out of date; production, reproduction and distribution costs were prohibitive, reviews were infrequent.
  • Information was inaccessible. Analogue, poorly indexed, and hard to copy.

Today, all these failures can be dealt with. Scale is not an issue for companies designed to make proper use of the internet. Network-based architectures are inherently more flexible than their hierarchical predecessors: role- and function- based permissioning is simpler to implement. Smartphones allow us to capture all types of media, not just text. Connectivity is pretty much ubiquitous. And the information is held digitally in the cloud, taggable, searchable, retrievable. From anywhere. Anytime.

Taking a leaf out of Clay’s book:

We have the means. Cloud computing infrastructures. Smart phones. Cloud services that allow people to converse with each other, share and annotate digital objects, improve upon them.

We have the motives. Human beings are inherently social, we like sharing. We enjoy the bonding, the peer respect, the recognition. No man is an iland, intire of it selfe.

We just haven’t had the opportunity before. Enlightened bosses are now providing that opportunity, by focusing on outcomes rather than input timesheets, allowing their staff to determine what happens with their cognitive surpluses.

Knowledge workers, part of the tertiary sector, are intrinsically different from those employed in the historical primary and secondary sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. Their work is lumpy, amorphous, misshapen, non-linear.

This is not a new problem. Many “professionals” faced real challenges of scheduling and prioritisation, and found it impossible to have true predictability in workflow. Ask a doctor. A nurse. A teacher. A policeman or fireman. Their lives have been about lumpiness and unpredictability and non-linearity.

But we were stuck in the manufacturing mindset, so we pretended these anomalies didn’t exist. And we designed our education and healthcare institutions as if they were industrial in origin. Look what they’ve done to my song, ma.

Today is another day. We now have means, motive and opportunity. All we have to do is to allow people to make use of their cognitive surpluses. Focus on outcomes rather than inputs. And make everything we do centre on the customer.

[Okay, after a period of quiet I’ve now written two posts in two days. Which means the risk of getting flamed is high. I await your comments. With some trepidation. ]

Thinking about cognitive surplus in the enterprise

I like Clay Shirky. He doesn’t say a great deal, he doesn’t write a great deal, but when he does say something or write something, what he says or writes is brilliant. Clay is a web optimist, a class of person who believes that everything the web stands for can create value, and often new value. That the democratisation engendered by the web is a good thing; that communities can do good things that individuals can’t achieve in isolation; that the very concept of expertise is being redefined by the web.

Such views often tend to attract a lot of criticism, often from people threatened by the worldview he describes and ascribes to.

And so it was with his most recent book, Cognitive Surplus. Some people loved it. Some hated it. I for one really liked it, because Clay made me think about something normal and commonplace in a different way, by exposing a small number of ideas in an articulate and enjoyable way. [Disclosure: I count Clay amongst my friends; I count Cory, who wrote the positive review, amongst my friends as well. And I don’t know Nicholas Blincoe.]

I’m not going to review the book here, other than to say I really liked it. I’m sure that you can read many erudite and enlightening reviews elsewhere. All I want to do here is to share one idea that affected me deeply. And that was this: what I found really intriguing was not that cognitive surplus existed, but that it existed because people were doing less of something. In this particular case the principal activity that declined was that of watching TV, but what I found useful was the principle. That a cognitive surplus exists because time gets freed up, and if you have the tools and the motivation, then that surplus gets put to good use.

When I try to learn about social software, I tend to use music and food as analogues, as digital social objects that will help me learn about the particular medium or media. If you’ve been following this blog for long, or if you’ve been following my tweets, you’ve probably noticed that.

And so it was with the cognitive surplus notion. I started looking for sites that would help me understand how people would create collective value in ways that individuals could not, specifically in music and in food. What I hoped was that I would learn something that could be applied at work.

In this context, I’d like to bring your attention to two sites:

The first, setlist.fm, is a wiki-style repository of sets played at music concerts. You get details about a specific song.

You also get details about a particular concert. Most of the time, you can play a video of the song, get the lyrics as well.

Sometimes you can even play the song; sometimes you can watch a video of the song; sometimes you get the lyrics. In effect, what services like foxytunes were trying to do for recorded music, setlist.fm was seeking to achieve for concerts.

Let’s leave music aside for a minute, and move to food. In this context, I found airlinemeals.net truly intriguing:

So now you could check out meals to expect by class of travel, see photos of what you were likely to be served, even get ratings for the meal. And for added measure you had an idea of what the person paid for the fare. You could even travel back in history, do some Retronautical research:

I guess Pan Am made the going great. I guess Pan Am went bankrupt.

What I liked about these two examples is that they shared a number of key characteristics: the problem to be solved could not be solved easily by a small number of people, it needed distributed scale, “edit rights” for a large number of people. The problem could not be solved per se unless people wanted to share something: their memories, their photographs, their mementos and relics: in fact recording devices like cameras and tape recorders are essential equipment in this respect. And out of the cognitive surplus, real value was obtained for many classes of person: archivist, historian, aficionado, experimenter.

Incidentally, there was an example of cognitive surplus use in the weekend papers that made me cringe, that sent shivers down my spine:

Big Brother meets the Twitching Curtain. First you acquire CCTV feeds, probably the most abundant thing in the UK today. Then you add viewers, curtain-twitchers with time on their hands and who are willing to pay for the “privilege” of random voyeurism via CCTV. Finally you add the businesses prepared to pay for the alerts. The viewer pays you. The viewed business pays you. Who knows, maybe the CCTV company pays you as well. I shudder to think what the next generation of such businesses will look like.

Which leads me to my conclusion.

I’ve watched attempts at knowledge management in the enterprise fail for decades, and rationalised the failures in many ways. The technology wasn’t ready. People didn’t want to share. Management didn’t want people to share. And so on and so forth.

That was then. We live in a world where edit and upload rights are getting more democratised every day, even in the workplace. Knowledge management is now less meaningful not because knowledge has waned but because the management of knowledge has become harder, given the historical bias towards making information scarce and therefore more powerful for those who had ownership or access to that information.

But none of this is meaningful unless there is cognitive surplus in the enterprise. Which means people have to admit that they have free time, time they can devote to creating value by sharing what they know, what they have known, what they have collected, what they have archived. The tools are there. The motivation is there. But before it can happen, people have to be willing to acknowledge the existence of a time surplus at work.

This was not a problem for the agricultural sector; this was less of a problem for the industrial sector during an era of manufacturing; but now, as we are full-fledged into the tertiary “services” sector, the possibility looms large that knowledge workers will have time surpluses. Knowledge work is lumpy and non-linear, you can’t apply assembly line approaches.

So that’s where my mind is today. That the lumpy nature of knowledge work means that there are time surpluses at work. That these surpluses are Shirky Cognitive Surpluses. That the people with the surpluses have the tools and motivation to share what they know, knew and “own”. That doing this would make their lives easier; would enhance the lives of their colleagues, their trading partners, their customers. That real productive value is gained by doing this.

Imagine a wikipedia of equipment installed at homes: the positions of meters and stopcocks and telephone lines and fuseboxes; the types of equipment, in terms of makes and models and ages; the dates they were installed, the dates they were serviced. Imagine the amount of time and money wasted because we don’t have this already, the errors made, the damage caused, sometimes the lives lost. So many industries will stand to gain if we had this sort of resource.

Imagine fault reports and customer complaints and cases all being made available for anyone to annotate, the ability to apply Linus’s Law to processes at work. Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow.

It’s been a while since I wrote. I’ve had a lot to think about. This is just a sliver. I’d love to know what you think.

Thinking about social objects

You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Andrew Largeman, a character in Garden State, a film that was written and directed by Zach Braff some years ago.

A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. That phrase really stuck in my head when I saw the movie, and it’s stayed there ever since. Go see the film if you haven’t already, you won’t regret it. [And you don’t have to take my word for it either. An IMDB rating of 7.9, spread out over 90,000+ votes, nearly a thousand reviews, that’s some going.]

It wasn’t long after that when Jyri Engestrom started riffing with the idea of social objects, and when Hugh MacLeod picked it up and spoke to me at length about the concept, part of me was still completely stuck in the Andrew Largeman mindset. The same imaginary place.

And that’s part of the reason I share some of the things I do via twitter: The music I listen to. The food I’m cooking or eating. The films I’m watching; the books I’m reading; the places I go to. Sometimes what I share is in the immediate past, sometimes it’s in the present, sometimes all I’m doing is declaring my intent. Because, paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

When we share our experiences of sights and sounds and smells, we recreate the familiar imaginary places we share with others. We use these digital objects as the seed, as one dimension of the experience to flesh out the rest of that experience. So we take the sound or image or location or even in some cases the smell, and we extrapolate it into a rich memory of that particular experience. Which is often a worthwhile thing to do, for all the people who shared that “imaginary place” with you.

This has become more valuable as a result of phenomena like Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, that have made it easier for you to share the digital objects with the people you shared the original experience with. Which is why any tool that helps you capture what you’re watching or reading or listening to or visiting or eating is worth experimenting with.

This is something I’ve been doing for some time now, playing with every tool that comes on to the market, trying to see what it gives me that others didn’t. [When I started doing this, I had to come to terms quite quickly with the fact that some people don’t like being on the receiving end of all this “sharing”. More than once, I thought long and hard about segmenting my stream so that people could tune in or tune out of the particular segment. But I’ve stayed “whole” nevertheless. More on this later].

I’ve written about social objects a few times, even touched on the topic of something analogous to a graphic equaliser for an individual lifestream, yet I felt it was worth while in discussing them further in the context of “a group of people that miss the same imaginary place”. This time around, I want to concentrate on the ecosystem, on the tools and conventions we will need. Because that’s how sharing of experiences can become simpler, more extensive, more valuable.

I think we do five things with digital objects:

  • Introduce the object into shared space
  • Experience (and re-experience) the object
  • Share what you’re experiencing with others
  • Place in context that experience
  • Connect and re-connect with the family that has the same shared imaginary place

So to my way of thinking, once I start going down this road, every music site, every photo site, every video site, every audio site, they’re all about helping us introduce digital objects into shared space.

Many of these introducer sites also double up as experiencer sites: so you can watch the videos, hear the music and so on.

Every community site then becomes a way of sharing the experience of those objects: every review, every rating, every post, every link, every lifestream, all these are just ways of sharing our experiences, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without.

As more people get connected, and as the tools for sharing get better, and as the costs of sharing drop, we’re going to have the classic problems that we’ve already learnt about from the web in general. There are too many firehoses. It becomes hard to know what is out there, harder to find the right things. Errors, inaccuracies, even lies abound. (Digital objects are easy to modify).

So metadata becomes important. Preferably automated, so that authenticity is verifiable. Preferably low-cost and high-speed. Preferably indelibly associated with the digital object. Preferably easy to augment with tags and folksonomies and hashtags. Times, places, people. Names and descriptions. Devices involved, settings for those devices. History of views, listens, access, usage, editing. The edits themselves.

Authenticity becomes even more important. Watermarking the object while at the same time allowing copies of the object to be modified.

Search tools have to get better. I’ve been reading and re-reading Esther Dyson’s The Future of Internet Search for some time now, linking what she’s saying to what I’m thinking about here. Esther has been a friend and mentor for a long time; when she has something to say, I shut up and listen.

Visualisation tools also have to get better, which is why I spend time reading stuff like Information is Beautiful, why I visit feltron or manyeyes.

Sometimes many of these things happen in one place, elegantly and beautifully. That’s why I like Chris Wild’s Retroscope, why I like How To Be A Retronaut. It helps us place into context some of the things we share, some of the things we used to share.

Sometimes the tools for doing some of this move us into new dimensions, as in the case of layar and augmented reality, or for that matter AR spectacles. Noninvasive ways of overlaying information on to physical objects, ways that allow us to share the imaginary place more effectively.

As a young man, I was an incurable optimist. While time has tempered that optimism, my outlook on life continues to be positive, so positive that people sometimes claim I’m almost Utopian. Yet I still remember two quotations that were like kryptonite to the Superman of my optimism.

The first was Thoreau’s: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And the second was Burke’s: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“.

There are many things we have to get better at, and many people working hard to make sure that, collectively, we get better at them. Feeding the world, eradicating poverty and the illnesses associated with poverty. Making sure every child has access to basic education. Improving healthcare, moving from cure to prevention, moving from symptom to root cause. Being better neighbours. Being better stewards of our environment.

I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally lonely; I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally depressed. And I have always wanted to do whatever I can to prevent these things from happening.

The tools we have today can help us eradicate loneliness and depression in ways that pharmacology can only dream of. Those tools can and will get better.

Of course there are things that come in the way, things we have to deal with first. Concepts like intellectual property rights have to be overhauled from the abominations they represent today, rebuilt from the ground up. Concepts like privacy and confidentiality have to be reformed to help us bring back community values that were eroded over the last 150 years or so. Human rights have to be reframed in a global context, the very concept of a nation re-interpreted, a whole new United Nations formed.

But while all that happens, we can help. By continuing to create ways that people remember the familiar shared imaginary places, by reminding ourselves what family means.

Family is not about blood alone, it is about covenant relationships. When something goes wrong in a covenant relationship, you don’t look for someone to blame, or even sue. You look for ways to fix it. Together.

Families don’t just share a past, they share a present. And a future. Social objects are, similarly, not just about the past, they’re about the present, they’re about the future.

We’re on the start of a whole new journey, and so we spend time learning about sharing by declaring past and present experiences. Soon we will get better at sharing intentions.

Soon we will get better at sharing imaginary places that are in the future, not in the past or present.

Soon. to paraphrase the prophet Joel,  our old men shall dream dreams, our young men shall see visions.

Musing about stewardship and software and noninvasiveness

My thanks to Franz St for the photograph of Melk Abbey in Wachau, Austria

The National Geographic Society regularly reviews historic sites all over the world, seeking to recognise those that sustain their heritage, history and sheer ethos despite the passage of time and tourists.

When I think of the word “stewardship”, I think of very similar values. The very word summons a sense of not owning something, of being given the responsibility of looking after something on someone else’s behalf. Of being given the responsibility of looking after that something (or someone) for generations to come, making sure that there continues to be something to look after.

Parenting is a classic act of stewardship, one I keep trying to get better at. And, one day, I hope to learn about grandparenting as well.

Much of what we understand about ecology movements is also related to stewardship. Looking after the earth and all around it is an act of stewardship. Making sure that we do things that are sustainable is an act of stewardship.

Stewardship matters.

Even building software can be an act of stewardship. Recently a colleague of mine tweeted that he was maintaining code written before he was born, code that was performing valuable service today. When I think about the role of software in stewardship, I start thinking about landlords and lessees.

Why? I’ve rented property for many years, I haven’t always been able to afford to buy. Whenever you rent a place, there’s usually a clause that says something like “you should leave this place just as you found it. All expenses to do with restoring the place to what it was like before you got here are payable by you”…. or words to that effect.

I think that principle is at the heart of stewardship. Which is what I was thinking of when I viewed some links tweeted to me by a colleague, Brendan Lee (thank you Brendan! ).

The links were about graffiti, and are well worth reading and watching. They were about Evan Roth and the Graffiti Research Lab. Go take a look, you won’t regret it. There’s a link to a related post here, about turning graffiti into code.

Turning graffiti into code. Now that starting sending me on all kinds of enjoyable wild-goose chases.

What if we could make graffiti non-invasive, no longer persistent while still “permanent”? What if we could could switch graffiti on and off at the touch of a button? Some of the things that Evan Roth demonstrates and talks about suggest this is already happening.

It’s no suggestion, it’s happening now. Augmented reality layers as put forward, for example, by Layar, one of my favourite companies, are classic examples of noninvasive overlays. Now, suddenly, I can see the possibility of walking around historical sites untainted, uncorrupted by modern signage and explanation. The descriptive information is retrieved by smartphone or tablet connected wirelessly to the cloud, and can be designed to enfranchise everyone, without any reliance on sight or hearing or reading ability or even economic power.

It’s happening in many ways now. The ability to become a Retronaut is also designed on this noninvasive basis. Chris Wild’s brilliant invention, the Retroscope, allows us to revel in our nostalgia, steep ourselves in our history, wallow in our culture and geography, all without the need for any “street furniture”.

There is a lot we can learn from Evan, from the people at Graffiti Research; there is a lot we can learn from Maarten and Claire, from the people at Layar; there is a lot we can learn from Chris and from Retroscope. Designing software so that it is neither intrusive nor invasive. No “client installs”. Nothing that ties what you do to a specific device or location or capacity or spend minimum. Software that leaves the environment around you untouched, software that can be undone at the touch of a button, software that lets you behave like a steward in the environment.

Software “estates” today exist in a heterogeneous world, built up over generations; every company has an environment that has evolved like Topsy growing up in the Galapagos. Many of these estates are no longer sustainable or even maintainable, and they will collapse over time. Which is why moving to the cloud is not a nice-to-have option but an imperative.

Noninvasive computing is here to stay. Even in the enterprise. Especially in the enterprise. Because tomorrow’s CEOs will demand it. Which is why I’m here to learn from graffiti and augmented reality and the Retroscope. They show me why the cloud matters.