stargeek
THE SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING + PERMANENCE?THE
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 My daughter spends much
of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her
hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share
your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book. Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
 In his recent article in Salon, David Weinberger responds to suggestions that the blogosphere is an echo chamber: Cliques of like minds parroting each other and nodding virtually, cementing their unenlightened perpectives and ignoring different points of view. David makes two important points: A conversation is a
social
group, and social groups serve many social functions. Some are
debating
groups. Some are places for people to show how clever they are. Some
aim at political change. Very few aim at changing minds about the
founding agreement, if only because it's so hard to pull up the planks
of conversation as we walk on them. The comment blog of a presidential
candidate is not about changing minds, any more than is the Red Sox
rooting section. It's about forming a political movement. It binds
supporters socially. It keeps their enthusiasm up. It lets them
collectively work out interpretations and feelings within a group of
people they trust precisely because of their shared agreement.
Likewise
for the right-wing sites. Likewise even for
extraterrestrial-conspiracy
mailing lists.
If you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on "Buffy" than he'll ever be on "Angel." And if you want to see the apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper, is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns more about, because he believes them to be "objective." The very fact that David needs to make these points is surprising. Sometimes we get so caught up in conversations that we don't realize what they are, why we need them, and why we engage in them so passionately. I've recently been engaged in conversations about important ideas in five different media:
My contributions to all the discussion groups I joined were largely ignored. I don't know if that's because I articulated my points poorly, or made points that others in the group did not deem worthy of discussion, or because I violated some unwritten discussion group protocol by not introducing myself properly as a newbie, or, as a newbie, had the gall to introduce new subjects for discussion instead of confining myself for awhile to responses to the regular members. In a way I felt (and perhaps others did too) that I was barging into the middle of someone else's conversation. As a newbie in those 'rooms', no one knew the context for what I was saying. I was a stranger, and might as well have been talking in a foreign language. And also, although in my chart above I identify chat spaces as appropriate for back-and-forth discussion, the convoluted threads within threads seem to me a most awkward way of accomplishing this. Perhaps I'm too old to understand the flow and etiquette of this medium, but I kept breaking the rules by sending private e-mails instead of posts to the whole group (all of which, unlike my posts to the group, actually did elicit a useful response). More than once I looked for IM or Skype numbers for members because I found the discussion group technology so limiting. As a discussion group member, I'm a failure. It seems to me the reasons we converse are complex and varied, and the fact that we choose to converse mostly with like minds is that it's easier and more personally productive than conversing with people whose worldview is antithetical to ours. Most people change their minds because new information undermines the logic that had led to their former opinion, not because someone with an opposing view effectively challenges their logic. That is why the small clique of multinationals that now dominate the non-print mainstream media are so dangerous: It's not what they say and report that narrows our perspectives and oversimplifies our worldviews, it's what they choose not to report. The fact that there is almost no news about what in happening in the third world outside the Mideast, and no news about the environment, or about the loss of civil liberties or the outrage of gerrymandering or a thousand other important subjects is that the mainstream media, with a competitive eye on each other to make sure no one does anything different or disruptive to get out of step and require a costly and competitive response, deems all these 'complicated' and 'slowly-developing' issues unnewsworthy. Their groupthink directly produces ours. Read Jay Rosen's brilliant article on 'Master Narratives' for more on this. So why do we converse, using any of the tools in the chart? Let's start from the writer's perspective, or the perspective of the initiator of the conversation. They're trying to do some of these things: Organize and save our thoughts
and information and stories.
Improve our language skills. Think out loud to reach a conclusion. Find people with similar ideas, interests or ambitions. Sell ourselves, our ideas, our writing. Help others. Get help. Overcome boredom, loneliness, shyness, low self-esteem. Debate. Entertain. Learn something. Express ourselves. From the reader's perspective, or that of the respondent to the communication, they're trying to do some of these things: Learn something.
Conversations allow these two perspectives to blur, so that all
participants can achieve any of the objectives from either of the
above
lists. And because they're iterative, they allow us to at least begin
to understand our own, and the other person's, worldview and mindset,
the context for what they are
saying, and get past the blind spots and jargon and unstated
assumptions and connotations, to reach, at last, common ground. Understand something better. Be entertained, excited, incited. Find something interesting to talk about with others. Find useful information and tools. Find people with similar ideas, interests or ambitions. Get different perspectives. Help answer deep, personal questions. Be seduced. Escape. Overcome boredom, loneliness, shyness, low self-esteem. |
 Yesterday I was checking my referrer log and came across a weblog called PTypes, which rates famous people, and bloggers, by personality type, and also draws linkages between three well-known personality typing schemas. I have commented before that the majority of bloggers seem to be INTPs or INFPs on the Myers-Briggs personality test, but the PTypes blogger list contains more 'Counselors' (INFJ) than either 'Architect' (INTP) or 'Healer' (INFP) personalities. More surprisingly, How to Save the World is identified as an 'Inspector's' (ISTJ) blog, which surprised me. I had always been a strong NT, and right on the line between E-I (to quote Neil Young, who seems to have a similar personality to mine, "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day"), and right on the line between J-P (I'm a compulsive list-maker, but I hate inflexibility). So I couldn't understand how the author of PTypes assessed me as ISTJ. Rather than argue, I decided to re-take the Myers-Briggs test. I Googled 'Myers-Briggs' and took the first four tests that came up, including this quite detailed one, which all produced the same answer: my personality has changed markedly since I started blogging. I've plotted the shift on the charts above. Using a small letter instead of a capital for close-to-the-border (less than 55-45%) scores, I've gone in one year from iNTj (a Thinker) to eNfP (a Change Agent), after not moving on the test for a decade. I suspect my blogging is more a reflection of changes in my 'personality' rather than a cause of them. But it's interesting -- is anyone else's personality changing, and why? Are personality changes fundamental and enduring, or situational and transient? Oh, and there is a 'disorder' associated with each of the 16 personality types when that personality becomes extreme or pathological. For INTPs it's schizoid (disengagement) behaviour, for INFPs it's histrionics, for INFJs it's avoidant, for ISTJs it's depression (maybe that's why the author of PTypes pegged me as ISTJ), for INTJs like I was last year it's schizotypal (social anxiety), and for ENFPs like I've apparently become this year it's paranoia. Not sure I buy this last stretch, since if I were borderline paranoic I would have self-censored some of my recent blog posts. |
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My Blog Functionality Scorecard
Everyone has their own specifications for what they'd like blogs to do. Advanced users, comfortable with the technology and able to tweak their blogs to do some amazing (and some silly) things, are quickly leaving the rest of us behind, and there are millions of others who took a quick try at blogging, threw up their hands, and gave up. This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost. My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to him how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer, could set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with help, it gets a 'red' score. I consider blogs to be rudimentary content management, publishing, communication and social networking tools. So I have taken the content management, publishing and social networking functionalities that I identified as critical in my Personal Knowledge Management chart, and added the functionalities implicit in my Communicati ons Decision Chart, along with some intriguing additional features that readers have told me about recently, and these 20 functionalities together make up the scorecard. If you think important functions are missing, or some of the functions I've listed are trivial, let me know. No list will satisfy everyone, of course. Here's the explanation for my scores.
PS - If you'd like to try out an alternative to the blog Comments Thread, here's a more robust discussion space, courtesy of QuickTopic: Discuss Pushing the Blogging Envelope |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 Sudan has a great deal in common with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations -- Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse, over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification. Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since 1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe harbour for Osama bin Laden. What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty, conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and hopeless nation:
What about invading Sudan? Its government is much more popular, at least in the North, than the government of Afghanistan, and the end result of an invasion would inevitably be the same as what we see in Afghanistan: Tyranny replaced by anarchy, the retrenchment of the power of local warlords, massive resentment by the locals of the invading force's inability to bring order or build infrastructure to allow even the promise of a normal life. Intractible civil war and strife. And quagmire for the invaders. Should we arm the non-Arab people of Darfur so they can defend themselves? After all, the weapons used in the genocide against them came from the West and from Russia, so can two wrongs make a right? And we can't disarm the janjaweed -- in Sudan, as in Afghanistan, there are so many weapons that disarmament is an impossible objective. This was, of course, how we dealt with the earlier problem in Afghanistan -- providing arms to the Taliban and other extremists to allow them to defend themselves from the invading Russians. We all know how successful that was. Should we relocate a million or two million people to Chad, and pay Chad to take them in, and protect their borders? This was how we dealt with the persecuted Jews after World War II, helping them build a new homeland in Israel. That, too, has been a political nightmare. Why would the people of Chad, itself overpopulated and struggling, be willing to give up part of their homeland to accommodate a huge exodus of destitute foreign refugees? The sad reality is that there is no answer. The problem is that there are too many people and not enough land, water, or resources to support them. Throughout human history, the maximum sustainable population has been 160 people per arable square mile (1 person per 4 arable acres), which would mean that Sudan should have no more than 11 million people, a quarter of its current population. By the end of the century it could have fifty times this maximum sustainable population, and if desertification isn't halted, it will be even worse. If we think democracy, 'free' trade, education and technology are somehow going to prevent this situation from being catastrophic, we're wildly deluding ourselves. What's happening in Sudan, now, is foreshadowing what will happen worldwide by the end of this century if we don't address massive overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, and all the consequences that these two excesses produce: famine, war, destitution, lawlessness, epidemic disease, terrorism, tyranny, oppression, suffering, genocide, and ecological collapse. Sudan is a country out of control, and while we must of course provide humanitarian aid to its needy masses, and do everything we can to persuade its government to allow us to help it broker a lasting peace, this is only a stop-gap. We must convince the government and the people of Sudan that it must reduce its population and start stewarding its resources in a sustainable and responsible way. Otherwise the next war, the next genocide, the next famine, the next epidemic, the next oppressive government, will be incomparably, unimaginably worse. They say you can't get blood from a stone, but there seems to be no limit to how much blood can be wrenched from an ocean of sand. Photograph of a Darfur refugee camp from this remarkable online portfolio by Bruno Stevens at New Yorker online. |
 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
 In an article in this month's Fast Company, Keith Hammonds profiles an unlikely hero of social and environmental progressives: Ashoka founder Bill Drayton. Drayton, a former Director at McKinsey and the Environmental Protection Agency, is now a philanthropist with a difference: Ashoka provides a 'leg up' to those with vision, creativity, entrepreneurship and a strong ethical sense, by making them Ashoka 'fellows', who receive a stipend, funding for project costs, and the legal, management, intellectual and networking support of the Ashoka team. From a modest start 25 years ago, the group has grown to over 1500 fellows in 53 countries, including some highly celebrated and astonishingly creative social entrepreneurs who are household names in their home countries. The support team includes representation from McKinsey (management consultants), Hill & Knowlton (PR) and the International Senior Lawyers Project (legal counsel). According to the group's website, "Ashoka Fellows are individuals who share qualities traditionally associated with business entrepreneurs — vision, innovation, determination, and long-term commitment — but are committed to systemic social change in Ashoka's areas of interest: learning/youth development, the environment, health, human rights, economic development, and civic engagement. Fellows receive up to a three-year financial stipend to allow them to concentrate fully on their programs, and in addition may apply for supplemental funding for collaborative projects and are eligible for training and technical assistance." Here are a few examples of what Ashoka fellows are doing:
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 During
my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time
trying
to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how
people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching
'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This
article summarizes that theory.This is not a new epistemology. I am disinterested in academic arguments that use language, a clumsy and artificial abstraction, to try to justify theories that to me are needlessly complex, counter-intuitive and of no practical use. For students of philosophy, and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my regular readers, my theory is consistent with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of epistemology. For those interested in the philosophical basis for this theory, I would recommend David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, much of which is devoted to explaining Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I'm merely interested in its practical implications, in work and in life. My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the personal, collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in different ways (fig.1): The best way is through active participation, which engages all our senses in the learning experience. Next best is observation, where we see or hear but where some of our senses are not engaged. The least effective way is second-hand, through communication of reports from someone else. When a squirrel learns, by personal trial and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder, this is powerful knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel instead watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to replicate the other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the best one for the observing squirrel, which may have a different body-weight or dexterity than the demonstrating squirrel's. And if one squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar squirrel of the presence of food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be accessed by navigating around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable. The squirrel listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome -- perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the part of the reporting squirrel. In human activities, we now get almost all of our knowledge second-hand, through books, newspapers, television and online, and its relative lack of credibility causes us to develop and assign a trust 'rating' to different sources, based on how often, in our experience and that of others we trust, that report has turned out to be accurate or useful. A blogroll is one manifestation of that need to rate the trust-worthiness of second-hand sources of knowledge. Schools, unfortunately, now provide almost all learning second-hand, and it is not surprising that 'field trips' are so loved by students -- an experience to learn something first-hand. It is also not surprising that the most effective and credible form of second-hand report is the story, which conveys knowledge in a way highly analogous to the way we might have experienced it personally. Why do we learn? The squirrel learns in order to survive -- by direct participation at first in play and then, often by observing its parents, in gathering food, building a nest etc. The squirrel draws as well on instinctive knowledge, which is coded in its DNA as an evolutionary advantage, which 'teaches' it the knowledge of its ancestors, for example to 'freeze' when it senses a predator species, which is often more effective than fleeing predators whose eyesight is attuned to motion, more than shape. That instinctive knowledge also tells it at what point, as the predator approaches, to flee, based on its ancestors' cumulative learnings of that point at which the probability of evasion through flight begins to exceed the probability of non-detection by the predator. Instinctive knowledge doesn't need to be learned, so it doesn't appear on fig.1 above. We're born with it. In natural systems, where the community, the physical area in which animals spend their entire lives, is small and almost completely 'knowable', we learn only to survive and make a living, and because nature has evolved us, as an adaptive mechanism, to find learning fun (fig.2). In such closed systems, we can get almost all the knowledge we need from direct experience and observation, and from our instincts -- there is little need to rely on second-hand reports as a source of learning. As that physical area that we need to know to survive increases, we can no longer get by with direct experience and observation, so we need to evolve languages to convey more and more knowledge second-hand. Our society becomes inevitably more interdependent, and in addition to survival there are now three more reasons to learn:
I had dinner last evening with some of our neighbours, and we were talking about some of these immense problems, and one of my neighbours, a student of history, said that no problem in history has ever been solved until it got so bad for so many that there was a spontaneous revolution. What would it take, he asked, before these problems -- overpopulation, famine, oppression, violence, disease, resource scarcity, pollution, war, suffering, cruelty, misery -- got bad enough that people would rise up and demand immediate resolution? I think the massive unrest and strife we see everywhere in the world indicates that we have already passed that point. However, in order to have a revolution there must be (a) consensus on the need for change, (b) consensus on the change that is needed, and (c) a simple process to bring about that change. Historically, the solution has been political -- to oust, violently if necessary, an identifiable oppressor, the cause of the problem, and replace him (or them) with new leaders committed to the consensus solution. And although billions have shown that they see Bush's corporatist imperialism, and the oligopolists' 'free' trade and globalization, to be causes of some of the major problems we face, once we get rid of these scourges, most of the biggest problems will remain. These more intractable problems have no identifiable enemy and, as yet, no consensus solution. They are systemic problems that can only be changed by a radical change to our entire global economic and political systems. And changes to these massive, entrenched and leaderless systems have historically almost never come about by political means, but rather by introduction of disruptive technology innovations that undermine the existing system, as the agricultural and scientific and industrial revolutions did. It is tempting to believe that scientists, not collective human energy and collaboration, are the only hope we have for saving us from ourselves, of rescuing us from our colossal ignorance. What is the cost of not knowing when, even if we could communicate enough knowledge to achieve global consensus on the need for change and the change that is needed, there is still no simple process to bring about that change? If we were to magically and suddenly be able to bring knowledge to bear that would persuade the vast majority of people on the planet that unless we quickly reduce human population below one billion and reduce each human ecological footprint to no more than one eighth of the current Western footprint, would that be enough to precipitate a combination of voluntary abstinence, intense social pressures, and (over the objections of the very powerful elite) laws and taxes and sanctions, to ensure that these targets were met? We did bring about the end of slavery this way, and the end of the Vietnam War, and in much of the world women's suffrage. Is the intractability of our greatest problems really the lack of a simple, known solution, or is it rather the lack of consensus on the problem, and of its severity and urgency and what needs to be done to find a solution? -- The cost of not knowing. Until the reactionary cult of leadership took over business thinking a few short years ago, there was a consensus that the best way to run a business was to agree on and articulate the business' objectives, get each employee to define their role in achieving those objectives, remove the obstacles that prevented them from fulfilling those roles effectively, and otherwise stay out of the way and trust the Wisdom of Crowds to produce better results than the arrogance of a few. Could the same principle, applied to the world's most challenging and threatening problems, work in society as a whole? And if not, why not? It is the examples of slavery and the 60s peace movement and women's suffrage that have caused me, insufferable optimist that I am, to think that there is hope. The solution of reducing human population by 90% and ecological footprint by 10% (in the third world) to 90% (in the West) is daunting, but it's also a simple, clear, measurable objective. And if we have six billion people working on it, convinced that this is what must be done to save the world, there's no reason why it shouldn't be achievable. Women choose not to have babies if they know pregnancy would put their lives in danger, why wouldn't they choose likewise if they knew it put their world in danger? Would knowledgeable people agree to participate in an annual lottery for the right to have a baby, and live with the results, as they now compromise so many of their 'rights' for the greater good? Would they agree to a 100% tax on all wealth beyond sustainable consumption levels, to be distributed to the poor? Would they shut down permanently businesses that knowingly damage the environment? Would they abandon urban sprawl and big centralized governments in favour of self-managed, self-selected, self-sufficient communities if it could be shown that these are more socially and environmentally responsive, and responsible, political units? Would they wrench power, by citizen and consumer action, from unrepentant corporatists who refused to give up their excessive wealth and influence? It is hard to give up old paradigms. I know a lot of people that see the salvation of the world in global government, to which all states will cede authority. I see no reason to believe that bigger more powerful governments, which largely got us into this mess, and which are more removed from the people they supposedly represent, would do anything but make the problems worse. But as the Internet has shown, the real power in any system remains at the ends: The front lines, the communities, where people learn by direct experience what works and what does not, what makes sense and what does not. It is as individuals and as members of small communities that we define ourselves and establish our belief systems and commit ourselves to action and to change. As citizens and consumers and members of communities, if we only knew, we could accomplish what needs to be done. It is time for a bloodless coup, the taking back of power and authority from central corporatist political and economic institutions and its reinstatement in local communities and in individuals. To bring it about, we need only accomplish these four daunting tasks:
The cost of not knowing is the end of our world. It's too great a cost to pay, and the answer, if we use the power of knowledge, is within our collective reach. |
 Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back. The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity. The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.  Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs. What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.  Yesterday the University of New South Wales
predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic
'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect
solar energy and
use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m
square
array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the
households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the
entire country's energy.This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy. The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads". Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about? |
 A few interesting articles on innovation, knowledge and the future of business - worth a read:
|
 In a recent
post
I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge
management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple,
intuitive tools consisting of:
On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on people's PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people need to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the ones supplied by their employer -- doesn't this suggest it's the tools that need 'improving', not the users and the processes they use? I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade. I wrote the other day about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell's study of why paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect and honour our most established 'information behaviour' -- the shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research (now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them 100%. Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and industries, are these fundamental 'knowledge worker' behaviours and needs:
I'd start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical workspace. We need a Workspace Tool that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the 'arrow' cursor with a 'hand' cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot more flexible. The 'hand' needs to be able to pick up and move a document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be able to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently (so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any document anywhere in a stack of documents. The 'hand' needs to be able to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send any copy of the document to any number of other people (without opening another 'application') and to 'permission' the document to identify who else can 'subscribe' to it -- the set of people who they will allow entry to this virtual workspace to access it. Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of 'virtual' space by doing away with the 'filing cabinet' -- that horrible black hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead, we would 'save' the entire workspace, with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again, we would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a 'clean' new workspace. This tool would need to be indifferent to the document's format -- whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other 'recorded conversations' would need to be seamlessly accommodated just like any other document. There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as child's-play, and will probably require software designers to start from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar 'file management' tools on most computers. OK, that's a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec for the tool. Let's go on to annotation. I've seen some limited annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that 'labels' each user's notes and/or changes in a publicly-accessible and centrally-controlled document. MS Word has some such functionality in its 'edit mode'. E-mail uses blacklining or indenting to create 'threads' of consecutive commentary. And wikis take it to the next step -- collaboration -- but at the cost of not distinguishing which individuals contributed and changed what, which requires enormous trust. All of these are forms of annotation. But you have to admit they're pretty clumsy. Again, let's look at how it happens in the physical world, and emulate that. For short additions we use the carat and write above the line. We cross out, without eliminating legibility, to indicate deletion. We use the margins, and, if that isn't enough, a separate page with a numbered reference for commentary and longer additions. We may use post-its for the same purpose, or for personal notes pertinent to the document. There are three reasons this is much easier with a pencil and paper than on a laptop. The first is flexibility -- by writing smaller or at an angle we can squeeze a lot of changes into a small area, and we can use graphics as well as text. And we can move stuff around within the document easily. The second is recognizability -- we can tell by the handwriting whose changes are whose. The third is comparability -- we can put two pieces of text side-by-side to compare them or see if they're compatible as we decide what edits or annotations to make. How could we do this in a simple, intuitive way on a laptop? This is much more challenging because of the different native formats of all the documents we annotate. I suspect any intuitive Annotation Tool would need to quietly convert each document to a bitmap in the background. It would also need to pre-set the user's annotation 'voice' -- using some distinctive font, typestyle, textstyle and/or font/background colour to set off the annotations from the rest of the document. It would use the pencil, rather than the hand or arrow, as the cursor symbol. It would need a simple 'insert or comment' functionality that would automatically expand the available space -- exactly at the point of insert -- to contain all that the user wanted to add. That functionality would include a simple freeform drawing tool for graphics. The tool would need a 'mark to delete' functionality that didn't obliterate what was proposed for deletion. It would need a 'replace' functionality that combined the 'insert' and 'mark to delete' functions. It would need a 'highlight' function. It would need a 'move' function. It would ideally need a 'cross-reference' function that would allow the annotator's inserts and comments to dynamically link to another place in the document, or a section of another document. The key again is simplicity and intuitiveness. When the user places the 'pencil' cursor in a space and starts drawing or typing, the tool would automatically interpret this as an 'insert or comment'. Click and drag would first 'highlight', and then if the user started drawing or typing it would be treated as a 'replace', whereas if the user hit the 'delete' key it would 'mark to delete' and if the user then moved the pencil cursor elsewhere in the document and hit the 'insert' key it would leave a numbered flag at the original point and move the highlighted content to the new location. The key sequence 'cf.' could activate the 'cross-reference' function. No menus, no special function keys to remember. In fact, this simple analogue to the pencil could even replace the word processor and html composing tool for all but the most sophisticated document preparation. For what is composition beyond starting with a blank page, and successively inserting, replacing, deleting, moving, annotating and cross-referencing?  Even
if this Annotation Tool isn't able to interpret and spruce up the
hand-drawn graphics into more professional form, as long as it is able
to compress the annotated document to a reasonable file size for
storage and transmitting to others, its product could become the
ubiquitous standard format in which virtually all documents are
maintained on our computers. And most important, the
Workspace Tool and the Annotation Tool together could obviate the need
for most of us to ever print out anything in hard copy. So not
only would we save a lot of paper, we'd no longer have to worry about
page size, page cutoff or printer compatibility.As I've mentioned before, I think UXGA technology is also essential to getting us to this state, since it allows the user to review, without eyestrain or scrolling, two complete pages side-by-side on the screen. I also think significant productivity improvement will only come when the third 'layer' in the chart above -- social networking applications that allow us to identify relevant contacts, connect to them powerfully, simply and virtually, and share our permissioned content with them -- have been built on top of these newly-improved personal content management applications. Only the three 'layers' of tools working together can enable powerful, context-rich virtual conversations, so that Dr. Nonaka's famous 'virtuous cycle' of knowledge creation (pictured just above right) can finally become a reality. And then, decision-makers will no longer be able to blame awkward and inappropriate technology for being uninformed. |
(Fourteenth of fifteen*
instalments of
the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise. ) "Find a need and fill it".
I have heard this quote from no fewer than a dozen successful business
leaders. Ted Rogers, son of the inventor of the alternating-current
radio tube (that allowed radios to be powered by electricity), and one
of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs in his own right, recognized
a need for more varied radio and television programming in Canada, so
he bought up some new and very inexpensive licenses, for FM radio
stations (when there were no FM stations and few FM radios), and for
Cable TV distribution (when there were very few cable distributors or
customers). Ted usually starts his speeches with the six-word quote
that began this paragraph.Entrepreneur Magazine lists 'find a need and fill it' as Rule #1 for business start-ups. Chuck Frey's 'Innovation Tools' says these six words lie at the root of any business success. It's the most important business advice you can give. But what does this mean? It means that every successful enterprise's offerings (products and/or services) meet four criteria:
The key to doing this is in research, the difficult, time-consuming (but usually inexpensive) process of discovering the who, what, when, where, why and how of unmet needs. There are two kinds of research: Secondary research entails reading and browsing online to gather information that has already been published about the market, and need, and the possible solutions to it. Primary research entails talking to people directly to answer these questions, gathering unpublished information and intelligence. Successful needs identification usually stems from primary, not secondary research. How do you go about doing this? To some extent it will depend, of course, on what the business idea is. You're going to have to be creative and patient and methodical in solving the all-important problem of identifying what the market needs, which is not already being satisfied by existing products and services. That means you're going to have to take the time to learn a lot about the marketplace, and about customers. Here are some ideas to get you started:
|
Last evening I had dinner with the delightful
Rob Paterson, and we gabbed on for the better part of three hours
about
a myriad of different topics near and dear to our hearts. I had never
met Rob before in person, but I already knew him as a friend from
reading his blog and our written exchanges. 
I just got off a Skype VoIP conversation with