 Because I played hooky from last Saturday’s best links of the week, I have a bumper crop this week, a veritable del.icio.us list. So I’ll keep the commentary to a minimum: Business: Politics:
Science: Techie Stuff: Just Astonishingly Good Writing: Lots more next Saturday. The image at the top of this post is a poem called Swan and Shadow written 35 years ago by John Hollander. It is not only moving and inspiring in its own right, it is crafted in the shape of its subject. Absolutely brilliant, a new art form. Thanks to reader Ethan Timm for the link. |
October 22, 2005
A Del.icio.us List
October 21, 2005
Hurricane Stan, Darfur, Niger and the Forgotten Victims of Disaster
 Hurricane Wilma hits Yucatan at 1:15 ET Friday October 21
In this, the year when Time’s Person of the Year absolutely must be Mother Nature, we have seen astonishing outpourings of support to the victims of the Pacific Tsunami and (except for the US government) to the victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Belatedly, again due to national government incompetence, we can expect significant aid to get through in the end to the victims of the Kashmir earthquake. We can expect the same for Hurricane Wilma. But in the meantime, this year has produced a lot of natural and man-made disasters for which the victims have been largely left to their own resources. Whole villages in Guatemala were buried in mud and have simply been abandoned because of Hurricane Stan. Even if rescue efforts could be fruitful at this late date, the ground is so impassible that relief workers are prohibited from entering some areas. The official death toll is around 800, probably significantly higher than the toll from Katrina, but there has been almost no coverage of this horrific disaster, and it is likely that actual human losses, including those in the buried villages, actually number in the thousands. The bulk of foreign aid for this disaster has come (!) from Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the genocide in Darfur continues unabated, with lots of hand-wringing from countries whose media have covered the event, but precious little action. The Janjaweed warlord militias in Darfur have been so emboldened by the impotence of the world to stop their atrocities that they are now attacking the troops of the corrupt and racist Sudanese government that put them in power in the first place (sound familiar)? The situation in Niger (the second poorest country in the world, where Saddam was purportedly trying to get uranium) is even worse, and the famine that has ruined that country has received almost no relief (Sweden again tops the list). Today 2.5 million people are on the brink of starvation. The drought and locust infestation, the worst in 15 years, has wiped out the crops on the already exhausted soils of this quickly desertifying nation (only 15% of the country remains arable, and that percentage is dropping each year). Malaria is endemic. In East Africa, sub-Saharan West Africa, and several Central American and Caribbean countries, the situation is not much better. Many countries are being ravaged by HIV/AIDS, suffer thousands of deaths needlessly from preventable diseases for which they cannot afford the medicines, or are being torn apart by civil wars and insurrections, some of them decades old. Why is it that we (a) cover some disasters in the media and not others, and (b) send aid to help with some disasters and not others? I would suggest that there are a number of factors that lead to this decision. Most of them are unfair:
Score each of the disasters mentioned above by these six criteria and you have a pretty accurate predictive model. Except for the novelty criterion, we can’t really blame the media. They generally respond to rather than drive public opinion in these matters. South Asian immigrants make up a substantial percentage of new Canadians, and were that not the case, the Canadian media would not have given nearly as much coverage to the Kashmir earthquake as they did. That coverage in turn embarrassed the Canadian government, and the Canadian banks and major charities, into providing and campaigning for a lot more disaster relief for the earthquake than would have happened if the identical earthquake had happened, say, in Central Asia or Africa or even mainland China. And a lot more than would have been the case a generation ago before that South Asian immigration grew into a torrent. This is why I don’t believe that governments should shrug off to individual taxpayers their responsibility to do their fair share to invest to prevent and relieve such disasters. Governments (aside from the bias of economic interest) are in a better position to objectively assess the relative need for aid and investment of the over 100 countries that suffered some kind of natural or man-made disaster in the last year, than we, with our individual prejudices, are. Many “not my bother’s keeper”-spouting individuals, in fact, don’t believe we have any responsibility to help the victims of disasters elsewhere, even elsewhere in their own country. That’s why so many Americans were actually embarrassed at the amount of relief promised and given to the victims of Katrina by governments of other nations — if the shoe were on the other foot (if you’ll pardon the mangled metaphor) they wouldn’t lift a finger. I think governments that rely on their citizens to act to help those unfortunate through no fault of their own, and waffle and hedge and procrastinate (or put political conditions on their aid!) are a disgrace to humanity. The fact that some in such callous, skinflint governments claim to be deeply religious is more galling. Maybe I should consider moving to Sweden. [Just as an interesting aside, the CBC's research on the Hurricane Stan death toll indicated that the areas that had a local, community-based emergency plan fared much, much better than those that foolishly left it up to "higher authorities". El Salvador in particular has inexpensive local warning and evacuation processes, which is probably why its death toll from Stan was so low. One more indication that, in government, business and just about everything else, small is beautiful, and big is clumsy and arrogant.] |
October 20, 2005
Even More Thoughts on AHA!: Instruments of Learning, Discovery and Realization
 When I first thought up the idea for AHA! I envisioned a physical centre (or centres) that would attract (by reputation and by some of its physical assets and setting) some of the world’s best minds to address some of the world’s most intractable problems. Weekdays would be allocated to business problems, with companies and consortia paying a fee for the service. Weekends would be volunteer groups addressing broader social problems, at no charge, and with the experts from the weekday sessions encouraged to stay over and help deal with these broader issues. Focus was to be on complex problems, the ones that don’t lend themselves to well-established solutions and analytical thinking. Everything we produced was to be made available Open Source and Creative Commons licensed.
Over time my thinking has evolved, aided by ideas and influences from some very creative, talented and experienced people. When I last wrote about it I was shifting my thinking from ‘solutions’ to working models and from methodologies to guiding principles — principles like:
Principles seemed to be more robust than methodologies, which tend to be linear and rigorous. It seemed to me that complex problems needed a more flexible approach, and, if the right people were equipped with appropriate guiding principles and tools, I believed they could ‘co-design’ an optimal process along with the ‘solutions’. This approach is very much in line with the type of approach that the pundits say is needed in dealing with Wicked Problems. I was aware that AHA! teams working on various issues will need to draw on the Wisdom of Crowds: the team members will need to be diverse, bring different knowledge and perspectives, and be independent of each other (to prevent groupthink), and I wasn’t sure whether self-selection and self-management mechanisms for the team (like that used in Open Space) could ensure that. At the same time, I was openly worrying about whether corporations large enough to fund our ‘weekday’ programs (which we would be counting on to allow us to deal with the larger problems on weekends for free) would be sufficiently advanced in their understanding of complexity to appreciate why the more traditional approaches to business problem-solving (generally involving cross-functional internal management teams, external ‘experts’, and/or reliance on leaders’ previous experience or ‘gut feel’) simply didn’t work in complex situations — and therefore pony up money for a bold new approach. I also began to realize trying to ‘certify’ AHA! practitioners and sell AHA! services would be a laborious and long-term process. We would have to start very small and be very patient. What’s worse, could fledgling AHA! centres be resilient enough to command this much patience from practitioners and those who needed their services alike, when everyone is busy and the intractable problems are crying out to be solved now? Would they be resilient enough to survive even if (when) they made some early mistakes in the learning process. Would they even be resilient enough to fend off the landlords who called to say “Hey, when is this great idea of yours going to start making enough money to pay the rent?” I started thinking about other ways to identify, attract and mobilize people to work collaboratively on urgent problems. I was struck by the success of churches, community-based NGOs and other cellular organizations, many of which are principally focused on complex, social, intractable problems. I also thought about how MeetUp, working at the community level, was able to attract people locally to work on problems and to coordinate what they were doing with similar groups in other communities around the world. Perhaps, I thought, we shouldn’t try to identify, organize and certify people to run and participate and attend AHA! events — perhaps we should empower people, people who care, to do so themselves. You can probably see where I’m going here, but it took me awhile to see it: Rather than physical centres with certified AHA! practitioners, what if we reduced AHA! to its absolute essence: a set or ‘basket’ of capabilities, guiding principles, working models and tools that have been shown to work well in dealing with complex intractable problems. Here’s the obvious FAQ:
Now let’s get into some tricky terminology: I believe we need to avoid the use of terms like problem, solution, analysis, cause, system, process, and methodology. These terms are fine for simple problems, but don’t work for complex, intractable problems — oops, I mean complex intractable situations and issues. We need to start talking about “approaches to deal with and cope with” situations and issues. We need to look for patterns and correlations, and forget about causality (and blame). This is humbling terminology, but it’s important, because it defines what AHA! will, and cannot, do. We have to stop looking for solutions to intractable problems — they don’t exist. What do we call this ‘stuff’, this collection of intellectual capital — these capabilities, principles, models and tools? It’s not a ‘solution set’, because there are no solutions. I like the term instruments. With a set of musical instruments we can play a symphony. With a set of AHA! instruments for dealing with complex, intractable issues and challenges, perhaps we can save the world. So let’s suppose a bunch of people decide we have to do something about the health care system and the education system (everywhere on the globe). How might AHA! work? Well, presumably these issues/challenges/situations would readily be identified on the AHA! database and in MeetUp or whatever other tools (instruments) are used to identify them. People would ‘volunteer’ (no reason why some of the people couldn’t be paid under certain circumstances, but that convention will evolve over time, too, so let’s put the term ‘volunteer’ in quotes to include ‘paid volunteers’) to work on the issues they care about, and be connected to other volunteers who care about that issue in their community. Databases and other tools would also allow that fledgling cell to identify people working on the issue in other communities and on a cross-community level basis. This self-formed network would work out for itself what work it made sense for each cell to focus on, what additional people/knowledge/capabilities it needed to attract to the cell to be effective, and how to coordinate and collaborate and share knowledge with the other cells. What about the action plans when that work’s done, you ask? Well, every member creates her own. In the ‘realization’ of approaches to complex situations, there is no telling others what to do. As Presence says, “You cultivate a quality of perception that is striving outwards, from the whole to the part, so you ‘see from the whole’. You let the experience well up into something appropriate. In a sense, there’s no decision-making. What you have to do becomes obvious.” Once again, this approach draws on the knowledge of aboriginal peoples, and of nature. There, there is no hierarchy of command and control. When an issue arises, it is explored collectively by those who care about it, until an understanding emerges of what should be done. It is then up to each participant to take the responsibility to see that it is. After eight months of kicking this around, I think AHA! Instruments for a Better World, the Means to Get Things Done, is nearly there. |
October 19, 2005
My Take on Plamegate
 Ever since I called Judith Miller a heroine when she first went to jail, I’ve been reading what others have said about the grand jury investigation, most notably this wrenching self-investigation from the NYT staffers, and staying quiet. Today I think I finally know enough to (a) predict what’s going to happen and (b) comment on what all this (should have) taught us
I still think Judith Miller is brave, and that she did the right thing going to jail. I’m probably the only one in the world that still thinks so. Here’s my reasoning:
The principle is important. Whistle-blowers need to know the messenger won’t always be shot (or at least, they’ll take the crook with them). Miller is a second-rate journalist and a loose cannon, and a lousy poster-child for the US first amendment, but the one thing the NYT management did right in this case was to support her for not revealing her source. What the NYT did wrong was let Miller have far more autonomy in dealing with this situation than they should have (far more than any reporter should have). That is especially embarrassing after the Jayson Blair fiasco, and basically shows the NYT wasn’t following its own procedures. For them to admit they never bothered to second-guess why she refused to take the ‘you can testify’ clearance at face value is just bush league. That undermines the credibility of everything in the paper, which is the only real asset a newspaper has. It’s a sad day for the NYT. The next crime in this case is one that both Miller and the NYT were complicit in. That dates back to the initial reporting by Miller that gave unwarranted credibility to the existence of WMD in Iraq (or at least to suggestions Iraq was attempting to procure them). The crime is a consequence of what James Surowiecki explains so well in The Wisdom of Crowds — groupthink. When you work closely with a bunch of people for a long period of time under difficult circumstances you come to trust them, and to think like them. That’s what she did, genuinely expressing her concern about Iraq’s WMD potential or intentions based heavily on the sense of the team she was ‘embedded’ with. The very purpose of ‘embedding’ journalists is to elicit such groupthink, and both the NYT and Miller should have known that. Groupthink is excusable for us, perhaps, but not for a journalist. Embedding is simply an unacceptable and inexcusable limitation on journalistic freedoms, and no reputable newspaper should tolerate it, even if that means being ‘scooped’ on distorted news stories by refusing to be part of embedded teams. What were they thinking, to believe that somehow they would be immune to the propaganda such circumstances are designed to produce? Don’t they teach this in journalism school? So, to sum up, lessons learned:
And finally, my predictions, which I really, really hope are proved wrong:
The irony of course is that everybody knows Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, just as everybody knows Clinton lied about having sex with his intern. The fact that the consequences of that knowledge have been so different for these administrations says more about the mindset of the public than it does about either the presidents or the media. |
Will DVD Be the Death of Television?
 Several years ago there was a lot of discussion about ‘convergence’ — specifically how the functionality of PCs and TVs would converge until the two devices supposedly became indistinguishable. As usual, the actual change has been slower in coming than the pundits predicted, and what has happened has not been what was expected.
Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog (perhaps the only one in the blogosphere with a name more ironic than mine) has recently been writing about how much more important (some) TV content is than the actual appliance, with all its annoyances and unfortunate behaviours, and how DVDs and BitTorrent-type file-sharing technologies may finally render the TV appliance unnecessary. The USSR-style collapse of the more popular (still) of the two devices is not the ending that convergence-predictors foresaw, but it is now a very plausible one. It is becoming increasingly clear that people will pay money for good hardware and personalization (useful atoms) but not for software or content no matter its quality (useful bits). That may not be fair, and it may change, but that is the Internet culture and it is growing, not diminishing, even in the face of desperate and hapless efforts by software and content owners to subvert it. In a head-to-head competition between PC hardware and TV hardware, there is no competition. Everything TV has tried to do to improve — interactivity, crisper picture, more personalization of content access tools — is a pale imitation of what the PC does much better, and the PC is just beginning to evolve. I think it’s ironic that Dell has now started selling large-screen plasma TVs — as if we needed further proof of how utterly disconnected that company is from its customers and clued out about its industry’s evolution. I believe we are less than a decade from reaching the point when all software and all content (information and entertainment) will be file-shared and quickly and simply downloadable free of charge as soon as it is released. By that time there will be some revolutionary changes to hardware as well — it will get much smaller, faster, cheaper (though not free) and wireless, to the point that you won’t bother to keep any content on your personal devices at all (though we may all share our content peer-to-peer through our cast-off wire-anchored PCs, part of a huge distributed network of global file servers, data warehousers that we will be oblivious to, and which will interact only with other machines). The plunging price of hardware and bandwidth and the ubiquity of free content will perhaps, at last, awaken us to the abominably low value of most of this stuff, and the horrific amount of time we spend paying attention to it — and we may (we can only hope) rediscover the superiority of personal, self-created entertainment, conversation, live performances, imagination-provoking fiction, art and poetry, and contemplation of the real world on this side of the screen. But there will be some other implications, less important socially but more important economically. With the disappearance of advertising, current producers of media content will need to find another business model to fund their productions. That model may vary from a Gift Economy (many of the baby boomers will have retired, and may be willing to write and produce good quality entertainment for the sheer creative joy of it), to a personalization model (sell tickets to the live performance, with a chance to meet the cast afterwards, and give the taped version away free). Those who entertain but don’t perform live (studio musicians, authors who don’t do readings and Q&As, and animated film producers) will need to be more creative in financing their careers (such as teaching — long an admirable and accepted vocation for entertainers, and making customized products). It’s hard to say whether corporate sponsorships (mainstay of US public broadcasting), and product placement will remain viable financing mechanisms. Private ‘memberships’ are doomed to be circumvented, unless they are altruistic and (also like US public broadcasting) bestow no special ‘bit-access’ privileges. Overpaid superstars will be a thing of the past. The implications for media intermediaries (television and radio networks and print newspapers and other content aggregators) are more dire. These groups simply do not add enough value to justify their cost. I predict that unless they reinvent themselves (and they have shown themselves quite uninventive) they will soon go the way of ticket-punchers, tellers and bellboys (“thanks, I can look after that myself”). As for those big-screen plasma and flat-panel TVs, sell your shares now. We will each have our own personal screen (perhaps mounted on our eyeglasses, or rolled up around our shirtsleeve for easy carrying) customized as we like it — ‘group viewing’ will be accommodated by electing to share a screen view over wireless networks, as simply and ephemeral as sharing an instant message, whether you’re in the same room or on the other side of the globe. With the purpose of its main appliance gone, the function of the ‘family room’ will disappear, undifferentiated from the already useless ‘living room’. Perhaps this will usher in the age of the all-purpose ‘great room’ — kitchen, dining room and ‘social’ room in one, with the portable, wireless PC becoming more like an article of utility clothing than an appliance that needs room (or a room) of its own. The end of ‘scheduled-by-others’ programming will also change the organization of our day. The VCR tried to do that, but its poor design defeated it. Being able to watch/hear any content, any time, anywhere, will free us from the tyranny of setting aside scheduled time for anything, and allow us to reset our priorities. Though I may be a dreamer, I suspect that this will mean spending less time watching/hearing ‘canned’ content of any kind, and more time living here, now, in the real world. I think this because I’ve studied our propensity to do urgent, unimportant things before important, non-urgent things, and with no fixed schedule, the urgency of all ‘programming’ disappears. I read recently a study that showed that children weaned off television spent more time on the Internet, but also more time not in front of any screen, including less time playing video games. Kathy’s post talks about TV as an addiction, so perhaps kicking the TV habit helps break other addictions, or perhaps the rediscovery of the value of social interaction and imagination opens up more attractive alternatives. I recognize that some people are easily addicted to aspects of the Internet as well, but for some reason I find this less alarming — perhaps because it is at least less passive. So the end of the TV appliance, and its unpleasant associated behaviours, is likely to change to transform the information and entertainment ‘industries’, liberate us from wires and the requirement to be in any particular place (and free up our laps!), change the social dynamics of ‘group viewing’, alter the layout and use of rooms in our homes, eliminate our dependence on others’ schedules, and enable and encourage us to spend more time away from screens and in person-to-person social activities. Not a bad scenario at all, and one that perhaps signals the end of an era of astonishing infatuation with technology. (This article was posted Tuesday, Oct. 18 but did not get processed by Radio Userland until Wednesday Oct. 19. Cause of the problem is still being investigated.) |
October 17, 2005
Why is ‘Underdeveloped’ a Euphemism for ‘Poor’?
 The term “underdeveloped” is defined as “having a low level of economic productivity and technological sophistication”. These terms are in turn very subjective. “Economic productivity” is generally measured by GDP, which is actually a measure of the total price charged for all economic activity plus a measure of the aggregate number of hours worked for paid wages, and which has been completely discredited as a meaningful measure of economic well-being. “Technological sophistication” is a measure of how complex (and costly) technologies are, not a measure of their efficacy or value. Despite this dubious definition and distinction between “developed” and “undeveloped”, we in the “developed” West almost blindly accept these arrogant propositions:
It is almost ironic that this arrogance prevails at the same time the West is realizing that we are in fact “overdeveloped” — too much waste and pollution, and overuse of soil, water, land, and oil, among other things. It is impossible to wade into the discussions of how and why “underdeveloped” countries became full of misery, suffering, deprivation and abject poverty without getting into the political quagmire of the ‘clash of civilizations’. It is clear that there are at least three routes to this state, each of which has its share of examples from the current world map of poverty:
Some countries are burdened with more than one of these misfortunes. Indeed, it is not uncommon for local tyrants to work in cahoots with foreign exploiters. Saddam Hussein had it down to a fine art. Some of the “developed” world (notably North America — I don’t know enough about early European history to comment on their situation) actually began as exploited “underdeveloped” countries. The vast majority of the First Nations of the Americas were killed by genocidal European campaigns. After awhile the European settlers who stole their land got tired of their colonial status and used their isolation, familiarity with the new land and European technology to liberate themselves from their European exploiters, and become exploiters of other countries in their own right. But the answer to the plight of the “underdeveloped” nations is not more development. It is an end to exploitation, tyranny and overpopulation. These countries need to reclaim ownership of their own land and resources, and work in partnership with democratic nations to put in place the institutions of constitutional liberalism that foster democracy and prevent tyranny from taking hold. That ownership must, absolutely, be spread equitably among all the inhabitants of the country. That equity not only makes tyranny harder to take hold (less concentration of wealth means less concentration of power, and less motive for protecting inequitable wealth by unpopular means), it also allows communities to once again self-manage, instead of relying on foreign handouts (the same argument could also be applied in the poorer parts of “developed” nations), and such self-management and self-sufficiency encourages democracy and family planning (women who have large families in poor nations generally do so because children are the only asset they can afford). The point of this essay is that we need some new terminology: The terms “underdeveloped” and “developed” no longer make sense (if they ever did). The term “Third World” begs the question of why it is still called that when there is no longer a “Second World”. The term “West” is also inappropriate: “North” would be a more accurate geographical term for the more prosperous nations of the planet. Using the term “market economies” as synonymous with prosperous nations is no longer appropriate (some countries with such economies are horrifically poor). Nor is the use of the term “democratic” or “free” nation unambiguous — many apparent “democracies” are a sham and are decidedly “unfree”, and even “free” is a term fraught with judgement. I’m tempted to be mischievous and suggest we call the affluent nations the “overconsuming” world and the rest the “overexploited” world (exploited by those both inside and outside, and by exploding population). But somehow I don’t think I could get conservatives to use these terms. We could settle on “rich” and “poor”, except that many countries have an abundance of riches that none or few of its residents share in. We could use the Gini index to identify “rich, fairly distributed” nations from “poor or unfairly distributed” nations, but then we would have to include the US in the latter category. The UN uses the unfortunate term Human Development for the composite of three measures — income, education and life expectancy — and they are in fact the “overconsuming” nations. But this measure uses that term “development” again, and it ignores some very important quality of life measures (inequity, poverty, infant mortality, illiteracy — take a look at some of this shocking data). But perhaps quality of life isn’t what we’re really looking for here. What the UN calls “high HDI” countries are the ones we are usually referring to when we want to contrast them with the economically struggling nations. So I propose we replace “developed” and “underdeveloped” with “affluent” and “struggling”, and use the 55 “high HDI” countries, pictured in the map above in dark blue, to define which countries are “affluent”. An even better list would cut the “affluent” off at #37. That would eliminate all Latin American countries from the list. No African countries, and only Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and S.Korea among Asian countries, make the list. Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel are the only other non-European entrants. |
October 16, 2005
Why Google’s Business Model is So Revolutionary
 ìGoogleís not a real company. Itís a house of cards,î Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer allegedly said recently. His jealous remark is at least half true. What is it about Google that so mystifies every group that tries to analyze it? The more I study them, the more convinced I am that Google has a truly revolutionary business model, and are the most visible pioneers of the emerging 21st century Gift Economy. Microsoft, and the irresponsible brokers who keep flogging overpriced stocks based on unsustainable growth promises, and everyone else who owes their living to the Ponzi scheme that is the modern growth/market economy, should be very afraid. There is a giant gulf between Google and its investors. The investors, justifiably recognizing that Google is the most customer-obsessed (their #1 principle, even ahead of ‘doing no evil’) and innovative (a neat trick — the two rarely come together) company in the world, believe that that will necessarily translate into the greatest revenues and profits in the world. They’re mistaken. Google, meanwhile, behaves as if it really doesn’t care much about revenues and profits. Until recently, its two principal sources of revenue were (and still are) marginal and fragile: Advertising online, Google’s #1 revenue source, is a virtual oxymoron. As the economy moves from a supplier-driven to a customer-driven one, a revolution Google is helping engineer, advertising as a whole will be history, and Google’s advertising is no exception, notwithstanding their attempt to ‘qualify’ ads as relevant to each viewer. Its #2 revenue source is selling search tools to corporate customers. But the type of search tool that is needed for an Intranet is very different from the ‘popularity-based’ Google search technology that works so well in the complex Internet world. You can get a sense of this from Google Desktop, whose refreshing speed and ease of use is just a delight to its users, but which often doesn’t locate the precise document you were looking for nearly as deftly as it finds the Internet page you were looking for in a vastly larger haystack. But recently Google discovered there’s a third great source of revenue in today’s wildly inflated and delusional stock market: IPOs. I’m convinced that, more than anything else, Google went public because it gave them a ton of cash to do even more things for free for their customers — which is exactly what they’ve done since then, offering a never-ending stream of wonderful goodies. Far from a sellout to corporatist philosophy, with its IPO Google may have pulled off the biggest Robin Hood act in history. There are some who believe Google will be successful, ultimately, by realizing the promise of Web 2.0 — moving the focus of the 21st century worker from the desktop (documents on the hard drive) to the network (where everything is kept online). Indeed, Google has been pivotal in the advance of AJAX, the fusion of technologies that allow users to assemble a page of information from multiple web-based applications, much as MS Office allowed users to assemble a page of information from multiple desktop-based applications. I have long espoused the development of two simple desktop meta-applications — a document annotator that would let you do, electronically and intuitively, everything your pencil can do with manual documents, and a workspace manipulator that would do, electronically and intuitively, everything your hand can do in a physical office, saving, storing, moving, aggregating, receiving and sending stuff (the illustration above shows how these applications drive all our essential information processing processes). If there is any hope of getting the 80% of the population that are not power users of computer and Internet technology on board, the use of these tools must be made this simple and intuitive, and I believe these two meta-applications are the best way to accomplish this. But Google and Web 2.0 may offer another alternative — making the personal document, desktop and office disappear entirely. Instead of having a collection of documents on your desktop and in your ‘files’, Web 2.0 keeps all those documents out on the Web (subject to security and access permissioning rules that you set) as a designated, tagged subset of all the documents in the world on the Web. And instead of having an office that routes documents to files and mailboxes, you keep your ‘virtual’ office on Web 2.0, accessible anywhere anytime. With Web 2.0 the two meta-applications are still the same (we all understand the functionality of the pencil and the hand) but they move from the hard drive to cyberspace. Or perhaps you have the choice of either or both — the applications work the same regardless of where you choose to keep your stuff. But strategically the development of these applications is different if the primary locus of data processing is physically local on a hard drive or virtual. Google may be waiting to see which primary locus emerges — which will depend on legal, cultural, security and technological advances and developments we cannot yet predict. But Google surely understands that however this unfolds, Web 2.0 and future desktop applications are not going to be profit-making ventures. They will necessarily be Open Source. They will be gifts, from Google and others, to their beloved and grateful customers. Unfortunately, investors will eventually realize this, so it is unlikely that public offerings are going to provide Google with much more revenue. The money, as I’ve said before, is not in software and content, but in hardware and personalized applications (concerts and customizations). So how will Google make money? It won’t. Perhaps it won’t have to. Perhaps in a Gift Economy customers will be so delighted by Google’s innovations that they will volunteer their time to identify and develop the next generation of applications. Open Source institutionalized. Or perhaps we’ll find that, fundamentally, there are only so many applications for computer technology, and the Internet will become, like phone lines and pipelines, another utility, to be maintained more or less unchanged. But back to the revolutionary Google business model. Traditionally customers have needs, wants, and nice-to-haves. Needs they will pay ‘market’ value for. Wants they will pay modestly for, especially if they’re bundled with needs. Nice-to-haves they will not pay for at all, but they’ll take them, and may make differential purchase decisions based on them (if the needs and wants of two vendors are indistinguishable). The market economy is focused on needs, since they are the corporation’s bread and butter, the only source of reliable revenue and growth, and hence profit. Now enter Google. They fulfil needs, wants, and nice-to-haves, all free. So those of us on the leading side of the digital divide gratefully take all three, and we don’t even really differentiate between them (unless some of the nice-to-haves unduly complicate the application, in which case we don’t want them). Those on the other side of the digital divide get none of them, widening the divide to a chasm. The market understands none of this behaviour, since it doesn’t conform to any accepted business model. Google doesn’t really seem to care. They’re too busy doing what they do so well — delighting customers with valuable, intuitive, boldly innovative and expansive new products, on a scale that is the envy of every entrepreneur. There is one last ‘search’ frontier that Google has not yet conquered, however, and it could be Google’s biggest hit yet, and possibly generate significant revenue as well. Google is well established as the company that best helps you find what. And recently with Google Maps/Earth they are becoming established as the company that best helps you find where. What if Google is now working on becoming the company that best helps you find who? The company that becomes the expertise finders, the shared-interest finders, the companion finders, the people who, at last, will help us find, effectively and intuitively, the people we’re looking for, not just their stuff. And not just find them, but make sure they’re available (and if applicable affordable) and seamlessly put us in touch with them. If they could do that, even I might consider buying shares in the company. |
October 15, 2005
New Photos on Flickr
 Instead of the usual Saturday links-of-the-week (I think I’ve given my readers enough to read and think about this week!) I’ve put a full set of my photos of our daughter’s wedding up on Flickr. |
October 14, 2005
Making Healthcare Work: Principles, Rules, Actions
 It’s a great shame that my old schoolmate Mike Rachlis (we went to school together in Winnipeg) has to devote so much of his time and energy to countering the heavily financed misinformation campaigns that are trying to undermine Canada’s world class, universal, single-tier health care system, because he has some well-researched, innovative and proven ideas on how to make the Canadian system even better. For those unfamiliar with the Canadian situation, (mostly) US-based corporations are lobbying furiously to get our governments to abandon Canada’s public system and replace it with a US-style, two-tier, system, despite the fact that the US system provides most Americans (excluding the rich, overprivileged elite) with demonstrably poorer health care (Mike’s books have substantial data to back this assertion up), and are much less efficient and effective (health care costs consume 15% of US GDP compared to 9% in Canada, although millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and the bureaucracy of the US system is stifling, with paperwork consuming as much as 40% of spending, far more than in Canada, to the point the NYT recently moaned that many Americans were so overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of the system that it was interfering with the quality of the care they receive). The reason for this lobbying is obvious and self-serving: Big Pharma and Big Medicine make substantially higher margins selling into the American system, and they want to con Canadians into believing that they should want such a system as well. So waiting times (although comparable to those in the US) are trotted out as evidence that Medicare is broken and the government is necessarily less capable of running a healthcare system than greedy private corporations. The con is working — the Conservative party in Canada and in Alberta, always willing to help generous foreign corporations line their own pockets in return for fat campaign contributions — is helping out with the misinformation campaign. So Mike has to focus much of his attention to countering the lies with hard facts, and his wise advice for improving the effectiveness of the Canadian system through innovations (most, ironically, borrowed from American community experiments) have received pathetically little public attention. The media dumb down the debate to “public vs. two-tier private” systems (Canadians consistently and overwhelmingly prefer the former, despite the money spent to try to convince them otherwise), and, except for the short-lived Romanow report (which most governments praised, but clearly don’t understand, as they have implemented few of the recommendations other than committing more money to the system), there has been almost no discussion of how to make the system even better. Mike’s newest book, Prescription for Excellence: How Innovation is Saving Canada’s Healthcare System (the choice of “is saving” rather than “could save” was presumably deliberate), is his latest attempt to bring attention to some of the practices that have been applied in various communities around the world, and which, if adopted by Canadian communities, could put an end to any doubts that Canada’s system is a world class model for other countries. Notice the focus is on communities. What Mike is calling for is sharing of information and best practices, and coordination of community-based healthcare initiatives, not massive centralized systems. He understands that networks work much better than hierarchies, but laments the lack of effective community-based networks in healthcare worldwide. The book lays out the principles and rules for effective healthcare established by the US National Institute of Medicine’s groundbreaking 2001 Crossing the Quality Chasm report: Principles: Health care should be:
Rules: Health care processes should be redesigned in accordance with the following ten rules:
Mike builds on these principles and rules to suggest specific improvements to Canada’s health-care system, at the community level, in each of these eight critical healthcare system stress points:
The recommendations are extensive, well-considered, practical, innovative, not difficult to implement, and illustrated with examples of where they have been successfully used. The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is the lack of autonomy of the community-based heathcare providers and systems, their ability, once they have had ‘aha’ moments and identified improvements they intuitively know will work, to actually implement them, free from top-down and bureaucratic interference. Nothing could be more discouraging than knowing what you need to do, and not being allowed to do it. That, and, for Americans, dealing with the infuriating and pervasive Moral Hazard Myth. |
