Tom Graves / Tetradian

Whilst working on a previous post on rights and responsibilities, I needed to hunt out the original of a phrase attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. A quick search brought me to Jone Johnston Lewis’ ‘Women’s History‘ site, which showed me that the correct quote is “mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention”. What I’d written was close enough, I guess – especially as I was only paraphrasing it anyway.

But what then caught my eye was this longer quote:

The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist — a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children — a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.

The anthropologist’s eye indeed – perceptive, insightful, yet also respectful of ‘the Other’. Almost the exact antithesis, in fact, of so many of the self-styled advocates of ‘gender-liberation’ that I’ve had the misfortune to deal with for most of my adult life. Where Margaret Mead had argued that the core principle would have to be that “every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man”, instead far too many feminists and self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men both then and since have patently believed that the only way to ‘liberate’ a woman was to enslave a man – and preferably via as much pain and prejudice as was practicably possible. In short, their method for reducing gender-violence was to increase it as much as they could: and then, when that didn’t work – because it doesn’t, and can’t – keep on ratchetting up the pain in the relentless pursuit of Other-blame.

This mistake affects different countries in different ways. Australia is perhaps one of the worst: for example, for the first ten years that I was there, the Melbourne newspaper The Age never published a single piece that was overtly respectful of men as a gender; and for the next decade, although such items did occasionally appear, they would each invariably be juxtaposed with another much larger article stridently reaffirming the ‘truth’ of the inherent evils of men. As I discovered whilst I was helping two of my lesbian friends recover after they’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight, the domestic-violence agencies defined violence as inherently ‘male’: there was no support available for lesbians (unless they blamed a man – my friends didn’t and wouldn’t, and were firmly told to go away because they were ‘rocking the boat’…!), and certainly no help for any man at all – even though the unlaundered hard-data showed that men were (and still are) the majority of domestic-violence victims in that country. And in my home state it was (and I believe still is) not merely a dismissable but criminal offence for a male primary-school teacher to comfort a crying child. All of this in the name of so-called ‘gender equality’…

Again in Australia, it was clear that many if not most of the ‘pro-feminist’ men I came across were not pro-women at all – in fact far from it, in several cases I personally knew. Instead, they were either lost in a vaguely-Marxist delusion that “it is impossible for one to have more without others having less” – and hence attacked men-as-a-gender (or all men other than themselves and their co-religionists, to be precise) under the mistaken belief that this would somehow automatically make things better for women (it doesn’t) – or else were still obsessively trying to hurt men-in-general as ‘payback’ for childhood hurts from other boys (which is a seriously dangerous form of self-dishonesty). It’s true that I did meet a few ‘pro-feminist’ men who genuinely were pro-women – but in every case they understood exactly Mead’s point that to be ‘pro-women’ we must also be ‘pro-men’. The blunt fact is that the only way that works is to create a frame in which everyone wins – otherwise everyone loses.

It’s not much better in Britain – there’s still the same massive dishonesty about domestic-violence, for example. In so many ‘Western’ countries, the main result of so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in employment has been to re-entrap women back in the same paid-workforce mess as men – a feminist tragedy of epic proportions, given that the main aim of the women’s movement for much of the previous century was to get women out of the paid-workforce, and free up at least some part of the community to repair the ongoing damage created the myopic self-centredness of the ‘money-economy’. (The real need, then and now, is to challenge the inanity and insanity of that economic model – not merely argue about who should or should not have the ‘right’ to not be enslaved in it!)

The Latin countries – for all their complexity and chaos – seem somehow to have a much better understanding of what gender-equality really means in practice, and to me seem much more human overall. In Portugal, for example, it was a huge relief to find it was considered normal for me to play mime-games and visual jokes with small children in their family and social settings; by contrast, back in Australia it was frequently assumed that, as a middle-aged man, I must be some kind of dangerous sexual-pervert if I merely smiled at a child in the street. Which hurts, a lot, that aggressive, pointless, baseless “exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in … the most engrossing, delightful care of young children”: a human, natural smile is merely an expression of the human need to be in and part of – rather than enforced apart from – the society that I’m in. In other words, as Mead put it, ”a man … who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person”.

The sad tragedy is that so much of feminism started out from a drive towards a true equality, but somehow lost its way in a paediarchal flight into a blame-filled fantasy, an increasingly-desperate addiction to ‘Other-blame’ as a means to evade responsibility in any form. Even now, forty or fifty years later, so much of it is still rampantly and obsessively anti-male, even rabidly sexist at times in the worst possible way. Yet it doesn’t work: and the reason why it doesn’t work is that too many feminists have forgotten the simple fact that, just like women, men are human too. Equality cannot truly exist for anyone unless all of us are considered equally human – with all that that implies.

Margaret Mead never forgot that fact: it’s one of the reason I value her work and life so much – and likewise those other rare, amazing and courageous women alongside whom it’s sometimes been my great privilege to work. Yet what strikes me most about Mead, I suppose, is her simple humanity:

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

Contrast that brief sentence, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher’s inane assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. I don’t think anyone but Mead could have described the human condition and the true nature of society any better or more poignantly than that.

Interesting insights indeed.

In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.

And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) [later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.

The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ’shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.

Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.

It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.

Let me explain.

In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.

Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:

Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.

More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ’social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.

You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…

Read more…

One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of  ’cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is.

The comment that started it off was from Ric Phillips. (I’ve trimmed it slightly, but you can see the original here.)

The innovations that led to mini-computers led to the increasing importance of information processing based on the technology’s ability to capture and model transactions (atomistic events). It really did change the nature of work and organisations and made a new kind of information available.

It wasn’t really the advent of PCs that changed things. If the information about the world that could be stored in them and used had not changed radically they would have simply replaced the niche occupied by terminals. But they allowed people to simulate sheets of paper and type writers. And spreadsheets – which were existed prior to software and were done on very large sheets of paper. Later came sound files, photographs, building designs, industrial machinery, complex electronics (like audio mixing decks) and a thousand other things that are now simulated in software.

In this wave computers became personal productivity tools. The changes to how personal productivity expressed itself in our lives when assisted by the new ‘virtual’ things PCs could provide is what changed our jobs, our professions and be extension our lives.

The internet started out as an extension of publication and communications models that already existed. But (in this case much more slowly that in previous transformations) our activity on the internet started to capture large amounts of information that previously wasn’t subject to computation – social information, information about opinions, subjective value, and what we might call (tentatively) knowledge.

There are intersecting trends (consumerisation for example). But mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on are all converging to create a new domain of information – information that allows us to model and manipulate in computers new and extremely complex things. Once again this will transform organisations. But this time maybe even whole societies.

I don’t see this as an impending disaster. Our world is changing again. As a strategic profession EAs need to get their heads around this. We are leaving the era of ‘information processing’ and ‘ICT’ and entering the era of social computing and Knowledge Technology.

Reading it again, I now realise that this critique has completely missed the point: all it’s doing is extolling the virtues of each of the transformations in technology, yet seemingly ignoring any possibility that there might also be vices associated with those virtues. Yes, each of those transformations are real and valuable to some context, and that is indeed a key driver for change. Yet the change itself is not the risk, and neither is the technology: it is the dependence on that technology that creates the risk.

So, as I put it in my response, I strongly agree that “mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on” are not in themselves an impending disaster. The same applies to their initial impact on organisations and “maybe even whole communities” – in general I see those impacts as desirable, even if certainly not something we can ‘control’.

What does worry me is what happens next. As an EA I’ve spent many months at clients tracking down all those small private-to-a-workgroup spreadsheets and databases and log-files and the like that were a) business-critical and b) unmaintained, undocumented, not backed up, inherently fragile [such as trying to use MS Access as a multi-user database, which it was never designed to do], unregistered, and in many other ways a real business risk. Whenever some key person changed jobs, or a single hard-drive failed, or a sysadmin triggered an automated application-upgrade, or any other of a myriad of seeming-trivial events, that business-unit would literally lose that part of its mind – and an entire business-process, affecting an entire cross-functional workstream, would grind to a halt until someone could work out what had gone missing and how to set up yet another kludged workaround.

When the business-application is non-critical, kludges usually don’t matter: it’s how people learn, it helps get things done, and it’s exactly what ’shadow-IT’ is for. The new mobile technologies and the like are brilliant for this – just as spreadsheets and single-user databases were (and still are). Everything’s fine as long as they’re essentially used in the same way as Lego bricks or a Meccano set or the like – a ’serious toy’ that can be used to knock out a quick prototype to test out an idea, or perhaps even to keep around as a vaguely-useful tool and talking-point. And as long as they’re used for that kind of purpose, it shouldn’t matter much when they do fail – especially if we can use that failure as a way to learn what to do differently next time. In other words, we accept failure as part of the deal – it’s ’safe-fail’.

But don’t try to use a ’serious toy’ for anything that’s business-critical. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s simply not ‘fit for purpose’: they’re not robust enough, resilient enough, agile enough, secure enough, and so on – which means that as a system we cannot set them up to ’safe-fail’ in such a context. Sure, you could use Lego to build a house (it’s been done), or Meccano to build a bridge (that’s been done, too), but the effectiveness of doing so is questionable at best, especially over the longer term.

It’s the ‘-ilities’ that usually matter most in architecture. The functional requirements for a system are usually much the same at any scope or scale, but the qualitative or so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are what will usually make or break the system in practice. Building an IT system that can handle half a dozen strictly-sequential requests in half an hour or even half a minute is relatively trivial; building one that can handle thousands or even millions of parallel, interleaving, fragmented, potentially-incomplete requests every second is not trivial at all; and yet the functional requirements are essentially the same. That’s the difference between a ’serious-toy’ prototype, and serious engineering with serious architecture and serious service-management and support behind it.

What we have right now in mobile-computing, ubiquitous-information and cloud is a whole bunch of serious-toys desperately pretending to be more than they are, and – more worryingly – being sold and used as if they’re more than they are. Sure, the function is there – but that’s easy. It always is. Getting them beyond that ’serious toy’ stage is not easy – and because it’s hard work to get there, it hacks into the short-term profits, too, so it’s not exactly popular amongst the money-obsessed.

So we have here all the ingredients for a ‘perfect storm’: more and more of individual people’s lives and livelihoods being placed onto platforms that are inherently unstable and unsustainable, because little or none of the work to make them stable and sustainable is as yet in place or even in progress. If you’re not already seriously worried about what will happen when large chunks of our society literally lose their collective mind and memory through the failures of these kludged-together toys, you’re not thinking hard enough about the architecture of the enterprise… 

The lessons of history are plain to see, and it’s also plain to see that the level of unaddressed risk has been raised each time, with even the earliest-period risks still not fully addressed even now. You Have Been Warned?

Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’:

It’s a story as old as the IT department: New technology arrives in the market, it makes some type of work easier to accomplish, the business asks for it, and IT reacts and delivers it. Not always however, and usually somewhat slowly. It was this way with PCs, it was this way with the Internet, and now IT is faced with what is turning out to be a veritable perfect storm of technology and social change. …

Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.

For once I’m going to stand firmly on the side of the IT-folks on this one – because no matter how wonderful this looks right now, this is not good news at all. Looking at this with a futurist’s eye, I’m wondering how long it will take before we wish we could put the genie back into the bottle… because what I’m seeing here is a full-on disaster-in-the-making. Or rather, a double disaster-in-the-making, given how much this will interact with the ongoing disaster that is ‘cloud-computing’…

One of the first lessons any futurist learns is to look back at history, to seek out any equivalent occurrences in the past. And the blunt fact is that we’ve been here before… not just once, but several times already. Each time that we came back to the same place – if perhaps from a slightly different direction – it’s clear that the fundamental lessons were not learned, in fact were wilfully ignored; and each time it took a lot of effort, a lot of skill, and a lot discipline, to tidy up the mess – just in time for the next batch of overly-excited idiots to trash the place all over again. This is the dirty end of Gartner’s ‘hype-cycle’: someone has to tidy up the mess. And yes, “it’s a story as old as the IT department”, because in every case so far, that ’someone’ has been the much-derided IT department – and also enterprise-architecture, in its broader sense, beyond IT alone.

Go back sixty years or so, to the first beginnings of mainframes and ‘big computing’. Watch the hype-cycle at work: slow adoption, then a huge take-off in ‘data-processing’ (we didn’t get round to calling it IT until quite a bit later). It will solve every business problem! Control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (COBOL, the IBM-360 architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Twenty years later, it’s the mini-computer boom. It will solve every business problem! Now even medium-sized businesses can control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except that it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (the C language, the Digital PDP-series architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Ten years later, we get the microcomputer revolution. It will solve every business problem! Now you too can control the world, right here on your desktop! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (disk-formats, file-formats, data-architectures, the IBM-PC architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Yup, you’ll be seeing the pattern here. The exact same sequence applied to the rise of the internet ten years later, the web five years after that (with a merry little hiatus called the Dot.Com.Bomb), the rise of cloud over the past few years, and now the rise of Hinchcliffe’s mobile IT or ‘CoIT’. In every case, there’s the same wild hype, the initial push from outside the IT-department (as ’shadow IT’) which gets the basic idea going to point where it’s usable.

(And to be fair, if that push hadn’t happened, those new developments would probably never have been usable: as Hinchcliffe implies, it’s actually quite rare that innovations arises from within the IT department itself. Because that isn’t it’s job: IT’s real job, unfortunately, is to tidy up the mess that will inevitably follow…)

In every case we see the same exuberance… then the slowly-dawning awareness that it isn’t quite as simple as that. It turns out that there’s a lot of work that’s needed in order to get standards happening – otherwise the new ‘revolution’ turns out to be something that can’t be shared, which means that the whole thing fizzles out quite quickly because we need that sharing to happen. We need clear standards for hardware, software, data-architectures, information-architectures, interchange protocols and much more besides. We need distinct disciplines around requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, quality-management, service-management and a whole swathe of other areas. And all of those, it’s now clear, need to allow for customisation, agility, security, versatility, adaptability, resilience and the like – none of which are easy to balance with conventional ‘control’-style disciplines.

So here I am, looking at the rise of Hinchcliffe’s ‘CoIT’ – particularly cloud-computing and mobile-apps. And what I’m seeing is an architectural disaster waiting to happen, if not unfolding right before our eyes:

• security – where is it? does it exist at all? (I’ve seen lots of hype and promises, but not much reality as yet)
• file-formats – half the iPad apps I’ve seen seem to embed their data actually within the app itself – they don’t even have a file-format other than perhaps plain-text or unstructured PDF
• interchange-formats -if they have a file-format at all,  most of the apps seem to rely on unpublished proprietary file-structures with no means to enable exchange between different apps, whilst cloud-providers will often deliberately make it difficult to exchange, so as to enforce ‘lock-in’
• escrow – information-lifetimes range between seconds and decades – yet no-one seems to be thinking beyond a year or more at most, and no-one at all seems to be planning for what happens when a cloud-provider or app-provider goes bust – which they will, often (over the long-term at least), and often very expensively
• system-standards – where are they? do they exist at all? – we seem to back in the worst days of early microcomputing, where just about every man-and-his-dog-in-a-garage could and did create an entirely different architecture for everything, often intentionally incompatible with everything else

I could go on… and on… and on… there’s no shortage of other nightmare-level architectural risk-factors that aren’t being addressed at all. Other than by the much-maligned IT-department, that is (who unfortunately tend to be able to see only the IT-related risks, which represent only a relatively small proportion of the whole); or by the few enterprise-architects who actually do think about whole-of-enterprise scope (and who are mostly derided, by the hype-merchants and their ilk, as doomsayers who’ve lost the plot). Not funny… Oh well…

Yes, it’s true that the excitement (or the oft-forlorn hope that it will finally be better this time?) is what gets people going to create new ideas; so yes, the exuberance does matter. Hence, in turn, I suppose, the hype does matter too. And safe-fail experiments are also always a good idea, because they show us where things will break but without causing much damage in the process. ‘Safe-fail’ can get quite extreme, too: for example, think of the buildings in a fireworks-factory, with very solid walls, very lightweight roofs – because when you know there’s a high risk that things can go badly wrong, you can indeed design for that fact. Yet there are also many types of structures that we can’t allow to fail: anyone who’s lived through a major earthquake or major storm-event will know that fact firsthand… Architecturally we need to be able to tell the difference between those two extremes, and design accordingly.

Yet that’s exactly what’s not happening here with cloud or CoIT: architecture of any valid kind, it seems, has all but been abandoned in the usual wild rush towards The Next Best Thing… So might it not be wise to take a brief pause for thought at this point, before we rush headlong into yet another insanely-expensive IT-disaster? Or is that too much to ask of anyone whilst the hype is in full flow?

Development of new ideas, processes and practices will always be a social process, and always somewhat messy.

To enable that development to happen, we need social conditions that can support it – and screen out behaviours that prevent it.

Those social conditions can best be described in terms of policy, which from my experience I would summarise as follows:

The debate needs to be respectful of the process – the fact that, by its nature, much of the work must pass through periods of inherent uncertainty. For example, see my Sidewise post ‘On innnovation, foundations, scaffolding and Portakabins‘ for some suggestions on how to handle this.

[Update in response to comment #1 below - many thanks to Paul Jansen for the critique]
The debate needs to be respectful of emotion – the fact that, by its nature, development and debate is inherently challenging, and will hence trigger many different emotions as positions and views are put forth, defended, argued, abandoned and so on. We need to ‘play fair’, ‘be reasonable’, allow ourselves and others to make mistakes, to stumble, to get things ‘wrong’, to feel embarrassed yet still feel safe in being embarrassed, yet also to keep moving towards the desired or emergent aim.
[end of update]

The debate needs to be rational – by which I mean an ability and willingness not only to test the internal logics of the ideas in scope (which in some cases may not follow simple ‘true/false’ binary-logics, by the way), but also to move outside of one’s own assumptions, theories and beliefs.

The debate needs to be honest – by which I mean that each party will need to focus strongly on facing their own personal challenges from the requirements for respect and rationality, both of each other and of respect to the ideas themselves.

The debate needs to exclude all forms of violence and abuse – or at least, given the realities of social interactions in often-challenging circumstances, that all parties in the debate must actively address and minimise these concerns to the maximum extent possible, both within themselves and with and/or from others. (The more positive form of this point is that we should always aim maximise each person’s ‘ability to do work’ in the respective context: see my ‘Manifesto on power and response-ability in the workplace‘.) ‘Violence’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to prop oneself up by putting others down (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, putting self down to prop others up); ‘abuse’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to offload responsibility onto others without their engagement or consent (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, taking responsibility from others without their engagement or consent). This requirement was famously summarised by Bob Sutton in ‘The No-Asshole Rule‘:

Two tests are specified for recognition of the asshole:
1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than themself?

If we wish to be engaged in meaningful debate, it is the responsibility of each of us to uphold that policy to the best of our ability.

In my own case, I challenge myself constantly on that policy. I know that, like everyone else, I will often be ‘wrong’ about some aspect of application of an idea; I know that, like everyone else, I will never have sufficient complete, accurate and final information needed to make concrete, unchallengeable decisions; and I know that none of this process is easy, for anyone.

It is clear, however, that some people, for various reasons such as excessive ego, assumed ‘authority’ or mistaken notions of ‘possession of the truth’, seem to believe themselves to be exempt from such policy, and instead believe that they have the ‘right’ to override others in any way that they wish. The result in each case is failure of the debate, and damage to or destruction of the development in scope – a circumstance from which everyone loses.

It is therefore our unfortunate but necessary responsibility to exclude such people from debate, until such time as they can demonstrate that they are able to hold to that policy.

In some cases we can do so by removing ourselves from the debate: I have had to do so quite often in discussions on LinkedIn, for instance, where there are all too many infamous examples of ‘debate-destroyers’.

Yet in other cases – and a personal weblog is one of them – there is no way to withdraw, and hence the only option is to explicitly exclude the offender.  I’m glad to say that over the past couple of years I have only been forced to do so here on two separate occasions, with two different people: yet it needs to be understood that it unfortunately is necessary in each case, for everyone’s sake. It also needs to be understood that in each case it is solely that that person’s behaviour makes it impossible for the debate to continue: it says nothing about the person as such (a crucial distinction between what they do versus who they are).

Similar policies are in place elsewhere, such as this extract from one of the LinkedIn discussion-groups on enterprise-architecture:

If you are not willing to have a civil discussion, you will not be permitted to play in this educational playground to further the cause of EA. No one that attacks will be permitted to play. This is a healthy environment to exchange ideas … not to better your cause at the expense of others.

I would urge everyone to consider and apply such policy on their own weblogs, on their Twitter-conversations, and everywhere else where difficult discussions need to take place.

This one’s for Oscar Berg, who this morning sent out the following Tweet:

My best ideas that I use at work are born outside of office hours. Who owns these ideas?

I commented on my reTweet that this was a “key fail of possession-economy”. It’s actually much more serious than a mere ‘fail’, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. First, some more follow-on Tweets from Oscar as he mused further on his experiences:

With social media people have tools that can serve as evidence that they got an idea outside of work before they used it at work

Here’s my idea: if my ideas are free & available for anyone to use, noone can own them -> I can use them as well for whatever purpose

Organizations are obsessed with owning ideas & knowledge

Enterprises should focus on becoming the best environments for ideas to be born, grow and successfully be brought to the market

RT @tdebaillon: “Claiming to own an idea is a political matter, a will to stay in control-and-command logic”

RT @EskoKilpi: “attribution is the new ownership” #ideas

This is indeed a question of ownership – and a highly political one at that, as Thierry de Baillon explains above. Perhaps the key point here is that there are two fundamentally different concepts of ownership: possession, and stewardship (the latter sometimes referred to, perhaps more usefully, as responsibility-based ownership).

Read more…

Another of those first-thing-in-the-morning ideas, which arose in part from a conversation on social-architectures that I’ve been having with gift-economy maven Alpha Lo.

Our whole economy is built around the idea of possession, and exchange of possessions; yet what do we really possess?

Things? Not really – a point made all too evident by the phrase “you can’t take it with you”…

Ideas? We don’t even know where they come from, so the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a bit moot anyway.

Relationships? They only exist when maintained by both parties, and they usually fail if anyone tries to possess them, so that option doesn’t work either.

Faith? Hope? Belief? A more likely kind of ‘possession’, though it tends to break down for the same reasons as for relationships.

What else?

The only themes I could find were time and responsibility.

We each have a certain amount of time. We have no idea how long that might be, or what will happen in that time, but it belongs to us alone. We can give our use of that time to someone else – hence all the mess of ‘employment’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘familial duties’ and the rest – but we can’t give the time itself to anyone else. It’s our possession alone: our responsibility as to what we do with it.

And we do each have our own responsibility, as ‘response-ability’ – our ability to choose appropriate responses within and to the context. Through responsibility, and through our responsibilities, we express who we are in what we do, how we think, how we relate, what we choose.

We possess our time, and our responsibility. They possess us. Everything else seems to be an option.

Comments/opinions, anyone?

Still doing catch-up, but here it is – another week’s-worth of tweets and links, in the usual categories, with a couple of extras, all after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:

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Urgently need to do a catch-up on the ‘week in tweets’ series: I’m running almost four weeks behind, which is not good – many apologies.

Usual categories and a couple of extra items, anyway, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:

Read more…

Another week gone by, running late again, but we do have the usual collection os Tweets and links. More after the ‘Read more…’ link:

Read more…