Escapable Logic

I wrote the other day about the effects many of the new technologies have had on me. I am getting more involved in the greater community, to an extent that was unthinkable for me before. Fear and complacency were big reasons. Now I am not as afraid to get involved.

The site, Escapable Logic, presents another blueprint for how people and technologies are creating things that have not been seen before. Read about the campaign in a box. or how to raise $1 billion dollars for Dean. Or Minimalism. Its author, Britt Blaser, is demonstrating just what can happen to a complex political campaign when new tools allow ordinary people to self-organize. What is amazing is that, to a large extent, the Dean campaign is not fighting this. to me, that says more about them than any number of speeches. The next year will be interesting.

‘… To Dare Mighty Things …’

This article was written by Michael Cudahy, the President of Strategic Focus Communications, a group that helps organizations write, market, etc.. He has been involved in communications for Republican campaigns for 20 years and was the National Communications Director for the Republican Coalition for Choice.

Indicative of his skill as a writer, this is one of the best political tracts I have read in years. He describes the horrible effects that wedge politics have brought to this country. He writes of things that ALL of us who call ourselves Americans want. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

It was nice to read this article because it fits my own arc. My political views have become more and more left over the last few years. Partly because the neocons have moved the center so far to the right and partly because of the response of this Adminstrations deprecations of things I find important. In many ways I have been closer to moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats but I am far away from conservative Republicans.

I’d vote for a Teddy Roosevelt in a moment. Colin Powell held my attention before his turn as Secretary of State demonstrated his abeyance to the neocons. I am starting to believe that this election cycle will be a pivotal one in American History, say like 1968. I don’t know what will happen but anyone who waits until the party’s conventions next year to get interested will miss something really important.

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 00:13:54 GMT

Four arrested over Najaf bombing. Four men – two of them foreigners – are held in Najaf, as the death toll from the car bomb rises towards 100. [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

I wonder if the two foreigner’s could be Saudis? In the short term this could be bad for the US. This sector of Iraq has been relatively quiet but now there are increasing numbers of extremists. In addition, people are upset that the US did not protect their leaders. While an impossible job, we can not protect everyone, it follows the plan of the instaigators of the bombing. We see FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) all the time in the high tech arena, but governments and insurgents have used them for centuries.

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 00:06:11 GMT

Dell sinks to a new low (who even knew it was possible?).

Dell Takes Click-Wrap ‘Agreements’ to New Low. Ian Goldberg and Kat Hanna: Dell’s Software License Policy. I’m just bewildered that Dell corporate policy is that users need… [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

As I said in my comment on Dan’s post this is utterly disgusting but entirely typical of the contempt I think Dell has for it’s customers.  I really hope Dan follows up on this.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

A wonderful Catch-22. You have to agree that you have read the licensing agreements for the software on your Dell computer before you can use it. But you can not even see the software, much less agree until you start the computer. So to see the software, you have to lie and state that you have read software agreements that you have not. I wonder what sorts of legal ramifications there are for a company that requires you to perjure yourself in order to use their product. I wonder if all the licensing agreements become null and void. That would be proper justice.

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 23:20:58 GMT

Caesar’s Wife and All That. CAESAR’S WIFE AND ALL THAT….The head of Diebold, a company that makes voting machines, is apparently a diehard Republican:Wally O’Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., this week sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations… [CalPundit]

Sounds kind of ominous when the CEO of a company trying to sell voting machines and the software that will run on it to say that he is working on delivering the votes to the Republicans ;-) But not having a paper trail is what scares me most about software voting. I just can not take the word of the CEOs. How do they know that their programmers haven’t inserted things? Who really vets all their software? The little bit that has gotten out into the public have been shown to be flawed. What happens when we can no longer trust our electoral system? (Yes, I know some people believe that this already happened in 2000).

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 23:02:56 GMT

Whither the Shuttle?. WHITHER THE SHUTTLE?….The LA Times has a good story about the shuttle report today. It makes a couple of points that I think have been overlooked in the rush to condemn NASA’s “broken culture.” First, there’s the problem with the… [CalPundit]

FIxing a culture is one of those MBA-type statements. See, it was not your fault as a CEO. There was just a bad culture. It was there before you got there but you’ll do your best to change it

The comment that you an engineering project can developed ‘cheap, fast or good but no more than 2 out of the 3′ is right on. The Shuttle is supposed to somehow be all 3. I loved the Congressman who commentedd that he was glad it was a culture thing and not spending. As if Congress had a good management culture!

Check out Homer Hickham’s comments. His boyhood was popularized in the movie October Sky and is one of the old guard engineers. His point that the Shuttle is fatally flawed is well taken. The decision to create the Shuttle had been a major reason for the stagnation we have seen in manned flight. Nothing to the moon in 25 years. Mars is closer than it has been in recored history and nothing. The Shuttle is not lowering the price of space travel and the expected life of these crafts really ended years ago. yet they still fly and we have no other alternative. Bad decisions have huge, longterm consequences. We discover this more and more each day.

Baghdad Burning

Another blog from Baghdad (although I do not know how one can be certain.) But this is an interesting perspective on rebuilding Iraq and the potential gouging by many of our contracts (some which had no bidding). The Iraqis rebuilt many of their bridges for much, much less than the $50 million one American company is supposed to get. It would be nice if most of that money actually ended up in Iraq but I figure it will go to pay for the ssalaries of the top executives. Assuming ANY of this is true ;-)

HOWARD DEAN, VICTIM OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA

Interesting comments by someone who is not a Dean sympathizer but dislikes the elitist bias that NYT politcal reporting often presents. There is too much editorializing in the papers rather than reporting. Use of hot button words, such as rapid, while little thoughtful analysis.

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 02:15:01 GMT

Internet Use by Region in the United States. This Pew & The Internet Report has been making the rounds.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has tracked the growth of Internet usage in the United States, from just under half of American adults in 2000 to about 59% of adults at the end of 2002. These statistics have continually shown that Internet penetration in the United States has been and continues to be uneven. We have discussed in other reports why this growth has not been evenly distributed among those in various racial and ethnic groups, those of various ages, and among those with different levels of education and income. This report explores the reasons behind the uneven distribution of Internet penetration by geographical region. And it looks at variations in use of the Internet by region. The following table outlines the disparities in Internet penetration among 12 regions of the country in 2002. (California is considered separately because Internet access and use vary dramatically from neighboring states.) [LISNews.com]

My mother asked me the other day how many people had Internet access. i said over 50% but she was skeptical. Well, here is a poll that says 59% use the Internet, although access is not evenly split. Now I know.

New Technologies Lead to New Voices

Blogging and Society.

500 years ago the communications system in the west was owned by one organization – the church. If you wanted something in writing a monk transcribed it. Few knew how to read as a result of books being so expensive. Your network news was delivered from the pulpit. The system supported the status quo of the power of God’s elect, the King and his henchmen the aristocracy and above supported the most powerful multinational enterprise the world had yet seen the church itself. The church was the largest landowner in the west at a time when land was the basis of all wealth. The barriers to competition were impossibly high.

I am sure that when Gutenberg built his first press that there was a lot of chatter about font types, about gearing and pressure and inks and about the best type of paper – the kind of geek talk that is central to all new things. This is where so much of the discourse is today about blogging – RSS etc. But the true power of the printing press was something else that went way beyond how it worked. It was how it was used that was to be important.

Within a hundred years huge numbers of people could read. It was possible to run off broadsheets – personal publishing very cheaply. So what happened as a result of this use of the new technology?

The reformation in Europe, the dissolution of the monasteries in the England the the redistribution of all that wealth to secular hands, the civil war and the end of the idea of monarchy being God’s anointed. The modern world was created where new ideas based on observation – such as a new vision of the universe – could not be held back by the establishment in spite of persecution.

So this is what will happen with blogging. What blogging is, is an end run on the strangle hold of our conversation and on our mindset that the corporate and institutional world has established. Until now the costs of having a human voice were set impossibly high. Only Rupert Murdoch or a government could play. But now communication costs are ridiculously low compared to the mainstream media and communications in corporations and government. Not only are the costs low but the interactive element of blogging is so much more powerful than the broadcast technique owned by the institutions. Any one of us can have a voice and groups can have power.Institutions are frightened of this voice and will fight it because it means that they will die as a result.

As at the time of the reformation – the general adoption of blogging tools  will lead to the overthrow of the corporate and the institutional mind. In so doing it will release the vast treasure that it locked up in the costs of corporate and institutional  life. It will free men and women from being peons in a feudal state where they had to live as liege men and offer fealty to their overlords.

We are not only oppressed by those in power in institutional life, we, like medieval peasant, are complicit. We know of no other life. Knowing no other life, like those in Plato’s cave, we cannot imagine what freedom from institutional life might be like. We fear freedom because we see no alternative to bondage.

Even simple blogging can help here. It offers for the first time to each of us the potential to find our voice. At first maybe to tell the world what we had for breakfast or to recall some work idea. But I have found in myself a huge change in the last year in my inner voice and in the confidence as I discover that I am not alone in how I think.

Until now people who think as I do have struggled alone. We are by nature are not joiners. Fewer of us every day work in institutional life and cannot use that voice. What “organ” do we have to speak with a human voice? Blogging By finding so many of us out there, we grow in confidence and our voice becomes less hesitant. I feel wonder as I read new blogs every week and see how close our thinking is. This is how power is created

Technical talk is helpful. It leads to better tools. But let’s talk more about how we will use blogging to change our world. It is not about making the corporation better – this type of discussion would be the same as a group of monks talking about how printing was going to help the church. It is about how to we take the institution out of our lives.

(Thanks to Dave Pollard for getting me going this week)

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

One aspect that Robert is leading to is that the most revolutionary technologies, the ones that changed things, often enlarge the social discourse to larger groups. Blogging does the same thing, providing an outlet for social interactions impossible before. You can interact with people you never see in places you will never visit. The community of ideas is so greatly enlarged then.

I read people whose opinions I disagree with, because they provide me insights into their worries. I read people I do agree with because they present me with facts that I was unaware. People blog because of the passions they possess. Only people with something worth saying will say it for very long.

But I am noticing personally another aspect of these technologies. The ideas and passions that I run across are also transferable to the outside world. In particular, I have been working with some not-for-profits the last few months. They love passionate people and the ideas I have get a voice that was difficult in a corporate setting. What Robert says about not being joiners was true for me. But now I have joined and found myself to be incredibly empowered. I wonder why I did not do this a long time ago. But I would not feel as confident or be as passionate if I had not found others who appreciated what I had to say.

I think that these technologies will dramatically alter the world in ways that we can not even imagine, just as the printing press did. It will have effects on all areas of our lives. But it will come from the bottom. I am just one person who has felt that I can go and use my talents in the ‘real’ world as much as the virtual. I can actually DO something rather than just write it. If even 1% of the bloggers do similarly ( and I think it will be a much larger number), we are talking tens of millions of people primed to take action. It does not matter what the action is. The addition of millions of passionate people to the mix will have a huge effect on society. We are beginning to see this in small doses with such things as Howard Dean’s campaign. In 10 years the changes will be huge.

Is Misleading Anything Like Lying?

Dust and Deception… (Paul Krugman). Dust and Deception… (Paul Krugman) [Common Dreams]

Every report on this uses the word ‘misled’. We have been misled for two years now by an administration that believes that scientific facts can be warped to fit their own political agenda. If the facts do not fit the myth, massage them until they do, or use misleading words or just flat out lie. These are the guys that subverted the will of Congress 20 years ago and gave us Iran-Contra. They continue to warp the world to fit their view and apparently do not care how many Americans will get asbestosis and other lung diseases as long as Wall Street is open.

A recent report from Congress details the many ways that this administration has warped and lied about science. As a scientist, I abhor seeing scientific data politicized and censored in order to fit a hidden agenda. As time goes on, I believe less and less ANYTHING this government says because I continue to see how it falsely manipulates scientific work that I know something about. I do not feel better seeing the work of the CDC being altered to fit a political ideology or to see work from the NIH being controlled by politicians. Read the report. There are a huge number of items and areas where ideology is more important than facts. It is an Orwellian world where Lies Are Truth and Facts Are Lies. If they can have this effect in areas where scientific rigor can be used, what sorts of distortions are they making in the gray sciences such as the ecology, sociology, or economics. This disregard for any fact they do not like will either result in their downfall if we are lucky, or our downfall if we are not.

Read the report. Even if someone claims that it is partisan – since a Democrat chaired the report – and misleading in its own way – because he does not like Bush- there are still enough instances of White House meddling in scientific matters to be extremely worried. Because of this, I simply can not believe anything the White House says about scientific matters. I need to hear it from a trusted source, which the White House is not.

We have a White House that is altering science to strengthen an ideology in much the same way that Stalin pushed Lysenko and his views on evolution forward because they fit Communism. Luckily we do not yet have a state that arrests and imprisons scientists who do not toe the party line. But we do have one that plays fast and loose with science in order to provide underpinnings for its ideology.

In the 30 years of my adult life, I have not seen any administration so blatantly seek to warp the goals of scientific explorations. If for no other reason, this administration must be voted out before it has a permanent effect on our basic research infrastructure. Health and Human Services continues to try an damage the NIH, to try and apply top down centralized approaches to an organization that thrives on bottom-up innovation, leading (or rather mis-leading) to reduced morale at one of our best factories for basic research.

More Great KM Stuff

Collaboration is in the KM toolbox.

Collaboration is the new KM

Why collaboration? I think it appeals because its less fluffy than ‘KM’ – people intuitively think its good (few CEO’s are crying out for their people to collaborate less) – and it taps a current need: in trying to cut costs by e.g. reducing travel, people are feeling the pain of projects failing and mis-communication. ‘Virtual teams’ as a term has been around long enough, but few companies are getting it right.

[from Intellectual Capital Punishment]

This snippet from the middle of Sam Marshall’s comments hints at why collaboration has gained new attention: collaboration = faster throughput with the same resources. He also reminds us that for this to be done well, we have to prepare for it.

As part of his discussion on expert databases last week, John Chu shared a report on the topic from Outsell, Trend Alert: Connecting People to People – Expert Databases (abstract only). Outsell surveyed a number of companies with expert databases and said some things about knowledge management and setting up expert databases. It was the conclusion that was most telling:

In our opinion, the pain won’t be worth the gain if collaborative work practices aren’t already inherent within the organization.

It is relatively easy to set up the technology to run video conferences and webinars. But to create a culture that takes advantage of these technologies is much more difficult, and much more interesting in the long term. Beyond saving money on travel, what does the organization expect to gain from having NetMeeting or WebEx or iSight?

[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Not only is collaboration important and allows more productivity with the same number of people, but the final aspect, culture, is critical. Companies that do not already have collaborative cultures will not be able to utilize these technologies efficiently and will thus be at a tremendous disadvantage to companies that already are collaborative. Simply providing collaboration tools to a company that believes that knowledge is power, where restricting the flow of information is the way to advance, will result in unused tools. In companies that already value transparency and open communication, that want as many eyes on the problem as possible in order to find solutions, these tools will only enhance productivity.

So, in my mind, it is worthless to try and provide the tools to a company whose culture will not allow them to be utilized. You might make a buck but your customer will not be satisfied. If their industry requires novelty, creativity and innovation to succeed, then they will eventually fail. In such an industry, not having a culture that fosters collaboration is a business model of failure.

I Follow Intuition All The Time

Managing unconscious knowledge?.

destinationKM.com: The ”Other” Knowledge

C.G. Jung proved that our unconscious is not just a bunch of instincts and repressions, but contains “intelligence” that comes to us seemingly out of nowhere. What’s more, technologies for managing the unconscious have been in existence for thousands of years. So how can IT benefit?
[from elearnspace]

John David Balla goes from here to discuss the conscious vs. unconscious mind and then into the abilities of many non-Western cultures to integrate these parts of the mind, where Westerners have essentially forgotten any important connection.

There is a lot of knowledge buried in our unconscious – either that we have explicitly learned and turned into “unconscious competence” or that stuff we just know — intuition. Balla then draws us back to KM and how difficult it is to encode intuition and the unconscious. I wonder if the focus on collaboration and innovation isn’t an attempt to bring the rest of the mind into the picture, without explicit attempts to encode it?

[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Systems that foster intuition and serendipity are ones that will lead in the coming years. As a biologist I tend to put intuition into biological terms. The non-verbal right hemisphere has only a small number of connections to the left hemisphere. So getting information from one to the other in inefficient and happens in ways that are under the radar of conscious thought. Intuition comes from the non-verbal, not-I part of our consciousness, our less dominant hemisphere, as it tries to get the attention of the dominant side. So, I listen to intuition because, for me, it works a lot.

A book that I enjoyed reading, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. (One of the great titles. I mean, you have to read the book just so you can figure out just what in heck the title means!) His thesis is thought-provoking and, even if not true, requires one to examine many basic assumptions of conscious thought. He postulates that consciousness as we know it did not really evolve until after language did. Language was controlled by one hemisphere of the brain. The other hemisphere had little or no communication with the verbal half. So it spoke to people in non-verbal ways, such as visions, dreams and visits from gods.

Yes, he postulates that what we call consciousness is a recent development, one that occurred AFTER human civilization began. The Ancients really did hear voices that talked to them because that was the only way for them to ‘verbalize’ the ideas that the right hemisphere was sending to the left. Real consciousness evolved when we developed ways to more accurately integrate our right brain (our sub-conscious?) with the left brain. Jaynes even postulated that you could see approximately when this occurred by examining the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad would have been handed down from pre-conscious times, since the Gods speak directly to the humans and control what happens to them. In the Odyssey, the Gods are much more secondary characters, with the story of the individual being paramount.

Now, it is hard to believe that Jaynes’ hypothesis could ever be proved but it is interesting to consider. Both our hemispheres work in parallel on many problems. I do not know how we integrate all the information they provide. But I do know that I have two modes of thinking – linear and non-linear. Many times I can just bull my way through a problem and follow a process. Other times, I ‘know’ the answer and just have to work backwards to the start to prove it. I have learned to trust the information this non-linear approach provides. It has been right way too many times.

KM Tools and the Needs of Users

Contributing and enabling technologies for knowledge management.

This article talks about the balance between knowledge management and the information technologies that support KM.

Information management will only provide competitve advantage when a company can “balance between clear understanding of the nature of information, well-defined information architecture, management processes and the judicious use of appropriate technological support.” Technology must enable people in the company to find and analyze information and make business decisions.

Rather than describing “the” knowledge management system, the authors describe important factors of any KM system. The technology should fit the needs of the company for KM, rather than the KM needs fitting to what is available from the technology. The technology needs to deliver up-to-date information of the appropriate type to those who need it, when and where they need it. This acknowledges the need for accuracy and integrity. And, finally, any technology needs to play well with the people who use it — the usability issue.

The authors divide technologies to support KM into three primary buckets: collaboration, content management, and business intelligence. Note that these aren’t KM tools, rather these are tools that can be used in support of a KM strategy.

While the article doesn’t emphasize the cultural aspects of KM, they wrap up by saying

Current literature suggests that organisations must embrace and marry two complimentary avenues for Knowledge Management success, namely, cultural aspects of the organisation and technological developments employed within the organisation. To achieve successful organisation-wide connectivity it is crucial to develop culturally shared values that facilitate the adoption of technologies and electronic communications. It is also important to combine technology mediated interactions with face-to-face interactions, thus marrying social behaviour and work practices.

“Contributing and enabling technologies for knowledge management,” by Sandra Moffett and Rodney McAdam, in International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol 2, Nos 1/2, 2003 (print only).
[Thanks to my friendly librarian who has done regular print searches for KM-related articles.]

[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

More and more people are getting it. KM systems only work if people use them. They have to allow people the ability to take information and create knowledge that allows decisions to be made. They must include tools that can be adapted to a wide randge of personlity types and diverse viewpoints. Otherwise they will only help a subset of people while actually hampering all others.

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 02:08:56 GMT

Gartner: Microsoft cuts Windows price to $40 in Thailand. In a move that could lead to lower prices for Microsoft’s software in other countries, the Redmond, Washington, software company has cut the price of its Windows operating system and Office application suite in Thailand, according to a report released by market analyst Gartner Inc. [InfoWorld: Top News]

And people get upset about pharmas selling drugs for less in other countries, yet here is MS doing the same thing. It costs almost $200 in the US. I guess they will have it set up so that you can not bring any copy back into the US.