Interesting elsewhere – 13 March 2013

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

The Android Paradox, Hackers and Casuals – acoustik – Quora
Most Android developers, designers, and product people tend to be Hackers. That’s why we do the things we do. And when we build features, we tend to build them for ourselves. Normally there’s nothing wrong with that: you’re supposed to be your first user.

Except with Android, that’s not enough. Because you also have to worry about Casuals. You have to take it one step further, and make sure that this market, that you don’t understand and probably completely disagree with, can totally understand and make sense of your app.

It’s so tough being me | Matthew Taylor’s blog
Hillsborough, the cover up of abuse by priests, MPs’ expenses, tabloid telephone hacking, misselling of payment protection insurance, Mid Staffs hospital: it is my contention that not just at one point but over and again in these episodes a siege culture of corporate self pity kicked in and helped tip the scales against acknowledging wrong and choosing to address it.

Bartleby, the CIO | Lost ConsCIOusness
Much enterprise IT demonstrates contempt for the user. I often ask people from big organisations, public and private sector, how they feel when they have to use their corporate HR or finance systems? And I do mean feel, usercentricity starts with how we feel.

The universal, UNIVERSAL, response I get is a chorus of groans. People hate using these core, fundamental business systems. Some of that is down to the business processes which themselves are often bedevilled by some of the things I have mentioned previously, but a lot is down to a user experience which seems rooted in a contempt for those who are forced to use these systems.

Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development
Responding to change over following a plan
provided a detailed plan is in place to respond to the change, and it is followed precisely

potlatch: the problem of ‘evidence centres’
The very character of Big Data is that it is collected with no particular purpose or theory in mind; it arises as a side-effect of other transactions and activities. It is, supposedly, ‘theory neutral’, like RCTs, indeed the techno-utopians have already argued that it can ultimately replace scientific theory altogether. Hence the facts that arise from big data are somehow self-validating; they simply emerge, thanks to mathematical analysis of patterns, meaning that there is no limit to the number of type of facts that can emerge. There’s almost no need for human cognition at all!

From transactional welfare to relational welfare | CLES
All of this means it is time to change the questions we are asking – not how can we reform existing institutions but how can we provide services that support people to grow and flourish in this century.

Why bureaucracy is a Good Thing | Flip Chart Fairy Tales
Bureaucracy is the corporate equivalent of the rule of law. It protects people from arbitrary decisions inside the organisation. Rules and procedures give people clarity about their roles, their scope for decision making and their boundaries. Like the rule of law, they protect employees from random and vindictive treatment by their bosses. It has become very fashionable to deride bureaucracy but working in organisations with fewer rules and procedures can be just as unpleasant. Trying to second guess the whims of a maverick autocratic boss can be every bit as energy draining and innovation stifling as working in a bureaucracy.

Design is the easy part… | disambiguity
It saddens me how many great design solutions are hidden away in filing cabinets. It’s not enough to know the right answers, the real design challenge is in getting the organisation to adopt and implement and maintain (a whole other challenge) good design. It feels to me like we need to focus on this more.

‘How to Be Yourself’: My Ignite talk about authenticity — Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good
The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

One Laptop per Child – Nesta
The marketing circuit still trundles on, appealing to gullible ministers and journalists. That’s the symptom that we don’t live in a knowledge society. If we did new ideas like this would be treated with enthusiasm, but they’d also be interrogated, analysed and judged. For now hype and vapourware are still winning out.

How Complex Systems Fail [pdf]
The potential for catastrophic outcome is a hallmark of complex systems. It is impossible to eliminate the potential for such catastrophic failure; the potential for such failure is always present by the system’s own nature.

Maybe It Was Apple | The Baseline Scenario
In the rush to anoint a charismatic savior, hiring committees, search firms, and boards substitute leaps of faith for cold rational inferences, fastening on the bits and pieces of a job candidate’s resume that play to their desire for a superman and overlooking the vast amount they just don’t know (see Rakesh Khurana for more). And this is one reason why external CEO hires tend, in the aggregate, to do worse than people promoted from within, who have the benefit of years of insider knowledge and precisely relevant expertise.

Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go | Creating – WSJ.com
In the real world, there are so many parameters and combinations that everything changes as soon as the next rider presses a button. In a building with six elevators and 10 people trying to move between floors, there are over 60 million possible combinations—too many, she says, for the elevator’s computer to process in split seconds.

Will There Always Be A Tube Map? | Londonist
Rather than continuing to update the increasingly cluttered Tube map, might we one day ditch it entirely? Could a souped-up journey planner ever have a persuasive number of advantages over a static map, enough to render the old way of doing things obsolete? Could our generation’s Tube map be the last?

Project Management: Believing in Lies | systemsthinkingforgirls
This type of project begins with everyone realizing that the project plan is little more than an educated guess. And yet somewhere along the way as the project gets underway people begin to lose sight of the fact that the project plan was just and educated guess. As the project progresses there remains less and less awareness regarding the non-reality of the project plan. Individuals begin to take the plan as gospel believing that it is an accurate projected of what is going to happen.

[Robert Brook] 176
Why not think of situations where beneficial organisation change has happened, then trace back to the source? Was it really an invited speaker? And I don’t mean organisational change as in we successfully completed that tedious project, but in the wider sense. People are less unhappy and we’re doing better work.

Don’t be beguiled by Orwell: using plain and clear language is not always a moral virtue
The way we speak and the way we write are both forms of dress. We can, linguistically, dress ourselves up any way we like. We can affect plainness and directness just as much as we can affect sophistication and complexity. We can try to mislead or to impress, in either mode. Or we can use either register honestly.

Why organizations need a Clark Kent, not a Superman – Boing Boing
Flouting the rules of the org is great for getting things done. But sometimes, without sufficient checks and balances, they turn out not to be the right things. Much-maligned bean counters and compliance personnel exist to make sure this doesn’t happen too often, even if it means that, some of the time, not much of anything gets done at all. Innovation and initiative have their place in any organization, but so do coordination and rules. The trick is knowing how much of each.

Schneier on Security: Our New Regimes of Trust
Think of this as a “security gap”: the time lag between when the bad guys figure out how to exploit a new technology and when the good guys figure out how to restore society’s balance.
Critically, the security gap is larger when there’s more technology, and especially in times of rapid technological change. More importantly, it’s larger in times of rapid social change due to the increased use of technology. This is our world today. We don’t know *how* the proliferation of networked, mobile devices will affect the systems we have in place to enable trust, but we do know it *will* affect them.

“Identity is the new Money”. Brilliant – I wish I’d said that
If you know who all of the counterparties to a transaction are, and can establish their “credit” then there is no need for cash. Identity substitutes for cash: when I go into Waitrose and pay with my John Lewis MasterCard, it’s an identity transaction. The terminal in Waitrose establishes that I have access to a line of credit that means that Waitrose will be paid. No actual money moves between my card and the Waitrose till. On the other hand, when I buy an apple from a market stall and pay for it with a pound coin, the stallholder doesn’t need to waste any time or money trying to establish who I am, because he doesn’t need to trust me. He just needs to trust the pound coin, which he self-assays.

Marginal changes and macro impacts

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Fifteen years ago, I predicted the demise of the supermarket. Four years ago, I noted that that hadn’t turned out to be the greatest of predictions:

I wasn’t quite daft enough to think that everybody was going to do their food shopping online.  My argument was slightly more subtle, though it has so far proved no less wrong:  it was that enough of the cash-rich, time-poor customers from whom supermarkets make most of their profits would defect to make the job of serving the lower-margin customers insufficiently profitable to sustain the overheads of large sheds with even larger car parks wrapped round them.  As it turned out, Tesco roughly trebled both its turnover and its profits between 1999 and 2007, which demonstrates fairly clearly that they know more about running whelk stalls than I do.

Now Andrew Curry has written two interesting posts about the collapse of HMV and some of its wider implications, in which he points out that:

In passing, some of the lazier commentary on HMV points out that younger people don’t tend to buy hard-format entertainment content. But hard format sales of CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray still account for three-quarters of the market. And if you’re in a declining sector, the decline is going to be slower if your remaining market is an older demographic that has more money than younger consumers do.

Now clearly there are two kinds of internet disruption in the music industry and only one for groceries: the physical object can be bought from an online retailer (which, as Andrew notes, was the basis of the Channel Islands tax scam); or the object can be dispensed with altogether and and the product downloaded in pure electronic form. In the interest of scientific rigour in the writing of this post, I have just downloaded a CD (or rather, of course, not a CD, though I am not sure what other word to use instead) from Amazon. It took 91 seconds. That’s not a level of instant gratification which Ocado is ever going to be able to beat.

But even with that important distinction between sellers of inherently physical goods and sellers of potentially virtual goods, the basic gearing effect remains interesting. HMV, Andrew points out

still sells 38% of all hard-format music and 27% of all DVD and Blu-Ray discs. These are market shares that are conventionally regarded as being monopoly levels. So there’s something dysfunctional about an economy in which a retailer with this sort of share can’t make sustainable profits.

In effect, it seems that there is a level or rate of reduction of demand which retailers struggle to adapt to, even if on the face of it there is still plenty of business to be done. And while established retailers might struggle, as incumbent players generally do, to adapt to radically changing circumstances, there’s not much sign of upstart competitors filling the space either.

It’s hardly surprising that you don’t have to lose anything close to all your customers for your business to become unviable. What may be more surprising is how small the drop needs to be before the issue becomes critical.

Public services don’t tend to have quite those pressures and quite those metrics. The pursuit of channel shift is core to the government’s strategy, not a threat to be avoided. And yet. How many potential HMVs are there scattered around the public sector? And how many of those are managing to become John Lewises instead?

 

 

The phoenix and the constitution

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It is hard to change constitutions – deliberately so.  It is hard to re-engineer physical infrastructure – intrinsically so.  It is hard to stop and start again from scratch.

Every decision and every context in which those decisions are made is the product of what has gone before, even when in another sense they may be radical and innovative. The past is deeply embedded in the present. The choices available today are heavily constrained by the choices made by those who went before us – sometimes a very long time before us. That sometimes makes things complicated which seem as though they should be much simpler, and sometimes means that there is no practical solution even when it seems obvious that one should be possible.

Some of that is technical. There is an old story of how the dimensions of the space shuttle were constrained by the design of Roman chariots.  That is alas discredited, but less extreme examples are all too real. Tube train showing tight fit with tunnel walls The design of tube trains in the twenty-first century is massively constrained by the decisions made about tunnel diameters in the nineteenth. Of course in theory it would be possible to rebore all the tunnels and replace all the trains – but it seems slightly more likely that we will all finally get personal jetpacks than that will happen.

This problem is not limited to heavy engineering. In many sectors (banking, air travel and government come to mind) even the most apparently modern of systems may rest on foundations going back decades. Nor are the limitations the past imposes on the present necessarily as obvious as the diameter of a tunnel. Charles Stross sums up the broader issue with examples ranging from which side of the road we drive on, through weaknesses in computer languages, to which drugs are made illegal, and makes the critical point that

Part of the problem is that we build rafts of infrastructure on top of existing design decisions. Which means that fixing a bad decision requires the abandonment of lots of stuff that depends on it.

In all those cases, it is pretty clear that we are dealing with constraints and that those constraints do in fact constrain. Providing for potential future change can be expensive in the real world of heavy engineering, and it is understandable that not much of it is done.

Single carriageway road crossed by bridge with spans for two carriageways.

There are two very obvious reasons for that.  The first is that building things for which there is no immediate need costs immediate money but provides no immediate benefits. The second is that there can generally be no guarantee that what is provided for will turn out to be what is needed. Parts of the pre-war German Autobahn network were built as single carriageway roads, but with bridges and other infrastructure ready for a second carriageway. East of the iron curtain, those second carriageways were a long time coming, and driving along those shadowy half motorways remained a faintly surreal experience decades later. The road in the picture above was finally upgraded just a few years ago – but the original carriageway was demolished, not reused.

It should be easier where there is no requirement to dig holes or pour concrete, but the basic difficulties are similar in heavy computing to those in heavy engineering: you can’t easily take account of future technological developments, and once you have built it, it’s difficult and expensive to move. Even if system architects in the 60s and 70s had understood and extrapolated Moore’s law for thirty years, that would have done nothing to change the immediate costs of memory, storage and processing they faced, and the practical consequences would have been non-existent.  That’s less true now in some important ways, but complex established systems are still hard to change. As so often, it may well be clear that there is a better alternative, but very unclear how to get there from here. The principle of designing for future flexibility is largely accepted, even if the practical obstacles are substantial. And even though the new stuff may be easier, the problem of the installed base has certainly not gone away.

Heavy computing used to come with heavy constraints as well, but the constraints have become less limiting and the opportunities for modular construction considerably greater. But in either case, the principle of designing for future flexibility is largely accepted, even if the practical obstacles are substantial.

And if we take all this up a level again, it becomes an issue for social and organisational change. Cultures, products and processes can atrophy just as surely as engineering solutions.

Most big companies deal with the issue, sooner or later, by going bust or being taken over. Those which don’t can end up in a very different business from the one they started in – it’s been a while since Sony had rice cookers at the centre of its product range.

Governments are not immune to this either, though the stability of governments and governmental systems obviously varies enormously too. But perhaps uniquely in government, there is a strong body of opinion that making design decisions which constrain adaptability to future change is a good thing not a bad thing. The US constitution is a particularly striking example of this effect: its continuity and consistency have taken it through a form of transmutation, where constitutional law becomes increasingly akin to scriptural exegesis. It is for most practical purposes unchangeable: all political decision making has to be built on top of design decisions made over two hundred years ago. A striking illustration of both the short term and the long term stability of the constitution comes from the fact that the most recent amendment went into force over twenty years ago, in 1992 – having been submitted to the states for ratification in 1789. To put it mildly, none of that is seen as a weakness of the US political system by those subject to it: there is no clamour of which I am aware for a new constitutional settlement.

The point here is not whether the specific provisions of that or any other constitution are good or bad, nor indeed whether having a formal written constitution in the first place is itself a good or bad thing. It is whether constitutions – or anything else – should be designed to constrain the choices of future generations to decide matters. I am not against the idea of constitutions – in the UK context, I quite like the idea of a Constitutional Consolidation Act – or against the idea that they should not be casually changed. But I am not persuaded that I know more about the situation or needs of people fifty or a hundred years in the future than those people will know at that time.

In practice, few constitutions enjoy either the formal continuity of the US system or the informal continuous accretion of the UK approach. The number of countries without a radical constitutional discontinuity over the last century or two is pretty small, and the phoenix approach to constitutional change, of letting the old one burn up and creating a new one from the ashes is probably the most common way of doing it.  But systems so brittle that you can only change them by having a revolution are hardly ideal. My simple solution to the problem of over rigid constitutions is to time limit them. Fifty years sounds about right to me – but of course each constitution would need to contain the conditions for its expiry, since there is no more certainty about the longevity of that approach than of the underlying constitution itself.

That’s not going to happen, of course. In principle forcing the system to refresh itself would allow small issues to be identified and addressed before they got large enough to threaten the whole system, but this is classic innovator’s dilemma territory, so we can be pretty sure that those threatened by change would fail to see the need for it and would have the power to obstruct it, applying what Kevin Kelly has called the Shirky principle:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

So the challenge for designers of roads, railways, constitutions and IT systems remains. Current needs must be met. Future needs must be anticipated, in the certain knowledge that our understanding of what they are decays progressively with time. And above all, the fact that there will be future needs which cannot be anticipated must be anticipated.

Tube picture by Ian Rory licensed under Creative Commons. Berlinka picture from www.goerke.us

A short history of computing, by a boiled frog

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Today my home broadband got upgraded. A few hours ago, 7Mbps down and a tenth of that up was as good as it ever got. Now it’s close to 50Mbps down and, even more dramatically, about 15Mbps up.

Once there were no computers visibly in my life, still less devices which happened to compute. Now they are ubiquitous and their impact has been transformational. The whole change has been enormous, but the scale of it is rarely obvious. No one step was life changing, but tracing back through the journey gets us to a strange and distant place.

I remember…

I remember when I first felt that I had the whole internet with me, almost always and almost everywhere

and stopped reading a newspaper on the bus to work every morning, breaking one more connection with physical information

I remember when I first got a smartphone

and left for a long trip in which I was able to manage flights, hotels and maps with a device which slipped into my pocket – and could even make phone calls

I remember when I first got a tablet

no, not one of those, one of these

I remember when I first started on twitter

when I realised that everybody at a meeting I was at had been having – and were still having – an interesting conversation which I wasn’t part of and couldn’t see was happening

I remember when I made all my CDs vanish

but could listen to them all over the house, using what to this day are some of my favourite ever gadgets

I remember when I first got broadband

it was partly the speed (though that was a tiny fraction of even yesterday’s standard), but even more so the immediacy of the connection: you didn’t have to go online any more, you could be online, and that made all the difference (and not paying by the second helped too)

I remember when I first got internet access at work

on a standalone computer in a locked room at the the end of a corridor, with a book in which to write a complete list of sites visited

I remember when I first got ISDN

you could have two 64k channels for a blistering 128k – but at the cost of two phone calls, so every second had to count

I remember when I first took a digital photograph

on a camera made by a company called Kodak, which used to be in the photography business

I remember when I first got a computer at work

which required a business case for each PC individually, constrained by the fact that typists were to type any document over a hundred words

I remember when I first accessed the web

it seemed enormous, but Yahoo was still trying to keep a central index of websites up to date by hand

I remember when I first went online

in what would now be called a walled garden, but for a while the inside was almost bigger than the outside, and it was suddenly possible to get something out of a computer I hadn’t put in to it

I remember when I first saw a mobile phone

a stranger in a pub, whose phone took up an entire attaché case, and who spent ten minutes setting it up and turning it on, but didn’t seem to have anyone to talk to

I remember when I got my first computer at home

with two floppy disk drives (now down to only 5¼”)- adding the optional 10Mb hard disk would have made it unaffordably more expensive

I remember when I first used a word processor

amazing dedicated machines, superbly optimised for their single task, using 8″ discs to store a few dozen pages of text

I remember when I saw my first home computer

built by a friend from a kit, playing jerky space invaders from a cassette tape

I remember when I first used a computer terminal

a teletype from school over a fixed line to the local technical college, programming first BASIC then FORTRAN on paper tape, almost always in batch mode with 24 hour turnround, so typos really mattered

I remember when I first had a pocket calculator

which had the extra sophistication of a percentage key as well as the four basic operators, and was called a vatman as a result

I remember when I had a book of four figure log tables.

None of that was very long ago. Or so it seems to me.

Interesting elsewhere – 11 February 2013

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

World building 201: Heuristics – Charlie’s Diary
The ratio of the near future is: 90% of it is just like today, 9% is stuff that is on the drawing boards, and 1% is unutterably strange and alien and unexpected.

Creativity at the heart of government – Nesta
Behaviour changes because of changes to habits, structures, processes and cultures – not because of one off events or speeches or guidelines. If you want a civil service to become more creative and innovative you have to change the wiring. But governments continue to resist the most basic lessons on how to manage innovation. Holding one day events is arguably a displacement activity – a symptom not a solution.

Seth’s Blog: Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving
The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn’t include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.

Schneier on Security: Power and the Internet
What we forgot is that technology magnifies power in both directions. When the powerless found the Internet, suddenly they had power. But while the unorganized and nimble were the first to make use of the new technologies, eventually the powerful behemoths woke up to the potential — and they have more power to magnify. And not only does the Internet change power balances, but the powerful can also change the Internet.

Girl talk | From small seeds
So maybe, in 2013, we could talk less about IT and more about digital products, less about coding and more about understanding the needs of real people, less about “geeks” and more about creativity. And perhaps if we did that we might do better at attracting the full spectrum of people who will show us where digital technology can really take us… regardless of their gender.

Seth’s Blog: Eleven things organizations can learn from airports
By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.

Institutionalising Serendipity via Productive Coffee Breaks – Nesta
Randomised Coffee Trials create an institutionalized space for serendipity.  The randomised coffee breaks allow people to break with their daily routine, make new connections and strengthen existing ones.

The Proper Use Of The Library | Terence Eden has a Blog
The proper use of a library is a space where people can feel safe and enjoy free access to culture.

Saying goodbye to pen and paper – Alexandra Samuel
These are the losses that accumulate through our transition to a new world, a new set of tools, new ways of working and new ways of remembering. At any time I could choose to pick up pen and paper once again, to forego legibility and searchability in favor of the serendipity of what gets recalled and what becomes indecipherable. But I have no romantic fantasies about sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris, sipping coffee and writing in longhand; that world is gone, or going, and my paper notebook isn’t going to reveal Paris or the world as they are today.

The new normal is already old

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wpid-20130123_075745.jpg

Somehow we used to manage without knowing when the next bus was coming, and somehow life still went on.  In London, that distant past is less than two years ago. All that time ago, bus arrival information was new, exciting and empowering.

Now, of course, it has just vanished into the background. It is how things are and how they should be.  Successful inventions disappear from our awareness. Until, that is, they go missing or stop working.

And the next bus could be anywhere.

Interesting elsewhere – 17 January 2013

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Standing on the shoulders of giants | Government Digital Service We also believe in openness and we think that government departments should behave as though there are humans in them. This is from our human side.
  • Creating digital services. A jump not a journey | iansthoughts It seems to me that we shouldn’t just talk about “digitising services” as this implies digitising our anlogue thinking. We need to “create digitial services” and see it as a jump not a journey (or any other term that implies incrementalism).
  • The dreaded ‘innovation and toilets’ trope – Nesta All this suggests that humans aren't very good at assessing the relative importance of new and old things. Today's innovations are controversial, modish, disposable. Yesterday's are indispensable, transformative, foundational.
  • Aral Balkan — Design is not veneer The way something looks is not veneer layered on top of its functionality. The two are inextricably linked. The way a thing looks creates inherent expectations about how it is meant to be used. This is called an affordance. If your site or app has intuitive affordances — that is, if it satisfies with its behaviour the expectations that it creates with its appearance — it will go a long way towards providing a usable experience. But even this level of basic functionality — what we call ‘usable’ — takes lots of thought, effort, iteration, and testing to achieve. It also requires vision. Good design rarely happens without intent — sustained, focused intent — what we call vision. If you don’t see yourself as a designer, you’ve already lost. For it is the designer who thinks about the user, tries to understand the user, and creates things that empower, amuse, and delight the user.
  • Schneier on Security: Feudal Security These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them — or to a particular one we don't like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it's becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.
  • From hierarchy to networks, can we write a road map? | Open Policymaking Networks move and change far faster than hierarchical organisations can and while other industries are facing the same challenges they are embracing radical change by accepting that some organisations will fail and fall away. Are we able/willing to do the same in the Public Sector?
  • Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: The Internet of the Dead By 2050 more than half of the Internet’s users will be dead – that is, of all the accounts ever created by Internet users, more than half will have been created by people who have since died. We don’t have the norms, the laws, the software or the markets to deal with this data.
  • Designing for the social customer – confused of calcutta Whenever you’re designing products and services for the customer, start with the question:

    Will this help build trust between the customer and the company?

    If the answer to that question is No, then everything else doesn’t really matter. Just icing on a cake that no customer wants to eat. No customer, no business.

  • The BBC regains its honour » Spectator Blogs >> Nick Cohen The absence of freedom of speech in the workplace has disastrous consequences. It cannot be said often enough that the interest of organisations – which require robust internal self-examination if they are to survive – and the interests of rent-seeking managers – who want to enforce deference and secrecy to justify their positions – are in conflict.
  • Some advice from Jeff Bezos by Jason Fried of 37signals [Jeff Bezos] said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

    He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

  • Are we ready for this? « Community Links blog More focus on smoothing the edges, on reshaping transition points into transition passages and on building readiness throughout these processes would reduce the need for rescue services and crisis management afterwards. It would be more effective for more people and ultimately less expensive. Our public services need flexible protocols and well trained staff devoted to building readiness. Then, they need parents, patients, journalists, politicians, managers, tax payers ,citizens willing and able to trust them. Are we ready for that?
  • Humans in Design – The interface of payment We’ve done a great job at making it easy for us to part with our money. We don’t have to part ways with pieces of paper that we’ve earned. We don’t have to watch as money leaves our bank accounts. We just watch numbers change, if we choose to pay attention.

    Perhaps the next step is designing systems that allow for more responsible spending and help build a sustainable economy.

  • Why the tools are not the answer Nothing that we do with online communities can’t, in effect, be done on 3×5 index cards. The tools are not the answer —they’re merely the scaffolding to make great things happen; it’s just potentially a whole lot easier online. I don’t want you on Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or blogging. I want you talking with people. I want you building and nurturing community. I want you gathering valuable data to make your policy, program or information better.
  • How We Finally Made Agile Development Work – Jeff Gothelf – Harvard Business Review Non-designers didn't participate in the process, and that was fine with us. How would they contribute anyway? We were the "designers." The agile process forced us out of the safety of the design phase and into a furiously fast new reality in which product managers, software engineers, and QA specialists were far more involved in the work we created. The demands of two-week sprints forced us to cut up our "big ideas" into lots of little pieces that could be fed to the "dev machine" to ensure that, God forbid, no developers sat idle.
  • newswireless.net .:. News .:. net.wars: My identity, my self None of which means we shouldn't be asking questions. We need to understand clearly the various envisioned levels of authentication. In practice, will those asking for identity assurance ask for the minimum they need or always go for the maximum they could get? For example, a bar only needs relatively low-level assurance that you are old enough to drink; but will bars prefer to ask for full identification? What will be the costs; who pays them and under what circumstances?