Twitter’s moral limit?

The Iranian election may well have exposed the two extremes of usefulness and moral integrity not only of the Internet, but of Twitter in particular.

There can be no doubt that Iranians have made great use of the combined web/mobile phone network to organise protests and distribute raw news footage, and these technologies have been central to the authorities’ considered response to the ongoing crisis.

Early in the affair it was widely reported that Twitter had postponed certain upgrades so there would be no service interruption to the organisers of the bush-fire like protests taking place across the country. Unwittingly, the Twitter admins became the guardians of a fragile, almost premature democracy movement that was gasping for the oxygen of publicity and effective communications. About a week ago you could tell a Twitter user from 20 paces -  they were the ones walking around with faintly self-satisfied grins all day long… confident that their last 140 characters really had changed the world.

While initially the effect was sustaining to the protesters, it could do little to halt the relentless screw that the authorities tightened in the following days – the expulsion of foreign journalists, the Orwellian surveillance of the Nokia Siemens phone network using the ‘Monitoring Centre’ (a government back-door into every mobile phone in the country, helpfully sold to Iran Telecom by Nokia itself in 2008 (gotta love the free market)), and the unshackling of the Basij militia all turned the tide inexorable against the pro-democracy movement.

The waves of that tide broke bloody-red on the dusty streets of Tehran this weekend with the summary execution of at least 10 people, most infamously the appalling up-close video death of ‘Neda’, a shockingly young and beautiful Iranian girl shown dying in the arms of her agonized father.

The horror of the moment defies explanation – it is intrusive and gory, war-pornography at its worst.

To respond to it therefore within a soulless Tweet of 140 characters seems trite, an arbitrary offense to the gravity of the event and the final, human emotions of Neda and her family, friends, and community.

Within 24 hours this brave woman’s death was reduced to the status of  a Twitter hash-tag and a cheap slogan – ‘The Angel of Iran’. Already her image has been reconstituted by a myriad of contradictory, even pointless causes that seek to somehow legitimise themselves in her reflected publicity – just as Twitter sought to legitimise itself in the unpleasant afterbirth of the Iranian election.

While Twitter has been quite useful, sometimes funny, and certainly pointless in the year or more I have been using it, it has never felt quite this… tainted.

For organising democracy movements, for contextualising appalling acts of violence, and for paying meaningful respects to the dead, it is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Public sector staff have blogging rights too…

The case of the UK of the police officer who was disciplined for maintaining an anonymous blog has dark overtones for all public sector employees (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/8104649.stm).

There is a body of opinion in the public sector that somehow commenting via blogs or online is inherently wrong – that it somehow circumvents a strong and true hierarchy in place within government departments. 

This is clearly not the case, as evidenced by the speed with which many departments and individual politicians have embraced various new media to engage with the citizenry, and also to disseminate information (both official and proposed). In Australia interim guidelines have been issued by the Australian Public Service Commission, which in essence state the obvious:

APS employees are entitled as citizens to do so (blog etc…), but they must avoid comment that might be interpreted as an official statement on behalf of their agency or that compromises perceptions of the employee’s ability to do his/her job in an unbiased or professional manner

This really is no different from any individual out there – if you pretend to be a company representative (or any fake ‘official’ person), then you are clearly misrepresenting yourself, and can mislead readers. If you go online and publicly challenge workplace decisions or belittle colleagues then, yes,  you are being ‘unprofessional’.

But the police blog did not breech this rule – it was anonymous, factual, and not a misrepresentation of the author or the events he witnessed. It might have contained opinion and individual interpretation, but that is the point – the author is ENTITLED to those views as a private citizen – this is the whole idea of democracy.

Of course if you go online and make bad jokes, brag, or make an idiot of yourself then you will lose respect at work – but that’s just as  likely to be the behaviour of someone who would piss people off  anyway in meetings, during lunch breaks, or just being themselves around others – all part of the rich (and yes, annoying/frustrating) tapestry of human relations where we are all randomly dumped together in the workplace.

To ban this type of online authoring is a step towards censorship that governments have no right to take – it is a step towards censoring phone calls, SMS’s, web browsing, and letters (why not – who knows WHAT you are saying…?). Before you know it, we end up with the Great Firewall of China (soon to extend to Australia maybe?)

The concept of whistle-blowing is essential to maintain a healthy, accountable public sector. While online public forums are not the place for formal and detailed complaints, the occasional frustrations and contradictions that public service inevitably throws up should be made clear for all to see (it could even make for a good comedy show at times… ). It will lead to a wider appreciation of the daily balancing act public servants encounter, and hopefully lead to greater debate about why such things are that way in the first place. To clamp down on this is to claim that the public service is an infallible dictatorship, whose every word should be adhered to and never questioned. That would be as unhealthy in the UK or Australia as it is in North Korea and Iran (and as we can see from that country, it’s not an approach that has ultimate longevity). 

What do you think – was it right to take down the blog?

What’s good about you?

I’m reading a book at the moment that got me thinking (worth the money then)…

In ‘The Greatness Guide’, the author (Robin Sharma) offers the top half-dozen things he does that might help others develop in some way, and it made me think – I MUST be doing something like these myself, or else how do I get on in life at all?

As an exercise I recommend doing this yourself – look at what you do, and take some credit for once! There is no way you would be where you are in life today without developing some pretty effective coping strategies, so why not share them around.

For my part, I think mine would be as follows:

• Never stay still. Keep looking for the next project, job, or challenge. This keeps me edgy, and planning for an ‘uncertain’ future, forcing me to learn new things just in case they are useful down the track!
• Ask stupid questions. Be the person in the room that says, “Sorry, but your going to have to speak to me like I’m a 5 year old, because that doesn’t make sense…”. This makes the other person work harder to re-think their explanation, and it gives you another chance to re-listen.
• Ask for help. Ask the people around you for their solution to your problems. At first they look at you and think “Hell, you’re the manager, YOU work it out”, but when you explain that they can take on the projects that stem from this analysis, or that they may be acting in your job on your next holidays, it becomes in their interest to get involved. And the more views and proposals you get, the fuller and more effective the solution becomes (as long as you have surrounded yourself with great people). You never know it all.
• Read as many bit and pieces as you can – always carry a book in your bag, just in case you get left waiting somewhere and have 10 minutes to kill. Also keep a highlighter pen handy – don’t be afraid to scrawl across passages, make notes in the margin, or tear a page out to pin on your wall (as long as you own the book!).
• Dream. You have to be a fantasist, an idealist, a dreamer. Otherwise the people who huff and tisk away in the background will get to you, and you’ll pull back from commitment. If you believe it can, should, and will happen, then it has a tendency to work out for you.

Comment on this to share your own advice. It might help other’s cope with a situation they face tomorrow.

A happy WAN acceleration tale

Last week I participated in a case study presentation at a breakfast hosted by Expanse IT in Perth – focussing specifically on the Riverbed product.

We’ve had Riverbed as a part of our WAN for 1 year now, and it was nice to be reminded of just what a great product its been for us. Now I’m not interested in advertising any one product over another, but at a time when we had terrible WAN performance and very unhappy users, I just wanted a nice quick and easy fix – and kudos is due to Riverbed for delivering that.

The part I really like is that it doesn’t lock our network into a proprietary architecture. We’ve since done some other projects around SANs, servers, Active Directory, and application redevelopments, and Riverbed just keeps on doing one nice simple thing – squeezing more traffic down our slow links than we ever could before.  

We outlaid around $35,000 to connect 7 offices across Australia, and we are getting an average 3x increase in WAN performance – and some applications (web traffic and Lotus Notes) are being accelerated by 70% – 90%. As we are rebuilding our applications to be web-enabled, that’s a major business enabler for us.

Riverbed came along at a time when simply upgrading the speed of our pipes was being quoted at around $1 Million by all the major ISP’s – and that would have done nothing for the inefficiencies caused by our old applications (especially Lotus Notes). Being smarter about what went into the pipe in the first place seems drop-dead obvious, but how to go about it wasn’t.

If your in a similar situation, then give Riverbed a look – it may get you out of a hole just like it did me, and make your executive managers a lot less likely to scowl at you in meetings (and Expanse IT setup a free trial that was great – we got the performance increase stats within 1 day, and I was brandishing those printouts at meetings with some relief shortly after).

If you want any further detail of what we did or the results now – I’ll happily share screen shots or more info of our environment – please comment/message me. 

Leave the Pirates alone

The prosecution of file sharing site The Pirate Bay reached new, farcical levels this week.

An idiot named John Kennedy from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries actually testified that if it were not for sites like The Pirate Bay, then users would have paid for every single file that was downloaded.

The response in the courtroom was appropriate – according to Wired:

Kennedy answered an affirmative “Yes” to Pirate Bay defence attorneys when asked whether that was true. Bursting laughter could be heard from the audio room beside the courtroom where the trial’s sound was being broadcast.

When will the recording industry learn that this kind of nonsensical prosecution simply will not work. This trial is an absurdity because:

• Sites like The Pirate Bay do not host any files – these are kept on the PC’s of individuals. They therefore cannot be accused of sharing such files – they are just an indexing service;
• There are perfectly legitimate uses for bit torrent technologies – breakout bands/film makers looking to make a name for themselves, copyright expired material, copyright exempt material, research data, creative commons or copy-left material, etc, etc…
• There is an assumption from the recording and movie industry that they can churn out repetitive, formulaic crap, and people must pay up front to listen to or watch it, even though the creative effort to manufacture it was seriously sub-standard. This is anti-competitive price fixing, intended to rob the public with over-promising advertising, which is unrepresentative of the actual product received. The so-called illegal sharing of this media allows users to assess the validity of the producers’ claims (if they hadn’t been so disingenuous in the past, there would be a reduced need for this safety mechanism now);
• File sharing actually increases the popularity of good producers, giving them a reach and credibility that would otherwise be unavailable to them. As the reputations of good producers grow, people will be more inclined to buy future store-sold products of theirs, or attend live performances or buy limited availability, non-digital content (posters, collectibles, books, etc);
• There is actually very little money lost in the sharing of digital media. Despite the laughable claim that gave rise to this blog, most users pick up shared material out of passing interest – if it was all hidden behind a price tag, then much of it would remain unseen and unsold (and in fact artists would lose MORE money – as traditional production requires large upfront costs (manufacture/transportation/storage/disposal) so poor downstream sales only ends up in increased LOSSES!).

Instead, the industry should realise that the world has changed – you can no longer just produce/distribute/sell like we did in the last century. Some artists are realising how the new world works – they make their money from touring,  product ties-in, and having a presence across media boundaries (all revenues strengthened by file sharing among fan groups).

If we are even to half-believe the recording industry claims then we should be prosecuting pub cover bands, celebrity impersonators, mobile phone owners, radio stations (no way do their fees cover the alternative of making every potential listener buy a full copy of any song they might be interested in listening to), and we should ban nightclubs and school balls.

The alternative of course is to grow up, stop making lawyers rich based on unenforceable claims, and get on with building the new digital world of entertainment distribution..

3rd Annual IM Conference – ADF Presentation

The  Australian Defence Force (ADF) context was presented by John Thynne, Director of Command Intelligence Management Headquarters.

As an agency, John started out with perhaps an obvious statement, but one which was telling within the subsequent context:: If the ADF gets its IM strategy wrong, people die. With command and control operations now running out of a new facility at Bungendore, and covering global operations from Iraq, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands, Sudan, Sinai, Israel, and East Timor, there are literally millions of people all over the world whose lives depend on the information management systems they use.

Information for them is key to:

• Strategy: accurate reports leading to concise recommendations and
• Operations: coalition and inter-agency communications
• Tactical: clear direction and processing of incidents

To deliver these capabilities, project initiation and turnaround is paramount – some projects have run for several years, cost millions of dollars, but have still not gone into production. In this kind of environment the ADF is implementing a more realistic approach, with projects that must focus on::

• access
• usability
• availability

And what is the big thing they do NOT want – ‘sophistication’ (for which you could substitute ‘complexity’, ‘gadgets’, ‘features’, or’ ‘latest versions’).

This is interesting – John said that the green light comes on at around 80% of anticipated needs realisation – that is enough to advance capacity, and may in fact give them enough of an advantage to save lives in future operations. The key is OODA – can that system allow them to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster than the other guy? If so, it may be a war-winning capacity.

The lesson is clear then – clever is good, but it may not solve your identified problems. Get the 80% usefulness out of the project. This applies to the project initiation and delivery, reporting, and budget analysis undertaken along the way. It doesn’t have to be perfect – it just has to be reliable enough to move us forward.

This reminds me of a phrase I heard in 2000 from the IT manager of a major Wall Street organisation (to a room full of software developers): “I want the ‘first-of-the-worst’ of you. The first of you guys into my office with an idea that advances my business by 5% for 6 months will make themselves rich. The rest of you guys, working on a ‘perfect solution’, will never get to market – the business and the world will have moved on while you were trying to get it 100% right”.

It was a sobering moment – and looking around the room there were some ashen-faced developers and researches engaged in long-term work who saw the Cadillac and the mansion disappearing rapidly – and ‘first of the worst’ didn’t seem to fit with their world view.

John finished with another perhaps clichéd phrase, but again it was interesting to hear from his world: “work smarter, not harder”. Reduce hours, seek automation, and implement best-practices.

Sounds like a good idea – I’m on it.

(I’m Twittering the conference highlights on http://twitter.com/mdart)

Conference Twitter

I’m attending the 3rd Annual Information Management Strategy Conference in Canberra today/tomorrow.

Check my Twitter feed for live updates here: http://twitter.com/mdart

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Don’t get too comfortable – the web is about to change…

Good article (full text here) about imminent changes to the way the web, and web tools, are set to change (web 3.0 if you like). This is an extension of many current web 2.0 projects, and it reinforces that we really need to focus on search as the key to our websites, not menus or predefined hierarchies of information. Let the user search for it and decide how to use it (the last line sums it all up).

This means organisations have to give up the power they think they have to control the message by corralling users through a predefined information production line, resulting in grinning customers who then ‘get’ the corporate strategy. Those days are gone, and the semantic web should prove to be the last nail in the coffin for corporate control of the message.

In the semantic future your corporate data will be sliced and diced, to be served up in all manner of contexts that you would never have dreamed of, and perhaps would traditionally have had nightmares about. It’s starting now through mash-ups, cloud storage and social networking, but come the semantic search engine get set for a whole new ball game.  

What You Need to Know About the Semantic Web

by Tom Ilube

A quiet technology revolution – one that will radically change the way the internet works – is likely to catch much of the world off guard. It involves the “semantic web” – a way of organizing and presenting web content not as documents but as items of data that are linked by both meaning and relationship. A shockingly high percentage of businesspeople have never even heard of the semantic web, which bodes ill for their ability to position their organizations to cope with its implications or exploit its opportunities.

The semantic web was envisioned nearly 15 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and is being developed within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which Berners-Lee directs. Indeed, some 23 billion data relationships have been coded since 2000 (more than half of them in the past year alone) using a protocol known as Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The pieces of data that make up a present-day HTML-based document are not, for lack of a better term, aware of their relationships with the document’s other pieces of data (or data in other documents). The semantic web, however, is built on standards and protocols that clearly define the relationship of each data item to others – not just within the document but wherever those other data may be on the entire web. At present, people must wade through and make sense of search results. The semantic web would enable computers to interact with other computers to assemble data items that are precisely responsive to highly specific queries.

Suppose you’re interested in Shakespeare’s many references to adultery. Whereas a conventional search would return thousands of separate documents, which you would then have to ransack for the exact material you want, a semantic web query would extract data from those thousands of documents and assemble a single, convenient collection of all the relevant references.

Online retailers, music stores, travel agents, game sites, media publishers, and myriad others need to absorb the implications of living in a rapidly emerging world of open, linked data. Business leaders must first understand what is going on and make sure that someone in their organization is immersed in semantic web issues and considering their implications. If you ask your CTO about the semantic web and he or she looks at you blankly, you’ve got a problem. Your technology team will have to devise an architectural road map for the semantic web over the next three to five years and to undertake the difficult work of transition.

Perhaps most important, try to see the semantic web from your customers’ perspective. They won’t care what it’s called, only what it does. The enhanced customer experience resulting from services that draw on a global web of highly relevant data will render obsolete many websites that are considered today’s best in class.