2029 part 1

Two key points before we start – the first is that anyone who tries to forecast the future is doomed and the second is that nothing here should be taken as having any official status at all. This is me thinking aloud

With that out of the way, here are some idle thoughts on the implications of technology as a driver of social change over the next couple of decades.

The Commercial Property Market is doomed

See those big office blocks? Why do they exist? Because the work done by the organization requires people to be closely colocated? Because the resources they need are in one place? Because it is more efficient?

In most cases none of those are true today and definitely not in 2029. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment knows that there are only 3 things needed to work -  information, tools and people.

Information used to mean paper files – vast acres of boxfile plantations filling the land. But now information means a search engine and a memory stick.

Tools used to mean filing clerks, huge mainframe computers and typists. Now tools mean a laptop and wifi.

People used to mean … well what did people mean? Performance management was performance observation, serried ranks of people meant a diary full of update meetings and make work meetings. Think about how often you actually need to talk to people at work for real work related purposes, how many people you actually need to talk to and how many times it wouldn’t have just been easier to call, email or Tweet them?

Half the people reading this post will think it is obvious, they do not have offices or they just use short term touchdown or shared space. The other half will say that they are obviously looking at things like “hotdesking” to reduce demand for office space, but without challenging the essential concept of the office.

For most organizations, accommodation is the second biggest item of corporate expenditure after staff. Why are we spending that money? How long can we afford to spend that money?!

The HQ office is sacrosanct, we need those marble halls. It is a visible symbol of our corporate strength.

The office building is a dinosaur, it is like the battleship of a century ago, staggering onwards because of ego, tradition and self-interest. But like all dinosaurs, it is doomed.

Not all offices will go of course, they will survive in schools, universities, hospitals – anywhere where the purpose is either to work with people or, like museums, to work with objects.

But the general purpose office which makes up so much of any city landscape cannot survive.

So what happens to Canary Wharf? What happens to the revenues from rates and the jobs in supporting these land leviathans?

Good questions.

The city is a beach

What will the world be like when you can just look at an object and find out what it is? When you can change how you see the outside world so beggars or the poor never appear in your line of sight? When we are continuously wired?

So far we have separated World 1 – the real world, and World 2 – the online world but we are now starting to overlay them to create World 1.5 – the hybrid world.

Take something like Google Streetview – it’s an online representation of the real world overlaid with digital information. At the moment it sits on a computer screen but the next step is for computer screens to merge with glasses. So far, so old school cyberpunk but we can already see the first steps with iPhone apps that display information over live video feeds of your surroundings.

These feel clunky but what if it is in your glasses? Your contact lenses? A constantly updated reversioning of what you see. The glowing line that links you to your destination, continually adjusting to show you the way to go. The obscuring of sights you do not want to see. The ability to “Bing-o” anyone you see.

World 1.5 becomes a way of either seeing more clearly or, more likely, not seeing at all.

“Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie”

The rain runs down the window, trying but failing to obscure the gaudy lights flickering like ignis fatui above the blackened heart of the brooding city outside.

As I reach for the coffee cup, my hand trembling slightly, I watch the small people on the screen. People speaking words I have spoken, adrift in the same deep dark waters that lap around me; lost souls in a city of lost hope.

And my head fills with thoughts of my mad wonderful genius friend and her amazing films and her excellent book. (Recommended by CNN )

And then I put on my hat and go off in search of the occluded secrets of the Capitale de la Douleur…

Ever Decreasing Circles

We were talking the other night about the power of social networks to connect us with people of similar interests. Through Facebook and Twitter we can gravitate towards elective affinities. No longer are we limited by location or access to just the people round us, we can find people who have similar tastes, similar interests, similar names anywhere in World 2.0.

Someone then asked what happens at the intersection of these social networks?

We are all faceted individuals, we all can tell rueful stories of what happened when one group of our friends met another group for the first time. So the overlap between these spaces may be limited, so the set of people who belong to the intersection of all the social sets we belong to will tend towards 1. Ourselves.

But what happens when we meet someone else in this hyperelective affinity? Are they our soulmate?

A nice thought. But then again I wonder if we lose something in such a reductive process? I am much the wiser for having friends who are very different from me. That tension between planning and experience. Perhaps there is another way?

She probably lives in Tahiti

Big Blue World

Was at City University last night to see Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner at Blue State Digital, talk about the use of social media as an engagement tool based on their experience running that strand of the Obama campaign.

I have to say that I was very taken by his approach. I was expecting something more technology focused, buzzword laden but instead the focus was very much on using simple technologies to build on basic good comms practice.

Some things I took away from the talk:

1. Be clear about why you are communicating. Do you expect the recipient to do something as a result? If so what? How will you know? How are you supporting them to achieve that? How does this become an engagement as opposed to just a one off?

2. Scale can be a way of derisking engagement. With 10 people if 2 disagree with you then that’s 20% of the audience actively against you, with 10 million people then even if 10,000 disagree with you it does not have the same impact.

3. If you are going to use technology then be clear why that platform. If the core value to you is being able to data mine the information about the people you are engaging with then doing that through Facebook or Bebo just means you have gifted that information to the platform owner. Not only that but you are now entangled in their brand values, viz. recent Facebook change of terms controversy.

4. Email works. Not email newsletters, no one reads them unless they are very specialised and effectively fanzines, but clear short emails which link to useful things. How can I get involved? What are the next steps? What resources are available to me? I liked the line about how the energy spent on email newsletters is vast and the return so slight.

5. Trust the people. User generated content can be gold. A recording of a teacher, a film of a volunteer these were the powerful things that stick in the mind.

6. But don’t get captured. It’s about facilitating community engagement, not community diktat. Be clear, be brave, don’t just delete and hide from things which challenge or embarrass but also do not get captured. Be clear what is up for discussion and what is settled.

7. Make it real and make it tangible. “I clicked here and I did this and now I am making this difference.”

None of this is unexpected, none of it rocket science so why are we still hooked on the idea that if we provide a platform that somehow, automagically, a topic will become interesting and people will become engaged?

Oh and …

More Selective

I am a big fan of Last.fm. It has introduced me to music that I would not otherwise have come across and it has basically replaced all but Radio 3 in terms of music stations for me.

While listening to it the other day my eye was caught by two statistics which Last.fm gives you about artists – the number of listeners and the number of tracks played. So Pylon who are playing in the background at the moment have 117,314 plays from 10,673 listeners, giving a ratio of nearly 11 plays per listener. This got me wondering about how this compared to the wider world. 

Obviously the baseline is a  band which has just one play and one listener. Hmm, I think I might have seen them supporting Boots for Dancing. So the lowest you can go is 1.

Now you could have an obsessional fan who only plays ooh The Prats and does so day in, day out so you could get a very high ratio without it meaning anything so there should be a landscape where you want a high ratio but not too high, lots of plays and lots of listeners.

So what does my world look like?

Biosphere	17.96
Brian Eno	19.57
Ferenc	4.53
Lali Puna	15.31
Loscil	11.80
Pan American	10.54
Pylon	10.99
Talking Heads	18.89
Wire	17.82

So apart from Ferenc they all sit between 10 and 20.

But what about “popular” bands, what do they look like?

Well Coldplay have a ratio of 48.80, Girls Aloud 23.74 and The Killers 40.98. So does this mean that Mark does not like any music which scores over 20? Well Interpol hit 41.42 so nope.

So does this mean anything or is it just an exercise in stats? No idea, just a way to kickstart my brain this fine new year.

Oh and The Prats? 3.62.

Techno Tips Number 1

Well it’s Christmas and it’s Hanukkah so I suspect that lots of you got exciting new presents, techno presents. So to round things up here are some helpful hints and tips.

1. MacBook Touch Pads

The latest MacBook touch pads support multitouch so you can use more than one finger at a time. You can find find a helpful overview here.

But they also work with Google. You can raise the PageRank of a page on Google by using a thumbs up gesture, similarly thumbs down will lower the PageRank. This only works if you are logged into Google and using their new social search rank feature.

2. iPhone

The iPhone 3G has GPS and a tilt sensor. This means that it will automatically flip the screen direction when you cross the equator going from northern hemisphere to southern or vice versa. This only works if it is on when you cross the line so it will not work on planes.

3. Vista

Vista has a feature called SuperFetch. This speeds up the loading of frequently used programs over time by learning those applications you most commonly use. This is very handy but what if you don’t use the same applications day in and day out? Well you can then tell Vista to forget things sooner. Just create a text file in your ‘Documents” folder called <name>DohDohDoh.txt where <name> is your name, and in that file just put one line “ForgetItFaster=TRUE”

“Should” Should be Banned

Why would my Vista machine not connect to my wireless network? At first I thought that it was down to a clash with the router. When I changed the security settings it seemed to work but then it just randomly stopped connecting.

The symptom was always the same, it could see the access point and if I hit the laptop enough times it would kind of connect locally but would claim it could not see the Internet. The little pop up in the bottom right hand corner would say “Access: Local, Limited” or something of the sort.

I tried new drivers – no use, new access point – no use, new LAN card – no use.

I had given up hope until I tried a beta  test Vista laptop on our work public wifi connection and had the same problem. At home I could run cables but at work we have to get it to work.

After much Google-fu the answer turns out to be that Microsoft read “Should” as “Must” in a standard.

It has to do with how Vista responds to DHCP. The gory details are that Vista expects the world to behave one way and a lot of access point vendors decide to behave a different way. Net result, you get limited access from Vista via wireless.

There is a fix which involves editing the Registry.

Or you can run this utility.

As it changes the Registry you need to run it as Administrator. Right-click on application and chose “Run as Administrator” and then allow the next UAC dialogue.

I have tried it on two machines and it has resolved the problem. So if you have a Vista machine and use wireless then I strongly urge you to run it. Though if it destroys your machine and/or your planet I cannot be held responsible, for anything, ever.

Technorati Tags: vista,network,wireless,DHCP

Fight the gap

I spent Wednesday at Microsoft as part of the launch of e-skills Big Ambition initiative which aims to increase the number of girls in ICT.

The figures are depressing, whilst the number of women studying technical subjects has increased in recent years, the number of women studying ICT has fallen and it continues to fall.

What is it about my world that makes it so unattractive to women?

We had some great speakers on Wednesday who made it plain that it was possible for women to succeed in IT, have a great job and manage to achieve a winning work/life balance. The audience of 170 13~14 year old girls were obviously inspired by what they had heard as only 33% said they would consider a career in ICT at the start of the day but that had risen to 81% by the end of the day.

Part of the day was a workshop where the girls came up with new ICT product ideas which they presented to a panel of judges, of which I was one. The ideas were fun, well thought through and there was a real sense of excitement about the whole process.

So how do we preserve that sense of excitement and engagement? How do we make our world visibly appealing to a wide range of people?

Why is ICT such a monoculture? Not just in terms of gender or ethnicity but mindset as well. People will talk about how it attracts people into maths, physics, logic hence it is mainly a world of inward focused people whose minds run on linear paths.

But that strikes me as a description, not an explanation. In ICT we spend much of our lives working with people, not machines. Trying to work out what it is that people want to do. Testing our assumptions with them. Training them how to use the systems. The machine bit, the “logical” bit is the easy part, ICT is not an exercise in hermeticism, it’s about making things happen for people.

The more we can do to encourage a broad swathe of people into the profession the better. I am sure that one of the reasons why so many corporate systems are ugly, inefficient and hard to use is that we have allowed ICT to become a world of stereotypes.

It’s down to all of us in the profession to challenge those stereotypes and encourage diversity. Not for moral reasons, though those are important, but because else we will simply be unable to deliver the critical systems which people need from us.

Oh and someone asked me about the “dream job” line on the Big Ambition website. My dream job? IT obviously

What would monkey C do?

Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks? His reply was “Because that’s where the money is”.

When I look at some web initiatives I find myself asking is this a Willie Sutton initiative? That is, are we targetting a mass market? A space where visitors will naturally congregate. Or are we blazing a new trail?

It seems obvious that expectations about visitor numbers, levels of engagement, impact of an initiative need to reflect where in the webcology we are positioning ourselves so why then do I still have discussions with people who expect Facebook levels of traffic for an initiative which is either of specific importance but limited wider attraction or so far off the beaten track as to be invisible?

In the former case, you may well get very intense and active participants as it can be something which the target audience feel passionate about but if the business case said you would get 1000000 hits a day then you are stuffed if you only get 100 people a day visiting the site, even if they are committed users who find it really important and are very vocal supporters of the engagement.

So the key conversation to have is right at the very start. Because while it may be tricky at times to transition a niche site into the mainstream, it is much easier than promising to rule the mainstream and only achieving niche.

An Adventure of Keats and Chapman

I inflicted this on staff in my Department so now it’s your chance, oh Internet.

A virtual prize for the right answer and the first person to name the writer I have so poorly pastiched.

Keats and Chapman had travelled to the Lakes in search of peace and the possibility of artistic inspiration, at least that was Keats’ idea. However the weather had been terrible and the inn where they were staying was notable only for its leaking roof and the vileness of its beer.

The two friends had grown irritable and it seemed that the trip would produce nothing but bad feelings and ill temper. Then one morning the sun came out and the sky was cloudfree for the first time all week. Keats and Chapman set out into the morning for an early walk.

They walked to the nearest lake where they found a rowing boat in the care of a local child. Negotiating feverishly Keats managed to secure the hire of the boat and he and Chapman set out across the water. With only a single pair of oars Chapman found himself doing the rowing. Keats sat in the prow of the boat and watched his friend’s exertions with interest, calling out pieces of advice from time to time and making a range of comments on Chapman’s style of rowing.

‘Can you not row any faster?’ said Keats.

Chapman complained that the boat was heavy, indeed very heavy.

Keats began to look about the boat and rummaging in the bottom of the boat he found a large household brick. Looking around he picked it up and threw it into the lake where it instantly sank.

Chapman was still having trouble with the boat and it soon became apparent that water was leaking into the boat and weighing it down. The flow of water increased and it was with some desperation that the two friends tried to get the boat to shore. The flow of water was such that it was very hard to steer the boat and Chapman’s efforts at rowing seemed doomed to failure. But with one final effort they made land.

Standing on the shore, panting heavily. Keats looked down at the waterlogged boat and with a supreme effort said ‘As ye seep so shall ye row.’

The question is did the waterlevel of the lake go up, down or remain the same after Keats threw the brick in? And why?