Thankfulness

Every Thanksgiving, every editorial writer, blogger and private diarist turns to the topic of "thankfulness" in the same predictable way that we will turn to Janus-like reflection and hope in about five weeks' time. It's a cliche, but so what? Isn't it ironic that the most spoiled, consumerist nation on the face of the Earth sets aside time to reflect on the fact of the mere survival of its early English settlers? Thankful for health, for having a roof overhead, for enough food to last a long, cold winter. While we all learned the story of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in elementary school, what many of us were too young to learn was the "backstory" and that half of the passengers died during their first winter in North America.

I think that this Thanksgiving, more than many, we might be able to better appreciate the 1621 Thanksgiving. We also face a long, cold winter in the United States, and while we're grateful for what we have today, we don't know what these cold winds will bring upon us. So we are grateful, but guarded. We know that we must appreciate what we have, and we accept that a great deal of hard work lies ahead for us.

I think denial is less of an option than ever before. While we might follow the annual tradition of running up our credit card balances at the mall (after all, didn't we spend our way out of the last downturn?) there's a new attitude of frugality that is gaining momentum. And it's not just the enforced frugality of lost jobs or foreclosed homes. Many Americans without immediate financial problems are looking around and asking - is this spending frenzy what it's all about?

Increasingly, our attitudes are turning toward an appreciation of what we have. As Emerson wrote “If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” Miracles are around us every day, and yet we have failed to look - there was something on television, or something happening at work, or our friends were posting news....

Distraction is at the root of thanklessness. Too preoccupied to consider what we have, yet still vulnerable to the advertisements for what we are supposed to want or gossip about whom we are supposed to envy, we cannot focus, cannot realize how lucky we are.

If you want to give yourself a present, give yourself a reminder of how fortunate you are. It's easy enough to do. Fill a bag with some cans of food and look up the location of the local food pantry. Deliver the bag yourself. You will go through the rest of the day with a different attitude.

TARP - An Unfortunate Acronym

Like most people, I first heard of the plan to spend $700B to bail out US financial institutions when it was a three-page memo. At the time, we all called it "The Bailout" because that's what we expected it to be - a massive cash infusion into the US financial system from the blood bank of the US Taxpayers (well, actually, the children of the current US taxpayers, due to the fact that we're already spending more than we're taking in without the bailout, but I digress.) But even after we managed to turn the three-page carte blanche into the kind of complex bureaucratic document that Washington specializes in, we still called it "The Bailout". Because that was the idea. The boat is full of water, and will sink, unless we bail it out so that is what we are going to do.

So what does a "bailout" mean? First, there is a vessel, a thing in a body of water that's in trouble. We "bailed out" Chrysler, and Lee Iacocca famously paid back the debt ahead of schedule and gave the American consumer the Dodge Aries (fail) and the Dodge Colt Vista (visionary). But I digress. The problem we have now is that we're really trying to bail out an entire system. There's a techie interview question that asks - if my boat is swamped and I bail out the boat so that it rises in the lake, what happens to the lake's waterline at the water's edge? And that's the problem we face now - are we bailing out entities (boats) or the system (the lake)? I won't beat the metaphor to death, but we could go on about how the boats are connected, how the lake is really a reservoir, and so on.

But what's bothering me more is the name that we have now chosen for this program: Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). A lot of editorial writers and bloggers are saying that it's no longer technically correct, since the government is considering plans that don't involve acquiring the "toxic" assets of the financial institutions. In fact, despite the fact that the three page memo grew to hundreds of pages, in action, the plan essentially resembles the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn, in which our trapped heroes spend their limited weaponry to kill the most immediate threats, and cut loose those from their own crew those who cannot be saved. Some of AIG's "safe" assets are morphing into toxic obligations? Quick! Get the holy water crossbow and shoot more money at them!

Which brings me to the acronym itself. A tarp is a cover. When I was a boy scout, the tarp was the open air meeting space in the wilderness, artfully suspended from nearby trees that provided shelter from rain, shade from sun, and space for all. This was when we camped in places whose "facilities" consisted of access via dirt road. In those places, a big tarp was a good thing. Under the tarp, you were still outside, but somewhat sheltered. I remember the secure feeling of being dry under a tarp with my troop as the rest of the world was soaked. In the morning when we woke and emerged groggy from our tents, the adult leaders were already awake, sipping coffee under the tarp.

But these days, I think my image of a tarp as a shield against the storm is not the right one. Today, if I were to think of a phrase using the word "tarp" I wouldn't think of "gather the troops under the tarp." Rather, I would think of "throw a tarp over this." And the "this" wouldn't just be some firewood I wanted to keep dry. These days, a tarp is thrown over the scene of an accident. To hide it from view. Until the experts are done with their investigation. Then they will tell you what happened and why, and when the tarp is removed, there will be little more than a stain left to show what really took place.

But hiding the scene of a crime is not the only thing a tarp is used for. These days, we almost never use the old-fashioned word "tarplaulin" which - despite its odd spelling - reminds us of where these things came from. Instead we have the word "tarp", in which we can simply switch the middle letters to create the word "trap". Now I don't want to get caught in a debate over subliminal meanings, but if you want to convince someone that you've filled a hole when in fact you haven't - and you've just thrown a "tarp" over the thing, then you have created a "trap", haven't you? Whoever trusts your tarp will fall into that deep, deep hole. That trap.

So, on the bright side, a tarp might be a shelter against storms known and unknown, a place where leaders gather the troops. On the negative side, a tarp might be a deception, even a potentially deadly one. But there is another occasion of "tarp" in my memory, and that is perhaps the worst of all. I am thinking of the blue tarps of New Orleans. I have known blue tarps (also known as "poly-tarps") for years. We have a big one in our earthquake kit (hey, I live in California...). But after Katrina hit New Orleans, a few contractors rushed in to put blue tarps over damaged homes. Because of the urgency and the bureaucracy involved, stapling blue tarps onto the tops of damaged homes cost as much as replacing the roofs would have cost. From the air, one could see thousands of blue tarps on New Orleans homes. The famous "blue tarps" are mostly gone now, but for many they symbolized our country's inability to see a looming threat and implement appropriate safeguards, then once the disaster had struck - our willingness to spend far too much money on temporary measures carried out by insiders. And yet, years later, the real job of rebuilding the city is still going on.

So I guess, on balance, TARP wasn't just a bad name because it was inaccurate. It was a bad name because it brings to mind our most sinister suspicions of the government's actions in the financial "bailout". So if it's not a "bailout" and it's not a "tarp" then what is it? I sure don't know.

Copyright or Contract?

Here's a nice post from the EFF that spells out briefly and simply the latest federal court decision on the applicability of copyright law (rather than contract law) to the conditions of an open source software license agreement. What's nice about the post is that you see how important the distinction can be for an open source developer community.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference

This week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It may be that after 15 years of going to events like this with something to pitch, I was shocked by the experience of going to an industry event with the perspective of someone who had lots to learn and nothing to sell. But the vibe I got from the others at the show was that there was an exceptional sense of "you're trying to do that too?" And that was cool.

In other words, the event had focus. Not because of the vendors or speakers -- the spectrum of vendors and "panel discussions" was as broad (and consequently as intermittently irrelevant) as most industry events. Rather, the (non-vendor, nothing to sell) attendees were essentially all people within large organizations that were trying to figure out how all these Web 2.0 thingamabobs could work inside their organizations. And whether guerilla IT would work, or the only way to pull this off was to spike the CIO's coffee just before the demo.

So here's the ironic part of the show. Cool attendees, all from serious companies, all with a strong belief that there's something big here, and yet, and yet, who do they think is rocking the house? #1 is the CIA. Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency. Closely followed by rabble-rousers like Lockheed Martin, Wachovia, IBM, and so on. It was an eye-opening experience for all of us. Some people have managed to get this participatory, community-oriented, social-computing thing started within big organizations; and most importantly, have started to work out the kinks of demonstrating benefit (ROI), figuring out end-user involvement, and driving senior management buy-in. But the big buzz at the event was the incessant conversations between people encountering total strangers that were attempting to accomplish the same thing within their organizations.

A great number of bloggers were at the event, and many of the presentations (in video and ppt) are online at the event site, so if you missed it (and even those of us who attended missed quite a bit) you should take a look. And maybe we'll see each at this event soon.

One last note. The poor Westin Waterfront was completely unprepared for the wifi requirements of the hundreds of attendees. However, when wifi was working, I was impressed with the "back channel". This was the second event I've attended that provided a back channel (chat room) for each session. I wasn't convinced at the Web 2.0 conference (even though their wifi never failed) but by the end of this event I was convinced that providing a back channel for chatting among attendees really enhances the experience of being in a presentation (even if it's not the one where someone chats "I want to run up and kiss this guy").

All in all, a good event, with some significant logistical snafus, and a lot of promise for next year.

I'm Baaaaaack

Brief explanation: I've been on hiatus while changing jobs, finding my bearings in a new situation, and blogging inside a firewall. (Which this week I learned is called a "dark blog". However, I kind of beg to differ, because a blog outside the firewall can usually be much "darker" than one inside, but let's not go into that.)

When Will US Voting be based on Open Systems?

A recent post  shows that the developers of electronic voting machines for the United States will continue to fight any objective investigation of their systems. The case is simple: do we rely on the vulnerabilities of a software development process protected by "security through obscurity", or do we - as a nation - start to get serious about the voting processes that underlie the foundation of our government?

Morality, Legality and Digital Rights Management

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, John Healy raises questions about the illegality of file sharing once again. Healy points out that if file sharing does not reduce the owner's ability to sell the content (because it is digital, not physical) then there should be a distinction between file sharing and standard larceny, which our legal system today seems to lack. In a related commentary in Ars Technica, Timothy Lee takes extends the discussion to the question of production of digital content in a world in which such "theft" does not diminish the supply of the asset. (Some may argue this point - it is hard to defend, but you should read the article.)

In the business world, the effects of file sharing directly impact the profitability of the entertainment industry, and the industry's attempts to curb activities it considers improper are impacting the behaviors of individuals who might adopt new technologies for entertainment. Note the generally widespread criticism of the 24-hour time limit on videos rented through iTunes and other services. As one early adopter of the iTV said to me, "I won't agree to a 24-hour rental for the same reason that we don't have a min-bar fridge in our kitchen."

Get the idea? We might pay for an inflight movie, a DVD rental at the airport, or an in-room movie rental when we're on the road, but please don't treat us like tourists in our own homes. That's a fundamental mistake, and it's kind of surprising Apple (of all companies) made it.

But it reflects a really important distinction that the articles in the LA Times and Ars Technica address: intellectual property rights are far from black-and-white.

Let's pause for a moment, and just consider the legal aspects of IP law. There are copyrights, trademarks, patents and licenses. Now, most of these are addressed through contract law. A copyright declares that the right to reproduce a work belongs to the work's creator, and may be licensed to others. Without knowing it, the average American has probably engaged in thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of implicit contracts with copyright holders, by doing things like opening a copy of People Magazine, watching a sporting event on TV or turning on a computer and navigating to a favorite web site. However, these license agreements may not carry the same legal weight in other countries, where the "owner's rights" are not equivalent, or the law regards licenses and copyright differently. This is not unusual. For a long time, the United States did not respect the copyright law of England, in order to allow American printers to reproduce the works of English authors without penalty. (By the way, the unintended consequence was to make the work of fiction-writing in America very unprofitable, due to the flood of cheap works by English authors.)

In the United States, we have taken a severe step in the wrong direction with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which attempts to extend the footprint of legal authority beyond actual violations of copyright law, to apply to technologies that facilitate such violations. Keep in mind that most copyright violations are in fact a violation of a contract, not a civil offense. Yet the DMCA makes these facilitating activities a civil offense. Very little debate occurred about this question of escalating the "enablement" of copyright offenses. It is a rabbit hole from which our legal system will not emerge for some time.

However, the legal dimension of file sharing is really just one aspect of this very interesting story. What's really fascinating is the various arguments around the concept of intellectual property. You see, when you leave one dimension to enter another, you may do so through a reasonable, logical relationship; or you may do so through an argument that is nothing more than a logical fallacy and a sleight of hand.

The most obvious example is "digital rights management" (DRM) which we are told is a necessary tool to prevent violations of legitimate copyrights. But DRM may include almost anything: a rootkit placed on on your computer, a "phone home" application like the "Windows Genuine Advantage" software, or some basic copy-protection code on a downloaded music file tat prevents a legal backup. Is there a legal requirement for any of these technologies? No. Would their absence diminish the legal rights of the copyright owners? No. More interestingly, do they violate your rights or expectations as a user and/or purchaser of the work? Often, yes. So the problem with DRM is two-fold. First, it diminishes the user's experience below expectations, and secondly, it actually engages the user in a secondary contract that is more restrictive than standard copyright law. For example, the idea of "fair use", which allows backups, parody, commentary, etc, is well understood in copyright law, but it is simply bypassed through the combination of a convoluted license agreement, DRM technology and the DMCA legislation.

My argument is this: the justification for egregious restrictions on the use of digital content are due to arguments that blur the distinctions between what is morally right or wrong (stealing), what is legally permissible (copying or sharing), what is technically feasible (DRM), and what constitutes a fair business practice. When someone tells you that the DMCA or DRM technology is essential to protecting the rights of legitimate copyright holders, ask them what fair use rights - ordinarily protected under US copyright law - they expect you to give up. Of course, that's a hypothetical scenario. You won't really be having a conversation with anybody the next time you agree to some DRM, spyware, or other scheme. It will be installed for you by the folks who noted that you "opted in" for something or other. The burden is now on your to stop your own implicit surrender.

Remembering Jeff Healey

A friend e-mailed me that Jeff Healey had died from lung cancer. It always shocks you when someone you think is "around your age" is in the obituaries. But Jeff Healey deserves the remembrance, for the great music he played and the life he lived.

The New York Times provides a good overview of this brilliant musician's career, but Toronto's National Post takes a more personal tone and thereby pays a greater tribute to their native son.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to check out some of those jazz recordings.

What Can the Apache Software Foundation Teach Us about Collaboration?

In a recent interview, Justin Erenkrantz, the president of the Apache Software Foundation, discusses some of the day-to-day operations of the ASF. There's some history in there, but also a really good introduction for those unfamiliar with the ASF.

Here's a bit that caught my attention. Justin quotes Roy Fielding:

One of the key things in Apache, another quote from Roy Fielding is, "If it didn’t happen on the mailing lists, it didn’t happen." All of the discussions, all of the decisions, have to be made on our published mailing list. That allows people who may be in different time zones, or different work schedules, to coordinate through this mailing list.

This strikes me as important because there are a lot of people in the "regular business world" trying to enable or improve collaboration -- through social networks and such -- and they're trying to do it while still accommodating face-to-face meetings, offline conversations, and closed-door sessions. No organization is perfect, but the ASF says this: if we remove the assumption that we will sometimes exclude some people from observing or participating in our discussions, or take a decision "off-line" in a private phone call, then we can support collaboration on highly complex projects with a relatively basic infrastructure. That's the opposite of a lot of business "collaboration" which seems to only be helpful in gathering information. When a decision is required, a single person or small group of people makes the call for the whole group.

Of course, the interview points out that the ASF does have a hierarchy. To contribute to a project, one earns greater privileges as one demonstrates usefulness and an attitude that is appropriate to the community. Thus the ASF refers to itself as a meritocracy. Reputation matters greatly in the ASF's projects, and so does attitude.

In the interview with Justin, a few things about the ASF strike me as important:
- The ASF is essentially a "community of practice" - a group of people with closely aligned expertise and day-to-day job responsibilities.
- Each project is an effort organized around a rather specific goal - the improvement and release of a certain software product.
- Participants typically involve themselves in multiple projects, so cross-fertilization tends to be common, facilitating interoperability among different technologies.
- Participation (or a leadership role) in one project does not grant special privileges in another.
- One of the ASF's primary roles is to protect its projects from an inappropriate degree of corporate influence.
- Leaders in the ASF have a responsibility over the projects' operations with respect to the foundation's rules, but they do not "govern" technology decisions.
- There is a transparent system for determining how one achieves rights and privileges.
- There is a lot of disagreement and argument, but projects rarely fork.
- The organization adapts to support new requirements.

Here's my question: when attempting to improve collaboration in an organization, what can we learn from the experience of the ASF and organizations like it? The ASF presents an example of one set of "ground rules" for collaboration, but there are others, some quite different. How well would an "Apache style" collaboration model work for your projects?

Fear: Bad for Individuals, Bad for Groups

I was reading something by Krishnamurti the other day that seemed oddly familiar: "To be creative, which is to have real initiative, there must be freedom; and to have freedom, there must be intelligence." Krishnamurti says that intelligence cannot exist where there is fear or prejudice, and goes on to describe "the intelligent mind": "The intelligent mind is an inquiring mind, a mind that is always watching, learning, studying. Which means what? That there is intelligence only when there is no fear..."

This idea of fear as the obstacle that impedes intelligence, thereby limiting freedom and creativity, reminded me of a similar discussion of the negative effects of fear. In their book Built on Trust, Arky Ciancutti and Thomas Steding identify a half-dozen behaviors that underlie a properly functioning organization, which they call "the leadership organization." The authors argue that when each member of an organization commits to these behaviors and attitudes, the organization builds trust internally, and when there is trust among the members of an organization, it improves its performance.

A quick summary of the book doesn't do justice to the ideas, but what I like most about it is that it's more than platitudes - it's a recipe for building trust in an organization. And what's more, the best organizations I've been a part of were the ones that put the principles of Built On Trust into practice.

I agree with Krishnamurti and I agree with Ciancutti and Steding. Fear stifles innovation, initiative and creativity in individuals, and what's more, it prevents trust from developing within groups. And yet, many business managers believe that fear is an effective motivator. Fear may be somewhat effective at driving workers to a goal, but the cost is an organization composed of individuals who don't innovate, lack initiative, and don't work well together.

The best organizations you've been a part of - was there fear or was there trust and creativity? And more importantly, if you reject fear as a management tool, what do you employ to motivate and guide your teams?