When I first heard of Conway’s law, I though it was a geek joke. After years of seeing it play out again and again, I’m realizing that it actually communicates a deep truth about how the world works.
Conway’s law (in my words): Any organization that creates something is doomed/destined to create something that is a mirror image of its own organizational structure.
I’m doing some consulting work for a small organization that is spread out over two continents. Two continents, about 10 computers, and probably no official full time employees. The fellow who runs it does so out of love, and he hires people to handle issues as they come up. There have to be at least 4 or 5 technical folks with their hands on these machines. Maybe more. Truth is - I don’t know how many there are, because I’ve never met them. I don’t even know most of their names. One fellow I can catch on skype, but I don’t have his phone number.
And the systems of this organization look exactly the same way - a scattering of programs and computers that are cobbled together by a mess of scripts that either don’t interface with each other, or do so in a totally unique and unpredictable way. When something breaks, it’s an archeology exercise to figure out how it was built and what went wrong.
The organization wants to fix the problem by finding ‘a better computer person’ to add to the group. Meanwhile, the rest of the bunch still have their fingers in their part of the mix. If they really wanted to get things shaped up, they’d either hire a serious full time person to take on the whole picture, or at least insist that all the people involved have a regular conference call. Without that, Conway’s law is going to keep us all poking away at a scattered bunch of misaligned things that don’t come together into anything cohesive.
Over the past few years, I’ve been getting more and more regular in my meditation practices. One of the main benefits of meditation, for me, is an increased calm awareness of what is going on in my head during the time when I’m not meditating. I can sit back and watch, learn to identify patterns, uncover deeper motivations, avoid traps, and the like.
From this viewpoint, I’ve noticed an interesting effect. The latest movies I’ve seen and the latest video clips play through my head on a kind of re-run, sometimes for days, usually with no added insight or enjoyment. My mind rescreens them, for whatever reason. It seems like they are more sticky if the emotion of the first watching was stronger. As if the emotion has waves that play out over the course of days.
My spider sense tells me that we’re looking at Web 3.0 on this one - the next big step up - and what could very well be a serious crimp in Facebook’s style. It’s a communication and collaboration platform. It’s open. It’s got an API. It’s open to community development. It’s got Google momentum and mass exposure to make it happen.
It’s email, it’s live chat, it’s a wiki, it drags and drops files from the desktop, it embeds itself everywhere. Garden walls comes down. And it’s open - it’s just the beginning. Think whiteboard, think document collaboration, think task tracking, think project management, think collective web browsing. Zing!
Ran into a Doctor friend in a park next to the Jerusalem open-air market about two weeks back. He started to tell me about all the ideas he had for websites, and how hard it was to make them happen. One idea was to put up a website on the swine flu - since there’s such a scare about and it’s hard to get good information. I told him that we could do it in a week, easy. Turns out, it took a bit longer, since we got distracted along the way. The result - The Flu and You. Next step is to drive some traffic in the front door, and see if we can be involved in any purchases people want to make coming out the other side.
As long as we’re involved in providing honest, truthful, and well researched information, I can still feel good about it. We being careful not to slide into ambulance chasing here.
On the knowledge management front, it looks like Wolfram is about to take a major step forward. I don’t make these predictions often - based on Wolfram’s track record and what it sounds like they’re set to deliver - this could be the next step in knowledge search, research, and computation. Meaning - it looks like it’s going to make the Google/Wikipedia method look a tad bit dusty. Wolfram Alpha is set to go live sometime in May. There’s a blog which gives us a bit of a tease.
Dr. Stephen Wolfram demonstrated Wolfram Alpha yesterday at Harvard. The video (embed below) gives us tons of mouth watering scenarios, video of Dr. Wolfram typing, but almost no views of the product performing. It sounds like it’s working. It sounds like he’s demonstrating something quite amazing.
I appreciate, as a observant Jew, that no matter how deep technology gets into our lives, there will always be one day a week where we will turn off the phones and the computers, get out of the cars, turn off the Kindle, power down the bionic retinal enhancers, and appreciate the simple world. Barring major unrest, I’ll always have books on my shelves.
My brain balks at fully understanding Twitter. I feel as if I can understand other media - newsprint, TV, Wiki, whatever. Twitter feels to me as if it’s half born - as if we haven’t yet seen what this baby is going to do.
Global Social Message Bus
In essence, it’s the pure social network - no frills, hobbies, books I’ve read, pokes, movie reviews. It’s just nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass messages along those connections.
Massive MessagingAnything Market
The power is multiplied when combined with URLs. Nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass ANYTHING along those connections.
Neurons and Synapses - Rewire at Will
We’ve spoken for decades about electronic communication becoming the nervous system of the planet. This baby is laying it bare and bringing it out to the edges.
Massive messaging markets (3M?) are changing the game in news reporting. The generation of news is already a distributed and complex interweaving of parsed and recombined news streams - we can expect that to only grow and take on new forms. It will be staccato and rapid fire.
Living in what is arguably the most focused-on city in the world, I am well acquainted with how even reputable news outlets routinely slant their stories. With tens of millions of news providers, all of whom adjust and filter what they report consciously or sub-consciously, how will we judge what is true? How do we judge truth in the Twitter age?
Instinctively, we judge the reality of a message by how distributed and consistent the corroboration is from multiple sources. This already is, and will continue to be, gamed by groups with targeted agendas. Any group with a semblance of organization is busy flooding relevant forums with their message.
When the same message comes from varied quarters - people from many different backgrounds - it starts to earn believability. But this too can be gamed.
‘Witnessing’ has a certain power and weight - one who claims to have seen an event with their own eyes. Yet, the claim is easy, how do I know it’s true?
A rare, but convincing, argument for the truth of a story is when it is propagated by someone with an explicitly contrary agenda - a story which is injurious to the teller. To even come to this evaluation, though, I need to be acquainted with the teller’s true leanings.
So tell me, how do you know when what you read is true?
June 3rd 2009 Transcendent Man EI: “Every time I hear the man speak I'm mixed with excitement and terror to meet the future he so convincingly portrays.”
May 31st 2009 Scientific Paradigms Map EI: “File under 'Infographics that would look better on the side of a building'”
May 16th 2009 Games for Innovators EI: “I'm really enjoying 'Fantastic Contraption' - first game I've enjoyed in a good long time. Don't even feel guilty about it.”
May 1st 2009 update on Warner Music EI: “Apparently Warner Music is interested in promoting relaxation of copyright. They couldn't have done it in a better way than by suing Lessig (by proxy).”
April 29th 2009 'Digital Barbarism' Wages Online Copyright Battle : NPR EI: “Hmmm. I'm enamored of both Helprin and Lessig, and here I see them pit on opposite sides of a fierce debate. It will be an intelligent and content-full debate, to be sure.”
I’m doing some consulting work for a small organization that is spread out over two continents. Two continents, about 10 computers, and probably no official full time employees. The fellow who runs it does so out of love, and he hires people to handle issues as they come up. There have to be at least 4 or 5 technical folks with their hands on these machines. Maybe more. Truth is - I don’t know how many there are, because I’ve never met them. I don’t even know most of their names. One fellow I can catch on skype, but I don’t have his phone number.
My spider sense tells me that we’re looking at Web 3.0 on this one - the next big step up - and what could very well be a serious crimp in Facebook’s style. It’s a communication and collaboration platform. It’s open. It’s got an API. It’s open to community development. It’s got Google momentum and mass exposure to make it happen.
