Simon Phipps: from “hub and spokes” towards a “mesh” society

I just listened to another fascinating edition of Floss Weekly. They had an interview with Simon Phipps, Sun‘s Chief Open Source and Open Standards Officer.

His outlook on the way that the Internet changes society and how this will affect business is inspiring and thought provoking:

If you look at what is happening in society around the world ever since the Internet became endemic. There has been a topological shift in the structure of society: Society used to be structured on a hub and spoke basis with people controlling rare resources and communications at the hub and citizens, employees and consumers at the spokes. What the pervasive nature of the Internet made happen was that the topology of society gradually changed from hub and spoke to mesh. And as that has happened, the way that business interests have been conducted has gradually been migrating from a world of secrecy giving confidence and security to a world of transparency with privacy giving confidence and security.
We have looked at that trend and are convinced that if we want to be a leading technology company in the 21st century we have to adapt the company to live in that mesh society and to fit in with the emerging norm of transparency with privacy.

What does this have to do with open source? According to Phipps:

Open source is the natural consequence of a society that is heading in this direction. Because, what characterises open source is the synchronisation of the self-interest of many parties. And to create an environment like this […] there has to be transparency.

He also talks about how hard it is for businesses to make this shift, the “succes trap” for businesses: you cannot make a profitable and succesful company do worse on the short term to become a better company in the long term. Companies have to exploit their fallow periods to reinvent themselves: “the blessing of failure” (like IBM in the 90s and Sun early in this century).

This interview is a must-listen for all managers in technology companies. So please don’t hesitate and download the mp3 file or listen online.

Finally let me try out the new poll feature in WordPress:

[polldaddy poll=1013281]

Kiva: the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website

Today is Blog Action Day:

I would like to use that as a chance to talk about Kiva, a website that facilitates micro-lending: allowing people to give small personal loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

It is a great example of how the Internet can make things possible that weren’t possible before. It builds bridges and connections that just wouldn’t happen earlier. Kiva allows us to see which entrepreneurs need small loans (often only a couple of hundred dollars). We can then decide who we will lend our money to and can use Paypal to do the transaction. Kiva’s field partners are responsible for making sure that the money reaches the right person and will also make sure that the entrepreneurs pay back their loans. The field partner also gives updates to the lenders about the repayment (through email and RSS).

You are encouraged to give many small loans instead of a few big loans. This way you spread the risk , which isn’t high anyway with a 1.3% default rate on more than 15 million dollars in loans.

A couple of months ago I lend out $ 25.00 to Vuth Ang who used that money (and the money from others) to buy a new grinding mill:

She has been pleased with the results of her investment. So far, the grinding mill can earn up to $5 each day. In the future, this couple plan to purchase a truck to transfer wood, rice and etc… There are no problems paying back the loan. Again, she states that the loan is very useful as it is provide a chance to all poor entrepreneurs to start and sustain their businesses. Finally, she would like to say thanks to all lenders for interest helping Cambodian entrepreneurs like her family.

I have decided to make out another loan today. Why don’t you do the same?

(Kiva Brochure)

The day that marketeers rule the world

Robijn is Dutch fabric softener brand owned by Unilever. I recently bought a bottle of their new “Robijn Crème” concentrated fabric softener. When I read the back of the bottle I could see that their marketing department had gotten free reign:

Verwen je zintuigen & kleding met Amandelolie. Robijn Crème is pure verwennerij voor jezelf en voor je kleding door de rijke crèmige samenstelling en verzachtende Amandelolie. Een echt verwenmoment! Zoals genieten van een heerlijke chocoladetruffel die smelt in je mond. Gun jezelf dat speciale moment. Ook op een gewone maandagochtend.

I will attempt a (quick and dirty) translation into English:

Give your senses and your clothes a treat with Almond oil. You are pampering yourself and your clothes with Robijn Cream because of its rich creamy composition and its softening almond oil. A true moment of pampering! Like enjoying a delicious chocolate truffle which melts in your mouth. You deserve that special moment. Also on a regular monday morning.

WTF?! I wish I could know the genesis of this brilliance. Does anybody know who is responsible?

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Lauren Slater’s Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is a marvellous book for anybody trying to understand human behaviour. Her perspective is that these famous experiments (e.g. Milgram’s experiment on authority) “ultimately concern themselves not with the value-free questions we traditionally associate with ‘science’, […] but with the kinds of ethical and existential questions we associate with philosophy.”

What makes this book special is the fact that Slater manages to give each experiment a personal and human touch. She interviews the people who were in Milgram’s experiment and surprisingly finds out that being part of the experiment has changed these people profoundly and made them highly aware of authority later in their lives.

She explores the Bystander effect and finds out that people can be armed against the diffusion of responsibility by educating them about it and by clearly articulating the five stages of helping behaviour:

You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring.
You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
You must assume personal responsibility.
You must decide what action to take.
You must then take action.

Slater also does her own version of the Rosenhan experiment in which sane people had themselves committed into psychiatric wards (by saying they heard voices saying “thud”) and acted normally as soon as they were in. Most of them got diagnosed with schizophrenia and they stayed for an average of 19 days(!).

My favourite chapter was the one on B.F. Skinner. He is well known for his experiments with animals, but less known for his thoughts on teaching. He was a strong believer on the effects of the environment on behaviour and was convinced that this could be used to create a better society. Slater writes upon reading his Beyond Freedom & Dignity:

Skinner is clearly proposing a humane society rooted in his experimental findings. He is proposing that we appreciate the immense control (or influence) our surroundings have on us, and so sculpt those surroundings in such a way that they “reinforce positively,” or in other words, engender adaptive and creative behaviours, in all citizens. Skinner is asking society to fashion cues that are most likely to draw on our best selves, as opposed to cues that clearly confound us, cues such as those that exist in prisons, in places of poverty. In other words, stop punishing. Stop humiliating.

All in all a great book…

The Chumby: sexy open hardware

I have a problem with locked-down hardware. It is not that I don’t like Apple’s products (the iPod Touch is a wonderful piece of hardware), I just don’t like the way Apple’s products treat their customers. I had to help somebody who’s Windows laptop had died. She bought a new Apple laptop and wanted to move her music from her iPod to her new laptop: impossible! It took Linux as an intermediary to get it done.

That is why I love the concept of open hardware. I personally own a Neuros OSD (great when you are on a holiday and want to watch your own videos on the hotel TV) and, since a couple of months, a Chumby.

The Chumby is a computer the size of a coffee mug and made of leather. It has a touch screen, an accelerometer, a microphone, stereo speakers, two USB ports, a WIFI connection and a nice soft button on the top.

So what can it do? I see it as having a couple of distinct functions. It is:

An excellent alarm clock with an easy interface. You can set multiple alarms and decide whether you want to wake up with music or a tone. You can even set the length of your snooze.
A relatively decent speaker set for your iPod.
An Internet radio player. It is full of Shoutcast and other streams.
A digital picture frame for photos that live on the Internet (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Picasa). It can display photos from a particular user, but also from a particular tag.
An RSS reader.
And finally, an Internet enabled device for any kind of content.

The last point is the important one. You can load your Chumby with widgets. There are hundreds of widgets available. You use a web-based interface to add these widgets into channels. Then you set your Chumby to watch a certain channel.

I have created this virtual Chumby (please click the link, it opens in a new window!) to give you an idea of what these widgets look like. This chumby shows a particular channel which I created for this blog post and has a couple of example widgets. Each widget will be shown for about 20-45 seconds. It starts with some random Flickr images showing my favourite tag: decay. You can interact with the screen to move to the next or the previous tag. Next up is Twistori, this displays recent tweets with the word “believe” in it. If you prefer “love”, “hate”, “think”, “feel” or “wish” then you can click on those words to switch to them. The Chumby will then display recent top news stories from Google news. Next this blog using Chumby’s RSS reader (you might see this blog entry). It finishes off with the weather in Amsterdam (including a forecast), a web cam looking at Abbey Road (do you see people trying to imitate the famous Beatles cover?), some video’s from the excellent videojug and the classic blue ball machine animation.

As you can see the Chumby mostly pulls content in. My colleague Job Bilsen had the interesting idea of using it as a device for pushing content to people. He had visions of companies putting Chumbies on the desks of their employees and sending them important updates about things like compliance, RSI, internal news, etc. I can already see a plug-in for a VLE like Moodle. Imagine doing your homework on your laptop with your Chumby on your desk displaying updates from your courses and playing your favourite Last.fm channel (they are working on a Last.fm widget)!

The best thing about the Chumby: the specifications are completely open. I had to get an European adapter for it and they have the precise information about the power supply listed on their website. You are even encouraged to hack into it! Use it as a web server or log into over ssh? No problem.

Where do you get one? Currently the Chumby is only available in the US. They are in the process of complying to all the European rules and regulations so it shouldn’t take much longer before you can buy one over here as well. Want one now? Ebay is your friend!