from the January 13, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0113/p09s02-coop.html

Libraries as places to linger and mingle
By Alex Wright

RICHMOND, VA. - Recent news of the massive book digitization efforts at the Library of Congress and other major libraries has renewed public interest in the long-standing dream of a universal digital library. Proponents argue that digitization will do more than just expand public access to books; it will change the shape of human knowledge itself. As digital books supplant physical ones, they argue, fusty old hierarchies like the Dewey Decimal System will give way to the liberating pixie dust of Google searches. Books will mingle with blogs. And we will all become, in effect, each other's librarians.

But if the shift from physical to digital books is so inevitable, then why did public libraries break attendance records last year? Why did publishers produce 300,000 printed, bound books in 2004 (up 14 percent from the year before)? Despite the enormous volume of information already available online, we seem to keep gravitating back to the physical world of books and libraries. All of which raises the question: Is a library really just a collection of books?

Advocates of digital libraries often invoke the image of the Library at Alexandria as the archetypal universal library. This was, after all, the last time a civilization managed to gather all of its accumulated knowledge under one roof. But the real Alexandria was much more than a giant papyrus warehouse; it was more like a Greco-Roman think tank, built with great colonnades and wide open spaces designed to draw scholars together, giving them a place to work together, engage in dialogue and debate, and practice Aristotle's famous peripatetic method: meaning literally, to walk around. The 500,000-odd scrolls were certainly a big draw, but the library was more than a depository. It was a living, human institution.

The great monastic libraries of medieval Europe, contrary to the popular stereotype, were not silent study halls for cloistered monks. They were noisy places where scribes, bookbinders and other artisans collaborated to create the astonishing illuminated manuscripts that flourished in the age before Gutenberg. Some visitors called them "houses of mumblers" because the monks liked to recite their texts out loud while they copied them. These, too, were living places, devoted not just to book preservation but to bringing scholars together to work with each other in the three-dimensional world.

Even in the silent reading rooms of our modern libraries, a kind of quiet collaboration takes place among readers, librarians, and authors. There is a tacit sense of community, and a reassuring solidity in the shared physical space that seems to provide an antidote to the specter of loneliness. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the emergence of the Internet has coincided with a doubling of public library attendance?

The current vision of the digital library rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that the function of libraries is to connect solitary readers with isolated texts. If that were so, then we could easily replace our libraries with book scanners, search engines, and laptops. And if the shape of human knowledge really rests in the Dewey Decimal System, then, well, we are surely in trouble.

Technologists have an unfortunate tendency to view the world in mechanistic terms, as a set of problems waiting to be solved. As a result, they often fixate easily on the most obvious and reducible problems - like retrieving a book from the stacks - while discounting the subtler and qualitative dimensions of human experience. We need books, yes, but somehow we also seem to need physical places to read them, together. This is why a collection of digital books is no more a library than a stack of paintings is a museum.

• Alex Wright, a former Harvard librarian, is currently writing a book about the history of the information age.

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The Clock and Library Projects

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Hillis, who developed the 'massive parallel' architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, devised the mechanical design of the Clock and is now building the second prototype (the first prototype is on display in London at the Science Museum). The Clock's works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system which is so accurate and revolutionary that we have patented several of its elements. (With 32 bits of accuracy it has precision equal to one day in 20,000 years, and it self-corrects by 'phase-locking' to the noon Sun.) For the way the eventual Clock is experienced (its size, structure, etc.), we expect to keep proliferating design ideas for a while. In 01999 Long Now purchased part of a mountain in eastern Nevada whose high white limestone cliffs may make an ideal site for the ultimate 10,000-year Clock. In the meantime Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose continue to experiment with ever-larger prototype Clocks.

Long Now added a "Library" dimension with the realization of the need for content to go along with the long-term context provided by the Clock - a library of the deep future, for the deep future. In a sense every library is part of the 10,000-year Library, so Long Now is developing tools (such as the Rosetta Disk, The Long Viewer the Long Server) that may provide inspiration and utility to the whole community of librarians and archivists. The Long Bets project - whose purpose is improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable - is also Library-related.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

-Stewart Brand

Updated March of 02002
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>By Alison Maitland
>Published: September 28 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 28 2005 03:00
>>

The grey hairs are rapidly showing in the oil and gas industry in Europe and the US. At an estimated average age of 49, half the workforce is expected to retire in the next five to 10 years. The US nursing and teaching professions face a similar demographic crunch, as do aerospace and utilities companies.

These sectors are experiencing labour shortages as younger people balk at heavy manual work, unsociable hours and "unsexy" skills such as engineering. Employers are being forced both to find imaginative recruitment solutions and to consider how to hang on to mature workers for longer.

It is into this tricky territory that IBM, the world's largest technology company, is stepping with the launch today of consulting services to help companies prepare for the potential loss of skills as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement.

IBM says it is offering a comprehensive package that includes analysis of companies' workforce demographics and skills, job modification and training of older employees to maintain productivity and methods to capture their knowledge and pass it to the next generation, possibly through modern apprenticeships.

"The ageing population will be one of the major social and business issues of the 21st century," says Mary Sue Rogers, head of IBM's 3,500-strong human capital management consulting group that will provide the new services. The company is responding to requests for help from clients, especially in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy.

Niche consultants and human resources specialists such as Mercer and Hewitt Associates are already active in the field. Angela Watson, worldwide partner of Mercer, says: "There has been a bit of a push from the marketplace in terms of addressing critical skill shortages re-lated to age and experience."

But global consulting companies have not moved in with innovative services, say independent experts. Deborah Russell, head of economic security at the American Association of Retired Persons, points out that many employers have not yet woken up to the demographic shifts that may confront them within a decade.

"I can't say there are droves of consulting firms advising employers about ageing workforce issues as yet," says Ms Russell. "We are always looking . . . because we see the value of working with big consulting firms. Employers still view the AARP as advocates - so of course we are going to say positive things about older workers. Consulting firms bring credibility."

As this is an emerging market, estimates of its potential size are hard to come by. Ms Rogers expects to have a better idea in the next six to 12 months: "We'll see this market mature and change over the next five years and we want to be in there at the beginning."

There are pointers, however, in population projections. In five years' time, for example, nearly 30 per cent of the Japanese population will be over 60, up from 17 per cent in 1990, according to US Census Bureau data. Around 26 per cent of Italians and Germans will be over 60, up from 21 and 20 per cent respectively in the early 1990s.

There is also survey evidence that many people expect to work beyond traditional retirement age but in a more flexible way, posing challenges for employers in reshaping jobs to attract or keep them. A new survey for IBM of 1,000 American workers aged 45 to 65 shows that half plan to work beyond 65 because they need the income or want to stay active. Two-thirds think their experience is transferable to other sectors.

The experience of employers in countries with fast-ageing populations such as Finland and Australia shows that successful recruitment and retention of mature workers requires sensitive management and culture change, areas in which occupational health and psychology play an important role.

IBM plans to use "cultural anthropologists" and social scientists to help clients understand the impact of an ageing workforce. But its new service draws heavily on its existing strengths in IT and outsourcing. "The solutions are going to be increasingly process and technology-driven," says IBM. The taxonomy of [companies'] population is data-driven. Capturing knowledge is in many ways IT-driven."

IBM cites the transformation of its own internal travel expenses process from a paper-based system to an online tool. It says the 3,000 processing staff, many of whom are babyboomers, have been transformed into consultants, selling the application to other companies. "They went from being an internal cost centre to an external billable resource."

Project BackPack and SeedWiki

Saturday 10 September 2005
Berkeley, CA
----------------

Last week, three school-age sisters in a Washington DC suburb watched the televised stream of images of Katrina refugee families. They wanted to know how they could help their peers, the children in their age-groups now in temporary shelters, far from their destroyed homes and forever away from possessions that helped frame their lives. These sisters talked to their father about an idea: the idea was to send children the thing every kid has - a backpack of things ranging from clothes and small toys to school supplies.

Project Backpack - a relief effort for the children of Katrina, was born from this simple idea and helped along with a handful of emails to fellow parents in that suburb. Within a few days hundreds of children and their parents were filling backpacks and preparing them for shipment to refugee sites in Texas. Three days later, participants numbered in the thousands. A public radio news piece about these children helping children fed the strength of the effort. People from all 50 states emailed they wanted to help. From a goal of 1000 backpacks, over 5000 were collected in the first week and shipped to kids who need them.

What we are seeing is an amazing example of grass roots activism that emerges with remarkably little organizational support.

Support has come from another approach.

From the earliest days of the effort, the girls' father -- Steve Kantor -- used a kind of software that's only recently attracted any press attention. What Mr. Kantor used is something called a wiki.

Wikis are best thought of as a set of tools you use to build the kind of web site you need. They offer a collection of features that remind us of email, online meeting software, web- and desktop- publishing, databases, web portals, and social networking sites. In the case of Project Backpack, what was needed and what was quickly built was an interactive online 'place.'

Project Backpack selected an online environment named SeedWiki -- a product created and supported by a small eponymous Berkeley, California, company.

While it's impossible for anyone involved with this software genre to claim a long history, SeedWiki makes a convincing argument for its veteran status from having offered this tool for almost four years. SeedWiki has been a pioneer in creating easy-to-use online environments and it has led the nascent wiki industry in offering free and universal access to its services. Project Backpack is one of hundreds of organizations and work groups that use SeedWiki's hosting service.

In the first few days of the Project Backpack wiki, nearly 11,000 visitors have had the ability to read and contribute practical information and new ideas to the effort. This is more than a democratization of input: it is nothing less than accepting the reality that groups can collectively steer an organization. It is, as the wiki community often states, a reality where 'Everyone is smarter than any-one.'

The mushrooming success the Project Backpack is in no small way a by-product of the fact that site visitors from across the country have created links to more information about contacts and distribution centers. They have suggested other relief agencies that can work alongside this effort. And they have created new logos and brochures for volunteers to use as they help gather and ship these precious new possessions to the children of Katrina.

Steve Kantor says this best:

Project backpack took off because SeedWiki provided a tool to create something where no one was in charge but everyone was in charge.

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ESSAY; A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple

By JESSIE SCANLON
Published: May 20, 2004

''WHAT'S that movie where the guy says, 'Plastics -- there's a great future in plastics'?'' John Maeda asks me. Before waiting for me to say ''The Graduate,'' he adds, ''I feel like that guy.''

If he were truly the Mr. McGuire of the 21st century, he'd be touting Google or biometrics, but I see the parallel. Dr. Maeda, an associate professor of design and computation at the M.I.T. Media Lab and an award-winning graphic designer, has spent eight months putting forward his own one-word vision of the future: simplicity.

There is too much needless complexity in the world, he argues. Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has taken a wrong turn. In 20 years we've gone from the simplicity of MacPaint to Photoshop. While the first fostered a creative explosion, the second gave birth to an industry of how-to books and classes. And such complexity is commonplace, Dr. Maeda says. Despite the lip service paid to ''ease of use,'' ''plug and play,'' and ''one-click shopping,'' simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, he adds, and it is time to break free from technology's intimidating complexity.

This was the argument Dr. Maeda made last August when he called to tell me about the Simplicity Design Workshop, an initiative that would bring working designers to the Media Lab to collaborate with researchers. He had signed on Bill Moggridge of the design consultancy Ideo, Alexander Gelman of the New York-based graphics studio Design Machine, and Charlie Lazor from the hip Minneapolis furniture company Blu Dot as fellows for the first year of the program. He wanted me to be the design-writing fellow -- someone to shadow and chronicle the workshop proceedings.

Simplicity is hardly a new idea. ''Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,'' Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying. His actual wording was a tad more convoluted, but in any case, few in Silicon Valley heeded his advice. Conventional wisdom held that to sell the latest version or next generation of a product, you had to add new functions. ''That's not the only thing driving the industry,'' says Walter Bender, the executive director of the Media Lab. ''But I don't think I've ever seen a piece of commercial software where the next version is simpler rather than more complex.''

The Windows operating system is a case in point. According to Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at the software consultant Cigital, the 2000 version of Windows had 20 million lines of source code. XP, released in 2001, had 40 million -- a doubling in less than two years. Critics of such complexity have offered myriad solutions. Writing about the ''threshold of frustration,'' Bill Buxton, a former chief scientist at the graphics software maker Alias who now runs a consulting firm, called for engineers to focus less on technology and more on who, what, when, where, why -- that is, how it's being used. He promotes the idea of information appliances, or machines tailored to a specific task, rather than general-use PC's. Others have criticized the industry for an obsession with beauty and technology at the expense of user-centered design.

Dr. Maeda says the solution is not better design or better technology but a better partnership between the two. Hence the Simplicity Design Workshop, which could leverage the lab's understanding of emerging technologies and the real-world experience of the designers into a series of concrete, well tested principles.

In January Mr. Moggridge of Ideo met with a Media Lab group led by Cynthia Breazeal, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences, to try to define simplicity. It was easy to embrace the concept, with its connotations of beauty and elegance and its promise of a better way, but what did it mean in practical terms?

They considered examples of simplicity: the iPod for its minimalist form and intuitive interface; Google for its straightforward, no-fuss approach to searching; the Screwpull wine-bottle opener for its mechanical elegance; Apple Keynote (rival to PowerPoint) for its subtle pop-up indicators that help you align and position elements like a pro. (Not to mention the Citroën 2CV for its, well, social engineering: a high roof to accommodate the hats of French farmers, and other details that helped the car blend seamlessly into its drivers' lives.)

The brainstorm suggested crucial elements: transparency, aesthetic appeal, restraint, just-in-time information. ''We started with the big picture: what does simplicity mean in the context of our work?'' said Dr. Breazeal, a pioneer of social robotics whose current project is building a learning companion robot called RoCo. ''But the real value is to see how Bill approaches the problem of design.''

''Our interaction with Bill introduced us to alternative techniques,'' she said. ''For instance, he shared Ideo's brainstorming cards, which will be a wonderful tool for thinking about how to incorporate human-interaction issues into the early stages of design.''

In a second collaboration, Mr. Gelman of Design Machine teamed up with a group developing OpenAtelier, a Web-based collection of software tools for drawing, painting, photography, video and text-editing. Specifically, he designed a series of interfaces that, through simple changes in the size of the icons or in the use of boxes to delineate options, were geared toward different users: adults, children, the elderly.

The principle seemed to be macro-personalization -- the equivalent of this newspaper's special Large Type Weekly edition for the sight-impaired -- rather than the micro-personalization offered by a My Yahoo page. It's easy to see the potential for, say, type-enlarged TurboTax forms for aging boomers.

From the first year's efforts, some tenets of simplicity have emerged:

1.Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.

2.Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.

3.Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.

4.Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.

Beyond principles, the project seems to have coalesced around specific emerging technologies that promise to be the pillars of simplicity. The first is visualization and the need for tools to display complex information in a meaningful way.

''Think of the sophistication of interacting with today's video games compared to working with an Excel spreadsheet,'' Dr. Maeda says. ''We need to bring dynamic, immersive, engaging visuals to a whole range of information-display problems, from handling messages in your e-mail in-box to mapping the genome.''

Another important research area is ambient intelligence. Wi-Fi, radio-frequency identification, and other wireless developments will allow people to obtain and transmit digital information through ordinary objects and surfaces. The mouse and keyboard won't be our only bridge to the digital world.

A third arm of research focuses on making computers smarter. One method, a new branch of artificial intelligence, aims to give computers common sense in the form of a vast database of mundane truths about the world (the sky is blue, coffee wakes you up). A second approach, affective computing, gathers information about the state of the user through a range of sensors, enabling the computer to adapt by, say, holding delivery of all but high-priority e-mail when it detects stress.

As the first year of the workshop ends, the most obvious conclusion is that it has barely scratched the surface. With every Consumer Electronics Show, we seem to wade deeper into the ''paradox of the digital age,'' in the words of the computer scientist and design critic Donald Norman: the very technologies that we hope will simplify life ultimately complicate it. But there is hope. As Mr. Moggridge says, ''Technology is the villain, as well as the exciting opportunity.''

The Business of Design

In an economy where style is king, we all need to start thinking and acting more like design.

Quick, what's your IQ? No, not your intelligence quotient -- your imagination quotient. In this turbulent, get-real economy, the advantage goes to those who can outimagine and outcreate their competitors. So says Roger Martin, who has devoted his professional life to the study of competition -- first as a director at Monitor Co., the Boston-based consultancy, and now as dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Martin believes that the North American economy is radically transforming. As the production of goods and services increasingly becomes routinized, the cost advantages across a growing array of industries accrue to China and India. Scale alone is not enough to thrive in a world where markets are rapidly globalizing; incremental improvement won't deliver a decent ROI. Our companies will continue to prosper only if they push to the higher ground of innovating and creating "elegant, refined products and services" -- which might well be produced elsewhere.

The upshot, says Martin, is nothing less than the emergence of the design economy -- the successor to the information economy, and, before it, the service and manufacturing economies. And that shift, he argues, has profound implications for every business leader and manager among us: "Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."

In a global economy, elegant design is becoming a critical competitive advantage. Trouble is, most business folks don't think like designers.

In a recent interview in Toronto, Martin asserted that real value creation now comes from using the designer's foremost competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery -- a problem that we recognize but don't understand -- and to devise a rough solution that explains it. "For any company that chooses to innovate, the foremost challenge is this," Martin says. "Are you willing to step back and ask, 'What's the problem we're trying to solve?' Well, that's what designers do: They take on a mystery, some abstract challenge, and they try to create a solution."

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem "so it isn't a mystery anymore; it's something they've done 12 times before," Martin says. Most don't avail themselves of the designer's tools -- they don't think like designers -- and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

And that, Martin claims, means traditional organizations must reinvent themselves to perform more like design shops. In this new world, there are fewer fixed, permanent assignments. Instead, work flows from project to project, and people organize their lives around their projects, just as in a design shop. Accenture, for example, is more efficient in part because it's a project-based organization -- it doesn't staff up for things that aren't projects, and it doesn't allow projects to become permanent.

Design-influenced companies also understand their customers at a profound level and mobilize around that insight. The Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts' detailed study of customers led it to conclude that it could win by offering first-class service, and so it invested enormously in recruitment and training. The chain visualized the desired outcome -- "make people feel great" -- and reinvented itself to deliver an exceptional "user" experience.

Organizations that embrace a design-based strategy also employ the practice of rapid prototyping. Whereas conventional companies won't bring a product to market until it's "just right," the design shop is unafraid to move when the product is unfinished but "good enough." Designers learn by doing: They identify weaknesses and make midflight corrections along the way.

Design's powerful impact on business strategy will require a whole new way of thinking. Martin asserts that traditional companies "reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be)." Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach -- abductive thinking -- which Martin defines as "suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it." Instead of acting on what's certain, designers bet on what's probable. Companies such as Apple act like design shops by saying, "If everything must be proven, we'll never make the likes of an iPod."

Martin believes that business schools are also out of position for the emerging design-based economy. In his view, even the degree -- a master's of business administration -- is problematic. "We're telling students that the big bucks are made by administering linear improvements -- getting better and better at doing essentially the same thing," he says. "But the real challenge lies in getting better and better at a different thing: devising clever solutions to wickedly difficult problems."

That view has led Martin and a handful of other pioneers to lead a groundbreaking effort to redesign business education itself. In a first step, Rotman has allied with the Ontario College of Art & Design to launch a series of joint courses. The Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design recently launched a nine-month-long executive master's degree program in design methods. And Stanford University has committed $35 million to launch its "d.school," where people from large companies and startups alike will come to learn design thinking. "We want to produce T-shaped thinkers," says David Kelley, the chairman of Ideo and founder of the d.school. "That means combining analytical thinking -- the vertical leg of the T -- with horizontal thinking: intuitive, experimental, and empathetic."

And that's only the beginning. Rotman, the Institute of Design, and the d.school are in the early stages of mapping out a new discipline, "business design," which will seek to yoke business schools' rigor, practicality, and business relevance with design schools' creative problem solving and intensive understanding of the customer. The goal is to create a new generation of design- and business-based talent factories that will help fuel the North American economy as it undergoes its next great transformation.

Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: May 2005

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1

---

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie­ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.

Take population growth. ...

February 15, 2005

YahooGroups, Groove Or Socialtext Wiki: My Personal Impressions
Online Collaboration

Social Networking

Thanks to the courtesy of Ross Mayfield (founder/CEO of SocialText -- TP), I have been experimenting with my small geographically dispersed team, how effective a wiki can be in supporting projects in which multiple professionals contribute and complement each other.

-------------------

In the past I have made heavy use of technologies at the extremes of the asynchronous collaboration spectrum. From completely free ones such as web-based YahooGroups, which offers everything from a mailing distribution list, to files archiving, polling of the group and calendaring, to much more versatile and rich commercial applications such as the desktop-based P2P full collaboration solution offered by Groove Virtual Office.

While the first approach has severe drawbacks in terms of privacy and intrusion from ads, both in the online facilities as well as in your inbox as a consequence of having signed up for a Yahoo service, the second one has issues relating to the level of computer hardware required, and the performance impact it may have on your other applications. Groove is also plagued by an excessively conservative and rigid access and protection system, great for enterprise customers, but absolutely suicidal for the SOHO and small business user.

I don't know how many of my colleagues and teammates have had to recur to re-install Groove from scratch as a consequence of the difficulty of storing or retrieving access codes once they are created. I myself have just lost my laptop, who died of over-resistance to being patched, and I am at a completely loss as to how I will be able to access again my account on Groove. I know I am not alone in this and I have duly reported my frustrations to Groove in the past. What I am asking is the provision of an option that allows the end user to select the level of security that she wants to enable at installation, while providing the ability to safely store and later retrieve one's own username and password with ease.

On Yahoogroups this is never an issue as, like most web-based systems it allows registered users to safely retrieve their username or password with a few steps that are easy and now familiar to many Internet users.

YAHOOGROUPS

But, and really I am just speaking of my own experience, I was never completely happy with either one of these systems.

As said, Yahoo annoyed me with too much advertisements both on its online facilities as well as in my inbox.

With Groove, I am never sure who I can safely invite without getting them in a complete nightmare. The issues that most frequently annoy my potential teammates are:

GROOVE

a) the need to download a large application

b) the fact that Groove demands a pretty recent hardware setup with a fast processor, lots of RAM memory and possibly a fast connection to the Internet too.

c) issues dictated by its complexity and richness, whereby not everyone can easily and promptly understand or find out how to achieve something.

d) the fact that Groove works only on the Windows platform. Like for all collaboration tools to be used in cross-enterprise teams, being limited to interoperate only with people having the same type of operating system is a great limitation today.

Happily, Groove can now be utilized also from ANY other operating system, thanks to the great work done by the PoPG team in the UK, who sells access to a supercool service called Blended Groove ($30/user/month) and which provides web-based access to your Groove account from anywhere and with ay type of OS.

But, as you can imagine this doesn't come for free. The Groove full version costs in excess of USD 170, (price actually varies depending on where you are located and in relation to the version you choose).

So, when I headed out to test Ross Mayfield's SocialText wiki workspace, I didn't expect much, as I thought wiki spaces allowed yes for collaborative posting of notes and files but not for much more of what I had become accustomed to find in these more established and popular collaboration solutions.

I was wrong.

As you can find out yourself by accessing the free 30-day try-out offered by SocialText, wikis can provide a very effective collaboration workspace that is both easy-to-use and rich enough in features to support many teamwork-based projects.

While each wiki (there are tens of different types of wiki technologies out there) can be rather different from another one, all wikis share one thing in common: they let users edit web-based content in a very simple and straightforward fashion providing great support to those projects where you need to post, comment, annotate and update information with other team members on a daily or even hourly basis.

Access is as fast as to getting to any standard web page. No software needs to be downloaded, no plugins need to be installed.

Navigation is immediately simple and once you understand how to do two things (create a new page and make a link to it) you can do most anything you want.

You can create pages with assignments, references, attached files and images that your selected teammates can access privately and update, extend, re-organize at any time they wish.

It is as simple as working inside a normal text editor. Text can be formatted very easily, and making a change to an online document requires only a few seconds.

Weblogs and RSS are integrated from day one. You can also create as many "workspaces" as you want and utilize each one of them to manage a different project or workgroup. Each workspace is in fact associated with the people you select and it is extremely easy to remove or invite new team members.

SocialText wiki workspaces generate email notifications, RSS feeds and Update pages that allow any team member to easily monitor and rack any progress and changes to the workspace without needing to access it directly.

Everything that is composed, edited and written in the wiki maintains a full track record of the changes made, and the administrator(s) can easily revert any document /web page to any previous state it was in.

Workspaces in the SocialText wiki can also receive emails from any of the team members, which are immediately organized and made available to all the other workspace members.

For my own experience, this is indeed a great collaboration technology that can be extremely useful to virtual teams of non-technically oriented people. It bridges ease of use and access with all the advantages of being web-based and open to any operating system.

If I were to recommend an alternative solution to the likes of Yahoogroups (and similar ones), Groove and other asynchronous collaboration spaces I would have no hesitation in indicating a wiki, and the Socialtext implementation in particular, as a great alternative to such other approaches.

Having worked daily on the SocialText wiki workspace for a few weeks now, I only have a couple of issues that I personally look forward to see improved:

a) Speed. For a web-based solution like the SocialText wiki, speed is of the essence. I mean, if I click on a Web page to edit it and I need to wait for 20 or more seconds while being on a T1, I may as well go back to Groove.

b) Cost. The SocialText wiki workspace is presently priced at $30/month/user. At this price level Ross is cutting out all of the professionals, SOHO companies and non-profit institutions out there, including a great deal of academic organizations. Not that the tool isn't worth that money each month, but being totally innovative collaborative technology, at least for the mainstream, a much lower entry price would positively guarantee much wider adoption. What is most ironic to me, is that those customers groups are probably the types of organizations that can take best advantage of this new technology, as large corporate accounts take a much longer incubation time to comprehend, test and certify such innovative technologies for adoption. My suggestion therefore is for greater diversification of the price offering and for a substantial lowering of the cost to professionals or small business teams (1-10) like the ones I often operate with.




To those of you that already use a wiki with productive results, I wish to ask which are the true alternatives to Ross' system and what are the differences in terms of costs and features?

For independent publishers, professional consultant, small virtual teams operating online is money spent on the SocialText wiki workspace well spent or should we be looking elsewhere?



posted by Robin Good on Tuesday February 15 2005

Tom Foremski: Blogging technology opens doors for enterprises
By Tom Foremski
Published: February 23 2005 07:50 | Last updated: February 23 2005 07:50


There is a new phase of the internet emerging and it is being fuelled by a new class of technologies coming out of Silicon Valley that don’t even have a name yet, but they have the potential to be disruptive in their application.

Some have begun calling this new phase Web 2.0, but I prefer the term internet 2.0 because it more accurately encompasses the broad nature of what is happening. Blogging, and blogging-like technologies such as wikis, are shaping up to become one of the most important features of internet 2.0. I would not be surprised if these technologies become recognised as the “killer applications” of the next few years.

Let me explain why I think these technologies are so groundbreaking. I know that most readers are familiar with the term “blogging” and many also read blogs. Their content consists mostly of personal views on the day’s events, and other subjects. The content of blogs, however, is not the interesting part – it is the underlying blogging software and its ability to automate the many tasks required to run a website. No technical skills are required of the writer, beyond being able to use a browser and the ability to type. For less than $100, blogging software such as the popular Movable Type, from Six Apart, is a good enough replacement for online content management systems costing more than 1,000 times as much.

That capability alone would be enough to be potentially disruptive to online publishing business models, but blogging technologies also come with a lot more, a distribution system that targets its audience perfectly. This is done through a feature called “trackback,” and a standard known as RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Trackback automatically detects if someone has published a link to your blog post, and it will publish their comment on your blog. This means that it doesn’t matter if a reader posts a comment on the writer’s blog, or, on another blog – the software tracks it all. The response of readers to a news story, for example, can be plainly seen in real-time. It also means that other bloggers, by writing a comment and publishing a link to the original story, become distributors of that content to their readers. And it shows that if the content is relevant, an audience will find it, and also personally recommend it to others through their blogs.

RSS is another way to distribute blog content. It allows readers to subscribe to a blog and read the content without having to visit the originating site. RSS makes it possible to aggregate the content from several sites within software called a “newsreader.”

Other types of related applications are wikis, which differ from blogs in that any reader can change the content of the web page. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by internet users, is a good example of a wiki. It also showcases how wikis can be used as knowledge management systems.

Blogs have been around for several years and wikis are 10 years old. What is new however, is the realisation of the business uses for these types of technologies. If they can create communities of self-selected readers companies could potentially communicate directly with their customers. And customers can provide direct feedback to the companies. If it is done right, this means potentially huge savings in marketing, and market research activities.

Astonishingly, a very small number of people within the business community have figured this out. Even in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of blogging technologies, the common view is that it is a narcissistic activity by unemployed software engineers with plenty of time on their hands.

A few people are trying to educate the business community through conferences, and interest from corporations seems to be sparking up. For example, in late January 2005, I took part in a journalism panel at the New Communications Forum, one of the first US conferences on corporate use of blogging and wikis. Elizabeth Albrycht and Jennifer McClure, the organisers of the event, were having trouble reaching their modest goal of attracting 80 to a 100 people to the conference. “I don’t know why, but then suddenly, just days before the conference, we were swamped by people wanting to attend, and companies wanting to be sponsors,” says Ms Albrycht. Encouraged by its success, they are now preparing a similar conference for Paris in April, and one for New York in the autumn.

The enterprise sector is being targeted by new start-ups such as Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite, once one of the largest search engine companies. “Corporate departments can use JotSpot to quickly and easily build custom business applications,” Mr Kraus says. Other entrepreneurs in this space include Ross Mayfield, of SocialText, also a developer of wikis for corporations. David Galbraith, one of the authors of RSS 1.0 has developed “Wists” a simple tool allowing users to create and publish online catalogues of images. In the UK, Fergus Burns heads Nooked, a company that helps enterprises manage their RSS feeds. And new types of web sites such as Flickr are creating novel communities and group activities that could not have been predicted.

A characteristic of these software technologies is that they behave as “platforms” that enable and support online communities on the internet or in the private corporate intranet. Social software is one label, but a more fitting one might be “community-ware” or even “community-aware” software.

Tom Foremski is a former Financial Times news reporter and now publishes SiliconValleyWatcher.com, a business news blog for northern California’s Silicon Valley. tom@siliconvalleywatcher.com

-------Hello Kind Reader,...Just a quick note that I've registered this book at BookCrossing.com, so that I can keep up on where it goes, who reads it, and what they thought of it. Please visit www.BookCrossing.com/888-287902 to make a quick journal entry, then pass the book along to someone else who will appreciate it. We can all track this book's journey and the lives it touches forever more!
-------Thank You! (NOTE: I've changed the number of the book)

Berkeley journal, Monday 7 feb 2005

There's a new blog Out There -- wikiSquared.com

when consumers own their own purchasing dossiers...

Chestnuts - revisited

The annual Great Chestnut Road Test

Roasted chestnuts were one of the culinary wedge-issues in my childhood.

And once a year I try to find a kind of epicurean accommodation.

In food, as in so many things, my parents were from different worlds. My father was raised in an ethnic New York neighborhood that would someday lead to stories about my grandmother teaching her seven children which streets were safe and which where places where no-matter-what-you-see-you-never-tell-anyone. It was a world of sweatshops and growing Communist sympathies. A world of daily market shopping with net bags and noisy, argumentative banter taking place across expanses of decidedly un-Heart-Healthy food.

My mother was raised in what nowadays we'd call Appalachian Ohio, one of eight children of a modestly successful Gentleman Farmer. Hers was a more boundaried world, sounding at times like a cross between Lake Wobegan and Walton's Mountain. I remember her stories about Pinkie, the family pet lamb, eating the grapevine clinging to lattice outside their summer kitchen, stories about the short-legged Shetland pony -- Trixie -- who always tried to be as fast a runner as her mother. Mealtimes at the farm were as full of genteel manners as they were of Scots-Irish comfort food.

These were two people, it should come as no surprise, with very different ideas of good food.

It was the 1950's -- food selection and preparation were my mother's dominion. Now and then, though, it seems my father yearned for something from his childhood. Somehow, he'd routinely manage to find a local farm stand or delicatessen on his way home and surprise my family with something totally unexpected: Basketsful of out-of-the-ordinary fresh and dried fruit, smoked oysters, dry-cured fish, and an un-ending range of vegetables packed in oil or aspic, with spices and herbs that had never been part of *our* kitchen.

Tolerant as she was, my mother could never hide her dislike for the smell of roasting chestnuts. And as my mother's son, I somehow inherited the idea that the sweet, musky smell of chestnuts baking in the oven was something that should occur in the homes of other people. People we'd not have to visit too often.

A generation later I began to suspect that some of my father's food tastes had merit. One by one, I'd end up trying some of the treats he'd brought into our world of shepherd's pie, pot roasts and garden salads. And far more often than not, I'd have to admit I'd missed something by being reluctant to try those foods.

Five years ago I began a new family tradition, something my wife calls the Annual Chestnut Road Test. Each January, around New Year's, I lay in a supply of fresh chestnuts. The shells are dutifully scored with a penknife, and are placed into a hot oven for varying times. Results so far have been uneven.

While I can't honestly say I *like* the flavor of these roasted nuts, the truth is, I've gotten to the point where I find the smell charmingly evocative of cozy afternoons in my parents' New England house.

So, on this late Sunday night (just after midnight) two days before Christmas and more than a week 'til New Year's Day, I'm sitting in our kitchen looking at a bag of chestnuts. *This years* Road Test batch.

Who knows, maybe this'll be the year that I actually enjoy them.

Why wikis will make a difference

GalactoHumvees, Bangalore work teams and a wiki worth watching...

A year ago, late in the afternoon of a Christmas Day in Northern California, a group of dads sat around wondering how to assemble a toy. It was one of those 'straddle and push' vehicles, something of a cross between a Mars's probe and a military assault vehicle. The picture of the finished product was intimating enough - the realty even more so as we realized the flat box contained hundreds of pieces to be assembled. The accompanying directions were in that strange dialect of Instruction English that promises more help than it ever delivers.

Clearly, we were on our own. What happened next was a kind of hands-on free-for-all. Someone, for example, would hold up a piece and say, "how do you figure two 3-foot rods find their way into a toy 2-ft wide? Opinions were tossed out. While some of us looked at what would become sub-assemblies of the vehicle, others opined about people with similar toys we might want to phone.

In less time than we'd feared, and by the honing of occasionally good- and occasionally outlandish- suggestions against each other, the toy was assembled.

AlexC. We're (Costa Mesa store) getting complaints from some customers that book returns are too complicated -- that its taking too much time.

Beth_FR. Yep - we've heard that too -- what they say is that having to wait as a Manager comes to the cash register to do stuff is a pain. And that it makes us look up-tight ... OTHER book chains, we're told, it's just the person at the register that's involved. Well, maybe its the Lead Cashier. 'don't know for sure.

AlexC. Exactly. That whole Manager On Duty call is something people are complaining about.

MayaLu. Didn't I read something in Book-Sellers about that big independent bookstore in Seattle - um - Elliot Bay (?) -- doing something like giving all employees great leeway in handling stuff like exchanges and returns?

DougWest. Yes - it WAS Elliot Bay. 'guess it made a lot of press in Seattle.

Beth_FR. Hey - isn't the new Manager in San Francisco from there?

DougWest. From Elliot Bay?

Beth_FR. No - just from Seattle. 'figured maybe he knew someone in the Indie Bookstores world who could give us any info.

RaoMachir. I'm in the San Fran store -- lemmie ask Lawrence about it.

Wikis and Work

Wiki THIS !

AND - lest I forget to mention one of the most visible players in this opportunity-arena -- there's the company (and product) - SocialText.

creating a new corporate function

A hypothetical company... let's call it "FilterMail"

1. E-mail hurts organizational effectiveness:

For all its benefits, e-mail occasionally gives a real body-blow to organizational effectiveness. It's usually an issue of too much noise that takes us away from using the tool for the greatest benefit to our companies.

2. It takes us away from something terribly basic in business:
We all want to give better service to trusted customers and vendors.


3. We need help managing our attention:

We create a set of filters on our e-mail systems. Filters that let our best customers and vendors get our immediate attention. Filters that flag all other messages as demanding a lessor amount of immediate focus.

4. Consider a story about how this might play out:

Unknown-Vendor-X finds my name somewhere. He or she sends me a message. That person's message to TomPortante@collectiveSome.com - for example, goes through FilterMail's system.

If it's a name of a contact I've place on my friends-of-the-company-list the mail is forwarded immediately to my computer.

For everyone else, three things happen.

-That piece of mail is forwarded to a FilterMail system mailbox in my name. It's a system mailbox I have access to. For, say, 60 days items are stored in 'interim mail'. After that time, messages are deleted.

-A message is returned to the sender of that mail. "Your e-mail to tomportante@collectivesome.com has not passed a mail filter. You have three delivery options (i) base rate postage is 15 cents, (ii) priority mail is 1 dollar, (iii) immediate attention mail is three dollars. Please press the PayPal button to deposit your postage costs." (NOTE: any micro-payment system)

-If there's no reply, no further action is taken and the message sits in the interim mailbox for a specified time. If, on the other hand, the sender selects one of the options, the original message (sitting in Interim Mail) is forwarded to me with a mail message icon letting me know someone has paid postage.

(... and of course, once I've read the postage-paid message, I could add that person to a "friends" permission list.)

5. There is a business opportunity for this hypothetical service:

This listing of "friends-of-the-company" can be outsourced to a third-party mail system.


6. There are at least two compelling value propositions for anyone with their names on such lists:

Professional contacts (eg: WiFi provider, office-supplies contact, lists of preferred pharmaceutical sales-reps) can have not only their name and addresses listed as a "trusted vendor for companies x, y, and z" -- but they can have their whole business card info included in that link. (and - even more info can be attached to their names. See below)

Their status as a preferred vendor would be in a free, web accessible database.


7. And an equally compelling one for the company providing this service:

An analogy to the Yellow Pages is a good one. Contacts would be given a free space for minimal information. Additional fees would be levied for better advertisements.

Trash Your Desktop
October 20, 2003 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Mitch Kapor’s new, more intuitive computer interface puts all the information we need to manage our digital lives at our fingertips, no matter what form it’s in.

By Michael Fitzgerald November 2003

"Thwump" sounds happen in boxing matches, not offices. So when a loud thwump bounces off the exposed-wood ceiling in an office in San Francisco’s once trendy south-of-Market district, every head turns. Programmer Jed Burgess is flat on his back next to a blue fitness ball. Burgess gets up, pulls his socks off for traction, and manages to balance atop the ball. Applause breaks out. Then the office returns to quiet discussions of software architecture punctuated by the clicking of keyboards. Welcome to Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation.


Kapor himself, famous as the founder of Lotus Development and one of the software industry’s chief malcontents, is away from the commotion. But if his foundation succeeds, it’ll make a thwump the entire software business will hear. The organization’s 13 programmers are hard at work on a piece of software that could change the way we manage our digital lives, curing the headaches of having to juggle the dozens of types of information stored on personal computers by a variety of applications—and, Kapor hopes, making computer users happier and more productive in the process.

Code-named Chandler, after the mystery writer (because, Kapor says, what they’re creating was something of a mystery even to them when the venture launched two years ago), the software promises to put all related e-mail messages, spreadsheets, appointment records, addresses, blog entries, word-processing documents, digital photos, and what-have-you in one place at one time: no more opening program after program looking for the items related to a specific topic. It takes the core functions of Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Desktop, and other personal information management programs and integrates them with the rest of your PC and the Internet. All the information you need to complete a given task or project is grouped on-screen, organized around the one function—e-mail—Kapor sees as the central conduit of our electronic lives.

Chandler & Outlook Microsoft Outlook and Chandler will have common elements, such as a calendar, e-mail reader, and contacts list, but Chandler hopes to add a number of novel features as well:

* An adaptive user interface that displays all the information relevant to what you are working on, no matter what form it is in—e-mail, word-processing document, digital photo, or Web pageThe ability to run on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems (Outlook does not work on Linux, and not all features are available for Macs)

* Built-in instant messaging

* The ability to swap out the calendar, the e-mail reader, and other software components if someone writes programs you like better

* Calendar and contact sharing that doesn’t require a central server (and someone to maintain it)


Because Chandler presents information in its logical context—displaying all related items together—and not in the separate folders and application windows of the traditional desktop computer system, you can think of it as a new way into your computer. “It may be hubristic,” says Kapor, “but we’re trying to push the edge of the envelope in terms of innovation, and trying to pioneer a new type of interface”—one that he thinks is sorely needed. “Software is too difficult, too limiting, and pretty severely so, and it’s a raw deal. The average user really gets screwed.”

Ending this “screwage”—a term that pops up frequently in Kapor’s Web log—is important enough to the software tycoon that he’s funding the foundation with $5 million of his own money. And this summer, Kapor gave Technology Review the first in-depth look at Chandler and the organization building it. Word about Chandler has gotten out through conference presentations, Kapor’s blog, and the foundation’s Web site, creating a buzz in programming circles. It’s a “very interesting project to watch,” says Chad Robinson, an analyst with the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, CT-based computer consultancy. “They are focusing on completely redesigning how you interact with” the data that flows through your computer every day. Robinson calls this strategy “wildly ambitious and a total crapshoot.”

Indeed, achieving success will require a shift in the way both programmers and users think about how computer data is presented and organized. Not only that, Chandler is an open-source project—meaning that unlike commercial software, it will depend partly on the work of volunteer programmers, and its resulting code will be free to all. It’s audacious to try to build a user-friendly program without the structure imposed by market requirements and shipping deadlines, and whether the project can succeed by Kapor’s intended December 2004 release date is, so to speak, an open question.

In its favor, the Chandler team has some stellar volunteers, including Andy Hertzfeld, a programming demigod who built much of the original Macintosh operating system, and Lou Montulli, one of the founding engineers at Netscape, along with a core, paid staff of programmers like balance-ball Burgess.

At stake is a new, more intuitive way of handling information that could be as revolutionary as the replacement of the text-based, command-line interfaces of the earliest personal computers with graphical computer desktops. That’s the vision that pushes Kapor—though he would prefer to be designing software—to spend much of his time imposing structure on the project. “I’m the benevolent dictator,” he says.

A New Agenda

Kapor hopes Chandler will draw droves of converts but says he knows how fickle the software business can be. The seminal Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was the must-have application that did more than any other to launch the personal-computer revolution. But Kapor, who founded Lotus in 1982, left the company five years later to lead On Technology, which had less success. He quit the software world altogether in 1990, when he cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-civil-liberties group that filed, and won, some of the earliest cases involving privacy protection and free speech online. After that, Kapor became a philanthropist and investor, hitting it big with founding investments in Real Networks, the Seattle-based streaming-media giant, and UUNET (now part of MCI), which runs the largest privately owned chunk of the Internet’s backbone network.

Now he’s back to his first love, software design. He thinks most of the “productivity” programs available to workers and consumers today are too complicated and inflexible. Case in point: Kapor and his wife Freada Kapor Klein, who leads a small sexual-harassment consulting firm, wanted to use the calendar-sharing feature of Outlook to coordinate their schedules and those of their assistants. But to do so they had to install and administer Microsoft Exchange, a heavy-duty server program for corporate messaging and collaboration Kapor calls expensive and hard to maintain. “It’s total overkill and it’s horrible,” he says.

That experience was on Kapor’s mind as he considered reviving the ideas behind Agenda, a database and information organizer that was his Lotus swan song. Agenda automatically stored free-form database entries—such as “Call Alice on Friday about the Australia trip”—under multiple categories, such as phone calls, Alice, Australia, and Friday. It then recalled the entries at the appropriate times—for example, when the user reviewed Friday’s to-do list. Even though Agenda ran on Microsoft’s original DOS operating system, requiring users to learn many typed commands, devotees raved about the program’s ability to sort related data from disparate sources. But the program never sold well, and Lotus abandoned it after Kapor left.

Kapor thinks Agenda was merely ahead of its time. And because so many of the ideas that keep our lives and businesses humming are now shared over the Internet, he believes that any program that revives some of the principles behind Agenda should be, first and foremost, built around the Internet’s killer app: e-mail. Despite the Internet revolution and the tremendous amount of money and energy invested in creating software for it, the main interface to your computer—the desktop—looks much as it did the first time you used a computer that featured graphical icons, even if it was a Macintosh in 1984. But with Chandler, Kapor envisions e-mail as the main interface with computers, with entities like calendars, contact managers, instant messaging services, and file folders grouped around it.

“People spend enormous amounts of time in their e-mail; we’re totally e-mail-centric. It’s the hot ticket in productivity applications,” Kapor says.

Secret Agent Man

Chandler puts the user’s convenience above all else—which means the way e-mail and other entities are grouped is changeable, depending on the tasks at hand and how users want their information arranged. The foundation’s programmers are calling the groups of files “contexts,” since the point is to let users easily access related items, and to control what types of items appear.

The “to-do” screen, for example, could be a context, with e-mail mixed in with related task items. So if you’re planning a party, Chandler might put a calendar with key dates on it (when to pick up a cake, say), the invitation form, RSVPs, a task list, and even a budget on-screen at once. When a guest’s e-mail request for veggie hors d’oeuvres arrives, arranging for them would automatically be added to your to-do list. Contexts will mean Chandler can reorganize the screen every time the user shifts between projects, as if she were replacing her desk with a new one. That’s a far cry from today’s software, which forces people to dig through applications and file folders to find things, and to print them out if they want to see everything in one place. And while Chandler will offer preset contexts, Kapor expects other open-source programmers to build them, too. If someone develops a better way to run spreadsheet analyses, a user can simply pull out existing contexts and replace them. (Try that with Outlook.)

Driving some of Chandler’s flexibility will be a technology with a checkered past: software agents. These are small pieces of code typically designed to perform individual tasks, such as beeping when an e-mail message arrives. Attempts to build more sophisticated agents, such as Microsoft’s much-loathed “Clippy,” an animated paper clip that purports to help people use Microsoft Office programs, have faltered. That’s where Chandler volunteer Andy Hertzfeld comes in. The exuberant, boisterous programmer, whose Mac OS remains perhaps the most user-friendly program ever, thinks agents done well could reshape how people use software. “On the network, there’s a whole world that’s constantly churning out there,” he says. “So can we allow end users to express their desires automatically and then track them?” For instance, Hertzfeld asks, why shouldn’t your computer have an agent that will perform mundane tasks such as making hotel reservations when it finds a room for the right price, or update your address when it sees that a friend’s contact list is out of date?

Hertzfeld can’t resist plays on words—he’s working on “postal agents” for e-mail, “travel agents” for booking trips, and “secret agents” to handle software encryption. But his purpose is not to be whimsical. “Mitch is afraid I’ll make it too cutesy,” he says. “I have to make things Mitch-friendly.”

From Blue Sky to Nuts and Bolts

As Chandler’s lead designer, Kapor has fun dreaming up new things. But he’s also the boss. “You can’t coordinate a project of this scope in an ad hoc structure,” he says. In one of the programming team’s regular Thursday morning meetings, Kapor lays down the law. “We should aspire to a rare and unprecedented level of honesty” about schedule slips and bugs in code, he tells the team. Kapor’s voice is slightly hoarse, a vestige of his pre-software days as a DJ, and he has a balky back, so he’s often more comfortable in meetings when he stands. He commiserates with the staff about the difficulty of meeting targets, saying “things never take shorter, they always take longer.…We’re not going to change human nature here. But let’s have a reality-based schedule, if we can bring ourselves to do it. We’re not VC-backed, so we have more of an opportunity to do things differently.”

The chance to work with Kapor on a groundbreaking product has attracted exceptional software people. Besides Montulli, a number of other former Netscapers are involved. John Anderson, who has to figure out how to build what Kapor dreams up, is one of Silicon Valley’s best contract programmers. E-mail architect Kaitlin Duck Sherwood has spent most of her life around computer messaging: her parents worked on PLATO, a seminal 1970s communications project at the University of Illinois. Hertzfeld seems to speak for them all when he says, “The purpose of coming in to work every day is to improve life for the user.”

But that won’t be easy. Though Kapor has put serious resources behind the foundation, Chandler is by no means a sure bet. The project has moved slowly since its kickoff in the summer of 2001, with more vision than code to its credit so far. Critics say Kapor is better at concepts than execution, noting the failure of several of his products after 1-2-3, including Agenda. And Kapor’s attempt to reorganize functions like e-mail, calendaring, and contact management has some labeling Chandler an “Outlook killer” and questioning the wisdom of taking on Microsoft. Kapor, however, says it would be “psychotically suicidal” to challenge Microsoft commercially, and he thinks it’s far fetched to talk about dislodging Outlook from its market dominance anytime soon. Still, since he does expect Chandler to have mass appeal, he says if that forces Microsoft to rethink its approach to applications, great.

Kapor says the skeptics are also missing the point when assessing the group’s progress. After all, it was only in August, once the idea of contexts coalesced, that Kapor declared the end of the “blue sky” phase of the project, directing programmers away from developing models and demos to actually writing code for the program’s major pieces. Kapor now believes that late 2004 is a realistic ship date for the first full version of Chandler.

And while some doubt, too, that open-source efforts can produce programs that rival commercial software, the spread of products like Linux suggests otherwise. Indeed, Douglass Wilson, chief technology officer for Lotus (now a division of IBM), says that open-source methods can build very high-quality software “by virtue of having lots of eyes.” He says the key is getting the right eyes. “What makes open source go is the community. If a technology spawns a community of interest…then you have both a very powerful creative force and a market force.”

It’s too early to say whether Chandler will develop such a community. Besides the technical challenges and the user issues, it’s hard to picture exactly what Chandler will look like, and until its basic framework exists, developers outside the foundation’s San Francisco office can’t write code for it.

So will Chandler succeed? Kapor pauses. “Uh, uhhh, yeah.…” And suddenly Kapor the open-source advocate morphs into Kapor the CEO, and asserts, “It’s like any other startup. When you’re doing something new and different, there are always risks. But I’m increasingly confident that it’s going to work.” He chuckles. “But maybe you caught me on a good day.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fitzgerald1103.asp?p=0

There's a story here. Turn of the last century - around the last several months of WWI, naval architects decided to try out an old theory: to build a ship out of reinforced concrete. It was a solid argument -- reinforced concrete could be fashioned into the right shapes, it had incredible compression strength, it was cheaper than steel, and -- once the moulds were created -- the cost/ship would be even lower. Commissioned in the last weeks of the War, the 450 foot-long USS Palo Alto turned out to be a dud. Its weight made it difficult to steer as well as too expensive to keep fueled. Mothballed shortly thereafter - and soon after that, an entrepreneur from Santa Cruz California got the idea of converting the Lightly Used freighter into a very posh, floating hotel.

Well, that didn't work either.

The investors pulled out of THAT deal and soon, the State of California purchased the now-gutted hull of the Palo Alto - for $1. It was towed to a pier - supposedly until someone could figure out what to do with it.

A major winter storm changed the plans. During unsually high seas, the Palo Alto was pounded up and down in the shallow waters - time after time it slammed into the seabed just feet below its keel. In twelve hours the Palo Alto's stern cracked open - two pieces of the empty hull sank into the sand at the pier. (the fuzzy blob at the left side of the pier is the ship's bow)

And - generations later - the hull of that great ship STILL sits at the pier.

There's good news here. Both sections of the ship are used by zillions of migratory birds and the submerged parts of the hull create safe habitats for a whole bunch of marine life.

A failure of imagination -- this time in business...

A long time ago I told someone a good day for me was one where a cherished notion had to be given up in the face of overwhelming (and often surprising) evidence tothe contrary.

A good day intellectually perhaps -- a personally difficult one nonetheless.

For a long time I've been pounding a pulpit about a demographic tsunami that's about to hit us. Its social, economic, technological and political aftershocks will be major. I claim no originality in this : demographers have been talking about this for a decade. Political scientists and workforce experts have been gaining increasing amounts of press exposure to this idea. (In yesterday's New York Times, an article talks about Yet Another Learned Book that makes the point: see below)

Still...

A colleague of mine -- someone who's on the front lines of trying to sell services associated with the problems of capturing knowledge -- fights against cynical backlash.

The short of it? -- executive management doesn't care about KM in general (be it classical knowledge management, new-fangled knowledge-mining, or even trendier expertise-location-and-management-systems. And so -- management neither knows or cares about this problem.

It's the same story: those with the fiscal wherewithal don't see a problem and whose who realize it is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately have no budgets and lines of authority to do so.

In the Scenario Planning business -- an activity I claim a fair amount of expertise in -- there's an apt saying.

What has not been foreseen will not be seen in time

Corporate leadership has no framework to help them connect the dots. What appears as so much background noise is, in fact, a converging set of parallel forces that will transform the workplace.

We have seen this Failure of Imagination in military intelligence.

We're seeing it again in the denial by corporate America.

-----

The American Worker, From All Sides Now

Published: September 5, 2004 The New York Times


Whan to know just how much the work force around you is changing? Well, more than a dozen books on the subject are scheduled to be published by year's end - many of them dealing with one group or another that is being reshaped.

The transformation is so pervasive that the authors - rightly, for the most part - think they need upward of 300 pages to explain how these groups will be affected.



The best of these books raises the most intriguing question: Are companies ready to deal with the loss of intellectual capital that comes from workers' retirement?

Not really, says David W. DeLong in "Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce" (Oxford University Press, $24.95). That is especially troubling because the baby boomers - the largest generation ever to work - have already started to retire, adds Mr. Delong, a research fellow at the AgeLab of M.I.T. and an adjunct professor at Babson College.

Because the oldest boomers are just 58, of course, the number of those who have left the work force is still small. But the trickle will soon turn to a flood, and most companies are not prepared for the fact that much of what those workers know - knowledge that has never been captured anywhere - will be walking out the door with them.

Of course, knowledge disappearance has been a problem throughout time. Just think of the lost library of Alexandria in Egypt, or the fact that no one can recall how Antonio Stradivari made violins.

But the problem is more severe today, Mr. DeLong says, because the knowledge we are about to lose is more complex, abstract and costly to recreate. Particularly vulnerable, he says, are the Defense Department, where a significant number of civilian workers are scheduled to retire by 2008, and the oil and gas industry, which expects to lose 60 percent of its veteran employees by 2010.

To help the country cope, he proposes multiple solutions, like staggering retirements and formally debriefing employees when they retire.

Mr. DeLong says the emphasis should be on capturing the information that is most important to a company's strategic objectives. Obvious as that may seem, the natural tendency is for individual departments, like marketing, to retain information that is most important to them, regardless of whether it strengthens the company's overall competitive position.

Presumably, most of the workers who would benefit from this retained knowledge are part of what John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade refer to as "the gamer generation." That means basically everyone under 40.

In "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever" (Harvard Business School Press, $27.50), they argue that this group has been influenced to a remarkable degree by all the video games they have played. As a result, the authors contend, these people are more creative, having figured out how to play the games - and more ompetitive, because the object of all those games is to win. They are also, of course, comfortable using technology.

Some of those on the other side of the "gaming gap" may not be convinced of the authors'
conclusions, but the book's premise is fun.

Guy Garcia, a former staff writer at Time magazine who also worked on the development of AOL Latin America, looks at the changing demographics from the other side of the business equation: how will these shifts affect what people buy?

Mr. Garcia doesn't supply specific answers in his book, "The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer Is Transforming American Business" (HarperCollins, $24.95). But he
relentlessly makes the case that the change, already under way, will intensify, and that companies need to spend even more time trying to understand the needs of all consumers.

As Mr. Garcia points out, blacks, Hispanics and Asians already make up more than one-fourth of the United States population. By 2050, Mr. Garcia adds, "non-Anglos will have grown to 47 percent" of the total.

The changing population has been affecting the marketplace for many years - and in many specific ways. Salsa, for example, overtook ketchup as the nation's most popular condiment 13 years ago.

"The buying power of Latinos alone is growing at a compound rate of 8.7 percent, almost double that of non-Hispanics," he writes, giving just one quick reason that companies will
need to further reshape their selling strategies to accommodate a changing marketplace.

SEVERAL other factors will affect employers in coming years, says Harriet Hankin, a benefits consultant, in her book, "The New Workforce: " Five Sweeping Trends That Will Shape Your Company's Future" (Amacom, $27.95). She says that there will be as many as five generations
working side by side - each with different wants, needs and expectations. That means corporate benefits will need to change to reflect not only same-sex households, but also the need for elder care, and she expects workers to start insisting more that their employers be trustworthy and believe in something more than making money.

All of this is a far cry from the work force depicted in the 1950's television series "Father Knows Best," in which the (white) father went to work and his (white) wife stayed home with their three children.

In fact, it would be interesting to know what percentage of the work force today would even understand a reference to "Father Knows Best," let alone the world it represented.

It really isn't about pixels...

A few weeks ago an old buddy of mine described - with breathless intensity - the precision of his new digital camera. 6 million pixels per image - arguably - an edge-y camera for recording precision images.

But then I remember a comment from a photography teacher I had, um, decades ago ..."it's never about the tools, its about eyes..."

There's a cult-y following to a camera Out There. It's almost not a camera at all -- it's a 20$ all plastic roll-film box made in China. The Holga takes rediculously large film (120 or 620 ... producing square negatives 2-and-a-quarter inches on a side), you advance the film looking at the photo number in a little red window, there are no guards agains double, or triple exposures, there are two f-stops (approx f/8 and f/11), and the focusing guides suggest distances for 'heads' (3 feet), groups of people (12 feet), trees (20 feet?) and mountains (infinity?).
The amazing thing about the Holga is just how incredibly cheap it is. The All Plastic lens creates _weird_ distortions. Light flares come from who-knows-where. The box itself is occasionally the source of light-leaks (leading many Holga users to wrap their cameras with black electrician's tape).

What you get are dreamy, heavy-lidded, usually distorted pictures with funny light qualities.

And there's the rub.

You end up with impressionistic photos. Photos where clarity comes a distant second to evocative images and impossible colors. Photos that seem to be images from long-ago memories.

Photography comes from your eye, from your imagination. The Holga helps you do this.

SEVEN SCORE YEARS AND TEN

resolutely real

That Old Mob Mentality Isn't What It Used To Be

From Publishers Weekly

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally.

"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.

Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

HELPING PEOPLE FIND A BETTER WORK/LIFE BALANCE -- by way of a place and by way of enabling software

AND - spin it a few more times. Information being filtered is important. It's typically operationally focused. It is, by definition, information being created 'in the field.'

Information. Know-how.

Think of the possibilites of being able to examine these data...

The coming (and present) international market for labor

This White Paper will also introduce what we now consider the most important demographic theme that confronts our workforce, employers, an policymakers as we enter a new century: a growing mismatch between the location of the world's new workers and the historical location of the world's best jobs. The long-term implications of this widening gap cannot be understated and will create the most important labor and economic dynamic of the first half of the 21st century.

God made people because he likes stories...

"Life-giving compost for my whole way of thinking" - Harry Eyres

Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence , like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep";
— William Shakespeare (Measure for measure)

Social Harvesting of Communal Knowledge (aka SHOCK: a privacy-preserving knowledge network)

elminating the geek-factor from finding what's important in blogs

Obliquity: Forget how the crow flies

"Forget how the crow flies"
by- John Kay




If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim.

The name of this idea? Obliquity


The American continent separates the Atlantic Ocean in the east from the Pacific Ocean in the west. But the shortest crossing of America follows the route of the Panama Canal, and you arrive at Balboa Port on the Pacific Coast some 30 miles to the east of the Atlantic entrance at Colon.

A map of the isthmus shows how the best route west follows a south-easterly direction. The builders of the Panama Canal had comprehensive maps, and understood the paradoxical character of the best route. But only rarely in life do we have such detailed knowledge. We are lucky even to have a rough outline of the terrain.

Before the canal, anyone looking for the shortest traverse from the Atlantic to the Pacific would naturally have gazed westward. The south-east route was found by Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador who was looking for gold, not oceans.
George W. Bush speaks mangled English rather than mangled French because James Wolfe captured Quebec in 1759 and made the British crown the dominant influence in Northern America. Eschewing obvious lines of attack, Wolfe's men scaled the precipitous Heights of Abraham and took the city from the unprepared defenders. There are many such episodes in military history. The Germans defeated the Maginot Line by going round it, while Japanese invaders bicycled through the Malayan jungle to capture Singapore, whose guns faced out to sea. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people. Obliquity is the idea that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly.

Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them. Forests have all these features. Fire is the greatest enemy of the forest. From the late 19th century, the policy of the US National Parks Service was of zero tolerance towards fire. Every outbreak, however small, would be extinguished. But the incidence of fire did not fall: it increased.

Computer simulation of fire control policies suggests the explanation. Most forest fires are small, and burn themselves out. In doing so, they remove combustible undergrowth, and create firebreaks that limit the spread of future fires. In 1972, the National Park Service determined a new policy: it would put out man-made fires, but allow natural ones to burn.

Sixteen years later, the largest fire known swept through Yellowstone National Park. In extremely dry conditions, several fires - some sparked by lightning, some by arsonists - joined together. The blaze was fought by 25,000 firefighters at a cost of $120m; more than a third of the park's vegetation was destroyed.
Today's guidelines allow forest rangers to use their judgment in deciding which fires should be tackled and which left to burn. Experience has shown that too much effort devoted to fire extinction is counterproductive. Time demonstrates, but only slowly, whether policy has gone too far in one direction, or the other. Forest management illustrates obliquity: the preservation of the forest is not best pursued directly, but managed through a holistic approach that considers and balances multiple objectives.

Forests are not the only systems structured in this way. Obliquity is equally relevant to our businesses and our bodies, to the management of our lives and our national economies. We do not maximise shareholder value or the length of our lives, our happiness or the gross national product, for the simple but fundamental reason that we do not know how to and never will. No one will ever be buried with the epitaph "He maximised shareholder value". Not just because it is a less than inspiring objective, but because even with hindsight there is no way of recognising whether the objective has been achieved.

For most of the 20th century, ICI was Britain's largest and most successful manufacturing company. In 1987, ICI described its business purpose thus: "ICI aims to be the world's leading chemical company, serving customers internationally through the innovative and responsible application of chemistry and related science.

"Through achievement of our aim, we will enhance the wealth and well-being of our shareholders, our employees, our customers and the communities which we serve and in which we operate."

ICI's corporate portfolio had evolved over the decades - the company's traditional strengths had been dyes and explosives, but its chemical expertise had taken it into other industrial feedstocks and agricultural fertilisers. After the second world war, the management of ICI concluded that in future "the responsible application of chemistry" was most likely to be found in pharmaceuticals. ICI recruited a team of able, young, academic scientists but the team was slow to bring returns.

The pharmaceutical division was a drain of ICI resources until, in the 1960s, the discovery of beta-blockers gave the company the first effective drug for controlling hypertension. More discoveries followed and, by the 1980s, pharmaceuticals had become the growth engine of the company.

In 1991, Hanson, the predatory UK conglomerate that had successfully acquired and reorganised sluggish British manufacturing businesses such as Ever Ready and Imperial Tobacco, bought a modest stake in ICI. While the threat to the company's independence did not last long, the effects were galvanising. ICI restructured its operations and floated the pharmaceutical division as a separate business, Zeneca. The rump business of ICI declared a new mission statement: "Our objective is to maximise value for our shareholders by focusing on businesses where we have market leadership, a technological edge and a world competitive cost base."

While the National Parks Service had moved from a narrow, focused objective to a broader holistic view of forest management. ICI made the opposite shift - from a grand vision of the responsible application of chemistry to a narrow concentration on established, successful activities. The aim of bringing benefit to a wide range of stakeholders was replaced by the specific objective of creating shareholder value from narrowly focused operations. The company translated this into an operational strategy by disposing of the company's interests in bulk chemicals to acquire a niche group of speciality businesses: ICI, once the main supplier of chemical products to one third of the world, was reinvented as a smells company.

The outcome was not successful in any terms, including those of creating shareholder value. The share price peaked in 1998, soon after the new strategy was announced. The decline since then has been relentless. After two successive dividend cuts the company was ejected in early 2003 from the FTSE 100 index, the transition from industrial giant to mid-cap corporation had taken only 12 years.
ICI is not the only company for whom greater emphasis on corporate financial goals led to less success in achieving them. I once said that Boeing's grip on the world civil aviation market made it the most powerful market leader in world business. Bill Allen was chief executive from 1945 to 1968, as the company created its dominant position. He said that his spirit and that of his colleagues was to eat, breathe, and sleep the world of aeronautics. "The greatest pleasure life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from participating in a difficult and constructive undertaking," he explained.
Boeing's 737, with almost 4,000 aircraft in the air, is the most successful commercial airliner in history. But the company's largest and riskiest project was the development of the 747 jumbo jet. When a non-executive director asked about the expected return on investment, he was brushed off: there had been some studies, he was told, but the manager concerned couldn't remember the results.
It took only 10 years for Boeing to prove me wrong in asserting that its market position in civil aviation was impregnable. The decisive shift in corporate culture followed the acquisition of its principal US rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The transformation was exemplified by the CEO, Phil Condit. The company's previous preoccupation with meeting "technological challenges of supreme magnitude" would, he told Business Week, now have to change. "We are going into a value-based environment where unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged. That's a big shift."

The company's senior executives agreed to move from Seattle, where the main production facilities were located, to Chicago. More importantly, the more focused business reviewed risky investments in new civil projects with much greater scepticism. The strategic decision was to redirect resources towards projects for the US military that involved low financial risk. Chicago had the advantage of being nearer to Washington, where government funds were dispensed.
So Boeing's civil orderbook today lags that of Airbus, the European consortium whose aims were not initially commercial but which has, almost by chance, become a profitable business. And the strategy of getting close to the Pentagon proved counter- productive: the company got too close to the Pentagon, and faced allegations of corruption. And what was the market's verdict on the company's performance in terms of unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return? Boeing stock, $48 when Condit took over, rose to $70 as he affirmed the commitment to shareholder value; by the time of his enforced resignation in December 2003 it had fallen to $38.

In Yellowstone National Park, at ICI and at Boeing, the attempt to focus on simple, well defined objectives proved less successful than management with a broader, more comprehensive conception of objectives.
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of modernist rationalism in many activities. Nowhere was the change more visible, or the results more disastrous, than in architecture and town planning. In the modernist vision, technology emancipated builders from tradition and accumulated knowledge. Twentieth- century planners could redesign our environment from first principles.

Charles Jencks, the architectural commentator, announced that modernism ended at 3.32pm on July 15 1972, when demolition contractors detonated the fuses to blow up the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri. Less than two decades earlier, the scheme had won awards for its pioneering, visionary architecture. Tower blocks were the supreme expression of Le Corbusier's view that "a house is a machine for living in". Corbusier himself designed the first such buildings, the Unite d'Habitation on the edge of Marseilles.

But a house is not simply a machine for living in. There is a difference between a house and a home. The functions of a home are complex and the utility of a building depends not only on its design but on the reactions of those who live in it. The occupants of the Pruitt-Igoe scheme, like those of similar buildings, were alienated by the isolation of a living environment that saw no need for accidental, unplanned social interactions. They showed no respect for its public spaces. The functionality of the blocks proved, in the end, not to be functional.

Communities are complex organisms, imperfectly understood, and their functioning depends on their social relations. Great architects implicitly understand obliquity, but obliquity is so important to the design of towns that the most successful towns have no designer at all. The planned city was conceived in the late 19th century. Baron Hausmann swept away the jumble of Paris streets that had developed over the centuries to create grand boulevards. From the 1920s to 1968, the powerful, autocratic Robert Moses controlled the physical environment of New York, driving expressways through apartments, offices and factories.
The zenith of these ideas was reached in planned cities such as the designed capitals of Brasilia, Canberra and Chandigarh. But all these cities are dull. They lack the vitality of real communities. As with tower blocks, their very functionality is dysfunctional.

The National Park officials who thought they could eliminate fire; the managers who thought they could reinvent ICI and Boeing; the architects who believed they could discard thousands of years of experience and redesign buildings on purely functional lines; the planners who attempted to rationalise the patchwork evolution of historic cities: all made the same mistake of underestimating the complexity of the system with which they dealt and the value of the traditional knowledge they inherited. And the answer to their problem is not better analysis and more sophisticated modelling, but more humility.

Such humility is not commonly found in the business world. Re-engineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy became a New York Times bestseller in 1993. Hammer and Champy are as radical in aspiration as Le Corbusier: "Re-engineering means asking the question `If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and given current technology, what would it look like?' Re-engineering a company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work."

Obliquity gives rise to the profit-seeking paradox: the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented. ICI and Boeing illustrate how a greater focus on shareholder returns was self-defeating in its own narrow terms. Comparisons of the same companies over time are mirrored in contrasts between different companies in the same industries. In their 2002 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras compared outstanding companies with adequate but less remarkable companies with similar operations.
Merck and Pfizer was one such comparison. Collins and Porras compared the philosophy of George Merck ("We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been") with that of John McKeen of Pfizer ("So far as humanly possible, we aim to get profit out of everything we do").
Collins and Porras also paired Hewlett Packard with Texas Instruments, Procter & Gamble with Colgate, Marriott with Howard Johnson, and found the same result in each case: the company that put more emphasis on profit in its declaration of objectives was the less profitable in its financial statements.
Similarly the richest men are not the most materialistic. Sam Walton, founder and principal shareholder of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, drove himself around in a pick-up truck. "I have concentrated all along on building the finest retailing company that we possibly could. Period. Creating a huge personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine," Walton said. Still, five of the top 10 places in the Forbes rich list are occupied by members of the Walton family.

Henry Ford was sued by stockholders who resented his determination to expand his automotive business rather than distribute the profits. When they won their case, most of the dividend that the court required the Ford Motor Company to pay went to Henry himself. He used the money to buy back stock and regain freedom of operations. The dissatisfied stockholders would have done better to keep quiet.
Warren Buffett, the most successful investor in history, still lives in the Omaha bungalow he bought almost 50 years ago and continues to take pleasure in a Nebraskan steak washed down with cherry Coke. For Buffett: "It's not that I want money. It's the fun of making money and watching it grow."
The individuals who are most successful at making money are not those who are most interested in making money. This is not surprising. The principal route to great wealth is the creation of a successful business, and building a successful business demands exceptional talents and hard work. There is no reason to think these characteristics are associated with greed and materialism: rather the opposite. People who are obsessively interested in money are drawn to get-rich-quick schemes rather than to business opportunities, and when these schemes come off, as occasionally they do, they retire to their villas in the sun.
And so, the greatest happiness is rarely achieved by those who set out to be happy. The development of psychology and neurophysiology gives us more insight into the real determinants of happiness. Author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores the nature of happiness by listening to what people say about their activities through what he calls experience sampling. He pages people frequently to write down structured reports of exactly how they feel about what they are doing at that moment.

Although we crave time for passive leisure, people engaged in watching television reported low levels of contentment. Csikszentmihalyi's systematic finding is that the activities that yield the highest for satisfaction with life require the successful performance of challenging tasks. These moments are encountered as frequently in work as outside it, and they constitute the state of mind which Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow. "Flow tends to occur when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable."

Csikszentmihalyi's formulation exactly parallels that of Boeing's Bill Allen - "the greatest pleasure that life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from participating in a difficult and challenging undertaking." Flow is as characteristic of the successful business as of the contented individual.
Yet there are fundamental differences. While the quest for happiness is complementary - by achieving it we make it easier, not harder, for others to achieve the same goal - the development of business is competitive. Tolstoy claimed in Anna Karenina that "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

However, the opposite is true in commercial life. Unhappy businesses resemble one another: each successful company is successful in its own way. Business achievement depends on doing things that others cannot do - and still find difficult to do even after others have seen the benefits they bring to the imitators. So the most profitable companies are those that are successful with major challenges - like Boeing's creation of the jumbo jet or ICI's development of a pharmaceutical division. For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the accomplishment of a difficult task, involving the successful match of capabilities to environment. In the less elegant language of business gurus, Collins and Porras describe the same phenomenon in business as the achievement of "big hairy audacious goals".

Companies that succeed in such challenges are disproportionately represented in the case studies of business schools. We don't hear much about business innovators who adopted big hairy audacious goals and failed, although failure, not success is the norm. For every Bill Gates, Sam Walton and Warren Buffett, there are a hundred people with similar ambitions, and not necessarily much less talent, whose pictures will never be seen on the front cover of Fortune magazine.

Success through obliquity is a product of natural selection in an uncertain, but competitive, environment. It is almost certainly true that, on average, profit-oriented companies are more profitable than less profit-oriented companies. It is very likely that on average people who are interested in money are richer than people who are not. But at the same time that the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, the richest people are not those most interested in money. Outstanding success is the product of obliquity.
This oblique relationship between intention and outcome is the subtle, but frequently misunderstood, message contained in Richard Dawkins' metaphor of the selfish gene. The gene is not actually selfish: the gene has no motive at all, in the sense in which we normally talk about motive. Genes that survive the processes of selection are those well adapted to their environment, and such adaptation was not the product of any conscious design. And this is also true of the forests we travel thousands of miles to see, the great capital cities of history, the traditions of classical architecture, and the development of great businesses. All of them are the product of evolution in a universe too complex and unpredictable for any of us fully to understand. All of them survive and prosper because they are well adapted to their environment.
The University of Sheffield Sports Engineering Research Group, after analysing David Beckham's performance on the football field, announced in 2002 that they had discovered a physics genius. The scientists had identified the complex differential equations that need to be solved to bend it like Beckham. No doubt their computers are already crunching numbers to tell Jonny Wilkinson how to drop a goal.

But little research is needed to confirm that Beckham is not a physics genius. Solving equations of motion is a means of understanding what happens, but is not a means of making it happen. Similarly, the financial returns of a business record what it achieves but are not the means by which it is achieved. Successful companies do maximise long-term shareholder value, or at least create large quantities of it. But that does not imply they were any more capable of formally calculating the results of their activities than Beckham can. Still less can we infer that such calculations were the basis of their achievement.
Would Boeing really have benefited from careful analyses in the mid-1960s of the prospective return on investment from development of the 747? An analyst would have had to anticipate the oil shock, the globalisation of world markets and the development of the aviation industry through to the end of the century. Anyone who has built models of these kinds, or scrutinised them carefully, knows that the range of possible assumptions is always wide enough to allow the analyst to come up with whatever answer the person commissioning the assessment wants to hear.

ICI might have made calculations in the 1950s that estimated the market capitalisation Zeneca would have achieved in the year 2000. Their strategists could then have put that number into a discounted cash flow calculation to estimate a return on the company's early investment in its pharmaceutical business. But no one would or should have taken such a calculation seriously.
The distinction between intent and outcome is central to obliquity. Wealth, family relationships, employment all contribute to happiness but these activities are not best conducted with happiness as their goal. The pursuit of happiness is a strange phrase in the US constitution because happiness is not best achieved when pursued. A satisfying life depends above all on building good personal relationships with other people - but we entirely miss the point if we seek to develop these relationships with our personal happiness as a primary goal.

Humans have well developed capacities to detect purely instrumental behaviour. The actions of the man who buys us a drink in the hope that we will buy his mutual funds are formally the same as those of the friend who buys us a drink because he likes our company, but it is usually not too difficult to spot the difference. And the difference matters to us. "Honesty is the best policy, but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man," wrote Archbishop Whately three centuries ago. If we deal with someone for whom honesty is the best policy, we can never be sure that this is not the occasion on which he will conclude that honesty is no longer the best policy. Such experiences have been frequent in financial markets in the last decade. We do better to rely on people who are honest by character rather than honest by choice.

In a similar way, the statement "we look after employees because we care" is not the same as the statement "we have introduced new compensation arrangements because, having calculated the relative costs of benefits enhancements and staff turnover, and commissioned a consultant's report on the policies of competitors, we believe it will produce a net enhancement of earnings per share". Even if the pensions and healthcare benefits are the same, the response from those affected is different. That is why companies that put the second statement in their board papers and investor presentations typically put the first statement in their press releases and communications to employees. But people who work in a business generally know its nature well enough to see the instrumentality at work.

Marks and Spencer was famous for decades for the breadth of its staff welfare programme. In particular, the company pioneered the provision of high-quality meals at nominal prices. The policy did not originate in any nice calculation of costs and benefits. It was adopted when a shop assistant fainted as Simon Marks was making one of his legendary store visits. Marks discovered that her husband was unemployed and the family did not have enough to eat. Marks was not engaged in philanthropy - he did not offer to feed his employee's family. Nor was his purpose the creation of shareholder value. Marks was making a sincerely felt statement about the kind of business he wanted his company to be. Such statements about the nature of the business defined the iconic company Marks and Spencer became. As at ICI and Boeing, Marks and Spencer was to sacrifice that status in the rationalist 1990s in the ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of growth in earnings per share.

You don't prolong life much by adopting long life as your goal. Nor do you learn much about the sources of longevity by asking very old people how they did it. Medical interventions don't have a large overall impact on life expectancy - medicine is to health what fire control is to forest management. The most important influences on life expectancy are environment and general health. We extend our lives most effectively, not through hypochondria, but by caring for our bodies and ourselves in a comprehensive, holistic manner.

Happiness is achieved in the same way. As John Stuart Mill said: "Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness... aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way."
The great cities of the world lift our spirits, not because some great designer set out to achieve that effect, but because of their lack of planning, their diversity and vitality, their unexpected encounters and conjunctions. And they evolve, not through conservative preservation or planned change, but by a process in which undistinguished buildings are torn down and only the best examples of each era are preserved.

Forest management is unexpectedly complex. The regimented plantation proved as unsuccessful as the planned city, and ecologists today are tearing such plantations down. Monocultural forests are not only dull to look at, but vulnerable to disease and fire. Managed woodlands are economically and environmentally superior. But no one knows the best way to manage a forest, or even what "best" means in this context. Our objective in a complex system is not to find the optimum, because no one can know before or after whether such an optimum has been achieved. We can and should be satisfied with an outcome that is good enough.

What is true of forests is equally true of businesses. The great corporations of the modern world were not built by people whose overriding interest was wealth, profit, or shareholder value. To paraphrase Mill: their focus was on business followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they found profit by the way.

This is how Hewlett Packard described it: "Profit is a cornerstone of what we do... but it has never been the point in and of itself. The point, in fact, is to win, and winning is judged in the eyes of the customer and by doing something you can be proud of."

Obliquity is relevant whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment, and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them. There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and when goals are simple. Directness is appropriate. When the environment is stable, objectives are one dimensional and transparent, and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. Obliquity is inevitable when the environment is complex and changing, purposes are multiple and conflicting, and when we cannot tell, even with hindsight, whether they have been fulfilled.
Balboa made the first transit of the American continent. The last great crossing was the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which runs almost 3,000 miles from Toronto to Vancouver. The most impenetrable stretch of the Rockies was the Selkirk Mountains. The builders of the railroad, faced with a costly detour, offered $5,000 and naming rights to anyone who discovered a pass. These incentives worked. On the Trans-Canada Highway today you cross the Selkirks through the pass named for the ambitious and intrepid Major A.B. Rogers. But even here, obliquity kicks in. The Rogers Pass is more or less parallel to the Panama Canal, and your westward journey across Canada is best accomplished by veering south-east to traverse it. But sometimes directness is the best solution. In the 1910s, after struggling to keep the Rogers Pass open in an area that often gets 100 metres of snow per year, Canadian Pacific bored a tunnel that runs straight as an arrow through Mount Macdonald.

John Kay is an FT columnist and the author of `The Truth About Markets' (Allen Lane)

www.johnkay.com

online-gaming environments to train soldiers

At the very hour a terrorist bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad played across worldwide TV screens, Jim Grosse, principal investigator at the Army's Simulation Technology Center in Orlando, FL, was speaking to Military Training Technology about training soldiers for fighting the wider war.

Grosse was describing a Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDEC) project that is as timely as the nightly news. Known as the Massively Multiplayer Simulation for Asymmetric Warfare, or simply MMP, it's essentially a virtual world intended to train soldiers well beyond the goals of war gaming. It will help prepare warfighters for the worst real life scenarios during long term, asymmetric military missions. Grosse's new science and technology objective (STO) will ultimately help reduce the replay of terrorist events in the future, wherever they occur.

It is generally accepted that immersive simulations form the gateway to training the armies of the future. The MMP is a bold new thrust in that direction, and it's very similar to the massively multiplayer role-playing game concept common in the commercial world.

The Army version of this unique training system will have a server and PC-based distribution capability intended to change the way soldiers interact online. It is expected to widen soldiers' view of the mission by stressing a long term, asymmetrical scenario, Grosse noted.
...

News every Californian would love to believe is true...

just-in-time expertise from your out-the-door workforce

copyright. Tom Portante, January 2004

It's a badly guarded management secret: entrepreneurial success often rides on the back of how well a company solves its day-to-day problems. Resolve these tactical challenges efficiently and you're lauded as successful. Do otherwise and rewards go elsewhere.

Problem solving in business is typically personal- rather than data- centric. We reach for the phone or we take a casual walk around the building to find someone who has the answer we're looking for. Failing that, we try to find someone who knows someone who might be able to help. Truth be told, this kind of expertise sharing works best under certain conditions -- most notably, companies with long-tenured workforces. Herein lies a problem. The more we look at current trends in relationships between employees and employers, the less successful we are in finding bastions of stable workforces.

Over the last decade there have been steady and remarkable changes in workforce dynamics. The new reality has to do with the unraveling of employee/employer affiliation. One of the transformational factors is increased worker mobility: people more easily switch communities and/or jobs than ever before. Other causes are generational: GenXers, for example, work hard to find a balance between professional and personal goals. Cultural forces are at play: witness the growing phenomenon of MBA-Moms -- women who leave the workforce for several years to tend to their children. And, lest we forget, some of the increased worker cynicism comes from the downside of occupational realities: 40-somethings, RIF'd once too often, are increasingly reluctant to re-up for another tour at yet another Big Company.

But the really big story is that workforce uncertainty is about to get worse. Much, much worse.

Within the year North American and European businesses will begin to confront an expertise die-off of historically unprecedented size. At the heart of the crisis is a demographic inevitability. Boomers are about to retire and there is no demographic bulge ready to step into their jobs. As they leave, as they take their expertise with them, businesses will suffer gales of workforce disruption.

Our strongest hunch is that a nascent genre of Knowledge Mining tools and procedures will help us weather this storm. Tools to help companies map the expertise carried around in the heads of people who, increasingly, have long since walked out their corporate doors. Tools to help companies query ('tap') those human sources of expertise in timely ways. And finally, 'though far from least importantly, the combination of business- and human-capital procedures and that will reward employees -- wherever they are -- who take part in this expertise exchange system. ('clap').

To be clear about the scope of this disruption. This expertise discontinuity is inevitable. It is unstoppable. It will be an unvarying backdrop to our business environment for the next 15 years. And there are no easy work-arounds. We'd love to hear your opinions about how your organization might face this generation-long challenge.




-----------------------
A note and something of a disclosure: As a Senior Associate at KnowledgeAgency in New York City, I'm part of a team watching a set of companies as they continue to develop Knowledge-Mining tools. Included in this set are; Kamoon, Tacit, Cadenza, Circade and IBM (IBM's internal application, "Blue Pages" to be specific).

-----------------------

FlexSpace - office hotelling 'for the rest of us'

(for those of you who know the Bay Area generally, if you take the Bay Bridge across to Oakland, the city of Oakland is off to your right, Berkeley is off to your left,... IF you could go straight - that'd be Emeryville)

bring me flesh and bring me wine...

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Financial Times
Monday 29 December 2003

FEATURES

Internet: Realities of a virtual economy: online gaming is taking on a parallel life of its own – spawning trade, exchange rates and regulatory headaches, writes PAUL TYRELL

To most people, the internet is nothing more than a powerful communications tool, a quick way to find information, buy goods, and reach likeminded people. However, to players of one type of computer game it is nothing less than a second home, a virtual world in which they can socialise, fight battles, and trade with others.

More than 6M people pay $10-$20 a month to take part in huge online games – simulated worlds inhabited by thousands of players, each controlling one or more substitute selves, known as avatars.

The games are visually rich environments where fantastic things are possible, such as magic or space travel. They offer a more profound escape from reality than traditional video games – indeed, a study of one of the most popular showed in occupied the average player for 20-30 hours a week.

However, these games have become so heavily populated and commercially significant that their effects are increasingly being felt in the real world, with some odd legal consequences.

The idea of enabling players from different locations to meet in a virtual world has been around since the mid-1980s. However, it was not until 1997 that the first true “massively multi-user online game” or MMOG, was launched to commercial success. Ultima Online was based on a successful series of conventional video games and has since built a subscriber base of about 250,000 players. Like make MMOGs, it takes place in a mediaevel landscape replete with wizards, monsters and quests for glory.

However, not all players are drawn to the life of an adventurer within the game, and many choose to settle down and start their own business – for example, as a merchant, a blacksmith, or a tevernkeeper. All MMOGs involve an element of trade using a virtual currency, and they usually offer numerous potential sources of income, ranging from simple entrepreneurialism (such as cornering the market in one particular ingredient for a spell) to service provision (training as a healer and treating other players) to armed robbery.

However, as the games communities grow larger and more sophisticated, more and more players are trading imaginary goods created with the games – products, services, and even spare avatars – with other players for real money.

It is the rise of internet auction sites that has enabled MMOG players to sell imaginary items to one another, on the understanding that they will be exchanged by one another's avatars within the game. On eBay, for example, a special category has been set up to deal with these goods which now has a weekly turnover of more than 28,000 trades, with a total value of more than $500,000.

Typical items for sale include spells (from about $5), property (up to several hundred dollars for a house or castle, depending on location) and avatars themselves , which are proving the most valuable commodity. This month a rare “Jedi Knight” in the Star War Galaxies game sole on eBay for $1900.

The currency used in the games is also being traded. On December 6 a block of 100,000 Norrathan Platinum Pieces (the currency used in the EverQuest online game) was sold on eBay for $65, implying an exchange rate of just over $1538 to the dollar.

Dr Edward Castronova, an associate professor of economics at California State Fullerton, has been a keen watcher of the MMOG world for some years and since 2001 has published two popular studies of these virtual economies.

“All you need for an exchange rage is a robust market and eBay is very robust,” he says. “It represents around 75-80% f the US market (for this category of good) and around 35-40% of the global market, because MMOGs are very popular in the Far East.

“Since July 1 it has seen a really large increase in trading. It's too early to understand whether this is a seasonal trend or something related to macroeconomics or a genuine growth in this sort of economic activity, but if its the latter then its a really big annual growth rate of about 600 per cent.”

Dr Castronova has used such calculations to make some unlikely comparisons between real world economies and that of Norrath, the virtual worlds where EverQuest takes place. In 2001, for example, he looked at the EverQuest avatars being sold on eBay and used the information to calculate a rough and ready per capital gross national product for Norrath.

At the top end of his range, this came out at $2266 per head, making Norrath the 77th richest country in the world.

There are even reports of real-world companies being set up to trade in imaginary goods. One such company claims to have more than 50 full-time employees in the US and Hong Kong.

Of course, as soon as an imaginary item is given a value in the real world, it can potentially be protected by real-world laws. This became the reality this month when a Chinese player of a science-fiction game called Red Moon successfully sued the administrator after his avatar's property had been stolen by hackers.

A loophole in the game's security was to blame, the case set a precedent because a Beijing court rejected the administrator's argument that virtual property was “just piles of data to our operating companies.” Player Li Hongchen, 24, had spent two years and the equivalent of more than $1200 in building a stockpile of virtual chemical weapons.

It was the growing complexity and need for internal regulation of these virtual societies that inspired Professor Beth Noveck, director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, to organise a conference in November entitled “The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds”, which brought together games designers, lawyers, economists and even government representatives.

“You can liken a regulated world to a regulated industry or set of stakeholders – all confront common problems of governance,” says Prof Noveck.

She describes a conference workshop involving game designers and officials from Washington responsible for putting thee regulatory work of all 180 federal agencies online. “We wanted to see if game designers could come up with ideas for a game to train citizens to used these government systems. “

“In fact, what generated the most interest was the exchange of best practices between game designers and regulators about ways to manage regulated communities. “

Some games have already experienced serious dissent among their players over unpopular regulation. For example, the administrators of Star Wars Galaxies recently asked players, for technical reasons, to limit to 100 the number of items in their virtual houses.

“There was a tremendous outcry,” says Prof Noveck. “This has a lot of resonance with the officials from Washington, particularly a representative from the Department of Transportation which is responsible for rules that get millions of people to wear seat belts or change their driving habits.”

She predicts that the law will soon adapt to MMOGs, with case law establishing “the rights of avatars, ownership of intellectual property within games and the rights of players to emulate or modify games” of the next few years.

One MMOG, Second Life, pre-empted this process at the conference by announcing change its terms of service to respect intellectual property rights in the virtual world and “recognise the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers who make it.”

In Second Life, players are not set challenges but are rewarded for creating impressive clothing, art, architecture or other items that attract visitors to their plot of virtual land.

Founder Philip Rosedale says its economy is regulated like a real economy in order to stimulate content creation. “We created pressure for better and better content by levying a property tax on land and objects. We also wanted very high liquidity, some made transaction costs low, and we wanted a high level of price transparency to incentivize more rapid evolution.”

Dr Castronova argues that the world of MMOGs could have uses beyond occupying the time of millions of internet fantasy fans.

“The great potential of this technology is to build parallel worlds and give one, say, a central bank independent of political authority, and another a central bank dependent on political authority, and one where we don't have a central bank at all,” he says.

“If someone could build a public-use world inthis way, they could watch what happens to inflation, production rates, production rates, populations or any other factor in isolation. What we're groping towards is what the physical sciences have been doing with computers – experimenting on simulations of plant life or the cosmos.”

“This would be the sociological equivalent, subjecting them to well-chosen interventions.”

full frontal capitalism

and so...?

circade .. bringing expertise-management to a place where you can measure value...

Lotus' Discovery Server and the Big-Blue-ish approach to expertise continuity

Who'll pay to deal with this workforce upheaval?

Beyond Workforce 2020: a Hudson Institute White Paper

Recruiting expertise across the great Generational Divide

today’s Wall Street Journal p A9 (Tuesday 4 Nov 2003). P&G and Eli Lilly are launching a job placement firm (YourEncore) to match retired scientists and engineers with companies in search of their know-how. Working with a placement firm called Barnard Associates, a consulting group brought in to create the job-matching pool.

...

Idea got its start 18 months ago when P&G put on a push to develop new innovations from outside the ranks of its own R&D ranks. This initiative is mentioned in the introduction to Open Innovation by Chesbrough.

Who will insure these free-agents?

Health Insurance for Freelancers

October 2, 2002
By STEPHANIE STROM
.

Finding a silver lining in the events of Sept. 11, 2001,
isn't easy, and capitalizing on it is even harder.

"I almost don't like to talk about it," said Sara Horowitz,
whose nonprofit insurance organization, Working Today, may
have hit pay dirt as a result of the attack. "It's, well,
sort of unseemly."

Working Today provides portable, affordable health
insurance for freelance workers in New York. The concept
would seem to be an easy sell, given the swelling ranks of
part-time, contract and temporary workers across the
country.

But the organization has struggled since its inception to
find financing to stay afloat long enough to stand on its
own two feet. "It has been a lot harder than I thought it
would be," Ms. Horowitz said.

Then, the September 11 Fund, the second-largest pool of
philanthropic money raised to help victims of the disaster
(after the Red Cross), faced a vexing problem that only
Working Today could solve: how to provide a year's worth of
health insurance to 15,000 people who are linked only by
the effects of the attack.

Suddenly, Working Today looks poised to be a model for
delivering health insurance and other benefits in a new
way, one better suited to today's mobile, more fluid work
force, which is exactly what Ms. Horowitz, winner of a
MacArthur "genius" award in 1999, had hoped when she cooked
it up.

"It's sort of sadly ironic that it took something like
Sept. 11 to get this concept noticed," said Mara Manus, a
former program officer at the Ford Foundation who granted
Working Today a $1 million working-capital loan to start
it. "She's on to something, she really is."

Health insurance is provided to groups largely by employers
and, to a lesser extent, governments and unions. Employees
working for the same company are one kind of group.
Veterans are another. Poor people are another.

The fund wanted to insure as many as 15,000 people working
below Canal Street and in parts of Chinatown north of it
who lost jobs or suffered a significant reduction in income
as a result of the attacks. They work for an array of
employers or none at all. They are rich and poor. They are
healthy and sick. They are United States citizens,
permanent residents and illegal aliens.

Victims of the trade center attack are in the same boat as
part-time and freelance workers: the health insurance
system simply is not set up to deal with them.

Ms. Horowitz, whose grandfather was the president of the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union and whose father
represented labor unions, saw the trends when she was
working as a lawyer for the health care union
1199/S.E.I.U., and immediately understood the implications.


"Look, we didn't set ourselves up and create this
organization because we knew this would happen," she said.
"We were seeing large national trends that showed a growing
number of people working independently, not connected to
any one long-term employer, and thus unable to get
affordable health insurance. It's not like we were
brilliant visionaries."

The number of workers who are free agents of one type or
another now make up almost a third of the work force, or
41.8 million people, according to the Economic Policy
Institute. Between one-quarter and one-third of them
probably do not get insurance from their employers,
according to health insurance experts.

But Ms. Horowitz found that the concept of providing health
insurance to a group representing a segment of the work
force, rather than a group linked by an employer or income,
was too radical for many foundations and other
organizations.

"Why is there no competition?" Ms. Horowitz asked.
"Because
there's no funding in it."

She recalled a meeting in spring 2001 with a foundation
that is one of the largest health care underwriters in the
country.

"It lasted 10 minutes," she said. "Usually, these
presentations turn into discussions, but they had
absolutely no interest. I got on the train afterward and
was just numb. I couldn't believe that they couldn't see my
point."

Ms. Manus, who backed Working Today when she was at Ford,
said foundations that back health care focus almost
single-mindedly on overhauling existing systems rather than
exploring new ones. "In the work force development field,
there's a burgeoning awareness that the structure of work
is changing," she said. "So funding is going to come from
the people paying attention to those changes, not from the
health field, which may not even be aware of this issue."

James R. Tallon Jr., president of the United Hospital Fund,
which is the only traditional health care financier among
Working Today's backers, said skepticism of Ms. Horowitz's
concept by traditional health care backers was
understandable if unfortunate. "Public policy has been very
skeptical about simply allowing groups to go out and form
themselves out of thin air, and for good reason," he said.
"To do so would provide an incentive for healthy people to
group together and get a great insurance rate, making it
almost impossible for less healthy people to get health
insurance."

But in 2000, Ms. Horowitz convinced Neil D. Levin, then the
state insurance commissioner, that the freelancers,
contract workers and temporary employees working in Silicon
Alley were a group no different from the employees of, say,
Lehman Brothers or Pfizer.

Mr. Levin, who later headed the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey and who was killed in the attack on the
World Trade Center, pushed his officials to be creative,
and Working Today was classified as an association, a
designation that enabled it to provide insurance.

Working Today is not an insurer. Rather, it forms a group
and then buys insurance for it from HIP and other
providers. On Sept. 4, 2001, Working Today opened for
business; 24,000 people tapped into its Web site
(www.workingtoday.org) in the first week. "Then no one
signed up after Sept. 11," Ms. Horowitz recalled. "For the
first three months, we thought, oh my God, maybe this won't
work."

But in January, eligible uninsured workers started signing
up, and now Working Today has almost 1,000 subscribers.
They had to show proof that they earned $9,000 in a
six-month period or that they were employed in technology
jobs for at least 120 hours. Technology is defined as
everything from software development to online journalism.
The insurance costs an average of $255 a month, which is
automatically deducted from their checking accounts.

"The monthly cost is very affordable," said Chris Lombardi,
a writer with multiple sclerosis who pays $235 a month.

Before she signed up with Working Today in July, Ms.
Lombardi and her partner had been getting by on her
partner's Cobra, a federal program that lets workers get
insurance at a reduced cost from their former employer for
up to 18 months after they leave a job, which cost them
$763 a month. She had looked into an insurance program
through the National Writers Union, which would have cost
about $600.

Ann Quinn, a marketing consultant, started her own business
two years ago and began searching for insurance for her
family when her Cobra began running out. "It was really
expensive," she said.

She read about Working Today and then attended a seminar

the perfect workplace storm..

Walking in empty corridors: who will form the workplace in the next decade?

Generational Shift:

What We Saw at the Workplace Revolution

By Bruce Tulgan & RainmakerThinking, Inc.®

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:


Key Findings of Our Ten Year Workplace Study (1993-2003)
Issued by RainmakerThinking, Inc.®, September 17, 2003, Copyright, All Rights Reserved

1 OVERVIEW: THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT
Between 1993 and 2003, a profound revolution has taken place in the values and norms of the American workplace; the impact has been felt throughout the world. During this ten-year period, we at RainmakerThinking, Inc.® have been conducting extensive research on the employer-employee relationship. Our research is ongoing. As of September 17, 2003, we have identified six key findings:

#1. WORK HAS BECOME MORE DEMANDING ON EMPLOYEES.

#2. EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIPS HAVE BECOME LESS HIERARCHICAL AND MORE TRANSACTIONAL.

#3. EMPLOYERS ARE MOVING AWAY FROM LONG-TERM EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS.

#4. EMPLOYEES HAVE LESS CONFIDENCE IN LONG-TERM REWARDS AND GREATER EXPECTATIONS FOR SHORT-TERM REWARDS.

#5. IMMEDIATE SUPERVISORS ARE NOW THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE.

#6. SUPERVISING EMPLOYEES NOW REQUIRES MORE TIME AND SKILL ON THE PART OF MANAGERS.


Together these findings and the trends they reflect amount to the most important change in the employer-employee relationship since the period immediately following World War II. We call this change, “the Generational Shift.” Why?

In the early- and mid-1990s, we first observed these trends only among the youngest people in the workforce. Back then, these trends were decried as aberrations---driven by the “free agent” inclinations of Generation X (those born 1965-1977). Many analysts expected these trends to abate following the dot-com crash and the economic downturn that has persisted since early 2001. Instead, these trends have both intensified and also spread among workers of all ages.

The changes in the employer-employee relationship derive from historic macro-economic
factors, not from short-term aberrations. Over the last ten years, globalization and
technology have created a business environment of high risk, erratic markets, and
unpredictable resource-needs. To remain viable, employers have been forced to adopt
extremely flexible and efficient staffing practices. In turn, employees have adjusted by
adopting more aggressive attitudes, expectations, and behaviors. Average employees feel
challenged to take care of themselves and their families; they struggle to balance desires for long-term security with short-term needs for opportunities, work-conditions, recognition, and rewards.


2 The downturn in the economy has further entrenched these responses, not weakened them.

As a result, the values and norms that first appeared among Generation X are steadily
supplanting more traditional workplace values and norms.

Now there are powerful demographic forces underway that will cement the Generational
Shift: First, those of the Silent Generation (born before 1946) are gradually exiting the
workforce; by 2006, two experienced workers will leave the workforce for every one who
enters the workforce. Second, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are becoming the aging
workforce; every day 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 55 years of age. Third, the prime-age
workforce will be made up increasingly of Generation X and Generation Y (born 1978-1986).
As Generation X and Generation Y come to dominate the prime-age workforce, they will
usher out the last vestiges of the old-fashioned workplace values and norms and finish the
workplace revolution.

Welcome to the real new economy: where employers must be ruthless to survive and
individuals must be very aggressive to succeed.

3 FINDING #1. WORK HAS BECOME MORE DEMANDING ON EMPLOYEES.

TREND: Productivity (output per labor hour) improvements are coming, not only from
new technology, but also from increased human effort and effectiveness.

TREND: Employees are working harder and facing increasing pressure to work longer
and/or smarter and/or faster and/or better.

TREND: Employers are reducing tolerance for employee error, waste, and inefficiency.

TREND: Employees must learn and utilize new technologies, processes, practices, skills
and knowledge.

TREND: Employees must adjust to ongoing organizational changes, such as downsizing,
restructuring, and reengineering.

TREND: Employees receive less management guidance and support.

TREND: Employees work in smaller teams with greater productivity requirements.

TREND: Employees experience less “down time.”

TREND: Employees experience greater fear of imminent job loss.

TREND: Employees manifest increased workplace stress and related problems
(including anger, interpersonal conflict, and “burnout”); employees express greater
need for work-life balance.


4 FINDING #2. EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIPS HAVE BECOME LESS
HIERARCHICAL AND MORE TRANSACTIONAL.

TREND: Traditional sources of authority are being supplanted by new sources: Seniority,
age, rank, and rules are diminishing. On the rise are control of resources, control of
rewards and control of work conditions.

TREND: Organization charts are flatter; layers of management have been removed.

TREND: Reporting relationships are more temporary; more employees are being
managed by short-term project-leaders, instead of “organization-chart” managers.

TREND: Employees’ are less likely to agree with employers’ stated missions, policies,
and decisions.

TREND: Employees are less obedient to employers’ rules and supervisor’s instructions.

TREND: Employees are more likely to question or challenge employment conditions
and established reward structures.

TREND: Employees are more likely to make individual requests regarding desired
employment conditions and rewards.

TREND: Employees are more likely to accept employers’ stated missions, policies, and
decisions, when employers promise a specific quid pro quo.

TREND: Employees are more obedient to employers’ rules and supervisor’s instructions,
when employers promise a specific quid pro quo.

TREND: Employees demonstrate higher productivity, quality, and morale when
employers promise a specific quid pro quo.

TREND: Employees are less likely to define “success” in relation to rank or seniority in an organization chart, and more likely to define success in highly personal terms.


5 FINDING #3. EMPLOYERS ARE MOVING AWAY FROM LONG-TERM
EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS.

TREND: Employers are more likely to undertake major business changes that eliminate
jobs regardless of employees’ length of service; such changes include mergers,
acquisitions, spin-offs, restructuring and liquidations.

TREND: Employers are more likely to implement new technologies that eliminate jobs
due to reengineering.

TREND: Employers are hiring fewer “employees” (full-time, exclusive workers), while
hiring more contingent workers; and employers’ staffing strategies for the future reflect
this change.

TREND: “Employees” are diminishing as a percentage of the overall workforce, while
the percentage of contingent workers is increasing.

TREND: Employers are less likely to award status, prestige, authority, flexibility, and
rewards on the basis of seniority; and employers are more likely to award status,
prestige, authority, flexibility, and rewards on the basis of short-term measurable goals.

TREND: Employers are reducing long-term fixed pay as a percentage of overall
employee compensation, while increasing the percentage of variable performancebased
pay; and employers’ compensation strategies for the future reflect this change.

TREND: Employers are reducing the percentage of employee “benefits” (paid for by
the company for full-time, exclusive workers) in relation to overall compensation, while
increasing the percentage of “employee services” (paid for by the worker on a pretax
basis); such services include health insurance and retirement savings.

TREND: Employers are less likely to make formal or informal guarantees about
continued employment and job security.


6 FINDING #4. EMPLOYEES HAVE LESS CONFIDENCE IN LONG-TERM
REWARDS AND GREATER EXPECTATIONS FOR SHORT-TERM REWARDS.

TREND: Employees are more likely to worry that their prospects for receiving long-term
rewards are vulnerable to outside forces, events, or circumstances; these include
monetary policy, politics, diplomacy, war, terrorism, and natural disasters.

TREND: Employees are more likely to worry that their prospects for receiving long-term
rewards are vulnerable to business factors beyond their control; these include global
market shifts, changes in particular industries, and organizational changes.

TREND: Employees are more likely to worry that their prospects for receiving long-term
rewards are vulnerable because the future of the organization employing them is not
secure.

TREND: Employees are more likely to worry that their prospects for receiving long-term
rewards are vulnerable because the continued employment of their immediate
supervisors (or other leaders) is not secure.

TREND: Employees are more likely to worry that their prospects for receiving long-term
rewards are vulnerable because their own continued employment is not secure.

TREND: Employees are investing a lower percentage of savings in long-term vesting
retirement plans and pensions, while investing a greater percentage in self-managed
cash balance plans.
TREND: Employees are less willing to make immediate sacrifices in return for long-term
promises. Thus, given the choice, employees are more likely to prefer short-term over
long-term incentives.

TREND: Employees are more likely to make specific requests for immediate increases in
pay, benefits, and work conditions, than long-term.

TRENDS: Short-term incentives are more successful than long-term for maintaining high
levels of employee productivity, quality, morale and retention.


7 FINDING #5. SUPERVISORS ARE NOW THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN
THE WORKPLACE.

TREND: Employees think of their immediate supervisors as the primary representatives
of their employers’ missions, policies, systems, and practices.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
assignment of tasks, responsibilities, and special projects.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
resource planning, obtaining necessary resources, and filling resource gaps as they
occur.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
planning to avoid problems, identifying problems, and solving problems as they occur.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
training opportunities; this includes informal on-the-job training as well as
recommending and/or approving formal training.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
the consideration and approval of desired work conditions; these include scheduling,
work-location, working with or avoiding specific co-workers, control of work
environment, and “special requests.”

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
the resolution of disputes with subordinates, coworkers, customers, vendors, other
managers and corporate policy or administration.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
task related guidance, coaching, and performance evaluation; this includes daily
feedback as well as formal reviews.

TREND: Employees rely on immediate supervisors more than any other individuals for
considering, recommending, advocating, and conveying to employees recognition,
raises, promotions, and other rewards.

TREND: The day to day communication between supervisory managers and direct
reports has more impact than any other single factor on employee productivity,
quality, morale, and retention.


8 FINDING #6. SUPERVISING EMPLOYEES NOW REQUIRES MORE TIME AND
SKILL.

TREND: Supervisors are under increasing pressure from senior executives to increase
productivity and quality; that means getting more work and better work out of fewer
employees, while utilizing fewer resources.

TREND: Average spans of control (the number of employees officially reporting to
each supervisor) are increasing; in addition, supervisors are given more responsibility
for staffing, recruiting, selection, orientation, training, performance management, and
retention; supervisors are also required to deal with more bureaucratic red tape.

TREND: Supervisors must learn to deal with and accommodate the needs and
expectations of an increasingly diverse workforce.

TREND: Employees are more likely to make special requests (or demands) of supervisors
regarding assignments, work conditions, benefits, rewards, or other special needs.

TREND: Employees need, expect and request more coaching and guidance than they
currently receive from supervisors.

TREND: Supervisors report increasing frustration and difficulty in their efforts to deliver
special rewards for high performers.

TREND: Supervisors report increasing frustration and difficulty in their efforts to hold
employees accountable for overall performance standards, as well as meeting daily
goals and deadlines.

TREND: Supervisors report increasing frustration and difficulty in their efforts to
implement effective performance improvement plans with low performers; and
increasing frustration and difficulty in their efforts to terminate recalcitrant low
performers.

TREND: Supervisors who spend less time engaged in managing employees spend more
time rectifying employee errors, salvaging lost resources, mediating conflicts among
coworkers, resolving complaints from vendors and customers, and solving other
problems; these supervisors also spend more time on lower level tasks.

TREND: Supervisors who learn, practice and implement proven management
techniques generate higher productivity, quality, morale, and retention; these
supervisors also spend more time on high level tasks.


9 ABOUT OUR TEN YEAR WORKPLACE STUDY (1993-2003)

The research on which this report is based has not concluded. The research is ongoing. Thus far, we have included data from the following sources:
RAINMAKERTHINKING® PRIMARY INTERVIEWS: We have conducted qualitative interviews with more than 10,000 individuals. Several hundred of these interviews have been longitudinal. Based on our interviews, we have developed hundreds of individual case studies and composite case studies. Our interviews have followed many different question formats and have been conducted by various individuals using various means, including in-person, via telephone, and via email.


RAINMAKERTHINKING® MANAGEMENT PRACTICES QUESTIONNAIRES: We have collected detailed management practices questionnaires completed by senior executives from more than 700 different organizations. We started collecting these questionnaires in 1997.

RAINMAKERTHINKING® INTERACTIVE SEMINARS: We have led more than 1,000 interactive seminars, logging more than ten thousand hours with hundreds of thousands of participants.

RAINMAKERTHINKING® FOCUS GROUPS: We have conducted in-person focus groups including hundreds of respondents each year. Our focus groups have followed many different question formats and have been conducted by various individuals.

RAINMAKERTHINKING® SURVEYS: We have conducted surveys including thousands of respondents each year. Our surveys have followed many different question formats and have been conducted by various individuals using various means, including in-person, via
telephone, via email, and via our web-site.

RAINMAKERTHINKING® SPECIAL ACCESS TO PROPRIETARY DATA: We have reviewed internal survey data from more than 300 individual client organizations; and more than forty benchmarking surveys. This data was collected by our clients and/or by other research firms. We have been given special access to this data as part of our work with client organizations and in connection with our contributions to benchmarking surveys. This data, collectively, represents nearly one million respondents.

RAINMAKERTHINKING® REVIEW OF PUBLICLY AVAILABLE DATA: We consistently review
available published data, including leading academic research.
Our research has been the source of fifteen books and hundreds of articles by Bruce Tulgan,
Dr. Carolyn Martin, and others from RainmakerThinking, Inc.®, as well as 101 issues of our
monthly newsletter. In addition, our research has been cited in dozens of books by outside
experts and in articles by more than 1,000 business journalists.
10

the social act of solving problems

17 February 2003
10:12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

Two days out of Cancun the Captain of the cruise ship Island Wanderer sent an urgent message to the company's offices in Miami. In the last 11 hours nearly a third of the passengers had started to complain of respiratory difficulties. One elderly woman had been placed on the ships only respirator.

11:18 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Emergency protocol was set in motion as Atlanta's Center for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were notified. Three objectives were paramount: (1) determine the cause of the outbreak, (2) establish primary medical responses and (3), baring both of these, establish where, in international waters, to quarantine the vessel.

630 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time (2 1/2 hours after the first message)
Included in the crisis team were the Wanderer's designers at Caledonia Shipworks in Glasgow (Scotland). Senior naval architect Gareth Lewis was responsible for assembling a team with direct experience in the design and maintenance of the ship that had been launched seventeen years earlier.

Lewis's solution was as clever as it was low-tech. By looking through a mailing-label database maintained for annual 'alumni parties', Lewis contacted nearly a dozen senior managers who'd worked on the Wanderer class of ships in the 70s and 80s. His message to all of them was the same:

"One of our D-Class ships at sea has had an outbreak. Bring whomever you think can help us give our friends in Miami a bit of assistance in solving a mystery.
10 Waterfront Quay -- Great Assembly Hall."

Within the hour over 40 senior employees (current and retired) were exchanging blueprints, documentation binders and ideas over hastily installed tables and computers. A 70 year-old retired maintenance supervisor mentioned problems he'd had installing HVAC filters in a similar D-Class ship. Two architects remembered AC turbine retrofits in the 90s as full of difficulties because of the ductwork. Listening in by way of a conference call, a CDC Epidemiologist asked anyone in the range of the Scottish speakerphone if there were any sharp angles in the ductwork leading either to or from the ships dehumidifying systems. When three designers laughed at the question -- pointing out that in this class of ship there were easily over a dozen right-angles in those ducts -- the CDC researcher had a hunch: insufficient airflow through long-neglected ductwork was an idea breeding ground for potentially lethal mold spores.

9 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Teams of HVAC engineers quickly determined access points in the ductwork where mold could be checked. Shortly thereafter, surgical-masked sailors aboard the Wanderer began cutting holes in the ship's ducts for sampling sites.

4:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Six hours after the first distress message to Miami, the USS George Washington dispatched a Harrier AV-B jump jet from its flight deck. Forty minutes later it hovered over the Wanderer to retrieve biological samples as well to deliver medical supplies.

The CDC's hunch was verified aboard the George Washington. The course of action was clear. Sections of the Wanderer underwent disinfecting and mold removal. Passengers' health conditions stabilized. Additional HEPA filters were jury-rigged into the cooling system and the ship proceeded, nearly on schedule, to its next port of call.

A potential health disaster was avoided.

What's next, plagues? locusts? ...

while demographics isn't destiny, it's a BIG force moving our way...

a demographic tsunami is about to hit the workplace!

Workforce 2020 : Work and Workers in the 21st Century
by Richard W. Judy, Carol D'Amico


Editorial Reviews

William E. Brock


It’s a wake-up call in the same way “A Nation At Risk” sounded the alarm for education reform...

Book Description

Ten years ago Hudson Institute's landmark study Workforce 2000 set the agenda for a new understanding of workforce issues. Described by the New York Times as "one of the most influential studies ever produced by a think tank," this groundbreaking report set the terms for much of the policy discussion at the government and corporate levels on these issues. It was the first to call attention to the changing demographics of the American workforce and the growing gap between the skills likely to be required for entry-level jobs in the future and those likely to be possessed by new entrants into the labor force.

Now Hudson releases its long-awaited follow-up: Workforce 2000 Revisited. Like its predecessor, the new book examines the trends that shape the economy and workforce, and combines them into a unique and fresh body of analysis. The authors set the record straight on the demographic makeup of the workforce in the years 2000 to 2020 and challenge the conventional wisdom on trends affecting American workers and employers. Analyzing important emerging issues, they detail the coming demographic changes in the workforce--and their potentially serious effects on the job market and the economy as a whole.

The book also considers the effects of globalization on U.S. business and the American worker, the impact of rapid technological change, the "skills gap" identified in the earlier report, and the need for a new model of education, training, and employment services to prepare workers for the jobs of the next century.

Workforce 2000 Revisited is an indispensable guide to the next decade of workforce issues.


Hudson Institute Publication

About the Author

Carol D'Amico is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and director of the Workforce 2000 Revisited Project. Richard W. Judy is an economist and senior fellow at Hudson Institute.

new digs, new opportunities

Puncturing sanctimony with a single brand

Going native with business research...

Let me tell you a story about something that happened at Xerox.

"The word on the street", several years ago, was that Xerox's competitors were doing a better job at field-servicing leased office equipment. The job of doing 'something-about-this' fell onto the desk of a Director of Strategy and Business Development. A woman by the name of Valerie Mullen.

By anyone's reckoning, Xerox did what made the most business sense. Focus groups were probed, questionnaires were sent out, managers of field support personnel were asked to chronicle daily routines and job bottlenecks, and considerable time was spent discovering the competition's best practices in this area.

A solution had two parts.

First: Technician expertise would be improved by issuing hand-held computers that could access a centralized database of service knowledge (all the right technical stuff here... wireless communication, daily updating of what'd been done that day)

... and second: Field technician deployment would be made more efficient by better scheduling algorithms.

What happened surprised everyone.

The longer the pilot project ran, the more customers called in to Xerox to say that tech support was -- in fact -- getting worse!

It was time to try Something New.

That something new came from, of all places, a pretty exotic corner of academia.

Xerox decided that what was needed was a new approach to understanding what Service Techs *actually do* in their jobs. What was needed was a whole different way to understand what people really do - what they really do rather than what their managers say they do, or what they tell researchers what they do...

For 3 months investigators accompanied the technicians. This 'shadowing' was for entire workdays: from the occasionally boring early mornings waiting for the day's assignments, to the client sites where the technician would (invariably) discover more problems than had been detailed in the work orders, and back to the corporate 'bull pens' to wait for the next job. And it wasn't a very passive involvement either. What happened was that, after a while, the investigators became (almost - at least) members of the tech-support team. They were learning what it takes to be a good field tech.

What emerged from the study was both critically important AND counter-intuitive.

In ways that had never been documented, the investigators discovered that an enormous amount of expertise sharing takes place in down time. The 'wasted time' in the early mornings, the end-of-the-day sitting around the tech area drinking coffee out of paper cups ... these were times when the field technicians told stories. They told stories about what they'd recently fixed, they told stories about how they'd figured it out, and they told stories about how someone else's story about how to fix such-and-such had helped them think of a new solution.

What emerged, from this second study, in other words, was that the first solution -- with the laptops, with the more efficient time management, had overlooked something terribly important.

WHAT EMERGED -- IN SHORT -- were specific recommendations for ways to increase the opportunities for this kind of casual exchange.
First: In this particular case, what that meant was that the new time-scheduling software included more shared downtime.

... and second: In this particular case, it meant introducing a bit of old technology - a kind of Walkie Talkie. Service team members would go to a customer site, turn on their two-way radio, describe the problem.. and leave it on ... occasionally telling 'whoever was listening' what they were doing. What would happen, if you listened to the channel, was a constant back-and-forth exchange of opinions, hunches, and comments like 'oh yeah, so and so saw that last month and here's what she did.'

THE RESULT? :

An expensive technology solution was seen as mis-matched to the need at hand. The replacing solution was a fraction of the original solution's cost.
Xerox customer satisfaction went way up. AND - job satisfaction for the field-technicians went way up.

how to generate more innovation from less

Generating more innovation for less

By Henry Chesbrough

Published: August 6 2003 18:00 | Last Updated: August 6 2003 18:00


These are tough times for innovation. The internet bubble is a distant memory. The technology-laden Nasdaq index has dropped more than 70 per cent from its peak in 2000. Even venture capital companies, the ardent financiers of so many start-up businesses, are handing back capital to their investors because they do not have enough opportunities to warrant investment. Traditional research and development laboratories such as Bell Labs and Xerox Parc have been downsized or spun off, as large companies have cut internal spending on innovation.


In tough times, many companies try to make do with less R&D spending and accept less innovation as a result. These cuts seem reasonable. They help stabilise cash flow and restore profitability. Yet they also cause the company to forfeit a tremendous opportunity.

Some companies are responding to economic crisis by rethinking their innovation processes to do more with less. International Business Machines incorporates external technologies such as Linux and Java into its strategies, while Intel searches for promising new technologies within universities or start-up companies. These companies view innovation as a necessity that can cut costs, generate revenues and create growth. They have an open attitude in their search for innovation and regarding its uses.

To establish a context for what these new innovators are doing, consider the underlying logic of R&D practices at the average company - a logic I call "closed innovation". It is the notion that successful innovation requires control from start to finish. According to this view, companies must generate their own ideas, develop them, build them, market them, distribute them, service them, finance them and support them on their own. Businesses must be strongly self-reliant because they cannot be sure of the quality, availability or capability of others' ideas. "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself," as the saying goes.

This thinking carries some implicit rules: you should hire the best and brightest people in your industry. To bring new products and services to the market successfully, you must discover and develop them yourself. If you discover it yourself, you will get it to market first. You should control your intellectual property so your competitors do not profit from your ideas.

The language of R&D is built on the foundation of closed innovation. Projects enter the "pipeline" or "funnel" at the beginning of the R&D process and proceed within the company until they are shipped to customers. Typically, there are no other paths into the company or out to the market.

In recent years, though, the closed model of innovation has become obsolete in most industries. Thanks to the rise of excellent practical university research, internationalised sources of knowledge and vastly larger pools of private equity in various forms, useful knowledge today is widely distributed. No company can afford to ignore this wealth of external knowledge in its innovation process.

Hence many are taking a new approach, which I call "open innovation". It assumes that businesses can and should use ideas from outside. And the ideas a company generates can be taken to market through channels such as joint ventures, licensing and spin-offs, which may lie outside current lines of business.

The concept of open innovation rests on the fact that managers today face an abundance of useful knowledge, which they must be ready to use if they are to provide value for the company. This perspective suggests some very different organising principles for innovation: Not all the smart people in the world work for you. You do not have to originate the research in order to profit from it. Building a better business model is better than getting to market first. You should profit from others' use of your intellectual property and you should buy others' intellectual property whenever it advances your own business.

At first glance, these ideas may seem to apply only to so-called "high technology" companies. They do not. Every company has a "technology", which is merely a means of converting its ideas, materials or labour into goods or services. And no company can expect its technology to remain fixed for long.

Adopting innovations from outside can be extremely practical. For example, a chemical company wanted to find a simpler way of manufacturing a particular compound. At that time, the process required nine steps, which resulted in poor yields and high costs. By teaming up with InnoCentive, an innovation intermediary, the chemical company found an inventor (a recently retired chemical engineer in another part of the world) who proposed a two-step process to make the compound. The process worked and saved the company millions of dollars. It paid the inventor $20,000 (£12,000) for this invaluable solution.

Or consider a low-tech example involving Procter & Gamble. Three years ago, in response to sluggish revenue growth, P&G decided to change its approach to innovation in the consumer packaged goods industry. Its company-wide initiative, called Connect and Develop, encouraged business units to reach out to external parties for innovative ideas. It created the position of director of external innovation to manage a team of "technology scouts", who would seek promising technologies outside the business.

P&G has set a goal of sourcing 50 per cent of its innovations from outside the company in five years' time, up from an estimated 10 per cent in 2002. The rationale is simple: inside P&G there are more than 8,600 scientists. Outside P&G, there are 1.5m. Why try to invent everything internally?

The company also tries to sell its own ideas to others. Any ideas generated by P&G's labs are available, even to direct competitors, if they are not picked up by the internal businesses after three years. This generates income for ideas that might otherwise go unused,

According to research by Jane Linder, Sirkka Jarvenpaa and Thomas Davenport in the summer 2003 issue of Sloan Management Review, the British retailer J. Sainsbury is adept at using external sources of innovation. It starts by identifying ideas that open up new market categories, then uses those insights to sift through external innovation suppliers, the aim being to get those ideas into stores faster. A popular new condiment line, Peppadew, came into the stores from the eastern cape of South Africa, rather than from internal R&D. Such new category items give customers a reason to come back and to spend a little more money each time they do so.

Not all industries operate in an open-innovation regime. Nuclear reactors and aircraft engines are industries where internal paths to market remain the dominant mode of innovation.

But other industries have been in open-innovation mode for many years. The Hollywood film industry, for example, has replaced the old studio system - where every element was owned by the studio - with a network of partnerships and alliances between production studios, directors, talent agencies, actors, scriptwriters, specialised subcontractors (such as suppliers of special effects) and independent producers.

In most industries, it pays to be open. By making the most of the knowledge that surrounds them, corporations can pursue innovation even in these demanding times. In so doing, they can cut costs, increase revenues and generate new business.

The writer teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of 'Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology', Harvard Business School Press, 2003

a slice of american uniqueness - circa Great Depression

New York Times, Saturday August 2, 2003

Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A.

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 1 — Writers are usually unabashed about claiming authorship for their work. So it's curious that many of the alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of the 20th century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers' Project, a program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.

Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the Writers' Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers during its four years of federal financing. When the government funds expired, Congress let the program continue under state sponsorship until 1943. Although grateful for even subsistence wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a badge of honor to earn $20 to $25 a week from the government.

But the Library of Congress takes a different view. With little fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of extraordinary Writers' Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage facilities. After an arduous vetting process, much of it is now available to the public.

What is becoming clear, says Prof. Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo., is that the editors of the project believed that they could build a national culture on diversity. "They faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and anti-immigration laws, held sway," Mr. Hirsch said. "In the Federal Writers' Project, ethnic minorities were celebrated for being turpentine workers or grape pickers or folk artists."

John Cheever was one of the program's unenthusiastic participants. A child of proud Massachusetts Republicans who had called the W.P.A. short for "We Poke Along," he was ashamed of working as a "junior editor" at the program's Washington office. He once described his duties as fixing "the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards."

Nonetheless, Cheever's experiences at the Writers' Project provided the material for many of the best scenes in his 1957 novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle."

Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the Writers' Project. Others included Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby.

These federal employees produced what would become the renowned American Guide Series, comprising volumes for each of the 48 states that then existed, as well as Alaska. The Writers' Project also turned out many other regional, city and cultural guides, like Algren's "Galena, Illinois" and Wright's "Bibliography of Chicago Negroes." All in all, it published more than 275 books, 700 pamphlets and 340 "issuances" (articles, leaflets and radio scripts).

Eudora Welty even served as photographer for the Mississippi guide. W. H. Auden called the whole project "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state."

Cataloging the output has been a long project. John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, has been working on it since 1978, when he first read Jerre Mangione's seminal study "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943."

"The Library of Congress has its work cut out," Mr. Cole explained in a telephone interview from his office on Capitol Hill. "It's an amazing collection. The Federal Writers' Project helped us rediscover our heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it had ever been described. I'm thinking here of both the state guides and all of those other publications that they put out — the collection offers the best examples of local history and oddball anecdotal stories ever amassed."

Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on the Library of Congress's W.P.A. Life Histories Web site, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html, with more to come.

In the last few years, some good biographies of the most notable alumni have been published. But no one has yet tackled a broad-based study of the thousands of untested but talented young writers who fanned out across the continent in search of a collective self-portrait of America. Recently, though, a number of scholars and researchers have begun to track the literary paper trail, unearthing documents and writings that have been packed in boxes for decades.

Pam Bordelon, a writer in Pensacola, Fla., for example, has spent the last 10 years editing interviews and compiling artifacts from the project's Poets Recording Expeditions Into the Floridas. She has traveled all over the state, searching for Writers' Project work done by Hurston, who was hired to collect folklore during the 1930's.

"I was just blown away by the richness," Ms. Bordelon recalled. "The voices in Florida alone are unbelievable."

David A. Taylor, a writer, and Andrea Kalin, a Washington filmmaker, have begun work on "American Voices," a documentary focusing on the Writers' Project in four states: New York, Florida, Illinois and Nebraska. One discovery is unpublished correspondence between Cheever and Ellison, who met at the project.

"The F.W.P. was much more than guidebooks and oral histories," Ms. Kalin explained. "It was where social and economic history met the individual imagination in literature."

But it is difficult to trace authorship for the W.P.A. guides. Mr. Bellow, for example, left mention of his Writers' Project work at the Chicago office out of his entry in Who's Who in America. In "Bellow," his biography of the author, James Atlas writes that Mr. Bellow was humbled to be toiling alongside hard-drinking literary heroes of the proletariat, like Algren and Jack Conroy, editor of the leftist journal The Anvil. Mr. Bellow explains in the book, "I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me."

Mr. Bellow, whose first Writers' Project job was inventorying Illinois periodicals at the Newberry Library, was later assigned to write 20-page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell. Mr. Atlas discovered the essays only a few years ago when he was researching "Bellow."

"They're incredible essays, very advanced for somebody 21 or 22 years old," Mr. Atlas said. Mr. Bellow, he said, was ecstatic to reread them recently, amazed that they still existed.

Wright and Walker were also first published while employed in the Chicago office. Studs Terkel, another veteran, used the oral history techniques he learned in the late 1930's as his model for books like "The Good War" (1984) and "Working" (1974). And Albert Murray, perhaps Ellison's closest friend as well as the author of classic works like "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), maintains that without the Writers' Project, Ellison would not have written "Invisible Man."

"It was because of the Writers' Project that I first got to read pieces Ralph was writing on his own," Mr. Murray recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Harlem. "It pulled him away from music and focused him on writing. It put writers and artists in touch as they had never been before. It was even more intense than the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout `Invisible Man' there are sketches and caricatures of people he met during the Federal Writers' Project."

Ellison himself is quoted in a Library of Congress document as saying that the Writers' Project helped him better understand the powerful connection between serious literature and folkways. "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded," he notes in the document. "I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings."

But Ellison, like many of his peers, didn't like to talk much about his days as a government employee. "He wanted to move away from it," Mr. Murray said. "It was his training ground. But he had higher concepts of art than the W.P.A. Guide Series."

Yet to many, the guide series are treasures. William Least Heat Moon said he wouldn't have written "PrairyErth: A Deep Map" (1991) without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his memoir "Inside U.S.A." (1947), his suitcase bulged with W.P.A. Guides. So did John Steinbeck's when he set out to write "Travels With Charley: In Search of America" (1962).

"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it," Steinbeck writes in the book. "It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."

Steinbeck points out that many of the printing plates for the guides were smashed in the wake of a late-1930's witchhunt by Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that the W.P.A. was a Communist plot. But the Library of Congress has hundreds of boxes of the guides' raw material: correspondence, interview transcripts, slave narratives, research notes and photographs. It is one of the most underused and untapped historical collections in America.

With help from the library staff, Ms. Bordelon, for instance, unearthed tape recordings or transcripts of recordings of these Florida sources: Earltha White, who ran a soup kitchen in the slums of Jacksonville; a Cuban cigar maker from Ybor City; white squatters in the Everglades; Izzelly Haines, a midwife, who recalls delivering her first baby; and Norberto Diaz, whose tale of the race-related murder of a friend in Key West inspired Stetson Kennedy, a project folklorist, to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

"Whenever anyone asks me what it was like working with the Works Progress Administration and recording Florida folk songs back in the 1930's for the Library of Congress," Mr. Kennedy once said in a radio broadcast, "I tell them we were as excited as a bunch of kids on a treasure hunt."

In "On Native Grounds" (1942), Alfred Kazin said the Writers' Project, originally a "drive toward national inventory which began by reporting the ravages of the Depression," ended with triumphant "reporting on the national inheritance." He concluded that it changed the course of American literature forever.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

Sqeamish politicos v. placing bets on terrorist attacks

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks

New York Times, Tuesday
July 29, 2003

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, July 28 - The Pentagon office that proposed
spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential
terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures
trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which
anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist
attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish
on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have
the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on
a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting
events and part of its search for the "broadest possible
set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Two
Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally
repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell
under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President
Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota,
said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble
persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr.
Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor
so that people could go in - and is sponsored by the
government itself - people could go in and bet on the
assassination of an American political figure?"

After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of
Oregon, spoke out, the Pentagon sought to play down the
importance of a program for which the Bush administration
has sought $8 million through 2005. The White House also
altered the Web site so that the potential events to be
considered by the market that were visible earlier in the
day at http://www.policyanalysismarket.org could no longer be
seen.

But by that time, Republican officials in the Senate were
privately shaking their heads over the planned trading. One
top aide said he hoped that the Pentagon had a good
explanation for it.

The Pentagon, in defending the program, said such futures
trading had proven effective in predicting other events
like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.

"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient,
effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even
hidden information," the Defense Department said in a
statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be
good at predicting such things as elections results; they
are often better than expert opinions."

According to descriptions given to Congress, available at
the Web site and provided by the two senators, traders who
register would deposit money into an account similar to a
stock account and win or lose money based on predicting
events.

"For instance," Mr. Wyden said, "you may think early on
that Prime Minister X is going to be assassinated. So you
buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each. As more people
begin to think the person's going to be assassinated, the
cost of the contract could go up, to 50 cents.

"The payoff if he's assassinated is $1 per future. So if it
comes to pass, and those who bought at 5 cents make 95
cents. Those who bought at 50 cents make 50 cents."
The senators also suggested that terrorists could
participate because the traders' identities will be
unknown.

"This appears to encourage terrorists to participate,
either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet
against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence
authorities," they said in a letter to Admiral Poindexter,
the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office,
which the opponents said had developed the idea.

The initiative, called the Policy Analysis Market, is to
begin registering up to 1,000 traders on Friday. It is the
latest problem for the advanced projects agency, or Darpa,
a Pentagon unit that has run into controversy for the
Terrorism Information Office. Admiral Poindexter once
described a sweeping electronic surveillance plan as a way
of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer
databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial
records.

Worried about the reach of the program, Congress this year
prohibited what was called the Total Information Awareness
program from being used against Americans. Its name was
changed to the Terrorism Information Awareness program.
This month, the Senate agreed to block all spending on the
program. The House did not. Mr. Wyden said he hoped that
the new disclosure about the trading program would be the
death blow for Admiral Poindexter's plan.

The Pentagon did not provide details of the program like
how much money participants would have to deposit in
accounts. Trading is to begin on Oct. 1, with the number of
participants initially limited to 1,000 and possibly
expanding to 10,000 by Jan. 1.

"Involvement in this group prediction process should prove
engaging and may prove profitable," the Web site said.
The overview of the plan said the market would focus on the
economic, civil and military futures of Egypt, Jordan,
Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey and the
consequences of United States involvement with those
nations. The creators of the market envision other
trappings of existing markets like derivatives.

In a statement, Darpa said the trading idea was "currently
a small research program that faces a number of major
technical challenges and uncertainties."

"Chief among these," the agency said, "are: Can the market
survive and will people continue to participate when U.S.
authorities use it to prevent terrorist attacks? Can
futures markets be manipulated by adversaries?"
Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wyden called for an immediate end to the
project and said they would use its existence to justify
cutting off financial support for the overall effort. In
the letter to Admiral Poindexter, they called the
initiative a "wasteful and absurd" use of tax dollars.

"The American people want the federal government to use its
resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it," the
letter said.

Fat, Challenging, and Grandiose

People don't listen, they reload ...

The fog of innocence

New York Times
Saturday 12 July 2003

Architecture's Irascible Reformer

-----By EMILY EAKIN



ARUNDEL, England — Moss grows from the steep, pitched roof of the West Dean Gardens visitors' center. Carefully trained grape vines hug its walls. And the facade, approached by a curving gravel path, is a pleasing tapestry of flint, brick, concrete and Portland stone.

Over all, the effect is quaint. The center, which houses a gift shop and a cafeteria for the 35-acre gardens next door, could have been plucked from the pages of a fairy tale — a primmer English version of "Hansel and Gretel."

But to Christopher Alexander, the architect who designed it, the center represents something much less whimsical: a small social revolution.

For nearly four decades, Mr. Alexander, 66, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, has been waging a quixotic campaign of messianic ambition: to heal the world by reforming the way it builds.

Humanity, he says, is ailing. And the built world is both source and symptom of its disease. Where there should be beautiful buildings in harmony with nature, he says, there is mostly "architecture which is against life" instead, "insane, image-ridden, hollow."

By this, Mr. Alexander means not only strip malls, office parks and tract homes, but also much of what is fawned over these days by highbrow critics. In his view, the recent spate of flashy confections by big-name stars — from Frank Gehry's glittering Guggenheim Bilbao to Rem Koolhaas's interactive Prada boutique in SoHo — is not just pretentious and sterile. It is actually making us ill.

"Architecture is a very strange field," Mr. Alexander said over lunch here in the medieval town not far from West Dean Gardens where he grew up and has lately been spending much of his time. "It's almost as though they've induced a mass psychosis in society by introducing a point of view that has no common sense and no bearing on any deeper feeling."

But Mr. Alexander, a bearlike, weather-beaten man with doleful blue eyes and rumpled khakis, is no mere curmudgeon. Having made his diagnosis years ago, he has dedicated himself to propounding the cure: an architecture based on what he calls an objective science of beauty.

It's a mission that has put him starkly at odds with most of his profession, where he is variously described as a reactionary, a mystic or a Lear-like madman ranting on the moors. It doesn't help matters that, like Shakespeare's prickly king, Mr. Alexander is, as he apologetically put it, "an excitable person": brilliant but conflict-prone.

"He's a self-proclaimed outsider," said the architect Peter Eisenman, who famously debated him at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in 1982. "I think Chris unfortunately fell off the radar screen some time ago. He got off into being cranky."

But even his detractors concede him a grudging respect. After all, Mr. Alexander's popular following is enormous.

Better known for his writings than his buildings, he is the principal author of "A Pattern Language" (Oxford University Press, 1977), one of the best-selling architectural treatises of all time, still selling 10,000 copies annually more than 25 years after it first appeared. His devotees range from amateur home builders and community activist groups to the Prince of Wales, who invited him to serve as a trustee of his Institute for Architecture in London and helped recruit him to design the visitors' center at West Dean Gardens.

Among computer programmers, he has attained near-guru status. Will Wright, the creator of "The Sims," the nation's most popular computer game, routinely cites him as a major influence. And he's an unlikely inspiration behind a powerful movement in software design known as object-oriented programming.

Now Mr. Alexander's iconoclastic reputation is likely to grow some more. This spring, he finally completed his four-volume, 2,150-page magnum opus: "The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe." After laboring over it for 27 years, Mr. Alexander had a falling out with his editors at Oxford University Press and is now publishing the work himself through his Center for Environmental Structure, a nonprofit organization in Berkeley dedicated to promoting his ideas. (Sun Microsystems contributed money to help defray printing costs.)

Much more than a do-it-yourself construction manual (though it is that, too), "The Nature of Order" is a grandiose, polemical, sumptuously illustrated and utterly singular inquiry into what Mr. Alexander calls "first principles": the essence of life itself. Available since May for $75, the first volume, "The Phenomenon of Life," has already sold 4,000 copies. In it, he lays out his view that beauty is a matter neither of taste nor opinion but rather an inherent attribute of living things. But Mr. Alexander's definition of life is hardly the standard one.

"Life is not a limited mechanical concept which applies to self-reproducing biological machines," he declares in the introduction (which, like the rest of the volume, appears to have been only lightly copy-edited). "It is a quality which inheres in space itself, and applies to every brick, every stone, every person, every physical structure of any kind at all, that appears in space. Each thing has life."

He describes 15 "structural features"— fundamental geometries of order — that signal vitality in plants, animals and objects. If respected by architects and developers, he argues, these features — which include "strong centers," "alternating repetition" and "levels of scale" — would result in a built world that is both beautiful and alive. To the untrained eye, however, the concepts are not necessarily intuitive. It may not be obvious that — to take just a few of the book's hundreds of examples — the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia has "strong centers," while a 1971 Minnesota house by Bruce Goff does not. Or that a Shaker cabinet radiates "the most beautiful inner calm," while a pair of carved wood Italian chairs from the 1920's are "gross and utterly lacking in inner calm."

Reviewing a galley of "The Phenomenon of Life" in the journal Architectural Record in May 2002, William S. Saunders, the editor of The Harvard Design Magazine and an admirer of Mr. Alexander's early work, called the book "full of contradictions, foggy generalities and extreme and unsupported assertions." He compared Mr. Alexander to Casaubon, the deluded scholar in "Middlemarch" who devotes fruitless years to compiling a grand synthesis of all the world's myths.

The architect Moshe Safdie, a close friend of Mr. Alexander's for 40 years, worries that some readers may be put off by the book's mystical tone. "This sense that there are intrinsic qualities, difficult to explain, but which you somehow feel when you are in the presence of great beauty," he said. "He wants you to accept it, grasp it and follow it almost as a religious teaching."

Another stumbling block for architects is Mr. Alexander's idiosyncratic building style, he continued, adding: "People go from the ideas, which they could interpret freely, to the solutions, which they see as somewhat anachronistic, somewhat craft-related, stylistically somewhat Victorian. They see him as a reactionary."

It wasn't always this way. Mr. Alexander once ranked among the profession's vanguard. Born Wolfgang Christian Johann Alexander to Austrian parents who were archaeologists in Vienna, he fled with his family to England during the Anschluss. They eventually settled in Arundel, where his mother and father taught high school. Mr. Alexander graduated from Cambridge University with degrees in math and architecture.

Asked as part of one assignment to design a house, he instead submitted a spoof of the formalist theory he had been taught: a glass box slashed by giant brick walls. "A completely abstract, pointless notion," he said. To his amazement, the head of the department called him into his office to congratulate him. "He said, `Christopher, my boy, this is exactly what we want,' " Mr. Alexander recalled. "I thought, Oh my God, I've walked into the nut house."

In 1958, he left England for what he rightly guessed would be the more open, experimental culture of Harvard. For his Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, published in 1964 as "Notes on the Synthesis of Form," he proposed a rigorous and — for the decade — technologically precocious approach to architectural design involving algorithms and computer analysis. It earned him instant renown.

He also spent time living in India. When the Indian government asked him to help rebuild a village that had been displaced by a dam, he reluctantly declined.

"I knew that the village would be meaningless if it weren't generated by the people in the village," he explained. "And I didn't know how to harness the energy and thought of the people to create their village. I thought: I've got to figure out how that is done."

His solution was "A Pattern Language," written over nearly a decade with the help of five collaborators, colleagues and students at Berkeley, where, in 1963, Mr. Alexander had become a professor. Printed on nearly 1,200 pages of wafer-thin paper, the book had the look, weight and commanding moral tone of a Bible.

Arguing that homes, neighborhoods and towns should be designed not by professionals but by the people who live in them, the authors presented the book as an all-purpose how-to guide for creating a global utopia: the built world boiled down to 253 patterns. From "country towns" (pattern 6) and "green streets" (pattern 51) to "six-foot balcony" (pattern 167), no design feature was too big or too small to merit detailed consideration.

Buildings should be no more than four stories high (pattern 21), the authors stipulated. Town squares should include paved surfaces for dancing in the street (pattern 63). And people should sleep facing east (pattern 138), for optimal well-being.

These were not arbitrary rules, Mr. Alexander and his collaborators insisted. Rather, they were "archetypal" patterns, "so deeply rooted in the nature of things, that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in 500 years, as they are today."

Melding a 1960's feel-good social philosophy with a rigorous structuralism, the book had broad appeal. Like Jane Jacobs's "Life and Death of Great American Cities" (1961), "A Pattern Language" offered a promising alternative to the sterility and exhaustion of modernist architecture.

By the early 1980's, computer scientists were eagerly discussing the book as well. In Mr. Alexander's patterns, programmers saw the solution to a software design problem that had long plagued the field. According to the dominant approach at the time, whenever a program was needed, one would be written from scratch, a method that tended to produce unwieldy and bug-ridden software. Inspired by "A Pattern Language," computer scientists discovered they could get more efficient and reliable results if they thought of programs as assemblies of predefined code patterns instead. To the thousands of programmers who use this approach today, said Richard Gabriel, a computer scientist at Sun Microsystems and a leading advocate of the software patterns approach, "Chris is a revered cult figure."

In his own field, his reputation has proved more fickle. By the 1980's, structuralist theory had given way on American campuses to the more playful and rule-free dispensations of deconstruction and postmodernism. At Berkeley, Mr. Alexander came into increasing conflict with colleagues. He says he and and his students were victims of intellectual harassment. In 1985 he filed a formal complaint against the university, charging it with violating his academic freedom. Seven years later, the matter was quietly settled, and in 1998, he retired.

But the embattled life seems to agree with Mr. Alexander, who has been getting up at 2 a.m. to work on a new book, "Deep Adaptation." Skeptics, he said cheerfully, would do well to recall the success of "A Pattern Language." As he put it: "Even the cautiously skeptical reader might say: `He did it once. Maybe it's possible that he's done it again.' "

The fog of innocence

WMD - a tripwire for legal investigation?

---Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Jun. 06, 2003

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation.

Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war.

That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public may strongly resist more of President Bush's warmaking.

Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.

Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the relevant issues.

President Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and declarative as I had recalled.

Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

United Nations Address
September 12, 2002

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

Radio Address
October 5, 2002

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003

Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt?

When these statements were made, Bush's let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many other Americans, doubted them.

As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United Nations, it was also being debated on campuses - including those where I happened to be lecturing at the time.

On several occasions, students asked me the following question: Should they believe the President of the United States? My answer was that they should give the President the benefit of the doubt, for several reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have operated in every modern White House and that, I assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House, too.

First, I assured the students that these statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. Presidential statements are the result of a process, not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters process raw information, and their statements are passed on to senior aides who have both substantive knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs before the statement ever reaches the President for his own review and possible revision.

Second, I explained that - at least in every White House and administration with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton - statements with national security implications were the most carefully considered of all. The White House is aware that, in making these statements, the President is speaking not only to the nation, but also to the world.

Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false. And in this case, far from backpedaling from the President's more extreme claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times, been even more emphatic than the President had. For example, on January 9, 2003, Fleischer stated, during his press briefing, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

In addition, others in the Administration were similarly quick to back the President up, in some cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that Saddam had WMDs - and even went so far as to claim he knew "where they are; they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

Finally, I explained to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me, it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't have damn solid intelligence to back him up. Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as important as this, and if there was any doubt, I suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he would be say: "I have been advised," or "Our intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such similar hedge. But Bush had not done so.

So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they currently appear to have been?

After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been very hard to find - for they existed in large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements, telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify, and production equipment also existed.

So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with the fact that they may not exist?

There are two main possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the nation, and the world.

A Desperate Search For WMDs Has So Far Yielded Little, If Any, Fruit

Even before formally declaring war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the President had dispatched American military special forces into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, which he knew would provide the primary justification for Operation Freedom. None were found.

Throughout Operation Freedom's penetration of Iraq and drive toward Baghdad, the search for WMDs continued. None were found.

As the coalition forces gained control of Iraqi cities and countryside, special search teams were dispatched to look for WMDs. None were found.

During the past two and a half months, according to reliable news reports, military patrols have visited over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of the prohibited weapons were found there.

British and American Press Reaction to the Missing WMDs

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under serious attack in England, which he dragged into the war unwillingly, based on the missing WMDs. In Britain, the missing WMDs are being treated as scandalous; so far, the reaction in the U.S. has been milder.

New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has taken Bush sharply to task, asserting that it is "long past time for this administration to be held accountable." "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat," Krugman argued. "If that claim was fraudulent," he continued, "the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra." But most media outlets have reserved judgment as the search for WMDs in Iraq continues.

Still, signs do not look good. Last week, the Pentagon announced it was shifting its search from looking for WMD sites, to looking for people who can provide leads as to where the missing WMDs might be.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, while offering no new evidence, assured Congress that WMDs will indeed be found. And he advised that a new unit called the Iraq Survey Group, composed of some 1400 experts and technicians from around the world, is being deployed to assist in the searching.

But, as Time magazine reported, the leads are running out. According to Time, the Marine general in charge explained that "[w]e've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," and remarked flatly, "They're simply not there."

Perhaps most troubling, the President has failed to provide any explanation of how he could have made his very specific statements, yet now be unable to back them up with supporting evidence. Was there an Iraqi informant thought to be reliable, who turned out not to be? Were satellite photos innocently, if negligently misinterpreted? Or was his evidence not as solid as he led the world to believe?

The absence of any explanation for the gap between the statements and reality only increases the sense that the President's misstatements may actually have been intentional lies.

Investigating The Iraqi War Intelligence Reports

Even now, while the jury is still out as to whether intentional misconduct occurred, the President has a serious credibility problem. Newsweek magazine posed the key questions: "If America has entered a new age of pre-emption --when it must strike first because it cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess nuclear or biological weapons--exact intelligence is critical. How will the United States take out a mad despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA can't say for sure where they are? And how will Bush be able to maintain support at home and abroad?"

In an apparent attempt to bolster the President's credibility, and his own, Secretary Rumsfeld himself has now called for a Defense Department investigation into what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd finds this effort about on par with O. J.'s looking for his wife's killer. But there may be a difference: Unless the members of Administration can find someone else to blame - informants, surveillance technology, lower-level personnel, you name it - they may not escape fault themselves.

Congressional committees are also looking into the pre-war intelligence collection and evaluation. Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee would jointly investigate the situation. And the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans an investigation.

These investigations are certainly appropriate, for there is potent evidence of either a colossal intelligence failure or misconduct - and either would be a serious problem. When the best case scenario seems to be mere incompetence, investigations certainly need to be made.

Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee - told CNN's Aaron Brown, that while he still hopes they find WMDs or at least evidence thereof, he has also contemplated three other possible alternative scenarios:

One is that [the WMDs] were spirited out of Iraq, which maybe is the worst of all possibilities, because now the very thing that we were trying to avoid, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could be in the hands of dozens of groups. Second, that we had bad intelligence. Or third, that the intelligence was satisfactory but that it was manipulated, so as just to present to the American people and to the world those things that made the case for the necessity of war against Iraq.

Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious chance that it is the final scenario that reflects reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a pattern of manipulation by this administration."

Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.

But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed "findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq," and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.

Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "[t]he country swims on a sea of oil."

Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs Are Still Missing

Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.

What Do You Think? Message Boards

John Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former Counsel to the President of the United States.

WMD - a tripwire for legal investigation?

---Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Jun. 06, 2003

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation.

Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war.

That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public may strongly resist more of President Bush's warmaking.

Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.

Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the relevant issues.

President Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and declarative as I had recalled.

Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

United Nations Address
September 12, 2002

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

Radio Address
October 5, 2002

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003

Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt?

When these statements were made, Bush's let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many other Americans, doubted them.

As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United Nations, it was also being debated on campuses - including those where I happened to be lecturing at the time.

On several occasions, students asked me the following question: Should they believe the President of the United States? My answer was that they should give the President the benefit of the doubt, for several reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have operated in every modern White House and that, I assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House, too.

First, I assured the students that these statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. Presidential statements are the result of a process, not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters process raw information, and their statements are passed on to senior aides who have both substantive knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs before the statement ever reaches the President for his own review and possible revision.

Second, I explained that - at least in every White House and administration with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton - statements with national security implications were the most carefully considered of all. The White House is aware that, in making these statements, the President is speaking not only to the nation, but also to the world.

Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false. And in this case, far from backpedaling from the President's more extreme claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times, been even more emphatic than the President had. For example, on January 9, 2003, Fleischer stated, during his press briefing, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

In addition, others in the Administration were similarly quick to back the President up, in some cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that Saddam had WMDs - and even went so far as to claim he knew "where they are; they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

Finally, I explained to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me, it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't have damn solid intelligence to back him up. Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as important as this, and if there was any doubt, I suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he would be say: "I have been advised," or "Our intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such similar hedge. But Bush had not done so.

So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they currently appear to have been?

After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been very hard to find - for they existed in large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements, telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify, and production equipment also existed.

So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with the fact that they may not exist?

There are two main possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the nation, and the world.

A Desperate Search For WMDs Has So Far Yielded Little, If Any, Fruit

Even before formally declaring war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the President had dispatched American military special forces into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, which he knew would provide the primary justification for Operation Freedom. None were found.

Throughout Operation Freedom's penetration of Iraq and drive toward Baghdad, the search for WMDs continued. None were found.

As the coalition forces gained control of Iraqi cities and countryside, special search teams were dispatched to look for WMDs. None were found.

During the past two and a half months, according to reliable news reports, military patrols have visited over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of the prohibited weapons were found there.

British and American Press Reaction to the Missing WMDs

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under serious attack in England, which he dragged into the war unwillingly, based on the missing WMDs. In Britain, the missing WMDs are being treated as scandalous; so far, the reaction in the U.S. has been milder.

New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has taken Bush sharply to task, asserting that it is "long past time for this administration to be held accountable." "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat," Krugman argued. "If that claim was fraudulent," he continued, "the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra." But most media outlets have reserved judgment as the search for WMDs in Iraq continues.

Still, signs do not look good. Last week, the Pentagon announced it was shifting its search from looking for WMD sites, to looking for people who can provide leads as to where the missing WMDs might be.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, while offering no new evidence, assured Congress that WMDs will indeed be found. And he advised that a new unit called the Iraq Survey Group, composed of some 1400 experts and technicians from around the world, is being deployed to assist in the searching.

But, as Time magazine reported, the leads are running out. According to Time, the Marine general in charge explained that "[w]e've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," and remarked flatly, "They're simply not there."

Perhaps most troubling, the President has failed to provide any explanation of how he could have made his very specific statements, yet now be unable to back them up with supporting evidence. Was there an Iraqi informant thought to be reliable, who turned out not to be? Were satellite photos innocently, if negligently misinterpreted? Or was his evidence not as solid as he led the world to believe?

The absence of any explanation for the gap between the statements and reality only increases the sense that the President's misstatements may actually have been intentional lies.

Investigating The Iraqi War Intelligence Reports

Even now, while the jury is still out as to whether intentional misconduct occurred, the President has a serious credibility problem. Newsweek magazine posed the key questions: "If America has entered a new age of pre-emption --when it must strike first because it cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess nuclear or biological weapons--exact intelligence is critical. How will the United States take out a mad despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA can't say for sure where they are? And how will Bush be able to maintain support at home and abroad?"

In an apparent attempt to bolster the President's credibility, and his own, Secretary Rumsfeld himself has now called for a Defense Department investigation into what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd finds this effort about on par with O. J.'s looking for his wife's killer. But there may be a difference: Unless the members of Administration can find someone else to blame - informants, surveillance technology, lower-level personnel, you name it - they may not escape fault themselves.

Congressional committees are also looking into the pre-war intelligence collection and evaluation. Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee would jointly investigate the situation. And the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans an investigation.

These investigations are certainly appropriate, for there is potent evidence of either a colossal intelligence failure or misconduct - and either would be a serious problem. When the best case scenario seems to be mere incompetence, investigations certainly need to be made.

Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee - told CNN's Aaron Brown, that while he still hopes they find WMDs or at least evidence thereof, he has also contemplated three other possible alternative scenarios:

One is that [the WMDs] were spirited out of Iraq, which maybe is the worst of all possibilities, because now the very thing that we were trying to avoid, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could be in the hands of dozens of groups. Second, that we had bad intelligence. Or third, that the intelligence was satisfactory but that it was manipulated, so as just to present to the American people and to the world those things that made the case for the necessity of war against Iraq.

Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious chance that it is the final scenario that reflects reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a pattern of manipulation by this administration."

Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.

But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed "findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq," and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.

Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "[t]he country swims on a sea of oil."

Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs Are Still Missing

Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.

What Do You Think? Message Boards

John Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former Counsel to the President of the United States.

N-degrees of separation of knowledge:

how a throw-away remark on a home-page can trigger a whole line of academic inquiry

Sizing the market for non-profits

The New York Times

Monday -- May 26, 2003

Web Options for Nonprofit Groups

By BOB TEDESCHI


The nonprofit industry is big business, with more than $700 billion in annual revenues and $2 trillion in assets. But unlike other large sectors of the nation's economy, this one has been generally Internet-resistant. And that, some say, is keeping nonprofits from achieving levels of efficiency they greatly need in an era of philanthropic tightfistedness.

The most recent critics of nonprofits include former Senator Bill Bradley, who, along with two of his colleagues at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, suggested this month that the nation's nonprofits could save $100 billion a year if they reduced costs and improved the effectiveness of their services. Internet initiatives, Mr. Bradley and his colleagues said, could help reach that goal.

Efficiency is certainly a watchword in nonprofit circles of late. With charitable contributions leveling off after 20 years of growth, nonprofits are ever mindful of ways they can better balance costs and services. Legislation recently introduced in Congress would force foundations to give away more money to charities each year, but this potential windfall comes at a time when grantors are increasingly interested in seeing statistical results demonstrating a return on their investments.

While some executives of nonprofit organizations have shown they understand how Internet technologies can create both improved efficiency and transparency, analysts said a vast majority of charitable groups were not yet wired in even the simplest ways.

The McKinsey team said, for instance, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review this month that Web-based fund-raising, among other things, could save significant sums of money. But of the 200,000 largest nonprofits in the United States, only about 5 percent use the Web to solicit donations. And other e-commerce applications widespread in the for-profit world, like client databases, e-mail marketing and Web site traffic analysis, are even less common in the nonprofit industry.

But such applications can be critically important, said David Saltzman, the executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation, which among other things provides grants and technology support to nonprofit organizations. "There are an awful lot of foundations, and people providing services, who think the magic occurs when a social worker is there with a suicidal, pregnant 13-year old," Mr. Saltzman said. "They think, `What's the role of technology in that?' "

But if the social worker had access to a client database, Mr. Saltzman said, "and they understood that the program they work for is also serving the abusive father, they could be even more effective."

Not all nonprofits are technologically backward, of course. "There's a stratification between the biggest nonprofits, who can afford the really high-end services, and the small- to medium-sized nonprofits," said Michael Stein, an author of "The eNonprofit: A Guide to ASPs, Internet Services, and Online Software" (CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, 2002), and associate director of Groundspring.org, a nonprofit group providing fund-raising and e-mail services to small and medium-size nonprofits.

Mr. Stein said that national nonprofits like the National Wildlife Federation, the American Red Cross and others "are spending a lot of money on technology, on infrastructure development." But among smaller organizations, which make up more than 80 percent of the nonprofit universe, "they're probably half a light year behind the corporate world," he said. "They don't have the money, staff or know-how to do technology investments."

Even if an organization makes the investments, though, technologies often go unused, according to Sheri Saltzberg, a nonprofit consultant based in Brooklyn. "They don't have the skills, the administrative support, a data person or a research analyst," Ms. Salzburg said. "So it ends up being the responsibility of the executive director, who has all these other demands on her time."

Mr. Stein, too, has witnessed this. Of the 1,000 customers who pay for Groundspring's software, 300 do not use it. "That's totally an industry norm," he said.

Nonprofit executives and consultants said one factor that could help change that norm was the emergence of affordable technology assistance for second- and third-tier organizations. With the dot-com bust and the downturn in corporate technology spending, many information technology consultants can be hired on the cheap, executives said. At the same time, low-cost technology consulting concerns aimed at nonprofits are attracting more funding, and are now offering their services in more markets than ever.

Take NPower, a nonprofit consulting group based in Seattle, and supported largely by Microsoft. The group, which was formed in 1999 and added a satellite branch in New York in 2001, has since added branches in seven cities, with another three to come this year.

NPower sells annual memberships to nonprofits on a sliding scale, at a maximum of $500, and provides technology support services to members for about $60 an hour — less than half the going rate in the for-profit realm. It also provides free online diagnostic tools designed to help nonprofits identify their technology needs.

Among NPower's clients is the Urban Justice Center, which provides legal assistance to homeless and mentally ill people, among others, in New York City. The Urban Justice Center has for the past two years been working with numerous nonprofit groups based in New York to log information about food assistance recipients into an online database. That database, which is managed by a coalition of government agencies and nonprofit funding groups, will help identify areas that are underserved by food assistance programs.

The Urban Justice Center will also use the database to identify common problems in food assistance distribution and, if applicable, mount legal challenges to protect the rights of food assistance recipients. Moreover, the Urban Justice Center will use the database as a model for building an internal database for its project to help the homeless. The thousands of homeless people served by the project each year are now tracked with paper files — a practice likely to end this summer, when both the food assistance database and the homelessness database are expected to go into action.

While NPower, Groundspring and other organizations are helping their nonprofit colleagues get wired, some for-profit e-commerce companies, like GetActive Software in Berkeley, Calif., have also found economic opportunity in the nonprofit market. According to Bill Pease, GetActive's chief technology officer, revenues for the privately held company are growing by 50 percent each quarter, reaching the $5 million range last year.

GetActive provides online fund-raising, advocacy and e-mail services, among other things, for monthly fees that typically range from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Most of its clients, Mr. Pease said, are the larger nonprofit groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the American Red Cross, and the major public broadcasting organizations.

But some smaller organizations, like Earthjustice, an environmental group based in Oakland, Calif., are also GetActive clients. According to Adelaide Roberts, the director of public support at Earthjustice, the group pays GetActive about $40,000 annually to help create and distribute a monthly e-mail newsletter that keeps members abreast of important environmental issues, and helps them contact legislators.

"It's paying for itself, but our supporters are also becoming more involved in contacting representatives about bills, so it contributes to our program, too," Ms. Roberts said. And to an increasing extent, nonprofit executives say that quantifiable service improvements like these are the fastest way to a donor's wallet.

Late last year the Harlem Children's Zone, a nonprofit group serving families in some of New York's most impoverished areas, rolled out a system that uses bar-code scanners and ID cards to track children in its day-care programs as they move to different activities and to monitor their developmental progress using database and analytical software.

According to Geoffrey Canada, the chief executive of the Children's Zone, the system took about two years and roughly $300,000 in hardware and software, but it has already helped him make significant improvements in services. And when major donors call for progress reports, Mr. Canada said he could quickly generate data and e-mail the results.

"That's been part of our success — our ability to get information back out the door very quickly," he said. "It's helped us get more funding."

Jonathan Shell's "The Unconquerable World."

NEW YORK TIMES
May 24, 2003

Waging a War of Words on the Very Idea of War

By RICHARD FALK


Ever since his earliest days as a writer, more than three decades ago, Jonathan Schell has had an uncanny ability to depict public preoccupations in an arresting manner. His superb journalistic coverage of the Vietnam War for The New Yorker, later published as "The Village of Ben Suc," remains to this day the best battlefield account of the war. But Mr. Schell's worldwide fame was established back in 1982 with the publication of "The Fate of the Earth," an eloquent disquisition on the unsustainability of the nuclear arms standoff at the core of the cold war. Mr. Schell has a special gift for articulating the most urgent concerns of the day in a prose that is accessible to the general reader and yet several cuts above standard journalistic treatments.

Undoubtedly "The Unconquerable World" is Mr. Schell's most ambitious, and over time will be regarded as his most significant work. Although it can be read as a timely and provocative commentary on the militarization of American foreign policy during the Bush presidency, its concerns run far deeper, challenging the strong linkage between national security and war that has dominated both political consciousness and international relations for centuries. The timeliness of the book is accentuated by the widely shared view, especially in the United States, that the American government had no alternative to war in dealing with the challenge from Al Qaeda.

The book mounts perhaps the most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to a continued reliance on war and that the failure to seize this opportunity will bring catastrophic results to America and the world.

The book is infused with the Gandhian ethos of nonviolence as theory and practice, and yet Mr. Schell tells us that although he had wondered whether the process of writing this book had turned him into a pacifist, he decides not: "The difficulty of the creed for me was not the root of the word, pax, but its suffix, ist, — suggesting that one rule was applicable to all imaginable situations."

But more significantly, he adds, a preoccupation with an unconditional renunciation of violence is not integral to his argument, which is to insist that there exists a growing presence, "fostered by historical events, of an alternative" to war, and he explicates and persuasively links his inquiry with his greatest forebear, William James, and his advocacy of "the moral equivalent of war."

Warning of the spread of weapons of mass destruction, "The Unconquerable World," offers a suggestive blend of hope and despair. In Mr. Schell's words, "Arms and man have both changed in ways that, even as they imperil the world as never before, have created a chance for peace that is greater than ever before."

President Bush has used almost identical language in talking about creating a peaceful global order. But the Bush vision depends crucially on indefinitely sustaining American military dominance. Such a geopolitics of warmaking has been recently moralized by Jean Bethke Elstain in her book "Just War Theory" (Blackwell, 1990).

Mr. Schell views such a course of action and thought as disastrous. His path to peace is based on the degree to which social change and the resolution of conflict can be achieved by an embrace of nonviolent tactics and ideas, combined with his assessment that a combination of nuclear weaponry and "people's war" has rendered war essentially obsolete as a rational political instrument. The most fascinating portions of the book present Mr. Schell's evidence for rethinking history from a nonviolent perspective, arguing that dramatic and unpredictable changes have often been managed without a violent challenge to the established order. In other words, our war-mindedness is a consequence of a massive dose of cultural brainwashing.

Mr. Schell brilliantly depicts some of the great revolutionary upheavals, including the Glorious Revolution in England, as well as the French and Russian Revolutions from this angle, showing that these revolutions were themselves mainly nonviolent and that it was only their aftermaths that turned out to be bloody. In many respects, Mr. Schell's real gurus are the architects of resistance in Eastern Europe, especially Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president; the Polish journalist Adam Michnik; and the Hungarian novelist George Konrad, whose ideas and related movements brought totalitarian regimes to their knees by nonviolent cooperative action. He is also astute in describing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the miraculous, almost bloodless, transformation of the South Africa of apartheid. In addition to the leverage that can be achieved by various forms of nonviolent struggle, Mr. Schell emphasizes the ethos of self-determination as underpinning a politics of resistance to conquest.

Where does this lead? Mr. Schell proposes a "revolution against violence — loosely coordinated, multiform, flexible, based on common principles and a common goal rather than on a common blueprint." Aside from an innovative league of democratic states, Mr. Schell's specific proposals follow familiar lines of global reform: disarmament, human rights, strengthening of international law and the United Nations, and giving priority to overcoming world poverty and reversing environmental decay. His essential idea, following Gandhi, is that it is imperative to link the renunciation of violence to an integral engagement with positive action to overcome the main grievances afflicting humankind.

What is missing from Mr. Schell's prescriptions, and perhaps too difficult to expect, is how to get there from where we are, some sort of road map. "The Unconquerable World" is devoid of a politics linked to the realities of power and opinion in America.

Yet even if there is no practical fulfillment of Mr. Schell's ideas for security and world order, his book at the very least belongs on the very narrow shelf of classic studies of alternatives to the war system. This book has a great potential to help young Americans to become engaged and hopeful about the future and through their commitment possibly to discover the political path that Mr. Schell himself has yet to find.

Regarding "E-mail's backdoor open to spammers" (Tuesday 20 May 200).


Spam is a costly proposition. Internet Service Providers spend considerably in their attempts to shield us from the true volume of junk e-mail. You and I, every day, lose time and productivity as we dispose of the electronic trash sitting in our computers.


In fact, the only people who don't find spam costly are the spammers themselves. Being able to spend just about the same amount of money to send either 200,000 messages or 2 million is why spam exists.


And it is also a pointer to finding a solution.


Imagine a world where unsolicited e-mail w