Musings & Meanderings

Dan writes on being a student again, a change which has granted him access to academic libraries, saying,

As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

We complain about the quality of education without thinking twice about the lack of resources available to anyone with a spark of interest or an iota of motivation. Any of us who choose to pursue an interest can easily summon the sense of attraction and challenge that emanates from a newly discovered and available body of knowledge. Most of us have looked for information in vain on many occasions.

Almost everyone I know who has any sort of specialized knowledge outside of technology and computers has commented to me on doors closing on the availability of learning resources over the internet for a number of years now. This continuing construction of barriers to learning is destructive to our society. It is rationalized on an economic basis, yet it shares characteristics with the economics of free enterprise. Lower taxes and the result will be economic growth. Open libraries and the result will be a higher level of public education and a greater demand for learning materials.

The more we limit access to literature of every sort the less knowledge we all have.

Some percentage of bloggers are also academicians. Those who are typically have access to far more online resources than the rest of us, but usually do not consciously recognize their participation in creating what is effectively a class distinction. The class divides are expanding. Schools increasingly ban access to online publications of the less educated while restricting access to tools of self education. Elite online publishers shun the masses, yet there are many weblogs written by informed and well-educated citizens who take greater care with facts than some professional journalists, with access to expensive resources, do.

My own subscriptions over the years, represented a huge outlay of dollars. Where those subscriptions were used to inform business activities they represented an investment. This thinking is sound as far as economics are concerned, but our lives and our society are about more than just economics. We don’t expect a direct financial return from teaching our children to read, nor from much of the reading and learning we do ourselves. My personal interests are wide ranging and cross disciplinary, so I have constant cause to compare the enormous gap in quality and depth of information available to the public on different topics. On this issue, I envy Dan his official student status. There is much online information that I would be willing to pay for access to which is not available at all, for love or money, to non-members, be they professionals or laypersons. Being limited physically, I don’t have regular access to various libraries, so am perhaps more aware than most of just how empty the electronic public library is.

The expectation that the internet could and would make more substantive information available to all of us has not been fulfilled. Whatever your views on the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of mobs, each is composed of a collection of individuals. Those individuals are either informed and educated, or not, and often those levels are determined by accessibility to learning resources. Formal education isn’t free, but access to educational materials and other publicly published information shouldn’t be limited only to those who can afford an expensive education. People who have a higher level of education read more. They read more for the rest of their lives, not just while they are in school. Not everyone who wants a higher education gets one. Sometimes life interferes.

If you’ve read this far, and are new to Open Access, try reading these
11 (mis)Leading Open Access Myths.
Peter Suber offers a page titled
What You Can Do To Promote the Open Access Movement.

Open Access does not make education, or books, free. Teachers and authors both require stuff such as food and heat in winter just like the rest of us do. The internet, though, offers us a different world with its own unique characteristics. In a bookstore or a public library, we can browse hundreds of publications on a topic we’re interested in. A majority of the billion people with internet connections, though, never even see the wealth of potential information and learning tools that already exist electronically. Much of it languishes, rarely read and ‘gathering dust’ in walled gardens while people of all ages, eager to learn something, wade through ad-laden Google search results.

One oft cited frustration by institutions which offer some open access is that we use the information without linking to the source or crediting the author. Perhaps some of us use information irresponsibly, and perhaps there are enough of us who have the opposite intention to make a difference. If you care, teach someone else about this.

Writing yesterday’s post was fun, as was writing it from the non-tech perspective. I considered making the last two categories Platform and OS, except that this change might have effectively reversed the view to that of a developer, and I might have ended up writing ‘how computers are different from people’ in terms of compile time, garbage collection, etc.

Machines are built from the OS up. In a way, so are people, but we also start with a cornucopia of possibilities hardwired into us that couldn’t fit into an elevator pitch even if the elevator went all the way to Pluto, and, we learn as adults to investigate and discover from the top down. The typical user viewpoint is possibly closer to that of a hacker than of a programmer, and more relevant to a marketer or interface developer than a coder.

This reversed view interferes with the opposite question of how computers are like people. In our efforts to bring the two together, have they become smarter and more relevant today than in the vision leading to the development of multi paradigm languages in the 1950s? Are we closer now to delivering what we think we need, or further away?

We aren’t all the same, and neither is what we think we need. Even those whose ‘needs’ are specific and limited, though, media and marketers for example, are stymied by the lack of connection between a billion users and the trillion pieces of miscellaneous data we collect and scatter. The more we break down the users into niches, and the uses into horizontals or verticals, the bigger the gap between any given application and what an individual or community could ideally do with it. If web 3.0 is only about connecting all the applications of 2.0, then it isn’t going to be much more successful, and we seriously hamper real progress with these bubbles.

Can disconnects such as this be addressed via endless scripts or more agile languages and databases, or semantic search? Can they be addressed solely by programmers and coders at all? An OS takes a long time to build. There aren’t enough lifetimes, I believe, to create information architectures that could house and manage all possible uses, not the way we’ve been doing it so far. Trying to do so is almost like trying to design a building that covers the entire world and addresses appropriate uses for the entire population. The entire population, though, could build what it needs.

I don’t believe that the future is in the ether, but rather in the hands and minds of the people, whose activities and uses should determine what lives where and for how long. I believe that can be created through structuring qualitative modules that can be adopted by individuals and groups. Blogs and communities are a limited preview of this, allowing us to manipulate our own data and create meaning. Concepts I mentioned in the opening paragraph, such as memory management, and relationship creation that goes beyond information tagging, are the key to moving beyond creating meaning into collating it.

The things we actually do here are limited greatly by our lack of relationship to the paradigms and structure of the tools, and my post yesterday could be read as a preface to exploring the human capacity for high level languages. After all, if there weren’t any humans, there wouldn’t be any computers.

Could a big company create a structure based on individual modules of human depth and breadth? They could, but it’s highly unlikely, just as traditional media aren’t about to invite bloggers into their midst. The free speech enabled by blogs, though, is far more threatening to the hand maiden of politics and big government, than individual consumers are to big private companies, which are increasing putting a toe into open source waters. The barrier, of course, is in the lack of economic models. We have (mostly huge) enterprise business models, some (mostly rickety) small business models, and two mass consumer models (delivery systems and advertising) that are sound. Big companies don’t exist to enable anyone’s business models but their own and the occasional partner’s, so building the true community model is up to us.

Community building requires leaders. For all the talk of entrepreneurship in web development, the true entrepreneurs, those who would conceive and develop new models, are a rare breed, and they also aren’t typically community leaders. The space that is wide open is in real community creation models (not simply peer to peer interaction which we have had since the internet began), and the time to start developing them is always here, yesterday, today and tomorrow, just as individual voices embracing free speech are always here and increasingly flourishing.

On the surface it’s all in the Styling
(first impressions… and also maybe all we ever see)

• some of us are mostly just simple html
• a few either can’t manage a WYSIWYG editor or simply couldn’t be bothered
• some of us can’t resist flash pages and more
• adjectives such as elegant or cool mean that our code is so good that you don’t even notice it (and it probably validates too)
• most of us only render properly in one browser

Start interacting with the User Interface
(from trying to get a date to learning whether you should have)

• none of us come with instructions, but some offer lots of verbiage while others remain silent
• if you’ve met others sort of like this one you can probably guess where the buttons are and which ones to push
• we won’t do anything for you until you take the trouble to figure us out
• we try to signal whether we want something from you or prefer that you didn’t exist
• figure us out and maybe we can make beautiful music together

Share activities and get to see Scripts
(hopefully you’ve only gotten engaged and not married yet)

• find out which scripts we like most
• some of us don’t have many so you won’t have to wait long for repetition
• some of us are not into developing this level, and tend to run as few scripts as possible, stalling often to consider anything from security precautions to the costs of increased functionality
• anyone who is mad about RSS might be a salesperson
• can we consider a Freudian interpretation for an obsession with plugins?

Interact with the Language and Database
(sometimes you don’t get to see this until you’re already committed)

• we can be practical and staid
• or strictly limited and that’s that!
• some of us are dynamic and others are just pretending to be
• semantic types can be slow or with a tendency to get stuck, but when they’re good at it you’ve got a winner
• don’t confuse agile and fast with narrow or shallow

Get up close and personal to see the Operating System
(discover morals and values, and bank balances too)

• some are old fashioned and rather clunky but very reliable
• others are easy to use and beautiful but ultimately limited
• DIY grass roots type can be unpredictable but are usually true blue loyal
• DIY eclectic types come in the most flavors
• some of us ‘make it up as we go’ which can make for a pretty bumpy ride with lots of crashes

Find the OS Kernel inside
(knowing anyone at this level, including ourselves, is better than winning a lottery)

• there’s the legacy version …generations of inherited layers of rules (occasionally explodes or implodes in fatal error due to conflicts)
• some are purists …investing much discipline in adhering to core guiding principles
• some of us are put together like a Rubicks cube
• then there’s the master chef devoting a lifetime to creating the ultimate banquet with eight ingredients
• the deconstructionists know that there’s no such thing as WYSIWYG at this level

Isn’t it awesome that both computers and people actually work on all these levels at once?

Getting out when you are physically disabled and in pain isn’t easy, and I haven’t done it enough since the major physical setback last December. Attending my first Geek Girl Dinner yesterday evening was great for me in more ways than one.

This was the first time I’ve been in a room full of mostly women with whom I shared work interests and even passions. After a couple of decades in a business where I worked exclusively with men, meeting mostly men in technology hasn’t fazed me much, but I also happen to like being a woman and am always thirsty for more powerful female energy in my life. Combining that with being able to talk about internet and web development topics was perfect.

A few of the people at my table were Sylvia, Director of Client Services at Broadview Software, a company that makes software for the television industry, Heather, who’s with Tucows and who has the coolest tattoo, and Shelley, a web designer with a lots of experience in accessibility. There were many more geek girls to meet… I look forward to being able to attend again.

The highlight of the evening was entrepreneur Leila Boujnane’s talk, followed by an open question session. Leila told her story, of how she traveled halfway round the world and chose technology over medicine, with sassy wit, revealing both a delightful sense of humor and an indomitable will to succeed. Bravo.

The central concept underlying Idée, Inc. is the identification of every digital image to a level of detail comparable in uniqueness to a fingerprint. This concept is, imo, an extremely valuable contribution to the core application processes we need more focus on in harnessing and benefiting from the full and barely apprehended power of the internet. Applications such as Idee’s visual search technology have the potential to support and enable many rich cultural activities beyond traditional media.

One of the things that intrigued me last night was that this gathering represented a truly wide political and ideological spectrum, yet these differences were of no issue in the face of common interests and dreams for the future. This is one of the ways in which women as a group have more power than they realize, in their natural ability to care and connect.

Thank you sponsor Tucows and to my fellow attendees, for an enjoyable evening.

Has anyone posted pictures?

About 15 years ago, I bought a slew of fancy electronic equipment from a big chain. After walking in and listing the functionality I wanted very specifically, I was sold products that, it turned out, couldn’t do a single thing on my list. Insisting on a refund, I was told that the store policy excluded them. They definitely got that I was angry, but had no idea what to do. My back up plan was to literally go picket the store with a large sign and my two sons in tow. It would have been onerous time-wise, but I would have done it.

The back-up plan wasn’t needed though, because, after a few hours of furious telephone work, I had the name and private number of the owner of the chain in his chalet in some mountain resort. I’m sure that my call didn’t improve his holiday, but I got my refund. Sitting at this computer, I know that the same task would be even easier today.

Yesterday, I read about Jason Calacanis fighting for, and getting, an apology from Wired.

Jason’s a well connected guy, you say? You couldn’t accomplish the same thing? Yes, you could. Some of it might take longer without the shortcuts afforded by a powerful phone book, but you could do it. All you need is the determination and perseverance. When I tracked down that big chain owner, he didn’t know me from Adam. We weren’t in the same business or community, and didn’t live in the same city or even country. I was simply an angry woman and mother.

What is different than it was 15 years ago, is that we are all now publishers, just as I commented on Jeff Jarvis’s post pointing to his column in the Guardian today about Google becoming a content provider.

The Calacanis Wired scenario is one to take note of. Traditional media has been wrapping itself up in knots for quite some time now over their potential loss of control and authority over the news we consume. There have been many references on weblogs to the NY Times ignoring the pointing out of errors and requests for corrections. In print, newspapers could tuck retractions and corrections into an inside corner below the fold in small print, where hardly anyone ever read them. This can’t be accomplished the same way online. The prospect of apologizing publicly to a reader, let alone one who can talk back, must be the stuff of nightmares for them.

Most individuals publishing online aren’t journalists or reporters, but more of us could and should be advocates for ourselves and each other. A truly free press is a cornerstone of every aspect of freedom.

Next time you are faced with an injustice, stand up …you can do it. If it affects a lot of us, then we have to learn how to join our voices together more effectively, and we can do that too. The better we learn to use our voices, the more we’ll be able to achieve.