Teblog

Who controls your personal information?

Doc Searls is a long time blogger, a deep thinker, a co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, an open source wizard, and too many other things to mention. He is held in massively high regard by all the social computing pioneers I've met over the past five or so years. He's currently on a mission to invert the relationship between us and the data about ourselves. Instead of repeatedly providing different cuts of information to everyone with an interest in us, we actually hold the information once and let it out according to need. (If you're reading this, Doc, I apologise for the horrible simplification.)

Doc recently found himself in the world of his namesakes - doctors. He'd undergone a medical exploration which resulted in him contracting pancreatitis. This in turn resulted in hospitalisation and a period of considerable discomfort. After watching the progress of his illness, it was good to follow his recovery and eventual discharge on Twitter. (Why do I care? Because I met him a few years ago and thought he was a good egg with some interesting insights.)

Not surprisingly, on his emergence from the 'health care' system, he had a few words to say on the madness of big systems which are not at all patient-centric, despite any assurances to the contrary. You can read his blog post for the specifics of his situation. The key point is that we know a lot more about ourselves than any doctor can hope to absorb from a medical history.

In his blog post, Searls chose to cite Fred Trotter, a US citizen amd open source software advocate, who said "Given current primary care reimbursements, my doctor is incented do everything in his power to spend under 10 minutes talking to me." I don't suppose it's hugely different anywhere else in the world. They just don't have time to unearth the key facts that lie in our medical history and, of course, the stuff that *we* know that lies outside our medical records is totally inaccessible.

In our own family, we make great use of a cranial osteopath. None of the information relating to his work finds its way into our official medical records. I also know that dairy products affect me within a few minutes of consuming them, but I've never bothered to share this information with the doctor. In fact, I rarely go to the doctor. The last time I went, I had a very swollen eyelid which, as well as looking unsightly, was causing double vision. The doctors in the local practice and the the hospital were all baffled. After several weeks of unsuccessful experimental treatments, I ran into a friend in the street and she said "that's an allergic reaction." She was right, we'd bought a goose down duvet just before the eyelid swelled up. I didn't bother to tell the doctor. It's still in the official records as 'lid-lag'.

There is a point to all this, and that is that we should somehow (no-one's figured out the details yet) become the custodians of information about ourselves, letting it out to others under our control. Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas are just two of the people who are investigating slightly different flavours. It's a bit like the early days of social computing, a bit 'wild west', but the fundamental ideas make sense. It's been christened VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which strikes me as a bit restrictive, even if it does resonate with and oppose CRM.

If you're interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, progress then you might like to head over to the ProjectVRM blog.

Will software gallop to our rescue?

My first love, apart from my family and close friends, has always been software. I say 'always' but, in truth, it's only been since November 1965, when I got 100 percent in a programming aptitude test. "Good Lord," I thought in astonishment, "And I can actually get paid for doing this?"

Since then, software has been at the heart of my life. Along the way, other skills have been added to the portfolio, particularly writing and teaching. And these skills have taken me into other areas, such as environmental sustainability. First in 1973 but then in a much more substantial way in 2002 when I became closely involved with an exceedingly large sustainability exemplar project. And now with Freeform Dynamics, where I am the environmental specialist, among other things.

While the economic and environmental bad news whirls around our heads, the one thing I know for sure is that software will be a major contributor to overcoming our ills. Not a panacea, but a fine contributor.

As Nicholas Negroponte has been saying for 15 years, "move bits not atoms". And that is one of the major contributions that software can make. In fact, only software can make it. Whether it's Citrix Online style screen-sharing or remote access or full blown telepresence conference rooms, they not only cut the moving of atoms, they also accelerate business processes and cut travel bills.

The other good thing about software is that it is a product with barely any environmental footprint. It can be delivered as a stream of bits and be paid for with another stream of bits.

For those that don't know, I used to be a software publisher, banging out product in expensive boxes with clunky manuals and floppy disks. But since 2001, this very part-time business has been run wholly electronically from the corner of a server somewhere in America. The programmer and I meet rarely (once a year on average), but we're in intimate, friendly and fairly continuous, contact online. And, of course, all support, 'paperwork' and accounting is done electronically.

Our product was lovingly crafted in C++ (following my initial development using the 8080 assembler) and it is tiny for what it does.

I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I can't help noticing that, by contrast, most of the systems I see today are packed full of bloatware, along with programs and data files which have become moribund. But most users are incapable of dealing with such issues unaided. They need software tools.

If larger programs could be debloated and users helped (in plain English please) with program and file removal, we could stall the madness of buying new equipment just because our old stuff has become clogged up and slow.

As with the organisational benefits of 'atoms to bits', users will benefit from slicker running, gain a financial benefit and reduce their environmental impact all at the same time.

Now, someone tell me these things exist. Please?

Or, if not, why not?

Thank you.

FrEDI: Freeform's Environmental Discussion Image

We've just released a research report called ‘Green Computing: The role of IT in the push towards environmental sustainability’. While doing the research and validating the findings it rapidly became clear to me that few people are constantly aware of the big picture and their part in it. IT is, after all, just an enabling component in an organisation's strategy yet, to listen to some people, 'greening the data centre' is the start and end of its environmental contribution.

The report examines the broader role of IT and actually gets inside organisations and looks at the drivers for green (and 'green', incidentally, isn't high on the list), cultural issues - including attitudes to IT, where responsibilities for action lie, and how IT can support the organisation's sustainability objectives. The statistical content was based on feedback from 1474 IT professionals while the interpretation was a combination of experience and consultations following the report's first draft.

Anyway, the point of today's post is to introduce you to FrEDI, an illustration which reflects all the areas that need to be considered when participating in an environmental sustainability strategy. The acronym stands for Freeform Environmental Discussion Image although, in retrospect, perhaps 'Illustration' would be a better last word. Its purpose is to keep people's minds open to the bigger picture when discussing and planning their environmental activities.

As you can see, there's a certain amount of blurring between the various elements of the illustration, this reflects the fact that nothing happens in isolation except, possibly, the determination of the drivers which are best decided at board level, even if some of them are informed by others within the organisation.

You will also notice that the drivers are two-tone - one for internal drivers, such as budget or PR value, the other for external drivers, such as government regulation.

The only way for the drivers to be implemented is through people and they are reached and inspired through leadership. Which, of course, comes from people. Hence the blurring. You may notice that both drivers and leadership fade out at the bottom, leaving the field clear for people, processes and ICT to intermingle and bring about the necessary change.

People are on top of the stack, quite deliberately because nothing at all happens without people. Processes are created and carried out by people and most of them are intimately supported by ICT.

The bottom part of the illustration hints at sustainability in that equipment and resources have to be chosen, acquired, used then disposed of. They are split in two, to reflect the different nature of hardware and resources. Servers, storage, cooling, PCs, laptops, thin clients, mobile devices, printers, etc on the one hand and electricity, paper, ink, toner, water etc on the other.

We believe that it is useful to have an illustration like this to hand whenever debating environmental matters so that the bigger picture is never lost. Organisational and individual benefits will be maximised through harmony and environmental benefits will drop out as a by-product.

Do take a look at the report if this subject interests you. And, of course, your feedback is always welcome.

PS In case you were wondering, the fact it looks like a tree wasn't lost on us. In fact, it looks most like an Evergreen Oak, but we realised that if we called a tree, then this would lead to hierarchical expectations when, in fact, we're all in this together.

HP green lab gets green light

Sometime today, as a consequence of its labs shake-up, HP will announce that its new Sustainability Lab has had its projects and staffing approved. But our tip-off goes on to say, "As befitting a Lab, it has a long-term horizon, so don't expect product or services to flow for a few years."

Does this mean we should ignore the lab until something pops out? Maybe. Or should we get some idea of where it thinks it's going, so that we can broaden our perception of HP? A few weeks ago I found myself talking to some HP worthies including Chandrakant Patel, the boss of the Sustainability Lab. All of them were interesting, but I figured that if we understood the way he thinks, we'd get some sense of the lab's guiding principles.

His aim is to deconstruct the business model in order to leave a lighter footprint on the world. His words, not mine. But they are increasingly being echoed by other companies such as Sun, IBM, Logica and BT. (The first ones that popped into my head, so don't read any particular significance into them.)

To someone weaned on Small is Beautiful, which I read and acted on in 1974, then on Cradle to Cradle in 2002, I get uneasy when I hear companies talking of leaving a "lighter footprint". According to these leading lights of the sustainable movement (and, yes, I know there are plenty of others), the world would be better off if we left it in a better state than we found it. But perhaps we have to get from here to there in a series of well-intentioned steps. And who knows what discoveries we might make as we adjust our minds to minimising the consumption of raw materials and the pollution of our world. Or to put it in Patel's terms: "use the least energy and the least materials."

He likes the idea of someone creating a kind of wikipedia for sustainability - into which everyone can contribute their expert and/or specific knowledge. Given the difficulty of tracking down sensible environmental and sustainability information - carbon footprints, practical measures, regulations and suchlike - a central and open resource, sounds like an excellent idea. But it would, of course, run slap bang into a policing issue as vested interests with big budgets try to distort the knowledge base. If we have a putative Jimmy Wales reading this, I'd love to hear from you.

Patel regards 'joules' as a consistent measure through which we can judge our impact on the world. In simple terms, a joule is the energy destroyed in doing some kind of work. One measure is the production of one watt for one second. Wikipedia has others. The point is that it is concrete and measurable. This metric can be used for the entire manufacturing, operation and disposal lifecycle. He talks of good joules and bad joules, mentioning different flavours such as coal, nuclear and photovoltaic. The last item is interesting, because it reminds us that this lab isn't really new-born. It is the result of the gathering together, filtering and focusing of a number of previous R&D initiatives under one umbrella. One has to hope that no babies have been thrown out with the bathwater.

So, while we might not expect to see short term outputs from the lab, a recent announcement from the company will hopefully give an indication of the quality of output we might expect in due course. It relates, as I hinted, to photovoltaics. Yesterday, Hewlett Packard licenced the 'transparent transistor technology' it developed with Oregon State University to Xtreme Energetics to create solar energy systems which are anticipated to generate electricity at twice the efficiency and half the cost of traditional solar panels.

This is exactly the sort of thing we need. I hope that the "use least energy and least materials" is able to accommodate this kind of project.

PS If you're interested in research done by Freeform Dynamics into 'Green Computing' take a look at the report that went online a few minutes ago.