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October 21, 2005
Yochai Benkler of Yale on Open Source Collaboration
On the POPTech stage is Yochai Benkler of Yale talking about knowledge and the collaborative effort of groups, and that through a participatory process, creates an end result that can be the equivalent of a full-time PhD.
What this brings to mind for me if the book, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki." (a book given to me by my 7th/8th Grade students who I recently trained in the "difficult conversations" of peer mediation).
I can see this model in a self-organizing system of open source computing, where the collective meta-mind sets its own tone and pace of sharing knowledge which results in an application created for the collective good. (Or when a group of people guess the number of beans in a jar, and collectively estimate the number of those beans more accurately than any single person.)
But I wonder about whether that same end result is possible when the "ecosystem" of the distributed knowledge is - forced to produce a product under the constraint of real world deadlines and "baskets" of pre-determined, yet undefined, components of functionality.
What I'm positing is whether an open-source development paradigm is possible when a group of say, customers or marketing folks (the customer's proxy) say "We want this amount of stuff, in this short amount of time."
Clearly, this is a difficult challenge for even a centrally located group of knowledge workers, managed as a single team (often stressed with multiple tasks or multiple projects). It seems like it is incredibly challenging when a time constraint in the form of a deadline, and a demand for a certain amount of capability - simultaneously exist from a specific customer, or a proxy for that customer.
But then again, I could be wrong... I would hope to see real-life examples someday.
Posted by Mike at 05:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
China and Technology
Oded Shankar, author of "The Chinese Century - The Rising Chinese Economy and its Impact on the Global Economy", now has the stage at the POPTech Conference.
Thus far Oded is discussing the massive trade deficit with China and the exports of manufactured goods to the U.S. Oded is also the Chair of Global Busisess Management at Ford Motor, which yesterday posted a quarterly loss of over $280 million. 50% of the content of Ford's new Rover Maverick truck is from China.
We think of China and manufactured goods, but I've been in recent talks with a company that is interested in having my team benchmark the development productivity of its software operations in the U.S., Europe, and - not India, but China.
What comes to mind for me is the blurring of offshoring and outsourcing in both maufacturing with knowledge work (which includes sofware design and development). The unifying economic force with regards to outsourcing of manufacturing and IT is the lower cost of labor. But what most technology companies fail to recognize is the difficulty of outsourcing or offshoring R&D, which poses difficulties that do not exist on work that is basically a ramp-up of low-cost, repetitive activities like production.
In manufacturing, we automate what we know. In design work, most of the efficiency comes from maximizing the flow of thought between people to uncover that which we do not know, to discover a way to solve a problem before a team. Invention is not as easy to speed up, or lower its cost, by sending it overseas. Invention is difficult to streamline by splitting a team across two continents. Friction ensues when what is designed isn't what the customer wanted because of miscommnication.
That being said, I think the difficulties that companies experience on outsourcing technology projects to India (as opposed to manufacturing) could have similar challenges for projects done in China, which may not have as strong a mastery of the English language to boot.
Shenkar is describing a scenario where India does software design, China does manufacturing, and the U.S. takes out more mortgages to buy more stuff (by borrowing from India or China).
Lots of questions here, few simple answers.
Side note, that's not exactly trivial: The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects demand rising from the current 84 million barrels a day to 103 million barrels by 2015. If China and India — where cars and factories are proliferating madly — start consuming oil at just one-half of current U.S. per-capita levels, global demand would jump 96%.
Doomsday situation - Many see another, potential ultimate conflict coming: China in a clash with the U.S. over the oil... sitting under Middle East soil.
Posted by Mike at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 20, 2005
Space Travel as Inspiration and Vision at POPTech
Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation which recently awarded a $10,000,000 prize for private spaceflight. Peter's speech reminds me of how the Apollo space program inspired a generation of young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. (I remember my own starry-eyed wonder watching Apollo launches and how it set a course for my own pursuit of science.)
What I find remarkable about the energy of people like Peter is the passion behind the vision that he espouses. And when I think back on then President Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon, I am struck by the alignment of energy that our entire country experienced in that period. With an entire nation of people working in such mass collaboration, amazing feats were possible. Seeing Peter's photos reminds me of that spirit.
That's the kind of passion that surely is possible on several dimensions of scale when we find a way to create alignments in our work communities. Innovation thrives, and teams achieve things at warp speed, which is impossible when a community is fighting itself.
Peter closes with, "The most critical tool for solving humanity's most grand challenges, is a committed and passionate mind." Bravo!
Post script: Just when I thought I heard my dose of inspiration for the day, along came Marcia McNutt on deep ocean research using marine geophysical data to study the physical properties of the Earth beneath the oceans. Then came Dr. Carolyn Porco, who is the leader of the Cassini Science Imaging Team and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission.
In her closing remarks, Carolyn talked about the positively spiritual experience invoked from bearing witness to the marvels of space, and her warm and inspirational message brought the entire opera house to its feet in thunderous applause. It was truly a highlight of the conference, as it brought out the soul of the POPTech community.
My oh my...
Posted by Mike at 04:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
POPTech in beautiful Camden Maine
Here in beautiful Camden Maine at the POPTech Conference. I was fascinated with the first two speakers, Graham Flint, a physicist, and Robert Hammer, a biologist. Graham is describing super-high resolution digital imaging - gigapixels. Robert is describing the taxonomy of cataloging species through barcoding.
The purpose? To preserve through high-resolution information, visual images of say, places around the world that are disappearing (e.g. areas of Rome, due to acid rain}, and species, which are losing their habitats.
I noted on the online chat that both are endeavoring to save information about that which is vanishing. An ironic and sad twist to "progress" in modern society.
And indeed, during the break I had a fascinating conversation with Robert, where his ultimate goal is to spark preservation and ecology. He was frustrated that, as a biologist, he can solve the cataloging of DNA problem, but the message about preservation and ecology is the one he really is trying to convey.
Any contributors out there would be greatly appreciated...
Posted by Mike at 04:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 04, 2005
Outsourcing as Social Transformation
One of the subjects in Optimal Friction (the book), will be about relationship management, with the notion that healthy work relationships bring about better outcomes – not only on projects, but also between people, teams, groups, and companies. If you believe the adage, “Work is the place where we play out the energy of our relationships,” then you might view work as a sandbox of sorts, where the interplay and dynamics between people have a stage theater to play themselves out.
With that, I just received an interesting book from my hosts at the POPTech Conference in Camden, Maine. (POPTech was conceived by John Scully (former CEO of Pepsico and Apple) and Bob Metcalfe (inventor of the Ethernet, and founder of 3Com), among others. Once I asked John if POPTech was really created by him and Bob as a way to get his friends to come to Camden, and he replied, “That’s about right.”)
Anyway, back to the book – it’s “Maximum City, Bombay Lost and Found”, by Suketu Mehta, a speaker at this year’s conference. According to the POPTech cover letter, it was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and named Book of the Year by the Economist. It tells gripping stories of a city transformed by the pressures of globalization and struggling under the weight of massive growth and huge divisions between rich and poor. It’s remarkable that, before one of the seminal technology conferences in the U.S., I am receiving a book about life in India.
What receiving this book has triggered for me is a reminder of what I feel is a different, larger dynamic going on with the whole subject of outsourcing. I’ll cut to the chase: In one sense, outsourcing can be viewed as an instrument of massive social re-organization on a global scale. Global economics are yielding an inter-continental, inter-cultural “marriage” between East and West. In this model, both halves bring to the relationship aspects that are not present in the other. India achieves a certain level of economic prosperity unprecedented in its history, while some say that western cultures - aside from accessing lower cost intellectual capital - gain from exposure to the culture and spirituality from eastern philosophies. Both sides are enriched.
But this is not without its difficulties when it comes to managing complex inter-cultural relationships. Because of the lens through which both partners view the world, there will be inevitable challenges that this marriage faces. Each culture is steeped deeply in the perspectives and mindsets born out of a long history. Being in an inter-cultural marriage myself, where my ancestry is from the East, and with my spouse’s from the West, I can say that my own relationship can be playfully described as outsourcing writ small. Basic partner issues aside, cultural differences can make it really tricky. And yet, the diversity of it all is what makes it so incredibly rich and remarkable.
The same goes with cross-cultural relationships on a massively global scale. It reminds me of the eastern philosophy of inter-dependence. Now, more than ever, interdependence is playing itself out in the huge social re-organizations that all started with changing how we work, and who we ask to team up with us on our projects.
I doubt that this was considered by folks considering outsourcing their Information Technology, but there's no doubt that something on a much larger scale is playing itself out. It will be up to those of us involved in this to make it work, since it poses unique challenges that most of us have never faced before.
Posted by Mike at 09:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack