Friends,
Excellent perception by John of the value levers (therefore our priorities.
cheers../bala
Bala Pillai, Sydney, Australia
"Bridging Minds in Halls Without Walls since 1995"
http://www.ryze.com/go/bala
bala@apic.net
-----Original Message-----
From: John S Veitch [mailto:jsveitch@ate.co.nz]
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 6:49 PM
To: communityinformatics@vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: [CI] Connecting Communities (NZ) (Very Long)
Connecting Communities
A strategy to develop internet use as a personal educational and
social tool and as an aid to community development.
This excessively long rant is an attempt to put my thoughts in some
order. One of the problems of being a self motivated lifelong
learner is that you can never be sure what you really know, and you
can have no idea where the gaping holes in your knowledge may be.
Writing something like this is a stake in the ground, it’s not the
end of the learning process. Rather I hope it’s the beginning of a
new direction in my learning stimulated by the reaction of my peers
to what I’m thinking.
What is the Internet?
The image of the internet as a superhighway of information is both
wrong and unhelpful.
My visual image of the internet is like a star filled galaxy. Each
star is separate from every other star, yet they seem to cluster, but
they are not physically connected. Stars vary in size, and in the
intensity with which they burn. The capacity to burn depends on the
mass of the star, on material it contains. Stars burn and the light
from them spreads everywhere, the heavens are lit by that light.
There is also a great deal of dark matter in the galaxy that doesn’t
have the mass to burn at all.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021202.html (See Photo here)
Of course the analogy is not perfect.. To understand my model
imagine the potential brightness of any star is held in its data (a
better term than information). Data does not spread everywhere like
light, data remains at it’s source until it is requested.. When we
replace the light with data and the heavens go black. Introduce for
each star the concept of purpose, intention and decision making. Add
to that ability to request data from data sources, introduce search
engines, introduce a need and a desire to identify and accumulate
relevant data, and the heavens can be lit up again.
Each internet user is like one of those stars. Google, the BBC, MSN
and you at your desk have essentially the same status when you
connect to the internet. With one difference, you choose to connect
to them and they probably don’t choose to connect to you. Why is
that? Because they offer something you want, they do it because you
have something they want, your attention. The bright stars, those
with better data, get more attention. The key thing here is that all
attention is voluntary given, it cannot be demanded, there is no way
for a big star to push it’s will onto lesser stars, without their
permission. Permission can be cancelled at any time with a simple
"click". The internet is popular because of the freedom to access
interesting places and to do so annonomously. When those who control
data sources act against the freedom of clients to choose, act to
push data onto the client and act in ways intended to trap or control
the client basic trust is abused.
A feature of the internet is that the small and the issolated are the
most active in trying to seek data from the large and well connected
sources. So people in small countries like New Zealand and Norway
are avid users of the internet, much more so than people in places
like New York where individuals are more likely to assume that are
already in the centre of things. The same thing happens locally
too. Members of a club or those who follow an activity like ballroom
dancing for instance already have close contact with each other.
They don’t need to access data sources to be informed, they are
informed because they themselves are the raw data source. Such
people see no need for listservers, for web sites nor for advertising
their activity. They operate in a closed way not realising that
unknown to them, many other people may be interested in their
activity. Then again they may not be. There’s no way to tell which.
There is confusion about what the internet should be like. Many
would like it to be better than television, but frankly the Internet
works best when it’s not like television at all. The WWW gets far
too much attention. The workhorse of the internet is email, plain
old text, not overblown html mail. Among some user groups instant
messages and chat programmes are popular. Web pages are a way to
store in a fairly static way the history of a star (any user). That
history can be an entry pointer to today’s activity, and to direct
contact with people who share your own interests.
Newbie’s
At any time half the people who have access to the internet are
"newbies", people with little experience on the internet (say less
than 300 hours online). That ratio seems to be fairly consistent
over time, the internet is doubling in size about every year.
Newbies need training. Courses are good, but self training after
minimal guidance is more common. Reading texts about strange new
technologies is a hard way to learn. Young people use various forms
of chat rooms to learn new things.
Newbies come on line for personal reasons that often don’t make any
economic sense or even common sense to others. Often it’s a desire
not to be left out, a passion to be part of the middle class. Very
often the need to get connected is driven by one friend or one child
who wants to send one email. Initial reasons for getting connected
may be to do things like play patience, or to play other games. One
learns more substantial reasons for being connected by discovering
new friends and new sources of valuable data.
Every newbie has the same amount of power to write, to read, to
engage with other people and to encourage other people to engage as
anyone else. Newbies lack the skills and the confidence to do that,
because it takes a few years to learn your way around. But newbies
are influential, never the less, who else could possibly keep the
spam merchants happy, and I suspect 80% of the traffic to sex sites
is driven by newbies too. Children are newbies who often have newbie
parents. Much of the panic over inappropriate internet content is
generated by newbie misunderstandings.
Newbies might "surf the web" but nobody else does. Surfing the web
made sense when there were only a few sites. It was be best way to
explore the territory before we had good search engines. Now-a-days
the only people who talk about surfing the web are market researchers
and politicians both of whom are confirming their newbie status.
Newbies might "surf "into an x-rated web site, but experienced users
will never do that except by intention. You can’t really get there
be accident, and if you do, you do know how to close the page.
Newbies don’t know how to find their peers on the internet. Once
they get past that stage they soon cease to be newbies.
Experienced Users
Experienced internet users have established many connections with
like minded people, identifying their own peers by a process of trial
and error. Experienced users know how to deal with spam most of
which is deleted unread on the ISP’s server. Experienced users
filter list mail and non-personal mail into in-boxes where it can sit
unread for long periods of time, but where it is available if needed.
Experienced users never have enough time, so they spend very little
time on the www. This time pressure also reduces television watching
which may virtually cease.
When an experienced user goes to the www, he usually begins with a
recommended URL that came in email from a peer. An alternative way
to find URL’s is to try a search engine. This works to some extent,
but the suggestion of a friend is usually better. The suggestion of
a friend is the driving force behind "viral marketing", it’s a
familiar idea, no advertising works better than "good word of mouth.
"
Experienced users spend a lot of time reading messages written by
peers. They in turn often write good word of mouth to share with
their peers. Email is the primary vehicle, often using list-
servers, but IRC, proprietary chat rooms, weblogs and open diaries
are all doing the same thing. This is a learning activity. It’s
highly educational. It’s also highly effective in building practical
working relationships.
Experienced users produce content as well as consume content. For
experienced users the quality of the content is vital. Nobody has
the time to waste with anyone else’s hidden agendas and mis-
information. The power to click is in my hand, feed me bullshit and
I’ll cut you off. Once I’m gone it’s unlikely I’ll ever be back.
You betray trust on the Internet at very great cost. There are no
second chances. What is generally regarded as normal advertising
over-statement in the print media is regarded as highly inappropriate
propaganda on the www or in email. I don’t have to read that stuff,
I actively reject it when I find it. 90% of the commercial internet
is unacceptably bloated with propaganda statements and experienced
users have learnt to immediately click-on-by. Pollution of my mind
space is an assault on me, and freedom of speech does not give you
the right to assault me in that way. I won’t allow it.
Some experienced users first used an internet that was spam free and
virtually commercial free. I would love to return to that
situation. In fact most of the commercial internet is irrelevant. I
don’t need to go there and mostly I don’t. I have my own private
homepage, a self made page of www links to sites I like to use. That
page has 45 links to carefully chosen places. It’s completely quiet
and doesn’t scream click here NOW on every third line. My home page
is controlled by me, not by MSN or CNN or in NZ a site called nzoom.
(The homepage for New Zealanders! sic) I control what I do on the
internet.
Towards a Connecting Communities Strategy
Given what I’ve said above, how do we use the internet to develop
social capital and create an innovative and yet cohesive society, and
what role can a government play in that?
Training for Newbies: Most newbies struggle along with inadequate
help, afraid to do things in case they break the computer. Newbie
training is important, and the best people to do it are probably
ISP’s. That’s not generally a role ISP’s see as vital to their
function. Government could certainly help by providing some
structure and support for newbie training.
Finding Mentors: One of the ways to quickly get ahead is to find a
reliable guide on the side, a mentor or merely a more experienced
friend. The commercial world often tries to lock people into
commercial solutions. The best solutions are often more personal,
demand a sharing of knowledge, and build relationships and community
not merely cash flow.
Spam Free Email: One of the critical things a government should do
is supply every child in school with an email address. Children’s
email should be spam free and x-rated content free. Now they do that
at a site called kinderstart, so it’s possible. Modern kids need
email, safe email, so let that be a primary objective. Moreover, I
need email like that too. So lets have a national strategy, spam
free email for everyone in New Zealand, and ex-rated email by
explicit request only.
Peer to Peer List Servers: The most powerful function of the internet
is to allow like minds to meet and exchange ideas. One of the best
ways to do this is to join a list-server or what is commonly known as
a group. Experience shows that internet users expect group
membership to be free. There are several sources of free group
membership, but all these are proving unsatisfactory. If the
government is serious about improving the quality of communication on
the internet, funding the development of NZ based lists would be a
very effective strategy. I say NZ based; I don’t imagine for a
moment that the members need to be based in NZ, only that the list
owner might be based here.
Once school children have email, list servers for children have the
potential to be very effective. Some standard lists might be created
around curriculum topics. Children beginning to study those topics
could be able to join an appropriate list.
To develop connected communities we need to train newbies to find
mentors and to identify their peers. Peer groups might be stronger
and there would surely be more of them is they were given support.
Relying on Yahoo Groups or Topica for listserver access is a third
rate way to do things. A switched on government would have sense
enough to supply such simple services as a free public service.
Linking to Real World Events
A "virtual world" isn’t very useful, it needs connection with the
real world.
Community Diversity: A reality of our modern community is the
diversity of language and culture. Peer to Peer may mean in many
cases creating lists for people who feel more comfortable writing in
a non-English language or talking to people from a particular
cultural background. Coping effectively with diversity goes directly
to the heart of developing social capital and creating an innovative
and yet cohesive society. How?
First recognise the different cultures and give then space. Online
space is the least expensive space anyone can use. Acknowledge the
culture and membership of that culture.
Second, communicate the values of that culture in the community, give
it credibility an a place. That’s not an easy thing to do online.
We need to engage man’s higher ideas. That can best be done via the
development of artistic pursuits.
Connection with the Arts: The finest traditions of any culture are
best shared by the arts of that culture. In NZ as in most of the
OECD countries, the arts are best supported by government when they
can demonstrate "public demand" the government wants bums on seats
and admission charges at the door. This is foolish and short
sighted. The real value of the arts, is the value of shared
creative experience of the people making the art. Dancing together
rather than watching someone dance. Being in the choir rather than
buying the recording. Having a live band (even a bad one) rather
than using a CD. By sharing the making of art within cultures and
across cultures we honour each other and give each other a place to
stand.
Connection with Crafts and other forms of Expertise: In the same way
as the arts are important, many areas of specialist craft, model
making, engineering and science have traditions that need to be
developed and nurtured. There must be ways to work together, to
share the tradition and the folklore and to pass on the expertise.
Connection with Centres of Learning and Excellence: I’m thinking here
of the subject material normally taught in universities. Any
interested member of the community should be able to connect with and
develop personal knowledge as a result of joining project groups or
interest groups of an academic nature.
Giving Diversity and Culture Visibility
Web sites: Building the content of the internet is a task requiring
knowledge skill and persistence. We need to encourage NZ built sites
that provide the best quality written and pictorial and sound records
possible. The www is one way to store that information in an
accessible form. However building quality web sites is difficult and
often thankless activity. When you compound that with the fact that
the is zero opportunity to earn an income doing such useful work, we
need to think carefully about what we want web sites for.
Government has consistently refused to fund individuals who created
wonderfully inspired web sites. There must be no personal gain. So
they fund community groups, and the committee approach kills the
creativity that might have brought the material to life. I suggest
an alternative.
Probably 90% of the cost of any web site is time, someone’s skill and
effort. NZ Dances the site I knew best had input from hundreds of
people none of whom asked for or expected payment. But requesting
and encouraging all those contributions takes time and effort and a
lot of relationship building. That’s the sort of thing one person
might do well. So one person assembles the collected effort of
hundreds of people, and something of great community value is
created. Who should pay? Right now the individual who did the co-
ordinating and the building pays the cost. The cost is paid in time,
in money and often in personal health. That can’t last forever. So
the site is first neglected and one day it’s no longer there. This
reminds me of the work of Professor Reg Revans (UK) who found that
the best teachers, the best consultants and the best counsellors were
always poor, and seldom acknowledged for their skills. As a result
the best soon leave the industry. Those who remain are the
charlatans, the ones who promise instant solutions, the ones who have
magic potions to sell. That’s fairly much what’s happened to web
sites. Most of the best individual efforts to communicate peer to
peer have gone. Those selling magic potions have come to dominate
the landscape. Newbie bait. Experienced users are not so easily
fooled.
>From the point of view of a country, the objective is to build social
capital and to create an innovative and yet cohesive society,
remember that. Any person who can encourage hundreds of other people
to contribute knowledge and expertise to a joint effort must be worth
his weight in gold. Such ability goes to the very heart of what
community cohesion is about. What’s wrong with our values system
that we give such effort no value and little recognition?
If the government is serious about encouraging innovation and
community cohesion they should front up with the salaries of the sort
of people who can produce that result. That will mean directly
funding certain individuals because that’s where the creativity is.
Find 100 individuals who have a history of binding together a large
group of people on a common theme and give them wings by funding
their efforts. What will that do? It will provide an easy to use
interface to involve all those newbies in worthwhile activities. It
will allow many cultural groups, arts groups and many forms of
expertise to develop a visible presence, to expand levels of
interest, to increase participation and membership. Here is the
knowledge society in action.
Giving Diversity and Culture Personality
IRC, Instant Messages, Chat rooms
One of the greatest gifts people can off each other is to share time.
Internet tools like instant messenger and chat lines and chat rooms
are ways for people to share time with each other. Young people
quickly learn that they can find "friends" in chat rooms and that
these friends can offer help and advice and answers to one’s
questions. Why do young people learn so quickly about how to use
the internet? Because they help each other, and chat rooms are a key
source of information about whatever you need to know.
Most adults, particularly professional people are reluctant to devote
the time required to build chat room relationships. This may be a
mistake. Certainly newbies of any age can learn a great deal by
visiting chat rooms.
There are peer to peer tools like Groove, that should appeal to an
adult or a professional user group. Tools like that cost money, but
they offer privacy and encryption and better control over who you are
sharing your time with.
How People Learn
Governments seem to assume, and far to many teachers accept the idea,
that people learn when they are well taught. 40 years ago I believed
that too, it seems quite obvious. It’s not true at all. People
learn slowly, in complex and unexplainable ways, the best learning
almost happens by accident. Learning is something the learner does,
in his or her own time. Learning can be encouraged but not forced.
You can learn a right answer to a question, but you might need ten
more years to understand what the word you’ve been saying really
mean.
Take walking. Everyone knows how to walk. One of the first things
dance teachers often do, is teach people how to walk. Ordinary
mortals are insulted by this, they resist the instruction, they are
not "ready to learn" and what’s more they can’t be taught. Maybe
after a couple of years of dance instruction, readiness to learn how
to walk might develop. Then you can learn, you can learn the right
words, you can learn the action, you can learn to maintain the action
for short periods. You walk on the leg you are standing on. You
walk with the big muscles of your thighs and torso, you walk with
your whole body. You can know that, intellectually, but you don’t
know it either. It takes years to learn. The wrong idea that you
walk by putting your free foot forward is hard to kill. There are
limits to what teaching can do. Knowing something well enough to
pass the exam might be very close to not knowing it at all.
People learn best when they are engaged in doing practical things and
when the things they need to learn have real and important
implications in today’s thinking and tomorrow’s results. Students
tend to learn just for the exam. Adults tend to learn "just in
time". Internet tools are wonderful assets to a just in time
learning environment. The learning environment of daily life is
enhanced by access to texts and data stores and to friends and peers,
and to teachers and mentors. Each of us has a portfolio of learning
tasks, problems to solve. We struggle to cope with inadequate data,
we seek additional data, but only data that is meaningful to us and
pertinent to the problem at hand is of value. Everything else is a
hindrance, a barrier we later need to remove. We need reliable data
sources. Facts help. It’s valuable if we try to tell the truth to
each other. When you give me half truth or deny me access to the
other half of what you know for some advantage to yourself, you
betray me. I learn when the critical bit of data that helps me make
new sense of my problem is found. That critical bit of data is
"information" all the rest is noise and confusion and smoke that
makes progress in learning difficult.
The Information Age
IDC tell me that at the beginning of 2003, the traffic on the
internet exceeds twice the entire contents of the Library of Congress
every day. They predict that the flow a data will grow in only four
years to be 64 times the content of the Library of Congress every
day. Telecom companies and politicians say this is the information
age, and all that data is the evidence of that fact.
Rubbish. We are drowning in data now. I don’t need a thousand megs
of text to read, I need ten words that make sense that will help me
understand my particular problem. This is the information age
because each of us has information and each of us need new
information pertinent to whatever we are doing in order to get
through each day. You and I join the information age when we realise
that we need to collect our own personal data, to assemble material
that seems to help us move towards the outcome we seek. We collect
documents and email and links to web sites. We develop data bases,
or research diaries, and I keep a journal which I find is enormously
valuable. To succeed we each need our own personal data. Our daily
work is to use that data to solve problems and to grow the data in
practical and useful ways. The amount of data flowing around the
internet isn’t a meaningful measure. What’s important is the tiny
portion of that flow that people find meaningful in ways that
increase learning or enable the completion of tasks.
Please show me the country where the education system is teaching
children that they all need to develop the skills to collect and
evaluate their own data. Such a country doesn’t exist. We teach our
children that someone else always has the data we need. We teach our
children that there are right answers to every problem and that there
are experts who know the "right answers". We cripple the learning
ability of our children, and make them slaves to other people’s
knowledge. We offer them the equivalent to "the wrong way of
walking" and call it education. Then we tell them this is the
information age and wonder why they struggle to function.
None of us can do anything with someone else’s knowledge, except that
we make it our own knowledge first. The information age can become a
reality only if we are a learning society. The information age will
make a knowledge society possible, not because in books or on the
internet or in the university there is more knowledge. The knowledge
society will arise because I have used "my data" to create my own
personal understanding, and because I have the courage to act on that
understanding to do useful things in the world. Each of us nurtures,
and controls our own knowledge. When enough of us are acting in that
way society itself will be fundamentally changed. There have always
been a few people who were involved in learning that extended
throughout life. Today that becomes a normal way for people to live.
Self teaching becomes a way of life. The knowledge society can only
exist if each of us has our own knowledge.
Appropriate Communities
Finally let me come back to the idea of Connecting Communities. The
principle change that the internet offers us is the ability to find
data and to find peers across the world. When the New Zealand
government talks about connecting communities they seem to be
thinking about cities, towns and suburbs. Those physical community
boundaries are seldom appropriate when the topic is internet
communication. Yet whatever we do needs to help that physical
community be or become a good place to live. A community is the
product of the efforts of it’s MEMBERS.
Membership is a critical issue, wherever you look. I mentioned
earlier the diverse cultural and racial groups that now a vital part
of the community here in Christchurch. That’s probably true of any
medium to large city in any country. Time will tell if the diversity
of peoples can be sustained in a way that gives each person a sense
of valid membership. Am I accepted here, am I recognised as a peer,
or am I treated as an outsider? These are critical issues.
Of course the concept of membership is not a single thing, but a
whole series of overlapping memberships or denials of membership.
The internet permits one to join peer groups that are not based on
the physical community. Those new memberships will increase the
confidence and the knowledge of the people involved. Eventually that
will flow into the physical community. Communities should not be
confined by ideas of geographic boundaries.
In the same way there is no hierarchy of peer groups that says that
science is more important than language, or that dance and drama and
less relevant than business studies. You can’t ever be sure where
the inspiration for critical new concepts will spring from. Each of
us makes choices, we have limited time and limited resources, we do
what is possible. Whatever set of choices we make enables some
experiences and makes another set of options impossible. We create
our lives by the quality of our choices.
The internet is a valuable tool, but there is too much focus on the
technology and too little on the choices people make in using it.
The internet works best for experienced and skilled users. To
develop an innovative knowledge based society we need individuals who
know that they need to develop their own expertise, to collect, order
and maintain their own data. To develop a cohesive and diverse
physical community people need to do things together in real
geographic physical spaces. Sharing experience creating arts events
or learning arts skills is a wonderful way to bind people together.
Face to face connection is essential for the best aspects of a happy
and productive life. Effective use of the internet can help to make
that possible but can never replace face to face activities. Living
interesting exciting and useful lives in a community is the real
objective.
Thoughts?
John
John S. Veitch
mailto:jsveitch@ate.co.nz
Photo Available on WWW
http://www.ate.co.nz/johnsveitch.jpg
Adapt to Experience
URL http://www.ate.co.nz/
for Virus Protection http://www.ate.co.nz/trend/
