Netizen: JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2)

Friday, June 19, 2009

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2)

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta

I talked about my round one investors pulling out in February. Okay, it is not as bad as I make it sound. There is a possibility all of them might come back by the end of summer. Keeping fingers crossed.

JP is also the guy who introduced me to David, virtually speaking: David Gelernter: Manifesto. It was a mind blowing experience to me.

Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 6: Musing about Role-driven Induction
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 7: Communities Facebook is not a “social networking” site. It is a community of communities. Now this is potentially of immense value in an enterprise
Facebook and Bloomberg how “addictive” communications can made significant business impact
musing about facebook and enfranchisement The pressure group, all 14,000 of them, became visible and vocal. Via Facebook. And Cadbury’s listened.
Continuing to muse about Facebook and enfranchisement a small proportion of the populace are sufficiently risk-hungry, open-minded, bored, curious or just plain nosy enough to get involved in anything and everything.....I’ve had the privilege of being able to watch “Enterprise 2.0″, as it now gets called, experimented with, made a fad off, written off, subverted, faced off to and rounded up by lynch mobs a few times now...... After Facebook entered the enterprise scene, everything changed. ...... The organisation structures and management styles and financial processes and HR policies were all descended from the Assembly Line Ape. And the knowledge worker didn’t fit that evolutionary process. ........ these marauding smart mobs made it into the enterprise. Much worse, they’ve found allies inside the enterprise walls. Even worse than that, they’ve found allies amongst their customers and their partners and their supply chains. ........ it’s turned up in a nonhierarchical beyond-the-firewall way, and this scares many people. ........ The 21st century Trades Union movement for knowledge workers. ........ No longer held hostage by a single trade or profession or company, switching roles between employee and partner and customer. ........ In the meantime, do tell me why I’m wrong, why this post is so much horseshit, why you disagree.
Social software is political science in executable form social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities..... de-coupling groups in space and time ..... the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog. ........ A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation
Maybe it’s because I’m a Calcuttan….. In its simplest sense, a collaborative act is a bit like making a baby. It takes two people with somewhat different characteristics and abilities to produce one. ......... most examples of social software tended to fail in the past, because there was more effort expended on creating and maintaining the complex barriers and walls that exemplified the guts and innards of the institution.
Fire And Rain and Sholay I’m one of those soppy sentimental guys who loves the “soft” rock that oozed out of the late Sixties into the Seventies, part folk-rock part acoustic-ish harder stuff......... [Isn't it nice when you get to that age when your tastes are genuinely your own?] ......... They’re re-making Sholay. ...... Sholay is the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever, and one of the few (maybe 50) that I’ve actually seen. ....... I can remember actually queueing in the rain for cinema tickets only once in my life (with Gary Martin, in Calcutta). The film I was queueing for? Sholay…. translated as Fire. In the Rain. Fire And Rain.
No, but I think my secretary does This is what some captain of industry is meant to have said when asked if he used Facebook. ..... I’ve heard this precise phrase twice before. The first time, it was in the mid 1980s and the question was about PCs. The next time around, it was in the early 1990s and the question was about e-mail.
Thinking about Citizendium and Wikipedia: Part 1 I must be Confused...... Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.
The Maker State: From self-buttering toasters to social software in the enterprise the madness of hiring intelligent people and then carefully draining every last drop of intelligence from them
Little orphan albums My father’s lifetime was contained in one job. I will probably have seven. My children will probably have seven —- but in parallel, not like my sequential efforts. ........... In my father’s time a musician belonged to one band. In my lifetime musicians belonged to seven. My children will see musicians belonging to seven bands at the same time.
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 8: Musing about signals the “recipes” for the best companies start with “First get good people”. ....... People use all kinds of signals to communicate. From keeping doors open to shutting them. From answering e-mails promptly and diligently, all the way to “deleting them unread”. From being early for a meeting to not turning up. From giving their attention to not giving their attention. From listening to not-listening. ............ There’s something non-threatening, something non-invasive about the way we can signal to people using social software.
Musing about 21st century irritations and concerns and the Because Effect
A Saturday stroll musing about advertising
Continuing to muse about advertising
Musing about open access publishing and economics-of-abundance and DRM by looking up a word or phrase first in Wikipedia, I seem to be able to establish “baseline” information about the topic quickly and cheaply ......... Almost 3000 journals already use the new system: instead of charging people for access to journals, they charge researchers to publish in them. ....... The articles are then made available for free online ....... possibilities of using virtual worlds as means to a very specific end, that of empowering disenfranchised people.
They don’t all use the same physics What’s possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another - unlike the real world, they don’t all use the same physics.
London calling: Musing about crowdsourcing a case where the crowd will always beat the computer, where it was actually quite difficult to write a program to compile the list.
A bug’s life It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all.
None of the above
Just pick one: Musing about toothpaste in Calcutta and its effect on enterprise information For the first twenty-three years of my life, I’d never known a home other than Calcutta. I’d visited other cities, sure, but never actually lived anywhere else. And I’d never left the country. .......... The culture shock I experienced wasn’t big and immediate and in-your-face, it felt more like a disjointed series of very small events over a long time. ........ One place I felt distinctly uncomfortable was the supermarket. I could not conceive of a whole aisle containing things to do with something like dental care. ........... the Facebook series (now on Part 9), the Wikipedia series (now on Part 2) and the Opensource series (as yet unpublished).
Pottering about on copyright and Calcutta “We had no clue that we had to seek permission from the author,” Santanu Biswas, secretary of FD Block Puja Committee of Salt Lake, the community group which designed and paid for artists to make the tent. ...... [Mr Biswas, there will always be a house for you wherever I live.]
Seeing is believing: macro microscope photographs of snow crystals Some of us are passionate about our faith and our beliefs. Some of us are passionate about science and things scientific. Some of us are passionate about both. (I belong to this category). ..... these photographs. ....... I’ve had a childlike interest in science all my life, and I guess I’ve striven to have a childlike faith as well. ........ “taken aback” is too weak;”fascinated” does not do it justice. “Entranced” is not enough. Neither is “spellbound”. Even the vernacular “gobsmacked” is woefully inadequate.
Musing about “laziness” Some people get called lazy because you see them lounging around at work, chatting to people, occasionally even smiling. Dare I mention it, even laughing out loud. Some of these “lazy” people get a lot of “work” done, if you measure work in outcomes rather than in perceived effort. .............. many times the (exclusive) troubleshooters are the ones that cause the problem in the first place, be it a hard-coded value, duplication of code or a large complex method only they can understand.
The Becuase Effect (sic)
On toilet paper and cultural differences I used to think I’ve been a foreigner all my life. My father was born in Calcutta. So was I. But we “came” from the south of India, we were Tamils ........... Neither Calcutta, nor its Calcuttans, made me feel a foreigner; I made myself feel that way. .......... A foreigner at home. A foreigner away. A foreigner everywhere. ......... when I started seeing different cultures. I began to feel comfortable everywhere. ....... visit over 50 countries, and felt at home in all of them. ...... I was a native. Everywhere. ...... a native of Calcutta, of Liverpool, of London, of Dublin, and of Windsor: the five places I’ve lived in. ......... Years ago, when I used to market and sell offshore software services, I tended to open sales pitches with a simple cultural point. I said “The English and the Indian cultures can sometimes be seen to be separated by something as thin as toilet paper. The Indians think the English are dirty, because they use toilet paper .............. this post
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 9a: Meandering around with ecosystems Where I work, we’ve been going through the laborious process of bringing together our network, process, product and IT skills into one coherent “converged” unit. ....... every enterprise is a community ....... The entire opensource movement is an example of the value generated by open ecosystems. ...... When I started working in software, everything was proprietary and siloed. Way back in 1980, there was already a well-established offshore software industry. But it wasn’t much use. .......... [By the way, ten years ago, who would have believed that the day would come when Apple would be worth more than IBM? Other than Steve, of course :-). ......... the firewall was designed to form a perimeter around an enterprise, a thou-shalt-not-pass barrier with intensive checks ....... This will change. This must change. The overlapping communities model that is emerging requires it to change. ........... People will belong to multiple communities, those multiple communities will overlap in many and varied ways. Innovation will blossom at the edges of the communities, as professions collide, as the distinctions between some of the professions continue to blur. ........... The concept of the firewall will continue, but perhaps it will become more personal. Like identity. Like authentication and permissioning. ........ In addition to being nourished by information, the ecosystem thrives on an alternate source of energy. The interactions between the people. ....... a set of rights as well as duties. Liberty, not licence.
Stuff I’m reading, part 142857 0.142857 (recurring) is the decimal representation of 1/7 .... 2/7 is 0.285714, 3/7 is 0.428571, and so on. The same six digits, gently moving around. Circulating. ...... 14 plus 28 plus 57 equals 99. 142 plus 857 equals 999. 1 plus 4 plus 2 etc etc equals 9
Musing about music and politics Gracenote maps
Musing about openness and security “most murders are committed by people known by the victim, so it’s best not to know anyone” ....... First we take living things and make abject skeletons out of them. Then we carefully build cupboards around the newly formed skeletons. And then we wonder why we have skeletons in cupboards.
But Miss, they’re not listening to me I learn from the behaviour of “fresh” graduates. In fact I learn quite a bit from observing what babies do. All this does not stop me from learning in other, more traditional, ways. ..... switch from hierarchical to networked ...... in a networked society, everyone is a peer
Learning from my children, part 97 we are going to see Generation M using things like Facebook creatively and differently, using the functionality in ways we do not expect. More importantly, using the functionality in ways that may not have been designed for, yet remain possible.
I’m a Believer in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed
Musing about Kurt Vonnegut and writing software A Man Without A Country
Meandering around as a result of strange Facebook status messages Facebook is a multidimensional conversation
More musings about what makes Facebook different “organic gardening”, this concept of having shared interests beyond work, but at work ....... there is a critical link between relationships and privacy
Chewing over jhal moori and chicken tikka masala When I came to the UK in 1980, there were many things I had to get used to, and many things I got wrong ...... the scariest thing I had to overcome, in the context of culture shock, was this: getting used to Western cuisine ........ What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way people here cooked Indian cuisine. That hurt. It really hurt. ........ I was expected to order the “curry” on the menu. Which meant saying a little prayer and then manfully working through meat with apples and raisins, with a bit of stale curry powder thrown in, and if you were lucky, a large dollop of turmeric for colouring (which had the salutary effect of killing all other tastes for a short while). ................... even good Nepali fare.
Cricket: The Sound and Numbers Game VVS Laxman scored his 112 all in ones and fours. .... 111/1, 222/2, 333/3, 444/4, 555/5. ....... For those of you who don’t follow cricket, all I can say is it’s never too late.
Enterprise Blue Zero Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.