Harold Jarche

Open Source Conference Proceedings

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Last May 2004, the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto webcast their conference on Open Source and Free Software: Concepts, Controversies, and Solutions. It was webcast using the KMDI ePresence system, soon to be released as open source. The archived sessions include my own area of interest, "Open Source Business Models". Here is a summary from a small piece of Matt Asay’s (Novell) presentation:

There are essentially three OSS business models:

  1. Product Proprietary or Commodity Model
  2. Commodity (Brand & Servicing) Model, e.g. Red Hat: make money from your services
  3. Transitional (Pragmatic) Model. The transitional model is focused on solving problems (e.g. MySQL and JBoss) and is open source in the sense that code is open, but may be closed in terms of controlling the development process and the developers.

Asay says that open source is continously commoditizing software, forcing proprietary vendors to enhance and innovate their products, or "drive it up the stack" as he says. Here’s one more item to think about:

Q: What is the main reason that people develop open source software?
A: Because it is intellectually stimulating.

Sessions are available as QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real. Sit back and enjoy these highly interesting sessions. Thanks to William Langley of the NRC for pointing this out.

The End of the Commons?

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Stephen Downes notes that Creative Commons may be
moving too far to the commercial side of things.

In various fora I have warned of the danger that Creative Commons will commercialize. It would be too great a temptation, I argued, to create special ‘business’ Creative Commons licenses for commercial content, possibly charging a fee for managing the license. When the Creative Commons ‘Education’ licenses were proposed a few months ago, I warned that this was first step in the process …. That day has now come. The commercialization of Creative Commons has taken a large step forward with the development of what is being called the ‘Commonwealth’.

I hope that this is not the case, but the future will tell. I agree with Stephen, and feel that CC should have a better medium for input from the great unwashed commons, especially since their success is predicated on the millions who have taken up the CC banner. I will be keeping an eye on the commercialization of CC, and you will know that I have parted ways with their philosophy if the CC License at the bottom of my pages disappears.

Update: 19 August – Creative Commons clarifies its position on the Commonwealth.

OSS Interface Elegance

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Steve Garrity made a post on interface elegance back in April, and a number of people commented. I think that it provides a good view of the design and development process in open source, and not being much of a geek I found it enlightening. Steven discusses the issue of feature creep in open source, and how this has been addressed in Firefox. I am a recent convert to Firefox. The conclusion of the article sums things up nicely:

Rather than adding more and more features for the mythical “power user”, or swing to the other end of the spectrum and dumb-down the interface for the mythical “average user”, smart developers are learning that good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience.

We are seeing the open source development community becoming much more market-sensitive (in its own way, in accordance with its own values) and I think that this bodes well for the future. With better interface design, open source software will be more acceptable to the average user, thus levelling the playing field for software developers.

If open source ever gets significant market penetration it may also change the dominant business model. In the near future, any software without customer support (proprietary or open source) may have no financial worth, and only the support services will have any market value.

The time is now

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From Seth Godin:

More than a year ago, I wrote this for Fast Company:

Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Seth goes on to conclude:

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

It may be the worst of times, but it can also be the best of times. This is good "get off your butt" advice.

Learning Innovations Forum

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This just in:

The Learning Innovations Forum d’Innovation d’Apprentissage is organizing the first Working Forum on eLearning Quality Assurance and
Return on Investment. If you have expertise and experience in these areas,
or if you know someone who has, and you’re interested in (1) sharing what
you know and (2) collaborating with others in Canada, the Americas and
Europe, please contact me. We are inviting speakers and participants to
this Working Forum, Sept 30 and October 1 in Vancouver, where you will have
the opportunity to participate in the first meeting of the Joint LIfIA –
EIfEL eQuality Committee which has responsibility for the Open eQuality
Learning Standards – the Open Source consumer-oriented eLearning quality
standards. And you may be able to find new clients and partners for your
products and services.

Registration in the Forum includes a half-year membership in LIfIA and
associate membership in EIfEL – the European Institute for eLearning. Among
other membership benefits, LIfIA is becoming the leader in panCanadian
development and implementation of the ePortfolio. (LIFIA news attached as
well).

Plan to be at this Working Forum if you have a story to tell or a need to
know about ROI, QA and the ePortfolio for Quality Assurance in eLearning.
Register early as participation is limited.

Please note that the site only works in Internet Explorer, as the navigation functions are not standards compliant (bad example folks). [now fixed – see comments below]

The Flexible Medium

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Jay Cross, on why the blog medium is so flexible:

A cool thing about blogs, something that can transform a blog into a mold-breaker, is closure. Or rather, lack of closure.

Many bloggers write self-contained articles or recommendations; every entry is whole unto itself…atomic.

Internet Time Blog is evolving into a stream of conversation. Because it’s a blog, not an article, I don’t feel compelled to draw a conclusion when I don’t have one. I’m happy for you to look over my shoulder as I paint on the canvas. With luck, or maybe a miracle, something meaningful will take shape.

I guess I’ll leave it at that for now.

 

Online Communities in Business

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If you’re interested in online communities then read the latest report by Ambrozek & Cothrel. The report surveyed 135 respondents, many of them experts in the fields of virtual communities, communities of practice, etc. The list of influencers on pages 22/23 of the report offers an excellent start to filling your RSS aggregator with the opinions of those who have the greatest influence in this growing field. There’s lots to chew on here.

The most interesting view of the future, from one of the respondents, that I think should be considered for those in the technology-based learning field is:

Cautious personal predictions for the future: movement from a linear scheduled-media environment to an IP-delivered, on demand, rich media environment where you can access tailored content where you want it, when you want it, how you want it … with linear programming and scheduling still firmly there, but as one of the choices you can make. [Media producers] may begin to talk about ‘brands’ and’genre content’ rather than ‘programmes.’ The public will begin to co-produce media, and the media producers will act more as editors who enable and shape this material, plus add the expert view and point to ‘the official view’ or ‘the best’, ‘the newest, ‘the most apposite,’ ‘the funniest. etc. Media producers will also still offer quality crafted content but audience/members will be able to view the content in different ways and to also feedback and comment/add material in separate windows or on separate menus if people want to drill down or across to take a look. Further ahead: 3D networked gaming environments with chat and self-build homes/dens/vehicles will increase in popularity with children, particularly boys. Medics and scientists will see the value of such environments for teaching, and holiday brochures will neverbe the same again.

With more people involved in multiple online communities, getting information and sharing their experiences when and where they want, there may be less acceptance of pre-programmed, linear elearning. Learners will also want to involved in the creation of their own learning programs, and will have the tools to do so. Add these together and we may see the end of “content based education”. If the content is up to the learner, then the only critical part (for organisations) will be the evaluation component. Instead of content-based testing, we may see a rise in performance-based testing. I hope so.

PS: There is a note in the report that the wiki is now open to anyone, but I haven’t found a way to get access –
http://www.socialtext.net/online-communities-in-business

Update: you can send an e-mail, which is available from the main link, and get wiki access from the authors – thanks.

Wikis Support F2F

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A few (many?) years back it was unthinkable that anyone would register and pay for a conference via the Web. Then Web only conferences came along. Face-to-face conferences gave out CD-ROM’s of proceedings, and later followed up with web-access for conference attendees. Vendors can now see their booth space on the Web and position it relative to their competition – for a price. Conferences also precede events and follow-up with mailing lists and contact information. The conference media keep changing.

The latest that I’ve heard of is from Eugene Kim, who discusses the use of wikis as a way to tap the energy produced at face-to-face meetings. It’s not as easy as just placing a wiki on the web and everyone will merrily contribute to it, but Kim offers a lot of good advice. My own experience with wikis is limited, but we were successful in using them as a way for physically distributed social workers to stay in touch and develop policies & procedures. It may take a lot of of hand-holding and support to get someone to the "ah ha" moment of understanding the potential of wikis, but after that moment you have to run to keep up to them.

Measuring Organisational Effectiveness

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I had previously mentioned Marshall McLuhan’s work in the context of forecasting for the elearning industry. A quick review of McLuhan’s Laws of Media tetrad:

Enhancement. What does the medium enhance, extend, enlarge or intensify?

Obsolescence. What does it make obsolete? When an old medium enters its obsolescence phase, it becomes more ubiquitous, often changing from a utilitarian to a recreational role (e.g. fountain pens).

Reversal. When something is extended beyond the limits of its potential, its characteristics are often reversed. For example, cars which promote greater freedom, when multiplied to the extreme can result in gridlock.

Retrieval. What medium that was previously rendered obsolete does the old medium retrieve from the past? This is usually something from the distant past.

Mark Federman shows how these laws could also be used as a metric to measure organisations:

The Laws of Media in particular allow us to anticipate and articulate the totality of effects, both those that we wish to bring into being, and those we might wish to avoid.
Organizational effectiveness can then be expressed (as a percentage or any other appropriately scientific measure) as the degree to which effects deemed desirable can be achieved, those deemed undesirable can be avoided or mitigated, and effects that were originally unanticipated can be anticipated prior to their occurrence and achieved/avoided as appropriate. Thus, with this conception, effectiveness measures the leadership’s ability to anticipate, execute, and perform the inevitable mid-course corrections as new information becomes available. Seems pretty effective to me!


So the measure of effectiveness could be whether an organisation was able to identify when its technology product was "extended beyond the limits of its potential" and shifted its focus to a new product or service. For instance, has Learning Management System technology become extended so far that it no longer manages training and educational requirements, and now hinders the sharing of learning experiences? Would an effective organisation shift away from a reliance on pushing this technology?

McLuhan’s tetradic lens judges everyone in the same way.

Innovation for eLearning

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In my previous post Community is King, I summarized Rob Paterson’s post on Reed’s Law and put it into the context of the elearning industry. Dave Pollard has added to Rob’s view of Reed’s Law and discusses what customers really value – service for the long-run.

What’s especially interesting is that customers know that high-value service cannot be outsourced (see my Dell story for an explanation of the internal distrust and finger-pointing that outsourcing inevitably produces) or offshored (no matter how competent they are, people in India can’t give me good service simply because they’re not here looking at the product that doesn’t work).

My take on this would be to stay as close as possible to your clients. Not just in terms of proximity but in understanding the culture.

Dave Pollard goes on to look at James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, and combines Reed’s Law to come up with two new processes in his Innovation Model. One is to help to create user communities, and use the wisdom of the crowd, as eBay has done. This means that you have to let the community self-define, and you stay out of the way. No mean feat for control freeks. The other is to poll the community/crowd in order to determine what next innovation will fly. This of course requires a mechanism that will be unobtrusive and used by the majority. Kind of like opting in to Google rankings.

For elearning companies, I think that innovation with this model is possible. We have seen some of it in the academic community, but it too has its walls and silos. Open source software is one way of keeping the community open; in that no one owns the structure, and will not feel locked-in. Since product price descends quickly to zero, then start at a zero product price anyway. When the product is free, you can’t complain. And if you have the source code, don’t complain, fix it.

Just using open source software will not be enough. You need to foster community. Blogs or other two-way communication tools can help communication, but what will you blog about? You have to find out what’s really important to your market. eBay found out that people want a trusted method to buy and sell things. An elearning example could be – what are the limitations of using Google for your learning needs? What could you add on to a Google search that gives just a little more learning value? This could be anything between the results of a web search and a structured online course. Anyway, the key seems to be to offer good service at a reasonable cost, to a community to which you are committed, that you understand and support. Easy, n’est-ce pas?