Open source better reflects customer needs

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The word is out that Windows XP can run on Intel-based MacIntosh computers and the software is now available for downloading. However, Apple doesn’t seem to understand its own customers:

An Apple spokeswoman declined comment on the contest. Apple officials have said they have no desire for Windows to run on their hardware.

Earth to Apple – it’s not about you, it’s about your customers. Thousands of people have already downloaded the software, so there must be some kind of a demand.

That’s the joy of open source software, because any group can “fork” a project and the wisdom of the crowd will decide which way is better. No need for a “company spokesperson” to say what’s best for users.

Communication Tools from the Army

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During my Army service I learned many things that I have already forgotten, such as the composition of a Soviet Motor Rifle Regiment, and a few things that I could never forget. Three tools that I used extensively during my military career were 1) the Estimate, 2) Battle Procedure, and 3) the Orders Format. All of these are communications tools.

The Estimate is a logical way of analysing a situation and making a plan. Battle Procedure is a logical method to get you on the road to your next mission, and the Orders Format is a standard form of conveying the details of your plan to those who are going with you.

Some specifics of these three tools have changed over the years, but these combat-tested tools for effective communication remain in use. If you strip away the military specific stuff, they are quite practical for civilian applications as well. The Combat Estimate is a short version of the detailed Estimate and is based around seven questions, which I have slightly revised:

  1. What are competitors and clients doing and why?
  2. What have I been told to do and why?
  3. What effects (these can be described as your specific tasks) do I want to have on the competition and/or my client?
  4. Where and how best can I accomplish each effect?
  5. What resources do I need to accomplish each effect?
  6. When and where do the actions take place in relation to each other?
  7. What control measures do I need to impose? (e.g. what detail of project management is necessary)

Here is a revised Battle Procedure, in non-military form, geared around a client project:

  1. Get a warning that a new project is going start.
  2. Pass this on to your team.
  3. Do some quick research into the sector, the competition, the client and the opportunity.
  4. Get the official go-ahead for the project [probably not as much detail as you would get from a military superior, but then your boss doesn’t know the Orders Format].
  5. Conduct a detailed analysis and research based on the available time.
  6. Figure out what you have to do, by when [do this by working backwards from your critical deliverable dates/times].
  7. Write a detailed message (see next paragraph), with your time estimate, to your team members and partners.
  8. Advise anyone else from whom you may need support during the project (printing, translation, etc.).
  9. Sit down with the whole team (or virtually) and ensure that everyone understands the project, the constraints, the deliverables and who is responsible for what.
  10. Ensure that all activities are coordinated (remember, it’s your project).
  11. Get going.

Finally here is a civilian version of the Orders Format, used to communicate your plan to others:

  1. What’s going on
  2. What we’re going to do and how success will be measured
  3. Who is going to be working with us
  4. Who has to do what and by when
  5. How we’re going to communicate over the course of the project
  6. Who’s responsible for making decisions

If twenty years of military service can be summed up by the mastery of three communication tools, I think that it shows the importance of effective communications in organizations. Since retiring in 1998 I have had three jobs — university-based researcher/consultant, dot com executive, and now freelancer. On reflection, I can say that almost all of my projects over the past 8 years have been about communication, such as:

  • explaining how to conduct training
  • coaching how to use technology
  • communicating through design
  • selling an idea through a business plan
  • telling how I would do a project through a proposal
  • putting together diverse opinions into a cohesive vision
  • connecting people through conversation

Basically, as more and more of us connect in our work, we need effective ways to communicate. Though not perfect or comprehensive for all business needs, these military tools have stood the test of time.

“Let them manage themselves”

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In a recent post on Learners as Contributors, which received some good comments, Bill Fitzgerald said that:

True student-centered teaching takes more preparation than traditional lecture because the teacher needs to be prepared for whatever outcome organically arises. Really, it requires an openness to possibility that many teachers feel uncomfortable with because they labor under the paradigm that they need to be the expert in any subject covered in their classroom. True student-centered teaching also requires teachers to explicitly teach critical thinking skills, media evaluation skills (a must for internet-based research), and a host of other skills that are necessary for life but are not directly measurable on a standardized test.

This got me to wondering about curriculum, such as Brian Alger’s comment that “Curriculum is a solution to a problem we created.” I also started thinking about the barnraising exercise that Dave is hosting on new media curriculum creation. I believe that it’s a good exercise but there is a more fundamental issue that really interests me.

What would a curriculum look like if you eliminated any specific CONTENT and any reference to particular TECHNOLOGIES and instead focused on universal cognitive PROCESSES? Many varieties of this “curriculum” could be created, using various content areas or communication technologies. I imagine a curriculum that is open to teachers’ expertise and learners’ needs, based on processes like:

  • Critical thinking
  • Problem solving, individually and as part of a group
  • Narrative development
  • Media analysis & critique
  • Self-expression
  • etc. (please add more)

What would be different about this more basic curriculum is that learners would be able to choose how they would learn these process skills and how they would show mastery. Self-expression could be shown through writing, blogging, art or mechanics. This approach would also free up a whole bunch of teachers in administrative curriculum development positions ;-)

Given the expanding amount of information and media that is available through the Internet, access to material should not be an issue. Of course, teachers would need to develop new skills, but just imagine what learners could achieve. As John Taylor Gatto wrote in Harper’s a few years ago:

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Writely now in Google Camp

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I’m sure that almost everyone has heard that Writely has been purchased by Google. I’ve been using this wiki-like program for a while and have found it very practical for collaborative word processing. It sure beats sending huge files around by e-mail and trying to figure out five colours of track-changes plus a bunch of comments in Word or even in OpenOffice.org. Writely is basically a wiki (multi-editor web page), but has a simple word processor interface and imports/exports from popular file types like .doc and .pdf.

So far I’ve had little luck in convincing many others that Writely is a better tool than “Word + e-mail”. People are stuck in their old habits and with the first sign of difficulty they revert to their comfort zone. Now that Writely has some street cred from Google I’m hoping that it will be easier to convince others to try it. The interface has been steadily improving and I’m sure that Google cash will help it even more. New users may have to wait, as Writely seems to have temporarily closed the door on new accounts. Existing users can add only four new collaborators. I’m sure this will change shortly.

Personally, I see the move of word processing to the Web as a real productivity advance for what used to be known as CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work).

Needed – Open Source Formative Evaluation Tool

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I was recently asked if I knew of any OS testing/evaluation tools. Stephan List is looking for something that he can use to put evaluations online that will give immediate feedback to the user. Something like your typical magazine quiz, on “how good are you at …” with the results available for your own instant gratification.

I thought of Atutor’s AForm and Stephan mention I Give Test, but the former seems to be designed for academic testing while the latter is open source but charges for license fees.

Any other suggestions out there? Please respond, even in the negative, so that I know that my new feeds are working from this WordPress installation. Thanks.

Personal Knowledge Management 2

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Note: If you are looking for the summary page on personal knowledge management/mastery (PKM) it is now here: jarche.com/pkm/

*****

Jay has recently posted on Learning Circuits that blogs can be used as knowledge management (KM) tools. Using these tools brings some new challenges, as Lilia has noted “In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.” I won’t deny the cultural change issues in using blogs for knowledge management but I will show how I, as an independent worker outside an organisational hierarchy, use blogs and other tools for personal knowledge management. [This is an update & re-write of a previous post from last year.]

I write on my blog for several reasons. First of all, it’s the platform by which I try to make implicit knowledge (e.g. not codified or structured) more explicit, through the process of writing out my thoughts and observations of what I have come across in my life. By forcing myself to write a summary or an observation, I have to reflect on my own learning. Also, by making my thoughts public I know that they will be scrutinized – now and in the future. There’s nothing like public visibility to make you check your logic. I also view my blog as my main communication medium, letting me converse with potential clients or provide them with a venue to get to know me without any feelings of obligation. Basically, it’s all out there for the world to see.

But how do I get from “Gee isn’t that interesting?” to a written blog post?

Many of my observations come from the blogs that I visit regularly. These feeds are aggregated in my Bloglines account which is made up of +/- 100 feeds. This feed aggregator is sorted into various folders and feeds are routinely added and deleted depending on my preferences and information needs. If I’m working on a project in a specific field I may add some feeds for the duration of the work. The feeds I select are a reflection of the work that I’m doing. I also keep a couple of feeds that have little relation to my work for any serendipitous learning. The ability to scan, preview, read and save posts makes this a simple and easy process – better than visiting each site.

There are also some web pages, posts or sites that I find interesting but I feel are not worth the effort of writing a blog post. For these sites I use Furl, a social bookmarking service. Furl not only saves the page but allows me to tag the item by category. My Furl archive is public so that I can share these pages.

Items and thoughts that are not ignored or stored in Furl usually get saved into a temporary bookmark folder in my browser. Over time I review these and may find a few others that relate to each other. When I have the time and inclination, usually after exercise, I’ll draft a post, review it and post it.

But what use is my blog?

Because my website is searchable, I’m able to retrieve two years of thoughts and comments and easily review these. This is quite practical for presentations, papers, proposals and responding to questions. If I didn’t write a blog, I would have a lot more bookmarks, without annotations of my reasoning and reflection at the time. After two years, my blog is becoming a valuable productivity tool, and the comments and links from others only add more value.

My blog is also a great way to meet people interested in similar subjects, and has helped to create an evolving community of practice. As I’ve mentioned before, this blog is like a very detailed business card, and those who disagree with my points of view may decide not to engage my professional services. This would be a good thing; from both perspectives.

As an independent consultant, a blog is probably the simplest, cheapest and most effective knowledge management tool there is today. Some other benefits are listed here.

Entrepreneurship

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I attended a local business gathering last night and the government-sponsored economic development folks gave a briefing on their programs and support (So Patrick & Isabelle, here are some articles that may be of interest; if you get to this website).

First of all, especially if you are looking at entrepreneurship as an early career option, I would recommend Dave Pollard’s list of reasons Why Young People are Afraid to Start their own Business and would call this Understand your Market for the economic developers. Reasons include:

Can’t handle failure
Don’t know the process
Can’t handle the stress
Can’t handle loneliness

For further background material I would read all of Dave’s work on Natural Enterprises, which will soon be a book. I’ve used much of this material with my own clients.

For those who are supposed to be preparing people for entrepreneurship, take a look at Jeff Cornwall’s post on Entrepreneurship Can, and Is, being Taught:

I believe there are two critical aspects of entrepreneurship education that increase success rates. First, we teach them what deals not to go into through the process of opportunity assessment. We teach them how to “fail on paper.” They learn how to create discipline around their instincts and drive to move ahead blindly into the pursuit of their ideas. Second, we teach them about how to manage growth effectively. Any banker will tell you that this is where most businesses fail. We teach them about the challenges that success can create as their ventures grow. As one banker likes to say, “Too much success leads to failure.”

Finally, I would recommend the Bootstrappers Bible to get a fresh pespective on starting a business with little money.

8.01.BootstrappersBible.pdf

Back to blogging

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This is my first post in WordPress and I think that it will take some time getting used to it. My previous Drupal installation was very good, but a bit of overkill for a plain blogging site. The spammers were getting pretty bad too. During the past three days I was getting three comment spam messages on the server every minute. James Farmer has told me that akismet should solve any comment spam issues in WP, so I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also reconfigured my SuprGlu public aggregator to reflect more learning feeds since Stephen has announced his hiatus and I know that Jay is trying to set up something to replace Stephen’s Edu_RSS.
For anyone using an RSS feedreader, you may have to resubscribe to the new feeds. They’re shown on the top right of the page. It will take some time to work out any bugs on this site, so please bear with me.

Moving to WordPress

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On Monday, March 6th, I’m moving this website and blog to a new WordPress installation. The URL will remain the same.

There will be a different look and structure, but all of the previous posts will be carried over and permalinks will work. I’ve been testing it this week with Tantramar Interactive and everything seems to work fine. We even think that the RSS feeds will continue to work, but just in case – you may lose this blog in your aggregator. If you subscribe to my blog feed (jarche.com/blog/1/feed) you might have some difficulties, though we are re-pointing these feeds. If you subscribe to the main feed (jarche.com/rss.xml) you should be OK. There will be only one main feed on the new site, plus a comment feed (something new for me).

I will also be closing off comments as of Monday morning, so that we can transfer all of the data.

This is post #700 and after two years I figure that it’s time for a change. I’ll try to keep these transfers down to every two years ;-)

Update: It’s Monday morning and the comment function is now disabled. It’s good timing because this site has been under “comment spam” attack from IP address 195.225.176.160 for the past 48 hours.

Bloggers’ Rules

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I’m currently in Jay Cross’s Informl Unworkshop and we are discussing some guidelines for bloggers. From Dave Pollard’s front page is this great advice:

Blog readers want to see more:

  1. original research, surveys etc.
  2. original, well-crafted fiction
  3. great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
  4. news not found anywhere else
  5. category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
  6. clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
  7. benchmarks, quantitative analysis
  8. personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
  9. first-hand accounts
  10. live reports from events
  11. insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
  12. short educational pieces
  13. relevant “aha” graphics
  14. great photos
  15. useful tools and checklists
  16. précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
  17. fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

  1. constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
  2. ‘thank you’ comments, and why readers liked their post
  3. requests for future posts on specific subjects
  4. foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
  5. reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
  6. wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
  7. comments that engender lively discussion
  8. guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

Update: This was quickly posted while listening to the unworkshop, so perhaps I should add some commentary, especially since Stephen has picked it up. I would think that one blogger could not address ALL of the readers’ wants nor could every reader give writers everything that they want. I think that the “reader wants” show how varied are the demands of this worldwide audience, and why sites like BoingBoing are so popular. This site will never be in the top 10,000 blogs of the world, but there are some points about reader wants that make sense for my particular situation, such as — original research; personal stories; relevant graphics; first-hand accounts. Anyway, I think that Dave has made a thought-provoking list.