Freedom and Responsibility

Responsibility is like a hot potato, but we have developed better ways to handle it than simply passing it on. We keep paying for this trickery, and so far, we can afford it. However, the stakes grow exponentially.

This is another essay in the Autonomy and Cohesion series. Autonomy and Cohesion is one of the essential balances that biological, social and socio-technical systems, basically everything from cells to cities, need to maintain to keep living.

Autonomy is the capacity to make uncoerced decisions, and cohesion is the action or fact of making a whole or working as a whole. Too little autonomy leads to ineffective, non-adaptive, and non-resilient systems. Weak cohesion results in inefficiency, and no cohesion means disintegration. Too much autonomy can cause silos, unreliable behavior, and various societal issues in markets. Excessive cohesion can lead to capacity problems and decision pathologies.

Cohesion often requires the sacrifice of autonomy, but some technologies and practices can bring both cohesion and autonomy. The balance is relative and depends on culture, situations, and system type. The nature of the balance was discussed in more detail in the first and the second essays of the series.

Autonomy and agency are functions of freedom. Autonomy is the freedom to decide, and agency is the freedom to act. The freedom of objects can be quantified in degrees of freedom. It can be extrapolated, literally or metaphorically, to agents and is naturally linked with independence and decoupling.

Human history is shaped by information technologies, and they, from clay tablets to cryptocurrencies, show an increase in decoupling. Content decoupled from medium, symbols from objects, books from authority, software from hardware, presentation from content, service from implementation, identity from host and so on. All these feasts of independence brought something valuable.

Decoupling is good, but only when a rigid coupling is replaced with a flexible one. In other words, when there is a balance between autonomy and cohesion (remember cohesion, in this context, subsumes coordination). Otherwise, decoupling can also be bad. Such is the case when we decouple a decision from its consequences and from a concrete individual who made the decision.

The Mastery of Hand-washing

Hand-washing took a long time to spread, and the recent pandemic showed that we are still bad at it. Symbolic hand-washing, on the other hand, is an ancient technique practised long before Pontius Pilate made it famous. Over the centuries, through regular practices and cultural innovations, we got remarkably good at it. Continue reading →

Apps Break Data

Information is not a first-class citizen in corporate information systems. Worse, it is neglected. Then why do we still call them information systems? We don’t. We call them applications. And applications, quite appropriately, are built or purchased with an application-centric mindset. Consequently, data is broken into diverse fragments, tightly coupled with applications, and expensive to reassemble into coherent information entities. Software engineering and procurement practices work in sync with market forces to maintain this trend.

How does this happen? And what can be done about it?

This essay is about the corporate management of data. If an essay about corporate data management had been written a decade ago and mentioned Artificial Intelligence, that would have been a weird essay. It’s the opposite today. A weird essay is a data management essay that’s not about AI. And this will be such a weird essay. I think that AI, more concretely LLMs, came too early, before we managed to solve problems with data quality and interoperability.

Speaking of AI and weird, a recent paper1Atari, M., Xue, M. J., Park, P. S., Blasi, D., & Henrich, J. (2023). Which Humans? OSF. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5b26t reported that all LLMs have WEIRD bias. They are trained on data coming exclusively from countries that are W.E.I.R.D: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. For LLMs, WEIRD is the norm.

In large organizations, weird is the norm as well, and here is one manifestation:

Information systems are not about information.

Now, the question is, of course,

How could that be?

Continue reading →

Liberating Cohesion: RDF

What do empathy, common enemies, and small talk have in common? They are all cohesion mechanisms. And so are calendars, clocks, protocols, plans, meetings, and memes. Cohesion mechanisms make elements be a whole or work as a whole. They do so by imposing constraints. Constraints reduce freedom and, in the case of agents, decrease autonomy and agency.

All socio-technical systems need to balance autonomy and cohesion to remain viable. There is then the need for a separate action or technology to enable autonomy. For instance, in organizations, cohesion brought by a goal can be balanced by autonomy via delegation of operational decision-making. More generally, cohesion brought by why has to be balanced by autonomy of what, and cohesion of what needs to be balanced by autonomy on how.

There are, however, cohesion technologies that provide1The use of verbs like bring, provide, reduce, increase, enable, support and so on should not be taken to imply that standards of this kind have some kind of agency. The cohesion or autonomy is not the result of an action from their side but a consequence of their use. both cohesion and autonomy. Like other cohesion mechanisms, they apply constraints. Constraints reduce autonomy. At the same time, through their use, these special kinds of technologies increase the overall autonomy and agency of their users. Standards and protocols have the potential to be such a kind of technologies. Two popular examples, reviewed briefly in the previous post, are HTML and HTTP.

This special quality of bringing both autonomy and cohesion distinguishes the cohesion mechanisms in the Interoperability area of the CABIN spectrum from those in the other areas. I call this quality liberating cohesion.

The present essay, part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series, will dive deeper into another standard that has this capability: RDF. Like HTML, RDF is an open standard maintained by W3C. While HTML is for representing content for human readers, RDF is for representing structured data, but for both humans and machines. Unlike HTML, RDF is not just a language; it is a whole framework.

Let’s first see what RDF is and where it can be found, and then discuss how using it brings cohesion and autonomy at the same time.

What is RDF?

RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. Resource is any entity2In the context of RDF, resource and entity are synonyms, and the latter is used in the RDF semantics specification. such as person,3Regarding persons as resources is common but highly problematic, as I discussed elsewhere. That doesn’t affect the value of RDF. It’s simply a reminder that also here, an alternative, such as entity, would’ve been more appropriate. place and just any thing, concrete or abstract, existing or imaginary. RDF provides a means to describe resources using uniquely identifiable relations. These relations represent both characteristics of and relationships between resources. Lastly, it is a framework that includes a conceptual model, semantics, vocabulary, and a set of serialization formats.

RDF is a data model, but the smallest element that can be considered RDF is the triple, which is already information. Continue reading →

  • 1
    The use of verbs like bring, provide, reduce, increase, enable, support and so on should not be taken to imply that standards of this kind have some kind of agency. The cohesion or autonomy is not the result of an action from their side but a consequence of their use.
  • 2
    In the context of RDF, resource and entity are synonyms, and the latter is used in the RDF semantics specification.
  • 3
    Regarding persons as resources is common but highly problematic, as I discussed elsewhere. That doesn’t affect the value of RDF. It’s simply a reminder that also here, an alternative, such as entity, would’ve been more appropriate.

Cohesion via Standards and Protocols

All cohesion mechanisms impose constraints and reduce autonomy. However, standards and protocols are unique. When well-designed or evolved, they can increase the overall autonomy and agency of the coordinated participants.

This assay is part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series.

When social systems become more complex, conventions, norms and rituals emerge to absorb the access of variety. When complexity increases further, they become more sophisticated and codified as laws, standards and protocols.

Laws, standards and protocols are cohesion and coordination mechanisms. But they have significant differences. Laws are coercive mechanisms. We even speak about laws using coercive language: a law comes into force. Standards and protocols, on the other hand, are voluntary. When compliance with a standard is mandatory, that can only come from a law referring to the standard, not from the standard itself. The same is true for protocols.

Standards and protocols are now ubiquitous. Almost everything we do relies on layers of standards1See Standards Make the World. and protocols. Thanks to another unique feature, when standards and protocols work, they are invisible. We become aware of them only when they fail.

Standards and protocols are similar – in fact, many protocols are standards – but they are not the same.

Protocols are ancient. Just think about how old greeting and parting protocols are. Standards are way more recent. They date from the beginning of the 19th century.2The mass production of machines during that period triggered the need for unification. A prominent example is the unification of screw threads. It was initiated by a paper presented by Joseph Whitworth to the Institution of Civil Engineers. The period of the Industrial Revolution was from 1760 to 1840. The paper was presented in 1841 as if to announce the start of a new era.

The second difference is that, unlike standards, protocols are not necessarily related to technology.

The third and most prominent difference between standards and protocols is related to time. Standards are static. Protocols are always about some sequence of actions. Standards may be related to time, as is the case with the UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), the ISO-8601 time format, the ISO 19235:2015 standards for analog clocks or the W3C time ontology. However, the focus of standards is on what and how, not on when. Protocols, on the other hand, are themselves temporal species. An outstretched hand invites taking, an HTTP request triggers a response, SMTP specifies timeouts. Continue reading →

  • 1
  • 2
    The mass production of machines during that period triggered the need for unification. A prominent example is the unification of screw threads. It was initiated by a paper presented by Joseph Whitworth to the Institution of Civil Engineers. The period of the Industrial Revolution was from 1760 to 1840. The paper was presented in 1841 as if to announce the start of a new era.

The Case Against Centricity

We need a center to steer explanations, summarise values and focus attention. It comes as naturally as the urge to compare and is closely related to it. Comparing can be explicit — we prefer this over that, and we say so. It can be wishful — something that is not the case, but we want it to be. And there is a third case, where we only realize our true priorities in hindsight.

It’s possible that out of these needs, the practice of adding “-centric” took off, and some of its products enjoy high circulation. Whatever the reason, all popular, something-centric words seem to me either delusional, hypocritical, misnomered, counterproductive or simply wrong. How so?
Continue reading →

Decoupling

The history of information technologies can be looked at as a punctuated increase in degrees of freedom.

Removing a dependency opens up new possibilities. A freedom from is also a freedom for.

This is the fourth essay in the Autonomy and Cohesion series. The first one was about the basics of the balance, why it is important, where it works and how. The second was about the forces that bring cohesion and the tools that we use to keep things connected and in sync. The third essay introduced the spectrum of cohesion, differentiating five zones depending on how cohesion is achieved. The next post of the series will take a closer look at cohesion technologies used in the fifth zone, Interoperability. Before that, and to prepare the ground, this essay will focus on another curious phenomenon: the balance is somehow present, in a more primitive, mechanistic way, in the tools that we use. And it enables and is enabled by the autonomy and cohesion forces in the larger socio-technical system.

When it comes to tools and technologies, it won’t be appropriate to use autonomy (with a few exceptions). Instead, we can talk about freedom and decoupling.

Let’s go!

When a rusty screw is stuck

There is a maintenance philosophy attributed to Earl Dibbles Jr., according to which,

you only need two tools in life: WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn’t move and it should, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn’t, use duct tape.

While I’m sure you have used duct tape, WD-40® might not be known to everyone. So, what is it? WD-40® is a widely used penetrating oil, and since its invention in 1953, it has indeed penetrated every corner of the world. It can be found in every hardware store, sailing boat, car repair shop, and many households. WD-40® is a lubricant, rust preventer and remover, and moisture displacer. According to the company website, it’s much more than that, so it lists 2000 uses. But if we come back to the wisdom of Earl Dibbles Jr., you use it when something “doesn’t move and it should.” It won’t help for a dead cat or a frozen progress bar on your screen, but for just about anything else, it should. Especially for a machine part that is stuck. Like a rusty screw. You spray a bit of WD-40®, and the screw is free again. You can unscrew it.

Degrees of freedom

The freedom of movement in space can be quantified. According to classical mechanics, rigid bodies have six degrees of freedom in three dimensions. They can translate (move forward and backward, up and down, left and right) in each of the three axes and rotate in each of the three axes. When classical mechanics came up with this theory, sailors had already established terms for each degree for centuries: surging, heaving, swaying, rolling, pitching, and yawing.

If you take a rigid body, say a rod, cut it in two pieces and then connect the parts with a joint, this system of bodies, called a kinematic chain, will have a degree of freedom equal to the combined degrees of freedom of the parts and the joint. If the joint works like a hedge, such a kinematic chain will have 7 degrees of freedom. Cylindrical joints can have two degrees of freedom: sliding and rotation. A robot’s arm with such a joint will have 8 degrees of freedom. In 2007, Dean Kamen presented a prosthetic arm with 14 degrees of freedom,1The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom, but together with the shoulder and the hand, 21. and a decade later, another DARPA-financed program developed a modular Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) with 26 degrees of freedom.2Perry, B. N., Moran, C. W., Armiger, R. S., Pasquina, P. F., Vandersea, J. W., & Tsao, J. W. (2018). Initial Clinical Evaluation of the Modular Prosthetic Limb. Frontiers in Neurology, 9, 153. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2018.00153

The concept of degrees of freedom is used beyond classical mechanics and robotics. In statistical mechanics, for example, it is applied to the movement of particles and is correlated with energy. A system with more degrees of freedom can carry more energy.3According to the equipartition theorem.

Degrees of freedom can be positively correlated to variety. Large structures expand and contract due to temperature changes. Flexible expansion joints in bridges give more degrees of freedom and, respectively, higher variety to respond to changes in the environment. Yet sometimes, more degrees of freedom do not bring more variety. My Sneekermeer sailing boat has a folding mast so it can go under bridges. It has more degrees of freedom than the masts of most sailing boats. And when it comes to going under bridges, if we apply Ashby’s law, it also has more variety. But in other situations, it has less variety than comparable4In relation to the degree of freedom given by the hinge, mast can be approximated to rigid bodies. Otherwise, they are not, and their ability to bend plays an important role in sailing performance. By comparable, what is meant here is that they are of the same material and height and are used in the same kind of boats. But importantly, a comparable fixed mast should be deck-stepped and not keel-stepped. On the other hand, the fact that foldable masts cannot be keel-stepped brings their overall variety down since they cannot be used on large cruising yachts where high compressive stresses occur. fixed masts. In heavy weather, the lower variety is due exactly to the hinge that gives that extra degree of freedom.

Back to our rusty screw. It’s stuck. It has no degrees of freedom. Spraying with WD-40® will free it. We can unscrew it. And when we do, it both rotates and translates (comes up). This means it should have two degrees of freedom. It has only one. Its rotation and translation are tightly coupled.

Coupling removes degrees of freedom.

Decoupling

The history of information technologies can be seen as a punctuated increase in the degrees of freedom — a history of decoupling. Content decouples from medium, representations decouple from mirroring reality, software decouples from hardware, interfaces decouple from infrastructure, data decouples from applications, and content decouples from the host.

Continue reading →

  • 1
    The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom, but together with the shoulder and the hand, 21.
  • 2
    Perry, B. N., Moran, C. W., Armiger, R. S., Pasquina, P. F., Vandersea, J. W., & Tsao, J. W. (2018). Initial Clinical Evaluation of the Modular Prosthetic Limb. Frontiers in Neurology, 9, 153. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2018.00153
  • 3
    According to the equipartition theorem.
  • 4
    In relation to the degree of freedom given by the hinge, mast can be approximated to rigid bodies. Otherwise, they are not, and their ability to bend plays an important role in sailing performance. By comparable, what is meant here is that they are of the same material and height and are used in the same kind of boats. But importantly, a comparable fixed mast should be deck-stepped and not keel-stepped. On the other hand, the fact that foldable masts cannot be keel-stepped brings their overall variety down since they cannot be used on large cruising yachts where high compressive stresses occur.

Cohesion Spectrum

This essay is part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series.

We can’t deal with most things in life on our own. We don’t have a large enough repertoire of responses to all the stimuli of the environment. We get together and form tribes, communities, companies, networks, states, or, in other words, wholes. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the saying goes.

This aphorism is often attributed to Aristotle, while, more likely, it came in this form much later, possibly through Gestalt psychology. Whatever the source, it seems popular and further amplified by those trying to explain concepts such as system and emergence.

While widespread and evocative, the saying doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It yields at greater and parts. When it comes to parts, for social systems, it’s not whole and parts but rather a whole of other wholes. System of systems. And systems formation does not work with a whole-part scheme.1When it comes to social systems, system formation is a matter of system/environment differentiation, which also applies to subsystems. It “does not involve the decomposition of a “whole” into “parts,” in either the conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partition).” See Luhmann, N. (2013). Theory of Society, Volume 2 (R. Barrett, Trans.). Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16878

Regarding greater, the “whole is neither more nor is it less than the sum of its parts: it is different,” wrote Heinz von Foerster in 1976.2 von Foerster, H. (2003). Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors. In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (pp. 261–271). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21722-3_11 (Original work published 1976)  Later, in an interview, he offered another clarification by simply modifying the popular saying and giving an example:

I would add the following correction to this principle. You require an additional measurement function for this: The measure of the sum of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts. One is the measure of the sum; the other is the sum of the measures. Take, for example, the measurement function “to square,” which makes this immediately apparent. I have two parts, one is a, the other b. Now I have the measure of the sum of the parts. What does that look like? a + b as the sum of the parts squared, gives us a2+2ab+b2. Now I need the sum of the measures of the parts, and with this I have the measure of a(=a2) and the measure of b(=b2): a2+b2. Now I claim that the measure of the sums of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts and state that: a2+b2+2ab is greater than a2+b2.

With “the measure of the sum of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts,” the aphorism makes more sense, and when the whole in question is a social system, variety is a good measure. The whole has (potentially) more variety than the sum of the varieties of the agents making up the whole.3 This follows the mainstream notion that people are part of the social system. We can entertain another possibility, defended by Luhmann, that people, while structurally coupled with the social systems, are part of their environment, while the social systems emerge from closed networks of communications. The LORV still applies, but this time, it is due to the variety of communications compared with the variety of the system and the irritations it has to respond to.

Agents can get more protection, respond more successfully to external stimuli, and achieve more ambitious goals. That’s, of course, the law of requisite variety.

Forming a whole brings one of the biggest problems every society and generation has faced since there have been people on the planet: how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. But let’s keep this moral box closed for now and focus on a related question: how does the system maintain identity, function, and viability?

The whole, be it a tribe, organization, network, or state, stays a whole as long as it has cohesion. Cohesion is brought about by natural forces and artificial tools and technologies, as elaborated in another essay from this series.

The way cohesion is maintained varies. For some social systems, it is through command and control. On the other extreme are systems where coordination mechanisms are technical standards and protocols, and autonomy is only reduced by participatory interoperability constraints. Between these extremes, there are different zones corresponding to idealized versions of actual social systems, forming a cohesion spectrum.

The CABIN model

The CABIN model proposed here distinguishes five zones in the cohesion spectrum.

Continue reading →

  • 1
    When it comes to social systems, system formation is a matter of system/environment differentiation, which also applies to subsystems. It “does not involve the decomposition of a “whole” into “parts,” in either the conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partition).” See Luhmann, N. (2013). Theory of Society, Volume 2 (R. Barrett, Trans.). Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16878
  • 2
    von Foerster, H. (2003). Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors. In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (pp. 261–271). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21722-3_11 (Original work published 1976)
  • 3
    This follows the mainstream notion that people are part of the social system. We can entertain another possibility, defended by Luhmann, that people, while structurally coupled with the social systems, are part of their environment, while the social systems emerge from closed networks of communications. The LORV still applies, but this time, it is due to the variety of communications compared with the variety of the system and the irritations it has to respond to.

Cohesion Forces and Tools

This article is part of the series on Autonomy and Cohesion. It is the second part of the basic overview of the balance. If you haven’t read the previous part, I’d recommend doing so before reading further.

Cohesion forces

Liquids and solids are in those states because there are cohesion forces bonding the molecules together. The main cohesion forces currently studied in physics are the van der Waals forces, dipole-dipole interactions, hydrogen bonding, and ionic bonding. In socio-technical systems, there are cohesion forces too. Those forces are way more complex and less studied. Cohesion in socio-technical systems is not only due to natural forces. Tools, technologies, and artifacts can significantly contribute too. They bring direct and also systemic effects. We’ll go to the cohesion tools and technologies after we briefly review some cohesion forces and factors. Cohesion forces and factors are difficult or impossible to influence, which is what makes them different from cohesion tools and technologies.

There are personal cohesion factors like the need for safety, the need to belong to a social group, to reduce uncertainty, and the need to increase self-esteem. Such needs make us form clubs, tribes, communities, organizations, and networks.

Shared values and beliefs are strong cohesion forces, and those can include the shared value of autonomy.

There are also social identity cohesion forces. We tend to identify, sometimes strongly, with sports clubs, ethnic groups, communities, professions, organizations, or religions. In some situations, compassion, loyalty, and empathy play a bigger role. In others, completely different forces. For example, typical personal cohesion forces in social networks are the need for self-expression, validation, and recognition, as well as the fear of missing out.

In every socio-technical system, there are internal and external cohesion factors and forces. The personal cohesion forces work both within organizations and networks, although they have different subsets and strengths. Typical internal organizational cohesion forces are organizational identity, internal operational dependencies, shared resources, synergy, and efficiency. In networks, cohesion forces and factors are proximity, transitivity, and preferential attachment, and in social networks, there are many additional ones, such as shared interest and shared aversion.

Which brings us to the external cohesion factors.
Continue reading →

Autonomy and Cohesion

The viability and welfare of socio-technical systems depend on their ability to balance autonomy and cohesion.

Is that true for other systems? Yes, it is remarkably universal. It works for biological systems like bacteria or elephants and social systems like packs of wolves, termites or beehives. However, this series focuses on socio-technical systems such as organizations, governments, and networks.

Autonomy brings adaptability and short-term effectiveness.

Cohesion brings efficiency and long-term effectiveness.

In viable systems, the balance between autonomy and cohesion is well maintained at all levels. And they have a way to restore it when it is disturbed.

Thinking in terms of dynamics of essential balances, one of which is that between autonomy and cohesion, has benefits over the usual dilemmas such as centralized/decentralized, hierarchical/flat, waterfall/agile and suchlike. If you are curious, you may watch this webinar for a bit more details or check out the book for an in-depth exploration. In the following series of articles, I’ll expand on topics only briefly mentioned in the book, such as the way the balance works outside organizations, how different systems differ by the way in which cohesion is achieved, and how some cohesion technologies achieve cohesion without reducing autonomy. Then, I’ll move on to decentralization and other topics. But we need to cover the basics first, which is what this and the next article will do.

What is meant by the balance between autonomy and cohesion, and how does it work?
Continue reading →

Requisite Hypocrisy

The city is charged with tension and a sense of urgency. After years of oppression, people’s frustration has reached its boiling point. The streets are flooded with bodies, united in their demand for equality. As you navigate through the crowd, you are just one among the countless anonymous faces. Only those next to you can see you and hear you.

The air is thick with determination and rhythmic chants. Every step brings you closer to the center square, where a stage stands as a symbol of hope and a platform for change.

You ascend the stage. A hush falls over the crowd. All eyes are fixed on the figure that has emerged from their midst. Now everybody can see you. You are given a mike. Now everybody can hear you. You are no longer equal, but only this way you can make the case for equality and help it happen.

Means rarely share values with goals. It can be temporary, just a learning stage, a Wittgenstanian ladder you can throw away after you climb up. Or, an ostensibly necessary compromise, like the oikonomia (same word as economy) in the Orthodox church, where you can deviate from the letter of the law to adhere to the spirit of the law. But in many cases, it is a necessity. A requisite hypocrisy.

You need a platform from which to talk against platforms.
Continue reading →

Link & Think

This blog started in January 2011. That was 13 years ago. Many readers assured me the content was valuable and has aged well. To help new readers find their way, today I published a short Reader Guide to the blog.

It’s time to experiment with new forms of publishing. I’m now launching Link&Think.

PKM (Part 2): Landscape

If you look to the east, you’ll see the Outliners Forest. It is a magical place where branches and leaves can talk to each other. Trees can do that, too, using the fungal network that entangles their roots. You can hear various bird songs, but what grabs the attention is the screech of the spaced parrots.

The Outliners Forest covers part of the Markdown Valley, yet the valley stretches over a much bigger area. The soil is fertile there. If you walk around, you can find all kinds of plants. A few knowledge streams go through the forest. The bark of some trees around the streams is chewed out by beavers who build dams further down to keep as much water area to themselves as possible before the streams flow into the river down the Markdown Valley.

The river flows fast at first, but it slows down when it leaves the Markdown Valley and enters the Canvas Canyon. Intricate drawings cover the walls of the canyon. If you come closer, you’ll see that the drawings are made by the slime mould. It is a bit like the fungal networks of the Outliner Forest, but the legend has it that the slime mould is so intelligent that it can solve any problem.

White clouds cover the sky above. They resemble fluffy thought bubbles, float gently, and seem deceivingly light. Yet, everybody knows they can carry a lot and expand to cover the sky from end to end.

Weary travelers usually enter the Landscape of Personal Knowledge Management from the south, from the Lonely Elephant Savanna. It is a place where one can reflect and prepare for the wondrous adventure that awaits them in the Outliners Forest, the Markdown Valley, and the Canvas Canyon.


Continue reading →

PKM (Part 1): The Explosion

When the virus hit the planet, it induced other parallel pandemics. They did not spread through the air and did not require physical proximity. They spread online. Some were conspiracy theories, of which a good part related to the virus itself. Others were political propaganda, already successful but now more than ever, seizing the opportunity that people got more susceptible and spent more time online.

A less-known yet undeniably astonishing parallel pandemic was the explosion of Personal Knowledge Management tools. There were a dozen PKM tools by the end of 2019. Then suddenly, something happened. In the second half of 2020, there were already more than 50. New ones kept popping up almost every month in the following two years. What makes it even more bizarre is that unlike viruses, which take hours and days to spread, the development of a software tool is a combination of entrepreneurial, engineering and design activities that need much more time to produce usable output. When we add to this the time for users to learn about a tool, be attracted to it, try it, adopt it, and contribute with their feedback, this quick spread looks even more incredible.

So why the sudden interest? Was that a dormant demand? Or could it be that this breed of tools redefined themselves after a series of innovations and created an entirely new market? Was it the rise of interest in Zettelkasten that caused the rise of PKM tools, or was it the other way around?

Continue reading →

What’s wrong with…?

We see patterns, create patterns, and think in patterns. Looking back at what I’ve written through the years in this blog, I see a macro pattern I can call, for the lack of a better name, the “What’s wrong with…” pattern.

The object is usually some common practice or a discipline that has established certain norms and stabilized them through training, certification, and tool design. It could also be a mainstream way of thinking about or doing something. Its object is usually taken for granted, rarely questioned if at all. If I find it harmless or slightly problematic, I don’t bother writing about it, but when it’s more fundamental and detrimental, then there is motivation.

So, this will not be a normal post but rather a signpost, a collection of pointers to posts with that pattern.

“What’s wrong with” is actually in the name of one article, What’s wrong with best practices. It could’ve been in titles of many more. Yet, it’s good to be careful here because the context is important as Tim Minchin convincingly reminded us with his song Cont.

The non-exhaustive list will look like this:

What’s wrong with…

And the last post about requirements may sound in praise of principles, so I should probably write about what’s wrong with principles. Spoiler: nothing if they a descriptive, but almost always they are prescriptive.

The above list is not the full “What’s wrong with” list, but just that part that made it to the blog. Otherwise, my “what’s wrong with” list is longer. It includes platitudes such as “you cannot manage what you cannot measure,” “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” influential averages like “per capita GDP” in economics or “personas” in design thinking, “Agile” and “SAFe,” “mental models” and many more. Some of them I have covered in Essential Balances, but only briefly, not to distract from the main focus of the book.

Data-centric project requirements?

Several times last week, in different circumstances, I was asked a question containing these three words or their synonyms. That’s not new. It happened previously. But this concentration triggered the write-up that follows. Nothing original and neither is the reason to write it:

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

— André Gide

Let’s first clarify what is data-centric and then see why it doesn’t go well with project and even less so with requirements.

 

What is data-centric?

The short answer is in these three1Check out all five principles data-centric principles. principles:

  1. Data is self-describing and does not rely on an application for interpretation and meaning.
  2. Data is expressed in open, non-proprietary formats.
  3. Applications are allowed to visit the data, perform their magic and express the results of their process back into the data layer.

I find these three are the most important data-centric principles, but another reason for selecting them is that they are context-independent. The data-centric manifesto they are taken from is currently with an enterprise-only focus2 After the publication of this article, the scope of the manifesto was adapted, and now it includes the other two scales. . Yes, the problem they address is most severely felt – or rather not felt because of ignoring or misattributing the symptoms – in large organizations. Yet, what is behind these principles is equally important for personal information management and on the open web. Let’s go quickly through all three levels then, from big to small, and see what data-centric means for the world wide web, for corporate IT, and then for personal information management.

The web was designed to be a decentralized system where the agreement on a few standards, basically HTTP and HTML, enabled free choice on just about anything else. People were finally free to express themselves and to choose from where and how to get information. They got free to innovate on building new browsers, websites, and whatever web applications and services they can think of. A system like this, with a self-maintained organization, can work well and have a natural tendency for virtuous cycles. In other words, it can amplify goodness and develop its own immune system for whatever threatens its viability. All it needs is to have the right kind of enabling constraints, for example, the standards I mentioned above, and to allow autonomy of all subsystems. This is the balance between autonomy and cohesion. It works for animals, people, tribes, organizations, society, and a socio-technical system like the web.

So the web flourished as a decentralized system, where people were free to choose and create more choices. And then one day the platforms appeared. They offered good and free services. Or at least they looked good and free at first. In reality, they were (and are) neither good nor free. The platforms are not nearly as good information providers as it was the decentralized web before them. What we see is not what we are looking for, but what their algorithms decide to show us. And the services of these platforms are not free. Quite the contrary. We pay with our data, and we pay twice. Once by being their content providers and a second time by giving them our personal data. Importantly, we don’t give them only our current personal data but also future ones, by allowing them to track our online behaviour. Who’s them? I’m talking of course about IT giants like Google, but the best example of extreme centralization and lock-in is Facebook3This has many facets. Facebook can be looked at as a very successful aggregator or as a prime example of a new form of capitalism.. In this way, the web, a decentralized system, shaped by the users, turned into a hyper-centralized system, shaped by a few powerful corporations4The centralization of the web is not only about the content but also about the infrastructure. The convenience of the cloud increased the dependency of both individual users and companies on the strategy and fate of a few powerful providers, namely Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.. It also formed users’ expectations. In 2019 Facebook and Google announced that it was now possible to copy images from Facebook to Google Photos. That’s the new norm for innovation. Only a few people noted the absurdity. As Ruben Verbourgh pointed out, 50 years after being able to send video signals over a distance of 380,000km, we celebrate that we can finally move a photo by 11km (the distance between Facebook and Google headquarters). A bit dystopian, isn’t it?

Yet, the problems with this centralization are not widely understood. For example, very few people realize how platform-based political propaganda works, and that’s why it works so well. Even fewer relate it to the hyper-centralization of the web. Same with fake news and so on. Maybe the least understood of the damages is how it suffocates innovation. It’s easy to illustrate. Even when you use Google for product search, where it should excel after so many years of work, huge investments, massive feedback, and the use of language models with trillion parameters, it’s really lame. Try searching for a bike below a certain price and certain weight. You’ll get results for bikes above that, but okay, then you can fix that using the shopping filter. Currently, that will not allow you to specify the weight even though it’s available in most technical specifications published online. But even if they add it at some point, the final selection will still exclude the majority of the offerings by smaller companies. As a result, you can’t get an answer to this simple question.

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  • 2
    After the publication of this article, the scope of the manifesto was adapted, and now it includes the other two scales.
  • 3
    This has many facets. Facebook can be looked at as a very successful aggregator or as a prime example of a new form of capitalism.
  • 4
    The centralization of the web is not only about the content but also about the infrastructure. The convenience of the cloud increased the dependency of both individual users and companies on the strategy and fate of a few powerful providers, namely Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.