Friday Apr 04, 2008
...doesn’t mean it’s a new idea.
This is the first lesson I learned from our annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference (a.k.a. the WWERC) in February. We picked the theme “The Power of Communities” for the conference because open source and the communities that support it are a key part of Sun’s strategy. I believe that communities are also critical to the success of academic, administrative and research computing.
For each of these segments, there are community development projects at various stages of maturity. In the academic computing arena, Sakai, a free, community source collaboration and learning environment, is already fairly well established. It's in production at over 150 institutions and being piloted by over 100 more. Kuali , a suite of open source software for administrative computing, is a more recent effort. In the research community, sharing open source code has been a key part of doing research for years, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
So given that there are all these academic communities, and given that we were just about to hold an education focused on the power of communities, I thought we should eat our own dog food and actually launch an online community of our own. So we created one on Ning.com, and invited all of the confirmed WWERC attendees to join.
Of that original list of about 500 people, 180 have joined. Of those, a small number connected online before the conference. Since the conference, however, activity in the community has dwindled. Maybe it will pick up again before the 2009 WWERC. I don't know. But we're looking into ways to re-energize it.
What I’m learning is that communities—be they in the physical or virtual worlds—don't just happen overnight. It takes work to be successful. It requires a commitment of time and money and an offer of value to (and from) the community members themselves. The difference, of course, between physical and virtual communities is that in the latter, it's easier to significantly increase the number of people in a community as well as geographic scope (among the digital “haves” of the world, at lest). But as I wrote in a previous blog posting, just having a bunch of people in a community isn’t useful by itself. It can simply result in a modern-day Tower of Babel.
So I’m going to document, right here in my blog, our journey of creating a purposeful online community. Now that the original catalyst for creating our online community (i.e., the WWERC) is over, the first step is to define what this community is for, in the long term. Is it a place for us to distribute information about Sun in education? Listen to our customers? Get them excited about Sun, our products and technologies? Give them a place to ask their colleagues questions? Let them give us suggestions for better products? Or all of the above?
First, I’ve got a bunch of questions for you all out there:
What's the most effective way to tap into the collective wisdom of the community? Such tools as social bookmarking like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon are interesting, but I don’t want to know what the whole world is bookmarking, I want to know what members of my ERC community are bookmarking. I want to know what books and articles they're reading, as well.
How can we get members of the community to contribute time and insights to Sun as well as to each other? What is reasonable given our target demographic? (I’ll write a future blog about what I’m learning about this from a blog-soon-to-be-book called Groundswell from a couple of Forrester analysts, Charline Li and Josh Bernoff.)
What technologies or platforms should we embrace? For example, we chose Ning to host our first generation of the ERC community. We needed something that was fast to launch and global in reach. Facebook is primarily focused on the US, and doesn’t necessarily have a good reputation among our target audience. Still, it has a huge membership. So should we sit on top of Facebook or be standalone? Should we link to Facebook or other communities, and if so, how?
If anyone has insights into these questions I’d love to hear from you. After all, just because these are new thoughts or questions to me, it doesn’t mean the community hasn’t already come up with the answers. That really is the power of community.
Tuesday Mar 18, 2008
I just finished a small home remodel that gives me a dedicated office (a "lair" as one of my friends called it -- a small lair.) As I was moving in, I discovered a quote book that I kept while in college. In it is a parable called "The man who sold hot dogs." I don't know who wrote it but it certainly applies to the unusual economic times we're in.
There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.
He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.
He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers.
But he sold good hot dogs.
He put up signs on the highway telling how good they were.
He stood on the side of the road and cried: "Buy a hot dog, Mister?"
And people bought.
He increased his meat and bun orders.
He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.
he finally got his son home from college to help him out.
But then something happened.
His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio?
Haven't you been reading the newspapers?
There's a big depression.
The European situation is terrible.
The domestic situation is worse."
Whereupon the father thought, "Well, my son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know."
So the father cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.
And his hot dog sales fell almost overnight.
"You're right, son," the father said to the boy.
"We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."
Thursday Mar 13, 2008
As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation
at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and
Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient
as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how
open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks
me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)
Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about
education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:
"Mass
education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither
the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural
education—indeed , all education—has to be totally
reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for
customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups
and even individuals."
We are approaching a time when we will be
able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer
connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given
the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the
Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning
through distant online mentors.
This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.
The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.
Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year
collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds
Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work,
and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range
of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content,
and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.
Monday Feb 25, 2008
In
the original Tower
of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language
and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that
would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as
powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude
of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of
Babel project was abandoned.
In the 21st century remake of
this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites.
Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the
communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to
build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to
interact with millions of people, so members create groups within
these larger communities. (Facebook
now hosts thousands of groups
appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos
in Oxford to Friends
of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create
separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn
(for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence
in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only
to discover that leaving
isn't as easy as joining.
Yet social networking as a
technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human
strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the
cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more
powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or
academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their
members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon
which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that
our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be
exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone
technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?
Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our
annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San
Francisco . We've got an incredible array
of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're
streaming the main
presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the
link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available
asynchronously for later playback as well.
The first Tower of
Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps
these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive
use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists
between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world,
it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to
crumble.
By the way, here's the original story from the Book
of Genesis:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of
one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,
that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them
thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we
be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord
came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded.
And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language
they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be
impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound
their language, that they may not understand one another's
speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face
of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is
the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord
scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Wednesday Feb 20, 2008
Sun
has long held that today's student is tomorrow's developer—and in
many cases, today's developer as well. We've put our money where our
mouth is by giving away our software, including the training that
goes with it, to student developers at no charge. More about that in
a moment.
We
understand that such tools and training are an important piece—but
just one piece—of an overall academic program. The field of
computer science isn't about tools alone. Tools change. Languages
change. Java didn't exist 15 years ago. Does that make a Computer
Science degree granted before 1995 invalid? Of course not. So it's
good that Microsoft is making a
first small step
at making their developer tools available to college students at a
subset of universities around the world (although it's too bad that
high school students still have to go through their teachers to get
these tools). It's a good thing, because it better equips students to
compare proprietary development tools with open source alternatives.
It may even result in the improvement of open source development
tools.
But
for the rest of the world—including high school students—Sun is
more than happy to provide our robust set of tools and training for
no cost. We've been offering our Free
and Open Source tools
to developers, including all student developers, for quite
some time now. Our Academic
Developer Program
gives student developers free
downloads
of Sun developer tools like NetBeans, Java Studio Creator, Sun Studio
and Sun's most innovative and popular software products for academic
use. Of particular interest to a generation brought up with video
games, we recently even open sourced the Project
Darkstar environment
for creating massively scalable online games, as well as the Project
Wonderland
toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds.
We've
been sharing our source code for years. Sun open sourced over 10
million lines of code in 2005 with the OpenSolaris
project. (The Solaris
Operating System
is also supported on over 900 x86
and SPARC platforms.) The
OpenSPARC
project is making the hardware source code of the recently announced
UltraSPARC T1 processor available under an Open Source license. Those
are just a few of the many projects
to which Sun contributes. And of course there's Java,
invented by Sun in 1995. Java has become the essential ingredient of
the digital experience for hundreds of millions of people in all
walks of life, all over the planet. Sun recently released the source
code for Java
Platform Standard Edition,
Java
Platform Micro Edition
and Java
Platform Enterprise Edition
under open source licenses.
Of
course, simply providing tools is not enough. You have to provide
training, too. Through the Sun
Academic Initiative,
schools become authorized to deliver training on Sun technologies to
their faculty, staff, and students. The Sun Academic Initiative also
offers non-profit academic institutions access to free Web-based
training and curricula, including courses in the latest Java and
Solaris technologies. The initiative gives students at more than
3,000 institutions around the world a competitive edge as they enter
the workforce.
Sun
also collaborates with universities throughout the world to bring
open content to market. For example, the Java
Education and Development Initiative (JEDI),
a collaborative project with the University of Philippines, aims to
make high-quality, industry-endorsed IT and computer science course
material available for free.
Sun
collaborated with the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and
Deakin University in Australia to develop BlueJ,
a free Java IDE specifically designed to teach object-oriented
programming with Java. BlueJ recently
celebrated more than 3 million downloads. Project
Greenfoot
is a new development environment aimed at bringing programming into
high schools and university entry courses by making it easy to build
graphical interactive applicaitons such as games and siulations.
Again, it's freely available.
Companies
should not charge students for development tools, training and
community, or make them only available on a limited basis. The
Participation Age calls for inclusion and investment in the next
generations to foster innovation. The open source community and Sun
have been doing this for years. We're glad that other companies, like
Microsoft, are realizing this as well. Free and open source software
is the wave of the future. Kids shouldn't be learning anything
else—certainly not closed, proprietary
technology.
So
maybe Microsoft is taking the first baby steps toward open sourcing
their tools and technology so that developers of all ages can have
access to them. We'd be glad to help.
Friday Feb 08, 2008
Since I've lived my entire voting life in California, I've grown quite
used to not having my vote matter in the selection of my party's
candidate for President. California's primary used to be in June of each presidential election year, but by June, voters in the other states
had already selected the nominee.
This year was different. California moved its primary to February 5, and for the first time, my vote counted. As
evidence of this, I received my first piece a mail a few weeks ago from
the Obama campaign asking for my vote (and not just my money.) The
ironic thing is that in every other race where my vote didn't matter I
had a firm opinion about who to vote for. This week—when my vote
mattered—I was undecided until the end. I reminded myself of the Devo
song "Freedom of choice":
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.
Perhaps it's should be the theme song for Democratic
Party voters who can't seem to make up their collective minds as Obama
wins one state, and then Clinton wins the next.
It may seem like a stretch, but this Devo theme song could also
apply to many organizations as they consider their future use of open
source technology. In the 2007 Campus Computing Survey, Kenneth Green
comments on the "affirmative ambivalence" of U.S. universities as they
consider Open Source applications. No one likes to be
locked into a single vendor (freedom FROM choice), but they're ambivalent about moving toward freedom OF choice.
By the way, if my 9- and 13-year-old kids are any indicator, Obama has
the youth vote locked up. My third grader said they held a vote in his
class of 17. Obama won with 14, Hilary 3 and McCain 0.
Wednesday Jan 23, 2008
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
This classic New Yorker cartoon (which you can see here, since I don't want to risk copyright infringement) captured one of the earliest virtues of the Internet: the anonymity enjoyed by its users, which gave them the freedom to say anything, or be anyone. But like most virtues, take it too far and it become a vice. The most extreme example is the sad, sick story of the troubled Missouri teen who killed herself because of a hoax perpetuated on MySpace by a mother and her daughter masquerading as a teenage boy. Even though I'm a news junkie, I somehow missed this tragedy when it first came to light over a year ago. What finally caught my eye this past week was the agreement between MySpace and legal authorities in 49 states for some kind of age verification and other child
protection measures. These measures were partially spawned by what has become known as the "MySpace Suicide," but it's clearly not the only case where anonymity has been abused on the Internet with tragic results.
I'd like to replace the complete anonymity of the early Internet with accountability and confidentiality. I use joe.hartley@sun.com as my AIM sign-on. It's easy for
people to remember, and they know who I am. That of course doesn't mean I'm actually that person; it could be an imposter using my email address. That's where some kind of validation or federated
identity system needs to be created—a trademark of sorts that proves that I am who I claim to be. Of course, we can't completely do away with anonymity on the Internet. It has its place, especially in communities related to providing people with online support for medical conditions or domestic abuse. But in the majority of areas, we've got to start demanding accountability of online sources and identities.
Most
importantly, we need to teach our children (and some adults) that you can't assume that someone you meet in the virtual world is the person they say they are. It could just be another dog.
Tuesday Dec 18, 2007
Like
most workplaces in America, coffee service in the breakrooms at Sun
is "make it yourself." The coffee machine brews coffee
directly into a vacuum-pump urn so that the coffee doesn't sit there
in a carafe and burn. When the urn is full, you get a strong flow
with each press of the button. When
the pot is almost empty, the stream of coffee into your cup is weak.
When it's empty, it gurgles loudly and spits
coffee remnants into your cup. That gurgle is the audible signal
that you're the one selected to make the next pot of coffee. If you
don't want to make the next pot, you stop pressing the button so the
"make-the-next-pot-of-coffee" gurgle alarm is triggered by
the next unsuspecting coffee drinker.
We
must have a lot of people in my corner of the building who stop
pressing the button as soon as the coffee stream is weak, because I
seem to brew about one pot of coffee to every cup I drink. I've put
signs out asking people to brew a new pot when the urn is empty. I've
tacked up cartoons. I've complained loudly. Nothing
seems to change my ratio.
This
is a silly example, but an example nonetheless, of the “Tragedy of
the Commons.” The concept is this: whenever there's a shared
resource that individuals benefit from without sharing the cost, the
potential for overuse or abuse grows. Each individual tries to get
just a little bit more than their fair share, thinking that no one
else will really notice. Eventually, everyone does notice the
collective impact of these individuals' decisions--when
the shared resource is depleted or gone.
A
better example for me is happening closer to home.
I
live in a more rural part of the San Francisco Bay Area. I've known
since I first moved there that the State of California was going to
"improve" the highway that runs near our home. The state
has now published its plan, and this two-lane
road is going to become six lanes in some places and 4 lanes in
others. I don't think any of my neighbors thought that "improvement"
meant turning our two-lane highway into a freeway.
In
order to stop the state's plans, we need to file a lawsuit and force
the state to complete a real environmental impact analysis and
report.
I've
never participated in a lawsuit before, so maybe I'm naive, but I've
been surprised to find myself having difficulty raising money for
legal fees from the “neighbors” affected by the state's project,
even though our real estate values will be adversely affected. We
each have an economic interest to defend, yet not everyone is willing
to contribute. Why? I think it's because of the “Tragedy of the
Commons” phenomenon. The thinking seems to be, "If my
economic interests will be defended by others willing to pick up the
costs, then why should I spend my money? I'll benefit from the
outcome without have to incur the cost."
But
that's a dangerous strategy. We can't depend on others to defend (or
pay for) our interests, because one day we'll turn around and find a
freeway in our front yard, or worse. Our participation on the
Internet, in particular, depletes our natural resources. I've heard
estimates that with
a billion people participating online today, the network consumes
more than 100 billion kilowatts of electricity and costs businesses
around $7.2 billion in utility bills annually. And those costs
trickle down to every one of us. (Not to mention our massive e-waste
problem.)
At
Sun, we're trying to mitigate our impact on the planet by reducing
our own carbon footprint, using alternative energies, greening our
datacenters, among other actions. (You can read about our philosophy
of eco-responsibility here.) One of the most important components of our plan is OpenEco.org, a new global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to
help participants assess, track, and compare business energy
performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation. It takes community-based approach to creatively solving our "commons" problem. Governments, universities, businesses and nonprofits need to jointly solve for the use and accountability of that natural resources if we are to succeed.
Now
if I could just find a way to get my co-workers to fill the gurgling
coffee pot.
Monday Oct 29, 2007
My oldest son is 12 and has attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He was diagnosed with that and
a couple of other learning disabilities when he was in kindergarten.
The great news is that through special education resources at our
local public school, he's been able to overcome his disabilities,
with the exception of some fine-motor skills such handwriting (or in
his case, the lack thereof).
Where we live, “middle school” runs
from the sixth grade to the eighth. Given that our
son had not only handwriting challenges but the everyday challenges
that most 10-and-11 year-olds face in getting themselves organized,
we jumped at the chance to put him in our middle school's “Laptop
Program” when he matriculated. The school forced us to buy an
overpriced laptop from a specific company that sells overpriced
products to schools, but we had high hopes that the program itself
would create an organizational paradise in the Hartley home and
overcome my son's handwriting issues.
Paradise was never found.
The laptop program was poorly thought
out. Although every teacher had to maintain a Web site that
documented nightly homework requirements, each teacher had a
different way of doing this. There was no consistency whatsoever.
Some teachers had too much homework and expected us to understand the
intricacies of their specific class Web site. Others barely updated
their sites. Even though the laptop forced upon us included a
calendar tool as part of its software package, the school didn't use
it. So instead of students subscribing to each class calendar and
then getting a single aggregated view of the calendar on their
laptops, we had to search six different Web sites every night to see
what homework was required. To add insult to injury, none of the
software tools used by the school's laptop program really required
the particular overpriced laptop that we'd been required to buy. All
of the software was Web-based. In other words, we could have accessed
it via any laptop running any operating system.
This is not a rant about the school.
What I learned in working with the teachers is that they have no time
or support to manage all of this technology. They work incredibly
long hours in the classroom, so any work they do on the computer has
to happen after hours. They assign too much homework, and don't
understand how to turn a computer into a learning tool, but that's a
subject for a future blog entry.
The point is that the laptop didn't
deliver on Paradise. Sure, it was expensive and booted up and ran
programs and accessed email and the Internet. The problem was that
we, as parents, had placed too much hope on a single tool. A laptop
doesn't teach—teachers do. Learning how to use a word processor is
not learning how to write. Nor is learning how to create a
PowerPoint presentation is not learning how to present or to think or
to persuade. In fact, as a tool, a television with
compelling content can probably teach more than a computer with
access to the Internet and an office automation suite.
This is why I'm so supportive of
Curriki.org. Curriki is an
online environment that's about sharing curriculum created by
teachers and other teaching professionals. It's free. It's global.
It's a community of educators helping other educators with
high-quality teaching resources that may or may not be delivered by
computers, but that will focus on the purpose of education:
learning topics, rather than learning tools. Current offerings on
Curriki range from lesson plans, assessments and media clips to
complete textbooks, all available at no cost. Anyone can join
Curriki. In fact, Curriki and the AARP are
collaborating to encourage retired educators who are subject
matter experts to share their curriculum, review content curricula,
and help train teachers. The focus is the content.
When he was in seventh grade, we
moved our son to a school that had smaller classes. His entire seventh
grade class is now 22 students. They do not allow the use of laptops
in the classroom. Despite that, we've noticed no
adverse impact on my son's academic performance. The lack of computers is, however,
forcing him to improve his handwriting skills.
My son's story is far from
over. We'll see how it develops, but the one thing we've learned so
far is this: The tool is not the teacher.
Tuesday Oct 16, 2007
When I started college, "Alcohol Awareness" meant trying to figure
out where you could buy beer underage. By the time I was a senior,
however, colleges began to combat underage and binge drinking through
"awareness training." I remember the mnemonic they used was H.A.L.T. It meant don't drink when you're Hungry, Angry,
Lonely or Tired.
Fast forward to now.
I've decided that this same approach needs to
apply to something almost as addictive as alcohol and potentially even
more frequently abused (at least during office hours): Email.
Never send email when you're hungry, angry, lonely or tired.
Especially when you're angry and/or tired. (For me, these two mental states
become highly correlated.) I find it amazing how email brings out the
passive-aggressive in people. People write things in person that they would never say in person. Or by phone, for that matter.
So H.A.L.T. on the email already.
Taking this to the next level is what some clever Intel engineers are advocating with "Zero-Email Fridays." Now there's an idea.
Tuesday Oct 09, 2007
I didn’t know much (or as much as I
should have) about World War II until I watched Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick's recent documentary, THE
WAR. WWII was repeatedly given short shrift in my world history
classes: by the time we got to the 20th century, too
little time was left in the school year to do it justice. I
knew the big story lines and the significance of places like
Guadalcanal and the beaches of Normandy , but I never really
understood the enormity of the challenge and the physical geography
that was affected until Ken Burns gave us the gift of his epic
documentary.
To make this film, Burns and his team
collected thousands of images and film sequences from hundreds of
archives around the world, including a few personal archives. He
describes the process in this
video. “It's a digital world,” he says.
This fact—and the importance of
finding a way to preserve our shared cultural history—hit home for
me, in a very personal way, this past weekend.
Do you recognize the people in this photograph?
|
Me neither.
I found this image as I was scanning
some of my stepfather’s photographs this weekend. He died this
summer. He fought with the Army in WWII in Europe. I have a bunch
of pictures of people and places that are nameless and dateless. Some
gruesome. Most faded. All real. My stepfather
earned a little extra money during the War by developing photographs
for others, and he kept copies of the ones he liked. (I've included his
favorite, which he called “War & Peace” according to the notes on
the back of the photo, at the end of this post.) |
I’m not really sure what to do with
these photos, so I’m preserving the ones I like by scanning them
and storing them electronically. I figure it’s the best way to
share them with the extended family that may be interested in them.This summer, I heard a presentation
from Dave Price, head of Systems and e-Research Services the Bodleian
Library at Oxford. The Bodleian Library has been around for some
400 years, and like many of the big old libraries on the planet, has
as a primary mission the preservation of scholarly and other
materials.
For much of the past 400 years, library
and preservation technology or science hasn’t changed all that much.
The first card catalog seems to have been invented at the Bodleian in
1674. Dewey invented his decimal system in 1876. The process of
cataloging and preserving texts has been around for a while. But
over the past 50 years, things started changing dramatically because
of the sheer volume of content combined with multiple and competing
recording technologies such as microfilm and microfiche. Today, most
content is “born digital,” and everything that is not (like my
stepdad's WWII photos) is being converted to digital formats.
It would be
easy to assume that preserving digital content would be easier than
the previous “analog” or paper versions. After all, paper starts
decomposing after so many years. But bits (of data) rot as well.
Disks and tape wear out and fail. Protocols and document formats
change. Try opening a word processing document from 10 years ago,
and you’ll see how big the problem will be in 400.
As a result, the management and
preservation task facing organizations like the Bodleian Library, The
Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque
nationale de France
is immense. These institutions must come to grips with the new
challenge that digital content creates if this content is to survive
and be readable by those in the next 400 years. That's why Sun and
some of the greatest libraries on the planet have founded
the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG).
We hope to help these new “cybrarians” form a community to
share best practices for preserving and archiving important research
and cultural heritage materials and to help design new products and
solutions.
I guarantee that our Sun engineers
weren't thinking about the problem of preserving scholarly documents
for the next 400 years when they invented some of the great
hardware and software that they have. But regardless of whether
it’s library documents, my stepdad’s pictures of WWII or
medical images to help cure diseases, it’s great to a part of
making—or at least preserving—history.
Thursday Oct 04, 2007
“What do you do for a living?”
It's a typical American question that was posed to me in an atypical
setting and by an audience that for me, answers the question “Why do
you care so much about today's students, since they don't buy your
products?”
I volunteer as an Assistant Scoutmaster
for my son's Boy Scout troop and go to summer camp for a week immediately
following the Fourth of July. The camp food is awful, so one
night I convinced my 12-year-old to do the
horseback-ride-sleep-under-the-stars experience. He didn't know that
my real motivation was gastronomic: the ride included a real steak
barbecue rather than Sysco processed food.
The camp employees who prepped the horses, led
us on our ride and cooked the food are known as Wranglers.
My stereotype of “wranglers” is that they're not the sharpest
tools in the shed; otherwise they'd be doing something else. Also,
at Boy Scout camp you never really know the age of the staff, as they
span from high school to post-college. Between the dirt and natural
variation in maturity I had no idea how old our wranglers were.
When we sat down to eat, we made small talk, and the lead wrangler eventually asked me the “What do you do for a
living” question. When I evasively answered that I was in “the
computer business,” it set off an interesting conversation. He
admitted that he didn't know anything about computers but that one of
the other wranglers did and was actually writing a video game. All of
a sudden my son became very interested because he is very much into
video games and has been “writing” the story for a RPG. (I'm
still not quite sure what an RPG is, but I learned it stands for “role-playing game.”) The game-writing wrangler wouldn't disclose any
details of his game—or about his staff of 18 people—because we hadn't signed non-disclosure agreements. (Where are the
lawyers when you need them?)
At this point, the third wrangler, who
had remained silent so far, asked where I worked. When I told him
that I worked at Sun, the conversation took another twist. He began
to tell me things I didn't even know about my company and its
technology as it relates to Internet gaming. He then educated me
about the pros and cons of Java vs. Microsoft's Silverlight vs.
Macromedia something or other. I was amazed how much he knew about
all three–and he wasn't even the future video game designer mogul!
When dinner was over, I just had to ask
how old these wranglers were. The future media game mogul was 17.
The future industry analyst was 15. My effort to avoid camp food
became a real-life example of why we at Sun care about today's students even
though they don't directly buy our products. Today's student is
tomorrow's developer, customer and decision-maker. That much became
clear to me that night under the stars.
Thursday Sep 20, 2007
[Read More]
Wednesday Sep 12, 2007
I'm simultaneously excited and
perplexed by the social phenomena
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I guess the question is what are the expectatio...
A community does not have to be a single place. S...