I lost my brother the other day. Less than a month after losing my aunt, it is starting to feel like carelessness. And to be clear, neither of these deaths were down to Covid-19, at least not directly, and this column isn’t about Covid-19, at least not directly. But as I spent some virtual time alone with my brother’s closed casket, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a future that might seem dystopian, but was instead rather comforting.
My brother was my only sibling, so there’s only me now from that family unit. And he lived on the polar opposite side of the world, in DC, and so hard to reach at the best of times from my perch in Singapore. But Covid-19 had somehow rendered that distance meaningless; he could have just as easily been across the causeway in Malaysia, and quarantines would have made it almost impossible to be grave-side.
For me it was deja-vu backing up down the freeway.
When my aunt died in a British nursing home a few weeks ago, I could do nothing but send a few photos of her to a small mailing list of people unconnected to each other except through my aunt. (She wasn’t a real aunt, but as a childhood friend of my mother I had known her better and longer than most of my other relatives, and she had outlived most of those.) Most on the mailing list were not geeks, it’s safe to say, so those photos that did come back were usually upside down or sideways, which could have appeared disrespectful, but which would have amused my aunt. Her funeral was of course a small one, remote and ring-fenced by Covid-19, and I never got to hear what she had meant to others, or even see a photo of where she was buried. I had to sit alone with my grief, and read a few scraps from others on the adhoc mailing list about how the day went.
My brother’s death was quite different. My tech-savvy nephew had arranged for me to to spend some time alone near my brother’s casket via Facetime, which was oddly peaceful. And then, with the help of his friends, he hosted a memorial on Zoom. As the introductory music played over a tasteful drawing, I watched as a list of people signing on flashed up on the screen — by the time it started more than 200 people were aboard. I made it through my own eulogy and then watched dozens of others talk about my brother. Most of the people were those I had never met, but it was moving to hear them talk about him, revealing angles of my brother that were new to me, and refreshing, like uncovering hidden doors in a familiar house.
My brother and I, 2008
The tools aren’t perfect of course. I forgot to turn my video off after I had talked, and so I dread to think what I was doing for the rest of the gathering. And there were the inevitable glitches. But most important for me was that people were there, wherever they were from. Distance was no obstacle, and neither was familiarity. You never know who will turn up at a funeral: that’s what makes them so fascinating. The former lovers, the unacknowledged offspring, estranged spouses and feuding relatives, all may turn up. The wake is a more selective affair. But here in a virtual room were dozens of people who had heard about my brother’s death, and who could join in to share the memory of someone without fear of somehow not being close enough. It was egalitarian in the way that wakes usually aren’t; no one has to fuss over who to invite, and whether there are enough chairs or canapés to go around. Instead it becomes a festival, where anyone can pay tribute. No one was left out because of distance, either physical or familial, and that seemed to me to be something rather beautiful.
I don’t know what will happen when Covid-19 is tamed. I’m sure a lot more things will go back to normal than people predict. But if we take one lesson from the pandemic I feel it should be this: whether it’s a funeral, wedding, wake, birthday party, bluechip annual general meeting or parish council conclave, offer a virtual version too. Don’t let physical distance decide who has a seat and a voice. And don’t just put a camera in a corner of the room and live stream it. Give it some thought, as my nephew did for my brother. It made a world of a difference.
I’ve been wondering about the countries we haven’t heard from yet on Covid numbers, or which have just flown under the radar. What I call the dogs that haven’t barked. In short, who’s on the other side of the curve, and who isn’t?
The most interesting data I could find was at EndCoronavirus.org, a website put together by Yaneer Bar-Yam from the New England Complex Systems Institute. They have collected together data from 72 countries and plotted graphs of their curve flattening efforts. They’ve categorised the countries into three. Those which
have already beaten COVID-19 (where the curve is back to where it started)
are nearly there (where it’s half way down the slope)
need to take action (where it’s still near the peak
https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries
That’s interesting enough, but I wanted to get a sense of what that means. First off, I wanted to get a sense of how many people that is — how many people are in countries that have beaten COVID (I actually it’s a little early to say they have, I’m using Bar-Yam’s terminology), and how many people are living in countries which still need to take action?
So I did a bit of downloading and spreadsheeting. This is what we have:
where populations sit on the curve
So according to that data, more than half of the populations of the countries measured haven’t really started to tackle Covid-19. Gulp. There are some big countries in there:
Eight of the 10 most populous countries don’t score well
Now, you could quibble about which countries are at which stage, and some countries have clearly done more than others, but the curve doesn’t really lie. At least, it’s as good a yardstick as any.
So my next question was: how many people are we leaving out? Turns out quite a lot. The countries covered had a population of 5.9 billion, which leaves about 1.9 billion people unaccounted for. The website says that the “set of countries is certainly not an exhaustive list, but we do highlight the countries which we find to be interesting or important in some way.” It doesn’t say why it found them important and interesting. Possibly the data was clearer for those included. Hopefully they’ll add more countries once the data is clearer.
So what does the pie chart of people look like if we account for the missing two billion? We get this:
The missing quarter
The population in countries that haven’t started yet goes down to 42%, which is still a big chunk of humanity, while the ‘good guys’ account for about 23%. A quarter of the world’s population doesn’t appear at all.
So what happens if we put all this onto a map? Where are all these people?
The gray of Africa and Central Asia
It makes for grim viewing. Several things jump out:
The countries doing well are flattered by the presence of China. And Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea. In population terms the largest country outside APAC to get a star is Greece, with 10.4 million people. It does not look good.
The gray areas are a big concern. Very little data from Africa and Central Asia was ‘interesting or important’ enough to include in the study thus far. As we’ve read in the media, Africa is unprepared for Covid-19, where two countries account for nearly half of all tests carried out in Africa so far, according to data collected by Reuters.
The other gray area is Central Asia. A piece in the Atlantic Council’s New Atlanticist this week said that the countries of the region were each ploughing their own furrow, with varied, sometimes suspicious, results: “Tajikistan and Turkmenistan had been clinging to a fantastical claim of zero cases for weeks, despite the recent spike in mysterious deaths attributed to pneumonia. Tajikistan finally reported its first fifteen confirmed cases on April 30, after weeks of speculations and warning from international experts.”
I don’t know what all this says, exactly, but it sheds a little light on the dogs that haven’t barked. Covid-19 is a pandemic, which means it infects people, not countries. Yes, we can seal borders, and keep people from traveling, but at the end of the day the disease will only be conquered when every country has flattened every curve — or, unlikely, never let it rise up in the first place. None of us is going to be able to travel as freely as we once did, or see supply chains and shops creak back into life again, until all the people in these countries are through the same tunnel we’re currently in. That could mean a lot more pain, heartbreak, and death.
So thinking of this by population size, and looking more deeply at the countries that either haven’t seen the curve appear, or aren’t reporting it for one reason or another, is one way of knowing how long we’re all going to be fighting this war.
When is innovation just another stab at the past, and when is it revolutionary? When it becomes a bit of a Twitter storm in a teacup, is possibly when.
Here’s an interesting case study in the offing: You might need to get your head around some unfamiliar terms, like bi-directional linking, breadcrumb navigation and transclusion. Or not.
My thoughts were nudged by a post at Amplenote, an online note-taking and note-sharing app that is worth a look. Like a lot of these players, they’ve been forced into offering features by the new kid on the block, namely Roam Research, which by taking the genre by the scruff of its neck turned itself into something that knowledge workers are getting excited about.
The post was written by Bill Harding, founder of Alloy, the company behind Amplenote. They’re old style, by internet terms and their own words, not relying on VC funding, freemium models etc. You can tell by the product that it’s neat, robust and reliable.
That’s mostly what people interested in this kind of tool are looking for. I’ve been a note taker and outliner since the early days, and I’ve tried pretty much everyone that’s out there. Folks know that I feel that despite some great stuff, computer software has let us down when it comes to making software that understands us, rather than the other way around. (Why Won’t Computers Do What We Want Them To?)
But it’s taken Covid-19 to make me realise this is changing. And apps like Amplenote — or ones more familiar to you, like Evernote, are getting caught up in it. Roam Research has given us a glimpse of what note-taking — the simple act of reading, hearing, thinking or seeing something, and storing that somewhere — is ripe for disruption, and he’s going for it. It’s early days, but lockdown may be the jolt that propels this genre into the mainstream, something no other note-taking app has managed to do. A day ago Conor White-Sullivan posted to Roam’s Reddit group that 10,000 new users signed up to the app over the weekend, causing upheaval for his servers and users and forcing him to suggest to those ‘super-concerned’ use a rival app “for a week or so”.
He must know that suggestion really isn’t an option for most of his disciples. Roam is attracting a lot of interest — and beyond the usual numbers of people who dabble in this kind of thing. Why? Well, I think there are number of reasons:
Roam works right out of the box. It’s all online, the (initial) interface is very simple, even prepopulating the page with blank, but dated entries, prompting you to just start writing.
It gets as complex as you want it to get. You could just use it as a journal, if you wanted, but that would be a waste. It goes deep, with features being added with little fanfare, including sliders, nodemaps, and stuff I haven’t gotten around to figuring out.
But the key to all the excitement, I believe, is a key formula, which I think is the basic currency of software success: you get more out of it than you put in. Put simply, this means, for example, that if you linked one page to another page, that second page would update itself so you can see that link. This is what they mean by bi-directional links, or backlinks. It might seem to be the most trivial and useless piece of data, but if you don’t know what pages are linking to the page you’re looking at, you simply won’t know what information you have that you’ve already decided is linked to this. Your effort in linking to that page is now automatically creating extra value without you having to do the extra work.
Bi-directional linking, in simple terms
If you’ve read this far you’ll probably get it. But if not, let me just go into more detail. Computers, and the software that run them, are useless tools if they don’t allow us to do more with the stuff we tell them than we are capable of. Enter numbers into a spreadsheet because you know the software can do a load of things with that data than you can. Let your Apple Watch collect data about your body because you know it’s going to do more with it that’s useful than you could with a paper and pen. But for the most part knowledge workers have not really had anything similar for textual data. Yes, AI can help to find patterns in large bundles of it, but the same applied to our knowledge — the stuff we decide is worth keeping from our readings, talks, viewing and thinking in a computer — has not been so useful. Mostly, it’s just about being able to retrieve stuff more easily, so we don’t need to remember it, or remember where we put it.
But this is 2020. And we’re still there?
And this is where we come back to Bill Harding. And his screed. His point is a fair one: that all this talk of bidirectional linking is deja vu for many of us, when in the post-dotcom bubble burst of the early 2000s Wikipedia’s surprising success prompting interest in the underlying technology (here’s a piece I wrote in 2004 (sic) for the Journal about the disruption Wikipedia caused).
To drink in the enthusiasm we’ve witnessed in some corners of Twitter, bidirectional linking will evolve what’s possible…for those who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of learning this enigmatic craft. As fate & capitalism would have it, an elite cadre has popped up to help enthusiasts learn how to benefit from bidirectional linking. By all accounts, those who successfully assimilate the ideas of these programs transform their lives for the better. It seems reasonable, and I believe these gentlemen are doing great work to which they are wholly devoted.
But how different are today’s opportunities than what came before? To technologists of a certain age, the groundswell for a better connected network of ideas hearkens back to the halcyon days of 2005, when wikis were The Next Big Thing. Back then, companies like Wetpaint raised $40m to help organize the world’s knowledge. “A lot of venture money is flowing into wiki products” said Techcrunch in 2006. Having ubiquitous, bidirectional linking with surrounding context info was creating transformative opportunities in companies where people knew how to build them.
But with a couple major exceptions, wikis fizzled out, never catching on for personal use. Having set up my share of wikis during the early 2000s, I can attest that it was “worse than WordPress”-level bad for Twiki and Mediawiki. Developers might struggle through it to better capture their personal ideas, but the benefits of bidirectional linking were largely relegated to business knowledge software.
These new startups reviving and refreshing the ideas from the wiki craze is a great outcome for productivity enthusiasts. Especially with the expert guidance of smart people like Tiago and Nat, there’s never been a better time to help the humble wiki live up to its nearly-forgotten first round of hype.
If you sniff a little snarkiness in the tone ‘elite cadre’, you might be right. After trying to lure Roam users away with an import tool and a pricing comparison, Amplenote’s twitter account said less than an hour before I wrote this, that it had been blocked by Roam’s:
It’s not really a battle of equals: Amplenote has 24 followers, Roam 16,000. And this is the thing. What we’re really seeing, I believe, is a new player come in and bring the necessary tweaks and rethink to an existing technology — in this case, personal databases — by taking the best bits from each, adding a few new ones, and stealing the show to create a following and a buzz. This is not to say Roam isn’t impressive: it is, and I have not found any other app to match it.
And that’s why Amplenote and others, Bear, TiddlyWiki, WorkFlowy, TheBrain, Dynalist etc, are all struggling to add similar features, thinking about adding them, or defending why they don’t have them. This is good, and classic Christensen disruption. It might not be Roam that ends up winning this, but they’ve shaken up the market.
But what market? Is there really one for this kind of thing? Back in the early 2000s I would have said yes, because the kinds of people interested in this kind of thing were the same kind of people who bothered to read a tech column in The Wall Street Journal. The internet was a means of connectivity, and its potential was seen in those terms — could I store my stuff in more than one place, was the common question. So it wasn’t surprising that, as Bill recounts, everyone thought that wikis (the ‘readwrite web’) were the way to go. But others saw it differently, and all the smart money ended up going to using the internet to create more passive experiences — user generated, yes, but simpler, shorter, and where possible multimedia. It was all about eyeballs, and so content as knowledge slipped into the background as Twitter (status), Facebook (sharing stuff) and Google (search) came to the fore.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily changed. But Covid-19 has helped crystallise something that was already happening, namely that smart people are exploring how to leverage their knowledge and knowledge of software to solve the unsolved problems of the past, or to reconsider tools that had been largely forgotten. Knowledge work was once an obscure term that is now on its way to describing pretty much all of us who are sat at a computer, and it’s this realisation that has made people like Conor, I imagine, realise there’s a market for tools that really address the problem of deriving more value from the cost of user input.
Bill’s error is a generational one: what was once ‘business knowledge’ is now something else entirely. Watch this video of Andy Matuschak, a software engineer who works at the Khan Academy, to see what this looks like (he’s using Bear, by the way, not Roam). It’s strangely captivating viewing, ASMR for the Knowledge Generation:
Andy Matuschak at work
The other mistake is to think of this as ‘productivity’. This is not about that. This is not just a better task manager. I believe we’ve moved on from that — or at least recognised its limits. Now the thinking is, as Tiago Forte, one of Bill’s ‘elite cadre’, has mentioned, about acquiring and processing knowledge in a way that our brain retains it. You can almost hear Andy’s brain whirring as he processes what he’s reading before he expresses it.
So where will all this go? I’m not sure. Roam is talking about charging $15 a month, which is why people like Bill still think they have a chance to grab some of this market. To me it’s a rising tide and I’m pleased to see there are boats paying attention. After 20 years of focus on either ‘Getting Things Done’ or on the cuteness/elegance of interface, we’re entering a much larger ocean, which has the potential to bring these cutters, sloops and yawls into the slipstream of the incumbent tankers. Whether they go under or catch the current is anyone’s guess. Evernote has, largely, failed to find a larger audience (for lots of reasons) but the timing might now be right, especially as knowledge workers find themselves with plenty of time, isolation, an internet connection, and an urge to learn.
Addendum: Conor points out in a tweeted response to this piece that he has “been working on this problem for the better part of a decade. Strong(ly) agree the changes in landscape are great for us, but we wandered the desert for years before this.”
(Post updated 2020-07-15 07:37 to include postscript on JK Rowling’s planning technique.)
Computers and the software that runs them have long denied us the basic right of dictating to them — not letters and grocery lists, but of what they should actually do for us – most importantly in the first step of thinking: the art of taking notes.
In the mid 80s I was studying history in London, and the first consumer PC came out: the Amstrad. I was immediately intrigued, though I’m no techie. I remember going into Dixon’s one rainy winter afternoon on Tottenham Court Road and explaining my problem to the salesman. It was simple, I thought: I am a collector of events, and I want a computer which will do exactly what I currently do, but store it so I don’t have to carry around this pile of paper. It was simple, I told him. And I explained how I took my history notes, involving two or three basic steps. He looked at me blankly and tried to change the subject. “It comes with a printer and three spare disks.” I bought it anyway. But oh, how naive was I.
Because the reality is that 35 years on — 35 years! — there is still no way to do this. No app allows you to draw lines on a page and then add pieces to it wherever you want. I should know, I’ve tried hundreds of them (and if anyone does read this, I will get responses like ‘Have you tried OneNote?’ or ‘Aeon Timeline allows you to do just that.’ Yes, and no it doesn’t. No app, in short, is smart enough to just ask you what you have in mind and just evolve into that, to help you shape the app in the way you want.
This is the fundamental failure of computers, and computer software. As a technology it’s failed to really find a place in our lives that we’re comfortable with, and that’s because it has demanded too much change in our behaviours. We are mostly compliant: back in the late 2000s executives at telcos were worried 3G was for nought, because people didn’t show any interest in using their phones for anything more than calls and SMS. It took Steve Jobs to change that, by building a consumer device we craved to hold. The rest came naturally, because of a great UI, but no one is claiming that the smartphone adapted to us; we adapted to it. That’s not to say it’s not useful, it’s just not useful in a way that we might have envisaged, if we ever sat down to think about it.
Indeed, the Apple revolution, which I would date from about 2008 cannot be detached from the broader mobile data revolution, which we’re just emerging from. This was a revolution in interfaces, but it wasn’t a revolution in terms of computing. We have become more productive, in narrow terms — we are online a lot more, we send more messages, we might even finish projects quicker — but no one is claiming that our computers mould themselves to our thinking. It’s apt that movies like Her try to explore what that might mean — that our computers learn our thinking and adapt themselves to it.
So back to me and my history problem. There of course are answers to it, but they all require us understanding the mind of the person or people who developed them. And I’m not ungrateful to these apps; they have long been welcome bedfellows. From TheBrain to Roam, MyInfo to Tinderbox, TiddlyWiki to DEVONthink, they have all rewarded the hours — days, weeks, even — I have invested in trying to understand them. But therein lies the problem. The only reward one can get is if one adapts one’s own mind to that of the creator’s vision, and, however amazing that vision is, this in itself is an admission of failure. I don’t want to have to report everything to someone else’s vision, I have one myself, but there’s no software on this earth in 35 years of looking that I can wrestle into submission to my simple vision.
This is not to say the apps in question are a failure. I love them dearly and still use many of them. I have used my pulpits to promote them, and have gotten to know some of the developers behind them. These people are geniuses, without exception, and it’s not their fault their tools cannot be more than interpretations of that genius. We just lack the tools to tell our computers what to do from scratch.
Such as
‘Take an A4 sheet of paper, turn it horizontally so it’s in landscape, and then draw three perpendicular lines equidistant apart. Allow the user to write anywhere between the lines, and interpret a three-line dash as the end of each nugget. Interpret the digits at the beginning of each nugget as a date, which can be as vague as a decade and as specific as a minute. Order each nugget chronologically, whichever line it sits between, relative to each other, with gaps between according to the dates. etc etc’.
If only.
I still don’t see why I can’t have that software. I don’t see why I couldn’t have it in 1985. I probably could get a developer to whip something up, but then that’s already demonstrated the failure I’m talking about. I want the computer to do it for me, and not being able to, to have to rely on someone else’s coding skills, or even my own, means it’s not doing that.
This feeds into a broader point. Tiago Forte, a young productivity guru, wrote an interesting thread about the serial failure of hypertext, which was a precursor (and loser) to the simpler Web, and the lessons we can draw from it. In the case he describes, Roam. The simple truth: taking notes is a niche area because it’s not taken seriously at any stage of the education process (my history chronology capture was shown to me by the late and excellent Ralph B. Smith, who understood the power of note taking; I can still remember him demonstrating the technique in our first class. It has stuck with me ever since.) Note-taking is the essence of understanding, retaining, collating, connecting and propounding. And yet it’s mostly done in dull notebooks, or monochrome apps, none of which really mould themselves to what we write, take pictures of, record or otherwise store. (And no, Clippy doesn’t count.)
Tiago may well be right: the trajectory of knowledge information management apps (and there you have it; already segmented into what sounds like the most boring cocktail party ever) is that they just aren’t sexy enough to break out of a niche. Evernote was closest, but it got dragged down in part by its dependence on a vocal core of users who pushed it one way and its desperate need to justify its valuation by trying to go value. Truth is, people don’t value collecting information, in part because it’s so easy to recall: even with my 60GB DEVONthink databases, I more often than not Google something because I know I can find the document more quickly that way than in my offline library.
But this doesn’t explain the pre-Google world. Why did we let software go in the wrong direction by not demanding it submit to our will, not the other way around? Well, the truth is probably that computers were basic things, oversized calculators and typewriters for the most part. Sure it helped us write snazzier-looking letters, but heaven forbid us doodling on them, or moving the address around beyond the margins.
We’re still hidebound by our computers, so much so that we don’t realise it. I am rebuilding my life around the new tools, like Roam, and old ones like Tinderbox — a wonderful piece of exotica that is massive for those of us who like to poke around in a piece of software, but which basically means poking around in the head of its developers — and I get a lot out of them. But I am keenly aware that I would rather be just telling a blank computer screen to “take an A4 sheet of paper…”
The similarities are that the page is used horizontally, the dates are organised on the left, and columns allow her to record what other parties are doing at the same time. It’s actually a magnificent example of the use of the technique.
This is part two of a series on the lessons we should, and shouldn’t be drawing from the Coronavirus Pandemic. Part One is here.
Remembering the Cluetrain/Anna Shvets, Moscow
A crisis defines us. Perhaps more precisely, a crisis highlights what we have lost, and what defines us is how quickly we can regain it (or not).
First there’s the humanity. One of the redeeming features about Hong Kong’s dense life — and a restorer of faith in human nature — was that once you got into the hills and trails passing strangers would greet each other as if they were on a jaunt in Kew Gardens. It’s a strange world now, when we venture out alone and nervously pass another lone pedestrian at a safe distance, and bark when they get too close. And you know we are in the territory beyond compassion when a family loses one of its kind to the coronavirus, and yet doesn’t want to say that is the reason for fear of stigma. Society, even at its smallest component unit, can break down quickly if social norms don’t catch up with the crisis in its midst. Now that family (friends of a friend) can’t properly mourn, or warn others in the tightly packed neighbourhood where they live of a lethal infection, and those around can’t find a way to offer support because they can’t speak the killer’s name out loud. Empathy withers, rumours prosper and dog ignores dog.
But there are other trends afoot. When there are practical things to do, air rushes in to fill the gaps. Our obsession with just-in-time supply chains has exposed its achilles heel — a lack of the things we need the most. But others have stepped up. A group calling itself OSCMS-Mods (Open Source Covid-19 Medical Supplies) has emerged on Facebook “to evaluate, design, validate, and source the fabrication of open source emergency medical supplies around the world.” It has quickly proved its mettle: a document listing needs ranges from hand sanitizer to laryngoscopes, complete with glossary and warnings about safety and liability.
The Facebook group is dynamic. At the time of writing it has nearly 48,000 members. In the past hour or so I’ve seen posts by an electrical engineering instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison mulling whether to assign as a final project to his students an infrared thermometer. Others chip in, saying they’re working on something similar, offering advice (“don’t forget to program in an emissivity factor”) or help (“I’m pretty fast with 3D modeling and a 3D printer. If you guys need some help with the casing, hit me up!”). In another post a resident of Vancouver Island reports, after driving 500 km, that there is no hand sanitiser or isopropyl on the island. Some offer alternatives (not all them wise) but someone in Hong Kong offers a simpler solution: shipping some of the excess from Hong Kong, where emergency orders arrived too late and the price has fallen below its suppliers’ cost. Medical workers from Southampton, New York, post a photo of themselves in full gear to ask for help alleviate a shortage of surgical caps and masks. The jury is still out on this one, but there are some good suggestions, and hopefully the gap is plugged.
Such adhoc approaches are reassuring. For one thing, people want to help, and the platforms are there to make that a reality — Facebook, with its groups, and a growing mastery of the technology: 3D printing, materials, Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Of course, these initiatives are only going to be meaningful if they are consistent, and find a way of ensuring that requests for help are not just met by comments and virtue-signalling responses, but concrete action. Time will tell. Technology can often be a hammer looking for a nail.
I think another side to this that may outlast these emergency responses is that the technology will find a way through to real usage, rather than a pure business model. In other words, that tools emerge not because people want to make money, but because they can be useful, and there’s nothing like a jolt to the system for us to realise we need different, or better tools and to define those needs better. A piece in TechCrunch relates how Jahanzeb Sherwani, who developed a popular screensharing app called ScreenHero which he sold to Slack, pushed out a follow-up app called Screen ahead of time — and made it free — to help teams stuck at home share their screens. Given how quickly we’ve grown sick of the ‘heads in a box’ conferencing view (where everyone to me looks like they’re baffled seniors, looking around for their false teeth) this tool works well by going the other way, realising that we’re online to work on something, not look up each other’s noses.
Zoom
This reminds me much more of the 2000-2005 era, when collaboration and thoughtfulness tended to be the norms, a post-boom pause which led to the development (or propagation) of the tools that became Web 2.0, and which in turn provided the (largely unacknowledged) foundations of the social media era. I’m thinking RSS, XML, podcasts, wikis, tagging, web-based apps, microformats, the Cluetrain Manifesto, simple beautiful interfaces. If you think we could have got to Twitter, Facebook etc without the work of largely unrewarded pioneers of that age, you’re mistaken. But it was born out of a particular era, a transition from the web’s beginnings to the mobile, silo-ed era we know today. It was a vastly underestimated period, where an explosion of ideas and connectedness led to an explosion of tools to make the most of that. Nearly all those tools were open source, nearly all became bedrock of these later, frankly more selfish, times. But the spirit, it seems, lives on, and I am hoping that what I’m seeing in initiatives like OSCMS and Sherwani’s generosity is something akin to that: a realisation that technology is the handservant, not of viral growth and big payoffs, but of building connections between us – in times of calamity (personal or global) and beyond, by providing tools for free because they might be useful and might lead to something great.
I don’t think for a moment that these initiatives will of themselves be enough; it’s clear that nearly every public medical facility and service was woefully underfunded and hence underprepared. No battery of 3D printers is going to be able to fill that void. But hopefully the level of interest and involvement — call it civic, call it individualist — in trying to address that gap contributes to a broader discussion about what is our baseline for supplying, funding, equipping and populating such services in the future. And just as Wikipedia arose, not out of commissioning existing experts to write up entries (an effort that failed abysmally) but out of just letting anyone — no need to flash credentials — to contribute and allow the water level to rise by itself, so may we find that out of this Quarantined Era emerges a new sense of how individuals might contribute, and what mechanisms and tools need to be developed or honed to make that happen.
