The Improbable Blogger

From open data to public data

2011-12-12T17:39:00.000-05:00

Is open data just a glorified form of publishing or can its benefits go beyond transparency and reusability? How do you take open data beyond the realms of traditional publishers and data sources and spur people affected by the data to participate and contribute new ideas/data about development (and in effect become open data/development partners)?

What do you think? Join the conversation right here.

Taking open data to the people

2011-08-09T22:00:00.001-04:00

Is open data useful only to developers and researchers? Can 'average' users use open data to answer questions they have?

One of the (undeserved!) knocks against open data is the presumption that its core audience is technical and that the only people who can truly take advantage of open data are developers who can tap into APIs to build applications that then make sense of open data for lay audiences (unless the audience happens to be researchers in which case they probably have the necessary tools and the forbearance to troll through vast amounts of raw material). Viewed through this prism, open data is only effective via infomediaries.

That doesn't necessarily have to be true...but it is crucial to provide interactive tools that invite people to use them, that are simple, and that explicitly encourage and demonstrate social behavior. When somebody comes to the site with a question, the site must intuitively guide the person to an answer, or to a community that may have the answer, rather than just throw data at them - that kind of blunt, brute force 'transparency' can be traumatic.

Easier said than done though. Join the conversation via a another blog post I wrote about open data of the people, by the people, and for the people.

On failure

2011-08-08T14:53:00.000-04:00

If you haven't failed, you haven't tried hard enough (and if your project is unlikely to fail, it probably isn't worth doing). Failure is good. How will you ever learn to aim high if everything you touch turns to golden dross.

That said, we probably eulogize failure too much. Far too many people wear failure as badges of honor or disingenuously conceal incompetence under the guise of heroic failure. The infatuation will lessons of failure must end. Truly honorable failure always expands knowledge -- if you have failed the same old way, you have truly failed. Irredeemably so.

Open data -- what next

2011-08-04T23:53:00.000-04:00

So you've worked really, really hard and finally launched your organization's open data website. It's a success and you're tempted to rest on your laurels but can't shake off the sneaking feeling that where you are is really the beginning of the project rather than the end. The conversation has in fact only just started. But what do you do beyond launching an open data site?

Some ideas at http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/node/568 -- join the conversation and share what you've done!

From open data model to open data website

2011-07-11T21:11:00.000-04:00

The open data model scribbled on a whiteboard finally becomes a real website. Let me know what you think and what data you'd like to see on the website. Also watch for a mobile app coming soon.

An open data model

2010-08-19T11:57:00.001-04:00

A quick and very rough model sugesting a way to describe the role/value of open data in your organization. It probably needs a lot of background talk to truly make sense but grateful for any thoughts/feedback.

Paging Dr Hekyll and Mr Jive

2010-06-17T15:04:00.000-04:00

You might argue that masonry is the least important part of a housing project -- the real secret to a nice house is the design and the decor. And you might be right. It can then be exceedingly frustrating when your new house begins to run months behind schedule because the bricklayer didn't show up, or the electrician got the wiring wrong, or...Why, you wonder -- after all you invested a great deal of time and money in the more valuable parts of the project, why is the grunt work dragging you down?

Much the same often happens in many Web 2.0 projects which start with pious declarations that IT is the least important part of what is being done, that the project is really about social or cultural change, and that the project team is going to spend 90% of its time on these and 10% or less on technology. It's all fine and dandy, and good for resounding applause in meetings, but when it comes to the rub, you start hearing about IT delays holding the project up, you begin to see little bugs on screens, and you begin to run more regularly into exasperated social media geeks shaking their head ruefully.

None of this is to argue for the indispensability of IT but to ask social media geeks what they were thinking when they planned to spend 10% of their time on IT? The number makes little sense -- it should be 0% (or over 50%; the latter makes it a different order of work entirely and social media types would do well to bow out of such engagements). Organizational realities makes 0% unlikely in many cases but that is the only meaningful number.

Look at it this way. Typical social media projects (think collaboration, for instance) are not IT projects at all and should not be tracked as part of an organization's IT portfolio. Your IT team should not be looking over your shoulder when you use Twitter, your IT team should not be asked to vet your decision to use Facebook, your IT team should be unconcerned if you start a wiki, your IT team should refuse to come to the meeting if you are discussing a new blog, and your IT team should glance pitifully at you if you broach the subject of a social network. Plenty of other folks in the organization should take a deep interest in each of these ideas of yours but not IT. And you should never, ever ask your IT team to build tools to support such services.

It is time to start thinking about what is and what isn't IT and social media is most likely not IT. At all.

If you plan for the ideal, you might achieve an approximation of it.

-----------------------------------

Thus ends a bitter triptych. Parts 1 and 2 are here.

Learning to fly (on a parachute)

2010-06-07T15:57:00.002-04:00

So a bunch of parachutists, who of course know all about being up in the air, show up at a flight school -- to help improve the quality of flight instruction. With predictable results. The school starts a blog, the instructors form a community, all flight data becomes public, enthusiasts geo-track every flight, pilots post photos of giddy children, 'on air' vidcasts become the rage, students defenestrate boring 'explicit' flight manuals in favor of mid-air conversations and connections, and more...

And the flight instruction? Well, never mind. Who's got time for that? Though somebody did say that the pilots were learning to fly on the fly. Or something that sounded better. As you might expect -- a success all around, especially for those that 'get it'.

As an avowed fan of social media, and as a professional whose career may depend (sadly) on keeping the knowledge balloon afloat, shouldn't I be pleased as punch? Or should I worry that the field has abandoned the quest to answer meaningful questions, that we are so busy trying to impress and outdo each other that we have lost sight of the 1.0 issues out there?

Are we so in love with the little things that we can never see the whole elephant (now that's a terrible sentence!!). Are we condemned to be witting victims and resourceful creators of intellectual fads?

The cliches of innovation

2010-06-01T17:43:00.002-04:00

Innovation has never been more 'in' -- innovation labs are sprouting everywhere, conference speakers on innovation abound, firms are hiring visionaries and innovation practitioners, skunkworks are mainstream, and it is exceedingly glamorous to be disruptive. Does that portend trouble for innovation? Is it time for the smart money to flee?

Ironical as it sounds, innovation has been overtaken by cliches, and it's suddenly extraordinarily easy to be 'innovative'. All you need to do is to follow the latest trend -- get a blog, start a wiki, pontificate about open data, go geo-spatial, think social, ditch the 'explicit' camp...you get the drift -- the more 'me too' you are, the greater your claim to innovation. Why let truly new ideas get in the way?

None of this is to say that trendy ideas are necessarily vacuous -- there is tremendous potential inherent within all the ideas I listed above -- but they are no longer truly innovative. Most of them are in fact hygiene factors now (though some organizations may be slower than others to catch up with the present). Many allegedly innovative groups however seem to be mesmerized by them (and all the 'best practices', now sometimes christened 'guidelines' or 'tips', that go with them), and have little appetite for business process transformation at the core of business. Rare is the innovation group that focuses on the entrails of business; it's the 'skin' that attracts them.

In some ways this is the KM story playing out all over again.

Fieldwork 2.0 - reporting and monitoring in the connected world

2010-03-09T15:35:00.001-05:00

Here finally is the 'Fieldwork 2.0' presentation that some of you have asked for. I've included a few examples that illustrate the basic recommendation that real time reporting, monitoring, and sharing presents powerful opportunities to influence and shape events as they are unfolding. A combination of well visualized early warning and trend data can make a tangible difference on the ground (and in the PMO).

Fieldwork2 0

View more presentations from prasannalaldas.

On Republic Day, a cry again for federalism

2010-01-25T21:22:00.004-05:00

Republic Day once again, and a call again to reconsider the nature of center-state relations in India. The blog post places the question within the context of Article 370, but the basic plea is for a reconsideration of a governing model which is 'a mode of governance, in which states, despite being in the frontline of administration, have little input into laws, and are squeezed between an unyielding center and an increasingly disenchanted populace'. Of course 'unshackling the states' may 'result in a race towards the bottom with each state keen to emphasize its ‘exclusive’ nature', but it is my (perhaps naive) contention that it is time to transfer' accountability and power to the state government in virtually all matters except those that deal with the integrity of the Indian union, and its international relationships. The idea is that only local governance can truly protect the identity and interests of a state and that central participation in governance should be limited to only larger and ‘national’ issues.'

Is Obama the second coming of Nehru

2009-11-23T22:02:00.003-05:00

As Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of the world's other great democracy, arrives at Washington D.C., Barack Obama may feel the lingering shadow of Jawharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, and a towering figure whose singular status and ambition closely resembled Barack Obama's and whose career offers ground for both hope and caution for Obama. Much of modern India is a legacy, direct or indirect, of Nehru who took advantage of a unique historical opportunity to remake India in his own image while describing himself as one of 'little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great, some of that greatness falls upon us also'. Obama has similarly never shied away from his desire to 'change history's course', frequently decried 'poverty of ambition' and repeatedly asked Americans to 'hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself'. Nehru's life is probably more instructive to him than anybody else's.

When Jawaharlal Nehru became the first Prime Minister of independent India, he sparked the same euphoria that Obama's election triggered. 'It was Times Square on New Year's eve', wrote an American journalist, 'More than any one else, the crowds wanted Nehru'. Much like Obama, Nehru was a wonderfully talented writer, a gifted orator, loved and adored by throngs of crowds everywhere, and educated at elite schools. As a young man, he flirted with what was still proudly called socialism in the 30s much as Obama was drawn by community organizing and (and perhaps briefly) the ideas of Fannon. His election as Prime Minister gave hope and voice to millions, the vast majority of whom had scarcely dared to dream that such a day would come; he was at once a symbol and a beacon, a 'moral force' -- suddenly amplifying the aspirations of millions of people and simultaneously demonstrating that the impossible was no longer so. Obama bestrides our collective consciousness much the same way -- to many people he is both the ideal and the idol. And some would say the idle, but more on that later.

Superficial similarities aside, Obama seems to be following the Nehruvian template in 3 distinct ways -- one, an abiding faith in the role of the government as a force of good; two, a distinct preference for the 'leavening hands of wise policy' and policy wonks over practitioners that sometimes seems tinged with an intellectual disdain for business; and three, an idealistic view of the world and foreign policy that seems driven as much by nobility of thought as it is by pragmatism and the harsh reality on the ground. Let's consider them in more detail.

Obama has undoubtedly been characterized rather harshly by his opponents as a proponent of unlimited government. What is undeniable however is his faith that people 'want their government back'. The push for greater regulation, the government ownership of high profile firms, and the expansion of health care are all steps that will visibly bolster the role of the government. Nehru charted a similar course after he became Prime Minister. The government assumed control over the 'commanding heights' of the economy, a planning commission was established, and Nehru was immensely proud that the work of the commission had made the whole nation 'planning conscious'. Many parts of the compliant private sector and the academic community were of course happy to concur that only the state could 'help diminish the inequalities of income'. Obama is playing out a similar scene today -- betting that the government can do what the private sector cannot.

The expansion of the government role was led by highly trained technocrats hand-picked by Nehru, most of whom had cut their teeth in think tanks and academic institutions rather than in industry. These were the policy wonks and the czars of their day -- much like Obama's czars who often don't have extensive experience in the industries they have set out to change (a la Steve Rattner), but bring other skills to their tasks. Skills that appeal to Obama but not necessarily to people within the industries concerned. Nehru made similar picks and appointed them in key positions. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a trained physicist and an 'awesome polyglot, the kind of man for whom Nehru was guaranteed to fall' rose to key government positions writing policy notes on the economy that caught Nehru's attention. Krishna Menon was another minister whose chief credential was an intellectual sophistication that Nehru admired. A trait that many of Nehru's closest policy associates shared was a belief in modernization and science and technology as levers of positive change. To Nehru this translated as a fetish for 'industrialization' in much the same way as 'green technologies' seem to infatuate Obama. Nehru may have been mostly right. Perhaps Obama too will be.

Foreign policy was an obvious arena for the cosmopolitan Nehru to play out his ambitions and serve as the 'bond between India and the world'. Here he was 'always fascinated by world trends and movements' with an opportunity to define a new world order in which 'we lead ourselves' and 'avoid entanglement in power politics and not...join any group of powers as against any other group'. This was the policy of non-alignment, one of Nehru's finest achievements -- at least in theory. Obama seeks similar new rules that 'give hope to those left behind in the globalized world'. He chafes that 'never has the US possessed so much power, and never has the US had so little influence to lead'. Like Nehru, he believes that idealism must have a place in foreign policy and that good intentions can go very far indeed.

So how did it play out for Nehru, and what is the prognosis for Obama? For Nehru many answers lie in the state of India today -- a vibrant democracy that prizes its diversity and secularism and where minorities and the historically powerless have an outsize influence on the polity (numerous caveats included). This was a legacy that Nehru crafted against immense adversity and the highest praise may have come from the gadfly Nirad C. Chaudhuri when he wrote that Nehru had 'prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmaji's leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them'. The report card on foreign policy and the economy is decidedly more mixed. Nehru may have been partially responsible for perpetuating the rancor that characterizes India's relationship with Pakistan and his China policy, blinkered as it was by romantic naivety, was an unmitigated disaster. The economic results are difficult to judge -- Nehru helped lay the foundation for a self-sufficient economy driven by a highly skilled labor force; this was however achieved through a centralized bureaucracy that stifled creativity and enterprise and an educational and health system in which self-described centers of excellence obscured the reality that shoddiness accompanied every aspect of life in India.

Nehru died unhappy for a man of his immense accomplishments. He might have foreseen the impending decline of India as the policies he had initiated were pushed beyond their logical limit by intellectually limited successors (including his daughter) who were truer to Nehruvian principles than Nehru's educated skepticism ever allowed him to be. And that might be the greatest lesson for Obama -- an outsize personality may constrain the long-term ability of acolytes, and an expansionist government may be the answer in the short-term but it can be a Faustian bargain. It took India almost 30 years and Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, two painfully uncharismatic politicians, to pull it back from the morass of pseudo Nehruvianism. Nehru may have unwittingly created a world view destined to collapse in the hands of lesser mortals. Obama needs to start thinking 'after Obama what?' right away. His most earnest followers know not what they will do.

Collaboration - don't tie me up, don't tie me down

2009-11-18T16:41:00.002-05:00

Are you still searching for that best-in-class collaboration tool? The goal of a single, secure, all-purpose enterprise tool is seductive beyond belief, but it unfortunately isn't likely to translate into reality soon (you're of course free to spend a couple of million bucks to find out). Folks in your organization are likely already collaborating and sharing on a wide variety of tools/platforms (perhaps even on the cloud!) while you frantically but futilely preach good practice, integration, and standards to them. Sometimes you may even hear them beg you to drop that enterprise dream of yours and please, please, please -

Manage my identity - how about you start by figuring out how I can use my organizational ID all across the cloud, without being forced to register by each service provider? Is OpenID the answer? Can my external stakeholders use a common ID across all organizational sites/services? Can you find me something else
Let me easily register with the organizational search (without throwing a long rule book at me that bars everything I do) - sure the enterprise search engine you are rolling out will be wonderful, but can you please extend the definition of your 'enterprise'? Can I start a new service in the cloud and one-click to register my portion of the service (let's say my wiki) with the enterprise search engine? Would that solve your silo problem at all
Track behavior and connections - do you have a CRM like solution that can track me and my connections across all the environments we use, including the cloud (when I'm in my organizational guise) and provide services that cater to my whole online personality (rather than its fractured versions on different websites)
Unify my experience - sure I work across a wide variety of tools/platforms as do a lot of folks/departments I work with? Can you help me create a single window into all of these

Are you listening? Could this be more valuable than what you have traditionally done?

Collaboration -- it ain't me I'm looking for

2009-10-28T09:36:00.006-04:00

Are you looking for a best-in-class collaboration tool that integrates well with your IT infrastructure, preserves your considerable IT investment in other areas, and is compliant with your internal policies, standards, and security requirements? Well, all the very best to you but it may be time to think outside the cubicle. Introspection may be beneficent for the soul, but when it comes to collaboration, you're staring the wrong way if you're looking inside yourself (or your organization).

Think about it this way - collaboration isn't about you, it's about others. It's about the people you want to collaborate and work with. It's thus not about the tools you use, it's about the tools they use. And a lot of them probably don't and won't use the putative best in class enterprise tool you select. The world just isn't as homogeneous any more. So is it really worth investing all that time and energy (and money) in that one tool that you think looks the best from inside your organization? Shouldn't you be open to using whatever the heck your partners out there want to use, as long as you can get your work done?

That, depending on your point of view, may sound a little immature or 'wild west' or ad hoc, but it may be your best bet to succeed in an environment that prizes flexibility, speed, and cost-effectiveness. You can't tie yourself to a tool and expect the world to fall in line.

Learning to learn learning

2009-09-28T14:00:00.001-04:00

There's a compelling case to distrust IT products designed solely by engineers (cue grumbling about usability, design, communication, and more). Is there a similar case to abjure learning products crafted purely by teams of learning professionals? Especially in corporate settings?

Corporate learning, if you ignore the approbation the learning industry heaps on itself, is in shambles (I exaggerate, but...). A recent survey suggested that fewer than 5% of corporate leaders are satisfied with the learning program in their organization. Can one of the reasons be the fact that corporate learning is increasingly learning of the learning professional, by the learning professional, and for the learning professional? Is that why you see corporate learning groups focus so much more on learning production than on learning results?

The inevitable result -- courseware that is designed to appeal to learning professionals (how many objectives, how many concepts, how many questions, how many practices, how many demos, how many hours, how many screens, how many pedagogical features, how many events, how many participants...) but conspicuously ignored by its audience (as LMS data in many organizations attests).

I should concede that this approach does have a few things going for it and works fairly well for procedural learning or for hermeneutically sealed knowledge (think working on an assembly line or operating a software system) but its value disintegrates rapidly in the face of the more sophisticated learning challenges that internal learning groups are meant to address in 'knowledge organizations'. One response from managers of learning programs is that corporate leaders 'don't get' the role of learning but should they be wondering instead if 'learning' as a separate line of business hasn't outlived its value and become too insular? Is there a case to explicitly unify learning with other knowledge products/resources/people? Can learning professionals look beyond fidelity to their practice? Should the leaders of learning programs diversify staffing, expand the list and type of content creators, stop thinking 'learning' and start thinking 'performance, context, and people', merge learning with other forms of explicit and social knowledge, stop calling it learning, cross their fingers...

Doesn't the best learning occur when people don't realize they are learning?

The last CIO

2009-09-17T17:05:00.000-04:00

The answer to the question is perhaps immediately obvious but let me ask it anyway - is it time to fire your CIO and never hire another one? This after all is the golden age of CIOs - technology and associated information services have fundamentally altered the workplace over the last couple of decades and there is nary a large organization (or in developed countries at least - government agency) that doesn't have a CIO. Many organizations in fact have a CTO AND a CIO. And CIO job descriptions liberally sprinkle talk of 'strategy' and 'vision', making CIOs sounds like indispensable organizational leaders (and a place on company boards reinforces the high regard with which many CIOs are held).

This is probably all well and good, and if you expect nothing more than 'people leadership, managing budgets, business alignment, infrastructure refresh, security, compliance, resource management, managing customers, managing change and board politics' from your CIO (as a recent survey suggested most CIOs define their jobs), you can stop reading now. If you reckon your CIO is the equivalent of a senior officer (say a Director), albeit with a fancy 'C' tag (and these tags are indeed being liberally distributed these days), you're doing alright. If however you view your CIO as a game-changer, you might be in for a little disappointment.

That really is the crux of the question (and it applies to every C level position). Does the work of your CIO confer competitive advantage to your firm - if the answer is yes (as it will be for many technology firms or for firms that rely on technology as a differentiator - think Netflix or Fedex or Walmart or Amazon or Goldman Sachs and other high speed traders), then sure you absolutely need your CIO. If however your CIO is just keeping the engines running (as many inevitably do or are hired to do), then you might want to pause for a rethink. Would a competent senior officer do instead? Especially as business has begun to clamor more incessantly for greater control over and visibility into IT? And the cloud has begun to creep into territory traditionally occupied by IT? And that business is less content to let technology constraints or preferences drive its strategic direction? And IT capacity has become notoriously difficult to sustain within organizations whose business isn't IT? Shouldn't then the smart CIO begin to work on preparing organizations for life without one - that would be an indisputable sign of success.

There is of course always another option - welcome on board a Chief KM Officer, and a Chief Learning Officer, and a Chief Change Management Officer, and a Chief Strategy Officer, and a Chief Communications Officer, and a Chief HR Officer, and a Chief Fun Officer, and a Chief Procurement Officer, and a Chief Business Process Officer, and a Chief...

Or stop and ask your CIO - can you use technology to set my firm apart from all my competitors? The answer still can be yes. In every industry and domain.

3000 sites to Graceland

2009-06-16T18:13:00.000-04:00

This one shan't make me popular but here goes anyway. Does YouTube fret that too many individuals are posting the same videos on the site; does Google complain that there are too many websites in the world on the same topics; does Wikipedia carp about having too many writers/editors on the same subject; does TED cavil that there are far too many bright people in the world with far too many bright ideas; does your organization agonize that it has 400 Sharepoint sites (and counting) and 3000 websites?

No, no, and no, but YES on the last one. Your organization (unlike the others listed above) likely does chafe that its web environment is disorganized and that its Web governance is anaemic (despite a plethora of committees, councils, boards, and secretariats). And a key evidence is the fact that it has too many websites and web spaces (that aren't managed or contradict each other). The 9 or 11 websites on Topic X is probably everybody's favorite example, and the story of 400 or 480 Sharepoint sites has probably already become a lightning rod among furious assenters. I must confess that there's a certain point to the hand-wringing about the unseemly growth in the number of websites but as is often the case, this may just be the symptom of a different problem.

The question that an organization should really be asking is not 'why the 19 sites on topic X' but 'why are 19 different groups working on topic X' and if there should indeed be 19 different groups working on topic X, 'why aren't they working together or collaborating more'. There may indeed be perfectly legitimate answers to these questions but you can't (and shouldn't) resolve the issue by shutting down the 18 websites whose Webmasters don't care (or exist) any more, or by merging them all into 1 'master' website destined to collapse under the weight of hubris. What Web teams instead should focus on are the user experience and credibility problems that readers encounter -- how do you build common functional search across all websites (even if there are thousands of them) from a common/pervasive location, how do you gradually recede poor quality content from view while taking care to preserve and promote valuable content (even if it old and poorly managed), how do you simplify the user experience without making your content resources simpler. With everything moving to the web, the notion of a website (or websites) is becoming increasingly muddled -- the quest for ONE website may thus be anachronistic anyway.

None of this to deny the need to 'clean up' your Web -- you just need to be sure you are answering the right questions.

An editor is not just a wordsmith

2009-05-27T15:46:00.004-04:00

Continuing the occasional series on roles in design teams (see this post on the role of ethnographers, and another one on content strategists), let's talk about what editors do and what you should expect from them. The editor position is probably the least likely to raise questions about its function (unlike say ethnographers or information architects, whose roles are relatively unknown outside information design circles), but it is widely misunderstood (or rather 'under-understood'). To most people, editors are wordsmiths who smooth sentences, correct grammar, hold writers' style in check, ensure consistency and standardization, and, in some cases, convey a brand through language. That is all true and many organizations struggle to get even this right, but it is a very limited understanding of the role. Here are a few other tasks you should demand out of your editors --

1. Create an editorial agenda -- this is what newspaper editors do as a matter of norm, but few editorial boards within organizations/corporations are up to the challenge. Editors working with communications and strategy must embrace a pro-active stance rather than a purely reactive or calendric one. Good editors see content as business output that is either intrinsically valuable (as say news or literary content is), or that imbues other products with greater value (think restaurant menus!). Editors must constantly seek to place content at the core of business, rather than at its periphery
2. Shape content -- sometimes editors suffer from tunnel vision -- fastidious to a fault within a very narrow domain and energized by their restricted view (everybody has a story about gleefully maniacal editors defenstrating copies in which a lone modifier dangled inappropriately) -- but good editors are quick to understand that while correct grammar and style is important, it is the most fungible part of their job. Creative editors focus instead on how content is assembled, what meanings it conveys, how it engages people, and how it connects with other knowledge. The aim of an editor is to create better writers, not just correct(ed) ones
3. Broaden the scope of content -- the online editor has long understood that content is not just text or narrative information, and that data is a critical part of the content arsenal. Editors have also become increasingly multimedia savvy and audio-video content is de rigueur in many organizations. These are wonderful technical advances and many editors have done well to keep pace with them. The one area that still needs work is the answer to the question 'what is content'. Many editors are still content to answer it in the traditional way -- documents, articles, reports, etc. Fortunately, others have come to embrace a broader definition that includes user generated content, data from user actions that becomes content, third-party data and content that creates new content opportunities on an organization's site, mashed-up content, and more. Each of these requires as much editorial attention as more formal content does (that is why Amazon's user reviews are far more useful than those on comparable sites -- what reviewers write is only part of the story)
4. Create structure and methodology -- an editor's role extends far beyond what she herself does. Style guides are an obvious artifact that most editorial teams produce but stakeholder expectations go well beyond that. Editors help people understand how, when, and why to produce content; they answer questions like when is a content piece actually finished; they help people understand attributes that distinguish superior content from junk; and they establish and manage processes that keep the editorial room humming. A good editor helps create better content partners

None of this is to run down the wordsmiths (I was one, for a while!) but really, there has never been a better time to be an editor (the world's never been so awash with content!) and there are new opportunities for the taking every day. This is bucking up each one of you.

Excuse me while I kiss a cloud

2009-05-18T17:16:00.004-04:00

Nicholas Carr and others have argued (somewhat) persuasively about IT as an utility but it might be premature for most organizations to make the jump immediately. It is however the right time to start considering the strategic role of IT in organizations a few years from now when the cloud model is likely to have matured and established itself as a superior alternative to the traditional services that internal IT performs (much of it centered around building and managing core enterprise applications). Where would IT's competitive advantage lie in such a situation -- why should organizations continue to invest in IT when the 'cloud' beckons?

Here's a stab at a rough model that tries to project what the environment of large organizations might look like a few years from now. Given the rapidity of change, the model's likely to be overtaken by time before I hit 'publish' on this blog post, but here are a few ideas to consider --

The cloud becomes an important part of an organization's landscape (like most of us agree it will)
The organization carves a defined niche for itself in the cloud (say http://cloud.xyzzz.org or something akin to it depending on the device you are using) that provides an organization's internal and external stakeholders access to a large and evolving set of tools and data
A nimble body including folks representing IT, legal, knowledge, strategy, others acts as the interface between the two 'clouds'
IT focuses on common services (identity management, search, user histories, etc.) that unify different cloud services (but not integrate them; the emphasis should be on sharing and openness) -- and common data services, rather than on developing/maintaining applications

This is all rather raw at the moment (as the graphic undoubtedly proves) but here is opening it up to the cloud for further ideas!

The seduction of co-production

2009-04-10T17:00:00.003-04:00

Call it the Wikipedia curse but the knowledge community seems to be bewitched by the notion of co-production of knowledge. I've ranted against it earlier and here's another potshot at it. Let me start though by conceding that co-authoring or co-production of knowledge has its uses, especially when it comes to content for the novice/uninitiated (tip sheets, 101 texts, FAQs, process information, and the like) - such content gains by being inclusive, neutral, bland, ephemeral, and impersonal. Wikipedia does it well and there's definitely a role for it in some firms. May the force be with the proponents of this strategy in these firms (including me!) as long as their goals are modest.

Co-production of knowledge is however distinctly unhelpful when it comes to a firm's strategic knowledge products, that are aimed at decision-makers in governments, businesses, and elsewhere who value the firm's knowledge precisely because it is distinctive and reflects a certain point of view. Undoubtedly, these products must not be insular and their creators should engage with a wide spectrum of sources/experts/people as part of their research - this engagement must however not lead to an abdication of a researcher's primary objective, which in stark terms is to report the truth as she sees it (and not necessarily as the rest of the world wants to 'edit' it). A distinct point of view (sometimes derided as prejudice or bias) moves conversations forward, persuades decision-makers, and nudges the status quo - and this really is the role of a thought-leading firm. You should leave it to others to create comprehensive lists of links and people (the so-called knowledge-broker role) - you really want to be what people link to!

Gone social

2009-03-20T13:38:00.000-04:00

A quick checklist for some of you building online communities. Mostly what everybody knows already but here goes anyway -

Identify your community
Identify the evangelists in your community
Establish the value of collaboration
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Lead by example
Set aside time
Make it part of your work processes
Make it easy
Don't worry about technology (but don't ingnore it either)
Lose a bit of control

Your intranet - is it history yet

2009-02-15T19:16:00.011-05:00

Guess I shouldn't really overdo the notion of getting rid of your intranet, but given the increasing linkages between businesses, their partners, and their customers, the emphasis on collaboration and participation; the multi-lateral nature of many organizations; the overlap of roles among staff, ex-staff, consultants, contractors, vendors, experts, and stakeholders; and the sophistication of today's web environment, it makes less and less sense to distinguish your intranet from your overall Web strategy and to create stand-alone, 'physically separate' web spaces aimed solely at internal staff (who, in any case, are very interested in putative 'external' content). That doesn't mean that you need to make your internal policies and internal applications open to the rest of the world (though it wouldn't hurt to rethink the confidentiality of the bulk of the so-called internal policies -- in most cases they are are just crafty regurgitation of generic texts disguised to appear original or appropriate, but that's probably a different blog!) -- it does however imply that intranets are a good idea gone drastically wrong.

There were other reasons galore, but the idea of intranets started with the recognition that different audiences wanted and needed different content. The binary distinction between internal and external audiences worked well for a while -- we were all new to the Web, our expectations were low, and businesses hadn't yet begun to reorganize and open up in ways that the Web makes possible (and often necessitates). That manifestly doesn't hold true any more -- most of the websites people use on a daily basis customize experience for the individual and individuals' (fluid) networks -- there is no treating people based on a immutable group identities that hold true and remain unchanged forever. People want their behavior and (shifting) loyalties to be reflected in their experience and they have no patience for other people's experience or preference. This isn't all wonderful -- there is something to be said for shared experiences, a la newspapers or broad based radio channels -- but it's unfortunately the reality. Intranets unfortunately mostly tend to fall squarely in the camp whose time has passed -- they are designed for a monolithic audience that doesn't really exist any more.

And this is even before we start talking about the trend for people to decide for themselves what they want, rather than omnipotent designers or business strategists determining it. You know the symptoms -- internal staff often tends to be clueless about an organization's external messages because nobody ever takes the time to go to the external website, and you simultaneously worry that your message isn't really getting through to the external audience because it is too fragmented -- is this really what you want?

On Republic Day, a call once again for federalism

2009-01-25T21:55:00.004-05:00

It's Republic Day again in India, the day we celebrate our constitution, and all of us can be immensely proud of contributing daily to a polity that, despite immense hurdles, can still be said to be based on magnificent ideals. Our constitution isn't perfect, not can it ever be, but it's a constant reminder that our goals must be lofty, even if they seem immediately unattainable (as they must have seemed soon after independence), and that we cannot be scared of standing on the side of universal truths however unique our local circumstances appear to be.

So far be it for me to quibble about the constitution, but here once again is a call for greater federalism in the country and a plea for the equality of states, even if some states make a case for being more equal than others.

The Unholy Grail

2009-01-12T15:47:00.000-05:00

I'm not terribly qualified to write about this but I do suppose that people mean well when they talk about system or data integration. The word is bandied about so much that it has almost become a stand-in for smart thinking -- if you favor integration, you're automatically on the side of angels. It's such a pity then that millions of dollars later, most organizations aren't much nearer to a completely integrated environment than they were when they started out dreamily (yes we know, if only it weren't for poor discipline, governance, vision, ad hocism, etc.).

While it isn't for me to indulge in tech talk about integration, how about a couple of inexpensive approaches to try out --

Leave it to your community to uncover the integration points -- how about focusing on making it easy for your community (and you've got to build one!!) to identify and link to sources of information. It seems to me that a lot of people will gladly publish data or information on a regular basis if it's easy to do so (it's so much better than fielding a hundred calls daily asking the same question!)
Turn the integration question around and replace integration with sharing -- rather than build sophisticated systems that go into the innards of other systems to extract data, how about making it incumbent on every system to make data openly (and securely) available using standard protocols. Don't treat integration as a gigantic project that, due to inevitable resource constraints, focuses on the highest value or core systems/data in the 'first phase' -- switch instead to a sharing based model in which each system delivers its data as a service, pretty much by default. You don't sign off a system that doesn't meet your security requirements -- do the same with data sharing. Make it a default requirement

Okay, may be the second approach isn't as inexpensive as I thought but it's probably still worth a try.

The intranet cookbook

2008-12-01T14:52:00.003-05:00

Global content strategy sounds wonderful and the idea of getting rid of your intranet is appealing in some ways, but how can you explain what you're trying to create in simple words, using analogies that everybody can relate to? Here's a sentence to try -- take Google, mix it with Amazon, throw in a little Facebook, don't forget Apple, a dash of Wikipedia and/or Youtube to spice it up, mix it all with W3C, and there you have it! You'll probably sound naive plus bombastic (never a great combination) so you need to break it down a little bit (if anybody is still listening) --

Take Google -- for its phenomenal ability to figure you out, by tracking everything you and everybody else in the world ever does. A recent New York Times article talks more about it, and while privacy remains a concern, your corporate network is just being lazy if it isn't actively utilizing the gargantuan amount of information it collects about you every day. Your network recognizes you. Ask it to do so meaningfully
Mix it with Amazon -- or Netflix or Lastfm or similar services that are tremendous at serving the exact information you want, and predicting what your next actions are likely to be. These services would be even better if they had the information that Google has about you (right now all they have to go by is what you do on their website). Your corporate intranet gives you the perfect opportunity to meld the two approaches
Throw in a little Facebook -- or a similar service built upon social networking so you can bring people and groups together in a collaborative environment. It's really all about people in the end
Don't forget Apple -- because design ultimately holds the key to your success. Give people a poor experience and they'll never forget you (and they'll tell everybody in the world about it too). The world's littered with great ideas that never made it to 'wow' -- most of them because they failed to establish an emotional connection with people
Spice it up with a dash of Wikipedia and/or Youtube -- because people like to be in charge and craft their own worlds. You've got to make your intranet of the people, for the people, and by the people -- most organizations however consider the last to be taboo. Is that really smart any more
Mix it up with W3C -- because I couldn't really find a great popular example. Suffice to say that most organizations haven't yet found a way to mange content effectively (and no ECM is not the answer), but there are things you can try. Ultimately, you won't get very far if the foundations of your content environment are shaky

Try it out*, and let me know how far you get.

*I should add that the services I mention are just illustrative. They don't do everything I wish they did and I may not know enough about them. The trick's really to be not seduced by any one of them, because none of them really takes the holistic view that your intranet demands. Your challenge is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Like your favorite chef.

Get rid of your intranet (as you know it)

2008-11-12T11:55:00.003-05:00

We have talked a little bit about global content strategy, the death of navigation, general design principles, the search chimera, and more earlier but a fundamental question still lingers -- in a design and technology environment awash with fabulous options (that don't always make complete sense by themselves), what are the key unifying principles that you must consider as you ponder over the future of your intranet? How can you build a strategy that maximizes the benefits of working with a captive audience, but isn't captive to any single strategy or technology decision you make? Here then is a way of looking at it --

Big Brother can be smart -- corporate intranets start with tremendous advantages that are seldom utilized. You know (or could easily find out) a great deal about everybody in the organization -- where do they work, with whom do they work, what do they do, who do they communicate with, what websites they visit, who do they email and about what, what do they do when online, what do they read, which videos they watch, what do they post, who do they share, work, and play with, what devices they use, what training they are interested in, which regions they work in, who are their clients, who are their external partners, and much, much more. You also know what their colleagues in turn do, what interests they share, what sort of formal and informal networks exist -- basically pretty much everything that happens on your corporate network is open to you to capture, organize, analyze, and transform. It's essential then that you insist that this knowledge permeate everything you build. Start crafting applications that respond to people's behavioral history, their work environment, and their personal or social reality. The days of guided web experience are gone -- this is the age of the responsive web. You don't forget people after you meet them and your every encounter with people is built around everything you know about them -- your website should do exactly the same thing
Be ecological -- much to the chagrin of the good folk in high offices, ivory towers, steering committees, boards, and 4-tier governance groups, gone are the days of tools that dripped grandeur ('we'll do everything, and what we can't, isn't worth doing') and websites that stood for everything about your organization (or so they claimed -- everything else was 'bad practice' and 'governance breakdown'). Like it or not, your organization will always create more websites and applications than you like, or your people will instinctively gravitate towards tools that help them get their job done (even if they aren't sanctified by the whatever inordinately long procedure your organization uses to determine such things). Your choice is simple -- ignore the impending reality and flail towards yesterday's command and control paradigm, or embrace the notion of your organization supported by an ecology of tools and practices (rather than by a dinosaur)
I can therefore I am -- this is a free country and people can live where they want, subscribe to whatever newspaper they want to, drive the car that catches their fancy, and rearrange their drapery as and when they want. Can they do the same on your intranet, or does your intranet resemble an overly planned environment where somebody else makes the key decisions on people's behalf (and figures out exactly what should show on each page, the exact reports that people need and want to run, the exact tools people want to use and how they use it, the exact content and layout people are interested in, the exact time they want information, the exact devices they want the information in, and more). People don't want that any more -- they want to 'mash-up' their own experience. Let them do that. You'll discover that plenty of them still prefer guidance, but they will thank you for the choice and feel empowered and liberated by it
Content is indeed everything -- I suppose the inner content strategist must come to the fore time and again, but none of the above is worthwhile if your content isn't intelligent. And the way to make content brainy isn't to inject gray cells into it (as many organizations are prone to do -- just ask any author who's been asked to 'add metadata' to his or her document), but to create tools that can figure out what you're doing (without asking you to do any grunt work). Sounds very hard, and is indeed tortuous to do, but there's no getting around it. Somebody has to sweat so everybody else can laze on the beach

And just in case you were wondering, some of these principles probably hold true on the Internet as well. Try them out.

Time to add an ethnographer to your team?

2008-10-31T12:13:00.002-04:00

Ethnography, a discipline where anthropologists and sociologists roam, isn't often immediately associated with the so called 'creative types' that dominate web design. Ethnographers have however always been a key part of successful design teams (they have just been hiding under inoffensive sobriquets like 'experience modelers' or 'design researchers'), and they may soon be coming to a design team near you (guess it doesn't hurt that firms like Nokia and IBM are key boosters of the trend, given their own positive experiences with the discipline).

If you are planning to hire an ethnographer yourself and are struggling to write the terms of reference, here's a quick look at what one might do on your project --

Observation and fieldwork -- your number one reason to hire an ethnographer. All of us profess to customer-orientation but almost none of us has either the time or the wherewithal to truly understand our clients (beyond 'artificial' interventions like focus groups, surveys, and interviews). Ethnographers however study people in their natural habitat and cultural context -- they use a variety of observational techniques (video recording, diaries, immersion, etc.) to understand what drives people, how their relationships, values, and lifestyle influence their choices, and what do they really want. As they would have it, this is the only meaningful way to gain holistic perspective about your consumers -- everything else is either intuition, guesswork, or if you are lucky, an inspired combination of the two
Analysis and interpretation -- you'd reckon that this is where poring over Barthes, Foucault, and Durkheim might come in handy, and it probably does. Ethnographers use a variety of tools culled from multiple disciplines like sociology, anthropology, psychology, art, and others to analyze the output from their fieldwork. This is where the data starts making sense
Insights -- your hope when you hire an ethnographer is that he or she would be able to provide (and test) insights that you can't manufacture using other, more traditional design techniques. Ethnographers sometimes describe this stage as 'transformation', which is basically another way of saying how you move from point a to point b. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
Design and iteration -- ethnographers have a very credible role as the voice of the ultimate user (they after all know how long some of them brush their teeth, and which video sharing sites they turn to while waiting for a file to download!), and are fabulous testers -- both directly, or in organized test sessions

If you really cut to the chase, steps 2-4 are pretty generic and you don't really need somebody with a PhD in a discipline that you always cut classes from to do them for you. Step 1 is what you need to think about -- what value do you hope to derive from it (and the answer is 'plenty' in the right project). The right ethnographer can truly spark a design team. Just remember that many ethnographers haven't yet completely traversed the distance from academia to the corporate world and you sometimes run the risk of receiving reports that won't quite cut it with a professor but are far to abstruse for your management to act upon (a bit like KM was for a long time, and some may say, still is). It's increasingly a risk worth taking.

The Internet is just one big website!

2008-10-17T14:32:00.004-04:00

To continue riffing on the notion of global content strategy, consider the pointlessness of enterprise content management (ECM) - of the sort that revels in uniformity, standardization, protocols, and rules. In ECM, bliss is to have one tool or 'platform', rigorous content types, immaculate taxonomy and metadata, perfectly efficient workflows, and well behaved robots as users, whose business never changes or changes in architecturally sound, timid, and predictable ways. There's a certain masochistic appeal to this pipe-dream but unfortunately it's just that -- a dream that hasn't come to pass yet in any organization. People are unfortunately too busy getting on with business to worry about prescribed tools (especially when they have obsolescence written all over them), 'process overheads' masquerading as knowledge management, and complex products and services that assume that means are more important than ends (thus learning the tool or conforming to its diktat becomes more important than getting good results for your business out of it).

What the world needs is not more enterprise content management, but more sensible, practical approaches towards content that marry the explicit with the social, the temporal with the permanent, and the organization with the world! That sounds silly and vain of course, but here are a few guidelines that the content strategist with an eye out to the future would do well to consider --

Choice is fundamental -- like it or not, you can no longer define a specific tool set or even a platform and expect the good folks in your organization to stick to it. People will use whatever catches their fancy (and the choice is immense across the text, audio, and video spectrum, especially in the nomadic workplace in which you can no longer tie people to their desks) -- it's your job to catch up to them; they aren't turning back for you
Relationships matter -- what you write or speak or show or share is very valuable; very often however people care more about what else you've done (and where and why and with whom). As Google and some other firms have shown, your trail is actually not that difficult to follow and establishing inter-relationships is then just one more step away. Your content strategy must start beavering away towards understanding and exposing as many relationships (between people, spaces, and artifacts) as it can -- this is an easy way to run smack into insight
Once is enough -- the secret to successful relationships is that they are easy and mutually beneficial. One time registration is more than anybody can handle (even if your organizations runs three businesses that don't like each other, or if your decentralized staff keeps creating tools that nobody else in the organization has heard about). Bring it all together, without tying them down to each other
You (or your organization) are not the world -- this is an easy trap to fall into; organizations are discrete entities and are apparently much more 'manageable' than the chaotic world outside (think about this when you web strategy paper begins to resemble a website strategy paper). Unfortunately, external entities now protrude deeper and deeper into organizations and do so at multiple levels (not all of which are easily quantifiable). Your content strategy must be cognizant of this salient fact and pro-actively seek to engage with content from all of the Internet and from every type of provider. You can control only a fraction of your content (or content about you) -- so get real
There can be just one door -- like it or not, your content assets and web properties are going to proliferate (and you'll not necessarily have complete control over all of them -- such is the nature of partnerships). Your stakeholders are however likely to be only patchily informed of this and they will just care for the 'mother brand' (sorry if this hurts internal units that still believe they are the world). Your services must thus all be accessible from a single point -- make people run around, and they will run out

The reality is stark. The Internet has no central navigation, no content standards, no real structure and yet it works so much better than your corporate website. What is that the world is doing that you can't get your organization to? Is it time to give up the ghost?

What the heck is a good practice

2008-10-07T13:39:00.001-04:00

While I'm no great fan of the collective fixation with good/best practices, it's probably still worthwhile reconsidering the debate about what good practices really are. A simplistic definition does for most purposes and the one that I like to use is that a good practice ‘is a practice that upon rigorous evaluation, demonstrates success, has had an impact, and can be replicated’. You probably have your own preferred definition and I shan't quibble against it. Much however lurks under these simple definitions and only comes to the fore when you move beyond platitude to action. That's when you bump against issues like the following -

Process vs. artifacts – in most good practice discussions, there is a constant tension to define what really constitutes good practice. Is it individual artifacts/documents that stand apart and serve as exemplars, or do good practices refer to the process through which a team or individual arrived at a superior solution. The artifact approach is appealing for its focus on tangible outputs while its critics assail its narrow perspective and suitability for repeatable tasks alone. The process approach meanwhile is attractive for its holistic perspective, while its opponents decry it as being vague and wishy-washy
Explicit vs. tacit knowledge – this is a fairly classic knowledge management dilemma and is worth repeating here purely from that perspective. The question is whether an organization should focus only on its explicit assets (documents, reports, records, etc.) or should the focus of good practices be on building platforms (expert groups, networking tools, etc.) that encourage the development of new knowledge or transfer of hidden knowledge from one person to another on a need and just in time basis
Past vs. the future – though generally not expressed in such stark terms, there’s a constant tug between the past and the future when talking about good practices. In the classical sense, good practices are part of the record of what happened and help people understand what did or do not work well in completed engagements; more current thinking however emphasizes practices, even if they are ill-defined, that have a bearing on the future and can solve problems/issues/challenges that an individual or organization expects to encounter
Technical vs. social solutions – with the growing prevalence of information systems in organizations, there is often a tendency to ‘buy and install’ good practice solutions off the shelf and expect the problem to go away. This contrasts with more community oriented solutions which disdain the constraints of technology and dismiss technical solutions as far too ‘in the box’

Think hard about it, and there may even be a case for the odd good practice project!!

What does a content strategist really do

2008-09-18T21:22:00.001-04:00

Content Strategy is quite unexpectedly receiving a bit of attention these days, so here once again is a quick note on the fundamentals of content strategy and what a content strategist really does --

Content value-proposition -- why does an organization produce content, how do you measure its value, what is its role in business, and perhaps most crucially, what is content (with reference to your business)
Content types and attributes -- getting down and dirty with content; how many content types exist in your organization and what are their characteristics (this is when concepts like metadata and taxonomy start purring firth!)
Workflow -- that explore your content lifecycle, the key milestones and players, disposal and archival, and what often gets overlooked -- the integration, or not, with business processes
Voice and tone -- or general editorial principles behind the management of your content; another aspect that's probably suffered from its perceived lack of glamor but that no smart business can thrive without
Content infrastructure -- or business and technical requirements/tools to run the content related aspects of your business (the temptation, quite often, is to reduce content management to this bullet alone, but we're too smart to fall for that one, aren't we!)
Training -- or capacity building so that all the stuff above doesn't walk out the door when the content strategist leaves

The content strategist must of course work well with the rest of the design team (often including web strategists, information architects, graphic designers, usability experts, and more), plus the business and technology teams. It never hurts to tell them right up front what you're in the team for and what you'll deliver.

More about content strategy in this presentation.

What is Content Strategy

View more presentations from prasannalaldas.

Design, or just a series of happy accidents?

2008-09-12T18:00:00.002-04:00

Once you have figured out how good your website is, the challenge is to create or sustain an online presence that is truly meaningful to your audience. Information design is likely to be one of the things that you'll peruse the hardest and you've probably already got Information Architects showering you with new wireframes daily. How do you know that the wireframes are any good? Testing is of course the ultimate recourse, but here are a few things to keep in mind as you analyze web screens and information design in general --

Hierarchy -- I've written elsewhere against being enamored by content hierarchy, but it does remain central to design (the secret's to avoid being solely dependent on it). Ask yourself as you review a screen -- do I know where I am, and can I work my way easily up, down, and sideways from what I am viewing? If you can't, you're probably lost and that's never a good thing on a website
Recognition -- or personalization. Does the site know who you are, and does it take advantage of that fact? You really don't want to show the same page to everybody -- learn to recognize your visitors and gently guide their experience. Help people make (what they think are) serendipitous discoveries
Community -- another word that is becoming too hoary for its own good, but it is a vital concept nonetheless. Nobody wants to go to an empty fair -- scan your wireframes for signs of communal life. Can you tell who else visits the site, what they like to do on it, and if they share your interests
Participation -- possibly the key to Web 2.0 and something that is becoming a basic expectation among surfers. People no longer want to merely read on websites, they want to 'give back' (and also serve themselves). Do your designs afford the opportunity to your visitors -- can they rate pages, comment on products, and contribute information? You're missing an opportunity if you're shutting any potential contributors out
Mix 'n match -- or mash-up as the jargon goes. You need to decide what's most appropriate for your audience, but people now increasingly want to build their own experience or create their own information products (for personal or business reasons). Do your screens make it easy for people to use your data, or are you still caught in a time warp where it was enough just to 'publish' data
You're never alone -- so make sure your website is not shy of acknowledging that it is not the ultimate authority on everything. When reviewing design and information approach, make sure your screens are not afraid of pointing to alternative sources. People leaving your website is not always a bad thing -- they'll come back if you're useful to them

What does your list look like?

On voice and tone

2008-08-18T15:53:00.007-04:00

Style manuals and writing guidelines for the Web abound, but how do you produce distinctive copy that is instantly identifiable with your site, how do you make your brand promise ooze out of every line of instructional text you pound out, how do you imbue your text with personality? A technique to consider is a voice and tone scale that can serve as the framework to measure all text against -- a well-crafted voice and tone scale can tell you whether your copy is too loud for your brand or if your subtlety is going to be lost on your readers.

Here's an example of such a scale. More about it on my Slideshare site.

How good is your website

2008-08-01T16:00:00.007-04:00

It may take only 5 minutes to get started with Web 2.0, but it can sometimes be more difficult to answer seemingly innocuous questions like 'how good is your website' and 'how do you know it's as good or bad as you say it is'. Most people base their answers on reader feedback or web traffic trends, or perhaps generally in comparative terms with other parts of the Internet/intranet, but there definitely is merit in occasionally conducting comprehensive website audits that give you a holistic picture about your web properties and associated strategy. Many of you however recoil at the prospect because such projects can take forever and eventually produce nothing too conclusive or just rehash shopworn truths dressed up as 'heuristics'. How then do you do something short and snappy, and yet largely meaningful? Well, how about starting with some of the questions below (after promising yourself to get as many answers as you can within 2 weeks)?

Business design

Clarity of business drivers -- why does the website exist, how does it impact the business, where is the business going
Integration with business processes -- which parts of the business are most affected by the website, how have they adapted to the online world, are the making the best use of the web as a tool for conducting business
Audience analysis -- who uses the site, why, and how effectively; does the site support any key 'personas'

General design

Navigation and structure -- is the content organized logically, is there a clear hierarchy of content (where appropriate), does the site support multiple entry points into content, is inter-related content easy to access, is there 'just enough' content on pages or too much or too little
Look and feel -- are the colors/palette consistent, what kind of a font library is used and how deliberately, do the graphics conform to a standard style, is the page layout standardized, does the site have a 'brand'
Task-orientation and task ease -- does the site support key business tasks, are the tasks relevant from the user's perspective, are the tasks easy to complete, do the tasks offer the appropriate amount of flexibility (review any scenarios that may exist)
Usability -- does the site conform to generally accepted usability norms
Modularity -- Is the visual design modular (componentized) and scalable

Content design

Content scope and sources -- how much content exists currently, how is it created, and where is it sourced from
Content types and attributes -- how many types of content exist, how consistently are they defined, and what are their attributes; is the content structured or do options exist for post-publication content analysis
Content flexibility and reuse -- can the reader control the amount of information she sees, can the reader mix and match content from different parts of the site, can the reader print content easily and/or convert it to other formats, does the content connect to external sources of content, are mash-ups an option at all
Voice and tone -- is there any consistent editorial representation of the brand or the 'personality' of content
Writing practices -- check for calls to action, consistent tone, freshness, scannability, messaging, captions, frequency of updates
Nomenclature -- check for consistent labeling, intuitive terms, absence of jargon
General content -- does the content appear reliable, current, and comprehensive, is there any duplication
Reader support (support content and features) -- how strong is the instructional content, are help options required and available

Interactive features

Interactive features -- does the site provide a variety of interactive options for readers, what are these options, how useful are these, and how does the range of such features match up against comparable sites
Personalization -- is content personalization important, does the site support any relevant personalization features, what is the effectiveness of such features
Community features -- does the site provide any opportunities to engage with the user community, can the user community generate content, does the site use any 'Web 2.0' features and they appropriate for the site
Search -- is the search consistently available, does it provide satisfactory results, can the reader slice and dice search results

Support infrastructure

Governance environment -- does the site have a clear owner/sponsor, are policies and standards clearly defined and maintained, is there a clear line of command, does the team have the right skills, are adequate resources available to support the site
General technology environment -- what tools are currently used and what limitations/constraints/risks (if any) apply
General website performance -- what is the site speed, does it support all popular browsers, is website reporting comprehensive and relevant, are all links functional
Accessibility -- does the site cater to accessibility requirements
Institutional alignment -- does the site conform to other institutional tools, does it make it easy to share data with other applications
Industry standards -- does the site conform to industry standards
Credibility and legal issues -- does the site feature terms and conditions of service, disclaimers, etc.

Work plan

Overall objectives and plan -- what potential options exist, what are the likely timelines, and what resources may be required
Roadmap -- what will be the key milestones, roles and responsibilities, and deliverables
Results -- what will be ultimately achieved, any quick wins, scope for innovation
Long-term approach -- how will you sustain the results

5 minutes to Web 2.0 (but go a bit slower)

2008-07-30T16:11:00.005-04:00

Speaking to a few colleagues the other day, it sounded like the fear of technical complexity and cost/scale may be discouraging many people from initiating or participating in Web 2.0 activities (say blogs, wiki, social networks, etc.). I'm happy to report that, as many people know already, technology and technology related cost are by far the easiest things about most Web 2.0 tools. If you have a pilot in mind, 'technical implementation' is a cinch (and takes 5-15 minutes in most cases). You can set up your own wiki or blog or social network in less time than it probably takes to read this post (and you need just enough technical literacy to surf the web). Here is how --

Starting a wiki -- about as easy as setting up a personal mail account on Yahoo or Google. Pick a wiki platform -- here's a matrix to get you started -- or just go with something easy and proven like Wikispaces, register, give your wiki a name, decide whether it is public or private, pick a template, invite users, and you're all set. You can change settings later, add/delete widgets whenever you want to, and upgrade to a paid version if necessary
Starting a social network -- about as easy really. Register, give your site a name, and pretty much follow the same steps as when creating a wiki. It should take about 10 minutes if you're very distracted, and soon you'll have your own social network that reminds people of Facebook! Try Ning if you want to keep it very simple; a few more ideas are discussed in this article
Starting a blog -- you're probably on surer ground here already. You can set up an external blog using one of the numerous tools out there. How about Blogger if everything else seems more complicated and you want to spare yourself complex research. Remember, blogs are about what you say -- the technology is incredibly easy
Starting a collaborative website -- this one may be slightly tougher, but you can take a crack with something like Microsoft Sharepoint. Download a copy (of WSS, which is free) and play with it. A few hours of auto-didactism later, you should be ready to set up new sites (that include wikis, blogs, calendars, lists, RSS, etc.) in minutes. Or just nose around Google Sites, which is much simpler and where it takes barely moments to start a new website with a few collaborative features baked in. In fact, hanging around the Google universe is probably the cheapest way to lose your fear of Web 2.0 technology
Creating a mash-up -- I guess techies still have an advantage here, but you can definitely get in the game. Try Popfly or even simpler tools/sites like iGoogle or PageFlakes -- it is simple enough to get a feel for the opportunities that mash-ups offer

That said, you will do well to remember that the success of Web 2.0 initiatives (like basically all initiatives) depends more on strategic, behavioral, cultural, and organizational (yes, including the G word) factors than on technology. The good news however is that the technical barrier to entry is low. You may also want to consider issues like data security, alignment with existing tools and standards, legal factors, and more but once you've got past that, or if you just want to experiment with the tools out there, all you need is 5 minutes.

Say no to good practices (in a database)

2008-07-30T16:05:00.005-04:00

In a large multinational organization, there is no denying the need to widely disseminate good practice information to staff around the world. The increasingly decentralized and fluid nature of operations make it imperative for organizations to establish a knowledgebase that can be easily accessed by all staff as and when they need it. It is however important to refrain from trying to build a ‘magic bullet’ solution via a database that can theoretically help codify and capture the majority of good practices that exist in an organization. The potential weaknesses of a stand-alone database include –

Backward looking rather than proactive – good practice databases, by their nature, seek to capture the best artifacts from the past, rather than anticipate current, emerging, or future requirements. The ‘historical’ perspective is undoubtedly important in organizations, but addressing knowledge gaps to address immediate requirements is possibly equally, if not more important, for the majority of the field staff
Limited content coverage – a good practices database, shall by definition, exclude more content than it includes. This is likely to affect the usage of the database as readers must learn what it contains and what it is useful for; readers must also continue to deal with multiple sources of information
Confusion about the definition of a good practice – as we have seen in numerous projects, different parts of an organization have different definitions of what constitutes a good practice (the process vs. artifact dispute is the most glaring example). It is tempting to choose one side over the other, but a database that focuses on one type of good practice, at the exclusion of other knowledge artifacts, can never have more than limited value
Emphasis on feeding the machine, rather than improving practices – excessive focus on good practices sometimes tends to encourage staff to create good practices rather than effective project output. The only true value of good practices is adoption; emphasis on producing good practices generally results in ‘yesterday’s core capabilities becoming tomorrow’s rigidities’ – it is a worrying sign when your core metric becomes the size, quality, and ‘efficiency’ of the database rather than the effectiveness of your domain
Isolation from other knowledge tools – most organizations already uses several tools which are not very well integrated with each other. There is a strong chance that the database will become one more tool that replicates/contradicts information in other tools, and the content of which cannot be effectively searched through other tools

Knowledge sharing isn't good enough

2008-07-15T22:20:00.005-04:00

Collaboration, knowledge sharing or, even better, knowledge linking are all the rage these days and may the force be with them. I'm however a trifle alarmed when folks aver that, to keep up with the times (when all rules are yet again being written anew), research-based organizations should emphasize knowledge sharing rather than their traditional forte, knowledge creation. As the argument goes, knowledge linking or knowledge networking is more inclusive, reflects openness to new, external, sometimes conflicting ideas, and casts researchers in the humble light their critics have long wanted to see them in. In any case, goes the argument, in world 2.0 knowledge is no longer a one-way vehicle and solitary knowledge producers who create allegedly authoritative knowledge that can be attributed to specific authors/groups, must inevitably give way to the 'wisdom of the crowd' where all knowledge is participatory in nature, resembles conversations rather than conclusions, and must be collaborative rather than oracular. The power in this world belongs to knowledge linkers and to owners of knowledge communities, rather than to the ivory tower clinging expert.

The idea is appealing in a languorous, guilt-cleansing sort of way but researchers/experts can embrace it only at their peril. Knowledge linking (and the associated community building) is indisputably vital but it confers zero competitive advantage on knowledge producers -- in the knowledge world, original research (or at least original sounding conclusions and recommendations) is the only meaningful currency that knowledge creators have. It takes long-term investment in research to set an organization apart from the crowd and the Internet suddenly offers tremendous opportunities to make this investment count. Chasing the 'linking' fad (in which the barrier to entry to much lower) isn't the way to do it, unless the idea is purely to rid researchers/experts of the insular, pretentious, and the by-the-numbers dissemination approaches they have historically chosen.

Go do some real research -- the Internet is full of people who will do the linking for you.

Global content strategy anyone?

2008-07-12T23:50:00.002-04:00

You could argue that we still haven't figured out enterprise content management (and you wouldn't be wrong), but it may be time already for organizations to start thinking about global content strategy or global content management. ECM or ECDM, with its centralized command and control paradigm, its insistence on common vocabularies and stately standards, its insular-first approach, its author-is-king POV, and its reassuringly traditional deployment methodology still has many devotees (for many right, though evanescent reasons), and it isn't going away in a hurry (at least not as long as ECM vendors can squeeze dollars out of circumspect organizations), but emerging trends in the industry almost demand that knowledge-based organizations start to at least begin reviewing their content strategies before the future is suddenly upon them (can't you feel a pall begin to descend already!).

Some trends that your global content management strategy must grapple with include --

The pervasive web -- the web will no longer be limited to PCs or even telecom devices, it will be everywhere -- in cameras, sensors, appliances, and more, and the number of data sources and types will explode beyond control. Your own people will migrate data to, or create data in, other sources if you don't grow up fast enough for them

The 'everything is standard' standards -- the days of tight standards that excluded the vast majority of data as nonstandard or unstructured are rapidly slipping away; in the global content world, almost nothing will be an exception and content platforms must learn to make semantic sense of all information (and not just rigidly structured data), and a lot of it will come from and/or interact with non-enterprise sources

The service model/cloud computing -- quite simply, if your content isn't available as a service, it might as well not exist. Unless you're willing to let somebody else scrape away your data and make a tidy profit out of it, while you (deservedly) slink out of the public sight, and eventually, business

The inversion of control -- Derrida may or may not have gotten it right with deconstruction, but the reader's context is everything on the web, and readers increasingly assemble their own experience. Your content strategy must ineluctably move away from the 'book with links' paradigm that dominates the web today -- the reader's expectations rather than the author's intent become paramount; you must recognize the reader much better than you do now

Whither security/trust -- the usual bugbear and IT's favorite line of defense (often for perfectly sensible reasons); watch out however for the mind-shift in this space as the cloud becomes more reliable, cheaper, and scalable than the servers hitherto considered secure because they were locked up in rooms only people with your organization's badges had access to. For organizations that jumped to outsource payroll, this will be an easy call

The next time you think enterprise content, think a couple of steps ahead.

If you blame culture, perhaps YOU don't 'get it'

2008-07-12T23:48:00.003-04:00

Visionaries and thought leaders, especially the technically inclined ones, are often quick to blame the 'culture' of an organization when their potentially transformative ideas (as they see it) fail to take root in an organization, while similar initiatives seem to fill case study listings in popular magazines. Solace then lies in declaring that the organization just doesn't 'get it' and that things would be so much simpler if you just took the existing people out of an organization and supplanted them with a trendier set (of the sort that has the blogosphere buzzing). Oh, how much better an organization would do if its culture somehow changed!!

Is it however contrarian to suggest that the people who don't really get it are perhaps the ones on the smug end of the debate? Businesses, and their collateral culture, tend to change rapidly when business managers see value -- culture almost never holds a company back from grabbing a dollar if it can see it. The Fortune 500 has seldom been littered with the hip, only the stodgy, bloody-minded make a home there.

Reformers, especially if they mean well, may do better if they reconsider the business value of their ideas -- when the manager's eye glazes over, is it because she was born too early to share your wavelength, or because your idea is just a wannabe that shows only a limited understanding of your business; do people fail to adopt because they just want to protect their turf or because you just didn't work hard enough to understand their world; does your wonderful project suddenly fall apart because you were so far ahead of the game that the organization couldn't keep up, or was it because you never thought about day 2? Are you just a barbarian at the gate?

The future of books (ahem!)

2008-02-01T13:59:00.002-05:00

Interesting conversations abound on the intranet about the future of the books and include several insightful observations plus the usual hysterical posts that sometimes make me wonder if it is necessary to be either shrill or extreme to be heard online. Anyway, my take (for what it is worth) is that there is a good case for moving beyond the either/or premise that seems to characterize conversations about the 'future of books' (a portentous theme if there ever was one). There seems to be a haste to reach conclusions such as 'books are dead' or 'wikis will be dead in the water'. A more level-headed approach may be to view books, MSM, everything 2.0, etc. as part of an information continuum that has space for each one of them, without the imperatives of a zero sum game, and in which each of these media forms shall gradually evolve in response to each other (and borrow traits from each other -- this includes 2.0 as well, which has a lot to learn from traditional media). The real value of information springs not from its form, but its message (regardless of what McLuhan might have said) -that shall never change. The author, individually or as part of a ‘crowd’, is the most vital part of the information loop.

Here's a glance at what the future (and I mean the next 5 years by that) may look like for books and 2.0 tools -

Books shall continue to be alive and kicking but change in subtle ways. We’ll see more 'on-demand' distribution; more 'editions' and 'versions' in different market segments shall become the norm; readers shall expect and receive more current and updated texts; there shall often be tighter linkage to 2.0 tools but this shan’t always be led by authors; we’ll see 'merged' online/offline distribution as digital readers become more popular; there will certainly be more multimedia within pages; 'chunk' or ‘module’ based distribution that doesn't force readers to buy the complete book shall become increasingly profitable; and 'custom' books that let reader combine information from different books to create their own books will be passé
2.0 tools shall become more mainstream and lose some (but not all) of their 'edgy' independent elements (4.0 will be the new 'cool'!). Wikipedia will likely remain the flag bearer for 'mass wisdom' but in many ways it may be one of a kind (and gloriously so). 'Branded' wikis (say a WB wiki on development issues) shall proliferate and straddle the line between mass participation and 'expert community' driven initatives; successful blogs shall drift towards corporate ownership with news organizations and others of the ilk 'employing' or 'co-opting' the more credible voices in the blogosphere; all publications will definitely become collaborative to a degree with reader ratings and responses becoming the norm; many bloggers will however remain resolutely independent but only a few of them may attain consistent and influential visibility (with most bloggers writing about their kids and sports schedules); the amateur blogger will be important largely in concert with others as a statistical indicator to take the temperature of the crowd, but not quite as an individual

More on other media elements/tools in another post.

The death of navigation

2008-02-01T13:57:00.002-05:00

Time was you would spend weeks, if not months, designing elaborate left hand navigation schemes, figuring out how deep your site should be (3 is best practice but we probably need 5'), and creating clever site maps ('look no scrolling'!). And then the navigation would soon grow too deep or unwieldy or plain unusable and there you'd go again. Has the time come to call the bluff, and move away from sites based on the classical navigation paradigm?

The evidence around us points overwhelmingly towards sites built upon 'progressive', 'user-driven' or 'query driven navigation' rather than drill down navigation systems. Wikipedia, for instance, doesn't really feature any formal navigation system -- you search for a term, and then follow contextual links (a classical navigation system, on the other hand, would force you to go through hierarchies/categories of information and finally take you to a page that 'belongs' to a defined part of the site, unlike the relatively anarchy on Wikipedia in which a page 'belongs' to multiple categories/pathways -- and of course, search never quite works on classical navigation driven websites).

Amazon or Netflix or YouTube or Digg or even New York Times (and others of the ilk) are further examples of sites that feature very little formal navigation schemes -- each click on such sites really launches a search query and leads to a page assembled from multiple content sources (often unique to users). What really drives these sites is the content taxonomy that can have unlimited facets and be experienced in multiple ways, plus task-orientation that is focused on the local and the immediate, rather than 'global' options. There is no 'designer experience' that you must suffer - you instead build your own experience based on who you are and your behavior on the site in the past.

I should however add that while Navigation with a capital N may be dead, task-oriented, modular, contextual 'little navigation' is alive and kicking and in fact never had it better. All the sites mentioned above dedicate extensive attention to 'contextual navigation/content' and interactive options, and place you in little worlds where you have everything you need or want. There give you none of the feeling of being in a big world represented by huge sites that glory in appearing massive (because they have 15 links in the left hand navigation which open 10 sub-menus each and in which bread-crumbs run 3 lines and where sub-sites assail you after every click), and are awash with best practice navigation. The online world is now instead being driven by the 'level 3 internal' pages and 'local elements' you never bothered to design because you were too busy designing the home page and the left hand navigation and countless other global elements.

Twenty-20 cricket - it ain't broke (yet) but two fixes

2007-09-19T20:55:00.002-04:00

While cricket's craven aping of baseball is amusing (hear, hear I guess to 'dugouts', 'hitters', 'ballparks', 'hitting' and other baseball vernacular), the ICC World Cup Twenty-20 championship definitely makes the case for adopting at least one of baseball's conventions - separate batting and bowling units, so that batsmen or hitters don't bowl, and the bowlers or pitchers don't bat, and both can be substituted at any point in the game. As I wrote earlier, in much greater detail , this takes the guesswork and luck out of team selection and also guarantees that the most skilful players face each other at all stages of the game (so that nobody has to suffer through tailenders trying to bat their teams out of trouble, charming as this occasionally may be, or batsmen feasting on clearly second-rate bowlers, in the team largely for their batting while better bowlers cool their heels in the pavilion, nee dugout).

The success of the World Cup Twenty-20 championship means that ICC is unlikely to tinker with the rules that currently govern the Twenty-20 format. Teams that want to win consistently may meanwhile try another tactical ploy - play with 11 specialist batsmen, a few of whom may be able to passably turn their arms over. This seemingly contradicts what has ostensibly been the biggest lesson of the World Cup Twenty-20 championship that it is bowlers, rather than batsmen, that eventually make the difference. The lesson is however deceptive and there is only a small difference between the effectiveness of part-time bowlers and that of specialists. The runs conceded per over are only marginally different (take the two games played today as example - Broad, Tremlett, and Sharma suffered about as much as the less regular bowlers in the India-England game, and Pollock and Oram/Martin didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the South Africa-New Zealand game). The same applies to bowler strike rates and luck or mistakes seem to play as big a role in wickets as skill.

So, is there a case for saying that team packed with 11 batsmen would concede only a few more runs in an innings (rarely exceeding 225, given current rates of scoring) than the current norm, while its batsmen, freed from any need to conserve wickets, would be almost unstoppable (or worth at least 10 additional boundaries per innings)? The math seems to favor the equation and it can't be too long before at least one international team takes the plunge.

Let's improve search - the biggest red herring of all

2007-09-02T15:31:00.002-04:00

'Garbage in garbage' out is every IT designer's favorite cliche and provides a ready-made escape route to paper over cracks in content management systems ('it's a great system but folks just don't use it right'!). The sad part however is that classical content systems are designed to accept only garbage and nothing else, and as long as the traditional content management paradigm that content management begins after a document is created endures, we must live with systems that only IT departments love. This is the paradigm where quests such as improving search spring from -- an eternal quest if there ever was one. You will never have 'better search' (whatever that may mean in the absence of a superior baseline than 'like Google' and a constricted definition of search as activities that start with a search box) as long as your content can be dismissed, by IT standards, as 'garbage' in the system even though your content/documents make perfect business sense.

For a content initiative to be successful, designers must start the content lifecycle before or during a content artefact is created and then consider its implications beyond its immediate purposes. Too many content management designers are beguiled by the content infrastructure (storage, workflow, forms, interfaces, etc.) at the expense of the truly meaningful parts of the content lifecycle -- the capture, creation, and consumption of content. The infrastructure is vital, no doubt, but it is in relative terms no more than grunt work, the equivalent of pouring concrete in highway systems. What makes any highway system tick -- the laying of concrete or the design of experiential elements like signage, lane marking, and contours? The traditional systems unfortunately seem to pander to the 'truck in the concrete and we'll worry about the rest later' model.

The real questions that content managers should be asking are -- how can I meaningfully capture what the business generates (without a formal 'capture/upload' step), how do I interpret output without an intervention (don't ask any self-respecting author for a 'summary' after the project's done), how do I capture metadata invisibly while the writer is producing content (any system that asks authors for metadata -- a bureaucratic extortion on par with any -- is doomed to fail), how can I design content quality standards that don't detract from business quality (asking somebody to upload a file in two systems for content reasons just won't cut it), how can I integrate content management processes with business processes (with the latter always taking precedence, with zero content management overhead), how can I reassemble content on demand (canned options suggest the limits of your imagination rather than real user needs), how can I make everything available in all formats and platforms (content and data really must be free), and how can I deduce the purpose of my consumer (this is the real value of search -- show answers before somebody starts a search, a la say, Amazon or Netflix).

The content management experience must begin and end at the desktop and never make its presence felt -- let people get on with their work and take care of their content management needs on their behalf. Don't ask for 'a little more metadata, and can you change the format please'. You'll be surprised how much better search is when it isn't an afterthought any more.

A content management maturity model

2006-11-27T18:08:00.003-05:00

Maturity frameworks are standard practice in industry to define how business processes, associated tools, and governance practices mature over time and often serve as roadmaps to determine priority areas of action. Examples of maturity models include the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model, the Information Process Maturity Model and the Capability Maturity Model published by the Software Engineering Institute.

Within content management itself, a maturity framework has been slow to evolve and no widely accepted industry standard models exist yet. Here therefore is a proposed content management maturity model that may be generic enough to be applied to a variety of business contexts and take adequate cognizance of past industry practices and emerging industry trends to be applicable to most environments.

The content maturity model spans these measures –

Strategy – what are the components of the unit’s content strategy, and how comprehensively are they defined
Governance – what sort of team and organizational infrastructure is available to carry out the content management mandate
Processes – how well are content management processes defined in the unit
Tools and technology – what tools and technologies are available to the unit to carry out its content management mandate
Implementation – how widely are content management practices actually adopted by the unit’s management and team
Benefits – what are the measurable results that can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the unit’s content management strategy

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The revolt of the conformist

2006-05-24T16:03:00.002-04:00

Agitations sweep India once again as the anti-reservation (and pro-reservation) stir gathers momentum and rumors fly on SMS messages and e-mail chains. Once again, all the visible signs and tools of change and transformation are in full force and we wait breathlessly for a new dawn in Indian polity. Unfortunately however, our protestors are not fighting for a new future, they are fighting for the right to ape the dreams of their parents. This is a conformist generation dismayed that change is in the air.

The signs of change that this generation recognizes are the ones that would have struck a chord in their parents’ times - reservations, quotas, disputes over 'merit', and the politics of victimhood. The generation does not recognize that the real issues are elsewhere - they lie in an elitist structure in which millions of people have no realistic shot at a decent education, healthcare, or professional opportunities, with or without reservations. The reservations bill will make no tangible difference to the vast majority of people, upper caste and OBCs alike, because the resource pool they are competing for is infinitesimally small. The real tragedy is not the politics of reservations, but the politics of scarcity, and our misplaced priorities that perpetuate scarcity as a way of preserving social and political dominance.

Two questions to ponder over - why do we want to build/perpetuate a society in which clearing the right exam can make or break your life, and why do we want to focus on exclusive institutions (a la another AIIMS in a city of a politician's choice) when it is less expensive and hugely more beneficial to support more popular institutions (say refurbishing regular government hospitals and creating accountability in their governance). The world that the anti and pro reservation demonstrators are fighting for is one that produces poverty of mind (as our schools languish while we thump our chests over wasteful IITs and IIMs, the ultimate refuge of the supremely conservative and self-serving), poverty of thought (as we peddle borrowed, rebranded ideas and squabble over shibboleths), and the worst, poverty of the body (while we dream of building an AIIMS, where a well functioning clinic would do).

This is a revolt not to rebuild India, but to claim its spoils.

A time for modesty (and a little fear)

2006-05-18T12:11:00.002-04:00

These are transformational times in India (at least for some people), and the cockiness is evident on the streets, in the mainstream media, and (nowhere more so than) in the boardrooms of alleged business titans who have perfected the swagger of the noveau-riche. The spirit has percolated to the job market where a vastly inflated sense of self-worth has become the norm, and coarse, blinkered hype has driven away advocates of perspective and proportion.

These thus are treacherous times for India because naked pragmatism has its limitations, the most cardinal of which is the proclivity to set aside bad news and/or never prepare for it. If India is indeed to make the best out of this tremendous opportunity, it must, silly as it sounds, spread a little pessimism around; our backs are still against the wall.

The new Euro-Dollar

2006-05-01T21:26:00.002-04:00

I'm obviously not an economist, and dread that the current post reflects naiveté rather than acumen, but I wonder about the economic ramifications of unifying the currencies of the United States, Canada, and the European Union. The currencies have comparable value today (give or take a bit), operate in relatively similar economic environments (though you can quibble against it), and constitute a largely friendly (if occasionally fractious) political bloc. And all these countries, so used to being the most dominant economic forces in the world, now face growing economic challenges from the rest of the world, especially with India and China poised to join the largest national economies of the world.

The western world must gear itself to meet this challenge in a variety of ways, not the least of which is its ability to create, define, and sustain new types of institutions that anticipate change and leave society better prepared to profit from them. Can a unified currency framework be one such institution? Would a common currency reduce inefficiencies in the economy, help widen internal markets, and encourage greater economic responsibility?

This land is your land

2006-04-17T15:56:00.002-04:00

As the immigration debate heats up once again in the United States, with everything from law to sociology, economics, and history in the mix, here is a glance backwards at an earlier post on this blog that described migration as natural human behavior and averred that the age of opportunity based on geographical accidents is now past. Is United States, which in many ways is the most free and tolerant nation in the world, in moral retreat now, have passing troubles sapped its courage, has righteousness vanquished right?

US baseball - time to play

2006-03-21T18:49:00.002-05:00

The World Baseball classic probably showed off the US baseball team in a poorer light than it deserves (they did beat the world champions didn't they, with only a little help from the umpires!) but it is blatantly clear that this isn't the country where the best baseball is played. The average standard of baseball in the country is most likely higher in the US than in other leagues around the world, but far too often we mistake mediocrity, shielded from competition against the very best, for excellence. MLB has several players who can massacre mediocre opposition and put up eye-popping numbers, but very few players who can routinely joust it out with the best in the world. The time may be nigh to at least question, though probably not hastily abandon, a few cherished truths about the game in this country.

The sanctity of the 162 game season - heretical as it may sound, but is there a case that the game a day paradigm that MLB follows discourages excellence and all out effort. Would players have more in the tank if they played, say twice or thrice a week and thus improve the quality of play and reduce the number of meanigless games (and create a league with a generally higher standard of play than we see today). Don't tell this to the owners though who like the money daily gate receipts bring in
The disdain for international competition - MLB professionals are under no pressure to secure national team berths as the defining mark of recognition of the quality of their play. Many of them thus stop developing as players once they make the MLB roster or the All Star cast. Give them the incentive to make it to the national team and let them know that the ones that don't make it are essentially class B players. Let them then compete against the best in the world and truly prove that their elite status. Right now, far too many players are lulled into a superiority complex simply because MLB puts their mugs on TV every night, while guys in South Korea languish in relative obscurity
The monopolistic structure of the game - this is a league in which there is no price for failure and no opportunities for the outsider. It is time to create a competitive league in which the worst teams every year drop out of the highest echelon of the game and new teams earn a right to play against the best. Let MLB players get used to playing truly meaningful games in which the price of failure is relegation from a division and not just a few days of sulking on TV and demand for trades to allegedly more competitive teams that offer players a chance to win
The sense of entitlement - what really hurt the US baseball team more than anything else was the general conceit that the US team just needed to turn up to win the tournament. Not that the organizers were taking chances and the draw was essentially 'rigged' to unduly favor the home team - it was quite ironical that our superstars were all secretly scared that somebody would waylay and whip them (which is what happened). A fairer tournament structure would have helped the team prepare better and consider the consequences of defeat and go into each game with the intent to win (and not just wait for opponents to roll over). Hopefully there shan't be any disbelief the next time the US professional team loses - players should be ready for it and bursting their guts to win instead

All questions to ponder unless USA is satisfied being the 3rd best team in North America.

Super-subs - how to kill a good idea

2006-02-10T15:20:00.002-05:00

The super-sub question has begun to raise its head again and there's a chance that the next cricket world cup will be played 11 against 11 (as in the old days). I wonder if that shall throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The problem isn't so much with the concept of a super-sub but with the timid nature of the rule change. One super-sub to be named before the match makes a mockery of the super-sub concept (and frequently gives an unfair advantage to the team winning the toss) -- the law must be extended to allow teams to 'expand the playing roster to 16 with the proviso that only 11 players may bat or bowl in an innings (the batting and bowling ‘sides’ of a team thus need not be the same, as is currently the case)'.

Here is a link to an earlier article on rethinking one-day cricket (originally published before ICC announced its pusillanimous 'innovation') that explains the concept further.

Saurav Ganguly - blasted into the past

2005-12-19T14:51:00.002-05:00

So the hulabaloo over Saurav Ganguly's exclusion from the Indian cricket team has begun to die down, and I shan't waste anybody's time discussing the merits of the case (this is indeed one of those 50/50 cases) but what is interesting is the way the team leadership has kept mum about the issue. No one obviously wants to rock the boat, and many would consider this a 'mature' stance but how different is this from the firebreathing spirit that Ganguly brought to the team -- here was perhaps the only captain in the the history of Indian cricket willing to take selection fights to the selectors and back his players, and here he is left to fight a lonely battle with only the powerless (oe 'pawar'less!) for company.

Article 370 - a case to extend it beyond Kashmir

2005-09-12T17:23:00.002-04:00

Article 370 has been a source of constant political tussle in India - its supporters see it as a symbol of India's secular credentials, while its opponents rail that it represents minority appeasement. It is my contention that given the changed historical circumstances, the entire argument may be misplaced, and that there may be a case for viewing the article as a harbinger of expanded federalism in India. Does the article lay down a model for a new type of center-state relations?

By Prasanna Lal Das

This article is also available on this site, and on www.prasanna.org.

The cry for the abolition of the Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which confers great autonomy on Jammu & Kashmir, is a misplaced one – the cry instead should be for its extension to the whole of India.

Article 370, unwittingly perhaps considering its historical circumstances, may be the brightest glint of federal expression in the Indian constitution, which otherwise remains largely unitary in character. Large sections of the Indian population (and regions that contain them) thus feel increasingly marginalized from the ‘mainstream’, and seemingly disparate phenomenon like recent disturbances in the northeast, the girding of heartland India by naxalites, the trivialization of the parliamentary process, and paradoxically enough, the continuing impasse in Jammu & Kashmir, may well be said to spring from the centralized nature of governance in India which concentrates power in the hands of a few organized interest groups and leaves the average citizen with only symbols of democratic participation like ritualized elections and awe-inspiring, monumental edifices where elected representatives apparently serve the people. Article 370, minus its current imperfections, may well be the harbinger of a ‘new India.’

Before getting ahead with the story however, a look backwards at what Article 370 is, and its motivations. The article was a byproduct of Kashmir’s accession to India after independence, and was designed to ensure that Kashmiri aspirations were well served by the government of India, and critically, that Kashmiris would have a vital say in the manner their state was governed. In its broadest contours, the article gave the central government primacy in defense, foreign affairs, and communication, while the state government assumed greater control over other laws (including those of property, citizenship, and fundamental rights) and the daily lives of its citizenry. The article was conceived under what may be termed as extraordinary circumstances, when the threat of Kashmir slipping from India’s then tenuous grip was a distinct possibility, and was certainly politically expedient – it was thus originally conceived as an ‘interim’ measure but like many other ‘temporary’ features in the Indian constitution, it has now assumed a permanent air and we currently talk about it mostly as a vexing issue that nobody is ever likely to do anything about.

As things stand, the battle lines for and against the article are clearly drawn – its supporters see the article as a vital cog in the preservation of the Indian union, an instrument that honors a promise that the government of India made to the people of Kashmir at the time of accession, a vehicle to assure citizens of India’s only Muslim-majority state about India’s secular credentials, and as a mechanism to safeguard Kashmir’s culture (or Kashmiriyat, as it is often described). The article’s supporters see in Kashmir’s unique personal and property laws an expression of the will of the people of Kashmir and reckon Kashmir’s interests are best left to the people of Kashmir themselves (especially if it helps maintain the integrity of the Indian union). The opponents of the article however see it as fundamentally flawed – to them Article 370 is a tool of appeasement, one that gives special leeway to Muslims even though they are a majority in the state (at the cost of the ‘real minorities’ in the state – the Pandits, the Laddakhis, etc.), they view it as a discriminatory tool that provides preferential treatment to one state over all others in the country on account of ‘historical blunders’ made after the Kashmir raids of 1948, and they decry it as another hole in the ‘pseudo-secular’ fabric of India which owes its continued existence to the twisted logic of electoral politics rather than to national interest.

It is not my purpose in this article to favor one argument over another (suffice to say that the motives of both sides are suspect to a degree and ideology rather than common logic takes precedence in many of their assertions) but to shift the focus of the debate – rather than keep Jammu & Kashmir at the center of the argument about Article 370, it may be time to view the article in a larger national context. Does the article offer any guidelines to the governing system in the rest of India? Is there greater merit in the rest of India adopting some of the salient features of the article than in denouncing it largely on the grounds of ‘we don’t have it, so shouldn’t she’? Should we choose to be frogs in a well pulling each other down, or is it time to climb out of the holes we have dug for ourselves, and take a look at the larger world around?

Let’s take a look at the article stripped of its historical baggage, and ignore for a moment that it only applies to Jammu & Kashmir in its current guise – all it proposes is greater autonomy in the running of a state than is the norm in the Indian constitution. The article recognizes that India is a diverse country and that a region may have special needs which may or may not be in consonance with the needs of the rest of the country. It thus leaves discretionary powers with the state and subjects all central laws/amendments to state approval before they can be implemented in a state. It transfers accountability and power to the state government in virtually all matters except those that deal with the integrity of the Indian union, and its international relationships. The idea is that only local governance can truly protect the identity and interests of a state and that central participation in governance should be limited to only larger and ‘national’ issues.

Viewed under this lens, there is little that is objectionable about the article and little that is not valid for all other states too – almost all Indian states have distinct cultural traditions, ethos, and practices, which are worth special attention, each state has needs, people, and circumstances that are unique to it and which are difficult to club with a national consensus. Unfortunately however, the Indian body-politick, with a few exceptions, chooses to treat the entire country as an unvariegated whole when framing laws and states have no choice but to both accept and enforce them, regardless of any reservations they may have about the applicability of the law to their local needs. There is quite often little ability amongst states to even tweak or ‘customize’ a law for its state-specific needs – one size, bloated enough, fits all. The result thus is a mode of governance, in which states, despite being in the frontline of administration, have little input into laws, and are squeezed between an unyielding center and an increasingly disenchanted populace. And worst of all, states always have an escape door when implementing unpopular laws – it isn’t their fault! The population is thereby left to fend for itself – it has little access to the central government, and the local government more often than not, finds it easy to wash its hands off any measures that excite debate and disagreement among the governed.

Make no mistake; Article 370 was not formed to lay down the principles of center-state relationships or to directly solve the problem described above. It isn’t thus either exhaustive enough or extensive enough to cover the gamut of issues that go into center-state relations. It however does provide the springboard necessary to begin questioning the unitary model we have chosen to adopt in the whole country, bar Kashmir. And if it can work in Kashmir, why can it not work in the rest of the country too?

There are many obvious problems, and the first ineluctably is the state of Kashmir itself – a state that is quite possibly, with the contentious exception of Bihar, the least peaceful in the country. To make matters worse – the violence in Kashmir does not stem from general lawlessness, as it does in Bihar, but from a disregard of central authority, an attitude that is often blamed, among many other things, on Article 370 (except by the extremists themselves, who believe it doesn’t go far enough!). Is there thus a real risk that extending the article to other states in the country will further fan secessionist flames in the northeast, and other states like Punjab and Andhra Pradesh which have flirted with incipient secessionism in the past? Will Article 370 be the spur that finally breaks India apart?

A more pertinent concern is perhaps the ability of the states to do justice to increased power, and handle it responsibly. Unfortunately, recent Indian constitutional history isn’t exactly littered with examples of farsightedness shown by states – their record is patchy at best, and downright shoddy in reality. In fact, a case may be made that but for central intervention and guidance, most Indian states, driven by narrow, parochial concerns, would have descended into anarchy a long time ago. Possibly the worst record in this regard is that of the Jammu & Kashmir legislature itself, which has shown a remarkable ability to shoot itself in the foot consistently. The recently proposed bill debarring Kashmiri women from property rights on marriage to ‘outsiders’, the legislature’s refusal to accept the amendment limiting the size of state ministries to 15% of the total elected strength, and its long standing refusal to recognize Anglo-Indians and other minorities in the state are just three examples of legislation which persistently refuses to look beyond the state. What guarantees are there that other states shan’t do the same, and perhaps worse?

The answer to both questions lies in the inchoate nature of Article 370, and in its flawed, single-state focused implementation. As stated earlier, the article is not designed to guide center-state relations, but in the case of Jammu & Kashmir, it does just that. Limiting the article to one state however produces one very significant consequence – it allows Jammu & Kashmir to create discriminatory legislation without fear of consequence (as no other state is in a position to answer it in the same coin). It is extremely likely, though by no means guaranteed in the short-term, that Jammu & Kashmir may loosen its property laws that preclude ‘outsiders’ from buying property in the state, and also employment laws that virtually exclude all outsiders as well as a large section of Kashmiris themselves, if other states ever decided to resort to quid pro quo, and excluded Kashmiris from property and employment rights in their states. Right now, this is a non-issue for Kashmiris, but give other states similar rights, and egalitarian values are likely to hit home soon. There’s of course always the chance that allowing such powers to all states may result in a race towards the bottom with each state keen to emphasize its ‘exclusive’ nature but the affliction is likely to be limited to only a few states and that too only for a short time, as some states demonstrate the benefits of inclusive polity and economy. The measure is unlikely to stir any more instability than already exists, and by making states responsible for their actions and overall condition, is likely to curtail any imprudent adventurism.

The other more fundamental problem with Article 370 is its state-centric, monolithic view of autonomy and local governance. In keeping with the overall unitary spirit of the constitution, the article does little to promote grassroots governance and concentrates all significant powers in the hands of the state government. The version of autonomy it thus creates is in essence a majoritarian one – it cloaks a centralized mode of governance under the garb of an autonomous one. Kashmir can thus never be truly autonomous unless it itself allows power to percolate downwards to the people. In its current avatar, Article 370 is largely a sham, and its fundamental centralizing proclivities must be given a thorough makeover before the article can truly become a template for other states.

All this of course is perhaps asking too much of an article that was conceived in a specific historical context and designed to gradually fade away as the force of those historical forces diminished – there are probably more implications for the constitution here than for this specific article. There also exist several other similar articles for which a similar case may be made (variants of Article 371 the most prominent among them). Article 370 however is as good a place as any to start as it is an existing constitutional provision, and one that already contains germs of what true federalism may eventually be like in India. Expanding it to the whole country will signal willingness on part of the government to start unshackling the states and also permanently bring Kashmir on par with other states in the country without compromising any of its aspirations or the means to achieve them. Article 370 may have been born out of all the wrong questions, but it may inadvertently have led us to a slew of right answers.

At the end however, the question about India’s secular fabric will remain – will expanding the article to the entire country send wrong signals to minority communities in India? This is the most morally challenging part of the debate because like it or not, religion and religious emotions are inextricably tied to the history of the question. Needless to say, the government must be steadfastly secular in its implementation of federalism in India, and religious leaders must indubitably play an important part in the process, but there are no easy answers to the question. The time may however have come to move away from the politics of easy answers.

September, 2004

www.prasanna.org

An alternate nature

2005-09-01T13:59:00.002-04:00

The way most nature lovers have it, the only way to love nature is to preserve it. And development is seeming antithetical to the preservation of nature. It is a wonderful conceit, designed to keep most of the world under-developed while environmentalists continue to smell of roses. This truism and other easy assumptions about the relationship between nature and development may not hold much longer - the 'extractive' model of development (so essential in getting us here) may have run its course, and mankind has already begun to recreate nature in ways unimaginable till recently. The occasional gust aside, mankind now dominates nature (though it is still impolite to say so), and it is my contention that this domination, or better still, indpendence from nature, is a positive sign, and just what we have thirsted for as a species for several thousands of years.

This article is also available on www.prasanna.org.

The reinvention of nature

By Prasanna Lal Das

Sure we need nature (we are cocooned by it and there is no escaping it) - the real question is do we need nature in its ‘natural state’? The answer to that is probably not.

The history of life is the history of its endeavor to remake nature. This is reflected at its most basic level by evolution. Every living organism is in a constant struggle to remold itself in ways that confer hitherto unnatural advantages upon it – a new color, a novel limb, a discarded organ, a different reproductive strategy, and so on. At another level, nature itself seems to yearn for dis-equilibrium – new diseases periodically sweep our world decimating species, the occasional asteroid hit does the same, just far more effectively, rivers change courses wiping out existing ecosystems and creating new ones, and volcanoes and earthquakes destroy and rebuild life-forms in their own ways.

What mankind has done is to accelerate the natural process of constant upheaval. In several ways, the civilizational impulse in mankind is driven by its deep seated evolutionary need to be impervious to nature. It started off with basic hunting and scavenging tools that ensured its survival amidst other species gifted with seemingly more abundant largesse from nature – sharper teeth, greater strength, quicker speed, night-vision, and even ‘thicker’ skin. Then came social and political organization that took evolution beyond the realm of the merely biological. Unlike any other species, ‘survival of the fittest’ when applied to humans did not imply just the survival of the species as a whole, but to the survival and flourishment of groups that had the finest ideas, the ones that learnt the most from each other, and the ones with the greatest urge to initiate change, rather than be driven by it.

This change has come most often at the expense of nature, though not necessarily to the detriment of it, and has proceeded in four distinct phases, each progressively shorter than the other as we’ve scaled even higher reaches of the human evolutionary ladder. Biotechnology, nuclear power and others of the ilk are just the latest in mankind’s longstanding quest to be free of nature and their logical place in human society becomes clearer as we take a ride down the four phases –

Defiance
Co-existence
Domination
Independence

A fifth stage, ‘escape’, is probably not long in coming but let’s focus on the four that we do have experience of and understand what they tell us about the future.

Defiance

We’ve talked about this a little bit already but it may be worth dwelling on it in one more time. The earliest man found himself dropped in rather inhospitable circumstances. The jungles around him were teeming with violent, inimical creatures, both visible and invisible, blessed with powers that should have ensured a very short life-span for our species. If lions didn’t get us, viruses should have and they probably would have if mankind had allowed nature to have its own way.

Mankind however responded in a fashion unknown to nature till then – use nature to defy the straightforward dictates that applied unquestioned to other species. It augmented its strength by fashioning weapons made of wood or stone, it increased its speed by shaping wheels that both conserved strength and enabled greater travel distances, and it coaxed health and nourishment out of hitherto indigestible substances around it by controlling one of nature’s cardinal elements, fire.

Around the same time, mankind also began to organize socially and politically in the same fashion as other creatures around it had done, but with a few significant differences. For other species, survival, attack, or reproduction were the only organizing principles and in all cases, species gave full vent to their natural impulses – run if danger was in sight, pounce if a victim came along, mate when the season turned, eat when food was available, and die if a disease struck.

Mankind however defied these conventions, and it began by subjugating its own natural impulses. It created social principles and strictures that were based on abstinence from natural desires – eating became a ritual based on social and family standing rather than a mere biological need, love and sex became codified, clothes became more than defense against the elements, and notions of community arose even though community rules severely curtailed natural individual freedoms.

All this was however symptomatic of mankind’s essential realization that nature was not its best friend. It had to find ways to overcome it and this state of affairs continued for tens of thousands of years.

Co-existence

The next phase lasted only four or five thousand years. It started with the great riparian civilizations of the bronze age and lasted till the cusp of the industrial revolution. This was the beginning of settled life and mankind had begun to exercise sufficient control upon nature to finally cease treating it as an enemy and begin using it as an ally.

Rivers with largely predictable flood patterns became cradles of civilized life and agriculture, with its defined cycles and human-controlled spread, became the staple of life. Nature also provided new metals and minerals which ensured that the material, rather than the natural, became the key determinant of mankind’s growth. Metals like gold, which in nature’s terms, were utterly useless as either food or implements, now gained in stature, and became one of the ways in which mankind was able to express its lack of dependence on what nature had originally bestowed it with and accorded priority to.

For mankind this was also the time to reach out beyond the immediate and nature once again proved an ally. Rivers and oceans, that had been nature’s way of stonewalling species into local confines, now became arteries for the growth of trade. Forests, which for long had served as dangerous homes for man, now became a source of wealth and medicines, and the earth itself turned out to be a storehouse of treasures for those who knew where to find it, and more importantly, what to do with it – if you had knowledge, you could turn iron into gold, and many did. . .

To be sure, nature still exercised a powerful influence on mankind and progress was almost always defined by geography but the nature of relationship between mankind and nature had irrevocably changed. Nature was no longer a force to be feared – mankind had now established a primary position within it, and learnt to use nature to spread its control over other species and elements. Nature was finally its best friend.

Domination

The industrial revolution was mankind’s signal for nature to take cover. The rapid explosion in technological growth allowed mankind to become ‘nature-proof’ in ways unimaginable before – distances began to measured in time not miles, communication was freed of senses (and some may say, sense) and vastly expanded the sphere of each individual’s influence, man took wings and mocked at nature imposed physical limitations, disease carriers that had prowled undetected now showed up magnified under lenses, people began to exchange organs, and man began to condition weather rather than adapt to it.

Mankind’s ability to manipulate nature was also manifested in startlingly visible ways – dams changed the courses of rivers, huge swathes of jungles were replaced by cities whose towers reached higher than the highest trees, mines bore deep into the earth’s belly, and people reached out to the seas to reclaim land and change landscapes forever. Man also learnt to make infertile land fertile, irrigate drought ridden regions, generate power from anything nature could throw at it (water, tides, sunlight), and make babies when it pleased and how it pleased.

In many ways, this was the culmination of mankind’s long standing struggle to steal a march on nature the way it had found it and change it forever in the way it desired. Its success was indubitable, it had enslaved nature and scorned it by sending grannies up the Alps. Its success was however not total – nature took a bite out of every victory man had. Pesticides accompanied bumper harvests, carcinogens littered every satiated puff, new diseases put a dampener on social mores, and suspended particles became the legacy of the millions of miles of freedom that mankind traversed in automobiles. Mankind ruled over nature but rebellion brewed constantly underneath.

Independence

The last stage is still in the making but the portents are already visible. Mankind now has sufficient (albeit not absolute) control over nature to shape it in most ways it wants and it also now possesses knowledge of nature’s preferred ways of fighting back. There is also the realization that we have perhaps extracted as much from nature as our civilization can possibly afford or manage, and it may well be time to leave ‘traditional nature’ alone and create an alternate one.

Cloning, genetic crops, nuclear power, virtuality of knowledge, and even plastics are baby steps towards creating an alternate nature – a human designed version of nature geared towards reducing dependence on nature as we know it. The alternate nature calls for raw materials not necessarily available in the world as it exists, and its output leaves many of us perplexed or apoplectic (as the case has often recently been). Babies from test-tubes were bad enough for many, but the notion of replicas or regeneration of even revered baseball players are abhorrent to most of us. We may have overcome nature, but there still reside within us natural tendencies that are repelled by the prospect of an alternate world.

Many of our natural concerns are valid in the short term. The world is an unequal place and our relationship with nature is unequal across different parts of the world. Our social and political growth has been uneven and our readiness for change varies dramatically. The case for a uniform worldview on our relationship with nature is premature at the moment but the inevitability of the change may be a given.

Inequality and poverty and perhaps the strongest arguments in favor of an alternate nature. Progress inevitably entails exploitation of nature, and to use the same old (or tweaked ‘gas efficient’ type) techniques to conquer nature as the developed world has done will be a folly given what we now know about the development models of the last two centuries. An alternate nature may well be our best chance of ensuring sustainable development in a manner in which resources currently cherished by mankind survive into the posterity. This will give developed societies an advantage in the short run (but they have an advantage any way) and it may even allow opportunities for the developing world to showcase alternate skills that may have been drowned out in the developed world due to its deeply embedded relationship with traditional nature.

The challenge before policy makers is to roll out policies that take into account differing levels of receptivity to alternate nature and the divergent state of preparedness to embrace it. It is critical to elucidate that traditional nature has not completely outlived its value, and also plan for a time when the two models will run simultaneously, one will be on its last legs and thus the most fiercely resistant to change, while another will be in its immaturity and thus potentially disrespectful of the contribution of the old. There will be opposition and apprehension from both the new and the old, and leaders must trust their judgment when at crossroads.

What is for sure is that there is no case for policy or legal interdiction on alternate nature models. Mankind is a seeking, questing beast and there is little likelihood of laws being able to restrain the growth of genetic engineering or nuclear power. The only countries that will do it are the ones that are prepared to one day fall into the trap of increased dependence on an ever vanishing nature. The best way to save nature is to be free of it.

August, 2003

www.prasanna.org

The reunification of India and Pakistan

2005-08-12T10:04:00.003-04:00

This article was written in February 2004, just when it appeared that the old shibboleths that had hitherto governed Indo-Pak relations may be on the retreat. Much has changed since then, and the progress has been slower than expected (or perhaps faster, depending on your point of view). I'm reposting the article to coincide with the independence days of India and Pakistan, with the hope that some people may still find the ideas in the article, which depart significantly from the prevailing discourse, to be stimulating.

The article is also available on www.prasanna.org and on this site.
Status Quo Ante as an Agent of Change, or Consolidate or Fragment, that is the Question

By Prasanna Lal Das

So the Indo-Pak cricket series is finally on, and the world is filled once again with images of joint flags, people hugging on the streets, airwaves bursting with talks of bonhomie, and what-if musings about the cricket superpower a united India-Pakistan team will be. Meanwhile, in the back-room, bureaucrats conduct another round of timorous baby-stepping aimed at 'normalizing' Indo-Pak relations, but unfortunately, if past experience is any indication, the patter of these steps will soon prove as futile as their well-intentioned predecessors did. Very little in terms of long-term vision actually accompanies daily announcements about cricket visas, new trains, planes, and buses except vague, undefined notions of 'peace' and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the baby-steps will soon be smothered by immovable paradigms borne out of memories of partition that have hitherto governed the politics of the sub-continent. The current burst of goodwill is just history playing itself out all over again, and the portents are farcical as ever.

It is my contention that the key to breaking this impasse can only be found by changing the rules of engagement, and the time may well have come to step out of the thrall of partition and, heretical as it sounds, seriously reconsider the reunification of India and Pakistan (and by extension, Bangladesh). The three countries have outlived their historical value, it may be time to revivify a plural nation (without going the 'Akhand Bharat' or the 'fundamentalist nationalist' way at all). It is not going to happen in a hurry but the time to start thinking about it is now.

The division has been sustained long enough to expose all its holes - externally, it has reduced the international stature of the sub-continent, created misplaced notions of friend and foe, and festered wounds over territories that should rightfully belong to both but do so adequately to neither; and internally, it has encouraged a polity based on deflecting attention from real issues, dragged ordinary people to the bottom of almost all social indicators, and brought out the worst in (at least) two great religions. Reunification is no guarantee against these malaise, but it can set the agenda for governance based on a potent mixture of morality, principles, and pragmatism, rather than the hurtful pettiness that passes for realpolitik right now. More critically, it can also serve as a blow for the forces of consolidation against the votaries of fragmentation that rule the roost today.

The greatest opportunities for reunification lie precisely in the challenges that confront the idea. The countries are sworn enemies (but their enmity lies in estrangement rather than self-interest which may have made the hostility worthwhile), the political systems are intrinsically different (and both close to collapsing under their own weight unless there is radical and structural intervention), mutual hatred has seeped into the pores of the people (yet we see only warmth in interactions at the personal level, the anger seems to be directed solely towards each other's symbols), our legal and civil norms are vastly different (yes, but they are unimaginatively derived from an imperial model which must be cast off), our economies are on different trajectories (but there is great interest from business on both sides), and our religious and social mores have been irreparably bifurcated (the greatest challenge but our faith in diversity as a glue must overcome this aberration).

Unfortunately however, reunification as a historical force is still far away. Externally, the reunification of Germany and the growing trend towards economic union (even within South Asia) may be considered an augury, but the trend is offset by the growing acceptance of political fragmentation as a valid ideological force - in the Balkans peace seems to lie only in the hardening of boundaries, the UN seems to be going through a population explosion of sorts as new countries spill out of the woodwork, and even within India, opinion polls (and mainstream economists riding on their coat-tails) suggest that states must become smaller by dividing and sub-dividing to maximize administrative efficiency. There is even speculation at the moment that south India should break away from the 'north' and thus cut out excessive baggage in its march towards ever growing prosperity.

The trend is fueled by the fact that the idea of fragmentation is a catchy one, and promises of a rupture are the surest way to capture the imagination of the marginalized and the ambitious everywhere. Plus, pretexts for fragmentation are never difficult to come by - religion, region, culture, identity, and economy unfailingly fuel the passions of the disenfranchised, the privileged, and the intelligentsia alike, and create a cycle of fragmentation, each feeding off the other, so that you start with one state, make it two, then three, and then start to prepare the ground for the fourth. It may probably be premature to wonder whether we are headed inexorably towards future partitions and whether we may soon break apart into several republics, principalities, and fiefdoms with indeterminate and unstable boundaries; it is however not completely fallacious to believe that the ideology of partition is a self-sustaining one and unless we can find a counter-weight to it, we will soon find ourselves overtaken by history.

The portents of fragmentation, as mentioned earlier, exist equally in both countries - India is riven by internal wars all across the country, Pakistan is riddled with provinces with visions of grandeur, and Kashmir straddles the polity of both countries like a yoke they dare not cast off. The countries have hitherto found ostrich like refuge in escalating hostilities at great mutual cost and negligible benefit, but this is an impasse that is unlikely to go away as long as our terms of engagement do not question the foundation of this dispute -the partition of India and its ostensible irrevocability? The question isn't whether Kashmir should be a part of India or not, or the culpability of India in the formation of Bangladesh; the real question instead is what do we want to choose now - one country, or none at all?

The seeds of Indian partition were sowed with the classic brew of fear, uncertainty, lure, and gullibility. Fear of a competing religion becoming dominant, uncertainty about the potentially destabilizing role of democracy, the lure of independence (from both the master and the rival), and gullibility (the master knew best). The same factors continue to hold true even today and are dominant themes in the ideology of fragmentation. They may in fact have been strengthened further by crude and misguided attempts at uniformity that tend to view our diversity either as an inconvenience or as a cloak concealing an underlying unity in need of overt (and common) expression. Fragmentation gains every time an attempt is made to deny its logic.

The India-Pakistan reunification must therefore be achieved under a framework that recognizes and facilitates the principles of democracy, diversity, pluralism, and federalism, and uses them as pillars of consolidation rather than succumb to the temptations of fragmentation. This means enabling multiple government systems, different legal codes, varying bureaucratic procedures, localized economic terms, and distinct cultural practices to co-exist; this however also assumes that the unified country will not give in to the dubious logic of relativism but hold certain basic principles, especially governing equality and freedom, and the integrity of the state, to be fundamental and unquestionable. The unified state must consider the political, social, religious, and economic differences that may have cropped up or been accentuated by and after partition - the differences must be allowed to persist, flourish, or decline organically unless they challenge the fundamental rubric of the state.

Many logistic barriers to reunification diminish in significance when viewed under this prism. The reunification need not call for common laws, a centrally agreed mode of governance, a common civil service, uniform economic laws, and other trappings of monolithic nations. It does however call for a common constitution outlining the unified character of the country and institutions common to all of it. This constitution must reinforce the points above and sedulously resist the temptation of creating central institutions likely to hinder local and state governance, perhaps even during emergencies, perhaps ever (with the sole exception of threats to the character and integrity of the state as a whole).

Practical barriers however remain and cannot be wished away. Reunification would entail changes that would call for tremendous devolution of power, and unfortunately significant changes generally have greater chance of success when there is opportunity to seize power than to give it away. For reunification to be successful, the central governments in both the countries must be prepared to lose much of their control over states and provinces, the states and provinces in turn must be willing to confer much greater authority to local bodies, and local bodies must allow power to dissolve within the general populace. This is all of course easier said than done and both our governments may prefer our long standing tradition of a fractious neighborhood to loss of power and the impetus for change is unlikely to come from them. The old chestnut about the ability of our people to assume responsibility for the qualitatively changed nature of power in a unified state too is likely to come to the fore again (as it did right after independence), as perhaps will questions about tolerance without which such a change is doomed, and more mundane but vital doubts about pre-partition property rights.

And then there are more immediate problems. The political and cultural climate in both the countries seems to have little appetite for constructive change and it may be a long time before Musharraf and Vajpayee can trust each other. And even if they do, the establishments in both the countries have vested considerably in enmity and will certainly be unfavorably inclined towards any paradigm shift. The section likely to be the most sanguine about the change is the person on the street and perhaps the urge for change will come from them or even be driven by them. It may however be a bit early to hope for that - the key at this point is to build an intellectual case for reunification, to demonstrate as conclusively as possible the implications of the changed nature of governmental power, the possibility of greater role on the international stage compensating for the wane in domestic authority, and the feasibility of pooling resources to improve social indicators. Build a rigorous case (much like the leaders of our freedom movement did), that is the first challenge.

Unlikely as it sounds, the India-Pakistan impasse may yet provide the ideal template to create and demonstrate an ideological counterpoint to the dominant fragmentary proclivities of our time. Status quo ante (with a few differences) may be an unappealing and quaint idea in our new-fangled obsessed culture and polity, but there probably is more change inherent in it than in many putative radical ideas. It is time for us to reclaim our tradition of assimilation rather than subjugation - one world may be far away, but one sub-continent will be a good start.

February 2004

www.prasanna.org

Rethinking one day cricket (two simple ways to reinvigorate the game)

2005-08-12T09:57:00.002-04:00

Here's an article written a few months before ICC's newest tinkering with one-day rules (a substitute per game, and flexible slots to bowl overs with fielding restrictions) were announced. It was heartening to note that the new rules followed the same themes that I had suggested in my article below, but I'm afraid the rule changes were far too conservative to be truly meaningful, and the lack of conviction leaves the changes open to ridicule. Here go the original arguments once again, with the hope that they will invite a little debate about them.

By Prasanna Lal Das

This article was originally published on this site. It is also available on www.prasanna.org.

Twenty20 may well be the rage these days but two simple changes to the existing laws of cricket hold tremendous potential to bring pizzazz back into one day internationals and re-energize a format that has become a victim of its own success. The proposed changes are –

Expand the playing roster to 16 with the proviso that only 11 players may bat or bowl in an innings (the batting and bowling ‘sides’ of a team thus need not be the same, as is currently the case)
Change the way the 15 over fielding restrictions apply – stipulate that fielding restrictions will apply during the first three overs of each bowler’s quota, rather than during the first 15 overs of an innings, as is the case now

The changes may appear radical at first glance and there may be a few concerns about their feasibility. The rest of the article describes the rationale behind the suggestions, the positive manner in which they can affect the game, and how they can be implemented.

Before we start, a look at the two main arguments that are commonly trotted out to make the case against the long-term prospects of one-day internationals. The format has been strategized to death, say the first camp of naysayers, and is becoming increasingly predictable – slam bang in the first 15 overs, singles and consolidation in the middle overs (when fielding captains oblige by setting fields deep and routinely give easy runs away), and then another flurry in the end. Everybody in the system knows their roles pat – aggressive batsmen at the top of the order, bloody-minded accumulators in the middle, bashers down the order. The bowlers follow a similar formula – wicket-taking bowlers at the start (at least from one end), the bits and pieces men who most often fill the 4 th and 5 th bowling slots in the middle (with the odd burst from a front-line bowler), and then the specialist death-men in the end. Most games follow the same pattern, and as indistinguishable games follow each other, diehard fans have begun to switch off – the only thing interesting about one day games now is the result. Everything else may well be played out on a computer, or perhaps not be played at all. The Twenty20 format follows the last dictum – why not do away with the middle overs and just focus on the slogfest (allegedly the only exciting part about cricket)?

The other, and perhaps more pertinent, quibble against one day cricket is the diminution in the average level of skills and the unabated proliferation of bits and pieces cricketers. The trend has affected bowlers more than batsmen and it is quite common to see top bowlers cooling their heels in the pavilion while ‘batting allrounders’ fill bowling slots, ostensibly in the interest of the balance of the team. Thus, the middle overs become even more excruciating to watch than they would otherwise have been, as quality batsmen keep the board ticking over against bowling devoid of any guile or venom. The game has become less a contest between bat and ball and more a game of attrition in which bowlers of limited ability follow ultra defensive tactics to minimize damage, rather than inflict it (which is how attack minded followers of the game wish they would bowl).

So what is the solution to revitalize cricket? Cricket commentators have suggested many – let batting sides choose when the 15 over restrictions can be applied, split the fielding restrictions evenly across an innings, play two innings per side in one day, let batsmen hit ‘eights’ after 15 overs, allow one bowler to bowl 15 overs, or well, dump the whole mess and play Twenty20 (till people tire of it!). Most of these suggestions are however piecemeal in nature and are designed to make the game even more batsman-friendly, or are too complex for the average fan. What the game needs instead is a set of proposals that can make a fundamental difference to the game without hurting its essential character – a result-oriented, attack-minded version of ‘proper cricket’ which tests the skills of its participants to the utmost.

The two proposals outlined above, taken in tandem, have the potential to address all these requirements – they will bring specialists back in the game to ensure that there are no easy runs or cheap wickets, they will break the monotonous three-act structure of the one day game and allow fielding captains more options, and most of all, they are simple to follow so that fans shan’t need their rule books to appreciate tactical decisions. Here is how they will work.

EXPAND THE PLAYING ROSTER TO 16

The only real value that a playing 11 serves is that it limits an innings to 10 wickets. It may seem heretical at first to say so, but it is my contention that the 11-person limitation imposes far too many artificial restrictions during selection and serves to enfeeble a side rather than allow it to parade the best talent available (which is what people come to see). Most team selection is a game of compromise in which one or more talented players are left out of a game to ‘balance a side’ or because of ‘conditions’. Selection is thus often a gamble based on subjective reasons (weather forecast, pitch prediction, etc.) and cannot be rolled back after a game starts. Teams thus frequently lose matches they could have won because they discover, after a match starts, that the right player for the conditions is carrying the drinks (‘Hey, the ball’s turning square and we’ve got four seamers!!). You win because your selectors are better or luckier than your opponents!

The other thing that a restricted playing 11 does is to keep good players out because ‘we need 7 batsmen’ or ‘his fielding isn’t good enough’. What you have instead are players with no special skills except that they are a variety act that can do a lot of things with no particular distinction. Spectators are thus forced to watch batsmen struggle to get balls off the square (but he can give you 4 overs for 25), or bowlers who whoop when they bowl a dot ball (but he’s good for 30 once in a while). And all this, while real batsmen and bowlers twiddle their thumbs in the pavilion because the team management decided they didn’t need another spinner or because a batsman needed to work on his fielding.

My proposal to expand the playing roster will take the guesswork out of selection and let events on the fields determine the fate of games. It will also ensure that a team is able to constantly readjust strategy during a game, and field its best batsmen to take on the opponent’s best bowlers backed by its best fielders. This is how it will pan out.

While batting, a side will be allowed to field the best 11 batsmen that are available to it. None of these batsmen will be obliged to either bowl or field and will be picked purely on their skills as batsmen. Similarly the bowling side will be allowed to pick any 5 or more bowlers from the playing roster of 16 with no obligation to bat them. Captains will thus be able to change strategy on the field of play and replace bowlers having off days or who may not be suitable for specific match conditions. They will also be able to make sure that rival batsmen always face a country’s top bowlers (and they are generally the attacking, exciting, wicket-taking type) rather than trundlers. The same logic will work for fielding as well and it will be left to captains to determine their best fielding 11 and use substitutes when necessary.

A few easy arguments can be made against the proposal. The most obvious one that the selection process is one of the ‘charms’ or ‘basic characteristics’ of the game and that expanding the roster will eliminate some of the game’s ‘glorious uncertainties’ is fuddy-duddy at best. The more valid objection is that the change may make the game even more batsmen-friendly – after all, what is to stop a team from packing 11 batsmen in a team apart from 5 specialist bowlers? The upside however is that even if teams do make such a choice, spectators will have an opportunity to watch 50 overs of non-stop high quality action, with the best bowlers pitted against the best batsmen all through.

FIELDING RESTRICTIONS DURING THE FIRST THREE OVERS OF EACH BOWLER’S QUOTA

The other problem with the one-day game is its regimented three-act structure described earlier, and fielding restrictions during the first 15 overs seem to be at the root of the problem. The restrictions were initially designed to promote run scoring in the early overs, which may otherwise have become too loaded in favor of bowlers with the new ball. And boy, were they successful? In fact the first 15 overs have now become the liveliest part of one-day internationals and often its decisive phase too. The only downside – the rest of the game pales in comparison, and games climax at the start of an innings rather than at its end.

The provision in its current shape is fairly inflexible, and strategic moves to exploit it to the fullest are easy to imitate. I propose therefore that the 15 restricted overs be spread across an entire innings (and that the number of such overs in an innings may increase if captains use additional bowlers). The manner of the spread will be two-level – fielding captain’s discretion, and the limiting rule that the first three overs of every bowler’s quota be bowled with the fielding restrictions in place. This will make sure that all innings flow a bit differently from others as the restricted overs occur at different points in the spectrum. The unpredictability will demand constant thinking on the feet – should a captain introduce a new bowler if a batsman is on the rampage, should a new batsman go after a newly introduced bowler, should a captain introduce a sixth bowler in the attack at the risk of increasing the number of overs with fielding restrictions? The number of possible scenarios is likely to be long and can add a new dimension to game strategy as we know it (and also open players’ tactical acumen to new levels of scrutiny). All of which can only mean only one thing – more excitement for spectators, and more challenges for the players.

A few other variations on the theme may be considered – perhaps bowlers introduced after the 30 th over can have three fielders outside the circle in their first three overs rather than the standard two, and perhaps the fielding restrictions should apply only to the first five bowlers who bowl three or more overs (just in case there’s a risk that the game will become too batsman-friendly otherwise). There’s definite merit in both the options and I reckon it may take a few games to prove which one works the best.

WHERE THAT LEAVES THE ONE-DAY GAME

The changes, if introduced, will substantially alter the one-day game as it is played today. The good news however is that the basic sprit of the game will remain the same – a test of skills against the best an opponent has to offer within a 100 over limit (against the 5 day delimiter in test matches). The only real change will be the fact that players will have to compete against the very best opposition for the entire game, rather than bide time against mediocre players making up the numbers and capitalize on ‘weak links’. The best against the best – won’t that be best for the game?

February, 2005

www.prasanna.org

The man who owned the world (like the rest of us)

2005-08-12T09:45:00.002-04:00

About a man with roots in the entire world, the kind of person that many of us are becoming every day. A man who belongs everywhere, or as locals would have it, nowhere at all.

By Prasanna Lal Das

This article was originally published on this site

Anthony Gonsalves, an erstwhile imported worker who now holds an exported job, a man of many worlds and none at all, is ready to go home. Home is his village, it is his uncle’s house in the town that he went to school in, it is the cousin’s shack in the nearly-city that he went to college in, the city where he worked the first 10 years of his professional life, the town-house he bought stateside when he worked there and may still return to, the villa ‘back home’ where he now lives, and the property he is considering in the next state for when he settles down. Or home is where his many suitcases are, the suitcases that have traversed the world but seem so rooted wherever he puts them, till it’s time to go again, and again. He has however never felt like a man with suitcases packed and ready to go; it is just that he has moved across many settled existences.

This isn’t really the life he dreamed of when growing up with his parents in a village that was so big people never went out, and the few who did, could never muster the energy to return to. It is however a life that has provided him with everything he could dream about – job satisfaction, social acceptance, material security, a future that both he and his family can look forward to; and isn’t that what everybody’s dream life is about anyway? He pauses only occasionally to ponder over it but finds that he is not alone. The world around him is full of people for whom the world opened suddenly and drew them along with itself, into its ever expanding boundaries, the ever new opportunities, its abhorrence of vacuum, its menagerie of cultures all so alien and yet so fundamentally similar, its fascination for apposite opposites, and its apparent meaninglessness despite powerful claims of a central design – yes, he is now resigned to being part of the ‘big bang’ generation which relentlessly grows outwards and has no center, in fact he has almost begun to revel in it.

In many ways, Anthony realizes that he is only a harbinger of a profound change sweeping the world, just an early warning rather than the strike itself. He is still faintly exotic everywhere he goes – his accent and food preferences sort of give the game away at Paris and New York, his accent and food preference are also a constant source of amusement at his parent’s house in the village he was born. His clothes don’t quite have the sharp cuts he sees on the streets in London, and they are stitched from a totally different cloth from what his friends at Delhi wear. He hangs out with foreigners, outsiders, and ‘transferables’ in India, and with Indians abroad (though everybody really wants to live in ‘non-Indian’ areas). And of course, literature on alienation and exile jostles on his shelves with CDs that he picks up from around the world, mostly to show his friends his presumptive backslapping acquaintance with the international street-cred.

Questions of identity are indeed the ones that leave him the most perplexed. Not for him the socio-political and cultural agonizing over diaspora, clash of cultures, and discourses on civilizational transmutation, he only worries about the constant predilection among several commentators to portray him as an outsider, even though he himself doesn’t feel like one anywhere he goes. He, who has never hesitated to call many places home, is easily branded as the ‘other’. He was the other child in his uncle’s house, he was the other caste in his friend’s shack, at college he was lumped as one of the others from another state, at work in a famously cosmopolitan city he was astonished to hear that others like him were filching jobs from the locals, in the US he was treated as the other person from the other country removing food from the tables of Americans, ‘back home’ in India now he is stealing food once again as the person who has taken jobs abroad from their mother countries.

Sometimes, he thinks he should take this to heart – after all, he is not the only other one. Everybody pointing fingers at him is an outsider too. Like those suddenly patriotic newspaper commentators – didn’t their country (and most others, and his too) not even exist till a few hundred years ago, didn’t their parents swear allegiance to different flags, isn’t most of their staff from other states in the country, didn’t most people in the city actually come from outside, isn’t everybody actually not stealing jobs from someone else who could conceivably lay a stronger claim on these jobs based on grounds of identity, region, and culture? Every one of them is guilty, except that people choose to expand or constrain the definition of identity differently at different times – let’s be honest, almost none of them would be where they are today if one or more of their ancestors in the past had not chosen to pack their bags (if they had any) and gone looking over the yonder. Sometimes far, sometimes just to the next village – but go they all did, rather than wait for work to come to them or concede the work to someone else just because that person was born at the right place. The age of opportunity based on geographical accidents is surely past, bound to end soon like preceding privileges based on birth, social rank, divine rights, religion, caste, tribe, and others did.

And what of countries and states, and votaries of sons of soil who raise bogeys that largely peaceful and eminently employable people like him will destroy local economies, destabilize cultures, and maroon future generations with stronger claims to the local air? These are the countries that scare him more than the allegedly failed states or threats to the global order. After all, each of these countries was built on forcefully emphasizing the obligation of other countries to welcome foreigners; these are the countries that forever demolished the smugness of insular countries that had once snubbed them; and these indeed are the countries that built today’s global order by emphasizing the international picture over the merely parochial. Anthony worries that these countries are in moral retreat now, that passing troubles have sapped their courage to look outwards which once made them great and still keeps them afloat, that righteousness has vanquished right. He digs deep into the numbers that drift across TV screens everyday to make sense of the current pessimism, numbers that talk about the local jobs lost, the numbers that talk about the coming migration deluge, the numbers that show an increasing burden on the state exchequer due to new but unaccounted people, the numbers that show that soon there won’t be enough ‘original’ people left in many countries, the numbers that show a different number of countries in the world every day, the numbers that represent his new province (one that didn’t exist till yesterday except in a few slogans), the numbers that don’t always add up, the numbers that change so often that you stop registering them. Anthony can now keep track of only one number – the one on his passport (but wait, soon he will have two of them!).

He steels himself everyday for the uncertainties and dilemmas of life around him. He knows that his own community in the village that he left behind now faces starvation –because of new people who have taken over many traditional roles due to their superior education, and new goods that make their way unfettered to all parts of the country. He understands that you cannot take away misery and resentment by arguments about the inevitable flow of historical forces. He is also painfully aware of the double (or most often, triple) standards employed by his own country in its treatment of migrants, both internal and external, and the discrimination migrants from, and to, the ‘wrong’ regions/countries face. His after all is the country that fawns on natives that made good abroad but makes it nightmarishly difficult for people from other countries, especially from its neighborhood, to either emigrate or work legally for even short periods of time. The hypocrisy is equally shared by all – there are no good guys in this movie, and no plain black and white either.

And so, sometimes he begins to feel guilty – he wonders if he was a part of his country’s brain drain, the much lamented (but not much else) phenomenon that, popular wisdom has it, deprives the country of its best and the brightest, its ‘export quality’ people. Should he have stayed ‘home’? He questions his loyalty to the countries that he goes to, did he make a contribution there or did he merely collect gold-dirt and move on: has that been the story of his life – the man who took from his village but never returned, the man who took from his college but never gave any back, the man who hoarded through his working life but never shared any? After all, he returned home not because he loved his old country any more than his new, he was just following the next job-opening (though it did make him feel elevated to hear that his expertise was going to contribute to his country’s ‘brain gain’!).

Anthony mulls over all this as he drives home. He isn’t completely sure about the way yet, and there are few maps in this country, but he senses he may be heading in the right direction. His only guilt has been his ability to make choices and live by them, and his choices have followed the choices the communities and governments of his time have made, or been forced by common sense, to make. The results have unwittingly made him the face of a profound social movement that is gradually chipping away the late medieval nationalistic anachronisms that dog our world even today – you cannot have both a global village and national gaols. He is dismayed that debates that pit imported workers versus exported jobs still exist – the two are mutually exclusive categories as far as he is concerned, and favoring one over another rather than economic realities (for ideological or even allegedly short-term pragmatic reasons) can only exacerbate social divisions, apart from the small matter of guaranteed financial ruin. He reckons that people have a fundamental right to better their lot and the world has little to gain by depriving large sections of its population of opportunities to work, study, and prosper just because they were born on the wrong latitude. Such barrier can also be immensely shortsighted as all they eventually achieve is the separation of the right skills from the right needs (and our experience with closed economies has already told us that no nation, however determined, can excel at all the skills that its population needs to be contented). Most nations have demolished such barriers within their territories, and it is time to do the same across nations.

Anthony has no illusions that his worldview will find easy acceptance. The fear of change, the unpredictability of the short-term consequences of free human movement, false notions of national pride, the actions of the odd deviant, and bogeys about ‘ways of life’ are still too strong for cocooned nations to contemplate any purportedly radical moves. Like all our forefathers, he must resign himself to doing the best he can for himself, his family, and his community, and the best way to do that is to answer the call of work. It has taken him around the world because every place in the world needs a little help from the outside, and always will, and he knows that if he shows up often enough, he will gradually be more welcome. He was born to the world, and loves all of it – someday, all of it will love him back (and ask for taxes in return!). All of it, after all, is his home.

August, 2004

www.prasanna.org