William Heath’s blog

America can be a fearsome, warlike and noisy place. It has vast freeways on which people emit copious amounts of CO2. You can deplore this, but it’s easy and fun to join in. I hired a brand new Harley-Davidson Electraglide and headed off to Sonoma, the wine country tourist venue where Mexican missionaries had sited their northernmost mission before being overcome by whitey.

Up to 110 DB, 860lbs, and 1800 miles on the clock. Do not drop this machine.

As I lay in bed in Joe’s lovely B&B, trying to listen to the dawn chorus against the next room’s airconditioning – punctuated by distant blattering of Harleys – I read up sorely needed articles about how to operate the big machine at low speeds (countersteering, looking round the corner with head and eyes, use of rear brake etc).

Somewhat emboldened, I decided to head off to what Google suggested would be a Quaker Meeting in nearby Napa. Sure enough, round the corner from the main square in Napa with all the big steeplehouses, in a community centre, there were five lovely Friends gathered for the refreshing hour of silence. Afterwards one of them kindly offered to show me the best local coffee shop with wifi.

He duly led me off, riding a Suzuki 650. I bought him a coffee. He’s called Herb Jager. He said he was a painter/decorator but there’s more to it than that. He knows a great deal about coffee houses.

A friend had suggested to Herb – who remains a contented atheist – they attend a first Quaker Meeting while they were working in Alaska in 1955. They went to a room and sat alone. “Where’s the meeting?” asked Herb. “This is it.” “When does it start?” “It started already.”

Herb just got married three years ago and is now hoping to move out of the Veterans Admin home to a catamaran. He’s 84 years old. He had been one the first “Bohemians” in Greenwich Village, before moving to San Francisco and taking over “the Blue Unicorn” coffee shop in 1965. This was described by Michael Fallon as the “new haven for beatniks” in an article which coined the term hippe. Herb ran it for five years, before moving to start starting “Communion”, an Indian restaurant offering “five courses for $1″ at the same time as bringing up two children in a campervan on the streets of San Francisco. If I understood him correctly he worked 14-hour days and lost a third of his body weight in 18 months. As we parted in the mall car park he sang me acapella several verses of the folk song “the bastard king of England”.

He’s not online so I can’t email him. But I’m sending Herb big peace and love. He’s a piece of the rock, and an inspiration.

Last Friday in San Francisco I wandered into Noisebridge to meet Danny O’Brien. The immediate impression was of a tech junk repository with kids earnestly doing homework. I sat on a bench and did emails; someone offered me a large bowl of strawberries and cream – just what I wanted fresh off the plane.

“Arduino for newbies” workshop at Noisebridge

Noisebridge is a 5600 anarchic geek “do-ocracy” open 24/7 in the Mission district. It self describes:

Noisebridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning. Noisebridge is also more than a physical space, it’s a community with roots extending around the world.

For we’re excellent to each other here
We rarely ever block
We value tools over pre-emptive rules
And spurn the key and the lock.
— Danny O’Brien, 2010-11-09 general meeting notes

We make stuff. So can you.

It’s as close to walking into a WIlliam Gibson novel as you can get. Danny arrived sporting an immense beard and showed me round. In one corner was a project sending Android phones into space under balloons. There was a donated broken ECG machine, since repaired. I saw my first 3-D printer (and later a Dalek bottle opener made from a downloaded design). Next step – you guessed it – scan your brain then print out a physical model. There are hologram etching tools, kids doing homework, teaching space, a kitchen.

There are undoubtedly deep challenges in sustaining an anarchic hack space, with Occupy-like consensus decision processes, in a challenged urban area where anyone can walk in off the street. How, you might ask, could lovely San Franciscans who offer strawberries and cream possibly ever be difficult? “Those were my strawberries” explained Danny.

There’s a universal and growing problem of how to express technical complexity to “mundanes” (as geeks are wont to call those of us who dont really understand technology behind our backs). One example is how hard it is to understand what happens to our personal data, our logins and permissions as we switch between different online services. Three emerging and developing technologies are particularly pertinent: the OpenID and OAuth standards, and the user-managed access (UMA) project. Eve Maler, now of Forrester, has updated her excellent Venn diagram of how these intersect.

You don’t get much out of this seeing it flash by in a presentation; it’s definitely a “keeper”. I’ll get myself a small reward when I can fully understand and explain it. Thanks Eve!

There’s a new blog over at Kelston Roundhill for all farm- and Klump-related stuff.


Idea is to try to track down interesting content (photos, stories) related to this wonderful site and to reach out to people who one way or another are interested or like it.

The site has permissive paths from the Cotswold Way so walkers can divert to the top of the hill and check out the views. I’ve met some wonderful and interesting people that way (plus had the inevitable odd less agreeable experience).

The aim with the land is to support viable farming (which is in the capable hands of our neighbours Park Farm), to increase natural diversity and see what other responsible enjoyment we can support. In the first year we’ve got cattle, sheep, water and honey going, and some firewood.

As for the blog. Man. Wordpress. Doth it not rock? Even I can use it, get my own domain name for $17 (plus some privacy for an extra $8), customise it so it’s half-respectable in about 30 mins. When I recall the hassle and anxiety of getting Ideal Government going on Expression Engine (even with copious help from the lovely Adriana).

A “major phone co” had a researcher quiz me about their proposed new privacy and customer data policy. On reflection I decided it was no bad thing to give them a full and frank reaction and earn £50 for charity. We do research too; it’s nice when people co-operate.
For me the question was, as they unveiled the new policy: do they really and sincerely want to be more respectful about their customers’ personally identifiable information (PII)? When they talk of giving the customer control do they really want to give me control? Or just to apply PR lipstick to the big fat pig of non-consensual exploitation of personal data we all have to hand over to get a phone service?
Mobile phone companies have a huge amount of PII including not just everyone you call and for how long and which web sites you visit but time stamped location data recording where you are at all times the phone is switched on. It’s probably the most revealing data trail we leave.
Have they architected a real technical solution to give themselves just the data they need to provide a good phone service (including billing, customer service and their statutory and legal obligations)? All I want from them is phone equipment and services. Are they dissatisfied with this? Are they addicted to getting more? Do they want to monetise, landgrab, offer insights and targetted advertising, sell my data to others who can nudge and wink at me? And dress this up as attractive to me?
I fear it’s still the latter.
The proposed new policy is full of good intentions: plain English, respect, control. But for me the clue was in their promise “never to sell or provide my data to others without my consent”. This can only be a fib, given the Coalition’s sinister and unnecessary Communications capability development plan. The fib wil be legally covered of course deep in some Ts&Cs no-one ever reads. But who wants a short plain-English privacy policy that has to start with the qualifier “This privacy policy contains statements which are untrue”.
It also had sinister language about targetted advertising and other services. It was like a Tony Blair speech. You’re dealing within someone smart enough to know what people want to hear. On 1997 that felt like progress. But you’re dealing with someone who has (as a close working colleague of his describes it to me) a complex relationship with the truth.
Why cant my phone company just offer a good phone service? I dont want bloatware on my phone. I dont want their choices, nudges or winks about what content to immerse myself in or which football team to support. I’d like good sound quality, reliable service and reasonable costs even when abroad.
Don’t most customers want banks, utility companies, social networks and other online services to stick their knitting and resist the temptation of adding in “surveillance by stealth” business models? Let’s say it again: whose personal data is it anyway?
So the good news is that at least one *major phone company* understands users’ concern about PII and wants to send out the right signals. They and many other businesses do need to come clean about the very poor prevailing practices over personal data. The “not yet so good news” is they’re still at the Tony Blair/”PR with fibs” stage, not at the stage where a different technical implementation delivers a truly different intention. But that’ll come. And the complication is that those who start to go down the right path are likely to be the ones who encounter the righteous wrath of customers who, according to Mydex’ research, are somewhere between depressed and in denial about just how bad the present state of personal data management by companies is.
As I said to the courteous and efficient researcher, I’m happy to speak direct to “major phone company”. When you’re ready.

For centuries the organised church has laid down the law on sexual morality. Whether you listen to new Sun on Sunday correspondent John Sentamu, the pontifications of Papa Ratzi, the prescriptions of Mullahs or the Santorum that washes across the Atlantic from US conservative Presidential hopefuls there’s a widely held view that rules are God-given rules. The only question is whether we’re righteous enough to abide by them, to be chaste and to avoid sin.

But this is utter tosh, according to a splendid 50-year-old essay I’ve just read. And the reality is far more enlightened, liberating and challenging.

Towards a Quaker view of sex was written in response to the needs of young gay Friends, to whom the Society appeared to have nothing to say (and who were plainly ill-served by the insights of the conventional churches). Its insights surely contributed to Quakers’ decision almost 50 years later to celebrate same-sex marriages. But the authors found that homosexuality could not be examined in isolation. It is simply part of human sexuality, to which the same morality consistently applies.

“Homosexual affection may of course be an emotion which some find aesthetically disgusting, but one cannot base Christian morality on a capacity for disgust. Neither are we happy with the thought that all homosexual behaviour is sinful: motive and circumstances degrade or ennoble any act, and we feel that to list sexual acts as sins is to follow the letter rather than the spirit, to kill rather than to give life.

“Further we see no reason why the physical nature of a sexual act should be the criterion by which the question whether or not it is moral should be decided. An act which expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the fact that it is homosexual. The same criteria seem to us to apply whether a relationship is heterosexual or homosexual.”

Vast chunks of the essay are quotable. It has a coruscating critique of the theology, history and damaging effect of conventional Christian sexual morality. The authors seek instead a deeper morality which “deals with the whole nature of man”. They interpret Augustine’s dictum “Love God, and do as you like” as “a statement of freedom, and also of the greatest discipline and obligation”.

Writing at a time when so-called acts of “gross indecency” were still illegal in the UK, and a general wave of promiscuity was clearly imminent, they see “the quality of human relationships as the only final criterion”. The sexual urge, they argue, is not a problem requiring repression but something for which there is a positive purpose, even if finding it leads through suffering, tension or frustration.

Some of the language is dated. It’s hip to emerging issues of contraception, but makes no mention of STDs. Nonetheless it’s a towering and lasting achievement of perception or discernment, whose central insights surpass, as far as I can see, the orthodoxy spouted by all the bureaucratic churches half a century later.

So what is sin? They cite a contempory Anglican broadcaster: “actions that involve exploitation of another person”. If they are not to be immoral, sexual actions need to be the result of a mutual decision. This condemns “seduction, and even persuasion, and every instance of coitus which, by reason of disparity of age or intelligence or emotional condition cannot be a matter of mutual responsibility”.

And what is chastity? Their cheering answer is not abstinence, but the quality of spirit which entails the deepest respect for oneself, for others and the profound value of human relationships.They cite John Macmurray: “sincerity in the expression of what we feel…the condition of personal integrity”.

If that’s the case then, to paraphrase Augustine: Make me chaste, and start right away.

Refs and some random quotations below.
Read the rest of this entry »

The best part of working life since I went indy in 2007 has been working with great designers. I love thinkpublic and wish huge swathes of public services could be transformed to work along the lines they espouse: more not less please. The original design work – mainly by Paul Thurston and Alice Osborne – for Mydex has stood the test of startup time wonderfully.

But the surprise has been working with recent design graduates, fresh out of college who haven’t even got their first job. Projects have included (in chron order):

1. Creating the independent Malmo09 event with Donagh O’hArgain. Tom Steinberg’s idea, this was my “farewell to e-government” in the form of an ideal-government unConference to face down just one in the series of interminably tedious European e-Government conferences. Donagh conceived and delivered it just as we thought it should be done (and on zero budget too). We couchsurfed, found a wonderful location – the Garaget (see event photos), Sir Bonar delivered an absurd speech I wrote for him and to cap it all the Swedish finance Minister showed up and did a pechakucha. It was a supreme blast. The old domain for our Malmo09 blog is now cybersquatted, and it never got recorded for the WayBackMachine, so I hope Donagh kept some records.

2. Engaging the wonderful Veronica Massoud to do ethnographic research for Mydex. This destroyed many of my preconceptions about why people would want to take control over their personal data and exposed the true human condition in terms of how we get stuff done online. It still defines the problem we’re working to solve.

3. Working with Barking’s finest Andy Millar to produce The Twitters of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom (ravings of the unimaginably senior Whitehall official for whom I act as unpaid speechwriter). Andy did a staggering job to design and publish on Lulu a book comprising entirely Tweets. Far better than the miserable old knight deserves. He also produced some hand-bound limited edition policy papers that helped get the personal data issue into national political manifestos.

and now….

4. I’m blown away by the landscape designs delivered this week by Alice Malaiperuman for the old barn at Kelston Roundhill. In just four days (she says) Alice has set this small but fine ruin in proper landscape and planning context, and visualised how it could be reached, used, enhanced. Her drawings are deceptively easy on the eye, convey something I’ve tried to get my head around for a year, and visualise how it could be transformed.

Fresh from college and before their first job each of these designers has completed – to my mind – brilliant, highly varied and utterly professional work. The first three are all LCC masters graduates, now working, and Alice has just done her first work experience at SEED in Bath (who were by all accounts very helpful and supportive). I’m convinced they’ll all go far. People say “quick – hire a teenager while they still know everything”. I do say hire students now, because they need work now and their rates quadruple the day someone else is charging them out. If we could buy shares in them, we should. Read the rest of this entry »

Wild food foraging holds all sorts of appeal. I’m not so into the “end days” scenario of post-holocaust scavenging or that “Gone with the wind” image of gnawing at indigestible roots. But we need ways to reconnect with the landscape, to find out more about the plants we walk past and ignore, to try out new and original tastes and food. And the sheer freebie factor of cutting out Mr Sainsbury the middleman feels good.

Aldeburgh marshes

So while in Suffolk we hooked up with Henry from Meldwith for a foraging adventure starting from our back door in Aldeburgh. Henry is Scandinavia-trained and Thorpeness-based, and brought lovely family and friends which made for an extra-cheerful party.

Our lot took bets in advance on how many edible species we’d find: range was from one to 12. In the event we found 17, including some real surprises. Everyone loves blackberries of course, which served as the pretext for getting small people out on an adventure-forage (the word “walk” is a big no-no). But then we also found and ate:

wild fennel: (part of the carrot family) which brewed up a tasty tea
stinging nettle: tasty if you crush tender leaves and chew them. They say grasp the nettle and you don’t get stung, but someone always does
greater plantain – nothing like as “great” as the plantain you’d get in a Caribbean store, but entirely edible nonethless; chop it up and cook it
ribwort plantain – same applies; bit tougher
chickweed – Henry will have to confirm which species, but I think a sort of mouse-earred chickweed. Quite nice and salady; stem is hairy on one side
horseradish: quite a surprise; strong clear taste. Who knew wasabi was related to cabbage in the mustard family brassicaceae? Well, any botanist I suppose. Need to return with big fork to dig up the roots and make fresh relish for the roast beef. The divine Wikipedia informs that 85% of world’s commercial horseradish comes from SW Illinois. Well, not this plant. Plucky Suffolk not to be outdone etc)
Hogweed: Genesis shd add a verse in which the sinister giant gets eaten. Well, the seeds at least are quite tasty
marsh mallow: gelatinous, like okra. Pretty flowers; potential for patisiers I suspect
dittander: big surprise, part of the mustard family. Really spicy; definitely alternative relish possibilities
wild beetyou can use the leaves just like other beet leaves for salad

Then we moved down into the flooded sea marsh area and found pre-salted vegetables:
samphire (later seen on the menu that night at posh local restaurant to go with seabass)
sea blight (which Henry tactfully renames sea pine when selling it to local butchers)
sea purslane also available in posh food servings

Back into town we found
wolfberries (from the Duke of Argyll’s fake tea plant) There were only a couple and I didn’t try one. But I understand they’re sold as a posh miracle health panacea as goji berries
hawthorn berries not much memorable taste but v high in pectin apparently

So, this is clearly not the easiest way to feed a household of seven. But it’s definitely an eye-opener, an underused resource, and it makes for a great walk. Definitely recommend give Henry a call if you’re up Thorpeness way. Sorry about my poor quality photos below; next time we’ll invite @paulclarke along…

Stinging Nettle

Dittander

Hawthorn berries

Stephen Roberts’ latest GNM Kable analysts’ newsletter is pretty dismissive about Liam Maxwell’s prospects in his new Cabinet Office IT role (see blockquote below), and has a fair old dig at my own work. Stephen and his team see no chance of Liam making progress on open source, or on SMEs. They’re scathing about what they call the “metaphysics of data ownership” of his VRM paper (which I reviewed here).

Remember that Stephen’s bread is buttered by big government awarding big suppliers big contracts, not by anything smaller, cheaper and more effective, not by the innovation of SMEs, the satisfaction of the general public or the easing of the burden on the taxpayer. His team measures big government IT spend – man has it been big – but they have no measure for how much time people waste and how much grief is caused by poor data logistics and ineffective online public services.

Declaration of interest: I co-founded Kable and suppose I therefore helped create these jobs. I completely understand how hard it is to ensure that being paid by big suppliers doesn’t affect underlying judgement, and always to keep front of mind that public services are done for people in need and paid for by taxpayers. It’s always tempting to provide the reassuring advice that wealthy clients want to hear, but one has to resist and instead offer them the truth however challenging. I fear Stephen himself may still be mourning Transformational Government and the benighted National ID Scheme as he adjusts to contempory reality.

I can’t speak for whether Stephen and his team now accurately understand Liam’s views, and we’ll just have to find out whether their dim view of what he’ll actually get done is justified. The newsletter goes on to have a dig at “unrepresentative” digital rights enthusiasts (like me, I guess). So what? No-one suggested the canary was representative of the coalminers, but it still served them a useful purpose.

From what they write about Mydex (the new project I and others are working on) I suspect they don’t entirely understand what it proposes, how it goes about it, and what else is going on in this world. Kable advises that “suppliers shouldn’t assume that Maxwell’s appointment means that they need to engage with this particular provider”. The tech is pretty simple they say, anyone can get access to banking and credit data, and government IT suppliers will find it straightforward to enter the market as personal data intermediaries themselves.

The point is there are real and substantial markets to forecast here. If I were a supplier wanting to understand the implications of this new personal data ecosystem and my role within it, I wouldn’t limit my horizon scan to this one analyst. I’d work out what Mydex and others have to offer, I’d look more broadly at the WEF work, deveopments such as the new Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and its members, and check out Ctrl-Shift’s take on Mydata and the ID Assurance programme.

Happy to debate this with Stephen any time in any suitably neutral forum. Read the rest of this entry »

So AFC Wimbledon has broken into the Football League after just nine years. I saw every second of 120 minutes of play-off final; the ball was in the net eight times. Yet I saw not a single goal scored.

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