GoodGNUs

This is a short post remembering Richard Rothwell, who died last Friday.

Three years ago I was made redundant from the BVSC’s MOST project, a project doing good things to get Free Software in the hands of voluntary sector organisations. Looking to carry on the good work, I pieced together ideas for a social enterprise to supply Free Software, recycled hardware, & appropriate local support and training. As I cast around for help in this enterprise, it was with great relief that I found a friend, Richard Rothwell, planning something similar, down the M6 in the Black Country. We soon merged our projects and formed M6-IT cic.

Crucial to M6’s early success was the personality of Richard Rothwell. A lateral thinker; a cynic; a warm-hearted & giving man; a contrarian; and a passionate & practical advocate for Free Software, education, & communities.

It was Richard who started the Supported Family Computing programme, diverting specialist schools’ unspent community fund to making a real difference to families on the wrong side of the digital divide, providing computers, software, broadband, support, & training to children otherwise denied such advantages in life. Richard’s no nonesense style & clear-thinking got us through bureaucratic hurdles to win early tenders, and left a deep impression in client meetings (albeit occasionally one of flabbergasted surprise).

As I have spent much of the last year on a sabbatical from M6, working on goodGNUs projects, we had not been in as close contact as previously. The last time I had spoken to him was a quick discussion on VAT matters, with a promise of a proper chat when it was all out of the way. Sadly he took his life days later, for reasons those of us left behind may never truly understand.

From the comments on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ he has touched many people’s lives, and will be deeply missed in circles beyond Free Software and the voluntary sector. For those who know only a little of Richard Rothwell’s life and work, take a look at the links to his many published sites and articles on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ - an insight into the complex mind of a sadly missed friend and colleague.

I was reading Cory Docotorow’s short article on the psychology of making gaming pay in The Guardian, earlier this afternoon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/14/technology-2009-14-apr-cory-doctorow-gaming

As it neared its conclusion, it drew a parallel between the Free Software business model (the most common one that is: download our software for free, but pay us if you want help), and arbitrage between time-poor & cash-poor game players, exchanging in-game items in fantasy worlds for real money.

Whether attained by coercion, social engineering, generosity or guilt, this arbitrage of the cash-rich and the time-rich is at the centre of many of the new business models emerging on the net. It’s damned close to the GNU/Linux business model – get the OS for free, pay us (or some other group of geeks) if you can’t be arsed to figure out how to make it work.

All very interesting, of course, but something that stuck out in the article is the final paragraph.

This business model has a certain attractive stability to it, in that it relies on technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness, which is a fundamental characteristic of the information age, where constant change ensures constant chaos.

Now we’re back in Cult-of-Done territory. We’re in a time of change, and that means what worked yesterday, may not work tomorrow. It’s easy to see why some people don’t find such a world very easy to adapt to, and some decide that the whole thing is not relevant to them – but for knowledge workers (see Clay Shirky’s much talked-about post on the Death of Newspapers), this is the territory we’re in.

Looking for Quality

The problem now becomes not “How do we work with technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness,” but “How can we adapt this changing, semi-broken mess into something not just useful, but something of quality”?

In my case, it’s by being the interface between various great (but not necessarily complete) bits of Free Software, and some Voluntary Sector organisations that just want to get things done, and not worry about technology.

More specifically it’s with some very exciting new Social Enterprise start-ups that’ll be blogged about here in the next few weeks & months.

Down the garden path

However embracing this chaos has meant me letting go of cherished ideas of over-engineering, and instead building robustness from flexibility & quick response to change.

No wonder it’s such a pleasure to leave all this behind for a bit of gardening now and then - a time-tested source of predictability & chaos, with quality in the eye of the beholder. :)

This week has been one of those rushed weeks, lots of little things, and very little project work advanced significantly. Nothing to write about, in fact. But last week I attended four events, and had several interesting meetings. I’m never going to get around to reviewing all of them properly so here’s a brief summary:

Monday 16 March 2009

PRActical Design for Social Action: PraDSA’s final event I’ve already mentioned. Please go to the website to read up a little on this project. I introduced the 20:20 concept - 20 slides each put up for 20 seconds. A powerful tool for presenting ideas in bite-sized chunks to audiences of mixed levels of interest in the topic.
It’s a popular format in geek circles - often used at GeekUp meetings, and there were 18 given at O’Reilly’s Ignite-UK North in Leeds a few weeks ago. nevertheless it has yet to gain much traction in academia.
A bonus of the day was, in the company of Andy Dearden, getting to go out for a beer and a meal with Doug Schuler, the author of the inspiring Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution

Tuesday 17 March 2009

Design Patterns for Civic Empowerment, at the London Knowledge Lab
Part of the Planet (Pattern Language for Networking) effort, and linked to the previous day’s PraDSA event. Using storytelling we had a chance to work through a problem, then use patterns from Doug Schuler’s above-mentioned book to apply design patterns for social action. Some pictures here.

At lunchtime I gave an impromptu tutorial on Twitter, other social media, and how to link it up, to Ann from the TUC. Some very interesting people there, including Sabine McNeill of the Forum for Stable Currencies.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

The first of my Small Steps to Sustainability events. 20 people talking about their experience of Open Knowledge / Open Access / Open Source & Free Software. The art gallery location produced an art gallery crowd, which gave great examples of peer-to-peer mentoring, but we must think about how to get a wider community through the door for the other events.

Thursday 19 March 2009

Manchester, and DEP’s Social Enterprise network event at Innospace (and an unfortunate clash with IT innovations in the Community in Shrewsbury - which would have been a great chance to catch up with contacts from the MOST Project’s Shropshire donations). An interesting group of social entrepreneurs, all with an interest in education, working through creative collaboration exercises and having opinions sought for the NWDA’s North West Regional Strategy

Next a quick meeting to discuss practicalities behind efforts to produce Free Software for Credit Unions. A growing field, badly served by current offerings.

Not much time for work, except on rail journeys, meaning the next week was a constant round of catching up. Time to think about out-sourcing something, perhaps?

Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, has an interesting blog post on What makes a Free Software company? that chimes with a lot of what we’ve been telling people on the subject - in particularin relation to a couple of Start-Up ideas (more here soon).

However, what caught my eye, was a link to a Gartner report, proclaiming usage of Free Software in the enterprise will reach 100 percent by November 2009. A report I somehow missed last year.

Looks like that bell-curve has finally reached the tail. Does anyone have a predicted date for the next few victories to software freedom?

Yet another blog on the Interweb pipes? Is there a need?

Who knows - I gave up blogging (though it wasn’t called that, then) about a decade ago, but found myself micro-blogging rather a lot about work these last few weeks:

http://identi.ca/richardsmedley

http://twitter.com/RichardSmedley

…and found the need to add in more. More on the Social Enterprise scene in the North West (and N Wales, and the Midlands). More on Free Software developments, and the software we’re writing. More on websites, as I seem to be moving from the back-end (oiling the servers, and tweaking code) to the front-end, and far too much on Social Networks.

So, another business blog. Why not?

Anyway, off to find a good WP theme to customise, then write some thoughts on last week’s Speak To A Geek event.