Comparison to last year’s number is largely useless without knowing what the variation is. Is a 50% increase within the bounds of normal, or does it represent a nation of speeding drunks, blearily passing out behind the wheel and mowing over toddlers as we tow our boats back from the bach?

If you want to make sense of the holiday road toll (as I write, we’ve had 17 dead) then you must look at it in context. You can see the numbers on the Transport web site (thanks data.govt.nz for steering me there), and with a little munging you can pull out holiday deaths:

As you can see, we’re in a declining trend of road deaths on the holiday. The variation from year to year is substantial. Look at the 1970-1975 range: 26, 34, 37, 16, 29, 24. That’s a 21 death range! Or just look at the last five years: 22, 9, 18, 25, 13, 12. From that you can see that this year’s is not exceptional, even though it is nearly half as much again as last year’s fatalities.

Think of it like rolling two dice. Seven is the most likely number you’ll get, 2 and 12 the least common (there are many ways to make seven, only one way to make each of 2 and 12). Even though you might roll a 12, that doesn’t mean the dice are suddenly tilting high and now you’ll get lots of 9s and 10s. The next roll still has the same probabilities of coming up low, middling, or high as it did last time.

Similarly, a high death-rate one year doesn’t mean there’ll be high death-rate next year. And a low death-rate one year doesn’t mean there’ll be a low death-rate next year. The probabilities are roughly what they were last year, except for this overall slow decline in the average from 20 to 15 in the last decade.

If we rolled lots of dice, we’d see that overall we get few 2s or 12s but many 7s as we expected. Similarly, over the last ten years we see a few below 10 or above 20, but most in-between. This year’s number is higher than normal, but not as much cause for alarm as (say) 30 deaths might be.

The probabilities of dice come from their construction: you could change the probabilities by changing the shape, making one side heavier, painting different numbers on. Similarly, the holiday road toll probabilities are affected by many things. Off the top of my head, I can think of: population (doubled since 1950!), weather, road quality, timing of weekends (which might change whether people make their holiday roadtrips during the period being counted), quality of cars on the road (turning crashes into fatalities), and of course the police presence on the roads. I’m sure there are more. These aren’t constant across the holiday period or across the country.

The biggest influence is undoubtedly population: it has more than doubled since 1950. 24 deaths in 1975 is the equivalent rate as 35 deaths today. Here’s the graph, taking population into account:

But I can’t collect or correct for all of the possible variables in holiday numbers. For a better idea, we should look at annual road toll trends. We see there that this year has been one of the best on record and it’s part of a continuing downward trend in deaths. While each individual road death is a tragedy, this year’s Christmas numbers are not a sign that the roads are necessarily a more dangerous place overall.

That’s a relief to me, though not as much as when the Mrs returns home safe and sound. Statistics can only provide so much comfort …

(wondering what happened in the late 60s and early 70s to have such massive changes in deaths? New Zealand History has some milestones that might be relevant: Speed limits were raised in the late 60s, sending the death rates up, and the drunk-driving policing helped bring them down, starting with blood alcohol tests which were introduced just before 1970.)

My Year in Books

Books: 100
Reading Rate: 3.6 days/book
Monthly Breakdown: 8 books/month on average 11,9,12,5,6,6,7,1,9,15,6,13
Busiest Month: Oct (15 books)
Slowest Month: Aug (1 book)

Total Reading: 29,696 pages
Shortest Book: Your Business Brickyard: Getting back to the basics to make your business more fun to run. at 64 pages
Longest Book: The Crimson Petal and the White at 900 pages
Average Book: 309 pages

All Reviews: 47,905 words
Shortest Review: No Dominion (Joe Pitt, #2) at 9 words
Longest Review: The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World at 3,467 words
Average Review: 479 words

Average Quality: 3.3 stars
Quality over time: 3.7,3.3,3,2,3.3,3,3.3,4,3.6,2.7,3.3,3.8
Best Month: Aug (4 stars average)
Crappest Month: Apr (2 stars average)

Shelf Size: 21,18,17,12,9,9,7,7,6,6,4,4,3,3,2,2,1,1,1,1,1,1
Top Five Busiest Shelves:
1: history (21 books)
2: science-fact (18 books)
3: other-fiction (17 books)
4: abandoned (12 books)
5: sf (9 books)
Slowest Shelf: medicine (1 book)

Good Books: 47 rated 4 or higher
1. The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (5 stars)
2. What’s the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education (5 stars)
3. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (5 stars)
4. The Golden Mean (5 stars)
5. Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (5 stars)
6. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) (5 stars)
7. About a Boy (5 stars)
8. You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (5 stars)
9. 100 New Zealand Poems (5 stars)
10. The Anthologist (5 stars)
11. The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel (5 stars)
12. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (5 stars)
13. The Cloudspotters Guide (5 stars)
14. Just My Type: A Book about Fonts (4 stars)
15. Shit My Dad Says (4 stars)
16. Steve Jobs (4 stars)
17. Running Blind (4 stars)
18. The Crimson Petal and the White (4 stars)
19. Guardian of the Dead (4 stars)
20. Caribou Island (4 stars)
21. High Fidelity (4 stars)
22. Feynman (4 stars)
23. An Autobiography (4 stars)
24. Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond (4 stars)
25. Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (4 stars)
26. Legend of a Suicide (4 stars)
27. The Quantum Thief (The Quantum Thief Trilogy #1) (4 stars)
28. Leading After a Layoff : Reignite Your Team’s ProductivityQuickly (4 stars)
29. A Scientist at the Seashore (Dover Science Books) (4 stars)
30. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (4 stars)
31. The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (4 stars)
32. Platform (4 stars)
33. The Cleaner (4 stars)
34. The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (4 stars)
35. Visible Learning (4 stars)
36. History of Life (4 stars)
37. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (4 stars)
38. And the Ass Saw the Angel (4 stars)
39. The Influencing Machine (4 stars)
40. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible (4 stars)
41. Remarkable Discoveries! (4 stars)
42. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (4 stars)
43. Wild Horses (4 stars)
44. Reflex (4 stars)
45. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (4 stars)
46. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (4 stars)
47. Half a Life (4 stars)

Background

New Zealand introduced “National Standards” last year. In the past, the curriculum talked about competencies and learning areas in general terms and defined stages through which children would pass. It didn’t say “at this age, children should be able to do X”. That was the gap that National Standards filled. The debate has been around timing (too fast) and how those standard age-based skills were arrived at (not soundly).

It’s important to note that National Standards is not standardised assessment. That is, it’s not the same test taken by every child once a year to determine what the child can do. Instead, teachers use their professional judgement to assess the child however they want, and work together to ensure that all children are assessed in roughly the same way. This process of working together to ensure that a kid in Paihia and a kid in Dunedin are being assessed on the same grounds is called “moderation”.

Failing Schools

I’ve believed for the last year that National Standards would be used to identify “failing” schools and those schools will then be punished instead of supported. Schools are required to report on performance against National Standards, and these reports can (and will) be gathered and sorted into “league tables”. Those at the bottom of the league tables (those with the most kids not reading at or above age expectation) will be labelled “failing” and given fewer funds to motivate the staff and board (and perhaps parents) to change for the better.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Kids should know stuff, and schools should be pushed hard to improve if they’re not doing right by their kids. The question is whether this is an accurate measure of “not doing right by their kids”, and whether this push will cause the schools to improve.

If you ask people what they want their kids to be when they leave school, they talk about: confident, healthy, knowledgeable, independent learners, financially literate, curious, creative, global in outlook, aware of their history, comfortable moving between the cultures in the community, fluent public speakers, and so on. All this is covered in the New Zealand Curriculum’s key competencies: thinking, using language, managing self, relating to others, participating and contributing. National Standards only looks at one and a half aspects (“thinking” and “using language”, both important but very narrowly interpreted) and completely omit the others.

So you’ve got two failure modes here: you can have capable confident curious kids who don’t know stuff they should, and kids who can recite the Kings of England but who can’t think independently to save themselves. Both exist and both are problems to be solved. Ranking on National Standards won’t identify the Kings of England problem, and if we want the independent creative financially-literate entrepreneurs who will lift NZ out of its economic malaise, we won’t get them if the grammar schools continue to churn out graduating classes full of children skilled in regurgitation and not digestion.

I think National Standards will successfully identify children who don’t know the stuff they should by their age. What’s needed to turn that around? Sometimes teaching is the problem. But research has repeatedly shown (see John Hattie’s “Visible Learning”) that most of a child’s progress in the year is a result of what they knew at the start of the year and what happens at home. A minority of the possible improvement in kids’ knowledge is a result of what happens at school.

Fixing Failure

So it’s entirely possible that we’ll end up identifying schools in poor areas as having children who don’t progress as rapidly as children in rich areas. This is hardly an earth-shattering conclusion. The question is: what will we do to make change?

A great school can change its environment. Pt England primary school has raised literacy in its entire community. Great schools like this are rare. How can we make more?

The Government today announced the introduction of charter schools, the first such intervention. The upside is pretty good: if a public school isn’t doing well and hasn’t improved over years, then let private or charitable groups to start a new one in competition, with latitude on employment and curriculum that public schools don’t current enjoy. Then parents have choice, can vote with their feet, and the worse school will be starved of pupils and die.

That’s the upside. I’d love to think that we’ll get more Russell and Dorothy Burts starting charter schools that have the effect of a Point England school. That’d be fantastic.

Failing Fixes

The problem is that while there is massive effort to identify and contain the failures of public schools, I don’t see the same thought being put into the downsides of charter schools. That is, if a charter school fails, how will we know and what will we do about it? “Charter schools will be accountable to school sponsors and subject to external review” seems rather vague.

What failure modes might there be? A charter school might not meet national standards. It might omit sex education or teach a bizarre version of it such as abstinence. It might include religious education, so a pupil is forced to be indoctrinated into a different religion in order to get a decent education. It might omit “relating to others” and “participating and contributing” in favour of creating kids who can recite the Kings of England and regurgitate an essay on the use of symbolism in Hamlet.

What’s really frustrating is that we already have a mechanism for assessing and improving schools: the Education Review Office. ERO just finished visiting our school, and dinged us on some things we weren’t doing well. They offered us assistance to improve, and we will. ERO even have the power to depose the board and principal and install a commissioner to run the school and reform the governance and administration (they did that a decade ago for our school, and it worked). Schools have tremendous freedom to meet their communities’ needs (Albany Senior High with its Googlish 20% time, and Auckland Grammar School with its British prep school aspirations are both NZ public schools). What exactly was wrong with that system that requires charter schools?

How is the solution to “this school is failing National Standards” to create a school with “more freedom to set the curriculum” and the ability to hire untrained teachers?

Failure to Fix

This disconnect between National Standards and charter schools is what frustrates me. You’ve got National Standards used as evidence of a problem, and charter schools as a cure that won’t necessarily fix the problem.

It’s hard not to see this as working backwards from a system the politicians want to see in place (charter and private schools), and National Standards with the language of “failing schools” used to justify the installation of that system.

Underneath is the belief that business can and will do everything better than government. This is, however, far from universally accepted (“everything”, really?) and far from necessarily applicable to education. Businesses have their failure modes too (cf Telecom, Enron, News of the World, and any number of finance companies) and should be guarded against as vigorously as public school failures are.

Forced Failure

What I ultimately fear, yet predict, is the introduction of what in America is referred to (without irony!) as “No Child Left Behind”. The process: test often, rank according to test results, those at the bottom of the test results are “failing” and therefore deserve to be punished, so withhold funds, and eventually starve them in favour of semi- or fully-private schools. Americans don’t compare well academically to Kiwis and it seems unwise to import this model (see, for example, OECD’s PISA scores where our kids do better in school but don’t stay in school as long).

How would we get there? We’ve got National Standards with no standardised testing. After a year or two it’ll be possible to say “moderation is blurring the numbers, there’s too much uncertainty and room for fudging, we need the clarity of standardised assessment” and in will come annual national tests. At that point we’re doing what one 19th century reformer called “continually pulling up the plants to see the condition of the roots, the consequence of which is that all good natural growth was stopped.”

I’ll wager a pint of Guinness that within 5 years we’re punishing “failing” schools and talking about, if not living, standardised assessment instead of moderation.

I prefaced my talk by saying that none of this is original, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I merely wanted to bring the different strands together in a way that showed them how to think about the opportunities afforded to libraries for the digital age.

Below is the text of the talk, and I’ve attached PDF versions as well (A4 and US-Letter). I’ve released this under CC-BY-SA and hope it’s useful for you. Please let me know if it is!

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Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995.  He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, “what next?”  The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.

The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times.  Bill Gates didn’t think the Internet would be big.  The Information Superhighway of Gates’s fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.

Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them.  Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.

At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software.  They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch.  They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.

I’m telling you this because libraries are like Microsoft.

At one point you had a critical role: you were one of the few places to conduct research. When academics and the public needed to do research into the documentary record, they’d come to you. As you now know, that monopoly has been broken.

The Internet, led by Google, is the start and end of most people’s research. It’s good enough to meet their needs, which is great news for the casual researcher but bad news for you.

Now they don’t think of you at all.

Oh yes, I know all the reasons why the web and Google are no replacement for a healthy research library. I know the critical importance of documentary heritage. But it’s not me you’re talking to at budget time. It’s the public, through the politicians.

They love public libraries, in our country at least. Every time a council tries to institute borrowing fees or close libraries, they get shot down. But someone tries, at least once a year. And England is a cautionary tale that even public libraries aren’t safe.

You need to be useful as well as important. Being useful helps you to be important. You need a story they can understand about why you’re funded.

Oh, I know, you have thought about digital a lot. You’ve got digitisation projects. You’re aggregating metadata. You’re offering AnyQuestions-type services where people can email a librarian.

But these are bolt-ons. You’ve added digital after the fact. You probably have special digital groups, probably (hopefully) made up of younger people than the usual library employee.

Congratulations, you just reproduced Microsoft’s strategy: let’s build a few digital bolt-ons for our existing products. Then let’s have some advance R&D guys working on the future while the rest of us get on with it. But think about that for a second.  What are the rest of us working on, if those young kids are working on the future? Ah, it must be the past.

So what you’ve effectively done is double-down on the past.

I like to think of libraries as services in three areas: collections, discovery, and delivery. You maintain big piles of stuff, you help people find the right stuff, and then you let them use it.

In the paper world, this was dominated by the challenges of collection and discovery. So librarians have incredible expertise in preserving words on reeds, on calf skins, on pulped trees. There’s huge mana in having a big collection.  Collections must grow, they must be complete, deaccessioning breaks hearts and causes shouting matches. And, despite paper, you’ve been eager innovators and adopters of new information technology: card catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System were profession-changing inventions in their day.

Collections, discovery, and delivery. Delivery is runt of the litter in the paper world, I’m afraid.

One copy?  One precious copy? Ok, sonny, you sit here.  We’ll bring it here.  Don’t cough, don’t breathe, warn us before you blink. Or, in old days, help yourself and we’ll trust you as a gentleman to bring it back. That was even less successful than pursed lips and the tyranny of the reading room.

The first movie was a camera pointed at a play. They didn’t know the possibilities of the old medium, so they reproduced the old structures in the new medium. When confronted with digital technology, you’ve basically reproduced the old power structures in the digital world.

You want a massive digital collection: SCAN THE STACKS!  Give it to Google!  Give it to a commercial partner! Just get the damn things digitized so we have a lot of bits of our atoms!

You agonize over digital metadata and the purity thereof. You maybe reluctantly part with your metadata (but not your precious collections!) to Trove.

And you offer crap access.

If I ask you to talk about your collections, I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures you have.  When you go for money for digitization projects, you talk up the incredible cultural value.  ANZAC!  Constitution!  Treaties! Development of a nation!

But then if I look at the results of those digitization projects, I find the shittiest websites on the planet.  It’s like a gallery spent all its money buying art and then just stuck the paintings in supermarket bags and leaned them against the wall.

You’re in the digital world.  Bits don’t work like atoms.  I’ll give you five critical ways that bits don’t work like atoms.

First, bits are cheap to copy.

By all means protect the digital master, but copies can be plentiful or even ubiquitous.

Physical access has been limited because you have one copy of each physical item, you need to maintain control of that copy to preserve it for the next patron, and copies are expensive to make.  Digital copies are free to make, they’re non-destructive, they free you from the burden of control, and you can have as many as you want.  Those are vastly different rules.

This is, of course, why copyright is such a bugger in the digital age.  It’s riddled with assumptions about the difficulty of copying atoms that aren’t true of bits.

Second, access is expected.

You can argue until you’re blue in the face about the intrinsic value of collections, but as your research monopoly has been destroyed, you need to start delivering some other value.  Access to those precious collections is it.  Collections, discovery, distribution.

If nobody uses your digital collections, what’s the point? If nobody can find the digital objects, what’s the point? If you recreate medieval standards of access in the digital age, what’s the point? You won’t get to the 21st century by doubling down on the 11th century.

Your new reading room is your patron’s web browser. Are you designing distribution for that?  How much did you spend building a new reading room, Bill?  How much are you spending on digital delivery?

The first place they start looking for things is Google. Are you designing discovery for that?  Do you know how to be found?

Example: the British Library had a company digitise, and got limited access and rights to the digitised content.  Google contracts have restrictions on your use of the scanned material, too. Is this kind of arrangement acceptable?

It depends on whether libraries are primarily collections or whether you have high expectations for access, too. If you don’t value distribution, you’ll think these are good choices. The British Library says “hey, the physical objects were only available on our premises; this gives more access than there was before.  Most importantly, though, we solved the digitisation problem!”

You can see the mistake they made. They focused on collecting digital assets and digitising their physical ones, probably even convened conferences on digital metadata.

And then hid their fabulous collections out of sight. It’s like they WANT to be irrelevant.  “Please, don’t be one of the first places people visit to research the nation’s cultural identity!  Let’s make it hard for you to do scholarship!”

So, once again: distribution is critical in the digital age.

Third, the Internet is bigger than you are.

In the past, you had knowledge, frozen in books.  Ordinary people came to you to get that knowledge. There was a bit of a class divide: those who Create Knowledge and those who Consume it.

Those days are gone. Online, everyone’s a creator. Those of you doing digital harvest of websites know this. “Look at all the crap we have to save!” (The same is true of legal deposit collections)

The point is that you’re saving the stuff that future generations will care about. And, increasingly, the stuff that future generations will care about is online. That’s why Library of Congress acquired an historical and ongoing archive of tweets. Not because a tweet is comparable to a first folio, but because it’s what future generations will care about when it comes time to determine the mood of the nation.

I personally believe that the greatest role you play is around the documentary national identity. People come to you to find out about their ancestors, to find out what life was like, to critically evaluate and understand the past.

If you consider your future in terms of documentary national identity, you might do other things. There’s a software project here called Kete, Maori for basket, which is a way to capture and preserve family histories, stories of the area, photos, interviews, etc. Imagine a future where citizens contribute to and search these, perhaps through their local public libraries. Wikipedia won’t take this stuff, it’s not notable, but it’s exactly your business: we’ll take it and help other people search it.

You might do what the National Library of New Zealand did, and dispatch a photographer to Christchurch to document the earthquake aftermath and recovery to ensure adequate documentary record was available to future researchers.

So, in short, much of the nation’s cultural life is now happening Out There. You need to find more ways to gather it in.

Fourth, bits are so cheap we have too many of them.

Our grandparents grew up with very little. They valued every possession.  I know this because I live in my grandparents’ old house and I’m still finding balls of odd-lengthed twine in the basement. In fact, we humans evolved with very little.  We were always starving for food, short of objects, desperate for information.

Now we have too much of everything.  Cheap plastic crap from China means everyone can have a crappy version of everything they need.  Cheap industrial crap food means everyone can get calories, even though they might not be good for us.  And easy copying of bits mean we have too many of the damn things.

Computer scientists think they can solve this problem.  We’ve got indexes and search engines. What we can’t programme is critical thinking in humans.  That’s where librarians come in.

Let’s assume that Google’s search engine is the state of the art at finding gemstones buried in dungheaps. This state of the art is not great.  It struggles with relevance, it tries to filter out spam, and it personalizes so I see different results than you do.  And, of course, it’s beholden to its advertisers. This can never be the only answer to helping citizens find what they need.

The best solution is when both man and machine work together: librarians make sense of indexes, this is what they do. Computers are great at building indexes. Don’t think either-or, think and.

Part of a national or state’s library’s role is to get stuck into this and help.  Teach information literacy.  Teach basic research skills.  Work with schools so kids know how and where librarians exist.

Discovery is important online, and it’s not just having accurate metadata and Google.

Fifth, the Internet connects things.

I know, it sounds obvious, but that’s what it does. Good broadband is coming to all of us, thanks to the national broadband projects which are by now too big to fail. That broadband isn’t just for sending digitized books across. It’s also the medium by which librarians and libraries can work together.

Oh sure, you can share collections.  This is threatening to institutions because the collection forms a key part of the institution’s identity.  Both countries have projects to provide one-stop-shop search across all cultural collections (search but not delivery!) so we’re starting to get our heads around sharing collections. I imagine a National Digital Library where the collections are shared like this.  But not just the collections.

You can share services too. You’ve probably experimented with online services.  NZ has AnyQuestions, for example. High-quality video conferencing, email, and the web are ways to deliver human services across the Internet.

If you have people delivering services online (answering questions, making recommendations, entering data, etc.) then you can share people without having to physically move them around.  What opportunities does this open up? Share staff between institutions, or have specialist staff offer services in a physical location where they cannot be.

The Internet also connects computers. This is the age of “the cloud”. Can you provision equipment for other institutions to use? The National Library has a project to provide regional libraries with an affordable functional modern catalogue system so they don’t need to spend the dollars themselves. What joint purchasing can you share in this fashion?

So, to recap:

• be useful as well as important
• collections, discovery, distribution
• bits are cheap to copy
• access is expected
• the Internet is bigger than you are
• we have too many bits
• the Internet connects things

You can’t afford to be bad at digital. I tell businesspeople: It’s your inventory, it’s your storefront, it’s your customer service line, it’s your supply chain, it’s your advertising, it’s your profit and loss.

For libraries, the Internet is your collection, it’s your reading room, it’s your catalogue, it’s your interloan, it’s your helpdesk, it’s your opportunity to reclaim relevance.

And I’m afraid to say, you’re the pointy end of the digital redefinition of culture and heritage institutions and public services, because text is small and the first to go digital. E-books?  Next are e-music, e-movies, e-ephemera, e-maps, e-paintings, e-sculpture, and who knows what e-lse. Every archiving institution will face your problems, some are already grappling with them (e.g., the Powerhouse Museum).

Online search? Online helpdesk? Online loans? Every public-facing organisation will face your problems. At least you can take comfort from the fact that you won’t be the only ones disrupted by this change.

Finally, let’s consider Microsoft. Nobody wants to be in their place: 15 years after discovering the Internet, they’re still tipping money into it with little success.

The company that successfully transitioned from a Microsoft business to the Internet age was Apple.  When Jobs returned in late 90s, he threw out the 40-odd products they had and said “we’re going to make computers that are build to connect to the Internet, and the software on them will be Internet-aware software.”  They focused on four Internet computers (that’s where the i in i-Mac came from) and from that success he was able to focus on successively further extensions like iPods and iPhones and iPads.

You need to focus. Success for you is relevance. Make things that people use. Value the skills that your people have and the services they deliver, but don’t be a slave to atoms. Value helping people.

Then when someone asks “why do we tip all these millions into this?” or “doesn’t Google do that already?”, your relevance is your answer.

You must do this. Libraries are the homes of critical thought, of long-term cultural preservation, and of democratic access to knowledge. This can’t end with the Internet.

You have three options to make more money:

1. Lower costs.
2. Sell more of the same stuff.
3. Make new types of stuff to sell.

In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can’t catch more fish because you don’t have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell.

These are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT propositions.

If you lower costs, you don’t increase the overall size of the market. If there’s $5B in sales, you can make more of that $5B by lowering your costs. This isn’t entirely true: elasticity of demand might increase revenue because lowering costs means you can lower the price, so more people may be able to afford it, and perhaps this new number * new price means more revenue than old number * old price.

Competing by lowering costs starts a race to the bottom on prices, turning your product into a commodity where different manufacturers compete to sell it for the lowest price. This fundamentally threatens the overall sustainability of the product because down that path lies short-sighted cost-cutting, offshoring of labour and environmental hazards, and all sorts of not just morally dubious but also legally and long-term-financially dubious actions.

If you innovate to improve quality or produce entirely new products, then you can increase the market size. So you could take fish sales from $5B to $7B without triggering that race to the bottom. You didn’t have to take more fish from the sea, but instead sold the fish you did catch for more money. This route encompasses higher-value uses (sushi vs fish food) and out-of-the-box thinking like fish oil supplements.

That this happens in the liberal arts is understandable. But there’s also a move afoot to reject Computer Science degrees: “go straight into a startup!” people say. I used to oppose this: university taught me what I was doing when I programmed. It didn’t make me a good programmer (though it sorted out some dodgy techniques I had as a self-taught kid) but it taught me how to think about solving problems, to recognize common problems, and to understand the different dimensions of tradeoffs all through languages, operating systems, databases, networking, and more.

So I was in favour of CS. “Go to uni!” I would say.

Past tense.

This weekend I met with a recent CS grad and we talked about what he should do. He had signed up for Honours, then realized he wasn’t interested by the research. And, talking to him, I realized he’d had the wrong approach to university. I had also had the wrong approach to university.

The right approach is to learn as much as you can. For a few years you have a lower pressure to earn, you have wide-open license to stretch your thinking in as many directions as you can, you have huge resources and opportunities around you, and you can do anything.

I came close: I had fun. I played with early Internet services, was hired to write some (learning sockets as I went), set up regional mirrors of software archives, and got caught up in the early web. None of this was deliberate (I never sat down and said “I will try as many Internet services as I can; this Internet thing will be big!”) it just happened to be the right thing for me.

My friend, however, didn’t even come close. He fell into the same trap that most people at university fall into: he thought the goal was to get the degree.

“Fuck no!” I told him. The degree is a side-effect! If you learn as much as you can, expand your mind, discover what interests you, and chase it as far as you can, you’ll get the degree (assuming you also spend some time studying). But to fuck around OUTSIDE university instead of learning, so as to do “the minimum amount of work necessary to pass” (my words, not his) — that’s a mistake.

But nobody tells the kids this. Of course, being kids, perhaps they wouldn’t respond. Education, like youth, is wasted on the young. I stay in touch with a few CS lecturers and they all bemoan the cohorts of students who aren’t interested in the subject, only “will this be on the final exam?”.

This young fellow I was talking to, he came out with the usual patchy set of skills. University didn’t actually teach him much that was directly useful. If he goes and joins a company, he’s going to have to hustle for a year or so to get his programming act together and be useful. University teaches that various computational things exist, but until you’ve used them in anger and had them ingrained into your way of thinking, you’re not going to be a good programmer. It’s the difference between having to struggle to conjugate verbs in a foreign language vs having that stuff be automatic and reflexive. It’s not muscle memory, but it has to become so.

Of course, rightly, universities don’t pretend to be producing useful programmers. “We teach high-level concepts,” they say, just as I did. But the high-level concepts that I learned were useful to me: what an operating system has to do and how you might divide the labour, how to describe and process regularity (hello, regular expressions!), the challenges of randomness and linearity as exemplified by the different approaches to memory management that I’d encounter in various programming languages, etc. The classes I tuned out (AI, for example), I wish I’d paid more attention to now! The stuff he learned, though, struggled to be useful: the description he gave of his HCI class didn’t seem to be coupled at all to the design considerations in my world. I think there’s a minimum amount of useful you have to be, and I wonder what the distribution of useful is across different university CS programs.

I still distrust the “just go to a startup!” people, though. There’s a huge industry whose raw ingredients are programmers. Only a few of them regard those programmers as a resource to be developed instead of exploited. “If you’re a good programmer, skip university and go to a startup” may be right for a handful of people, but for most kids it could easily reduce the probability that they will ever become a great programmer. The leisure to learn at university is NOT afforded you at a startup. The people telling you to join a startup do not have your best interest in mind. And, of course, startups require you to solve a problem–the only problems kids have are getting laid and scoring weed, and those were (not coincidentally) well solved by Mark Zuckerberg.

So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what’s occupying my mind now.

When I look forward to the world they’ll come of age in, I don’t see a world with careers like people had in the 60s. I do see a future in which they’ll have to be self-reliant, know how money works, know how to sell, to start and run a business. That argues for startup, or some kind of financial experience. But they should also know how to learn, to think about the general not just the specific, to analyse. Traditionally, they’d acquire those skills at university. Will they do so in the future?

I don’t know whether I’ll steer my kids toward uni. I’m trying hard to give them business experience before they leave school. I just sat down with Mr 12 and we ran through this month’s set of board papers for a real company, talking about what’s on the agenda and why, and getting our heads around the financials to see what stories they tell about the company’s performance. It was great to have a discussion of the differing risks of fixed-price vs time & materials, see them come up again in the CEO report, and then reflected in the financials.

In the end it’s up to the kid whether university makes sense for them, but if it looks like it’s on the cards then I plan to:

1. Take them on research trips around the various universities to find out what courses are offered relevant to their interests and see how they map to practitioners,
2. Remind them that university isn’t about having a piece of paper at the end, it’s about what you can learn getting it.

Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I’m helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we’ve passed through the “oh my god, it’s going to happen!” stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We’ve started the conversations of how many of which type of person we’ll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we’ll nail down the specifics and budget.

I finally got my kick-off email out with MacLean yesterday. Everyone had informally agreed to participate, but were waiting on me to get infrastructure crap together. The plan is to rough-out the top-level design next week.

Was asked to speak to a newspaper about the Wellington IT plan but declined because I wasn’t familiar with. Did talk to a journalist from the Weekend Herald about startups, what works and what doesn’t. I look forward to seeing what he took from the conversation; my speech and his writing is both acts of translation and not all my original sentiments will make it to the page intact. I’m also keen to see who else he spoke with, as I gave him a list of people much better qualified to talk on the subject.

I’m reading the Wai 262 report. That’s a report on Maori traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights. I’ve read the first few chapters on creative works, and it is excellent so far: easy to read and it appears to take a very sensible and practical tack. I hope to blog about it next week when I’ve digested the later chapters.

Had dinner in Wellington with Kiwi Foo attendees, conversation covering a wide variety of topics. My takeaways: alchemy was heavily practiced in the home by women who were responsible for the health of their family, which reminds me of the near-saturation density of women dispensing homeopathic bullshit around us; I’m not the only person who can be vehement, eloquent, and incoherent about clouds; Wellington can be warm.

Friday was a LIAC meeting. It’s a half-dozen people in a meeting room, each representing different parts of the “library and information sectors”. Highlights of the day: (0) the new Auckland office of the National Library has a haka exhibition that I absolutely must see; (1) the National Library’s services to schools are exquisite and will save me and my schools a huge amount of duplicated effort; (2) having three statutory advisory bodies (LIAC, the Guardians Kaitiaki of the Alexander Turnbull Library, and Archives Council) in one room for a spirited discussion; and (3) being warmly appreciated after the meeting by one of the Archives Council (“you spoke well, thank you!”) and, after she left, being told “oh, that was Anne Salmond”. She’s only NZ’s top historian whose books I’ve read. D’oh!

We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good ‘un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we’ll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It’s a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you’re in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O’Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don’t want to tell you about just yet.

A week later, on Sunday October 9, we play the Devonport Bunker. That’s two sets, featuring new material we haven’t played in front of people before. The bunker is a small intimate venue, and we love playing there. The half-time beer is cheap too …. You’ll get our polished favourites and the exciting new songs for $15. Doors open at 7.30 for an 8pm show.

Hope you can make it!

Monday was when I wrote the talk I gave on Tuesday to Orion Health. They have regular hackathons (though they don’t call them that, it’s the idea of setting developers and other coal-face makers loose to build things for a few days, then report back). I was their first speaker for this hackathon, and was given a very wide brief—every topic I raised with the development manager there seemed to work. So I worked backwards from what I wanted to accomplish (firing people up at the start of a hackathon) and decided that I had to point out how awesome and important software people are (they are). I had been listening to an In Our Time episode on The Dawn of the Iron Age, was still struck by Ben Hammersley on Moore’s Law, and so I mashed up some O’Reilly-esque themes of early adopters and unevenly-distributed futures with these things on the surface of my mind, and came up with 50 slides.

I gave the talk on Tuesday to 100 people from Auckland and Christchurch. I think it went well, and I had a coffee with some of the Orion developers afterwards to talk about how to make a sustainable open source work. I put the talk onto Slideshare, where it made the front page: Technology Time Out. The title’s the only thing I’d substantially revise—I wanted to pun on “time” but “time out” completely undercuts the sense of urgency and importance that I wanted to convey. Live and learn!

Tuesday afternoon I flew to Wellington and had dinner with the InternetNZ councillors and other group directors and CEs in preparation for the strategy day on Wednesday. This is the third or fourth one I’ve been to and I’m getting a sense of what works. We need clear agreed objectives, which drive the structure of the day. If we document our strategic direction (and we should) then at least one objective is updating that document, and it shouldn’t be substantially different year on year. The day should begin by thinking about the future, and my personal preference is for a quick SWOT/PEST analysis to put everything in perspective.

It felt like we accomplished about 80% of what we set out to, which wasn’t too bad. It’s always interesting when there’s an elephant in the room—you see people being passionate about Y, which seems completely bizarre until you realize it’s X they’re afraid of but aren’t comfortable directly addressing. We had one of those, but I think we tackled it in the end. And that’s the point, after all, of these things: to work through issues from where are and, in the working, resolve some of them. Such a good group of people on the council, too: generous with their knowledge, patient with my questions, and respecting the good intentions of all.

I managed to get some email done while in Wellington, and caught up on project MacLean. It involves creatives and developers and I’m bringing the team together. I got agreements to participate from all, we’re all excited, but I’ve been out of action for two weeks with sick kids. I have the domain transferred to me, the artist has begun the sketches, so all that remains is for me to put together the initial Google Docs and schedule our first meeting.

I’ve made little progress on my Higgins project, which is longer-term and presently inchoate. I’m busy learning what it isn’t, which is a fun phase that nobody really talks about. “Ah, so that’s why nobody is servicing this market!” and “Wow, the cultural issues around that are thorny to say the least.”

School board meeting on Thursday. We just had a visit from the Educational Review Office, which threw up (as they always do) some areas for improvement. New Zealand schools are fortunate in that responsibility for most of the strategy and operation of the school has devolved to the local community, but it’s a lot of work and there’s precious little concrete guidance from the Ministry of Education. I’m glad we have reviews from ERO, because they are at least prescriptive and precise. This ties into The Checklist Manifesto: I wish we had the checklist that the reviewers use. No conclusion, just food for thought.

Friday was spent researching and writing questions for the local school trivia fundraiser. 100 questions, about 90 of which I wrote myself rather than simply found online, and holy cow it was hard. I wasn’t prepared for the difficulty of compiling questions: it’s not a matter of turning Wikipedia into the form of a question, because it’s easy to make an ambiguous or confusing question from a topic you don’t really understand.

My favourite question came from information from Te Ara:

10. Maori made kiwi into cloaks, their feathers being highly prized. They also ate them, preserving them in their fat like muttonbirds and then eating in a hangi. 19C explorer Charlie Douglas is one of the few Europeans to eat kiwi. Did he prefer the eggs or the meat?

ANSWER: The eggs. He didnʼt like the meat (“a piece of pork boiled in an old coffin”) but thought the eggs made great fritters when fried in oil from the kakapo.

We had 40 people show, a good night was held by all, and everyone our house is absolutely knackered as a result. Success!

Call me slow, but I just realized what a disgusting cop out this is. “100% Pure” isn’t just a tourism slogan, it’s how we see ourselves. We have a long tradition of believing we’re clean and green, and of trying to act in league with that. It’s a fantastically ambitious high standard to hold ourselves to. If we pollute streams with dairy farming run-off, stop doing that. If we have foully-emitting vehicles, raise emissions standards. If we were going to mine in our conservation estate, don’t do that! Just hold yourself to a lower standard. This is a no-brainer, people.

Resiling from the challenge of stewardship of the environment is lazy and corrupt. If we said “we Kiwis are smart” and then someone pointed out that we weren’t 1st in childhood education in the OECD, would we then say “oh no you’re right, we’re stupid, let’s give up”? Or would we continue to aspire to wisdom, funding and engineering our educational system to live up to that ambition? Somehow, though, we’re happy to back away from the environment. How the fuck did we let that happen?

Sorry, something just slipped into place as I realized what happened, and I had to rant. As you were, back to your cat videos.