Wednesday, 8.30pm
Sheffield, U.K.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker
Next month I will be talking about some of the ways in which I use Action Research to address a variety of problematic situations.
I am always a little uncertain about whether I’m the right person to talk about stuff like this.
I learned when I was growing up that resources are limited and we can do much more with what we have than people might think.
We went to see people who lived in huts with floors made from cow dung.
It turns out that if you spread dung and get it flat, then let it dry and polish it you end up with a surface that works quite well.
It’s a sort of organic plaster, when you think about it.
Being dependent on certain resources may make you more effective but that dependence is also a problem.
Agriculture in the West is clearly not the kind of farming we think about when we imagine how farms work.
Farmers buy seeds that are designed to work for one harvest. We don’t get seeds from that that we can grow again – instead we have to buy more.
That kind of dependence on a supplier of an essential resource is also what computing has become for most people.
If you use platforms from one of the behemoths you have no option but to buy into the ongoing process of subscription and payment.
Without that you cannot function because they have captured the market.
There are several posts at the moment about the way in which these platforms use their dominant power over smaller companies that are now dependent on them to access customers.
And I have noticed a couple of things.
First, you have the company named after a fruit that controls its entire ecosystem – a strategy that is in its DNA from the start.
Then you have the boring company, the one that took over the desktop and is now trying to use AI everywhere.
When another firm starts up that has a unique idea – say it’s web conferencing or document sharing – the big firms go ahead and copy it.
And because they’re big they can get it out to their customer base faster.
So what they can now do is simply wait to see what’s getting traction in the market and then build that functionality into their own products.
I’ve seen this with online facilitation software – there are a couple out there that many people know about.
I don’t really use them – because I don’t like the SaaS model in that situation anyway – but I have tried them out.
I recently re-used the facilitation system from the major desktop provider.
And it now opens with templates and all kinds of things that are clearly designed to woo the market that uses these other platforms.
I think that competition from a big, hugely wealthy and powerful customer that already has dominance over the customer base will win.
But I don’t use any of their stuff.
So when I talk about what I do my tools aren’t the thing that most people will recognize or be willing to learn.
But people really want to know about tools – which pencil, which computer, which package, which app do you use?
And the think is that those don’t matter.
Well, they do a bit, the technology does dictate what you can do – it’s easier to draw certain things on a whiteboard and different things using a stylus.
But what really matters is the theory – the principles that underpin what works in practice.
But theory is boring.
So.. if what really matters is boring to most people, and what you’re interested in learning about is not what I’m there to teach – then what’s the point?
I suppose it doesn’t matter how many people you don’t reach.
It’s about putting the message into the world that you can take control of your systems – you can use Free and open source software to do your personal work, run your business, help your community, and spread learning to those who need it.
Show people that an alternative exists to the dual party – seemingly all-powerful system.
And that’s a good enough reason to have a go.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 