Lucian Teo, Singapore

When I first started out my career in the public service, it was always with an aim to raise the level of government websites, both from the design of aesthetic as well as the writing of code. It was bad enough that governments all over the world faced the prejudice of never listening enough to their customers, government websites also had the reputation of exhibiting no thought whatsoever for people unfortunate enough to use them.

So back then I redesigned the website of the Ministry of Education and hoped that it would start the ball rolling somewhat; that government agencies would pay more attention to the user experience their websites provided. To be honest, I started out hoping to change as many as I could, and the colossal effort needed to enact change one site at a time took its toil.

I am very, very heartened to find that there are others who have taken the same torch to much loftier heights. Charlotte and her gang at Digital Boomerang have been steadily working on site after site. Their latest launch for the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources carries their trademark excellence, after their equally stellar work on the Ministry of Health’s website.

It is a wonderful departure from the very corporate, distant feel of most government websites and draws you in with its use of colour and illustration. They have also simplified the navigation a lot. Having worked in the government, I can testify to simplification being probably the hardest thing to achieve with a government client.

I’m very proud to have such amazing “co-workers” who share a similar vision, and possess the tenacity and strength of will to power through obstacles in order to realise it.

On the football field, everyone wants to play the striker. The striker is the scorer of goals, the winner of games, and the position that offers the greatest chance for glory. Very few people, on the other hand, aspire to play the role of the goalkeeper. The job of the goalkeeper is often regarded as a thankless one. The goalkeeper is the guardian against disaster. If he’s doing his job right, few would notice. But should he falter - or worse, falter continuously! - he will bear the brunt of the blame.

There are two matrices of assignment here: the assignment of responsibility, and the assignment of blame (I use it loosely to include even positive contribution). The first is objective while the latter deals with perception. In an ideal state, the two matrices ought to be one and the same, but it seldom is so.

The gap between these two is perceptibly large when we look at massively public-serving roles, primarily that of government or providers of public utilities. It doesn’t take a genius to see that short to medium-term public perception of public servants follow the goalkeeper model.

The loudest and most immediate public response to national crises have traditionally been “off with his head”, insisting that the person on the top take the blame and resign. It is not entirely unreasonable, but it may not be the most beneficial of responses. We need only look at many countries still suffering from endemic corruption despite many changes at the top. The assignment of blame is emotional and often driven by anger. It seldom solves any real problems.

When the public seems overly trigger-happy with assigning blame, there is a natural reaction from the public service. The operating environment within the public service clams up and the appetite for risk is reduced (there has never been much of an appetite to begin with, I can attest to that). A healthy appetite for risk is essential for innovation.

Why then, do you think that public service operators like SMRT speak of using social media as some esoteric, obscure art that requires rocket scientists and brain surgeons? Or why do you think the government seems slow to open up to more collaborative and transparent ways of decision making? It is because of a deep-seated fear that the public will come down hard on any mistakes made, real or perceived, so it is easier to perpetuate the status quo. Taking chances means a possibility of failure.

We need to be more objective about our response to failures.

When Minister of Transport Lui Tuck Yew said that he needed to investigate if the two lapses in our public train networks were symptomatic of a systemic problem or isolated incidences, the more vocal online voices among us blared, “of course it is a systemic problem!”. Without information on whether scheduled maintenance was carried out on par with international standards, or whether SMRT was operationally deficient, we assumed that it was common sense that bore no need for investigation, and our prescribed immediate response was to fire the CEO who made over a million dollars last year.

After we allow our emotions to subside, we need to ask ourselves if the CEO’s pay is directly related to the incidents, and whether her removal solves any problems. It is an evolutionary process of our maturation as citizens, but I believe it is time we develop a more robust spectrum of responses to crises.

We should be able to look at a problem and ask the right questions: how did this come about, where sufficient safeguards put in place etc. It is through careful study that we can resolve public issues.

I’ve been in the public service for a number of years now, and those of you who know me know that I’m in it because I’ve chosen to devote my energies to better working relationships between citizens and government. There are more like me - many more - who are passionate about serving others, and we need the support of the people we serve.

We need you to believe that we want to be the best at our work, like any other person in any other job. We need you to put aside the stereotype that we are in the public service because we are incompetent of holding down a private sector job; or that we work less than folks in other sectors.

Because if enough people believe it to be true, the public service will be unable to attract the right type of people to serve. Because if we insist on stringing people up to dry every time a mistake is made, very short-term painless solutions will be chosen over long-term visionary strokes that may incur some immediate pain.

Ultimately, we need to work together because there is no line between a public servant and a citizen. The two positions should be one and the same.

At the recent Singapore Govcamp, Professor Ashish Lall brought up the need to abolish anonymity from the internet.

I appreciated his point of view, authentication of identity has always been a bugbear for communications and tech professionals alike. Like Professor Lall, I’m also a proponent of open communication, but I see the need for anonymity on the web despite its warts and all.

I tweeted my immediate response at Govcamp, “Anonymity will remain necessary as long as there is unfair (real or perceived) repercussions to free speech.”

In an ideal world, where one can speak freely without fear of unfair repercussion, openness ought to thrive. We should not hide behind masks or alternate personas for nefarious motives, or make hurtful or insidious comments without bearing the responsibility of having made that comment in our own name. There should be a direct correlation between words that are uttered and the person who uttered them.

But many of us live in a less than ideal world. In some areas those who wield power do not take well to criticism, and brandish a heavy rod upon those who speak up against them. The options available to people in those places are submissive silence or anonymous speech.

That option should remain open.

But let’s not leave this discussion at this point of doom and gloom. For a great number of us live in societies that are generally accepting of open speech, but live in submissive silence or speak anonymously due to fear. There will always be this dissonance; we will always scrutinise those in power, and to varying degrees judge their reactions to criticism as apathetic, appropriate or alarming.

To move towards the ideal environment that allows for open identities and speech, we need both sides - speaker and listener - to be fair.

For speakers:

1. Keep speech constructive. Identify issues, recognise the tradeoffs, explore and suggest solutions where possible.
2. Speak as a collective. Offer the initial benefit of doubt to those in positions to effect change. The most effective change-makers are leaders. They need not be official in positions of power, but are able to gather people together to solve problems. Tone of voice is important here.
3. Be patient. We live in a complex world where there is an overload of information. Change might take time, but keep looking for signs of change. Be encouraged, however small those signs are.
4. But be creative. Look at innovative ways and angles to solve the problem. Set a threshold for persistently trying out a single approach. When the threshold is reached and the approach exhausted, try a different one.

For listeners, particular those in positions to effect change:

1. Listen. Give speakers time and space to voice things out. Be flexible and thick-skinned enough to overlook emotive responses, and insightful enough to draw actionable items from them. Wait for your turn to speak.
2. Educate as a collective. When you do respond, do not dumb it down. Speakers who are passionate enough to speak up are your greatest assets. Empower them. Arm them with facts. Allow them access into the dilemmas you face, that they might emphatise with the decisions that need to be made. They’ll come out of the exchange stronger activists and some maybe even advocates. You’ll come out of it wiser, trust me. You’ll realise you don’t know everything, and that’s very important given the power you wield.
3. Respond in a timely manner. While it is reasonable to expect some level of patience, this once common virtue has grown exceedingly scarce in the internet age. Provide cues that views are being heard, and wheels are in motion. Learn from user interfaces: progress bars, spinning hourglasses are all there to provide reassurance.
4. Take responsibility if you are in that position to effect change. Don’t pass the buck. Stay in the conversation, be part of the collective gathered to tackle the problem. Communicate authentically, human being to human being. Don’t hide behind organisations, acronyms, jargon, press releases or paperwork.

“Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.” - V for Vendetta.

And truth is, we all want a better world for our children.

A response to Fast Company’s post “The iPhone 4S’ Siri is the ultimate interface: none at all”.

The star of the show when Apple announced the iPhone 4S last week wasn’t the phone, it was Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant.

Voice-controlled interfaces aren’t at all new. Conceptually, they’ve been around for a long, long time. Just think HAL 9000 in Space Odyssey 2001, Jarvis in Iron Man, and countless Star Trek movies.

Back in the early 90s, I bought a solution from homegrown Creative Labs. (Can’t recall if the product was Phone Blaster). The whole idea was that I would be able to command my PC using voice commands. I spent many hours training the software, all in the hope I could do things like “minimise window”, “close program” and “shut down” using only the microphone provided. There was definitely a coolness factor.

What I failed to realise back then was that I used the computer mostly for gaming in the dead of night, hoping my parents wouldn’t wake up and discover my addiction for Doom 2 and its ilk. The voice-activated interface was mostly left unused.

Siri will face similar challenges, least of which is the ability to accurately decipher voice commands. Apple has amazing engineers, and if need be, they can always buy the massive database of voice commands Google collected with its Grand Central Project (known now as Google Voice, I think) and also the now-defunct Google 411.

The greatest challenge is the shifting people from visual + kinesthetic (touch, for example) as the primary means of interface and manipulation to audial + voice. Over the last few decades, the computing age has entrenched a hierarchy among our senses. The eye has established itself as the primary sense for information ingestion, while touch has become our main means of expression to a machine (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen). Even the way we conduct face-to-face presentations has changed, and we are often told to have more impactful slides because people rely so much on the visual that the presenter’s voice almost plays second fiddle.

Our sense of hearing has been relegated to a secondary role. Millions plug into their iPods (yes, there’s some irony) to their customised playlists. By plugging in we decided that we find no need to be audially cognisant to our surroundings, whether the honking of a car or the crash of a tree branch.

Most telling, we designate irrelevant information as “noise”.

Using voice as a means of manipulating a device might be hard, probably for the same reason I encountered in my gaming days. With the population density of urban cities we live in, we have learned to suppress our voices. In some cultures like Japan’s, even speaking on the phone while on the train is frowned upon; what more speaking to the phone.

The brilliance of Siri lies not in its ability to decipher commands - we’ve had that for a long time - but in its natural language processing, if we assume Siri flawlessly does everything the demo shows. Personally, I’m not sure we can reinstitute hearing back to a main source of input in the immediate future, nor voice be used effectively in a crowded, barely-tolerant-of-each-other environment we live in.

There’s a lot of criticism over Facebook’s new layout. Kevin Rose astutely points out that “everyone will love/accept it in a few days…watch.”

It’s been the common Facebook refresh refrain: Facebook doesn’t care about us, oh now we need to relearn everything. And it all quietens down in a couple of days, like Kevin said.

People are amazing at adapting to new stuff, despite how much they prize familiarity. But it is foolhardly to say that users will always adapt to whatever the designer creates. You need only look as far as Kevin Rose’s own Digg, which ironically enough, lost the majority of their users when they redesigned.

We designers are faced with a conundrum: great design is timeless, and yet we are told to always be innovating.

It is much easier when we speak of designing physical objects. You’d design a great chair, and it is sold. While in the owner’s possession, the chair remains as it is. It is not so for websites. Every next iteration affects all existing users, and it destroys the relationship the user has formed with the interface over time.

Back when I designed the Ministry of Education website, I did away with the 4-year mandatory revamp, opting instead for iterative realignments. A lot of effort was made to recreate the underlying code to make it flexible enough to accommodate tweaks and adjustments.

Facebook’s massive redesign efforts regularly places an undue burden on their users to relearn the user interface without offering significant additional value. I haven’t tried out the new Facebook timeline profile, but I hear that it’s awesome.

It’s a fine line between boldly innovating, and realising that a design is complete: nothing more ought to be added, and nothing more can be subtracted from it.

Innovation is the exception rather than the rule. Innovation isn’t mainstream, or “the way it’s usually done”. It is the process of finding the shorter, more efficient road less travelled.

Because of its very nature, innovation will always outpace the crafting and writing of rules. Innovation will always be ahead of legislation.

“Oh so you’re the guy in charge of innovation”, my then-new boss said during our first introduction months ago. It’s not my official job title, but being in the technology department and having a reputation of shaking things up, the label sticks. Innovation is so much more than technology, though technology has been its most visible arm in the last few decades.

You see, this is the first time I’ve been in a technology department, and it comes with challenges rather foreign to me. Where I’ve spent most of my career in the front lines battling monolithic IT departments through various means, the new job requires me to play both innovator as well as the enforcer of rules.

The application of law is an essential for good governance, but we live in an age where innovation severely outpaces our ability to enact new rules. As such, it is not the letter of the law we ought to live by but its principle. This is the leap Singapore desperately needs to make if she wants to explore possibilities outside of her very small comfort zone. The inertia to extract patterns from the obvious and act upon it is probably the largest obstacle preventing Singaporeans from being the shrewd and creative entrepreneurs our forefathers were.

It is this fear of departing from established methods - of innovation! - that I am tasked to address on a day to day basis, even within myself. Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it most eloquently when he said:

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

The push and pull of innovation and legality surrounds us, its prize and hazard the possibilities of a better world. Copyright laws, obsolete in a digital world obstruct the free-flowing creation of a global cultural tapestry; creative greed-driven complex financial instruments adhere to the law, exploiting loopholes and bankrupting millions; intellectual property laws put life-saving medication out of reach to the poorest communities in the world. The list goes on.

It’s not that laws are an evil in themselves. No one would dispute the right to fair remuneration, or that reward is essential to the sustainability of innovation. But we are all personally responsible for choosing and exhibiting the principles by which we live our lives and make our decisions. It is easier to leave this to legislators, or adopt a “I pay taxes, you solve the world’s problems” approach, but it robs us of the ability to think, and even more importantly, to care.

We need to put aside the fear of departing from the tried, tested and documented if we are to explore the possibilities that innovation brings. But we need to hold fast to the principles and values that define our organisations, and ultimately, ourselves.

Cloud computing is a very natural step in the evolution of all things communal. In the dawn of civilisation we moved away from self-sufficiency, aggregated demand, and some of us took on roles as gatherer of berries, others became fishermen, and others makers of clothing, of spears, of tools. This shift has brought us to present day civilisation, where mass production is made possible by specialisation, rather than differentiation.

So the move away from organisations handling all different facets of information technology into one where, like before, demand is aggregated, and different parties concentrate on what they do best, seems extremely logical. There is a dilemma of trust, which I suppose existed back in the day as well.

“Can I trust the guy assigned to be a fisherman to bring me my fish? I used to have relative success in catching a few by devoting a few hours a week. If I’m in charge of cooking the food, and the hunters decided to skive off, my whole livelihood would collapse.”

Being a cog in a supply chain requires a leap of faith. But it’s not a leap we’ve never done, given that it is more the exception than the rule to see organisations own the entire supply chain these days.

But that said, we cannot make a blind leap of faith either.

At a recent gathering of fellow peers from a mix of private and public sector organisations, I mooted the question: “How do you guys deal with the fact that for the most part, legal jurisdiction still abides by geographical rules, while data in the cloud doesn’t?” Sure, contracts with cloud providers can define things down fairly well, but there’s always that fear, given that the global legal framework isn’t nearly nimble enough to adjust itself to the change in paradigm. It is still ridiculous that media sold on iTunes is geographically segregated. Or that DVDs are still being region-locked.

In response to the my question, the group shrugged.

We can’t afford to not know. And we can’t afford to stay still. Defraying the cost of maintaining servers and building systems from scratch - the cost of self-sufficiency in a connected world - could give corporations a strong competitive advantage, or subject them to greater risk.

There is no denying that large clouds are more lucrative targets for ill-meaning hackers who mean to play for all the marbles. It is also true that cloud providers have a much greater economic impetus to ensure the security of their clouds, and given that it is what they specialise in, most of us assume that they are better equipped to deal with these threats.

The traditional way of keeping IT operations in-house (or employing a dedicated vendor) offers 2 things:

1. Greater knowledge. It’s easier to know what’s being done, and what’s not being done to protect your data. It is also easier to apportion responsibility (aka who to blame when the shit hits the fan).
2. Security through obscurity. If your organisation is small enough, you present a smaller target that hopefully won’t interest hardcore hackers.

To address #1, study up. Cloud providers need to provide a great deal of transparency (ironic to demand transparency of something named “cloud”) and tenants need to have a firm grasp of their operations.

To address #2, we need to dispel the myth that being obscure provides security. It is not responsible to rely primarily on “let’s not put our eggs in the big basket of eggs” to protect our data, especially in an increasingly technologically-savvy world where we can expect fledgling technologists to look for softer targets to practice their hacking. I would even go as far to say that we ought to encourage responsible hacking. Security through proliferating general ignorance is infinitely worse than putting blind faith in obscurity.

As with all things, the decision on whether to put your data on a cloud isn’t a binary one. Tradeoffs abound. Private clouds provide some restitution, but forgo the cost-savings of aggregated demand. Hiring very competent vendors would close the gap between the offerings of the cloud specialist and the in-house solution.

Ultimately it boils down to the basic risk assessment, and just as much as we need to counter the dangers of data loss with due diligence, we need also to counter the fear of the unknown through the active acquisition of knowledge.

Every time someone says “but the reality is…” or “the actual situation on the ground is…”, amateur philosophers have a field day explaining how there is no such thing as reality because everything goes through a lens of some kind. Everything is biased, and democracy, to some extent, is the act of normalising these biases.

A dichotomy has always existed between our own experience of what life is, and what people tell us life is. The dilemma a teenager faces when given parental instruction that goes against instinct, or when a sales rep is forced to sell something he knows won’t pick up from folks on the ground are but a few examples. When mass media hit us with radio, tv, movies and magazines, we were subscribing to “life as it is told” while living “life as it is lived”, often spending our entire lives trying to match the two.

The reach and oddly homogenous message of mass media is, in my opinion, the most powerful force that has defined the lives of individuals all over the world. While the aspirations for a better life is universal, we have been fed with the notion, now so engrained it seems irrefutable fact, that the “better life” equates with a lifestyle of excessive consumption. We see this everywhere around us: more money, bigger cars, private jets, larger and more opulent homes, an endless string of women or the fawning adoration of the one alpha male.

Our endless pursuit to survive and thrive in this projected reality has led to a discontent that is the defining characteristic of our generation.

The proliferation of access to the internet has been monumental - the production of media is no longer guarded by the few who could afford the means. The massive amount of content being created and communicated has created an environment where attention has become the new currency. When audiences have so much content to choose from, producers (even the stay-at-home adult putting up videos of his overfed cat) adapt their strategies to grab their share of the attention pie. Verbosity is out, brevity is in. Dour discourse is out, and humour becomes a very necessary lubricant to maintain the intellectual connection between audience and actor.

The new content-producing paradigm added a new punch to the Hollywood-projected reality we were feeding ourselves and our children.

Highlight reels, movie trailers, ideas distilled to 140 characters or less. Because producers had to keep things brief in order to keep their audiences, they now communicated a new message that rode on the old one: we want the better life, and we want it now.

I’ve played basketball for a little more than 20 years now and its evolution is symptom of the larger malaise that plagues us. Youngsters that take the court these days were brought up on short youtube-sized highlight reels of Kobe Bryant hitting the impossible shot, or Allen Iverson embarrassing another player with his crossover dribble, and it shows in their game. They attempt ridiculously difficult shots with absolute belief that the ball will sail through the net, even when passing to a teammate would mean a much higher chance of winning the ballgame. And I fear that as sports imitates life, we may have developed an addiction to dramatic finishes while ignoring the tenets of basic probability; focused more on short-term waves of emotion over long-drawn protracted periods of extensive effort.

Unable to summon the attention span needed to define what winning the game entails, we may have settled for the dopamine boost, hoping that we’re judged on style over substance. This attitude seems to have crept into our workplaces, our voting booths and even the personal chamber in our minds where we perceive who we are and what we can contribute to the people around us.

I am personally convinced that we need to start on 2 things:

Firstly, we need to redefine what “winning the game” is. We need so much to break away from equating happiness (my definition of a universal end-game outcome) with securing the top rung of the corporate ladder and relooking at what really matters in life. While we have started demanding that our schools stop using purely quantitive academic metrics to assess the worth of our children, there has not been as strong a move to change the social mindset of what makes a successful person. We need to restore the dignity to the recently marginalised: the independent artist, the teacher, the social worker and most importantly, the homemaker, if only to name a few. These used to be highly regarded positions in society. Today, in their place we have bankers and lawyers who have skimmed off millions of vulnerable people, and we celebrate their lavish lifestyles, golden parachutes and gigantic paychecks.

We need to restore dignity to serving our fellow man.

Secondly, there is a need to develop a resilience within ourselves; an understanding that things worth doing take time and effort. We live in a world where most solutions to the societal issues we face take more than 140 characters to explain, where failures happen more frequently than successes, and the pivotal decisions to change the world for the better are more often made in tears than in punchlines.

I say all this as someone in the middle of a personal journey. As my wife starts her no-pay leave this July, I need to accord her the dignity and respect that I say a homemaker deserves.

As I’ve made up my mind to devote my time to improve the life of citizens through work within the government, I stand often on the verge of pulling my hair out while trying to work through government bureaucracy, and I need to remind myself to dig in because transformative agents are always disruptive agents. It is always easier to look for places “more ready and ripe” for change, but running away wastes valuable time.

I always tell the younger folks that my generation, those born in the 70s and early 80s, lie in between 2 very different generations: the stoic, survivalist mentality of the older, and the younger which might carry the false assumption that life can only go up. The role of our generation is to carry the steely determination of the past and help define and address the challenges of the future.

This, in my opinion, is the real awakening we need.

A few years ago SBS Transit, the company responsible for most of Singapore’s public bus routes, provided an online service called IRIS. People could obtain information on when the next bus would reach a specified bus stop. It was a very useful service, especially since buses in Singapore don’t stick to a fixed schedule like in other countries. It was always good to know how many minutes you had before you had to leave work in time to catch the bus, cutting down on otherwise unproductive waiting time.

The service didn’t really reach its full potential until we saw the recent proliferation of mobile computing. Now, instead of only being able to access IRIS on the desktop, users of public transport could find out when the next bus was coming from practically anywhere. A number of innovative technologists created mobile apps to tap on IRIS’ database, extending the service to iPhone, Android and Windows Phone users everywhere, most notably Hon Cheng’s SG Buses, which has 800,000 users.

Over the lifespan of SG Buses, Hon Cheng and many others have asked for IRIS to have an open API on which developers could pull bus arrival timings from. Until today, this data still has to be painfully screen-scraped off IRIS’ web application.

Not only has SBS Transit not developed an open API, they have placed numerous obstacles in the path of these developers. Most recently, a captcha was installed to gatekeep IRIS’ use, presumably to stop automated requests from mobile apps. I have written to SBS in my personal capacity to ask that this data be made open as its availability has been an integral part of life as a commuter, and now 9 days later I have still not received a reply.

IRIS does not lend itself well to the mobile platform; its interface is extremely convoluted and clunky. It barely stands as a web app for desktop use, but the data within is golden.

The reason that SBS Transit is protective of IRIS’ data, I can only presume, is that the increase in web traffic results in an increase in the cost of providing the service. But SBS Transit needs to understand that the cost is not borne out of frivolous use: services like SG Buses and Gothere.sg feed this essential information to SBS customers who really want to know how much time they have before the bus arrives. Every piece of information goes into a better planned commute, and every better planned commute is one less pissed-off customer who spent 20 minutes waiting for a bus when he or she could be spending quality time with their children, or poring over the details of a business presentation.

The other reason I can think of is that of control. It is likely that we will soon see an IRIS iPhone app, and the data block is a preemptive strike on competitors. While I am not privy to the strategic plans of SBS, I strongly advocate companies and organisations to build their developer communities and establish a platform for self-help and public innovation. Not only does it extend the product offering of the company, it can be couched as a corporate social responsibility initiative, an investment in building the capabilities of citizens and small businesses to better the lives of your customers.

Help others help you help others. It’s how public service in the 21st century should function.

Update: SBS does have an iPhone IRIS app, but none for Android or Windows.

“Nobody owes you a living.”

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The clichés go on and on, and it’s common wisdom to treat kindness as a bonus, not as an entitlement. Somewhere along the way we’ve come not only to be comfortable leeching off free services, we’ve come to expect it.

We may not pay anything for Blogger, Gmail or Delicious, but when those services go down, even for a little bit, we rain down fury like hell have never known. We act like self-appointed royalty, behaving as if these poor starving coders ought to be grateful we lavished them with our mouseclicks.

Like those I just described, I too have put aside whatever little common sense I started out with and used free services like Facebook, Yahoo! Pipes and Twitter. Frankly, it’s hardly something I can avoid given my line of work.

But placing our content in the hands of others, some of whom we cannot hold accountable thanks to free, might make us vulnerable to a myriad of problems. Dipping service levels, closure of service or even unfair (albeit mistaken) treatment.

The best solution is to host everything ourselves. The decentralised ownership model gives us a host we can hold accountable, disaster-recovery which we are responsible for ensuring, and removes the ambiguity and the crunch mentality of us expecting someone else to be taking care of our stuff out of the goodness of their hearts.

The problem with the self-serve model is that the speed of global innovation is stifled. At best, individuals have to download, install and configure systems, like WordPress or Movabletype back in the day. At worst, they’ll have to code their own. The barrier will once again divide the technologically savvy from the casual user and drive us back almost a decade.

Another plausible alternative - call me crazy - is that people pay for stuff they love to use.

I’m writing all this from a free service I wouldn’t mind paying for. Thanks Tumblr folks.