Paul Miller (021)
Paul Miller, founder of The School Of Everything, describes ways in which online tools are making representative democracy less meaningful.
Transcript:
A. Create itself and then accelerate and accelerate and accelerate to the point where, basically, that curve of technological acceleration is vertical and at that point it is sort of a whatever -- a super being and there are basically a new bunch of people that believe that that is coming and that we will all be subsumed into this thing, whatever it is. It is basically just like the matrix. But there are a bunch of people who believe that we are starting to see that so Wikipedia is kind of this global brain and all those kind of people. It is terrifying to me but there are people who are really into that kind of thing in America. You don't tend to mind them over here so it is quite interesting the contrast between that Californian view of, what I think is techno distopianism, and a sort of more measured Europeen view -- nice fluffy social such stuff and all this -- rather than believing this is going to save humanity by creating a step change in the way that we are biologically and intellectual.
Q. What you like about it them, your works -- what are the things that you are trying to (something) about that?
A. (1.35) We are just trying to turn things slightly up side down. So with school of everything, where usually everybody is told what they should learn we are asking them what they would like to learn and letting them organise it around their own desires. So it is a bottom up education system and that is what we set out to do. It was born out of our personal frustrations as a team of institutional education and we were trying too work out, you know, how would you change education? How would you set up a school, if you wanted to start from what people wanted to learn rather than what they were told they should be taught?
And that is where the idea grew from and it still excites me because still, when you ask people what do you want to learn or what can you teach, you still get a glimmer of excitement from people because people have not asked them before and that still gives me a buzz and, you know, that is what we are trying to build on is that idea that, actually, you can turn institutions up side down using the net and start from the individual user and or whatever you want to call them in a community and you can design systems or institutions from the bottom up and let themselves organise rather than starting from millions and millions of pounds and a big building and a government policy.
Q. Isn't there a problem in that people will want to learn stupid things that are not necessary or people wont want to teach them how do you maintain any kind of quality in that?
A. Yes, well whose version of quality? That is the first questions so, you know. Actually there are a lot of things that sound stupid at first that people can teach or people want to learn or they are very small like, how do I use this little bit of software on my computer to do this little thing so you can not go to evening class in that. You would have to go to a 12 week class in how to use your computer basic. Basically how to use your computer. Whereas actually you just want half hour with somebody to let them show you what it is. So that kind of level of granularity might sound stupid when you first hear about what people are going to teach but actually it is really really useful and something that institutional education can not offer at the moment and that is fine. As long as it is legal, you can teach it on the school of everything, basically, and I that I think that is a really good thing.
In terms of quality that is all about feedback and one of the things that we can do in the school of everything is use all the mechanisms of web 2.0, like you know reputation, feedback, user generated, sort of comments, qualitative feedback -- we can use all of that to basically make this sort of catalogue, if you like, of teachers available on the school of everything, make that come alive based on what people are saying. Whereas again institutional education can not really do that all you have is offsted or whoever it is and basically to be honest they are just one point of view of whether a teacher is any good or not. Teachers vary and whether you think a teacher is a good teacher varies on who you are, not just on who they are. Teaching and learning is a really complex area in terms of working out what is good and what is bad.
Q. If just to look at why do people want to teach other people? Some of the examples are we are looking at are couch suffering where people give away their sofas and et cetera et cetera advice to other parents meeting up with them why are we seeing SHOEPL so many people doing good stuff or each other and wanting to?
A. I think they have always wanted to do it but now they can just see the potential of the reach that the internet can give them very very cheaply. So the barriers to entry, to helping people, have gone down significantly and that is basically what has happened. I think the desire to think help people and the desire to share and the desire to collaborate with other people and get feedback and that sense of what I am doing is useful and meaningful has always been there but basically the barriers to entry to being able to do that as an individual have gone down rapidly over the last ten years. So now you are starting to see it really get to the point where it may well become the mainstream rather than being at the edges.
Q. It seems to be like in the last you know twenty years or so a lot less of that people in the public domain get broken or et cetera et cetera now we are seeing four people for people to add to and people respond well to that what is it in people et cetera et cetera?
A. Also gradually there has been a massive decline in trusts in institutions and a lot of the public good that has been produced over the last century has been provided by institutions and that was great to start off with because they were new things things that people did not have access to before. They provide them with clean water, schools, everything like that. But over time basically alternatives have been have become more visible and people have seen that actually the way that institutions do things is not necessarily the only way and also you have seen over time the number of mistakes that institutions make go up. So people start to have in their consciousness these institutions might not be the best way of doing things and what you have seen with the internet is people can create their own way of doing things very cheaply very quickly without much pain at all. Whereas, if you were to try and do the same thing as an institution, or through an institution, it would just be a nightmare and people would not have any faith in it at the end anyway. So that is what we are seeing is a decline in trust in formal institutions for good reasons and also then new tools growing up which people can use so easily that it just becomes the obvious option to take.
Q. (8.25) So what does that mean for organisations. How do organisations need to adapt to make the most of this in terms of what they use how do people react?
A. Just try things out, you know. Just be experimental and be willing to take risks. To be honest they can not get much worse in the ways that people think about some institutions and so just try things out in a little way. Don't spend millions of pounds on a website. Never, ever, spend millions of pounds a website. Just try something out, the tools that are also already there. Start getting feedback from your users. Get feedback from your users based on how they are using it. Adapt it. Do it again. Adapt it. Do it again. And, you know, there is some great examples of government departments that started bloging and started getting much better feedback from people about how they are seen and potentially what they should do on particular policy areas and that cost then them nothing compared to average government budgets for IT and things. That is the way to do it. Just try it out and see what happens and don't believe that doing something once means that you are going to have to keep on doing it forever. You are going to have to change and adapt, probably month by month, and it is an different mind set for institutions to get into but it is pretty rewarding one when you see institutions playing in this space.
Q. EBS fleet United publicly owned football club and they are seeing the benefits of this and that but they also have a lawyer for legal issues and they have a scout checking for good players. Can you describe that? Is that do you think an brother organisation a concept what do you think of that model?
A. It is the massive advantage of opening yourself up. You don't know what you don't know and you don't know the people that you don't know as well. So if you just open yourself up, you find that there is all these kinds of resources out there and expertise out there that could be incredibly valuable to you but you would not have known if you had not done it and I have seen lots of people go through and that and that and aha moment of 'I had not thought of that' but that would be really good and they just realized that it was opening themselves up to a community of people that help them to do that and, yes, it tends to work out a lot cheaper as well. The cost of finding the right person to help you at a given time is quite high. It takes you a lot of time to go and investigate and find this person to help you with the legal side of whatever it was you are doing but if you would just open yourself up, put yourself out in public, let people come to you, it is a lot cheaper and actually a lot more satisfying I think to find that people come to you.
That is certainly something we have found with setting up the school of everything, pretty much in the open. The old way way of doing a internet start up or a start up business would be closed or secret -- don't tell anybody what you are doing. Hold on to the idea. Don't tell anybody. From day one we were on the net: this is what we want to do. We did not even have a product or a web site or anything at that stage -- this is what we are going to do. Anybody could copy it. We don't mind. It is all about us building up a sense of community around the idea and us building up a pasionate user base and getting people excited about the idea and that way we can tap the resources of that community and also they get something out of it as well because we produce a better sight, a better service that they then can use and can get value from in their lives.
Q. Something or other can not really hear the questions.
A. (12.47) The critical thing is not to feel threatened for leaders in an online world. There is a risk that the best leaders actually are kind of sort of cult leaders, rather than necessarily sort of minute -- what is the word -- detail managers if you like, so the people that can get people excited are the great leaders in online communities and, yes, it can become leadership by sheer charisma rather than by, necessarily, competence and that can be a bad thing. There are some online communities, some projects that have back fired because they had this culture of personality but when push comes to shove either the business needs to survive or, if they keep on falling out with people who then go off and do their own version of it. I think it is about letting go when it comes to the best the people who make the transition best from being what I would call manager to leader are the people comfortable with letting go and have a slightly different skill set of being responsive rather than necessarily being directive and those people who do it can do it really well but it is a tricky thing being a leader of a herd of cats. Some people do it better than others. The ones that do it badly tend to be the ones that try and stamp an authority of control and permission -- that you need permission from them. Those are the ones that get it wrong.
Q. Is there talking about is there a new sort of business model merging from these companies but is that reflected nor more deeply in economics having to engage much more with their user in order to companies don't have control over their brand their able to to implement what do you does this mean for economics of companies?
A. (15.37) I am quite sceptical of the just advertising based business models. I think we will see quite a big change in that over the next five years where the idea of banger ads and paper clip adverts, the bottom will fall out of that market probably. So I think people do need a more authentic financial link to their users and yes Jason Freed, 37 signals, he creates all these sort of online products -- he has this thing where he is, like, surprise! People will pay for something if it is valuable for to them. So their business model so to get people on pay for their products, their services even though it is just on the web and it turns out people do pay. They are a very successful company and I think we will see more of that kind of creating a direct link where people actually value something therefore they will pay for it and I can see the advertising hype model sort of dying away to some extent, especially if we go through a period serious economic down turn.
Q. What about out sourcing the organisationing changing to allow more et cetera et cetera also allowing users to do an number of different things what do you think about that?
A. (17.06) Yes I mean distribution of production is going to be a massive thing over the next ten years I think. The problem is you have to be very very wary of just exploiting people and people are as aware of exploitation as they have ever been. So a business model that just exploits a distributed community -- so a community creates all the value within the business but the business take all of the revenue that is not going to be sustainable. Like, there is an few people doing that at the moment, you tube springs to mind but those models I do not think are going to be sustainable you are going to have to do a proper revenue share with the community. The community is going to get value back back, probably financial as well as all the things that make them feel fuzzy and warm at the moment. So, yes, it is going to become much more transactional over time, I think, all of these business models, rather than just sort of 'all for the love of it.' I think people will want to see some financial returns for their involvement in user generated content and that sort of thing.
Q. Are the big core operations going to have to change over time?
A. (18.25) In some ways nothing changes because the way that you make money is that you produce value or produce something that people find valuable. That basic truth is not going to change. The way that you provide value, potentially, is changing and actually it may well be that the value you can provide is by creating connections between people so that they can do things themselves or with other people, rather that you just doing something for them. That I think is what is changing. So it is the how rather than the what that the internet is changing. The basic principal of you know you survive as a business by providing value to a customer or a user or whatever you want to call them, that is not changing.
So, yes, I mean I do not think it is fundamentally changing the nature of business it is just changing the methods and the structures and the way that things are organized, rather than actually changing any fundamental truth.
Q. It is quite fundamental is it not because the propriety nature of the companies listsed on the web et cetera he is et cetera et cetera do things just for themselves and now companies seem to be doing best are making use of these sorts of produce ERS isn't that quite fundamental?
A. I think people have always been producers but maybe it is just that companies have started to notice that people enjoy producing as much as they enjoy consuming. I think very rare instances where people are doing something completely new. It is -- there is a sort of new tool coming round so now it is much easier for people to create their own video or create their own music and all those kinds of things but really people have always created their own music people have always created their own video. It is just that more people can do it now so that area of business has expanded and so more people have got interested in it and it is a bigger pool to play with but I do not think there is anything fundamentally changed that actually somebody needs to produce. It just used to be that the produceers were much tighter into the company if you like so bands had to be part of a label before they could really produce and so on.
So it is just a way that things are organized rather than anything fundamentally changing. You always needed people to produce and there are still people consuming. Consumption has not gone away, lets face it. It is just the way that things are organized and that interests and that is changing the way that people feel ownership of brands and of companies but I do not think there is anything fundamentally changed in the idea that a business is about producing some value for a customer and so, you know, if you look at some businesses, they are not producing value for a customer but they have lots of venture capital money going into them and those are the once to watch they are running on thin air but the ones where there is actually paying customers, people using the service and loving it -- those are going to be sustainable businesses.
Q. If business is changing the way organisers et cetera et cetera the idea of business to value of to people what does the public sector have to gain from the internet and ideas don't very they stand most to gain as they are already stake holders in something other other?
A. (22.49) Absolutely. The public sector has probably, to some extent, the worst reputation in terms of trust in institutions and I think that is what, to some extent, all these tools are really so far have been about challenging these existing business models and I think, over the next ten years, we will see more of these tools being used to challenge existing public government, you know, models, and that is an area that has not really been properly explored yet and just starting feel it.
So one example that I came across a couple of weeks ago was thepoint.com. It is based on the tipping point and so if you get, you know -- you want to provide something and it takes a certain amount of money to do that. You put it up on thepoint.com and people say I will place this amount of money to do this and then it it authorises your credit card and then, if the total amount is reached, it charges your card and the money is available to whoever it was that wanted it it. Now one of the examples on there at the moment is some guy that wants to put a giant inflatable banana in geostationary orbit over Texas, okay, and they think this will cost $1.5 million and so they are getting people to sign up and donate to put the banana in orbit over Texas. That is fine. Great. It is getting publicity but imagine if that was a public project. Imagine if that was to build a railway. You want to build a new railway between London and Birmingham to cut the journey time. How much would that cost? Several billion pounds, I have no doubt. But at the moment the only method of doing that is through taxes. Now if you were going to use thepoint to do that, completely outside of public policy, you could do it. You know you could do it. There is this possibility of using these tools to do massive things which is completely unexplored at the moment and what we are trying to do is produce kind of competitor education system, an alternative education system which is organized outside of the state but that is much more in tune with the needs of individuals. You could do that potentially with health with transport, all these kinds of things.
So there is a threat there to public policy and to government. I don't actually think that it is going to be as simple as one wins and one doesn't. I think there will be a process of adaption but I think that government is not going to adapt as quickly as businesses are with these tools and that is an problem. They need to really get going on that because, you know, there are real issues around accountability, confidence, all those kinds of things. Which need to be answered. I think they will be answered over time but at the moment it is just a straight threat and there is no real engagement as far as I can see by politicians or senior policy makers.
Q. Can you repeat that stuff do you mean just repeating that last line 26.00?
A. (26.00) Yes, it is an threat to government and to public policy as it stands because there is no real engagement as far as I can see from senior politicians and public servants in looking at what the radical potential of these things are and it will be the radical things that come out in the end and it is not just the little things around the edge like the fact that civil servants can blog or anything like that. There is some big projects, some big things that will come along the track, using these tools, that will challenge the way that government is done at the moment.
Q. What is that would you describe it what are you the things that you are imagining time 26.39?
A. Well imagine.
Q. What is the model if it is an threat what is an threat everyone you know votes and pays for a how do they work together what is is the sort of what is that threat and opportunity?
A. (26.48) One example is how to does this relate to representative democracy. That is interesting because at the moment, you know, you have the falling turnouts, falling trust in representives. One idea would be that you could have representives that have their own online political party, if you like. People -- that representative will only vote in the House of Commons if the majority of their online party agree and they do that on decision by decision by decision. So it is sort of like direct democracy.
I do not think that is going to happen. I think there is a much more radical thing that is going to happen which is basically that people go around the side of representative democracy and rather than going through the due process, talking to their representative, getting their representative to make a kind of approach to the department for education or whatever it might be, I think people will use online tools to set up their own school. That is basically the kind of thing it will be and they will basically go around the side of some institutions. Some things that at the moment politicians and senior public policy people expect to carry on forever -- they may well carry on forever but they will become increasingly irrelevant because people are creating their own alternatives and the challenges that they need -- they need to adapt and work out what those things mean rather than just say we will carry on regardless.
Q. Representative democracy is sort of rise on the view that we can not representative ourselves or don't want to or have not got the time or are not interested or etc isn't the technology pressing that idea because people are involved 229.37?
A. Yes so ask me the can request question again I think.
Q. Representative rise on people based on the idea that people can not representative themselves but they need someone to representative them isn't online participation and technology providing the ability for everyone to representative themselves and proving that actually people do want to?
A. (20.30) Actually, I think representative democracy was based on the idea that people are thick, basically, and that is not true. Then there were all kinds of problems that it overcomes disagreement because just one person decides and that sort of thing and actually what these tools are doing are allowing people to make decisions themselves and to work collaboratively in a way that means that representative democracy is less meaningful to them and that is what is going on. That is why people are less engaged in politics in the representative sense but they are much more engaged in politics in a personal sense, in terms of the power that they feel feel to affect their community, the world around them. I think that is steadily increasing as their trust in representative politics is steadily decreasing.
Q. How would you describe this as a sort of different moments in time et cetera et cetera how do you define?
A. (31.23) I am deeply cynical about politics at the moment, although I used to be very engaged in it. So I am always cynical about any one single moment in politics but there is like one thing going on in the world at the moment which makes me think, 'Hang on, maybe something is changing here,' which is the Obama campaign and just the language that he is using is actually very different if you look at it so: 'Yes we can.' There is two points in that which are very, very important. One is the use of the we -- it is not I. He is not talking about representative politics. He is saying, yes, we can. It is about us doing something not about me doing something for you. It is us, we. And then 'yes'. This is about the politics of what we can do not what we can not do. So those three words, 'yes we can', is one way of summing up what is possible with all these new tools using the net and I do not think if it is any accident that he has really picked up massive support from the online community, in terms of his possible becoming president of the United States but I think he is the first politician who has really tapped into that vibe and so I do think maybe there is something going on. Because also he has been incredibly successful -- much more successful than Howard Dean was and so time has changed and now I think we will start to see politicians aping and copying Obama and realising that actually there is massive potential in this language and this mindset of what politics is for. It is less about representaion and doing things for people. It is actually about leadership and doing things with people.
Q. And are we going to see that influence main stream politics the way the country is run over the next?
A. (33.13) I think so, definitely. I think so. I can see only very tiny shoots of it in British politics at the moment. I have not seen any politician that I think really engages in that mindset in the UK but I suspect that will happen in the next five years. The other thing is that British politics has longer league times than the American politics so you can stand for president without being in parliament for 20 years, without having a history of -- having to be part of this things thing called a political party, so American application moves faster, changes faster in terms of the mindset of the politicians whereas that is very hard in Britain because we have these centuries old institutions which their histories and so on and that which are very very difficult to shift as in the labour party and the conservative party.
Q. Once this change got underway way I think is it an improvement and why is it a improvement?
A. (34.08) I think it is a vast improvement on the politics we have now because it is much more responsive it is much more able to cope with decisions that are relevant to the now and to the demographics of the population and it is much more able to shift between scales. So it could be very very local or it could be national. At the moment our politics finds it difficult to move between levels of institutional hierarchy and power. Yes, I just think it is a more vibrant politics. It is one where people can actually feel their voices heard rather than yelling their head off but nobody is listeninging, you know. It is a politics where you can help as well as just say what you want and that is an amazing thing and at the moment we are starting to see that with some online projects. Imagine if a country was run like that or even if just a town was run like that, in the way we started to see football clubs run like that. I think that is is a sign of things to come.
Q. Something something something?
A. Entrenched, old ...
