What struck me in Ethan’s first go at constraint is what he expands on in his extended mix, namely, that not only does innovation happen in spite of lack of access to resources but because of it.  It is a paradox that a lack of resources can actually be a greater spur to innovation than abundant access to resources.

Examples of self-imposed constraint and innovation are everywhere.  Poetry is a great example, from iambic pentameter to the haiku. Constraint is like the reflective chamber of a laser which turns ordinary light into a directed beam of focused energy. There are numerous examples from literature where authors voluntarily constrain the manner of their creation.  One of my favourite examples is in the Miles Davis’s use of modal jazz in albums like Kind of Blue.  Jazz aficionados will recognise the incredible expression achieved in a song like So What which is performed entirely in a D and E flat Dorian mode.

There are more obvious ICT-related examples of constraint leading to innovation such as the 160 character constraint of SMS messages leading to an entirely new form of expression. This innovation has helped accelerate the growth of similarly-constrained microblogging services like Twitter.  In fact, the discipline enforced by Twitter and text messaging has proven so popular that we see proposals like five.sentenc.es which propose to constrain email to a more distilled format.

For me this can also be seen as an incremental edging up of the quality and clarity threshold for communication on the Internet.  As we are overwhelmed with increasingly amounts of information, our tolerance for poorly crafted, excessively wordy communication decreases.

Constraint and Complexity

Interestingly, about the same time as Ethan was writing about constraint, Dave Snowden was offering his own tentative rules of complexity in the 5 Cs of Complexity.  The first of which is, you guessed it, constraint.  He says that

Constraint is key to understanding complexity, it governs the transition between the three ontologies. Increase constraint and you create an ordered system; do that inappropriately and you create the conditions for catastrophic failure; remove constraint and the system is chaotic…

Understanding the boundaries and critical variables in the environment that you are operating in is the key to intervening successfully in any complex system.  Too constrained and there is no innovation, witness most development projects based on a logframe.   With no constraint, innovation also doesn’t happen because (I believe) that innovation is a dialogue involving people and things.  With no control, innovation is easily dissipated in many possible directions.

Innovation and Evolution

Aydin Örstan has a great quotation from François Jacob (The possible and the actual, 1982) in an interesting post on evolution.  François says:

In contrast to the engineer, evolution does not produce innovations from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it a new function or combining several systems to produce a more complex one. Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. If one wanted to use a comparison, however, one would have to say that this process resembles not engineering but tinkering, bricolage we say in French.

I’m oversimplifying a bit but the rest of Ethan’s rules (with the exception of the cardinal rule number 5 i.e. don’t imagine you know what the hell is going on without being there…) could be a variation on the theme of creating a healthy environment for evolutionary innovation.

1. Innovation (often) comes from constraint
2. Don’t fight culture
3. Embrace market mechanisms
4. Innovate on existing platforms
5. Problems are not always obvious from afar
6. What you have matters more than what you lack
7. Infrastructure can beget infrastructure

Putting it another way: create a culture of tinkering.

Constraint as a Design Tool

So how to now turn constraint into a practical design strategy?  I don’t have the answer yet but one way to try to unpack this is to look at a specific project.  I am only speculating at this point but I suspect that constraint will turn out to be one reason why the Village Telco may succeed where wireless networking in the developing world in general has been something of great potential but that has failed to take off the way many expected it to.

WiFi is a great platform for tinkering and innovation but it is possible that it is simply too much of a blank canvas to grow virally in the developing world.  There are individual cases of success like Onno Purbo in Indonesia whose indefatigable passion and expertise has driven a wireless revolution but they are still more the exception than the rule.

With the Village Telco, we have a wireless project that has a number of self-imposed constraints.

1. Get pay-as-you-go voice services right.  Data services are a given on a wireless platform but the one thing we want to make bullet-proof is affordable, simple-to-bill voice services.
2. Make a telco as simple to set up as a wordpress blog.  Wireless meshes, least-cost-routing, etc.  Let’s make as much of that complexity disappear into default behaviours that can be tweaked as the owner/entrepreneur becomes more comfortable with the product.
3. Be as open as possible.  This is more of a philosophical than a practical constraint.  We believe we can attract maximum participation by making software and hardware as open as possible.  We believe that Open Hardware strategies devices like the Mesh Potato can change the way people think about hardware.
4. Break even in six months.  The technology ought to be cheap enough and easy enough to deploy that anyone with a reasonable head for business could have recouped their investment and be making a profit in six months.

I am still unpacking the idea of constraint as a design tool.  One thought that comes to mind when evaluating projects that have innovation as an objective is to simply ask the question, what design constraints have you placed on yourselves?  I like the idea of looking at constraint from a complex systems point of view.  It helps me understand why constraint is important but also opens up other avenues for exploration such as creating attractors and inhibiting negative patterns within the context of a project.  More to come…

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The decision has been bitterly opposed by broadcast companies who claim that the devices will degrade television signals.  However, the FCC has carried out extensive testing and has determined that the devices can operate without affecting television broadcast services.  The FCC’s decision to approve this spectrum use was unanimous.

All “white space” devices will be subject to approval by the FCC.  This new generation of wireless devices will use a combination of technologies to operate within the television spectrum.  Most devices will have geo-location technology and will access a database of the incumbent services via the Internet, which will let them know what spectrum is available for use.  The devices will also have spectrum-sensing technology which will alert them to spectrum in use.  Some devices will be approved without the geo-location technology i.e. with just spectrum-sensing but they will be subject to a more rigorous approval process.

To date only prototype devices have been tested.  It is estimated that commercial products are about 18 months away from market.  How remarkable would it be if South Africa (and developing countries in general) were to approve the use of “white space” spectrum in time for those products to come to market?

So what makes these devices so much more amazing than WiFi?  It is more the spectrum than the technology itself that will allow “white space” devices to offer dramatically improved performance over WiFi.  Television spectrum has much better propagation characteristics than the 2.4GHz and 5MHz bands that WiFi uses.  This means that radio signals can travel further and move through obstacles more easily, making it both easier and less expensive to set up wireless networks.

This was an important decision in terms of delivering broadband access to underserviced areas in the United States but think how much more impact this technology might have in developing countries where underserviced and overpriced is the norm for access.

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aims to stimulate debate and provide information and analysis on South African ICT policy by means of public seminars and fora as well as through online spaces. Through these various channels, South Africa connect aims to influence interventions in ICT policy, regulation and practice that are geared towards connecting South Africans to global ‘network society’ and information economy.

Already featuring posts by well known South African ICT policy researchers including Alison Gilwald and Steve Esselaar, South Africa Connect is a place to find informed commentary on the complex ICT policy and regulatory environment in South Africa.

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Minister Matsepe-Casaburri courtesy kjd

Here in South Africa, Justice Norman Davis has denied Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburi’s request to appeal the Altech ruling. This once again opens the doors to competition in the telecoms sector in South Africa.  The Minister can still appeal to the Supreme Court but let us hope that she takes good advice on whether to do so.  The current situation has already gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.  However, I put nothing past the Department of Communications.  Telecoms in South Africa is the land of “never say never”.

The Minister could still attempt to have the Electronic Communications Act amended to suit her design but that seems less likely now for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, ICASA is now likely to continue converting VANS licenses to either individual Electronic Communications Network Service (ECNS) licenses (essentially a license to be a telco) or Electronic Communication Service (ECS) licenses. This is likely to mitigate against any attempt to move the state of play backwards.  On the other hand, elections are looming in South Africa for the middle of 2009 and the appetite for passing legislation that is likely to be unpopular will hopefully be quite small.

So, with this issue out of the way, what remains?  Well, frankly a lot.  Market definitions, interconnection fees, essential facilitites, local loop unbundling, the list goes on.  By far the most interesting one for me though is the issue of spectrum. The market is not going to really open up to competition unless we take some very proactive steps to open spectrum in South Africa.  That for me is the next and most immediate challenge for industry, government, and civil society.

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A surprise bonus for me was a donor round-table that I participated in.  Having been involved in “donor panels” before, my expectations were very low as donors are generally the last people you want to consult about what to do in development.  I suspect that people attend mostly because they want to sniff out which way the fickle donor wind is blowing.

Having said that the conversation did get interesting.  It re-awakened a conversation that Mark Surman had started and prompted me to think further about what philanthropy for a small foundation should look like.  In general I think it is true that most philanthropic institutions are more conservative than they intend to be and not as nimble as they imagine they are or they should be.

Pushing A String

Philanthropy is a bit like business in reverse.  In business, you try to create value that people are willing to pay for.  No value, no payment.  In philanthropy, you make payments in the hope of creating value.  Sometimes this works but sometimes it is like trying to push a string.  If you have someone pulling on the other side, everything works fine but if not all you have is a pile of string i.e. funding and no change.  I have funded my share of projects that turned out to be piles of string.  So how do you ensure that the person / organisation on the other side is pulling as you are paying out string.  I sometimes envy bankers and venture capitalists.  There is always someone pulling the string.  People come to you and if they meet the criteria, they can borrow money.  The string is kept tight because the consequences of failure for either side keeps people honest.

With philanthropy, what is the consequence of failure?  If you are a good spin-doctor, quite possibly there are no consequences.  It is not that hard to exploit the fact that most donors (I am by no means exempt) quite naturally don’t like to acknowledge or admit failure.

Lessons from Venture Capital

When I joined the Shuttleworth Foundation about 10 months ago, I was quite excited about the prospect of being co-located with Mark Shuttleworth’s Venture Capital company (HBD Venture Capital).   I imagined this might be an opportunity to blend Venture Capital thinking with philanthropic thinking.  The reality was a little different than I imagined.  HBD have a great team of people but it became immediately evident that the values of HBD were quite different from the Foundation.  The mandate of HBD is to provide an impressive financial return on investment whereas the mandate of the Foundation is social transformation.  These don’t fit easily together, at least not in the obvious way I imagined they might.

Having said that, the rigour with which venture capitalists scrutinize their clients is something worth looking at.  We just need to move that rigour from a single bottom line to a triple bottom line. One idea we have thought about trying here is to have the Foundation staff pitch their development ideas to the HBD fund managers in a Dragon’s Den style in order to start opening up that discussion.

Philanthropy Has a Place Beyond Venture Capital

At the Foundation, one of the criteria we have for projects is the potential for “viral” growth.  The increasing connectedness of the world opens up the possibility for large scale impact, assuming you find the right recipe.  Part of finding the right recipe is trying stuff that banks and venture capitalists would never fund.  Giving a crazy idea a chance to become sufficiently mainstream in order to attract the attention of more conventional sources of funding.  Doing this requires a conscious decision to withstand the naysayers and conventional wisdom types who may argue, for example,  that openly licensed materials will never achieve the quality of commercial products.  Being consciously risky is a good place for philanthropy, at least for a foundation the size of this one.

Failing with Style

The corollary to taking risks in philanthropy is recognising and dealing with projects that don’t succeed.  This week’s Economist has an article about technology start-ups facing the downturn which I think has a clue for philanthropists about how to deal with failing projects.  Have some rules!

Another useful strategy is to shed projects that are not central to a start-up’s business. Executives at Jive Software, which produces online collaboration tools for corporate clients, say it is now far better at scrapping initiatives that do not seem to be paying off. Once these have been placed on a “kill list”, there is no further discussion about them. In the past the lack of a formal process for canning ideas meant that many lived on, absorbing time and resources better spent elsewhere.

Have a formal process for killing ideas. Now that is a sensible idea.

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