 Good morning and thank you for this opportunity since everyone seems to be talking about the future of work and I'm a lurker at heart in many ways. I now spent the last four or five years before retirement thinking a lot about why community participation worked the way it did and why work didn't feel like that and I just want to spend the next 25 minutes sharing you know what thoughts I have about it and I'm very happy to take questions after that. When I grew up as a child of the 60s, born in 57 things took a little time to come to India but you know my summer of love was closer to 69 than 67. There's a time delay for these things to sort of rattle their way through and get known and I also had to go old enough so you know 12 or 13 was probably the minimum before I could engage about my parents getting too upset but part of growing up at that time the experience since and I spent like 40 years as a result in something that vaguely passed for tech was a real sense of utopia about tech you know that we could solve the world because of technology it was going to sort of solve Middle East peace world hunger get our you know medical lives together I wasn't into the we would live forever I had you know no part of me was into that necessarily but I genuinely believe that technology would serve us to keep us happier better it would reduce inequality it would deal with the kind of issues I was growing up with as a child I had a grandfather who would say things to me as a chemistry professor and you'd say things to me like your peak longevity generation and like a bit of a shock so you know what do you mean that my children are less long than I am and then he'd sit and explain why he thought so and this was like in the early 70s or you need to be rich to be thin and statements you know every one of those statements made me wonder what life sort of had for us going forward and then you know I look at today and there is a sense of what have we wrote because in many ways technology is a participant sometimes a catalyst sometimes an enabler but we can't leave it out of having increased inequality having interfered with our sort of political and economic systems not everything that has come out of technology has necessarily been something I can stand up today and say wow that was great not that it hasn't you know I'm still a tech a utopian in that sense but I've had to temper it with saying not everything has worked we have to have feedback loops we've got to get better and I remember talking with Freeman Dyson you know like he was in a you know the lobby of a conference I was attending because his daughter was organizing the conference and you know he would say things like in the 40s we were planning to use nuclear power to for space travel and it took us a little while to figure out maybe that wouldn't work okay so those sort of sort of implications it perfectly reasonable from a scientific viewpoint to say you have a model you try to refine that you put it to use you learn something about it you refine it again there's an iteration so I'm still of that belief that you know iteration is what's going to help get to this utopia and you know I'm still young enough to to believe in the Jetsons sort of you know I I do want to be able to fly on my own right we'll figure out the global warming or climate change costs somewhere along the line but I'd like to be able to impart that kind of that sense of optimism that can be pragmatic it can have the necessary you know down to earth how do I actually make this work but the alternative is of no interest to me I you know I can't be chicken little kind of fear and that was as a result of that I tried to to look at what was happening in society and in many ways things confuse me that everything I understood from studying how the technology I call technology had sort of roots in the 50s and 60s based on papers and work and investment in the 40s and leading back to you know the research and thoughts of people maybe a hundred hundred fifty years worth so I'm not sort of in any way discounting that but by the time I experienced it it was about a 60s set up as a reaction in society to a set of world wars and a belief that things were going to improve but there was a lot of community within it so I started moving from this idea of technology to a sense of community becoming the important driver so a meeting like this a festival like this becomes very important to me because even at the small dinner that you know I attended last night until I came here earlier it was a real sense of community and how every member in the community had something to bring to contribute to participate and that started setting my social context that you know I now that I'm retired I play golf and one of the first rules of golf is a solitary golfer has no standing in a course that you have no importance if you're alone it is defined as a social game to begin with everybody can pass you everyone can tell you get off wait do whatever you want because you don't have a right in a similar kind of way the you know it's like working at BT you know what uses one telephone right in any form of exchange or communication and I put you know one is a pretty useless number the sense of participation the sense of community becomes a key part of how things happen and you know as I watch my children grow up and now I'm watching my grandchildren grow up there's something fascinating about how they fight for an individualism and yet it's individualism within a group right so my first child and she's got 33 now nearly 34 and I remember her looking at me and saying by myself meaning real lead me to do this and actually like three four maybe even younger but while she's doing it she turn her head to see whether I was watching right it wasn't the sense of doing it by herself which was important but doing it by herself while being noticed as doing it by herself so way you know your part of your group identity also had that feedback loop and now that I've got two grandchildren and I watched them the same thing is there there is a joy in being to do something yourself but part of the joy is in being able to to know that someone is watching you do it and that someone matters to you or the opinion of that someone matters to you you know we are social people so as I try to establish the sense of community within the you know the world of technology I had to look at how society work and all the evidence existed that society was a team sport life was a team sport okay it's not you know I'm a rocker no man is an island or whatever there was some genuine reason to believe that we were brought up somewhere within our psyche to be team players you know that we that we had a consciousness within us that required us to learn how to work with each other and then because I spent so much time in sort of financial services it had to take time to explain to people the the essence of society was always some form of mutualization right if you look at insurance models you know what does it basically say well no one person can take the hit of a major event but if we could spread that cost in order to prepare for it amongst enough people then the few people whom it did hit would be able to afford it and by definition everybody else was paying for those few people to be able to afford the hit right that sharing that mutualization was part of how the market worked and it's not an insurance marketplace that evolved out of the city of London or something you know you go to any community and you see how they deal with events that affect part of the community you know your barn burns down the rest of the village will come along to help you rebuild that barn feed you house you give you support provided you paid the price of being a member of the community okay you have to be an active member of the community and it's not equally active it's not a homogenous society you had to just participate enough to say you're doing what you can so that you know there is a widows might aspect to it because it's not a subscription fee that everyone has to meet consistently it's what you can do for it and they are differently scheduled we are differently able so it is expected that there's a heterogeneity a variety of diversity in community and it will work and a lot of our you know until maybe 150 200 years ago we used to live and die within 30 miles of where we were born because the cost of migration was high we couldn't afford it and we tended to move because there was some natural or economic or political crisis movement was enforced otherwise migration was only available to the explorer with a patron behind them or her it wasn't natural to be able to make those sort of moves and some people and I'm include myself in it believe that what happened was the diasporas that took place because man could afford to migrate post the industrial revolution as it became cheaper and cheaper to be able to move fast distances it took time for communications to catch up because the cost of communication didn't drop at the same speed or at the same time so that's what created a kind of environment where when I came to the UK in 1980 I was earning after tax about 230 pounds per month and it cost me 10 pounds to call my mother in Calcutta for a three-minute call yeah imagine that people trying to take a similar slice their income to make a three-minute call and make the answers I didn't make calls and I was too lazy to write and it became a problem until you know mothers and hands and ears and twisting whatever else happened but over time I did communicate location but people don't realize that the cost of communication did not drop anywhere near as quickly and then when it did surprise surprise you've got friends to friends who united Facebook or whatever because people used the technology and the lowering of cost to be able to rebuild the communities that we used to have it okay but now they were virtual they were distributed but the community existed looking further at society where I got to was saying if mutualization existed how did the community work from an electronic viewpoint so there was a bit of you know trying to understand people like Durkheim get a sense of you know community from a sociological perspective move through that to people like Durkheim Habermas you know Howard Reingold seeing how communities of practice began to evolve in an electronic world getting further than that and watching you know it may be considered pop science but I enjoyed reading even people like Steven Johnson you know helping me understand about whether it's slime mold or ants or swarm behaviors emergence and how often things that were hard to do as individuals was solved by community and these communities were sometimes very similarly skilled but more often than not differently skilled and you know coming from India I was used to division of labor within society and yet I hated the caste system so how was I going to solve that problem because societies seem to to work around this idea that you did have different skills but people seem to price or value those skills differently there was a market failure somewhere within it then I realized it wasn't the diversity in skill that was the problem but the ranking of those skills as soon as you say you are better than that person because you know a cobbler is better than a baker or something of that rather than you are differently skilled and for society to work we need that variety we need those differences so I began to get comfortable you know by the time I was reading people like Amy Jo Kim and how communities practice formed in electronic networks and visit in the digital or virtual world a lot of it came down to being able to understand diversity and variety within the community a lack of attempting to rank that so that you still had equal rights within it and then a sense that not everybody contributed the same way or with the same volume as the open source movement started getting more they engaged in a lot of your work in different parts of open source you know even today in the late 90s it also became clear and this is where my interest in lurking became active to say almost every community I studied about 5% of the people in the community seem to carry the lion's share of the work another 15% or so just as a rule of thumb this is not precise scientific research this is anecdotal but anecdotal over 20 odd years of being interested in the topic and about 20 15 another 15% seem to be active enablers participants supporters and the rest of the sort of the community the 80% were noticed almost by their being passive or appearing to be passive and these are the people that were being referred to you know as lurkers and it didn't make sense to me that the way we looked at that community it's the 5% that mattered or even the 20 and I was trying my best to figure out this other 80% there has to be value there is a reason why the integral community contains all of it and that the lurker is important and as I sort of started working through that I got to a point where the we were beginning to see premium models start coming through as you know post.com business model style emerging saying not everyone will pay so you've got the idea that if you could get it's like a super premium group of you know 5-10% of your subscribers paying heavily is a smaller group above of the larger whole being able to pay something then you could almost create what the economists might consider a free rider to say as a result 80% of the people got something for free and people would analyze this and say well yeah that's the whole essence of the premium model that you could subsidize through getting a small group would be able to pay access to something for a much larger group and then people started sort of corrupting that model to say rather than access for a larger group you're going to redefine the terms of service to say you know he or she who doesn't pay will actually get a degraded service and I began to sort of question why that was the case but I understood something about this 80-15-5 and had an interest in that to say no it's not patronage but it's a variant on that you know why can't the people who afford it subsidize it for the others if they're not a variant on the mutualization principle to say if you can sort of share out some of that capability to to earn to spend to to afford then you're able to reach more people and it is not necessary for you to say you know this why the Obamacare kind of discussions drove me nuts. So guys when you talk about it as a medical insurance the whole essence of insurance is that you pay in order that a disproportionate hit on part of the population can be absorbed right if the only people who paid were the people who could afford it then there is no point in having the insurance because the mutualization model is missing so I couldn't even get my head around why those sort of debates were getting as active as they were because I love the idea of that inclusion and then that took me back to the work kind of principle where I kept getting irritated when I would go somewhere with my wife and somebody to ask her what are you doing and and she'd say you know I'm a housewife and I you get professional people in many parts sort of eyes glaze over a bit as if the you know this person was not contributing or being a mother wasn't right or whatever and you know this was my wife's choice I didn't force her not to work or anything but she quite enjoyed what she did and she was busy but this sense that I had an income and she didn't didn't make sense to me because if she if it wasn't for the things she was doing I was going to be unable to work if I tried to price what services she offered within the household and what she did and I have to do it myself it would be a very big salary that I would have to replace I tried to ensure her absence so I began to question the idea that this lurker or this person without an income had no value because it was because we were trying to measure taxable earnings in some form and I questioned the unit that we were using to be able to deal with income you know should we not say household should we not say group and I'm not looking for some sort of nuclear man woman two children kind of model it's just what is the earning unit and who the hell decided it was one person right was that reasonable or is there a collective even in the capacity to earn because there are different skills being brought together to create the value and to contribute and that went back to keeping hitting this idea of because you don't have a visible economically measurable cash coming and taxable identity somehow what you were doing was not to be valued but as I was proceeding towards retirement I got to a point where how am I doing on time great the as I was proceeding towards retirement one of the topics that kept streaming up was this idea of AI is going to take everybody's job away and you know the machine is going to be what replaces all of us and again you know the same utopian also believe that most of the time if we act even vaguely responsibly you know at least have part of the family brain cells switched on for that day and we are masters of technology rather than technology being masters of us and this idea that we're creating more and more complex technology and we have no idea what it does sort of vaguely sounds like a responsibility to me saying what do you mean you know you're doing things and you have no idea what the outcomes are going to be that doesn't sound like you know even basic common sense you can say there are risks and I'm going to watch those risks I'm going to figure it out there's going to be feedback loops there's going to be iteration there's going to be learning but there's sort of random I had no idea you know I'm going to play with this and I had no idea what the outcomes are for society I mean you know this is not like the Freeman Dyson thing where he said but we at that time we thought nuclear was going to power us there then we learned something and no there wasn't going to power us there so it's perfectly reasonable to take steps as a result of the feedback loop but I got to a point where I said you know I I want to be able to use technology to solve for this job loss risk and initially I said well somehow it's going to be like UBR right there's got to be a way of having everyone paid by the creation of enough value in society through the application of technology so that we can reduce the income in quality as a result we can give people security and if you gave people enough money the tendency would be like the patronage in the Middle Ages but not through fiefdoms and lords and patrons as it were but through some collective work social work we could create funds that were able to provide something that was close to UBI and the model I was looking at which quite a lot of people are now trying fascinates me still is that if we could make human beings sensors of waste right that we are we all have access now to smart mobile devices reasonably cheaply almost anywhere in the world the connected part of the world is growing I read about a girl in India who having spent time in the US went back to her the villages that have roots were from although she hadn't grown up there and found that life was hell because there was no predictable availability of clean water and that meant cooking hygiene ability to dress up for work plan anything look after your children it didn't matter if you didn't have predictable access to clean water this was a problem and she tried to get to why and found out that it was because the infrastructure for delivering water to these villages was so decayed that it kept leaking and the utility company could not afford to do anything other than firefight therefore it was quite random as to when what was available she spent a little time studying and came back with the idea of a trade between the villagers and the utility to say the villagers will photograph and report the leak where they saw it using their mobile devices and SMS and in exchange for that service because it would solve a problem for the utility the utility would form a schedule that said you will have water in your village between 11 and 1 or between 2 and 4 or whatever so that the beginnings of predictability and planning came into it and this was a simple example for me of human beings becoming sensors of waste and of value being generated from the aggregation of data to do with that waste and so I started thinking that's what I was going to do but when I found out there were a lot of people doing it a lot better than me then my dreams are saying I'm going to do a PhD on UBI to do with AI and sort of and the management of waste was perhaps not for me but I still couldn't get away with this idea that I was now going to become this lurker this person without income this person without value and there was a guy called you know this is one of my big worries you know when you remember something and you cannot find any report on the web of what you remember and you wonder whether you made it all up but I have this distinct memory those watching something in the late 80s or early 90s where John Harvey Jones who used to be the chairman of ICI was going on looking at companies for a week and then coming back and saying you know these are the things you must do to fix it and whoever ran that series decided that he would look at an erstwhile Maharaja's kingdom and he went to this kingdom for six days came back and said oh you know by the way I've looked at everything I have good news for you you have about you know five or six thousand people who are completely redone you know they fulfill no value to the kingdom and this Maharaja looked at them and said so what will they do and Harvey Jones said you don't understand it's there's nothing for them to do we can look back and said but what will they do and I've grown up with an idea that dignity a sense of purpose a sense of inclusion and participation comes from the mere act of someone feeling that what you're doing is of value then we are that's what I'd rather call work rather than connecting it up to an income or a taxable income to say there is a purpose for what you do and that purpose is something that we have to be able to give everybody and when I look at community participation and this idea of lurking and I then went you know into saying if open source communities work this way where else and if you remember the late 80s or early 90s and I look around and say okay enough of you would remember you know they working in enterprise we would get these discs if you belong to a Microsoft Gold Partner program where you had early access to the technology and what they were doing was open sourcing testing right by turning around and saying we're going to give you a substandard product and you can have it early and you can tell us what's wrong with it and we'll make you pay for the privilege okay that's a pretty clever model but the premise of then saying what I saw there I could see in open source communities as well right now the lurkers were beginning to light up as having different values they would exercise the code base in different ways by their usage that diversity had value just through how they use the code base of something that was open source and built by community there will be a situation where the functional requirements would be added to because again that diversity created a range of needs to be able to test something there'd be feedback loops and for our that form because someone saying I'm trying it and this is what happened people would start teaching each other there would be a skill cross fertilization so everywhere I looked because I now had this sense of saying I want to rather than assume the lurker had no purpose I'm going to start with the assumption the lurker had purpose and then look at the value generated differently and everywhere I looked I could see that we were calling these people lurkers but it's like using junk DNA or dark matter human beings of this habit of saying I don't understand that so I'm going to give it a label and I'm going to park it to one side and everything's going to be okay and I'm going to improve the quality of the model of the little bit I understand right which is insane because a lot of the interest would be in the things you don't understand so this thin this group this 80 percent this great unwashed call the lurker started not just attracting me but exciting me to say there is a purpose and this purpose is really important I don't know what that purpose is other than to make what the community builds better because that diversity that inclusiveness that ability to test in every single sort of possible use case the ability to tell people what works and what doesn't improving the iteration cycle getting those feedback loops really healthy is valued and that value is important as long as we define anything we do as community and I'm starting from the premise everything we do is community life is a team sport unfortunately work hasn't been a team sport because people still get paid individually all companies that I've sort of seen been in watch talk a big story about collaboration but that's all it is most of the time because the structures and the processes are about as anti-collaborative as possible many other things we get taught are adversarial in their styling whether it's an industry or law and politics or whatever else you seem to revel in being able to bring adversarial approaches to learn rather than truly sort of cooperative which means that even though our DNA has that the technology the environment and context we work in doesn't I'm not going to end with a mixture between sort of Elon Musk and John Milton right though as a school kid I was forced to learn on his blindness and I was fascinated with the last line they also serve only stand and wait and the sense that he had that he felt God was giving him a purpose of being able to be patient to participate just while being patient rather than expect some active contribution from him and he had to learn how to be peaceful in that patience okay that was part of the you know as he became blind in the service of the state having to work in poor light conditions he got a sense of peace from it yesterday or day before someone sent me a clip of Musk and Ma in conversation to do with AI and two very different expectations and one of the statements made was something like do you realize that the bandwidth of machines is so much better than the bandwidth of human beings that machines as they evolve faster than humans are going to get to the stage where they get bored with waiting and a part of me went aha you know I am the child of of companionable silences of pregnant pauses of tempo and timing in human interaction and no machine is going to be able to solve that that easily you know when people ask me about chewing tests kind of thing my my favorite example would be you know an only fools and horses clip where trigger and and Rodney are talking and the the conversation goes something like Dave yes trigger why did they call you Dave well actually nobody calls me Dave it's only you who calls me Dave all right Dave and and that kind you know when I can see a computer smile about that I'll figure something out but I think that thinking slow eating slow living slow being able to bring time and tempo into our lives is something that differentiates us very much because only someone who really understands interaction and community values the time in that interaction right and taking that time away as sort of inter process communication and technology works through only makes you wait faster right there is a point at which you can't take that time out so that's my ending I think they also serve only stand and wait I think we have a lot to learn about this lurker population that we discarded because there is immense value in what the lurker does I think community is still the answer I remain a utopian about what technology can do to improve lives but to do that we have to redefine what the productive unit size and shape is and what the engagement protocols of society are and we know them already it's only a question of being able to bring them back to the fore thank you for your time and I'm open for a few questions