Take Two

At http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/970479.stm the BBC reported on the "Blueprint for the E-University". And if you look behind the laudable statements the cracks (with 2020 hindsight) are obvious from the outset.

Fault Line No 1: "to make the UK a leading player in the booming market for "virtual" learning over the web", says David Blunkett. This is a strategic government announcement. Another lurch of money to show that "we are doing things". That bodes well, for some.

Fault Line No 2: "The e-University offers a way of harnessing that energy and expertise in a way that all can benefit from." so says a leading University, in this case York. What is really going on is that Universities need money so any new bandwagon that carries a fat cheque is welcome news, especially if you are at the epicentre. The statements from that quarter wholly justify the status-quo. It could be rephrased, "We have been doing it since the 12th-century, so we know best, and we are going to show these new upstarts a thing or two." Well, you sure did.

Fault Line No 3: "Cost-Effective." Well, you sure proved yourselves experts in that field!

Fault Line No 4: "We start from an excellent base. We have world-class technology infrastructure, outstanding skills in our universities and colleges, and some global technology-related companies to collaborate with. ", says Hefce's leader Sir Brian Fender. Market-speak of the first order. They are suggesting the work with the market leaders. This is the Internet for pity's sake. Are yesterday's market leaders ever going to come up with anything innovative that propels us forward? No they are going to ply their existing wares - necause that is where their investment lies. To promote anything at all innovative is counter-productive to their own profit margins. The absolute classic of this thinking was when IBM suggested the worldwide market for the single-user computer was 40,000 at absolute most. And a small unknown company called Microsoft was born.

David vs Goliath, and both lost

Yet another stage in the death-knell of the UK E-university saga rang last night (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4311791.stm), and it makes me so embarrassed & jealous and a 100 other adjectives. I skim-read the compendium of the e-university (http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/1641.htm) and it shouts out at you why the failure occured. (You have to skim read, the bible seems shorter.) This was a project with huge amounts of UK taxpayer money spent primarily on people with egos and pensions. It was spent on someone trying to play inside the Internet "by committee". It was a top-down approach with no bottom up feel. And perhaps there is another angle.

The report makes as an excuse the dotcom bust. But I have to ask why were they playing as a committee in an entrepreneurs world? The whole premise is laughable, except it just makes me want to cry. It makes me cry because you can see someone saying "oh, Tom go round all the higher education colleages and report back." So Tom spends six months travelling round, building up his pension plan. And for every Tom there is an Alice and a Jo, because this organisation needed to do its research throroughly. It was going to get things right! So all these teams come back, write their reports, and these get aggregated up into larger more complex reports that committees contemplate, and contemplate. And all the time the £££ are being spent.

And therein lies the first problem. A key to success in the Internet is the ability to react, instantly. An ability to get ahead. An ability to read an opportunity and turn a business plan on its head within 24 hours. We use PayPal for our e-commerce. They have their problems as a company, but they also do a lot of things very very well. They wouldn't have 50m customers if they did not. They did not start by researching all the traditional banking organisations. They did not send teams around gleaning facts and figures. They spotted a niche and pressed that advantage home. In the early days, pressing that advantage meant changing their business model as often as a new customer joined them.

So how is this relevant to PopG & Groove? In our time we have had far more success in e-learning on just about every statistic you could imagine than the e-university ever had. Our deployment model is so far superior we are on another planet. Our education customers include CalState, University of California, Stokholm University, Creighton University and the University of Western Ontario. Meeting their needs is not easy. They are demanding, not least in that they want to keep costs down. And how have we done this?

Well we haven't written reports of 1000's pages. We spotted an excellent technology - Groove and another one - Citrix. We realised that these are at the opposite ends of one measure of computing - server based computing versus peer to peer computing. We took two diametrically opposite technologies and we welded them together. Our insight is that together they work. Our IP is in the welding, and it is something that many others have tried and seem to have failed at.

And lest we forget, that other angle. What small companies are good at is spotting and exploring that niche. One goal of the UK E-university could be said to be to create a 21st Century edition of the Open University. A large organisation stacked full of the well-qualified and the well-meaning. Does that work? Just take a look at the way society is moving - the increasing proliferation of small companies will not abate. We are no longer in the era of mega-sized companies. In the microcosom that PopG inhabits we fit incredibly well into our mould. We shape that mould. We react and morph. And so many other companies are doing the same. This is the age of the entrepreneur, the age of diversification. So how on earth could anyone expect one solution fit all? One reason for our success is the ability to spot that niche and emphasise and apply our strengths. Dovetail.

And so we struggle on from project to project, improving our business bit by bit, thinking why for f**s sake won't the government encourage start up companies more effectively (with the emphasis on the word startup). There is a world we can beat out there. I just wonder how many more time the UK Government has to spend £50m on just 900 students, how many more large egos need satiating, before it realises that it has got something fundamentally wrong, and I don't just mean the UK E-University.

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What slows Groove down most?

It is really frustrating to see people think and expect that Groove can do anything "just because it is easy". A space starts life and is empty, void. Then someone adds a file or two. Someone else adds three or four. It soon gets re-organised into folders.

And then the explosion happens. Suddenly it becomes a free for all and files are dropped in from everywhere. The result? Chaos.

As more files are added no-one thinks what the impact is. That is until a new member of the team joins the space. I have just joined a large space - 550 megs. It has taken my computer probably 5 hours of download on my broadband connection. (I made a mistake, I should have accepted the invite on my account PopG. We all make mistakes, don't we.)

These large spaces do no-one any good. Except from a feel-good factor, a buzz of "I've got a 550 megs space on my computer". It certainly is not productive! It is not productive use of Groove.

And sadly, I guess, it is what many, many Groovers are doing and suffering with day after day. Ah, I hear you say, "I have an 800meg space, and I'm not suffering." Just tell that to your next new space member.

Why is this bad, apart from performance? Just look at the content. Just look at the content. How many people use Groove for storing software downloads? How many people use Groove for sharing PDFs they have collected?

One of our users, Rick Lillie has this right. Using Groove to store large files is not good. Yes, it is right in some cases, but that is not the same as every file on your disk! Rick, of CalState, uses Groove primarily for thought sharing. He then tends to include external content (PDFs, Setup.Exe's) as hyperlinks.

Embedding a hyperlink into Groove costs nothing. It has no impact on performance or any resources whatsoever. It has a great positive impact on productivity.

That's is the beginning of an architecture that will scale, and scale and scale.

Star Gazing to V4...

What would a next generation of Groove look like?

The starting point has to be a mind-map of spaces. Instead of this current linear listing & folders the whole concept has to become more intuitive. The mind does not work in a linear way, so why enforce that!

It then needs to break the "space" apart. It needs to move more towards a more flexible and granular container & object model within the space. This needs to be done both graphically and in its security model.

A rectangle on screen in which may be the results of a database query whose results are only editable or even vieweable depending on "object membership". And perhaps another rectangle dedicated to presence awareness. All organised according to the way the project requires it - not according to how some developer / designer wants it limited - a page-design layout.

The granularity of its security must drop down to the object as well. With the ability to add new objects in to that secure zone according to the project needs.

Making the security drop down to an object rather than the current rigid concept of a space will significantly reduce and optimize bandwidth. For example, will people no longer have to copy PDFs et al from one space to another, they will just embed that PDFs own secure zone in to another secure zone. This will imply no breach of security, it will allow greater and more flexible distribution of the object (eg PDF) into other relevant containers.

And talking of bandwidth, once the above improvement is in place then p2p bandwidth performance enhancers such as bit-torrent can be applied to dramatic effect since the pool of computers from which a given object can be obtained from grows exponentially. Whereas right now Groove can only fetch from a limited number of computers, perhaps only 2 or 3 in many cases.

This above change will extend the reach of space membership. Instead of being limited to some nominal number such as 50, 100 or perhaps 200, now a space may contain up to 1000 and beyond members with little effort.

And finally Groove needs to come out of the dark - it needs, optionally to be able to integrate with HTTP, FTP, SMTP and other protocols as a feature. Right now there are add-ons, for example there is Groove+Outlook integration, though in PopG today we favour AvantMail. RSS-feed integration is possible. One goal is to be able to look at all the pull and push points and ensure there is no wastage of development effort since many of these involve developer partners.

The extensible Forms tool needs continuing and substantial development to become the front-end for all data manipulation. If it is any good (and it is) then it needs to become a powerhorse of the GUI. That means it has to be able to deal with all the layout issues possible. And of course the developer community has to be "there" in understanding the next generation of the tool.

In truth the currrent architecture, which I believe is a phenomenal acheivement is also holding back the performance, extenstibility and usability - and that's what Groove 4's agenda should aim to deliver on.