Podio – finally!

When I started as a development worker in Peru in 1985, PCs had just started to emerge. Everywhere around me I saw Peruvians and aid workers alike programming PCs using floppy disks and software with funny names like dBase and Lotus 123. At technical college I had been taught a little about programming in Basic on mainframe computers. Now, high up in the Andean mountains people were developing their own applications and I was quick to hitch the ride. No Windows yet and MS-DOS was just one of the obscure names floating around. 

After these initial exciting times of developing your own applications, and actually using them yourself (!), companies started to take over. MS became Microsoft. Databases and software became the stuff of professionals and the rest of us became users. Some got very rich, some very big, some both, but most became disenchanted with software and systems. Users were charmed with user requirements, user acceptance testing, training, and, more recently, user stories or even journeys.

How come that we can create our own websites, blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and much more, but that the organisation of our work still depends on other people?

No more! Podio has put us in charge again 🙂  

Commodities

A raw material or agricultural product that can be bought or sold, such as copper or coffee.

• a useful thing such as water or time.

That’s the dictionary’s take on what a commodity is. As good a description as any, but outdated. Raw is no longer raw and products have expanded from the agricultural realm into virtually all areas of economic activity.

It started out simple. People found things and bartered. One had salt, the other flint. They got together and determined among themselves how much salt was worth how much flint. Then specialisation set in: some people could do things others couldn’t and vice versa. Trade emerged. In fact, trade still means both the act of producing products and of exchanging them. Then exchange itself became a trade too. In other words, the tradesman no longer traded what he (or she, but mostly he) had produced but sold it to what came to be known as middleman. This type of trade took place in markets or shops. Shop, by the way, just like trade, refers both to the place where the product is produced and where it is sold.

The tradesman could only barter what he had crafted. The middleman had more options. Why stop there? One middleman could trade the output of many tradesmen. The output produced by one tradesman became the raw materials for the next. Only problem was how to determine the value of what was traded among middlemen rather than tradesmen. Money and markets entered the stage. From there it was a short leap to commodities—products valued and exchanged by markets.

Fast forward a few centuries and we have lost sight of the tradesmen all together. Engineers, distributors and marketers are among the many that stand in our our line of sight. Them moving out of sight would no longer suffice, however, as each product is made of many other products (erroneously referred to as raw materials), all of which are produced by many—well—producers. Simply put, we now have producers that produce commodities that are sold on markets to consumers. This may work for steel, but does not work for the primary raw material of today: knowledge.

from alchemy to knowledge

That’s awfully familiar, I thought when reading about the early days of natural philosophy in Clay Shirky‘s second masterpiece Cognitive Surplus. I have tried to illustrate why open communications are essential for development aid by retyping this piece from Shirky’s book in the left column and rewriting the same piece but from a different perspective in the right column. Clay had the benefit of hindsight, I the benefit of the future’s unpredictability.