The occasional light expression

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.

CKS Consulting recently released the Mobile Development Report. Over the years CKS (formerly the Center for Knowledge Societies) has done some pioneering innovation consulting work focused on emerging economies.

In its signature style, the report notes…”Those seeking to be involved with the coming media revolutions that are bound to unfold in emerging economies such as India would be advised to leave behind the expectation that these regions shall merely come online or replicate industrial societies’ adoption and enthusiasm for the web as it exists today. This will not merely be a web 3.0 or a mobile 2.0. The world of mobile media in India by the end of this decade will be more richly immersive, multiply-mediated and nuanced, through subtle forms of gesture, moving, growing, shifting and changing at the rate of sociality itself.”

Will Value Added Service providers, and telecom providers wake up and develop meaningful, contextual, relevant applications and services for the large semi urban and rural consumer base in India?

On Friday, I attended a Siliconindia summit on Leadership. Since the 199os Siliconindia has been an inspirational magazine profiling Indian American and more recently, Indian success stories in the technology marketplace. I fondly remember reading the magazine back in grad school.

In this post, I cover highlights of a few talks at the event and my takeaways.

Sharad Sharma, who heads Yahoo R&D in India gave an excellent keynote on the journey from offshoring to in market incubation. He described some mega trends that characterize the new problem for multinational corporations – product clutter, aggressive and nimble international and local competitors coming out of nowhere, the emergence of overnight new technology innovations and unpredictable network/viral effects (He cited Facebook’s book application having 7000 Harry Potter reviews, the largest anywhere).

His viewpoint was that captive product development (such as the India Development Centers or IDCs of Microsoft, Symantec, or Oracle) and Outsourced Product Development (OPD) firms (such as GlobalLogic and Symphony Services) is already a fading story. Rising wage costs, talent crunch, and the tapering of Operating Margin gains means only one thing – it is harder to extract more business benefits from passive captive outfits.

The solution to this new MNC problem? In market incubation. Meaning the development of innovative products and platforms for local consumers, for small medium businesses, and the reorganization of captive units and OPD working arrangements to wards a multi-hub, autonomous, and risk sharing model (Sharad cited the Airbus/Boeing component responsibility model where landing gears are made in France and wings are made in Japan as self contained units!).

Sharad ended his talk suggesting that this new incubation model would mean the emergence of 3 key positions within the Indian product ecosystem:

1. Leader of a Global Center of Excellence with ownership for global or local products

2. Intrapreneurs – who seed inhouse innovation with access to go to market channels

3. Product entrepreneurs who develop new products or support the ecosystem

The subsequent panel discussion on Leadership traits included Dr. Anil Gupta from Sun’s India Engineering Center, and Vijay Anand from Oracle.

Vijay used famous CEO/Leader quotes to bullet his views on what makes leaders tick - including CEO views on newness, on opportunity, and on value systems.

Anil chose to go back to the basics of what makes a good leader tick – having a clear conscience, a human bond with employees, a healthy body, and a strong sense of values.

He ended with a lovely poem from the ex Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Touche!

“..Mere prabhu Itni Oonchai mat dena..

Gairon ko gale na laga sakoon..

Itni Rukhai mat dena”

The leadership panel was peppered with references to some very interesting books on the subject of leaderhip including Straight & Crooked Thinking, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness, and The Whole New Mind.

All the panelists agreed about the need to have more ‘Integrative thinking’ leaders than reductionist/conventional thinking ones – and made references to a recent July HBR article on ‘How do Leaders think’.

..Other interesting talks at the event are archived here. I enjoyed most of the afternoon talks particularly the ones by Sanjay Singh from Akamai, Ramesh Srinivasan from Bally Systems, Santanu Paul from Virtusa, Alexius Collette from Phillips, and C Mahalingam from Symphony Services.

Image Source: Grunwald Associates - http://www.nsba.org/site/docs/41400/41340.pdf
In a recent study conducted by Grunwald Associates LLC in cooperation with the National School Boards Association (with support from Microsoft, News Corporation and Verizon), one meta trend has emerged: Teens and tweens have adopted online social networking to an extent that it now rivals television for their attention.

The study also throws up other interesting findings:

1. Many of the early adopters of social networking technologies have average B or C grades - from an official grading standpoint, they are average kids

2. Many school boards and administrators have imposed restrictions on the classroom or official usage of social networking technologies as aides to classroom learning

Why are most school teachers and principals so afraid to admit that most of the learning in schools happens as much on the edges as in the classrooms…that students learn as much by observing and miming other students…that social networking platforms if effectively used will do more for students than simply dumping PCs and crappy e-learning software into schools?

And finally, how will the social networking (or ‘Facebook’) generation change the way most software is designed?