BC-STV

I am becoming increasingly fed up with the fear-mongering and misleading statistics being used by the campaign against the BC-STV electoral system being voted on next week in British Columbia.

I'm voting yes to STV for one very simple reason: it removes the fear of vote splitting, allowing me to indicate my true preferences. Period.

Have you ever heard any of the following statements?

• "This is an NDP riding, there's no point even voting for someone else."
• "This could be a close battle. Voting for the Green party might help the Liberal party get in."
• "I like this party but I don't like their candidate in my riding."

With STV, you'll never have to hear those again. You can indicate your true first preference and, if they don't get elected, your vote gets counted for your next choice. No more vote splitting. And voting is dead simple: you write a "1" next to your first preference, a "2" next to your second preference, and so on.

Any electoral system is a complex balance between individual and group freedoms, degree of proportionality, cost, and many other factors. There is no "perfect" system. BC-STV may get tweaked over time but, in the meantime, the freedom to vote the way I want is reason enough to support it.

It's a shame that our province doesn't seem able to manage a real debate about this significant and important issue but don't be fooled by the mudslinging from either side. If you find the pro and con sites for STV in BC a little too heated, the Wikipedia articles on STV and FPTP (as well as on other voting systems) at least list both pros and cons for each. I also found the website of the Electoral Reform Society in the UK had useful and interesting reading (including pros and cons) on many different electoral systems. Although their stated preference for STV may bias their assessments of other systems, the site is much more balanced than any of the BC sites.

Seaside at The Chasm

I've seen two references this week to Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. I haven't read it yet but I've added it to my list.

Kent Beck describes the book's theory of market segments like this:

1. Enthusiasts — will try new things for the sake of novely
2. Innovators — will try new-ish things for the sake of business improvement in spite of some risks
3. Early majority — will adopt proven products provided there is no perceived risk
4. Late majority — will follow in adopting established products
5. Laggards — the name says it all

He then goes on to highlight these observations of Moore's with regard to high-tech products:

• The gap between innovators and the early majority is particularly wide (the “chasm” of the book title), stymying many promising innovations
• Marketing is fundamentally word of mouth, but people in one segment don’t converse with people in other segments. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem in gaining traction in a segment.
• Messages that work for one segment don’t work for the next. The time to switch is when a product seems to be gaining momentum, because that segment will soon be exhausted.

Eric Sink adds:

One of the ideas in [the] book is that new innovations don't go mainstream until they become a "whole product".

Now Kent is talking about JUnit Max and Eric is talking about Distributed Version Control Systems (like git, Mercurial, and Bazaar) but this got me thinking again about Seaside's positioning and how to grow our user community. I think GLASS, by providing integrated persistence, is a big positive step towards making Seaside seem like a "whole product". But what else is missing? Deployment/admin tools and documentation spring to my mind and I'm hoping to make a start on the latter with some of the posts on this blog. But what else?

Growing support by major Smalltalk vendors helps reduce the apparent risk within a small segment of the market but, for many people, Smalltalk itself is seen as a major risk. So part of making Seaside less appealing would involve either de-emphasizing its use of Smalltalk (not really going to work—people will notice eventually) or reducing the apparent risk of Smalltalk itself. That's no small task and the vendors, I'm certain, have this at the front of their minds. Still if anyone has any thoughts on how Seaside in particular can contribute to that effort, I would love to hear them.

One of the major perceived risks associated with Smalltalk, of course, is the relatively small number of developers using it. Thus we have a feedback loop there: more users means less risk, which means more users, and so on.

So three important questions, I think, are:

1. What does Seaside need in order to be considered a complete product?
   
2. What can Seaside do (other than growing the community) to reduce the perceived risk of adoption?
3. What can Seaside do (other than reducing perceived risk) to grow the community?
   

No answers yet; just questions. If you have any thoughts, please share.

Das Unheimliche

Last weekend I went for a walk along the Bodensee. It was a beautiful sunny crisp winter day and people were out in force, catching whatever warmth they could from the sun before it disappeared.

All of a sudden I was struck by the feeling of being an outsider walking through somebody else's world. This was a strange feeling for someone who had just spent six months living in china: I mean in Germany I look like everyone else; I dress like everyone else; I even (arguably!) speak the language.

One of our major frustrations in China was knowing that, no matter how long we lived there, we would always look like foreigners. We could live there for 30 years, speak fluent Manadarin with no trace of an accent, and still pay more at the market than a "local". We were treated differently (though, in many cases, for the better) and yet, at some level, we fit in. While the pigeonholing was frustrating, our role in society was "expat" and playing it was pretty straightforward.

Contrast that to (relatively small-town) Germany: here I'm not given the role of "foreigner". Here I look pretty much like everyone else so, instead of being a convincing expat, I sometimes feel like an unconvincing German. This reminded me of a blog post by Jeff Atwood from a while back about the Uncanny Valley hypothesis. This hypothesis relates to all kinds of things from robotics to animation and (Bill Higgins says) web-based user interfaces. The idea is that, as one thing gets closer to mimicking something else, the remaining differences make us feel increasingly uncomfortable. So, for example, an animated character (like the one above, from Polar Express) that is trying to look human may feel creepy but one that looks nothing like a real human (Homer Simpson, for example) may feel totally natural. By the way, if you haven't seen it, check out how far computer generated animation and motion capture can currently take us: meet Emily.

I'm off to practice being a more realistic German...

The Socratic Method

While cleaning out my browser's bookmarks (yes, I'm obsessive enough to do this once and a while), I stumbled across an article I had read by Rick Garlikov about teaching children using the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method, used extensively in the portrayal of Socrates in Plato's writings, is a form of philosophical exploration using questions to stimulate discussion and insight.

In this context, Garlikov is attempting to teach a third grade class about binary arithmetic by asking only questions and allowing the children to work out the answers themselves. A major part of the article is a transcript of this class, which lasted only 25 minutes and apparently resulted in 19 out of 22 students having "fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material".

The article is a quick and inspiring read and I suggest you take a look. I sometimes think it would be nice to volunteer to work with a group of school children (eToys maybe?) and this would be an interesting approach to play with.

There is also a letter to his daughter with further details on Plato and the Socratic Method. If you are at all interested in pedagogy or philosophy, you might also want to check out some of his other articles. I seem to recall finding the article about mistakes made when teaching math interesting.