The Director's Cut
This is the original article I submitted to Learning Circuits. I've highlighted the portions that didn't make it into print. This was a rather mild edit. I was a little disappointed that the publication deleted my "The economy is in the toilet" line.
eLearning
Forum Update: Peer-to-Peer
by Jay Cross
Peer-to-peer technology provoked a spirited discussion at June’s meeting
of the eLearning Forum in
Menlo Park. Great stuff or pipedream?
The P2P working group, championed by Intel, says “P2P is the next Internet revolution.” On the other hand, Ziff Davis’s Charles Cooper reports corporate “concerns about intellectual property, and concerns about not flooding available bandwidth—in a word, concern about control.”
What is P2P?
Computers in a peer-to-peer (P2P, for short) network share resources directly with one another, bypassing a central server.
Networks are traditionally made up of many PCs (clients) receiving information and access to shared resources from a common computer (a server). Client/server architecture became the norm when client PCs were weak relative to servers. As PCs have bulked up in processing power and grown tentacles into the Internet, they have gained the strength to act as servers as well as clients.
P2P is controversial. P2P PCs can swap files, share disk storage, or use one another’s processing power, connecting to one another directly via the Internet. On the upside, users can create online meeting spaces for project teams without involving IT at all. Team members can immediately begin chatting (audio or text), sharing files, touring the net together, discussing topics, and more. This is great for the user but a nightmare for the IT department. P2P empowers users by disenfranchising IT. It enables them to burrow under firewalls and avoid restrictions. P2P can be a security threat.
P2P in action
Peer to peer comes in many flavors, depending on what’s being shared.
Distributed computing. The SETI project uses otherwise idle time on tens of thousands of PCs to create the equivalent of a single supercomputer. IBM’s most powerful mainframe, ASCI White, tops out at 12 teraFLOPS; SETI’s network works at 15 teraFLOPS. ASCI White costs $110 million; SETI has spent just $500 thousand.
File sharing and content distribution. As members arrived for the eLearning Forum meeting, pirated music played over the loudspeakers. Earlier, when I was downloading songs from one of the successors to Napster, other people were plucking songs off my hard drive. P2P is a two-way street. We could have been swapping documents, videos, programs – anything digital. Regulators were able to clamp down on Napster because it had a central server. Napster’s descendents have no center; there’s no one to sue; control floats around in the Internet cloud. Cue the Twilight Zone theme.
Instant messaging. When my son is doing his homework, he chats continuously with friends online. Most kids are into instant messaging. Email’s too slow; you don’t know if the recipient is around. Presumably they will bring IM into corporations who have been slow to adopt it, in spite of the fact that IM is free.
Enterprise collaboration. While other P2P applications have a place in the eLearning tool drawer, online collaboration promises to have much more impact on the way we work and learn.
When Wayne Hodgins and I planned the eLearning Forum session on P2P, we decided to “eat our own cooking” (you know what I mean) and coordinate the session in a P2P environment. Wayne has been experimenting with Groove, a P2P software platform developed by Ray Ozzie, the author of Lotus Notes. As you may be aware, Wayne is Strategic Futurist at Autodesk, has been the driving force in establishing eLearning standards, and has been showered with awards for his contributions to eLearning. Wayne uses Groove to coordinate nine different projects and considers it a more effective way to work. We decided to use Groove at the eLearning Forum meeting to show what P2P could do.
Groove describes its product by telling us:
“Groove applications enhance existing Web-based and centralized business systems with a person-to-person interaction layer that enables members of the enterprise to connect quickly with customers, partners and suppliers in a secure online work environment. Groove peer computing technology erases geographic and organizational boundaries, bringing together the people, information and tools needed to speed decision-making, solve problems and reduce time-to-market for new goods and services.”
“In Groove, colleagues, customers and partners conduct the essential conversations, the business practices - negotiation, clarification, review and selection, exception handling, brainstorming - that surround and inform each of those business processes. Groove was specifically designed to integrate practices and processes and make these ad hoc interactions effective and efficient.”
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline accelerates the time-to-delivery of new drugs by using Groove to bring 10,000 people together. Designers at Ford coordinate planning for its 2004 models on Groove. A major law firm connects far-flung members of defense teams in Groove spaces. Wherever there are teams, there’s probably an application for Groove.
Why P2P is important
Before explaining how we used Groove at eLearning Forum, let me explain three reasons Internet Time Group feels P2P is a breakthrough technology. (As you’ll see in a moment, not everyone agrees with me.)
Fluid organizations need flexible IT. Value-chain thinking shows the importance of linking with customers and suppliers, but firewalls insulate corporations as if they were fortresses. Drucker points out that value comes from outside the corporation; inside the organization, you’re just rearranging the furniture. Corporations praise spontaneity and innovation, but the paradigm drag of client/server views user control as the doorway to anarchy. People work in teams; P2P facilitates team development and collaboration. (See sidebar, The Changing Nature of Work.)
Relationships matter. In the old days, a company often made a sale and abandoned the customer to head for the next prospect. Now, as The Cluetrain Manifesto emphasizes, business has realized that, “Markets are conversations.” Marketers look at the “lifetime value of the customer.” A sale is the initiation of a relationship for achieving mutual gain over time. That sale is often not just product and services; it may be maintaining the loyalty of a free-agent worker or inspiring a downstream partner. Relationships are two-way and personal, as is P2P.
The economy is in the toilet. In the past eight weeks, I have talked with senior managers of the three-dozen largest eLearning providers. Guess what. Orders are off. Instead of buying, corporations are focusing on optimizing what they already have. What they have is good people and the know-how stored in those people’s heads. P2P collaboration can put this know-how to use. As Lew Platt used to ponder at Hewlett Packard, “If only HP knew what HP knows.” P2P collaboration is a cheap way to experiment with accelerating decisions and innovation. It’s the natural alternative to betting scarce capital on distant rewards. Internet Time Group estimates that it can install more powerful P2P collaboration for teams for $30,000 than you'd get for $2 million using client/server.
How we used Groove to support our meeting
Wayne popped into Groove and sent me an invitation to join him in a new Groove space. I downloaded the Preview Edition of Groove; it’s 10 MB; it’s free. (Here are the details.) I clicked on Wayne’s invitation and entered into what appeared to be a website offering text chat, audio chat, a discussion board, files, a notepad, a sketchpad, a shared web browser, online file storage, a place for photographs, group calendar, contact list, and a chess game.
I learned the basics by pushing buttons and exploring. I sent Groove invitations to Sherry Hsi, president of Metacourse; Hal Richman, an authority on collaboration; and Kate Gardner, an eLearning business developer who’s been working with eLearning Forum.
A few days before the meeting, we all met with Wayne online via Groove to talk about who would be presenting what and to get familiar with the Groove environment. Things went smoothly, save for a representative of Pacific Bell cutting off my phone service a few minutes into the session. (That’s a story in itself; be cautious when selecting your DSL provider.)
Flash forward to Monday’s meeting. We logged into Groove: Sherry, Kate, and I from Menlo Park, Wayne from Autodesk in San Raphael, and Hal from his headquarters in Nova Scotia. My connection to the net wasn’t functioning, par for the course for me – I can freeze up a network just by looking at it. Sherry took over as operator.
The voices of Wayne and Hal came in loud and strong. Mind you, this was VOIP – voice over IP. That alone saved us an immense phone bill. Wayne toured our shared space in Groove and explained how he was using it. He also pointed out that Groove is a serious business effort. Ray Ozzie is a highly respected software architect who could spend the rest of his time on his yacht if he cared to but is instead passionate about creating this industrial-strength collaboration platform.
Whenever Internet Time Group is pushing eLearning to its limits, someone brings up David Merrill’s caveat that “Information is not instruction.” After thirty years in business, my reply is “So?” Whether we achieve better performance through instruction or information or by concocting magic potions in the cemetery at midnight on Halloween is immaterial. Performance is the bottom line. Whether or not something qualifies as instruction is academic.
Wayne emphasized that P2P technologies, of which Groove is but an example, can improve the way we work, and that alone justifies their development.
As for learning, P2P activities shed light on team processes that used to disappear when a project’s participants dispersed. Groove creates an audit trail; If you missed the eLearning Forum meeting, you can visit the demo space on Groove to look at the text dialog between Sherry and Wayne. You can examine the planning documents. If you’re developing your own Groove session, you can learn from looking at what we did. If you’d been invited to join us early on, you could have “looked over our shoulders” while we invented what we were going to do. P2P merges learning and work.
Break and discussion
Wayne wrapped up, and we took a 30-minute break for gossip, coffee, swapping stories, and finding out who’s doing what. (Glenn, congratulations on your new daughter!) Typically, groups head out to the courtyard. Some tell us this is where the real learning takes place.
During the break, people decided they’d had enough P2P technology. They wanted to talk about the behavioral and social implications.
Lance Dublin said he assumed the technology would get there. The issue is how people are going to act differently.
(Graphic deleted.) I feel client/server and peer-to-peer
will co-exist, following the tradition that TV did not replace movies.
The issue is when to choose one approach over the other.
Oracle’s John Hathaway challenged my assertion that P2P entails zero administration. I replied that P2P didn’t take administration if IT wasn’t aware of it. With the wisdom of hindsight, I recognize that I was thinking only of the early, wild-and-wooly days of P2P. If it catches on, of course it will need administration.
Some people predict that IT will bar use of P2P collaboration because it offers crackers and competitors a Trojan Horse to ride onto corporate hard drives.
Members were wary about P2P’s security implications. Glenn O’Classen said we needed to take a more adult approach to P2P. I acknowledged P2P’s roots in free speech, Open Source, in-your-face, hacker-chic rebellion. Gnutella’s Lenin poster will not comfort CIOs. (Graphic deleted.)
(Graphic deleted.)
Mark Cavender,
Managing Director of Chasm Group, tracks eLearning and is a frequent contributor
at eLearning Forum
meetings. He classifies P2P as pre-chasm. Members pointed out barriers
to implementation such as:
q
Too weird
q
People not in the habit of working
like this
q
No training is available up front
q
Where’s the revenue?
q
Where’s the content?
Xerox’s Tracy Mendéz expects to see functionality similar to Groove, but running on client/server, perhaps on Enterprise Blogger or Xerox’s own LinkLite. SRI’s Marcelo Hoffman thinks P2P will enable communities of practice to form more rapidly.
Gary Latshaw, formerly a honcho with Pensare, compares P2P to telephone conference calls. P2P is cheaper but communication costs are trivial in relation to the cost of the people in the conference. P2P sound quality isn’t as good as telephone, but it’s great to be able to share materials with one another.
Moreover, the materials can be spontaneously selected (or maybe even created on the spot) to suit the situation. When these elements are important, such as reviewing a final document or a group receiving an instructional presentation from a moderator, this is a big plus for P2P.
Next
eLearning Forum task forces on eLearning Metrics and on Building Online Community are thinking of adopting Groove for their virtual discussions. We’ll keep the demo space on Groove we used for our meeting live for the next few months. We’re posting pointers to additional information at www.elearningforum.com.
If you’re interested in tracking leading-edge issues such as this, consider joining us at eLearning Forum. Membership is free. Apply at www.elearningforum.com.
Jay Cross is CEO of Internet Time Group and eLearning Forum. Internet Time Group helps organizations get the most from eLearning. You can reach Jay at jaycross@internettime.com.
For more information, visit
eLearningForum
www.elearningforum.com/june2001
Internet Time Group
O’Reilly Open P2P
Tim O’Reilly’s excellent P2P Meme Map
www.openp2p.com/p2p/2000/12/05/images/800-p2p2.jpg
Dan Bricklin’s Thoughts on Peer-to-Peer
Silicon Valley World Internet Center
www.worldinternetcenter.com/psp
The Changing Nature of Work
In a typical hierarchical organization, both face-to-face networking and local area networking take place in isolated departmental silos.
The need for collaboration in our increasingly complex world drives the development of interdepartmental teams.
The organization finds it more effective to think of itself as an ever-shifting grab-back of teams rather than a group of specialist departments.
Today’s teams include customers, partners, and suppliers who reside in other organizations. P2P can hop corporate boundaries to put these teams together.
