Island Wisdom, Coded in Java explains how Charles Armstrong, fed up with cubicle hell, developed a new communication tool based on what he learned on a tiny island:
So in 1999 he set out to conduct an ethnographic study of how people naturally communicate and organize when shorn of externalities like e-mail and PowerPoint. His quest took him to the tiny island of St. Agnes, the smallest of the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles off the coast of Britain. He lived there for a year, studying how the 80-or-so island villagers interacted and functioned.Not surprisingly, life on the island contrasted powerfully with the corporate culture of London business. ‘Looking at how people schedule tasks and priorities, in most conventional organizations people make a to-do list, then they will do the highest-priority things first,’ he says. ‘On St. Agnes, somebody wakes up, has breakfast, walks out the door and looks up at the sky…. If it looks like the right kind of wind and tide to catch a kind of fish they like, they might just do that first.’
That same fluidity extended to communications, says Armstrong, with unexpected efficiency. If Friday’s boat from St. Mary was canceled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge.
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Called Trampoline, the program will integrate with a company’s existing desktop and enterprise server applications, sitting quietly on a company’s network and vacuuming in e-mail, files, spreadsheets and anything else it can find.From there, Trampoline indexes the data by parameters like authorization, originator and destination, and scours it for “semantic triggers” — interesting words that tend to crop up a lot. Then, like a village gossip, it shares information with people who might have use for it within the organization.