‘Agricultural Extension and Rural Development: Breaking out of Traditions’ edited by Raymond L. Ison and David B. Russell
And
‘A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet’ by John Naughton
12 October 1999 in the Systems Seminar Room at the Open University
Professor Diana Laurillard chaired the launch
Diana Laurillard
Welcome everybody to the Systems Discipline and to this launch. We’re going to launch two books today from the Systems Discipline ‘Agricultural Extension and Rural Development: Breaking out of Traditions by Ray Ison and David Russell and ‘A Brief History of the Future: the Origins of the Internet by John Naughton.
The programme will be, first of all Prof. Michel Petit will introduce Ray and David’s book and then I will briefly introduce John Naughton’s book, so first of all I’d like to welcome Prof. Michel Petit from the Institute National Agronomique, (INA) Paris.
Prof. Michel Petit
Thank you very much. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I would like to say three things about the book. The book is interesting, it is ambitious and it is challenging. These are three nice things. Of course, that’s why Ray invited me (to say nice things). But I must also add a few barbs; otherwise, it would not be much fun… So, I’ll try to do that as well.
First, the book is very interesting. And on this, I have no reservations. The title: "Agricultural Extension and Rural Development: Breaking out of Tradition" is already very promising. The book deals with an important issue and the reader is not disappointed. The subtitle: "A second order Perspective" will attract my first criticism: Who can understand such jargon? Coming back to the main point of the book: I do not know of any extension system, and I know many, which does not generate much frustration. The accusation is always the same: the extension workers are accused of not knowing what the problems faced by farmers really are. These workers are viewed as irrelevant, as they work in bureaucratic institutions which can’t be responsive to farmers’ needs. When extension has been privatized and therefore is run on a commercial basis, as happened recently in a few countries, particularly Commonwealth countries, it is criticized as being only relevant to those who can pay for it and, as a result, as not fulfilling the public service role extension services are supposed to render. So, the problems of extension services and of their role in rural development are well known. The first merit of this book is to tackle the issues frontally and to bring to them a very interesting perspective. This is done through a case study of a research project in the Western Division of New South Wales in Australia. This is a very dry region, full of ranges, grazing and graziers. As the authors indicate, pastoralism is indeed a very difficult type of farming, always extremely challenging for extension. As you know, before becoming again a Professor, I worked for the World Bank as a Director for ten years. I am therefore well placed to know that the rate of success of the Bank in its livestock management projects has been close to zero.
The main question then is what can be done to increase the rate of adoption of innovations by farmers. The authors convincingly argue that an essential condition is to place the problems faced by graziers and also the research itself in their respective contexts. One aspect of that context must be the researchers and their own context. In this vein, let me tell you about my context on the subject. I began my career at INRA in France, working also on issues of adoption of technical change by livestock farmers, but as an economist. I was prone to tell my colleagues from technical disciplines that they were not paying enough attention to the economic situations of the farmers we were studying; in other words, they were neglecting an important aspect of the context of these farmers. Farmers were not adopting many innovations suggested to them simply because these were not profitable in the particular circumstances of those farmers. But then it became obvious that farmers were also not adopting innovations which seemed to be profitable at first glance. We invented then a new approach postulating that farmers have good reasons to do what they do and suggesting that one purpose of our research should be to elucidate those reasons. So, you can understand that I have a lot of sympathy, in the original sense of the word: feeling with them, for the approach proposed by the authors. In addition, story telling becomes an important instrument in their tool kit. And they fully justify using that tool. Their own stories (of range lands they have worked with in Australia, of their own research, of some aspects of their lives) are indeed illuminating; and make their book very interesting. So I urge you to read it.
The second point: the book is very ambitious. The authors propose a radical change of approach, as suggested in their sub-title. The idea of the need for a second order perspective suggests that the first order perspective is at least insufficient. But when you go through the book, including even its glossary, you find out that they do not have a crystal-clear definition of that second order perspective. Essentially, as I understood, they mean that the researchers should not view themselves as being outside the object of their research. They are interacting with it all the time. I find again that our authors are convincing. For instance, one of the last stories of the book is the story of the research project as seen from the point of view of the graziers who participated in the project. These people are very convincing as they explain how they were enriched by the process in which they were real actors and not simple guinea pigs. This ambition of fully involving farmers as participants is the a major one, with many philosophical, epistemological, and even ethical implications. A second ambition is the integration of knowledge provided by an extremely wide range of disciplines. The authors want to integrate the knowledge, the tradition as they call it, of range land management, which already includes many disciplines, together with the "tradition" of human communication and, thirdly, that of innovation adoption, which also involves many disciplines. In addition, they call on psychology and the biology of knowledge, quite an ambitious range of disciplines indeed. Thirdly, they advocate a daring intellectual endeavour: giving a central role in their approach to one emotion, which they call enthusiasm. They convincingly argue that in order to generate genuine participation by farmers in the research project, one must elicit their enthusiasm for the project. Besides they claim, somehow backtracking into a first order type of argumentation, that they have found a scientific justification for the importance of enthusiasm in the work of a Chilean biologist, Prof. Maturana, who has worked on the biology of cognition. This point is so important in the eyes of our authors that they devote a whole chapter to it.
Finally, the book is very challenging. The most critical challenge for both readers and authors is the challenge of evaluation. How good is their work? In a sense the chapter by the farmers provides a first answer. Clearly for them the project has been relevant and it has succeeded in "engaging" them, something which traditional extension activities had failed to do, or done very little. But what about the knowledge being produced? How well grounded is it? How well does it relate to existing theories, either validating or challenging them? Given the extremely wide range of disciplines involved, no single reader, including this reviewer, can be capable to bear judgement on this. Another dimension of evaluation is economic evaluation. An important reason for launching the project was the dissatisfaction of research and extension funding agencies with traditional extension practices, which were seen as ineffective. So, it seems only legitimate to inquire whether or not the new approach proposed passes the test of economic viability. At this stage, I doubt that we have the necessary information to answer that question. In addition, this question of economic evaluation poses a more radical challenge to our authors, as revealed by their frequent use of the word project, for instance when they discuss the graziers’ involvement with the project.
In a sense the very idea of a project is a concession of the authors to communicate with research funding agencies…and secure funding for their work. But I wonder how long you can keep the concept of the project in a second order perspective. There is always a meta-system beyond the system you are studying. So you have no fixed reference to evaluate against and that perhaps makes true economic evaluation impossible. Quite a challenge indeed!
But do not let these quibbles detract you from reading this book, which is very interesting indeed.
Diana Laurillard
Professor Petit, thank you very much for a superb and challenging introduction to the book, which I bet Ray and David can’t wait to get engaged with. But they’ll have to wait just a minute.
I wish at this point I could be introducing Donald Davis to introduce John’s book. He is currently recovering from chemotherapy, and we felt it was really not wise to encourage him to make the trip to the OU for this particular purpose. But I do hope that in the not too distant future we should be able to invite him back for another occasion.
This means that I have to do the introduction, and I cannot give the kind of academic introduction to John’s book that it deserves, in the way that Professor Petit has just done. I approach both of these books as a lay person.
And I must say that as a lay person, I found the concept of ‘second-order R&D’ to be a wonderful idea. It is important for all researchers of complex human systems to understand – it enables the researched to become co-researcher.
This is an important idea for managers of complex human systems to understand as well. The blurb of that book directs it to ‘any professional involved in agricultural management and policy-making’. I think you could take out the ‘agricultural’, actually, and say ‘any professional involved in management and policy-making’ needs to understand those kinds of complex human systems and how you research them.
The systems concept of reflexive learning, of the self-organising system, is close to this idea of the researcher being part of what is being researched. The idea of ‘braiding theory and practice’, which they describe in the book, defines how an organisation like the OU might set about learning from what its members do and how they articulate that learning. How do we make progress? Are we learning as we go? And yes, that complete system has to operate in that kind of reflexive way.
For me, this creates a neat synergy between the two books. As you read through Ray and David’s account of how to design a second-order R&D system, you cannot help but be reminded of the accounts in John’s book of the development of the technologies of the Internet.
These are all stories of how the ‘democratisation’ of innovation worked.
John’s book is extremely important for all of us who merely use the technology.
I realise now I’ve been taking a sort of Dr Watson approach to technological ingenuity. If you remember, whenever Holmes explained some clever piece of deduction Watson would find it transparently logical, to the point of triviality, to Holmes annoyance. And I think I greeted every great computing advance I interacted with in the same way.
The first time I used a Mac, in 1982, I remember thinking ‘at last, they’ve realised it’s human beings who use these things’, and got on with it gratefully, yes, but also with that slight sense of resentment that it had taken them so long.
It was the same a decade earlier, in moving from batch processing system to an interactive terminal. No more queuing for data processing, and it didn’t take a week to debug a 10-line program (in the days when programs were 10 lines long). But my reaction then again was ‘about time – why didn’t they think of this before?’ Classic Dr Watson, really.
Reading John’s book puts my end-user experience into a quite different perspective. He draws for us the elaborate landscape of intellectual achievement that made those technological shifts possible. As users, people like me are only interested in the ‘ends’ – which John describes as ‘chic, cool, interesting’, – but this book is about the means – ‘mundane, uncool, routine’, as John characterises them. And part of his thesis is that these stories of the means by which engineers go through the means to arrive at our ends. They are fascinating human stories of passion and risk and enthusiasm and brilliant insight. And they are wonderful stories.
But there is another, subtler thesis, that is an enduring theme throughout the book, and it’s this that relates to Ray’s book. It’s the democratisation of innovation I referred to - perhaps it is too clumsy a phrase, but it refers to a common thread that runs through so many of these stories behind the inventions. It’s how, for so many of these innovations, there is a community at work there, which operates differently from the norm. It’s there in the story of how Licklider shifted ARPA from being a military department into being an information processing research operation. Doing that, he laid the foundations for interactive computing and time-sharing systems. The way he did this was to fund very clever people to do what they wanted. It was the kind of anarchic, distributed, interactive system he created that made the invention possible. There was a vision that provided the framework, but it was emphatically not a line-managed programme of work that made the progress.
And it’s there in the account of the Linux development. The conditions that made it possible to produce this phenomenally impressive system were: the prerequisite that source code be freely available, that contributors communicate collaboratively, and that they all benefit from making their contribution. ‘Democratisation’ doesn’t quite cover it, and John’s description of the whole process as operating like a ‘gift culture’ is closer to it. It is something that is completely alien to the way in which research agencies and carefully managed organisations operate. But it does fit the kind of second-order R&D description that Ray’s book offers – it is a self-organising, self-improving system of co-operating individuals. That’s what makes it successful.
So both books, for me, have lessons well beyond their immediate subjects, of agricultural development and the Internet.
Perhaps that’s in the nature of the systems discipline. These books will both find their way into our courses, I have no doubt, and both will contribute not just to agriculture and technology, but also to the systems discipline itself.
I hope John’s book will find its way into Technology’s most popular course, T171, to which he is also a key contributor. It is just what the subject of the Net needs, because it is completely free of the extravagant claims that we get so tired of reading about. I think this is the only piece of writing about the internet I have ever read that does not contain the word ‘vast’ – I’d like to know, for sure, but I really think it doesn’t!
John says in his Acknowledgement that I tried to save him from sentimentality. If that’s true, it was a bad mistake. Not that I would call this a sentimental book. It’s a passionate book. And that’s the charm of John’s writing: that he can be writing about ‘packet-switching’ and yet invest it with the beauty and simplicity of the idea, and convey the excitement of the intellectual achievement it represents.
It’s a wonderful book – I’m sure you’ve all read it, I don’t need to exhort you to read it, but I would like you to join me in congratulating him – on a terrific achievement.
Diana Laurillard
Now, we have to give the author’s the right of reply. Ray, can we ask you first, and then David and then John?
Professor Ray Ison
Well, I’ll try and be brief because I’d enjoy a glass of wine. Thank you Michel. I appreciate your challenge because it invites me into a conversation and I think that is the essence of what our book is about. It is an invitation to participate in a particular type of conversation. I’m not going to try and address all of the issues that you raise and the challenges here. I’d like to pick them up with you and I’d certainly like to discuss some of them with other people as we go on. I’m going to confine myself to a couple of points and a few thank you’s. I think what is particularly apposite to this occasion is that ten years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting in an office in the Netherlands, and received – in those days the only way of international contact was through faxes – a fax from David which was about the process of developing this research proposal which Michel spoke about. It was about constructing the language to get the grant in the first instance to do what we really wanted to do and I guess its an indication of how long some of these cycles of learning take to come full circle. Here we are ten years later and the book is finally here. It’s a great joy to see it and to have you here to celebrate it’s launch. So thank you for coming and thank you for accepting the invitation, I hope you will stay around and drink and talk afterwards. It is particularly pleasing that David is able to come across from Australia to join us for the launch because it has been an important collaborative journey between the two of us. We’ve had our moments of conflict, lots of emotion, lots of learning and a much stronger friendship as a result of it all. And a friendship that I value greatly. I’d like to thank Andy Lane Head of the Systems discipline and Mary McVay for facilitating this particular event, and for putting the organisation into it. And my secretary Pat Shah. To Diana and Michel for opting to take the roles that they have in this. I thank them too. I’d like to thank the publishers, Alan, Katrina particularly and Maria, who’s not here, from Cambridge who’ve been on this journey of getting a book out, which is not always a straight forward journey. I’m very pleased that Diana picked up the synergies between John’s book and ours. If I were to pick up the main synergy I think it’s the notion of enthusiasm, of creating the context to foster enthusiasm. John’s book I know, having read chapters of it, both embodies the passion and enthusiasm that he has for his subject. We share, as Diana has quite rightly pointed out, a trajectory which I would call the democratisation of technology, and the democratisation of learning. I think this interesting intellectual trajectory is something we could well benefit from discussing in other fora with regard to the future directions of the OU. I think the other connection that I really wanted to make between the two books is certainly, with John, is to acknowledge the role that our father’s played in the experiences which shaped the way we started to think about issues. Given that my father died earlier this year, I’m very sad that he wasn’t here to see this particular book launched. Finally, some more thank you’s. To my wife Catherine, and daughter Nicola who put up with all the vagaries of an absent father as he damaged his back at the computer. To my systems colleagues who bore the brunt of my intermittent absences when I attempted to finish this book after my stint as head of discipline. So thank you all and thank you Michel for your challenge.
Dr David Russell
I think Ray has done it. I don’t feel any great need to speak but I will just for a moment, just to give an image. The image of the book for me, and thank you Diana and Michel for your contributions, the image is of young parsifal leaving his mother in his homespun vest, leaving the hearth, and the book is very much homespun. It’s very much from the bottom up, it’s made of wool and it’s woven by the mother and it’s very close to the ground in a simple but not simplistic way. It’s very ambitious, as Michel said too, so there’s another side to it. It’s, as with the story of parsifal, he’s after the Holy grail. He doesn’t know that at the time and I’m trusting that our book will somehow brush against some bigger ideas and I think it’s got that potential. Hopefully it will. So that’s all. Thank you very much.
John Naughton (unedited)
I just want to say a few thank you’s. First of all to Diana for such a generous and it seems to me an over the top compliment to my book. I’d like to thank all of you for coming. I would just like to say a couple of things about writing the book. The first is that it made me into a kind schizophrenic because I had two kinds of parrots perched on my shoulder. On the one hand I have a friend and colleague in Cambridge, an American who used to work for Newsweek and has written several best selling books himself and he kept saying "come on boy, get this thing straight", you know "what kind of story is this" and he basically was encouraging me to write a kind of Bill Bryson book about the net. Like John Naughton goes into the net … and I had to explain to him in the end that I played no part in the development of this great system whatsoever and he looked crestfallen at that but his point was basically that if this was going to be a popular book it should be a bloody ‘well popular book’ and not one of these half-baked half-arsed academic works, and on the other hand perched on my shoulder I had my academic colleagues here – whom I love dearly, as you know – and the general sort of impression they had upon me was conveyed many years ago at summer school when I gave a lecture to a large audience at the summer school and there was spontaneous hooting and a standing ovation and clapping that went on for five minutes and so on, and I began to think maybe I’d cracked this lecturing stuff and as I was going out one of my colleagues from the systems department said "very good lecture" he said, "just the right number of half-truths", and that’s the kind of parrot I’ve had perched on my other shoulder. I wrote for three reasons. First of all I wanted to find out for myself where this technology came from because it’s surrounded as you know encrusted with myths and I wanted to try and sort that out. Secondly, I wanted to celebrate the people who built it. Mainly engineers. One of my great character deficiencies in the view of my colleagues is that I am myself an engineer. I can do nothing about that. I was too young to make an informed choice at the time. I’m a lecturer in systems which was defined by Alan Thomas, whom I’m glad to see is here, once, as operations research plus megalomania and Dick Morris contributed that I was the one in the department who specialised in megalomania. And the third reason I wrote the book was I wanted to communicate my own sense of wonder at this technology. Raymond Williams once said, I heard him say, talking about his father, "that he was the kind of person who, when switching on the light was always amazed that the light goes on", and I am one of those people. I am still amazed that I can pick up my phone, a mobile phone which is in my pocket and ring someone who is driving down a freeway in Santa Monica and then we can talk. I think that kind of thing is wonderful and I get enraged at the way in which people with IQs not reaching into the 20s working for national newspapers, despise and decry and patronise these kinds of technologies. These people have no idea what went into making this stuff. So in a sense I wrote the book mainly, if it turns out to be passionate rather than sentimental the reason was that I feel passionately about this. The net gives me things I would have killed for as a child and I watch my own children take it for granted. I watch them looking for web sites with steam engines on the net and not thinking about it and sometimes, like every upwardly mobile parent in history, I think these kids have no idea how lucky they are. And I think in a way society has no idea how lucky it is. Lastly, I’d like to say a couple of words about this institution because much of what I learned about this stuff, anything I know about it I learned here and I learned mainly from the people in this room. I had an e-mail account from 1970. It was then courtesy of Cambridge University, the other institution to which I belong. My user ID at Cambridge is JJN1. There are no others. There may be a JJN2 but I was the first. From 1975 I had e-mail from home and I had that e-mail because the OU was the kind of institution it was. We were the first university in the country, for example, certainly in Europe, to give access to time-share systems on a distributed and geographically dispersed basis to undergraduates. We did that in 1971. So this was a great institution to be in if you were interested in this technology and it gave me most of my insights into it. Everything I learned I learned here from my colleagues and that’s why I am very pleased to see you here. Thank you for coming. The last thing I wanted to say I’m also very pleased that Toby Mundy, my publisher is here. Toby Mundy, in my opinion ought to be shot, stuffed and preserved. The reason for that is that he is the only known example to me of a person in the media business with principals. He used to work for Harper Collins, which as you know is an off-shoot of Mr Rupert Murdock and when Mr Murdock decided that Chris Patten’s memoirs, which Toby and his team were working on was going to be too inconvenient for his business interests in China he decided that perhaps the book was a mistake and at that point a number of publisher’s from Harper Collins of which Toby was one simply said OK, that’s it, we walk. Not many people do that in the business and it was very nice to have him as an editor. So thank you Toby for coming. Thank you very much for coming, and I hope the foods as good as the speeches.
Diana Laurillard
It just remains for me to add my thanks and to wind up the formal proceedings and to encourage further conversation, participation, iteration and eating, there’s a lot of food there. So thanks again. Thank you.