Jackie Danicki

I’m quoting, with her permission, something I spotted my friend Adriana saying on a mailing list. (The recent mailing list renaissance is something I want to blog about soon - can you stand the suspense?) It’s the kind of thing I wish was understood and accepted by, oh, everyone. But just a fraction of the people working in and on the web could make a big difference if they grokked this:

I live on the Web. Which ‘lives’ on the Internet. Which is a decentralised network. Silos don’t work in such an environment and never will. It may take time but, all things being equal, the network should dissolve silos by making them increasingly by-passable and irrelevant.

For my part, I’d like to make sure that a) all things do remain equal (see network neutrality and other telco induced battles) and that b) the process is speeded up as much as possible.

There is no reason why I as an individual can’t be a platform, in other words, a valid, independent and functional node in the network, rather than a profile page in someone else’s silo. In fact, that’s much more ‘native’ to the internet and its workings than the large platforms that we currently depend on for our data and functionality for it. And please don’t get me started on the current interpretation of the ‘cloud’ (as in ‘cloud computing’)…

The silo-less world is not a fantasy - it is a consequence of a networked environment working its way through industrial age mental models (in which scale by aggregation rather than by distribution has an upper hand).

Still too slow for my taste, but one can’t have everything…

Emphasis mine, accuracy Adriana’s.

Filed under: Life