chris horn's blog

One of the easiest people to meet if you ever attended an annual UNICEF conference of the fund raising National Committees somewhere on the planet, was Dr. Robert Fung. This wonderful gentle unassuming man, with his positive and tireless warmth after a lengthy day of endless presentations and discussions, was everyone's friend. If this was your very first annual conference, Robert would be sure to approach you, introduce himself and crack a wry joke with a gentle smile, all the time making you feel as if you - like he - had been part of the UNICEF family for years. Robert loved his work with children, he loved people, he loved his work as an accomplished paediatrician (having degrees from both Harvard and McGill), he loved his work as a successful businessman, he loved Hong Kong, and he loved his work with UNICEF. He reached out to everyone, and quietly understood the functioning of the UNICEF machine. If you felt lost in the scale of UNICEF's operations around the planet, UNICEF's awful acronyms, UNICEF's extensive programmes, UNICEF's subtle machinations, and UNICEF's global organisation, Robert, with his wonderful mop of silver hair and warm face stood out, and he'ld give you a great big hello. You now belonged to the UNICEF international family.

Robert sadly passed away peacefully in Hong Kong last friday. He founded UNICEF's fund raising operations in Hong Kong in the mid 1980's, and was its Chairman until his untimely death. He devoted so much of his time and energy to raising the profile of UNICEF amongst the people of Hong Kong, including the business community and of course the regional government. His was the public face of UNICEF in Hong Kong, a well known fatherly figure working endlessly for children.

Farewell, Robert: I didn't know you well, but I knew you enough to know that you improved the lives of so many children, and their mothers, and meant so much to so many people. Your passing will be mourned not just in Hong Kong but across the world.

The text below is an invited talk that I gave this morning to a symposium organised by the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals - the heads of primary and secondary (high) schools of Ireland, and their deputies.

My goal was to encourage the teaching profession in Ireland to seize the initiative, and help themselves to help their colleagues. In these very challenging fiscal times in Ireland, it seems clear to me that our Department of Education and Science will not have the fiscal capability to lead, and so leadership must be bottom-up, indigenous and community based - which, in my mind, is at the core of the ethos of the internet.

If you are a technologist yourself, please forgive my poetic license below in categorising some web sites and technologies - I am trying to explain essential characteristics in laymens', non-technical, terms.

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"The ancient Masters didn't try to educate the people, but patiently taught them to not-know. When they think they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can then find their way"--- from Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" - the Book of the Way.

Teaching is about not-knowing. Educating is about fostering self-awareness. Learning is about finding.

Being an educator is one of the most privileged professions. In knowing herself, an educator imprints on the next generation a way to understand themselves and thus to find their way.

I went to Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, finishing in 1974. John Harris, who introduced the Transition year project to Ireland, was my Mathematics teacher throughout my time in secondary school. Derek West likewise taught me in English classes for six years. Dr John de Courcy Ireland taught me History, and also French. I was so fortunate to have many further fine teachers - Derek Langran, Chris Sealy, Roy Rohu, Bob Weatherill and many others. And I believe in every case, all those years ago, I viewed each of these teachers as a prime source of information and knowledge. They knew, and I didn't.

Today, I think many of us accept that the situation has irrevocably changed. Teachers are of course still fine people, but many students no longer accept their teachers as the prime source of information and knowledge. The internet, and in particular Google, is now the primary way to find out and learn. Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia, to which I will later return - is a chief reference and authority. Twitter - an online headline broadcast service - is a rapid access to what's happening. Facebook and Bebo - online social communities - are a quick way to find and share what's cool. Youtube - an online video clip service - is a quick way to humour. iTunes - an online music and "podcasting" service - is a quick way to music and interesting interviews.

Ten years ago, I used to worry about the 'digital divide' -- that the wealthy had access to the internet, and those of limited means did not. I remember the Ennis Information Age project in which we asked ourselves what would happen if an entire community was trained on how to use a PC and had access to the internet. Over the last decade I believe that, in Ireland at least, there is considerably greater uptake and affordable access to the internet, compared to some of those countries I have experienced through my work with UNICEF. There are of course still digitally impoverished communities in Ireland, but the situation is improving. The convergence of mobile phone technology with broadband internet access, is a further catalyst.

Now I worry, maybe unnecessarily, about the digital divide of the generations. Most of us know how to book an airline seat online. Most of us know how to send an email, or access our bank account. But how many of us know how to upload a video to Youtube, or to make a podcast, or how to contribute to the wisdom of the crowd ? Meanwhile, for the younger generation there is no divide between virtual reality and the real world: for them this would be an unnecessary and unnatural distinction, and for them the internet is an intrinsic part of the real world as much as the telephone, the radio or even the weather.

Therefore today, what role should a teacher and educator now play ? It's now clear to many students that their teachers don't know as much about their chosen subject as Google does. It's also clear to many students that traditional classroom teaching isn't particularly interesting or stimulating. Instead, on the internet, you can quickly browse from headline to headline, quickly learn, quickly find out what's happening, quickly participate and quickly share with your friends and community. It's not that today's students have attention deficit, and are incapable of absorption or focus: on the contrary, they immerse themselves deeply - for hours sometimes - in what they find interesting, such as specific games and challenges. The difference today is that students have found a way - the internet - to so much more easily quickly find out what is really interesting, and to rapidly filter out and discard what is mundane.

So, as educators and technologists, what should we do ? How together can we change Ireland ?

One thing we must of course continue to do is to challenge students' understanding - the old "compare and contrast" technique which Derek West drummed into me. No single source of information should be taken as definitive, including Wikipedia. How easy it is today for example to instantly compare the front pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, but also for example the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Los Angeles Times!

One thing I personally strongly believe that we cannot do, is wait and expect our Government and the apparatus of the State to help us. From where we stand today, it is pretty clear that the State has a rapidly diminishing capability to invest in education. With a ballooning national budget deficit, the worst thing we can now do is to fold our arms, sit back, and wait for some fiscally impotent Minister of Education to put together some study on what on earth should be done; then perhaps sometime put a computer and broadband link in front of every single student in every classroom; ensure that there is support and maintenance for all those machines; and put all of our educators through continued professional education on computer use. Ladies and Gentlemen, from where I stand, this just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So, we have two challenges: (1) how to get all of our professional teachers conversant and confident with the latest internet technologies; (2) even if we achieve the first challenge, how do we make teaching relevant in today's internet world where the teacher in general knows little and Google knows everything ? Let me address both challenges with the same solution.

One of the key points about the internet is that it is self-creating and self-sustaining. It is bottom-up, a community phenomenon. In the early days of the internet, you could connect your computer for free to the mesh of computers already in the network, but only if you were then prepared to let others - even strangers - use your computer to in turn connect theirs into the mesh. The world wide web came about by a bunch of physicists devising their own way to better share their scientific results, and then sharing their new way with anyone else interested. The ethos of the internet is sharing, "bottom-up". So let me talk to you about the technology underpinning wikipedia.

Perhaps some of you have a jaundiced view of wikipedia. It has replaced the Encyclopedia Britannica - which my parents encouraged me to consult in Blackrock library as the definitive source of knowledge. But some educators, and I do understand, question its accuracy and are concerned that students may place an unnecessary over-reliance on its authority. We should always compare and contrast.

But allow me to distinguish between wikipedia - the web site - and a wiki - the technology on which wikipedia is based. Wikipedia is but one example of a wiki, and there are many others. The basic technology of a wiki is free - zero cost - as result of Ward Cunningham's work in the 1990s. A wiki is a web site in which not only can anyone read its content, but anyone can also edit the content. At first this sounds extraordinary - what prevents somebody from editing accurate content and defacing it ? In fact, the answer is nothing, and defacement happens - however, the wiki keeps a record of who edited what, and what was the previous version (and the previous version to that and so on). Anarchists and political pundits can quickly be identified by the community of readers, isolated from the wiki so that the wiki refuses to accept any further edits from these rogues, and the maverick changes made by these fraudsters are quickly unwound.

The consequence is that the community of bona-fide contributors work together to make the wiki better and better, capturing the best inputs from everyone, and discarding the weaker edits. The system becomes Darwinian - the best survives, the weakest is dropped. A wiki thus captures the "wisdom of the crowd" - the collective wisdom of a community of readers and contributors.

If you Google on the topic of wikis and teaching, you will see some articles about how some teachers elsewhere in the world (I couldn't find any from Ireland) are experimenting with the use of wikis within the classroom, to encourage a class of students to work together on group projects. We can of course adopt this idea here in Ireland, but I have a broader suggestion to make to you.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you are a community. Your professional teaching colleagues are another larger community, to which you also belong. Why not use wiki technology to address the two challenges - digital confidence amongst your community, and enhanced teaching ?

I do make the assumption that the vast majority of you and your teaching colleagues already have access to the internet (not necessarily in your schools but at home or elsewhere), and know the rudimentaries for example on how to book an airline ticket online. To contribute to, or to just read, a wiki you do not need needlessly complicated tools like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint or some such. Instead, you use any internet browser: editting is done using the browser itself and very simple controls. In fact, by examining a wiki, you can quickly see how other contributors have achieved the layout and presentation of the wiki, and simply copy their styling. If you know how to start a computer, connect to the internet and launch an internet browser, then you really need only learn very little more to be able to read and to contribute to a wiki.

I then envisage a new wiki (not Wikipedia!) created by some of you and your teaching colleagues which starts to capture the wisdom inherent in the national community of teachers in Ireland on how to get the best out of the internet, and out of internet trends (such as podcasting..), for teaching students in Irish schools. Such a wiki would then potentially help every teacher in Ireland. I envisage another new wiki that some of you, and/or some of your teaching colleagues, create on experiences, and best practice, of engaging classroom experiences in Irish schools. Such a wiki would then further help every teacher in Ireland.

I envisage another wiki, created by some of your mathematics teachers, on each topic within the Higher Level Leaving Certificate Mathematics syllabus, not only explaining each such topic but illustrating it from real world examples from applications in society and science as to how that particular mathematical technique can be beneficially used. I envisage another wiki, created by some of our Irish history teaching colleagues, on each topic within the Junior Certificate History syllabus, not only laying out each such topic but explaining its consequences on Irish society and culture.

I envisage many wikis, one for each syllabus in Irish schools, through which both experienced and neophyte teachers alike of that syllabus can share with each other nationwide the best ideas and experiences.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my proposition to you is that in todays fiscal environment, it is unrealistic to expect much help anymore from the State. Instead there is a huge wealth of competence and wisdom within your own community, and it really would not take very much for you to work together to help all of your interests.

In the business world of global companies, such as IONA was, great emphasis is placed on team work, and ensuring that every member of a global organisation contributes to and benefits from the collective wisdom of the staff: domain experts share their knowledge and skills so as the whole company benefits. The commercial world for which we are preparing the vast bulk of our young people is one in which team work abounds. In the world of education, perhaps the current fiscal position of our State can be a catalyst for change, an impetus to encourage sharing amongst education professionals what is the very best.

A wiki is a community self-help tool. Best of all, a wiki can be created by anyone, by any small group of like-minded professionals, at any time. It does not require a mandate from a Government, a Minister, a Trade Union, or even the NAPD! It is a "bottom-up" tool, deep from within the community itself. A wiki can just emerge pretty much overnight, and regardless of any national agenda and policy: it just needs bona fide like-minded professionals.

Be wary of educating people, but instead teach them to not-know and hence to find out. When people think they already know the answers, they become difficult to guide. When people know that they don't know, they can find their way. One of the best ways is to ask and share with others. That is what the internet is all about.

Friday, july 18^th next is Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday.

In UNICEF Ireland, we’re celebrating his birthday by inviting everyone to send him a birthday card. We’re very grateful to the Sunday Times newspaper which next Sunday (6^th) will be including a birthday postcard, which you can then use to fill out with a greeting, and post in to us. There are also a number of volunteers and retail outlets around Ireland handing out the postcards. We’re also extremely grateful to An Post, who have very kindly offered to carry the cards free not only in Ireland, but also in bulk when we send them all on to his home in South Africa. Finally, there is an online version of the card which you can also use.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation has been a partner in the “Schools For Africa” campaign with UNICEF and the German philanthropist Peter Kramer, via his Hamburg Society for the Promotion of Democracy and International Law. Schools for Africa is catalyzing basic education across Africa, with an emphasis on girls, orphans and vulnerable children. Schools are being renovated or re-built, educational materials are being provided, and teachers being trained. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I visited a number of schools in Kigali earlier this year: both those which have been receiving UNICEF aid, and those which do not yet have the “child friendly” designation.

I remember when I was a student studying in Dublin in the 1980s, twelve staff at Dunnes Stores supermarkets, led by Vonnie Munroe and Mary Manning and under instructions from their trade union, IDATU, went on strike for two and a half years to protest against the importation of produce from South Africa during the anti-apartheid era. Vonnie could not keep up payments on her home, on her strike pay, and was forced to leave it. On June 18^th – just three weeks ago – a plaque was unveiled by the Minister of Foreign Affairs as a permanent feature outside the Dunnes Stores shop on Henry Street in the centre of Dublin, to remember the stand taken by the staff. Mary Manning has met Nelson Mandela, and also has had a street in Johannesburg named after her.

In 1958, the ruling National Party in South Africa, chose Hendrik Verwoerd (note that name…) as its new prime minister. He believed that the solution to the challenges which faced the country at the time was the complete separation of the black and white populations and, further, the division of the black population into ethnic groups or ‘nations’. He unveiled his master plan in 1959, positioning South Africa as a ‘multi-national state’ with separate homelands for eight black ‘nations’. In the same year, the African National Congress, founded back in 1912, suffered a split as the core ANC, including Mandela, pursued a multi-racial holistic South Africa; and the Pan-Africanist Congress demanded a ‘government of the Africans, by the Africans, and for the Africans’. In Sharpeville, a black township fifty miles south of Johannesburg, in March 1960, police opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd of PAC supporters, killing 69 and wounding 186. Using emergency powers, Verwoerd then banned, and cracked down upon, both the PAC and ANC. In July 1962, Mandela was arrested two weeks after having being surreptitiously abroad for six months.

Mandela was found guilty the following November of two charges, of inciting workers to illegally strike, and of leaving the country without valid documentation. He was subsequently charged in October 1963 under the Sabotage Act, which carried the death penalty. He conducted his own defence, and gave a lengthy, impassioned and widely reported speech to mitigate his sentence: he was sentenced to life imprisonment on the 12^th June 1964.

In March 1980. the Soweto newspaper The Post started a campaign to demand Mandela’s release, as a symbol of the anti-apartheid movement and in the light of riots and the repression that had followed. Probably millions of people around the world at the time frankly had little idea who exactly Mandela was, but the momentum against apartheid was building, and he became one of the most famous prisoners in the world. While still in Pollsmoor prison (having been moved from Robben Island in 1982), Mandela made several proposals to meet with the then president PW Botha to break the deadlock that had stagnated South Africa, both economically and socially. They eventually held a highly secret meeting in Tuynhuys, Cape Town, which was the president’s official residence: that meeting was 19 years ago tomorrow, the 5^th July.

Six weeks later, PW Botha resigned after friction with his cabinet colleagues. His successor, FW de Klerk, under pressure from international governments, but also calculating that the ANC was poorly organized and that he could form a winning alliance with conservative black organizations, lifted the ban on the ANC in February 1990, and released Mandela from prison on the 11^th of that month.

In April 1994, during the first national, and fully democratic, elections, the ANC won a national majority and Mandela became president. However a year earlier, the grand-daughter-in-law of the instigator of apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd (remember him from above?..), Melanie Verwoerd, had been invited by Nelson Mandela to stand as a candidate in the first democratic elections in South Africa. Melanie was duly elected as an ANC Member of Parliament. She was the youngest woman member ever to be elected to the South African Parliament.

Melanie today is the Executive Director of UNICEF here in Ireland.

So, in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 90^th birthday, and due to Melanie’s initiative in celebrating the event, please fill out and post the birthday postcard, either physically via next Sunday’s Sunday Times, or virtually on the web.

The crisis in Myanmar after cyclone Nargis of May 2^nd last is critical. There have been at least 21,000 causalities, with – at the time of writing – some 40,000 people still unaccounted for. The catastrophic damage to infrastructure, including transportation, water, shelter and food immediately threatens even more.

I personally would concur with those who are concerned for human rights issues in Myanmar, and some of the policies and actions of the Myanmar Government. But an emergency situation is not the same as a longer term development initiative: in my view, a solid, democratic government should never be, and rarely in practice is, a pre-condition to emergency relief.

UNICEF has been on the ground in Myanmar since 1950. It currently has 9 offices in addition to its headquarters in Yangon. We currently have 170 UNICEF staff on the ground nationwide. Aid given via UNICEF goes directly to the people of Myanmar.

When the structures of a civil society are weak, when poverty is widespread and governance leaves issues to be resolved, the need in an emergency is even greater.

Delay and procrastination will cause further, and avoidable, deaths in Myanmar. The response to the 2005 south east Asian tsunami was immediate, and indisputably saved lives which would otherwise have been lost in the chaotic aftermath. In the case of the tsunami response, and now in the case of Myanmar, in-country pre-disaster stockpiles of emergency response materials by UNICEF and other major global organizations are critical. Replenishing those supplies is vital. Rapid reaction by the host government, including issuing visas to overseas nationals, is equally essential.

In my view, it is irresponsible, morally inexcusable and potentially murderous to delay.

The leader of the Irish agency Goal made certain statements today broadcast nationwide in Ireland by the national radio organization. Goal fundamentally is an excellent organization, and indeed UNICEF frequently partners with Goal in targeted projects in those developing countries in which Goal actually has a credible presence.

But I am disappointed by the comments today from Goal, which frankly were ill-conceived, factually incorrect and morally dangerous.

If the Board of Goal really sincerely believes that the Government of Myanmar does not care for millions of its own people, can the Board and wonderful staff of Goal still nevertheless sleep comfortably at night just letting people die, when practical assistance is possible and desperately sought ?

What moral right can an aid organization justify telling the people of Ireland to deny the people of Myanmar, to not join with the international community in responding to the plea for help, and to instead just allow people to die in the aftermath of Nargis ?

I spent last week in Rwanda, as Chair of UNICEF Ireland, bringing some of our individual donors to see our work with children.

It was my first visit to Rwanda, and I was incredibly impressed by the sheer beauty of the place. It is a small country, almost the size of Ireland, and like Ireland extremely green and lush. The scenery is stunning: Kigali, the capital (of “mille collines”, a thousand hills), is built amongst hills and valleys; Gisenyi near the border with Congo is on the shores of the spectacular Lake Kivu; and we finished amongst the Virunga volcanoes near the border with Uganda. Bluegum, sugar cane, eucalyptus trees and vegetables and flowers are abundant in the fertile soil. Three languages are predominant, with most people multi-lingual: Kinyarwanda, French and English.

In preparation for my trip, I had read Dervla Murphy’s own account of her visit in 1997, and I was very keen to see what changes had occurred since then.

The entire country is pristine. I saw no litter anywhere whatsoever, and no graffiti. Plastic bags are illegal, and I had been warned in advance that customs officials will confiscate them from your luggage on arrival. One Saturday morning each month, the entire nation – including its politicians – take part in community service, umuganda, which traditionally was a form of labour, as opposed to financial, tax: as I saw last Saturday morning, each community goes to work on maintaining the local paths, tracks, water infrastructure and so on.

The parallels with us here in Ireland seem remarkable, except perhaps a different view in Ireland of pervasive tidiness, purity and social commitment. Like us a few decades ago, Rwanda is a wonderful country with incredibly friendly people, in a green oasis of rural agriculture, and an under-developed but potentially services-led economy. Gisenyi is a concealed haven, right on the Congolese border beside Goma, but at our hotel we saw an internationally very well known US film star, and Bill Gates is also rumoured to be a periodic visitor.

The population of Rwanda is 9m, with only about 23% urban. The main roads pretty much everywhere have people walking along both sides of them – it needed steady nerves from our UNICEF driver to ensure that nobody was hit. The main roads are tarmaced, but potholed, and almost all side roads are heavily rutted dirt tracks. On one bruising 20km drive along one to visit a school, I had the chance to ride a gicugutu: a scooter, made entirely of wood – the frame and the wheels - great fun, if exhausting.

The five year term of Paul Kagame since 2003 has seen the economy grow 44% to 2.4Bn$ (2006 figure), with growth of 4.5%-6.5% expected for 2007. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda is just 3%, very low compared to some other nations, and due in part to the strong educational and health programmes of the government. There are elections next autumn, and from what I learnt, Kagame is a highly popular leader even if sometimes controversial internationally in the aftermath of the genocide.

Re-integration of society since the genocide of 1994 has clearly been painful and every citizen was affected by what happened. It was surreal to visit and have a drink in the bar of the Hotel des Mille Collines in central Kigali, an apparently perfectly normal international hotel but also Hotel Rwanda. Each April, there is a one week of national mourning, in memory of the start of the events of 1994. I naturally took the opportunity to talk quietly to individuals, and heard their personal stories and how they have dealt with the situation. One of the key national educational issues is how to explain what happened to the young Rwandans who have been borne since 1994: how do you explain to young teenagers what the adults around them – including their teachers - did and experienced just 14 years ago ?

On this particular trip, the focus was primarily on education (as opposed to e.g. HIV/AIDS for which I have visited other African nations before). UNICEF worldwide has a programme of what are called “child friendly schools” – a term which I personally find strange since it implies that other schools are “child unfriendly”, but there is a certain logic. Child friendly schools generally have better staff/student ratios, sports facilities, teacher training, re-integration of orphans and challenged children, and in particular are safe locations for girls – separate latrine facilities for example. Attendance rates, and completion rates, in child friendly schools are generally excellent. In Rwanda, the target staff-student ratio is 1:55 (as opposed to nearly double that historically). Sports facilities – like soccer, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics – are very helpful in re-integration of orphans and vulnerable children into the normal society of their peers.

We visited both child friendly and as yet un-refurbished schools. A child friendly school is used as a centre point for a cluster of schools within a district, with teachers at the centre training those from the periphery. The contrast in terms of fit-out were obvious: concrete floors instead of mud; desks instead of benches; good sanitation and separate latrines; rain proof roofs; rain water collection tanks, and so on. The far better attendance by girls in child friendly schools was conspicuous as we visited classes.

We also visited child headed households, which I had experienced in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Zambia on previous trips. I was invited into the home of a 14 year old girl, who ran the household for her three younger siblings with support from UNICEF. Her extended family had been killed in the genocide. Her eyes carried a deep sadness which will haunt me for some time. In the schools we visited – of both categories – there were between one third and one half of the children like her and her siblings who had been orphaned and were vulnerable. Attending school, and getting younger siblings educated, is clearly an enormous challenge when so many domestic issues – including in particular food – pre-occupy teenage-led families.

Paul Kagame hosts a national childrens summit on an annual basis, over two days which are also nationally broadcast. Childrens issues are high on the national political agenda and UNICEF is a valuable partner.

For me, UNICEF is a wonderful organization and I occasionally surprise myself with deep awe, respect, sadness and hope – and yes, from time to time, tears. IMHO, to make a difference we really do need global organizations with scale and impact. UNICEF eradicated polio across the planet: I’m not convinced that many other organizations could have done this. It is not just about emergency relief but also about development of nations. I understand that a well known Irish national NGO has recently decided to cease any development activities and focus solely on emergency relief: while this is perhaps understandable given their limited scale, it has left projects abandoned with funding suddenly stopped, and with organizations like UNICEF then having to step in at short notice to pick up the shattered pieces. Development requires sustained, multi-year long term commitment: a “spray and pray” strategy is immature. Sometimes smaller NGOs suddenly abandon a country, as a response to strife, and in some cases – despicably – pull out their white staff, leaving other staff to their fate: UNICEF continues for example in Kenya and indeed Melanie Verwoerd, our UNICEF Ireland Director, had been in Kenya just the previous week – she was interviewed live from Kenya on the Gerry Ryan show amongst others. Sometimes, as an emergency relief response, smaller NGOs have difficulties working where they have no track record: at the time of the Asian tsunami in 2004, smaller NGOs reputedly turned up at Jakarta on short term tourist visas. The Indonesian government came under some entirely misplaced media criticism here in Ireland and elsewhere at the time: but on the ground the Indonesian authorities had long established operations with UNICEF and the Red Cross and handled the crisis well with military efficiency.

We visited, on our first morning, the Kigali Memorial Centre, where there are mass graves for 250,000 people. We laid three wreathes on the graves, and spent several hours inside the centre itself. Apart from the Rwandan story, including its impact on children, the remaining third of the centre is devoted to other genocides, including the Nazi and former Yugoslavia genocides in Europe. Let me leave you with one of the quotes carved outside the centre:

“In a search for a hideout, I found Jerome, his legs cut off. I could not leave him in this state. I tried to lift up Jerome so that we could leave together, but the car of the commune stopped near me. It was full of machetes and other instruments of death. I lay Jerome down on the ground and ran because a man got out of the burgomaster’s car to kill me. He finished Jerome off. I saw this when I looked back to see if anyone had followed me. I will never forget the way Jerome’s face was filled with desperation. Whenever I think about it, I cry all day long.”

Eric, 13

In the spring of 1994, approximately one million Rwandans were brutally and savagely murdered. But, as the Memorial Centre says, what really happened was not a million murders but first of all, one extremely violent and brutal one. The loss of a beautiful human life. And then, another was done. And then, incredibly, a third. And then a fourth. And on and on and on, relentlessly, on over a million separate individual occasions.

PS: if you are really really interested, there are some photos here.

Some news snippets from some of the things I'm involved with:

Cloudsmith

An upgrade to the web site at www.cloudsmith.com – more features, particularly so that you can easily map your own repository, better documentation. The site is generating considerable interest in both the open source community, and some commercial firms seeking interesting new ways to distribute and support their software.

Note that the next major release of the Eclipse development environment – the Ganymede release - will be built using Buckminster: the team behind Buckminster also have built Cloudsmith, as I discussed in some earlier posts..

Science Gallery

Opening in Feburary next, with the LIGHTWAVE festival and showcase, and getting some good coverage eg in Nature and the Irish Times recently. Watch the blog at www.sciencegallery.org for further news and announcements.

UNICEF

A great new video at http://www.youtube.com/user/UNICEFIreland - featuring Irish children with Irish celebrities Andrea Corr, Colin Farrell, Marian Finucane, Stephen Rea and Ryan Tubridy. Our UNICEF colleagues in the US Fund produced a similar (US centric) video last year, and the Irish National Committee have borrowed their idea, with permission.

“Every single child deserves to live”.

Ammado
Their web site is now live at www.ammado.com I first mentioned Ammado and their CEO Anna Kupka earlier this year. Actually, I'm not directly involved in Ammado, but know the senior team and are very excited by what they're doing.

An entirely new way of thinking about social networking is imminent...

"Creating heros.."

How do you change an entire nation ?

It’s a topical and fascinating discussion to have over a coffee, and clearly is preoccupying a number of people right now. You may be aware elsewhere from this blog that I have been a frequent visitor to China since 2000: the incredible social shepherding of this enormous nation must be one of human history’s extraordinary moments. I found George Packer’s book on the American administration’s work in Iraq both entirely credible and frightening. My trip to KwaZulu Natal province in South Africa last November with UNICEF brought home to me the frustration of a nation challenged to put its wealth and talent to work in rebuilding after a brutal regime. Closer to home, it is intriguing to watch the recent developments in Northern Ireland as Ian Paisley of the DUP and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein sit down together to form a devolved government.

Changing an entire enterprise IT infrastructure should not be as demanding as changing an entire nation, but sometimes I’m sure some of us wonder. The introduction of a Service Oriented Architecture, and the management of a Service Oriented Architecture, at enterprise scale, and almost certainly globally, gives justifiable cause for reflection.

As you may have seen if you follow IONA, we announced our first product in the SOA repository and registry sector last week. While some observers expressed strong interest, nevertheless certain others believed that IONA is entering a somewhat crowded space, with various other existing pure play and bundled repository/registry products already out there.

The essential difference, IMHO, between a SOA repository and a SOA registry is in fact largely historical, and most vendors in the space – including now IONA – offer a combination. A SOA registry is (traditionally) used to register WSDL interface definitions and to catalogue available services which implement particular interfaces. It is particularly useful at development time to guide software engineers to discover and re-use existing definitions. A SOA repository is (again, traditionally) a runtime store in which certain meta-data about WSDL interfaces and services, and certain governance policies, are recorded, and made available for interrogation by applications and by the underlying middleware substrate.

In a SOA environment, the distinction between a development time phase and a runtime phase is arguably a little artificial – and as a result, the industry is moving to the combination of repository and registry functions within the same products. A new service is evolved over its lifetime within the SOA, and must both be designed and maintained within the context of other operational services. Certainly, a new service must be deployed with care, adequate testing, and appropriate “sand-boxing” so that it does not disrupt the operations of other services; but equally it cannot be developed completely in isolation to the operational effectiveness of the current system. SOA systems are inherently loosely coupled, and thus full testing of the interdependency between services usually ultimately happens carefully in an operational setting.

The governance of SOA systems is a key theme of the vendors – again, including IONA – in this space. Combined registry and repository products are positioned as assisting the judicious management of both the development and operation of a SOA. No doubt “SOA governance” has been chosen carefully as a catchphrase by the SOA industry, resonating as it does in some business executives’ minds against the backdrop of Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent corporate legislation worldwide.

The pragmatic challenge for any SOA architect concerned about the governance of enterprise systems is of course that governance policy mechanisms are almost certainly already widely fragmented across the entire software system. Some policy mechanisms may already be embedded in application code and business logic. Some are in stored procedures, relating to the probity of particular databases and their data management applications. Some are described by business processes, and orchestrated by business process engines. And now, SOA registry/repository vendors come along and pitch “SOA governance” using their respective products.

In a SOA system, how do you implement policy ? How do you affect changes in policy ?

Let’s return for just a second to the analogy of governing a sovereign state. There is both the integrity of the state, and strategic management of it, to consider. By integrity, I mean both a legal framework by which the state operates, including an appropriate set of laws, perhaps set against the framework of a constitution; and an appropriate enforcement mechanism by which the state and its citizens can reasonably assured that laws are obeyed. By strategic management, I mean the set of policies – laws but also fiscal and other incentives - which the state chooses to adopt to, for example, grow its economy, educate its children and its citizens, and care for the health of its population. However, strategic management cannot occur unless the fundamental integrity of the state is assured; equally, an assurance of integrity alone does not necessarily lead to the long term economic and social success of a nation.

From this analogy, I believe it may be useful to draw a distinction between the integrity of a SOA system, and the business policies and processes chosen to be implemented using it. I believe that integrity should be defined and enforced using a “SOA Guardian” – I deliberately introduce a new term – whilst business policy implementation is rightly the domain of business process engines and orchestration.

Interestingly, business process mechanization and SOA service orchestration has probably been given more attention, priority and emphasis, by the SOA industry at large than SOA integrity issues. BPEL and WS-CDL are probably the best known business process mechanization initiatives, for which a number of process engines exist, including in open source form. Indeed, orchestrating business services defined using standardized interfaces is one of the key selling points of SOA, if not the very essence of SOA for some protagonists. Perhaps business process orchestration and choreography has had more attention than SOA integrity, since there may be a perception amongst SOA practitioners that line of business managers, and corporate executives, can relate most to corporate business process enhancements, rather than the more complex holistic concept of SOA.

But “salus populi suprema est lex”: Cicero said that the ultimate law is the welfare of the people. If the people are unwell, how they can they be governed ? If an enterprise system is impaired, what benefit is business process orchestration ?

“SOA Governance”, if it denotes anything at all, should encompass both SOA integrity and strategic management of business services orchestration: I believe that that is in fact what line of business managers, and corporate executives, expect from the SOA industry.

SOA integrity is a critical prerequisite to leveraging a SOA for business process orchestration. The boundary between the two is naturally dithered to produce effects which are actually not really of substance: business process orchestration can be overloaded to attempt to define and enforce integrity; integrity functions can be strained to implement business policy rules. In the spirit of lean software services, I argue however for a separation of concerns: SOA integrity should be focused as a complete baseline from which business policies and procedures can be easily defined, rapidly deployed, and safely evolved.

A SOA Guardian should be driven by rules relating to the integrity and unimpaired operation of the entire system. It certainly includes security concerns, and the authentication and authorization of access from principals to SOA hosted services, based for example on LDAP directories. However it also includes performance concerns, such as load management and brisk responsiveness. It knows the configuration of every service, with technical details such as the size of the allocated thread pools, binding and addressing information, runtimes and containers across the (almost certainly, highly heterogeneous) SOA deployment: it can be used to re-boot any failed service or even ultimately the entire enterprise. It includes transactional integrity, fault and outage management, so that the temporary loss of one or more SOA hosted services does not cause catastrophic failure. It includes management of change, including management of schema and version changes of services and interfaces. In particular, it includes the planning and execution of technology change, so that old technologies and services can be phased out, rationalized and consolidated, without adversely affecting operations.

It is clear that a SOA Guardian has both – forgive me folks, I’m an engineer by background! – sensors and actuators. That is, it collects and presents operational information relating to the integrity of the system. Equally, it is the mechanism for implementing and enforcing changes to the integral operation of the system. It is clear that the Guardian itself needs to be sound and cohesive: a Guardian system will itself likely be federated and fault-resilient. Because of the heterogeneous nature of most SOA environments, a SOA Guardian may well use combined repository and registry products from other vendors in order to administer details of certain proprietary environments. A SOA Guardian is thus much more than the emerging generation of combined repositories and registries.

Having a repository to record decisions and rules relating to the integrity of the system is certainly useful: the library of a parliament records the laws made therein. Having a console from which operational metrics can be gathered is also important: laws should be made in the context of the society they influence, and it is the role of elected representatives to reflect the views of the populace and the current state of society. But a SOA Guardian also includes the enforcement mechanisms to impose change on a system. Some “SOA Governance” products, surprisingly, apparently are weak or even non-existent in this regard.

For a SOA Guardian to enforce a change, it should clearly be desirable that the entire SOA system not be brought to a halt. Changes in security integrity are already routinely dynamically enforceable in most systems. Changes in configuration to improve performance can sometimes be dynamically implemented in some systems. Changes in fault avoidance and outage management can likewise be dynamically enforced in some systems. Changes in schema and interface versions likewise. Changes in technology are perhaps the most difficult to dynamically implement.

A SOA Guardian, given the correct meshing with the middleware substrate, should nevertheless be able to dynamically deploy all such changes to the integrity of an operational SOA, including changes not hitherto envisaged or previously planned. There should nevertheless be no need to update application business logic or business orchestration in making changes to the integrity of the substrate.

Provisioning changes in telecommunications infrastructures is both a science and an art, based on operational experience. Vendors with experience of such realtime provisioning may emerge to become one source of what I have called SOA Guardians.

How do you change an entire nation ? How do you successfully effect evolution of an entire system ? My view is “carefully”, using small incremental and rapidly evaluated steps, along with a strong separation of concerns. The integrity of a SOA implementation is different from the orchestration of business services to exploit a SOA deployment.

“SOA governance” tools may (perhaps, for some vendors even deliberately) confuse the issue. I encourage the industry to instead separate the concept of SOA guardianship from SOA orchestration. A combined repository/registry tool is a step towards a SOA guardian: dynamic binding, late decision, immediate execution and enterprise wide deployment, is also needed for complete integrity and agility.

This particular posting has very little to do with “the software industry” and more to do with the “other things” , so skip it if you are just interested in technology!

As I mentioned in my first posting, I am (non exec.) Chair of UNICEF Ireland. If you travel transatlantic with Aer Lingus, you may be aware of our “Change for Good” campaign which the cabin staff and airline management promote for us..

I first became involved in UNICEF as a result of an early decision at IONA to designate it as our corporate charity. I joined the UNICEF Board level back in 2001 after IONA underwrote a major auction for HIV/AIDS at Sothebys in New York for memorabilia donated by the movie industry, as a result of a wonderful initiative taken by Liam Neeson.

Maura Quinn got me involved, in her role as the Executive Director. Maura has been a tireless leader and advocate for children at UNICEF, since starting in 1996. She has been a frequent visitor to UNICEF’s field operations worldwide. She put the “Movie action for kids” initiative together, and was the driver behind the UNICEF world wide initiative on HIV/AIDS – a decision taken when we hosted the annual global conference of the national fund-raising committees in Dublin in 2004. During her tenure, the Irish Government has dramatically increased its giving to the third world and is well on its way to its public commitment to invest 0.7% of GDP, and in particular – and I believe as a direct result of Maura’s intervention – for children and HIV/AIDS.

Maura came to me last September and told me she had decided, after ten years, to step down as Executive Director. She is doing so for personal reasons, and will be returning to her home town of Roscommon. I am very sorry to see her go, wish her the very best, and am sure that she will continue to be a great friend of UNICEF.

Amrop-Hever very kindly offered their services in finding a replacement for Maura. We had a large number of candidates, and some very strong ones indeed. I am very happy to confirm today that Melanie Verwoerd is taking over from Maura, from April (ie next week).

Melanie is a South African national, living in Dublin. She lived and studied in the UK for a while, but returned to South Africa in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. She advocated strongly against apartheid, and on behalf of women and children.

She was invited by Mr. Mandela to stand for Parliament on behalf of the ANC, and was duly elected in 1994 as the youngest ever woman to serve the South African Parliament, and subsequently also re-elected.

In 2001 she was appointed as the South African Ambassador to Ireland. She was involved in the Northern Ireland peace process, and during her tenure both trade and tourism in South Africa from Ireland greatly increased.

In 2005 she finished her post as Ambassador and has remained in Ireland. She has been the weekly presenter on national radio on issues relating to immigrants and children in Ireland. She also has represented the Mandela Rhodes Foundation here.

As far as I know, I believe that this is the first time a major Irish based NGO has appointed a foreign national as its Chief Executive, and I believe that Melanie will bring a fresh perspective and linkage between childrens issues in the developing world and in Ireland.

I enjoyed very much working with Maura. I believe that working with Melanie will be as exciting, and I expect she will be a very powerful advocate for children.

Gee, welcome to my blog, thanks for stopping by.

A little about me: electronics engineer, then got into software. Co-founded IONA back in Feb. 1991, along with Annrai O'Toole and Sean Baker. Was CEO from then until 2000, including taking the company public in 1997. Came back again as CEO in 2003 and stepped down for the second time in 2005.

Today I’m Vice Chair of the Board, and have no executive role. In practice, I attend our board meetings – typically twice a quarter, one physical and one by concall. I take part in strategy discussions, including our merger and acquisition plans. From time to time I’m asked to meet customers, and always enjoy doing so.

Since stepping down from an operational role in IONA, I’ve got myself involved in a fair few other activities. I have an interest in China, and founded the Ireland China business organisation back in 2000, although today I have no longer have any committee involvement. Together with Nicole Bernard I co-founded, and chair, Slisiar which provides business services to companies entering the Chinese market. We have a small team in Beijing – Nicole is resident there – and have clients not just in the IT sector, but also for example in wind farms, the building materials industry, and agrifoods. Pretty much regardless of a sector, the challenges of trading with China, or establishing a business in China – hiring, legal authorisations, channel and partner development, etc – remain similar. I visit China a few times each year.

I also co-founded and am non-executive chair of Cloudsmith, along Mitch Sonies as CEO and Henrik Lindberg as CTO. Cloudsmith is very virtual – Mitch is in Manhattan, Henrik is in Stockholm, I’m in Dublin and we also have a small team in Prague: but skype and our internal wikis and blogs keep us together. We raised private finance for Cloudsmith over the summer of 2006, and started operations just in October 2006, and will launch its initial – free - service to the world wide developer community round about Eclipsecon 2007. The Cloudsmith guys have already donated open source technology to eclipse.org in the form of Buckminster and Cloudsmith will add some interesting services later this year.

Last November, I agreed to become non-executive chair of LeCayla. LeCayla was founded a few years ago by Conor Halpin, who created and managed our CORBA mainframe business in the late 90s. LeCayla is private, and venture capital backed by Trinity VC. It is a very interesting play in the “software as a service (SaaS)” space, and offers billing, rating and metering technology for software ISVs who want to build a new business model using SaaS. LeCayla’s technology can be bundled with an ISV’s software package, and then when installed inhouse on end customers machines, can monitor actual usage (driven by whatever business rules the ISV wishes) and securely report this for billing purposes. SaaS is typically positioned – eg by salesforce.com – as the combination of remotely hosted software and pay-as-you-go. LeCayla’s technology enables pay-as-you-go but the actual software can either be remotely hosted or inhouse.

In 2006, I became involved in a couple of projects for Trinity, from where we founded IONA back in 1991. The bigger of these is one of the seven national centres for science and technology (CSETs) in Ireland. I’m chair of the woefully named – I didn’t chose the name! – centre for telecommunications value chain research (CTVR). Participants in CTVR are seven universities led by TCD, together with Bell Labs Ireland and Lucent-Alcatel, and some smaller participation by Xilinx and EADS. It’s a big project and working in areas as diverse as photonics systems for terabit ethernet, cooling technologies, corrosion and failure research, ultra wide band antennas, and software and cognitive radio. The key theme underlying and guiding the research is identifying leverage points in the global telecommunications industry – in its value chain – for which successful new research could have a highly disruptive impact and create entirely new business opportunities. Donal O’Mahony is centre director – the CEO – of the project and is doing a fine job co-ordinating such an ambitious inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional nationwide academic-industry initiative. One of the very exciting aspects of the project is the license granted to it by COMREG, the Irish telecommunications regulator, to allow experimentation of ultrawide dynamic frequency techniques for cognitive radio on the national electromagnetic spectrum: the only such license granted anywhere in the world.

A second project at TCD which I chair is the Science Gallery. This is the ground and first floors of the new ship-shaped building at the corner of Pearse street and Westland Row. The Gallery will open later this year, and will be free to the public. It will be a venue for discussion and debate on scientific issues of interest to society: for example, global warming, the MRSA super-bug, avian bird flu, radiation from mobile phone masts, and so on. It includes exhibition space and a theatre. We have just appointed Michael John Gorman as the first CEO, and Michael John is putting his team together for the official launch and opening later this year.

I have been the chair of UNICEF Ireland for several years, which fund raises from the Irish public and commercial sector on behalf of UNICEF world wide. We also actively advocate on childrens’ issues to Irish Government, and have been successful in for example getting the Government to allocate a considerable proportion of its investment in HIV/AIDS work for children. Maura Quinn has been the CEO since 1996, and is stepping down next April having rescued the organisation from near bankruptcy in 1996 to the multi-million euro business it is today. We have just concluded our search process for her replacement but we have not yet announced who is the new CEO, who will start her work in April.

I’m also currently acting as a business coach to six CEOs of Irish software companies. They were allocated to me by Enterprise Ireland under its inaugural one year mentoring programme for 30 CEOs, together with Stanford Graduate Business School and with CLG Executive Coaching. In practice, we meet together monthly for peer discussion, and I naturally keep in touch with each of them on their strategic issues.

I guess that’s about it. I do also have occasional meetings of the IBEC ICT management committee; and with Vinny Cahill and David Abrahamson as an advisor to the Dept. of Computer Science at TCD on the research and teaching programmes.

Every day, and every week, is different. Sometimes I have a lot going on. Sometimes not. I work from home a lot, and avoid going into the city if I can. I’m usually travelling once a month or so, although from October to December last I don’t think I had a single trip. Right now, I’m just back from Beijing and Shanghai last week, in Dublin and Cork this week, and heading for Stanford next week.