The way people talk to each other on the tiny island of St Agnes is the basis for a new computer program designed to enhance communication in the corporate world.
The new program is the brainchild of Ethnographer Charles Armstrong (pictured above). Armstrong once worked in London as an account manager for an internet marketing firm, his only real day job. Clearly it wasn’t for him. Morale was terrible, communication even worse. He was sure there was a better way to communicate - and believes he has found it on the Isles of Scilly.
In 1999, Armstrong set out to conduct a study of how people naturally communicate and organize in an unnatural environment; one deprived of computers, internet, email and other cyberspace delusions. His research took him to St Agnes where, for a year, Armstrong watched how the locals interacted and related to each other; when, where and how they got the information they required; the trivial, the mundane and the important.
Life on St Agnes and life in London are worlds apart, but Armstrong feels he found something on the little Atlantic island that could provide a model for the wider world. “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 tells Wired News. “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.”
“If Friday’s St. Mary’s boat was cancelled there might be six people on the island with a need to know.” He discovered that these six people would know very quickly, despite a very informal distribution system, and those who didn’t care would not find out. A sort of intelligent spam perhaps.
From careful observation of the cut and thrust of island life, Armstrong feels he has discovered a set of principles which, if successfully applied, could enable people to communicate in a new and more meaningful fashion. Now he is preparing a piece of software that he hopes will present his ideas in a useful and intuitive way. The program, called Trampoline, will hide in a company’s existing computer network, nosing around, examining emails, documents, anything it can find. Trampoline will look for words and phrases that recur frequently, then, like island gossip, disseminate the information on to the people who may have use for it within the company.
An earlier version of the program is being used by Channel 4 and has been very successful, so perhaps the people of St Agnes are unwittingly about to take the corporate world by storm. Instead of organising multibillion-pound hostile take-overs, the movers and shakers may just fancy a mullet and go fishing instead.
For more information check out the Trampoline website on http://www.Trampolinesystems.com
Ethnography:- The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.