Data driven communication

I've noticed that in our communication, we often tend to pass judgment, which is processed information, instead of passing raw information. That is unfair to the ones that we are speaking to, because we do not give them the chance to have their own judgement. Not only it's unfair, but it is also source of misunderstandings and conflicts:

• Upset customer about service: "Your network's quality is not good enough, we are receiving complaints from our users"
• Excited business developer about a new opportunity: "Management should support me, this project will generate around 1M€ of revenues, huge one!"
• Angry work colleague: "You did not reply to my emails several times this week"

In all of the above examples, sent information is not objective. I will give in the following some tips for achieving healthier communication.

The first golden tip would be: "A little less adverbs, a little more data!". Adverbs (too much, extremely, slightly, highly, nearly, very, quite, sometimes, seldom, often) without supporting data are pure judgment. Consider the upset customer again rather telling you, his network provider: "In the last week, the latency on your network was 150ms on average between our offices in Dubai and Paris, causing up to 10 user complaints regarding calls quality". In the first case, you are probably opening a ticket with your technical services in order to correct the issue, but in the second case, you are probably going to compare noted performance to contracted SLAs, might find it compliant, and thus propose a new feature (VoIP QoS) in order to improve the customer experience. In the first case, you are loosing time, whereas in the second you are generating new revenues.

The second tip is backing absolute values with references for better appreciation. For example, compare sales growth rate of this quarter to the same quarter of last year and compare churn rate of your customer base to your industry average. Consider our excited business developer again: 1M€ is indeed a lot of revenues, but his company has limited resources and got in its pipe some other projects generating 10M€ each. It wouldn't be surprising that the 1M€ project will not get priority (a small confession: it's a true personal story!).

The third tip is providing information about samples as well as about the population that we are sampling. Consider the angry colleague again. It's true that this week you didn't answer 5 of his emails, but he globally sent you over 100 mails, which means that you had around 95% responsiveness rate! the sample here is unanswered emails, but the population is sent emails. That would completely calm your colleague :)

Using data in our communication is not about inhibiting the expression of our thoughts and emotions. On the contrary, you are free to add your own subjective judgement, as long as you provide the full picture backed with data. Not only you will give your interlocutor the chance to have his own judgement, but sometimes, by using objective data, your own perception and judgement can change. This is typically the case when your judgement is biased by temporary emotions.

In this post, I gave mostly work related examples, but it's applicable to everyday communications: Better say "I love you like the ocean" than "I love you a lot" hein? :D

Linkedin Influencers & Silent Evidence

This post will be a short one!

Many of us follow influencers on Linkedin, like CEOs of big companies such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. We follow their advice, read their "5 rules to change your life", and share their posts with our community. These people inspire us, and make us want to follow their path to replicate their success pattern in our careers. For example, I personally follow Laszlo Bock, Google's VP of Humain Resources, as I found interest in his advice around resume and job application. 

Nevertheless, following influencers to understand success is biased and can probably lead to wrong conclusions. It is the survivorship bias, or also silent evidence as called by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Black Swan. He illustrated it by the following story:

Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. 

Diagoras asked, “Where are the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?”

Do we know how much people applied the "5 rules to change your life" but failed and never made it to be Linkedin influencers? Until we do, we should stay skeptical, and do not take whatever a top influencer gives us as truth, but rather try to validate it.

CDN benchmarking

Today, when we want to compare the performance of different CDN providers in a specific region, the first reflex is to check public Real User Monitoring (RUM) data, with Cedexis being one of the most known RUM provider. RUM data is very useful, and many CDN providers buy it in order to benchmark with other competitors and continuously work on improving performance.

I will highlight in the following what exactly Community RUMs measure, so you do not jump quickly to some wrong conclusions. Let's focus on the latency performance KPI and list the different components that contribute to it:

• Last mile latency to CDN Edge, which reflects how near is it to the user from network perspective.
• Cache width latency, which is mainly due to CDN Edge not having the content locally and must go get it from somewhere (Peer Edge, Parent Caching or simply from the origin)
• Connectivity latency from CDN to Origin when there is a cache fill needed.

In general, Community RUM measurements are based on calculating the time (RTD) it takes to serve users a predefined object from CDN Edges. Since the object is the same and doesn't change, it's always cached on edges. In consequence, Community RUM solely measure first mile network latency, which reflects sufficiently the latency performance of very high popular objects in cache.

Nevertheless that's only a part of the picture. In real life, CDNs have different capabilities and strategies for storing content beyond Edges and filling it from origin:

• According to content popularity, CDN cache purge policy, disk space available (Cache Width) on the Edge and Parent Caching architecture, the request will be a cache miss or hit with impact on performance. VoD provider with large video library know very well this topic. 
• According to CDN upstream connectivity, the number of hops needed to fill from origin impacts connectivity latency. CDNs who built their own backbone benefit from a good upstream connectivity. Dynamic content is very sensitive to this aspect.

As a final word, we also need to be aware that CDNs tend to optimize their configuration used by RUM measurement for this specific use case.

Networks & economic paradigms

I will start by the above revisited version of Maslow's pyramid for human needs. It's a funny expression of how internet is now a basic need, making all of us "data" consumers. Data delivery to consumers is organized in different ways, according to different economic models. In the following I will go through these different ways and their correlation to known paradigms for organizing economy: liberalism, centrally planned economy & participatory economy.

The first paradigm is current internet decentralized organization which is based on liberalism or free trade, the dominant ideology nowadays. A user is connected to internet through eyeballs, e.g. the local ISP or mobile operator. Now eyeballs are connected to internet via different kinds of peerings:

• Directly peer with content providers such as Google, Amazon & Netflix,
• Peer with other regional eyeballs to exchange traffic directly,
• Peer with backbone providers such as Level 3 & Cogent who globally connect eyeballs together.

The dynamics driving network meshing are very interesting. An eyeball has many questions to answer in order to guarantee a good internet connectivity and a profitable business:

• Which of the above peering kinds should we build? in which breakdown?
• With which networks should we peer? what capacity? private peering or through internet exchanges?
• In which geographical locations should we peer with a considered network? in which carrier hotels?
• What is the cost of transport network to those locations?
• Should we pay for a peering or is it free?
• How should we diversify peerings to guarantee resiliency?

The main driver of building internet networks is making profit because it is managed by private sector. Meanwhile, we have witnessed competition, price compression, innovation, rise of broadband.... But making profit means only serving solvable consumers, which has lead to the below unfair image of the world in terms of network connection density.

The second paradigm is the organization of access network of a national eyeball which is based on central planning. Indeed, network expansion and deployment is planned according to usage forecasts given by marketing studies, and it's decided centrally by the eyeball in a top-down approach. The main driver of building such kind of networks depends on whether it is a public or private service, and on the telecom regulation pressure, thus leading to more or less fair network coverage.

The main advantage of this model is a more rational and efficient use of resources (network assets, people) to satisfy the present and future needs of population. On the technical plan, network is more controlled and thus potentially providing better service, for example:

• Traffic types (voice, download..) are differentiated and quality is manged from end to end.
• Traffic routing is better controlled with any chosen protocol, where on internet only BGP can be used with its limitations.
• Some specific techniques can be used to optimize the network usage, such as mutlicast for video streaming, where it's almost impossible on internet.

But on the other hand, planning cycles have important inertia and often can't cope with demand dynamics. Moreover, eyeballs are not leaders in terms of innovation, for example, the ongoing SDN/NFV revolution in networks is driven by software companies like Google.

The third paradigm is the FON model, based on participatory economy, i.e. network is crowd sourced by users themselves.

As explained in the above video, a Fonero (user participating to the FON network) shares its home WiFi connection with others in a secure way, and thus has access to others' WiFi anywhere anytime. By making use of the idle bandwidth on your internet box, you gain access to thousands of hotspots around the world for free. It's the same concept of P2P for downloading files on internet.

The main driver of such communities is making the world a better place in a bottom-up approach. Agility, innovation, open standards & free service are keywords in this model.

As a final word, I personally believe in a 4th paradigm which is a mix of the last two. I will try to develop it in a future post.

Ce qu'il cache ce burkini ...

Je vais m'en vouloir d'avoir participé à ce faux débat dans son timing, son ampleur et son champs d'analyse. Néanmoins, je vais en profiter pour revenir sur les notions théoriques de laïcité, liberté et d'égalité, pour ensuite commenter d'une façon plus pragmatique l'hypocrisie du débat ainsi que ses dessous politiques dangereux.

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La meilleure définition de la laïcité que j'ai trouvée est chez Albert Jacquard: La laïcité consiste à prendre des décisions au nom des hommes, de leurs besoins et aspirations, non pas au nom d'une révélation externe telle une directive religieuse. Elle ne signifie pas la repression des religions comme on commence à le constater en France. Elle ne se limite pas non plus à la doctrine religieuse, mais toute doctrine qui nous parait aujourd'hui sacrée telle que le capitalisme avec ses valeurs de propriété privée et de compétition entre hommes dans une logique de marché. Dans ce sens, notre société occidentale est loin d'être laïque.

La laïcité reconnait ainsi l’individu comme citoyen libre participant à la société, à son sort, et en faisant partie intégrante. Elle reconnait son identité, et l’aide à la forger. Quand l'individu se voit privé d'une réelle participation à la société, sa relation avec elle devient conflictuelle et peut finir soit par une révolte consciente, soit par une vengeance contre soi ou par une violence envers elle. Notre société occidentale avec sa démocratie délégative illusoire et la concentration du pouvoir dans les mains d'une seule classe sociale exclue des catégories entières (pauvres, femmes, immigrants...) de cette participation. Le fanatisme dans le monde entier est en partie la manifestation de cette exclusion, que ça soit religieux comme Daesh, ou politique comme l'extreme droite. En effet, c'est une recherche d'identité qui peut devenir suicidaire comme dirait Amin Maalouf, surtout en l'absence de forces révolutionnaires aiguillant la colère.

Donc la citoyenneté nécessite comme condition la liberté de l’individu, mais encore faut-il définir cette liberté. La liberté d'un individu dans une société n'a pas de sens que si elle est associée à des contraintes. Cette dynamique de liberté-contrainte nourrit la participation du citoyen à sa "cité" et lui donne du contenu, mais à condition qu'elle soit égale pour tous les citoyens. L’équilibre auquel arrive cette dynamique résulte du dialogue continuel des individus avec la société, qui est au final le synonyme de leur participation. Cet équilibre n'est pas immuable, mais évolue avec l'évolution de la société. C'est dans cette optique que je voudrais considérer le burkini. La liberté de le porter est associée à la contrainte des autres de le voir, et donc la contrainte de voir les autres aussi  exercer leur liberté de s'habiller. Je pose ainsi les questions suivantes:

• Est-ce que les femmes portant le burkini ont eu la possibilité de participer réellement à la société?
• Est-ce que leur identité forgée est le résultat d'une libre participation? d'un dialogue avec la société?
• Est-ce qu'on a considéré la dynamique liberté/contrainte de s'habiller en respectant le principe d'égalité?

Non à mes yeux. Personnellement je considère le burkini comme un syndrome de la domination masculine sur les femmes, mais je crois que le seul moyen d'en finir est d'inviter les personnes concernées à participer librement et d'une façon égale à la société. Toute attaque aux syndromes, sans considérer la maladie, ne ferait qu'aggraver la maladie.

Maintenant passons à l’aspect plus concret du débat burkini en France. Il est hypocrite parce qu'il se réclame défenseur des droits de la femme alors que c'est probablement le sujet le moins structurant dans cette thématique par rapport à d’autres sujets comme le salaire des femmes comparé à celui de l'homme, la reconnaissance de la grossesse comme travail... Il est aussi hypocrite parce qu'il se réclame défenseur de la laïcité, alors qu'on tire dessus à chaque décision prise au nom du peuple mais qui n’émane pas de celui-la, comme par exemple en utilisant l'article 49.3.

Enfin, le vrai enjeu derrière toute cette polémique est d'ordre politique afin de mobiliser les gens, de récupérer les voix et de détourner l’attention. Le danger de ce jeu c'est de pousser plus les gens dans le fanatisme et préparer les identités meurtrières de demain.