Introduction

Building the right relationships with the right people applies to any context, offline and online. However, the ability to rapidly make connections on the Internet means we need to be more vigilant to ensure that we remain true to this recommendation. Apart from this, the nature of relationships remains fundamentally the same. We argue that a person is an integrated whole; whether engaged in the physical world or online, there is the one life, albeit played out in multiple facets.

We may pretend to be someone else (as promoted in VR worlds such as Second Life and the metaverse), but these only add layers of maya (illusion) and according to Buddhist teachings, karma accumulates around the same stream of consciousness; after the virtual deed is done, the effects will be experienced by the person, in their constituents (khandhas). The key requirement then is to understand what deeds bring happiness and unhappiness. Do we really need VR?

Given the acceleration driven by socialising online, the creation of amenable networking systems is a difficult challenge and cannot be solved by facile means. We may aim for art, but won’t reach that until we’ve worked hard to find workable, if not the most elegant, solutions. That’s a technical challenge, but we can all work on the problem of happiness. Surely, then, a sensible candidate should be able to reflect closely the nature of human relationships pre-Internet, comprising kinship and non-kinship relationships, which have distinct contextual meaning and grow organically.

Fortunately, there is an architectural model that strongly suggests an architectural framework, one that is based on the Buddha’s teachings to a householder, which I explore on the Sigala research site.

Timeline

To indicate how I’ve reached my present position, I offer a timeline of my involvement in initiatives that relate to this theme.

Nov-Dec 1996

“The MiningCo” – taking back the Web

I was one of the first guides (Buddhism) for the MiningCo (later renamed about.com). This aimed to build a community around thousands of guides applying their expert knowledge to assist with the problem of identifying relevant sites. What I particularly appreciated was the support community within the company itself.

2004-2005

Reflective and Private Blogs

Blogging is normally considered a social affair, but the RAMBLE (Remote authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments), for which I was principal investigator, trialled private, reflective blogs. Undergraduates were encouraged to write about their learning experiences and share them selectively with tutors and peers. Social can be selective.

Summer 2007

Joined Facebook

I was lulled into opening an account by colleagues.

November 2007

On ‘Friends’ and other associations

Dissatisfied with Facebook’s architecture, I sought a design that would properly support the deepening of human friendship and found inspiration in the Buddha’s teachings, resulting in a post on the EDUCAUSE Connect blog.

December 2010

New Architectures for Sustainability

I consolidated some of my ideas in a paper I gave at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science in Thailand. At the heart of the new architectures is a separation of concerns, especially of different kinds of relationships (kinship and non-kinship) rather than lumping every connection into the ‘friend’ type.

2011 –

Sigala Project

Named after the householder who received the Buddha’s teachings (though with flexible pronunciation!), the project was started, initially as theoretical research.

September 2021

Cultivating Sīla Online: The Use of Cognitive Interventions in Systems Design

This substantial paper, which I gave at Oriel College, Oxford, brings together many elements that I have been exploring. It provides assurance that the software development can now proceed.

Here are a few highlights. For details, pleased browse the portfolio.

March 2000

Open Source Wisdom

I delivered a paper, Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, at To Catch the Bird of Heaven: A conference on ‘wisdom’, which took place 27-29 March 2000, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.   I’ve kept a brief programme summary.

4 November 2001

Public Release of NetWedit

I released NetWedit with GPL license, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-powered rich text editor, deployed in a teaching-based CMS, where Oxford’s Theology Faculty could maintain their own profiles.  Read more in Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

2002

Editing XML with XSLT

The Interactive Audio Comprehension Materials (IACM) project at Oxford University’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages enabled academics to generate learning paths, including audio segments, with all data stored in XML.
I devised a means of editing XML using XSLT, based on correctness preserving transformations; changes to specific nodes were targeted with XPATH. Beyond the technical achievement there are significant reflections on structure and flow.

2002-2003

CD2Go – A static web production system

I conceived and implemented an extension of a CGI/Perl website to a static web production system, preserving all the interactive multimedia content. Inherently secure, the content remains online, though browsers no long support most interactive functions. The same system was used for a Japanese site.

09/2004 – 04/2005

RAMBLE project

As Principle Investigator of this ostensibly technical project at Oxford, showcasing service-oriented architecture (SOA) between personal learning spaces and institutional LMS, I uncovered insights into the conditions that foster deeper learning, as intimated in an article for Ariadne.

December 2010

New Architecture for Social Networking Online

I gave my first paper on a multi-dimensional relationship model based on the Buddha’s teachings, the foundations for the Sigala project. This was in the social sciences track at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science at Mahidol University, Thailand.

2019-2021

A Vision for the History of Science Museum

On a different note, I have applied a holistic approach to envisioning how a museum can be a hub for a scientific ecosystem with proper accountability across the University. The blog post illustrates the ongoing process of refinement to my ideas.

2021

Offline Search for WordPress

Twenty years after starting work on CD2Go, I returned to the problem of searching static snapshots of CMS, now updated to WordPress. After some radical changes to an existing plugin, I now have a solution (which you can try out by downloading the Sigala research site.)

Mobility has become the key characteristic of our period. Social and physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one of the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of this freedom is the individually-owned motor-car. Mobility is the key both socially and organizationally to town planning, for mobility is not only concerned with roads but with the whole concept of a mobile, fragmented, community.

[Alison and Peter Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 1962?]

Today we have virtual highways in which mobile phones are the vehicles, which for many symbolise freedom of expression. But do these material enablers lead to mental crutches? How can such freedom be used for our well-being, particularly in education?

I’ve been interested in mobile/handheld/portable computing on and off since the late 1970s, when as a child I used to play with pocket calculators (a Texet 880 and the ‘Little Professor’). Much later I came across general-purpose handheld computing with the Psion devices, but I didn’t own any until a trio of Hewlett Packard devices, namely: HP 320LX, HP Jornada 568, and HP Jornada 720.

Until about 2004, this was mainly a personal interest, where I wiled away many an hour in experimentation, until the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University gave some formal support, allowing me to bid for and subsequently manage an externally-funded project, RAMBLE (on top of my usual work, of course!). Seeing its growing importance, in subsequent years (mostly in my personal time) I promoted the strategic thinking around mobility and ubiquity, and gained sufficient impetus to set up at the beginning of 2008 a Mobile Special Interest Group at OUCS, that gained 20 members across the different sections.

This galvanised interest and led to some important university-wide developments; by April it had become incorporated in graduate skills training.

The links below provide an archive of developments from an earlier decade, which are still useful, especially for the rationale.

• Using X applications on an HP Jornada 720 (2003) — just an intimation of what is possible. The underlying issue concerns thick vs thin computing, especially relevant concerning the delivery of Web content to handheld devices (compare e.g. Opera 9.5 with server-side solutions from the likes of Skyfire).
• RAMBLE (2004-5) — Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments, JISC-funded project concerning mobile blogs and their integration in institutional learning environments.
• Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments (2005) A broad overview from Issue 44 of the Ariadne online journal
• Handheld Musings (2004-10) — a personal blog, with various thoughts, especially on OxPDA, an educational assistant to replace the Oxford University pocket diary.
• OxPDA: Pervasive e-Learning in your hands (2005) — Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3, Handheld Musings blog posts.
• From Portability to Ubiquity — What do we mean by ‘Mobile’? (2007)
• OxMobile: Towards a Mobile and Ubiquitous Strategy for the University of Oxford (2008) — a report detailing context, present status and various project proposals to really start embracing handheld and mobile technology at Oxford.
• Notes from an Emerging Mobile SIG at OUCS — A presentation I gave on my last day as SIG coordinator (I was shortly to leave the department to pursue full-time studies).
• Erewhon (2008-9) This strangely named project concerns the development of location-based services, building on a number of initiatives at OUCS, and led to the production service, Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk), as presented at the 2010 ITSS conference and documented in the WebLearn VLE. It can be seen as a step to fulfilling some of the vision in OxMobile (Tim Fernando remarked that he has used the posts as a kind of checklist).

(My list of mobile devices has since grown to include the HP iPAQ 1940, Asus Eee PC (first and later generations), Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, Amazon Kindle, Palm Phone, and iPhone SE.

Pause for Thought

So, what of the quote above? It reminds me of the phrase “car-owning democracy,” much cherished in the 1980s. However, it can be argued that the motor car was a symbol of an acquisitive approach has not led to greater well being — Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence gives plenty of food for thought.

Will mobile devices with all their options for personalisation merely encourage a form of consumerism that fails to enrich us as human beings? What about personalisation as a general principle…? How many different ways of serving tea and coffee do we really need?