eLearning Forum Update: Peer-to-Peer
By Jay Cross
Peer-to-peer technology provoked a spirited discussion at the June eLearning Forum meeting. Great stuff or pipe-dream?
The P2P working group, championed by Intel, says "P2P is the next Internet revolution." On the other hand, Ziff Davis’s Charles Cooper reports corporate "concerns about intellectual property and available bandwidth—in a word: control."
What is P2P?
Computers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network share resources directly with one another, bypassing a central server. Networks are traditionally made up of many PCs (clients) receiving information and access to shared resources from a common computer (a server). Client/server architecture became the norm when client PCs were weaker than servers. However, PCs have increased processing power and grown tentacles into the Internet, gaining the strength to act as servers or clients.
P2P is controversial. P2P PCs can swap files, share disk storage, or use one another’s processing power. P2P makes it possible for computers to connect directly via the Internet. The benefits are obvious: Users can create online meeting spaces for project teams without involving IT. Indeed, P2P empowers users while disenfranchising IT. And P2P can be a security threat, enabling users to burrow under firewalls and avoid restrictions.
P2P offers several practical applications. Here are some real world examples.
- Distributed computing. The SETI project uses otherwise idle time on tens of thousands of PCs to create the equivalent of a single supercomputer. IBM’s most powerful mainframe, ASCI White, tops out at 12 teraFLOPS; SETI’s network works at 15 teraFLOPS. ASCI White costs $110 million; SETI has spent just $500 thousand.
- File sharing and content distribution. As members arrived for the eLearning Forum meeting, pirated music played over loudspeakers. But P2P is a two-way street: When I was downloading songs from one of Napster's successors, other people were plucking songs off my hard drive. We could have been swapping documents or videos--anything digital. Regulators were able to clamp down on Napster because it had a central server. Napster’s descendants have no center; there’s no one to sue.
- Instant messaging. When my son is doing his homework, he chats continuously with friends online. Most kids use instant messaging because email is too slow; you don’t know if the recipient is around.
- Enterprise collaboration. While other P2P applications have a place in the e-learning toolbox, online collaboration promises to have much more impact on the way we work and learn.
Why P2P is important
P2P is a breakthrough technology because fluid organizations need flexible IT. Value-chain thinking shows the importance of linking with customers and suppliers, but firewalls insulate corporations as if they were fortresses. Drucker points out that value comes from outside the corporation. Inside the organization, you’re just rearranging the furniture. Corporations praise spontaneity and innovation, but the paradigm drag of client/server views user control as the doorway to anarchy. The goal is to have people work in teams, and P2P facilitates team development and collaboration. (See The Changing Nature of Work.)
Another factor influencing the growth of peer-to-peer technologies is the idea that business relationships are two-way and personal. A company often makes a sale and abandons the customer for new prospects. As The Cluetrain Manifesto emphasizes, businesses have realized that "Markets are conversations." A sale is the initiation of a relationship for achieving mutual gain over time. A sale is often not just for a product or service; it may be maintaining the loyalty of a free-agent worker or inspiring a downstream partner.
P2P in action
When Wayne Hodgins and I planned the eLearning Forum session on P2P, we decided to "eat our own cooking" and coordinate the session in a P2P environment. Hodgins, a strategic futurist at Autodesk, had been experimenting with Groove, a P2P software platform developed by Lotus Notes author Ray Ozzie. Currently, Hodgins uses Groove to coordinate nine different projects and considers it a more effective way to work. Here's how we used it for the meeting.
Wayne logged into Groove and emailed an invitation to join him in a new Groove space. I downloaded the Preview Edition of Groove; it’s 10 MB and free. Then I clicked on Wayne’s invitation and entered into what appeared to be a Website offering text chat, audio chat, a discussion board, files, a notepad, a sketchpad, a shared Web browser, online file storage, a place for photographs, group calendar, contact list, and a chess game. I learned the basics by pushing buttons and exploring.
I sent Groove invitations to Sherry Hsi, president of Metacourse; Hal Richman, an authority on collaboration; and Kate Gardner, an e-learning business developer who’s been working with eLearning Forum. A few days before the meeting, we all met with Wayne online via Groove to get familiar with the Groove environment and discuss who would be presenting.
Fast forward to the official meeting. Attendees logged into Groove: Sherry, Kate, and I from Menlo Park; Wayne from Autodesk in San Raphael; and Hal from his headquarters in Nova Scotia. My Internet connection wasn’t functioning properly, so Sherry stepped in as facilitator.
Using VOIP, the voices of Wayne and Hal came through loud and clear. It's important to note that VOIP saved us an expensive phone bill. Wayne gave a tour of the shared space and explained how he was using Groove on other projects. He also seemed adamant about pointing out that Groove is a serious business effort, noting that its developer Ray Ozzie is a highly respected software architect who is passionate about creating an industrial-strength collaboration platform.
Wayne emphasized that P2P technologies can improve the way we work. More important, P2P merges learning and work, shedding light on team processes that used to disappear when a project’s participants dispersed. For example, P2P applications can create an audit trail.
Similarly, whenever my company is pushing e-learning to its limits, someone brings up David Merrill’s caveat that "Information is not instruction." After thirty years in business, my reply is "So?" Whether we achieve better performance through instruction, information, or by concocting magic potions is immaterial; performance is the bottom line.
Wayne wrapped up the discussion, and we took a 30-minute break for gossip and coffee--where the real learning takes place.
The discussion
During the break, people decided they’d heard enough about P2P technology and wanted to discuss behavioral and social implications. I stressed that client/server and peer-to-peer will coexist, following the tradition that TV didn't replace movies. The issue is when to choose one approach rather than the other.
Mark Cavender, managing director of Chasm Group, classifies P2P as pre-chasm. Members pointed out the following implementation barriers:
- It's too weird.
- People aren't in the habit of working this way.
- Early training isn't available.
- Where’s the revenue?
- Where’s the content?
On another track, some people predict that IT will bar use of P2P collaboration because it offers hackers and competitors a Trojan horse onto corporate hard drives. Indeed, meeting members were wary about P2P’s security implications. To that, Glenn O’Classen said we needed to take a more adult approach to P2P, and I acknowledged P2P’s roots in free speech, Open Source, in-your-face, hacker-chic rebellion.
Next, Oracle’s John Hathaway challenged my assertion that P2P entails zero administration. I replied that P2P applications don’t need IT administration because IT isn’t aware of them. With the wisdom of hindsight, I recognize that I was thinking only of the early, wild-and-wooly days of P2P. If P2P catches on, of course it will need administration.
Continuing the conversation, Xerox’s Tracy Mendéz said she expects to see more applications with functionality similar to Groove, but running on client/server applications, such as Enterprise Blogger or Xerox’s LinkLite. And SRI’s Marcelo Hoffman thinks P2P will enable communities of practice to form more rapidly.
Then Gary Latshaw, formerly with Pensare, compared P2P to telephone conference calls. P2P is cheaper but communication costs are trivial in relation to the cost of the people in the conference. Although P2P sound quality isn’t as good as telephone, it’s a great asset to be able to share materials with one another. Moreover, the materials can be spontaneously selected (or maybe even created on the spot) to suit the situation.
Leaving the conversation open, Lance Dublin said he believed that the technology would grow, but wondered how people would act differently.
For more information about P2P, visit
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The Changing Nature of Work
In a typical hierarchical organization, both face-to-face networking and local area networking take place in isolated departmental silos.
The need for collaboration in an increasingly complex world drives the development of interdepartmental teams.
The organization finds it more effective to think of itself as a shifting grab-back of teams rather than a group of specialist departments.
Teams can include customers, partners, and suppliers in other organizations. P2P can cross corporate boundaries to create teams.
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Published: July 2001