Collective Intelligence and The Art of Making Soft Chappatis

For a long time I could not make soft chappatis (Indian Flat Bread). Since my wife and I are rice eaters, it did not matter much and we did not try hard enough. It all changed when we were advised to add more wheat to our diet. You can buy chappatis from the local Indian store. But I am into this 'make everything from scratch' streak lately.

Since I am a big fan of collective intelligence, and believe in the future of long tail solutions, I decided to try the collective intelligence approach to find out if some one very similar to my family has faced this issue.

This was the criteria for my search. The target family has to be south Indian expats in the US (because they are rice eaters), with little time to spare and yet, have a desire to cook healthy food. More importantly, they must have faced the frustrating problem of dealing with flaky or wafer like chappatis and they must have been successful in making soft chappatis. They must have posted their experience, not just their solution on the web. Several others must have tried out their solution and must have verified that their solution works. If they are using any equipment that equipment should have been used, reviewed and commented upon by atleast a 100 people. Tall order, right? No. Turns out there is a South Indian family, working in the technology industry, that has faced this problem and has figured out a solution and has blogged about it. About 5-6 similar people have tried out the solution and given feedback about what worked and what did not work for them. There was confirmation of the process even from a Chinese lady, who is married to a (chappati eating) North Indian. It does not get better than this.

I tried out the approach recommended and it turned out better than my usual chappatis. I learned from the blogger that the key to soft chappatis is the following

• Knead the dough for atleast 15 minutes
• Add 2 spoons of oil to the flour
• Add 2 tablespoons of milk
• Use warm water to knead the dough
• Set the dough aside for 20 minutes before making chappatis
• Keep it overnight in a fridge for even better results

The key to making soft chappatis is the ingredients and the kneading. Since one of the readers in the blog said she used a food processor, I decided to, using the collective intelligence approach again, look for the best food processor to mix dough. Turns out the Kitchen Aid Artisan Food Processor is the most popular among home bakers in the US.

The listing on Amazon.com has 1656 reviews, most of which gave a 5 star rating for the product. There were reviews from a house wife who advised users on how to address certain common problems and reviews from an aircraft mechanic, who loves to cook, on the components used in the mixer.

So I ordered it and used it to make the dough. Now I get to pick whole grain wheat for my chappatis, they are soft and available in the quantities I need, when I need them.

Since I Shared this experince via my blog post and twitter, I received useful tips from friends who are experts at this. One my friends gave me this tip. Cook the chappati on the griddle for 30 seconds. Then flip it over and cook it directly on an open flame. This will make the chappati puff up and make it softer and give it a layered feel. When I have some time, I will post a video on how to do this.

The people who lost out on the process are the local grocery store that sells readymade chappatis. They will do fine without my patronage. Macy's (that sells the Kichen Aid Artisan Mixer) lost out because I am reluctant to buy anything that has not been reviewed by people who share the same problems as I do.

I even contributed to the discussion by suggesting a solution for one of the problems. The dough becomes dry when you keep it overnight in a fridge. The solution is to wrap the remaining dough in a Glad Cling Warp so that the dough retains moist.
 

Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin

I just finished reading the book Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
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The book talks about how marketing is changing fundamentally. He argues that there is no mass market anymore.

Godin says that marketing needs to move away from interrupting as many people as much as possible to identifying the people who matter and asking for their permission to talk to them. I like his message. Don't be fooled by the cover. It is a seminal book.

I saw some parallels to how social media is changing the way employers treat employees. Employers who deploy social media tools without realizing that their relationship with employees is fundamentally shifting are in for some rude awakening. Although this book is written for marketers and points out how power is shifting from sellers to consumers, I believe the same concepts can be applied to human capital management as well.

Fighting Crime with Collective Intelligence

There has been a spike in burglary in my neighbourhood. So we had a meeting at one of the houses in my street to discuss what we can do to stay safe. The first step was to share everyones contact information with each other so that we can call each other in case there is suspicious activity in the street. I offered to set up a wiki (actually I told everyone that is is a password-protected web site that anyone can edit) and there were some nods. Some understood what I was talking about and some did not.

However as soon as I setup the wiki and sent the link out, there was a flurry of activity. Everyone corrected spellings of their names. Added pictures of unfamiliar cars parked in front of their houses and pictures of solicitors visiting the street. Then I got requests to add multiple people from the same household to add them to the wiki.  Not everyone in my street is Web 2.0 savvy. A 72 year old great grandmother attended the meeting. The youngest attendee, who of course cared for his safety and comfort, was 5 months old.

As a next step we are planning to post names and schedules of the service people who visit the street; gardeners, swimming pool maintenance people, maids and  so on. I am very glad to see collective intelligence bringing the community a bit closer and may be stop a potential crime.

I am also glad to use technology to address problems for the community. It is refreshing to not think of technology as something that we can use to increase the next quarter or next year revenue numbers.

Making an Analyst Presentation when your team is distributed

We had an interesting situation where we had to make a presentation to a Gartner analyst who was in the east coast of the US. Our team was working out of Palo Alto and Bangalore in India. We used Adobe Connect to share the product overview and demo with the Analyst. It worked well.

We rehearsed the hand-over twice to ensure that the presentation will go smoothly. Dry runs are very important when a distributed team is making an important presentation.

Effort : It took us an hour of preparation for every minute of the presentation. For example the 30 minute demo took about 30 hours to design, build and rehearse. The overview took about 5 hours to design build and rehearse. The sales and marketing section of the presentation part took about 4 hours of planning, creation, discussion and rehearsal.

Lesson learned: Always leave 10 minutes for unplanned activities. No matter how much you plan, no matter how seasoned the team is, when the audience is distributedsomething always comes up. In our case that something did come up and we cut short the 4 demos 2.

Day 3 of the June 2009 Design Workshop - Drawing helps

Today was day 3 of the two week design workshop on the Learning Portal Conversion assignment. Today we discussed web services to enable a customer integrate SAP Enterprise Learning with their web shop or SAP CRM Web Channel. We used the Confluence wiki and the white board feature in Adobe Connect.

Since the discussion was mostly about web services, we could draw a picture on the white board and discuss things.  I do not use any special drawing tools. Just the mouse.

We edited the Software Requirements Document posted on the wiki directly and added our comments to the wiki page. The development team in Bangalore projected the Adobe Connect meeting screen in the wall so that all team members can see the screen and discuss it.