Today I registered benj.io.
It is short, personal, and pleasingly unfinished. The .io is supposed to belong to the British Indian Ocean Territory, but technology has quietly borrowed it for input and output. I rather like the accidental fit: something goes in, something changes, and something else comes out.
That has been the appeal of technology for me since I was eight, sitting in front of a BBC Micro and becoming far more interested in how Granny’s Garden worked than in behaving as the game expected. I was not trying to become a programmer. I wanted to know why the machine had decided what happened next, and whether I could persuade it to make a different decision.
Once you discover that a system has rules, curiosity becomes difficult to contain.
The screen was the visible bit. Behind it sat instructions, choices, and consequences. Change an instruction, and the world on the screen changed with it. The lesson was not simply that I could write code. It was that systems were made by people, and could therefore be examined, questioned, and rebuilt.
That idea has followed me into everything since.
We now carry more computing power in our pockets than I could have imagined while negotiating with an educational witch. The phone is becoming a camera, a map, a wallet, a newspaper, and a way of reaching people almost anywhere. Yet plenty of organisations still talk about digital as if it were a new shop window: make a website, add an app, and declare the future successfully installed.
The interesting change is deeper. Technology alters what an organisation can know, how quickly it can respond, and which assumptions no longer deserve to survive. It can shorten the distance between a question and an answer. It can give people a voice at a scale that once required considerable time, money, and bureaucracy. It can also make a bad process happen much faster, which is less often included in the sales presentation.
At Decision Fuel, we are trying to make research move at the speed of the people answering it. Mobile gives us a way to hear from people across Asia without treating every piece of insight as a long expedition. The difficult part is not putting a survey on a smaller screen. It is designing the whole system so the technology, the data, and the decisions belong to the same thought.
That is where the useful work tends to be: not in the device itself, but in the distance it removes.
I have registered benj.io because I want somewhere to keep thinking about that work in public. Not a polished corporate biography, and certainly not a monument to having all the answers. More a workshop for the questions that survive contact with reality: what technology changes, what it merely decorates, and what happens when people, organisations, and systems collide.
There will probably be code. There will be travel, because changing the place from which you look at a problem usually changes the problem. There will be ideas that prove useful, and others that will deserve the quiet dignity of being wrong on the internet.
I do not know exactly what this site will become. That is rather the point.
The name is registered. The input is curiosity. We will see what comes out.