Alice & Bob Communicating as Humans

This post was originally published on LinkedIn. I’m making it available here in a bilingual format, with no tracking or metrics. If you like it, there’s nowhere to click, but do reach out and let me know.

Let’s Talk Communication!

Our good friends Alice and Bob need to communicate about something, so they use the coolest protocol out there, except they’re humans and they’re very different people.

Regardless of whether they’re using RFC 1149 IP over Avian Carriers or the Signal Protocol, their biggest challenge is taking information from one’s model of the world all the way into the other’s. The effects of speed and latency imposed by the protocol they’re using are ultimately negligible, when compared to the huge differences in how they each view the world, how they imagine the other to view the world, how they each communicate most comfortably, and how they bridge these gaps.

A Human Protocol

Taking this into account in our communication allows us to implement a more robust human protocol. Let’s consider packet loss due to distraction, compression effects from different forms of dialog, reduced signal-to-noise ratio when communicating across languages. With all that in mind, let’s remember a good protocol has check-in and acknowledgements built-in, so we can’t blame the communicators for missing information, but the medium and the process. Perhaps most importantly, let’s remember we’re working across similar but different systems and we must always consider the impact of converting across them. Let’s remember to communicate as humans.

A Note On Communicating Visually

Alice & Bob Communicating as Humans - a diagram

I’m most comfortable with spoken and text communication, but I know a lot of people are more visual. So I drew them a picture! Jokes aside, I couldn’t, in good conscience, discuss bridging these gaps without making an effort to do it myself, so please enjoy this diagram with attached alt text. Feel free to share it, as long as you include the alt text.

One More Thing - A Note On Localization

Read this is both languages and check the external links. Notice anything? They each lead to the Wikipedia page in the post’s language. The link text is in English in both cases, but in Portuguese it adds language information, so it’s correctly read out by screen readers and interpreted by search engines:

<span lang="en">IP over Avian Carriers</span>

The Signal.org link is only available in English, because that’s the only option Signal provides. We can’t be perfect, but we should do as much as we can to bridge these communication gaps.