It’s rare when an institutional need meets a personal opportunity so elegantly as the one that’s now open to IT professionals.

About six weeks ago, some of us conceived the idea that the Dean Campaign could enjoy what no organization has ever experienced: IT Nirvana. What would happen, we wondered, if some of the people working on the Americans For Dean project went up to Burlington and did whatever it takes to make the network, the computers and the software run like a Swiss watch. Though we’d never seen it happen, we knew that there was plenty of geekpower available to make it so.

Have you ever seen the flashbacks on West Wing to the early days of the first campaign? Have you ever wanted to put yourself in a position to–just maybe–have a beer or flip a frisbee with the next Toby, Sam, Josh or Donna?

How’d you like to experience the excitement, drama, people and spirit of an historic presidential campaign while it’s still small enough to be personal and fun? If you’re a qualified geek, you may be able to. And as a geek volunteer, you’ll have the gratitude of the people you help, and represent the leading edge of the most important revolution in governance since . . . since . . . well, you pick the last time power moved away from the politicians and toward the people. My answer seems too dramatic.

The Dean Campaign has accepted our proposal from last weekend that Tech volunteers spend a week at a time helping the campaign with its IT needs. Like any organization, the campaign staff needs help with keeping the computers running, the network up, the new Ethernet nodes installed, routers set up, and anti-virus software kept current.

There’s also the kind of stuff that turns crazy employees into happy campers: how do I format this table in Word? How do I create new mailboxes in Outlook? And on & on.

And there’s an army of geeks around the country ready to support you around the clock. Instead of soldiering through some software problem alone, post the issue to the mailing list and see it jumped on by the Dean Tech Dream Team.

Campaign HQ is in Burlington, Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain. Where would you rather spend a week in August?

Here’s You. There’s the Plate. Step Right Up.

Think of it as an Adventure Camp for IT Pros.

The first two volunteers are invited to arrive in Burlington as early as Sunday, August 3. We’re developing a rotating schedule so that the two volunteers share a motel room near the campaign HQ, arriving Sunday by noon and leaving Sunday afternoon, so the outgoing team can brief the new one.

This is a true volunteer project. The volunteers will pay for their travel, room and board and expenses. You won’t need a car unless you want to see the sights. Heh. Like you’d have time.

 

10:24:37 AM    

Jason Kottke has a terrific post about a sidewalk stand that increases profits by improving trust.

“Next!” said the coffee & donut man (who I’ll refer to as “Ralph”) from his tiny silver shop-on-wheels, one of many that dot Manhattan on weekday mornings. I stepped up to the window, ordered a glazed donut (75 cents), and when he handed it to me, handed a dollar bill back through the window. Ralph motioned to the pile of change scattered on the counter and hurried on to the next customer, yelling “Next!” over my shoulder. I put the bill down and grabbed a quarter from the pile.

I walked a few steps away and turned around to watch the interaction between this business and its customers. For five minutes, everyone either threw down exact change or made their own change without any notice from Ralph; he was just too busy pouring coffee or retrieving crullers to pay any attention to the money situation.

Ralph probably does lose a little bit of change each day to theft & bad math, but more than makes up for it in other ways. The throughput of that tiny stand is amazing. For comparison’s sake, I staked out two nearby donut & coffee stands and their time spent per customer was almost double that of Ralph’s stand. So, Ralph’s doing roughly twice the business with the same resources. Let’s see Citibank do that.

When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc.

And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
                         (thanks, Roland!)

Ralph the Coffee & Donut Man has done two things to improve his business. First, he’s put himself at risk rather than the customer (caveat venditor). Whether it’s a hard-headed ROI calculation or a social statement, he’s come out way ahead. Second, he’s changed the character of his relationship with his customers. Instead of insisting on a simultaneous exchange of coffee and cruller for cash, he delivers the goods and ignores the mechanics of the transaction. He’s depending on reliable protocols for the money side of the deal. To his “business logic” (as the consultants call it), the money’s an afterthought.

Many of us, like Roland, see the similarity between the Ralph protocol and the Xpertweb protocol. Once the order’s delivered, the vendor’s free to start on another revenue cycle. Upon delivery, the customer is trusted to pay according to his satisfaction.

In both environments, the delivery and the customer’s response are visible to bystanders, which probably reinforces compliance, but the urge to treat fair work with fair payment is probably genetic, since animals do the same thing.

Trust. You can take it to the bank.

11:13:04 PM    

I’m privileged to be the Senior Lurker and Occasional Contributor to the team that’s building AmericansForDean (A4D)–Zack & Josh and all the rest. After having my open source sensors tuned up at OSCon last week, it’s fascinating to watch these guys re-inventing democracy out in the open.

These truly are the best of times, because our tools have become permission-free. Just as there is no way to stop us from Purchasing the Dean Campaign by buying our own votes, there is also no way any force on earth can keep citizens from giving themselves the tools to contribute money, ideas, talent and shoe leather to the political activity of their choice. A4D is building an open source toolkit. I call it Campaign-in-a-Box (notice that little RSS Feeds widget in the center):

There’s an interesting aspect to all open source tools: These are commodities that, like Google or the ‘Net itself, stop working if passionate people don’t show up each day, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his OSCon keynote. You may have all the money in the world, but unless you invest yourself in the results you promise to the world, there’s no there there.

The scarce resource is NOT capital, but rather the ideas and energy to make commodity tools do insanely great things. Once there’s a resource scarcer than capital, are we still practicing capitalism? I’m not sure.

Mistake-based Talent

Different organizations treat mistakes differently. When I flew airplanes for Uncle Sam, we always talked about fuck-ups. They are the raw material for all aviation stories, since aviation is hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. We all agreed that aviation rules are just a collection of be-nos.

Yeah, be-nos. As in “There’ll be no more of this and there’ll be no more of that.” Every action you take in an airplane is surrounded by the hundred ways you could screw it up with spectacular results. You’re never on course, you’re correcting back to course. You’re never on time, you’re adjusting to make your ETA. And bombs dropped by humans are never right on target.

I saw that kind of approach in my consulting to a couple of university medical departments. Every week, they hold an “M&M”–Morbidity and Mortality Conference about what went wrong the previous week. Doctors talk proactively about mistakes for the same reasons pilots do–their mistakes are so obvious and so significant. Perhaps Dr. Dean will talk about mistakes as well as successes, for how can anyone enjoy success without committing errors?

The same is true for engineers and programmers. Programmers write code and immediately list all the things that are wrong with it. A group of programmers talks about what’s wrong, ways things can be done better and then they go away and do real work to improve performance the next day. Here’s the kind of thinking you get from a programmer:

I did this in perl, and I can probably port the code, but I don’t quite know what
sort of modules are available in php for mail header construction/deconstruction.

I added these notes here:
[URL for the Dev wiki]
Please tell me if I’m way off base here.           
(from an A4D volunteer email just in)

Perfection-based Companies

But that’s not how most companies behave. Companies never tell you what’s wrong, though it’s obvious that things are haywire. Instead they minimize problems and deflect criticism and suggestions. We’ve built a business culture focused so much on appearances that reality is nowhere in sight.

Most corporations only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
                                 — Cluetrain

It should be no surprise that, when a President campaigns as our CEO, his spin can outweigh his facts, causing some people–curmudgeonly sticklers for detail–to mistrust the spin behind the recent hostile takeover bid for a long term, low cost oil lease in the middle east.

Mistake-based Democracy

You don’t collect Internet clues if you’re in denial about your mistakes.

“The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.”
                                 — Veteran of a firm free-falling out of the Fortune 500

There’s a current notion in the body politic that it’s unpatriotic to discuss problems. Finding faults in America is equated with finding fault with the American experiment. Of course that’s just silly. We’re making mistakes every day because this nation is a human enterprise. People with an America–Love It or Leave It bumper sticker apparently can’t live in an imperfect world, preferring to be coddled in some theme park America where you’re surrounded by uncomplaining, politically passive citizens.

Doc writes today about the Dean Meetup he attended last night in Santa Barbara:

The main attraction for the event, from what I gathered from a few conversations, was a pitch passed among friends by email and phone: Maybe Dean has the best chance of dumping Dubya. The assumption seemed to be that Dean was the one Democrat who was not only taking clue train deliveries, but laying as much track as possible. This, of course, is why I’m so interested in what the man and his campaign are up to.

On Tuesday Doc quoted his Cluetrain co-author:

Go back and read what Dr Weinberger says about “management.”

Every company already to one degree or another is a hyperlinked organization, although management may not yet know it.

…(get) out of the way. It’s not your job to create conversations, to create voices. It’s your job to listen to the conversations and voices alread
y there.

The web is remaking business in its image. This is a bottom-up, distributed network of people creating their own loose structure. You’re not in charge anymore. Resist the reflex to reassert your control.

Here’s what’s cool: What’s happening in slow motion to business is happening rapidly to politics. So far the Dean people are taking advantage of the change.

Wow. “What’s happening in slow motion to business is happening rapidly to politics.” And then I got it: Politics is like war, where you improvise within a tactical framework, without the luxury of endless staff meetings.

Unlike past campaigns, Dean’s Campaign Manager Joe Trippi is running one that doesn’t claim to know it all. He acknowledges that he’s learning from the comments posted on the campaign’s blog. The campaign’s bloggers, Zephyr and Matt and Joe and (oh yes) Howard, are having a conversation with their supporters, speaking in a human voice:

Doonesbury Getting Local with Dean Again
I haven’t been linking to every single Dean-focused Doonesbury because there are too many — but I can’t resist this one. Dean supporters organizing with the Get Local tools are featured again.

Technology happens fastest in war and communications technology is happening fast in this campaign. The campaign has built a rapid feedback loop that’s not going to disappear after the election. These donors will be just as demanding of the President they bought as any other donors. And that’s where the A4D network comes in. Remember that widget called RSS Feeds in the network graphic?

It’s a technical breakthrough in campaign organization, a chaordic disruption of party politics, and another genie freed from its bottle. This is a big deal:

• The campaign (or resulting presidency) can’t ignore the comments posted to its own blog
• Interesting comments rise through the Dean sites to reach a broader audience
• More information moves to the campaign than from it
• More initiatives and work get proposed and acted upon from outside the campaign than within

Consider these two comments (of 127 so far) to the blog announcement that former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (Ohio) is supporting Dean. This is the kind of ferment that’s not unusual in 19 minutes of Blog For America comments:

__________________________________________
Hi bloggers etc. –

I have an idea that may sound strange, but I’d like some feedback. We’ve been doing a great job of getting the word out digitally, but I’ve become increasingly convinced that it will be our success outside the digital-world that will define this campaign. The thing that has been so great about this campaign, however, has been our ability to use the internet to do real grass-roots organizing and keep everyone engaged and excited.

I’ve been thinking that we could probably use computers to organize a huge outreach effort by building a one-to-one non-digital action database.

It seems like there are plenty of supporters who would be happy to make a few calls a day or write a few letters a week.

It also seems like we can (as a group) probably identify a number of the people who would like to hear from Dean supporters, (from Democratic mailing lists, friends, family, folks we talk to who want more information but can’t get online).

If we can employ a Database for sharing information about who we should call or write to, then we can be more efficient about using our people-power (letting the people who know a lot of interested people, but don’t have much time, share those contacts with people who have exhausted their personal resources but have plenty of time to help.

I’ve been moved by the effectiveness of the one-to-one campaigning, and since we definitely have the people power we’ve got to use it.

I worry about security problems etc . . . What does everyone think ?

Posted by Anne Bradley at July 17, 2003 04:53 PM
__________________________________________

Response to Anne: Yes, capital idea. Logistically a bit of a problem, and perhaps security a bit of a problem also, but probably not insurmountable. The letter-writing campaign is a great idea, and many hands make light work. Computers might make a distributed mass letter-writing campaign possible.

How about it, Joe? Figure you can ramp it up? Let’s see; if 200,000 people each write one letter a week for six months, that’s 5.2 million letters…for Howard Dean and other Democratic candidates as well. And it’s on the cheap. No number of $2,000 hot dogs could buy it.

No other candidate can offer that level of assistance to state and local central committees.

Posted by Alan Barbour at July 17, 2003 05:12 PM
__________________________________________

“Since we definitely have the people power we’ve got to use it.”

Has that kind of dialogue ever been conducted by anyone but campaign staffers? Have two voters ever designed a letter-writing campaign and ragged on a campaign manager to provide the contact data so they can get out the vote? But it gets better. The campaign staff is surely overwhelmed with the mechanics of the campaign. Will they be able to respond to Anne and Alan’s initiative? It’s not certain.

Has a campaign ever enjoyed the resources represented by A4D and thousands of other experts who consider it their obligation to manage data on behalf of the campaign? Experts with the means to design the data base, the User Interface, and acquire the data for their fellow voters to write letters and to report which letters have been sent and which calls made?

How does a conventional campaign, no matter how rich, respond to such passion? It’s a big challenge in a world where passion and smarts is the apparent successor to capital as the dominant force in our economy.

10:20:03 PM    comment [commentCounter (177)]

It’s not confusing to most folks, but it bothers me a lot. The conventional wisdom is that we’ve got the best of all worlds–freedom to innovate and be a winner, in a free-market orgy of talent and capital and consumers. The only problem with the dance is that it’s so hard to find anybody that’s actually made it work for them. Even those who seem to have it made will–with little prompting–spill out a tangled web of possessions and obligations and stresses that are suffocating them. And for most of the few who have made it without an ulcer or a coronary, there’s been a lot of history that they don’t want their kids at boarding school to know much about.

Managerial Capitalism – the Rule of Meritocracy

Free-market capitalism is neither aristocracy or democracy. Its special “ocracy” is meritocracy – those who are most able rise to the top of the pecking orders of multi-national corporations and their management teams, not determined by any static biases of family, ethnicity, national origin or even gender. But the lack of those perceptible biases doesn’t mean there’s a lack of bias. The bias is for a special blend of intelligence and energy called merit. Most of the significant wealth is managed by corporations which need a steady supply of hungry young tigers with big brains and bigger egos to attack markets and destroy competition and launch killer products to conquer market segments. It sounds as brutal as feudalism. The expendable foot soldiers of these campaigns are people from the same social classes as those who rise to the top. The difference may be in their genes–their hearts don’t seem to be in the unending fight–and at some level they know they’re expendable as soon as a wave of re-engineering or acquisition dictates. There’s been a steady increase in the level of commitment, intelligence, energy, ambition and ruthlessness required to rise to the top of any corporation, so the few who make it are reaping greater rewards compared to the people who fight in the trenches. And that’s why they’re in the game.

Money, not nobility, is the only way to differentiate oneself from the run-of-the-mill. The stock market wealth engine has reduced the process to a formula: Own stock or options in a company; build the company (perhaps from scratch); buy another company or be bought out; own stock and be perceived as instrumental in building the new organization; buy another company or be bought out… That process builds the winner’s web of wealth. Stock is never given out of generosity, so folks who don’t negotiate hard have a more constrained web of wealth. If they are downsized, they are separated from their web of wealth, perhaps before they have any significant bit of other people’s productivity.

Meritocracy’s profound, counter-genetic shift

Historically, those chieftains who were woven into a web of wealth maintained a web of support for the many whose productivity they laid claim to. In our time, technology means that more productivity does not mean more workers. The genetically based contract – that the powerful protect the weak in exchange for their productivity – has broken down. It would never occur to a king or noble (or silver-backed gorilla) to estrange a loyal and hard working serf simply because there were harder-working serfs. This all changed with the pervasive application of the Net Present Value calculation.

With no alternative in sight and general agreement that capitalism won the battle of the isms, no one seems to see any alternative but to keep carrying a heavier load each year, like the farmer carrying a calf around each day until he falls under an unsupportable load of bull.

Perhaps this is not the final system. Perhaps there’s life after meritocracy, especially when one observes that the products and services produced by the meritocrats are not always satisfactory. Just because these hard-charging companies are defeating each other in the market doesn’t mean they’re winning customers’ hearts and minds. There’s something about large organizations which squanders most of the participants’ time and energy in producing motion rather than progress. Too often, they seem as competitive with customers as they are with competitors, designing byzantine structures to lock a customer into a complex dependency when all the customer wanted to do was surf the net or call home.

Some day we may discover that our suspicions were correct, that, during the years surrounding the beginning of the third millennium, only 10% of our efforts were producing value but we were going crazy with the cultural and economic myths surrounding that 10% of our effort. All it took was to change the work protocols slightly and people once again were able to turn most of that wasted 90% into a real life.

I believe that Xpertweb provides those protocols, but we shall see.

The Tyranny of Net Present Value

All capitalism is based on a single strategic algorithm: calculating the Net Present Value (NPV) of a series of expected cash flows by discounting each cash flow (cf) by a percentage (discountRate) over time:

NPV=cf1*(1-1*discountRate)+cf2*(1-2*discountRate)+…cfn*(1-n*discountRate)

Why would this dry formula be so important to every one of us?

The NPV calculation lies at the center of all resource allocation decisions

You may resent it, but all your economic possibilities are defined and constrained by this simple calculation buried in the computers of people you will never meet. It is what they are talking about when people say “Follow the money.”

The greatest civilization in the history of civilization has been reduced to this single formula. If in the beginning was the Word, then in the end there’s only the Net Present Value formula. With it, managers and financiers and governments and pension plans compare any set of cash flows to any other set. Then they sell the lower one and purchase the higher one. Even though it ignores the sweep and drama of the rise of civilization, it’s a democratic yardstick. It’s also the basis of meritocracy.

It is the process of “capitalizing” every cash flow, whether it’s an inflow (customer payments and collections, bond yields, corporate earnings) or an outflow (employee salaries and benefits, supplier payables, social security payments). Corporate managements have an uneven track record in growing their revenues but they are masters at reducing their expenses and making optimistic forward-looking statements. A company’s stock market valuation is some multiple of forecast earnings. To increase the value of the shareholders’ (i.e., management’s) stock holdings and options, the best strategy is to reduce expenses, which appears to instantly increase earnings. As available capital exploded in the 20th century, every discernible cash flow opportunity in the economy showed up on someone’s radar screen and was targeted for assimilation or annihilation, whe
ther it’s mom & pop retail sales in rural Arkansas (a Wal-Mart opportunity) or a 48 year-old engineer at Chevrolet (a GM expense).

The logic of meritocracy says that an engineer may be a star at 27 but a liability at 48. This is the basis of the pervasive, subconscious grievance against meritocracy, even when it’s not framed in those terms. The conventional wisdom of the age is that everyone needs to re-train themselves on a moment’s notice to become a software programmer or help line staffer or home health care specialist.

The question is, what is the obligation of an economy to consider and support the preferences of the majority of its participants? Naturally, the “moving hand” school of thought is that the market economy is driving all these choices, and complaining about it is unreasonable, as G.B. Shaw pointed out. Even if individuals can adapt as quickly as proposed and remain employable, they are repeatedly separated from their last company’s web of support and their only opportunity for a web of wealth–often, it’s obvious, by intention.

I have no answers for the meritocracy dilemma, but it’s obvious we have an economy that freezes out most of its participants. The resentment’s not boiling, but it’s building. That inequality has been embraced and extended by most decision makers in our government, and they seem to think it can go on forever without repercussions.

We shall see.
12:16:59 AM    

On 7/15/03 at 1403 EDT, the DeanTechTeam made its first support call.

[Q: How do you start up in OS 9 rather than OS X? A: hold down the option key.]

What’s the DeanTechTeam you ask? It includes everyone who:

• Has above average computer and Internet skills
• Wants to meet her neighbors
• Wants to help his neighbors with computer issues (hey, we all got issues!)
• Wants to show that Howard is people-powered, not spin-powered
• Has registered as a DeanTechTeam support staff

How the DeanTechTeam works

A DeanTechTeam volunteer puts the word out that s/he’s available for free tech support.

Here’s an idea for a flyer:

When contacted, the DeanTechTeamMate starts solving the tech problem, without boring their neighbor about why they’re doing it. If they make a house call, they wear a Dean button, perhaps a special DeanTechTeam button. (Yeah, we know. House calls raise liability issues. Evil people are everywhere. Fear everything. Do nothing. Rely on authorities. Let’s all stay home and watch TV. Don’t skip the commercials.)

The message is that process is more important than ideology. We’re not here to lobby you because there’s already too much lobbying (33 lobbyists for every member of congress). Instead, let’s just do something useful. We’re happy to be helpful.

3:24:18 PM    

go direct to Dean Campaign Purchase instructions

I had some great hang time at OSCon with Doc. Doc is the metaphor meister, but he’s nobody’s fool. I emphasize his non-foolishness because historically the king’s metaphor meister was a brightly dressed fool who was allowed to say outrageous things that the nobles could not. Many of the fool’s gems were metaphors, and Doc comes up with more pithy comments than anyone, and also reports everyone else’s. I think of him stalking through the jungle with his metaphor net and pith helmet.

Yesterday he quoted Jakob Neilsen: “Cluetrain was marketers defecting to the customers’ side of marketing.” After a week at OSCon, I’m back to report that Neilson’s describing a cultural trend, not an isolated event. We’re all defecting from tired viewpoints to previously inconceivable ones.

On the evening of June 30, I heard Howard Dean speak in New York. He worked the crowd with his articulate plainspokenness regarding health care, state’s rights to regulate couple’s rights, and in a clever finale to the list, the glory of a balanced budget to secure our future. He got a rousing, lingering round of cheers and applause. When we quieted down, he added, “Look what just happened: A crowd of liberal New Yorkers cheering for fiscal responsibility!”

That’s a mass defection. What a contrast to the mass defecation on George Tenet this week!

The Open Source Democracy

Back Story

Remember when people quit asking if you had an email address and just asked for it? Happened with fax numbers a decade earlier. Here’s a news flash from OSCon: that kind of tipping point is happening with Open Source software, in the biggest companies in the world. That’s not according to the OSCon presenters, it’s from the corporate IT guys in the audience and hallways.

There were lots of big company guys spreading the gospel, sounding like evangelists. Folks from Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch, Ticketmaster and Real Networks and on and on. The people there were IT guys in big companies, plus big vendors who feel huge pressure from their customers to get their enterprise-class apps working on Linux.

The sense you took away is that the Open Source genie won’t fit back in the bottle; that the tools are plenty good enough and are only getting better. Companies are no more likely to back away from Open Source than we are to stop using email.

Am I just seeing penguins or is this a cultural trend?

• We’re tired of waiting passively for software vendors to make their stuff work right.
• We’re tired of waiting passively for professional educators to fix schools while our children’s futures slip away, so we’re home- and charter-schooling.
• We’re tired of watching cheery TV news drivel so we’re reporting hard news to each other.
• We’re tired of Network time slots so we Tivo our own channels.
• We’re tired of telecoms’ last mile roadblock so we’re building wireless networks ourselves.
• And music acquisition? Heh.

Which is why big companies are using open source tools to do DIY IT, as Doc calls it.

Is Democracy the Killer App?

• We’re tired of waiting passively for parties, politicians and pollsters to forge a democracy they’re not interested in.

What would an open source country look like? It’s been done many times before. They’re called revolutions, hard reboots that are really messy, with all those bodies and widows and orphans. Usually they end up hacking a Colonel. Those are the lengths people will go to install an open source government.

Democracy, the killer demo.

Unfortunately, like our current republic, most of those revolutionary open source installations suffer from a slow but persistent memory leak. The revolutionaries revert to type and act like the old leaders. Think of Castro and the NeoCons here. Remember the Gingrich Contract with America? (Reproduced below for convenience & blog stickiness. BTW, did anyone else feel a disturbance in the Force when they made a newt our most powerful legislator?)

That’s why Thomas Jefferson felt that a new open source government should be installed by its users every generation or so.

The Über Issue

As I said last time, an ad hoc smart mob might be reaching a critical mass around the Dean campaign. If it is, the mob’s collective sense may be that the key issue behind the movement is their new sense of empowerment, not the candidate or issues. That might not even bother Howard Dean. Every leader wants to leave behind something larger than himself, and open source democracy sure would be it.

Make no mistake, these people love Dean and there are many reasons why they should, the DLC and pundits notwithstanding. Dean is smart, human, informed and charismatic. On the main points that people like in a president, he seems ahead of the candidates of both parties. On his campaign blog a while back, a worker commented that Dean had left his notes behind before a talk, but that, “as usual, he just improved on the notes.” Doh. Natural, coherent speech seems the most presidential of traits.

As Doc points out in his link to my Steal this Campaign post yesterday, the candidate is just the start of the appeal. Beyond the issues and the candidate, which are features, lies the real benefit. The Dean campaign is facilitating a different character of participation, by entirely new people, who are not as focused on the candidate and issues as on the process they want to establish, which looks nothing like the process we have.

Fix it in the Mix

These new constituents are collectively buying the Dean campaign, just as big Republican donors are buying Dubya’s attention–I’ll bet Kenny Lay has already slipped a couple grand into his old buddy’s pocket. Dean supporters, with their $112 average contribution, seem to feel a collective confidence in Dean’s willingness to listen to them just as Republican donors feel in their ability to be heard by the candidate they’re buying. Dean’s indicated that we’ll see a White House blog in 2005, and he’s guest hosting Larry Lessig’s blog next week. It’s the transparency, stupid!

If the citizens own this candidate, and there’s a way to aggregate our collective sensibilities into a coherent expression of policy preferences, then we should be confident we can steer the country after buying our candidate. Amazon knows all about its users’ preferences, thanks to all those Linux boxes, why shouldn’t the president we buy?

Now that’s an aspiration greater than mere presidency: “I am the preferred puppet of the American people. My job is to understand their collective common sense and make it so.” If you have a puppet for pres
ident, you know you can fix problems in post production.

Are Mobs really smart?

All my smart mob talk gives Mitch and some others the willies. They say that if we get too confident we might fail to get Dean elected, that elections are won in meatspace, not cyber and so we Netizens can’t assume we’ll connect with actual citizens. My point is a different one. If the smart mob reaches critical mass, it’s a fundamentally different animal than the one that currently elects governments, with radically different capabilities. Its effect on party machines and mechanics would be like the effect of P2P networks on the music biz. And it’s all about meatspace, not segregated from it.

I went to a Dean Meetup 10 days ago and wrote 3 letters to Iowa Democrats. So did about 20,000 other people. I’ve never written a campaign letter in my life nor had anyone around me. It gets no meatier than that. This was an example of the effect of the civic level of cyberspace that Jim Moore described on the eve of of Dean’s Super Monday:

So the four levels are the infrastructure (e.g. telcos), the service (ISPs, services, operating systems), the application (browsers, blogs, RSS and other standards) and the civic level (online communities, networks of bloggers, wired enterprises, etc.).

Based on a series of digital messages, 60,000 people have registered to go to Meetups and do things like write letters with real ink on real paper. The experts who specialize in managing the torrent of money flowing into candidate’s coffers every other year don’t like this formula which is more complicated than buying attack ads on TV. Because it’s human.

Let’s try a viral mob-forming experiment. I’m dropping this in the meme pool to see what happens. I know people who can build this function overnight:

Dean Campaign Purchase Instructions How we the people can buy the Dean Campaign. At this price, it’s a steal! This purchase requires no one’s permission. The campaign or any of the Geeks4Dean sites springing up like mushrooms sets up a simple web app. This app would collect campaign pledges from site members who dig an Open Source Democracy. There would be six pledges on the Pledge Form: * I pledge to do at least one thing to support the Dean campaign or for a movement to elect a Democratic Congress willing to respond to statistically valid citizen input. I will report that action using this form. I pledge to join the Democratic Party and work to transform it into the best vehicle for expressing the will of the majority of the people through responsible governance, as measured by statistically valid citizen input. My expertise is ; I pledge hours per month to the Dean campaign and to collateral congressional restoration efforts. * I have selected the issues I care most about from the list below and indicated my stand from the choices available, or have entered my views in the comments section. * I am a producer of government and not a passive consumer. I pledge to help define the campaign’s message if asked by Dean Campaign officials to contribute my insights, and I expect the campaign to build its platform from the bottom up through this form and other statistically valid citizen input.        The $1 Billion Dean Fund (required) I make a pledge on my honor, to be charged to my card when the campaign reaches $1 billion in total pledges* $1,000 to the Dean Campaign as soon as 1 million others do (Winners’ Circle Level).    $500 to the Dean Campaign as part of a $1 billion collective commitment.    $250 to the Dean Campaign as part of a $1 billion collective commitment.    $100 to the Dean Campaign as part of a $1 billion collective commitment. * required inputs. The campaign’s membership goal is 1 million on-line supporters by 1/1/04. This pledge goal is $1 billion by 1/1/04

As the salesman says, “Sign here, press hard, third copy is yours.”

Next Problem?

---

Contract with America*
1994

An Example of Memory Leak in Partisan Politics

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.

This year’s election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.

Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves.

On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government:

FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs;
FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest a
ccounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.

Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.

1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT
   A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.
2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT
   An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer’s “crime” bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT
   Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT
   Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society.
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT
   A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief.
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT
   No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT
   Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT
   Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages.
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT
   “Loser pays” laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT
    A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.

Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills.

Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

11:49:23 AM    

OK, we can’t steal it, but we can buy it. Cheap.

All the campaigns are talking about money, which is what politicians care about. We can put an end to that foolishness with a simple strategy: Buy a campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise:

You can buy people’s votes

The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing.

But someone said recently that, if a million people give $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window.

In an email today, Lindsley Haisley opines:

The PBS thing on Martin Luther and the Reformation last night was
informative and relevant. The program explicitly made the connection
between the invention of printing and the Reformation on the one hand, and
on the other it likened print technology in the 16th century to the Internet
today, with the implication that eventually the Internet would be a vital
tool for social change.

Martin Luther’s personality, political skills, writing skills, and certainly
his personal courage were the major things he had going for him. The medium
of printing was simply a vehicle for magnifying this across Europe. I don’t
know what the literacy rate was in the 16th century, perhaps less than the
percentage of people with Internet access today, but Luther’s message was so
persuasive that he had overwhelming popular support wherever he went.

Corporate control of radio, TV and print news are much like Church
censorship of the written word in the 16th century. The Internet lets
people with a strong message get it out, but the message has to connect with people and get them fired up. The medium is not the message, as you point out, only a vehicle for it.

Lindsley and Mitch disagree with my assertion that this campaign isn’t about the Presidency, it’s about the Internet, because the basics of elections haven’t changed–get out the vote, raiseawareness with TV money, etc. My point, though, is that all those things are givens. Of course we need a message, a strong candidate, etc. However that’s like saying that the Battle of Agincourt was not about the long bow but Anglo Saxon fortitude, which is just silly. Of course it took great Anglo Saxon determination to trudge through the swamp all night just to show up. But, once there, the battle was about the long bow because it so overshadowed the other variables.

So I believe more strongly than ever that politics in 2004 and 2008 is about the Internet. More precisely, it’s about the uneven use of the Internet because some candidates are willing to open their campaigns to the voters and put up with the chaos of that feedback loop. People are responding to Dean because they are empowered to. Confident in that power, they’re less concerned about Dean’s specific positions, because they buy the inspiring tone and they think they’ll still be posting comments on his blog in 2005.

Scale

Everyone seems to agree that 6/30/03 will be written about for years since it was the first spontaneous expression of political will by self-organizing voters talking each other into caring more and donating more through the Moveable Type Comments function. That inspiring day caused the campaign to believe more strongly in its core aspiration: to somehow get nominated and then to give the Republicans a decent challenge. If 6/30 is as important as it seems, the campaign is making a mistake: It should re-calibrate its goals.

If the campaign doesn’t see the potential in the Internet, then the smart mob phenomenon just might. And a smart mob functions at an entirely different level than conventional hierarchical structures. Its force is nuclear and 20th century politics is just gunpowder.

Do the Math

Internet-equipped people caused $802,000 to be donated to Dean on 6/30/03. They did it by chatting each other up as the new totals were posted every half hour, and as the goal, depicted as a baseball bat, was increased as goal after goal was surmounted through the afternoon.

A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late.

Metcalfe’s Law says that this mob’s value and power will grow with the square of its population, attracting more people and volksmoney as an accretion disk in space sucks in matter from the systems around it. I believe this phenomenon is a social force too powerful to be stopped, and that historians will be more interested in 6/30/03 than 9/11/01.

The smart mob is not limited by the campaign’s preconceptions. At a gut level, this mob seems to be saying, “We’ve got plenty of money for this little problem. Shit, we give $4 billion a year to Apple Computer. Apple! We can easily spend a couple billion every four years to own our own government!”

Wah hoo! I just made my first ever campaign donation and I gave it to Dean. No candidate has ever gotten me excited enough to give money. 🙂 I could only afford $50 (rent time), but I intend to give more next month and I wanted to get something in before the end of the quarter.
Posted by Amanda at June 30, 2003 11:25 AM

Look at the wonderful people that are contributing people who really can’t afford to yet we all feel we can’t afford not to. We pinch our pennys and know we’ll make the sacrafice to get our point across. The only thing I say is don’t do what Mr Bush has done to our country don’t go into debt. We need to start with a new mind set. Everyone be solvent.
Thanks,
Stephanie
Posted by Stephanie at June 30, 2003 01:55 PM

I kept thinking I couldn’t afford to give anything (working mom supporting the family) and that I would just support Gov. Dean the best way I could. But reading everyone’s excitement has really inspired me and made me feel like it was important enough to contribute what I could today (payday) before my other payments went out – so I gave $15.00.
I want the message to be loud and clear that it’s every day regular Americans like me who are making this campaign work and who will put Gov. Dean in the White House. We really do count and we have the power together to change our country.
I’ll check back all day to see if we make the $7 million goal!
Posted by Cari at June 30, 2003 02:13 PM

Today was my 4th contribution ($100) and it came from the proceeds of a community yard sale that I participated in last Saturday. At the site of the sale I had a Howard Dean poster up and attached was my sign saying; “all proceeds go to Dean!”

Lots of folks asked about Howard Dean and I was able to explain his most significant positions.
Think “Yard Sale” as BOTH a source of dollars for De
an as well as out reach for getting others involved.
Posted by Elwin at June 30, 2003 02:14 PM

I contributed a small amount, but what I could afford, $25 (twice so far) and plan to contribute again today, because when Howard Dean emerges as the Democratic front runner, I will be proud to say that I was a part of the movement that put him there! I feel so empowered by this.

I can’t help it, I’ve approached family members and coworkers, and said, please just check out the website and then contribute today if you can.
Posted by Sharon at June 30, 2003 02:37 PM

more

Do you hear what I hear?

I hear a being waking up, wiring together its own dendrites and a little surprised at how easy it is to do what its forebears found challenging, like a Cro Magnon artist looking at a Neanderthal adornment.

I hear this being forming its mouth around the word landslide. As in, “What the fuck! Is that all we’re talking about? Sure, we can afford this, but why not buy a landslide, it’s way more fun than an even race! And why not buy a congress and that little Democratic party too. We pay a lot for government already. Why not just own it outright?

Of course all those little donors are giving money to buy their own votes. The ultimate bootstrap.

Yeah. I think this campaign is about the Internet.

10:36:19 AM    

I’m in Portland staying with my good friend and data mentor, Nick Johantgen and his talented and stylish wife, Nina Davis. Nick & Nina and Tamara and I go way back, to Seattle, Philly and now bi-coastal. Roland Tanglao and I are meeting in Portland on the occasion of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference this week. (Flemming‘s moving to France next week, so he’ll be here only in spirit and iChat). Mitch is driving down from Tacoma to join us tomorrow. Our purpose is to hammer out some Xpertweb design details and to get some input from the Opensourcerati.

If Xpertweb does its job, we might one day see an Open Data Conference. “Open Data” is meant to suggest an architecture that mirrors data among participants’ web sites. It formalizes what we already embrace in a random fashion as we scan multiple RSS feeds, blogs, news and research to triangulate what we accept as true. If multiple sources describe roughly the same story, we come to embrace it. Multiple sources implicate the truth while open data explicates it. Our resentment of dead links indicates our commitment to open data, though we’ve not yet committed to an open data standard.

In transactional reporting, the kind of data that our clients and employers pay us to manage, Xpertweb wants to foment identical data in the records of both parties to the transaction. That alone is worthwhile, but the real win comes by making the data also open to other parties, anyone who may want to trade with the parties to this transaction and who would benefit from full disclosure of the character and quality of past undertakings.

I find it ironic that everyone uses open source tools to create closed data. Perhaps the benefits of open data are not obvious.

Lopsided, Balanced or Open Data?

The more technical terms might be Asymmetrical, Symmetrical and Transparent data.

Several years ago, it occurred to me that the world is built on asymmetrical data, where transaction records are maintained and controlled by the designer of the transaction. So, when a buyer and a seller transact, the seller (the designer of the transaction) keeps and controls the data. When an employer and an employee intersect, the employer (designer of their transaction) keeps and controls the data. That’s when I started my quest for a symmetrical data standard, where both parties maintain identical records of their transaction.

And realized how profound is the power to design transactions.

Later I realized that was a partial step. Symmetrical records may help the parties approach parity, but the smaller party will still be subject to the larger party’s, well, largesse. (It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Do we ever see largesse practiced by larger parties?) After some digging, I realized there’s lots of symmetrical data, but it’s hidden from view.

Symmetrical data is built cooperatively when businesses insist on parity of transactional data, using standards like EDI. So far, only largish businesses have had the luxury of symmetrical data, since it has required expensive tools, data servers, staffs and usually lawyers. And there’s nothing inherent in symmetrical data that will keep a GM manager from trashing a supplier as a smart career move.

Open Data is the next step. An ideal Open Data transaction is one where the symmetrical data is published on the web so it requires no permission for any interested party to examine it. Further, the data need to be persistent over the life of a transaction, not just archived at the close of the deal. This encourages the parties to deal as they say they should, since the details of failed transactions will be as visible as successful ones.

What’s in a Name? We had no ID…

We seem to have solved the hard part of the Digital ID challenge, as Doc described after we showed it to him in May. There’s a review of our digital ID system at the end of this post, for those patient enough to wade through it.

We have an ID process, which would seem to be the hard part, but not an ID format, which is harder than it seems. Our naming challenge stems from Xpertweb’s lack of centralization–there’s no central registration authority as for internet domains. Instead we have to rely on each mentor to generate a unique Xpertweb ID for all those who come after her. It’s a little like surnames, where John’s son Dave became Dave Johnson. Too bad that medieval standard wouldn’t scale past the first metadata level.

But the geneology model is compelling. Since we can compare satisfaction ratings for any users or groups of users, then, if each Xpertweb user’s ID contains the IDs of all the mentors who form the user’s “family tree,” so to speak, we can quickly compare any mentor’s effectiveness to any other’s. This seems to me an overarching value. The following method is the least worst we’ve come up with, which Roland describes as “Britt’s method.” Perhaps he’s distancing himself from it…

Procedure for Assigning a New Xpertweb ID (implemented by the Mentor’s Registration form)

The New User’s ID will be an extension of the Mentor’s ID The last character of the new user’s ID will be a single A-Z character (ASCII 65-90 or 97-122) for the first 26 New Users sponsored by the Mentor. All IDs shall be assigned in the order of the date and time of the Mentor Agreement by which they are created. There is no provision for a Mentor to assign Xpertweb IDs to more than 26 New Users. EXAMPLE: James Franklin’s ID is ADCGEFH. The first 7 characters (inheritance code) of the user ID for all Franklin’s New Users is ADCGEFH If Mary Smith is Franklin’s 5th New User, Mary’s ID would be: “ADCGEFHE“: her inheritance code + “E“. If Mary is Franklin’s 26th new user, her ID would be “ADCGEFHZ“.

Simple enough, right? Unique IDs all around. But we need a lot of unique IDs, since Xpertweb means to be a data collector and an alternate economy and globally virulent. Further, each human may have more than one persona, operating in parallel or serially.

The issue is the length of each ID. As we add users, their IDs get longer. At what length does an ID become unwieldy? Are ten digits too many? 15? 20? Does it matter, since each mentor’s web site will point out who begat whom? Theoretically, you can imagine a string as long as the number of users, if they’re added serially. However, since the Xpertweb system depends on each person training several others, (four is the recommended minimum), 4x4x4, etc. yields I
Ds about 16 digits long. Not bad, and we get to keep the geneology model.

While we need to anticipate every eventuality, such as a thousand people at a meeting, each of whom mentors the person seated to their right (AKA “Ming’s Nightmare”), I feel human nature is on the side of one person mentoring several others, so the digit-length tax on each generation seems likely to earn a four-fold population gain:

 

# Chars Population # Chars Population 1 4 1 6 2 16 2 36 3 64 3 216 4 256 4 1,296 5 1,024 5 7,776 6 4,096 6 46,656 7 16,384 7 279,936 8 65,536 8 1,679,616 9 262,144 9 10,077,696 10 1,048,576 10 60,466,176 11 4,194,304 11 362,797,056 12 16,777,216 12 2,176,782,336 13 67,108,864 14 268,435,456 15 1,073,741,824 16 4,294,967,296

Xpertweb has generous rewards for mentoring new users (some say they’re too generous), so it’s likely that many mentors will introduce more than four new users. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Unless we can come up with a better story.

Whaddaya think? Does this approach make sense? Do we need a more elegant, computing-intense way to generate IDs? How important is it to provide a simple means to look at ID strings and see within them the ” geneology” of the mentors who trained an Xpertweb user. Please send any comments to Roland.

Why work on an idealized, theoretical economic system?

Is one better off to work directly on the symptoms of the real socioeconomic climate, like getting an Internet-based President elected? Or is it better to fantasize that a novel transaction data model could grow to significance? As you guessed, I like to place both bets.

Clearly, Xpertweb is a delicate, tentative little evolutionary economy. Like all evolutionary species, you can almost hear it gasping and flopping around at the edge of the water hole, wondering if breathing air is really such a great idea. But it’s a little horny, nonetheless.

“Oh well, maybe it’s wo
rth it. Let’s find someone to transact with…”

---

Current Method for Authenticating an Xpertweb Buyer

Since both parties control web servers containing the ID data they wish to selectively expose, we can use cooperative scripts to identify ourselves to each other, making the steps fairly straightforward. Here’s an example where I might want to buy something from Flemming Funch, but he doesn’t know if I’m the person I say I am.

1. I’m attracted by FFUNCH’s reputation and click on a product link.
2. The product page asks me to enter my unique Xpertweb URL.
3. Upon submitting a URL, FFUNCH’s site visits the URL and discovers there IS an Xpertweb site present with a properly formatted me.xml file at the root level and a script that says it’s ready to play nice with his script. Only then does FFUNCH’s script learn that I say I’m BRITTB.
4. FFUNCH’s script still doesn’t know if I’m BRITTB, so his script notes the current time, the visitor’s IP number, composes a unique ID for this contact and places a cookie on the visitor’s browser, something like:
        taskid FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754; IP 66.65.84.10 and some product info
        (a task ID = both users’ IDs + the Unix epoch [# of seconds since 12/31/1969])
5. FFUNCH’s script directs my browser to the URL I presented
6. The script at BRITTB’s site asks me (still unverified) to enter BRITTB’s name and password.
7. If I pass the challenge, we need a stateless way to confirm to FFUNCH’s script that I am indeed BRITTB.
8. BRITTB’s script looks in its buystuff/sellers directory for a subdirectory labeled FFUNCH.
         [If absent, it creates a buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH directory]
         It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH
            … listing the now-current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info
9. BRITTB’s script returns me to the FFUNCH site
10. FFUNCH’s script visits BRITTB’s site and notes that the properly formatted file was created in the proper directory at a time shortly after the task ID creation, from a browser at the known IP number.
11. FFUNCH’s script looks in its sellstuff/buyers directory for a subdirectory labeled BRITTB.
          [If absent, it creates a sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB directory]
          It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB
             … listing the current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info

Now the two of us can transact with high confidence that our reputations are accurately represented. Naturally, no system can guarantee that we’ll behave well. All it can do is report what we say about each other’s behavior.

And that seems like a good start.

[back to the Unique ID discussion]

9:31:45 AM    

…Was a wildly popular biz book for the tech biz a few years ago, for good reason. It described the dilemma of tech companies trying to convert early success into lasting success. It’s all your fault. And my fault. And the fault of most people who know what “blog” means.

We’re early adopters and if a new product or service gets our attention, the company can experience an immediate flash that doesn’t pan out. Their hopes are dashed when the growth stops and they wonder where the market is. The market heights they seek are on a tall mountain across a deep chasm which they must cross in order to climb higher. It turns out that lots of companies can win early sales and 15 minutes of fame, but few have the will and resources to cross the valley of the shadow of death that yawns before them.

Certainly if I’d foreseen the chasm dilemma in 1987, I’d not have been the angel investor behind Dynamac, but what fun would that have been?

Our nation has a cultural chasm to cross, the rift between those who applaud our get tough stance with the world, vs. those who aren’t sure that we’re tough enough to beat everybody we’re now pissing off with our bluster.

Books of a Feather

Jock Gill pointed me to an amazing depiction of connections among books. As you’ve noticed, Amazon and Barnes & Noble relates books to each other by noticing what other books are bought by the buyers of any given book. One curious reader, Valdes Krebs, wondered back in 1999 whether there might be any useful insights by charting those associations. His latest look at books, Divided We Stand???, generated an interesting insight illustrating the echo chamber phenomenon:

If only because he thought to lock down the domain orgnet.com, you’ve got to admire Valdes Krebs, but his is a masterful connection of meaningful dots. All the little squares represent books purchased at the same time as the other books they’re linked to. There are two echo chambers depicted here:

In the diagram above, two books are linked if they were bought together at a major retailer on the web. I call these ‘buddy books’. A link was drawn if either book of a pair listed the other as a buddy. The data made public by the retailer shows just the ‘best buddies’ — the strongest ties. Other patterns may emerge with investigation of weaker ties. The data was gathered January 2003.

Using snowball sampling — following the connections between books — two distinct clusters emerge. There is only one book that spans both clusters. Lightly-connected books, with two links or less, were removed. None of the removed books played a key role in the network — they were satellites, on the periphery of one of the clusters.

The actual political affiliation of each book buyer is not known, not even by the web retailer. Yet, after thousands of data points, this emergent pattern is curious. Although the data was collected uniformly across all shown books, the cluster on the right contains less books. These readers kept selecting the same few books — their clique of books is dense — 39%. Most books have highly overlapping buddy lists. Slander, Bias, and Let Freedom Ring are the most popular buddies in this cluster.

So Valdes Krebs discerns a disconnect between the people who buy books described as liberal and those who buy books described as conservative. The only book these two echo chambers have in common is Bernard Lewis’ excellent What Went Wrong? Lewis is considered our leading Islamist scholar, making him acceptable to “intellectuals.” In What Went Wrong?, he dissects the failing of Islam, which makes him appealing to whoever yearns to feel superior to the presumed enemy of our new perpetual perpetuated war.

Crossing the Classism

It’s class warfare. But to me it looks like a war that started in the classroom, where the compliant, eager-to-please, more curious kids ran circles around the guys in the back row and never got over their feeling of mental superiority. Since school, many of those kids in the back row have done much better than the former brainiacs, for whom they feel nothing but contempt, knowing that clear purpose, not introspection, is the key to success. Success in business requires a kind of drive and bonhomie mastered on the playing fields, not in the classroom.

Intellectuals rarely master the American version of the good life, which rewards the kind of unwavering, unquestioning confidence that intellectuals seldom possess. Nor is it clear that those who are outwardly most successful have the will or perspective to avoid the narrowmindedness of any petit bourgeoisie.

If you don’t think there’s a civil war going on, here’s Newt Gingrich rallying the troops in 1988:

“The left at its core understands in a way Grant understood after Shiloh that this is a civil war, that only one side will prevail, and that the other side will be relegated to history. This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefields, nonetheless it is a civil war.”

15 years later, it’s the Republicans who are taking no prisoners. We must cross this uncivil chasm, and this would be a good year to start.

8:13:50 PM