Author: brittblaser

I received some questions from Shannon Clark regarding some of the Xpertweb Issues.

When you refer to “Xpertweb transaction protocols” what is this? (yes, this is a “simple” question.) Is there a specific source for this protocol to look at?

A series of sample forms may be seen starting at http://www.xpertweb.com/process/.

The “Xpertweb Protocols” provide transaction forms for use by non-tech people to record a transaction’s history on the web, using their own web site as a peer to other participants’ web sites.

To that end, each participant is set up with their site, by which they manage forms for buying (receiving a benefit) and selling (imparting a benefit). Most importantly, each transaction is graded by the participants. When the task is done, a completion report/invoice is generated by the seller’s script, REQUIRING a grade (01-99%) from the buyer, plus a written comment. Money is not required, but If the task specifies a payment, the buyer is required to transmit funds to the seller immediately, in an amount which may be discounted by the buyer’s grade. A grade of 85-100% generates a full price transaction. A 50-85% grade pays 50-85% of the contract price. A grade below 50% dismisses the effort as worthless.

The risk is always to the seller. The seller’s only protection is that a customer’s grading history is known before accepting an assignment. It’s like walking into a restaurant with your tipping record on your forehead. Mitch Ratcliffe described the “Caveat Venditor” principle a couple of months ago.

All grades and comments are recorded at both participants’ sites, so no ratings can be hidden. All data is saved as plain XML data in the web directory, so it is discoverable by spiders or purpose-built scripts.

Perhaps related to this, what is the intention behind the “transaction protocols” – do you plan on having separate “Xpertweb servers” vs. “Xpertweb clients”?

An Xpertweb “server” is just a web directory with a certain structure, like this. Each participant has their own directory, as depicted. This “server” has its own code for saving data in 3 file types:

1. the owner’s digital ID
2. a product or service description offered by the owner
3. a History of each transaction (including the rating that Xpertweb is all about).

Each person may have as many Xpertweb personas as desired, and may use the tools for any or none or all of their transactions.

I ask this because my understanding of Xpertweb would leave me to believe that currently it is intended as a centralized platform via which work gets done – more specifically, a party contracts with another party to perform some unit of work, related to each part may be one (or more?) “mentors” who assist in the management of the project and in the performance of the work and may share in the fees. Fees paid are arranged to be paid on the basis of an acceptance measure, with a pre-set rate for less than perfection. Over time the past history of mentors and mentees will build up providing a documented system of “proof” of how well (or not) different parties have performed work in the past. First, is my above one (long) paragraph summary of Xpertweb even close? If not, how not?

Very close. If I’d read it first, my above answers could have been shorter, but I’ll leave them…..;-)

There is NO centralized service. Xpertweb is an agreement, really. There’s no curtain and no wizard. The only repository of knowledge and standards is each user’s series of mentors.

The idea is to build a guild-like virtual organization with no leaders but with a respect for experience and quality work.

What does it “mean” to “Use Xpertweb to conduct a transaction?”

It refers to the use of the forms starting here. Those forms require that both users have an Xpertweb site, so, implicitly, each has a mentor who set up their site and is available to support them. That’s on the principle that new software benefits from a human guide.

XPERTWEB IS MEANT FOR TRADESPEOPLE MORE THAN FOR ENGINEERS.

That’s because there are so many more tradespeople than engineers.

Why 5 Mentors, for one question that puzzles me.

One reason is to encourage a guild mentality – a non-capitalistic approach.
Another is to appeal to people’s ambition – a decidedly capitalistic approach.

From late January :

Should Xpertweb’s Designed Economy offer Hierarchical Rewards?

This is the central design question. Probably the self-generating reputation index is enough of a benefit to attract new users. But the system asks a lot of users – more than any commercial system would: you must have your own web site. You need to upload your starter kit via FTP. Where will you get a starter kit? If it’s only available from a central site, that site is a business that must charge for its service and, if the service is well received, will increase the price as it becomes a necessity.

No, there must be a mentor for each new user. Any user must be equipped to be a mentor. That means that the skill set for any user is broad. A mentor will be needed to set up every new user. Why would someone do all this? The immediate attraction is to get paid something by several generations of new users, hopefully a lot of them. The more subtle payoff is a sense of community, IF the users relate to each other as carriers of a shared, successful meme.

The reason for 5 mentors is to invoke the greed principle. 4 is not enough to generate a LOT of fees, and 6 is so over-the-top as to be outrageous. 5 generates quite a lot, but just short of obscene. Here’s a graphic, where very dot is a persona and each is the center of a ring like the larger one, connected much as dendrites connect neurons. These rings are concentric, like the relationships among bloggers and the LinkedIn model:

Mentor Fees

Mentoring is a service like any other. Each mentor is graded 01-99% by each 1st-level “mentee”. Low grades from them will automatically discount the fees paid by all the other users paying fees. In addition, each person may deny any fee for any reason, though there should be a reason.

It’s presumed that fees are a motivator. If you don’t pay fees, why should you receive any?

I stress this because mentor fees are the Xpertweb lightning rod. The fees exist because most people like money WAY more than ideas, and Xpertweb is designed to appeal to most people. For a sanity check, ask your spouse if it’s preferable for you to be involved with Xpertweb with or without the fee structure.

Offsetting that is the fact that Xpertweb is only an agreement, handed down, guild-like through a series of mentors. See this entry for other similarities to Searls’ &a
mp; Wieinberger’s World of Ends clarification engine.

The Xpertweb agreement may be modified, and those modifications are currently being discussed. Some mentors may not want to receive fees. Others may want to have all fees sent to designated charities, or parents, or political funds, etc. There is no rigid model, but the model does include the possibility of receiving enough fees to pay for an expensive college. That is not such a bad thing.

Presently our best and brightest are lured to the Wall Streets and corporate suites to become unwitting pawns in the intermediation between people’s talent and the buyers of that talent. Xpertweb proposes to be an alternate path for people whose future includes prosperity.

1:44:11 AM    

Hi Alan,

Thanks for reminding us that we’ve hired a President whom we’d not hire to organize the supply closet. Here’s my $.02:

If you earnestly believe these facts are unimpeachable, turn this document into something effective in the minds of people who didn’t vote in 2000 or who are inclined to vote for him again. At least that gets you past the current pattern of progressives talking to each other and affecting no other opinions.

To be useful, this document needs focus and substantiation. If this were a blog, I’d want it to appeal to someone who isn’t convinced of these facts or their import. I’d feel compelled to provide links to mainstream media and include some graphs and charts. It should be shorter and punchier, with a link to a more complete web page with deeper documentation and more mainstream media links. Lose the links to Hyperreal.org and http://www.votetoimpeach.org/. They only convince the convinced.

This is worth editing and putting on a web site. The facts must be so true and the wording so tight that they’re indisputable. Then you need to find a rich progressive to underwrite a challenge: $10,000 to anyone who can prove these facts wrong ($100,000 would be better).

Then you need to retain an auditing firm to audit any claims that these facts are wrong. If someone claims there’s an error, let them put up $1,000 against the $100,000 reward (I like that number better). Turn it into a media circus, if you can find a medium that wants a circus. Find an Edward R. Murrow to take this and run with it.

That alone will not change as many minds as you would think, since Dubya’s appeal is not based on facts but feelings. The people who blame all their problems on the gummint were in a kind of personal hell during the 90s. They felt then as you do now. They honestly believe that the government does nothing useful and should be reduced to the vanishing point (except for the military, which should get 1/3 of the GDP, since killing heathens is something worth living for).

People who support Bush are getting the government they deserve. They don’t want to pay attention to government and details and policy and diplomacy and all the rest. They want someone who expresses anger at the things that piss all of us off. They want someone who convinces them that he is honorable and that he’ll take care of the bad guys and will make the world stop being so complicated and dangerous. These are not stupid people, but they believe there’s a stern but fair and honest father out there somewhere who will take care of us and never dip into the petty cash drawer. And they believe they’ve found him.

Oh yeah, they also believe there’s a criminal behind every tree and that we need to lock them up and throw away the key. Criminal includes every insecure teenager wearing a head rag and walkin’ the Pimp Roll in the mall.

---

On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 03:52 AM, Alan Peevers wrote:

This lovely and impressive resume (sent to me by my brother) really illustrates why we can’t go back to sleep. I think Bush is worse for the world than any other president in US history. Anyone have any news or opportunities to defeat him in ’04?
 
Peace,
Alan

George W. Bush Resume

Past work experience:

• Ran for congress and lost.
• Produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.
• Bought an oil company, but couldn’t find any oil in Texas, company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
• Bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using tax-payer money.
  Biggest move: Traded Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox.
• With fathers help (and his name) was elected Governor of Texas.

Accomplishments as Governor of Texas:

• Changed pollution laws for power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union. Replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog ridden city in America.
• Cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
• Set record for most executions by any Governor in American history.
• Became president after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, with the help of my father’s appointments to the Supreme Court.

Accomplishments as president:

• Attacked and took over two countries.
• Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
• Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
• Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
• First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
• First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
• First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
• After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history.
• Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.
• In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
• Set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12 month period.
• Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
• Set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
• Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history.
• Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
• Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
• My presidency is the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history.
• Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history (the ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice has an Chevron oil tanker named after her).
• First president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.
• Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.
• First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation.
• Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
• Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.
• Removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any
  presidential administration in US history.
• Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
• Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
• Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.
• First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US elections).
• All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.
• My biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
• Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
• First president in US history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
• First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1).
• First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
• Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
• With a policy of ‘dis-engagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
• Fist US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
• First US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
• Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
• Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
• Failed to fulfill my pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’.
• Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18 months I have no leads and zero suspects.
• In the 18 months following the 911 attacks I have successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
• In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the civil war.
• Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down. Records and References:
• At least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).
• AWOL from National Guard and Deserted the military during a time of war.
• Refused to take drug test or even answer any questions about drug use.
• All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my fathers library, sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• All minutes of meetings for any public corporation I served on the board are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public review.

For personal references please speak to my father or James Baker (they can be reached at their offices of the Carlyle Group, profiteering handsomely from recent and current U.S. military activities.)

7:04:57 AM    

We have genes for usefulness.
                              — Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell

My world changed when I read Thomas Lewis’ Lives of a Cell. It’s a collection of essays by a world-class physician, researcher and administrator (Director of the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Research Center in New York). One summer night, driving through rural Connecticut, he was struck by how the fertile earth seemed to him like a living cell, exchanging nutrients and energy, cooperating in an orgy of chaos and order.

“Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.

Education is for improving the lives of others and leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
                            — Marion Wright Edelman, Children’s Defense Fund

There’s a theme here, about service after success and based upon that success. I was trained that the ultimate privilege is to be so successful that you had the means and mentality to serve the community, one way or another. Those who so served therefore distinguished themselves from those who either could not or would not serve the community.

In that way they distinguished themselves from less successful people, who lacked the outer or inner wealth to serve others’ needs. Another way one might distinguish oneself would be to not cheat or lie. When receiving incorrect change in your favor, one had two choices: correct the error or pocket the tiny windfall which declared you to be someone in such poor shape that the pittance mattered to you.

Loyalty Downward

Aaron Feuerstein is in the news again this spring. Mr Feuerstein is the owner of Malden Mills in Lawrence Massachussets, founded by his family in 1906. The last time you heard of him was in 1995, when the mill suffered a disastrous fire, yet he kept the payroll going and fired no one. That would be extraordinary enough, but it’s downright miraculous when you discover that Malden Mills is one of the last textile mills in America. This is an almost impossible business under the best of circumstances.

Malden Mills’ insurance covered only 75% of the rebuilding costs, so Malden filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001. Its creditors include GE Capital, SunAmerica and some private investors. Are we surprised that the creditors fought the reorganization every step of the way?

Let the Lady Speak

I can’t improve on the sentiments expressed by Marion Wright Edelman on her quotations page. Read her wisdom. Is there anything each of us can do, today, to make the world a little better. Not just social software or revising the world economy, but something here and now.

We have genes for usefulness.

11:32:53 PM    

Burning Answers

Doc Searls hung out here last week: we laughed a lot, did tech and swapped stories. He attended the Burning Questions conference presented by the Harvard Business Review and organized by Halley. She and a bunch of other bloggers were at Katz’ Deli Thursday night.

(To answer the most burning question at the conference, I confirmed that Halley did stop by a Fifth Avenue boutique for some sexy underwear for her NYC survival kit. That’s the kind of undercover work this blog will undertake to bring you the back story you deserve to know.)

It was an interesting week. Doc signed up to work with me and my co-consultant, Transition Networks, to develop a massively luxurious web application. “Massively luxurious” is what happens when a luxury brand successfully sells into the “mass market” of people who are almost invisibly prosperous, living simply but insisting on top quality for some purchases. Noted recently,

“We don’t want to haggle over commodities but we’re experts in prestige and the tools of our trade and we want the good life at great prices. You’ll find us over at CostCo, loading paper towels into our Mercedes. Next we’ll stop at CompUSA, grooving to our iPod while stocking up on commodity CD blanks to Rip Mix Burn on our tricked-out iMac. Back home, we’ll order cut-rate printer cartridges from inks4art.com since CostCo and CompUSA only stock the Epson parts.”

Whether it’s a Mont Blanc pen in your pocket, Steuben crystal on your mantle or a Rolex on your wrist, you probably indulge in a luxury item once in a while. When you do, while you may wish you could pay less, price won’t keep you from the purchase. Price often justifies the purchase, a fact that supply-demand curves don’t explain very well.

Transitions. Networks. Luxury.

Transition Network‘s CEO Mary Olson and Creative Director Randal Hunting brought Steuben Glass into the web age with the kind of success story many have given up on. After two months developing an innovative web strategy with Steuben management, they implemented, rolled out and established a new web site over the next two years. Their deliberate work resulted in a site that generates 68% of Steuben’s new business, revenues up about a third and web activity up 90%. Not bad for an investment equivalent to a retail store, and requiring just 3 people to operate. Most importantly, it’s halted a decline in their customer census, attracting for the first time the children and grandchildren of their aging customer base.

Transition Networks has been similarly successful for other clients:

21 Club
Corning Museum of Glass
Oxygen Media
Luxury Marketing Council
Joseph Jurson
Saber Partners
Henry Welt
Steuben

These companies know better than any others that their customers are customers, not consumers. When you make that distinction, Doc is the guru you want on your team, and not just because his Google link count is 88,100 (Steuben’s at 14,100). He and Dave Weinberger nailed customers’ decline into consumer hell in Cluetrain:

“So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than ‘a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.’ Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.”

The Clue Trainers, of course, specified just how absurd that model is, and Googling “consumer customer” at searls.com supports the prediction that the web would reform the consumer poop collectors. But we’re still a long way from the kind of intimacy the web can enable–CRM done right, as Mary describes it. Since Xpertweb is really a reputation/intimacy protocol, I find this kind of work fabulous, dahling, as they say in the world of fashion.

The mass/luxe market is as boutique as you can get with a corporate web site. Rather than launch with a blitz attempting to capture as many eyeballs and clickthroughs as possible, the luxury site must reinforce the quality of the “brand” rather than dilute it. For example, Mary’s and my client is the irrepressible Michael George Florist, who is the florist of choice for New York’s fashion industry, media, celebs and notables. When Calvin Klein opened his store, Michael’s arrangement of 400 calla lilies stopped jaded New Yorkers in their tracks. People clustered at the door to gawk. Calvin, kibbutzing the activity with Michael, says, “Michael, people are coming in because of the lilies.” Michael was skeptical, but later realizes it’s true.

Convergence Marketing

Mary Olson and I have been noticing a kind of cosmic convergence around the mass/luxe meme, but today’s intersections are a little over-the-top. Maybe Doc’s message and this blog are channeling each other due to sleep deprivation. We got 2 hours sleep before his 4am wakeup (blog dinner gossip and Xpertweb musings while Doc forced his NYC photo album down the throat of his balky server).

It doesn’t stop there. Mary calls ten minutes later as I’m forwarding Doc’s email to her. Apparently the mass/luxe meme is getting some real traction, with documentation coming by courier. To understand the traction, we need to consider the market segmentation practices that have dominated marketing over the last 35 years or so. Just as computers morphed from mainframe to minis to PCs to phones, Marketing theory evolved from a single mass market through multiple demographic market segments and now, we’re certain, to sets of luxury preferences within individual demographics and often across them.

How’s that for a disturbing, self-parodying graphic? This is the image that Harcourt Brace uses to attract marketing students to its textbooks on market segmentation. The message seems to be to “carve up the people so we can serve them better.”

It echoes the 18-year-old Marine in Viet Nam who said “We had to level the hamlet in order to save it.” I guess it takes a child to raze a village.

Harcourt Brace cites traditional market segments like Mature Age Groups, Young Age Groups, Hispanics and Upscale Customers. The idea is that you should address each segment as a homogenous mass, which is only a slight refinement of the 1950s doctrine that you aim the same message at the entire market. Slight, because it’s probable that each of those segments now has a higher population than the reach of all television advertising in the mid 50s.

Mass/luxe web strategies, as practiced by Transition Networks, is surgical by comparison to the blunt instruments of conventional marketing. At Steuben, Mary mined executives’ personal contact lists to offer compelling opportunities to known humans in whom the executives had a continuing investment. The database was pristine so the approach to its members also had to be. It worked beyond all expectations. From this base, concentric circles of acquaintanceship and intimacy leveraged both the brand and the relationships, rather than simply diluting the brand. The relationships engage clients, really, beyond even customers, and far removed from mere consumers. Not only are they the
brand’s clients, they know they are its clients, a fact from which they draw tangible pleasure.

The relationship is communal, and in that sense it’s like the community that grows up around a school or church. Fund raisers for a private school will never fire a stakeholder, and neither will a luxury brand. The institution and its members draw mutual strength from each other where lesser brands contend with their customers in the lose-lose tension of value versus price. Such companies constantly abandon customers in the naive assumption they can recruit replacements at will. In truth, if a new depositor is worth a toaster to a bank, a long-term depositor is worth a microwave oven.

You are What you Drive

Years ago, a Car and Driver article summed up the mass/luxe model: “BMW drivers are bold and enthusiastic because BMWs are bold, enthusiastic cars.” It perfectly captures what we know instinctively: A luxury item helps define its owners, whom less subtle marketers would arbitrarily assign to a traditional “market segment.” The taste and special interests of these brands’ customers transcends arbitrary designations.

Customers are those for whom vendors must customize their products and, indeed, their behavior in the market. Everyone benefits from a luxury brand: high profit margins give the vendor the luxury of behaving generously; customers have the luxury of considering quality and not price; craftsmen enjoy the luxury of high-quality design and materials and the time for careful execution. A sales representative is often the client’s peer in taste, fashion sense, education and sophistication. Their sensibilities reinforce each other.

All have the luxury of behaving as most of us wish we could. The acquired good is merely a token of a deeper truth, a kind of Platonic ideal: The real luxury lies in the behaviors and attitudes afforded by the margins attached to luxury goods and services. In that special sense, luxury purchases are the most affordable of all.

The move of luxury brand owners onto the web suggests we may see the finest expression of the evolution from consumer to customer to client and beyond. That most human of conditions grows out of the special calculus of a luxury brand’s adoption of the web’s potential:

known quality + adequate margins + a community ethic = customer intimacy

That’s an intimacy that even the Cluetrain authors might not have thought possible.

6:19:48 PM    

. . . of last time is the buyer’s ethical responsibility to embrace the seller and help extend the seller’s skills and reputation. If that’s the flip side, then my last rant must have been the flippant side, noting how resentful and impatient we are with a seller’s shortcomings, whether real or assumed.

The urge to encourage and cultivate a seller is part of the relationship model that Doc has been championing along with many others. During the period between 40 to 1 B.C. (Before Cluetrain), we assumed that commerce is simply commercial, with buyers and sellers doomed forever to terse, often adversarial salvos. We might call that communication mode expedient. The long decline into mass marketing and the muting of the customer’s voice had caused us to forget about the market conversation, or to conduct it sotto voce at best.

Then the Internet clued us that the market is a conversation and money is just the punch line.

Doc reports that, soon after the ink dried, the Clue Trainers started hearing from people whose cultures had not lost the art of transactional conversation. They pointed out that real markets are more than conversations, they’re relationships, crafted one conversation at a time, often over decades and generations.

When we realize that markets are relationships, we can recognize that Iraq’s Sumerian ancestors invented written language, not to record their ancient myths and epic poetry, but to keep track of market conversations and the relationships developed out of them. At first they were anecdotal, like blogs are today. They evolved like blogs, getting more efficient, connected and data-like until an Italian friar named Fra Luca Pacioli invented double entry bookkeeping in 1494. In a very real sense, double entry bookkeeping was the XML of the Renaissance. (Are the “o”, “k” and “e” double-entered in “bookkeeping” just to get the point across? How weird is that?)

We need to be clear: Literature, Ethics and Law are the products of explicit recorded history and explicitness is the enabling technology of market relationships. Like VisiCalc jump-starting personal computing, public markets were the killer app that jump-started money and writing and literacy. Without public markets, trade isn’t robust enough to support anything more than ad hoc barter. The agora requires standard pricing of a commodity to act as a medium of exchange (probably grain in Mesopotamia) and writing to support the market experience, where you barter your pig in the morning for grain or shells or coins and then barter them for a rabbit, maize, mead, a trinket and a little hashish to make it all seem worthwhile. When everyone uses the same barter good, it’s money, no matter how it’s styled.

The agora was surrounded by cafés, foundries for written philosophy, politics, laws. John Bosak famously said that “XML gives Java something to do.” Writing gave Hammurabi, Homer, Plato, Aristotle and Solon something to do.

We didn’t need literacy to teach the youngsters in Ur about Gilgamesh. Epic poetry retold around the hearth did that more effectively than books ever would. We needed writing only to record explicit market relationships:

<grain_deposit>Farmer Hotep deposited 40 bushels of high quality grain in the South Baghdad Granary on the 4th day of the 8th moon of the 7th year of the reign of Shalmaneser III.</grain_deposit> Indeed, the first business forms were Cunei-forms; the first data platform, wet clay; the first data managers, priests (we still think of them as priests, which is how they like it). The data was as closed and proprietary as it gets: Farmer Hotep could no more get at or read his record than you can get at or read your Homeland Security profile. The development of agriculture implied, even demanded, markets and markets imply a thin-client form of literacy, just as TV implies illiteracy, email and blogs imply mass literacy and, I would argue, XML implies, even demands, Open Data.

Agriculture was the watershed organizing force that institutionalized slavery and accounting. Daniel Quinn suggested that the Garden of Eden Myth started as the recounting of a barely remembered hunter-gatherer utopia in the lush Fertile Crescent before farming and climate cleared and desolated the middle east.

Explicating the Implicit

As Ross Mayfield noted, it’s often good to be explicit. In the case of transactions, Cluetrain gave us a context to be explicit about market conversations. Bloggging tools set us up to record and archive our thoughts and, collectively, to archive our market conversations and suggest their progeny, relationships. What will give us the context to describe and implement market relationships on a global scale? Let’s review the evolution of markets (warning: non-researched vague impressions formatted to look authoritative):

Cultural Phase	Activities	Pricing	Data	Mode
Hunting & gathering	1. ad hoc barter	haggle	oral	relationship
Agriculture	2. public market	haggle	oral+	relationship
Mercantilism	3, retail (via distribution)	fixed*	closed	expedient
Mass media	4. retail, mail order, QVC/HSN	fixed	closed	expedient
E-Commerce	5. [4]+ web brochures & review sites	fixed	closed+	softened expedient
Cluetrained	6. [5]+ data websites + blogs	fixed	closed+	exp/conversation
Peer Economy	7.  commerce-blogs	satisfaction	open	exp/conv/relationship
* after John Wanamaker

If that’s how trading and markets evolve, then we can guess that they evolve to the next stage when the old modality can’t scale to meet the requirements of a new cultural phase. Hunter gatherers accumulate no more than they can haul around, and they meet very few of each other. Farmers build granaries and farm-to-market roads and highways and cities with sewage systems. All of those imply coinage and accounting as soon as bartering won’t scale to the newly expanded marketplace.

Farmers notice that tea kettles develop a lot of pressure, but they don’t do anything with that knowledge. When steam is harnessed, trade routes proliferate, as cotton is moved to the mills in bulk and loomed into cloth to be worn by the newly employed and tightly scheduled loom operators whose wages buy the cotton. (“Got no time to haggle now, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!”) Haggling on small items won’t scale to an industrial pace, so John Wanamaker instantiated fixed pricing in the 1880s, as Saturn did for cars in the 1990s.

The expedient mode scales great as long as the one-to-many model of clerk-based retailing constrains buyers’ choices. But when media frees sellers from the clerk-based low bandwidth model to the high bitstreams of broadcast, many more sellers are selling to many more buyers. The broadcast model may be one-to many, but the seller model is many-to-manymore. Early e-commerce, we know, is just brochureware, so nothing really changes until data driven web sites and email and web logs open an electronic feedback trickle rising to a bit torrent.

That’s where we are now, on the cusp of a peer economy. P2P transactions may look like data-backed blogs talking about commerce, like this example. A global market as intimate as blogging is a major disruptor. Should we be surprised that this era’s masters are fighting our current scaling crisis without really understanding it? Why should they be any different than their precursors at previous inflection points, movers shaking at the prospect of a new mode for transactions?

Sweet Home, Ali Baba

So here we are, the newest, least subtle culture, back in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where it all started, just as our economy is emerging from the cathedral’s gloom, blinking in the bright light of the global bazaar. Obsessing about Iraq and antiquities and cuneiform records and all the rest, reinventing the divine chaordia of peer-to-peer market relationships mediated by value and quality and with asynchronous time enough to care about those arcane, . . . well, qualities. The super market’s goods scaled to suburbia but they really weren’t goods, just OKs. They were less filling and worse tasting than fresh New Jersey tomatoes and Iowa farm-raised beef. The mass market is re-learning how to spell q-u-a-l-i-t-y and we won’t let mass merchandising put our genie back in their bottle.

Now we have all three communication modes at our disposal: Expedience, Conversation and Relationship. We don’t want to haggle over commodities but we’re experts in prestige and the tools of our trade and we want the good life at great prices. You’ll find us over at CostCo, loading paper towels into our Mercedes. Next we’ll stop at CompUSA, grooving to our iPod while stocking up on commodity CD blanks to Rip Mix Burn on our tricked-out iMac. Back home, we’ll order cut-rate printer cartridges from inks4art.com since CostCo and CompUSA only stock the Epson parts.

In a few more web years we’ll order our ripe red beefsteak tomatoes direct from Doc’s second cousin in Jersey and marbled beefsteaks from ripe red Gelbvieh cattle on Dick Gholson’s farm in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. (If current distribution systems won’t scale, someone will scale them for us. Maybe UPS will buy Mail Boxes, Etc. Ya think?)

How will we know about those tomatoes and steaks? The same way we knew about them in the bazaar: Reputation. Reputation, that evanescent characteristic owned by everyone except the person it’s attached to. Reputation, the secret sauce of a decommodified life. Reputation, the public knowledge that’s too important to be left to private data.

Clue the Data, Maestro

We’ve not yet developed a clued-in context to help us talk about open data as A Good Thing, or even why it might be. Aside from anecdotal web sites and blogs (randomly linked but otherwise disconnected), there is no user-centric open data yet, where relationship information, reputation, is threaded and mirrored in the mind/data spaces of the seller and the buyer. Consider this stunning fact: There is still no example of public, open data.

Big companies insist on mirroring data for their B2B transactions, often using the EDI protocol or the more pervasive my_lawyers_vs._your_lawyers protocol (FYTP). They can afford the effort to 1) agree to agree, 2) explicate the agreement, 4) staff for compliance and 5) go to court to weasel out of or enforce the agreement. But you and I don’t have that luxury and we can’t compete with mass merchandisers interpreting our data for us, constrained by business models and data architectures that can’t scale to the public forum.

Corporate Agoraphobia

Companies hate public scrutiny as much as agoraphobic hermits hibernating year round. They would never conceive of open data along the Xpertweb model so data for the rest of us is a job for the rest of us. The Internet and FTP and email and the web was built by clued individuals who proved it could scale
enough for enterprise. WiFi was built by clued individuals who proved it could scale enough for enterprise. Closed data has proven it can’t scale to the Peer Economy, so it’s time for some clued individuals to create open public data for the rest of us, where you own your record of our relationship and I own mine and if they’re identical, everyone knows the record is valid and so the reputations we build out of our relationship are valid.

What might fuel such a profound shift? What’s even more powerful than companies’ behind-the-scenes collusion, haggling, defaults and legal maneuvering? Publicity, and its dependent, politics. Publicity is literally openness.

Openness trumps legality, PR, accounting, advertising, good intentions, pricing, litigation and every other mechanism that convinces us it’s a good idea to buy over-hyped commodities and sell an hour of our time for $20 so the company can resell it for $60. A single email may be enough openness to bring bankers down who once would have moved quietly on to another firm to do it all over again. When reputation data is too broadly distributed to be hidden and too obvious to be spun, we’ll have recaptured the User Interface enjoyed by generations of traders in the stalls of Chaldea, relating to generations of customers, teaching the world how to serve the customer and the bottom line.

Like any relationship, it’s a two way street. Gradually we’ll remember how to be great customers, embracing and extending seller’s customization skills, relating through authentic conversations and coaxing each other into the peer economy, one expert at a time.

1:28:57 AM    

Many threads are woven into the Xpertweb meme. Like most of us, I’m prone to remember poor service longer than good service. I’ve found, though, that outstanding service is so welcome that I want to tell my friends about it, like great art, which it partly is. By noting great service, I also reassure myself that I’m not yet so jaded that I have to wear my old fart lapel pin.

FWIW, I’ve been conducting an experiment for several decades. Regardless of the service, tip the cab driver generously on the way to the airport and you’ll never be an airline statistic. The warranty does not extend to your luggage.

Unfortunately I mostly notice poor service. For many years, I was a reasonably successful real estate developer. Since we contracted to build things, we were always a heartbeat away from a contracting meltdown that made the Money Pit look like a doghouse with crooked siding. About 1980, I was building a shopping center and construction had not started well. Haranguing the pleasant but somewhat lackadaisical contractors wasn’t helping. I walked into the construction shack one morning and immediately sensed that something was very wrong.

“Guys, there’s something wrong here.”

“Whaddaya talkin’ about?”

“I’m not sure. Something’s missing. Give me a minute.”

I looked around and suddenly I got it.

“Holy Fucking Shit! There’s no calendar! You guys are running a $4 million job without a fuckin’ calendar! Where are you from, the Moon?!”

It was true. A wall calendar, the essential enabling technology of project management, was missing. This was unheard of, as improbable as a Texas Republican building an insane deficit while gutting the Bill of Rights! Even the lamest contractor had a pin-up calendar from Snap-On, LJB Pipeline or Tarco Construction. Like, you had to work at not having a wall calendar!

Meeting Mania Intervention—The 12 Steps to Sobriety

Meetings waste more time than any other activity. Most groups would be better off with a Wiki. Most Wikis would be better with less conversation and more explicit promises. Do you suppose that explains the success of Open Source? It’s a huge operation that never holds a meeting.

The only reason to have a meeting is to find out what everyone’s doing, what they should be doing and when they will work on what they should be doing. Many organizations I’ve worked for want more technology, but often the best thing I teach them is how to have a meeting. It’s actually simple:

1. The meeting leader takes the minutes with a note pad and a laptop.
2. Everyone says what’s on their mind.
3. Everyone will propose solutions.
4. Ask who’s going to actualize the solution.
5. Note who’s willing to do something and when.
6. Outline the tasks, people and dates.
7. Print and distribute the outline, requesting follow-up at the next meeting.
8. Now starts the back-tracking:
   1. “Oops, I forgot I’ll be out of town this week”
   2. “I just realized it’s more complicated than I thought”
   3. “I’ll need Mary to help me”
9. Record the changes and re-distribute the outline.
10. 2 days before the next meeting, send the outline to everybody.
11. Bring enough copies to the next meeting for everyone, since many will forget it, hoping you will.
12. Repeat. Allow six weeks for behavioral change. In Europe, allow six weeks for behavioural change.

That’s it. Published promises galvanize productivity. If you do nothing more than list them, you’re ahead of 99% of the world’s workgroups. Xpertweb forms automate that process.

No frickin’ calendar? Sheesh!

10:35:18 AM    

I’m down for the dinner Doc and Haley are planning on May 1, my favorite date. Here’s why.

I once helped a friend establish a trust company. One of their clients was in his late 80s, was terminally ill and looked it. He was spending the last spring of his life fine-tuning an already well-crafted estate plan. It seemed like a terrible set of priorities to me.

On May 1, 1993, he shuffled into the office with a gleam in his eye and asked rhetorically,

“Do you know what we can say today?“

He grinned at our cluelessness:

Hooray! Hooray!
The first of May,
Outdoor screwing starts today!

He was dead by fall.

2:07:01 PM    

Actually, I may be the last person to learn about Andrius Kalikauskas and MS Labs. Andrius is a passionate guy with undergraduate degrees in math and physics and a physics PhD. Andrius was introduced to Xpertweb by Mitch and Flemming as a person who is interested in reputation systems. Since they are Xpertweb’s secret weapons, their recommendation ensured that he would be involved.

Andrius’ larger concern is thinking itself. Most people don’t realize that thinking is a tool so they don’t treat it with the objectivity they might use when shopping for a computer or Sawzall. The tag line of MS Labs is “Do you care about thinking?”

Flemming riffs on thinking:

Thinking is one subject I’m really interested in. Our ability to think abstractly is one of the key traits that define what a human is. Yet we seem to have little clue how we do it, or how we might do it better. Our future depends, of course, on what choices we arrive at, individually and collectively. And yet, most of us don’t have any better strategy than picking the strongest thought that appears in our head, or our stomach, or wherever it appears, and assuming that this is our answer. Without examining where it came from, and without having the faintest clue as to HOW to think.

The presence of that quote in this post is an example of Andrius’ work. He organizes and juxtaposes important points of view among his MS Labs members. I’d seen the quote before, but might not have found it again without seeing it in the MS Labs members’ feed. Logically enough, the MS discussion group is called “Thinking Relevantly.”

Relevance is the first service Andrius is performing for Xpertweb. Another is to help organize willing hearts and minds to help with the coding and rollout. Andrius is pressing Flemming (actually, himself and Flemming…;-) to have working code on May 23, for demonstration at the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. That’s what Andrius does, he catalyzes innovation.

Andrius and Flemming are both driven to take the broadest view possible when starting a project, questioning every assumption and bias. Combined with Mitch’s dogma-killing crusade, Xpertweb is reasonably protected from blowing smoke up its own ass. All three of them know that the most dangerous force in developing a new protocol is one’s own assumptions and biases.

Half a Loaf

Here’s an example of how Andrius is questioning our assumptions:

[A list of] references – kind words, frustrations, evaluations.

http://www.ms.lt/en/work/references.html

My wish is to see what initiatives are out there, help them find
synergy, and build a “web of references” so that people are better able to hook up their efforts. Right now I’m just spitting the pages out of a little database on my laptop. I appreciate more data! Flatter yourself! or somebody you care for! It should be something that’s posted on the web.

A key feature of this system is that the data is excerpted from the web, that is, it is data “in context” so you can see why those kind words were spoken, or learn more about the initiative. It’s the power of overhearing people speaking. It also lets people farm the information that helps them present themselves, which seems only fair and helpful.

Partly I’m doing this for my work on http://xpertweb.com because I’m trying to show the importance of practicing with a real live system and seeing what kind of uses trigger self-sustaining participation. Already> it’s helped me understand the data breakdown between initiatives and references, and the various kinds of each. So that will be important in defining data elements.

Partly I’m doing it because I need to sell our lab’s team building services and I realized that these words seem very convincing, as at the bottom of http://www.ms.lt/team/ Even the frustrations seem informative.

Partly I’m doing it because I think its been long needed in order to get anything done. I’d like to use a web of references to back up Tom Munnecke’s work on “uplift pattern languages” specifically applied to helping HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa. http://www.upspace.org

I appreciate all kinds of feedback, and also data, and especially ideas on how this might be put to practical use. At some point, too, it would be nice to put the database itself online.

When you go to the references link, you see entries like this:

Minciu Sodas

kindword… Benjamin, Leon on 4/2/2003 about Minciu Sodas: This is excellent material – I’ve been lurking here for some time and reading with fascination. In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a new concept with the group called iWork based on Dee Hock’s (Visa) chaordic model – watch this space.

kindword… Bruk, Ian on 4/2/2003 about Minciu Sodas: I guess the one thing I didn’t mention is that Minciu Sodas, through Andrius mostly I think, has my trust. That is a big thing in my mind. It’s just how to develop that?

kindword… Pillai, Bala on 3/28/2003 about Minciu Sodas: How about us considering having our mindcosms working as a union? — a tighter minds parallel of the European Union? Assess what Minciu Sodas’ comparative advantage in strengths and resources are , ditto for APIC Mind Colonies and conjoin the two better? Us rowing in the same direction but focusing on difference inter-connectible aspects — like a ship going in the same direction but key minds within the ship are taking charge of different functions.

You’ll find 14 sets of these kindwords on the page, demonstrating why Andrius is so valuable. I picked a series of three at random, and discovered something about non-explicit reputation systems when I rea
lly examined those three sets of kind words. Notice that the last one is a suggestion classified as a kindword. Although it’s the only such case among the 14, it points to the problems inherent in a non-explicit system.

Like blogs, kindword/frustration/evaluation comments can be helpful but they share a failing we’ve discovered about blogs, which is why people are trying to leverage them into knowledge management systems: non-explicit, anecdotal text is quotable but otherwise unusable. Here’s a report just in from Jason Calacanis on how his company’s venture capital database overtook the previous market leader, which was a blog about venture capital:

That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. (author’s emphasis)

Reputation is too important to be a hobby.

If I’m looking for a Java programmer for a particular solution, and I need it by Tuesday, how do I use the accumulated kindword entries to find the perfect programmer? I want the kind words, of course, but I need quantitative ratings and average rating reports and numerical comparisons that act as pointers to help me get to the these little blocks of text. All of that info might be available elsewhere, but surely it will be captured on the site of the person with the reputation, (or in an RSS feed) so, that I can click on a link to an order form as soon as I’m satisfied that I’ve found what I need. The Xpertweb approach is to require the buyer to provide the kind (or not) words and a number grade (01-99%). Then we can look at all the Java programmers who have sold n or more tasks involving, for example, graphic representation of numerical data.

The operative word is require. A reputation system is worthless if it captures ratings only at the whim of the buyer, or worse, at the whim of participants in a forum, as in this example, where the comments do not necessarily relate to a particular task. They can be too vague to benefit the next customer. Therefore it’s imperative to require that a grade and comment be recorded within a specified period after presentation of a completion report or invoice.

Pulling the String . . .

Have you ever had one of those projects which seemed simple, but once you got into it, you discover non intuitive requirements embedded in your initial enthusiasm? Such a discovery is like pulling a string out of a sweater. Actualizing the Xpertweb meme is a little like that.

Here’s what happens when you think seriously about a useful reputation system:

1. The central form, a Completion Report or Invoice. (form 1)
2. In order to capture a grade and comment, there must be a contract in place to require the rating, presumably in an order form. (form 2)
3. The order form is really 2 forms, the order plus a buyer authorization to proceed. (form 3)
4. There’s often give-and-take between the buyer and seller to arrange scheduling, delivery details, etc. The parties can do it over the phone or email, but since we’re building forms anyway, why not provide a little subroutine for negotiating the details? (forms 3a & 3b)
5. There’s nothing explicitly required between buyer acceptance and the Completion Report or Invoice. It’s useful to provide a Remarks Form, initiated by either party. (form 4)

Fair enough, those forms could be designed in an afternoon. But there are other considerations. Once completed, where should their data be stored? Today, such information is kept by the seller. Naturally, the seller will yield to the temptation to excise the unflattering remarks. The data could be kept on a central server, but then what happens to reputations built through blood, sweat and tears if the central servers go out of business? It’s not like the W3C is gonna store this info for us. Just as bad, any centralized system may not scale as needed or worse, is corruptible, as described in the HumanTech Parable.

The only answer left standing is that both the buyer and the seller must keep the information, which must be identical to be valid. That means that both parties must have a web site with space and programming for the reputation system. Ratings so mirrored are demonstrably valid. If there’s any divergence, the ratings cannot be presumed to be valid.

The ratings are only useful if subsequent users can access the reputation data. Conventional wisdom says the data should be a mySQL data base with a CGI. Then, of course, each user would need an XML-RPC or SOAP routine to access reputation data from all the other sites. That’s a load which is sure to overload the requirement for user-maintained data. (Visionary doesn’t have to mean stupid–there are some experts who think Xpertweb is silly enough already!) The obvious but counter-intuitive answer is to post all data as pure XML in plain sight on each user’s Xpertweb site with known paths to the data.

And it doesn’t stop there. Our little Xpertweb engine (the little engine that might) needs to help its users describe specific products, like a customized PHP-MySQL shopping cart or mowing a 20,000 sq. ft. lawn. Once described, that product data must be accessible as a product page, and the product itself must have a reputation built around it. When someone needs their drain fixed, they’re not really looking for a plumber, they’re looking for a fixed drain.

That’s almost the end of our little string, so I’ll spare you the rest.

Freeing the Horse

As Doc reported on Thursday, these requirements seem implicit if you’re serious about a useful reputation system, sort of like seeing the horse in a block of marble and removing all the marble that doesn’t look like a horse. In fact, as Doc also related, a useful reputation system seems to me to be implicit in the XML spec. Though enterprises seem to be using XML primarily as a serialization routine (like SOAP) to connect legacy data systems, XML is fine as a data format, if you’re willing to live with its verbosity.

As a data format hosted on a web server, XML is readable by search engines, a skillion parsers and certainly by a thin-client purpose-built script like the one we’re building for Xpertweb. We’re even on the cusp of a promise dormant since the spec became a recommendation in February, 1998: An XHTML page can contain explicit links to bits of XML data and, without any programming display linked data when the page is opened. XML is truly data for the rest of us, because it frees us from CGI programming and the hidden data that only CGIs can talk to.

Internal Combustion

All those moving parts seem obvious and necessary if you’re serious about a useful reputation system. If there are any shortcuts, we’d love to hear about them. We have recurrent internal debate on whether all these moving parts are necessary, typically when a new teammate signs on, as in Andrius’ case.

I see a reputation engine as a kind of internal combustion engine. Even if it’s a two-banger, you still need quite a few moving parts to get it to turn over. I think we have a pretty good design and built-in means to re-engineer it while it’s running. That’s why I welcome dogma slayers,
but note that there’s more to a reputation engine than it seems at first.

10:21:44 PM