Author: brittblaser

Mitch and I are doing a little hobby consulting with Allen Searls, Doc’s son. Are we surprised that this Searls is also smart? Doc says Allen is a lot smarter than he is. Well, doh. He’s smart enough to be in his 20s.

What’s hobby consulting? It’s when you have a little experience and a lot of mileage, and you help out someone with energy, promise and a good mind. Unlike regular consulting you don’t get paid and you don’t tell your client what he wants to hear but rather what he needs to hear. (Actually, I now tell clients what they need to hear, which is why I don’t have as many clients as I used to, but they stay in business longer.)

Allen has developed a live expert solution called GlobeAlive, the World Live Web. The participants on the site use a built-in chat tool to augment email as a way to connect to an expert immediately, which is the gold standard of using expertise. Mitch and I are helping Allen develop the site along conventional lines and also preparing it to act as an Xpertweb infomediary for the benefit of Allen’s participants. Here’s Allen describing his unique value proposition:

There may be a deeper parallel between the mission of GlobeAlive, which is to create a search engine of live people, rather than websites, and the mission of Identity, which I believe is to create a data set for each individual on the web that automatically tells advertisers, companies (and perhaps other people in general) what they’re interested in and more importantly, what they’re not interested in. That definition is probably completely off base, but as a starting point it may work to complete this thought.

In it’s most abstract form, GA intended to help do for people what the Internet did for information. Right now, if you want a piece of information, you can use a search engine and get it, thanks to the web. But if you want a person? The WWW links websites, but it doesn’t link people. Not really. If I want to talk to a person, I have to go to chat rooms, or find out a phone number/email address/Yahoo ID, etc. But how do I know in advance who I need to talk to? I only know the type of person I need to talk to. There’s no way to just punch in a keyword and find the right person– except for perhaps dating sites, but that’s not the idea. The idea is that the internet might be a better place if everyone online had a profile of keywords (or any other form of data set), etc that they chose to describe themselves/their product/service, etc. Then their contact information, whether it’s chat/phone/email could be found through a search engine when people punch in their keyword(s). Of course, one of their preferences in such a profile could include whether or not they’d want to show up in such a search result at all.

But if someone is selling a product or service, or would like to meet people that share one’s precise set of interests, than it would make sense to be in the “people’s” search results. GlobeAlive has already used this model to make a “chat engine” so that anyone who is available for chat on the search topic at hand shows up in our search results. However, this same keyword profile or an adaptation of it could be used for other purposes like Identity is proposing, such as alerting advertisers/companies of what one’s real interests are.

It’s amazing that Allen “got” this Identity and Presence thing so long ago, and developed his own chat engine, within GlobeAlive, to connect his participants.

Compare the GlobeAlive service to my conception of ideal support and expertise:

The Problem with Silicon-based Solutions

There’s not too little software, there’s too much. All the enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers who want to learn and explore new applications and scripting languages and preference panels have already done so. How many apps can one person master? I’m a maven with about a dozen software apps and conversant with another couple of dozen, but I feel incredibly incompetent when confronted with a software issue.

In the 1970’s, every new piece of software was new and compelling. Perhaps because there were so few of them. It’s like wiring your stereo. It starts as a receiver and 2 speakers and morphs slowly into a component system – you’re able to grow your dendrites at the same rate as the system. But software got away from us a long time ago.

So I’m as put off by new software as I am by late model car engines. The investment of time and energy in a new app seems like just too much hassle.

You know what I want? I want Commander Data. I want him in my coat closet, using no resources until I have a question and then he activates, solves my problem and goes back into stasis (he might be expletive-activated and then expletive-deleted). Because he’s Commander Data, he does everything almost immediately, so I’m willing to pay him a lot per minute.

I’ll bet that’s what you want too: an expert on the software you’ve got, not more software for you to be inept with.

Carbon-based Solutions

My Commander Data exists, but he’s in the form of dozens of skill sets, each possessed by thousands of people whom I could IM or web to, if I knew how to connect with them. For every problem I’ve got, there are lots of folks who are as good as Commander Data for that specific problem and who would be happy to help me out, especially if paid, say, $1 per minute.

Sometimes you find them at help desks, but rarely, and the irritation threshold is just too high there. I need an index of “amateur” experts with proven track records who are available immediately for high per-minute rates which I only pay when I’m satisfied, which means they have to be confident that I’ll be reasonably satisfied. So we also need a reputation engine in addition to an expert index. They need to be “amateurs” for the same reason that the best bloggers are amateurs.

With a decent market for instant expertise, more than software support becomes available. I’ll find wizards at Excel who can whip up an analysis by noon that would take me ’til Memorial Day. So why would I buy Excel? There will be online bookkeepers who’ll make my copy of QuickBooks irrelevant. Etc. and so on. Customers for expertise are not customers for software. If you’re in the software business, this is a nasty vision, but what other outcome is more likely? We know we’ll figure out how to link up consumers with experts who know how to do the things that software publishers wish everyone would like to learn.

If this vision is correct, the software industry will find itself at a crossroads as dicey as the one faced by the RIAA. How many experts are needed to do the specialized tasks of, say, a thousand people? Way less than a thousand. Do companies want their people struggling with Excel analyses when they can outsource the expertise for a fraction of the allocable resource costs? Your guess is better than mine, but from here it feels more like the Dreamweaver market than the MS Of
fice market.

Maybe the answer is Xpertweb. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. From here anyway.

10:08:55 PM    

Why has the rise of the Web coincided so precisely with a decline in organizational candor? Obviously I don’t blame the web, but I wonder at the coincidence. By organizational candor, I’m thinking of the alignment of what is said by corporations and religions and companies, compared to their actions. Whether it’s a company, a government or a religion, it seems that a marketing mentality has co-opted the organizational agenda.

This disconnect is what the Cluetrain guys were describing:

“Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.”

Have you heard the old saw that a man’s blood supply is insufficient to support his brain and penis simultaneously? Likewise, perhaps, there’s just not enough energy in an organization to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Our Future Economy

Not the economy of the future, but an economy obsessed with future outcomes. That is to say, outcomes which have not yet occurred. That is to say, outcomes which are not in place, as in nonexistent. We think it’s great to be forward-looking, working on emerging technologies and inventing the future. But organizations seem to spend so much effort describing their impending triumphs that they just can’t match their projected image or meet the inflated expectations that they so casually broadcast.

Perhaps it is the Internet’s fault. Perhaps it’s always been like this and the Internet has exposed a traditional disconnect which was not obvious before. However, there’s another suspect. Some time in the 1990’s, the quintessential corporate obsession became stock price rather than intrinsic company value. And stock price is all about unexpected good news which the SEC calls “Forward-looking statements”. These statements have even perverted formerly reliable statements like “the company will“:

“The Company and its representatives may from time to time make written or oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company’s filings with the SEC and in its reports to shareholders. One can identify these forward-looking statements by use of words such as “strategy,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “will,” “continues,” “estimates,” “intends,” “projects,” “goals,” “targets” and other words of similar meaning.”*

Aha! Now we’re on to something. Corporations must maximize their stock market valuation so employees who do the things that raise the stock price are valued above all others. Now let’s consider what really drives stock prices. Do we think it’s by doing the right things that build a solid company and better social values? No, that’s just the spin. The market discounts all the information it already has, whether it’s product news or war news, as Mitch Ratcliffe observed on April 9th in Wreakonomic Reality:

Saddam’s statue topples and the Dow closes down 100.98 points, off 1.72 percent for the year. The predicted rally on the heels of a rapid “victory” in Iraq hasn’t materialized (now we’re in for months of internecine conflict and a slow dissolution of the “new Iraq” as the U.S. moves on to the next crisis — see Afghanistan for details). The long run-up to war kept growth subdued and now we’re seeing the impact in lowered guidance from companies and rising national debt and trade deficit s. In other words, war isn’t a magic elixir for the economy and we still have to face reality, that a lot of basic block-and-tackling of fundamentals needs doing. This from the New York Times :

” The market has been absolutely thrilled about an imminent end for arguably (these) first three weeks of the war. We started the stock rally before the war started,” said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. “Unfortunately, when investors stop celebrating they will have to focus on corporate profits, which may not be so jubilant,” he said.

Profits. Those often ugly realities which, we know, companies will attempt to counter with marketing to the stock market, spinning the analysts, pre-announcing products not ready for prime time and all the other insubstantial maneuvers meant to divert the world from that pesky challenge called profits.

The Hard Work of Holding a Job

The obsession with brightly painted futures is not confined to the executive suite, it permeates organizations. The brightest, most ambitious employees can’t afford to work for a living. They need to hold jobs for a living. Sure, they’d like to work for a living, but they need to do what best secures their families’ futures: their careers. And what builds careers? Expectations build careers. Track records don’t build careers, mentoring doesn’t build careers, innovation doesn’t build careers.

What builds careers is the constant expectation that you will make things dramatically better, with the emphasis on the dramatic part. And that’s the problem.  Practical, workmanlike solutions are not dramatic enough for a spin-based economy. No, if you want a meteoric career, you’d better come up with whopper ideas, transformative re-structurings, mega deals and impossibly complex global initiatives that are never proposed by the conventional, unimaginative people whose horizons are limited by the realities of operations and the fact that there’s no such thing as a resourceless task.

What if things don’t work as planned? It really won’t matter to your career, because you’ll have moved on to your next grand vision. The disconnect between the grand plan and the sad reality won’t be apparent until you’ve applied your magic to an even bigger opportunity in some other division or subsidiary or, more likely, moved up to corporate where your positive attitude and strong convictions give hope to an even higher level of credulous cheerleaders.

Nope, none of has met a bubble we didn’t love, in a company or in the market. For those with the best backgrounds, prospects and handshakes, bold initiatives are the path to corporate stardom, with a remarkable strain of company amnesia about what happens to the grand plans 3 years later, when the shooting star of your career is riddling another operational illusion.

What Doesn’t Work

There’s a lot of ritual in business. We do things because it’s unthinkable to not do them, even if there’s no evidence that they make much difference. Consider Marketing and sales. When we consider the billions of dollars spent on advertising, we glimpse a naked emperor.  Maybe there’s some huge cohort of the population that we’ve never met that is highly impacted by ads, but I haven’t met anyone whose buying decisions are actually impacted by most advertising. If my premise is correct, it’s because there are three kinds of purchases, habitual, important and trivial.

1. Habitual buys, like detergent, cereal and corporate OS decisions.
   (A kind of dogma that Mitch described in his important article, The Invisible Dogma.)
2. Important buys, so crucial we blow right past the ads and do our own research.
   (which, thanks to the web, is easier than ever)
3. Trivial buys, based more on shelf position and coincidence than ad awareness.

I know, there are far smarter people than I who have proved time again that advertising is effective and crucial. I’m just reflecting my experience and that of people I know. Do you suppose those studies were done by people with a vested interest? Maybe they’re just more spin, since a lot of careers are counting on advertising. Don’t pay attention to the detail that the only ads with measurable effectiveness, Web and email ads, are so ineffective as to be laughable.

The other thing that doesn’t work as advertised is selling. Don’t take my word for it, ask Jerry Vass, author of Soft Selling in a Hard World. Jerry is paid a lot of money to teach highly paid account execs to string together the right words to close sales. He will tell you that only 52% of sales are the result of selling. The remaining 48% involve salespeople, but may be subject to the same three limiting factors as advertising. Here’s Jerry’s assessment of most experienced salespeople:

Company Secrets

Experienced salespeople lack the skills to present at the boardroom level because they are unable to explain:

• your firm’s sustainable competitive advantage
• your unique selling proposition
• what business you are really in from your Client’s point of view
• how your service fits the Client’s business
• how your service is different from the competition
• the results your service delivers in the Client’s terms
• why your service is worth your asking price
• why you are defenseless in a price negotiation
• why you are surprisingly difficult to buy from

And here is the kicker: Your salespeople don’t know that they don’t know and leave half their business undiscovered and unsold.

So if marketing doesn’t work and selling doesn’t work, how do we explain all the business that gets done? We are, after all, running a robust economy here, even when times are slow. Maybe it’s because we’re all in the habit of buying stuff from each other, and we make our peace with whatever level of quality our research leaves us with. Maybe competitors spend about the same amount on marketing and sales and so it looks like it’s as necessary as sponsoring a tennis star or golf tournament. But I think it’s because top executives like to hobnob with celebrities.

What we do know is that if a company quotes a study, we assume it’s been rigged in ways we can’t analyze. If the government says a new law is good for us, we assume it’s beneficiaries have prepaid its sponsors. If the Catholic Church or the Air Force Academy says that sexual abuse is rare, you know that a lot of innocents are being taken advantage of.

Spin gives you motion sickness and our society is looking a little green around the gills.

12:16:39 AM    

Speaking of the Spin Problem (below), If Google labels a press release as news, will there be any difference between spin and news? Here’s a little design exercise that shows what a long lever arm Google has become. We start with how bad its current policy is, and imagine how it might help make journalism honest again.

Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer,  The Register and many others have objected to Google’s treatment of press releases as the same as news. Google’s well-received Beta News service lists a press release as a peer to a news articles if both are returned by the same search argument. This is A Bad Thing, especially since it’s so hard to tell the difference anyway. But could Google turn the tables and increase its stature with a simple algorithm?

What we know:

• Google knows which sources churn out press releases, and could easily identify any press release by the standard format taught in Press Release 101.
• Google can compare text better than anyone else.
• If it chose to, Google could categorize and track all press releases.
• If it chose to, Google could append a styled “PR” next to every press release found in a search.
• Google could also identify what portion of a “news story”, published by a so-called news source, is derived from a known press release.
• If it chose to, Google could append a statistical measure to every news source with PR content,
  (like, “95% PR“, or “75% PR” or “33% PR“)

Presto! Google becomes part of the solution and exposes how little of “news” is newsworthy.

12:46:38 AM    

Doc points to my Spin Country entry but pushes back a little, noting that corporate propaganda may be less now than it once was, scrutinized as it is by fact checking bloggers:

“I’m not sure it’s worse now than it ever was. In fact, I think it’s better. One measure: common as they are, the number of press releases chasing me in the world has declined since Cluetrain came out. Of course, that may be because I’m one of the four last people you’ll want to send a press release if you’ve bothered to read the book; but still, it seems indicative.
 
Plus there’s the plain fact that you’ve got a quarter million or more stringers out there, calling bullshit on every specioius source that rears its flacky head. After awhile that has to have an effect.”

I agree. Also, as I put this and me to bed in the early morning hours, I felt the post was a little cynical:

“The brightest, most ambitious employees can’t afford to work for a living. They need to hold jobs for a living. Sure, they’d like to work for a living, but they need to do what best secures their families’ futures: their careers. And what builds careers? Expectations build careers. Track records don’t build careers, mentoring doesn’t build careers, innovation doesn’t build careers.”

I went over the top there, since most people in organizations do the right thing and work hard at doing it better. But the grain of truth is that they work for top-level managers who are forced to generate impossibly optimistic intimations of breakout possibilities, in an arms race against competitive optimism to try to get a little respect from jaded analysts (at least the analysts they don’t have in their pocket). I don’t see a conspiracy here, just the unfortunate maneuvers of people who do sorry things because they feel they need to.

The Fix is In

What’s shocking is the pervasiveness of cynical, amnesia-based representations by companies, governments and religious folk. Amnesia-based in the sense that it relies on the public’s tendency to be so busy with their real lives to track and check facts, but rather to respond to the tone of the representations it sees and hears, rather than the underlying, fairly obvious realities. Our memory seems about 3 months long and shrinking. It’s as if managers, politicians and evangelists believe their own PR and then, like a kid caught in a fib, feel forced to extend and embellish misleading statements to make them big enough to be believed.

No Way Out

The most obvious example of this disconnect is practiced by Karl Rove’s White House, Praising soldiers while cutting veteran’s benefits, cheerleading education while cutting school budgets, Deriding Big Gummint while designing the biggest deficit in history.

Our Attorney General, the Cop of Our Land, is on the record advising his people to overtly violate the Freedom of Information Act. Who’s going to prosecute them? It’s like a police cruiser parked on the sidewalk in front of Krispy Kreme.

It’s disgusting when corporate chieftains and evangelists violate our trust, but we can sell stocks and boycott products and worship elsewhere, precious freedoms all. But notice a cynical disconnect in the integrity of the leaders of the land, and you’re told to Love it or Leave it.

Bad news fellas, thinking people are here for the long haul, and our collective memories are long enough to notice lies and resurrect the truth.

1:57:18 PM    

You may have heard about the LA Times’ discovery that one of its war photographers had photoshopped a couple of images together “to improve the composition.” The Times summarily fired him and several bloggers have been wondering how much of the rest of what we see is fake. (Login name and password = “useless”)

Tim Bray writes,

“This really raises a deeper issue: are photographs, in this digital day, useful evidence in establishing the truth? I think they remain useful, here’s why.

Just a few days before the war started, there was a demonstration in San Francisco that got ugly and the police ended up arresting a lot of people. There wasn’t much news coverage, and I was poking around a bit to figure what had happened. It turns out that Lisa Rein had posted a whole bunch of video of the event, which I watched, but can no longer find on her site, although she’s got lots of other demonstration footage.

What really impressed me about the video, aside from how unhappy the cops looked, was the incredible profusion of recording devices in the crowd. It seems like every second person had a digicam or videocam or something; a thousand little bright silver flashes of digital memory.

Now suppose that one of the demonstrators or one of the cops or a passing motorist had had a psychotic episode and someone had ended up dead. The evidence from any one of those digital devices, turned in the next day by an attendee, would be essentially useless. But if the crucial events were captured independently by two or three (and it’s pretty obvious that they would have been), then if someone was trying to doctor the evidence you’d know, and it’s easy to believe that the digital record could be a major help in establishing the truth.

That is to say, at the same time as the advances in digital manipulation technology make any one instance less trustworthy, the increasing ubiquity of digital recording technology more than compensates.”

It looks like Tim is describing the proliferation of ubiquitous PFRs–Personal Flight Recorders, unobtrusively streaming our captured video to our private repository and sharing them at will:

If you can spell S-O-N-Y, you know what’s around the corner:

• Picture Phones will become Video Phones.
• Video Phones will be connected into the wireless mesh.
• Audio/Video capture will be unobtrusive, separated from the phone as the microphone is today. (We’ll be stealthy without being sneaky)
• Copyright holders won’t like it, but we will have the right to capture anything we witness.
  (another of the many things they don’t like about the future)
• We will replay and share any part of our personal history we choose to.
• Within n years, more people will have PFRs than not.

On the same theme, Ming blogged yesterday about a Salon article by Sheldon Pacotti. Pacotti is properly concerned about the surveillence society enabled by Constitution-bashers like the little bible thumper Ashcroft, enabling an industry of people whose job is to watch us:

“The computer-networked, digital world poses enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian, can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival.”

Ming concurs:

“Yeah, I agree. There’s really no way of stopping it, so we need to expand our collective ability to solve problems, our collective intelligence, at least as fast as the speed that new technologies are developed at. The author talks about various sectors of society where governments might think they ought to hold on to all the knowledge. Like, surveillance. If there are cameras everywhere, do we trust government agencies with deciding what to do with what they see? No, of course not. If there has to be surveillance, the only safe thing is if it easily available to all of us.

” If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character than one in which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government. Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the “authorities” to monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear.” (Pacotti)

Although Flemming goes on to follow Pacotti’s concerns about the spread of “dangerous ideas” like nanotech and nukes and gasses, but I’m most interested in the vision of a surveillance industry so overwhelmed and outclassed by the collective record that it has no useful product to sell. Sorta like a guy on the street corner peddling an 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen mix.

Peer Brother is Watching You (from 2/15/03)

That inevitable future may seem bleak, but perhaps only because we haven’t got our head around the effect of decentralized peer-based surveillance. Intermediaries always act contrary to the interests of those for whom they intermediate, so we assume that a video-archived future is through corporate and government surveillance serving the interests of those powerful enough to control the “public” record. That is not what Peer Surveillance will be like.

We cannot predict what shape the Peer Surveillance culture will take, but there’s ample precedent. It will probably  be like a small village where everyone knows everyone else’s business and gossips about what’s most aberrant. Historically, the intrusiveness of busybodies varied inversely with the population of the village. With the whole world capturing the activities of, well, the whole world, maybe we’ll become more tolerant of our peccadilloes as they become so common that they’ll be uninteresting, like chair-throwing on Jerry Springer or hot-tubbing on reality TV.

Perhaps the most chilling effect of the Peer Surveillance culture will be on guilt and whining. We may find that the sins and guilt we carry with us are simply not that rare, outrageous or, worst of all, interesting. Perhaps then we’ll learn to be of real use to each other, and productivity will be the norm rather than the burden of the overtaxed few.

Take Away: The PFR is a HUGE watershed change. We will all be visible, obvious and accou
ntable, not to Big Brother, but to each other. Digital accountability trumps anonymity and is likely to impose small-town values on urban communities. The accountability meme will seep into our thinking and may inspire us to be civilized without having to be religious. As real-life cause and effect becomes as common as reality TV, we’ll discover together that things actually do make sense and don’t require superstitious thinking.

10:34:20 PM    

From Europe a week ago, Flemming wrote on the subject of “Original Affluence.” Quoting Marshall Sahlins, who, in The Original Affluent Society, described what Ming calls “gift economies and how pre-historic economic systems weren’t as miserable as they’re commonly believed to be“. In addition to the current assumption that wants are always greater than the means to satisfy them, Sahlins says:

“But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their “prodigality” for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters’ economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.”

Flemming goes on to say,

“Sahlins explains how typical hunter-gatherers work 3-5 hours per day on acquiring food, and they have plenty of time for leisure. For that matter, they have a schedule that most civilized people would be sort of envious about. The more ‘civilized’ we become, the harder we tend to work, and the less time we have for leisure. He also makes some interesting distinctions between primitive living and poverty. In hunter-gatherer cultures starvation would be pretty much unthinkable.”

“The world’s most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.”

Call Me Ishmael

This was well depicted in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael which described the life of a Mountain Gorilla as a little like living in a candy store, where the gorilla would absent-mindedly stretch out his hand and it would rest on some delicious green shoot. Quinn suggests that the Garden of Eden is a primordial species memory of how life was before the few locked up the food to sell it to the many and called it the miracle of agriculture.

So pervasive is our presumption of primordial want and brutality compared to modern wealth and satisfaction that we can’t recognize what is obvious. In a hunter-gatherer society, whether foxes or gazelles or people, the resources are in perfect balance with the populations. Unless the ecosystem is undergoing one of its rare rapid changes, the population fluctuates a little around its ability to find food. Like a thermostat, a little excess leads to a little adjustment, which may not even be noticed. These are animals and people who have lived their lives bundled up in winter and sweating in summer with a stomach rarely as full as ours is three times a day. So they do not expect, or want, anything else. Every one of them kills a lot of creatures during a lifetime, but is only killed once. Without a highly developed sense of the future or social entitlements. That single death may have little sting.

Could we ever hope to regain a hunter-gatherer mentality and affluence model? I’ve often fantasized that Xpertweb might be in some ways a parallel. If your reputation is your marketing and guaranteed satisfaction a way to close more sales, you may find customers guided to you by your excellent ratings in your area of specialization. That would make you more a gatherer than a hunter. Like Amazon, orders would come in at a rate close to what you can handle, because if it’s less, you’ll master other skills better suiting your talent. Or if you get too busy, you’ll tap your skill at finding Xpertweb help to subcontract work to, confident in their proven ability. And you may train others to help you fill the enthusiastic market.

Consider Flemming’s conclusion:

“I’m not sure what we can learn here, other than that it is possible to successfully live very simply and modestly. There must be some kind of point that applies also to a technological civilization. A just-in-time kind of thinking. We could very well arrange our world so that nobody ever has to starve and so we only work a few hours per day. From what I hear, only 2-3 percent of our work relates to actual production, and from my own observation, the majority of human work is inefficient or unnecessary, just arranged to keep people busy. So, why can’t we have a an efficient and productive, but leisurely and relaxed, high tech society, where it would be unthinkable that basic needs wouldn’t be filled?”

A Lever Long Enough to Move the World?

Ming’s got Xpertweb on his mind as much as I do, so perhaps he’s glimpsed the same possibilities. He’s clearly noting that most people don’t work for a living, but hold jobs for a living. If we’re less than 10% on task, what happens when we’re 20% on task for each other and spend the rest of our time off the meter? A cornucopia never really dreamt of. Interesting that 20% of a 12 hour day is close to the 3 hours that hunter-gatherers like to put in.

Of course that cornucopia won’t deliver us to the Zen state that Flemming and Marshall Sahlins and I admire but have not achieved (well, one of us hasn’t). However, it opens the possibility of release from the expectation of deprivation and want. And there’s nothing more Zen than letting go of fear.

Have you noticed that the peace protests and more enlightened seeking happens in affluent areas? Maybe you consider those expressions too new age for your taste, but there are a lot of people working out a new reality so dramatic that it’s been called, collectively, the second superpower. Like the ancient Athenians, the common ground of people seeking a better world is relative affluence, not scraping by. Instead of slaves, we’ll have each other, amplified by elegant electronic levers that Archimedes could never imagine.

12:27:49 AM    comment [commentCounter (119)]

Mitch responds to the Count the things that count blogalogue that Ross Mayfield and I conducted earlier this week. On Monday, Ross had suggested, in regard to the rating of experts,

• A rating is a price. We define a good and deliberate over its value through signals. Sometimes we express price not for transaction but to communicate value in its simplest form (a guy at Stanford won a Nobel Prize on this). A price is the simplest method of communicating value.
• A rating is a mode of communication. What I value when. When I send a smiley to someone, its a rating.
• A rating is a signal of trust. Whom I value when. Trust is credit and credit is priced.

On Tuesday, I harped on proprietary data again,

Proprietary Data is the Basis of Tyranny

Perhaps we need a systems approach, where we conceive a model transaction, one that serves both parties equally, and removes the data dominance factor. Of course, that’s the purpose of our little design study. We think we’ve come up with the 6 essential states in every transaction (Discover, Identify, Specify, Negotiate, Invoice, Evaluate); and we think we’ve identified the Atomic Elements of transactions (People, Products & Tasks).

If we’re right, and our standard transaction model simplifies selling and buying, then it might lead to more and better buying and selling. In any event, we’ll be counting some things that haven’t counted before. Like Quality ratings.

Flemming, still jet-lagged, gave the post a thumbs-up but Mitch urges us to not repeat the errors that have marked so many endeavors: Establishing technical standards that enshrine data, or a way of thinking about it, that becomes dogma. The dogma then dooms the participants to follow the old flawed patterns, perhaps not even realizing what assumptions are baked into their enterprise:

My take is that this is all great thinking, but we need to keep clearly in front of us the idea that human relationships is what we are talking about. The technology is a nice-to-have accelerator, but it can be profoundly alienating. Technology, because it is usually deployed en masse is a blunt force instrument that treats everyone the same way, especially within the confines of a small group where starkly different beliefs and styles of learning and communicating come into sharp conflict.

There is no doubt in my mind or any manager’s that an organization should pick tools that enforce its priorities to some degree. It would be impossible to cook a meal in a kitchen where knives were forbidden and every company, because they do largely deal with the manipulation of information, needs to define the range of data it will try to process. So, some dogma is a very good thing. The very act of defining an organization requires managers invent a bit of dogma, a dollop of determinism in an otherwise chaotic environment—after all, we can’t be in the business of doing everything. A deterministic system is purposeful and supports goal-setting.
 
The mistake would be to get locked into those goals by a technology infrastructure that constantly enforced initial-state biases. If, after achieving your first-year goals for establishing internal competencies and product development, you had to go back and spend a year and a large amount of capital to retool your company for delivering its product or services to the market, instead of having these capabilities be an implicit result of your first year’s efforts, your company is not likely to succeed. Think about how many times your company or a company you know has had to retool information technology to support new processes and the consequences of setting and forgetting dogmas becomes painfully apparent.

I agree with Mitch, and not just because he is a valued advisor and the expert entrepreneur in the booth of this quiz show. The failure of organizations to understand their data strategies is one of the reasons they’re so frustrating to work with and for. But this design study could easily repeat those kind of mistakes, even if our aims seem more open. So I want to address Mitch’s points in serial fashion to give us a chance to question assumptions behind the current Xpertweb design.

Let’s start at the top: “we need to keep clearly in front of us the idea that human relationships is what we are talking about” To which I respond with a firm, “Well, yes and no!” (Never equivocate on important points…;-).

Yes. I’m inclined to wax rhapsodic when glimpsing a future with a kinder, gentler economy based on human connections across the globe or around the corner. And I do believe that our current structures devalue the creativity most of us pour into our work and the deep and vital relationships we form with partners we transact with. And I think Xpertweb improves the chances of forming and maintaining those relationships, compared to proprietary hierarchies, which would be the most social benefit of our socialware.

No. However, there’s also a pragmatic edge to getting things done, which is why an Object-Oriented, “Open Resource” economy is so attractive, where the obvious expert is easy to find, easy to engage and easy to pay. Just as programmers can plug other people’s code objects into a program, so do we need to plug other people’s expertise into our activities, on-the-fly, and get on with our day. When I use a piece of open source code, admirable for its elegance and price, to do something otherwise impossible or lengthy, it’s just a tool that I use without forming a relationship. As my long-time friend, client and author, Jerry Vass teaches his Fortune 500 clients, “Your company may be impressive, but the buyer doesn’t care if the seller lives or dies, as long as he doesn’t die on the premises.”

Mitch has challenged us to strike the right balance between over-determining behavior or making the design so loose that there’s no value. There’s no way to respond without specifics, so please indulge a detailed overview of the Xpertweb approach, including our allowance for flexibility. Maybe you’ll have some ideas about whether it’s too rigid or loose, and how it could be improved.

The Xpertweb Bottom Line

All we’re really after is to elicit a rating from each transaction and to make it indelible in the public record. The rating needs to be both quantitative (1-99%) and qualitative (a written comment). We all know that we rarely fill out rating surveys after the fact, so the rating must be required at the moment of payment in th
e invoice, perhaps with an incentive to the buyer.

Therefore, at a minimum, we need to provide an invoice form. Ideally, an invoice should summarize the transaction so the buyer can make a rating based on more than memory. That means it’s useful to capture the history of the transaction. We decided to provide some basic transaction forms and a dead-simple data capture system for the transaction details, including the one we care most about, the final rating.

Last time, I revealed my horror of proprietary data–that both parties to a transaction need all the data so they are full peers. Flemming agreed and so does Mitch, if we strike the right balance between rigid and useless. That’s what drove the decision to give everyone the same data tools and to require a web server for both parties to each transaction. It was the only choice left standing after all the other choices wouldn’t work. Data that’s not on both web servers is suspect, since one of the parties may have changed or deleted something. Validation is by duplication.

When you’re designing a campus, put the sidewalks where the grass wears out.

The 5,000 Year-old Flow Chart

How do we know what forms to provide to lead up to the one we actually care about, the evaluation? On March 18, I suggested that we have an ancient model to follow for the Xpertweb transaction flow:

It’s obvious the transaction record must reflect the real-world dynamics of the special kind of conversation called a transaction, which, for the same 5,000 years, has had six distinct stages:

1. Discover Find a seller to deal with
2. Identify Select the specific product
3. Negotiate Resolve delivery location, timing, quality, etc.
   (often a back-and-forth between buyer & seller)
4. Commit Buyer and Seller commit to the negotiated terms
   (Goods or services are delivered between steps 4 & 5)
5. Invoice Seller reports the actual results and amount due
6. Evaluate Buyer rates seller and vice versa
   (this is the vital metadata of relationship, now made explicit rather than as a general impression. Or worse, hidden from the market by the seller )

Notice that Xpertweb doesn’t attempt to describe the actual work nor to manage the payment details. Work details are too specialized for our generalized data capture, though it’s described by the “Productid.xml” metadata and can also be discussed in task remarks. As for payment, that’s left to whichever means the parties prefer, though some third party payer is required, one which sends a confirming email to buyer and seller upon taking irrevocable responsibility for payment. Third party payer commitment closes out the transaction.

Why Do We Need a Flow Chart?

Transactions are asynchronous.

1. The buyer, having discovered a vendor and a product,
2. identifies the buyer’s interest and basics like delivery details.
3. The seller must, at a minimum, agree to the delivery location and timing, but may need more details–color, size, scope, etc. Those negotiations are related to the parties’ needs and the product type. Whether the negotiation is complex or just the seller’s simple “works for me, I’ll do it”, we need to provide a form for the dialogue.
4. Naturally negotiations end upon the parties’ definitive commitment.
5. After the work is performed, the seller submits an invoice–the form Xpertweb really cares about,
6. a)…where the evaluation by the buyer is recorded, in numbers and words. followed by payment using mutually agreeable means.
   b) After payment, the seller evaluates the buyer’s role in the task.

All those things happen in the real world, but the evaluation is maintained privately by each party, and then not explicitly. Xpertweb intends to make evaluations explicit and public.

Okay, we think we’re clever enough to design those forms, but we need a data store that’s flexible and searchable. There are few examples of open, pure-XML data stores. There’s a lot of data on web pages, but it’s hard for computers to organize and aggregate web info for us, so they’re not really data. A lot of “real data” are served by web pages, but the data are buried in proprietary data bases that Google and the rest of us can’t get at without permission. A Peer Economy must be a permission-free zone.

So, we found ourselves going the eccentric route again. Xpertweb users will store their data on their own web servers, in pure XML format. It won’t require UDDI or SOAP or XML-RPC or anything else exotic to get at user records. You can do it with a browser or a search engine. RSS will provide pointers to help people find what they want.

Why is Data So Difficult?

There are two ways that data systems lock their users into the kind of rigid structures Mitch is warning us against. The data structure itself may not be malleable or the data language may make it hard to design and integrate new forms to gather inputs (old or new) for the database and display the gathered data.

Most companies maintain a little bit of info about a lot of people. Xpertweb users need a lot of data about relatively few people. So instead of using a huge array to store the data, An Xpertweb site will keep three kinds of small datasets:

1. A person type data set for the owner of the site. (“youruniqueid.xml“)
   (this as complete a Digital ID as the owner wants to make it).
2. A product type data set for each product. (“Widget1a.xml“)
3. A transaction type data set for each transaction.
   (“sellersuniqueID.buyersuniqueID.numberofunixsecondsatstart.xml“)

Within each of those datatypes, the trick is to have just enough structure that the data needs are served, but to avoid freezing that structure. Let’s think about data strategy. Every data design specifies data types (first name, last name, city, zip, etc.) and data forms (rolodex card, product sheet, etc.). The problem with the data tools we’re used to is that, as Mitch suggests, they’re too rigid:

• arbitrary structures–not enough design input from on-the-street business units.
• Specialized languages and tools–hard to find experts to maintain or modify
• Obscure code–dependent on continuing involvement of a few staff or consultants

Those factors combine to make it difficult to do what every data structure should: facilitate new types of data and new forms for novel inputs and display of the old and new data types.

This design study tries to avoid those traps. The design is as public as possible
and welcomes pushback. We’re describing only the data structure and the three data types. Data collection and display will be by plain old HTML forms using whatever CGI language that works. There are a few required datatypes that are obvious, but any optional datatype is allowed. For starters, we’re providing free PHP code which Nobody will own, Everybody can use and Anybody can improve, like the Internet itself.

Because the data forms are HTML, there are thousands of people able to modify them or add new ones. HTML skills are possibly the most common computer specialty, so form design and modification can be learned or hired out reasonably, probably as an Xpertweb-rated specialty.

Aha! you say. There may be tens of thousands of HTML-aware people with Front Page or other editors, but only a small fraction of them know how to design the code to equip HTML to save or display data.

That’s the sad truth, esteemed Effendi. Where’s the data design tool for the rest of us that will let someone’s niece or nephew build or modify data forms? I saw an article today praising a barebones 300 page book on web data that he used every day, rather than the several thousand other pages on his shelf.

We call it XWriter and it will be part of the code we’ll provide to every user. XWriter will let any HTML author add the required data calls (inputs or display), working with any of the six types of HTML input widgets (text box, text area, value list, value popup menu, check box and radio buttons). XWriter 0.8 was built by Hurai Rody and Flemming will write Version 1.0 using techniques he’s used on other projects.

So What’s the Point?

If we’re doing this right, these are the most likely reasons:

Data structures are restrictive when the users don’t help design it.

A lot of people are chiming in on this one, and every one of those people is a buyer and a seller of stuff.

Data structures are rigid when the data formats are obscure and rigid.

Structures are standardized and data sets are small, simple and publicly visible

Datatypes are hard-wired by designers with no sense of the business logic

Required data types are only the obvious ones (name, XWURL, XWID, etc.)
Optional datatypes may be added at any time by listing it in XWriter.

Data code is difficult, often obscure, with few skilled enough to create or maintain forms.

Xpertweb is based on HTML, the most common presentation format, with XWriter available to add the PHP data calls.

This has been a lot of detail, but it’s the only way to find out if we’re headed down the slippery slope Mitch warns us against. Isn’t the reason there are so many poor data solutions that the owners aren’t willing to dig around in the details? I’ve consulted on data projects and the users are so rarely involved, it’s no wonder they aren’t ideal. Many bloggers and bloggees have experienced detail aversion first hand, and it’s not a pretty sight.

Fifteen years ago when I funded and later tried to run the Dynamac Computer project, we would send an extra stick-on keyboard key with each computer. It was red with white letters: DWIM. Do What I Mean. It’s what every database customer wants and it’s what most data designers are forced to guess at. We hope that we’re looking at enough details to avoid the DWIM trap, and we hope you will too.

Thanks.

1:24:50 AM    

Mitch generally agreed with yesterday’s blow-by-blow dissection of Xpertweb’s measures to avoid hardening of the data arteries. But he adds four important points on the specific biases that are usually embedded in enterprise data design. These are the biases to avoid by providing for gradual system evolution.

Participation and modality biases, that define how and when users should contribute to the group’s dialog; this may take the form of forcing people to use a form or that they learn some esoteric mark-up language to participate—maybe some of your team is most comfortable using email, but cannot do so to submit information to the workgroup application (why do they have to change? Because a programmer said so? Not a good enough reason when those people earn $80,000 a year already and do just fine communicating by email);

Which is why Xpertweb v 1.0 will be able to read your email (or a dedicated email account). It’s not certain though whether the messages will be organized in a way that a script can make sense of it. Certainly they will if they’re script generated, but you never know about those pesky humans.

I’ve always felt that modality bias is the greatest challenge in networked human interaction. Modality is the mode of interface dictated by the software’s User Interface and data categories. Most of us are comfortable with email, as Mitch points out, though we forget how recently we’ve adopted that mode. When you force people into a new modality, you’d better have some damn good reasons, which is not always the case.

But the web’s theme the past few years has been about unstructured content becoming structured. Web pages like this are unstructured. Even if the content is worth something (unlikely as that may be), it’s hard to find and aggregate the nuggets to establish meaning, because HTML is a presentation tool, not a data-tagging tool. That’s what led to the formulation of XML and XHTML, which requires authors to tag their content by categories. XML adoption has been slow, except by enterprises using it to encode data between two otherwise uncooperative data bases. It’s a pain to tag your data, which is Mitch’s point.

Just as so many mastered the email modality in the early 90’s, so have we mastered online purchasing in the later 90’s. It seems to me we’ve become as comfortable with forms used to buy things on line as we have with the familiar three-paned email interface. So, if the Xpertweb forms can look a lot like other online experiences, we’ve got a shot at providing a friendly user modality.

Semantic biases, evident both in the range of options available for categorizing information, from labeling every new topic as a “problem” to be solved instead of a business opportunity (this evolving from the quality-assurance based practices of software programmers) to limited ranges of choices in pop-up menus that prevent the group from straying outside the well-defined lines that the program lays out;

Bingo! Labeling is a huge problem, since programmers can’t get the lingo and categories right without enthusiastic collaboration with the people who will use the system. Such collaboration is rare because users have no interest in pitching in on the design until the piece of dreck is switched on. I can think of only three ways to reduce the semantic bias problem:

1. Rely on language and processes so well-established that they’re naturally comfortable.
2. Provide some metadata describing the terms as they’re presented (the tooltips approach).
3. Provide a way to evolve form design and add or redefine datatypes easily.
   (without needing permission or great expertise)

Time and skill biases, based on the presumption that every user has the same amount of time each day to participate in a group project to assuming that it takes everyone the same time to perform chores in the interface (that they all have the same skill level with the technology);

Here’s evidence of the steep gradient between the early adopters and the rest of us. The early adopters see the value of the new tools and are adept at responding to new modalities, unlike you and me. Too bad they’re never around when you need some guidance. Fortunately, time spent is a matter of skill, and skill is usually a matter of time and patience. I learned in the Air Force that there are brilliant pilots and the rest of us, but time in the seat is the great skill leveler–most pilots are average pilots. Motivation is the skills leveler. If you have a strong reason to master something you will. Think of all the grandparents who’ve mastered email to stay in touch. Now they’re even exchanging pictures! Money can also be a strong motivation, and Xpertweb has some explicit rewards built into the system to inspire enthusiastic mastery of the bit of procedurality that can’t be avoided.

Historical bias, the preservation of outmoded knowledge because of the rigidity of technology. What if your company has moved from making buggy whips to airplanes and the software you use still is designed for a buggy whip company? Often, it is the failure of software to evolve with the organization that makes it utterly useless—this has happened in many media companies, where digital technology was designed for outputting paper or television signals and has locked companies that could be exploiting the Internet and on-demand multimedia networks into outmoded business models.

All of us are seeing Mitch’s historical bias example. Consider how hard it is on the RIAA. Heh.

Historical bias is assured when the data structures, datatypes, data forms and output protocols can’t be evolved to keep up with the people evolving away from the system. But if someone is motivated to fix the problem and the means are easily engaged, then the changes will be done and the curse of legacy avoided.

I sense that Mitch has concerns about the predetermined stages of an Xpertweb transaction: Discover, Identify, Negotiate, Commit, Invoice and Evaluate. The reason to have discrete stages is because the purpose is to sensibly organize work, without requiring an organization. The asynchronous imperative of a transaction record requires that the data needs of each stage be met before moving to the next stage.

• The evaluation (our core value) can’t be captured until the invoice data is entered and presented
• The invoice can’t be presented until completion can be recorded
• The work can’t be committed to until the order details have been negotiated
• The details can’t be negotiated until the buyer’s preferences are recorded
• The buyer preferences can’t be entered until a service/product is identified
• The item can’t be identified until the Expert is discovered

At the risk of being doctrinaire, we feel the need to provi
de at least that much of a skeleton for the transaction record. If Xpertweb can avoid being haunted by that skeleton, it’s because all data and structures reside at the level of the user. Some think the idea is unworkable, but that’s a question that will be solved simply by seeing if it works. Similarly, many experts once wondered why you’d want bit-mapped displays so you could see formatted text onscreen. They also wondered why in the world you’d want to see formatted text.

Data for the rest of us is similarly untried and, by many, still unsought. Our design indeed raises problems. Unlike a central data store, there’s no team to manage and maintain it. It’s not optimized for compactness and speed. It assumes the proper functioning of the Xpertweb scripts on each user’s computer. It assumes that there are enough people who will learn a new (to them) technology and a new way of dealing. A determined techie could find another half a dozen objections.

Living With Diversity

We never set out to create a weird data architecture just to be different. We had no choice, since all conventional methods rely on the kind of centralized data hegemony that would eventually pervert our purpose. Xpertweb’s distributed data store is kind of holographic, present on at least four web sites (2 parties to a transaction and their two mentors). The mirroring of identical data on those sites imputes validity. Validation is further promoted by a validation tool built into every installation. This tool verifies the file structure, to make sure it conforms to this model. It also provides a schema to validate the XML structures, and to validate other sites, on a schedule or on request, so your mentor’s site is continually validating your site’s structure and file conformance to your schema.

The schema provides for the datatypes that are obvious and any optional datatypes the owner may designate using the XWriter tool. These would most typically be added to describe attributes of a service or product. Another compelling reason for adding new datatypes is to transform your ID.xml file into a full-fledged Digital ID using Liberty Alliance protocols to become your own Identity Provider.

The Open Source Haven

In facing these challenges, the Xpertweb model is fortunate to not be a business. If it were a business, we’d be capitalized to hire a crew of programmers and arrange for office space and computers and furniture and all the rest. Development would be done in secret so competition wouldn’t get wind of our gazillion dollar concept. Naturally we’d have a business plan to promise a Return On Investment with a stated marketing budget and rollout and the server farm, etc. Once the code was “done” (always a more-or-less state), we’d have a limited horizon to satisfy the nervous investors, so we’d move heaven and earth to inspire massive adoption by our target demographic. As with most new software, despite the promising number of enthusiastic early adopters, the press and the public would note that it’s interesting and worth looking into some day and would go back to business as usual.

Then would start the decade of dimming hope and rising anguish as the shrinking team of stakeholders tries to wring some value out of what has become an old idea that didn’t quite work out.

Xpertweb has no burn rate and no central software or servers. It will put its genetic material out there, with the means to further propagate it. Starting with just six users and spreading slowly at first, we expect to wring it out, make a few adjustments and then, as they say, let ‘er rip.

Naiveté

Perhaps we’re naive to think that ordinary people will choose to, or even can, master these new skills. But it seems less naive than assuming that our current skills and hierarchies will spontaneously inspire higher productivity and individual work satisfaction.

9:51:26 PM    

Ross Mayfield noted my Social Software post and added the important insight that what we’re doing, when web services start counting things previously uncountable, is like the arrival of coins in the days of barter:

“Harkening back to the days of yore, in the medieval bazaar, some crazy guy was probably going around trying to get everyone to agree on the concept of coinage. Initially people resisted.  A cow is a cow and a sheep is a sheep and never the twain shall meet. If I think gold is worth one thing and you think its something else and lord knows what it will be tomorrow, how can one commodify? But, lo and behold, you can carry a coin in your pocket and a cow only with great difficulty.

People are in constant pursuit of the commoditzation of everything.  Not just goods, mind you.  We abstract concepts in commonly digestible forms.  We archetype and then debate over value.  Things must be simplified to be social or we end up talking about different things.

• A rating is a price.  We define a good and deliberate over its value through signals.  Sometimes we express price not for transaction but to communicate value in its simplest form (a guy at Stanford won a Nobel Prize on this).  A price is the simplest method of communicating value.
• A rating is a mode of communication.  What I value when.  When I send a smiley to someone, its a rating.
• A rating is a signal of trust.  Whom I value when.  Trust is credit and credit is priced.

If there is a theme that indicates we need new counting tools its when things become too complex and when we need to simplify through the language of a rating.”

Bingo! When things get too complicated, we need new counting tools to simplify through the language of a rating. This design study intends to implement a peer economy because clearly, the big-E Economy has grown too complicated. It’s complicated because complexity suits the purposes of people better able to make the rules and hire analysts and lawyers and accounting firms to follow, and bend, the rules. That’s why the stock market systematically moves funds from the less informed to the better informed.

Data is the Basis of Economic Complexity

As one of my favorite economists, Tom Robbins said,

“During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.” *

That’s complexity at work. But just recognizing complexity isn’t enough for our design study. We need to get our hands around the choke point that’s preventing the right things from being counted. I suggest that the check point is who controls the data and thus the character of the data kept. We assume that data is always kept by the seller, but is that so?

Consider this:

• Whenever a seller and a buyer intersect, the data is maintained by the seller, as we expect.
• Whenever an employer and an employee intersect, the data is maintained by the employer.
  (Who is the buyer of the services.)

In the first case, the data keeper is the seller, not the customer. In the second, though, the keeper of the data is the customer, purchasing the employee’s work. So it’s not about the roles of the players, It’s about size and who is the designer of the transaction. Data is the asset of the designer of the business agreement, and a liability to the other party to the agreement, who’s subservient to the keeper’s records.

I emphasize designer of the transaction because transactions are designed ad hoc, one-at-a-time, like component parts in machines before Eli Whitney invented standardized parts. Perhaps our economy has become too complicated to let transactions be designed for the sole benefit of whoever thinks it up first and has superior data resources.

Proprietary Data is the Basis of Tyranny

Perhaps we need a systems approach, where we conceive a model transaction, one that serves both parties equally, and removes the data dominance factor. Of course, that’s the purpose of our little design study. We think we’ve come up with the 6 essential states in every transaction (Discover, Identify, Specify, Negotiate, Invoice, Evaluate); and we think we’ve identified the Atomic Elements of transactions (People, Products & Tasks).

If we’re right, and our standard transaction model simplifies selling and buying, then it might lead to more and better buying and selling. In any event, we’ll be counting some things that haven’t counted before. Like Quality ratings.

You can count on it.

11:23:34 PM    

I’m reminded again that everyone discovers DNA at the same time. The social software meme seems to be everywhere. By software, I think everyone means web applications. Yesterday, citing an earlier Ross Mayfield post, I suggested:

“If the Net’s open protocols weren’t in place and agreed upon, we could never improve it with the more highly abstracted, software-only, permission-free improvements, social software really, that we can now imagine together.
Our primary hope depends on our shared imagination, freed from the limited horizons of those who would manage us into irrelevance. As the ad says, we’ve already got the shoes. Now Just Do It.”

And Ross Mayfield said:

“The physical and logical infrastructure of the web has reached a maturity while usage has surpassed a tipping point where it is ingrained in most people’s lives.  As people have become participants on the web, they are building a new social infrastructure, connection by connection.”