Author: brittblaser

I had a couple of good meetings last week with smart guys who want to make the world more sensible. It’s pretty amazing how universal that urge is and how many smart people there are, especially among the bottom 98% of the people in the big-E Economy who do the heavy lifting.

Erick the Well-Read

On Thursday, spring smiled on NYC and I met with Erick Herring at a sunny table at the Redeye Grill, named in honor of the number of its patrons who fly the redeye between the coasts. Erick Herring is the proprietor of Lasipalatsi, Finnish for “Glass Palace”. He spent his formative years in Denmark and Norway and speaks fluent Danish:

“During that time, he built the higher education segment for NeXT Computer’s dealers in both countries, ran a private consulting practice, was the chief architect for the first Internet-enabled library system deployed in Europe, built a secure, nationwide IP network for the Aalborg University Library in Denmark, taught courses and lectured on the Internet, network security, software development, and operating systems, and served as a Senior Management Consultant and lecturer at the Danish Technology Institute. Erick attended the University of Texas at Arlington and Aalborg University Center in Denmark, is published in English and Danish, and founded the Danish Java Developers Group (DJUK) in 1996.”*

. . . meaning he actually understands the terms I fling around so cavalierly. Erick had quoted extensively from five of my little essays, so I wondered if we might get together. Sure enough he was headed to New York on a consulting gig. (Coincidentally, I had stayed at a hotel 5 blocks from his Santa Monica office about a week earlier—life is a karmic strip). Erick is the Chief Security Officer for Digital Evolution, inventors of the DE Management Server. As I understand it, it’s like a firewall with a bigger brain that assists people in an enterprise to safely engage open standards services without being exposed to security risks on ports that the firewall doesn’t monitor.

Erick knows there’s a better way to run our society, and is willing to help out with the Xpertweb design study. Aside from being off-scale smart, he lives close to our code architect and deep thinker Flemming Funch, who’s Danish! I’m probably spoiling the surprise, but I can’t wait for Flemming to pick up the phone to hear a Danish greeting about tech rather than Havarti. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Mitch and I may have to decipher tech notes that look like this.

Erick generally agreed with my take on the Liberty Alliance DigID initiative, as much due to its grand ambitions as its tech, which he feels serves us better than MS PassPort. His greatest contribution to Xpertweb may be to ensure that our DIY DigID is actually useful. Under the Xpertweb model, the risk is to the vendor, who delivers value before the buyer pays, as discussed by Mitch in his Caveat Venditor post. Since every Xpertweb buyer maintains a DigID file on her Xpertweb site, the seller’s site can require the buyer to pass an authentication test at her own site prior to committing to the task or sale. Then the seller knows that the work is being requested by the person who owns the reputation on the buyer’s site. Did that make sense? Well Erick says it can be the basis of a Good Thing, and that’s what’s important.

Isn’t that cool? Xpertweb code flowering under the care of a couple of guys with Scandinavian sensibilities who believe thoughtful people can live together in peace and prosperity.

Spiral Unbound

Stuart Henshall’s Unbound Spiral and this blog have cross-linked a few times, so we met by phone on Friday. Stuart’s firm consults to organizations to get them to act smarter by realizing they need to see their work as “serious play.” The operative word is serious, not solemn, to correct how too many groups approach progress. He must be good at it, if you trust the recommendations of people like Jay Ogilvy and Gary Anderson, Chmn./CEO of Dow Corning. Actually, Stuart’s insights are about how to employ the fact that we trust those men’s ratings more than others.

He’s been doing some deep thinking about the core value, trust, as opposed to the general description, reputation, especially in his “Identity Trust Circles” post on March 24. As we talked I understood Identity Trust Circles for the first time, and a very cool way to apply Stuart’s principles to Xpertweb.

Since Xpertweb users expose their transaction data as willingly as we blog our thoughts, It’s straightforward to find all the plumbers who work in your zip code, or all the programmers in Bangalore who hack PHP-XML. It’s simply a matter of applying Google APIs to find instances something like,

<xwspecialty>residential plumber</xwspecialty> and <workzip>98040</workzip>
<xwspecialty>web programmer</xwspecialty> and <skillset>PHP</skillset> and <skillset>XML</skillset>

There will also be RSS feeds aggregated up through the mentor chain to find skills. Once you find the skill sets you need, they can be filtered by average grade overall, last 6 months, by product, etc. We had already envisioned all that, calling it reputation.

But Stuart suggested that finer level, trust, by using an even more Googlish approach. We each develop confidence in others through their blogs and acquaintance and probably by how they handle their transactions. So Stuart suggested that we need to be able to filter ratings by who made them. How do the people in our Identity Trust Circle rate potential vendors? How do other skilled judges rate providers? For instance, what do people who write O’Reilly books think of programmers? Stuart has provided an important insight.

Such filters are easy for any reasonably skilled mentor to set up in a couple of hours. It also occurred to me that we might also weight opinions by location. For instance you might want to know–in a hurry–how people in your small census tract rate the local plumbers.

In his Identity Trust Circles post, Stuart notes something that Doc has also been alluding to. There are a lot of people working the reputation meme and providing the web services to back up their op
inions. Technorati and Ryze and BlogShares come most easily to mind, but there are others, like our gestating favorite.

This flowering wouldn’t be possible if the Net hadn’t progressed beyond its basic protocols to the point we’ve reached: a permission-free zone where anybody with an idea can launch a web service without a preliminary buy-in by existing vested interests. This freedom to innovate is the third leg of the Net’s NEA stool: Nobody owns it, Everyone can use it, Anybody can improve it. 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.

11:10:12 PM    

Money velocity is a big deal, but only economists talk about it. I’m no economist, but I know what I like. Money velocity measures how many times the average dollar changes hands in a year. The GDP measures all the transactions we do in a year. When we get a dollar, we spend that dollar, which gets measured as a $2 addition to the GDP. If consumers and businesses feel confident, they spend money faster and the GDP goes up and we proclaim ourselves successful, If we hang on to our dollars a little longer, we’re less successful. I don’t know what the current figures are, but I recall money velocity being about 12-14 times a year when I took my single Econ course. (Obviously, you should look elsewhere for your economic insights.) The calculation is made by dividing the money supply (no simple calculation, that) into the GDP.

If money’s zinging around the economy at the rate of 1 move per month (12 per year) and it slows by just a day, the GDP drops by 3%, which is a big deal. It gives us an idea why the consumer confidence rating is so important. It’s safe to assume that money velocity was higher in 1999 than it is now, and that difference may account for the relative weakness in the economy.

The Easy Refunds “Bounce”

A few decades ago, no one but the big catalogue companies did any mail order business. Then it began to catch on and lots of businesses started mail order operations. In those days you had to have a reason to return an item to a store. I remember clerking at Macy’s in high school when you actively resisted returns, unless the goods were obviously defective. The new mail order companies were equally reluctant to accept returns and people started complaining to the Federal Trade Commission. Legislation was passed requiring mail orders to be returnable for thirty days after shipping, at the customer’s whim, no reason required. Naturally the companies bitched and moaned that it would ruin them. You know, like Jack Valenti excoriating video tapes and file exchanging.

What actually happened was unexpected. The mail order business exploded! Released from the fear of getting stuck with the wrong goods, customers came out of the woodwork. This was one of many lessons about large effects from small changes. Although consumption is a double-edged sword (wasting resources and trapping human consciousness on the material plane), if you’re using your economics filter, you like more activity, since it’s the only way we know to raise living standards.

How’d that work again? Oh yeah. If we increase customer’s confidence in purchases, they start to spend just a bit faster, and those dollars end up back in their pockets sooner, go out sooner, yada yada. A righteous cycle.

Caveat Venditor

As Mitch said the other day, Xpertweb inverts the traditional balance of caution in a transaction. Instead of a wary buyer, we let the vendor beware. This shift is analogous to shifting the mail order risk from the buyer to the seller. The Xpertweb mantra is that every vendor and every customer has a grading history and the seller allows the buyer’s grade to affect the price. You can never predict effects, but that is likely to cause people to open their wallets just a little faster and start that righteous money velocity cycle.

Velocity = Generosity

Imagine an economy that’s cooking along with an exuberant P2P model that’s no worse than Xpertweb. Now you’ve got folks spending more freely on stuff, and sellers find it easier to employ more and better people, because they’re rated also. The stage is set for a kind of looseness in the economy that characterized the late 90’s, when people and governments felt they could afford to do more of the right thing. Under this romantic economic model, you start to see a similarity to the gift economy, where people produce freely and put their stuff out there and just assume plenty of gifts will show up real soon.

So maybe the name of the magazine should be Fast Money rather than Fast Company.

11:50:59 PM    

Doc has an enlightening article in Linux Journal about the annoyance of marketing as we know it and how hard it is to be a well-known customer rather than a cynically-pitched faceless consumer. The stimulus was an automated telemarketing call from Disney:

I hung up.

Right now, it’s all up to Disney. Our relationship is entirely producer/consumer, which means we don’t have a relationship at all. Disney sets all the terms and conditions. I can buy their goods, join their clubs and what not; but I can’t initiate any kind of relationship that proceeds on my terms, even if that relationship might be good for them. The same goes for airlines, credit card companies, banks and various other entities whose relationships with me are manifest in the plastic cards that thicken my wallet. In fact, these asymmetrical producer/consumer relationships are so deeply embedded in our economy and culture that we hardly can imagine any kind of truly symmetrical power relationship with a large company–much less one in which we, as customers, are truly in charge.

(Doc’s good at this presentation. When he does it in person, he fans his credit and club cards across the table like a Vegas dealer.)

So let’s imagine one . . . What this requires is something we don’t have right now: a new identity infrastructure–one provided by open APIs, protocols and other standards that serve no agenda other than to enable useful dealings between buyers and sellers of products and services. Like the Web and e-mail infrastructure that are already part of the Net, this new infrastructure would be a full-fledged service on the Net. And it won’t become that unless it’s something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Again, like the Web, e-mail and the Net itself.

Since this infrastructure won’t be built around any corporation’s agenda (though it will prove quite handy to corporations wishing to do business with free-range customers in a real marketplace), it necessarily will be centered around customers. After all, we’re the  ones with the money, right?. . .

. . . Let’s say I have engaged a new category of business–a relationship registrar called MyID–to certify, authenticate and otherwise substantiate the preferences, permissions and other variables that might be involved in mydentity-based relationships with participating companies and other organizations (including federal, state and local public ones). When I’m not using this mydentity, I still default to anonymity or to the relationships provided by current systems. . .

. . . When I spoke at Digital ID World last Fall, I said I didn’t believe any of this would begin to happen in a meaningful way until we had an invention that mothered some necessity–a dirt-simple killer application or killer protocol that would spread like wildfire and carry its own default infrastructure to ubiquity. I’m not sure Liberty supports that, but I don’t know. It kind of depends, I guess.

Right now there are other moves afoot, too premature to talk about, all intended to build out a mydentity-based infrastructure. I may hear more about these over the next four days, when I attend PC Forum, which combines big company CEOs and presentations with disruptive subjects. . .

. . . One concern I have is the need for simplicity, for the Principle of Good Enough that accounts not only for the success of the Net, the Web, e-mail and their founding protocols but for infrastructural building materials like Linux as well. To me, Liberty looks too complicated for that.

The Emerging Mitch-based SMI Protocol

Mitch climbs on Doc’s giant shoulders and exposes an idea he’s been baking for a while, the Strip Mall Infomediary (SMI), to implement Doc’s proposed Relationship Registrar business category. Since Xpertweb has a role to play in the market space, his idea must be good. And it plays a utilitarian background role, which is even better.

Mitch has seen what all of us will eventually get: carbon, not silicon, is the key element for the future of networked business. Messrs. Gates, Jobs, McNealy et. al. are required by their shareholders to imagine a world of complex rules and pipes and code intermediating our futures, but Mitch suggests that, for our most important needs, only a plugged-in human will do:

We cannot take time to manage access to our interests all the time, just as most people rely on money managers to help with their finances, doctors to keep track of their health, and so forth. The infrastructure that Doc describes, that Andre Durand has described here and here and Eric Norlin talks about when suggesting we “hijack” the Liberty Alliance protocol is necessary, but not sufficient. We also need people who are motivated to begin collecting the information that revolves around each of us and to organize that information for exploitation on behalf of the individual.

His non-obvious point is crucial. Our needs will always transcend our machines’ abilities to serve us. When they catch up to our current needs, we’ll have moved on to richer, more subtle requirements. Mitch describes how his infomediaries would arrange Doc’s ideal Disney vacation, but it extends to less obvious excursions. How soon will an automated travel agent like Expedia design the fulfilling trip to Florence and Venice that David Weinberg wants this week, for which he seeks pointers from his readers? Obviously there’s no current satisfaction index, or David would be using it.

When will code-based travel routers match the subtlety of the carbon-based Parker Company, renting seductive Italian villas only to clients they speak with on the phone? Why even ask? Check out Parker’s gorgeous, evocative site for a hint of the rich future of human-centric services—it’ll inspire you to break out that neglected pasta maker.
Mitch’s SMIs will know how to find villas like this one, 30 minutes from Florence, as easily as the downtown Marriott, but less dear at $90/night. Either one may be stocked with the wine and flowers you prefer. This is how the infomediaries of the Very Rich work already, so it’s just another digital divide for us to cross. But we netizens are on the wrong side of this one. Is that OK with you?

Citing the proliferation of financia
l services companies like Edward Jones in retail Generica, Mitch suggests that the relationship registrar will build on whatever Digital ID infrastructure emerges, selectively shielding and exposing the client’s presence, generally deflecting the intrusive, opportunistic side of sellers, while narrowly engaging the responsive service sides of the same sellers (without that proven responsiveness, they don’t even get a shot).

The second part of the supporting infrastructure is what Flemming calls “SMTP for reputation”—Xpertweb. For the strip mall infomediary, Xpertweb is just a background utility, tracking clients’ satisfaction as thoroughly as their portfolios reflect financial satisfaction. As rhapsodic as I may get about a Peer Economy, we need to remember that the Xpertweb protocols are just a black box to aggregate and depict quality with incorruptible integrity. What you do with the protocol is your business. Literally.

Mitch then describes the icing. A ready, willing and able buyer is the most precious resource in the economy and he’s worth a lot to sellers. The quality of the infomediary’s clients is proven to the sellers he works with, so, like the rug merchant at the bazaar, they’re ready to deal. Whether it’s a discount or extras, the infomediary’s client will be way ahead of the unassisted customer:

The infomediary is incented not only to protect the client’s information, but also to develop new ways to make money for the client using that information — just as Wall Street has created a thousand derivatives to create more value it can extract.

We’ve never considered Mitch’s idea so it couldn’t work, could it? But the infrastructure is imminent and free. Digital ID will be free. Xpertweb will be free. Web space might as well be free. You can rent furniture cheap and often get strip mall space for six month’s free rent to start, which I found out when I built one…;-). There’s no Cost Of Goods Sold and no SABRE terminal to lease.

Probably the only expensive part is Mitch.

11:25:36 PM    

I cannot explain a strange ennui that I’ve felt the last few days which has kept me off the air. Perhaps it’s the reaction of an ex-warrior to the sight of yet another generation embracing war as the answer to an existence not quite “meaningful” enough? …driven yet again by transient office-holders whose exquisite mix of idealism and cynicism and ego celebrates the triumph of brilliant execution performed in a vacuum of wisdom.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not categorically against this “war,” which is at once a geopolitical necessity in the historical sense but also a violation of the most important new way of thinking about power since the Magna Carta—our new collective sense that violence in any form is an affront to our humanity. It’s a failure of our country’s management to let go of its legacy systems.

Not Getting Through

My ennui may have been at work Friday. Just as I don’t discuss science with creationists, I don’t discuss the Xpertweb design with people who don’t “get” the Internet or who believe that its purpose is to enable B2C commerce. As a result, I live in an artificial state of grace of enthusiastic support. But yesterday I couldn’t articulate the protocol’s plumbing and its larger promise to a guy who totally gets the Internet and believes it’s destined to connect individuals in unprecedented, useful ways. His commitment to the assumptions behind Xpertweb may precede and exceed mine, but he seems so sated with the failure of people to embrace small procedural changes that he can’t imagine a subculture of process-driven zealots embracing the ritual of an alternate economy, filling in forms to hire a plumber. That view seems to me to ignore our willingness to use a form to buy a $6.95 paperback. Certainly he can’t imagine the protocol growing beyond the early adopters and scaling through the use of their servers. Mitch says it’s exactly the position he took before he dug beneath the surface.

It’s simply a difference in points of view, but my failure to reach him somehow felt like part of my larger reluctance to engage since Wednesday. Maybe I’m naive to conduct this design study or maybe he knows too much to accept its idiosyncratic premise. We’ll see.

Fraternité, Égalité, Trivialité

We can assume that a smooth running Peer Economy won’t pump as much adrenalin as managerial capitalism. Prosperity can be pretty boring and a smoothly running peer-based economy won’t sound jazzy compared to the corporate vocabulary of conquering markets, killing the competition and clawing up the corporate ladder by launching killer products through triumphant vendor shoot-outs and fly-offs. Much of this silliness may attract thrill-seekers to combative businesses.

I totally understand that urge. I was a thrill junkie most of my life, spending a lot of time on mountains with and without snow and wrecking one each of three kinds of conveyance—car, motorcycle and airplane (coming so close so many other times). Extenuating circumstances aside, I purposely put myself in conditions that heightened the likelihood of an inelegant person-earth interface.

We all strive to be of consequence and so we chafe at the restraints of the pecking order. Young men are particularly wired to challenge order and that urge is unlikely to disappear in the presence of P2P prosperity as dramatically different as is ours from our (anybody’s!) ancestors. The need to distinguish ourselves is at the root of ambition, whether athletic, academic, entrepreneurial or political.

So where’s the thrill in Xpertweb? If there is one, it would be in participating in a new wave economic system with data structures designed to focus company-founder levels of reward on its early and almost-early adopters. Perhaps a lot of restlessness is driven by economic dissatisfaction and the young and the restless will happily trade the adrenalin for the quiet abundance of any peer economy, whether Xpertweb or another.

Or perhaps we are once again at the dawn of a fundamental shift in the type of person who thrives in the new structure. The world was once dominated by violent warrior kings, ruling by what John Perry Barlow described as “the divine right of thugs.” The people who prevail now couldn’t wield a battleaxe to save their family jewels, but they’re better than others at organizing capital. Just as they replaced the brutes before them, a new personality type may rise to the top in a Peer Economy, though it’s hard to know what type that may be.

Might it be people a lot like you?

The Obvious Economy

My skeptical expert is convinced that people won’t extend themselves to fill out a form, even if the result might be a dramatic transformation of their lives.

One of the keystones of my Obvious Culture notion is that it will include an obvious economy. The tools of obviousness are also the means to help a community to form around a successful protocol. Each Xpertweb site will point at many others and each will publish its data in well-documented, highly discoverable ways. But that’s just the beginning of the fun. Of course we’ll deliver tools to tabulate seller ratings and customer generosity and all the Xpertweb plumbers in your zip code who are available right now. Like having your own specialized OMB, you’ll be able to list the success rates of all mentors and their protegés, by region, specialty, last name or any other way you want to view them.

But it can get better. If you’ve never visited Kartoo, go there now to see how a search engine can disclose web connections graphically as you’ve never imagined. Who knows how current or accurate it is, but Kartoo’s mix of various sized 3D URL orbs and their explicit links makes their data obvious. We’ll provide a similar tool to depict the growth of the Xpertweb community.

So, using Xpertweb forms, you’ll be able to see where you stand relative to others, how various sellers and their mentors are doing, where the money is moving around the community and in what volumes. This might be a microeconomy, but it’ll be the best documented economy in history. Xpertweb provides a strong incentive to its users to train others who then train even more others. The payment rituals encouraged by Xpertweb roll a lot of little bits of cash into the accounts of the early and almost-early adopters. If Xpertweb users conform to the forms generated by their own web servers, they’ll transform the lives of a lot of people who serve others well and teach others that
habit of quality service. And, should they do so, it will be obvious to everybody just how much and how fast high quality work and high quality money is moving through the system.

As we begin to observe, in real time, the work and money moving among Xpertweb users, sometimes in great amounts, even the skeptical will have a choice to make: Can you stand to have that much money moving past you without moving through you?

12:22:21 PM    

Flemming Funch, AKA Ming the Mechanic, has posted an overview of Xpertweb’s precepts and processes, emphasizing that everything’s public and everything’s decentralized and there’s no central greedpoint. Ming’s description carries more weight than others, since he’s the guy who’s putting it into practice. His approach to building this web app is to make it as simple as possible—notice that he calls himself the mechanic, not the theoretician. We both believe that code must follow custom, not enforce behaviors. Like, when you’re designing a park, put the sidewalks where the grass wears out.

I’ve admired Flemming since I discovered him last December, when I mirrored his entire Organization Archive in a blog titled “Ming’s Dynasty“. He learned a lot about reputation systems as originator and designer of the New Civilization Network, which now has thousands of participants:

“If there is a list of people’s reputation ratings as numeric values, ordered in descending numeric order, people change their behavior and get competitive about getting better numbers.”

At NCN, he quotes Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Who better to birth the Xpertweb code than a programmer-philosopher? And civilized—he’s a great Dane

GUI and EUI

As the posts by Flemming, Mitch and Doc suggest, our little design study is morphing back into programming mode. That means we’ll be finalizing our Graphic User Interface, of course, but also developing an Economic User Interface—the essential events that define economic activity. Fortunately, when you’re not trying to design a multi-national lock-’em-in enterprise, the economic imperatives customers care about are pretty straightforward.

Caveat Venditor

Mitch wrote Sunday about Xpertweb’s inversion of web-based economics, whereby work is done first and satisfaction-based payment later. That simple inversion opens doors for less selling, more buying, and a healthy microeconomy of satisfied peers.

The secret sauce we are adding to our microeconomy is reputation. In order to do that, we must collect every task rating without exception. To ensure 100% compliance, we need to embed the rating—a numeric grade and a written comment—in the invoice so it cannot be put off and thus not entered. If we’re to rely on ratings, they can’t be entrusted to sellers nor should they be centralized: why do all this work to build a closed system bound to collapse under its own weight?

So it’s mandatory to have open data co-hosted by the seller’s and buyer’s synchronized web sites. The data set includes the surprisingly few types of promises and outcomes common to every transaction: due date, description, price, etc.

Project Background

Over the last four years, five programmers worked on various aspects of the project, proving that we could synchronize the buyers’ and seller’s transaction records and equip users to create and modify data forms even if they couldn’t spell XML.

When Flemming and I started talking, he was very diplomatic. He said the programmers had done a good job of implementing what I’d asked for. His point was, of course, that I’d been asking for the wrong things. I appreciated his restraint.

I had always felt that our data files need to be as simple as possible, which meant well-formed XML but not validated against a strict schema or DTD. This was due to the overarching need to avoid centralization in any form, even an “official” namespace, to preclude any future possibility of a determined party gaining control of the namespace server and steering the community away from openness.

The decentralized approach also seemed to dictate a truly aberrant file structure: each datum would have its own 3-line xml file, avoiding any assumptions about how a data collection might be structured. Verbosity seemed a reasonable penalty for the simplest possible data structure. Our users won’t be data managers.

As Flemming and Mitch and I discussed architecture, we realized that we might have a data structure if it reflects the real world. In the Agora, there have been three kinds of things worth knowing for 5,000 years:

People (“youruniqueid.xml”, sometimes selling and sometimes buying),
Products (“Widget1a.xml”) and
Transactions (“sellersuniqueID.buyersunique.numberofunixsecondsuponsubmitbutton.xml”).

So we’ve declared those three categories to be the core datasets for the Xpertweb universe. It seems so obvious now, but that’s hindsight. Sometimes the obvious takes 5,004 years to sink in. For me, anyway.

That People datatype includes the Digital ID part of Xpertweb, which may be a pretty exciting byproduct. Xpertweb gives DigID something to do.

To Schema or Not to Schema?

We wrestled with this. Finally, as Flemming says,

“Certain relationships are built-in. Both providers and customers have mentors, who both might act as helpful consultants in making this all work, but who also serve a function in letting their software verify and aggregate activity for the people they have sponsored. That introduces some checks and balances that makes the system more fault-tolerant, and that fosters synergetic relationships.”

At the beginning, Flemming’s will be the only code at work, so there’ll be no need for a schema or DTD to enforce structural rules. However, Many Xpertweb users will embrace and extend Flemming’s code, so we’ll be adding a validation tool and a schema located on each site. That solves the decentralization problem, but still provides confidence that the directory structure will conform to other users’ expectations, and so that data forms and those three kinds of data sets are structured correctly.

Jon Udell suggested that we not build the schema first, but wait until we’ve banged on Flemming’s code for a while. Who are we to argue with Jon Udell?

Each Xpertweb site’s validation tool will also be able to validate another site. Specifically, a mentor’s validation tool will monitor her protegé’s sites’ integrity, and any site will accept validation requests from another site.

Unearthing a 5,000 Year Old Flow Chart

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)

Invoice Seller reports the actual results and amount due

5. 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.

Reputation – The Secret Sauce of Decentralized Bookkeeping

Employees go to work for an accounting system, not the management. Managers hate that truth, but we all know what’s really going on. When you see an office full of busy people, you conclude the reason they showed up is the company is making payroll, so you agree to work today in anticipation of payment later.

Most of the compromises in our lives are based on our need to find a reliable accounting system, in the presence of which we agree to fritter away our days and imagination. What we really want is that future payment but hold the fritters, please.

After a series of Xpertweb transactions, some of us will be provably reliable and some less so. When that happens, even for a single expert and customer, we will have succeeded in reinventing communal reputation.

An expert will perform work for a reputable customer without needing to see that office full of busy people. That’s the EUI—Economic User Interface we’re designing. Will it work? No way to know for sure, but like GUI design, you take your best shot. To our design team, the EUI is just another feature of the web application and, since we’ve all done a lot of buying and selling, what we design for ourselves will probably work for others. But just to be safe, we’re including a tool to let anyone generate or modify the PHP forms so they can roll their own EUI.

If the Xpertweb EUI causes people to be more useful and to readily send money to each other, that EUI design is valid. If not, we’ll work on it. Eventually it will take.

11:44:01 AM    

I’m on my way back to NY this Sunday night from LA, having met with Doc on Saturday and Flemming Sunday. I had spent barely any face time with Doc and had never met Flemming in person. Flemming, “Ming the Mechanic,” has taken on the chore of rewriting our code, based on a new model he’s suggested, whereby each Xpertweb site will validate its own structure and xml data, and a mentor’s site will provide validation services to protegé sites.  It’s an exciting and vital extension of the protocol.

Something’s Coming

…is how Doc described Xpertweb yesterday. Doc Searls is my blogging mentor, having exhorted me to start this blog as we held long phone conversations last summer about Xpertweb and everything else. Maybe it was just a way for him to get back to work. Saturday at lunch, Doc said, “Until now, you’ve had my divided attention,” meaning he hadn’t really got his head around it until then.

It’s interesting that I hadn’t got my head around Xpertweb until I read Doc’s and David‘s World of Ends model. That was when I saw that, like the Internet, Xpertweb is only an agreement, something like this, with just enough code to let the parties deliver on their commitments. The agreement describes what a mentor does for his people, and generally how each Xpertweb user will store and preserve and mirror shared data as a good citizen of this protocol-based economic collective.

Doc’s the infrastructure guy. He went into detail about the infrastructure pluses and minuses of the Internet vs., surprisingly, the Local Area Networks that preceded the Net. We take it for granted that our LANs will provide file, print, messaging, directory, etc. services. To be truly useful, the Net needs to provide all those services (and more, as with the web). Sure, the file and messaging services are well established, but there’s still no printing service, which  is the lowest common LAN denominator. “Why should I have to fax you something? Why can’t I print it to your printer?”

The Net needs some other services, that Anyone can provide, like the critical but missing ID piece that Andre and Eric and Bryan and Doc and Mitch and others have been describing. I’ve suggested that the only way to really own your ID is to host it as your own web service on a server only you control. And that’s the model for Xpertweb ID services. Each user’s id, xpwid.xml, is one of the three core Xpertweb datasets, along with Productname.xml and taskname.xml.Your ID file provides the usual datatypes plus any optional datatypes you like, so subsets of your data can be selectively exposed on any basis you like. Or not. Your info, your server, your rules.

Doc described how the Cluetrain meme, “Markets are conversations” was received by third world people who actually have those conversations. Freed from our limited sense of markets we’ve never really lived, these free-market experts embraced and extended Cluetrain’s central point: markets are more than conversations, they’re relationships. People come together repeatedly in the market over the years and so they matter to each other, ultimately more than the goods and services they had come to the market to trade. It’s a rich model that we’d do well to emulate.

So Doc thinks we need a way to parse relationships, not just conversations. We concluded that’s really how Xpertweb can best serve, as a relationship API.

The Mentor Thing

And that brings us back to the mentoring thing. Our world revolves around mentorship, but our acknowledgement of mentors is so perfunctory as to trivialize their contribution. Doc mentored me into blogging, which forced me to tease these ideas out of their cocoon. Blogging hooked me up with Flemming and Mitch who saw where their contribution could make a difference. Others are coming forward.

In Xpertweb, advice and reputation and money moves vertically along the links among mentors and their protegés as they invest in others’ growth and are rewarded for that investment. Work and reputation and money moves laterally among buyers and sellers, point-to-point across the hollow sphere of their world of ends. It starts to feel like a wireless mesh network, with signals moving ad hoc where useful. Think of it as a cluefulness mesh.

As Doc said yesterday, it’s a simple system when you break it down, but it seems complicated for now. As I suggested in my corollary to the 10 WoE points, most of this stuff seems complicated until we can do it, like trying to explain to your great grandfather about googling an ATM location and driving over to squeeze cash out of plastic.

The logical extension of that sequence will be here when we are constantly replenishing each other’s plastic, rewarding each other for the skills we enjoy using, and bootstrapping each other into doing this.

9:48:20 AM    

I got a long and thoughtful message from Dave Rogers which deserves a public answer, with Dave’s permission:

Much as I enjoy your weblog and as many of your thoughts as I’m capable of comprehending, I’m wondering why you think the Obvious Society will be a good thing

I’ve read The Lucifer Principle, though I haven’t read Bloom’s latest book. I think he flogs the meme past all rationality, but I think social organisms (he calls them “superorganisms”) are a legitimate phenomenon that deserve greater study.

It is in that context that I believe the Obvious Society that you outline, and I agree that is likely to be the way the technology will go, is going to be one of the worst things ever to happen to human beings.

I wonder, have you ever lived in a small town? I have. It’s not exactly fun when everyone knows what you do, especially if you do anything that isn’t in strict conformity with the “norm.” Small towns can be oppressive for people who are “different.”

And what about parenting? How do we nurture notions of “trust” and “responsibility” with our children? I was an intrusive parent for my oldest daughter. I often kept the things I learned to myself, I just wanted to make sure I had some idea of what she was up to. But there’s no way I think I could handle knowing everything, and there’s no way she could have grown into the wonderful young lady that she is, if I had.

And what of citizenship? How do we nurture quaint notions like “trust” and “faith” and “honor” among ourselves as citizens? Why have any of those when we can simply rely on our technology to intrude into people’s lives and ensure they’re not doing anything we wouldn’t approve of?

The Obvious Society is the authoritarian’s wet dream. Knowledge is a form of authority, as I’m sure you’re aware. Giving people greater knowledge of what their neighbors and children are up to is giving them a form of authority without any real understanding of the responsibility that must attend that authority.

In superorganisms, or social organisms, people try to use authority to advance in the pecking order, usually at the expense of others. The world you describe is undoubtedly a better one for social organisms, they will be much more efficient at ensuring their constituent members’ efforts and activities are consistent with the aims of the social organism. But I’m very certain that it will be a terrible world for creating healthy individuals with a strong sense of individual identity, and a knowledge of the values that make life worth living.

I’m no luddite, but the world you describe is not one I welcome, nor one I would wish to inhabit. I am afraid we are already too far down along that path, and the rate is accelerating with the likes of Attorney General Ashcroft in control.

Earlier, on 2/25, Dave had written,

…let me point you to this little piece at Escapable Logic [The Obvious Society].

If there is a more frightening vision of the future, I can’t think of what it is.

Britt seems to believe human beings will use all of this particular technology in good ways. I’m not sure he’s ever lived in a small town. What he describes would enable the very worst of human nature to oppress and enforce conformity within the community. Suicide rates would sky-rocket. Hopefully, it will never happen; though I’m sure some fraction of it will to the extent that it will convey an advantage to one group. I can think of a half-dozen Twilight Zone episodes set in Britt’s vision of the future. I sure would hope I was Rod Serling…

Well, to kind of return to the religious theme: I suspect that technology is going to compel us to confront our spiritual problems in a way that nothing else could.

Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

David and I seem to agree that these technologies are inevitable and probably imminent. Is there any other information that might bring us closer to agreement? Let’s start with the expectation that Peer Brother will drown out Big Brother in a flood of personal video information that we’ll sort out among ourselves without government intervention. I’ve got my private web space here and David has his. We share what we choose to on our site, but not everything. Our captured video will reside in a similarly controlled repository. We can share whatever we want with whomever we want, when we want. As Personal Flight Recorders (PFRs) proliferate, as David agrees they probably will, our collective record will dwarf the records captured but ghettoized by the competing organizations using the cameras we see today.

The other softener in our disconnect is that none of us has any obligation to do any of this. At parties and locker rooms and home and perhaps church, our PFRs will be off. So we’ll be public when we’re out in public and otherwise I bet we’ll observe the kinds of limitations now accumulating around cell phones and smoking.

The Values Worth Living For

Let’s look at David’s core (I think) concern:

In superorganisms, or social organisms, people try to use authority to advance in the pecking order, usually at the expense of others. The world you describe is undoubtedly a better one for social organisms, they will be much more efficient at ensuring their constituent members’ efforts and activities are consistent with the aims of the social organism. But I’m very certain that it will be a terrible world for creating healthy individuals with a strong sense of individual identity, and a knowledge of the values that make life worth living.

Which are the values that make life worth living? If I had that answer, I might be a lot more decisive. Values seem to vary with the respondent and for each of us over time. John Ashcroft knows he has the values that make life worth living, but David and I don’t agree with him. I don’t know which values of the last two presidents I want to embrace, if any. What I can say with confidence is that there is nothing more human than being certain that one knows the “right” values, and that one’s “knowledge” of their rightness is unwavering. The value we both want to protect is our right to our own choices, discoveries, rituals and mysteries.

But within what framework might our choices be made? With no help from the Obvious Society, we’ve already abandoned a lot of freedoms. Our non-obvious society has done nothing to slow Mr. Ashcroft’s a
bsurd crusade against the real America he so obviously hates. In an Obvious Society, the video record would have laughed that sorry Bible-thumper out of the confirmation hearing. In an Obvious Society, we’d see Dubya arrested for his DUI and snorting coke rather than reporting for Air Guard duty as ordered. In an Obvious Society, youth will probably be a little more restrained. Perhaps it won’t ruin them for life.

David and I may have already lived in such a society. David is a retired Navy Commander and I was briefly in the Air Force. The visibility in an Obvious Society may be a lot like the visibility in the military, especially in combat, when you all live and work and horse around together. Like behavior on base, people in an obvious society are likely to be more formal out in public, but perhaps no more formal than people in the 1950’s.

Confronting our Spirit

I’m certain that the Obvious Society will, as David suggests, “compel us to confront our spiritual problems in a way that nothing else could.”

Now there’s a profundity I wish I’d thought of! What is our spirituality? My shorthand is that it’s our authentic self—the sum of thoughts, feelings and urges which spring from a deeper source than the face we put on for others. It’s the place we go when we give up being someone we’re not. What better outcome could we hope for than confronting our spirit? Perhaps we’ll even discern the distinction between spirituality and religiosity—how quiet and meek is the former and how petty and domineering is the latter.

Will it play out that way? I haven’t a clue, but I think so. I believe that deep reflection concludes that only closely held knowledge is “a form of authority” and then only if it’s owned by the authorities. Truly open, public knowledge is more like yesterday’s news—boring and toothless. To be effective, tyranny must hide reality rather than expose it. It’s likely that the Obvious Society is one where we collectively cancel government’s franchise on secrets and shame.

Further, our shared sense of fair play is more strict than our private ambition, else why would public officials work so hard at spinning their character? Being on stage brings out the best in us, if we can stand it.

The stink of money in politics is caused by the need for politicians to buy media time to present a false persona to the electorate. In an Obvious Society, it’s a waste of money and effort, since we’ll be clear about who each of us really is.

The Death of Privacy?

The question is whether we can stand being exposed to the rest of us while in public. It’s easy to forget that privacy is a recent invention, an artifact of the industrial age. It’s sometimes liberating but it’s not the usual human condition. All people through history and most people today live in full view of their family, clan, tribe, village. We’ll not abandon privacy though, since our living spaces sequester us far more than is possible in history and the third world.

But is the non-private life so bad? If you’ve ever seen third world villagers interact, you’ve noticed how cheerful they seem to be. Is it possible that our attempt to hide ourselves is a source of anguish? Here’s John Perry Barlow on life in Kabale, Uganda:

I also wonder how much of our world I actually wish on these people. They are desperately poor by our standards, but I don’t see any of them starving, and, taken as a lot, they sure seem a whole bunch happier than most of us Northerners.

People we see along the road smile and wave. I see them waving even from the distant fields, genuinely glad to see us. Their little gatherings are often doubled over with laughter at something someone has just said.

Imagine average Americans smiling and waving at a carload of passing Africans and you begin to appreciate how different is the vibe. Do I really want to endow other people with such blessings as we endure? At one point, we stop to take a picture and a boy walks past me, coming up from the fields with hoe over his shoulder.

“Hello,” he said brightly. “How is your life?” “My life is good,” I said, meaning it. “How is your life?” “My life is good, too!” he said, meaning it every bit as earnestly. He had no shoes. He was very dirty. He had probably been working for about 10 hours. Altogether, his family makes maybe 500 bucks in a decent year.

His life is good.

How is your life?

It’s a chilling prospect to be truly public in public, but it may be the best way to build ourselves a more liberal environment than the small towns David has escaped—the places that can paralyze its inhabitants into a lockstep conformity. Why might our world be more liberal? Because every voice will be heard, not just the voices of people who want to control others through politics and the religious wrongs. The current morality is skewed by and for those who have grabbed the lectern. Their values are broadcast by media whose members require access to the lectern, which they purchase with their complicity.

Most of our society has become more open than the little towns we remember, judging by the audience for the values and humor on film and in the video store. This blog tries to be a serious (not solemn) series of essays, but is anyone concerned when I proclaim the occasional holyfuckingshit for anyone to see? Not really.

Further, I’m convinced that small town morality and judgmentalism is as much a function of economics and boosterism as of firmly held mores. As access to online work penetrates those societies, your neighbor’s opinion of you loses its grip on your wallet and frees you to dialogue widely, as we are here. Interestingly, messaging lets you connect with like-minded, perhaps open-minded others a few blocks away, who may outnumber the self-righteous but, like oneself, are invisible.

I suspect there are are so many of us normal, red-blooded, slightly zany folks out here that, like the music collectors laughing at the DMCA, we’ll thumb our collective nose at the pathetically self-righteous minority and go have a beer, surf the web, play with our kids, do some yoga and not take ourselves as seriously as we’re told to.

We’ll learn together, Obviously, that an inquisitive, open-hearted, juicy and spontaneous humanity is the natural human condition, not the arid purgatory of artificial, fundamentalist “values”.

12:49:21 AM    

Mitch is back on the air with news that his son is just about recovered from acute appendicitis. Mitch has been offline since last Wednesday, so I’ve felt apprehensive. He had written that he was thinking a lot about how to be a Dad and therefore a human:

…if we start using this technology the right way, maybe he and other kids will grow up to spend more time with their kids. I remember going to the hospital a couple times around his age and not seeing my father for more than a few minutes at a time, where I slept by my son’s bed (or, rather, didn’t sleep). So, while we take care of this I appreciate your coming by the blog to check if there’s anything new.

The hospital has given me a lot of time to think about how we use technology, why I use it to work more rather than less, and so forth. I believe, looking backward and forward, that many folks have forgotten the emigrant ethos of making a better world for our kids. We dote on them more, but when you look around the hospital it is clear that a lot of what we do is create distractions — from pain, from life. There are Nintendo systems and geegaws and, yesterday, a Mardi Gras party. But what happens when we step out the door, kid in tow? Do we go back to work? Do we stay engaged? Do we work to make it better? I know, we all want our kids to go to college, but that is a sort of maintenance effort these days — like sending a child off to apprentice with the local printer or silversmith 200 years ago.

Everything about the level of connectivity I enjoy tells me there are powerful forces that could substantially improve my kids’ lives if they are put to use to make them participants in, and not just consumers of, the media in which we live.

My kids Brian and Kelly are in their early 30’s. They’re doing fine and living the lives they want (Brian’s a GIS specialist in environmental remediation and Kelly’s a yoga teacher/artist/poet/web designer). But from where I sit, their economic environment seems too iffy. I feel that our generation has let them down, so focused on our own path that we’ve left too many divots in the playing field.

Tonight on West Wing, they’ll replay the episode where Toby and Josh spend the night in a motel in Indiana and meet a dad taking his daughter to a college interview. They run into this dad in the bar because he’s avoiding telling his daughter he doesn’t know how to pay for her college. He and his wife have good jobs and are frugal but can’t do this vital thing for their daughter. They expect to work hard, but can’t it be just a little easier?

Can’t it be just a little easier?

Indeed. Everyone is working harder but most seem to me to be less sure of the trajectory of their lives. It’s clear we’ve mastered the trick of overfeeding ourselves and keeping a pretty good roof over our heads, but the level of effort to match our expectations seems so over-the-top that it clearly cannot be sustained.

Most of us lead lives that can’t scale.

Perhaps part of the problem is that our cultural flight plan has vectored us into the Bermuda Triangle. The 50’s offered unlimited promise; the 60’s, passion and enfranchisement; the 70’s, consolidation and a recovery; the 80’s a technical and financial renaissance; the 90’s an eruption of promise, wealth and unlimited horizons. Each decade seemed worth investing more time and effort to achieve what our immigrant forebears had wished for us.

But the market bust and our reaction to the 19 fanatics who got lucky have caused us to slip into a spiral of pessimism and doubt. As usual, these distortions have brought out opportunists who leap at the chance to turn public difficulty to private advantage. Meanwhile, most of the people who do the heavy lifting in our culture are wondering how their lives became so daunting.

Everything’s a Nail to Me

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so naturally I want to give our livelihoods a good Xpertweb whack. In looking at Andre Durand’s suggestion that individuals hijack the Liberty Alliance protocol, Mitch points out today that Xpertweb is one way to enable a strip-mall solution rather than nothing-but-net ideas. It’s true, and I hadn’t thought of it that way.

When I was a real estate developer in Denver, I built the Kipling Place strip mall. One of our tenants was Rocco’s Deli, owned by a former Johns Manville accountant from New Jersey. Rocco’s is the kind of place that would benefit from Xpertweb, and I think the accountant in Rocco would love the data stream that Xpertweb generates automatically. And from the customer’s point of view, if you’re looking for a Ruben sandwich, do you wanna go to the Southwest Plaza food court or to Rocco’s, whose Ruben is rated 97.4% with customer comments that make your mouth water? Fuggedaboutit!

Everyone wants to re-calibrate their future. That’s the same everyone who does all the work and the everyone who has all the money. There is no technical barrier to building a public economic utility for everyone, a place where everyone’s kids can find work and mentorship and build a reputation, and everyone can find certain satisfaction from vendors vetted by everyone else.

12:27:55 AM    

As I said last time, I didn’t “get” Xpertweb until I read the World of Ends Declaration. In making Xpertweb “WoE-compliant”, as Doc put it, I mimicked WoE’s point 8—based on Doc’s NEA construct:

8. The three virtues of the Xpertweb agreement:

    a. No one owns it

You can’t own an agreement. It lives at the intersection of your promises.

    b. Everyone can use it

Like the web, you’ll need some code and a little training, but that’s what Mentors are for.

    c. Anyone can improve it

Don’t like the rev 1.0 PHP business forms? Roll your own in Fortran. Only the schema matters.

The reason the schema is the big deal is that it does for economics what all the Internet’s equipment does for electronic transmissions—enforce an agreement on how to play nice with each other. That’s a bracing thought: unlike anyone else, Xpertweb people are subject to an overarching economic agreement enforced by forms and scripts conforming to their agreement.

As you’ve learned by now, the larger economy has no rules and few ethics. Like the wild west, people do whatever they can get away with—pretty much anything.

Let’s review what World of Ends teaches us.

Tale of WoE

Doc and the Doctor have reduced the Internet to its essence, which is how we can finally get it that the Internet is only an agreement. The parties to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol have agreed to distill our words and our longings into ASCII chunks of a certain size and format, and route them according to certain rules. You also abide by your agreement to do so every time you log on to the Internet.

What’s that you say? You don’t remember making that agreement? Neither do I. To save us all a lot of trouble, every Internet black box and switch and chip and router and software program conforms to the agreement called the Internet. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t. If a data packet doesn’t conform to the IP agreement, it’s not an IP packet, so it’s just ignored.

This is a big deal. We’ve come to a point in our culture that we can reduce our obligations to code so we don’t have to worry about breaking the rules.

Economic Rules For the Best of Us

You probably know better than I that a schema is a rule book for XML file structure and XML is a way to organize information so it’s readable by machines and people. By putting all Xpertweb data out in the open on its user’s sites, the Xpertweb protocols let all its users know about all its users. When people use the Xpertweb tools, they also use the schema’s rules, which are based on the standard Xpertweb Mentor Agreement. It’s a work in progress, but you get the idea.

And just as a packet isn’t an IP packet unless it conforms to the agreement, neither is a transaction an Xpertweb transaction unless its records conform to the schema and are present on the sites of both the seller and the buyer.

When we get all these tools hammered out, there’ll be two kinds of economy. The huge one we use now, with no stated rules, and the tiny micreconomy we’re designing here, with explicit rules for those who choose to abide by them, and a way to add others rapidly.

Then we’ll find out how many of us prefer to play by the rules.

 

10:27:58 PM    

…is how Doc Searls & Doctor Weinberger described the Internet effect when they launched worldofends.com this morning. The 10 points they have put together is like the Internet they describe—so obvious you say “Well, duh”. There is no surer sign of brilliance than describing what’s obvious but which has not yet been said. The actual phrase is:

Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.

WoE be to the managers who don’t hear their message. Our little design study is focused on a fertilizer to help flowers bloom wherever seeds find a crack in the pavement. I’m going to be crass here and leap onto the giant shoulders of WoE to get at what Xpertweb is about. Surprisingly, I didn’t really “get” Xpertweb until this morning.

1. Xpertweb isn’t complicated

You sell me something. I look it over and rate your work. Then I pay you. We both keep track of what happened so others can learn from our exchange. Think of Xpertweb as medium of exchange.

2. Xpertweb isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement

The agreement is that each of us will record particular facts about our exchanges and place identical records on our own web sites. When both our sites agree on the facts, they’re considered valid facts. If not, they’re suspect. The facts are in plain site, no one (nor Google) needs permission to see the record of any exchange.

3. Xpertweb is stupid

There’s no one behind the Xpertweb curtain and no curtain, because the Internet lets you have agreements without enforcers. There’s no central server, no Xpertweb Inc., no central greedpoint. When two parties identically publish their exchange according to the Xpertweb agreement, that’s an Xpertweb transaction. If they don’t, it’s not.

4. Adding value to Xpertweb would lower its value

You could build a company around the Xpertweb protocols using a central server and accounting and it would be great for a while. But eventually the wheels would fall off the wagon, as described in the HumanTech parable.

5. All of Xpertweb’s value grows along its edges

Xpertweb is as hollow as the Internet. If you can’t find an ISP, Xpertweb can’t help you since there is no Xpertweb. It’s just an agreement. Out on the edge of the Xpertweb agreement are its current users, each of whom has agreed to set up others with the tools they’ll need to understand and conform to the Xpertweb agreement. When they do, the edge moves out a bit.

6. Money moves to the suburbs

…because there’s no downtown for it to get stuck in. VISA is as hollow a company as there is, and it moves more money than any “real” company. If they re-coded their software as a web application and let each of their member banks host mirrored records of transactions, it would be even more hollow, and no one would have to pay processing fees. That’s how Xpertweb works. (OK, will work)

7. The end of capitalism? Nah, capitalizing on the ends

Our current model, managerial capitalism, depends on complex, proprietary accounting to maintain the franchise that management has acquired without asking. Every public transaction eliminates an otherwise private one. In a world of $400 CPUs, broadband and specialized skills, the ends are where all the talent is and where the work gets done (most Cisco products are never touched by a Cisco employee). Those ends are about to be equipped with the one thing that managerial capitalism has that no one else does—a way to keep track of who does what for whom and what they get as a result.

Accounting systems can now be inter-networked—distributed rather than concentrated. Squint at smokestack industry and all you see is vaporstacks.

8. The three virtues of the Xpertweb agreement:

    a. No one owns it

You can’t own an agreement. It lives at the intersection of your promises.

    b. Everyone can use it

Like the web, you’ll need some code and a little training, but that’s what Mentors are for.

    c. Anyone can improve it

Don’t like the rev 1.0 PHP business forms? Roll your own in Fortran. Only the schema matters.

9. If Xpertweb is so simple, why is it so hard to explain?

Everything’s difficult until you “get it.” Then it gets simple. What’s easier than finding an ATM on a website and driving over there for cash? Explain that to your great grandfather.

10. Some accounting systems we can abandon already

Companies are talent brokers. Their accounting/disbursement systems are the only lock-in keeping companies between customers and talent. Employees go to work for accounting systems, not management, but management doesn’t see it that way. When we all share the records, we’ll do things for each other today with confidence we’ll get paid tomorrow. And that’s the definition of an accounting/disbursement system.

 

 

9:54:52 AM