Author: brittblaser

Mitch Ratcliffe writes, RE Digital ID, via Doc:

So, the process needs to begin with the debate about policy and not what you can do with a Digital ID. People must own every aspect of their identity, guys. Design from that principle outward–the company or non-profit that does this will eventually win.

Mitch takes the debaters to task because they assume that the interested corporations will wrestle each other to the ground and come up with a DigID “standard” that will be forced on everyone. He points out that the ID must be controlled by the individual. Sounds good.

Well, actually, individuals never own every aspect of their own ID, because it’s our collective sense of a person that matters, not theirs. Let’s expand upon our conception of modeling an ideal marketplace:

When Big Bob, the prosperous, straight-talking village blacksmith, strolls into the agora, shoppers and merchants who have grown up with Bob project upon him their collective respect and comfort. When Bob’s brother, the unfortunate town drunk, lurches into the square, another collective persona is painted on ol’ Fred. No one in the village would let Fred sleep outside on a harsh night, but they don’t get out their best wares for him.

This is human nature at work—we make each other into what we have concluded about each other. In that ideal marketplace model, I suggested that we need to emulate our idealistic vision of the village market as we conceive and program our next economic reality:

“The point is that buyers and sellers are most invested in never saying no to the customer or never being without a greengrocer. Since reliability is what matters in meatspace, where people are mostly trustworthy, how might we model those dynamics into cyberspace?”

Call it idealistic, or call it a sensible disregard for digital reputation methods that have proven unsatisfactory. Every application has a vision of how its users will interact with the application. Since Xpertweb has no obligation to ask permission, to establish an industry standard or to sell to an installed base, we can design it any way we choose. The ultimate freedom in the Xpertweb design, of course, is that we don’t have to be concerned about a Business Plan, that icon of managerial capitalism responsible for more corporate losses than any quotidian human failing.

As an Xpertweb user (player? see below), I maintain information on my Xpertweb site that is enough to fill in a typical order blank—name, email, etc. When I go to a seller’s site, I need only enter my Xpertweb URL, and the seller’s script retrieves everything needed to process the order. But not payment info. In the Xpertweb world, the risk is to the vendor, not the buyer, so payment, based on buyer satisfaction, happens after the sale, and the buyer is freed from exposing financial information. And, of course, she exposes only the information she’d rather not type into the seller’s form.

Payment after purchase is an immense difference. By laying off the risk onto the seller, we finesse most of the difficult aspects of digital ID.

With every transaction, though, a dossier is built about this person. When buying, what are her average ratings given to sellers? How do those ratings compare to other buyers’ ratings of that same seller? Reviewing the written comments she is obligated to make with every transaction, does she seem reasonable or not? Is she thoughtful or dismissive of others’ efforts? When selling her artwork to others, does she get good grades and comments, or are they enough lower than her peers to suggest a weakness?

While her scores are recorded at her Xpertweb site, we would be naive to assume that anyone would incriminate themselves, so the scores and comments are also kept at the sites of each buyer and seller she deals with. Data is mirrored to the sites of her mentor and to the mentor of each party she deals with. It’s a simple matter to “walk” the sites of the people she does business with to compare her representations to the village she now inhabits.

So who owns the reputation of an Xpertweb user? Just as It’s Our Internet, They’re Just the Owners, so too, the components of an Xpertweb reputation are distributed so broadly and publicly that the whole picture can be re-constituted from its many mirrored parts, whether or not the nominal “owner” of the reputation fesses up to the past.

It’s still an opt-in economic model. If a seller doesn’t want to risk rejection or low ratings from buyers, then they’ll just do business the old way. If someone doesn’t want to see their reputation built this way, then they’ll just do business the old way. that’s clearly the best option for those who don’t feel the need to reach out to this new peer-based microeconomy.

But Xpertweb, though managed by no one and as blind as any gene or meme, is designed to embrace the marketplace and extend it as energetically as the most ambitious corporate entity. When there’s a large enough population of people willing to let their peers record the details of their reputation, what does it say about those who refuse to?

We can only leave it up to human nature.

9:22:58 PM    

It’s been interesting to watch Doc and Eric work through Doc’s NEA description of the Internet:

Nobody Owns it
Everybody Can Use it
Anybody can improve it

Doc attracts many of us because he’s so good at coming up with the seminal phrase that captures what so many of us are thinking about. Eric took exception to the first stanza, pointing out that every corner of the Internet is owned by somebody. Like so many blogged ideas, Doc told us about reality rather than fact, and Eric took him to task over that detail.

I can walk across town to Times Square in about 20 minutes, and so it seems to me that the Internet is like Times Square. Everything interesting about Times Square is owned, but it’s still a public resource. Everybody (in the vicinity) can use it, and Anybody with a sandwich board sign, a restaurant flyer, an outlandish costume or ghetto blaster can (as they see it) improve it. Although the people who own the parts could theoretically improve it until it’s unrecognizable, they’re not likely to mess with the formula.

Rudy Giuliani changed Times Square more than anybody by getting rid of the panhandlers, hookers and sleaze industry. I’m not sure whether there’s an analogy there. Was he Fritz Hollings? I don’t think so.

Several years ago, I built a really nice home, employing a master carpenter whose work was so good that I soon gave him his head and let him work out the details. At the end of the project, Troy told me, “It’s my house—you’re just the owner.”

“I’m a Good Girl, I am”
             —Liza Doolittle, My Fair Lady

Liza Doolittle’s protestation could have no effect on Professor Higgins because he knew nothing about her. She would be better off saying “I want to be known as a good girl!” A reputation will always be in the eye of the beholder, no matter how many Digital ID mechanisms someone puts in place, or how centralized it is.

As you know if you followed Doc’s and Eric’s exchange better than I could, it was about digital ID, online reputation, anonymity and privacy. I’m not sure I can or should add anything, but, since Xpertweb and this design study is mostly about reputation, here are some escapable thoughts.

“You have no privacy. Get over it.”
              — Scott McNealy

“You have a right to privacy but not to anonymity.”
            — A memorable quote from someone whose name I forgot

The anonymous quote gets it right. Privacy is not the same as anonymity and, when we’re truly alone, consenting with other adults, we have the privacy rights we think we’re guaranteed by the Constitution. When we go out into the Agora to do business with others, we have no right to anonymity. And this ID thing is only about selling stuff. It’s not like we’ll be choosing our kid’s Day Care Center without direct experience.

So, since Digital ID is only about selling, let’s put it into the frame it deserves. If we customers/consumers remain willing to foot the fraud bill charged by vendors and card companies, we will. Just because they see the possibility of saving billions doesn’t mean the problem’s going to be solved. Eric insists:

“Companies will push the world of commerce toward this (specifically credit card companies and banks) because they can save Billions (with a B) of dollars. And, for the most part, the average everyday person will accept it because they will be told how much more secure their transactions will be; how identity theft and fraud is being fought; how parental controls are now easier — stuff that, in Nebraska and Peoria, plays really damn well.”

Or not. Grand visions where many big companies cooperate toward a common end seem to get bogged down in the reality of the roll-out. Is this really any different than the Microsoft’s failed centralized Passport idea? I surely don’t know and it’s not clear anyone does. Those midwesterners may not know Art, but they know what they don’t like. And they’re also just about as smart as other people.

No matter. Eric is sure right about one thing: parts of the Net will be much more finicky about ID than others as, by golly, they already are. He sees the Net dividing into two worlds—the ID Net and the Anonymous Net, the former being a pretty clearly cordoned off area. Given his background, he’s probably thinking of a virtual place that’s a lot like the NSA where he used to work.

Like the real world, the Net is likely to reflect the same range of anonymity as it does today. My bank is very careful about what it shows someone saying they’re me, but Amazon is less demanding and shareware authors let you take their stuff at will—catch me later, if you like it. The continuum will likely be more broad than it is now (banks to shareware), but only as a few players get more finicky.

What may change the nature of ID is a change in the nature of transactions.

When Reputation is Beyond Price

Here’s Eric Norlin quoting Frank Field, referencing Dave Noble:

Reputation is fundamental to commerce. Here’s a little thought experiment that Dave Noble (now a prof at York University – something of his from firstmonday) made us think about 20 years ago: “Suppose that you and I each have a good that the other wants, and that we agree that the exchange of these goods will make us both better off. Assuming that we are both rational, how can we accomplish this transaction?” If you think it through, you realize that the only way such transactions can take place is through the agency of something like reputation.

Consider: there has to be some point in the transaction where one actor actually possesses BOTH resources. At that point, what keeps that actor from keeping them both? Only the realization that it is more important to maintain reputation than it is to achieve a one-time gain.

Without something like reputation, transactions cannot take place, because without it, there is no rational reason that an actor will give up a resource in the expectation that the exchange will be completed.

Let’s ignore the detail that the simultaneous possession problem fades to inconsequence down at your friendly agora, where you’re handed the radishes at the moment you tender the cash. Let’s focus instead on the fact that most purchases are like a radish, an Amazon book, or a printer cartridge—of only nominal value to either party. The point is that buyers and sellers are most invested in never saying no to the customer or never being without a greengrocer. Since reliability is what matters in meatspace, where people are mostly trustworthy, how might we model those dynamics into cyberspace?

8:18:43 PM    

I’ve found myself stopping by Flemming Funch’s Ming’s Metalogue daily, and reliably find a useful post. Today he’s discussing reputation systems:

Alex Halavais talks about an experiment with a karma/reputation system in a class he was teaching. The idea being that one had a certain number of points, and one could give them to others for doing good deeds, according to a simple system. But people cheated and the system fell apart.
I’ve noticed myself that it is rather difficult to make a functional reputation system. There is one in NCN, where people mark others as being ‘acquaintances’, ‘friends’ or ‘comrades’, meaning that they’re somewhere on a scale between ‘I know them’ and ‘I would trust them with my life’. Some of the problems I’ve noticed are:

• People have different norms. Some people feel they trust everybody unconditionally.
• Many people feel obliged to be reciprocal, even if they don’t quite mean it.
• Some people try to have several virtual personalities, so they can give each other points.
• 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.
• If I made the system, and I’m first on the list, people get suspicious.
• People who are very active get high ratings.
• Some people end up hating reputation systems.

Aside from that, it works fairly well. I just think I need to get rid of the comparative listing.

Of course, Xpertweb is nothing more than a reputation system:

•  Sellers deliver value for a proposed fee, say $100.
•  The Buyer rates the seller 1-99% and adds a written comment.
  •  A grade above 85% receives $100
  •  A grade between 50-85% receives $50-85
  •  A grade below 50% is failing – no payment
•  Grades are compiled into a reputation for the seller and the buyer.
•  Mentors who train others who get good grades are well rewarded.
•  Various mechanisms counter the foreseeable manipulation possibilities.

We’ve decided to just put the system in place rather than model it in a controlled environment. The reason: Grades must be dollar-denominated to mean anything. The only way to understand how something really works is just to do it.

Our work on Xpertweb has convinced me there are 4 problems with real-world reputation systems:

1. People no longer work for a living. They hold jobs for a living, which pays better.
2. People are incidentally loyal to a company, but deeply loyal to an accounting system.
3. Accounting systems are designed to buy work cheap and sell it dear.
4. Managers of accounting systems are hostile to exposing success or failure, whether within or outside of the organization.

Where programmers and bloggers take delight in finding bugs and celebrating quality, all organizations, like most people, are insecure. One study (can’t find it now) discovered that most high achievers are afraid they’ll be found out. Transparency exposes incompetence which is why any organization that manages an accounting system as its primary activity (is there any other kind?) cannot and will not support reputation-building. Only humans would consider such exposure and then only those highly qualified or motivated to do so.

We need an economy of people who solicit suggestions for improvement from customers and mentors. I guess we’ll just have to start small.

Funch-y Musings

Flemming Funch has a series of entries on the subject of organization and they’re worth a look:

2002-12-19: Reputation Systems
2002-12-10: You can’t shut up a network
2002-12-04: Dynamic Facilitation
2002-12-02: Online Business Networks
2002-11-30: Power-law distributions on the web
2002-11-30: People Tour
2002-11-29: Compliance or Creation
2002-11-26: The State of Grace Document
2002-11-25: Self-Organization
2002-11-22: Fertile soil for group-forming

5:20:41 PM    

If you disagree vehemently with a blog’s point of view, why would you spend time there? Do you go there to get along a little better or to work yourself into a lather?

I thought of this when I came across Eric Norlin’s rant yesterday. Eric’s had it up to there with the whiners (lower case, with an “h”) who wish the world were better than it is and who think the Internet’s protocols contain the seeds of a fairer, more collective society:

There seems to be this highly vocal contingent of bloggers. Oh they’re nice enough—until you offend their smarmy, alan alda/gloria steinem/woodstockian sensibilities. That’s right—these folks (you know who you are) are inexorably stuck in either A)1968 or B)some bad new age seminar. So, just for the record, let’s review this little bugger we call the internet:

If, Larry Lessig is right (as he recently alleged), and the NET IS NEUTRAL, then it has absolutely no moral imperative to:

1. increase the peace, love, harmony and economic and social justice on the planet
2. help you “find yourself” (how hard is that?!)
3. explore more deeply the beauty that is dialogue (i think i’m gonna throw up)
4. fight the power/stick it to da man/whatever

Bottom Line: thinking the interent should be some tool for helping us all get along a little better amounts (at the end of the day) to the same kind of draconian thinking that the worst upholders of copyright expansion subscribe to. Its a tool for human society — which is ugly, messy, beautiful, offensive, disgusting, lovely, awe-inspiring and about making money (at least sometimes).

So. Eric’s bottom line is the bottom line. Fair enough—Xpertweb is intractably focused on its practitioners’ bottom lines. But I can think of no finer attribute for a business tool than that it helps us all get along a little better, so I’m not clear how that might be a negative.

The obvious lack of a “moral imperative” doesn’t mean that the Internet cannot function as if it has a pre-determined purpose. Richard Dawkin’s important book, The Blind Watchmaker, speaks directly to this effect, raised by “the 18th century theologian William Paley, who made one of the most famous creationist arguments: just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed.*” Where Reverend Paley divined (literally) a celestial Watchmaker, Darwin and Dawkins demonstrated that tiny changes to a species over eons of time can generate mechanisms of mind-numbing complexity and seeming purpose. Dawkins originated the notion of the gene’s cousin, the meme and, as Br’er Hussein might say, the Internet is the mother of all memes.

In other words, just because the Internet has no moral imperative doesn’t mean that it does not intrinsically support certain modalities of behavior. Anyone can observe that email drives an organization away from hierarchy. That force is true even if there is no moral imperative.

Eric’s rant seems to be directed as much at books as blogs, linking only to his buddy Chris “RageBoy” Locke, which cites his current reading, “Shoshana Zuboff’s latest recipe for overhauling capitalism,” The Support Economy, which sounds like an Xpertweb rant :

Zuboff and Maxmin would eliminate the “little murders” of customer service interaction by replacing the current transaction-based model with a form of “distributed capitalism” based on a customer-supplier relationship, so semi-anonymous customer service reps will be replaced by “advocates” fully emotionally involved in their clients’ needs. (Publisher’s Weekly)

My instant sense was that no one’s forcing Eric to submit himself to those blogs’ (or books’) intellectual pollution. When an attack is so vitriolic, ya gotta wonder why.

Doc’s House Call

Then I found Doc Searls response, pointing out that Eric seems to be describing Eric’s Internet, not others’, and that the Internet is what you want it to be—the summer of love or the simmer of cash flow:

About making money. Ever asked yourself what the business model of rocks is? Of dirt? Of trees? Of rotted plants? Of reproductive urges? Last I looked the building, concrete, lumber, oil and porn businesses were doing pretty well. The difference with the Net is: its resources are infinite. They don’t need to be renewed, because they’re not scarce. You mine and harvest them by processes like duplication. Take all you want; just don’t buy the illusion that you “own” any of it. You don’t, any more than you own the air you breathe or the jillion-ton wedge of rock and lava between your yard and the core of the Earth. Deep down, it’s a commie kinda place. Deal with it.
  Think of the Net as a laboratory for human nature, because it’s the first world entirely made by human beings. And as Craig Burton says, we’ve only begun to terraform it. It’s like we created a parallel planet, occupying the same space and time as the one we already inhabit. We’re there already and have to make the most of it. Including the fact that some of our founding dreams were wet.

[Later…] Eric pushes back, basically laying out exceptions to my descriptions of the Net’s character. More later. Meanwhile, re-read Britt Blaser’s Bloom on the Peach. It’s related.

Not To Scale

This sounds like a religious controversy, and economics often lies just beneath religious passion. That point supports Eric’s view that we bloggers need to be less touchy-feely and more about business that works.

The Internet can be irritating to managerial capitalists. Even while it supports huge reductions in communications expense (internally, or with vendors and customers), it also so distorts the playing field that the Old Boy Network seems like a childhood dream. And managerial capitalism doesn’t seem to scale well to the Internet. Organizations often spend far too much on sites that few customers visit or, conversely, their business model can’t meet the demands of too many customers who want their emails answered and to take delivery as promised. It seems like Amazon’s the only one who’s nailed it.

The genetics, anthropology and history I’ve
read, as suggested in my peachy essay, describe a relentless march from thuggery to “getting along a little better”. Clearly, this Xpertweb design study is about building protocols that let buyers and sellers get along a little better in the marketplace, not through draconian thinking, but by exposing every promise and every outcome to (dare I say it?) collective review. As Doc says, that’s a commie kinda place.

The Slippery Slope of Power Sharing

In the movie Stargate, a distant world was literally owned by a Pharaoh wizard-god with all the power and no one else with any. Sorta like our early monarchies. By 13th century England, the nobles, whom the monarchy relied upon to hold power (and who had therefore been granted some power) were able to wrest concessions from King John in 1215 by his execution of the Magna Carta.

Well, there went the neighborhood. Since then, the inevitable has progressed: those who control assets and work have been forced to grant concessions to those who actually perform the work, and we’re not done yet. I believe we’re at the cusp of recognizing what’s been hidden in plain sight for 5,000 years:

Assets are an accumulation of property rights based on organizing others’ toil.

Now, organizing work has been no mean trick, since managing workers is like herding cats. So it’s not surprising or even unfair that huge fortunes have been amassed by those who’ve organized work productively in the presence of raw materials, factories, distribution and accounting. The question on the Internet table is whether the self-organizing protocols we’re seeing and anticipating will be sufficient to interest the cats in herding themselves. This is precisely the point of this microeconomy design study.

Self-organizing workers are a death threat to managerial capitalism. If managers’ primary purpose is to do things that are more easily and elegantly accomplished by an incipient web application, they’re in deep doo-doo. In many ways they’re acting that way, and why not? Ask yourself: How many managers do I know who are replaceable by a reasonably programmed web application? Yeah. Me too.

If the cats can herd themselves, what is the purpose of the managerial class? When work must no longer be organized into jobs, what is the need for external organizers? The homes of people I know already have better Means of Production than their cubicles—faster CPUs, comparable broadband, chairs, desk space and coffee. Is management as we know it simply another intermediary whose franchise is questionable?

Those are economic and humanist questions. It’s premature to dismiss the humanists as inadequate because they’re not discussing economics. The Federalist Papers never discussed the Uniform Commercial Code because the UCC is just details. John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence boldly, so King George wouldn’t have to put on his spectacles to finger him. The important work done, he went back to work on his little insurance company.

As will we all.

12:21:08 AM    

Eric Roberts is an impressive young man who has joined the Xpertweb team to conform our codebase and our shared vision. He asked me the other day for a description of my  management style so he could be most useful to the project. I’m not sure I have a management style, but I’m sure I have a set of expectations. There’s really no difference between those expectations and the values that the Xpertweb protocols are designed to encourage and, in some cases, enforce. Let’s start with a story that might be called economic romanticism.

It is told that, during the great whaling days of Bedford Massachusetts, a certain Captain William Jamison had commissioned the construction of a new ship. Captain Jamison was an experienced and sensible man, and had put much thought and energy into this design. The ship had features that he felt traditional designs needed, and which he knew would improve the efficiency and safety of his crew, which he treated well. On the day before his ship was to be floated out of dry dock for rigging, The captain ran into his insurer, Josiah Wheatley, on the street.

“William, that’s a fine vessel you have built,” said Wheatley.

“Thank you, Josiah, I’ve been meaning to stop by and engage you to insure her.”

“That will be my pleasure, William, and how much have you invested?”

“Ah, there’s the rub, it’s up to $3,500, but we can haul 10% more than any ship I’ve owned and stay out 15% longer, in better comfort—a contented crew is a profitable crew.”

“Indeed, Captain, you’ve always gotten more from your men than my other clients. I’ll draw up the papers and stop around next week. Do give my warm regards to Abigail.”

“And mine to your Martha.” The men shook hands and parted.

That night, still in dry dock, the Mary Belle caught fire and was a total loss. The next morning Capt. Jamison was supervising the cleanup and saw his friend Josiah Wheatley ride up.

“Well Josiah, it appears I should have engaged your services earlier!” laughed the Captain.

“Oh, you were just prompt enough, Captain,” Josiah replied, whose little insurance company was to grow into an international force. “Here is your cheque for $3,500 in satisfaction of your loss.”

“Josiah, I don’t understand. I purchased no policy. We simply agreed to do business.”

“Captain Jamison, I can see you’re not cut out for business! I have served you for 17 years and expect to serve you for many more. My father provided for your father’s insurance needs. Our deal was made when we shook hands yesterday and I would be no businessman were I to not hold up my end of the bargain. I’ll be giving you no reason to consider another insurer!”

As I said, Economic Romanticism.

Unreasonable Expectations

Our expectations of others may be more universal than we admit, and our core expectation is that we will be served rather than just sold to. Here are some universal hopes that any of us has when engaging another for anything more than a commodity, but are rarely spelled out. Naturally, they’re unreasonable:

• Understand my purposes and serve them. When you know what I’m trying to achieve, you’re more likely to help me get what I want, even if I express my needs unskillfully. Listen past my words.
• Leave your business plan at the door. I know you need to make a profit, but not on every interaction. When you say you will do something, finish it well, even if it takes more than you thought. Next time you’ll know better what your client needs and you’ll charge accordingly. Your extra cost in serving me this time is an unexpected investment in your knowledge, not an operating loss.
• Take the time to educate me. I’m interested in this purchase or I wouldn’t make it—if I understand the technical parameters of our undertaking, the project will benefit.
• Details matter. Many projects and products fail because the salient details were omitted or glossed over. Many basic decisions seem too minor to discuss thoroughly before it’s too late.
• But don’t drown me in the details I don’t need to know about. If I had bandwidth for all the details, would I hire you? Remember that a good waiter never asks if you want cream or sugar with your coffee. She brings both, quietly, and lets the customer decide.
• Bring your expertise but leave your biases behind. If I have a well-considered reason for something that seems contrary to your industry’s “standards” don’t push those standards, which are often fads in disguise. War is too important to be left to the Generals; architecture must not be dictated by architects and web designers don’t get to re-do the company logo.
• Respond to the rhythm of my participation. No matter how important this project is, I have a real life to live – children to nurture, loved ones to laugh with, old friends to catch up with. But when I come back in the loop, respond to my need to be in the loop.
• Give the project credit for its passion, significance and potential. If this project excites you and arms you better for your future, whether by skill or résumé, put more into it than your fee suggests. Everyone slacks on dull, stupid work, so we need to dig deeper for the opposite.
• Keep the loop alive because communication is your real product. Even if not requested, and even while not directly working on the project, I assume that the project owns a part of your heart and brain. Drop me a note, more often than you like, describing what aspect is currently important; what you’ll work on when you get back to the project, something you’re researching to make sure the project responds to its technical environment.
• Respect the goddam deadline. I hate it as much as you do, but I’ve got my own promises to keep. Every milestone is sacred—until revised. Revise it only when you have an improvement to offer or a shared obstacle to overcome.
• Despite the task pressures, remind me, gently, that you can get my job done three ways:
  • Fast
  • Good
  • Cheap

    Pick Two

Those points assume that the project is of deep importance to the customer, like a new home, dream vacation, etc. The project, task or purchase lies on a scale between the customer’s life purpose and a nuisance to be disposed of. If it’s on the light end of the spectrum, use your expertise to dispense with the deep involvement and just get it done.

Economic Realism

Few projects have the luxury of a budget for all of those considerations. The point is to understand your client’s expectations, not to serve every whim. Even if you can do no more than your competitor, you’ll have an advantage knowing the extent of your client’s unreasonableness. You can build a good business on that insight.

One More Expectation

Expect a mature, reasonable client to be pleased to work with a keen young mind. Mentoring is the second most enjoyable thing two consenting adults can do.

11:16:00 PM    comment [commentCounter (66)]

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.”
                                        – Henry Miller quoted by Flemming Funch, Ming’s Metalogue

“…blogging is about nothing more than writing—and that more of us will be writing to more people, with more effect, because of it. Every new blogging tool is one more step in the evolution of the Web as, literally, the ultimate writing medium: one that lets anybody write for everybody.”
                                        - Doc Searls

A literate person with no literary interest is said to be unread. One with broad knowledge through reading is well read. Only an author is read, and presumably, we’re all better read than dead. In the 21st century, to be unread is coming to mean not read. The profound truths Henry Miller describes, spread by the tools Doc describes, are the birthright of humanity.

Web blogs are the means to make each of us a voice in the global coffee house. One of my first blogs took the position that we’re in a new age of enlightenment, resonant of the eighteenth century when caffeine overcame alcohol and spawned conversations worth holding.

The blogging boom may be self-referential to the point of incestuousness, but it’s inspiring if you dig the right of Everyman to reach her potential. Blogging seems to be accelerating rather than slowing. Richard Dawkins calls it positive feedback in The Blind Watchmaker and Freeman Dyson calls it autocatalysis:

“Three successful “bottom up” approaches described by Dyson share an important trait: As they succeeded, they spread quickly. Dyson calls this ‘autocatalysis’ — a chemistry term meaning that as a chemical reaction proceeds, it automatically accelerates. When, for example, British farmers in the 1950s began using drying sheds to keep their harvests dry, the technology spread rapidly. “As soon as the sheds were shown to be effective, every farmer had to have one,” Autocatalysis is a “key virtue to look for in any technology that claims to improve human welfare on a large scale,” he added.”

” He introduces two profound questions:

1. How do we improve human welfare on a global scale?
2. What energy could ‘automatically accelerate’ to fuel this improvement?”
                          - Flemming Funch quoting Tom Munnecke, quoting Freeman Dyson

The Blogging School of World Enlightenment believes that web logs, expressed through improving tools, is the answer. Indeed, what transformation ever took place without conversations to spur it on?

Towards a Common Voice

The problem with a planet of bloggers is, how can we quantify the clustering of discrete trends and imperatives the bloggers feel strongly about? My proposal continues to be a coherent blog aggregation protocol:

Culture-wide Blog-based Knowledge-Logs
Let’s take all blogs’ RSS feeds and slice and dice them to aggregate our combined sensibilities.
1) Create a mechanism for people to identify and define the issues they care about, and the major positions that surround each issue.
2) Inspire and help bloggers to structure their RSS feeds to expose which issues they’re discussing and where they stand on each issue.
3) Let bloggees indicate where they stand on each issue as they view it. Compile all these data points and let a million flowers bloom.

9:28:54 PM    

Multiple reports were expelled into the surrounding ether from the Supernova conference on decentralization in Palo Alto (blogged by Jeremy Allaire, Cory Doctorow, Glenn Fleishman, JD Lasica,  Mitch Ratcliffe, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, according to Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor. Dan was even pressed into service to replace a scheduled keynote by Clay Shirky, stranded here in NYC by his airline). Dave Winer participated as a panelist on blogging but was tepid at first about even the bit of centralized meatspace the conference required:

“Is it in poor taste to say that I wouldn’t go if it weren’t 15 minutes away and a freebie for me because I’m speaking? Yeah, it is in poor taste, but I have to say it anyway. Maybe the conference will exceed my expectations. Right now they’re pretty low.”*

Understandable. Conferences, like computer magazines, seemed to have been eclipsed by the immediacy of the web. But the unexpected seemed to happen as the conference was blogged from the floor by many who brought their unique insights, their own publics and shared the ability to look over each other’s shoulders. Even Dave seemed to warm to it, perhaps helped by companionship over spicy noodles:

“Hey the nicest moment of the evening, even though it was horribly embarrassing, was the enthusiastic round of applause I got when I walked into the restaurant and saw the scene. The cool thing about weblogs is that today in 2002, it attracts the nicest, smartest, and most ambitious people. We kicked butt at the conference during the day, leading Kevin Werbach to say that bloggers rule the world, or something like that, to which I say It’s about time y’all figured that out and stop sending PR people to explain technology to us, and be prepared to answer the tough questions, and also be prepared to build on our work. Nothing is more frustrating than a BigCo who sends a glad-hander to tell you how they’re going to fail at reinventing everything you had working three years ago. “

Life’s like that. We’d rather stay in our own cocoons but are forced to congregate and we end up getting more than we expected. “April is the cruelest month,” T. S. Eliot lamented over spring’s annual invitation to party.

Well Named

Like the Supernova conference, supernovas are the source of the heavy elements that have been organized into humans and other simple creatures. The Big Bang was certainly the archetype of centralization – everything’s been rushing to the edges ever since. The elements spewing from the big bang were lightweight: hydrogen, helium, some deuterium and lithium. Evolution’s just a process of combining in novel ways. In the primordial minute or so, sub-nuclear particles coalesced into subatomic particles and then into atoms, molecules, etc. My favorite data point is that a neutron has 10.3 minutes to join up with a proton or it disappears. I guess a 16-year-old could relate.

After spreading around the universe, the light elements coalesced enough to form stars and to fire up the fusion of hydrogen into helium and thence into bigger molecules right up to carbon, iron, etc. Cosmologists point out that life depends on supernovae to expel those elements out into space to populate the universe with enough heavier elements to support organic chemistry. Every interesting atom in our bodies was cooked in the fires of an unnamed sun and exploded into our sun’s orbit by a supernova.

The Stupidnet

Cory Doctorow was inspired by David Isenberg’s talk on the promise of the Stupid Network:

“In two or three years, you can have an entire telephone company’s worth of bandwidth in your house for $2,000.
“The phone companies value artificial scarcity. The most malleable of all laws (Moore’s Law, Gilder’s Law) is accounting law — depreciation…
” So keep it simple, stupid. All the smarts in the network should be at the ends, in PCs or devices, not in routers or other network pieces.
“Internetworking shifts control and value-creation from the network owner to the end-user. A conventional telephone call touches every node in every network, and every node’s owner can add features — call waiting, etc. The Internet’s job is to ignore network-specific differences, like call waiting. Call-waiting is defined at the end-points between both parties on the conversation.“

David Isenberg seems to assume what everyone else seems to dismiss out of hand – that we can run fiber to the home and be done with it. If the cablecos could profit on coax 30 years ago, why is it assumed someone else can’t make sense of fiber today – it’s not like you can’t buy stuff using it.

Cory references George Gilder who is worth quoting here. Gilder’s Law of the Telecosm holds that bandwidth capacity grows ten times faster than Moore’s Law of microprocessors doubling every 18 months or so. He pointed out as early as 1992 in The Coming of the Fibersphere that, “In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb“.

Gilder characterized an optical fibersphere, analogous to the atmosphere from which we use clever radios to pluck just the message we want while ignoring the rest. The rise of ubiquitous clever connected machines threatens every intermediary and its employees and shareholders. Whether they’re telcos, “content” companies, wireless providers or the politicians who work for them, there’s a zillion people and organizations which, however clueless they may be, can sense that there’s something radically wrong with their income model and a lot of franchises are about to be cancelled. His Fibersphere article hoped that the owners of fiber would just hook it all up together and let us light it from the edges, so that every packet is propagated everywhere to be grabbed by just the intended recipient. Under this model, a signal will travel down the fiber to Beijing faster than it will move from your microchip to the back of your computer.

The solution of the centralists is cleverness. We’re promised services that the smart machines don’t quite do yet (but will), like Voice Over IP, Pay Per View,
Messaging, etc. Cleverness is a euphemism for complexity we don’t need promised by business plans we can’t trust.

And that’s the take-away from any discussion about decentralization vs. concentration. When you buy a service, you don’t buy it from a company or its owners or its asset base or even a stable set of employees. You buy it from a business plan and nothing more. “The most malleable of all laws (Moore’s Law, Gilder’s Law) is accounting law.”

If the business plan doesn’t work out, your trust will be violated in a New York minute. Airlines routinely cancel flights to maximize their scarce returns, and probably don’t have a lot of choice. Clay Shirky, trying to get to the Supernova conference to deliver his keynote, could only hope that his reservation reflected a reservoir of resources, competence and intent adding up to a timely flight to the west coast. Unfortunately you don’t buy a plane ticket from a pilot, a worthy craft and loyal crew, but from a set of contingent, often promiscuous business intentions.

Separation of Church and Statement

I’m convinced we need to separate representations about quality from those from whom we seek quality. Until quality is quantified and rolled up into useful data across vendors, customers and individual products, we’ll continue to stumble around in the agora bumping into the stalls. It’s information that will never be organized by vendors since it chronicles the failure of business plans that were never going to work anyway, and in some vague sense, they knew it all along.

8:57:27 PM    

Jonathan Blocksom and I have been lobbing blogs back and forth (blobbing?) on the fine points of Xpertweb’s many-to-one compensation algorithm. Here’s his latest:

More on Xpertweb
Britt Blaser, who’s responded to my earlier questions about Xpertweb. The part I found enlightening:

“Another word for a retirement fund is money while you sleep… all money-while-sleeping systems are pyramidal”.

Which is a nicer way to think of things. The difference becomes that the Xpertweb retirement fund isn’t automatically put away until you turn 65. Here’s an interesting aspect of Xpertweb: presumably, corporations can’t participate. So let’s say I want to get some new 3D models everybody’s favorite creativity program. Presumably I would contract them personally, they would assign the copyright on their work to me (a term of the contract), and I would assign it to GollyGee Software, Inc. Aren’t new economies interesting?

I had been reluctant to expose our thinking until closer to release, but this shows why Doc wanted me to go public. The protocols improves as their concepts are debugged.

Some clarifications: There are no set rules for Xpertweb users, since there’s no way to enforce the rules and no central system to collect the money, redistribute it and, presumably, to skim something off the top.

The only mechanism to enforce standards are the agreements made among users of the protocols. The first users will start with an agreement between each mentor and each trainee. This initial agreement will be to deal with each other fairly – simple rules like no spamming, fair grading, timely payment – the general principles that the larger economy has built a legal juggernaut to enforce. The simple mechanism to minimize unfair treatment is that work is delivered prior to payment and payment depends on satisfaction and all promises and actions are published to the world. Of course, one of the agreements is to send each of 5 mentors 1% of all transactions and mentor fees.

The other understanding is that each trainee will enter into a similar, equally public agreement when acting as a mentor to subsequent trainees. This is expected to create consistent mentor-to-trainee understandings which are visible to the world, but there’s no way to know until the system propogates.

Fine Points

Corporate Participants
There’s no reason for corporations to not participate. Jonathan’s company is a corporation, which can participate if Jonathan wants the company to hire an Xpertweb expert to program or design packaging or design OS X icons. Any participating company will have to pay according to the general rule that you grade work on the seller’s published schedule (24 hours would be typical) and initiate an electronic transfer immediately upon grading. This alone is a breakthrough for a large company, but its employees already pay immediately for taxis, travel and meals, so some of them will get used to paying immediately for direct productivity.

The Xpertweb “Retirement Fund”
Jonathan is correct in observing that Xpertweb mentor fees aren’t put aside until age 65 like pensions we’re used to. Instead, tiny amounts start flowing immediately. This raises a key difference between asset-based money-while-sleeping and flow-based money-while-sleeping.

As suggested earlier, it was quite a feat to create a system whereby work is converted to assets. The first example was when hunter-gatherers became farmers. Until then, resources flowed through their lives, including food, which was discovered, harvested, eaten, and maybe a little carried along. With agriculture, food had to be stored and accounted for, leading to the development of writing, data bases, administrators and static ruling classes. When you store food collectively you have, well, a collective. What food was grown by what citizen is a matter of record, not observation. Who owns it depends on the representation of the record-keeping clerk-priest, and the results have been pretty obvious.

Capitalism went further and figured out how to transform the flow of intangible work into an asset (shares of stock) that is fungible, as the lawyers say – countable, tradeable, stealable, discountable, etc. Pretty clever. This system has even learned the magic of converting the expectation of future activities into stock value. Enron, “the crooked E”, raised it to a high art, but that sleight-of -hand is implicit in the equity markets. Anyone who can manage public expectations is set up to profit from those expectations.

Xpertweb is based on delivered value rather than expected value. This emphasizes past performance and gives no weight to future performance – think of it as “Spin Emasculation.” This is the opposite of our instincts and the current economy, which both emphasize hopeful expectations rather than past performance. The virtue of paying for delivered value and proven mentoring is obvious: it transforms our shared economy from forward-looking vaporware to a proven solution.

Pensions are a future promise in exchange for present loyalty. (I wonder if “loyalty” is shorthand for “incredible boredom and quiet desperation.” Just a question.) Pensions are a liability on the books of a company, but that liability creates an offsetting asset known as cash. Pensions also create an almost irresistible temptation for the holder of the cash borrowed from the future pension to change the rules, invest the money recklessly, etc. Naturally, it’s inconceivable that any group as well-spoken and conscientious as our management class – or our Congress – to act so irresponsibly, but there have been reports…

Immediate and growing cash flow is a fundamentally different form of wealth. Interestingly, it’s the kind of wealth that every company and government works so hard to arrange for itself. It’s the reason that Sprint PCS will give you a $300 phone for $50 plus 2 years of crappy service. They want your 30 bucks a month and employ a legion of MBAs to set up those cash flows. That’s the big difference between people and companies: ask yourself the basic question: “How many checks do I send out each month and how many do I receive?”

Xpertweb is designed to inspire corporate-like cash flows among its users so that the mentors get lots of small payments from later mentors and trainees. Like ALL many-to-one money-while-sleeping schemes, the majority support the few. As previously emphasized, if you expect to retire on 80% of your income, you’ll need 1% from 80 folks like you to do so. That would suggest an 80-1 ratio of payers to payees. This is no different from any pension fund, but the numbers are visible and obvious.

So how can we – seemingly reasonable people – support such a many-to-one plan? If we do, it’ll be for three reasons.

1. The 80-1 ratio is lower than under current conditions. By rationalizing and standardizing the ratios, we avoid the obscene, often hidd
   en levels of compensation that are set up by corporate boards to reward those who are close to corporate boards – Jack Welch being a recent example.
2. Hierarchical rewards can be separated from hierarchical command structures. Presently, pensions and other compansation plans are developed, managed and enforced by people who control the system. Because the Xpertweb fee structure is an algorithm out of the control of its designers, its ratios (80-1 or whatever), even if no better than others, it is totally free from arbitrary re-design to benefit the re-designers.
3. No one is locked into any relationships. Any Xpertweb user is free to set up under a new mentor at any time or have as many mentors as desired. The doctrine is: establish an Xpertweb persona under any lineage of 5 mentors, pay the 5 mentors according to the agreements you’ve made, and never pay a mentor whom you or that mentor’s trainees have rated unsatisfactory.

It’s hard to imagine a perfect system, but the further the reward rules are from the rule developers, the better off will be the beneficiaries of the rules.

10:18:01 PM    

Much was made, during the dotcom boom, of the Attention Economy. The notion was that attention is more important than profits and the web still looks that way.

Today, Doc has dug deep into Michael Hall’s questioning of Doc’s and other bloggers’ Google-based attention-getting, in I’ve never felt so deconstructed in all my life. Specifically, Hall is distracted by what he sees as Doc’s obsession with his rank on Google. He wonders what it all means and why so many of us are blogging and why should we bother? After all, so little of it matters to anyone else. Here’s me quoting Doc quoting Michael Hall:

“For every useful link or mini-review of a good site, we get dozens of inane shout-outs sent for no better reason than, perhaps, raising one’s linkage so Google will notice, so we can blog about Google noticing.

“What the hell does it all mean? Why do you care? Why do we care? What am I missing? Why don’t I Get It?”

Hall’s hard questions seem to come from the viewpoint that seeking attention is vain, unbecoming, somehow beneath our dignity. I’d turn that around (which is how I seek attention). Suppose, for the moment, that our productive lives are only about getting attention, and the dignified self we think we are is just marketing.

<non-obviously_necessary_background>
Richard Dawkins is smarter than most of us and understands genetics better than any of us and is a hell of a writer and, really, a philosopher. In The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, he teaches us that there’s a little replicator inside every cell – literally an organic digital ROM which is a collection of genes. Cells manufacture other cells and reproduce their replicator ROM code in each new cell, eventually building a ROM Life Support System called a flatworm or Richard Dawkins or Saddam Hussein. Flatworms and Dawkins’ and Husseins get together with similar, differently plumbed others and put together a new kind of cell with half of the ROM code from each of them. That unique new cell makes other new cells saving its unique combination of the merged ROM. The ROM code dies when the ROM Life Support System dies. Not even a creationist would disagree so far.

Exactly half the ROM code is saved when the replicator collection makes a child and 1/4 of the code will live in a grandchild. The ROM doesn’t know anything – about the cells (millions die and are replaced hourly) – about the ROM Life Support System, about the support system’s environment, or the DJIA or TCP/IP. But the support system (you and me) will learn anything, do anything and fuck anybody to perpetuate half our ROM code. The most successful fuckers crowd out the less successful. Perhaps you’ve noticed this feature.

A replicator is any mechanism that creates very good copies of itself which in turn know the copy creation trick. What’s vital to a replicator is not the copy, but the trick. The copies (you and I) are abundant, cheap, disposable and unimportant except, of course to we the copies. Our purpose is not to be dignified or meaningful but to be copied. We learn things, develop habits and act on them to make copies. Successful lessons, habits and memories of successful actions are RAM code that is carried into future copies. Others wither and vanish.

Dawkins invented the idea of a meme, which is a disembodied replicator with the same traits as a gene – memes are the RAM-based lessons, habits and memories that leap from mind to mind, more or less perfectly. Memes were originally available only to relatives close enough to copy them but the ROM Life Support Systems learned how to send them further and more broadly. Since we care about these ideas, we often care about other people who also carry those ideas, even though they share none of our RAM code. We might even die for people nothing like us.
</non-obviously_necessary_background>

Whew. Sorry about that, but I don’t have time to make it shorter.

Memes, Memes, Me! Me!

I can’t tell the difference between ROM code and RAM code. If something feels like the right thing to do, I do it, and rarely know exactly why.

I was conflicted about becoming a grandfather, but the moment I held Eddie in my arms, a genetic switch closed and I knew I will do anything to preserve this wonderful spark of life – 25% of my ROM code under the protection of 100% of my ROM/RAM code. Eddie may need my counsel for a while, so I’ll work out and eat pretty well and use a seatbelt, because I’ve caught memes that make me feel like doing those things.

I have no direct proof that any of those ideas will have the desired effect, but I’ll do them anyway.

Docking His Memes

So Doc’s RAM may be as interested in spreading his memes as his ROM is interested in spawning his genes. We parents don’t care whether our gene carriers are pretty or smart or how many toes they have. We just want to give them the best shot we can. You know, the way flatworms and geneticists and Muslims do.

There is no intrinsic meaning to any of these memes, but how we respond to them is important. When I post something that Michael Hall thinks is trivial, it may have meaning for someone else. If not, and my posts get scant attention, I’ll change them so they get more. Bees and ants learn this and so will the authors of the “bite-sized ‘my little dog entries’ “ that bother Michael. Michael and Doc:

“Michael asks, … ‘is its eventual valuelessness the real racket here?’

“I think the answer is mostly yes, in the long run. We don’t homestead here. We rent. None of us owns one cubic molecule of cyberspace.

When Doc gazes in his Google mirror on the wall, he’s seeing his progeny and he’s as proud of them as he is of his son, reeling off the names of constellations. From the culture’s standpoint, they’re the same, experiments that may take root and may not, or might only for a while but be useful for a time.

Michael Hall’s questions are necessary and helpful. His are powerful memes hoping to overcome the weaker but more pervasive memes of vapid ramblings on irrelevant happenings. If his ridicule withers a few of those wastes of our time, then our collective intelligence will have been raised. But if Pop Culture continues its decline into meaninglessness (from Michael Hall’s standpoint), then we will be the most homogenized, lowest common denominator culture in history. His fears are shared by Richard Dawkins, the Eastern Elite and the GOP’s conservative intelligentsia, all of whom know the prole
s have nothing to say.

From its dark nadir of inconsequential text ricocheting among the navel-gazettes of the Land of Blog, our lock-stepping networked culture of uniform mediocrity will have the potential (but not destiny) to energize simultaneously, like the similarly insignificant, lock-stepping photons of a laser, to reach levels of relevance, focus and intensity inconceivable in the old days of a few clever, entitled, published wise men attempting to illuminate the vast proletariat of the unpublished and the unread.

Is Google’s mirror on the wall a physicist’s half-mirror? Like quantum mechanics, evolution’s a crap shoot.

3:41:20 PM    

Jonathan Blocksom blogs his sugar-coated skepticism of the proposed Xpertweb microeconomy:

Brain Food
Britt Blaser’s Weblog is my current favorite weblog. His post from Saturday about corporate ethics struck a chord with me. As usual with Britt’s posts, I find that there’s so much I could respond to that I write nothing, because it would take far too much time to post a complete reply and a half hearted one just doesn’t do the original justice. Sorry, Britt, I’m still trying to adjust to the fact that I don’t have to be perfect on the web. Oh, hey, since only you and my Dad are still reading this, I’d like to say that I find the pyramidal nature of Xpertweb a little disturbing. What if my mentor sucks? What if I mentor someone who turns out to be a bozo, and for whatever reason I can’t turn it around? What about people who are fantastic engineers but have terrible management skills? And are you, Britt Blaser, the alpha-mentor who will reap the 1% rewards of all of xpertwebs workers? I’ve been meaning to email you better forms of those questions but just haven’t gotten to it. Some you’ve addressed but I still have concerns. Also check out Britt’s post on Common Sense, and he’s got some good war stories too.

Aha! The well-documented Xpertweb gag-me-with-a-spoon reaction!
(Sorry, Jonathan, there are no secrets in the land of Blog).

I’ve been meaning to be more thorough in treating this most interesting Xpertweb UI issue – the built-in mentor fee wealth/retirement mechanism, based on a multi-level algorithm. But, since no serious script writer would even storyboard the guys in Washington, I’ve been distracted.

Let’s talk about something even more interesting – Money For the Rest of Us. What if we just get together to wire money to each other without asking anybody’s permission?

Review
The Xpertweb peer-to-peer system automates reputation-building.
Here’s a graphic depiction of a typical Xpertweb transaction.
Here’s a list of Xpertweb-related blogs.

Why Xpertweb’s “Pyramidal Structure” Should Disturb You Too

Issue 1

Should the Xpertweb design include a wealth generation system?
It’s an open question. Like all designers, we on the Xpertweb microteam want to give our baby as many genetic advantages as possible. A key feature of any economy is something called a retirement plan. Another word for a retirement fund is money while you sleep. Every one of us works for survival while we dream about money-while-sleeping. And we seem to agree that our pension is A Good Thing, but we’re not so sure about someone else’s $multi-zillion retirement package.
Unfortunately, one man’s meat is another man’s poisson. It’s hard to distinguish between a modest pension, a less modest one, all the way up to Jack’s beanstalk. From an accounting standpoint, there’s no difference: it’s all money while you sleep.
All money-while-sleeping systems are pyramidal, whether it’s a modest union pension or a golden parachute. Money while sleeping takes a little money from a lot of people and gives it to a few, like Jack Welch’s tax on every GE employee and shareholder. You can’t take the same amount from everybody and give it to everyone else to generate money while sleeping.
The Math can be easy: For simplicity, assume everyone in your company makes the same income. If you want to retire on 80% of your (and everyone’s) pay level, You need to receive a payment from 80 remaining employees equal to 1% of the salary level. Obviously, if you’re Jack Welch, you’ll need 1% of a lot of employees salaries.

So the question is, Should Xpertweb devise a little tax on all its participants and arrange to have it sent along to a few of them?

Issue 2
What wealth algorithm is the most even-handed?
The most open standard would be one that no one has control over. Now that’s never happened, since no one has ever proposed to distribute funds according to a formula without a central accounting system, collecting from the many and sending it to the few. (Somehow, of course, the few to which money is sent always turns out to be the people managing the distribution system).
This is the trickiest part of the Xpertweb transaction tracking system. The clue came from the open source phenomenon, where conversations about a problem directly generate solutions to the problem. Since a central accounting system was a non-starter, the solution was to depend on peer-to-peer networking to respond to the algorithm. Xpertweb simply publishes promises and actions and ratings of the actions by all involved parties. If you don’t take actions and/or don’t do the publishing, you’re not part of the system. The six Xpertweb actions are:

1. Do work
2. Rate work quality
3. Pay for work
   
4. Mentor others
5. Rate mentoring quality
6. Pay for mentoring

Specifically, if money changes hands, it’s because the receiver of the value (as in shareware) rated it high enough that their promise to pay was generated automatically. 5% of each payment is deducted by the payer and reserved for the payer’s 5 mentors. 5% of each payment received is earmarked for the receiver’s 5 mentors. No central entity collects all payments for redistribution. BTW, once reserved for fee payment, it’s not certain that the money will be sent to the mentor – it’s up to the individual whose Xpertweb mentor script has earmarked the funds.
It’s even possible that an open-source multi-level algorithm could be embraced by a transition like the one that carried Europe past its abhorrence of usury to an acceptance of charging interest.

So the question is, By trusting users holding the money to distribute the 1% bits according to a standard algorithm, is the Xpertweb algorithm even-handed enough to get past the yuckiness response?

Issue 3
Are all multi-level algorithms uniformly yucky?
(Sorry to use a technical term like ‘yucky’, but precision’s important here.)
Yuckiness is presumably in the eye of the beholder. The multi-level algorithm is a compelling meme, and it has distributed a lot of money to people who got in line luckily or skillfully. Of course, the managers of multi-level systems have designed the accounting systems for themselves, so they manage to change the rules the same way they reduce the commission struct
ure for unexpectedly effective salespeople.
The multi-level algorithm is so compelling that it causes otherwise reasonable people to do things they normally wouldn’t to people they normally wouldn’t hassle. It appears that the bug isn’t in the algorithm, but in people’s response to it.
An Xpertweb transaction generates no money until the payer rates it as worth buying. This value-first-money-later dynamic is the inverse of the Amway model, which says, basically: “Stock up on way too much of this shit which you otherwise wouldn’t, and try to sell it (and our multi-level meme) to people you otherwise treat nicely.

So the question is, Does proven satisfaction re-calibrate the multi-level algorithm enough to make it un-yucky?

Issue 4
Every time someone gets involved in these schemes, I get hounded and they get disappointed. And there’s that white shoe, gold chain thing going on.

I can never put my finger on it, but these deals are complicated, impenetrable and have way too many moving parts to be trusted. I knew someone who lost $1500 in one of these deals once, but I never went to another meeting. Yuck.

So the question is, Will the Xpertweb algorithm be transparent enough to allow us to trust its workings?

My purpose is not to answer the questions, but to point out the issues. But here are the answers Jonathan Blocksom deserves:

What if my mentor sucks?

1. Rate the mentor’s mentoring as sucky
   This will show up on your and his record and will automatically discount or eliminate your mentor fee and will also suppress the fees payable by anyone whom you trained using the Xpertweb persona which has the sucky mentor in your lineage.
2. Find another mentor
   You may have as many mentors as you want. You may have mentors for different specialties, like graphic design vs. HTML coding. Or for different locations, if you like hands-on mentoring around the corner.
   Only in practice will we discover how much energy partial-purpose mentors will invest in part-time trainees.

We Answer Some Questions and We Blocksom

Jonathan Blocksom’s questions:

What if I mentor someone who turns out to be a bozo, and for whatever reason I can’t turn it around?

1. Join the chorus of crappy ratings so this bozo’s bozo-ness is part of his global reputation.
2. Better though, at the first sign of trouble, suggest that everyone’s a genius at something and a bozo at almost everything else.
3. Don’t mentor someone you don’t value (your mentor will probably warn you on this. Every mentor’s grade is based on their trainee’s average satisfaction ratings).

What about people who are fantastic engineers but have terrible management skills?

1. Narrow your trainee’s work product to engineering products. Most engineers should be selling their terrific structural beam analyses, not management consulting.
2. Use the Xpertweb forms to manage business dynamics: automatic reputations replace marketing; automated task tracking replaces project management skills, automatic invoices replace invoicing.
3. Mentor Tip
   Everyone wants to be paid by the hour, but it’s hard to grade an hour.
   Mentor your trainees to productize their time so they offer things like:

   <myproduct1a>Structural Beam Analysis for a 2 lane, 3-400 foot bridge</myproduct1a>
   <myproduct2c>Five-page static small business web site</myproduct2c>
   
   That way they provide a tangible foundation upon which to build a reputation.

And are you, Britt Blaser, the alpha-mentor who will reap the 1% rewards of all of xpertwebs workers?

The mere presence of an alpha-mentor would poison the waterhole.

Everyone who uses Xpertweb tools to mentor someone [Level 1] (who then mentors others [L2], etc.[L3], etc.[L4], etc.[L5 – last level]) is positioned to receive a 1% fee from work done by Xpertweb people at those 5 levels, subject to their mentoring ratings. Like everyone else who thinks Xpertweb is barely good enough to be worth criticizing, I hope to get the best mentor grades I can in order to have a nice reputation retain loyalty and get money whiole I sleep, but after the sixth level, no fees are available to anyone, because the universal structure is 5 levels of 1% fees, and the sender controls the sending.

Way before a single mentor fee is generated, the entire open source structure will be better understood than this description. If the system isn’t transparent,only the white shoe boys will play….;-)

The Xpertweb Forms

The initial set of Xpertweb PHP-driven forms are based on an open XML data structure, with no rules about how the data is collected or displayed. If you want to use Radio Userland to generate valid XML RSS feeds that advertise your URL, skills, product names, mentors, where to send your money, etc., then you can do it that way.

You can use pure XML for output, to aggregate and present data if you like, rather than the PHP-enabled initial forms. This presumes our favorite browsers ever handle xml properly…

Our microteam looks forward to the post-design stage when it attracts the attention of open source experts start designing tools good enough to make ours look primitive. Presumably, they will use their own Xpertweb tools to sell their own Xpertweb tools.

6:12:57 PM