Category: Uncategorized

It’s like we have no idea what to spend our time on. In recent months, many seers, like Lessig, Barlow and others have asked why we’re not more exercised by the disappearance of America–details like civil rights, free speech, public domain media, freedom from unreasonable search & seizure, habeus corpus. You know, the stuff that mattered before the 2000 coup d’état.

The only possible explanation is that we’ve lost the collective ability to differentiate between what matters and what’s flashy. Today’s news tells us about the life-changing project that has possessed a group of bright people at GM working tirelessly around the clock for the last few months: spending millions to create a 1,000 horsepower V-16, $250,000 land yacht called the Cadillac Sixteen. As Alan Watts asked so long ago, Does it Matter?—Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality.

We all know, of course, that it’s the height of folly to decry the spending of other people’s resources on foolish or unworthy projects. Like pornography, folly is in the eyes of the beholder. But it’s irresistible to contrast the unilateral cancellation of constitutional guarantees with the rise of managerial capitalism.

Then there’s this gem from the Consumer Electronics Show:

Japanese video-game giant Nintendo will also have news, after titillating gamers for a month with the promise of a “megaton” announcement. Nintendo won’t give any clues, but the most informed forecasts have the company unveiling a new version of its Game Boy Advanced portable game player, equipped with a backlit screen to address one of the most frequent complaints about the megaselling handheld game machine.

Boy Howdy! A megaton backlit display to rescue us from lives of quiet desperation!

Then there’s this Doc-baiting analysis:

“Manufacturers will focus on new ways of consuming digital content so that it will really be ubiquitous,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with research firm Jupiter Research. “They’ve been talking about this for a while but they will work to mature their products so that consumers can more easily access digital content.”

Any time you hear consume and content twice each in the same paragraph, you can count on retribution from the seer of Santa Barbara.

Liberty Shits
(an obscure riff on Liberty Ships,
  the WWII transports that carried gung-ho kids to Normandy,
  …reputed to have been built in return for $1 profit per year
  …what a difference 6 decades make)

So here I am, playing around with this lukewarm screed I started this morning on our collective failure to pay attention to what matters, and I get an email from Mitch saying, “Listen up now, I’m onto something big!”
Naturally, I drop my single malt to rush to his post:

“the Liberty Alliance trumpets the first roll-out plans of its members while we people, whose identities they will be abusing, cower in the shadows like a Strawman, Lion and Tin Man waiting to sneak in to see if we can rescue innocence. Read this Infoworld story about the Liberty Alliance. Check out the press release announcing 22 new members of the Libery Alliance.”

“I challenge anyone to find a single example of a project that will give the individual control of their identity; instead it is all about hanging tags around our necks and tracking us, like the security systems at all those Web startups that have gone out of business. These top-down identity regimes will not produce an equitable relationship between companies who want access to our identities and each of us, the sovereigns of our personal information. Instead the dialog is going to end up like this: You [sheep] need a card to open this door. You [slaves] need a card to access this building. You [consumers, the wide-mouthed baby birds of the economy] need a card to be issued food from the cafeteria.

“We must own our identities and that process must begin from the edge and grow into the networks so that people end up in greater control of their personal information. What these projects describe is a world dominated by T2 and T3 identity in Andre Durand’s hierarchy . I cannot imagine anyone arguing that, if 802.11 wireless had been rolled out by carriers before it started growing organically, the results would have been revolutionary in any sense. However, we’re giving in on identity before the first skirmish because there is an assumption that only organizations give people identity.”

Brains and Courage and Hearts, Oh My!

So, in the face of a clearly untenable assault on our privacy and anonymity, how shall we acquire the brains, courage and spirit to defend ourselves against this further assault on our personhood? Since we’re not doing well so far, let’s drop back and get the big picture.

The Industrial Age invented Mangerial Capitalism, whereby a tiny oligarchy has usurped most economic and political power, since management is the only capitalistic stakeholder with a coherent interest in how things are run. I suggest we’re on the tail end of that cycle.

The internet is accumulating protocols faster than managements are adding success theories du jour. Based on Doc’s Nobody Owns It, Everybody Can Use It, Anybody Can Improve It (NEA) model, the internet is like a 6 foot 14-year-old, testing its strength and reflexes, learning how to kick a field goal without falling down. This gangly wunderkind would be a lot more promising if it weren’t the first expression of its species. Without an Alpha Centauri talent scout here to reassure us that this is gonna work out just fine, we’re wodering if the current dinosaurs will continue to rule our swamp.

The answer’s in front of us, but not top-of-mind. Haven’t all of us worked in a big company and witnessed how incompetent it is at doing what it thinks it does well? Don’t we understand the glacial inability of Microsoft, “the world’s greatest software company”, to respond to problems with its raison d’etre, software code? Don’t we see how much better the LAMP applications (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python) respond to issues as they arise? What are the missing element to transform all of us into open resources?

Put the Blame Ennui

Perhaps we’d understand how close we are to a solution if we remember how clumsy companies are. Trust me on this: companies are far more scared of us than we of them. It’s just that they’ve managed to camouflage the irritation we collectively feel about depending on them to allocate resources (Us) to extract resources from the Consumer Us. When we recognize and organize our voice speaking to ourselves, we’ll find it easier to take the small steps to finish the story we imagine but don’t know how to conclude.

T
he solution is NEA web applications. Design our culture, not widgets. If we don’t like the economy, design a better one (our mission here). If we don’t like the way the Electoral College works, design the Electoral Collage, the silent majority made deafening by broadcasting preferences derived from the most of us using a UI so compelling we won’t leave it alone. Even if things don’t resonate with the designers’ preferences, who cares? Once we establish our collective voice, we’ll learn to live with the elegance of equitable disappointment and the power of our own awakening.

Mitch is right to be alarmed. Let’s take up his challenge. Where are the issues-based tag structures to help us “roll up” our passionate web logs and comments into a coherent voice which we pledge to act upon in the voting booth?

In short, imagine something that takes us in the right direction, then make it more concrete until it amplifies all these voices. We just need a few more design studies.

11:41:03 PM    

From the installer for TypeIt4Me, a must-have OS X utility:

Please take your time to test it BEFORE paying for it, to save us both the trouble and expense of issuing a refund.

7:31:34 PM    

Like Doc said, “It’s getting real interesting now.” This Digital ID meme polyblog has been like pulling a string out of a sweater. I’ve been gnawing on the problem of reputation and identity since Mitch Ratcliffe pointed out that I was talking about reputation and everyone else was talking about DigitalID. I’ve thrown away a few thousand words, (aren’t you glad?) and am just beginning to get at the core issue that’s been troubling me: Digital ID has nothing to do with Digital Reputation, and we don’t want it to.

Andre Durand won’t agree with that, but I think it’s implicit in his work. Everyone’s quoting Andre’s 3 tiers of identity white paper, which led Doc to come up with his Mydentity, Ourdentity, Theirdentity model. Then I read Andre’s Anatomy of a Reputation and I finally got it (well, felt I got it enough to quit agonizing over my cluelessness). Andre has thought about this longer, harder and better than the rest of us, and has framed the conversation beautifully. Despite that contribution, I think Andre wants to tie reputation too closely with ID, perhaps because his PingID start-up wants to manage both of them for businesses and us, but more probably because we’re all doing it.

Let’s be clear: the only reason we’re jamming on this Digital ID stuff is that we’re working out how it affects us on the internet and, more personally, how we can cooperate to build personas that live on the net which have higher value than than the ones we can develop in our zip code. When I need a financial analysis, I need analysis, not an analyst. I don’t care what the creator of my solution does in his spare time with whom of which gender or species, under what influences. I just want someone who’s the Commander Data relative to my solution, not Jean-Luc Picard, idealized in every regard.

Isn’t that our grievance with managerial capitalism? Aren’t employees tired of having to act, look, vote, nod and grovel in particular ways, when the real assignment is to keep the network up? Every 10,000-job business would be better off with 30,000 ad hoc experts than with their experts at job-holding. The takeaway from that viewpoint is that a specialized task—real work—needs a reputation, an Ourdentity. The real-person carbon-based Mydentity may be necessary to hold down a job in finance, but not for buying financial analyses over the internet (is it consulting? an Excel template? a macro? do you care?).

As Doc points out tonight, “It isn’t who you are, it’s how you blog. . .’After all, who cares who you are?'”

Or, as my old buddy Jerry Vass tells his Fortune clients, “The buyer doesn’t care if the salesman lives or dies, as long as he doesn’t die on the premises.”

For those of us not in the business of selling Digital ID services to businesses:

Forget about linking Digital ID to Digital Reputation. There’s no there there.

Andre tells us in Reputation, “Reputations only really exist within the context of your interactions with others, and therefore, a reputation can be viewed as existing in the space between you and others.”

Like your shadow, your reputation is attached to you but doesn’t belong to you. When you want something real done, what you want is work performed under a terrific reputation that doesn’t get ruined during your assignment. The personality behind the reputation, unfortunately, is no more relevant to your task than the shadows in Plato’s Cave are related to reality. In the coming world of work-not-jobs, tasks will be parsed to expertise, rather than referred to the IT people for further study.

First Principles

To get my head around the possibility of a DigID-DigRep disconnect, I had to go back to our core dialogue, as inspired by the Great Hintchoochoo. The market is a conversation, the internet enables a human voice, peer-to-peer trumps B2C, organizations are dehumanizing, etc., etc. You know–all the truths we should review every morning instead of the market report.

But the Cluetrain truths led me into a confusion. In my longing for human voices in the marketplace, I’d somehow got the idea that my transactions could be truly like my conception of the old personalized Agora, but it can’t be designed that way. Unless you’re an ATM, meatspace has nothing to do with the marketplace. That’s not my or Xpertweb’s problem, so I don’t have anything to add to the Mydentity discussion.

Since Xpertweb is all about reputation, we need to understand how best to value each other. Here are Andre’s talking points from Anatomy of a Reputation, and how Xpertweb is hoping to develop Ourdentities based on those points:

Attributes of a Reputation

What You Say . . .Of all the ways to create a reputation, telling people what they should think of you is both the weakest and carries the least amount of weight in the real world. That said, what you say about yourself can serve to amplify a positive opinion of you if it is consistent with your actions (in their experience). Likewise, what you say about yourself can negatively impact one’s image of you if it is inconsistent with their experiences with you.

What You Do “Actions speak louder than words” embodies this attribute of an identity. Nothing serves to more quickly establish a reputation than one’s actions.

Which means: Aggregate your reputation by capturing every customer’s candid rating of the task you performed. Make that a quantitative and qualitative rating, collected before the tears of happiness are dry, so it’s got to be part of the invoice. Use only your customers’ words and numbers when putting your service or product before the public. If they like what your customers have said, they may look further, so your home page looks like this:

• “My 183 jobs have an average 88.6% rating. Click here for every task grade and comment.”
• Mission/Nutshell Statement: 43 words or so
• A longer How I Work for You statement
• Your even longer Exemplary Projects listing
• Your reflective Things I Care About statement, which feels like a web log
• Maybe a resume, but by this point, who cares?

What’s Pub
lic Certain elements of our reputation are public, that is, generally known by us (the owner of the reputation) and by others who know us. . .Generally speaking, we work to reinforce positive elements of our reputation and diminish negative ones. If I knew that I’d been branded a ‘tight-wad’ when it comes to paying my bar tab, I might over-pay in the future to counteract a negative impression of my reputation as being generous.

Which means: Publish every promise and every outcome. Xpertweb transaction tracking is optional, but when used, the metrics of the task are known to every successive customer or seller. As Andre suggests here, being observed improves one’s performance. It’s both common sense and a management theory known as the Hawthorne Effect since the early 1930’s. What better way to develop conscientiousness and competence than to give people a bully pulpit from which to strut their stuff?

What’s Private Certain facets of my reputation are private, and will never be known to me or others. Individuals who choose to create a new identity are doing nothing more than running from their reputation.

Which means: We can’t be certain of someone without a reputation. Once we have a metric for quality, published universally, it may become more risky to deal with someone without a documented reputation. But the flip side is compelling as well.

Xpertweb, like shareware, has a way to make it easy to build a reputation whether starting out or starting over. Deliver your benefit first and calibrate the price to the buyer’s rating. The prospective buyer knows it’s a riskless purchase (not just money-back-after-a-hassle but grade-based pricing), and has no reason to hesitate to let the seller show what she can do. If a failed Xpertweb user tries a new persona with a new mentor (perhaps offering more modest services), it might take just six months to establish a new reputation, just like the first time. Maybe this time will work.

This is the societal payoff from a system that recycles failure into new reputation opportunities. Our collective goal is not to banish failed first attempts to an occupational debtor’s prison, but to help anyone find a new skill or a better approach to a flawed skill.

What Context Lastly, while in real life and in every day conversation we do in fact attempt to summarize an individual’s reputation (e.g. “…she’s an amazing person.”), the fact is, our reputation is contextual and it is quite possible for me to have a positive reputation in one area of my life with individual A and a negative reputation in another area of my life with individual B.

Which means: When you understand the context of an expert, you can understand the expertise. One benefit is to recycle failure into success. Another is the opportunity to know where an expert comes from, by training and mentoring.

Every Xpertweb user has at least one unique ID. If Jim Franklin’s ID is ADCGEFH, then you know that Mary Billing, whose ID is ADCGEFHC has been mentored directly by Franklin–specifically, his 3rd protegé. Every ID reveals who mentored whom, published ratings let you know how good Mary is, as well as all others mentored by Franklin and his mentor as well.

The Digital Reputation
While historically reputations have been somewhat vague and subjective, in the digital world they are likely to become more objective, binary and long-lasting (all the reason to take them seriously). Biologically, time is a built-in eraser, allowing us to forget and move on. In the digital world however, where memory is cheap and caching the norm, our reputations are likely to become more persistent . . . Probably more important, in the digital world, our various reputations which are today disconnected are likely to become more connected, if not by us, then by others.

Which means: We get the best of both worlds. We’ll be able to deal with proven experts without risk, yet not force them to be more than the skilled specialists they are, allowing them to be fully human (i.e., flawed) rather than the perfect employee. Instead of working for their boss, they’ll be working for a customer. And not a consumer in sight.

Might reputation systems spark the productivity renaissance we expected from computers? People holding down a job are lucky to be on task a third of the time. Experts focusing their talents are likely to be productive half the time. That’s a 50% productivity jump for everyone attracted into a reputation-enabled craft.

11:51:59 PM    

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    

Role-Playing Games are big, and the Xpertweb design study is focused on creating an open source economic role-playing game that publishes the scores of the players and also reports the details of each game they play. Like any such game, we expect a community to develop around the software, to the extent it attracts and holds the interest of enthusiastic evangelists.

Unlike the larger Economy it mimics (and can replace, if enough players go online), the Xpertweb RPG provides a coherent, unchanging set of rules for success or failure. This is because, in the capital-E Economy, the big money is won by changing the rules. In Xpertweb, the big money is won by playing the game according to the rules and coaching others to start playing.

Many of the RPGs have a secondary economic aspect, since player attributes and tips can be bought and sold. Xpertweb is designed to be primarily economic, with score keeping added to allow the players’ reputations to precede them in the field of play, which Xpertweb calls an Agora, or Market.

As with many RPGs, Xpertweb players may team up on a common enemy. Most teams will be two players, combining resources to subdue an impersonal problem, not another player or team, sort of like playing against the computer. Usually one of the teammates will be called a buyer, who brings the problem to the attention of the other player, called a seller. Once they team up, it’s a shared problem. After the problem is defeated, both players are scored, but the seller also is paid by the buyer for teaming up on a challenge that was just too much for the buyer alone.

The Role-Playing aspect is important, for each of us plays a role when we go out into the market seeking to sell something of value for more than it costs us. In the Xpertweb RPG, one person may assume several roles, if it’s useful for selling different kinds of services. For instance, a landscaper might cut lawns under one role and design landscapes under another one. Freed from the limitations of a single job at a single company, individuals can find what roles best suit them.

As with any online game, each new role must earn its own reputation from scratch. However, just as you can buy weapons and tips for many games, anyone can team up with a more skilled player to solve a problem for another player.

Where other RPGs award only points to success, Xpertweb players also send each other money, either at the end of each game or periodically, in exchange for reputation tips and data & tech support.

The game interface is bland compared to online games but, because it’s just HTML & PHP, it can easily be modified by the players. If the players need more graphical interest, maybe they can buy artwork with the money they win from playing.

12:52:28 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