Category: Uncategorized

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    

                                    holiday update

FADMINISPHERE The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

ASSMOSIS The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

BLAMESTORMING Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

CUBE FARM An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

OHNOSECOND That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG, uncorrectable, mistake.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE The fine art of whacking the shit out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

SALMON DAY The experience of spending an entire day swimming up stream only to get screwed and die in the end.

SEAGULL MANAGER A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

SITCOMs (Single Income, Two [or Three] Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

6:56:05 PM    

Surprising news from our week in Iowa: People in the heartland may be as appalled by the No Secure Home initiative as people on the coasts. The first hint was an article by Charley Reese, a Southern Christian conservative, with his take on the Homeland Security Department:

The new Department of Homeland Security will merge 22 federal agencies and 170,000 federal employees into one monstrous bureaucracy. It will not make America safer.

After all, the key agencies most directly involved in fighting terrorism are excluded. They are the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department, not to mention the National Security Agency. So, if the most important intelligence agencies are left as separate agencies, what do they hope to accomplish by consolidating less-important agencies?

It’s bad enough they picked a name George Orwell might have thought of, but they are overselling this to the American public. It will take many months, probably even years, to actually put it together, and it is a rule of thumb in government that the bigger the bureaucracy, the harder it is to manage.

Furthermore, you can count on the fact that in this long process of consolidation, the individual agencies will have their work disrupted. So under the most optimistic projections, the immediate effect will be less efficiency and effectiveness, not more. I hasten to add, of course, that only God knows how the Immigration and Naturalization Service could possibly be more inefficient and inept than it already is.

So, OK, I’m like old Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. I can’t think of anything good to say about this new monster bureaucracy. The only cheerful thing I can think of is what a British aristocrat, who hated us, said more than a century ago:

“God looks out for fools, drunks and the United States of America.” I sure hope that still holds.

Sounds like common sense.

Funny how you can use a phrase for, like, forever and still learn a new meaning for it. “Common Sense” has always seemed to mean something like horse sense – the lowest common denominator opinion; a kind of base line body of knowledge obviously valid but so diffuse as to be meaningless.

But this week I suddenly get a more interesting, cultural sense of the term. It’s our collective sense of how things ought to be, ever in contrast to how they are. Charley Reese taps in to our common sense of how governments should be designed in order to show how crazy this new level of bureaucracy is.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, the Homeland Security Department’s scope and intrusiveness is an affront to your sense of what Washington should be doing. True conservatives shouldn’t buy this tar baby and liberals shouldn’t either. Perhaps our common sense of what’s sensible will join to dismantle this turkey before it plucks us. Are there other indications that the people aren’t so far apart on the overreaching security-industrial complex?

The Little Magazine That Could

I have low expectations for midwestern regional magazines distributed in motel rooms – my superior attitude toward them is disgusting, anticipating the hunky-dory school of journalism and Let’s-get-us-some-more-bidness boosterism. But when I picked up a copy of Midwest Today at the Best Western Long Branch motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I was attracted to its end page, The Update and the Low Down. Five short essays I would have devoured in my favorite Blog Rolls:

1. A listing of recent wins by clients of Tom Daschle’s lobbyist wife Linda: L-3 Inc.‘s flawed bomb-sniffing devices, which the FAA is required by the Congress to purchase; American Airlines‘ opposition to safety regs, while still nabbing $583 million in bailout grants. The author, Jon McIntosh, notes that the Daschels have refused to release their tax returns.
2. A Teddy Roosevelt quote: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” (Of course, Teddy wasn’t the kind of guy to sit out a war, and took a fanatic’s bullet in the chest).
   The quote is cited in contrast to a warning to Ohio State University students that they were subject to arrest and expulsion if they even silently protested instructions from George II. OSU’s Richard Hollingsworth, who surely has better things to do, “urged” the students to give Bush “a thunderous ovation“.
   Police, threatening arrests, escorted away those who silently turned their backs. Is this how you want your kids to be trained to think for themselves?
3. Al Gore was subjected to extra screening on his way to and from a speech in Madison Wisconsin. “Just wanted to harass him, I guess.”
4. Chekhov would get it: The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (“It’s what’s for dinner“) is controlled, according to small ranchers, by multinational companies and large factory farming operations, and collects $1 per head sold – the “Beef Checkoff” fee. “Checkoff dollars are used to to position poor quality, heavily processed products in direct competition with pure, American beef,” according to Steve and Jeanne Charter, who were fined $12,000 by the USDA for refusing to pay 250 Checkoff Dollars recently (the USDA could have fined them $1.25 million). A South Dakota Judge has ruled the fee unconstitutional, so the NCBA is appealing the ruling, presumably paying attorney’s fees with Checkoff Dollars. Maybe it’s about why the USDA acts as collection agency for the NCBA.
5. A review of High and Mighty: SUVs, the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles, and How They Got That Way. This was the most surprising entry of all, quoting the author, Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: [SUV drivers] “tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.”
   Whew! Even I found those judgments over the top, but apparently not Midwest Today.

That got my attention, coming as it did on the heels of Charley Reese’s anti-imperialist sentiments the day before, so I looked through the articles. In addition to tips on antique hunting and affordable elegance, I found:

• The Fight to Save Big Muddy -How America’s longest river is endangered by poor water management practices, mostly the Army Corps of Engineers “The Corps of the Problem?“
• The Gathering Storm – Could We Be on the Verge of Another Depression Like 1929? Robert Kuttner notes that,
  “What deregulation has produced is an economy and a culture rooted in conflicts of interest.
  “The SEC already had the power to police most of these, but when Bill Clinton vetoed Newt Gingrich’s bill that made it almost impossible for investors to sue for securities fraud, Congress – with the support of many Democrats – passed it over Clinton’s veto.”
• Merge and Monopolize [apple] The FCC’s Michael Powell is on a Deregulation Binge. Includes a chart of consolidated st
  ation ownership topped, of course, by Clear Channel’s 1231 stations in 190 markets.
• End of the Church Age? A rant against radio evangelist Harold Camping, whose megamaniacal crusade is to usurp local churches as HE becomes the voice of God over his 38 stations and 107 translators.
• Grant Wood Not Be Amused How the artist’s family is using copyright to block the reproduction of American Gothic on the Iowa U.S. quarter. However, a judge had had thrown out the family’s right-of-privacy claim in 1981, so the Quarter commission is pressing on (so to speak).
  “We suspect the bohemian Grant, who delighted in bringing art to to the masses, would unhitch those bib overalls of his and bend over to give [the family] a moon shot to rival NASA’s.” (Let’s hope Disney stays out of this).
• Alarm  over logging old-growth forests in the Black Hills and elsewhere.
• The World Health Organization’s findings linking fertilizers to Alzheimer’s.
• Concerns over recently approved nuclear waste caravans planning to pass within 1/2 mile of 50 million Americans.
• Public Being Misled by food producers’ new authorization to label irradiated food as “pasteurized.” Iowa’s Dem Senator Tom Harken added the provision to an agriculture bill recently. Agribusiness PACs contributed $192,138 over the last 3 years.

I’m not just commenting on how little I had to do last week. There’s a bright light here. If we, like the constitution, relish free speech, right of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, etc., we need to band together with those we may previously disagreed with, the way Virginians and Bostonians fought side by side so long ago.

Band with Your Brothers

If you’re as sick and tired of being sick and tired as I am, we should try an experiment. Let’s each reach out to someone on the other end of the political spectrum and find the important things we have in common rather than the trivial ideologies that have separated us.

We are being held hostage by bureaucrats and politicians and CEOs whom we wouldn’t consider for odd jobs in our little operations. Why should we submit to their agendas?

It’s not Republicans vs. Democrats or conservatives vs. liberals, it’s us vs. THEM. People vs. big organizations using people’s money against people’s interests. If you’re against big government – as you should be – then also oppose companies big enough to influence governments.

The current administration is oppressing all citizens with its own version of big government – in the most virulent form we’ve ever seen – bureaucracies that Republicans won’t try to dismantle. Without the Republicans’ traditionally trustworthy counterbalance against big gummint, we may be facing the darkest time in our history.

As Charley Reese pointed out, FDR, the legendary big-government guy, had about 15 people on staff while fighting his world war. George W’s got 3,000 bureaucrats directing the biggest military of all time and he still can’t find a 6′ 4″ Arab on dialysis. Isn’t this a good time for less government, fewer intrusions and more candor?

Now that’s a project for our Common Sense of how our country should operate.

9:34:47 PM    

I lost count during my hiatus, pondering the things to appreciate. Since Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough, the current times are an orgy of gratitude if you like breakthroughs as I do. To be thankful, we need to be working on the right things, as is happening so much in the web world, rather than on the wrong things, which has been perpetually the case.

There’s a current forked meme that I hope we let go of so we can put our energy into some ideas more useful than these old illusions:

• Companies need to start acting ethically – like they used to!
• Politicians need to start acting ethically – like they used to!

I enjoy reading rants by Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and John Robb among others, pointing out the excesses and stupidity of businesses and their political tools, screwing the people who are their consumers while taking care of their real customers. These smart guys still believe we should expect something else from companies and their toadies.

Like love and war, business and politics have never had a standard of fairness nor will they ever. The media have always exhorted politicians and businesses to be fair, so we (via our parents) assumed there must be a way they could be.

Let’s stop barking up that tree.

Corporate “Ethics” the Mistaken Identity

There are two kinds of people under our legal system: humans and corporations. The law grants corporations the same rights and legal protections as humans. If a human hurt as many people as did Enron, they’d be ostracized at church, school, club, work, etc. People are hard on their peers, but companies aren’t, and that’s the problem.

That corporations are treated as people is a legislative accident, as explained so skillfully by Marjorie Kelly in The Divine Right of Capital, which tracks the legislation which inadvertently declared them to be persons.

Her larger point is that we place a hugely disproportionate emphasis on the rights of the entities which nominally “own” a company – its shareholders – to the detriment of all other stakeholders – customers, employees, the economy, the environment. All property once belonged to the king but the world was able to move beyond the divine right of kings doctrine. She wonders if we might move beyond our current worship of the “divine right of capital.”

Written before the full force of the corporate meltdown, Marjorie Kelly’s point is even more potent today, with an even darker implication:

Holy Shit! Corporate equities don’t even benefit the shareholders! The corporate structure seems to favor only its elite stakeholders – investment bankers, brokers, auditors, bureaucrats, etc. The form fails at the only justification for its existence – that it provides capital for innovation and growth – since we know that small groups and the open source movement are far better at organizing for innovation.

With its primary rationale debunked, how long will it take to innovate a new organizing force that won’t dissipate its participants’ vitality, creativity and savings? The corporate structure has changed little since the days of wooden ships and iron tyrants. Don’t we imagine that a self-organizing force might be supported by the Internet? Surprise! Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock did in 1979, calling it the adhocracy, which is how most creative projects are developed today – movies, music and non-Redmond Internet software (maybe even Redmond, if you count temps).

Fighting for Survival

Our conception of companies as big bad wolves is part of the problem. Any company that really believes it has a lock on profits and market share behaves like a benign dictator – as public utilities and banks once did. But when any organism feels threatened, it will do anything to save itself (as will the chieftains who know they may never again lead another company).

Companies spend about 5% of their time plotting the takeover of the world, but 95% of the time struggling for survival, as they see it. This is what isn’t obvious to outsiders. They cannot afford to be less than ruthless, because every fiscal quarter holds the threat of do-or-die, not the promise of everlasting benevolent rule.

What would you not do to prevent your family from being turned out into the streets? For those who have risen to a  visibly elevated status – CEO, bishop, Representative, etc., demotion to the wretched life the rest of us live is the end of life as they know it, so they’ll do anything to hang on. Once that line has been crossed, defeat or exposure is a double threat, since there’s an impeachment or indictment in the wings.

Sound extreme? Why do you think Dick Cheney disappeared? Don’t you think his conflicts of interest are actionable? How about George II?

Saddam Hussein is out of options. He can’t stop being “evil” because, if he’s ever caught, he’ll be reduced to a sub-human, from his viewpoint. You know, someone who can’t execute people for fun.s

The Only Answer Left Standing

Sherlock Holmes famously said (and Commander Data reminded us) that when you remove all the possibilities which are untrue, then the one that is left, no matter how implausible, must be true. The implausibility that we must accept is that there is no way to redeem the corporate mechanism. Like trying to save a gangrenous limb, society must amputate this hopeless form of organizing work and resources.

Once we see an alternate way to organize resources, corporate structures can blow away like dead leaves. The open source movement is pointing in the right direction. My regular rant readers will recognize my regular answer – an even-handed transaction  system with distributed data and no central greed point.

I’m thankful this weekend that things have broken down to such a sorry state that the obvious breakthrough is on the horizon.

7:49:31 PM    

Doc Searls insists that the Internet is a place, not a distribution channel. He and the rest of the Cluetrain authors (our clue trainers?) see the Internet as a place, not a content pipe, and specifically, as a marketplace, and he reminds us that markets are conversations. I am Doc’s eager disciple in that assertion, but not all conversations are markets. Only conversations about value are markets.

Doc also cautions us that consumers aren’t customers. Customers are those irritating people whose approval the business lusts for, while consumers are the invisible people whose approval is only incidental to business operations and values. In his current Creative Commons interviewby Lisa Rein, he illustrates how consumers are not the customers of the media business:

“Consumers of commercial TV have no economic relationship whatsoever with their local NBC station, with the network, or with the producers of shows. All the “content” is just bait. Chum on the waters. The commercial broadcasting marketplace is a conversation that exists entirely between the media, advertisers and intermediaries such as advertising agencies.“

That set me to thinking about the many other cases where the people I deal with in a transaction see me as a consumer and not a customer. Who is my contact working for – me or someone else?

Employees work for their boss, not for the customer. Most businesses have so many little transactions that it really doesn’t matter to them if they lose somebody’s business. So if an employee pisses off a ‘customer’ because of a company policy, their boss will invariably honor their decision. If I’m passed up to a supervisor, I may get satisfaction, but I’m more likely to be told that I just need to understand that company policy is immutable. Sound familiar?

Like commercial broadcasters, such an operation has customers, but they aren’t you and me. Their customers are their distributors and, more distantly, retailers or product reps. Often the heart and soul of management is owned by Wall Street Analysts, not the consumers of the products.

The farmer’s customer is the co-op or the meat packer. If that customer needs green tomatoes for easier shipping, that’s what the farmer produces. If livestock must be stoked with hormones and antibiotics because of the way the jobber handles the product, that’s what the farmer does.

A Nation of Shopkeepers

In 1967, I arrived in Taichung which was then a sleepy little town in central Taiwan with no large enterprises, just streets full of tiny shops. To American eyes, it looked like there was not enough commercial critical mass to make it economically viable. Finally, we concluded, it worked just because they sold stuff to each other.

Napolean famously derided the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” – presumably in contrast to the superior French. At Waterloo in 1812, of course, the English canceled Napolean’s franchise.

In a nation of shopkeepers, most interpersonal transactions matter to the participants. Perhaps a nation of shopkeepers has a higher cohesiveness than one where transactions are arbitrary or taken for granted – in short, where purchasers merely consume rather than customize – by conversation – their choices. Certainly, our nation has historically been driven by a culture where conversations in the marketplace mattered to the participants. The evidence is only anecdotal, but certainly it feels like the sellers’ people don’t care as they once did. If they don’t, it’s because their customer is their boss, not the person across the counter or on the support line.

So, if a nation of shopkeepers and their customers confronts a nation of marketers and consumers, do the shopkeepers have an edge?

All Talk and All Action

What’s the most dynamic segment of the computer industry? Open Source!

Holy shit – Open Source is onlya conversation! Is software that no one buys even part of the computer industry? If you need ratification of Cluetrain’s gospel that markets are conversations, just consider that this vital phenomenon is all talk and all action but no money.

We haven’t developed the vocabulary to credit the open source dynamic for what it is rather than a puzzling aberration of hackerdom. Once we have the vocabulary – a way of measuring quality vs. cost – we’ll elevate open source to the pinnacle it deserves: the most productive process in an economy obsessed with productivity.

Is this Internet Place a Market or a User Group?

Internet product conversations rarely involve the producing company, which denies product flaws by not discussing them. The users trade rants and workarounds for those few products good enough to ridicule. Until the producers participate, the marketplace conversation is short circuited – not a market, but an after market. And we’re not customers but a User Group.

So we need to transform this after-the-fact bitch session into that elusive marketplace conversation that our Clue Trainers are exhorting us on to. Einstein once said that we value what we can count but doesn’t matter, instead of valuing what matters but can’t be counted.

Naturally, Xpertweb proposes to add to our counting tools the grades and comments for each transaction, so we can start to value what really does matter. And to always deal with people who work only for the buyer.

2:39:12 PM    

I’m in Iowa City with my nephew Greg Gholson. He’s a terrific young man with a world of potential, who loves the Internet and who makes great grades. I’m encouraging him to start his own blog, so we can all hear his thoughts as he navigates 7th grade.

Send me an email to Greg, using the link to the left. I’ll pass it on to Greg so he can hear from some of the smart people on the web.
11:47:09 AM    

Thanks to Andy Fragen for replying to my plea for help on the discussion group. After doing a complete re-install and copying the latest weblogData.root, etc. and re-publishing, the site still didn’t work, and all my archived content was still missing.

The issue was that I had failed to update my ftp info in Prefs, so it was no doubt publishing to my UserLand space, not here.

I guess it’s time to go write an essay….
7:21:07 PM