There’s a famous story about the eastward blitzkrieg of Alexander the Great through Asia Minor. On a narrow isthmus at the town of Gordia, on the only road to the east, there was a wagon left by the legendary Gordius, which had stood there time out of mind. The crossbar of the yoke was tied with cornel bark rather than rope, as they usually were, to the bar attached to the cart. Untypically, this knot was of mind-numbing complexity and size. Legend had it that Asia Minor would never fall to any conqueror who could not unravel this knot. As was the tradition, Alexander was led to this puzzle, which had stumped all who went before him, none of whom were successful in taking Asia Minor.

Impetuous Al took one look at the massive snarl, shrugged, and cleaved it with a blow of his sword. It seems that with oxbows as with life, the direct, unorthodox approach is often the best.

We need to cut through a lot of mystery that surrounds data management, especially as it lives on the web. Actually, the RSS standard is pointing the way to the future of most data on the web, and RSS may be the means to cut through the Gordian Data problem.

The standard for large data-driven web sites is to connect the web (html) server to a separate data server, which supplies the data to be displayed in the user’s browser and which stores the data provided by the user. Special code in the web page triggers a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) which talks to the data server and gets and puts the required information. Every time the user hits such a web page, there are two events: fetch the web page and fetch the data to be displayed on the web page. When the web form is submitted, there are another two events, tell the page you’re done and move the data to the data server.

Data for the Rest of Us

Interestingly, a web page is a database. It contains information which, when requested by an authorized user, is served to the user. It’s not elegant and it’s useless for large data sets, but it still has all the characteristics of a data base.

Until the world wide web, there never had been a public data record like a web page. The web’s breakthrough was to totally expose some set of useful data to anyone, without restriction. who had the web address. This was, I submit, a bigger deal than even we web junkies acknowledge.

My mantra is that proprietary data is the root of tyranny. If information has no use, it’s not considered data. But if it has been elevated to data status, it’s needed by somebody and protected by someone else. Whether it’s a driver’s license record, Visa account or the Most Wanted List, when you need to have the data you are subject to the demands of the party controlling the data. It is what gives governments power over their subjects and police the power to make your life a mess. It’s why it’s bad form for a government to detain its citizens without putting them on a public data list so others can see what’s going on among their peers.

The Data Problem

When you build a data base, you need a trained data guy who will use specialized software to design the data forms and connect them to the data base, which is usually a table with a header row of the data types and another row for each record (person or property or airline flight). Sounds good, but the problem is that the tools are quite specialized and each data base is custom-built for its owner. That means it’s hard for another designer to step in and modify the data base, since it’s a little like a computer program.

This means the data base owner is dependent on the designer, which he doesn’t want to be, and the designer is an indentured servant to the owner, which he doesn’t want either.

So we’ve got an ungainly data source that’s available to everyone and buildable by almost everyone’s niece – the web page. And we’ve got a cumbersome, expensive specialized tool understandable by only a few and fully understood only by the designer. Where’s the middle ground?

The data problem is really two problems: interface and data integrity. Data for the Rest of Us needs a lot of  people who know how to design a useful interface with low cost tools. That would be web design. Since all data is finding its way onto the web, we’re making the web page our default interface standard.

That leaves the back end data problem. There are thousands of people who will design you a web page, but hardly any of them can even spell “data”. Most owners of data bases want to get information from their customers, not just digitize their brochure. The best that small outfits can usually get from their designer is the ubiquitous web-to-email tool which dumps the info they want into their inbox. If you want something useful, you’ll spend more than a small outfit can, or use one of the one-size-fits-all solutions, which locks you in to a single vendor.

Find Your RSS with Both Hands

The RSS solution is elegant. It codes your info as categorized text using XML tags like <title>Jaws</title>, <director>Spielburg</director>, etc. And it puts it right on the web where anyone can see it. Since it’s just text, it can be written by many tools, and because it’s systematically tagged, machines can read the data and slice and dice it, just like a “real” data base.

The problem is that “the Rest of Us” and our web designers still need an expert to customize the RSS feed for our purpose. RSS is real progress that stops just a little short for anyone but bloggers and news syndicators.

The Gordian breakthrough is to store data right on the user’s web site using XML as the data store. Suddenly any web designer is able to design the data input form, if they have a tool to parse their preferences into PHP code.

XWriter.php

This fall, you’ll be able to download an open source script that lets a web designer add data tools to their web sites. The only skill they’ll need are these:

1. Know where the data display folder is on your web site
2. Know where the data input folder is on your web site
3. List your data types, which XWriter converts to a parseable string
4. Drag the XWriter-created data display strings or input strings to your WYSIWYG editor
5. Click on a graphic representation of the 6 form types and 2-4 options for each input
6. Click Process

That’s it. XWriter adds the needed PHP code to your web page, puts the page where directed and opens it for testing. XWriter was developed for creating and modifying Xpertweb forms but its uses are so broad it’s been enhanced for use on any PHP-equipped site.

The XWriter tool is being developed by Hurai Rody, who has done a great job working on a strange concept. We’re indebted to him.

8:24:31 PM    

Before I got off on my rant about our rights as soldiers in the New Continental Army, I had promised that we’d explore Xpertweb’s Open Resource model of collective rewards:

Fees paid by the buyer and seller to their mentor group (cash flow)
(5% of the transaction price paid by each = 10% total)

The voluntary 5% payments are based on the principle that mentors are doing something that benefits every person whom they inspire to join the web of experts. The first question to ask, from a systems engineering standpoint, is whether we support the concept of hierarchical rewards.

The Xpertweb model is based on a view of the macroeconomy as an Economic Operating System (EOS) that we the users have the right to revise as we see fit. A well-publicized feature of the current economy is that some of its users get very rich while most scrape along. We’ve observed that’s because some people are in a position to design the EOS subroutines, but most are not. What they design are accounting systems which are controlled by the companies they form, to which employees and buyers approach as humble clients, with no say in the subroutines they need access to.

Just because the old OS has hierarchical rewards, should the new one? If so, how should they be set up and managed? And what the hell is a hierarchical reward system, anyway? Let’s examine those questions in reverse order

Hierarchical Rewards for Higher Arc-ers

What are Hierarchical Rewards? Anyone who gets money while they sleep (like pension payments or investors) is living off the work of others. In a steady-state model, the payments are fair because the retirees invested money in productive assets which owe them a cut of the later action – think of it as money with a memory.

But people who are way more prosperous than average are those who, like Bill Gates, have developed a toll on others’ efforts way out of proportion to the effort and money they invested in their toll booth. Capitalism says that’s A Good Thing, since it’s so hard to organize ordinary people so they do something productive. Employees aren’t so sure that the salary spread is based on relative contributions, as suggested by this analysis of financial industry salaries for clerks through controllers in 2001:

Hierarchical compensation rises steeply at upper management levels and, as reported everywhere else, spectacularly among those eligible for stock options. Each level gets paid at multiples of the previous level. This is the defining characteristic of hierarchical rewards.

How should Hierarchical rewards systems be set up and managed? There has never been a standard for how to design the really amazing wealth hierarchies – they’re designed by the beneficiaries and are subject to the vagaries of the market, at least in theory. At those levels, professional management is pretty astute and likely to succeed, since…

Equity markets systematically move money from
the less informed to the better informed.

That’s all there is to it – end of story.

The Set-up But we’re proposing to design a hierarchical rewards system, well, systematically. So the same rules must apply to every participant, presumably through revisions, so the code is backwards-compatible. Xpertweb’s goal, like any meme, is to expand the population of true believers. So, if it’s appropriate to feature hierarchical rewards, they must reward those who increase its population. The algorithm is simple: everyone you mentor will send you 1% of purchases bought or sold as long as they appreciate what you’ve done for them. That’s a meaningful contrast with Ye Olde Economy: Hierarchies in the current EOS are lock-ins. Every organization in our society is locked in to paying the Microsoft tax. If they grow disenchanted with XP’s nagging, they still will be forced, one way or another, to pay for the next upgrade, as long as they are committed to the Microsoft koolaid. Since there’s no Xpertweb Inc., Corp., Amalgamated, or LLC, there’s no one to pay money to except your mentor and the 4 other mentors who are responsible for the chain of mentoring that introduced you to the system. Each month, you pay your mentor support chain based on how you rate your mentor and how each of those mentors rate their mentor. At any time you may start to work with another mentor and start to pay your 5% to a support chain you prefer.

Managing the Hierarchy Hierarchies are always managed in Ye Olde Economy, which is why they work so well for those who benefit from them. In a systematically designed hierarchy, there can be no way to change the rules for paying the participants, so there can be no management of the hierarchy. This is the Xpertweb model. Every transaction can spin off as much as 10% of its value to the participant’s 5 mentors, on a voluntary basis. Those who prefer lock-ins need not apply. Like the sellers and products tracked by the Xpertweb protocols, happy campers pay as suggested. Buyers and “mentees” determine quality ratings and advertise it to their successors. The rewards may be absurdly high, but the quality of services can never be questioned.

Should Xpertweb’s Designed Economy offer Hierarchical Rewards? This is the central design question. Probably the self-generating reputation index is enough of a benefit to attract new users. But the system asks a lot of users – more than any commercial system would: you must have your own web site. You need to upload your starter kit via FTP. Where will you get a starter kit? If it’s only available from a central site, that site is a business that must charge for its service and, if the service is well received, will increase the price as it becomes a necessity.

No, there must be a mentor for each new user. Any user must be equipped to be a mentor. That means that the skill set for any user is broad. A mentor will be needed to set up every new user. Why would someone doall this? The immediate attraction is to get paid something by several generations of new users, maybe a lot. The payoff is a sense of community, IF the users relate to each other as carriers of a shared, successful meme.

Xpertweb User Skill Requirements

1. Understand the buying and selling forms on your new Xpertweb site.
2. Know how to use an expert to modify your forms or create new forms.
3. Understand the structure of your new Xpertweb site: what’s a directory, a data set, a form.
4. Know how to send and receive money electronically: any way that’s best for you.
5. Know how to treat others fairly, both when buying and selling: how to give and get good grades.
6. Understand why you must never contact anyone without their explicit permission.
7. Understand why your new reputation means you will never need to contact anyone without their explicit permission.
8. Actively use all the Xpertweb forms and protocols until you’re a power user.
9. Buy something and sell something, every month, $100 total.
10. Know how to mentor others in the skills you’ve mastered.

The Payoff

All those skills are the responsibility of the mentor. Let’s pause for a minute:

Have you ever had a computer mentor? You know, one of those mavens described by Malcolm Gladwell who knows everything about your computer and its software. Someone who’s patient with your questions, which are elementary at first but increasingly sophisticated. Have you ever evolved from a newbie to a mentor to others? Has any of us not so evolved? Doesn’t it prove that it’s even more fun to give than receive? Otherwise, why would we do it all the time?

We have genes for usefulness.   – Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell

Run The Numbers – This is the Scary Part

As part of their training, each new user is expected to buy and sell stuff and train others, to master the 9th and 10th skill requirements. Every new user buys or sells a total of no less than $100 every month for a year. They can buy $50 of stuff from someone and sell $50 to someone.The point is that they will have a reason to use the software every month for a year.

This activity will require the new user to send up to 1% – $1 – to each of her 5 mentors every month, requiring her to rate her mentors and to use the forms which manage her mentor ratings and support fees. Each user is expected to witness the mentoring of 4 other new users during their first 4 months. The mentoring is done by the new user’s mentor, but by the time it’s done, she can do it herself. This means that that her “mentees” will also be buying and selling a total of $100 each month, also for a year.

The Amway Part

OK, the issue is in front of us. Do we have the right to do this? Don’t we need permission to establish our own distributed shared-source data base? Are we allowed to send money to each other according to a published but non-obligatory set of rules, with no company approving and managing our transfers?

If everyone trains 4 users, who train 4 others, etc. and each of those sends/receives $100 per month, everyone will get $1 a month from 4+16+64+256+1024=1,364 people = $1,364 per month, after about a year. They will also learn that 1% of all receipts are paid to their qualifying mentors, so they send another $13.64 to each mentor. After about 2 years, the theoretical total is $1,464 paid by 1,364 people to each mentor = $19,969 per month. That’s a lot of mentor motivation.When people start using the protocols for real work, the numbers get much larger.

What’s Wrong With this Picture?

This is a lot of money to contemplate, especially moving among a loosely affiliated bunch of people with no obligation to do anything until and unless they’re satisfied with the value they’ve received from sellers and mentors. Who knows if any of this will really happen?

No One. It’s an experiment! It’s not venture-funded, so we can design a system with an unknown outcome. There’s no cost to keep the system alive until it gets traction, so it doesn’t have to take off immediately. There’s time for people to play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t. The forms publish all the cash flows through the system so, when the process does get traction somewhere, it will be known to everyone. We can’t know ahead of time if the protocols trigger the expected actions. But when there are actions, we’ll all know it immediately.

That’s when we the Xpertweb users will discover what uses we’re putting it to.

11:29:58 PM    

When you feel fear in a media-driven society, chances are it’s because someone wants to scare you.

As previously conjectured, fear is usually the product of a media message. The message is certainly calculated, perhaps cynical. At its most benign, it’s to sell you a hygiene product to avoid the purgatory of those who smell, look or taste human. If political, the message is surely cynical: to alarm you over a non-issue so convincingly that you reward the manipulator of your emotions with your vote or worse – another of your dwindling freedoms.

There are two kinds of people in a society: those who expect to work for whatever shows up and those who just know they can get others to do for them what they cannot or will not do themselves. The latter kind must manipulate the willing workers to be served as they expect, with fear as the best tool for the job.

Let’s break that down. In my recent Viet Nam recollection, I suggested that we pay too much attention to scary but improbable anecdotes and too little to our real lives and loves. Perhaps our innocence has been stolen by terrorists, but our energy is being drained by politicians. They can do it because we’re wired that way.

To be fair, the politicians face their own greatest fear: another major attack will expose their lack of control of this conflict. Their fear, then, is for their political security and not the security of their fellow citizens. All they have to sell us sell is the illusion of control over a chaotic world.

We are the Warriors

A war on terrorism is a war of terrorism. Who are the front line soldiers in a terrorist war? It’s you and me, untrained guerilla fighters moonlighting on the front lines of a nasty, random conflict. It’s not our troops who bravely take the conflict to the nations harboring terrorism.

We are the Continental Army on the barricades of this conflict. As the front line warriors, perhaps we want some voice about how this battle will be joined. For instance, we might accept the fact that some of us are going to be killed and wounded. Not many of us, certainly, and very improbably any one of us, but some of us. Now if we’re willing to be real patriots and warriors – to die or bleed for this cause – maybe we want to tell our elected “leaders” about our preferred terms of engagement. Here’s one view:

Poiticians Terrorism Briefing

• No more grandstanding – Lead, follow, or get out of the way, but don’t erode our civil rights for political gain or the appearance of security.
• We’re not secure – We all know that. Don’t insult our intelligence or courage by pretending you can save us from a threat you don’t understand and can’t relate to. Join us in taking responsibility for our actions by being responsible for your own actions.
• Be candid – Tell us and the world that we are an imperfect nation doing its best to perfect its civil liberties and education for all its citizens, so we remain a beacon of freedom and possibility for all the people of the world, as we always have been. Admit that the terrorists are brave, committed warriors willing to do things so unthinkable that we are in real danger, and that the outcome is so uncertain that your ability to manage it is questionable.
• Be intelligent – the least we can expect. Remind us that we are committed, courageous and caring; that this fight is between a culture that blindly does what its leaders say and one that seeks to once again be led by intelligent, thinking strategists: Leaders who understand the constitution’s limits on powers and who know we’re fighting for diversity, free speech and due process.
• Listen to US, not your party workers or toadies. Reach out to the most of us who are able to make fine distinctions between cultural values; who know that there will be a cost to dissuade the people who know we’re evil. Focus our outrage through intelligent, open discourse so the terrorists learn they cannot prevail against this alarmed, alert (perhaps, even, as ESR urges, armed people).
• Above all: Define the Mission
  • Are we really fighting for our “style of life”?
  • Is our “style of life” worth dying for?
  • Does our “style of life” mean being 300 million people living like 3 billion?
  • Does our “style of life” mean reducing real people to consumers
       (poor sods who ingest ads in one end and crap cash out the other)
  • How many real Americans would die for those values?
    
• Define What We Stand For.
• If we’re defending freedom, then we’re defending diversity. Let’s deplore government policies that limit diversity – even here.
• If we’re defending freedom, we’re defending free speech. Even the kind that makes other uncomfortable – even here.
• If we’re defending freedom, we’re defending freedom of religion – or its absence – even here.
• Skip this list – just read the Federalist Papers. Why not interpret the Constitution and Bill of Rights strictly, as Absolute Authority, rather than, say, the Bible. Like their fundamentalists.

Get Real, Go Online

Of course I’m dreaming a utopian vision. Politicians won’t do this because they are the worst of the people who excel at getting others to do things for them. And they’ve got the best means to do it – subjugation. Only technology (web applications) can save us from the 226 year slide from a barely governable oligarchy of propertied, rebellious white guys to a manipulated herd of materialists.

But who’s going to build these web applications? We will. If Mitch Kapor can spend $5 million on the OSAF PIM, surely we can find a way to build specific, purpose-built global connectors:

The Electoral Collage A web application to aggregate opinions into votes, in the same way that the open source community aggregates user preferences into executable code. The opinions would be developed, of course, by the blogging community and its knowledge logs.

Moneyware A web application for a P2P economy – people buying and selling based on proven reputation rather than unsupported hype – among other things, a way for motivated American women to buy homespun directly from Afghani and Iraqui women, creating a new and visible female Arab moneyed class. (In process)

Take it to the Streets A web application with online protocols for rule-based, sustainable community development, whereby American cities and towns can directly communicate with and adopt sister villages and pipeline funds directly into communities, bypassing central graft government.

Howard Bloom points out that confusing times can make you fee
l listless. Larry Lessig wonders why the web community is so passive about copyright. But why not do what we do best? Let’s hack some code, build some shared applications, get it together. And get all of us together while we’re at it.

9:29:36 PM    

All this tiresome talk about accounting systems must seem too detailed or obsessive, but that’s where it all starts. Every one of us works for an accounting system – we’re really that shallow. Because accounting systems are the baseline for our behavior, it’s the high order bit for our design study. Again, our definition of an accounting system, from October 22:

If any set of buyers and sellers reliably moves funds according to published rules, they are implementing an accounting system, whether or not it’s centralized. If, in addition, those participants establish formal financial relationships whereby they reward activities that promote their collective goals, then those helpful activities are rewarded through an accounting system.

We’re not designing an economic utopia because they don’t exist. Our Xpertweb protocols must work in a world of short-sighted, self-centered competitive people. People who care most about the how well the money moves among the participants and how much of it lodges in their account. Once that confidence is established, people will do what they have to do to get their fair share. They may work on their quality, if quality is measured and published.

There are 2 kinds of money that fall out of an Xpertweb transaction:

1. The price paid for the seller’s product or service (cash flow)
2. Fees paid by the buyer and seller to their mentor group (cash flow)
   (5% of the transaction price paid by each – 10% total)

   Both payment types are subject to the payer’s rating of the payee

These payments correlate to the 2 kinds of money common in the larger economy:

1. Purchases and compensation to employees & contractors (cash flow)
2. Capital generated from net profits accumulated by a corporation (assets)
   (this ignores government pensions)

There’s an interesting distinction here. In the traditional model, everybody’s goal is to receive automatic money – money based on capital that shows up as a pension, royalty, residual, dividends, stock sales, etc. All of those exist because some corporation has employed people to generate more cash flow than the people cost, generating retained earnings. The profits themselves may be available to generate automatic money but usually it’s based on the willingness of stock speculators to pay more for a piece of the company than the last owner of that piece paid.

So the interesting money in Ye Olde Economy is not type 1, wages and sales, but the money that wasn’t paid for employees or parts, and was transformed into assets that can be bought, sold, mortgaged and fretted over. It is frozen work, generated by capitalizing a vibrant event – production – and turning it into a static thing. It is the genius of capitalism to develop that financial alchemy, for it made it possible to turn the fruits of past successes into the possibility of new success.

The interesting money in our Xpertweb microeconomy is not static but dynamic. Where in Ye Olde Economy you try to accumulate assets which will pay you a dividend or might increase in value, Xpertweb wealth is the flow of tens or hundreds or thousands of people sending you a dollar or ten each month. These myriad peer-to-peer payments cannot be intercepted or devalued or traded to someone else like assets can. They are not fungible, as the lawyers say – not convertible to another form or easily conveyed to another. Importantly, it is not practical for a clever person to re-direct these myriad payments to themselves. For the successful mentor, having mentored successful others who mentor likewise, these payments are incessant, continuous, and cannot be avoided. Every day, one-thirtieth of their mentee pool deposits a few dollars into their bank account.

This is a change in kind, not just amount. Where we currently seek to amass several significant assets, each of which may rise or fall with the market, Xpertweb proposes to deliver myriad streams of  inconsequential amounts.

Next time we’ll look at the math behind these payments.

8:41:10 PM    

On October 16, I fantacized the perfect computer support solution:

I want Commander Data. I want him in my coat closet, using no resources until I have a question and then he activates, solves my problem and goes back into stasis (he might be expletive-activated).

Andrew Duncan observes from New Zealand:

“I suppose that when you are finshed with him, he could be expletive-deleted.”

Now that’s user-centric design!

12:32:49 PM    

The Zipless Accounting System (thanks, Erica Jong)

An obscure deliberation where our resident mad scientist defines what an accounting system does, in order to describe an instance of  a non-managed, decentralized accounting system.

Because people like money without strings attached.

Open Source – the Impossible Dream

Open source software is an economic anomaly: it shouldn’t be possible. But then, neither should soccer moms. According to economists, all work must be compensated through a managed accounting system or it doesn’t count as real work. Twelve years ago, this point was questioned by Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost business writer, in The Age of Unreason. He pointed out that an immense portion of the useful work in a society doesn’t show up in the GDP*, performed by people who aren’t paid for what they do.

*

Ever notice that, like the DJIA, the components of the Gross Domestic Product are constantly adjusted, presumably to comprise a market basket of improving indices? Einstein said something like, “We pay attention to the things we can count but don’t matter, and ignore the things that matter, but that we can’t count”

Handy’s point is that we need to be purposely unreasonable in order to do the most-needed things. For support he cites Shaw:

George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, as I must add, to the unreasonable woman.

Unreasonably, not only is Linux gaining ground against capitalism’s poster boy, Windows, and a patchy open source web server (Apache) delivers 66% of the world’s web pages, one of the world’s great software architects, Mitch Kapor, formed the Open Source Applications Foundation last week. Its purpose is to spend no less than $5,000,000 to give away a first class Personal Information Manager. The OSAF web site received 91,000 hits on its first day so obviously something’s going on here. Dan Gillmor thinks this may be just crazy enough to work.

Like Kapor, huge numbers of smart, well-employed people are staying up nights to create something worth giving to others. We on the Xpertweb team may not be in that category, but that’s certainly our purpose here.

Why do economists think this kind of activity is crazy? Maybe it’s because our culture hasn’t developed the vocabulary to put this new gift economy in perspective, though Eric Raymond has described its proportions in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

When people work within unconventional structures to deliver a product that competes well with products developed under conventional structures, then the structure they use must be acknowledged as relevant. Open source works very well, but it routinely ignores people with money, preferring acknowledgement from the hacker community as its currency. In that sense, it’s aristocratic, though our culture’s taste runs to the democratic. Mitch Kapor is a well-intentioned patron of the software arts, but a patron nonetheless.

Once Kapor’s software is released into the public domain, it will certainly be more responsive to user requests than, say, Microsoft’s code juggernauts, but it’s still not subject to free market forces. How does a real customer, clutching real but limited plastic, get someone to build me that obscure little feature I want? I know there’s someone who can do it before their morning coffee, but where is the democratic market engine to find and reward that hacker?

This is important because, like all artists, programmers like money more than they want to admit.

This design study is exploring that unconventional market engine – one that’s not yet been tried, much less proven effective. Otherwise, this would be a report and not a design study.

Open Resource: If It Looks Like a Duck…

We call it Open Resource. We imagine an unconventional structure which gets people to do things for money, yet leaves out the central feature of all the productive enterprises valued by those dismal scientists called economists: The Accounting System.

I’ve previously suggested that no one has yet figured out how to move money without a central accounting system, but that’s precisely what Xpertweb proposes to do. First we need a test for what a central accounting system does, so we can know when we’ve developed its features, which are technically trivial, and left behind its drawbacks, which are legion.

If any set of buyers and sellers reliably move funds according to published rules, they are implementing an accounting system, whether or not it’s centralized. If, in addition, those participants establish formal financial relationships whereby they reward activities that promote their collective goals, then those helpful activities are rewarded through an accounting system.

It’s a binary question: If the participants reliably and reproducibly match their payments to their promises, they constitute a collective accounting system that’s as effective as any managed centrally. If not, they don’t have an accounting system.

Armed with our test, we may be able to design protocols which inspire people to move money around as effectively as SMTP and POP3 inspire people to move words around.

2:40:14 AM    

Enough with the book reviews, already. Let’s get back to our design study.

Where were we? Oh yeah, Xpertweb: Peer-to-Peer viral microeconomy meme intended to attract loyal adherents by an unprecedented even-handed transaction protocol with superior open source e-commerce protocols, delivered using the subversive strong attractor developed by the open source movement – actually doing what it purports to do. Make the tool simple enough to use that your neighborhood butcher, baker and candlestick-maker can use real e-commerce. You know, like those burka-selling women in Afghanistan and Iraq:

1. Every transaction gets a 1-99% grade and a written comment
2. Payment is made only after the grade is given
3. A low grade from the buyer may reduce the payment
4. All buyers’ and sellers’ grades – given and received – are recorded
5. Sellers may decline requests from buyers with a poor grading record
6. No way to control the reports accumulated by the network
7. Each Xpertweb user is mentored by a power user for training and support
8. User pays mentor up to 1% of any transactions, based on the mentor’s support grades
9. User pays another 1% to the mentor’s mentor.
10. User pays another 3% to the 3 mentors in the support chain above the mentor’s mentor.

Oh. Had I left that last part out? The Xpert Web is based on the formula described in the HumanTech story on September 28. At HumanTech, each employee trained other employees who trained other employees, etc., and they all were graded by their clients for every temp assignment and were paid fees based on the population. Our hero Jeff Greenberg worked there for about 5 years and earned as much as $42,000 per month before management dismembered their Golden Goose.

Xpertweb is designed around the same algorithm with a twist: there’s no central accounting system to spread the money around. Instead, it depends on the aggregate actions of peers communicating with each other – an open resource analogy to the communal activities behind the open source software movement.

Carrot Yes, Stick No

Xpertweb proposes to decentralize what has never been done without a central accounting system. It’s designed to inspire, not direct the movement of  money among peers according to a set of published protocols.

Accounting Systems move money by putting it all in the hands of a central management. Employees are electronic records which have the right to receive money according to a formula which management may change at will. Behavior is compelled from participants because the accounting system owns the buyers’ money and controls the movement of every penny to employees and suppliers. As we know, management pays itself well to manage their accounting system.

Xpertweb records the events of a peer-to-peer transaction, whether it’s a sale or mentoring. The most important events being promises. At the end of the transaction, each party grades the other’s actions compared to the promises. One of the promises is to pay buyers and mentors as agreed. The data build an expanding web of money promised and money received.

Can it Work?

The design question is whether the web of promises so woven moves money as reliably as your average managed accounting system, dependent as it is on nothing more than the promises of its participants.

If you believe that most people are as effective (when their actions are public) at moving money when promised as are managers of accounting systems, then you have a bias for the Xpertweb protocols.

12:19:13 AM    

Howard Bloom is a disturbing man. In The Lucifer Principle, he demonstrated what Richard Dawkins simply stated in The Selfish Gene. The Lucifer Principle tells us why people can’t help doing stupid, evil things: Our genes invented you and me as mini-experiments in their drive to take over the known universe. Saddam Hussein is driven by the same imperative.

He also demonstrates that evil things are not necessarily stupid and stupid things are not necessarily evil. In fact, the term evil means nothing in a gene-driven world. His points are interesting at this moment because our republic is about to realize its imperial destiny by colonizing Iraq for oil and air bases. Most bloggers think that is a stupid, evil thing. Genetically, it’s just business as usual.

Here’s the truth we have to deal with:

• Nations, like companies, are intrinsically ruthless. You might sacrifice your life to pull your neighbor from a house fire, but nations and companies never do that for each other. Why expect anything different?
• Nations and cultures are superorganisms, like the collection of bees called a hive and the collection of surprisingly self-sufficient cells called a human.
• Like organisms, superorganisms always know where they are in the pecking order (remember grade school recess? That’s how life is in every pecking order).
• Individuals in a superorganism (you and I) depend on the superorganism’s status in its superorganistic pecking order. If your family or company or country or religion is rising in its pecking order, you’ll feel energetic and purposeful. If it’s falling, you’ll feel listless and confused. That’s the source of the energy fueling Islam and the ennui our culture is experiencing.

I Hate This Shit!

This stuff is contrary to everything I believe about how life should be lived: that strong people deal gently with each other, their strength affording them the luxury of equanimity, their reason energizing their actions.

But that kind of reasonableness also demands reason when confronted with the inquiries of Bloom, Dawkins, Blackmore and others. How can reasonable people reconcile the biological and anthropological record with our urge for a more humane existence? Denying the record would be like a fundamentalist denying natural selection because it’s not mentioned in the Bible.

Where’s MY Superorganism When I Need It?

I want a new superorganism – a culture – that reflects my values and beliefs, and I want that culture to take over the world as soon as possible. I want freedom from want through economics based on abundance, not scarcity. I want young people raised by adults confident enough to be gentle, reasonable and informed enough to mentor them skillfully. I guess I want to live in Jean-Luc Picard’s world. Above all, I want patriarchy and fundamentalism to be a distant bad dream. Is that too much to ask?

It certainly is if you’re doing well under the current system. Our best and our brightest are doing very well under the current system, so they’re not likely to be much help in this renaissance of reasonableness. We who would promote this dream (if there is a we) are probably not the best and the brightest, or we would have given up on these Victorian notions long ago. No matter how compelling our logic and our blogs, we’re not going to jawbone our culture into adopting reason and gentleness as its theme, so e-thepeople, moveon.org, and EFF need a different approach – writing our politicians is useless.

The Internet Really DOES Change Everything

But we the true belivers are not acting like we’re believers. Where are the web applications to achieve the things we say we’d like to change? How are we going to leverage the power of open source into a disciplined mechanism for attracting people who hunger for reasonableness and a virulent new Pax Internetae that sweeps undesired protocols before it and unreasonably imposes its intractable standards of reasonableness? Are we prepared to wage peace aggressively?

Doing What We Do Best – Develop a Language, Hack some Code

Who gave us bloggers and bloggees the right to be passive, scared and directionless in the face of cultures clashing over ageless hate and the illusion of scarce resources? Let’s get off our collective ass and try to do something, even if it doesn’t prove out. Why do we need permission and capital to do this stuff? Here are some design studies I’d like to see taken up:

P2P E-Commerce
That would be this Xpertweb Design Study. It’s based on a new Open Resource economic model, connecting peers around the globe. From the Xpertweb perspective, the greatest threat to world peace is the lack of a P2P linkage between faceless Islamic women who know how to make their own Burkas and prosperous western women who buy their Burkas for outrageous sums to demonstrate their solidarity with their Islamic sisters. And, of course, introduce a subversive new source of woman-controlled capital into the Arab World.

Anonymous, Reliable Internet Banking
We need a P2P system for people to store and control whatever bit of capital they can raise over the web, perhaps through Xpertweb. PayPal’s doing great but its FDIC banking partner didn’t pan out. But there must be an open source way to concentrate spendable cash in cyberspace for those Islamic women and others so their masters can’t extract it and buy guns or whiskey with it. This feels like a feminist project. Any takers?

An Electoral Collage
In the western world, politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time managing our elected toadies?
An online Electoral Collage would be based, of course, on our right to actually vote and to enforce full, fair and equal representation, but the Electoral Collage would see suffrage as a wireline protocol, with other, behavior-based protocols lying on top of voting, like the HTTP overlay on the IP open standard.
The Electoral Collage would be a massive distributed database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would use a kind of namespace to match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical beca
use most politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about abortion. They do care about voters who care about choice).

Sample Electoral Collage Report:
“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless the amendment is withdrawn.
This data has been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff and is summarized at http://www.electoralcollege.com/fleemer.&quot;

C’mon, e-thepeople, moveon, etc. How about helping us help ourselves?

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.

Alan Kay famously said that “it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” And, one assumes, than fighting it. Every invention starts with a design. Why not design the web applications that might take us in the right direction?

7:07:04 PM    

Howard Bloom’s Global Brain suggests that the blogging community is a self-organizing superorganism thinking like a neural network, promoting its central meme. The blogging meme would be something like,

The world is full of experts who will teach me most of what I need to know if I read their posts regularly. I will also get to know them better than if we worked in the same office for years. They give me insight, candor, depth and humanity available nowhere else.

But there’s something even more important going on. Bloggers (I think) are exposing their personal thinking to others’ debugging in the way that programmers do, and to an extent that only open source programmers do. That’s a big deal. Consider the thoughtful, respectful dialogue around Doc’s Blogo Culpa over just a hint of conflict of interest. Look around your office or PTA or condo board and see if regular folks in meatspace routinely expose strong opinions for which they expect, even demand, debugging. I’m not seeing it out there. Are you?

Who We Are and Aren’t

People who blog expect suggestions that range from helpful to inflammatory. We do it because our collective purpose is so important and because we believe in the scientific method. There have always been disciplined thinkers but it’s never been a widespread pursuit. Managers and leaders and parents and priests are rarely interested in a partnership seeking the best way to reach a goal. I guess you’d call it collective debugging. It’s the defining characteristic of the part of western society most worth preserving.

There’s a large and growing group of people who suppress collective debugging:

Fundamentalists

Fundamentalists are proud of their resistance to thoughtful discussion. Collaborative debugging vs. Fundamentalism is the war we’re engaged in, not America vs. Terrorism, Palestinians vs. Israelis, North Koreans vs. South or Islam vs. Everybody Else. The sooner we understand the core nature of the deeper conflict, we can start some real life-saving.

On September 15, 2001, the distinguished British scientist, Richard Dawkins wrote:

  Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.
   It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

But fundamentalism lies even deeper than religion. It describes any group that relies on a single creed with no allowance for discussion of “foreign” values. The Crips gang is fundamentalist, but not religious, like the cult around the Jonestown massacre. Examples of secular fundamentalism are everywhere – supporters of the O.J. acquittal, the Ku Klux Klan, most forms of patriotism, liberalism and conservatism. The problem is that science and the scientific method have reached a critical mass and a global presence. (Of course we’re not very good at disciplined thinking. The point is that we think we should be, and we try to recognize it when it shows up).

The common thread of fundamentalism is lazy, uncritical thinking. If you defer all choices to a received text, even if current, you’re abdicating Choice – the greatest gift god gave you.

The religious right’s support for a war to “defend our way of life” is an irony you’d never put in a novel. Our way of life – democracy itself – is about being able to live your life as you want while not harming others, a bear hug of diversity.

It Takes Real Faith

Just because Copernicus won the sun-centered universe debate does not mean that society bought into his methods. Patriarchy has ruled our lives forever and has a few good generations left in it. The key to patriarchy is absolute alpha male dominance of the household dialogue monologue. TV drives a stake through patriarchy and that’s why autocratic rulers are nuking up as fast as they can. They can’t stand a world with television. And the Internet? Fuggedaboutit!

The point of accepting Copernicus’ and other scientists’ views is the greatest act of faith possible. Real Faith is when you understand just enough of another’s guesses and investigative methods to trust what they report back to the rest of us. Real faith lies in trusting your annual report to 50 million lines of code built by people you’ll never meet under conditions you’d never endure, using circuits that would not work without quantum physics. Or boarding an airliner with no clue as to what Bernoulli’s theorem is about.

Real faith is not the simplistic regurgitation of an inspiring ancient text for parables to inform our daily actions. Such texts are seductive for their simple-mindedness but not very useful for taking responsibility for your actions in a world that must include diverse views. If we condone killing those who think most differently, do we then support killing those who think a little less differently?
(Doc – That sounds pacifist, but it’s not.)

People of Faith, Infiltrating From Within

There are fundamentalists everywhere. They haven’t infiltrated our democracy to tear it down from within, they’ve always been in control because they are the natives here.

We are the infiltrators with our notions of healthy diversity and a method to arrive at a truth that hasn’t been written down yet. All the hallowed texts were penned by followers of rabid iconoclasts and we are their proteges, fighting the same fight with the same kind of people: patriarchal lazy thinkers with little faith in others’ ideas and observations. They’re pissed because we’re driving a conceptual wedge between patriarchy and the young disciples they want to automate. As it has always been done.

It’s our meme and we’re sticking to it.

10:51:34 PM    comment [commentCounter (32)]

Dave Winer’s map for the way out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death:

It’s the software, dummy#:

Let’s pop the stack back to the 70’s when we did technology in Silicon Valley. Software, software, software, that should be our mantra.

Most software users would say Dave’s got it wrong. There’s not too little software, there’s too much. All the enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers who want to learn and explore new applications and scripting languages and preference panels have already done so. How many apps can one person master? I’m a maven with about a dozen software apps and conversant with another couple of dozen. I’m the go-to guy for most people I know, and most of them are way younger than I am. And I feel incredibly incompetent when confronted with a software issue, but I soldier my way through it. What do the regular folks do?

In Dave’s fondly-remembered 70’s, every new piece of software was new and compelling. Perhaps because there were so few of them. It’s like wiring your stereo. It starts as a receiver and 2 speakers and morphs slowly into a component system – you’re able to grow your dendrites at the same rate as the system. But software got away from us a long time ago.

So I’m as put off by new software as I am by late model car engines. The investment of time and energy in a new app seems like just too much hassle. It’s not an age thing – I don’t know many people 25 years younger than I who get excited about software, even if they’re in technology. Perhaps especially if they’re in technology.

I can’t pop my stack back to the 70’s, so how can the software industry pop consumers’ stacks? This is the real problem. You know what I want? I want Commander Data. I want him in my coat closet, using no resources until I have a question and then he activates, solves my problem and goes back into stasis (he might be expletive-activated). Because he’s Commander Data, he does everything almost immediately, so I’m willing to pay him a lot per minute. I’ll bet that’s what you want too: an expert on the software you’ve got, not more software to be inept with.

Carbon-based Solutions

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

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

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

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

Maybe the answer is Xpertweb. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. From here anyway.
7:06:21 PM