Escapable Logic

This vet loves his war stories as much as any other. Every time we flew into a place that started with a “K”, I got my ass shot up and they gave me a Distinguished Flying Cross. Maybe it was just to shut me up.

It didn’t work.

A review of Xpertweb-oriented Blog Entries

When I was 25, the important thing was to have a good time and not get killed, in the reverse order. Now it’s more interesting to get Xpertweb online.

Here’s a review of the blogs that relate to the open source/open resource system designed to help a lot of people feel a lot better.

For Hurai and Eric:

A parallel between the settling of the New World and the Xpertweb microeconomy

Plato’s metaphor of the cave: our blindness to the bugs in our economic Operating System

Is contrivance simply how we discriminate among people to determine who gets the goodies?

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

No data base controlled by the seller will tell the truth about the seller

When rules are formalized, it is by the seller or the employer

The Xpertweb seller knows the buyer’s grading history, which is more detailed than eBay’s system

We can’t trust sellers to report everything, so we need customer’s records for the truth

A little microeconomy with a better feature set than the larger one. We’ll see if the nutrients are suitable

Your Xpertweb Value Chain builds itself automatically, extending over the horizon of comprehensibility

What drives the engine of greed, fear, manipulation and capitulation that circumscribes most lives?

Building the Symmetrical Data Store, one datum at a time

Their skills can be describable, sellable, reputable and worth more next month than they are today

The theme of Peer-to-Peer transactions: Identify, Specify, Negotiate, Deliver, Evaluate and Pay

Aristocracy and meritocracy look remarkably alike to people who missed the boat

There’s an expert in Bangalore to finish our code and someone nearby to build our deck

Imagine a centralized system set up to do what Xpertweb proposes to do

Once we start designing for both parties, we have the economic equivalent of cold fusion

We may inspire people to move money around as SMTP and POP3 move words around

We currently seek to amass significant assets, Xpertweb delivers myriad inconsequential amounts

Money for the Rest of Us

Data for the Rest of Us. The XWriter tool by Hurai Rody. We’re indebted to him.

Open Data, Open Resources

Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the next RFP

The Mentor Agreement is the core of the Xpertweb experience

10:36:53 PM    

In his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger observes that the web allows people to “try on” different personalities. Examples he cites include eBay sellers and web loggers. He suggests that trial and error lets people find the voice that works best for them

This is an interesting point that deserves more than passing notice. The point of this design study is to discover and code the protocols which best serve our collective, yet personal, economic needs. In the economy we love to hate, one is expected to be well educated, well rounded, well spoken and well placed. Like any superstar, it’s a rare person who has all those traits.

And that’s what should raise our hackles. The “real” economy is based on an unrealistic model of how people learn and grow. Further, it measures workers against an impossibly complete package for the employer – not the talented programmer, project manager or accountant the company needs, but the model employee that managers want to surround themselves with.

Since the Internet invites us to try out different personas – and possibly improving on each one, our economic design should provide that possibility. How does the Xpertweb mentorship model allow such variability?

The mechanism is twofold. Mentors are rewarded only to the extent their support is valued by their students, and each Xpertweb user may have as many mentors as they wish, creating a new Xpertweb persona each time. The only impediment to changing mentors is that, like any Xpertweb provider, each person’s new persona must earn a reputation from scratch. Until respect is earned from experienced purchasers, each persona must undertake an apprenticeship of lower income and volume.

This flexibility would be impossible if Xpertweb were a conventional enterprise. Mentors would be unwilling to allow their students to move on to other mentors and that preference would be formalized as policy – because they could control the payments moving through the system. The virtues of an unmanaged transactions system echoes the virtue of open source software – responsive because there’s no management to be unresponsive.

11:45:34 PM    

Unlike most blogs, this is a series of essays – a word whose root means attempts. My attempt is to describe the web application a tiny group of us is developing called Xpertweb. I’m just too hurried or inarticulate or egotistical to make it a series of short entries. This idea seems to want breathing room and its architecture is just quirky enough to need background. Or so it seems to me.

As a result, this blog is so thorough that it’s pretty unapproachable – maybe that’s just part of our reader deflection program. There are so many people more observant and talented than I, who point to all the links worth linking and who keep you current on what’s going down, that I’m concentrating on this P2P microeconomy design study.

That’s a little disingenuous. The design was laid down some time ago and we’ve been hacking code longer than I care to admit. I hope the specification is even-handed enough that we haven’t missed anything crucial. Certainly, it’s not too late to change the few Xpertweb parameters that are hard-wired. But there’s not much hard-wired. Everything in Xpertweb is voluntary, which makes it the inverse of the current Economy of Compulsion described on Sunday.

There are specific elements that cripple software or web applications:

1. The data structure is set in concrete and the datatypes are frozen.
2. The data interface is unresponsive to user needs.
3. The data is centralized and subject to the economic interests of the developer.
4. Only a few experts are skilled in the use of the layout/data tools that built the application.
5. Only the designers know how the specific application works.

By addressing all those factors, we hope to make the Xpertweb application responsive to its users. The only thread that even slightly directs user behavior is the relationship of experienced Xpertweb users to less experienced users. Each user of the protocols is expected to mentor others in their use. Each mentor will have an understanding with the newbie that there are certain ways to behave in this boutique economy. The mentor will spell out those standards and the new user will agree to convey those standards to other new users when the time comes.

So the Mentor Agreement is the core of the Xpertweb experience. Although the agreement is only between the user and her mentor, it specifies the standards under which the user purports to be operating. Its logical concerns are:

• Never break a promise.
• When you do something, do what you know well.
• When you buy something, give the highest grade you can justify.
• Be a good mentor immediately: get your student off to a good start.
• Be a mentor for life: even when your student surpasses you, generous admiration is a gift.
• Buy from your students or their students or people mentored by your mentor.
• Maintain data integrity – yours is one of 4 records of the transactions you track, be a good steward.
• NEVER contact an Xpertweb user to sell something – your reputation is your marketing.
• Pay your mentor fees promptly on your mentor date – You will not receive what you do not give.
• Do at least $100 of buying and/or selling every month.
• Mentor 4 students during your first four months.
• Enter into these commitments with your students.

Word of Action

Xpertweb is a formalized word of mouth describing visible actions. The Mentor Agreement is the only tangible obligation made by an  Xpertweb user. The expectation is that these mutual commitments will be passed along in a natural way, as skills once were passed from parent to child – we all were once millers and bakers and smiths and wrights.

With any luck, it will look a lot like a guild.

11:49:44 PM    

The other day, I suggested that a valid design criteria for an economy would be to base it on bloggers’ values: openness, exposure and candid discussion of our offerings, a compilation of our justifications for and our collective estimation of the quality of our respective offerings.

But what if we turn that around? Instead of imposing blogger values on meatspace, what values from meatspace might we take on, as representative of the collective values of web loggers?

Tonight I caught the end of PBS’ Ken Burns documentary on the life of Thomas Jefferson. It concluded with these words:

Thomas Jefferson essentially said to us:

“We cannot be complacent until two conditions are met.

“Every human being born on this continent has a right to equal, indeed, identical treatment by the machine of the law, irrespective of race, gender, creed or class of origin.

“And secondly, that every human being born on this continent has a right to roughly equal opportunity and modest prosperity. Until those conditions are met, we cannot rest.

“When those conditions are met, we may say as he said he would, nunc dimittis, ‘you may dismiss me.’ My work is done.”

Do we have anything more important on our agenda? Do we have the right to such lofty goals? Do we have the stomach for them? Is web logging the forum to take on Jefferson’s challenge? Oh, what the hell. Why not?

The challenges to the human spirit have always been economic, and the tyranny that scarcity economics invariably leads to. It’s not surprising that my view is that those imperatives can be embedded in a set of values and transactional forms adopted to express those values. The people using those forms can hardly presume to change the “machine of the law,” but it can route around undesired compulsion under the law using the tipware protocols I described yesterday.

Just a thought.

11:23:42 PM    

Reflecting on this Sunday after the Microsoft Absolution, I’m reminded of the distinction between personality types: Pushers vs. the Pullers, Daniel Quinn’s distinction between the Takers and the Leavers; the current line between the Geeks and the Suits. In the middle ages, there were the peasants vs. the “nobles” (John Perry Barlow’s “The divine right of thugs” comes to mind).

Geeks like to do stuff that’s useful and often worry about the pay later. Suits like to control stuff that’s useful and compel others to pay more for it than they pay the geeks. Nice gig.

Howard Bloom has made a strong argument that the dominated become aggressive when they become the dominators, so the distinction may have more to do with roles than personalities, but that may make this an even more worthwhile inquiry.

What might a new microeconomy do to break down these distinctions rather than reinforce them? It’s unlikely that any amount of teaching, preaching or reaching out will work – those have always failed. Government policies and books and morality plays don’t work. Religion seems a Dominator’s dream, so rigidly does it subject its followers to the whims of its leaders. Given all that, are there any protocols in our economy that should be included in or excluded from our little design?

You Can’t Steal a Gift

Let’s look at the protocol called compulsion. Our economy and our rule of law are based on compulsion, as have been all societies. The western world has raised compulsion to a Kafkaesque level, essentially saying:

“Here’s our body of laws, so complex that no one understands or obeys them perfectly.
If you violate one and attract the wrong party’s attention, whether or not you know about the law (even though no one knows them all), and whether or not it hurts someone else’s interest, you will be compelled to undergo a degrading, expensive process that intentionally does you significant harm.

“Of course, if you’re influential enough, or your interests align with influence, the compulsion will be illusory or non-existent.”

(Let’s not feel sorry for ourselves. It’s always been tough for people like you and me who descend from the peasant classes.)

Is compulsion the source of customer dissatisfaction? Sure it is, especially with intangible services. Phones and cable TV and subscriptions and travel and lodging are all based on making bandwidth or physical space available to you, on the assumption that the availability has intrinsic value. Individual vendors may have generous refund policies, but that’s at their disgression. The fine print says that if you sign up, you’re compelled to pay until some period after your written cancellation. That’s how it’s always been.

But now there are alternate models – the work of waitpersons and street musicians and bloggers is valuable but unstealable. Open source software and closed source shareware and most Internet browsers are unstealable. Gene Lees wrote a fine book about Jazz called You Can’t Steal a Gift.

Naturally, most laws are broken due to economics – and the temptation to steal what’s stealable. Could our little P2P microeconomy make some of this stealing impossible, perhaps reducing the power of compulsion?

The solution for theft and compulsory economics should be based on code designed around the shareware model. Lawrence Lessig’s doctrine is that code can have a power comparable to law. Under the shareware model, all work would be delivered in advance with no compulsion to pay, as in Xpertweb. (Unlike shareware, Xpertweb requires the receiver of the work to declare its value – anything above a failing grade requires a payment between 50-100% of the asking price.)

Xpertweb users will live in two economic operating systems, the large one we love to hate and their P2P forms-based shareware model. For the Xpertweb portion of their lives, they’ll deal with people ranked as experts by their previous customers. They’ll find their expert by looking in an RSS index for people who’ve done similar projects before and who know more about their problem than they do. This is the embodiment of Bill Joy’s axiom that there are always more smart people outside your company than within.

Both the buyer and the seller know the expert’s work is shareware. By knowing each other’s reputation, thay share some assumptions. They assume that this gig is not a big hassle for the expert, who may be customizing previous solutions, so he’s not risking a lot on this task. The buyer knows the seller is motivated first by the grade and secondarily by the fee. The presumption is that this is indeed an enjoyable and responsive economic OS for both parties.

The peer-to-peer transaction model favors the geek over the suit (who’s nowhere to be found in the deal). This transaction is as unstealable for the suit as it is for the buyer – an expression of a gift economy with contingent price tags.

Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the next RFP.

6:58:31 PM    

Phil Windley, CIO of the state of Utah, gives us a wealth of insights we usually don’t hear from people managing “big iron” systems. I hope he won’t mind me reprinting this report from last Monday:

I did a little reading at lunch in The Transparent Society by David Brin. Brin sets forth the following and calls it an “accountability matrix:”

1. Tools that help me see what others are up to.	2. Tools that prevent others from seeing what I am up to.
3. Tools that help others see what I am up to.	4. Tools that prevent me from seeing what others are up to.

His contention is that people see boxes (1) and (2) as good and boxes (3) and (4) as bad.  What society needs is boxes (1) and (3) since that creates accountability.  Further, society should eschew boxes (2) and (4) since that pits citizens against each other in “an arms race of masks, secrets, and indignation.” 

This point speaks directly to the data issues we’ve been looking at in this design study. Let’s imagine an economy entirely made up of bloggers. Do bloggers worry about there privacy? Not really. In addition to the blogger’s URL and email address, any industrious reader can dig a little and know where a blogger lives, her phone number, etc. Bloggers willingly give up their anonymity in the interests of the truth they wish to share.

“After 9-11, we have a right to privacy but not anonymity.”
                          – (source spaced out, not withheld)

In the blogger economy, Brin’s boxes (1) & (3) would be part of the transaction software, and boxes (2) & (4) would not. Further, the likely features of the software would be:

1. Transaction records under the control of each blogger, like their blogs
2. No central transaction database, like blogs
3. Expose the quality of participation in every transaction, like the links to individual blog posts
4. Beyond some standardization, variability in the information types, like each blogger’s navigation links
5. A means to aggregate quality ratings and expose them for comparison participation skills, probably using RSS, like blogs
6. A means to streamline the introduction of new bloggers into the Bloggers’ Economy, As bloggers help newbies like me.
7. A global web of links among the participating bloggers, as is already the case.
8. Blogger appreciation is currently linkage & blogrolling; In the Bloggers’ Economy, it’s likely to be money

It’s hard to beat the blogger ethic as a guideline for our design study.

It will be easy for individuals to adopt such protocols but very hard for corporations, which think their value lies in what the hide from others. They’re only now beginning to guess that their value is in what they expose to others.

11:46:01 PM    

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