Mitch Ratcliffe's Travels

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 01:09:03 GMT

Not everyone likes the chaordic principles

While I am not going to change my previous posting about La Leche League because of the following message, this clarification from someone associated with them about the internal debate within the group with regards chaordic thinking (and further proof that any tendency to create a dogma around organizational ideas, like chaordic principles, is an invitation to disaster):

Dear Sir,

You report on your page that La Leche League is now governed under the CC model. This is un-true and I ask that you remove LLL name from the statement in reference to who currently uses the CC model.

LLLI is currently exploring whether we will become a Purpose and Principles driven organization under the CC model. There are many in LLLI who are deeply troubled at the influence the CC lingo and model has had on the outcome of some of this work. Your statement will only go toward fanning the flames of this distrust and "civil war" like atmosphere and sense that some outsiders are trying to change our "current" published purpose, mission and soul which are already in place.

Thank you for your time.

Jenny Baughman

As I've noted before, conflict is part of the evolution of any community. I don't mean to or intend to stir any flames of distrust as much as share my own observations about my experience at the Chaordic Commons board meeting.The La Leche League does have a section of its Web site dedicated to chaordic principles. You can read and decide about all of this for yourself.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 19:21:49 GMT

The chaordics of dancing

So, after taking a break from the meeting yesterday (in rather dramatic fashion, but that's another story), I'm back in the Chaordic Commons meeting. There is a problem of infinite opportunity when you talk about new models for organization, as with any group of bright people. I am having that problem myself, though I am not necessarily so bright as just embarrassed by many opportunities.

For the past six months, I've been launching a new phase of my career. Having stopped writing for a couple years to focus on investment banking work, which was a surreal education at best, I decided to begin building a media life all over again. This meant putting a lot of activity into motion, all of which is coming to a head now. This week, I have to decide what not to do.

Life self-organizes, but organizing oneself is never easy. You look out at the many things and many good people you can work with and have to say "no" to something. Except for telling one's children "no" about doing dangerous or stupid things, there is no harder word to use in the English language, though "yes" is a close rival.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 01:32:36 GMT

Process and pain

I've been at a board retreat of the Chaordic Commons for the past two days. It has been a study in frustration. The whole point of this organization has been to support and disseminate notions developed by Dee Hock that have already proven they can guide the founding of healthy, democratic shared-ownership and self-organizing organizations. The problem with the Commons, unlike the organizations actually using chaordic thinking, is that in every case, successful chaords form to accomplish some goal or profit (in the form of betterness of a situation as well as financial profit) while the Commons has no shared ends except the propigation of chaordic principles. Without meaningful ends that address the full range of human needs, chaordic principles become about as useful as Catholicism in Afghanistan.

With a shared goal in common, something that is largely worked out in practice, chaordic groups will strike an agreement between participants and use that agreement to govern their affairs to the degree that they are intertwined. At the Chaordic Commons, however, the constitution and a set of principles came before any common interest besides the principles themselves.

And everyone sees those principles differently. When folks from the government look at organizations, they see an armidillo where a private sector person might see a giraffe. Same "animal" different perspective.

I had lunch today with Mitch Kapor, whose team working on Chandler has encounted the same type of perspective problem.When thinking about how to store data, the PC applications veterans say "Well, let's build something of our own [in the application memory space] and fill it with the stuff we need to manage and the data that describes that stuff." The guys who come from Netscape and other network companies say "No, we need to be able to store this in any type of repository, not just our own."

Mitch explains that the two perspectives informed a hybrid solution. Since each Chandler client is a little server unto itself, they cleanly separated the front-end from the back and built an interface that could call a local server or a remote one with equal ease. Simple: treat the PC itself like it is a network so that if there is a network in between the front-end and the data repository (such as when you access your calendar from a Web kiosk at the airport), the system will continue to work reliably.

Unfortunately, when you are talking about organizations, the clean break that allows the hybrid solution to occur has to take place in the mind. The screwed up human mind -- no two are alike, so a standard solution is impossible (and I'm glad it is so). There is the old saying that genius is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in mind at the same time. It's also true that most geniuses make lousy leaders, many are among the worst company I've ever known. It is the rare privelege to meet a genius who is a wonderful wit and a generous host, but when it happens you never forget it.

Personally, I'm comfortable being quite dense and doing nothing more than asking stupid questions or pointing out the obvious.

So, the rub: The Chaordic Commons has no common goal, because it consists of members representing different constituencies -- public, private and non-profit -- that are trying to promote an abstract idea, "chaordics," that has only worked in practice and hardly been subject to any rigorous study. We're advocating a fluid idea, which is what emergent organization-building is all about. The Commons has no ends in common that would define the means its members need from it as an organization dedicated to the promotion of chaordic thinking.

The Commons does, however, have a constitution that is a thing of some elegance. In fact, it is chaordic organizations' reliance on contractual frameworks for responsibilities and shared rewards that make it so interesting. The constitution in this case, however, is an equisite cart for which there is no horse, no urgency that will make people get together and pull.

I started the meeting this time quite disappointed that the first thing I saw was a copy of the Commons' constitition sitting at my place on the table. It seems like all we do is wrestle this document, and there is no clear reason why. But we write resolutions more than we do substantive stuff, like create tools for people to use to apply chaordic solutions to problems. So, I ripped up the constitution at the start of the meeting and it felt good.

Unfortunately, because many of the people who have applied these ideas have also spent years developing special communications processes to deal with barriers to understanding, they manage to get pretty religious about the way one should talk and interact with others. When you bring people from government and the private sector together, for example, the private sector people are a lot more willing to forego the niceties of the World Cafe dialog process and just say what's on their mind. That's not to say the World Cafe process isn't valuable, only that it shouldn't be applied rigidly.

Alas, if people are already engaged in a process that they believe encourages communication, deviation from that process is discouraged. Yet, if a group is going to be diverse it needs to endorse different ways of communicating simultaneously and all differences to the degree that it wishes to be inclusive. There is every reason to set limits for a community, but only when you've hashed out that differences the group will not tolerate. Because chaordic organizations encourage "consensual decision-making" and "educing" change, most chaords only arrive at a level of tolerance after a lot of argument (such as how many fish one can take from an Atlantic fishery each year -- do you think that was discussed politely at first?). In an unnatural parroting of the end result of chaordic organizing, the Commons board has existed in a vacuum that dismisses conflict as unconstructive.

I've studied community a long time. It's one thing to write "online community" on a white board and another to make it work and this is true all the more so in face-to-face meetings. Community (or a good marriage, for that matter) is born out of conflict, through people's decision to tolerate their differences rather than part ways, because by staying together they will benefit more than they would by separating. If we don't acknowledge differences in a community, a company, a team, they fail because the group will never come to the point where they see past their differences to what makes them stronger together.

Now, all this is to say that I have no idea whether the Chaordic Commons can or will survive or thrive, because after seven months on the board of trustees, I've never seen us do anything but deal with the process of communication rather than our real differences. We have no common goal, because any one of us can go and apply chaordic ideas on their own -- we don't need the Commons because we know the principles and already apply them. We haven't created a situation where anyone but a volunteer can feel satisfied, while those of us whose employers (usually ourselves) don't pay for us to attend and participate can't make a meaningful contribution without huge sacrifices. The spirit of the Commons is that of an Illinois 501-C3 non-profit, and that is a stultifying thing.

This is all especially ironic since Dee Hock thought of these ideas while building the largest economic entity on the planet, Visa. The ideas work elsewhere, but Dee always saw the power of greed, even if it was only the opportunity by some participants to protect what they already had by being more transparent and sharing resources. Every player in the Visa story was hoping for huge gains, not just a fairer environment for transaction processing. Nevertheless, the harmonizing of profit motive with representativeness and self-organizational models produced something great. All we have at the Commons right now is a non-profit struggling to find a meaning for itself. Since that meaning must emerge from a group of minds, we need to let go of the processes and wrangle a bit, because nothing in human history has come as easily as we would like and if we back away from the conflict through which we must pass to find what we have in common nothing will ever be accomplished.

Sat, 08 Feb 2003 18:26:36 GMT

FBI scuttlebutt: Iraqi roundup

A friend with FBI sources tells me that the Bureau is planning to round up every Iraqi in the U.S. in the next two weeks or so. This, along with the heightened security risk, sound like more than your standard war preparations - it's all propaganda at this point. When you add the proposed Patriot Act extensions being lobbied for by Attorney General John Ashcroft, we've basically bid farewell to the country we and our ancestors lived in for the past 200 years.

I'll go out on a limb here: I believe that this administration would and will try to suspend the 2004 presidential elections. This situation is nuts. In San Francisco they are searching trucks trying to cross the Golden Gate bridge. Encryption would be outlawed by the Attorney General who, despite all his troglodyte thinking, was once an ardent supporter of personal privacy. This administration is out of control, is using warnings and hype to scare people and, I think, is capable of believing suspension of democratic mechanisms is necessary and even good for the people of the United States.

A friend who remembers my writing about Y2K, when I urged people not to convert to gold because it was not necessary, asked today in email if now I might not reconsider. I wrote back flippantly, but somewhat seriously: Gold is always more valuable in a feudal society, and that's where we're headed.

Ironically, this all started with a feudal war lord, Osama bin Laden, trying to destroy the American way. We have become what he wanted us to, so scared of any shadow, even our own, that we would sacrifice liberty. We've become what the al Queda monsters want to impose on Muslims, a feudal system of force and absolutist propaganda. Welcome to the Dark Ages, with George W. Bush as the new Holy Roman Emporer. God save us all.

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 01:01:48 GMT

San Francisco for a few days

I'm on the road for a few days, attending the Chaordic Commons board meeting and hanging with the fun crowd in San Francisco.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 23:19:37 GMT

Rethinking Telecom session

Andrew Chapman, Narad Networks. A services delivery, QoS and management technology. My rejoinder to David Isenberg is that the network can't be so stupid that it can't do anything.

Mike McCue: Company about changing how people use the phone. Talking about open standards changing: call centers; directory assistance; voice dialing. [Note: This is a huge departure from their original mission, which was personalized information delivered to cell phones]

Michael Stumm, Soma Networks: Last-mile wireless broadband. $2 to $10 per home passed, miniscule compared to $500 to $1500 per home passed for copper and more for fiber.

Kevin starts: Why is there any hope for any of you? The old guard telecom companies, now the ILECs, everyone is dying.

Mike McCue: Where there is change there is opportunity. It's a matter of grabbing business opps that are short term acheiveable. You have to move from opportunity to opportunity to be successful.

Andrew Chapman: Calling isn't going away. I have a bet at longbets.org that by 2007 that one of the ILECs will file for Chapter 11. That doesn't mean that they won't be resurrected by some government support to ensure universal service. There are 2x cable modem subscribers than DSL. Cox Business Services will do $250MM in revs providing business services and they have the chops to move into the local loop. If you give them an ROI model that makes sense, they will deploy [tech].

Michael Stumm: Telcos know they are in trouble, will use new technology to save themselves. His tech provides 12 Mbps shared network access, so each user gets about a Meg down and 300K up. Not a win at all, if you ask me.

Andrew Chapman: Korea is the country in the lead. Real broadband is when you never have to think of the size of the pipe, again. Narad is a fully-switched non-shared 100 Mbps services. Customers can buy whatever bandwidth they want. Tests underway in US, major announcements are coming in months. Imagine all the things that could be done in a SIP-enabled network with unlimited bandwidth. Distributed services work, but the network has to know something about the traffic.

Michael Stumm: Most households don't know how to manage firewalls, servers, etc. so they are moving into the network.

Mike M: Installing TiVo services into the network.

Andrew: What you really need is a Java client that puts the functionality in the client and commercial third parties host the major repositories of data that have to be available to users.

Michael S: The network has to have some intelligence, just putting in more capacity in place is not sufficient to deliver, for example, video. Networks need to route data based on priorities.

Mike M: I think it is strange how the IT industry thinks that all problems with centralization will be solved by decentralization or vice versa. It's going to be a mix. It used to be that in order to install a voice application, you had to buy a bunch of Nortel boxes, program them using Nortel tools, and now we can use voice XML and distributed clients to deliver the same service. Don't get too religious about centralization and decentralization.

Andrew: You have to have a balance between centralization and decentralization, because if you say you are just going to provide commodity bandwidth that doesn't make a profit you can't get it funded.

Kevin: What will change in terms of applications?

Mike M: Call center, directory assistance and communication applications (voice dialing). In the call center, it's about automating logic trees in interactive voice response systems today using Voice XML. Directory assistance with extra features: movie listings, restaurant reserverations -- voice reviews, there's a content opportunity here. Voice access to email, voice dialing.

Andrew: Migration of IT applications that are the sole province of large enterprises will migrate down to small enterprises -- backup, management of health benefits. All depends on network-based storage. Video enriched email. Video information that overwhelms home storage. Video conferencing.

Michael S: Firewall and content filtering in the network. Voice-data integration, ability to set up calls without all the hassle (but describes kind of awkward interface).

Andrew: Important that you will have tools you can use to build applications. P2P really happens in the sense that everyone is a peer on the network.

Mike M: TellMe Studio -- anyone can build a voice XML system and deliver it over the phone. Built a blogging-like tool that was a huge hit and drove a huge amount of traffic on the network. Phone companies have a huge advantage in that they have billing relationships with the user; they could provide third-party billing.

Michael S: Ultimately, it's competition from small greenfield deployments or one large company that gets desperate and deploy that will change the big carriers' behavior.

Mike M: He says AT&T Wireless would possibly run a voice blogging service [no fucking way] and they wouldn't because they don't bill end users. [Instead of thinking of the carrier relationship, TellMe should build an API and provide voice hosting for a small fee each month]

Andrew: The enterprise protocols (Gigabit Ethernet, IP, etc.) are going into the ground today because the carriers, especially the cable companies, want to deliver the full range of applications that people want to use.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 22:30:41 GMT

David Isenberg and the stupid network

The really important idea that David talks about, after the notion of a dumb network that can be the foundation of any IP-based networked application, is the Session Initiation Protocol. It will allow any device to find another device and begin to communicate.

The end-to-end principle: If you can do something at the ends of the network or in the middle, do it at the ends to preserve your options, because we don't know what the network will be used for later. Thus, internetworking shifts comtrol from network owner to end-user of the network.

SIP lets client devices negotiate connections, ignoring the switches and "value-added" services that are embedded in the network. That leaves the application developer to deliver products and services to create income, ignoring, for the most part, the network.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 19:57:38 GMT

Sergey Brin

I'm going to rest my fingers. This is an interesting conversation I want to really absorb. There are others blogging most of this.

This is a very smart guy.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 19:48:17 GMT

Are Weblogs the Next Platform?

Kevin: At least don't have to explain what a blog is. Are we talking to ourselves? Will we ever move past it being diaries (not really the right question).

Meg Hourihan, Blogger

Dave Winer, Userland

Nick Denton, Weblog Media

Kevin: I'd like [Dave] to expand on the statement that weblogs and web services are the same thing.

Dave: Weblogs are like the word processor, for the web. We did blogs to open up writing for the web for everyone. How do I connect a word processor to a server -- that's what led me to do XML-RPC and SOAP, since it lets you do that. To me, they [blogs and web services] are the same thing. That web services are about big enterprise apps is not seeing the big picture. There's this whole other thing, called humanity, that they are not addressing.

Nick: I have a different perspective. I'm a media guy. I look at weblog publishing software as a way to produce media much more cheaply than it was three or four years ago. The unfinished business in IT is that personal information management isn't complete. Weblogs are one way to create sites that distribute content out to an audience.

Meg: I'm sort of with Dave, but what is interesting about web services is how they can be transparent to the actual users. We're so early in the development of [this stuff]. What happens when we are using our phones and are able to get photos online as easily as text. How the content and people come together is what is interesting. It took us to this point where scripting tools making publishing possible, and we need to take the next step and get them publishing even more.

Kevin: Why do you think weblogs are going to move to these other platforms?

Meg: Because people want to talk to their friends.

Nick: Last Thursday, there was a big snow storm in New York. You couldn't tell from the NY Times. But if you went to [the web] there were pictures and it was providing a good media experience and local coverage.

Dave: It wasn't just local. We were looking at it to on the West Coast.

Photolog has pictures of this panel up already.

Dave: Starting a weblog is like starting a magazine. For a person who wants to write, its a great thing. It has to be reverse chronological, calendar, permalinks, and in two years it will probably be radically different, but it will be gradual to us.

Nick: Gizmodo, a $1,000 a month investment to pay the writer. At that rate you can imagine a business that brings in $5K to $10K a month, it's a fabulously profitable business. It's not a VC-oriented business.

Dave: It's like 1981, it was a good idea to invest in word processors. [Nick] is making money, my company is making money.

Nick: Tina Brown, it costs $40MM to launch a magazine. You can do it for a lot less with a blogging tool.

Kevin: What about what happened with Hypercard, which just disappeared?

Dave: Apple didn't support it. In this industry, it won't just go away. If we close shop, other companies are ready to step in.

Meg: I hope the buzz dies down, so that we focus on the information and the way you present information. It won't just go away.

Dave: Kevin's weblog is a perfectly example. I've learned a lot about Kevin, a lot more than when I occasionally read his column in Esther Dyson's newsletter.

Marc Canter jumps in: As word processors were to weblogs, there will be a decentralized environment in which many vendors provide aspects of the systems people use. The answer to VCs is that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg, when people want to connect cameras, PVRs, broadband in and around the home and office -- the same type of tools.

Dave: It would not be good if this industry just consolidated into a single app, like Microsoft.

Bob Frankston: Are we talking about capital "B" Blog with a trademark or just about making it easier for people to post stuff? It the later, we should be clear about that.

David Weinberger: If I am a consumer, I am not going to care if it is a blog. There's a third aspect: blog as a tone of voice.

Meg: I've always defined a weblog as just a format. Whether you write about your cat, and there is this idea that it will happen frequently, but that's about it.

Dave: My first blog post was in 94, no format. By an individual, not premeditated. This is what upsets professional reporters the most. When Dan Gillmor was talking about his blog, I wanted to say that most managers want their reporters to blog, but the reporters don't want to. They should post rumors and see what happens for their journalistic work.

Nick: That's what British journalists do in paper.

Question from the audience: In what way is a blog a platform? In what sense is a drawing or writing tool a platform?

Dave: Even the most basic blogging tool has programmability, so it is a kind of platform.

Marc Canter: As a Radio developer, it is a platform for us and we're going to do a lot with it (disclosure: I cowrote Marc's business plan for Broadband Mechanics)

Nick: There are lots of ways of making money. Buying advice. Personal news services, which hasn't worked because it was keyword based. You can even imagine online dating services based on blogs.

Meg: How do you find this stuff -- that's the huge unanswered question. How do we get this information to people when it is relevant.

Glenn Fleishmann: There are more than one type of blogger. But we're all men here -- 95%, and several conferences recently. Can we go beyond this monolithic blogging story to specific examples?

Dave: The NY Times has covered blogging a lot, but they always assign a reporter that hasn't been on the story before.

Dan Gillmor: There have been many more articles saying it is the next big thing than that they are going to disappear.

Dave: But they always tell both sides of the story (laughter in room).

Nick: One of the niche blogs we're going to launch is a woman who will write about life, and she's a woman. (this is all part of a "why are there so many men here in the room?" discussion -- Phill Wollf suggests that certain tools are more conducive to women, like LiveJournal, where the average user is a 16-year-old girl).

Doc: The most important thing about blogging is linking. If it is a blog, it's got to link a lot. This builds on what Tim Berners-Lee built to begin with.

Kevin: The question is, does the blogging community become predominantly the general population?

Nick: We can talk about the sexual demographics of blogging, but the politics are quite interesting. A lot of the activity and growth are among right-leaning libertarians.

Meg: A lot of people get into weblogging to connect to a small circle of friends, family and acquaintances. If my friends from high school do it and I keep track of them, okay. A lot of people don't realize its so open.

Dave: I can use the phone, regardless of whether that fat guy with the radio show -- Rush Limbaugh -- uses the phone, too. Lots of people need to be informed about what's going on.

Kevin: Let me rephrase: In five or ten years, what percentage of people who are online will have a weblog?

Dave: Everyone.

Meg: No way.

Dave: Do you want to make a bet?

Nick: A lot more people will be writing and that's a substantial change.

I asked a question, lost track of typing. Big gap in the discusson here.

Question from audience: How is this different?

Dave: Weblogs demand respect. On an email list, people can veto you. On a weblog, you can, if you choose to, get work done on your weblog in spite of resistance in your community.

Meg: A weblog post is like an IM post to the world.

Audience: But it doesn't demand a response.

Meg: But it is a packet of information that goes out, and people respond in a variety of ways. You don't think about it as much, so you get a variety of responses that people don't have to think about.

Audience: What about collaborative work?

Meg: That was why Blogger was built.

Dave: The best response we've had is in instant outliners, but we haven't any idea how to introduce that? We will, probably in a matter of weeks, two instances of these things called blog browsers - a tool that understood the chronological nature of what it is browsing.

Meg: How does blogging change social interaction. When we started Pyra, we worked in my living room. We are both bad at email, talking would interrupt. So we created an internal weblog to [note stuff]. It became a chronology of our startup and everyone we hired read it to learn our culture.

Cory Doctorow: What makes blogging interesting, like Hypercard, others: put tools for experts into their hands without demanding they know a lot of tools for publishing. It's not the usual suspects writing. It changes everything. There's a homeless guy in Philly with a blog; I'll bet every social worker in Philly reads it, and if they are not, they should. At EFF, we used to have to clear everything by lawywers, but with the blog we can clear stuff a paragraph at a time. It removes the barriers.

Dave: What you are saying is profound. Why is this like web services? It's coming in through the back door, just like the PC did. It enables people to do what they need to do in order to get their jobs done. When I made my decision to enter this industry in the late 70s, I didn't do it to help corporate people make little changes, but to blow through barriers.

Moses Ma: I think most people don't care about running what I call "windblogs" operated by pundits. But the tools are useful for creating new environments, like Ryze.

Kevin: What are the features you want?

Meg: Push for Weblogs. I can choose where I can read it, on phone and PCs, as it happens and as I think it's important.

Doc: Search within blogs.

David Weinberger: Blog threads

Dave: Have you seen backtracks?

David: It is better than not backtracks.

Marc Canter: Multimedia conversations. Re-entrant conversations. Persistent use throughout life.

Florian Brody: There is a perceived technology hump to getting in to the technology that needs to be overcome.

Nick: I want a news front page for the blogosphere and across the entire web. I want to locate myself within my social network, people recommending what I should read that day.

Cory: Indiosyncratic Google -- not a beauty contest but the people I like at the top.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 18:17:07 GMT

Summarizing Web Services

The panel is interesting for the way it wandered into a hard discussion of the fact that J2EE, APIs and open source eliminates the need for expensive server softare to support web services.

Now, you can argue all day about what the right tech is for which job -- it gets religious -- and that's what's going on, in a way. Only this religion is couched in business terms. To a degree, this is the most pragmatic discussion at the conference so far, but it still ignores the human element, which is the elixir needed.

Adina Levin asked me to expand on a phrase in a mail exhange, about how we need to change our views of one another. The first step is to forget the notion of people not as people but only as consumers. The delivery of stuff people need is important, but we need to recognize economy enables everyone to participate in large or small ways.

Take the blogging the news thing. Here's a model for covering city hall: Have everyone interested in the news contribute $50 a year to support someone who spends time blogging city hall, the public meetings, the questions asked and answered in the hallways. If three people want to do it, split the money. Make it possible for individuals to have their voice and pay them for that voice. They'll throw themselves into it with a passion, because for the first time this relatively dull esoteric interest (relative to most local citizens' interests, at least). Make it a chaord, where people share interest and control of what the money pay to focus on -- democratic coverage of democratic processes.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:28:03 GMT

A Fox in the Henhouse

Eesh. Note that Bush has named a banker to head the SEC. Idiocy. If you want to provide legitimacy for investors, find an investor and not a banker to oversee the markets. Replacing the chief lobbyist (Harvey Pitt) for the banking industry with a banker at the SEC is compounding the original mistake.

My prediction: Resignation, again, in nine months.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:20:40 GMT

Web Services panel

Brent Sleeper, Stencil Group: Some of those questions of recognizing who is speaking -- let me tell you who I am and you decide what to think about me. I am called an analyst, but think of myself as a consultant as I ... offer advice.

Christian Gheorghe, TIAN

Anne Thomas Manes, Author

Dick Hardt, ActiveState

Anne Manes: I hate the name "web services" becuase it has nothing to do with the web, is all about services and has everything to do with XML. The one piece of tech you need is XML, everything else -- transports, directories, etc.-- are up to you. Some protocols are widely used, so you should be using them.

Christian: Why a direct marketer up here? Big companies need to use this to connect with customers. WHen you start looking at decentralization, there is a notion of quality of experience.... [the design value argument]

I'm not sure where this is going.... will get coffee now.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:12:20 GMT

More Dan Gillmor

The next time there is a major earthquake in Japan, it will be photographed and distributed way ahead of the rest of the press. Then journalists will say "holy shit, this is something new."

What can we trust? KayCee Nicole faked a death online, the bloggers checked it and found the person did not exist -- then the journalists picked it up. The bloggers did profoundly good journalism. I know that anything I see that is anonymous I assume it is not true.

Dan doesn't like the fact that most people get 95% of news from one or two sources. But big media does important stuff, investigation is expensive.

Ad revenues are in jeopardy. Okay. we know that. If we don't change the way we see the Net, "we are screwed."

Bob Frankston asks: Revenue models are a kind of patronage system. In particular, do we need a local model versus a global change in business models?

Dan: We have an aggregation model today that has been very successful as a journalism model.

Bob: There is a straight linkage between revenue and coverage that makes the model a blunt tool. He also points out the assumption that making content is expensive is a fiction.

[My take: At ON24, we cut the cost of production of audio and video by 90%]

We're talking about the ethics...hope someone else is blogging this.

David Weinberger: When 10 years from now and we have electronic book hardware that works -- to what degree does that change the line between journalism and blogging.

Dan: It's not a hardware question -- a copyright question. There will be a rather thorough undermining of the business models that support journalism today. When I start to think about what other bloggers think about a topic, the coalescing of the meme through RSS feeds, that gets really interesting. But the physical question of how we read doesn't affect that.

What's a journalist? The 1st Amendment protects everyone.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 16:46:44 GMT

Dan Gillmor stands in for Clay Shirky

We Media, we do it with you rather than for you.

Talks about 9/11. TV, weblogs. Dave Farber's Interesting People List the next day providing a much wider set of ideas than in the mass media. Personal journals and, ultimately email messages and blog content being picked up by mass media. That would not have happened before this We Media thing happened.

My readers know more than I do. I didn't know it as profoundly until I started the weblog. This is not a threat, it is a grand opportunity.

Story about Joe Nacchio of Qwest at PC Forum. Joe was whining. Dan got a mail from someone reading Dan's blog (Doc got it, too) pointing to how much Nacchio made pulling money out of Qwest as it crashed. I noted this in the blog, and Esther Dyson (founder of PC Forum) said that because people were reading the blog in the room the temperature toward Joe lowered. Dan thinks Joe pissed people off all by himself, but it is important that the message started in Arizona hotel then went to Florida and came back to change the conversation in Arizona.

The sources we cover now have new options. The DoD posts full transcripts of all interviews. I think this is good for journalists. Anything that adds context and completion for a conversation is good.

He said he can't post his notes, because the Merc's lawyers are not happy about that. I asked why he listens to lawyers at all. He said he works or a big organization and has to take orders sometimes -- said he has tremendous freedom and would leave if he didn't. I suggested that he should leave, he'd do better.

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:50:58 GMT

Broadband Media Distribution panel

Cory Doctorow starts off with the history of media company fear, from 1908, when music publishers went after player piano makers, to Napster.

Broadcast flag initiative: The music industry has gone to Congress and the FCC to say that unless there is copy protection in digital TV, they won't release their content for distribution. The flag is a bit embedded in the signal that turns off or on the ability to record. It's the usual hardware solution to distributed content control -- totally impractical, because everything from TVs to PCs and CD burners, just to name a few, will need to be compliant.

Why did IT let Hollywood have a veto over what can be distributed. Deadline for FCC comment last Friday -- 3,000 comments, mostly from individuals. IT companies made a lame claim that it's silly.

Broadcast flag is step one. Second step is to block the "analog hole" that lets hardware display content with a "cop chip" that would shut down hardware trying to copy protected stuff. Step 3 is The Dark Net, a network of computers and users that continue to find ways around content protection -- the solution is to redesign the Net to survey for content violations. Infringing packets would be discarded.

These are apocalypically bad ideas. Why isn't tech coming out strongly against this? No one every asked a crowbar company to make their crowbars work only on accidentally locked doors?

Sean Ryan, of Listen.com. Started as a music directory services. Then Napster came along and destroyed the market, advertising collapsed, and the labels have finally started to move toward greater licensing. It's hard to be a label apologist, it's sort of like voting for Grey Davis. We spent the last two years working with labels to create Rhapsody, a viable subscription service that delivers a proprietary stream of most of the stuff you want to hear. Ability to burn for 99 cents. Portability in 2003/04 -- other devices than PC, stereos, cell phones.

Digital music will get to allowing people to hear anything, even individual concerts. The restrictions on music today are vastly improved compared to the situation five years ago.

Morgan Guenther, TiVo. Audience shouts: "My TiVo thinks I'm gay."

I feel like a grizzled veteran. No more discussions about a brave new world -- we lament how we destroy business models. We're focused on: execution on marketing and financials -- cash break-even this quarter come hell or high water; transition, from straight consumer facing subscriber acquisition model to being arms vendor for the industry -- DVRs will be ubiquitous in four or five years; innovation, we continue to have to innovate in system software, silicon, hardware and applications that ride atop basic DVR functionality. Our business model is focused on the service -- 550,000 subs that are "happy as clams" one percent churn (that is good, but give these folks the way to move off the paid service and they are gone.)

TiVo working on home networking/content distribution. We can create secure distribution, increase customer relationship, market and advertise.

So, I wonder, what does this have to with decentralization?

Kevin Werbach: Cory, why doesn't Sean Ryan's story ring true?

Cory D: SDMI (music industry security system) that was supposed to be embedded in PCs to protect music from unauthorized use. The team that cracked it was threatened with suit, even when it was perfectly legal to talk about math in the context of academic exercises. Real pirates have fabrication facilities in the Ukraine. DRM providers secures systems from private users.

Making a copy of a DVD is illegal, even for your own use. Hollywood wants you to buy more than one copy of a DVD, even though private performance is legal use.

Sean Ryan: We try to give the consumer what we can -- you must be online to listen, even when you have burned a CD. Consumers don't understand that a download is intended for limited use. Consumers want reasonable restrictions and reasonable prices. SDMI was a classic example of a stupid solution. We'll continue to argue this and, because this is a democracy, we'll come out with a compromise. At least it is better than it was in the music space than it was a few years ago. We play the middle game, but it's never popular.

Dan Gillmor asks if compromise is working as a strategy.

Sean Ryan: We've tried various approaches. Is it perfect? No. Is it every format? No. Historically, compromises have been reached that allowed industries to flourish.

Cory: No compromises, people ignored the industries. They were victories for the consumers.

Morgan G (TiVo): I don't want to spend my time in litigation, let's create a consumer experience that works and not rub the industry's nose in it.

Bob Frankston: Can individual artists publish through you (TiVo or Listen)?

Sean R: Listen does publish individual artists, mostly live (note: this is because artists usually retain live performance rights), We hope to make all music available.

TiVo will go there, too. But TiVo is still a closed system.

Sean R: It is a historical fact that content providers want to own every channel. We go through this phase every time [a new media emerges]. Then, we go back to third parties that are good at consumer experience and the lables back to licensing music.

JD Lasica: Will users be content creators?

Morgan: I guess, a couple points: We're all about distributed computing, and we think that model is more economic, more scalable and more enjoyable model. I think what you will see happening, cable cos. adopting closed standards for serving up television off hard drives and they are scared to death of IP delivery. Latest TiVo can receive IP-delivered content; it's a matter of bandwidth and metadata so you can find what you want. We think you're going to have access to all kinds of content, won't care where it came from -- that's about 10 years out.

Doc asks: Morgan, there's a mixture of distribution and P2P in your language, but is there another TiVO down the line based on access to a framework others can tap.

Morgan: We don't have the [resources] to do that today. He goes on to talk licensing, but not addressing the open source question Doc asked. "We're setting the standards in the industry today....it's all about deployment." Licensing talk.

OASIS -- rights technical committee is working on a standard, but they are patenting rights expression languages, just like Intertrust (Sony bought it). Microsoft and Sony will contend with one another.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 22:37:28 GMT

Panel: Collaborative Business

David Weinberger: This is a panel on collaboration, a term almost entirely void of meaning.

John Hagel, consultant and author.

John Parkinson, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

Narry Singh, CommerceOne

Parkinson: Since '95, I've spent a billion dollars on technologies that are supposed to promote collaboration and I am often asked why.

Weinberger: You can talk about ad hoc collaboration, collaboration in the enterprise, collaboration across enterprises -- in every case, it usually involves people working together toward common goals.

Parkinson: There is no good collaboration software.

Hagel: I focus on enterprise-to-enterprise collaboration. A lot of inefficiencies -- an enormous amout of time is spent on converting data, so there is very little time left over for value-adding effort.

Singh: Not sure the right question is whether the tools are ready, but whether the demand for collaboration is at an all-time high. Now, one process has many companies and that is a fundamental change. The mandate for collaboration is at an increasing high.

David is confused, because there is no single thread. No good tech from Parkinson. Hagel is seeing some success, but a lot of wasted time. Singh is seeing demand. So, we just spent the past 10 years building and deploying the world's largest network of connections that enable the widest variety of connections and yet we're not seeing any progress on enabling collaboration.

Singh: The things we don't talk about enough are governance and incentives architecture -- tech alone is naive.

Weinberger: Doesn't track for me. One of the lessons of living in decentralized world, we don't have to wait for things -- it's usually like mushrooms growing in forests.

Must go out to make a call....

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 22:23:44 GMT

Kapor speaks

Mitch started out talking about how he embraced decentralization in the early 80s, when the PC gave people the tools to break out of the priest-class controlled world of the mainframe.

OSAF is my third bite at the apple doing something with technology that represents decentralized tools. I am not an absolutist about decentralization. P2P is not the center of Mitch's world, some kinds of centralization can be helpful.

Chandler is a pure open source effort to build a PIM built on other open source resources, like Python and Jabber. "One of the things I like about it is that it is a low-spin environment."

My wife's 3-4 person consultancy has an Exchange server just to share calendars. When you spread the cost of Exchange over four users, its too expensive. It got me to thinking, for a small org why could you not do the whole calendar thing on a P2P basis. For that matter, why not do other information management on P2P basis.

Mitch is on Groove's board -- need to pay investors back drives high-end projects. So, Chandler, his new PIM, is P2P based to minimize costs. The product should synch two machines you use without a server. It turns out there are a number of issues -- what if you are offline on a laptop, how do other people get access to data on that laptop that you've shared? They don't, if there isn't a copy of your repository somewhere. Servers are noxious because they are running other OSes, administrative skills you don't have -- unfriendly.

Chandler -- just run another copy on your desktop. Clusters possible. Use Jabber to allow people's machines to find one another when they don't have a fixed IP address.

My message is: What I've been learning is that great products always focus on the pragmatics. If it isn't seen as an empowering decentralized tool, we won't be successful.

Kevin Werbach: You choose to do open source, but you are doing a sort of patronage model, in the good sense in that you are putting some of your money in. Why do it open source?

Mitch K: The more successful open source products, like Linux, are not just people hacking away. There are systems and rules in place. Companies that have a strategic interest in having a product around are compelled to put people to work on [the open source product] to keep it around. PIMs for the next generation -- it's a fairly large effort. That said, we've had some great volunteers and public contributions that a small group of people would never find.

You can't just drop a whole new thing on people and expect them to adopt it. That's why he didn't do "something new," aiming to do what exists better. Having the software actually know something is at the heart of what we're doing. It's a platform, not just a single application. It's actually incredibly audacious what we're doing, but it can't be done all at one time.

Glenn Fleishmann: Do you need a lot of bandwidth for your systems or are slow connections okay?

Mitch K: We need both. Slow connections are okay for background but when you need information immediately it is there.

We're assuming people will have millions of items of information on their machine -- five years of stuff.

How is information displayed -- timelines for some information. Info is incredibly modular, so that .... to allow people if they have a different insight about how to organize data, they can do that and we are not trying to do it all?

Looking for interoperability with Mozilla email and upcoming calendar client.... We're avoiding all the proprietary protocols.

Is this thing an app or a platform? I know a lot more about designing applications than platforms, though there are several very good platform people in the organization. Apps attract attention. If you try to do a platform -- try to fill that out later -- you're screwed. You need at least two clients. If we succeed there will be something that if like a platform that someone could use to build a Finder or file manager. In first product, the views will let you see your email attachments alone -- the ability to build a view of your files.

I still focus on the front end and behavior for the user, relying on tech people I respect to [build the back end] I am more open to other people having good ideas, probably a result of age. I'm a lot clearer that, in the event of design roadblocks, I am the tie-breaker.

It will stay small, so I stay comfortable. I want to work at this for 10 years.

Is it a blogging too, Dave Winer asks? In 1.0 it is not, Mitch replies, but you could write a blogging tool using what's in there.

Mitch is committed to multiple releases, regardless of success at first.

If we do succeed, I want to take on rewriting the word processor and spreadsheet. (Laughs in the room).

Doc asks what kind of response the project is getting....

"The one thing that has been most surprising is the resonance this has created." Big players are coming around to see whether it is competitive.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 20:10:09 GMT

Panel on "Beyond the Web"

Karl Jacob of Cloudmark says that communities will emerge from within the network. Uses Classmates.com as an example, suggesting data on his system will connect him to others. This ignores the leadership factor, which is critically important to the development of any group or community. Also ignores the intrinisic privacy problem -- while we may have preferences about how to share data (these P2P discussions assume the machines have an algorithm for trust that covers the grey shades of disclosure we use in normal conversation -- they don't work and will not for many, many years).

The Groove guy, Mike Helfrich, talks about decentralized swarming and flocking. The IT organization is a barrier to this kind of activity. Again, we assume the machines allow us to trust, when all they do is allow us to begin to trust.

Helfrich also talks about ease of creation, as compared to use, in that tools will be easy to assemble for new communities. There will templates for this, but customization in IT systems always costs. He's talking about war-settings for IT as though groupware is the key to beating Iraq. Don't see how that relates to community or decentralization, because military structures are defined, even when they are in fluid situations. Orders are orders.

Doc Searls now: Something important is going on. Not so much decentralized as that it is -- the end-to-end architecture -- it is all ends. The middleware folks make things with no ends. (He's driving at the fact that no tech from a centralized structural framework is generous). Notes that Marc Andreeson said that features don't start with consumers, but with technologists who want to add value.

Same with the Net. Anyone can build and anyone can improve it. Google is a monopoly, but it is still slower than real-time, so Technorati, a linking trackers, is an example of using Google APIs to provide base value and adding to it. Wi-Fi: It's do it yourself.

There are a collection of internet services that aren't deployed. Directory services. IM. Identity services.

Questions (Jeremy's online, face is frozen, so it's hard to tell if he's really there):

Kevin Werbach: How do we build in rich clients without building in incompatibility and intermediaries?

Doc: Give away the fundamental infrastructure and build proprietary value on top of that. (BRAVO -- that's the right way).

Winer: Microsoft and Winer are trying to take the generousity of programmers and pull it out of the market for additional improvements.

Jeremey: All APIs, frameworks are published and anyone can build on it. This is key to the development of edge services.

Helfrich: Talking about DoD, again. Interoperability for edge apps is a big deal at the DoD. Defense Collaboration Toolset spec requires web services solutions. (But it is centralized, and Groove is still proprietary). Points out that the center is where analysis takes place -- characterizes the edge as where decisions are made. This is a romantic notion of military structures. A Marine platoon is an entity that stands on its own, but only on the basis of extensive social practices.

Karl Jacob: This will be profound as the Web and we're all going to do it wrong several times. (Is this a way of saying to VCs that it's okay to invest?) Talking about Keen.com ratings and real-time trust in spam prevention. Keen could take it slow and review reputation.

Bob Frankston: It is a bad idea to characterize a person as good or bad, because it simplifies the social problem.

Kevin asks: What are the limitations of the browser we need to transcend. (What I think is that decentralization started beyond the Web and it needs to be integrated into it, rather than the other way around).

Karl Jacob: Spam is binary, is or isn't. He finds this surprising. This is an example of self-organizing? (No, it's an example of shared values). A P2P model for Amazon would be based on distributed rules (but the challenge is finding out about the book catalogs, what people think about books and music and clothes, etc., since no one records that in day-to-day life. If ratings were based on what people buy, we'd all own SUVs instead of only half of us -- the gradients of trust and ratings are immense and algorithms do not substitute for that.) Jacob says, "If I trust Kevin and Kevin trusts Marc, then I can trust Marc." Yes, but only provisionally, because the trust between two different dyads are of different characters.

Tom Kall of UC Berkeley: What about massive multi-player games?

Helfrich says Ray Ozzie was inspired by this phenomenon. Jeremy seeing lots of Flash-based multi-user games.

Doc: Infrastructure is two things. 1.) The Net itself. It's sub-platform stuff, like geology. When the geology changes, it does threaten the Amazons. Flash builds on TCP/IP, but it isn't the Net. We need a name for that. We add stuff to the geology, it's human nature. 2.) Then there is the infrastructure we want our customers alone to build on -- another territory. It's infrastructure, but not infrastructure.

Dan Farber: Amazon creates a unique personal experience.

Karl Jacob: Imagine taking your wishlist from Amazon and take it with you. EXACTLY!!!!

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 19:11:49 GMT

Jeremy breaks up

Not the audience, he himself broke up during his web-based presentation to the conference from his office in Newton, Mass. Static kept us from understanding him as he talked about rich clients. The video worked great, but the audio was awful. He suggested we mute the audio and the sound guy said "Mute the audio?"

So, we move on to a panel....

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 19:09:11 GMT

The Next Big Rant

Adina Levin posts a rant that carries on my recent comments about finding the next long wave rather than the reductionist next big thing.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 18:06:11 GMT

Dan'l Lewin notes from Supernova

Microsoft's "Man in Silicon Valley" is starting out, talking about implications of technology and social issues associated with what's going on. An evolution slide: Things have chaged from TCP/IP through HTML and XML web services.

Xerox PARC invented a lot of what we use. Gracious, but reminds that most of those inventions were unprofitable undertakings. The university community drove this. "It really is about what is going on with the kids. I really think it is a generational thing." Lewin has a polsci degree -- hey, like me.

Cites the homebrew approach at universities in the 80s. (Me: It's all pretty formal today, as researchers and students often start from standards and with businesses in mind).

Where are we now? In a strong build-out period. Halfway into a 50-year cycle, just after the crash.

Microprocessor build-out coming through genomics, GPS, cell phones, PDAs; and it only works (becomes relevant) when it "wraps around us."

"While the pendulum swung [from the dumb terminal] to the PC [where there was a confusion between the OS and the apps people used -- many thought that Lotus 1-2-3 ran their PC].... to an XML era of rearchitecting the web services framework."

"The action is really at the edge of the network, with these self-organizing networks. Kids...." "The cornerstone, and it is revolutionary, is the customers and IT departments are really smart, but we can't tell them what to buy" just give them information and they will decide.

New app model: Moving data from one machine to another machine based on what the owner wants.

Building blocks driving .Net and the "next generation."

1. XML Web services

2. User experiences = clients + servers + users

Missed #3, he's flying through his slides.

Talks about any client participating, it's open, but the clients are all MS clients.

Question time....

Marc asks about My .Net services. Google shows that APIs that are open are adopted -- will these be available only to MSN users or all the rest of us schmucks?

Dan'l: It's a set of licensing schemas. The core business model is not to operate services, except our constituencies. Kerberos coming and will provide trust bridges.

Winer: Why should anyone trust Microsoft? Lewin says we have to succeed, so we'll do the right thing.

I asked a question. Can't blog -- thinking.

David Isenberg points out that Microsoft should provide leadership on open source, following Marc who says what can we do if we don't want to license your servers but still have the APIs.

Lewin, bloodied, but head held high, departs.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 17:32:51 GMT

Just in at Supernova -- Rheingold notes

Flights slow at SFO -- late with Howard Rheingold, who is saying that democracy may be one of the casualties of smart mobbing.

The questions are revolving around the same issues the Framers dealt with: What is the balance between direct democracy and deliberative democracy. I think we will find that the outcome of this discussion will be agreeing that we don't know -- everyone is citing how screwed up our electoral process has become and that can't be solved just by giving people a vote without linking them to information and the sense of engagement with others.

Question is asked about why didn't Napster users complain to Congress. Dave Winer says they did; but no one showed up. That's the rub, the lack of physicality reduces our shared sense of involvement and risk. Book brought up Democracy by Disclosure: The Rise of Technopopulism, by Mary Graham.

The idea that kids will be scarily different comes up. Marc Canter says it isn't age, but adaptability, that counts. Howard says software should intermediate, knowing that when one refers to "Howard" out loud, the tech should know to pass the message along to him. Exists today, but doesn't sound attractive to me to have people be alerted whenever I say their name.

Howard wraps up. Kevin Werbach says it is great people are raising a lot of questions, but state their names. Identity rules.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 03:23:49 GMT

Notes from Supernova coming Monday

I've stayed away from conferences for a few years, but the group gathering at Supernova is ripe with potential for interesting conversation and ideas. I'll be posting notes and photos during the event right here.