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June 24, 2004
Supernova: Afternoon Thoughts
Here are some thoughts I recorded as I listened to some of the topics this afternoon.
From Marc Canter: "FOAF is a lingua fraca for identity data."
From the Connected work panel: "We need to be able to move authenticated secure sessions between different messaging systems." I was struck by the fact that we have all these different messaging formats and transport protocols and we can't translate between them. They're silos.
In the email panel, Stowe Boyd said: "I think email sucks!" He goes on:
I think that IM is a better model -- so much better that email will have to adopt the defining characteristics of IM to survive:Well. We will see, but email -- because of the fundamental flaws in the system -- is falling down. What made it useful in an earlier world is dooming it in this one.
- Gated community -- IM are networks, and the members must log in to enter. Once in, the members must follow certain protocols of interaction (either directly or indirectly enforced) or they are booted out. This could prohibit sales intrusion, sex advances, etc., depending on the network's arrangement.
- Communication with the Known -- while IM networks may allow strangers to contact us, we can opt to shut them off. In essence, we can limit communication to those that are known to us.
- Conversation, not Communique -- email is not conversational, really, unless you believe that sending letters through surface mail is conversational. Conversation is generally better than dueling essays, which is the communication style that email engenders.
From Supernova Email Panel: My Spiel: I Think Email Sucks
Referenced Thu Jun 24 2004 17:12:11 GMT-0600
Stowe isn't just talking about email. By IM he means a general purpose presence-based platform that handles not just text messages, but any kind of messaging. The issue really is that we treat email for everything. As Jon Udell says, "email is a jack of all trades and a master of none." New tools like IM, blogs, and RSS are going to chip away at this, but so far, they're just chipping away.
Esther Dyson said something interesting about adding friction to email, which is a general way of talking about computational taxes on sending email. Something she said though, made me think that this ought to be smartly applied, however. We want to create friction selectively to force certain kinds of conversations to happen in certain ways. This may be too difficult in a universal sense, but its certainly doable in the small sense.
For example Sento, where I'm on the board, provides contact center services, but our goal is to do so in a way that saves our clients money by selectively creating friction for the most expensive ways that their customers communicate with them (e.g. phone) and thus drive customer interaction less expensive interactions (e.g. chat and email). Could enterprises do similar things to push people to more effective communication media (IM, Wiki, Blog, RSS, SMS, etc.) for the task they're performing? Maybe.
04:31 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Rip, Mix and Burn
Michael Sippey asks Where's the rip, mix & burn? The point being that RSS is not about blogs, its about hyperfragmented, recombinational media. We don't use it like that. I was talking to Doc Searls at lunch about his IT Garage. Rather than write specifically for it, I'd rather "syndicate" some of the content from this blog in the original sense off that word. Right now, I have to cut and paste to do that. It should be more automatic than that.
02:47 PM | Recommend This | Print This
RSS for Food
Steve Gillmor has a great article on how RSS aggregators could do a better job of showing items of interest. He gives three specific examples of what they might do to do their job smarter:
To begin with, we need to harness the information we already possess about who and what we read. Rather than relying on content creators to signal already consumed material, let's let the RSS aggregator (offline or online) filter out the links, but not the supporting commentary, to already consumed posts. Instrumenting the browser to record what is read, in what order, and for how long is trivial, says Adam Bosworth, in the context of his Alchemy caching architecture.
Next, let's incent that cache, mirrored on both server and client, to save posts that appear of interest or import not just to me but my peers on the network, as represented by the RSS feeds that I and they are subscribed to. If Jon Udell, Dave Winer, Doc Searls and 70% of their subscribers find the RSS BitTorrent thread compelling, then please send a message to my cache engine not to throw that post away, no matter whether I have ever heard of the poster or the horse they rode in on, the idea he or she is promoting.
Next, compare all the posts and posters and produce a weighted priority list that takes into account variables such as author, subject, updates, Technorati cosmos tracking, the amount of time I have before the next meeting on my calendar, and so on, producing a post rank based not just on my attention but the attention dynamics of those I choose to do my filtering with and for me.From Steve Gillmor's Blogosphere - Wednesday, June 23, 2004 Entries
Referenced Thu Jun 24 2004 14:52:38 GMT-0600
01:53 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Supernova: Social Spreadsheets
These are some comments and thoughts from a panel called "The Network is People." Esther Dyson, Ray Ozzie, Mena Trott, and Christopher Allen were the panelists.
Spreadsheets were amazing because they sit in the middle, between calculators and the corporate accounting system. They let people not just change the numbers, but to change the models and to build new models. The power of the spreadsheet is the power to persuade people (some might say "beat them into submission"). Spreadsheets are as much about group interaction as presentation software is.
Social networks have a problem in that they let you record relationships, but they don't give you power to control interactions. They provide too many opportunities for "friend inflation." They don't accurately reflect people's real social networks. What we need is a "wiki for transactions." We need a way for users to manage their workflow in a flexible way--a spreadsheet for social interactions.
Would you rather have ten networks with 700,000 people in them or 700,000 networks with ten people in them? This is an interesting question. Linked-In is the first. Blogs are the second.
10:56 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Supernova: Ray Ozzie on Cooperative Work
Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove Networks is giving a short perspective on "The Future of Cooperative Work in a Connected World." He's using several case studies with Groove as examples. The talk was interesting and showed how P2P work spaces are being used in Iraq. He cites the example of a Naval Commander with the Iraq Humanitarian Operations Center created an instant interorganizational workspace for doing humanitarian inventories using Groove, their personal laptops, and the open Internet. Here are some points Ray makes based on this and other experiences:
- A tool's value rises dramatically according to its fitness for purpose
- Awareness-based swarming is real and valuable.
- Hybrid architectures are key in an organizational context.
- Real and compelling local need to work together is required
- Individuals participate for selfish reasons
- Trust, accountability, privacy required for participation.
- Servers a re centers of territorial power
- Regulatory, compliance issues are real but are sometimes used as weapons.
- Increased transparency and accountability are very threatening
09:53 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Supernova: The Future of Work
Tom Malone from MIT's Sloan School is speaking on Decentralization. Tom is the author of The Future of Work. Tom thinks we are in the early stages of an increase of human freedom in business that may be in the long run as an important a change for business as democracy was for government. New technologies are making it possible for organizations to have the economic benefits of large organizations while maintaining the human benefits of small organizations. Its now possible for huge numbers of people to have all the information they need about the big picture to make their own decisions about what to do instead of waiting for someone above them in the hierarchy to tell them what to do. To shape these changes, we need to think deeply about what humans really want.
Tom uses the Wikipedia as an example. Even though any one can make a change, the list of changes is available so that frequent contributers can watch changes and make sure they are good changes. Individual actions with the right kind of feedback yield an amazingly good encyclopedia. He uses eBay as another example. eBay has huge scale, but also provides significant human freedom since the marketplace is created by thousands of small shop owners, many of them making their living on eBay.
Our ancestors made their living in small bands of people who were independent and egalitarian. The second form of government, historically, was large centrally organized empires or kingdoms. The third form of government was democracy. While there are significant factors in the development of all of these, there is one factor that is definitive: the declining cost of communications. Writing made large societies possible. The printing press made democracy possible. I've also heard similar talk about postal roads being one of the factors in the rise of the American revolution.
These same three stages are playing out in business. Early on, most businesses were small independent groups. Modern communications like telephone made the modern, large corporation possible. Now networked communications is making it possible for us to enter the third major stage of how businesses are organized.
Is this change desirable? To argues that people adapting to information rather than following orders are happier and make better decisions because they're adapted to local conditions. They're context sensitive. Motivation, creativity, and innovation are the hallmarks of decentralized decision making in business.
There are three main ways that large groups of people can make decisions:
- Loose hierarchies - Universities and research organizations are examples. AES is Tom's favorite example. AES is a power producer. They made a decision to purchase a power producer in England a while back without the board of directors or even the CEO being involved. Their rule: you don't have to get approval for a decision, but you do have to get advice.
- Democracies - Boards of directors are examples of democracies in corporations, but that's just at the top. This also can play a role further down in the organization.
- Markets - two kinds: external and internal. External means outsourcing to other companies or individuals work that might have been done inside the company before. Communication technologies make it possible to do this as never before. Movies are a good example of this. Most of the people, including lighting people, sound people, etc. come together for the purpose of one project. Then they are disbanded. Internal markets happen where people inside one company buy from and sell to each other. Tom and others did a study on how Intel could use an internal futures market to determine how to resource new products. Sales buys futures on products from plant managers. Changes result in these future being resold to reallocate resources based on current context.
09:24 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Global Guerrillas
I had a chance to spend a lot of time at dinner last night with John Robb (former CEO of Userland) about his forthcoming book on Global Guerrillas. Fascinating and scary stuff.