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March 9, 2007
Euan Semple tells you everything you need to know about implementing Enteprise 2.0, in three lines… [Tags: enterprise2 euan_semple]
Dan Bricklin blogs about a talk given by Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Navy’s Chief of Operations about pooling resources in a trans-national community of trust (The 1,000 Ship Navy). And Dan has a really interesting podcast interview with Vice Admiral John Morgan. Man, there’s a lot going on! (Not to mention Dan notes Paul Carroll’s joke about “pier-to-pier” communications.)
[Tags: dan_bricklin 1000_ship_navy social_software everything_is_miscellaneous mike_mullen john_morgan]
March 6, 2007
Peter Swire at Ohio State U and former privacy advisor to the Clinton Admin explains why he thinks Yochai Benkler gets it wrong. Benkler overstates the shift from market to non-market, and Peter will explain “why an economics-based alternative is pragmatically useful.”
Your laptop is an information factory. Consumers own the means of production, which sounds pretty economic, he says. He says he’s a big fan of Yochai, but not with the major thesis that says it is “social rather than proprietary and market relations that create all the big effects — freedom, equity, etc.” (p. 92). But the shift to non-market is not proven, and there are pragmatic reasons to employ an economics-based approach.
Is non-market overstated? It’s defined too broadly in the book, says Peter. And Yochai is observing the early adopters, but as the niche grows it may well go commercial. The amateurs give way to marketized professionals. The Internet itself has shifted from non-commercial to highly commercial.
He says that the production costs have gone well down, so we’ll get more production. There should be a market response, not that we’ll go to a non-market environment.
Why adopt economics as a second way of explaining what’s going on? It’s not clear that Yochai is right that the big change in tech will result in a shift to a nonmarket economy. That’s not what happened with the industrial revolution. It’s simpler (Occam’s Razor) to apply the usual economic view that a reduction in costs will lead to an expansion of production and a bigger market, says Peter.
Yochai responds: It’s important not to confuse markets with economics. My claim is exactly that people own the means of production. But the point that the supply curve shifts outward is not inconsistent with what I’m saying. It means the supply of zero-priced goods increases. You’re using the term “market” as a metaphor and a seucrity blankie. You need to include the pricing mechanism. My claim is that the price mechanism is of smaller importance in directing action. If you want to affect action you have to accept that there is a unique system that is outside of the price system. And that’s what I call nonmarket. To claim that I’m not using economics in this book is surprising.
Second (Yochai says), I thought to say that when you change the costs of the physical capital necessary to act in economically significant ways you get changed behaviorial patterns is not technological exceptionalism. It’s like saying the same thing about the steam engine. Costs matter, the combination of physical human etc. capital all matter. One cost component has declined to a point that a whole set of behaviors that were peripheral to the economy are becoming central.
It’s not that the market disappears. Rather, the addition of nonmarket actions adds a degree of freedom that can solve some of the problems of the purely market-based system (Yochai says).
Peter: The amateurs are likely to get professionalized.
Yochai: Could be. But what will the policies be?
Yochai says there’s a wiki at benkler.org to talk about this type of thing…
[Excellent.] [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler peter_swire economics ]
WorldBlu has announced 34 winners of its first award for Most Democratic Workplaces. (That’s a lowercase “democratic,” btw.)
Among the organizations that made WorldBlu Most Democratic Workplaces 2007 premier list were Great Harvest Bread Company, GE Aviation’s Durham Engine Facility, Honest Tea, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Equal Exchange, Linden Lab (makers of the Second Facility Life virtual reality world), Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, SRC Holdings Corporation, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, i-Free, and Threadless.
March 5, 2007
Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a “theme-setting” talk.
He points to the wide distribution of computer power and “insight, intuition and experience” across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see “commons-based prodiuction,” i.e., produciton without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. “The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides.”
It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See “Sharing Nicely.”) He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process (“Martian clickworkers”). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: “We’re beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phnenomenon.” There’s a “load balancing of motivations over time” — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.
“Building such platforms is hard.” “Coase’s Penguin” says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he’s been working on seeing how this works. He’s looking at experimental literaure on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. “There are more design levers than I initially thought.” Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.
So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were llimited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we’re seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange…a parallel form of production. We go from recording industry to p2p, Microsoft to open source, Grollier to wikipedia, telecoms to Skype. And there are new “opportunity spaces,” from well behaved appliances to production tools. He points to the BBC citizen journalism effort, among other examples. [Yochai moves very quickly. . This is the double fudge Death by Chocolate form of knowledge overload.]
But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there’s a battle on. Yochai shifts to politics. “The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves.” And they can do more in loose assoiciation with others. When it comes to democracy, our epxerience “is purely with a mass mediated public sphere.” We’re beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.
The Internet democratizes. It’s boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: “The Daily Me” fragmentation hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t polarize the way claimed. For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.
There’s a strong “see for yourself” ethic. We come to understand that everything we read is a provisional judgment, rather than training ourselves to seek authority as we did in the mass distribution system.
The Human Development Index depends on who and how produces information, Commons-based and peer production are beginning to help: open source, open academic publishing , free hs science texts in South Africa, BiOS and BioForge out of Australia.
The threat is being played out over institutional ecology. “Rules can make some actions easier or harder.” Incumbernts are trying to make distributed production harder, more expensive, subject to permission. And there’s a push back to be free and productive. Broadband duopoly vs. muni broadband. “Trusted computing systems” vs. general purpose devices. Software patents vs. free and open source. DMCA vs. sharing and open innovation. There’s been a tightening up of all the “toggles,” e.g., copyright. “Law has been systematically optimized for control-based business models…”
“But we’re beginning to practice new ways of being free and equal human beings.” This is subject to a persistent battle.
Now there’s a panel: Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, KC Clafy and Gigi Sohn.
Elliot Maxwell talks about Yochai’s ideas applied to pharmaceuticals. Among other things, he points to the PLoS library of failed clinical trials.
KC Claffy (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis). Things we cannot measure on the Internet: The topology from one point to another at any layer. Propagation of routing. Router won’t give us its entire state (it’s second best routes.) One way delay from two places on the Internet without customized instruments. Can’t get an hour of packets from the core. Accurate flow counts. Accurate bandwidth. How much spam, phishing. A commons infrastructure would allow all this. (See this presentation.)
GG Sohn from Public Knowledge first praises The Wealth of Networks. Then she says that her one complaint is that Yochai gives the government too much of a break.
Mark Cooper wants to chart a course between Yochai’s optimism and Lessig’s pessimism. Yochai points to the use of collaborative production in the material economy. But, in his politics he shrugs off the attacks under the claim that in the long run the superior mode of production will prevail. “I think he’s clueless about politics.” But, “we can build an alternative politics on Yochai’s epistemological and moral base.” We need more than the blogosphere. We have not yet shown we can transform the public sphere. The public sphere needs institutions that transform the routine activities of daily life. [Yes, but how we do this except by having good ideas an implementing them? E.g., come up with another Creative Commons.]
Q: (isenberg) Yochai, would you like to address whether loose goosey has a chance against righty tighty?
A: There’s a common thread between Gigi and Mark. In the long term we care about social practices rather than policies, laws and institutions, because those are subsystems we occupy and life practices are the outcome. Law matters, but the critical question is: Do we need an affirmative set of rules that will enable things, or is blocking bad law and rules enough? I used to work on reforming laws and was pessimistic, and now I’ve flipped. “I do think that what we’re seeing in the Net roots, in the blogosphere, in the global access to knowledge is that political organization is also shifting away rom the standing institutional model, toward more ad hoc networks that mix different kinds of players nad get updated over time…and that disconnect and reconnect, rather than relying on stable institutions…I see the future of political engagement being much flatter, ad hoc…” [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler economics peer_production ]
February 16, 2007
Rageboy in an email passes along the following message from his in inbox:
We thought you might be interested in www.pptexchange.com . — We are now in the process of getting the word out about the site…
The site is focused on allowing its users to publish, trade and sell content in PowerPoint presentation format. A marketplace for presentations !
If you have any presentations (self-promotions are welcomed ) that are sitting on your hard disk getting dusty please bring them online… Publish hem… Decide on a price ($ or email), put them out for free, or make available for viewing online only – please sign up and upload it! — It is free…
Any help spreading the word would be most appreciated!
Regards,
pptExchangeTeam
Not a lot there at the moment that isn’t a sample or posted by the PPTexchange team. But doesn’t this have to be either: 1. A performance art piece or 2. The future home of Powerpoint parodies?
Not that either would be a bad thing… [Tags: powerpoint markets exchanges ]
January 25, 2007
Harvard Business Review’s annual list of big ideas—as well as the rest of the issue—is online for free until Feb. 26. I bat cleanup — does that mean “go last”? — with a critique of “accountabalism,” right after Clay Shirky’s defense of “Ready, Fire, Aim,” and well after Linda Stone’s “Living with Continuous Partial Attention,” and seventeen others. [Tags: hbr clay_shirky linda_stone accountability]
January 18, 2007
From John Palfrey’s blog:
This press release is actually big news. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Vodafone have been working very hard — alongside academics and NGOs — to produce a set of common principles guiding company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights. There is an enormous amount of work to be done, but the process is headed in exactly the right direction…
As JP explains, the question is whether we should have laws (reintroduced recently) forbidding multinationals from complying with foreign laws that violate human rights or a code of conduct. JP’s opinion:
If an industry code of conduct were to emerge that has real bite to it, and where NGOs and investors and academics are on hand to ensure that signatory companies live up to it, the results could be far better. And over time, it might well make sense to redact the global industry agreement into law or a treaty to ensure that it is enforceable, evolves over time, and has true public oversight.
The code of conduct, developed behind closed doors, is now going public for discussion, with an impressive list of high-integrity groups involved.
This is a fascinating and crucial issue that we have to resolve if we are to continue living together in close quarters. [Tags: ethics john_palfrey berkman globalism]
December 1, 2006
Mark Dionne points out that emailweb.us—a service that delivers fully-formatted Web pages via email—charges $18 per year, but waives the fee if you can answer 10 of 12 questions about the Gospel According to Matthew correctly. [Tags: emailweb religion]
November 28, 2006
I received a notice today from PrivacyGuard (a “service” of Trilegiant), telling me that if I don’t write or call, they will continue to charge me $10.99/month. I did not sign up for PrivacyGuard knowingly; there must have been some box I didn’t uncheck on some form I filled in somewhere.
Fine. Well, not so fine. In any case, I called their 800 number. After the robot gathered my information, I was transferred to a message that said that because of the unexpectedly high volume, due to the “popularity” of the program, they are unable to handle my call at this time. Then they robo-hung up on me.
So, I’m writing to the snail address to unenlist. There is no way to unenroll over the Web. I somehow suspect that my letter will get “lost” in the mail.
These seem to be first-class thugs. If you can avoid them, do. [Tags: privacyguard fraud]
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