Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’ve never been to a rave and I don’t really want to but I saw one in that horrible movie. Who’s in charge? It is a question that comes up.

When people ask that about open source I like to tease them. I say it’s kind of like what happens if you put a bunch of people together in any group. Pretty soon they all start spontanously dressing a like, using the same cliches, making fun of people outside. It’s in the nature of things, like the rythmic clapping of an audience. I gather that rythmic clapping is somewhat more common in European audiences than American ones.

Standard behaviors can emerge entirely bottom up. Fact is, given the way that power-law network tend to emerge out of all kinds of unregulated linking up, I’m beginning to think it’s more the rule than the exception.

It’s actually kind of amazing the way a lot of open source projects seem to
spontaneously organize. You create a body of code; you add a half a dozen interested parties; after a bit they all start rattling around in something that approaches - just a bit - a synchronized manner. Who’s in charge? The code repository?

In the fractal nature of these kinds of discussions I got to noticing this at three scales all at the same time. First you have the ongoing to-and-fro-ing about “what is a blog.” Which is of course the conversation about what is the emerging standard blog. Second you have the question as it applies to an indivdual and his blog. There you might call it “finding your voice.” Some people’s voice is long tedious essays; others are tightly written humorous observations; some like to write little provocative Zen koans; while yet others have found a voice that consists of just revealing a stream of URLs they find interesting. Part of the tension in the “what is a blog” conversation arises from the way it does the violence of catagorization to individual voices. Who in charge? Where to you get off announcing that the annual christmas letter isn’t a form of blogging.

Group blogs are an fun kind of intermediate level. It’s the middle class! Sometimes easy going, tollerant, urban. Sometimes uptight, gated community, suburban. I’d not noticed the way that if you look at a few group blogs; like many-to-many or crooked timber you can clearly see that the particpants have begun to adopt a similar voice. Comming to them fresh you might assume that they gathered together because they shared a common voice; but if you read some of their individual writing from years past you notice that they had either wider ranges or even entirely different centers of mass. I suspect if you just measured the size of the postings you’s see a kind of learning to clap in unison begins to emerge.

Over on the brand spanking new Planet Apache this process is particularly stark. First off we have a mess-o-people posting how have already developed a voice over the last few years. Second we are aggregating those entirely automaticly from their individual blogs; so to first order there is no reason to expect these voices to begin to standardize. Third the Apache communities I’ve particpated in have been particularly good at remaining both tolerant and diverse - which would suggest there is less social pressure toward a common voice. It’s very much in the best interest of a healthy open source project to remain like that; otherwise you make it a lot harder to bring on new blood. But then on the otherhand the Apache communities I’ve particpated in have been extremely narrowly focused, very much communities of limited liablity. That’s because they focus down onto the working code; often have no other scope. That suggests two things; that these folks have a strong expectation that planet apache will focus down on something, probably the work of the various projects, and secondly that these folks aren’t fluent in what happens if you don’t limit the liablity.

I have good friend who drew my attention to a behavior he calls “monkey see monkey do;” i.e. that we primates like to try things. We watch the other monkeys and then we go “Oh, that looks like fun. I think I’ll try that!” And, it is fun. I certainly tried blogging for much those same reasons.

It will be interesting to see what happens at planet apache. Maybe we will wander into a common voice there. Maybe we will remain “just a bunch a guys.” Maybe some people will choose to submit a partial feed of their own blog not because there are guidelines for the planet’s content but because they decide they want to avoid the subtle temptation to conform any conventions that might begin to emerge there. Certainly some people like to settle into a framework. Who knows?

Hopefully we won’t be tempted to answer the question: “Who’s in charge!” Or was Mark Slemko once so wisely said: “That would be wrong, except when it’s not.”

Del.icio.us is neat.

What’s in it for me? I get an account where I can collect bookmarks and access them from all over the web. It’s easy, since I can add bookmarks to your account using a bookmarklet. So I can type cmd-2 and hit a button I’ve saved another URL.

What in it for us? We all get to see what other folks are taking note of. For example I can discover that other folks that have taken note of the same bookmarks I’ve noted and then look at other things they are noticing.

All the stuff you’d expect: categories, what’s new, popular lists; and of course people have built hacks that complement it for automaticly capturing the URLs from blog postings, or embedding your recent entries into your blog’s home page.

It’s a very interesting example of how people will volunteer to reveal stuff and that a hub can create a network effect, which creates value out of collective action, and generates assorted complements around that hub.

I gather this is the work of the same guy that did the geourl stuff I pointed out a long time ago. A similarly sweet lite idea.

Give it a try!

• Create an account.
• Put the bookmarklets on your toolbar.
• Add some pages from your browser bookmarks and history.
• Join the fun.

I’ve learned that when people ask me in a puzzled manner “How’s that work?” regarding open source I shouldn’t answer until I’ve let them reveal what aspect of the enterprise bewilders them. For example I had one SVP who’s key question was “How do you get along?” I had a guy who’s primary interest was how do we solve the distribution, or as he put it shipping, problem. After collecting a few dozen of these I’ve come to think it’s a little odd that people assume the greatest mystery about open source is the revealing secrets, or the ip rights issue, or the volunteerism.

The dynamics of open source at the level of firms is particularly interesting to me since it bleeds into another area I’m curious about. How do standards emerge, particularly industrial exchange standards?

The simple model for that stuff is that buyers and sellers rendezvous in markets and since standards make that easier there are network effects which will accelerate the adoption of a few standards. It is simpler if we all use the same weights and measures and it is safer drive on the smae side of the road.

Buyers, sellers, market makers (and their agents) that can consolidate enough power to push standards to emerge will do so. The realist will point out at this point those with that power will advocate choices that benefit them and possible disadvantage than the other players.

In the absence of extreme market power the player will find it advantagous to negotiate a standard and advocate it’s adoption by all parties. Both stages are key, in fact you really have to solve three problems. You have to find representatives of all parties that can bring the right talents to bear on the design problem. You have to muddle thru all the negotiation and coordination problems of getting the standard designed, implemented, and maintained. Finally you have have to solve the advocacy, adoption, distribution, customer support problems.

The good news is that we have a carrot and a stick to make this happen. The carrot is improved exchange efficency, in many cases exchanges become possible that were otherwise impossible. The stick is the fear that other players will abuse their market power to create standards that disadvantage us.

Open source provides a reasonably good framework for working on these problems. The Internet makes it a lot easier to find talent, in particular it gives you a huge sample space draw from and then and makes it easier for the talent to volunteer (no travel!). We have stumbled on some tricks for solving the coordination problem. Optimistic concurrency for example. The net also makes it easier to solve the propagation problem as do the open source licenses/pricing. Working with information goods in an age of vastly increasing communication makes all this a possible.

Any firm involved in any exchange need to think about this. For example if your one of a thousand firms processing phone bills you can a) build it yourself, b) buy it from a vendor, or c) join/create an open source project to do it. Which one is best isn’t obvious. There is a lot of risk in building it yourself. There is the danger of becoming locked into a vendor if you decide to buy it. Coordinating an open source project, or any standards setting exercise, is a huge pain.

If you think of the problem as a game with moves it gets even more interesting. Assume, for example, you have built the solution yourself. In that situation you might find it advantageous to open source it first. It could reduce your development costs. It could force vendors to lower their prices. It could help to assure the industry “does it your way” instead of some other way that would be costly to switch to.

If your a vendor of such software you might want to move toward a more open version of the software for different reasons. If your customers are afraid of lock in this addresses their pain point. If you competitor goes first you could be toast as they become the default answer to the problem. If your customers start improving the software you can capture the value they create.

While open source or standards are dominate strategies in lots of information markets they doesn’t win all the time because the problems (talent, coordination, adoption) are still hard. We are getting better at all three though. It’s only just getting started.

Moore’s law isn’t the only rapidly growing technology curve. It has at least two peers. Disk space and communications. These stand on a rich substrate that is equally fecund. A soil of component parts: displays, batteries, memory, semiconductors and of social structures - firms, standards, technologists. These are not the only forces reshaping out future; because above all this the pool of talent that can be brought together to work on any given task is exploding.

This is the plate techtonics that pushes up (and down) continents of new applications and businesses. Meanwhile the differing rates that these elements progress helps to shape the topology of that future.

As we discover better schemes for coordinating the work of huge pools of talent the rate of displacement of which Wikipedia v.s. Britanica is one example will accelerate.

In another example if communications moves much faster than diskspace then we would rapidly reach a state where fetching information was a dominate strategy vs. local storage, caching or synchronization.

This paper: pdf from 2001 by Coffman and Odlyzko has a lot of interesting things to say about all this.

They conclude that: both disk space and network bandwidth are doubling ever year; realtime data (voice and video) won’t provide enough data to become the dominate form of data traffic. So we will continue to cache a lot of data locally. They say plenty of other other interesting things as well.

Could somebody please stop this madness?