Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This book “Implementation Games: What happens when a bill becomes law,” which I must have read maybe 20 years ago, enumerates all the various ways that big projects can implode. It’s a list that I’ve found very useful thru out my carreer.

The book was written after the author’s study of some large projects. The projects he studied are the really hard ones. For example trying to create jobs in a poor section of town. These tough problems are the ones that culture, structure, and markets have all failed to solve. The ones were Government is left holding the bag trying to create public goods from scratch. Needless to say most of these fail.

The author grows kind of pessimistic about these enterprises toward the end of the book. I don’t think he appreciated how hard the problems really are. But that said he collected quite a list of syndromes. These are huge help in diagnosing when things are going south. Useful for avoiding various tar pits in both public and private worlds.

For example one of the syndromes he names is “piling-on;” or the tendency for projects to accept an increasingly long list of goals and requirements overtime until such time as there isn’t a chance they can successfully execute on any but a small subset. This syndrome combines well with “Budget Games” since each time a new goal get’s added it is often possible to capture a bit more budget to help pay for it. Together they can make for some really amazing failures.

• Diversion of Resources

• Easy Money
• Easy Life
• Budget Games
• Pork Barrel

• Piling On
• Vague Mandate
• Keeping the Peace

• Tokenism
• Massive Resistance
• Incompetence

• Stubbornness
• Turf Battles
• Not our Problem

If you want to read this you probably have to go do a good Library. I doubt it’s still in print.

It’s a pretty noxious combination when the the dumb network and the stupid terminal come together! But then I guess we knew that shortly after all those MSDOS boxes appeared on the Internet and all those AOL users poured into Netnews. But this example; the phone network and dumb phones is a praticularly amusing combination. It is pretty difficult to install a spam filter into your phone because the phone companies keep limited the phones they will support to protect their priorietary network gardens. But then they don’t want to expend the cost to weed the garden…

Tim Bray posts an interesting comment.

I was talking today to this really smart guy named Jonathan Leblang who works for A9, and he said �You know, Google�s success may conceal a death warrant.� I said �Huh?� He said �Well, the most useful Web pages used to be the ones that aggregated a bunch of useful links, and so people would point to those and Google would find them. Nowadays, why would anyone go to the work to put a page like that together if you can just rely on Google to find stuff?� Hadn�t thought about it that way.

Let me pick that apart because it’s both deeply true, but in this case it’s false.

First off it catches my interest because I’m a deep believer in the hypothisis that good things happen in the presence of a rich, deep, complex supply chain of stuff you can cobble together. That a house should be full of stuff, that a brain needs a lot of ideas in it, that a city is better than the country because it’s full of all kinds of stuff. You could say I’m more into the fecundity of clutter than efficency.

One example of this struck me when I went to Paris the first time: the incredible diversity of food products in the markets. How could you possible create a culture of food without that wealth of ingredients? That a rich network of supply of a given kind creates a culture for that kind of activity. This is why cities tend to specialize.

The first half of the insight that Jonathan Leblang is noticing is that to solve a hard problem - like the “find what I’m looking for” problem that Googles is working to solve - you first have to accumulate a huge assortment of ideas for how to solve it. I’m confident that Google and eBay are in the Bay area because the rich culture of ideas, supplies, and other stuff needed to nurture firms of that kind.

Jonathan notes that Google depends on a particular kind of supply; i.e. the supply of high quality pages full of links on a given topic.

The second half of the insight, the bleak half, is that as you solve the problem sufficently then your reward will be to capture more and more of the users. You will aggregate all the demand and this will lead to starving out the supply. As the network effects begin to kick-in the users will start defaulting to your solution and alternatives will die out.

That is what’s happened to food in the US. Industrial franchised food consumes so much of the demand for food that there remains only a very small niche for food that’s not highly standardized. Eatting in the rural regions of the US can be an amazingly consistent dull experiance. You have to work hard to avoid it.

This is just another way to look at what happens as the slope of the power-law curve begins to steepen and standards fall into place. Or to recall the cliche good-enough drives out the better.

Now this is the interesting thing. I think this model doesn’t apply in the case of Google. That in this case we are looking a very common kind of confusion about the nature of “stuff.” Physical-stuff (grapefruits, car parts, computers) is different from information-stuff. The linkages of supply and demand are different. So the arguement he’s making assumes that the supply of pages of aggregated links is somehow connected to the demand for such pages. That is just not true, or at least it’s not true in the same naked darwinian scarcity of niche sense that it’s true for the food vendors.

People are packrats; they create a supply of those pages that aggregate stuff about what ever they are interested in independent of the demand for those pages. So even if Google captures more and more of the traffic of folks looking for stuff; people will still make collections of info-stuff. The specialist blogging pages are a fine example of that. I don’t write this blog for my audience, I write it for me. (At this point we could run off on a subplot that about Google acquiring blogger to incourage supply.)

That’s entirely different than the food markets of Paris. If demand for passion fruit wains the supplier of passion fruit will too. But for info-stuff, a Martin Geddes recently said over at Telepocalypse: “No scarcity, no market, no problem.”

That said, there is a scenario where info-stuff begins to look like physical-stuff; i.e. when it begins to spin up in a strong network effect. Thus Apache’s httpd server (who’s network effect of mindless adoption coupled with it’s rich community of complementary products and services) does drive out other web servers. It drifts toward becoming a physical object because it’s network effect has some physical qualities to it.

Open standards can help temper that effect; the HTTP standard does help avoid the entire web server market collapsing into a singularity. The vicious competitive attempts to make the HTML standard more proprietary go a long way toward explaining the near singularity that developed around Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. If your attempting to create public goods around info-stuff - closed standards enable scarcity, market, problem.

This is an amazing photograph. That group is formed by the photographer’s role as outsider. Try putting a name to each of those expressions; the variety is amazing.

I’ve been reading Tilly’s book about collective violence in tandem with Kotter’s book on Leading Change; they make for a volitile mixture in one’s head.
Tilly’s books create really big complex ideas that give you a lot to chew on. In this book he tries to capture a big model of what creates collective violence. I got to reading this because it’s another way to look at group forming. An example. Tilly enumerates a number of processes that can work to create collective volence; for example: us-them boundary activation. For example consider this quote: “… political entrepreneurs and violence specialists deliberately activated the Hutu-Tutsi boundary in 1994.” Add to that one this: “Jan 93- Mar 94: Rwanda imports about 580,000 machetes ..” Having read all that it’s hard for me to look at that photo without seeing a boundary standing ready to be activated. In that crowd stands an opportunity the worst kind of political entrepreneur. My brain starts humming that tune from South Pacific.

Kotter’s book is an entirely different kettle of fish. While Tilly writes from ivory tower Kotter is writing from the floor of the executive training workshop; i.e. you can almost taste the bad coffee of some luxury hotel’s conference center. Kotter is attempting to teach the art of being the political entrepreneurs; i.e. the skill of taking the large complex culture of an insitution or firm and move it into a newer more functional culture. This is skill demanded when your institution is on the threshold of getting displaced by change. But it is also the skill you need when you want to transform an existing group so it’s culture splices in new DNA that wasn’t there before.. The skills you’d need if you want to take the crowd in that photo and lead them someplace constructive.

The photo comes from here, via google image search. I keep trying to find images of groups, crowds, etc.

I’m a sucker for these models of a messy real world thing that attempt to explain it all; particularly if they include a drawing.

Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.