Sam’s talk on organizing the Atom standardization activity via a Wiki is quite nice.

Even if you have a desperate community of people yearning for some kind of exchange it is an amazingly complex coordination task finding creating the concrete standard. But, there are few patterns for solving this problem. I’m very impressed by the Atom story. It really looks like we have a new pattern, a more open pattern.

One example one of the patterns people use is to create standards: a small elite group of invited members gathers to create a first draft of the standard. This can work. It approach is not without risks. Even in the absense of bad actors it creates standards biased toward the roles represented by the members of the elite group. All exchange standards have buyers, sellers, and middlemen. When buyers and the middlemen design the standard it’s unlikely to be a best fit for the sellers. Of course all standards activities have to guard against the risk of a stick-up.

The negotiation literature suggests that one way to resolve messy multiparty negotiations is to rondevous around a single document. The Wiki fufills that role. The liturature also suggests having that document cared for by a neutral party. Sam ended up holding that bag. In the talk he uses the term lightning rod; I visualize that at that point in the talk his smoking hair stands up on end and smoke comes out of his ears. The classic example of this pattern was Switzerland, a landlocked country, acting as steward of the Treaty of the Sea. Sam wasn’t entirely a neutral party; but he was a sufficently minor player in the market that other parties didn’t see him as plotting a stick-up; well most of them didn’t.

One of my cartoons for open source is that it’s a substitute for standards making. That a portable body of code is a surprisingly good means get to a standardized way of solving some problem. The code acts as the common-document around which the parties can coordinate their efforts.

But I then tend to say that open source doesn’t know how to do standardization. That we haven’t yet managed to write any new standards using the work patterns of open source. That new standards tend to be written the using the old design patterns. That’s why the Atom example is so thought provoking; it looks like a first case of an open source style of working on a nearly pure standardization problem.

Sam was very close to totally open. Everybody with a stake was welcome to come on down. While that was helped by the highly fragmented and rapidly growing market this standard was targeted into I’m still impressed that it seems like it worked. That’s so cool.

All my friends are sexy. Well, those in Orkut are. Well, they would be but Safari can’t believe it; so it crashes about half way down the list. Maybe it’s a particular friend in the list? Maybe Safari knows something I don’t know?

I was quite taken by David Weinberg’s comment over at many-to-many that prisoner’s in solitary confinement will tap on the walls to communicate with each other. It was just after that that I noticed the amusing way that in Orkut people are finding ways to hear thru the walls of their rating system; so they can figure out what the rules of the road are.

Orkut’s autistic model of a person is trust/cool/sexy. Those linked to you can vote on a scale from 0 to 3 on each of these. To help keep these votes slightly anonymous they don’t display your score (which is just the sum of all the votes you’ve recieved) until you have accumulated at least five votes.

One way that standards of behavior emerge is by mimicing the behaviors of others. If your friends are into the high-five then it’s likely your going to mimic that. If your friends use jargon or cuss a lot you’ll get with the program so as to create cohesion in the group.

Some group standards, like the common handshake, are more coersive than others, like wearing the same color ties. Exchange standards, like handshakes, force the two parties into conformance at least for the duration of the exchange. Where as a the community uniform only signals membership and always has some non-conformance around the edges. Well, to be perfectly honest and remembering the alpha-male behaviors revealed during some handshakes, you get a lot of non-conformance around exchange standards as well.

In anycase people in a community labor to conform to the community’s standards as part of contributing to the public good established inside that community. And since we all know there are risks of being talked-about, scolled, shunned, ostracized, or beaten up in the play ground, if we fail to get with the program.we all expend energy puzzling out what the community rules are.

So I’ve noticed that most people in orkut seem to vote either zero or three. And I suspect that they tend give the same vote to all their associates. I infer this from the tendency of my scores to step forward in units of three. People seem to vote early, but not often.

It looks to me like a lot of people have decided to either opt-out of the rating system; or they have decided to turn all the dials to eleven. The second choice seems kind of friendly than the first; though both signal that we’re too cool to take this autistic model of acquantance seriously.

This is not dissimilar from the tendency of eBay ratings to be effusive and over the top; or a similar patten I’ve noticed at epinions. I don’t think I quite know what this says about the hypothisis that diffuse internet based rating systems can displace proffesional reviewers – a theory I generally agree with. But, you just can’t stop them – people trend toward nice and cooperative.