Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

A conversation with Brian reveals the interesting insight that many products emerge first as situated software; to use Clay’s delightful term.

Consider for example MovableType. It emerged situated in the intersection of the set of people that could install Perl and the set of people who manifested a desire to rant (or reveal). For the longest time that community of people both limited it’s growth but at the same time forgave it any number of short comings. Finally the folks who wrote it budded off TypePad which eliminated a the Perl expertise portion from the embedded situation.

If you want to get dragged into conversation about membrane design again then you can turn up the knob and rant about how that’s another example of how public goods can be captured by private entities. But that’s somebody else’s rant.

All this is analogous to Clayton Christensen’s rants about how disruptive products seem to always emerge serving unserved customers. Such customers are both forgiving of the products short comings and they provide a strong demand signal that helps to shape the product that emerges. Both of these are necessary preconditions for creating something new.

Oh no, there are now two dudes named Clay in this posting; what’s up with that!

In any case.

Another point to make about situated software is this balance between a forgiving environment and a strong signal that helps the software to adapt.

The challenge in making a thing survive over time is getting it to adapt.

So among the benefits that a piece of situated software draws from it’s environment is this adaptive advantage. More forgiveness. Better feedback.

One reason that real world software is so much harder is that it’s unforgiving. One reason that Windows has thrived is that they have demanded a high level of forgiveness from their users. They get to do that because of the monopoly.

Economists should stop being so fixated on the pricing advantages a monopoly captures and turn their attention to the adaptive advantages. Oh wait, I’m getting dragged back into the membrane design discussion; I hate that discussion.

Clay’s new essay about what he calls situated software is very important. He is saying something new about software. I don’t think he’s run the idea to ground yet, which makes it even more fun.

He says the idea arose out of observing how his students executed an assignment - build a web app useful to our local community. The key insight was that some of these applications leveraged the complement of that assignment - build a web app that makes use of the local community.

Clay is close to asking a question that I’ve been puzzling about in various forms for the last few years. If we embrace that group membranes are a good thing then what kinds of things are possible inside of the membrane? It is hard to get to this question since so much energy is devoted to worrying over the membranes.

Clay frames that question by introducing the idea that there is a class of software that we could call “situated software.” Software that’s inside the membrane. Software that is dependent on the social contract or physical reality it runs inside of. He contrasts this with what he names “web school” software; i.e. software designed to run in cold cruel world, the globalized, firewall free world. That other world is, of course, interesting because the huge audiences create the chance at minimum of drawing on a huge sample space of users, and at the maximum of spinning up huge network effects. But yeah! Ignore that. What if I want to create software that empowers huge numbers of groups.

You can reduce what Clay’s saying in this essay; should you want to, by could mapping it into various conventional frameworks. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we take care to avoid killing the baby. Clay even does some of that in the tail end of the essay.

To some extent the idea is like personalization; i.e. software that adapts to it’s users. To some extent it’s like localization; i.e. software that adapts to the culture of it’s users. To some extent it’s like the things that we too casually repeat about the democratization of software development; i.e. that exciting things happen when users are empowered to author their own solutions.

I have gotten a degree of milage out of that last one. It gives you a long series of historical events you can pick apart. In each you can look at the social unfolding of what happens when software becomes more local. Lots of examples: minicomputers, PCs, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, drum machines, Hypercard…. Clay’s essay makes me tempted to go back and think about each of them again as a “localization event,” as enabling situated software to emerge. That’s more inward looking, which is what I want, than my usual model for these, (i.e. undermine the ivory towers).

He talks about how one of the student applications, a market making app, could skip having to build the module we find in market-makers like eBay which try to reify the buyer/seller reputations. His student’s applications could gloss over that because the local community’s reputation system was already available. It was in the platform so to speak.

That reminded me of how often I’ve encountered in-house one of a kind systems with no training materials what so ever. You do occasionally hear complaints about the lack of training materials (or doc); but generally the social networks of the organization are entirely sufficient to make up for the lack of doc. In fact I’m reasonably confident that the lack of doc often turns out to be something of a positive for both the local social network’s health and the applications in question. At minimum it makes adapting the applications easier. Documentation has a tendency to be like a coating of varnish making an application shinny and immovable.

Similarly he talks about another sample application where the problem of how to manage the dialog with your users is solved by physical presence. In what he calls “web school” or real internet application that problem bleeds into the entire can of worm around email preference management and privacy policies. Who in their right mind asks their bank to send them more email?

In the example he gives the students built kiosks put them in a public space, devices with minimal UI. Both the minimal UI and the use of public space are things I’ve noticed too. The first time I noticed it was with spreadsheets - an early success at software democratization. You would not believe the percentage of spreadsheets that contain no calculation what so ever; instead they live their lives as ritual artifacts placed on a table in a meeting. (information radiator, is a similar story).

Thanks Clay!

I see that Kevin Drum is reenforcing the hair-on-fire meme around Richard Clarke’s testimony. He stoops to suggesting Clarke is suffering from “monomania.” Kevin even signs on to the “clinton-bush-same-policy” meme.

How can Bush and Clinton have had the same policy if Al Quida was the #1 or #2 foreign priority of the Clinton administration while the Bush administration didn’t manage to have a meeting about it until September? How can they be the same policy when Rice’s essays on what is and isn’t important leading into up to their take over barely even mention terrorism and when they do it’s only in the context of state sponsors.

The hair-on-fire meme is the most serious accusation, but it’s only one of many so far. So far, the opponents of Mr. Clarke have suggested he’s gay, and that he’s picking on a black woman, that he’s a lier, a opportunist, … we could go on. So possibly we shouldn’t be too concerned if the mud that sticks is that he is a “true believer,” a man with a mission. But I think that terribly misses the point.

I’ve been thinking recently that one aspect of this story is how a liberal organization v.s. a conservative one responds when a guy enters the room and announces there is a huge unrecognized problem. For a liberal organization the response is “Sigh, another constituency. Ok, tell me your story and we will see what we can do.” For a conservative organization the reaction is “Calm down my son. Your problem is covered in our model, which has worked for years and will endure for many more.”

So it’s entirely consistent that Clarke was able to get a hearing and make his case in the Clinton administration. In the Bush administration he was considered just another one of those people with their hair on fire.

When ever any large institution changes course the social network of the people involve will have people out in front of the change and people that lag far behind and cling to the old ways. The folks out in front are always characterized as being over the top. Recall that enthusiasm was, until recently, a sin: to believe yourself full of the breadth of the lord. What distinguishes a healthy organization from a stagnant one is that it manages to filter thru the various enthusiasms and integrate in the ones that it must.

Institutions that fail to adapt act progressively more and more dysfunctional as the world around them changes and they don’t. At first this dysfunction is indistinguishable from all the usual background noise of the real world. In time it becomes sharper as the mismatch becomes more severe. Finally it is fatal.

It is clear that the Clinton administration was adapting and it’s clear that the Bush administration was not. Further it’s clear that as the signals from the real world became stronger the Bush administration retreated into their classic old models of how to address the problem.

There was a failure of the Bush administration to pick up the ball from the Clinton administration. Worse yet when they finally found the ball on fire on their front door they reacted by heading off in entirely the wrong direction. Feeding the supply chain of the terrorist networks with huge pool of outraged young men.

Ok so now we have a guy, Clarke, who was one of the folks on the fore front of trying to get the institution to change. He labors for years to help the ship of state change course. He makes significant progress. He suffers a set back when the new administration arrives. Over the months it becomes clear that he’s not getting thru to these people. They are deeply loyal to their model of the world and he’s not managing to get their attention.

Then the horrible day. No longer is his hair on fire, now the lawn out front’s on fire. What do they do? They go in entirely the wrong direction.

What would you do at that point? He did exactly what any well practices organizational specialist would do. He engaged in “object shift.” He looked for a different venue in which to make the case. This time he shifted the discussion to the public sphere. Is that excessive enthusiasm, monomania? No that’s effective workman like organizational grunt work.

We owe this guy a huge debt. To engage in projection and suggest that he’s suffering from narrow minded religious passions is the worst kind of insult. It paints him with the same brush we might appropriately select to paint religious terrorists, the oklahoma bombers, and possibly even the neo-cons.

What a nice term this is: Information Radiator. I’ve often very successfully solved some organizational problem by creating just such a device. More than once I’ve improved the quality of a large piece of software by just creating a concise report of current status and placing in someplace were people would notice it. The trick, from my point of view, is less to collect the data than how you manage to present it. The less ink the report uses per item of information the better. The more the report shows change or summary scores the better.

But the best thing about that term “information radiator” is how it so nicely sums up that you want something that’s not to hot not to cold. Something that changes the temperature. Something that draws attention to it’s self; but doesn’t burn.

(via Brian Marick)

These are delightful. Various snow/ice constructions. If you click on the thumbnails you get enlargements; if you click on the gallery you can see all the various entries.