Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’ve been continuing to fool around with internet telephony. The last few weeks I’ve been fooling around with the GPL/open-source PBX software called Asterisk. PBX stands for “private branch exchange.” When ever your inside some organization that has phone extensions then there is almost certainly a PBX someplace nearby that is routing the calls from one extension to another and when necessary routing them out to the rest of the world.

It was trivial to install asterisk on one of my basement FreeBSD machines. But it has one of those configuration languages that only a old time phone maven could love. So mostly it’s been pain and suffering to get it do what I want. But I now have voice mail, and can dial out to the real phone system thru it. I keep breaking it in subtle ways or having mysterious lossage. Fun bleeding edge stuff.

This is a facinating example of a new hub displacing an old hub. The old hub; the classic phone system has a set of regulatory organizations that solved the severe coordination problems that the industry faced in the early years; and continues to face. The cost structures of the firms and these regulatory bodies is all in doubt now that the Internet has shown up with an entirely different cost structure.

I spend about 25$ a month on phone service at my house. If I set this all up and shifted my phone service to this new model I could probably lower that to around 10$ or 15$. So may $150 bucks a year. That gives you a sense of what the potential energy is that is pushing this transition. It also make clear that what I’m doing is a hobby and not a wily cost savings.

One part of my costs would be the cost of buying a dependable real world phone number and getting it routed to basement open source PBX. That runs about 5$ or 10$ a month. There is one charitable dude who will give you a free public phone number, but it’s in a different state so it would scare off my local calling friends.

One part of my costs would be the cost getting access out to the real phone system. That runs about 2-3 cents a minute. There are plenty of vendors who sell that service so lots of commodity pricing pressure.

Sometimes you can avoid routing a call into the real phone system and send it for free just over the internet. For example I have a friend who has bought phone service from Vonage and when I call him my PBX figures that out and routes the call directly to him without recourse to the regular phone system. That’s rare right now, but as the old system is displaced by the new system this will become a more common case.

My little hobby PBX in the basement currently doesn’t have any direct connection to the real phone system. It only talks to the Internet. I use services that other people provide. They can connect to the real phone system.

I could connect to the real phone system by buying something and wiring it up to my basement machine. Then when I made calls my PBX could decide if the cheapest route was to use the household’s real phone or to go out over the Internet.

Which brings us to an oportunity for collective cooperative actions. If I had such a card I could allow other folks with basement PBXs to call out thru my household phone. Doing that would require some amount of infrastructure to coordinate the sharing. For example I’d prefer to share my phone only when I knew that there was yet another phone in my region I could share if I needed to make an outbound call. I’d prefer to share my phone with some market aspect so that freeloading is limited. But those aren’t terrible hard problems. Similar systems have existed for a long time for faxing sharing.

I’m interested in how groups form. It’s frustrating, most of the literature about groups is fixated on how they rot or how the gears in mature ones mesh. For example you can read floors of books on revolution. There is very little on what happens after the revolution. There is also a lot of thinly veiled liturature targeted at the frustration of people attempting to change some existing group.

One thing groups do as they mature is they being to lay in various rules, procedures, practices, rituals, etc. to compensate for and temper assorted problems that have emerged as the group matured. Clay Shirky and Dave Weinberg both gave very nice talks about how groups emerge and and undergo constitutional crisis.

A friend asked the other day. Constitutional crisis? Body or law? A bit of both, I guess. The first constitutional crisis of a group is clearly of the body, a fever. If they go thru the fever, as versus backing off from it, then governance begins to emerge. From then on the body’s fevers and the rule rework engage in a kind of systolic ebb and flow.

To take a simple example consider the community around a Wiki. They initially allow any and all to drop in and add/maintain content. Inevitably something unfortunate happens. They then might institute some coordination device that helps to assure all changes get proofread by at least somebody within a week of going into the shared document.

This is the moment in the life of a group when the individuals in the group agree to relinquish some authority to the collective group. That’s possible only because the individuals have come to value the goods group is managing to create. (Well possibly some overarching authority might command that relinquishing, but let’s ignore that.) This adds a little refinement to the life cycle of the common cause around which a group rondevous.

Kieran Healy has a nice posting about professionalism. It includes this quote: “Professionalism is about relinquishing something.” That’s not limited to professionalism; that’s part of the price of membership in mature groups.

Which brings me to a puzzle. I’m confused by a regular pattern I observe when I watch others trying to create new communities. They proceed in what appears to me to be a kind of cargo cult behavior. Where they proceed build a runway and then a plane out of old fruit crates. They then you stand back and wait for the manna of vibrant community to fall from heaven. It’s sort of a magic build it and they will come ritual.

For example communities that start by specifying their proffesional behavior (no sleeping with clients), a constitutional document (a vote of 3/4 shall be required for a rules change), a mission statement, etc. Isn’t this backward?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been invited to the launch of some effort and the first the organizers put on our plate is to write a mission statement, or adopt a set of operating procedures. I’m beginning to think this is always the cart before the horse.

I can sympathize. People do this because they are looking for exercises the group can engage in. Exercises that will begin to build muscle. Muscle that represents the groups cohesion. Writing mission statements seems like just the ticket because it looks like it will help the common cause to emerge; and common cause is central to getting a community to rondevous. It just seems that you need to have the Boston tea party before you have the constitutional convention. Party first, constitutional convention second. Best practice?

I was quite disappointed by the apology that appeared recently in the New York Times. This version by their “public editor” is better.” I certainly hope they aren’t finished with this soul searching. I might prescribe some bleeding, drain the noxious humors from the corporate body.

I think they got it right. Mostly.

Mostly?

This is a list of ways not to give sympathy.
I collected this list from Ms. Manners a long time ago. Since then I’ve reworked it some and added some more.

• Pangloss - it is all for the best
• Affirm’s this is a just world - “Probably deserved it…”  “If only he had stopped”
• Relativism - “You know, it could be worse.”
• Competition - “You think you’ve got troubles!  Let me tell you about my …”
• Emotional Vampire - “Go ahead feel bad!  Cry!  I’m here for you.”
• Not a Quiter - “I’m sure this will only lead you to redouble your efforts.”
• Predjudice - “Ah that’s how people like you deal with this, eh?”
• Distraction - “Ah, how ’bout those Red Sox!”

Since we are on the topic I might as well mention the right thing to do.

“I’m so sorry, I just want you to know I’m here for you.”  and actually doing something is better.

These can be used to construct a very silly joke of the exaggerated kind. Something very minor happens. For example: “Oh, we are out of milk!” you then trot out the full set one after another. “Well it’s probably for the best. We probably don’t deserve milk. You think that’s trouble why my toast is cold! …” This works best if you can the entire family to join in.
Next time something bad happens to you, see if you can collect the whole set.

I’ve been thinking about roles in the economy of ideas. Three roles: those that make ideas, those that consume them, but most importantly the idea middlemen.

I’m reasonably sure it was one of Paul Krugman early books that introduced me to the idea of the Policy Entrepreneur. These folks are middlemen between those who do and those who know; i.e. their suppliers are smart people who think about how we might fix a hard problem, were new oportunities are emerging, etc. etc. Their customers are the people with the resources - policical, social, capital, etc - to act on those oportunities. They are entrepenuers because they are striving to trigger big transformations; what might be called disruptive changes.

Here’s a nice example of how a frustrated policy entrepeur might spin a sentence: “it’s fascinating (particularly towards the end) as a study of how a closed belief system reacts to the introduction of fact-backed heresy. Since the human race in general and technology profession in particular tend to the development of closed belief systems” That is Tim Bray. Sam who quoted it immediately followed that with a posting about getting it done.

When Krugman first wrote about this he was very much a member of the idea supplier class. His description of the Policy Entrepeneural class was dripping with the usual distaste for the middleman. He complained. The Policy Entrepreneur tends to sell an inventory of spoiled goods from the the last decade of ideas. The ideas that have spoiled in his warehouse. Ideas he has stripped them down and repackaged to their in service of making them into talking points that the customer could comprehend. The ironies in that run deep. Krugman is and economist, who might be expected to have some repect for the middleman, and in the years since while holding onto his stature in the knowledge creating class he has become a premier member of the middleman class.

A fair critque. But, that’s what all marketing departments do with the elegant output of engineering. That’s their job.

The knowledge suppliers are not the only ones who complain about the Policy Entrepreneurs. The customers, those that do because they have the resources to do so, complain that the Policy Entrepreneurs are uninformed by the realities of actually execution - which is of course the case by definition. For example in the first comment of this posting Dave Winer shuns Clay Shirky’s insights about power-law distributions in the blogging world because Clay doesn’t have the same hard won calluses that Dave has. “I finally figured out what I don’t like about Clay’s pitch. It’s not fair that Clay, who hasn’t made the investment in blogging himself, should try to control what happens in blogs.”

Here’s another example of the voice of the middleman. In this case after the fact. “But, for example, the other day at a conference someone very sweetly thanked me, crediting Cluetrain as the inspiration for the company he’d founded. That’s great to hear, but it also invokes my Flight or Polite instinct.”
That’s Dave Weinberger talking about cluetrain.

What really impressed me more about Dave’s posting was that he voices another thing I think is always true about the middleman. The middleman knows where he sits in the supply chain, in the fabric of ideas. So Dave writes: “Cluetrain tried to articulate ideas that were just below the surface (and occasionally above the surface) in the Web community, but now the co-authors sometimes get credit for the ideas.”

Consider for example eBay. eBay doesn’t sell anything; it enables the selling. Consider google. Google doesn’t know anything; it enables you to find things other people know. The middleman bridges. Or, to use Dave’s nice turn of phrase, in the case of the Policy Entrepreneur, the middleman helps to reach below the surface and articulate what the we know so we can act upon it.

Can’t we just all get along?