Wednesday, August 18, 2004
A little more on Irving L. Janis’s work on why competent capable groups focused on some crucial decision end up having a fiasco. His diagnosis of the what leads to a premature exit from the vigilant problem solving at the feet of arousal. Like the three bears the group fails because it is too hot [...]
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
When groups reach decisions in tough problem spaces it can be hard to get everybody in synch with the choice that’s been made. Sometimes this leads to folks wandering (even boiling) off. That almost always happens in an Open Source projects in the inter-version transitions. Sometimes it leads to the group splitting up. This is [...]
I used to hate shopping. Now I enjoy it as a form of sport, a game. It isn’t necessarily a good hobby. I spent a few hours on Friday saving 4 dollars! Your amazed, I can tell. I used a sniping tool to bid on 6 identical auctions. I got the object the fourth lowest [...]
Saturday, August 14, 2004
I’ve been looking for years. A beehive! An example in nature of a two sided network effect! It provides brokage, exchange, or agency between two classes (pistil and stamen). It draws off a tax (honey) for the maintainance of the hub (hive). Since these kinds of hubs become more valuable as more and more particpants [...]
Thursday, August 12, 2004
How to herd cats: tie a small bright object to a string; place it in the peripheral vision of the cat; and then pull it around a corner out of sight. Ben Laurie has been trying to entice me to pounce on tor. … I pounced yesterday morning. Tor helps to frustrate the man in [...]
Thursday, August 12, 2004
This paper by Steve Johnson is wonderful. I spend a lot of calories thinking about how groups form, but also about how groups create shape the membrane around them. I’m less interested in the organizational problems inside the cell, in part because there is so much liturature about that. Using the Dean campagn as a [...]
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Tim Oren appears to be suffering from sympathy. An unusual affliction for a VC. A handful of reasons why, Mr. Entrepreneur, your amazingly cool new innovation isn’t going to get funding: Cool demo! Great price point, what a leap forward! Man making stuff like this dependable is really hard work. You probably can’t see that, [...]
For any number of reasons I’m interested in middlemen and brokerage. Here are four ways that a broker might bring value to another group. Inform either side of interests or difficulties of the other. Import useful techniques, practices, tools. Draw analogies that the other group is blind to. Synthesis of techniques, practies, tools, ideas thru [...]
I underestimated how sticky Moveable Type is. Vendors love things that make their product sticky. If developers really appreciated this software products would be even more sticky. Instead developers hate sticky; they call it things like “backward compatiblity” or “legacy.” Maintaining the sticky bits is a pain. Platform developers have the worst of it because [...]
I like it because it saves typing. There was a good example of a 20-line Java program that was reduced to 3 lines in Groovy. I’ve lost the link though. — Script Musings That’s the problem. Tiny programs are so easy to misplace. The entire corpus of APL programs was practically whipped out back in [...]
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