Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I think I’m noticing something I’d not noted before about the statistics of the populations served by the standard. Some standards don’t scale the way you might expect them to. For example the B2B standards written in the 1980s and 1990s have not scaled. They are not used by small businesses. Bear with me as I build some substrate.

Exchange standards provide efficiencies for the transactions between parties. If we all adopt a similar handshake then we can have more handshakes at lower cost. Next up world peace.

In thinking about standards you can focus down on the details of the single exchange, but I find it more fascinating to shift up and think about the populations involved with the standards. For example consider selling a house. Down in the details you can pick apart the process steps taken by a buyer, seller, and middleman they do the transaction. Stepping back, at the real estate market level, look consider the three populations: house buyers, home sellers, and real estate agents.

Statistics gives us tools to talk about these populations. Even the simple statistics can illuminate some interesting things. For example we know that small populations are easier to organize and coordinate. In our example the smallest population is the real estate agents. When society comes to negotiate the rules (aka standards) for home sales the agents are much more likely to get their desires fufilled because they have an easier time getting their act together. The smallest of the three populations in any standard setting scenario have an advantage. That is a political reality.

Another simple statistic: some members of the population do more exchanges than others. The surprising fact is how skewed that is usually is. Some members do a lot more exchanges than others. Again and again when you look at the populations around these exchange standards you find a power-law distribution.

A cartoon approximation of a power law curve splits the population into two groups: the elites and the masses. In the blogging world they call the elite bloggers the A-list. (Sidebar about the risk of cartoons. This crude approximation is blind to the middle class. Blindness can do harm and so can approximations. That said, we return to the fun of this cartoon.)

The small size of the elite population has a political consequences exactly like the small population of realtors. The large transaction elite have power. For example, returning to the rules around real estate sales again, we can look at the population of house sellers for a high volume player - i.e. real estate developers. Not surprisingly they show up at the table to help set the rules.

Ok, so back to the to seemingly new thing.

What I’m noticing today is that there seems to be some very interesting to say about what happens about the correlation between two population statistics.

What happens if the elites tend mostly to exchange with only with each other? That’s what happened with the B2B standards that were written in the 1980s and 1990s. Large businesses say the benefits of getting standards in place to improve their efficiency. So they wrote all these standards that fit their needs. Today lots and lots of commerce takes place intermediated by those standards; but the majority of that commerce doesn’t involve small economic entities.

It’s probably worth ringing all the changes here, but that’s a project for another day. For example you get a particular kind of standard when there is a small concentrated elite on one side exchanging with a huge diffuse lower-class on the other.

If a standard is designed with only one class of players, large transactors say, then it won’t be well suited to the needs of the players who were not there when it was designed. I think that’s a very interesting insight.

Let’s go back to the example of the B2B standards designed in the 1980s and 1990s. Consider this design question: “How hard/expensive should it be to adopt this standard we are designing.” The answer the elites gave was “No more than two expert consultants for 3 months.” The answer the masses would have given: “Oh, $49.95 would be acceptible.” There is a third group at the table. The guys that design and implement the standards, i.e. the vendors. Their answer is always “As much as possible.” So the B2B standards of that era got designed with a high adoption cost, i.e. they are standards with very high barrier to entry.

This doesn’t always happen. Sometimes a standard comes out of the masses. As SMTP or HTTP did. Small players solving a problem that then got widely adopted. Such standards have their own problems; for example they may not scale well for the traffic patterns that the elite players experience. If you fear the power-law’s tendency to concentrate power you might like this kind of standard. If your trying to consolidate a market you might prefer the other kind of standard making.

At one point in David Weinberger’s delightful after dinner speech he’s working thru some thoughts on ontologies and tagging by describing how odd the 200’s are in the Dewey Decimal system. “The Buddhists, their to the right of the decimal point.”

He then asks why hasn’t this been fixed. The short answer is “immovable installed base,” but Dave has much more fun with it by asking his listeners to visualize librarians slowly scrapping the white paint off the back of millions of volumes as they convert to the upgraded version.

Two things came to mind when I read that. First is the way that a finite field of integers creates scarcity, so if there are only N digits in the product bar code you must establish a central registry and that in turn creates a hub, which in turn creates a point of power. The fixed sized fields for IP numbers are another example. Even if you design for unlimited abundance, as for example the domain name system strived to do, you still get forces that lead to scarcity. It’s nice to have a short domain name. It’s nice to own .com.

The second thing that came to mind was how the immovable installed base is on the one hand the object of desire. What the capitalist is seeks to own. Since immovable installed base is but another name for loyal users. While on the other hand it is what the many fear. The careful designer of an ontology lives in fear his legacy will not be the next Dewey Decimal system but rather that he shunted the 360 Million Buddhists to the right of the decimal point. This gives him pause, it slows him down.

The puzzles, not to be lightly tossed aside, are thus. Does the internet’s culture of abundance sufficiently lowers this risk that our designer can to set this particular fear? How do we preclude the key ontologies from being privately owned in the way that Westlaw owns the pointers into all case law.

Dave Weinberger gives a very nice after dinner speech!

nota bena: any illusions about said ethos maybe set aside by this

My father liked to order things off the menu he had never eaten and then cheerfully attempt to get his children to try them. This is a cheerful kind of cruelty that I have inherited. We often told the story in later years of the time we ordered sea urchins in a dingy chinese restaurant in New York. The consensus was that the sea urchins weren’t actually dead when they got to the table. They would go in your mouth and when they discovered you were attempting to chew on them they would quickly flee to the other side of your mouth. Being a very low life form once you had succeeded in biting them in two your reward was two panic sea urchins in your mouth.

I’m reminded of this story by the fun people are having with neologisms these days. For example blog, or folksonomy. A neologism is rarely a very highly evolved creature, which makes it hard to pin down. But there in lies the fun. You can have entire conferences about a single word because collectively nobody really knows what the word means. These littoral zones are full of odd creatures. The tide of Moore’s law and his friends keeps rising. The cheerfully cruel keep finding things to order off the menu.

But, before I got taken prisoner by that nostalgic reminding, what I want to say something about is this definition of ontology that Clay posted this morning.

The definition of ontology I’m referring to is derived more from AI than philosophy: a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. (Other glosses of this AI-flavored view can be found using Google for define:ontology.) It is that view that I am objecting to.

Now I don’t want to get drawn into the fun that Clays having - bear baiting the information sciences.

What I do want to do is point out that the function of these “explicit specifications of a shared conceptualization” is not just to provide a an solid outcome to the fun-for-all neologism game.

The purpose of these labors is to create shared conceptualizations, explicit specifications, that enable a more casual acts of exchange between parties. The labor to create an ontology isn’t navel gazing. It isn’t about ordering books on the library shelves. It isn’t about stuffing your books worth of knowledge, a tasty chicken salad between two dry crusts - the table of contents and the index.

It’s about enabling a commerce of transactions that take place upon that ontology. Thus a system of weights and measures is an ontology over the problem of measurement and enables exchanges to take place without having to negotiate from scratch each time, probably with the help of lawyer, the meaning of a cord each time you order fire wood. And, weights and measures are only the tip of the iceberg provide the foundation for efficient commerce.

But it’s not just commerce, ontology provide the vocabulary that enables one to describe the weather all over the planet and in turn predict tomorrow’s snow storm. It provides the the opportunity to notice the planet is getting warmer and to decide that - holly crap - it’s true!

To rail against ontology is to rail against both the scientific method and modern capitalism. That’s not a little sand castle on the beach soon to be rolled over by the rising tide. Unlike say Journalism v.s. blogs, it’s not a institution who’s distribution channel is being disintermediated by Mr. Moore and his friends. Those two are very big sand castles. They will be, they are being, reshaped by these processes but they will still stand when it’s over.

What really caught my attention in Clay’s quote was “shared conceptualizations.” Why? Because sharing, is to me, an arc in a graph; and that means network, which means network effect, which means we can start to talk about Reed’s law; power-laws, etc. It implies that each ontology forms a group in the network of actors. To worry about big, durable, or well founded these groups are it to miss the point of what’s happening. It’s the quantity, once again, that counts.

What we are seeing around what is currently labeled as folksonomy is a bloom of tiny groups that have rendezvous around some primitive ontology. For example consider this group at flickr. A small group of people stitching together a quilt. Each one creating a square. They are going to auction it on eBay to raise funds for tsunami victims. For a while they have taken ownership of the word quilt.

What’s not to like? The kinds of ontology that is emerging in examples like that is smaller than your classic ontologies. These are not likely to predict global warming, but they are certainly heart warming.

This is the long tail story from another angle. The huge numbers, excruciating mind boggling diversity, billions and billions of tiny effects that sum up to something huge.

The best uses of the internet connect two halves to make a whole. This maybe the best example yet of this matchmaker design pattern.

Thanks to Mimi who is currently showing how to skin a cat. Backward!