Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Fascinating. EBay is eliminating seller’s ability to give buyers negative feedback. Nicer for buyers, worse for sellers. That’s really the tip of the changes. Amazingly they have noted that sellers leave negative feedback eight times more often than buyers. And it seems like they are going to substitute some more private in house means of giving sellers a way to negatively effect buyer reputations.

I love the PR speak: “Donahoe revealed that eBay will update its feedback system to reinforce healthy, vibrant trading and keep bringing buyers back to eBay.” It appears they have noticed that when buyers get negative feedback they don’t come back.

Markets work if there is a balance of buyers and sellers. So, presumably as market maker eBay had decided it to make it more attractive to buy. This is analogous to how the credit card companies presume the buyer is right and the seller is wrong when disputed payments arise.

Buyer reputation isn’t as actionable as you might think. Sellers must accept bids, even if the buyer has a lousy reputation. Buyer reputation is more important if the buyer is also seller; but that’s pretty rare.

Watching the soon to be CEO of eBay speak to their top 200 sellers at their eCommerce forum is fascinating. This is an elite club, no doubt they account for a huge slice of eBay’s income. He, in effect, tells some of these 200 that they won’t be kicked out of the club. The real meat of what they are thinking is hidden in this talk; though you have to suffer through a lot of organizational change. All that change is a signal of how significant the changes they are into.

For their elite sellers they are setting up very significant carrots and sticks (they call that motivate and reward). They appear to be very concerned about how some bad sellers are causing buyers to flee. Discounts on fees for well behaved elite sellers. Search engine ranking that disadvantages lower reputation sellers, elite and other.

It is interesting that they are setting standards to raise the tone of the market place. This is one of the kinds of standards settings that I find most interesting. For example how the airline industry once agreed to set a floor on exactly how lousy a “sandwich” can be. I’m more interested in the collaborative cases where floors, for example professional ethics, are introduced.

This is mostly a publicist’s piece in about a web site that sells to apartment building owners a web site where their tenants can network.  I’m impressed that the vendor can sell these to landlords.  Most landlords know better than to let their tenants help organize against him.  I recall as story from years ago about a landlord suing a site because his property had such awful ratings.  There is a nice success story near the end of the article about a child birth counselor getting a lot of buisness by advertising via the site.

My town of 40 thousand people has a surprisingly successful email list.  It survives because there a tremendous pool of people here who know how to manage an email list of this kind.  Replicating that success, using volunteers, would be hard.  In time such skill will be more common place, in the meantime I find it somewhat more plausible that a firm could do it.

Great quote.

You’ve just got to keep reminding yourself that control is failure. — Daniel Taylor

That probably sums up my theory of both parenting and technical management.
The quote appears in Deep Economy.  Taylor’s president of Future Generations a 3-4 Million dollar a year nonprofit working in Afganistan, China, Peru, and India on programs.   The idea is to create seeds by aiding communities to activate problem solving on a problem, and then to replicate that across regions to achieve scale.

Here’s another quote: “Change happens not because of how we invest our money.  Change happens because of how we invest our human energy.”  I don’t think that’s quite right.  It’s right to focus on the human energy; coordinating that is the hardest part.  A franchise business model solves this by creating a ridge structure and channeling the labor through that.  But what does he mean by “our human energy;”  if we means by that the community members then yes.  If he means by that the organizers then not so much.

The first quote is a delight because it’s clear he knows that when you create these systems you can’t prescribe how the human energy will be coordinated; you can only attempt to create a context in which that coordination emerges.  This is particularly necessary when you maybe uncertain what problem your solving, how your going to solve it, and what issues will arise as soon as you get into it.  At that point you want frameworks that enables the human energy to remain engaged.  At that point it’s unlikely control is going to be much help.
Oh sure, there are of course are plenty of systems where control is a means to success.  Your lucky if you’ve got one of those, since such systems scale more easily.  Once you get them blocked out you can replicate them: some standards, some mass produced capital equipment, some training, some quality metrics, some architectures of control.  You see lots of that in large scale franchising.  And it appears that to a degree the folks at Future Generations do just that.  If their seeding attempt succeeds they attempt to replicate the pattern for solving a problem developed in the first community into others.  Stamping out of duplicates.  But the problems they are grappling with requires much more adaptable problem solving schemes; so I suspect that the duplicates feature substantial variation.

Interesting.  This is a kind of grass roots franchising model.  If one community puzzles out how to run a farmer’s market, a community tool shed, a library, a wifi network, knitting circle, etc. etc. then others can mimic that.  That’s interesting is that there probably is a valid two step process here.  In the first phase you need to attempt to get a solution to emerge that works for community members, at all.  In the second stage you want to strive to get it to replicate.  These probably call on different kinds of entrepreneurial skills.  But the build out is where you can create really significant change.

Boy, I’m late to this party! Freebsd’s usual file system, UFS (unix file system), has snapshots. It’s had them for years. I wonder why MacOS doesn’t appear to have them? In anycase, these are great!
There is a nice tool kit for managing them be found in ports freebsd-snapshot. Written by an old friend too. That gets you 95% of the value of a netapp. So, now I have hourly and daily snapshots of all my main file systems and can trivially recover lost files and do diffs of things like log files. e.g diff /snap/var:hourly.1/log/messages /var/log/messages.  Suddenly it is easy and cheap to see what happen recently.

This is also a big help in doing proper backups; i.e. you can backup snapshots. Orchustrating a good snapshot for backup purposes is a nice programming puzzle. You want to tell every running process to flush it’s state to disk and to lock out changes during while you make the snap. That’s a lot easier if the file system supports snapshots. Of course this flush to disk and lock intervals should create a suitable restart/recovery point for the application. You can see example here for doing just that with mysql as the application.

Here’s an amusing thought.  Quoted over at calculated risk: “We’ve attracted a lot of borrowers who are really renters … It is disheartening as a servicer to see the willingness [to walk away] … [borrowers] simply don’t care.”

Ha!  The bankers have disintermediated the landlord; and like usual when you cut out a middleman you discover, a while later that he had a function which surprise surprise you now have to fill.  And since you haven’t been filling that role well to date there are more surprises to come.  No doubt there is a business opportunity there; a variant of the condo management companies, but this time beholding to the bank rather than the condo board.