Brad DeLong informs us that:
"Paradise" is derived from the Old Persian word for the wall around an enclosed, irrigated garden. Xenophon mistook the word for the enclosing wall for the word for the garden-park itself, and here we are.
I don't see that explicitly in the OED; but it's too delightful. Oh, and I agree that the New York Times better tear down their garden wall if they want to remain the paper of record.
Tim Oren takes a poke at simplistic applications of Reed's law. I'd love to see a careful attempt to enumerate a long list of the barriers that frustrate the pipeline between Moore's law and his friends and the economic productivity improvements that so pop out much much latter.
It takes a long time for society to puzzle out how to harvest the opportunities generated by these guys. It often takes even longer for the society to figure out how to fold them into culture.
Tim's critique, while entirely valid, reminds me a bit of those famous quotes from the first few decades of computing about the upper limits on demand for computing. Will we think much the same thing about the arguments that there are limits on group forming in a few decades?
Yeah. Notice how the neat vs. scruffy debate in computer science is related to this:
Bricolage: "(French, 'doing odd jobs'). A characteristic (according to C. Levi-Strauss) of the early human mind, in contrast to modern scientific thinking. But bricolage is entirely rational (i.e. not pre-rational) in its own way. He introduced the term in The Savage Mind. A bricoleur is one who improvises and and uses any means or materials which happen to be lying around in order to tackle a task: 'The bricoleur is adept at executing a great number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools, conceptualized and procured specifically for this project; his instrumental universe is closed, and the rule of his game is to make do with the means at hand.' In the making of myth, bricolage is the use of whatever happens to be 'lying around,' so that myth is both rational and improvisatory." -- www.bloomington.in.us/~okolicko/definitions.html
The book I'm reading about Self Efficacy attempts to define efficacy but Garrison Keiler put it well: "The ability to get up and do what needs to be done." The book labors with some success to block out subspecies of efficacy. For example that ability to get stuff done within the limits of what is at hand v.s. the ability to get stuff done while bending the rules and reworking materials at hand.
I am effective if I bend a coat hanger to keep the hotel window held open at night. To me a coat hander is just a source of soft iron wire. To me that is an act of the first kind; a simple shaping of materials at hand. To the hotel it may appear instead a bit of rule bending bordering on vandalism. Category making in this kind of discussion ain't easy, which is why the book is labored and long - I guess.
Another suggested partitioning: efficacy via collective vs. individual action. The author reveals his personal and culture preference for the individual. b He sorts the individual before the collective. So in his view collective action is an exception handler for failed individual efficacy. Should the means above prove insufficient then you might shift over to collective action. Using politics to rewrite the rules presumably. That's too narrow a model of what collective action is good for; there is of course a bricolage of collective action.
All these means of achieving goals form camps: inside/bend/outside the rules; inside/outside the individual/collective boundary. The camps then lay claim to the generic labels primitive or modern, scruffy or neat. The scruffies in computer science have always worn the label with pride; like the some people wear the label hacker. But then a group's self label always means to entirely different things depending on the speakers membership in the group. When other non-programers call me a "programmer" they know not of what they speak.
Dragged a word into service from a foreign language, like bricolage, brings the possibility of freeing up the discussion. Maybe? We should replace the term hacker with bricoleur. I kind of like that Levi-Strauss was using it to suggest savage.
Yeah! Let's having an illustration.
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?
As I was walking down the back alley where this sign appears I was thinking about how you might go about organizing the community to get it paved. It's a muddy pothole ridden thing today. About 300 to 500 people would benefit. It wouldn't be expensive per person. It would make the alley more pleasant in the winter and the rain.
Then I came upon this sign.
My rule of thumb is that signs are a kind of social hacking, an attempt to get the system to work a bit better. They usually appear in response to some undesirable event. I'll leave it to your imagination which one triggered this nice big sign.
Some times the sign order you. Sometimes the signs warn you. This is a nice one. It's just an announcement. It's announcing the poster's opinion about how community member's are selflessness and do their communal duty. Actually I like the way that it's a little ambigous who's speaking; i.e. how legitimate their opinion might be.
It's like the difference between a sign that says "Vote!" and one that says "Citizens vote."
Facinating example, for an upper middle class american, of the maintenance of group norms.
The young Japanese civilians taken hostage in Iraq returned home this week, not to the warmth of a yellow-ribbon embrace but to a disapproving nation's cold stare.
Three of them, including a woman who helped street children on the streets of Baghdad, appeared on television two weeks ago as their knife-brandishing kidnappers threatened to slit their throats. A few days after their release, they landed here on Sunday, in the eye of a peculiarly Japanese storm.
"You got what you deserve!" read one hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. "You are Japan's shame," another wrote on the Web site of one of the former hostages. They had "caused trouble" for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced it would bill the former hostages $6,000 for air fare.
Now before I start muzing about this as an example of group membrane maintanance let me say that having watched documentaries about the US on television in Europe I'd take that entire story with a grain of salt. The actions of even a significant minority of people do not necessarily a nation make.
You can't have a group membrane without having some degree of exclusion; and sooner or later (usually later) your going to have top ostracize somebody. While it's amazing what a adaptible thing humans are and how different groups can have such amazingly different configurations of such stuff it get's you a mess of point on my cult score card when you become black and white about this kind of stuff.
It's often very hard to discern the source of shunning. Sometimes it's the inate fear that association will just lead to spreading infection. Sometimes it is necessary the maintenance of group norms. Sometimes it's just blame the victum or kill the messenger.
If anybody should want to think that such things don't happen in the US I would suggest they go back and read about the period around Vietnam; or some of the vitrolic things getting said about anybody that acts out against the war in Iraq; or this story about fast food resturant managers and their relationship to authority.
It's a classic problem solving technique to take some of the free variables in the problem space and nail them down. Holding something constant reduces the complexity of the search space. The designer may select what to pin down based on his rough estimate of the cost of manipulating that aspect of the system. For example the real estate developer may decide to treat the zoning laws as fixed, or he may decided to expend the effort to change them.
Clay has two postings this morning that illustrate examples of introducing scarcity intentionally to capture a longterm value for the system under design. This first quote is Clay's:
When they were re-building Parliment after WWII, Winston Churchill is (said to have) said “Whatever you do, don’t put enough seats in for everybody,” on the grounds that, in the old Parliment building, when some matter came up that was important enough for all the members of Parliment to show up at once, the place got uncomfortably crowded, which re-enforced the sense of urgency. The surface inadequacy provided deep value.and this second is Clay quoting Ward Cunningham.
The problem was that the abuser had too much time. He was too active and could get too worked up about things, so much that he had to fight.
So I put a post-limiter in place. People can only post so many times during a set time period. And it worked, almost straight away. We haven’t banned the abuser, merely limited his ability to post so that what he does post is more within the norms we can expect and deal with.
In both these cases the designer has shaped the community boundry and structure - engineered the membrane - so that the activity situated inside that structure will gain some benefit.
It would be fun to accumulate a laundry list of such devices. A catalog of social system design patterns in the tradition of a pattern language. It would also be an endless task since the set of them is infinite.
Let me play at that game a bit. Here are some examples.
Here's a little one: the other day I had to put up a wall to prevent some folks from borrowing an image. I would have prefered to do something bandwith limited like Ward describes with his problem but I lacked the time.
Here's a pretty big ornate one: firms have boards, executive teams, and outside accountants to help temper the probablity of foul play. That structure makes the entire enterprise much more irriatating to work inside; it's a designed in constraint on the operation.
Here's a huge one: the typical modern democratic state has many centers of various kinds of elite power and if you want to do anything substantial you need to get a significant porportion of them on board.
Here's a contrast between two similar ones. Open source projects and wikis both exhibit a bottleneck that contributions are forced flow thru on their way back into the project. The design of these bottlenecks creates costs and shifts responsiblities for aspects of the act of contributing between those who guard the public good and those who would like to adapt it. Wiki's have a low barrier - you have to be able to figure out how to edit using that wiki's text markup language. Open source tends to have a higher one - you have to figure out how to use CVS and create a diff for submissions. Wiki's tend to be more optomistic about their concurancy - putting more responsiblity on the guardians to be watchful. Open source tends to be queue up changes putting more responsiblity on the gate keepers to be responsive.
That one is at the heart of how you shape the nature of the exchange that take place across the community boundry. It gets into the particulars about what Doc Searles is talking about when he rails at traditional firms for failing to appreciate how their relationship to their customers is now a conversation rather than a communcation.
All this is the interesting otherside of the design of public goods. While it is primarilly the goal of the public good designer to create an abundance of options in these scenarios the designer is making selective choices about where to create scarcity so as to shape the adaptiblity, the safety, the efficency of exchange on borders, etc. etc.