Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This talk by Clay Shirky is a basicly the first bit of his book performed live.

He cut from the book the suggestion that the phase transition we are going thru is going to lead to chaos.

I don’t recall hearing before the delightful idea that Institution rely of carrots and sticks, but that if you want to tap into the the long tail of one off contributors you can’t do that, making the long tail a no carrots, no stick zone. That is very line nice. While it’s probably not true, since systems that work by filtering value out of that thin soup of long tail contributors can to a lot to manage their incentive structures, it is a very good rough approximation of the right mindset.

Sam is doing the hard job, striving to find a workable framework, a firm vocabulary, but grows suspicious that the watery tart will have the last laugh.

Here’s an amusing business tactic: lock out the customers. You know the drill. You visit the website, log-in, and the vendor inserts an extra page forcing you to provide your missing zip code, or what ever. “Our data quality is more important than your time.”

So this company, a health club, locked their patrons out of the club. If they went to the desk they were told that their account was missing their email address.

It’s always good to keep things neat and tidy, but it’s impossible to get across how much this kind of thing drives customers away. Particularly because it drives off the most lightly connected customers. The ones that are hardest to model. The ones you desperately need going forward. There is probably some deep design principle here. You need to design the system to maximize the amount of chaos in your data. Homogeneity is a false God.

Meanwhile, if you enjoy keeping account data tidy you might want to drop by the Useless Account web site. Sign up! Edit your account profile to your hearts content.

Quite a few times over the last months I’ve found myself talking to somebody with a lot of customer relationships to manage.  Actually it is more accurate to say a lot of relationships.  As a certified power-law nutter I presume that some of these relationships are deeper than others and the distribution is highly skewed.
There was a short period, years ago, when I was the benefit of Apple’s out reach to their high value developers.  Somebody from Apple would appear at my office door.  We were well fed while on nice junkets.

In the conversations I’ve been trying to tease out how various people and firms organize to address this highly skewed set of relationships.  My guess, call it my hypothesis, is that they do not treat everybody equally.  That what emerges as they adapt to the highly skewed distribution is a two headed strategy.  One approach for the high value relationships, and a second approach for the rest.   This puts, for example, a new light on Apple’s old slogan: “A computer for the rest of us.”   In many cases the strategy for the rest is a kind of populism.

Letting my hypothesis run out of control I assume that firms, as they grow are consciously, or more typically unconsciously, rebalancing the resources they devote to one or the other of these.  For example Google certainly began by having very very light relationships with millions of web sites, and then as they built out more traditional sales and marketing organization for relating to the largest websites.  Possibly they did that consciously, but it’s just as likely the environment they found themselves in forced that.  Presumably the same scenario happened to eBay.

The way you execute on these different kinds of relationship is obviously very different.  For the high value relationships you can afford to assign labor, travel budget, etc.  For the vast number that make up the rest you expend money making self service web sites, doing targeted advertising, and engineering effective, but cost effective, customer support systems.

This problem, how to manage the resource allocation across a highly skewed set of relationships, is scale free.  Individuals have this problem just as do huge firms.  The address book, the rolodex, and social networking sites are all schemes to give individuals tools to manage the rest of their relationships.

Any group has this problem.  For example open source projects tend to many tiers of contributors.  Ben Laurie recently was reacting to a common accusation we encounter from outside observers about open source that we “don’t care about users.”  That word “care” is about relationships.  The accusation is that the open source project fails, somehow, to do it’s part in the relationship with users.  I’ve often heard this complaint from product managers in traditional consumer software companies.

The product manager in a traditional consumer software firm exists because the firm needs and funds labor to manage the relationship between the firm and the vast diffuse pool of users.  I.e. the product manager is labor of the second kind - the long tail kind.

Ben who embraces the accusation by highlighting the deep relationship that open source projects have with their developers.  That’s right, but at the same time some open source projects develop a second kind of relationship management that is modern substitute for product management.  For example the editors at Wikipedia are that. Most open source projects learn, after a while, that they should devote significant resources in support of the vast number of very low value relationships.  But they tend to devote those resources to making it easier to download and install the software (easy on ramps) rather than to better customer support systems.
But in most cases the question reflects a category error about what kind of institution an open source project is.  For most open source projects there is a long tail only to the extent that the easy access to the resulting code acts as a shout out that may attract addition developers, i.e. high value contributors.  Rather than a well funded call center broadcasting that “Your call is very important to us.” your  more likely to encounter a “Eh what?  Oh, sorry, gotta run.”

In Yochai Benkler’s essay “Sharing Nicely” about large class of institutions where people solve problems by sharing rather than market clearing or regulatory frameworks he blocks out a rough model of what enables that them; e.g. a large pool of excess capacity (empty seats in the car, idle cycles on your PC or your head) and ownership at the periphery.

With that model in hand you can begin to look for them.  And there are lots and lots: in the ride share space; the community wireless movement; around the P2P, mesh networking, craig’s list, freecycle, leave-one/take-one book exchanges, etc. etc.  There are lots of little examples of which the pool.ntp.org is a great one.  And given that you start to see them you can try to get to the next level and see if you can find opportunities to create new ones; e.g. entrepreneurial opportunities to create new sharing institutions.

This is fun! It’s like three other periods in my life when I developed an eye for a new pattern.  For example at one point I started to realize that marketing people had an eye out for empty niches in your house and tried to slip products into them: the fridge door, the medicine cabinet, your pockets.  That each of these was a competitive landscape.  For example at one point I noticed that there were components which were so widely used for one function that they created a near discontinuity in the price curve for things of their kind and that they then created options to repurpose them: the magnets in disk drives, or the motors and lasers in cd players are both examples.  The sharing nicely examples are analogous to both of those.

So, it looks to me like wifi/bluetooth equipped phones are an almost perfect example of a substrate for Yochai’s sharing systems.  If they were sufficiently open and sufficiently dense upon the landscape it should be possible to route around the Telcos.  That would be fun.  I don’t doubt this idea has already brought a smile to a lot of engineer’s eyes inside of the handset manufactures.  Makes me wonder, is Apple planning on doing just this to escape the relationship with AT&T?  Makes me wonder if you couldn’t to this today with some of the Linux based cell phones.