I very much doubt it’s that simple.  In fact the illustration above shows just the bit where the virus enters the cell and off it’s coat.  There is an antiviral drug that works by frustrating it’s attempt shed it’s coat.   Obviously it get’s even more complex yet again if we add in how the virus moves between host animals.

But the copy step is notable. In quantity and quality.

a typical RNA viral genome of 10,000 bases, a mutation frequency of 1 in 10,000 corresponds to an average of 1 mutation in every replicated genome. If a single cell infected with poliovirus produces 10,000 new virus particles, this error rate means that in theory, about 10,000 new viral mutants have been produced.

The quantity is high, but the quality is low.  Amazingly there is method in this madness.  The combination of high errors and high numbers creates something useful, a search scheme.

If you want to frustrate a virus then you need to shutdown, or a least narrow, the pathway through which one of the steps in the reproductive cycle.  For example, improved hygiene and increasing social distancing works by making the movement between host animals harder.   Anti-viral drugs target individual steps in the cycle.  The immune system learns to recognize the virus and pick it off as it moves between cells.  In all these case the challenge for the virus is to route around the resulting bottleneck.

Since most of it’s offspring are mutants, most of it’s offspring are sacrificed to searching for these alternate pathways.  Like most r-selected reproductive strategies the vast majority of the offspring fail in the process.  When the spider has a thousand babies it works out because takes that many to searches opportune door into the next cycle of reproduction.  When the maple tree throws off billions of seeds during it’s life that works because it needs to run that many searches to find one that let’s it pass it’s genes into the next generation.

It must be vary frustrating for the inventor of an anti-viral.  The stupid viruses can mindlessly find a route around his clever invention.  Adamantine was approved for use in 1966, by the 2005-2006 US flu widespread flu strains had routed around the hole it plugged.  I think we can assume that the route around was found quickly and what took most of the time was propogating it around the larger community of flu viruses.

There are interesting analogies to be drawn between this and the way we use r-selected designs in open source, platform, social-network, strategies.  I need to stew on that.

As with most things these days, I draw analogies twix this and my job search.  I keep trying to have the options be numerous and to try to treat the failed attempts casually.  But my species is not naturally given to r-selected tactics.

What Eric von Hippel taught me works both ways.  Real innovation requires close contact between a interesting problem and talent.  When you encounter innovation it signals an interesting problem and engaged talent.  Ignore the story told.  Look for that problem and why the talent had to fix it.  Ask, without the snark: “so what’s his problem?”

It’s a guess, but I think Linus’ problem was two fold.  First was a deep passionate desperate need to encourage other developers to take risks with the code.  I think his guilty foxy phrase for this is: “They do the work so I can take the credit.”   He wants to encourage forking!  That’s obvious, once I recognized it.  But it’s an insight that was denied me because forking has such a bad reputation.  I knew a guy once.  He forked, later he had a nervous breakdown trying to rejoin the main branch.   An exagerated story sure, but I have suffered dozens of cases where-in good labor branched off and nothing came back.   So given those experiances the insight that forking is something an Open Source project would want to encourage, v.s. temper, has left me gob smacked.

But it’s absolutely true.  To suppress forking is scarcity thinking.  Inside a closed system where you need to husband resources in an open system you need to court it.   I know that, I just didn’t get it!  Almost the whole point of open source is to cast forth the code so a million eyes and hands can improve it.  And every one of those improvements will be a fork.  It would be insane to try and keep that from happening.  If you don’t enable billions of tiny edits/forks then your killing the seed corn.  Since the entire cascade starts there (and it’s scale free) failure to encourage forking undermines the flow back toward the main branch(s).

I didn’t see that, at first.  I came to that in a round about way.  And damn if I did not have to puzzle out the second insight in a really round about way.  I’m embaressed to admit I was not trying to figure out what “his problem” is.  No, I was confused by this scenario that appears in most of the tutorials.

Your working on some complex change and suddenly your Boss steps into the room and demands a quick bug fix.  What do you do?

... working on complex change ...
git checkout deployed_version
... make quick fix ...
git checkout branch_of_complex_change
... back to work ...

My reaction to that was “Huh, what? you don’t got any diskspace?”  Just check out the main branch into a fresh directory and do the work there.  In fact I’d be surprised if you didn’t already have a copy checked out.  So it took me a while to accept the shocking part was that switching between branches in the same working directory is a common operation.  It was only then that I asked “why would Linus want that?”  That was the “what’s his problem” moment.

This story is a lie.  Linus doesn’t have a boss like the one in that story.  Linus lives on the boundry between “they do the work” and “i take the credit.”  His boss, and this is critical, is “they.”  “They” burst into his virtual office and make demands; in the form of patches.  Each of those demands/patches is branch.  Managing them is Linus’s problem.  At any given time you might have a hundred, thousands even, of such demands/branches.  It’s not your Boss coming thru the door that triggers switching from one branch to another; it’s email, irc, and the whims of your attention that do it.  When ever your brain thinks “Oh, I wonder if patch Foo does Bar?” you do git checkout Foo, look into the Bar question.  A moment later, buffeted by another boss/demand/patch you switch off to another branch.

These two are complementary.  That git encourages forking energizes the periphery of your project; that it empowers you to manage a blizzard of patches lets you deal with the consequences.  But even if you don’t need to have a vast army of contributors I find that rapid context switching useful.  My damn brain is full of contributors too.  I can give all these fever’d demons their own branch.   You can cast those hot ideas out of your head an into git, stew them over time.  It maybe a chaotic mess, but git provides the tools to help manage all that.

While this is a totally different model of branching and forking from the one in traditional source control systems, it is absolutely better.  It is better at assuring the improvements are enabled, captured, managed, and nurtured.  Full stop.

There is a social aspect to git that deserved it’s own posting.  But leave it to say that it’s actually brilliant, from the point of view of somebody more familiar with the ASF’s development models, because it enables and encourage the forming of small groups of common interest around forks.  Brilliant because it’s scale free.  Brilliant because it creates a locus for socially constructed validation tied to that common interest.  Brilliant because it distills out the flow of commits in a canonical form that enables the forks to bud off and remerge smoothly.  Brilliant because it removes a huge “ask permission” cost; i.e. in this system you don’t submit patches you mearly reveal them.  Notice that word “submit.”

I wrote an essay years ago about what could be done to improve the dynamism of open source.  I wrote that there was a virtous cycle between the code base and the user/developers and one thing that we seriously needed was to look at all the friction in that cycle and see if better tooling and practices couldn’t ease them.  Git delivers!

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Today Bill told a bit more of the story.

See, something else happened: During the sale dozens of people contacted me by email and telephone. They weren’t seeing it as a joke. They were anxious to bid. They regretted being unable to participate. The wanted to work with me on research, or with anybody on research, or have a chance to carry forward research they had started but lost….

They wanted to collaborate.

They were graduate students, and laymen, and people with Ph.D.s and M.S. and other advanced degrees in mathematics and science and engineering and humanities and social sciences and art. And they were busy, and focused, and full of ideas… and every one felt disenfranchised.

For one reason or another they felt unable to collaborate in serious research, to follow ideas through to completion with colleagues. They were stymied by sexism (MIT-trained female math Ph.D., forced into industry by uncollaborative peers), by the burden of diligence (graduate and undergraduate students, or industrial researchers ordered to focus and pay attention on their immediate work), by the walls of the many-siloed Ivory Tower itself. Or they were smart academics in the right position, who had nobody willing to collaborate with them in a culture that over-values competition and secrecy and primary authorship. Some were full professors, fully-credentialled but held back by service or administrative obligations, or funding hardships, or some other oft-voiced complaint. Some were in small ivy-covered undergraduate teaching institutions, or community colleges, and just out of luck for chances to do some work.

Nobody seemed dumb. Nobody sounded like they were trying to scam a lightened workload by foisting the hard part of their project over to me. Nobody was trying to cheat on their homework or thesis. Nobody was a creationist, nobody was astroturfing. They all made it sound as if finding a colleague was the best thing they could imagine.

I make it out to be very general, very broad, almost ubiquitous. There was diversity in the character of response, but I’m not exaggerating: nearly two dozen people contacted me. This expression of disenfranchisement was a shared trait of a stream of email correspondents, and people who called me directly on my business line. They didn’t really care how good or bad I was, and maybe didn’t care too much about my credentials. The fact that I seemed capable, and serious, and willing to give my time and energy to thinking and talking with them about something they were interested in… that was enough.

I have a catalog of insta-theories for Open Source, but that there is always a kind of desperate undercurrent of demand for quality collaborators isn’t in that catalog. I’ll go fix that.

Most people are not aware of the depths of the argument that between the fine craft establishment and the dominate fine art elite.  I used to think about that debate more; but I’m pleased to note something about it.

Fine art is at it’s core about scarcity; fine craft is much less so; and what has come to be called crafting hardly at all.  The fine craft movement, which weaves it’s way back through all of history and all nations, in it’s modern manifestation, I’m surprised to note, a lot like open source.

I hate to play that card.  The term open source has almost fallen dead for me.  So many people play that card in an attempt to grab a bit of legitimacy for what every scheme they are executing that involves sucking talent out of the vast pool of people on the other side of the internet; and don’t get me started on the neologism ‘democratizing.’

What is going on in the modern crafting movement, as manifested in the web, is the thing I think is coolest about the Internet.  First off it has a pool of people of common interest finding each other, like a giant pot luck dinner or a stone soup.  They are creating energy and knowledge that wasn’t there before; in an commons.  Secondly the energy of this movement comes from the periphery; the respect of the participants faces toward the periphery.

When this works you get the opposite of scarcity based activities.  In fine arts the entire community is polarized by the pervasive question of who’s at the top, who can command the premium prices, who’s hot, who’s not.  In a periphery facing community the tension, the anxiety if you wish, is where on the vast periphery the next insight will emerge, the next cool trick of the trade, the next breath taking bit of design.