Monthly Archives: October 2005

Enabling Agency

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Agency is a puffed up word used to way to say that somebody else is doing the work for you. A real estate agent, for example, sells your house for you. The paranoid worry that agents won’t manifest exactly your best interests as they do the work.

The other day I overheard somebody saying he wanted to allow users of his site, call it A, to give permission to other sites, call them B, to push and pull information from A. That ought to be common, but it is not. eBay has a scheme for doing this; but that maybe the only example I’ve seen in the wild of what ought to be a common pattern.

For example say I wanted to delegate to a B site permission to scan my email for important messages and when it finds them it should send me SMS. For example say I wanted to give permission to site hosting my blog permission to pull URLs from my private bookmarks site. For example I want to give permissions out so that my blogging and email sites can collaborate to make posting something I got in an email more trivial.

The usual, and extremely lame work around for this is for site B to ask for my user name and password at site A. Site B then visits site A pretending to be me and get’s the data it needs. That’s bogus because it grants site B far more power to act on my behalf than is desirable. This is the “Here let me help! Oh, I’ll just need to steal your identity.” approach.

Better systems aren’t hard to build. For example Site A can have a page that the user fills out to state: “I grant site B the following rights to act on my behalf for the following period.” Submitting that page results in site A coughing up a big number, in effect a ticket (technically it’s called a capability). The user gives the capability to site B.

Just a small matter of standardization?

Actually no. These such simple systems that standards, while nice, aren’t really necessary. All site A needs to do is keep a table recording the capability tokens it has handed out. When site B wants to do work as the users agent it works directly with site A. The best news is that it does not have to lie. It no longer needs to masquerade as the user. Site B authenticates with site A using it’s own account. Site A knows who it’s working with. When B wants to do some work for the user it includes with it’s request the Site A capability token it got from the user.

Site A then has to check if the requested operation is approprate; e.g. timely, within the rights the user granted, and something Site A currently trusts Site B to do. Site A can then lookup who the user is and do the deed. Site B never need know the user’s identity at Site A.

I suspect the real reason this is so uncommon is that site A doesn’t really want to relinquish data to site B; it would rather horde that data and the options for what to do with that data closely. In the dreams of site A’s product managers holding the data enables them to lock the user into a more bundled solution. Capablities help temper this concern, notice that Site A can negotiate with Site B over time to reach mutually advantagous deals.

Small sites should do two things. They ought to enable this kind of agency because it will create complements around their offering; while complements always make your offering more valuable they also let small sites collaborate to create integrated experiances that currently only huge portals can. The second thing they should do is just as important though. They should be prepared to limit partner site access in scenarios where it becomes clear that they are taking more than they are giving back. I.e. some sort of peering agreement would be a good thing.

If small service sites can enable this kind of activity highly cool highly integrated services will emerge quickly, much more quickly than the product manager at any tightly integrated centralized site can manage to implement them.

Fear of agency v.s. fear of concentration – damn’d if you do damn’d if you don’t.

(thanks to the three people who noted typos so far)

Design Traps

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I very much liked this list of design traps. It’s taken from the middle of a paper (pdf) by the always brilliant Phil Agre. In that context Phil is talking about the problem of designing a technology rich system that will presumably transform an existing large social institution, libraries. But it’s a really good list for all those situations where your designing a system that is expected to transform behaviors in an existing institution.

The trap of …

  • … presupposing standards
  • … deriving political consequences
  • … automation
  • … assuming rapid change
  • … command and control computing
  • … inventing a new world
  • … blaming resistance
  • … assuming away intermediaries
  • … technology
  • … designing for a limited range of cases
  • … presupposing transparency

I want to chew on these a bit, so hopefully this posting will get revised over time. These are my restatement of what Phil writes, which is of course much better.

Standards: Never presume things are interoperable. Standards are hard work and only rarely emerge. Let’s repeat that, they rarely emerge. Most systems are heterogenous aggregations with much, if not most, of their substance in the glop that inter-connects their parts.

Politics: Never assume your technology leads to your desired political outcomes. This one’s facinating because consensus that the work at hand is creating a social good is always a constructive driver of large change. It maybe a near certainty that one will get piled on. But! Systems design is a thicket of unintended consequences. This one’s very entangled with the standards, hierarchy and intermediary traps.

Automation: Designs reshape roles, they don’t meerly automate existing chores. At first blush you may look at your system as lifting a burden off some actor in the old system; but it is useful to realize that in fact you are negotiating the nature of the work. This is often why system designers tend to automate other people’s work, not their own. This kind of negotation is politics; not in the big idea sense but the complex local politics of successfully integrating diverse points of view and need.

Rate of Change: Chips, communications, and network effects can grow amazingly fast; meanwhile social, physical, and economic systems are be very resilient, durible, and slow to change. System design takes place in the huge space between. Any assumption you make about real rate of change should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Note the irony in the standards trap mentioned earlier: assuming standards, and hence interoprablity, is the presumption that there is a stable durible social foundation you can build on.

Hierarchy: Phil’s argument here is that historically computer systems drew most of their funding from hierarchtical organizations both commercial and milatary and that has created a bias in our tool kits and mind sets. True. But that’s not the only reason why edge emphasising design patterns are so scarce.

… more later

Phil’s paragraphs on these are at the tail end of section two of the paper (pdf).

Petrol and Gas

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I filled up the car yesterday for $2.19 a gallon. That’s not the typical price here in the Boston area, getting that price requires a detour over to the low price gas zone nearer the gasoline terminal. But it is weird. That’s less than we were paying Rita and Katrina laying waste to US oil and refinery capacity in the Gulf region; and that source of supply hasn’t come back on line.

Why is it so low? I think it’s because both the international regulators and the market over reacted and we are now bathing in petrol sent over by from Europe.

Heat is on at my house. Wholesale natural gas hasn’t rebounded like petrol has. It’s still going for about twice last years prices and some people think we might see a shortage this year. In New England a big slice of our electric power is produced from natural gas. The state has relaxed some environmental protection rules so some older oil based electric plants might be able take a bit of the pressure off the natural gas supply.

But the key fact I draw out of all this is that petrol is a lot more fungible in world markets compared to natural gas. And in the near term US is on it’s own when it comes to natural gas. LNG supply isn’t going to fill the gap – the supply isn’t there and the terminals to accept the supply are don’t exist.

Here’s a bizarre thought. What happens when people to realize that the cheapest most abundant source of fuel this winter is petrol? Most people have no idea how dangerous petrol is.

There are snow flakes outside my window at this very moment.

Who’s the Pitcher

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The Fitzgerald press conference was just marvelous, the kind of political theater that you’d pay to see on the stage. Just amazing. (transcript).

I found the most revealing bit to be this analogy:

Let me try something.

If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you’d want to know why the pitcher did that. And you’d wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, I’ve got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I’m just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.

You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter’s head. And there’s lots of shades of gray in between.

You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.

And what you’d want to do is have as much information as you could. You’d want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you’d want to know.

And then you’d make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it.

In this case, it’s a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn’t to one person. It wasn’t just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.

And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

Meanwhile in other news. Washington Post shows some balls: Vice President for Torture, and the Secretary for the Environment channel’s Orwell arguing we should open the Arctic Refugee to drilling because administration’s friends would then have someplace to spend the 10 billion in profits they captured last quarter.

town cable contract

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The cable company’s ablity to lock its customers is improved by selling phone and internet service as well as television. If take all three and you want to switch you need to coordinate the switching of all three services, which is amazingly hard. The television is the least sticky of the three, since there is always broadcast television as a fall back. The phone company plays a similar game around here where it is practically impossible to get internet via DSL without also paying for a plan old phoneline. Subscription customers who are well locked down are great revenue generators. You can entice them into your system with huge discounts. The vendor discovers that he can raise prices and they don’t bolt. Higher prices increase the size of the discounts you can offer up front.

There is another player in this game; at least around here. The town grants the monopoly to the cable companies by negotiating a lease for the right to string all those wires. The cable company pays for the right by providing a community access channel, and donating internet acess to various public enterprises around town.

We are currently negotiating the next N year lease. The cable company is being very agressive about reducing what it pays us. Clearly they see the town as being just as locked in as its customers are.

It makes me wonder what the town’s BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is in this case. What happens if we decided not to grant the cable company a new license.

Maybe we should run our own. I assume we could not provide all the same TV channels that the current dominate provide does. I assume we couldn’t pick up the ball, or switch to another vendor without some service interuption. Which implies cutting off some residents phone service.

My town is exceptional in that it has two cable companies. The cable company guys will scold you if you complain about the mess on the telephone polls. “Utility Polls!” they will say. The polls are a mess. This extra degree of freedom doesn’t seem to change anything in a meaningful way. One effect is notable though. The community access channel isn’t on the #2 cable company and the community members who run the channel want it to be; so they are a large part of the constituency fighting for a more generous cable contract.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

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Here is a another really delightful metaphor for the power-law dialectic between the elite and the long-tail.

In his essay on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, Berlin starts with the fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The conventional interpretation of this proverb is that the fox, for all her cunning, may be defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. Berlin suggests the metaphor may also be used to highlight one of the important differences among basic vision of life held by different thinkers and writers.(4) On the one hand there are those who believe that there exists a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance. On the other side of the divide are those whose beliefs are scattered or diffuse, moving on many levels, seizing upon a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are without seeking, consciously or unconsciously, to fit them into any one unchanging, all embracing, unitary vision. The first kind of intellectual is like the hedgehog, the second, like the fox. Berlin suggests that Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs. Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce are foxes.(5) Berlin readily acknowledges that, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd.(6) Yet he argues that because the distinction captures an important insight, it provides a useful starting point for genuine investigation.

There is a small excerpt from Berlin’s essay here.

del.icio.us

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Listened to Joshua Schachter answer questions at Berkman last night. He seemed to be at the end of a very long day. Many of the usual questions were asked and the usual answers were given.

Things I learned. You can now type delicious.com, rather than del.icio.us. But does that mean we can stop typing del.icio.us every time we talk about it? That “bacon” is a very delightful word for ambiguous search. Maybe we could introduce the term bacon for output of bad actors who’s spamming is more sophisticated than just spraying mass quantities at open systems.

I was a bit surprised by what appears to be the lack of any platform strategy; and of course I find that extremely lame. (And no, an API does not constitute a platform strategy!) People in the audience read lots of value propositions into his business. He seems very centered in the value of delicious as a means to help people capture the memorable.

I’ve long thought that delicious would be a fascinating opportunity to introduce some light weight group forming as a means to raising the bar on the quality of the tagging. But while they are intending to play the group card into the design space it appears that they don’t see that as a means toward raising quality, or even as an enabler of additional sociability. They have seen a demand for it, as they have seen a demand for privacy so they are chasing that demand.

In passing he mentioned how they would like to be able to enable some degree of account linking so sites could link up account info enough to help a user manage his things to remember stuff.

Two thinks linked up. He was working as a quant with a brokerage before. He’s curious about the possibility of finding trend spotters in his user base. Stock trading is all about buying before the crowd arrives and selling back when they do. Which is, of course, also somewhat the business that Ester Dyson and Tim O’Reilly are in. Two of his investors. I wonder if that’s a of a NYC mindset about things rather than a valley mindset? Of course crowds and social have some overlap; but they are quite differing attitudes about the group. Probably three things there: modeling the crowd’s behavior, shaping the crowd’s behavior, and encouraging the forming of crowds.

I’m a big believer that a web site that built in this manner, i.e. draw upon the lite contributions of a large pool of talent, is better off if its operators are conscious of what qualities they are attempting to aggregate. So for example my story about how everything2 went off in a particular direction by it’s emphasis on cool; or how wikipedia is has a heading set by the emphasis on neutral point of view, or how each of the open source enclaves has particular attributes they use to ground their work.

Most sites like these don’t manage this well. That comes, possibly, of a modern fetish for dismissing the value of planning with such vigor that any plan becomes suspect. They tend to settle into some attribute that then rises toward the top for reasons that have to do with the dynamics in and around the operators. Wikipedia is a good example because neutral point of view addresses an organizational and coordination problem; but is only slightly correlated with other qualities you might want in a reference work. It is an evolutionary approach; and tends to create curious mutations that happen to work rather than designed things.

That delicious is trying to be a good place for its users to remember stuff is pretty clearly an attribute that was written into it’s DNA early and still gets a lot of respect.

It looks like trend spotting, or some analogous term, is in its blood.

Memory aid for the trend spotting crowd, Makes for an interesting target audience. Interesting to contrast it with other attempts to serve that fickle mob. A developer net, a political activist, or an advertiser would be trying to shape and draw the crowds interests.

Rosa Parks

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So many threads in this story.

LBJ wanted to be president, so he allied with the northern democrats that were pro-civil rights. The South switched over to the Republicans. The rest is history.

When they buried Dr. King my mother stood next to the cleaning lady watching the television, both weeping.

The student reading the news on the college station which woke me this morning said Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a black man.

The map at right shows the black population density from the 1990 census data for Boston and suround. American cities look like that today because of racial covenants in the mid-century and then latter because because mortgage lenders, lead by the federal mortgage lending rules, treated race mixing as an indicator of increased risk. That made drove mortgage lending out of cities into sharply segregated suburbs. In Detroit, where Rosa Parks died, a desperate developer solved this problem by constructing a high wall around his property – entirely so he could get a mortgages for his buyers.

Bedroom Cities

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My town of about 40K people is a bedroom community; it’s population shrinks by about a third each day as people head off to work in other parts of the Boston metro area. When the railroad into this town the commuting ran the other way – farm workers who lived in the urban center and came out on the train to work the fields.

Urban cores typically draw workers into them during the day. Boston’s population rises by 41% each day, more than most. A very few larges cities in the US shrink, anti-cities? Not a hubs of economic activity but instead of hubs of housing. In Virginia Beach the population shrinks by 12%, in Mesa City, AZ it shrinks by 10%. In San Jose, CA it shrinks by 6%, and in Long Beach, CA it drops 4%. Detroit manages to just break even. Washington DC grows by 72%; and Boston swells 41%.

I’m amused by the idea that San Jose and the surrounding area, silicon valley, might become the first inside out metro-donut. A dense vibrant urban residential core built in the vertical with a surrounded the flat 1-2 story industrial landscape, so popular in the valley.

Data from US Census by way of Infectious Greed.