“Trying to understand the Wiki technology is like

For your Rat Holes every group needs a few Rat Terriers, but then it’s also good to know that others may have been dragged stuff out of that hole before. It helps to prepare the mind: what comes out of a rat hole is typically a dead rat.

My opinion? Well leaky abstractions are good. Diversity is good too. Another good principle: generate strictly, accept generously. Interning any symbol from an outsider is subtle work. Crossing cell boundries always is. We will be evolving very complex cell walls around our organizations. In the internet the money is at the gates and the intermediaries.

Namespace versioning would be nice.

Amazing! , more…

Oh dear, I’ve been wasting time on this thing for more than a year.

Now I can start recycling postings I like on their anniversaries (and maybe I can go fix some of the typos now that I can see them).

A year ago I posted three examples of real world power-law distributions:
World population and electricty, national productivity, internet routers. For desert: computerized astroturf.

Pretty good little essay on how we are seeing Open Services Platforms emerging in the web and how at some point we should see these
appearing in the financial industry as well.

“Organizations shifting to a open service platform model have clear goals. First, they hope to encourage incremental innovation that adds value to their core offering or core service using the resources of others. It’s also a realization that most of the good ideas in the world don’t come from your own staff. While you might very well have lots of smart people in your organization, they are also aware of and sensitive to the inevitable organizational constraints that tend to restrain innovation.“

Exactly

I wonder how many of these service platforms we are going to see. Dozens? Thousands?

If Kieran Healy was in Silcon Valley rather than some primitive outpost of the british empire he’d capture a pattent: shake and bake business model for research and development. He outlines a simple DYI method – take two large rich complex world views, slam them into each other, study the result. I used to joke that particle physics proceeded from the presumption that if you need to understand the automobile the right approach was to slamming cars into each other a very high volocity and then weigh the debris. For example here is an example of running Quaker and Puritian world views into each other the result formed a big thick interesting book.

Of course the dark side of this amusement arises when the two big world views are two institutional forms locked in mortal combat. It’s all in in good fun until somebody loses an eye.

Cute picture:

David Weinberger makes a number of important counter points to Clay Shirky’s talk on groups.

Clay often does a clever bit of dialectic busting by simultanously enjoying the new, emerging, innovative, that disrupts the vested interests while at the same time demanding that people stay grounded in the lessons of the past and admit to the enivitable, necessary emergance of hubs, formal structures, centers of excelence, or dare we say vested interests.

Dave, on the otherhand recognizes the violence inherent in forcing things that are implicit to become explicit. That when you write the governing constitution for your group you reduce a picture worth a thousand words and compress it into a few dozen bare statements. A lot dies in the process.

Shortly after writing the rules, making explicit a tiny bit of what was once implicit, people show up who recognize that rules imply a game. People who enjoy the process of playing games and writing rules. People blind to all that is implicit.

One of the curious things about academics is how the structure of their institutions encourages them to become extremely specialized. The doctoral process and it’s follow-on the tenure process both encourage an extremely depth first drill down into a domain. Each paper they write is required to be tightly entangled in the literature via references and a long reprise of what has come before.

This is a little like a man who has spent his entire legacy to purchase a very expensive peice of equipment, say a high speed drill press. In a variation on the if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail when you present a highly trained academic with your problem, say a leaky roof, he starts thinking – “Hm. You know I think we could get my drill press up there on the roof… sure, no problem.”
My life has been much broader and much much more shallow. And when presented with a leaky roof I often find myself thinking; “Hm, I worked in an umbrella factory once – maybe 30 years ago…”

I was reminded of that by reading Tim Orton‘s post of a list of links to systems that allow delegation of rights to other parties.

These papers were a nostalgia trip for me. Back in the 70s at CMU I had some light involvement in the development of a multiprocessor system known as C.mmp. The operating system had a clever way of managing rights. It used something called “capabilities.” Capabilities where a much better but in the end impractical design. Today operating systems use an approach called access control lists – a lousy but practical design.

Access control lists, usually called ACL, protect things by marking objects with a list enumerating who is allowed access. If the question arises “Is Bob allowed to update the payroll data?” the ACL system checks that list to see if Bob’s on the list, if so it allows the change. ACL’s are like the guest list at an exclusive party, each time another guest shows up the doorman checks their ID against the guest list before letting them in. Maintaining the guest lists is a pain, so is the managing the ID cards.

Capabilities allows Bob to delegate the task of updating the payroll to one of his acquaintances.

In a capability system Bob carries around large set of capabilities. Think
of one of those huge key rings that building maintenance
guys carry around. When Bob wants to modify the payroll data he pulls
out the right key/capability and presents it to the system, which then checks
it. If Bob want’s to delegate, he can hand the key to his assistant. Keeping
all these keys under control is a pain.
Real world system work with a hybrid of keys and guest lists. In some situations you present an ID card (for example to withdraw books from the public library) and in other scenarios your provided with a key (for example when you rent a car).

I’m finding it very chew on all that, particularly because there is lots of work going on these days in and about identity systems for the net. It’s an amusing puzzle: is a browser cookie more like a capability or an identity card? … Yes. It depends. Ah, no it’s really something else. More about groups…

Fun boondoggle for the blog. Adding this to the home page,

  <meta name="ICBM" content="42.41528,-71.15694">
  <meta
    name="DC.title"
    content="Ascription is an Anthema to any Enthusiasm">
  <meta name="geo.position" content="42.41528;-71.15694">

and then doing the right magic at http://geourl.org/ registers the site in their geographic database. Among the fun that enables is that you can find out who the
neighbors are. You can even get a RSS feed for them. Not very many sites using this yet; darn.

Of course you should put your own location into that code fragment. Topozone is a good place to figure that out.

Of course none of that is as much fun as Geocaching, or playing with the reverse phone book and the show neighbors feature.

Update. This is becoming quite popular; so the default list of sites is a little long. You can reduce the radius the list includeds by adding a dist=100 argument to those URLs. That will limit the radius to 100 miles rather than the default of 500. The ones above have that change now.