I’m slowly rereading Olson’s “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups”.  I find it pretty frustrating, but that’s another story.

In the section I was reading last night he gets to musing that there are two flavors of clubs: inclusive v.s. exclusive.  Both create club goods.  The default tendency of an inclusive club is to welcome new members, while members of exclusive clubs tend to prefer that the membership shrink.  For example a lobbying group seeking lower taxes on industry will be inclusive, the more the merrier; meanwhile a members of an industry will tend to prefer that the number of competitors shrink.  Thus, for example, the members of an industry standards body with associated patent pool may prefer to trend toward a smaller and smaller membership.  In another example a professional society who’s function includes granting professional status to it’s members will might tend toward exclusive; e.g. a profession with a 1o0 members can charge more for it’s services than one with a 10 thousand members.

I sense foreshadowing in Olson’s plot development.  Since any hint of  selfish motivation always excites economists  I’ve little doubt he will soon explain how an exclusive club is more sustainable.

The name of this blog is about this topic.  A club of enthusiasts will not casually ascribe membership in their club to others, in fact doing so would offend them.  The enthusiasm acts as a binding force for the group, and dragging in those who lack it is likely to weaken that.  Members of the local model rocket club may engage in outreach, striving to juice up other people’s enthusiasm for the hobby, but it would be quite odd for them to randomly pick people and anoint them as members.

Clubs labor to create club and public goods.  That is their primary goal, but other goals get piled on sometimes intentionally sometimes by happenstance.  An example of that is how members of some clubs often garner status.  To start the goal is to create the good, in support of that the club fiddles with the process that maintains the pool of members.  As an unintended side effect membership becomes selective, and hence elite, and hence confers status.  This status creation wasn’t the goal of the club, and in fact it’s a distraction from the goal.  Good members are engaged with the primary goal, creating the goods; further they are peeved at the way the status becomes a distraction from that.  Meanwhile, outsiders who are much less concerned about creating the good tend to see only the status.  How perverse is that!

Most clubs are actually a hybrid, of course, you want members who contribute to the goal but at the same time you want to extend a broad and enthusiastic welcome to any and all; since how else can you hope to search out the enthusiastic members.

No doubt there are scenarios where the agenda of a club is entirely captured by the status generation.  As an outsider it would be hard to know for sure; for example I know practically nothing about Mensa, which was the first club that came to mind as existing entirely to create status for it’s members, but for all I know if I was inside that club I’d know that it exists to provide a delightful pool of fraternal activities for it’s members.  The insider/outsider problem is fascinating.  For example I certainly feel that people who own Rolex watches are just buying status, but then you discover that lots of those are sold to people who own multiples and have special watch humidors for their collections.  It’s confusing.

Inclusive/Exclusive is not the only dialectics that can be used to sort clubs.  It’s probably worth starting a list.

• Primary goal: create club goods v.s. create public goods.
• Focus is inward facing (i.e. on some project (think barn raising)) v.s. focus is outward facing (for example on some threat)
• Membership – is naturally inclusive v.s. exclusive; e.g. the existing members would naturally prefer more or less members going forward.
• The club tends has high/low capacity to exclude others from access to it’s club goods.
• Clubs that create a broad range of goods v.s. clubs that fix upon a single good
• Clubs who’s principal good’s quality depends upon the quality of the members contributions such that the best contribution sets the quality v.s. those where the worst contribution sets the quality.

These are not entirely orthogonal, are they?

I got a spam-ish email today from a web site I signed into once years ago, A standard product management kind of thing, an attempt to entice me to come back.  I get such things all the time from my assorted dormant credit cards.  Thinking about it I’m surprised I don’t get more email like this.  My password wallet has hundreds of accounts in it.    They don’t even send me a Christmas card!  But then I don’t send them one either.  My parent’s generation had a suite of social norms about how to maintain long lived low intensity relationships.  Christmas cards played a big role in that.

If I scroll down through the list of things in my password wallet it’s quite nostoglic.  There dozens of mailing lists and web forums which I have warm memories.  For example I used to lurk on the tornado chasing list server back in the late 1980s – good times!  I particularly remember a long thread about some product they would all buy and spread over their wind sheilds; apparently once applied you didn’t need to turn on your wipers.  They all swore by it.  Rain-X I think it was called.

The impressive thing about this spam I got this morning was it worked.  They successfully reminded me of why I enjoyed hanging out at that site and drew me back for a visit.  This was the key: what do you call that thing where an egg is cooked in a hole in a slice of bread?

Lots of organizations have huge peripheral networks of related parties.  Alumni networks for example.  Community networks.  Product owners. etc. etc.    When I think about the kind of communications I get from various groups targeted to me as a member of this or that peripheral network it’s just sad.  They are so heavy handed, over done, and often kind of needy.    As the example above illustrates that doesn’t need to be the case.

So, something to think about.  Why do community organizers do such a lousy job of this kind of sustaining of the long term low key relationships.  Why do we all do such a lousy job of it.  Shouldn’t this internet thing should make it a lot easier?

Reading recently that as Microsoft was selecting the sites for their new cloud computer’s data centers they had 31 variables as input.  I assume they plotted those on heat maps like this one showing the price of electricity across the United States.

Back in high school I Jane Jacob’s books on the economics of urban regions schooled me in a cynical attitude about these stories about site optimization.  I recall learning that the most powerful predictor of where a large firm would sight it’s new office park was the distance from the CEO’s wife’s horses.  So I wasn’t terrible surprised that one of Microsoft’s big data centers is in the country side of east of Redmond.

FYI – the drawing above is terribly misleading.  For wholesale power West Texas is a steal right now, wind power.  For a residential power consumer per month cost to connect to the grid tends to be a large additional cost.  I wrote about that under the heading of “micro-utilitity coops” using the gas company as an example.  Since then I’ve learned there is a nice term of art in the utility industry “islanding.”  That’s worth reading about if your want yet another way to look at the issues around localism.

Islanding is one of the themes that runs thru the discussions of cloud computing.  But it goes under various guises (security, control, specialization, cost or ops, capital equipment, bandwidth, latency).  That I continue to presume that anybody who can make a credible case for building their own island will be able to  negotiate  a pricing deal with their cloud vendor means I’m starting to think that people who run their own data centers feel like fellow travels with other the off-grid enthusiasts.  You gotta love ‘em.

Over at 43 things, a site where people can clot together around random common goals, I see that two thousand people have revealed thier desire to “become better at small-talk.” The “learn to make polite empty chit chat” group has only 59 people. I’m a bit distressed that only one person wants to learn how to banter.

The books on small-talk advise one to talk about the weather. Though they rarely mention that it’s critical to avoid being drawn into the ongoing dispute about why nobody does anything about it. Even the origins of that particular dispute remain contentious: Mark Twain or Samuel Clements?

Talk about the weather is one of the seed crystals of group forming. It’s surprising how far you can go. When ever I’m trying to explain how much I enjoy lurking in esoteric enthusiastic groups on the internet I always mention Tornado chasers; since I was lurking in that group back in the 1980s.

All this is really preface to a shout out.

Some folks in Iowa have created Jabber chat rooms for each national weather service office. What’s sweet about these chat rooms is that they pump real time weather alerts into the rooms. So even if nobody else in your area cares to join the room this is still the best way to get real time weather alerts for your area.

For example zzboxcat@muc.appriss.com is the Jabber ID for the Boston area weather office, who’s mnemonic is BOX. Just replace that mnemonic with the appropriate one for your area.

This is easy, well it’s easy once you puzzle out a) how to find your area’s weather office, and b) how to join a jabber chat room.