Category Archives: group membranes

Community drift

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This is taken from these notes on a talk Joshua Schacter gave.

As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes
less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the
system fragment in to different areas of attention.

The common cause of a group shifts; in a system like delicious the center is statistical. In other groups it’s a more social construction. Effected by cliques and leaders. Then of course there are the shifts that come from the group’s relationship with it’s surround.

It’s a very nice talk full of things which are true, except when their not.

Focusing Diffuse Rage

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I found this posting just fascinating. Recall that displacement is an economist’s word for that moment when you wake up and discover that your job, community, culture, etc. have been displaced by some alternative; typically through no fault of your own.  Some examples. The hurricane floods your neighborhood; Home Depot sucks the life out of your family’s hardware store. The landlord decides to displace tenant farmers off lands they have occupied for generations.  That was this original example, he was make way for more profitable sheep.

The victims of displacement react with rage.  “The rage of the small property holder – the peasant, the artisan, the stall-keeper – against his inexorable ruin by the competition of bigger capital is given a face … to hate: a physical particularity that stands in thought for the abstractions of ‘finance’ and ‘the market’ and ‘the banks’.”

This rage can be a powerful tool for shaping group solidarity.  What the posting illuminates is how the rage often lacks a focus.  If your neighborhood has been flooded by the hurricane you can quickly to organize the citizens into a posse, but you can’t get a rope around Mother Nature’s neck.  Potent rage versus a diffuse unnamed other makes for a, ah, interesting situation.

Clever social activists will work to assure the group’s rage is dissipated.  They directing the rage toward an available target.  Consider some pairs:

Tragic suicide at the high school?  Focus the rage to invigorate the after school activities?

Traditional society finds it is being displaced by more modern and economically vibrant societies.  Focus the rage on first world nations and their citizens?
‘The Jew’ has often become the focus of this rage, as the quote above goes on to say. Rage seeks a concrete focus. Displacement rage often grows and festers until it finds a focus.  Political actors know this. The rage is an opportunity to solve problems.  But the rage is also dangerous, since it might turn on them.  You can’t hang Mother Nature, but you can hang the Mayor.

Bush et. al. refocused the rage against terrorism (a very diffuse threat) onto Iraq.  They were acting as perfectly rational political actors.  They believed was a constructive goal.  But they also saw the risk the rage would focus on something they cared for, say Saudi Arabia.

The posting goes on to suggest that the displacement rage of the Left has yet to find it’s focus. Personally I think Republicans are a fine focus. Republicans are the new Jew.

End of History, or Becoming a Landlord

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Martin is toying with a very thought provoking glimmer of an idea about the future of Telephones…

… In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle. …

That could go in all kinds of directions. For example it is marvelously synergistic with my gleam of an idea that the 80s enthusiasm for personal computing leads to a kind of blindness about what is really going on in the Internet era. For example it echos why Fukuyama wrote Trust, a book on groups, after writing about the End of History.

But here’s one of them.

This is great. It shifts the value proposition of the telecom business out of the pairwise and into the group forming; i.e. from Metcalf’s toward Reed’s law.

Groups need rendezvous points. So this also bounces right back on the number one problem the traditional telecom companies have competing with the dumb networks. Dumb network owners loose if they horde the options to search for innovations.

Trying to horde the option to create these rendezvous points frustrates the search to find them. You can’t find the high value rendezvous points without a tremendous amount of experimentation, i.e. a r-Selected strategy. The careful husbanding of options done by the telecom companies is fatal.

When the market signals that you have become a platform vendor it behooves you to listen, and learn learn how to be a platform vendor.

Core Concerns

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Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro.  It’s pretty good, which is a relief, since most books about emotions written by rational intellectual people are crap.

It is not without flaws. It is padded out with a review of the ground covered in the other books from their branch of the negotiation community.  I was surprised by a disconnect – emotions are very powerful but the advice the book gives is very temperate.    For example, it is good thing to find common ground with your partner. Discover shared hobbies!  Yes, might oak trees of good relationships from from such tiny seeds, but this kind of advice follows in the tradition found in most geek written books when they touch on emotion:  excessive distancing and reductionism.

Having gotten that out of the way – the structure of the book is just marvelous.  I was particularly delighted that they don’t fall into the tedium of enumerating a hierarchy of emotions.

Here’s the nut.  Humans have some very core concerns: to find a fulfilling role for example.  If these core concerns are not being met then strong negative emotions will follow.  If they are met, strong positive ones will rise.  Skilled negotiators entice the positive emotions out, and avoid baiting the negative ones.  Their reward: productive flexible creative problem solving sessions.

I particularly liked that they complement each core concern with a verb; so here they are:

  • Appreciation – which is expressed.
  • Affiliation – which is built.
  • Autonomy – which is respected.
  • Status – which is acknowledged.
  • Role – which is chosen and fulfilling.

While this book is written with negotiation in mind – i.e. an episodic attempt to engage in collaboration – these issues clearly arise across the spectrum of collaborative effort.  That list is universally actionable!

For example: a manager should keep a score card for every participant v.s. each of the five core concerns.  By participant I mean individuals and groups.  For example each of your suppliers.  Then act on that, encourage action to improve each item.  Do that using those verbs.  If you can’t answer the question “How is X chosing an fulfilling his role?” your not doing your job.  (I might add to that list: “What is the top idea in X’s mind?”)

All this has triggered a number of insights.  For example notice: if you struggle and win a particular role there is the risk that there will be negative emotions created – because winning is not choosing.  Fun, eh?

Notice how role and status are pulled apart here.  I hatz how often they are treated as synonymous. Notice that instead of using the term loyalty they use the terms affiliation and autonomy.  I’ve written before about the dual nature of assuming a role,  e.g. that there is something you do and something others do.  By example, you can’t lead if nobody follows.  By teasing out status from role they address that duality.

I’m pleased that they don’t talk about loyalty.  Loyalty is a outcome, and so it is built indirectly.  But also loyality is a term of hierarchical organizations; where roles are not chosen they are assigned and status is not acknowledged it is merely painted on the door.

Is affiliation just another name for what I call common cause in community dynamics?  A binding force of the collaborative effort, like gravity.  People get very emotional about it!  Which is why they guard the public goods of their communities so emotionally, with scolding, patriotism, loyalty oaths, etc. etc.

Autonomy sounds a lot like freedom, something people get emotional about.    Freedom depends on a rich pool of public goods.  Which are created thru communities of common cause.  Autonomy is to freedom like club good are to public goods.  This is a book about negotiation; as you negotiation your always attempting to frame up a new club.  Even if the  negotiation  is something as trivial as creating a link in the supply chain.

Business jargon likes to talk in terms of power: supplier power, consumer power.  It’s a pain to be a buyer when the supplier has all the power, and via versa.  If you have a single supplier for a key component, for example funding, then that supplier will be powerful.  All five of those aspects illuminate why that’s an emotional situation.  If you have billions of tiny customers then no one of them has much power and the emotions change, they become more alienated.  There is something deep running thru the dynamics of all exchange networks that these five issues can help to inform.

Gamer Group Think

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Interesting posting by Liz Lawley on how players of CMU’s picture classification game game the system. The players quickly discover that there certian schemes garner more points than others. Liz illustrates a number of examples where that tags the pictures with less than optiminal tags.

I have a bone to pick with the folksonomy fans. It seems to me that these folks have never met a institution they found worthy. The larger the institution the less worthy it’s outputs. Or in short: individuals good, institutions bad.

Let’s adopt that mindset and look at what Liz uncovered. The players in this game develop more allegence to the game than then classificaion task. They strive to supress thier individual knowledge. They attempt to socialized their behavior to that of their model player. Oh my God! Look! It’s group think.

Club Pricing

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Paul English is peeved about what a pain in the neck it is to buy a membership in a health club. He asks “Why the sleaze?”

Here are some theories:

  • Low barrier to entry means too many health clubs; i.e. excess supply, leading to sleazy marketing practices as they desperately attempt to survive.
  • Lack of consumer protection laws or enforcement removes the only effective negative feedback on the sleaze.
  • Testosterone and steroids.
  • The subscription pricing models (i.e. lock-in and upfront discounting) is sleazy out of the gate, it’s all down hill from there.
  • Clubs that adopt aggressive value pricing are more sustainable than those that don’t. The more aggressive the more sleazy.
  • Matching price/user to cost/user is impossible, all attempts to do so look and often are sleazy.

Clubs are the text book response to the standard list of problems with of public goods, e.g. overcrowding, under provisioning, free-riding, etc. It’s fascinating that in this example the club doesn’t resolve those problems; it just reframes them. The presumption is that once you are allowed into the club you will find a world where facilities and services are abundant and collegial; i.e. you will enter a world where the facilities are now a public good. You won’t be excluded and there won’t be rivalry. The water in the pool will be warm and you won’t have to double up in the lanes when you swim. Piles of towels will be close at hand. The exercise equipment will be standing by and dependible when you need it.

Most of the health clubs I’ve experienced fail to achieve the eden like fantasy. They are under provisioned and overcrowded at the hours when I would show up. Interestingly the lanes in the pool would be occupied by people who used them for hours every day, in effect free-riding on the membership contributions of people like me.

These clubs have terrible pricing problems. They would like to charge people for the value they extract from their facilities, including the value of reducing their guilt by having a membership even if they don’t use it. Of course they don’t mind if they over charge. The more they can push their prices up toward that goal the better the facilities they can provide will be. That’s all reasonably virtuous.

I have a bad feeling that the distribution of load imposed by the customers is power-law in shape; but the willingness to pay isn’t. Which is why on the high end you get the heavy user free-loading illustrated above. On the low end you get a long tail of users who are charged far more than they will ever consume in services. The entire thing’s a mess.

I have noticed that some very high end hotels have health clubs that don’t suffer from these problems. They, presumably, are subsidized by the hotel’s guests. In a few cases they even sell a reasonably priced membership in a transparent fashion.

The YMCA is a good special case. As a not for profit they can do their value pricing by using needs based analysis. Their prices are clearly stated on a sheet of paper at the front counter. At the bottom of the sheet it invites you to speak with them if you can’t afford the price they are offering. At the same time solicit donations from the better off members of their community. It’s interesting how this doesn’t suffer from the sleaze problem. It also means that when you gain entrance to the club and the public good isn’t as wonderful as you might hope your reaction isn’t that you have been mislead, but rather that a group of good people are doing the best they can with limited resources. Which, if your well off, might lead you to donate.

At the same time the Y’s model for how to fund the club doesn’t resolve some of the problems outlined above. They still have some members who draw off 100 times more services than others – i.e. free loaders. And the club are always a bit under provisioned, the water a bit chilly, the equipment a a bit run down. The community is generally very convivial; particularly if it makes you happy to see hordes of elderly and children using the club around you.

The private health clubs have eroded some of the communities common cause around the Y. That has weakened the Y as an institution. For example the Y wasn’t able to raise money to build a new branch in downtown Boston recently.

Price Fixing and Knowledge Pools

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If you sell widgets you often have a choice about how to price them. You can fix their price or you can engage in differential pricing. Differential pricing, i.e. trying to charge customers more or less depending on how much value that customer thinks he will get from the product, has the benefit of increasing the number of customers you can reach. For example you can reach thrifty, poor, low usage customers. It has the deficit of raising transaction costs, for example some customers will spend additional time shopping for price. The more the buyer is aware that approximately the same goods are available at differing prices the more resource he will likely spend shopping. Note that any time the buyer spends shopping tends to imply a lack of trust. Lack of trust implies a risky market.

Standards are a way that industries can engage in collusion or cooperation (take your pick) to temper the risk in a market for it’s participants. Here is a nice example of that. The auto-insurance industry needs data to set insurance rates. Each company has claims data which gives it a rough picture of the risk of insuring a given demographic. The demographic data available to one company is limited to it’s current customers. A company that insures mostly elderly people in Florida will have good data for that demographic.

To improve the quality of the data they pool their data. The pool is managed by a non-profit organization setup by the firms in the industry. That data then becomes the standard estimate of the risk of insuring a given car for a given class of individual. Some of this data is available on the web..

All this reduces the risk for the auto-insurance industry and leaves them to compete on other attributes: customer service, marketing, in-house efficencies. It also reduces the chance that one company will give you a better price than another since it standardizes the measures used thru-out the industry for sizing up a customer prior to quoting him a price.

Notice how the data pool is very similar to a standards body.

It helps set standard prices.

The data pool both reduces transaction costs in a market, letting it run more efficiently and lowering risk. It tends to shift the pricing from differencial to fixed.

The data pool lowers the need for firms to merge. Without it the only way to get a large pool would be to merge. Stated another way the data pool provides a way for small firms to collaborate to gain knowledge that only large firms might otherwise aggregate.

I got to thinking about this because I was seeking other examples of collaborative knowledge pooling. I.e. other than open source, where the source code is the obivous reification of the pool. Other than a classic standards bodies, where you find patent pools.

Peering contracts, say between Internet ISPs, look like fourth example.

Spontanous Artist Collaboratives

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This is really a posting about automating the creation of light weight groups.

I wish I had tools to filter some of the feeds that I read so that I could filter them better. For example if I subscribe to Mr. Diverse Interests I want to setup filters so that I get those of his postings that overlap my diverse interests. Doc. Searls for example thinks about lots of stuff; but I’m only interested in a portion of that stuff.

One idea, among many, is draw on the work of the tagging hordes. Intersecting my the tag cloud of my interests with the tag cloud of others. An approach like this helps with the UI problems. The filtering software could present me with a source’s tag cloud and I can toggle those for white/black listing. The neat thing that’s hidden in here is that we can probably build two models – one of the reader and one of the writer – and then intersect them. The model built can, of course, draw on various sources of the meta data: tagging, text analysis, link graph analysis, semantic web, etc. etc.

I’m already doing a certain amount of this using pubsub. When I notice a turn of phrase I add it to a query I have at pubsub and see what it turns up. That is, of course, similar to what Amazon is doing with their statistically improbably phrases.

But back to group forming.

This would be particularly useful for some of the planet sites that are trying to aggregate postings from all the loud mouths who are thinking in public about a particular problem domain. The trigger for this realization was planet identity. Which is an attempt to aggregate all the very very diverse voices that are talking about the internet identity problem.

I call these pools of loud mouths the mob: i.e. the set of disaffected intelectuals and artists who actually provide the most substanative analysis of an emerging topic. The identity bloggers is only one example. These are very tenous groups. They have common cause in so far as they are working on the same problem; but in many cases they have no common cause around how to solve that problem. Such groups – ones with a common problem but very little consensus about the right solution – are of course extremely intereting.

All the other planet’s I’ve encountered have, go in, agreed on a common body of work they are engaged in. Planet Apache for example is a tiny subset of the Apache committers; it’s a minor complement to the real thing that brings that group together.

Mob sites are a different kettle of fish. The mob members aren’t organized into a coherent group. Recall that my definition of a mob says they are “disaffected.” The benefit of going to the mob for information about a topic arises out of their collective lack of loyality to any given solution.

Many years ago my wife was in charge for a while of an “Artists Collaborative.” A phrase I consider the penultimate oxymoron.

So the really fun idea here is that mob sites might be brought into existance without resolving that disaffection. It looks entirely straight forward that one can create very very light weight collaboration forums from out of the work of entirely disaffected artists that happen to be working on that problem. Distilling the liqour of the mob’s conversation on a given topic without forcing the mob’s members to join a drinking club.

Fundable

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Why don’t neighborhoods have a collectively owned tool shed? My neighbors and I own the most amazing amount of idle captital equipment! We each have our own hedge trimmers, snow blowers, lawn mowers, etc. etc. It is mind boggling! I’ve been puzzling about this question for years and years, because this question is a good small proxy for many big questions.

A varient of the tool shed question is snow removal. Why don’t neighbors band together to hire somebody to plow their sidewalks and driveways. There is an interesting liturature on that question. It is a really hard problem. Consider this simpler one. Say three families are interested in planting a tree. Take as a given that the cost for the tree is $200. With the help of powerful mind reading techniques we know exactly what each family is willing to donate for this project. The numbers are: $100, $75, and $50. So in theory there is enough money ($225) to plant the tree. In practice the tree is very unlikely to get planted. The project falls apart as issues of equity, fairness, debt, etc. enter into the negotiation.

One way to solve this problem is to insert a middleman. He can then obscures who paid what. Community activists often fill that role. They keep the secret. If that information got out the whole project would fall apart. If you want to kill a community activity just force the contribution levels of the various participants out into the open!

The tool shed question is more complex than the tree planting project. The tree is a one shot event, while the tool shed has all kinds of policing, maintainance, liablity, etc. etc. aspects that add complexity. Worse they add uncertainty and we all know that’s deadly to action. One reason I find Circle Lending an interesting business is how they reduce the uncertainty by doing the loan servicing if one or more people agree to lend money to an activity.

So. Take notice of Fundable.org today. They provide a place you can go if you want to raise a lump of cash, via contributions or donations. If they could keep the secret then they could be used to solve the tree purchase example.

Group purchasing is very common in the online car tuning communities. One guy offers to collect the funds from a group for a make a bulk purchase of something. Often this is an accessory that, for example, you can only buy in Japan were the car was made. He then orders, splits out the parts, and ships them off to the group members. This is exactly like community activists acting as middleman. The guys that organize these things keep secret the varations of the various participants. I notice a lot folks who do this use paypal to collect the funds. So does fundable.org.