There is a surprising syndrome in standards. At first blush standards exist to make help exchange between parties proceed more smoothly. If buyer and seller agree on weights and measures then transactions are simpler. It’s an efficiency argument. Surprisingly there is a countervailing force.

A common, but dangerous, blindness that arises from that simple view of standards. If you thinking about standards that way you become fixated on the efficiency benefits and in turn on the beneficiaries of the efficiencies. Example: why do we drive on the right (or the left)? Obviously because it’s so much more efficient and safe compared to not having a standard; it’s good for the drivers. This makes you blind to the other players in the game. What about the road builders what benefits to they capture?

We have two major sets of standards for weights and measures on the planet. The metric system and the anglo-american system. After the second world war the vast majority of the planet’s economic activity used the anglo-american system. Then and now the switching costs of moving from that standard to the more efficient metric system were huge. The efficiency improvements were minor compared to the huge advantages of having one system. This is a classic “standards war.”

I have come to consider a bit of a mystery why the minority standard – i.e. the metric system – survived and thrived. What what the source of the advocacy for that? I do not believe that parties to exchanges, i.e. those who use the standard, were creating a forceful demand for change. I do not believe that the benefits of switching were even close to the cost of switching. I just do not find it credible that the forces of good overcame the installed base by the virtue of their eloquent arguments. In large part because I find, upon closer examination, that the arguments are thin. They lack sufficient force to drive people over the switching costs.

What was the driving force? Who was driving this change?

Follow the money.

The beneficiaries where the tool vendors. The entire weights and measures industry benefited from the exercise. If they could get the anglo-american system to be changed over to the metric system they would get a share of the switching costs.

The entire boondoggle was driven by a desire to force upgrades in the installed base! Better yet the longer the switch over took (or takes) the longer they can sell two of everything. Two rulers, two scales, two sets of cups and measures. Sure the tool vendors had allies in the science community that were actually seeking efficiencies. They even allies in the education establishment who were looking for things to teach that weren’t controversial. But I can’t convince myself that the allies perceived sufficient near term benefit to be the real drivers.

The tool vendors sell efficiency, but they reap a benefit from volatility, complexity, transition, and change. The result is that almost without exception as standards setting unfolds the players at the table with the clearest understanding of why they will benefit is the vendors of tools (etc.) used to implement the standards. Their motives are not the same as the motives of those the users.

Something to consider next time you encounter a complex standard.

Could this be the real reason for opposition to gay marriage?

This chart is stolen from here a blog with a lot of fun little drawings like this over at Salon.

I’m amused by the lengths I go to rondevous with different people in their prefered communication channel. We certainly do have so many different kinds these days! Heavens, I have coworkers with whom interaction requires I cross a continent, schedule a meeting which is named from a catalog of known meeting kinds.

The chart above pretends to provide a decision procedure for how to parties would agree to rondevous in a communication channel. Each participant would take the topic in question and then run down that decision process and pop out in the approprate channel. It requires a fair amount of optomism to presume that when they pop out the other parties in the conversation will be there.

Back toward the end of the Vietnam war the parties spent what seemed like years agreeing on the shape of the table around which the negotiation would take place. These discussions over the shape of the table are often just as important as the actual negotiations. You can see that by seeing how hard it might be to get the parties to a discussion to agree about each of the questions enumerated in the decision tree shown above.

It’s also facinating to notice how once the parties get into a given communication channel they will cling to that channel even as it becomes increasingly clear that the channel’s strengths aren’t all that relevant to the challenges of the task at hand. Switching channels isn’t cheap. Your sure to lose people on the way. People will have to waste time learning the standard practices of the new channel. It’s certain to cause the community to have to carry some coordination costs to keep the task model in synch between the two or more channels.

Yet another example of how much material still waits to be dragged out of the deepening darkness of those primitive pre-web times: apparently almost none of Goofus and Gallant on the web!

Could there be a finer example of the mindless way that technology casually displaces the hard won ethical standards of the past?

Goofus hordes his intellectual property, Gallant shares!

A friend recently shared with me a paper from the dark ages (i.e. 15-20 years ago) on the changing nature of work and the tools people were hacking up to support these bizzare new forms of work.

It had a chart like this one; except that I’ve put some points on the chart.

That’s the kind of chart that B School professors can make an entire consulting practice out of.

One of the things I’ve been noticing recently is that the locus of work is moving toward the upper right hand corner. The folks working on a given peice of collective action rondevous less and less in time or space, sometime never. Other points of rondevous are replacing those; e.g. the code repository, the mailing list, etc.

Some kinds of work are stuck in the lower corner. For example the Congress only lets those people in the room at the time vote; so they are stuck having to all be in the same place at the same time.

I sat on a board of directors once. The lawyers wouldn’t let us hold our board meetings in the upper right corner and insisted that we do them on the phone. The phone thing was still pretty innovative.

As you move around in this space you encounter different practices. For example a group of graphic designers working in the lower left will sketch and toss bits of paper back and forth across the table. Once there work moves away from there they loose that; which makes them sad. But it begins to allow practitioners that don’t excell at rapid interaction to join in.

I’m convinced that lots of people and groups are very confused about all this. If some of the players moves to one point in the space and some of the players stay in another part of the space it provides all the raw materials for boundry making and conflict.

More interestingly I’ve seen situations where the work moved into the upper right while some number of people clinge to the lower right – staying in their comfort zone – so that the community is paying the cost of supporting two complete infrastructures for coordinating work.

That’s similar to the way that if you want to introduce the next generation standard you need to inter-operate for a very long time. Thus televisions are still ready and willing to recieve a black and white signal, my office has a fax machine, a mail room, and the old office had a hitching post outside.

I see that Gartner has suggested that Cisco should take over control of the internet. Should this attack on the end to end principle make progress I hope they follow the suggested standard outlined back in April 2003 here in RFC 3514. That involves an enhancment to IPv4 header.

   The bit field is laid out as follows:

             0
            +-+
            |E|
            +-+

   Currently-assigned values are defined as follows:

   0x0  If the bit is set to 0, the packet has no evil intent.  Hosts,
        network elements, etc., SHOULD assume that the packet is
        harmless, and SHOULD NOT take any defensive measures.  (We note
        that this part of the spec is already implemented by many common
        desktop operating systems.)

   0x1  If the bit is set to 1, the packet has evil intent.  Secure
        systems SHOULD try to defend themselves against such packets.
        Insecure systems MAY chose to crash, be penetrated, etc.

Really, when will people learn that appealing to a private intermediary to save you rarely works out in the long run?

While we are on the topic of evil. I’m getting link parasite attacks on my server’s log files. Presumably the idea is that by stuffing the list of refererer pages or the list of pages not found with the evil dude’s page names I might create back links to them, by mistake. In this case the lession once again is that if you let outsiders cross the wall around you site content without moderationation; some twit will abuse that. The answer to these puzzles is not to make the wall infinitely high. An even worse answer is to hand off responsiblity for the wall to a central authority.

We see this same pattern in the standards war between the telecos and the internet; i.e. between the garden wall smart network model of the telcos and the dumb network end-to-end model of the Internet. The business advantage of a the garden wall model is, of course, that you can deploy all kinds of discrimitory pricing on along the gates in the wall. (editor: Did you say “Gates”?)

So look: Telcos would like to create their on top level domain. To quote Martin Geddes: “Very, very evil. I’m impressed.” Some of my best friends are telco employees.

With today’s insight we can see that the telcos ought to have started by having Gartner rail at them for failing to create a top level domain of their own. Then sheepishly they could have gotten back to work repointing the bricks in their garden wall.

I’m glad that other people have to try and puzzle out things like what exactly Trespass to Chattels is all about.

It would seem that the general idea is seemingly straight forward.

“Trespass to chattels” basically prohibits others from substantially interfering with your personal property (“chattel”). Generally speaking, there must be an intentional physical contact with the chattel, and the contact must result in some substantial interference or damage.

Several cases have imported this antiquated common law doctrine into the digital world, reasoning that “electrical signals” impinging on networked servers can be enough “contact” to support a trespass claim.

  — here

This stricks me as the law that you invoke when you brother messes with your stuff or stands outside your room and sings “The song that doesn’t end” for a few hours. Is this the law against pests?

I see that it’s been used to force a former employee to stop sending mail to his old employeer. In that case it would be the law you use to ostracize a pest; not that we haven’t all needed that law from time to time.

My interest? Well imagine that you own a standard hub; i.e. monopoly that arises because most of the exchange goes thru your bottleneck. Can you use trespass to chattels to keep people from using your bottleneck. This would seem to run up against the common carrier (pdf) rules. The ones created to limit the extent of differential pricing engaged in by the railroads, innkeepers, telephones.

There was a time when the phone companies could price service so that what you did on the phone limited in the contract. For example you could only use the phone for business. There was a case in the early days of the phone company fining a customer for using the phone to report a nieghbor’s fire. Buying a phone so you could reach the fire department was a uniquely priced part of their range of services.

From where I sit there is a sharp distincition between using Trespass to Chattel to guard against pests and using it to discriminate. But if you get down close to cases the sharp distinction gets pretty fuzzy. Thus I’m happy to delegate that to the courts. That said, there are monopolies and the line should move for them as it has for inn keepers, railroads, etc.

Now. Why are there no good images of cow-tipping on the web via google’s image search?