Thinking about Ravelry

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Forgive me but I will enjoy this exercise … Let me take a stab at explaining Ravelry’s success as domain specific social network site.    I do not participate in this group so this is dangerously ungrounded.

Further, I’d be very careful about over valuing a single example, i.e Ravelry.  If you want to tease out what makes for a vibrant social network there are lots of vibrant sites which any model has to explain.  Some other examples: Howard’s Forums about the telecom industry;  Fat Wallet for power shopping/consumers; one of my favorites is Blade and Badger about wet-shaving.  There are also ones for every affliction, and ones for every diet fad.

Things about Ravelry…

Group sport two kinds of common cause.  Ones which draws them together and ones drives them together.

Common cause/draw: The gravity at Ravelry is their joint problem solving – in this case the problem solving inherent in knitting.

Common cause/drive: What drives them together are those spouses, and others, always suspicious of their partner’s hobbies.  They critique the time, the expense, and they tease.

Nature of the talent: There seems to be high correlation between knitting and women in high-tech (the few that are left).  Presumably that has been invaluable for Ravelry, but it’s just a hypothesis.  Possibly that explains only the overlap between this particular hobby and the internet.

Green space: Craft suffered an interregnum in the late 70s early 80s.  It’s back, under the reign of Queen Martha :).  But that dry spell enabled a green field for new institutional structures to emerge.  I was amused in chatting with people at Etsy.  They didn’t even know about the major craft fairs or magazines of the prior era; many of which endure.  (Maybe it was the domestic arts, rather than craft that suffered the interregnum?)

Esoteric swag:    The stuff required to engage in any enthusiasm is a great catalyst for group forming.  This forum at Blade and Badger is a near perfect example of that.  Swag gives you something to talk about.  It gives you a stream of problems to work through.  It enables shopping, sorting, marketplaces, and group buys.  Ravelry has a bunch of unique tools that allow members to organize their stash of materials.

Nature of the problems: The problem solving around tools, materials, and patterns has great granularity for the social conversation.  This joint problem solving is key to allowing group members to model and act upon one of the cornerstones of good groups – a strong reflex to aid each other.

Common ritual: The literature on groups says they always feature common practice/ritual/jargon – clearly knitting is rich in that.

Signs and Wonders: All groups have a problem with outreach, i.e. how to draw in new members.  The evangelical movement has a cliche that advocates “signs and wonders” (i.e. speaking in tongues and miracles make a good draw).  Knitting has great outreach because it’s practitioners do it in public and it self starts the conversation.

Riffraff: Like the old National Geographic, the Apalacian Mountain Club, or Google’s mail and voice offerings Ravelry played the exclusivity/scarcity card.  You needed an invitation to join.

There are plenty of questions this leaves unaddressed.  I’d love to know of other sites where large groups hang out that provide tools for what you might bloodlessly call inventory management.  I don’t know what the precursors and competing points of rondevous where.  For example were there existing sites that were organizing offline knitting groups.  I certainly don’t have any model for how this interacts with the knitting bloggers, who hold a surprisingly large market share in the blogging industry.  (“Blogging industry” – HA!)

I’ll leave you with this.

Hotdogs and Buns

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It’s been a while since I’ve added another entry to my enumeration of cartoons models of open source.  I love it when I get another one.

I recently read one of Paul Krugman’s old essays from back when he was writing for Slate.  The essay is a three corner shot.  He presents a little cartoon model, advocates for for humor in science, and closes with is a bit of snarky attack on a book writing journo/pundit who’s fixated on a single model, a model Paul dislikes.  In the days since I read this I have been chewing on the example model.

Here is Paul’s amusing cartoon model:

Imagine an economy that produces only two things: hot dogs and buns. Consumers in this economy insist that every hot dog come with a bun, and vice versa. And labor is the only input to production.

… Suppose that our economy initially employs 120 million workers, which corresponds more or less to full employment. It takes two person-days to produce either a hot dog or a bun. (Hey, realism is not the point here.) Assuming that the economy produces what consumers want, it must be producing 30 million hot dogs and 30 million buns each day; 60 million workers will be employed in each sector.

Now, suppose that improved technology allows a worker to produce a hot dog in one day rather than two. And suppose that the economy makes use of this increased productivity to increase consumption to 40 million hot dogs with buns a day. This requires some reallocation of labor, with only 40 million workers now producing hot dogs, 80 million producing buns.

This is an analogy for the shift from manufacturing to services.  If productivity gains enable the production of more goods (i.e. hotdogs), then the consumption of complementary services which wrap those goods will increase.  I’ll forgive Paul for glossing over the displacement issues.

That model is a prefect fit for what Open Source has done to the software industry.  For a shockingly wide range of software systems open source has turned out to be a radically more productive means of production.    If that’s the meat then the business models that have risen up around this shift emphasis services; ala Redhat, WordPress, MySQL, Elgg (org/com).

Let me add one more observation, a point about complements.  There is always an pressure between complements.  It leads to one becoming commoditized.  Presumably as services become more dominate in the economy they seek ways to lower the profit margins of manufacturing.    And so, if your a software services firm, you might want to encourage Open Source.

So my new addtion to my collection of open source cartoons is that it’s a hotdog and bun economy, where we give away the hotdogs.

Gift cards to the rescue

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Currency substitutes exist to enable their issuer to tinker with how their used.  There is real value in that power.  For example when the drug store sells a gift card to a restaurant chain they bought that card for about 20% off it’s face value.  Presumably that 20% is a measure of the value the restaurant captures from their little micro-currency.

There are lots of aspects to tinker with.  Food stamps tinker with one thing, as do school lunch vouchers.  Frequent flyer programs are mostly about loyality.  Gift cards are about loyality as well, but they also have a change lost in the cushions thing going on.  National currencies are about retraining control of your macroeconomic control levers.  But, I doubt I’m close to enumerating all the things people try to tinker with and I’m surprised I haven’t stumbled upon a long careful enumeration in the liturature.

I wrote a while back about how some of the local currency systems established in the depression were explicitly designed to assure that people didn’t just stick the money under their mattresses.  They were designed to increase the velocity of money.  Here’s another example along those lines.  The suggestion that the government should send out stimulus payments in the form of rapidly expiring gift cards.  While they do some of that already, either you buy that high efficiency appliance this year and get a tax rebate; or you miss out.  There must be a lot more they could do to increase people’s sense of urgency.

the briar patch

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Dan wrote up his travails getting some Lisp libraries working on.  Boy have I been there!

Dan manages to imply that the problem he encountered can be tagged open-source.  Coordinating consistent builds across a tangle of libraries would seem to be hard enough that it would require some orchestration.    It’s actually kind of striking how well this works in the loosely inter-project world of open source.  Stefano has been known to point out that the friction that rises out of solving this problem creates inter-project social energy that’s extremely valuable.  Which I’ll admit to wondering if it’s not a good thing that these problems arise.

The Common Lisp ecology is a bit weak on the infrastructure for library management, distribution, automated testing et. al. that helps to channel that energy in productive ways.    For my Common Lisp stuff I’ve had pretty good luck with clbuild; it could use some more energy but who couldn’t!

One fun aspect of clbuild is that they have a file that makes it trivial, with the help of graphviz, to draw dependency graphs for your boondoggles.  Here’s one of a program I wrote last week.  You can see the library Dan’s troubles began with near the center there.  Ironically it’s name is babel.

Update: I put the code that gins up that drawing here.

Git

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I’m really blown away by how nice a bit-o-work git is.

What Eric von Hippel taught me works both ways.  Real innovation requires close contact between a interesting problem and talent.  When you encounter innovation it signals an interesting problem and engaged talent.  Ignore the story told.  Look for that problem and why the talent had to fix it.  Ask, without the snark: “so what’s his problem?”

It’s a guess, but I think Linus’ problem was two fold.  First was a deep passionate desperate need to encourage other developers to take risks with the code.  I think his guilty foxy phrase for this is: “They do the work so I can take the credit.”  He wants to encourage forking!  That’s obvious, once I recognized it.  But it’s an insight that was denied me because forking has such a bad reputation.  I knew a guy once.  He forked, later he had a nervous breakdown trying to rejoin the main branch.    An exagerated story sure, but I have suffered dozens of cases where-in good labor branched off and nothing came back.    So given those experiances the insight that forking is something an Open Source project would want to encourage, v.s. temper, has left me gob smacked.

But it’s absolutely true.  To suppress forking is scarcity thinking.  Inside a closed system where you need to husband resources in an open system you need to court it.  I know that, I just didn’t get it!  Almost the whole point of open source is to cast forth the code so a million eyes and hands can improve it.  And every one of those improvements will be a fork.  It would be insane to try and keep that from happening.  If you don’t enable billions of tiny edits/forks then your killing the seed corn.  Since the entire cascade starts there (and it’s scale free) failure to encourage forking undermines the flow back toward the main branch(s).

I didn’t see that, at first.  I came to that in a round about way.  And damn if I did not have to puzzle out the second insight in a really round about way.  I’m embaressed to admit I was not trying to figure out what “his problem” is.  No, I was confused by this scenario that appears in most of the tutorials.

Your working on some complex change and suddenly your Boss steps into the room and demands a quick bug fix.  What do you do?

... working on complex change ...
git checkout deployed_version
... make quick fix ...
git checkout branch_of_complex_change
... back to work ...

My reaction to that was “Huh, what? you don’t got any diskspace?”  Just check out the main branch into a fresh directory and do the work there.  In fact I’d be surprised if you didn’t already have a copy checked out.  So it took me a while to accept the shocking part was that switching between branches in the same working directory is a common operation.  It was only then that I asked “why would Linus want that?”  That was the “what’s his problem” moment.

This story is a lie.  Linus doesn’t have a boss like the one in that story.  Linus lives on the boundry between “they do the work” and “i take the credit.”  His boss, and this is critical, is “they.”  “They” burst into his virtual office and make demands; in the form of patches.  Each of those demands/patches is branch.  Managing them is Linus’s problem.  At any given time you might have a hundred, thousands even, of such demands/branches.  It’s not your Boss coming thru the door that triggers switching from one branch to another; it’s email, irc, and the whims of your attention that do it.  When ever your brain thinks “Oh, I wonder if patch Foo does Bar?” you do git checkout Foo, look into the Bar question.  A moment later, buffeted by another boss/demand/patch you switch off to another branch.

These two are complementary.  That git encourages forking energizes the periphery of your project; that it empowers you to manage a blizzard of patches lets you deal with the consequences.  But even if you don’t need to have a vast army of contributors I find that rapid context switching useful.  My damn brain is full of contributors too.  I can give all these fever’d demons their own branch.    You can cast those hot ideas out of your head an into git, stew them over time.  It maybe a chaotic mess, but git provides the tools to help manage all that.

While this is a totally different model of branching and forking from the one in traditional source control systems, it is absolutely better.  It is better at assuring the improvements are enabled, captured, managed, and nurtured.  Full stop.

There is a social aspect to git that deserved it’s own posting.  But leave it to say that it’s actually brilliant, from the point of view of somebody more familiar with the ASF’s development models, because it enables and encourage the forming of small groups of common interest around forks.  Brilliant because it’s scale free.  Brilliant because it creates a locus for socially constructed validation tied to that common interest.  Brilliant because it distills out the flow of commits in a canonical form that enables the forks to bud off and remerge smoothly.  Brilliant because it removes a huge “ask permission” cost; i.e. in this system you don’t submit patches you mearly reveal them.  Notice that word “submit.”

I wrote an essay years ago about what could be done to improve the dynamism of open source.  I wrote that there was a virtous cycle between the code base and the user/developers and one thing that we seriously needed was to look at all the friction in that cycle and see if better tooling and practices couldn’t ease them.  Git delivers!

Well that job certainly had excessive cellulite!

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I have it from a very good authority – my wife, experienced connoisseur of advise columns – that items like the following are a perennial favorite:

“I hear the same kind of complaints coming from single men. ‘There are no good women out there.’ … if your idea of the perfect wife is a 19 year old compliant Czech super model with pencil thin, cellulite-free thighs and DD-cup bustline whose fondest ambition is … then perhaps it is your attitude that needs a bit of adjustment … There are plenty of decent women out there.”

I’m hopelessly amused at the metaphor: job ~ fashion model.  But, I have my standards and I will not accept a job with excessive cellulite.  Ok, having seen the scale of my pending tax bill, maybe I will.

SO

If you don’t already know that I am looking for a job, you do now.  Suggestions are most welcome!

Adding to the excitement is that my kids are all out of high school now and Mimi and I would be open to any number of scenarios, even if packing up this house might kill us.

Note there is a contact me link in the sidebar and more info on the about page.

Etsy Sellers

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I’ve been playing with the recently released API for Etsy, and here is a chart of questionable value.

Each dot represents a single shop on Etsy.  The vertical axis shows how many items they have sold.  The horizontal axis is a very rough estimate of their average price.

This is pretty bogus.  Some reasons why:  I drew my sample from a list of high volume shops;  If I had a list of high grossing shops I’d have gotten more points in the lower right.  The estimated average price by sampling current offerings.  E.g. shop at the lower right probably has an average selling price of around twelve dollars, in spite of having a number of two thousand dollar items in their shop.  The data is not per-year, but rather since the shop opened.

Lots of things come to mind.  For example, the cost structure of shop in the upper left (mostly fulfillment I assume) is quite different from those in the lower right.

That said it doesn’t seem implausable that there are a few hundred shops that gross more than fifty thousand a year at Etsy.  Maybe, there are a few who’s profits are above that level.

A Slurry of the Miscellaneous

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A beautiful essay where in the middleman rants at his dear good friends on both sides of the divide he bridges.  A good example of both how the middleman is always struggling with how to frame how he characterizes these parties; but more so how there is always an underlying larger scope that is likely more critical than their self indulgent disdain for each other.

Speaking of living on borders: a nice paragraph:

Which brings back a memory. About nine years ago, as a young pup, I recall meeting a Programme Director from another organisation. Having just come back from years in a field office, she was gaunt from tropical diseases, and wrinkled and weathered from years of sun exposure. Her clothes looked like they were from another decade. She wore no jewellery and no make up. She spoke slowly and deliberately, using simple words and short sentences. No jargon. No sophistication. Plain speaking. Every few minutes, she would pause and check that you got her point. I recall another colleague saying derisively, “You can tell when they have been in the field too long. They lose touch”. I recall that now. And realise, with some pride, I too have lost touch.

This just makes my skin crawl: a catalog of autistic schemes to reify reputation in your software.  These social software people seem hell bent drain the blood right out of the community they attract.

Google Voice, the refresh of their GrandCentral acquisition, is quite nice.  The transcription of voice mail to text is quite amazing and useful.

Django’s templates … {{block.super}} leads to all kinds of tangled wonders.  But then these frameworks are 90% tangle out of the box, right?

On the attention management tool front:  The Readablity bookmark (make your own) is addictive.  Combines nicely with the rough but useful Firefox plugin FullerScreen.  I often use Platypus (another firefox plugin) to reduce the clutter on a web page prior to printing it.  I’ll note you can edit your Firefox navigation toolbar so it’s more at hand.

I’ve been using the Perspectives Firefox plugin for a while now.  It’s great if you interact with sites that have homemade SSL setups; particularly now that firefox has gotten all fastidious about them.  Appears to be pretty, if not more, safe too.

Yeah!  Here’s why Quicksilver stopped working r. my Firefox bookmarks.  Toggle browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true via <about:config>; and then you have to explicitly add the resulting bookmarks.html file (hidden in you Firefox preferences folder), and finally toggle the settings so quicksilver's cataloging mines the urls out of it.

As side effect of my work on the Simile project I found my self drawn in to the puzzle of how hard it is getting for Reasearch Libraries to archive the output of scholars.  I was discouraged to see that while the librarians were very worried they didn’t seem to be even close to sufficently worried.  By way of the enjoyable Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog here is a fine example of what a good scholarly paper should look like, and hence what the Libraries need to figure out how to capture and preserve.