Category Archives: democracy

The Intention Economy: a window into the next phase of the Internet

Posted on August 6, 2012 by | Leave a comment
Doc Searls

Doc Searls: The Intention Economy. used under CC license from dsearls on flickr.

I just finished Doc Searls’ latest book. This book is several things, all of them good. This is a knowledgeable look at the future of being a customer in a world where the Internet realizes its potential as an information commons (instead of a storefront). The book is simultaneously about being a consumer and a customer (not exactly the same), and about big data and little data (the data you should be in control of), and about the Internet and the economy. Doc introduces a new (5 years old or so) effort to create software services that enable customers to announce to the world their intentions, and to then receive bids from vendors who wish to sell the products and services that might be some value for those intentions. This is a reversal of rules and roles which currently lock customers into the loyalty silos that companies use to corral their wallets.

Every chapter in this book is a revelation on an important topic, from the coming collapse of the advertising bubble, to the need for customer-based contracts instead of the current lopsided boilerplate contracts of adhesion, to the Internet as a managed commons, which can support individuals owning their own data and negotiating with an open market for what they need: based on their own intentions, rather than from some expensive (in money and effort) algorithm devised to mine their data and ferret these out. Who knows their intentions better than the customer?

The new economy, based on fourth-party brokers that act on behalf of the customer —not the vendor—will be open (newcomers welcome, no silos allowed), efficient (no more guessing intentions, transactions are knowledge-full), effective (allowing vendors to work together), and it will bring the Internet closer to its potential as a free exchange of knowledge that can also support innumerable transactions and contracts. In the end, this is also a story of a work in progress, as Doc and others have already started to build software services to explore this new economy. This is an important work, that announces what could, and I would argue, should be a new direction for an Internet enabled economy.

As a bonus, the work is extraordinarily well written at the prose level, and is not simply a blog-to-book. Each chapter adds substantially to the overall argument. I cannot recommend this book too highly. I am encouraging friends and strangers alike to give it a read.

I would also submit that there are corollaries to the commercial vendor/customer relationship that Doc’s logic and services would help improve. How much better would civil society be if the intentions and the capabilities of citizens, and the problems they face, were announced in this fashion to their local governments? How much more effective would continuing education be if the student could announce the skills they require to the world and have multiple offers for training? The Internet as a managed commons (Doc does a great job of advancing Lewis Hyde’s work on the commons) extends to many facets of our social interactions, not just those that involve transactions for money. Doc does talk about micro-transactions, but there are also new efforts to enable a sharing economy that would benefit greatly from these services.

Doc Searls: The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. Harvard Business Review Press

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intention-Economy-Customers-Charge/dp/1422158527

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Democracy happens in places and with crowds

Posted on February 15, 2011 by | 1 Comment
Tahrir Square demonstrations

Tahrir Square Demonstrations 2011

In Community, Democracy, and Performance, I spent a chapter looking at how festivals opened up the street in a manner that could reenact the moments when the crowd asserted its role in civil society. “Celebrations in Cities: public spheres/public spaces” reexamined the fear of the crowd, and the value of crowd moments in the history of democracy. ”Let’s now return to the festival, and to the movement of people across national boundaries, and how festival production can loosen the grip that the nationally domesticated space holds over the city. A civil democracy is realized through actions taken by its citizenry. This use of the street for demonstrations of civic belonging and collective celebration or protest is not merely window-dressing for the mass media.”

Today we salute the people of Egypt and their weeks of democratic crowd moments—moments that have awakened a new space for democracy in that ancient place. Tahrir Square will now be a space for the civil crowd, and a place where reenactments of civic participation will remember these weeks, and also the people who died.

In Community, Democracy, and Performance, I expressed a concern about the lack of such founding moments/places in the city of Kyoto. What did that lack mean for the daily performance of democracy? The same might be said about Baghdad. When your democracy is delivered by Donald Rumsfeld and a foreign army, how do you reenact this as a feature of daily life? How do you own it? Egypt will not need to face such questions. They bought their democracy in the streets, and they can return to the same streets at any time to remember and reassert their national public sphere.

Photo Credit: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images

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Facebook, schmacebook: We’re getting tired of shopping at the company store

Posted on August 13, 2010 by | Leave a comment
I can’t wait to get off Facebook. Everyone I know can’t wait to get off Facebook. We are all waiting for the next good thing to come along and take us off this island of wasted opportunities. The two questions surrounding this situation are these: what’s wrong with Facebook? and what can we know, say, or do to help the next good thing happen?
A large problem with Facebook has to do not with what it does (or fails to do) but what it is. In fact, Facebook nailed the whole “social” side of social networking early on, only to then lose it. Facebook is a piece of software run by someone else with a business model designed to maximize how my content can be used by them to make money, but not for me. I donate my content and my time, and they keep tweaking the service to make my contributions more valuable for them. This situation is hardly a secret, so we are not talking about deception here. Just bad faith. Facebook is a social network service designed to convert my efforts (and those of 500 million others) into their IPO. Fine. For this, what do I get? A place to pop up microblogs (status updates). A space for random photos and videos (and a not very good service in terms of storing and retrieving these).  A constantly changing user interface that sends me suggestions I don’t need. A collection of my stuff that forever and without compensation now belongs to Facebook. There is no exit from Facebook. Users can only flee. But flee to where?
The next good thing in social networking will have to so several things better than Facebook:
  • Be big and small at the same time. Be a network of networks where each network has the means and the incentive to become more coherent and thus more useful and attractive. 500m members don’t help me out. 500 of the right members, with the right tools. That’s what I’m looking for.
  • Build in real reputation services, on top of powerful collaboration and publication tools. I’m looking for a place to publish once and publish everywhere. I need to know who’s reading what I contribute. I want to reward others for their insights.
  • Build in content sharing services so that I can load up my really good content and have this licensed (Creative Commons) and cited.
  • Build in property and privacy rules so that I control my own contributions. Give me an exit that packages all my content for me to take somewhere else and erases all of this on the system. Chances are I will not use this, simply because it is there. If you love my content, let it go. That’s how you get me to stay.
  • Last, and most importantly: build in network governance so that I have a say in how my social network(s) in the system are managed. I might want to donate some time to curate a part of the content. I might want to help build some policies about member services. Governance is the launching pad for network growth. When members own their own networks they care for and about these. Leaders emerge. Members become evangelists. This is the future of social networking. It looks a lot like democracy. Get used to it.
Back when a mining company opened up in a remote village it would force its workers to use the company store by paying them with scrip only that store would honor. The prices in the company store were managed to the company’s benefit. Often it was a pastel kind of slavery. Sound a lot like Facebook? This is where we are today in the tail-end of the first generation of social networking. We are living our online lives in the company store. And we are ready to jump ship.
Photo Credit: CC licensed for reuse by jekemp

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Posted in democracy, online, social network, Uncategorized, Web 2.0

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Democracy First: effective governance to grow an active social network

Posted on July 29, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Any social network service is much more than its code, its content, and its communities. It is all of these within a dynamic framework of rights and roles, and of needs and opportunities. All of these opportunities will flourish best if they are built on a thoughtful system of best practices and clear rules.

Your social network platform represents the various groups that must come together to build, maintain, support, and use the service. These groups include teams of developers/administrators, some number of key sponsors/funders, member organizations, and member individuals. Each of these groups has interests that you want to fulfill.

These interests can be identified by the issues they engender: funding, community (leadership, reputation), privacy (policy creation), sharing (licensing), branding, technology (features and standards), and policing (boundary control for content and bad behavior). All of these issues (funding excepted) can be addressed over time through the right kind of governance system. This system is the garden where communities can grow.

Too often, software services (even currently successful ones such as Facebook and Wikipedia) paid too little attention to governance in their infancy. This failure has long-ranging consequences, some of which are now becoming evident in these early Web 2.0 experiments. Best practices suggest that governance needs to be considered up-front, at the same time as software design.

One of these best practices is to get the your members involved in devising (and then owning) the governance system. So the plan is to first create a starting point: defining membership within the network, and then facilitate the members to create the system.

The goal is to build a nimble system that rewards sponsors for their support, enables open-source software development, encourages organizations to add their members, and gives each member not simply a voice, but a say in how their network runs.

Photo Credit: CC license on Flickr by undersound

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Posted in cybersocialstructure, democracy, virtual organization

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Post Publication Peer Review: It’s in your future

Posted on June 8, 2010 by | 1 Comment

I recently attended the PLoS Forum in San Francisco. For a couple years, I’ve been encouraging PLoS to find a way to experiment with post-publication peer review. However, the pathway from the current academic peer review system to something potentially better (faster, fairer, more precise) must first overcome the enormous weight of influence that the current publication system holds for academic careers. I was encouraged that half of the day was spent trying to figure out how to move ahead with post-publication peer review.

Here is an excerpt from a Knol I wrote about scaffolding a new system based upon the reputation system of the old system:

“The real sticking points preventing scientific communication from taking full advantage of digital distribution are the following: 1) top ranked journals have cornered the reputation economy in terms of impact on tenure (they are a virtual whuffieopoly:  for the term “whuffie” see Hunt and Doctorow). 2) the very same journals remain locked into the 20th century (with resemblances to prior centuries) print-based publishing model, built on blind peer review and informed by the scarcity of space available in any printed journal. The task then, is to release them from their print-based constraints, while rewarding and supporting them to continue to be a high-end filter for quality science; and then transitioning their whuffie-abilities to a form more suited to the rapid digital dissemination of scientific outcomes. The academy needs great filters to help guide readers to the best science among hundreds of thousands of new papers every year. Universities need fair and broad feedback from the academic community to decide which faculty deserve promotion. The research community needs to accelerate publication speed and minimize editorial overhead. And the public needs markers that help them determine good science from the rest. Open-access content is the first step. The next step might need some badges.”

You can read the whole piece at Post-Publication Peer Review in the Digital Age


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Posted in democracy, eScience, peer review

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Delivering the Goods of Democracy for your VO

Posted on September 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Crates1

One of the first conversations I have with people who have been tasked to build or manage a virtual organization centers on the cost/benefit issues of democratic governance. Given the usual shortage of funding and time, they have real concerns about the effort required to build a community-based governance system. These concerns are usually layered on top of the more general concern that the community (or rather, certain activists within the community) may use the governance system to push the organization’s goals toward their own interests.

Certainly, democratic governance increases the overhead (in terms of time and effort) spent on governance. Top-down decision making can be quite efficient up to the point where it tends to fail rather abruptly. Democratic governance is also more prone to being gamed by people with time and interest to do so. This is where the community comes in to play. When you build in enough democracy to give the community the opportunity to really govern, it will tend to resist the efforts of certain individuals to subvert this opportunity. This is one of the goods that democracy delivers to your VO. Continue reading →

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Gathering privately online: the key to democracy

Posted on September 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

lock

The door has a lock for a reason. Inside there is a group discussing their political choices and potential actions. In the US, this group has a right to assemble guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However, this right is also contingent on the ability of group members to meet in private. And so the right to assemble also requires that the government not record who has assembled and what was said.
On the internet, there are few ways of hiding one’s identity (as this might be matched to the use of a computer) when you are conducting a virtual meeting. For virtual democracy to flourish, we need to find more ways to protect our presence online. This remains a software problem beyond the choices that people might make to reveal or conceal their identities. We need some sort of “anonymizer” service.
The EFF has also noted that we are physically tracked by the same devices we use to establish locations (the iPhone’s location services is a good example).  Check out this discussion of the EFF site.

Let’s find a way to lock the door on the internet!

photo credit: Doggie52 on Flickr, used under CC license

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Beware of Zombie Democracy in your VO

Posted on September 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Zombie1

Some digital organizations want your enthusiasm, and will suck this dry with offers of representation and feedback. How do you know your interests are being represented when the social network (SN) or virtual organization (VO) sets up a feedback system? What if they create some kind of users committee? What if they ask you to vote? All of these look like democratic practices. But the real test comes when decisions are made. Remember that democracy is a form of governance. If your feedback form, vote, representative delegate has no authority within the governance system, it’s just a zombie practice. It looks vaguely like democracy from a distance.
Most VOs and SNs are RUN BY SOMEONE… someone with their own interests. Someone being paid to do so. And that someone is probably not you. If they conjure up some kind of democratic shell game, demand to know how decisions are being made and where the money goes. If they are honest and tell you they want your feedback because it’s valuable to them and it might help them serve you better–you know where you stand.

Photo Credit: Ateo Fiel on Flickr. used with CC atribution license

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Virtual: Community, Democracy, Public Sphere

Posted on September 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

CommDemo

Community:
Building community is the central task for any virtual organization [VO] that a) needs to rely on an expert community to develop/deploy technology, or b) is looking to spread new technology among the wider (and thus more diverse) population. the cybersocialstructure effort is designed to bring together best theories and practices to help cyberinfrastructure [CI] projects know when, how, how much, and what kind of community building to pursue. Community is often the “undesignated” group that shows up in the proposal (or the RFP) as the larger target  developer or user cohort. But turning a cohort into a community, and a weak community into a strong community (when this is necessary) needs time, effort, budget, and skill.
There is no reason to build community for community’s sake. What your VO gets along with community is commitment, leadership, and communication. Volunteers can identify with the goals of the community and the other members of the group. Those with initiative can step up in the organization. Communication is member-to-member, peer-to-peer: with implied obligations to respond in timely fashion. Criticism is enabled and so is praise. Other management efforts become more effective and cost less (in effort and time).  This is fortunate because running the community is neither easy or inexpensive. At the end the total cost is likely to be the same, but the impact and broader outreach of a sustainable community of volunteers becomes another deliverable for the project.

Democracy:
Governing a virtual organization is  no less problematic than governing any large, non-virtual volunteer-led group. Subtending all of the project management tasks of any large VO is the need to build sufficient social networking and identity resources to feed  the amount of non-paid work (volunteer efforts) required to a) complete the actual project and b) sustain the community. Democracy, as this can be applied within virtual organizations, is one way a VO can create real communication among peers and real ownership by the community over the outcomes of the VO.
While community building is a more subtle social practice that happens as well (or better) in cafes and bars during meeting breaks than it does in plenary sessions, democracy is a noisy, visible practice that everyone in the organization does (to some extent) intentionally and explicitly. Democracy in a VO announces itself through public practices that involve all the members or their delegates. In part, democracy in a VO might resemble what you find in your nation-state: meetings, voting, constitutions and by-laws, and protests. The ability to voice disagreement is perhaps the most precious outcome of democracy in a VO: this is what will save the organization more often than any other management practice.
Democracy in a VO offers unique challenges and opportunities. Since the interactions are normally mediated and the records digital, democracy can become embedded into the digital communication services to where this becomes ubiquitous. By activating the voices of all of the community members, the VO energizes its community and can legitimately harvest real value from them in return.

Public Sphere:
With community as its destination, the virtual organization uses democracy as its vehicle and the virtual “public sphere” as its pathway to sustainability. The virtual public sphere (VPS) is made from the cyberarchitectural structures (the services and netware) that connect the peers, enable democratic participation, and assemble the means to build community.  The feedback forms on the website, an electronic voting service, chat, email, and WIKIs: all of these and more serve to connect volunteers into a peer network.
In any VO working in, through, or toward cyberinfrastructure (CI), a part of that infrastructure will be dedicated to the communication needs of the CI team effort. When these communication infrastructure services and nodes are also made available to support democratic community building, then they form the basis for a VPS.
In a democratic nation-state, the public sphere is the precious arena within which the discussions of its citizens are meant to inform public policy. The Public Sphere (capital “P”) is a space (discursively and mostly physically) distinct from that of religion, home, or the workplace. And the Public Sphere is the ongoing conversation that happens in this space. The strength or weakness of the space or the conversation in the space impacts the qualities of the available democracy in the nation-state.
In a democratic virtual organization, the public sphere is the space created by the cyberinfrastructure and the conversations enabled by the governance of the VO. Examining the “cyberarchitecture” allows us to predict how much democracy is available within the VO.

PHoto Credit: Timothy Vollmer

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Community, Democracy, and IT work

Posted on September 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

ITworkshop

ANOTHER FAMILIAR SCENARIO: Those of you from the IT world recognize this room: PPT up the old wazoo. But then it’s over and the work plans that have been listed on slide 17-23 (if not 117-123) are slated to become deliverables. The listserves get busy, the telecons are scheduled. Perhaps your IT group tracks tasks on BaseCamp and pings you whenever someone else has completed something. But if your not in the critical path, you might not know what others are doing and what your next step is. You might be able to volunteer a couple hours this week, but how do you know where these are best spent?

There might be a couple hundred people like you in the virtual organization (VO) that surrounds this particular project. Some were brought in to advise, others because of a current interest. At the core, decisions are being made and money spent. But the whole idea was that this was more than a distributed project among a small group of  paid Co-PIs. Most of the room was excited about helping move this forward, looking at the outcome as their payback. The workshop cost the government agency $100k to put on, and spent up three person-years in a week.  It had the carbon footprint of a small town.

The feeling of engagement that many participants experienced at the meeting lasted a few days. The funded Co-PIs went back to work. The larger VO languished as everyone else’s calendar’s filled up. Opportunities to pull in the talent and skills of the larger community passed by and dried up.

This doesn’t have to happen.

What is the answer?

One answer is, of course, cash. Spread the funding around and more people pay attention. But that is rarely possible. Another answer is community: grow it, use it, let it manage the work. And give it just enough funding to help people work together.

Be warned: when you let the VO community run the project you invite a range of voices into the room. You have to deal with competing interests and conflicting priorities. The good news is that these interests and priorities were there hidden (more or less) all the time in the VO, so dealing with them is something you can now do and move on. Otherwise you face these same issues when the project of over. To succeed, the VO community will need some form of internal governance. Since you are working with IT professionals, you’d better treat them like peers.

Your peer-based VO community will demand something that looks a lot like a democracy. Do not be afraid. You know that’s not how business gets done. At least you think you know that. In VO communities, democratic governance paves the way for volunteer participation, for leadership, for constructive criticism, and for active attention to the goals of the project. Try getting things done without it.

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Posted in democracy, volunteerism

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