February 29, 2004
Evoting forum in Houston
Last week Wednesday, I was on an evoting panel at Rice University headlined by Professor David Dill. Dill spoke articulately about the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail his presentation is here.
After the meeting, several people talked to me about taking party platform resolutions asking the party to support a paper trail. One participant lives in a Houston-area county that's considering buying voting machines to replace a paper system. I recommended against it, since a paper system is safer until the electronic systems have a voter-verifiable paper trail.
The drive out to Houston was pretty -- through rural areas and little Texas towns. The drive back between 10pm and 1am was very very very long.
February 25, 2004
Constitution
The President of the United States is running for re-election on an anti-civil rights platform. Think about it.
February 22, 2004
Arizona Day Trip 2
We stopped to see the Sinagua cliffdwellings. 
A village of 200 people built houses that lasted 600 years after they left. Our "big box" Walmart and CompUSA stores are designed to last 8-15 years.
There was an exhibit of Sinagua artifacts. They made rather ugly pottery, and traded with the Hopi for nice pottery. They also made baskets. The Hopi pottery, and Sinagua baskets were very similar in style to pottery, and baskets, and other southwestern objects. There are shopping malls and office buildings and subdivisions designed in the shape of those cliff-dwellings.
One part cultural appropriation, one part cultural continuity. There's something so compelling about the design patterns that humans replicate them for 1000 years.
Arizona Day Trip 1
Went to Arizona last weekend for a family wedding. On Sunday before the wedding, took a day trip that reminded me why I don't travel with the nuclear family, though I love them dearly.
The travel itinerary is:
* wake up at 6:30 am
* leave before 8
* drive two hours
* get out of the car
* scurry around an attraction for 15 minutes
* get back in the car
* drive
* get out of the car
* scurry around attraction for 15 minutes
* eat food from bag lunches in back seat
* drive
* repeat for another 2-3 attractions
* get back in the car
* drive two hours back to destination.
My parents are doing lots fabulous travel with their post-kids-at-home time, and it makes them sad that I don't go with them.
But I really can't stand it. Hated it as a kid, realized as an adult that you really can travel in a less frenetic fashion, and resolved not to do it again.
February 19, 2004
Is XFN worse than FOAF?
You might think that XFN would be even more even more decentralized and emergent than FOAF.
Both are decentralized ways for individuals to describe their social relationships, in contrast to the centralized social networking services from Friendster et al. XFN uses hyperlinks to describe the linker's relationships with the linkee, while FOAF (friend of a friend) uses a file in XML/RDF format listing all the friend relationships.
The reason that hyperlinks are generally such a nice way of showing emergent patterns is that they reflect millions of tiny choices that individuals make about what's relevant.
But the XFN site anticipates that the primary use of XFN will be in blogrolls. If that's the case then the relationship is buried in markup, in a list that doesn't change very often. This replicates one of the major problems with relationship profiles -- they are static, while relationships change slightly with every interaction.
Am I really going to update my blogroll to add a "met" attribute for Kevin Marks after meeting him in person at Etech? That kind of micro-maintenance will happen even more rarely than people clean their closets.
Kevin Marks' "vote links" are a much simpler and likelier use of expressive hyperlinks to show emergent opinion. The choices are simpler -- vote-for and vote-against. They let users express distinctions they want to express. In an article about Diebold's ghastly security holes, you can link to Diebold with a vote-against link.
By contrast, do people really want to declare a relationship as a "crush", "date", or "sweetheart"? (These are real XFN vocabulary terms). Imagine the agony of deciding when to switch from "date" to "sweetheart". Is it after the first kiss, or the third date, or flowers, or what?
Link emergence works when the links are frequent and simple. XFN won't create link emergence, because the links are static and complicated.
Traction Software Envies Ross Mayfield
Traction Software has apparently taken out a Google Ad for the words Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext. Traction is our competitor in the enterprise social software market. Ross saw the ad on his Flickr profile and other blogs quoting Ross's personal blog.
At Socialtext we respect honorable competitors but this is pretty low. If Traction wanted whuffie as opinion leaders and googlejuice as A-list bloggers, they might try to say intelligent, articulate things about the Social Software market instead.
If there's an alternate explanation for these symptoms of Ross-envy, then let us know.
February 17, 2004
Daypop != Fitness
On the other hand, Ross Mayfield alleges that the blog echo chamber gathers and amplifies the fittest memes.
* Blog-communities collect conversation, making it easy to form and find groups of people with similar interests.
* Blog amplifiers like Technorati and Daypop make popular memes audible above the noise. In political and organizational contexts, these tools and techniques will be powerful ways to get a zeitgeist check.
Popuar ideas are "fit" by the chosen evolutionary metric. But not all loud ideas are valid. Millions of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11, and that the terrorists on the planes were Iraqis. Doesn't make the ideas true.
The zeigeist amplifiers make good counsellors but bad dictators.
Censorship != Politeness
Shelley Powers equates community norms with self-censorship. I think Shelley's right in the extreme case, and wrong for the ordinary case.
Shelly writes: "I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons."
As I've said in comments to Joi Ito's post on the topic, there's a distinction between groupthink -- when someone silences an unpopular opinion in the face of social norms -- and basic politeness.
I don't think it's a bad idea to use a moderate tone when you're critizing someone's idea, when you're speaking directly to that person in front of others. (Assuming the idea you're critizicing is within the realm of civilized discourse).
Nothing useful is gained by hurting the person's feelings, or embarrassing them in public.
Here's what I said in my blog about Don Park's proposed relationship UI. The post on my blog uses a rant tone to project the idea in a noisy blogosphere.
And here's the more diplomatic version in the comments to Don Park's blog. I had never really spoken to Don before this conversation. I certainly didn't want to insult or alienate Don, though I disagree with his point.
Now that we've chatted a bit in comments here and there, I'd feel comfortable being a bit more blunt, though not yet rude.
In social life, there's a range of ways to say true things, depending on social context. Except at the outer reaches of diplomatic obfuscation, politeness isn't the same as lying or censorship. Being brutally blunt at all times just yields flamewars with no socially redeeming value.
February 12, 2004
LinuxChix
LinuxChix is an online community that hosts courses on Linux-related topics. This makes me very happy. A forum to learn without being chronically anxious about violating the Raymond Rule.
via Dorothea Salo on Misbehaving.
The Raymond Rule
"Only at grave peril shall you ask a question for which there already exists an answer somewhere in the world." This principle drives me batty, and causes geeks to waste hours of time. It's the macho-geek version of guys refusing to ask directions and driving till they are hopelessly lost.
Erik Raymond wrote the canonical explanation in How To Ask Questions. The geek world is run by wizards who don't have time to answer newbie questions and keep the earth orbiting the sun.
Therefore, if you have a question, you must read the man pages, scour google for diagnostic phrases, spelunk through code, and test your hypothesis. If you still haven't found the answer to your question after two hours, three hours, eight hours... then you may ask the wizard who may know the answer off the top of his head.
Otherwise, you risk scathing criticism, and a permanent deduction of 20 points from your interlocutor's estimate of your IQ.
I'm really glad to see LinuxChix which looks like it provides a forum for improving one's tech skills without facing the consequences of the Raymond Rule.
February 10, 2004
On the "Echo Chamber"
David Weinberger said something great about the allegation that online political conversations create an "echo chamber."
Some of the time you want to talk to people who are different and learn from them. Some of the time you want to find supporters, energize supporters, and acheive a goal. You don't have to do both things at the same time.
When you're learning and coalition-building, it's good talk to everyone, find and create common ground. When you're trying to achieve the goal, you find allies, co-ordinate with them, cheer with them.
Joe Trippi at Etech
The Joe Trippi talk at Etech yesterday was disappointing. He pointed fingers. He blamed the media and the primacy cycle. He didn't take responsibility for the disorganization in his own campaign and the lack of precinct organizing savvy that made the Dean get-out-the-vote effort less effective than Kerry. He didn't take responsibility for communication failures and flaws. After all the candidates had taken up the anti-war message, he didn't move on to other issues like health care and fiscal responsiblity.
It was all somebody else's fault, none of it was the responsibility of the campaign or the candidate.
Trippi's example of listening to the grass-roots was using a blogger's idea about using a baseball bat as a stage prop. He was proud of the fund-raising they were able to achieve, and didn't understand the community that the Dean campaign helped to catalyze.
February 09, 2004
How to affect the voting system
1) Congress sets policy for the nation. Call/Write your congressman to support the Holt bill, HR2239 mandating a voter-verifiable paper trail at the federal level
2) In each state, the Secretary of State sets standards for the voting systems in their state. In California and Nevada, the Secretaries of State have taken the lead in requiring a voter-verifiable paper trail. The Secretary of State's office is in charge of certifying voting machines.
Call or visit your Secretary of State. Encourage them to require a voter-verifiable paper trail at the state level. Find out about the process to certify voting machines. If it's secret, use the press and legal system to make it not be secret.
3) Voting machines are selected and implemented in each county. Make friends with your county clerk. Understand the process that they use to implement voting. Many of them are struggling with the technology. The county-level voting system has traditionally used a lot of volunteers. If you're a geek, your skills are needed.
4) Follow the issue at
Political Blogs and Democracy
The blogging session at O'Reilly Edemo had one part of the point. Yes, political blogging is "about" a new generation of A-list opinion leaders, those on the panel among them. AND it's about building groups of the like-minded. AND its a tactical tool that campaigns can use to co-ordinate in public and in private.
Social software tools play a variety of roles:
* express opinions
* build community of the like-minded
* discussion among the diverse
* tactical organizing in campaigns for elections and issues
February 07, 2004
Emergent relationships
Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.
Relationship definitions in social network services don't reflect this -- they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.
From conversation on #joito last night.
Emergent relationships
Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.
Relationship definitions in social network services don't reflect this -- they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.
From conversation on #joito last night.
Reconnections
"It is 'reconnection' that is the most powerful feature of these social network services, not new connections." - Chris Allen, on the long, rich analysis of social networking services that I haven't finished reading yet.
Patterns of Enterprise Social Software
As Socialtext deployments grow within organizations, here are some reflections on enterprise social software deployment patterns, based on observation of usage patterns of weblogs and wikis at scale on the public internet.
There are three main tiers of social networks in an organization, as Ross Mayfield describes. These map to different usage patterns of social software.
- Project teams are creative networks, groups that work closely together. These teams use shared workspaces to communicate and collaborate intensively, and maintain a continuous, shared understanding of project status. Schedule and presence capabilities will make it easier for these groups to co-ordinate.
- Communities of practice are social networks. Knowledge workers want to be able to scan, discover, and meet other in their disciplines across the organization. On the public internet, there are communities of bloggers in technology, law, teaching, and other fields using this model today. There are established wiki communities in technical areas, like Apache and non-technical areas, like, for instance, Kayaking, RSS subscriptions provide an excellent method for members of communities of practice to discover and follow relevant projects and conversations. Blog search engines, including Technorati and Blogstreet, that are used to discover network relationships among blog communities.
- The enterprise as a whole is a political network. Weblogs can be used by executives to communicate in an individual voice across the organization. On the public internet, the relevant model is popular bloggers such as Joi Ito in Japan and Doc Searls in the US. The link structure enables the discovery and tracking of popular ideas, with blog search engines such as Daypop and Blogdex.
| Network | Size | Application | Distribution |
| Political Network | ~1000s | Publishing | Power-law (scale-free) |
| Social Network | ~150 | Communication | Bell-curve (random) |
| Creative Network | ~12 | Collaboration | Dense (equal) |
- Each creative network creates its own core of strong ties among users who can act upon information.
- Social networks provide a source of new ideas.
- Political networks assure the rapid distribution of fit memes that benefit from social filtering.
As on the public internet, there are valuable emergent properties of the social software network that are greater than the sum of the parts.
- Within and across creative and social networks, managers gain visibility into multiple projects and disciplines
- Users can more efficiently manage attention by choosing their own subscriptions and notification frequency, instead of being flooded by email.
- Once critical information flows are made visible with a rich link structure, the organization can analyze and improve the information flow by monitoring social dynamics, identifying key hubs and structural gaps.
The adoption of social software starts by benefiting the workgroup with tools for rapid and convenient collaboration, fostering participation. Over time, the aggregation of content, and the emergence of link structures and social network patterns provides value to the organization overall.
February 03, 2004
Fuzziness
David Weinberger wants the notion of friendship to remain imprecise, instead of clearly delineated with false precision.
I don't mind if the definition is precise, so long as it is so precise as to be unique and hard to compare.
David's picture is fuzzy to start. My picture has lots of little spikes and looks fuzzy at life-scale.
February 02, 2004
Infinite names
More reflection on why I find the Don Park diagram horrifying. Meeting new people teaches you distinctive new things to appreciate. Getting to know another person well is a glimpse of the infinite.
The dimensions of the chart ramify infinitely, the more people you know, and the closer you know some of them.
What poverty of expression, to try to constrain the infinite into a 5-scale in 4 categories.
Pete, of course, suggests a Friendship Wiki.
That Which Should Remain Nameless
Don Park has a draft of a user interface to diagram the level of closeness of one's friends. I hope this is intended as satire!
A Friendship Circle is basically a nested rings of people (represented by icons with miniture photo and name) around a person. To use the Friendship Circle, the user drag and drops icons from a palette of friends to the circle. Note that this can be done using DHTML+CSS.
Does one spend time with this graph every morning, and move one friend-counter closer, after he has been helpful in a difficult situation, and move one of the mistress-counters further away because she used a unappealing perfume?
Very clever and amusing if satire. Repellent if sincere. It might have a certain appeal among playboy geeks and junior high-school girls.
What I like most/least about Orkut
Most: the pictures. There are people I know through blogs, #joiito, and other online settings. It's nice to connect faces with names and personalities.
Least: reminders of old squabbles. The trouble with online communities is there are fewer opportunities to make up if you disagree. I wish that Orkut had a "send roses" feature.
February 01, 2004
Creepy spam
I just got spammed today by something called Word of Mouth Connections, noting that: a user at our website has just begun to look into your background via our anonymous online community.
In order to find out more about the request or contact the person making the inquiry, you need to pay them $10.
This smells like a scam. They're probably using it to verify email addresses for spam purposes, and to scam money from people gullible enough to pay.
Ptui.
Collaborative Restaurant Reviews
Belated kudos to Mark Hurst for Add Your Own, a wiki-based collaborative restaurant review site.
Intellectual Property is the Inquisition of our time
Before modernity, the Church held exclusive rights to authorized representation of the life and beliefs of Jesus. Ecclesiastical prosecutors searched far and wide for unauthorized representations. They issued cease and desist orders to heretics when they found them, and conducted criminal prosecutions when the heretics persisted.
Cory Doctorow reports that Marvel and DC Comics successfully dissuaded GeekPunks comic books from using the term "Superhero" in their titles, claiming they own the trademark on "Superhero".
In our era, we are free to invent stories and interpretations about Jesus or the Kabbalah in the public doman. If an existing religion doesn't approve of the ideas, we are free to tell our non-standard stories in public, and gather like-minded folk to start our own sect, without fear of criminal prosecution.
But in our era, some of the most powerful mythical ideas are owned by corporations, not the Church. Disney, Marvel and DC Comics have the right to search out those who transform their message in an unauthorized manner, and criminally prosecute those who refuse.
We the people have given up ownership of our culture's myths to powerful copyright-holders. And we accept the state of affairs, as most people in medieval times must have thought the Church was right to search out and prosecute heretics.
Future civilizations will consider the corporate monopoly on our cultures myths as absurd and barbaric as we think of the Inquisition.