Another Clay Shirky article that is fascinating, eloquent, insightful, and at heart, deeply wrong.
Clay ponders the emerging mechanisms of self-governance in online game communities, and probes the differences with 3D communities.
One difference is that in the real world, we have a mechanism for changing the rules -- it's called legislation. This takes Clay to explore Nomic games, where changing the rules can be a move in the game.
Another big difference, posits Clay, is that in the online world, somebody else owns the server. At the end of the day the server owner can always pull the plug, so governance defaults to dictatorship. Clay explores models of server co-ownership, which would remove this barrier to self-government.
In making citizenship a function of property-ownership, Clay is back with the Athenians and the US founding fathers, who found it self-evident that property-owners can self-govern, and others can't.
Take the thought experiment a few steps forward; imagine a virtual world in which one can sell one's server shares. Soon, game players down on their luck will sell server shares to refresh depleted life scores, entrepreneurs will amass oligopolistic ownership of the servers, and property control will be stronger than it is today, because the owners feel that they earned it by the divine invisible hand.
Liberty, as political thinkers concluded in the physical world, is not a property of property ownership -- it's a property of being human.
In the long run, the solution to the problem isn't collective ownership of servers -- although that suggests some interesting and fruitful models. The solution to the problem is itself political.
Denizens of virtual worlds can demand self-government, and can use the physical-world political system to get it. Think about it. A landlord doesn't have the right to kill tenants at will (not since feudal times), nor to destroy a tenant's furniture. If it is important to enough online game-players to demand tenants' rights, this will happen. Big owners have the ability to buy physical-world government, but the oligopoly isn't omnipotent -- a large enough, vocal enough voting population can win a populist issue. It seems counterintuitive now -- it might take a generation to make the point -- but it could happen.
Clay rightly points out that a second scarce commodity is software and coding skill. The programmers can choose to unilaterally change the rules of the game. This is an artifact of the social system. Law-making is also a relatively scarce technical skill, but legislators are seen to be employed by the people.
Programmers are currently employed by game companies. What if programmers were employed by game-players? Programmers would implement the rules that game-players wanted, or they'd be out of a job. Game-players will demand rules that guarantee easy wins, you might argue. It's the same argument against democracy itself -- government by the people will "naturally" result in bad laws. We use representative government to ensure some continuity, and avoid government by mob; similarly, programmers might be elected for a term, and voted out of office.
The scarcity of programmers and game platforms is an artifact of the immaturity of the games industry. Given a decade or more (think about how long it took for Linux to emerge and become popular), there may well be a set of free, open source game platforms, large populations of developers and power users, with open standards for virtual cities, virtual property, and scores. When this happens, communities or players will be able to move more easily.
The condition of a game-player today is like a medieval serf, who is bound to his land (the virtual world), and has painfully few rights. A combination of changed economic conditions (greater mobility) and changed political beliefs (government by the people), could transform the relationship between players and game hosts, just as it did between rulers and ruled.
Clay's conclusion that the solution to game world tyranny is only fractionally right, and misses deep principles about the nature of self-government. But, as usual, his articulate framing of the issues invites broader discourse, and thoughtful disagreement. Thanks as usual, Clay.
Usually, when I go for a walk in my neighborhood, I wish I had a digital camera to share the pictures. Tonight the images wouldn't have come out on film or pixels, at least with my snapshot skills. The air is steamy, the moon is white and half-hiding behind silver clouds, the live-oaks look shaggy and nearly animated, like their cousins in the wizard of oz and the lord of the rings; and the neighborhood's stage lighting talents are up for awards. Small, yellow footlights along the path above the stairs from streetlevel, lighting the way to the looming white triple decker. Twinkling white strands surround a courtyard, suspended on fences. Yellow living room light glows behind a cavern of bushes. Stray sunflowers grow in stray dirt and rubble in the corner of the street. The globes of the 1930s experimental tower streetlight cast halos against the sky, appear and disappear around corners down the hill.
Some of the chiaroscuro comes from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which I've finally gotten around to reading. May blog more about Sandman upon reflection.
Cleaning is an important part of the weekend. As soon as I'm rested enough to think and see, I'll declutter the house and pick something else to clean up.
Blog comment spammers are just another kind of vermin. They evoke the same sort of visceral disgust as ants, roaches, and flies. I just downloaded the latest MTBlacklist and cleaned the comments.
Talking to Jonas Luster a couple of weeks ago about the popularization of Social Capital and other social science concepts.
Jonas is frustracted that people confuse numbers of Orkut and Friendster connections with social capital itself. The problem, says Jonas, is that people mistake Friendster and other social networking sites for social capital. "We can not see Social Capital -- we can only see its effects."
Social capital is a measure of the strength of relationships and communities. It's measured using factors including cohesion (would I lend you money or offer you my guest room if you were travelling), proximity (degree of separation) and density (do my friends know your friends).
But the Orkut/Friendster/weblog/wiki fans aren't that far wrong, I don't think.
Social network tools and structures are potential energy, and cohesion is kinetic energy.
New means of meeting and staying in touch -- YASNS, email, weblogs, wikis, and meetups -- give people more chances to create groups and build relationships.
We have a history of similar shifts. Cheap telephone connections let families stay in touch across distance. Television displaced vast quantities of social interaction, community-building, and cultural creativity with passive isolation.
Will today's new tools have no effect, destructive, or constructive results for communities and connections?
I have an opinion. I have a company and several communities that communicate online often, and meet in person occasionally. I think the new patterns will give more people opportunities to strengthen ties across distance, and make in-person connections. When we lower the cost of networking, some of the connections are shallow, like Orkut friend requests, and some of them are deep, like the open source projects that power the internet.
Time will tell. We get to watch and participate.
p.s. Jonas also explained that there are two main ways to define social capital
* Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, sees Social Capital as an aggregate entity -- a person or society can have strong or week social capital.
* Coleman sees Social Capital as being measured by the sum total of attributes -- social prestige, family connections, business reputation etc.
The definition seems important if you're doing social science research and want your numbers to add up, but they seem mathematically equivalent to me.
The second and sixth US presidents, John Adams and John Quncy Adams, belonged to the Unitarian church.
But that's not enough for the State of Texas. Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn ruled this week to take away the tax exempt status of the Unitarian church, because the church "does not have one system of belief." See this Knight Ridder story for more detail.
Why stop with the Unitarians? Hindus and Buddhists surely don't meet the standard either. In fact, Jewish theology has far to much room for variance in important areas such as the precise nature of the afterlife. Time to tax synagogues and temples.
The failed attempt to finance schools with "sin taxes" on cigarettes, strip clubs, and lottery machines was clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Clearly, we need to finance Texas education with taxes on religious organizations with insufficiently rigorous theology. Not to mention atheists, who should register to pay extra taxes.
Or maybe reread the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The second and sixth US presidents, John Adams and John Quncy Adams, belonged to the Unitarian church.
But that's not enough for the State of Texas. Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn ruled this week to take away the tax exempt status of the Unitarian church, because the church "does not have one system of belief." See this Knight Ridder story for more detail.
Why stop with the Unitarians? Hindus and Buddhists surely don't meet the standard either. In fact, Jewish theology has far to much room for variance in important areas such as the precise nature of the afterlife. Time to tax synagogues and temples.
The failed attempt to finance schools with "sin taxes" on cigarettes, strip clubs, and lottery machines was clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Clearly, we need to finance Texas education with taxes on religious organizations with insufficiently rigorous theology. Not to mention atheists, who should register to pay extra taxes.
Or maybe reread the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The Texas Senate State Affairs Commitee held a hearing yesterday, May 17, on the implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Professor Dan Wallach and I testified on behalf of a voter-verifiable paper trail. (Without a paper trail, there is no good way to audit or recount the result of an election.)
Chairman Duncan asked county administrators sharp questions about what happens if there are discrepancies in the vote tally. Senator Nelson's son has worked in computer security, and she asked questions that showed an understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks that affect computer systems.
The voter-verified paper trail got better reception in Senate State Affairs than at the House Elections Committee hearing on March 31, where the Representatives had a much earlier level of understanding about computer security. Chairwoman Denny dismissed evidence of problems with electronic voting systems in other states, even though the same systems are used in Texas as elsewhere in the country. We have more education to do in the House.
You can download and watch the video of the meeting here on the "lege-cam."
Dan's testimony is here
The Web catalog is currently on-line:
Sunday 10:30 a.m.-12 midnight
Monday-Friday 6 a.m.-12 midnight
Saturday 6 a.m.-9 p.m.
The Web catalog is not available on Library holidays.
Do they have little sql elves to fetch the book references from the database? Does the web server belong to a union?
Or do they take the system down every night while data entry clerks in Bangalore add new novels and take away obsolete collections of magazines.
Socialtext is based on wiki which, which uses a model of collaboration coming from the world of agile software development.
Within a team, there is a level of trust. People want to be able to work together quickly, with few barriers. If someone makes a mistake, others will rally and correct it. The capabilities of the team as a whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so it's great to be able to get contribution from everyone. People are working quickly, in short iterations. It's important to be able to contribute quickly, with as few steps and interruptions as possible.
The original wiki model was fully open to the public. Socialtext supports public wikis, which are fully open, and private wikis, which are open to members of the team.
Larger organizations require a more sophisticated model than "public" or "private." There are models to draw on from Christopher Alexander, an architect whose work on "pattern languages" describes the design patterns in the physical built environment, ranging in scale from rooms, to houses, to streets, to neighborhoods and cities.
Alexander writes about an "intimacy gradient". There are some areas in a house that are public -- the front porch; areas that are indoors and public -- the living room; and areas that are indoors and more private -- bedrooms and bathrooms.
The design opportunity is to create livable, workable, more-public and more-private spaces, using a "social software method" that focuses on helping people connect and collaborate with people in the least restrictive, most appropriately trusting way.
This is a different design philosophy than the traditional methods for setting levels of privacy. The underlying traditional assumption is that information should be available, and users should have privileges, on a "need to know basis." Individuals should have as little information and as few privileges as they need to do their jobs.
The goal of a tool for group work is to be able to restrict access with as much control as possible. Content and privileges should be controllable at a highly granular level. A work process should be clearly defined, to determine what users should have access to what information, and a given stage of a process.
This methods depend on a highly-structured, formal process. Analysts and administrators need to carefully define the types of information, to parcel out privileges, and to be able to monitor information access.
These processes and assumptions are right for some environments, and wrong for many others. If an organization needs a highly structured, controlled, restricted process, then Socialtext is probably not right for that need.
Many knowledge workers overuse email, because that's the only way they can get the kind of rapid, flexible communication that's appropriate for the collaborative work they're doing.
Socialtext is seeking looking to add more layers to the "intimacy gradient", without recreating the highly structured collaboration tools that exist today.
There's a class of private conversation thats an alcove in a broader, more conversation.
You develop ideas in exchange with someone, and those ideas are shared by blog or wiki. The social convention is to credit the blogmuse, and the source of conversation (in person, on IM or IRC channel.
Like many social interaction, the norm is based on give and take. It would be unfair for one party to interview another and continually post the results. It is normal give and take to share ideas, credit sources, and put the ideas out in public as material for further conversation.
The traditional muse is female, the artist is male. The physical beauty of the muse inspires the artist to create. The muse is a model, not a collaborator.
The blogmuse is any gender, and the conversation is the inspiration. The ideas are created collaboratively. Who blogs is a matter of the day.
The tensions of authorship and inspiration are more relevant in weblog form, which is individually authored, than wiki form, which is group authored. Although wikis are not necessarily public domain -- some wikis have collective ownership of content, without permitting wholesale copying and repurposing elsewhere.
And the other services that require human intervention before an email address is whitelisted.
Don't folks realize that they have anti-network effects? They'll work for the first few people who use them. But what happens when a mailblock bounce comes back to another mailblock service?
People will have to wait for the singularity to get their email.
I've wondered idly whether the naming game between adults and infants was universal, or culturally-specific. It turns out that Western children learn nouns faster than verbs "that's a ball. see, ball" and East Asian children learn verbs just as fast.
Richard Nisbett's "The Geography of Thought" includes a variety of experimental evidence showing how East Asians and Westerners think differently.
When shown pictures of a cow, a chicken, and some grass westerners are more likely to group the cow and the chicken, while East Asians are more likely to group the cow and the grass. Westerners are more likely to organize things in categories, while Asians are more likely to organize by relationship (the cow eats grass).
Westerners perceive things as objects (a bowl), easterners as substances (wood). Westerners will group a wooden bown and a silver bowl; easterners will group a wooden bowl and a wooden spoon. Westerners more likely to group items by rule, Easterners by similarity. Westerners are more likely to attribute human behavior to essential traits, Easterners to social context.
Some of the differences covered in the book are well-known -- the individualism of the west, compared to eastern group identity. Western culture -- particularly US culture -- thrives on debate, while East Asian cultures value harmony.
The book seems naive at times -- ancient Chinese images of bucolic scenes are taken as typical of Chinese life, rather than as conventional subjects of art, produced (I don't know, but guessing) for the wealthy. The book makes broad-brush assumptions about how East Asians are content with the hierarchical structures of their societies, an assumption that's falsifiable with the barest minimal familiarity with literature.
The most compelling evidence in the book was about low-level thought constructs that one might think are universal but aren't.
Last Friday, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines in the State of California.
As Kim Vetter reported in Wired Magazine,
Counties will not be able to purchase any new e-voting machines unless the machines can produce a voter-verified paper trail that voters can use to authenticate that their vote was recorded accurately. This pushes up a previous deadline Shelley put forth in December when he mandated that all new voting machines purchased after June 2005 would have to produce a paper trail.
The last straw was the dodgy activity by Diebold (which serves El Paso County among others). In Kim Vetter's words at Wired, "Diebold Election Systems made last-minute, untested changes to a device used with its AccuVote-TS and TSx voting machines. As a result of glitches, hundreds of polling places failed to open on time, disenfranchising voters who couldn't cast ballots." Secretary of State Shelley is referring Diebold to the Attorney General for the unauthorized upgrades.
The California decision was made after years of work by activists including Kim Alexander at Calvoter, and David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, founder of Verified Voting educating state officials about the risks of non-verified voting.
We have a ways to go here in Texas. County and state officials are learning about voting system security. At a public hearing of the House Elections Committee, a county clerk testifed about the popularity of the Diebold system among voters. None of the state or county election administrators seemed concerned about the studies in the last year showing serious security flaws in these systems.
When presented with reports about evoting problems in other states, chairwoman Mary Denny declared that these stories were not relevant, because they did not happen in Texas. Imagine if Firestone tires self-destructed in California, and Texas officials said that the evidence wouldn't be relevant unless the tires exploded here in Texas.
This means we have more education to do here. But the trend nationwide is in the right direction.
Jon Udell contends that we're hard-wired to recognize other humans:
Humans are hardwired to recognize faces, voices, gaits. We do it always and automatically. Perhaps so automatically that we don't notice, for the most part, that we are doing it. When my teenage daughter comes downstairs there's rarely any ambiguity about who she is.
Jon is disagreeing with David Weinberger, who says that identification defaults to off:
In the real world, we don't identify everyone. We only identify those about whom we have doubts that we have to resolve for some purpose. Identifying is not the default in the real world. Nor, IMO, should it be online.
They're both right. We instinctively recognize other people -- nod to neighbors, chitchat with baristas, and identify those we know well by the smallest of gestures.
But we don't ask for deep ID until its necessary. The social protocol for data is progressive disclosure. When do you learn someone's street address? Their home town? Their salary? The default is to start shallow, and to get deeper with trust.
Computers are literal-minded critters. Knowing hair color and HIV status is all the same to them.
Perhaps identification defaults to on, but disclosure defaults to off.
I'm slow to read the wonderful posts of Sebastian Paqet and John Udell. Their stuff has so many insights and links down interesting avenues for exploration that it requires time and focus to reflect on the ideas and to meander down the paths.
Sebastien Paquet and Phil Pearson have written a paper about Internet Topic Exchange, a service they built that enables weblog posts to be shared among open groups in the form that we call topic channels. After nearly a year of operation, more than 200 topic channels have been created; several of them have been very active and have brought together many participants.
Now, with the discussion a while back about emergence, one might think that this was about the coalescing of knowledge; the growth of collections of text like termite mounds.
For the metaphor to hold, it implies the following about termite biology -- that the instinct that draws termites to move grains of sand into a pile are different from the patterns that cause them to build structures with passageways and rooms dedicated to various purposes. (I don't know this to be true, seems logical, references to relevent genetic ethology welcome).
Topics serve as pheremones -- people are drawn together by the "smell" of a common interest. It takes an entirely different set of skills to shape those interests into shared meanings, to weave the individuals into a group, to build those shared interest into shared artifacts and actions.
I'd take a picture of the roses that are blooming on the rosebush, the small forest of thriving grass that was mowed in the backyard, which was a muddy desert last winter, (fortunately, the grass in the front yard goes dormant over the winter), and the little white flowers whose names I forget, on the backyard bushes.
I wish I had a gardening mentor who would stop by once a season, give a few tips that I could do and digest, and come back again. Would happily trade for semi-pro editing, career counselling, or dinner.
A few good follow-up conversations about the "women and competition" story, two posts down.
Sunir wondered about whether the study reveals cultural bias in favor of single-winner competition.
Just one recent example: Joi Ito's post about Japanese reaction to the hostages in Iraq and ideas about individualism vs group identity in Japanese culture.
Peter comments that the preference for competition vs. co-operation doesn't line up neatly on a gender axis.
(Which is my beef with difference feminism; gender is an illustrative lens to examine human differences, but one of many; gender differences are real, but reflect averages across the population, and don't determine individual behavior).
The more that I think about it, the real, detectable underlying bias here is that of the University of Chicago, the affiliation of the study's lead author. The Chicago school of economics applies the mathematical and experimental techniques of economics to "prove" how the rational, individualistic incentives of "homo economicus" apply to everyday social life. Debatable philosophical assumptions about human nature are baked into the premises of the studies, and the outcomes confirm the premises.
I keep the #joiito IRC channel running in the background some chunk of the time, and occasionally join in the conversation
Here's what I like about it:
* makes me laugh. It's an opportunity for pointless silliness. Occasionally, people show up and ask "what is the point of this channel." Occasionally, people talk about "serious topics" and spark real-life projects. Put pointlessness is mostly the point. This is very good, I have way more than enough purpose.
* background noise. Similar reason that I like working and hanging out at the Green Muse. Something about the varied hum, the sense of being in a social space, even as I'm concentrating on something else.
* friendship bookmarks. Don't quite count people I meet there as real friends and colleagues, yet. There's a bit of "unbearable lightness" about IRC on its own -- people can easily come, and easily go. People get mad at something or other, and leave in a huff -- no need to come back, no need to apologize. The measure of realness isn't how often you meet in 3d, it's obligation and reciprocity over time. Reality is taking on some project, or putting someone up in a strange town, or helping in a pinch. The friendship bookmarks are real, though. Enough context over time that reality can happen.
Years ago, I helped edit the manuscript of a friendly acquaintance, who was writing a book about Rockwell Kent, a once-famous, now-obscure American illustrator, best-remembered now for his leftist politics. (/alevin edits friends' manuscripts for love and free food.)
The illustrator's producer and collaborator for many years was a woman who was a leading impresaria of American art in the 20s and 30s. She organized gallery showings, nurtured artists, cultivated patrons and critics, and grew a scene around contemporary American art. She's remembered less well than he is, and I'm not remembering her name. (if you remember the details, let me know).
The manuscript paraphrased the impresaria's journals at the time. "Despite the lack of formal education, and mediocre skills, the impresaria was fortunate enough to meet a few talented painters, and, despite her mistake-ridden management, was lucky enough to bring a showing or two together."
"You fell for it", I told the manuscript author. The impresaria used a self-deprecating style to describe her position as the result of happenstance and the skills of others. Given the facts of her biography, she was clearly a powerhouse. She organized a school, a community, a market, as a result of initiative and hard work, diplomacy and management skills.
For various cultural reasons, some women find it hard to take credit for their own achievements. It doesn't mean that their self-deprecation should be taken at face value.