Category: Tech

Tom Coates of plasticbag.org fame has started Everything in Moderation, a new blog about forum moderation.
Very interesting topic — the social practices around online communication are at least as important as the tools we use.
via Nancy White.

John Udell’s instant classic:

Every interpersonal e-mail message creates, or sustains, or alters the membership of a group. It happens so naturally that we don’t even think about it. When you’re writing a message to Sally, you cc: Joe and Beth. Joe adds Mark to the cc: list on his reply. You and Sally work for one department of your company, Joe for another, Beth is a customer, and Mark is an outside contractor. These subtle and spontaneous acts of group formation and adjustments of group membership are the source of e-mail’s special power. Without any help from an administrator, we transcend the boundaries not only of time and space but also of organizational trust.
An ad-hoc group convened by e-mail dissolves unless membership is reaffirmed by each message. This is a feature, not a bug. Many of the groups that perform work in a modern organization are transient. A hallway conversation is over in minutes; a spontaneous collaboration can last a day; a project may take a week. Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction. Like an operating-system thread, an e-mail thread is a lightweight construct, cheap to set up and tear down.

Mitch Ratcliffe wants to work on “a ‘Sociobot’ that ties into MySQL to allow people to be introduced and to track relationships by looking at who links to whom on Technorati and, if I can figure out how, on LinkedIn and other systems.”
Sounds cool. Some questions the bot might answer:
* ?Who knows “Dave Weinberger” — given a third party, who in the group knows that person
* ?Who’s blogged about “QuickTime6” — given a topic, who in the group has blogged on the topic
What other cool questions would you want to ask the sociobot?

I think Maciej gets it half-right in his comment on the space shuttle disaster.

Physics 2, Business Administration 0
“When a program agrees to spend less money or accelerate a schedule beyond what the engineers and program managers think is reasonable, a small amount of overall risk is added. These little pieces of risk add up until managers are no longer aware of the total program risk, and are, in fact, gambling.
Columbia Accident Investigation Report, pp 139
One of the most sobering conclusions of the Shuttle accident report is that the Columbia was an exact replay of the Challenger – the same false confidence, the same scheduling and funding pressure, the same lack of attention to an intermittent problem whose causes were never understood. There’s even the same badly-designed briefing slide, failing to convey the urgency the engineering team feels, and the same old Edward Tufte on hand to point it out, once the investigation gets into full swing.

Maciej is absolutely right that business managers have no business setting schedules and making risk assessments over the heads of the technical folk.
But he’s wrong to say that the answer is to get rid of every last PHB. Geeks should have the sole voice only on projects whose primary goal is technical.
Where a project has a non-technical objective, the decisions about requirements and scope need to be made by people with domain expertise.
XP gets it right, here, I think. The technical people are the only people who can set the schedule for technical work and assess technical risks. If you ignore this principle, you are living in a world of delusion and inviting disaster.
The people who understand the business objectives should have say over what the project should do and when they think it’s done.
Tangra’s comments about the gaps in the Deanspace program highlight the flaws in a project driven by geeks, for non-geek users. The Deanspace documentation explains the technical features and schedule of the project, but still lack some of the documentation — and features– that are needed to make campaign activist group successful.
This isn’t a fatal flaw — Deanspace is a volunteer project that needs more volunteers to fill in this gap. But it does point out that you need customer input to be effective with a projec that has non-technical goals.

LOAF

In the aftermath of the Sobig worm, Ross and many others are forecasting the death of email. This is an over-reaction.
From an IM conversation with Peter Merholz
Peterme: Some of my most valuable (and yes, most frustrating) e-interactions are in discussion groups.
Adina: Discussion groups are complementary with blogs & wikis and such but mailing lists don’t go away. The limitations of discussion groups are:

• you never reach a conclusion
• it really helps to use a wiki to get on the same page, literally
• email is not a good medium to really explore an idea. Blogs are good for that. In a discussion group essays are kinda rude
• email is not a good medum to sent people links, overload happens fast
• mailing lists are vulnerable to flaming

Still, for real, live, interactive conversation, email discussion is still great.

via Prof. Lessig a pointer to DeanLink, social networking application that links and matches Dean supporters by geography.
Very cool. Takes social network features like profiles and recommendations and applies them to building a network of political supporters.

Clay Shirky contends that wikis are effective because they dispense with process.

A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add ‘process’ in order to keep people from doing stupid things. Instead, it provides more flexibility, a crazy amount of flexibility, and intoxicating amount of flexibility, allowing massive amounts of stupidity and intentional damage to be done, at will, by roving and anonymous posters. And it provides rollback.

Process, contents Clay, is a destructive immune response that tries to protect a group from damage before it occurs. Wikis replace this with the healthy immune response that quickly fixes damage when it happens. “It takes longer to set fire to the building than put it out, it takes longer to grafitti the wall than clean it, it takes longer to damage the page than restore it.”
Ben Hyde, responding to Clay, sees wikis as the embodiment of a set of process assumptions that are different from the typical bureaucratic model.

Wikis are another example of a process framework for solving a class of organizational problems where you have a huge pool of hands and eyes and you want to leverage that resource to make something good…

• Create a large binding surface, i.e. lots of options, call it modularity, pages, plug-in whatever; but ship options preference to product.
• Let the many hands self select what options to exercise; this lower’s coordination costs, and moves you closer to the customer/audience.
• Undo is good, it let’s people experiment at much lower risk.
  Stream changes past many eyes to capture free QA

• Very very lightly sort your community and give more power to people closer to the core
• Strive to lower barriers to entry on all community boundries
• Strive for open: a little ownership of turf is good, a little more isn’t, a lot is toxic.
• Bias for action where ever possible
• Ship early – real users trump designers almost everytime.
• Labor to reduce the distinction between audience and creators
• Look for the network effects, nurture them.
• Tone is important – it will drive what you define as “good”
• Know that working with infinite tiny options and infinite tiny resources is very different than working on systems with scarce expensive resources.

Good insights all around. Whether you see the form as resistance to process or alternative process, the conclusion remains: there are effective alternatives to systems that depend on fixed hierarchy and inflexible rules.

I’ll comment on the subtle and insightful aspects of Clay Shirky’s blogconversation on wikis and process in a subsequent post. But first, a rant.
Clay alleges that “Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.” Nah. Process is an embedded reaction to doing the same thing twice.
Process was invented when a primeval hunter gave his fellows some hints on how to hold the stone-tipped spear, and a primeval gatherer told her clanmates heuristics about to find the bushes with sweet-tasting berries and not the toxic ones that poisoned dear old Oog.
Of course too much process is bad but some process is core to what makes us human.

Sociologist Mark Smith has developed a tool that analyzes the social dynamics of Usenet, helping users find congenial groups whether they’re looking for conversation or quick answers.

By charting different types of behavior in Usenet groups, he’s able to steer users to the kind of group they want — not just a group that discusses the right topic but a group with the right goals and pace…
In real life, indicators such as the number of people eating in a restaurant, the decor and the smells tip off the consumer, he said. In an effort to create such atmospheric cues online, Smith and his group have created charts that represent with big colorful bubbles how chatty, argumentative or helpful a given group is.
They do this without reading any of the words in the messages. It’s all based on the pattern of activity. People who post multiple replies on every discussion thread tend to be the arguers, the nitpickers. Those who post just one reply — especially if that reply ends the thread — tend to be the expert problem solvers.
The software Smith’s team created, known as Netscan, is available online at netscan.research.microsoft.com, and about 1,000 people a day use it to help them choose discussion groups that fit their needs.
Someone who wants to know how to configure a printer would probably choose a group with a track record of quick answers, while someone looking for entertainment might choose a group whose history is riddled with flame wars, or online arguments.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, via EEK.