Author: JP

Take a look at what Clarence Fisher is saying here. Fantastic stuff. Keep it going Clarence, your post is the kernel for this one.
All this drum-banging about social software is not because I own stock in one or more of the firms that produce them (I don’t. In fact since 1987 I have never owned stock in anything other than the company I worked for). It’s not because I think it’s cool and I want to be noticed. I’s not because I have nothing else to write about.

So why is it? It is because I care for disenfranchised people, and want to make a difference. Particularly because I grew up in Calcutta, I have always felt I understood something about the haves and the not-haves, the contrasts were stark there. And somewhere inside of me, I guess I think of myself as a street kid born into almost-bankrupt almost-nobility, yet with immense privileges and access.
What I see now, and what I have seen for the last twenty-odd years, is the emergence of a whole new set of sharp-contrast urban and suburban societies. But this time they’re in the West, so they don’t get called slums or shanty towns or anything like that. People use euphemisms like inner cities, urban degeneration, sometimes even admitting to terms like “underclass”.

This sharp-contrast society is everywhere. Worldwide. East and West, North and South, developed or not. And there’s a whole generation, maybe two, who are out there, without access or choices, living hand-to-mouth and primarily on their wits. Some angry, some depressed, some apathetic. Many with no options apparent to them but some form of crime.
And their primary fuel? Peer respect and recognition. You can’t blame them. Nobody else appears to care for them or even acknowledges their existence.

I think social software can go a long way in motivating people like that, giving them their dignity and self-respect back, giving them access and options they have never had.

For “education” read “anything you like”. For “disenfranchised inner city student” read “anybody”.

This thing we call social software is huge. It will take time. But it will happen. And we must do what we can to embed this thinking, this paradigm. In enterprise, in education, in government, in healthcare, even in world trade.

Markets are conversations. Conversations happen between people with relationships. Trust and transparency are the glue to relationships. Transactions are a by-product of the market, not the objective.

And social software helps us make this happen.

I read Economics at university. Many years ago. And my father used to keep telling me that the most dangerous phrase he’d ever heard an economist use was “Let us assume that…”.

So when I studied perfect markets and perfect information and rational behaviour, I understood the assumptions and understood that the assumptions were wrong. But it didn’t matter, or so I thought, since all we were doing was building theoretical models.

When it came to “perfect information”, I was naive enough to believe that the only constraints to perfect information existed in the technologies used to transport that information. It was only as I began to understand how organisations worked that I realised just how naive I was.

But there were parts of me that still believed, And so as Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder marched on, and the web became reality, I could see a way of using social software to inch towards perfect markets in some very specific niches.

Two niches in particular.

I wanted to be able to build a list of requirements using a wiki, and I wanted to be able to go through the search, price discovery, and fulfilment stages of purchasing something that meets those requirements via a blog.

Which brings me to this story in the Telegraph blog, pointed to me via Ross and Alexis. Thanks, guys.

When we look at the problems of requirements capture and their consequent impact on project costs and delivery, we need to look at ways to improve this process. We understand about time-boxing and time-placing, we understand about scope creep and requirements creep, we understand about extreme programming, pair programming, fast iteration. So why can’t we see that we can capture, share, iterate and evolve requirements much more effectively using wikis? I’m confused.

There ought to be a law that says “Information tends to go corrupt when hidden, and tends to corrupt those who participate in the process of hiding the information.”

We waste so much in the procurement process for the same reasons. We don’t use the tools we have to discover what’s out there. We don’t make the process a participative one. We make it worse by allowing the tenderers better access to the requirements than anyone else. I’m confused.

As with wikipedia and with the celebrity blogs, there will always be vandals, some in the interests of art, some in the interests of “freedom”, some for the heck of it.

But you don’t shut down record stores because Banksy makes a statement about Paris Hilton.

You don’t shut down museums because Marcel Duchamp puts a moustache on a copy of La Gioconda.

So why do we do this? Why do we have so much fear of perfect information? So much so we blame the tools, the people, everything.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined a cynic as follows:

A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

Many years later, Albert Einstein defined common sense as “the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”.

As I grow older, I realise that however hard I try to keep an open mind, and to learn, I land up with anchors and frames and perspective-biases that I don’t always know I have. Which means that sometimes I have to work hard to ensure that I don’t lapse insidiously into cynicism.

So you can understand why I had to work very hard indeed when analysing the Microsoft Open Specification Promise that was published yesterday. If you’re interested in the subject, then please do check out Kim Cameron’s blog here,  Doc’s piece at IT Garage (where he asks for your opinion as well) and Phil Windley’s blog here, along with Becker and Norlin’s Digital ID World blog at ZDNet.

Microsoft are not known for their pioneering approaches in the opensource world. Identity is one of the three big issues that affects our ability to deliver the promise of today’s technology (the other two are Intellectual Property/Digital Rights and the “internet”, with or without Stevens’ Tubes). A valid solution for identity pretty much needs Microsoft’s support and that of its legions of lawyers.
And so we come to the Open Specification Promise. My early reactions? I think Kim Cameron and his team have done a brilliant job at pulling this off and getting something workable past the lawyers’ cynosure.

If you want to understand it, and don’t particularly feel like wading through “implication, exhaustion, estoppel or otherwise” (and who could blame you?), then skip the legalese and go straight to the Frequently Asked Questions section. I quote from the FAQs:

• The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement specifications through a simplified method of sharing of technical assets, while recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property.
• We listened to feedback from community representatives who made positive comments regarding the acceptability of this approach.
• Q: Why did Microsoft take this approach?
• A: It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever.
• Q: How does the Open Specification Promise work? Do I have to do anything in order to get the benefit of this OSP?
• A: No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to implement the specification(s), as they wish and do not need to make any mention of or reference to Microsoft. Anyone can use or implement these specification(s) with their technology, code, solution, etc. You must agree to the terms in order to benefit from the promise; however, you do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate your agreement to Microsoft.
• Q: What is covered and what is not covered by the Open Specification Promise?
• A: The OSP covers each individual specification designated on the public list posted at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/. The OSP applies to anyone who is building software and or hardware to implement one or more of those specification(s). You can choose to implement all or part of the specification(s). The OSP does not apply to any work that you do beyond the scope of the covered specification(s).

We have a long way to go before we can solve all this. We’re not going to solve all this unless we stop acting like cynics. So let’s get behind Kim Cameron on this and see what happens. That’s what I’m going to do.
An aside: Why can’t legal agreements be written like FAQ sections? Is there a law against it? 

One thing I have found to be consistently true for social software is the immense value of experimenting with every form of it. You don’t know what you can do with “it”, (whatever “it” is) until you try.

I remember being told when I was eight years old that the ancient Greeks had major arguments about aspects of gravity; the arguments centred around a two-stone model, one big and one small. They assumed that the big stone would fall faster than the small one, taking the feather analogy to its extreme. But after that, they were lost. One school suggested that the resultant “stone” was bigger and would fall faster than the big stone. The other said that the small stone would slow down the big stone and therefore the resultant “stone” would be slowed down in comparison to the big stone in isolation.

The detail doesn’t matter. What matters is that they never tried it. Just talked about it.

And it is with this in mind that I recommend you take a look at BizPredict. Thanks to Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 for letting me know.

Whether it’s blogs or wikis or social networks or prediction markets or better tags or identity or intention or whatever, we all need to figure out what happens by playing with it. What governance models work. What privacy issues emerge. What unusual uses humankind finds for all this. What the ecosystems look like, how they evolve.

A few days ago I wrote about David Freedman’s piece in Inc magazine, where he,  in Carr-like fashion, suggested that collaboration doesn’t work, that crowds don’t have wisdom, that workgroups fail most often when they’re faced with making a decision. I took some issue with the statements.
I then suggested a number of false or weak forms of consensus, seeking to make the point that real consensus requires trust and commitment, and showing how social software could help us achieve this.

I realise I missed out an important evil form of consensus. Silent and tacit consensus. The Elephant In The Room Without Any Clothes.

And, in a typically serendipitous bloglike way, where do I get the kernel for this post? The same David Freedman. This time, writing in the latest issue of Newsweek on new directions in cancer research.

I quote from the article:

• Vogelstein notes that cells with genetic scrambling can already be picked up in the blood of cancer patients, which suggests that catching cancer early may end up a matter of a routine blood test. That in itself is a hurdle for researchers, though. “Early diagnosis is undervalued in the research community, because prevention isn’t as dramatic as curing,” says Vogelstein. “Pharmaceutical companies are more interested in treatment, because they make drugs, and they account for a large part of the cancer-research budget.” And so much time, money and expectation have been staked on the oncogene approach that abandoning it would be a demoralizing admission of defeat and, in many cases, a career sinker. “The way science works is, when you end up backing a theory you can’t afford to be wrong or your grant will suffer,” says UCLA researcher Jeffrey H. Miller.
• Many scientists and funding administrators often simply choose to ignore a promising avenue of research until pressured to do so; careers are more easily advanced by sticking with accepted paths even when they may be wrong. That places the ball squarely in the public’s court, says Benjamin Djulbegovic, a researcher at the University of South Florida who studies clinical trials of new cancer therapies. “There’s dissonance between what researchers study and what patients need,” he says. “When there are competing research agendas, there needs to be public discourse on who should control those agendas.”

I’m not really picking on Freedman, he’s just reporting what researchers and scientists have told him.

For cancer research read complex project. How many times have you seen, or even participated in, a project that was hopelessly wrong from the start, or where fundamentally better options emerge midstream? How many times have you seen teams continue down such blind alleys because they genuinely believe that any other route represents the end of their careers?

Just look at what is being said:

• Careers are more easily advanced by sticking with accepted paths even when they may be wrong.
• There’s dissonance between what researchers study and what patients need.

Here’s another place where social software can help in enterprises and even across enterprises. Better connect between customer and designer, patient and researcher. More transparency in the status of projects and programmes, real status reports rather than political Office mashups. A genuine ability to put your hand up and say “but daddy, he’s got no clothes on”.

People who raise their heads above the parapets tend to get shot. This I realise and understand. We already have a number of cases of blogger bashing. But I can’t help feeling that this is changing, and that the change is being brought into existence by the openness and transparency that social software affords us.

Soon, an enterprise that reacts unwisely to truths emanating from their internal and external social software implementations, will pay a heavy market price for their actions. Values count; actions that define values count even more.