Category: Four pillars

I hear you say “Enough already!” to the A-list-blogger-as-gatekeeper debate; so no more on the subject.

What I’d like to do instead is open up debate on a question that kept bugging me throughout that debate:
If we believe in a Long Tail World, then why do we insist on looking at that Long Tail World through the eyes of a Hit Culture?

Discussions about ranking are in some form or shape related to a Hit Culture. Ever since search engines have been available, I have seen papers suggesting that Big-Gets-Bigger or Rich-Get-Richer. If you’re popular, then you get to the top of the rankings, which makes you even more popular. And so on and so forth.
That was the received wisdom. But something about it didn’t make sense to me. Soon after reading Cluetrain in 2000, I’d had the pleasure of meeting Chris Locke in Bangalore and again in London, and he was talking about communities that did “left-handed organic gardening” as being an intrinsic part of web communities and of the nascent blogosphere.
Around the same time, I started following Amy Jo Kim’s work on web communities, directly as a consequence of reading her book, Community Building On The Web. And she in turn influenced a lot of my thinking about how web communities work; I was particularly intrigued by her discussions on how subgroups emerge and why they should be encouraged to emerge. I quote from her site:

• If your goal is to build a robust, large-scale community, then fostering member-run subgroups should be an integral part of your community strategy. Whether they’re set up by the community staff, or created by the members themselves, these small groups are where people will form their deepest relationships and strongest loyalties. That’s why it’s crucial to understand how these groups evolve, and make sure that you cultivate a fertile environment within which they can take root and grow.

I took these member-created subgroups to be the same thing as Chris’s Organic Gardening sites; micromarkets with microconversations involving people who had a very specific narrow-focus interest binding them together.
By this time, I’d already become a fan of Steven Johnson’s after reading Interface Culture in 1997, so by the time Emergence came out, aided and abetted by Lazslo-Barabasi’s Linked and Bloom’s Global Brain (both, incidentally, referred to me by Gary Casey!), I was getting very comfortable with the idea that lots of little and specific and healthy markets were where the action was, and that all this represented the disaggregation of the Hit Culture.

You can see that I was ready for The Long Tail, especially since I’d also been exposed to power laws and Zipf curves a few decades earlier while at university.

Yet I kept seeing Hit Culture attitudes, particularly to do with search engines and ranking, and more recently in the A-list gatekeeper discussions. This intrigued me, and continues to intrigue me. [Which is why I do apparently strange things like look at Youtube’s Most Linked, Most Viewed, Most Discussed and Top Rated All-Time video lists, to see what’s happening. And for sure I see Long Tail and not Hit Culture.]

Bearing all this in mind, I was fascinated by an article in the New Scientist. Headlined Internet Search Engines Go on Trial, what was of particular interest to me was a study it cited, done by researchers at Indiana University. You can access elements of the study here.

I quote from the excerpt to the study, titled Topical Interests And The Mitigation Of Search Engine Bias:

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page ranking strategies, and it has been argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. This bias could lead to a dangerous monopoly of information. We show that, contrary to intuition, empirical data do not support this conclusion; popular sites receive far less traffic than predicted. We discuss a model that accurately predicts traffic data patterns by taking into consideration the topical interests of users and their searching behavior in addition to the way search engines rank pages. The heterogeneity of user interests explains the observed mitigation of search engines’ popularity bias.

Surprisingly, I could not sign up to a full subscription to PNAS online, there is a forced offline step and associated time delay. [Which gives me time to figure out whether I already have access as a result of some other academic/professional body.] So I cannot claim to have read the entire article. But I will, soon.

I am truly fascinated by this, because it allows me to get rid of one of those things that made me Confused.

And I genuinely believe that is how the blogosphere tends to work. Not hits, not ranking-linking-vicious-circles, but heterogeneous long-tail interested communities. Comments welcome.

A recent post of mine on group selection elicited a number of responses; some pointed me to the Beinhocker book, for which I’m immensely grateful. Others questioned the mere possibility of group selection making sense, challenging me on a number of fronts, ranging from the relationship (or more accurately the risk) of using biological evolution discussions in a social or economic context all the way through to discussions on Darwin and, more appropriate, Dawkins.

Exemplifying the serendipity that all such debates have, I found myself at the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York a few days later, and had a great time there. Do see it if you get the chance. While I was there, I learnt that the single biggest event that influenced Darwin to write his theories on evolution was reading Malthus on population. A harbinger of consilience?

I quote from their web site, which summarises aspects of the exhibition:

• Darwin always read widely, on the lookout for new ideas. In late September 1838 he found himself reading—”for amusement,” he later recalled—the “Essay on Population” by political economist Reverend Thomas Malthus. In this essay, Malthus argued that human population could quickly outstrip the food supply: competition for food or space was a constant force keeping population in check.
• Darwin immediately saw how the idea could be applied to the natural world. More animals were born than could survive.

A harbinger of consilience?

Then, catching up on my reading after returning from vacation, I found this article in the New Scientist, sadly behind a DRM wall. Headlined The Selfish Gene That Learned To Cooperate, it deals with a gene called regA that helps certain unicellular algae survive in hostile environments, and at the same time helps cells in a related multicellular alga cooperate. Read what Kurt Kleiner has to say in the article, it’s worth it.

I quote from his article “At some point, a mutation seems to have occurred which turned the selfish gene into a cooperative one, and made it possible for V. carteri to develop specialised cells.” He also quotes a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Gene Robinson says this : “The evolutionary roots of altruism have been functionally traced from a solitary species to a more social species”.

I think a lot of emergent and swarm behaviours have some element of altruism at their heart, or at the very least a communal rather than a purely selfish will to survive and thrive. But I claim to be no expert on this, just an interested amateur. Much of what I’d read in the Emotional Intelligence space also suggested similar ideas to me, so the Group Selection theory is probably deeper in me than I realised.

Dennis Howlett commented on a recent post of mine, On Control, where I was musing over Big’s relationship to Control Failure, and arguing that we needed a Better But Not That Big approach. One of the things Dennis said was

“Big often means complex. So how do you propose to solve the complexity issues?”

That stayed in my mind; I have tremendous respect for what Dennis has to say, it’s not often that I am able to connect with a tech-savvy open-minded articulate accountant :-).

Almost coincidentally, I was reading The Origin Of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker, as recommended to me by a couple of readers of this blog. [Thank you Dave Bridgeland and Tommi Vilkamo]. [And yes it’s true, I read every comment, try and reply to as many as I can, and try and learn from the comment. Otherwise why bother?].

I’m still reading it. [I read maybe a dozen books in parallel, usually in multiple passes as well. First pass skim-read, take a few notes along the way. Determine where to focus serious reading time the next time around. Second pass do the serious reading. Take notes on what I didn’t understand, what I need to dig deeper into, not necessarily in the book either. Third pass follow up and clean up, get the ideas clear in my head.]

And it was while I was reading the Beinhocker book first-pass that I was given the opportunity to revisit some of the stuff that Scott Page had written. I’d come across Scott before, I think it was Erik Brynjolfsson who first pointed me at him; I’d read Scott’s Computational Models from A to Z some time ago, and some of his stuff on Path Dependence more recently; I couldn’t link to that, you can find it on his homepage as a pdf.

I quote from Beinhocker:

Page proposed that there are two dimensions to the difficulty of an economic coordination problem. One dimension is how hard it is to decompose the problem into chunks that can be solved in parallel. [……] The second dimension is the number of steps that need to be done sequentially. […….] Page posited that organisations evolve to match the nature and difficulty of the probelms they are trying to solve. In rough terms, if the problem can easily be chunked into parallel tasks and doesn’t require much sequencing, then the organisation will reflect this simplicity and tend to be broad and flat. If the problem cannot be easily divided up and has numerous sequential steps, then the organisational hierarchy will tend to be narrow and deep.

And I think that’s where one of the major problems of Big and Complex lie.

There is considerable organisational inertia to task redefinition, de-sequencing and re-sequencing, as people desperately try and hold on to fiefdoms and power bases built around particular task definitions and sequences. As a result, things are done sequentially where they don’t need to be done sequentially. This false sequencing yields an unsolvable complexity and an immense amount of wasted energy, repeat work, even completely unnecessary work. Which in turn demotivates the workers and reduces task completion quality and increases task completion time. Workers aren’t stupid, soon you have apathy.

And I guess apathy is the hierarchical organisation’s equivalent of anarchy.

Big is necessary for Complex. But only when Complex itself is necessary. What I worry about is how often Complex is a construct of past hierarchies rather than a genuine need to solve a problem. I’ve heard phrases like “Don’t Allocate, Isolate”, “Don’t Automate, Obliterate” for a few decades now. I’ve even read HBR and related articles with similar titles that long ago. So why doesn’t it happen? Because of Unnecessary Complex.

As Einstein said, we need to keep things as simple as possible. But no simpler. So where there is a need for Big, Big can and should stay.

When you take into account the fruit of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law, when you take into account the sheer power of the web and virtualisation and consolidation and service orientation, when you overlay all that with distributed computing and the grid and P2P, then maybe some of these hub-and-spoke approaches are ripe for obliteration. Just maybe.

Thanks again to Dennis for forcing me to think harder about this. And I look forward to more challenging comments, that’s how I learn.

Opensource communities have always had some form of moderation.

Sometimes they are called “the core“, sometimes they are referred to as “1000lb gorillas”, and sometimes they’re just called “moderators”. The term itself doesn’t matter, but the function represented by the term does matter.

Unless the term itself is wrong.

Like “gatekeeper”. [Yup, this was partially triggered by some of the Rogers/Searls/Finkelstein debate. But only partially. The true kernel for this post was a piece by FactoryJoe which I will come to later.]

Why do I think it’s wrong? Let me try to explain. To keep the argument simple I am going to compare “gatekeeper” with “moderator”. This is not some deep semantic exercise going into the etymology of each word; it is nothing more than my personal view on what the terms conjure up, and the contexts they tend to get used in.

• A gatekeeper checks your credentials before he lets you in, the default is access denial; a moderator assumes you are in unless some simple overarching community principle is broken by you, the default is access approval.
• A gatekeeper protects a narrow entry into an exclusive space; a moderator seeks to prevent an open space from being polluted.
• A gatekeeper provides the credentials he later checks; a moderator neither provides credentials nor checks them.
• A gatekeeper is a concept rooted in hierarchy; a moderator is a participant in a network, although sometimes moderators have supernode status within the network. In this context the moderator operates, in a Gladwellian sense, as part-maven, part-connector. And the connections tend to operate on a soft-touch-weak-interaction network-oriented basis rather than a Pyramid-Selling exploitative strong interaction which is hierarchical in nature.
• Moderators need the deep domain knowledge that mavens have, and the wide social networks that connectors have; gatekeepers need authority from on high within the hierarchy, like parking wardens and ticket inspectors have.
• Gatekeepers are about exclusion. Moderators are about inclusion.
• Gatekeepers can be automated; moderators can’t.

I could go on, but I won’t. What I wanted to do was get a worthwhile debate going, so that I can learn from it, and hope that the community learns as well. How will I know? Simple, the market/community will tell me. Many comments and links, the snowball works. None or few, the post will atrophy into nothingness. The market decides.

The essence of democratised innovation, be it opensource software or for that matter the blogosphere, is enfranchisement of all. Which is what a moderator seeks to do. The essence of what a gatekeeper does is enfranchisement of a few. Which is about as counter to opensource thinking as is humanly possible.

So when I read Chris Messina’s recent post on Building a Better Mousetrap, I was thinking “Oh dear, gatekeeping, path pollution” and not “Wow, enabling”. Maybe I’m wrong; I’d love to find out otherwise. Here are a few quotes from Chris’s post:

• The problem that I see is Google’s ability to shut out third party services once you’ve imported yourself into the proverbial gLife.
• In simplest terms, with the state we’re in with centralized authentication in web applications, it’s like waiting for Microsoft and Apple to strike a deal enabling you to copy and paste from Appleworks to Word.
• To put it in greater perspective: Web2.0 should have been the “great wide opening” — that is, where you could be in utter control of your data and move it in and out of services at your whim, just as you can with your money, in and out of banks depending on the quality and diversity of services they offer. And indeed, they’ve got to compete just to keep your business

Great post, Chris.

Ability to shut out. Centralised authentication. Rather than the “great wide opening”. In other words, gatekeeping rather than moderation.

This is why getting identity and authentication and permissioning right is critical for a functioning Web 2.0; this is why getting IPR and DRM right is critical for a functioning Web 2.0; this is why getting an internet that is neutral to what’s in the bits is critical for a functioning Web 2.0.

Otherwise what we will have is a Web 2.0 that is less than Web 1.0 ever was, and a pitiful shadow of what it could have been. That’s like building planes and then ensuring by law rather than by technology that they can’t fly. And that’s why I’m confused.

An aside on the “mathematics of opensource”, a rule of thumb that I’ve seen work:

For every 1000 visitors/lurkers you get around 80 active participants; of the 80 active participants you get maybe 20 hyperactives. These hyperactives often form the core, the 1000lb gorilla, the moderators.

And guess what? These moderators don’t get elected, blessed or knighted into place as a result of some grace and favour by a ruling monarch. They vote themselves in to that place by active (and valuable) participation. Participation that needed no prior authentication or credentials. Just their brains and their willingness to participate. Participation that generates value to the community.

I think this rule of thumb works for the blogosphere as well. I know many so-called A-listers, but nothing in their behaviour makes me think of gatekeeping. Open access. Nobody owns it Everyone can use it Anyone can improve it. That’s how these A-list people have behaved with me.

It is possible that some of the access I’ve had was bequeathed upon me as a result of my title or my status. I can’t discount that. But most of the time, in my experience, people don’t even ask me what I do, they use something that is more akin to a trusted domain approach. And perhaps, as a consequence, there is something that looks like gatekeeping to those who look for something like gatekeeping.

But it’s not gatekeeping.

Moderators connect. Gatekeepers channel. Connected, not channelled.

Do you remember LIFE magazine as it was in the 1960s? Amazing photojournalism. I was fourteen when it closed, and since it was one of my favourite reads and I was one of those fourteen-year-olds, I asked my father why.

And he said “It grew too big and too successful“. Now that’s an extreme summary of the answer he gave me, and I have learnt much about it later, but his words stayed with me. And continue to.

[An aside. Sometime in the late 1960s, LIFE published a photograph of an orphan, possibly from Central or Eastern Europe, probably about six or seven years old, sitting on the steps in front of the entrance to a building, hugging his first-ever pair of new shoes. I think it was in black-and-white. It’s one of my favourite photographs, hauntingly beautiful and a great antidote to materialism. Is there someone out there who (a) remembers the photograph and (b) knows how I can get a paid-for copy or print….?]

That conversation with my father in 1972 was probably the first time I considered that something could fail by being too successful. I hadn’t yet got deeply into economics or sustainable development or related politics or philosophy, I hadn’t yet read stuff like Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, nothing like that. I was just bemused at the idea of success begetting failure.

A few years later, I lived in a different India for a while. A state of emergency had been declared sometime in 1975, and the country was under central rule; there was considerable censorship of media, the emergence of something that looked and felt pretty much like a police state, opposition leaders were languishing in jail, reports of dissidents being shot in “police encounters”, that kind of thing.

Then, sometime in 1977, elections were called and some of the jail-languishers were freed, and the stage appeared set for a classic central-control any-vote-you-like-because-it-really-doesn’t matter election.

What would you do if you were an opposition leader in those circumstances? Shout “Foul” and “Fix” and “Unfair” and “Mommy”. So they did.

The results poured in.

The opposition kept up their chants of “Fix”.

And they were wrong.

The ruling party lost. The only party ever to have been elected to office since Independence, the party associated with freedom and Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and the dynasties that followed, that party lost. The Prime Minister lost her own seat, which was akin to the Kennedy family being declared personae non grata in Massachusetts.

Funny fix that.

And again it made me think, what happened there? How come the incumbent party couldn’t game the system, couldn’t fix their own election? Were they so big that they couldn’t control it?

Not long after that, I sort of fell into information technology, and have been there ever since. And twenty-six years ago, people were talking about why big project teams don’t work, why Seven was a Magical Number, why man-months were mythical. But guess what? I’ve probably seen more large project teams than all other types put together since then. Large project teams. Large budgets. And often, large failures. And I wondered to myself. If big equals control failure, then why does big carry on? [Told you I was confused :-) ]

Then, many years later, I was talking to Professor N.Venkatraman about the things to look out for in setting up an in-house incubator function at the bank. This was 1999, maybe early 2000. And Venkat said something about Microsoft, which I interpreted as “They can’t promise the growth, so they don’t have the equity-currency to attract and retain the best talent any more”. My words not his. [So apologies, Venkat, if I’ve misinterpreted or misquoted you.] And I wondered again about sustainable success and scale, and the role of control in setting that scale target. And I still wonder.

With all that buzzing around in my head, I was skimming the waves of information this past week. Laptops and battery problems. Airport operators finding it hard to cope with the new security requirements at UK airports, with the airlines screaming at them. [Of course, customers were not part of the debate :-) ] And I wondered some more.

And somewhere along the line, I read that somebody thought Doc Searls was a gatekeeper and a censor. That bemused me. I know Doc well and can’t begin to understand that argument, so I won’t go there. But it made me think. And it felt a bit like Steven Johnson’s slime mould discussions in Emergence. Were the people calling Doc a gatekeeper the same sort of people who couldn’t accept that there were no slime-mould-leaders, who can’t believe that emergent self-organisation does take place. I began to wonder. Is the blogosphere made of slime mould, with similar characteristics. Mouldy snowballs? Hmmm.

So I went into Google and took another look at the LIFE shutdown story. And found these quotes, apparently from the day that staff were told that LIFE was shutting down in 1972. They are both taken from Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers Part 1, via The Digital Journalist:

• Carl Mydans, who had photographed the very first photo essay for the magazine, a study of depression-era Texas, mistily said, “I never thought that I would outlive my profession”.
• As one senior official at NGS told Fred Ward, “35 years ago when I first came to the magazine, we had 35 photographers and one Vice President. Today we have 42 Vice Presidents, and 2 staff photographers.”

Where’s all this leading to? I’ve said before that it’s all about Trust. Now I think it’s more than that, it’s also all about Losing Control. Gracefully. Which sometimes becomes an issue of size. And then you have problems that only size can bring.

Take air travel. All based on a hub-and-spoke model consistent with Big and Assembly Line. We now live in a world where it is becoming increasingly possible from a technical viewpoint to fly from the A you are at to the B you want to get to. Smaller airports, many more of them. Smaller planes, many more of them. Smaller queues, shorter delays, the possibility of more efficient fuel consumption both on roads as well as in the air, and maybe even less attractive targets for terrorists. But there’s a lot of pushback. Loss of control by the incumbent “scale players”.

Take manufacturing. I’ve read reports that the laptop battery problem is actually one of scale and the need for greater efficiency as demands on the industry grow. Now if I was cynical, I would say “That’s the kind of reasoning that created Mad Cow Disease”, but I won’t say that.

I could make similar arguments for hospitals and schools and even government, but I’ve spent long enough on this post.

Cluetrain is about the failure of centralised control and the success of empowered individuals. So is Small Pieces Loosely Joined. So is Emergence, in a roundabout way. So are the attempts at freeing up individual identity a la Dick Hardt and SXIP. So is Hugh Macleod’s Global Microbrand, in its own way.

This is not a rant against Big. Just an attempt to further the debate on how to make Big actually work. And what it will look like. There will be new and successful Bigs, but the control process will look different as will the structure of the organisation. And therein lies the difficulty. A difficulty exacerbated by the battles between professions as lines between professions blur faster and faster, as Andrew Abbott surmised.

The only Bigs that will work will be Because Of companies, because they’re fundamentally infrastructure, commoditised, high on trust and low on control. [Take a look at Doc’s presentation at reboot if you want to know more about the Because Effect in tomorrow’s markets].
You can have many Smalls operating as With companies, competing with each other. They too will be high on trust, but probably higher on control. Which is fine, because the consumer has a choice. Caveat Emptor.

What we are seeing today is that there are With people and Because Of people. And the With people are still looking for the leader cells in slime mould. In their worldview, they must exist. Gatekeepers must exist. Censors must exist. Crowds don’t have wisdom. Prediction markets don’t work. Their worldview. Not mine.
Otherwise they would not have control.

It’s all about trust. And losing control. Gracefully.
We need to get these things sorted out from the perspective of information and its enabling technologies, so that we can work harder on things like mobility and identity and simplicity and convenience and enfranchisement and accessibility and affordability. Because they can make a real impact on the world we live in.