Category: Four pillars

Over the last two years, I’ve been continuing with my research into open multisided platforms, particularly with a view to building community with them.

I’ve been privileged over the years to be associated with openadaptor, tiddlywiki and web21c; from the earliest moment I’ve tried to learn how to get out of the way and stay out of the way, while somehow remaining accountable. Sometimes I think we need a new term to describe the sort of soft-hands leadership required; the last time I tried, the best I could do was “tangential management”. But that’s another story.

I continue to think about open multisided platforms, and I’m sure there’s a lot I will learn in the process, particularly as friends and colleagues point me at people to talk to, books to read, articles to ponder over, sites to visit. And this has been happening.

For many years, it was hard to talk about open multisided platforms. Open source people don’t go looking for monetisation models, they solve problems. They make shoes, not money. So it was with open platforms. Whenever you mentioned them in conversation, the first question was not about the community but about the business model. And when you mentioned meta-models built around the community, in fact often built by the community, there was wailing and gnashing and glazings over. Which sort of killed the conversation.

Things have become a lot easier. Firstly, people are more willing and able to understand the importance of community, and of second-order business models built around the emergent community. But secondly and more importantly, articles like Better Than Free have helped remove the scales from their eyes (thank you Kevin Kelly).

Nowadays, when people talk about platforms, it is hard to avoid mentioning what’s been happening with Microsoft and Yahoo and Google. And it always reminds me of these three pictures I saw in an article by Henry Blodget. Read the whole article, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with some of it.

They tell quite a story, don’t they? It’s going to be interesting, moving from the lock-in world to the open multisided world, a journey we have only just begun to take. A high-stakes table, as the charts above show.

… I plan to visit Kensal Green Cemetery again. Haven’t done so in over 25 years. The last time I did it, sometime in 1982, I didn’t get the chance to see all I wanted to. Some people have this real thing about cemeteries, I am not one of them. Until I discovered Kensal Green Cemetery, South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta was the only one for me. It was close to where I was born, close to where I grew up, close to my school, close to my college, close to the people and things I cared about. There were many days when I went to visit friends “cutting through” the cemetery even though I didn’t need to, there was such a sense of history there.

Kensal Green Cemetery is in a different class. Here’s a sample of the people buried or cremated there:

Charles Babbage, the man behind the difference engine; Charles Blondin, acrobat and tightrope walker; Robert Brown (of Brownian motion fame); Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Wilkie Collins, of The Moonstone and The Woman In White; George Cruikshank, the Dickens illustrator; Leigh Hunt, the writer of Abou ben Adhem, whose tribe may increase; Freddie Mercury; Terence Rattigan of The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables; Howard Staunton, who gave us the Staunton chess pieces; William Makepeace Thackeray; Anthony Trollope, creator of Barsetshire.

And two other people. Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, the reasons why I went there in the first place. Here’s a sample of the Daniells’ output:

Calcutta used to be a City of Palaces. The Daniells were the ones that let me see what used to be, and what could be again, as I walked the streets in my youth. So I will go back to Kensal Green Cemetery sometime this month. And yes, I will be back at South Park Street as well, sometime in the next twelve months. Been too long.

There was a strange story making the rounds a few years ago: apparently someone had thought up the idea of etching images of house flies on public urinals; boys being boys and men being men, they “took aim”. And suddenly “spillage” was reduced by lots and lots. You can see the story here.

When I was reading that in 2005, I’d already become obsessed by the Clay Shirky mantra about damage and repair: if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then things that are “in the commons” are less likely to have tragic (as in Garrett Hardin) consequences. Well that’s my wording and interpretation anyway, apologies if I’ve got anything wrong.

What it did was make me think slightly differently about design. I started considering opportunities to reduce the cost of repair by minimising the need for repair. From a design perspective, what could we do to reduce the likelihood of damage and thereby reduce the cost of repair?

As serendipity would have it, I was thinking about these things while waiting for the flight back from Copenhagen, and found this in the men’s washroom at the lounge:

So it wasn’t just Schiphol airport where you could go up and see someone’s etchings in the washroom. Anyway, seeing it made me think about other places where the design of something reduces wastage and obviates the need for repair. And that made me think of this:

Now that’s a photograph of a room in the Wine Residence in Shanghai, a wonderful place where you can acquire wine, store it, taste it, learn about it and even trade it. I was taken around it by a close friend, and I loved the built-in spittoons. What did I like about it? Well, I’d seen spittoons being used in places where you learn about wine before, but they were usually set apart from where you were. You had to go to the spittoon. I come from India, where a lot of people chew betel leaf and betel nut.

And while spittoons can be found occasionally, what you tend to see is dried-blood scars on walls and floors in public places, as people aimed for the spittoons and missed. Here’s a sample (actually taken from the Solomon Islands, not India, but the point remains. My thanks to Everything Everywhere, Flickr and Creative Commons):

Where is all this taking me? It’s Sunday and I’m thinking lazily, provisionally. I started wondering whether Mac desktops used to be “dirtier” before someone thought of putting the Trash can there. Whether personal information would be more accurate if we presented the tools for repairing the information more usefully. That kind of thing.

If we take design seriously, we need to work harder at reducing the cost of repair. Sometimes that means doing what we can in design to reduce the need for repair.

I had been looking forward to meeting Umair Haque at Supernova a few weeks ago. But it was not to be; sadly, Umair’s mother was ill and so, quite understandably, he couldn’t make it.

There are many reasons for my wanting to meet Umair; just take a look at what Terry Heaton wrote about him some months ago and you’ll get what I mean.

My disappointment was short-lived: unable to turn up, Umair posted this article instead: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. Great article, excellent food for thought. Here are some excerpts:

Creative destruction has two sides – the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff are going to sharpen. The price of growth, it seems, is a world that’s always riskier, more uncertain, and more brutal at the margin.

…

Consider this. When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

…

Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble?

…

Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.

…

If that’s 21st century capitalism – maybe it’s time for a revolution.

All this got me thinking. The turbulence that Umair speaks of, the successive bubbles, these are not theories any more, they’re here. We’re seeing acceleration and spiking in creative output, we’re also seeing the same acceleration and spiking in the cost of destruction.

When human lives become part of the “cost of destruction” something is seriously wrong. And we need to change our views and values, in some fundamental way. I remember attending the inaugural Esther Dyson Flight School some years ago, where the incomparable Freeman Dyson (her father), spoke. He talked about heady days in the late 40s when physicists were excitedly contemplating the use of nuclear power to launch rockets and to extend their reach, a time when we didn’t know enough about the consequences. Then it all changed. Which was a good thing.

We have already learnt two important lessons from innovation, particularly when democratised or opensource:

• how to keep the costs of failure low (as in Jeff Clavier’s quote here or Josh Kopelman’s here)
• how to keep the costs of repair low (as in Wikipedia)

The costs of failure and the cost of damage repair are two components of the costs of destruction. We’re going to have to extend these lessons radically, often counterintuitively,  in order to reduce the costs of destruction while sustaining, even enhancing, the creation of value.

Food for thought.