Specifically, I got my oil changed.

The epitome of banal, right?

Yeah, except, see, I don’t really know anything about cars (yeah, I’m man enough to admit it… what? What?!), — and so when the Oil Can Henry’s technician suggested that I use synthetic motor oil instead of the conventional stuff I’d been using, I had no idea what to tell him — though the significant price difference definitely put me off.

Pressed for an answer, I did what anyone in this situation would do (yeah right): I posted to Twitter and CC’d Aardvark (a question-answer service that follows my tweets):

Within seconds @vark sent me a direct message confirming that they’d received my query and were on the case:

Of course by now the attendant needed an answer — I was there for an oil change after all — and stalling until I got a definitive answer would have just been awkward.

“Sure,” I said, “what the hell.”

Then the responses started rolling in.

The first came from Derek S. on Aardvark 3 minutes later:

I’m far from a car expert, but my experience with my Honda Fit is that Hondas are generally engineered to run on the basics… regular unleaded gas, regular oil, etc. My guess is it’s probably not worth it.

Hmm, okay, that’s basically what I thought too, but it sounds like Derek knows as much about cars as I do.

Then came the first response on Twitter from Kasey Skala:

@chrismessina synthetic is for 75k+

Hmm, well, that’s pretty definitive. Guess I got punk’d.

But then more answers came in. A total of 17 tweets overall:

Erik Marden:

@chrismessina synthetic costs more, but lasts longer. I always go for it.

Rex Hammock:

@chrismessina For the record, Castrol is 100% owned by BP. Just saying. For the record.

Nick Cairns:

@chrismessina castrol is a bp co

Jon Bringhurst:

@chrismessina If you go synthetic, keep in mind that time between oil changes can jump up to like 10k+ miles, depending on how you drive.

@joshsprague:

@chrismessina Started doing 15Kmile synthetic on my 98 Honda. Need to read up more, but think fewer oil changes = less oil used.

Mark Boszko:

@chrismessina Synthetic oil is always a good idea, in my experience. I’ve taken cars to nearly 300K miles with its help.

Sam Herren:

@chrismessina Only if you wanna keep synthetic for the rest of the time you own the car.  Can’t go back and forth.

@earsmack:

@chrismessina I’ve heard that’s about the time to do it. Advantage = less frequent oil changes but nary any cost savings in my experience.

Frank Stallone (2, 3):

@chrismessina I put only synthetic oils in my cars — check your manual you may find you were suppose to be putting that in from the start!

@chrismessina I just looked up your car – every engine that Honda built for it should use synthetic http://bit.ly/aRvtmX

@chrismessina I love Amsoil the most but I’ll use Castrol and Mobile 1 any day — very trust worthy brands

B J Clark:

@chrismessina yes, go with synthetic and then only change it once every 5k – 10k miles.

Todd Zaki Warfel (2):

@chrismessina primary benefit of synthetic is if you drive hard or want to go longer on oil changes (e.g. 6-10k).

@chrismessina it’s the only thing I ran in my Mini Cooper S Works Edition (street legal race car)

Osman Ali:

@chrismessina Mobil 1

Christopher Loggins:

@chrismessina Prob too late, but Castrol Syntec is good oil. Good viscocity, temperature range, and zinc. Would use vs conventional.

I’ve captured all the responses here to give you a sense for the variety of answers I received from respondents who were all presumably unaware of each other’s responses.

If you ask me, this is a pretty good range — and is an excellent demonstration of both social search and distributed cognition and illustrates why “social” can’t be solved by an algorithm (this is the stuff that Brynn‘s an expert on).

The reality is that that my social network (including my 22,000+ Twitter followers and extended network through Aardvark) failed me. I probably made a premature decision to switch to synthetic oil — or at best, a decision without sufficient knowledge of the consequences (i.e. that once you switch, you really shouldn’t switch back). It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything, but this is the kind of experience that I’d expect social networks to be really good at. And it’s not like I didn’t get good answers — they just weren’t there when I needed them.

And it’s all the more funny because I actually tweeted my plans two hours before I left… why didn’t the network anticipate that I might need this kind of information and prepare it in advance? Better yet: why didn’t my car tell me its opinion (I’m half serious — it should be the authority, right?)? Surely the answer I sought was out there in the world some where — why didn’t my network tee this up for me? (And no doubt I’m not the first person to find himself in this situation!)

The network responded, but only after it was too late. So the next time I’m confronted by a question like this, what’s the likelihood that I’ll turn to my network? What if I didn’t work on this stuff for a living?

Out of curiosity, I submitted this question to Fluther, Quora, and tried to cross-post to Facebook (since Facebook is working on its own Q&A solution) but that failed for some reason.

So far, I’ve received three responses on Fluther, none on Quora, and two on Aardvark. I also posted the full text of my question to Google and Bing but amusingly enough, only my Fluther question came up as a result.

My takeaway? We’ve certainly made progress on the accessibility of social networks in aiding in question answering, but until our networks are able to provide better real-time or anticipatory responses, caveat emptor still applies.

Then again, YMMV.

On Friday, David Recordon, one of the original authors of OpenID, released a single-page specification for OpenID Connect, a concept that I outlined on this blog in January before I joined Google.

I’m particularly excited about this early proposal because it builds on all the great progress that the community has made recently on a litany of technologies, including OAuth 2.0 and the link-based resource descriptor format (LRDD) and its emerging JSON-based variant (JRD).

But I’m most excited about OpenID Connect because it forces the OpenID community to evaluate the progress we’ve made over the last three years (OpenID 2.0 was introduced in 2007) and to think critically about where we go next, and how we get there, given what the market has indicated it wants.

Rearticulating the problem

When Brad Fitzpatrick first created OpenID, he was looking to solve a fairly mundane problem: develop a protocol that made it possible for a commenter to claim her comments on someone else’s blog. For the commenter, she had a way to vouch for her words; for the blog owner, he had a way to establish the authenticity of the comments left by his readers. Given this context, all that was required in the early days of OpenID was a stable way to uniquely identify people — gathering additional profile information wasn’t as necessary because blog commenting forms already asked for — and often required — that commenters supply their name and email address.

Thus the basic architecture of OpenID concerned itself with establishing identity across contexts (i.e. “Bob” from Context A is the same “Bob” found in Context B), rather than with profile portability. This focus lent itself to privacy-preserving anonymous and pseudonymous transactions where identity could be established without the need to divulge personally-identifying information, or without forcing you to collapse the boundaries of separate social contexts.

This feature of OpenID (called directed identity) enabled you to hold a single account at, say, yahoo.com, but sign in to third party sites using “non-correlatable identifiers”. That is, this feature made it possible to maintain discreet profiles for logging in to other sites across the web without needing a different password to manage each.

The ability to “select [the] OpenID identifier” that I want to share with stackoverflow.com is how this feature manifests on yahoo.com:

The economics of user-centric identity

Features like directed identity, however, present several challenges for users and OpenID relying parties.

For users, these features complicate the sign in flow by introducing new interface surfaces (as seen above) and management tasks. They also increase the cognitive burden of registration by requiring a user to pick a profile (or create a new one) to use in a given context. Additionally, the ability to refrain from disclosing profile information when registering for a new service may seem economically advantageous to the user at the outset (“Aha! I refuse to tell you my name or email address!”) but results in unintended disadvantages over time.

That is, because OpenID users share less information with third parties, they are perceived as being “less valuable” than email-based registrants or users that connect to their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Why? Simply put: OpenID, by design, favors the user rather than the relying party. In contrast, technologies like Facebook and Twitter Connect emphasize the benefits to relying parties. So while it might seem like an inconvenience to custom-tailor your personal privacy settings on Facebook, the liberal defaults are meant to make Facebook users’ accounts more valuable to relying parties than other, more privacy-preserving account configurations.

So, as Twitter and Facebook have grown in popularity and the number of sites willing to outsource their account management to them have increased, both OpenID users and providers find themselves in a predicament: if they continue to restrict the flow of data, the number of OpenID relying parties will diminish in favor of Facebook- and Twitter-Connected sites. If instead OpenID users become more liberal with the data that they are willing (and able) to share with third parties, they will still need to rally support from relying parties to be recognized as valuable users. Thus making more data available from OpenID users is the first essential step that we must take to regain our footing in the marketplace.

But it won’t be enough.

To overcome both the real and perceived economic disadvantage of supporting OpenID, we need to make adopting OpenID exceedingly simple, straight-forward, and economically advantageous — in real terms.

Why harmonizing “Connect” is important

I wrote my overview for OpenID Connect convinced that the “connect” verb (inherited from the Twitter and Facebook platforms) would help users distinguish between merely registering for a site and signing up for and sharing some data about themselves. Even though Facebook abandoned the “connect” brand at F8 this year, I’m still of the mind that the “connect” verb suits our purposes, even if it’s going to take several years to catch on in common usage.

In any case, if OpenID solves the problem of providing a stable and unique way to identify someone, then the “Connect” in OpenID Connect layers in the ability to access data on someone’s behalf (via conventional APIs like Portable Contacts or ActivityStreams).

It’s this assemblage of authentication and authorization technologies that the industry is calling out for — as evidenced by the success of Facebook and Twitter Connect and more recently, Messenger Connect from Microsoft and upstart efforts like Diaspora that cite OpenID among the technologies they intend to leverage. Without a common standard, each of these efforts is inventing its own custom-tailored solution, retarding industry-wide progress and delaying the development of next generation social applications.

Thus, by leveraging OAuth as the core of OpenID Connect, we can build on the consensus and momentum that has been achieved in the marketplace, and by weaving in a standard and much-simpler discovery mechanism, we can preserve the decentralized design of OpenID. Presuming that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others all become OpenID Connect providers, that means that site operators can implement one connect API and interoperate with potentially dozens of providers with a single, well-understood open source stack of technologies.

Such an outcome would be good for relying parties (or “clients” in the parlance of Recordon’s proposal) as well as citizens of the web, who deserve a choice when it comes to entrusting a provider with their digital identity but are increasingly marginalized by “privacy-preserving technologies” that are not economically viable.

“Connect” also provides a convenient answer to the question of what kind of interface to present to the users who want to use their OpenID:

(Note that I also used the “connect” verb very intentionally in my social agent mockups for designing identity into the browser.)

If every site that supports third party authentication today added a “connect” button in place of their conventional “sign up” or “register” buttons and deployed a consistent user experience around picking a provider (some combination of NASCAR buttons and a type-anything email/URL field) that executed the OpenID Connect protocol, we’d be well along the path of decentralizing the social web, and restoring balance to the ecosystem.

What does OpenID stand for?

Of course, applying the OpenID brand to this solution isn’t something that I would do trivially, since the OpenID Foundation is the real authority for the trademark. However, at the foundation’s board meeting earlier this year at the OpenID Summit West, we unanimously decided to expand the scope of the OpenID Foundation’s mission to include advancing the technological underpinnings of internet identity in general, without regard for the existing OpenID technology.

This is a critical recasting of the role that OpenID and the OpenID Foundation plays in the ecosystem. Though there are other groups with similar mandates, the OpenID Foundation has decided to take on the internet identity opportunity as a general problem, rather than one narrowly scoped to disposable use cases.

In that light, it seems to me that we have come to a crossroads in the history of the foundation — however knowingly — and decided to take aggressive actions to advance the cause.

Without speaking for the foundation as a whole, I believe that it is essential that we are able to reconceive OpenID as the brand for decentralized digital identity. OpenID need not be thought of as merely an identity algorithm, but as a means for representing and conducting oneself online and across digital environments. Thus as the identity landscape undulates, the OpenID Foundation is in the position to articulate solutions that are not protocol-bound, but responsive to needs of the time, and able to adapt to and weather the shifting winds of technological progress.

After OpenID 2.0, OpenID Connect is the next significant reconceptualization of the technology that aims to meet the needs of a changing environment — one that is defined by the flow of data rather than by its suppression. It is in this context that I believe OpenID Connect can help usher forth the next evolution in digital identity technologies, building on the simplicity of OAuth 2.0 and the decentralized architecture of OpenID.

Brightkite, a location-tracking service, recently launched version 2.0 of their service after merging with Limbo and taking $9M in funding this past April.

In recent months I’ve found myself using Foursquare more and more, though I still update Brightkite from time to time since it powers the location status on my personal homepage. In some ways, Foursquare is to Brightkite what Twitter was to Jaiku: a more personal, streamlined experience that builds on a core activity and dispenses will all other distractions. And, through game-like mechanisms, get you to perform the core activity more regularly (i.e. mayorships in the case of Foursquare, and, up until recently, follower counts in the case of Twitter).

I bring this up because I just stumbled upon Brightkite’s advertising section of their website, and there’s some extremely interesting stuff in there!

First of all, it’s very clear that Brightkite is one of the first (at least in my experience) to be pushing their location platform as a walk-up-and-create ad platform, much in the same way that Facebook is (you can start creating your own Facebook ads here).

Like Brightkite, Facebook gives you a considerable amount of control over the targeting of your advertisement as well, which leverages Facebook’s horde of user-contributed demographic information:

But here’s where Brightkite’s platform gets interesting: this class of mobile ads — which we’ve known have been coming for some time (so-called proximity marketing) — target the individual based on their location and real-time behavior. Thus, when a user engages in some kind of action or activity tracked by Brightkite, the system can respond with an “appropriate” ad in real-time, triangulated off of a number of aspects of the user’s situation. Brightkite has enumerated the current set of attributes that they use:

• Location and place
• Real world behavior
• Time of day
• Activity
• Demographics
• Language
• Content and interests
• Weather

The only thing missing, it seems, is friends, but they could easily fit into the “content and interests” category.

Now, as a user, if Brightkite is able to leverage all this information — presuming that I’ve provided them with accurate information — the ads in their app better be friggin’ awesome.

Indeed, Brightkite’s blog post on freebies (as in, “free beer”) suggests as much, and the example they provide shows that Brady (Brightkite co-founder), having checked into the Rackhouse Pub, has just been offered a free draft or well drink:

Hard to argue with that. But this is where things get dicey, isn’t it?

Maybe I’m reading this image wrong, but since Brady’s already in the Rackhouse Pub, why would they want to give him a free beer? Unless Brightkite is underwriting such a promo (say, to counter Foursquare’s similar promos), Rackhouse Pub wants to get OTHER people in — not just give away drinks to their current patrons.

Of course there are countless ways to spin this — for better and worse.

Word of mouth for Rackhouse Pub could skyrocket, since people would virally spread the offer to their friends through social networks — amounting to a fairly cost-effective way to “acquire” new customers, especially if Rackhouse is able to recoup the costs of its giveaway on new dine-in guests.

But it could also backfire. For the price of a free downloadable iPhone app, countless single-drink seekers could take up Rackhouse on their offer and then leave, making for a costly marketing ploy with little upside.

Who knows. It all depends on how Brightkite “pushes” this kind of information to its users.

And Brightkite et al. aren’t alone in this space. Some companies are starting to leverage location and social networks in their own apps too. For instance, the 1.1 update to the Starbucks iPhone app adds Twitter, Facebook, and location-sharing features:

Now, with all these companies offering deals and incentives, I want a piece of the action! But I don’t want to be treated like some generic, disposable target. I want to be engaged with, and respected by, companies that want my business.

We have a long way to go to make this kind of engagement simpler, but longterm, I want to be the one who manages who does and doesn’t get the right to “target” me. I don’t want to opt-out — I want companies to request the privilege of showing up on my phone, in my activity stream, or in my inbox when I ask them to, at my convenience. I want to be able to put out a list of my desires and requirements, and then have companies bid for my business. And it’s fine with me if there’s a middleman broker in the middle that takes a cut, as long as I’m getting a better deal with better service than I would have otherwise.

Is that too much to ask?

Some months back, I wrote up a vision for what I call “connected commerce“, using Comixology as a preview of where I see this going, though that service is still far too manual, anti-social, and, critically, a bottleneck between me and my preferred retailer. This is a recipe for disaster, as Apple’s App Store continues to prove.

Attention brokers, like Brightkite, therefore, need to remember their place in this ecosystem: they need to first be the friend to and advocate of the individual (their customer), and second, to the advertiser or brand. Companies that don’t get this prioritization right will fail (and is why, in some respects, Facebook continues to change its platform rules while drawing the ire of developers, because, in order to keep their users, they must ultimately continue to make their environment a safer and more trustworthy space).

Doc Searls calls this consumer-driven leverage VRM or “vendor relationship management”. I’ve been a fan of the idea, but I think it falls down on the last word: management. Big companies are willing to devote thousands and millions of dollars “managing” their customers; individuals are not. But services like Brightkite and Facebook are beginning to change that by enabling us to leverage our real-time, real-world behavior as a gating apparatus, removing the “management” requirement of VRM, and allowing us to “flow with the go”. As we invite these attention brokers into our list of recipients to whom we release increasingly contextualized and precise information about ourselves, we stand to benefit a great deal. And privacy, then, becomes a rational, economic instrument that determines whether a company gets to serve us well (based on knowing us better) or clumsily (as they make presumptions about us through circumstance rather than intentional disclosure).

Implicitly, I am already benefiting from such opt-in vendor relationships. Through Twitter, I’ve “invited” several local vendors to send me real-time updates about their offerings to me via SMS, from Luna Park around the corner to Sightglass Coffee across town. They’ve earned my trust by not spamming me, instead offering actual value and insider information, treating me as a member of their esteemed coterie.

On the surface this model doesn’t appear to scale, but that’s just a failure of imagination. Scaling up is what the web does — if you know how to embrace it. By giving individuals more control over their experience and over the kinds of data that they can share, the need to “target” (in the military sense), recedes. Instead, opportunity emerges from being available, on-demand, and ubiquitous. Attention aggregators and identity providers can then broker relationships on behalf of their customers, and both parties will, ideally, end up with a better experience, and stronger, enduring relationships.

I hope Brightkite and Foursquare and the other location-based services keep this in mind. In as much as we let them broker our attention, they work for us — and not the other way around.

I’m not a great fan of patents, not because I’m against innovation, but because I don’t believe the patent system (especially in the United States) has kept up with, or modernized, in a way that actually encourages the widest possible public benefit at the lowest cost in the least amount of time. In other words, what we’ve learned from open source is that different types of competitive pressures in transparent markets can do as much if not more than centrally conferred monopolies over a given idea, implementation, or design.

Furthermore, the process by which the rights of a patent are exercised is costly, damaging, and net-net ends up wasting, in my estimation, much more energy that could otherwise be put into more essential or meaningful pursuits. I mean, I know lawyers need to eat too, but the outcome of a successful patent prosecution usually inhibits technological advancement more than accelerates it. Put another way: when has there been a patent dispute in which someone was prohibited from infringing on someone else’s idea that lead to an increase in innovation (and no, rewriting kernel extensions and whatnot do not count)?

Now, it occurs to me that not all government-sanctioned monopolies are altogether bad. In fact, the benefits of the exclusive capitalization of an idea seem to provide an ample marketplace incentive for companies to invest heavily in research and development. That’s a good thing. However, the current patent system, which seems to award such monopolies to a vast number of ideas which are never actually built, I believe, contravenes the original intention of the patent system — which exchanged limited-time exclusivity for longer-term transparency into the architecture of an idea, for the benefit of the public.

With so many complex patents now being applied for and granted, I think this has lead to a marketplace distortion that now benefits those who know how to play, and thus game, the system. In order to address this situation, I think more uncertainty and scarcity need be introduced to shake things up.

One approach that I’ve been noodling on lately is the shift to something more like the Academy Awards, known for giving out the prestigious Oscars given out to professionals in the film industry. Now, I’m sure the Oscars can be equally gamed, but what I’m interested in is the scarcity, honor, and publicity that come with receiving one of these awards. In some ways, the Oscar is like a year-long monopoly on notoriety or fame (sort of, but not exactly). Still, the 24 awards that are given out represent the best in the industry, and bring with them distinction that is desired, it seems, by all who work in film.

If the patent system operated in a similar way — where it was just an honor to be nominated — and 24 exclusive patents were granted on a yearly basis to the ideas of greatest merit or potential human benefit, we might see some real competition and most of all, new entrants into the marketplace. I guess this is what the Nobel prizes are all about, but don’t bring with them a state-sanctioned monopoly to commercialize an idea. If the patent system were designed to publicly highlight and honor those few ideas of merit, provided a restriction on the length of monopoly to 1-3 years (instead of the current 20), involved a kind of voting process (perhaps more transparent than the Oscar’s?), and organized some kind of annual fete to celebrate the chosen inventions — who knows — maybe the patent system would provide a very different kind of incentive structure to create and to invent.

This idea of mine is of course far from perfect, but then again, so is our patent system.

Still, I find his “Awesomeness Manifesto” actually useful, if only because it’s an argument against innovation as we commonly think of it.

His point echos a common refrain among many of the web’s independent progeny of late (consider Tim O’Reilly’s “work on stuff that matters” first principles, including the invocation to “create more value than you capture”, and 37 Signals’ recent rants on the “VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation“). As it happens, innovation for the sake of itself can really be rather damaging if we never arrive at a point of stability and equilibrium — enabling us to benefit from — or at least consider in a broader context — the advances we’ve made.

In other words, innovation at all costs is just that: at all costs.

To counter this myopic obsession with the superficially novel, Haque describes four pillars of awesomeness (which I won’t detail here — read his post):

• Ethical production.
• Insanely great stuff.
• Love.
• Thick value.

These are much more squishy, feminine qualities. These traits show up where diversity and balance are valued. But, contrary to Haque’s implicit suggestion, I don’t believe that we should just pendulum in this direction. Instead, like kneading bread or stirring a risotto (can you tell Brynn and I’ve been cooking lately?), I believe that we need to constantly pay attention to and work at this mix. It’s not one or the other — we’re post-zero sum economics even if our definitions of success haven’t caught up yet.

Haque closes thusly:

Let’s summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

I’ve talked to many boardrooms about awesomeness. Beancounters feel challenged and threatened by it, because it feels fuzzy and imprecise. Yet, it’s anything but. Gen M knows “awesomeness” when we see it — that’s why its part of our vernacular. It’s a precise concept, with meaning, depth, and resonance.

What makes some stuff awesome and other stuff merely (yawn) innovative? I’ve outlined my answers, but they’re far from the best, or even the only ones — so add your own thoughts in the comments.

You might be innovative — but are you awesome? For most, the answer is: no. Game over: in the 21st century, if you’re merely innovative, prepare to be disrupted by awesomeness.

Does Haque’s manifesto resonate with you? If so, how? If not, why not?

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Lately, I’m feeling the acute reality of this sentiment.

In 2005, I wrote about how I wanted to take an “open source” approach to the design of Flock by posting my mockups to Flickr and soliciting feedback. But that’s more about transparency than “open source”. And I think there’s a big difference between the two that’s often missed, forgotten or ignored altogether: one refers to process, the other refers to governance.

Design can be executed using secretive or transparent processes; it really can’t be “open” because it can’t be evaluated in same way “open source” projects evaluate contributions, where solutions compete on the basis of meritocratic and objective measures. Design is sublime, primal, and intuitive and needs consistency to succeed. Open source code, in contrast, can have many authors and be improved incrementally. Design — visual, interactive or conceptual — requires unity; piecemeal solutions feel disjointed, uncomfortable and obvious when end up in shipping product.

Luke Wroblewski is an interaction designer. He recently made an observation about “openness” that really resonated with me:

I read this quote last week and realized it is symptomatic of a common assertion that in technology (and especially the Web) “completely open” is better than “controlled”.

“But we’ll all know exactly where Apple stands – jealously guarding control of their users [...] And that’s not what Apple should be about.” -TechCrunch

Sorry but Apple makes their entire living by tightly controlling the experience of their customers. It’s why everyone praises their designs. From top to bottom, hardware to software -you get an integrated experience. Without this control, Apple could not be what it is today.

He followed up with a post on Facebook’s design process today that I also found exceedingly compelling.

I worry about Mozilla in this respect — and all open source projects that cater to the visible and vocal, ignoring the silent or unengaged majority.

I worry about OpenID similarly — an initiative that will be essential for the future of the social web and yet is hampered by user experience issues because of an attachment to fleeting principles like “freedom” and “individual choice”. Sigh.

I’m not alone in these concerns.

When it comes to open source and design, design — and human factors, more generally — cannot play second fiddle to engineering. But far too often it seems that that’s the case.

And it shouldn’t be.

More often there should be a design dictator that enters into a situation, takes stock of the set of problems that people (read: end users) are facing, and then addresses them through observation, skill, intuition, and drive. You can evaluate their output with surveys, heuristics, and user studies, but without their vision, execution, and insane devotion to see through making it happen, you’ll never see shit get done right.

As Luke says, Most people out there prefer a great experience over complete openness.

I concur. And I think it’s critical that “open source” advocates (myself included) keep that at top of mind.

. . .

I will say this: I’m an advocate for open source and open standards because I believe that open ecosystems — i.e. those with low barriers to entry (low startup costs; low friction to launch; public infrastructure for sustaining productivity) — are essential for competition at the level of user experience.

It may seem paradoxical, but open systems in which secretive design processes are used can result in better solutions, overall.

Thus when I talk about openness, I really mean openness from an economic/competitive perspective.

. . .

Early today I needed access to a client’s internal wiki. Having gone without access for a week, I decided to toss up a project on Basecamp to get things started.

When I presented my solution to the team, I was told that we needed to use something open source that could be hosted on their servers. Somewhat taken aback, I suggested Basecamp was the best tool for the job given our approaching deadline..

“No, no, that won’t do,” was the message I got. “Has to be open source. Self-hosted.”

I asked them for alternatives. “PHProjekt“. Double Choco Latte. I proposed Open Atrium.

Once again, as seems all too common lately, more time was devoted to picking a tool rather than producing solutions. More meta than meat. Worst of all, religion was in the driver’s seat, rather than reality. Where was that open source pragmatism I’d heard so much about?

Anyway, not how I want to begin a design process.

Ultimately, I got the access I needed — to MediaWiki. So, warts and all, we’ll be using that to collaborate. On a closed intranet.

In the back of my head, I can’t help but fear that the tools used for design collaboration bleed into the output. To my eyes, MediaWiki isn’t a flavor that I want stirred into the pot. And it begs the question once and for all: what good can “open source” bring to design if the only result is the product of committee dictate?

I’d like to add my voice to the stream of complaints about the iPhone App Store, but before I say anything critical, I have to promise one thing. No matter how annoyed I get, I will not stop developing for Apple’s platforms or using Apple’s products as long as they continue to produce the best stuff on the market. I never forget how deeply Apple cares about making their users happy, and that counts more than how they treat their developers. Besides, when I have a problem with a friend, I don’t threaten to boycott our friendship until they change, so I’m not going to do that to Apple either.

Having said that, I have only one major complaint with the App Store, and I can state it quite simply: the review process needs to be eliminated completely.

Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.

He goes on to discuss the gargantuan task of having to effectively evaluate the thousands of apps that are submitted each week to the App Store — pointing out that the app developers themselves would be more effective at diagnosing and remedying bugs than the Apple reviewers. He suggests that the review process is really in place to ensure agreement with Apple’s terms of service, rather than to benefit the end user, a point he makes in series of tweets (best read bottom to top):

He concludes his post thus:

If you think that all apps should be held prisoner by Apple until proven safe, you should also be able to convince yourself that this is how the web should work. Perhaps I am just spoiled by my many years of web development. The next time I create a web app I will probably feel a little guilty when I upload the files to my web server, knowing that I didn’t have to ask the web police to review the app first to make sure I wasn’t evil.

Given that Joe works at Facebook and Facebook just hired David Recordon, it’s interesting to watch how Facebook itself wrestles with the yin-yang of the open versus closed models of innovation and design, at times at polar opposite ends of the same spectrum. Facebook has assembled a tream of really smart people to lead their platform efforts — many of whom have worked on open source projects in the past (Joe, Mike Schroepfer and Blake Ross all worked on Firefox, to name a few). Meanwhile, my good friend and Facebook platform manager, Dave Morin, hails from Apple — and the Jobsonian influence runs deep in him.

You can see the push-and-pull of these influences throughout Facebook platform its products.

On the one hand, Facebook talks about itself as though it were an “open source” company — bringing light to the dark realm of social software. On the other, Facebook Connect prioritizes a singular user experience that eliminates choice in order to achieve user acceptance and familiarity.

That kind of challenge — balancing openness, freedom, and choice with convenience, accessibility and visionary design — is a tension that I think leads to great products. Tipping the balance too far in any particular direction can lead to distortions, especially when caused by priorities that are not intrinsically aimed at enhancing the user experience but instead stem from a fear of openness or, as I like to say, embracing the chaos.

Apple is in the center of an increasingly volatile vortex. They have built an incredibly valuable platform and everyone wants a piece, but in putting themselves in between developers and their customers, Apple is taking on a role it is simply ill-equipped for, and one that increasingly makes it look like a bad guy, in spite of the love that most people otherwise feel for the company.

It’s one thing for AT&T to be hated — it’s practically a given. But for Apple to become the butt end of developer complaints is an awkward and unfortunate position that it can’t enjoy. I think Joe Hewitt’s right, and I think it’s time Apple seriously considered the damage being caused by a process that was likely instituted to prevent a different kind of damage — one that, in comparison, seems somewhat irrelevant given Facebook’s experiment — and ongoing success — at implementing a resilient trust-first platform.

Specifically, Dion Almaer’s point system seems useful:

• 0 points: Say you are open
• 10 points: Choose an OSI license
• 20 points: Define the governance of the code, or the protocols / specs. If the spec gets a license that is great, but how does it get changed? Does Adobe hold all of the cards still? Can others participate? For code, who participates? Can anyone patch? Can you, and if so how do you become a committer? At the core: HOW ARE DECISIONS MADE
• 30 points: A reference implementation under an open source license
• 40 points: Where does the IP stand? Did you donate it to Apache or some other foundation? For an example, you can see Exhibit B: Patent Non-Assertion Covenant for the OpenSocial Foundation Proposal

And summarizing the source a lot of my frustration, he writes:

All we can really ask is to have the clear communication. Just be honest with us. Be clear with your intentions. The ramifications really do effect us too. I may get more involved in a project that isn’t just run by one company, where they can change things on a whim. If the purpose for using open source is more than the insurance of “if they do something I can fork it” then this stuff matters hugely. Some are in the game for insurance, but in general I think that people like to also get behind causes. They want to put energy into something they believe in. As soon as this happens your project has a part of us in it, and you need to respect that.

Perhaps using a framework and approach such as this will help me communicate more clearly why getting open right is so important to me.

That said, he does from time to time incite a good deal of discourse and discussion, and on the cusp of the bankruptcy of General Motors, he sent around his suggestions to Barack Obama on what should be done with the company, and so I thought I’d reproduce his nine points here, since I largely agree with them:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

   We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

   The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true — that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

   President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don’t put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce — and most of those who have been laid off — employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades — and we don’t even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven’t used it, is criminal. Let’s hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we’re going to have automobiles, let’s have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories — that simply isn’t true).
7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that’s a start. Please, please, please don’t save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don’t throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.