Untitled, unfinished, incomplete

Flywheels and spinning plates

Photo by Mike Sweeney and shared under Creative Commons license.

Interesting conversation tonight with Greg Wolff and his wife about capturing social capital as a dynamic kind of “currency”.

I didn’t follow the discussion in its entirely, but going off on my own tangent, I did come up with a rather interesting framing of the idea… at least insomuch as it relates to the gift economy and participation in open source communities.

The example given had to do with choosing, let’s say, an ice cream store to shop at. Everything being equal save the size of the crowd gathered outside, the very size of the crowd (or social capital as defined by the amount of accrued activity) could well determine which shop you’d buy your ice cream from. Essentially, the premise is that in numbers lies preference, wisdom or the promise of something better.

Applying this to open source projects and open source communities, it does seem to be true that the amount of momentum or potential attention such projects or communities can generate determines its attractiveness or recruiting-slash-staying power (obviously quality, opportunity and interestingness also play a role among other things).

What’s interesting about this observation is that it can be modeled by imagining, first, a vast number of simultaneously spinning plates, representing all active open source projects. When someone sees a “plate” faltering, there is an opening to get involved and to contribute productively, keeping the plate “spinning”. Should there be a lack of interest or a lack of talent over time, that “plate” (or project) will fall (essentially going dormant). Now, fortunately, the value and progress made on that project has not been lost, since, as it is open source, anyone can come along later and start up the plate spinning again. An important principle in play here is the “conservation of attention” within a system run on social capital. Knowledge-based systems are infinite; what is limited is attention spread across knowledge-amassing projects. In thinking of open source projects as spinning plates, they require attention in order to keep “going” or producing more knowledge.

The second part of this observation is that, similar to the plate metaphor, successful open source projects operate like flywheels, spinning faster and faster in perpetuity the more that people join up and contribute.

However, this only works to a certain degree. If an open source project builds a community of active contributors and “gets the flywheel going” but then is unable to build infrastructure to harness the additional marginal effort that is contributed as social capital, eventually the excess social capital will dissipate and spread to other spinning plates (or open source projects). The result is something of a self-correcting equilibrium state where projects will continue to grow and flourish so long as they are able to sufficiently spend the capital that is being amassed.

This is a reflection of the self-healing, decentralized aspects of open source projects, where if they can not build large enough “buckets” to contain the magnitude of contributions directed their way, they will grow temporally only to revert back to a smaller and more manageable size.

In other words, if a project needs me for something and acknowledges and shows appreciate for my work in the context and view of other contributors, I’ll be happy to contribute more (to continue helping to spin the flywheel). If instead, I give my “gifts” of work to a project and they ignore, reject or otherwise devalue or fail to acknowledge what I’ve contributed, I will likely abandon the project and seek a more receptive audience elsewhere, that will compensate me with social capital in exchange for the work that I am willing to do — monetarily speaking — for free.

My contributions should be valued in direct relation to the degree that I am able to help “spin the flywheel”. And insomuch as the project is one that others are willing to work on, there is a derivation of social capital that comes predominantly from the shared experience of working together with peers. Thus I am able to produce more “wealth” (in terms of social capital) for myself and for others by giving away my work freely and by working on projects in which many others are willing to do the same.

In this we find one of the motivating factors for working in open source and reveal how people come to decide on which project(s) to contribute to: namely, the degree to which one can earn and spend social capital, both individually and collectively. The degree to which one derives personal satisfaction from the outcome of this exchange will in turn determine the longevity and ongoing success of a project.

The atmosphere of community

Photo shared by Glenn Letham under a Creative Commons License.

Was thinking over the Digg and Flickr hub bubs and had an observation.

For one thing, Kathy Sierra’s mediocrity index comes to mind — where you’re either at both ends of being loved and hated (to greater and lesser degrees) or you’re in the middle, and frankly, no one cares.

There’s something else that’s missing from that graph though… part of it is helping to prepare community builders and managers for what happens when you get a surge in one direction or the other… and the other part is what leads you to climb outwards, in either direction.

I might propose a natural phenomenon to be considered here, and that is the phenomenon of atmosphere and the weather that results by being contained in this protective particle shell.

Without atmosphere, you’re a dead planet — there’s no oxygen, the conditions are extremely harsh and barren, and life simply cannot thrive.

Too much atmosphere and you get global warming effects — things like “community algae blooms” where too much life is created too quickly and the internal ecosystems break down because they buckle under the weight of the increasing resource demands… we are living in a period similar to this today (also, think spam!).

Now, the sweet spot — where systems are in harmony and life is able to sustain isn’t necessarily a walk in the park. Under these conditions you definitely get weather — and that weather can be destructive, can come on unexpectedly and worse, can ultimate change the landscape forever.

From a community building standpoint, this is the kind of weather that you need to be extremely careful of, because these tempests in teapots can wreak havoc on the livelihood of your broader community ecosystem and can do untold damage if you’re unprepared when it happens. The strategy to take varies on the kind of weather we’re talking about, and whether you’ve conjured it up by something you’ve done or whether external factors are to blame.

A couple examples: Digg’s founder Kevin Rose declares the end of the Top Diggers list… Flickr declares their acquisition by Yahoo… 18 months later, they announce the termination of independent Flickr accounts… The Wikipedia co-founder breaks off to establish his own competing project called Citizendium… Mozilla revenues are flat after earning upwards of $80M the previous year… The Flock founders leave in semi-rapid succession… BarCamp is planned and executed in a span of 6 days “changing the way we think about, organize, and participate in technology conferences“.

All of these events bear an interesting semblance to what I might call social weather patterns: moments in time when a tropical storm could have made the shift from a benign warm rain into a destructive gale force hurricane at a moment’s notice. Also consider tremors and earthquakes as coming from within, typically along well known social fault lines where some well known controversy erupts and shakes the pillars of the community. In some cases, these shifts have happened, taking out entire communities or leading to the crumbling of support infrastructure or the dissolution of leadership causing people to flee for refuge in neighboring communities. These behaviors are all fairly well documented and established in the real world — but for once, because of the digital context I’m thinking on, we can see precisely that this weather is heavily influenced by us — a conversation of sorts that our environment is having with us and for us on a grand scale.

In any case, looking at Flickr in particular, there are lessons to be had.

In particular, Flickr decided to drill into a particularly well known fault line in the community and stirred up a minor tropical storm. They had prepared for it, however, and in the early hours of the storm, had staff manning the levee-forums as the first order of defense. Next came the blogger response with heavy winds and crashing waves — Stewart and others waded into the comments and attempted to diffuse any self-spiraling weather patterns. Finally, with the leadership and community infrastructure still firmly intact, the storm subsided into the sea (aside from a few stray lightning bursts) and things continued on as normal, as they should.

But this is not always the way things go down. And without proper preparation and an understanding of the goal of resiliency as opposed to domination, you’re likely to fare far worse under similar conditions.

So the greatest lesson from this is to consider the existence at the poles of Kathy’s index… to realize that stormy weather is a good thing, and a result of positively creating atmosphere — an excellent indicator that you’re alive and creating the conditions for life and for survival. Without weather, you’re probably dead; and with too much atmosphere, you’re probably suffocating your community, in which case, it could be too late to turn back anyway. Keep these things in mind as architect the foundations of your community — and remember that community isn’t warm and fuzzy all the time.

The coming war against microspam

Off the cuff:

as microformats diffuse throughout the web, malevolent uses will inevitably rise.

if you imagine that microformats allow you to use the web as a database or as a file store, you can begin to see the parallels to the malware, spyware and viruses that have wreaked havoc upon every operating system and storage device that there ever has been.

thus it will become important, perhaps at some later juncture, to consider the importance of fighting microspam in the microformatted ecosystem.

i don’t know how, i don’t know what that fight will necessarily look like, but i do know that it’s coming and that we ought be ready when it comes.

to this day, humans have not irradicated the common cold. nor is it likely that they’ll prevent or end the onslaught of a contagion like spam. thus as with the great potential that the lowercase semantic web brings, it is also our responsibility and charge to begin to think about how we might prevent its abuse.

Reminiscing about Nintendo and Sega

Watching Google and Yahoo! compete is like watching Sega and Nintendo back in the day when it was SegaCD vs Super Nintendo (wow, now I get to date myself with “obscure” references to old skool technology!). Oh yeah, and meanwhile Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market, just like NeoGeo did.

With Google’s more staid bundle of desktop-cum-web applications being the talk of the town, Yahoo!, (represented by upstarts Flickr and Upcoming) not wanting to be upstaged, has launched its own cross-application barrage of new features.

It’s funny, because I use many of Google’s services but I actually like Yahoo! better. I mean, maybe it’s because they actually come to my events or because I’m friends with many of their WebTwenny staff or because if I were reincarnated as a web app, I’d want to be Flickr… I dunno.

It’s like I used to have a SegaCD but I still always played my Nintendo because it felt like it had a heart. It was about more than just the game. It was subjective for sure, but you can’t really rationally argue against intuition.

Maybe that’s the key to Robert’s question… and my criticism. Google has a ton of blogs and newsgroups, but I just don’t connect with them the way I do with the blogs, services or people of Flickr and Upcoming… I mean, I know there is, but it just makes me wonder, “Gee Tinman, is there really a heart in there?“

A combined view of the world

In a post titled “The new Combined View and hybrid web/desktop apps“, Brent Simmons reveals that’s he’s starting to see the power of AJAX-powered interfaces in Mac apps, namely NetNewsWire (beta 3.0b7 now available).

Going one step further, he makes a very important observation:

The key to the whole thing is JavaScript. When something happens in the page—you click on a news item, for instance—the page calls back into the app, and the app tells the page how to update.

It’s kind of like Ajax in that way, except that the communication channel is not http and it’s synchronous (which it can be, since it’s right there on your machine).

And in that, he’s beginning to pull away at what very likely will become the next generation platform of the next revolution in web development.

For some time, people have gone on and on about the LAMP stack — made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. It’s certainly a veritable and productive bundle of technology — if you’re always online. The truth of the matter, however, is that our local content stores don’t sync well with the remote stores… that my local LAMP don’t talk much with remote LAMPs. And in terms of offline productivity, that makes for huge dilemmas.

I’m seeing a third generation stack emerging that holds a great deal of promise for sewing up the future of offline-sync-online experiences.

That stack looks a bit more like Rails, SQL Lite (which the next rev of the Firefox bookmarks will be based on), Microformats, some blend of JSON/AMASS/jQuery/behaviour.js/scriptaculous/prototype and, yes, WebKit. What do they have in common? Well, enough inter-woven stickiness to make the heart of a true web geek start to murmur.

The missing link? The client and server OS component to tie them all together. Now, I’d love to see hAtom used as the data transport and storage mechanism in the OS. It would simply so much… but alas, it looks like RSS is the chosen son in the near term.

Why do I say that I wish hAtom were used for this purpose? Well, consider this. The language of the web is, for whatever you make it, HTML (and lately XHTML). This means that any webpage you visit, and indeed, any feed that you suck up, probably has some of this markup in it. In fact, rendering engines are getting better at both supporting web standards and as well as enabling some crazy cool things that you might not have thought possible before. All the while, XHTML is becoming the modern day ZIP format, able to store rich media as well as metadata about that data in microformats.

The browser is also constantly caching this data for you, in order to load sites faster and faster.

Now think about that: where are you doing most of your work in any given web app? Not surprisingly — in the browser! So you’ve got this cached version sitting on your harddrive with all the JavaScript, all the XHTML source, all the graphics and all the CSS, but nowhere to stick the data should you re-instantiate or open that page from the cache. Which is kind of ironic, since AJAX is all about asynchronous messaging… that is, sending messages non-immediately.

So, the thinking here is… if we’ve got this new “stack” at our disposal, it’s only a matter of time before we rewire our web apps to learn to write to a local SQL Lite store, using Rails as the delivery system, meanwhile storing the views and interactivity later, like Brent has done, in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, most of the entire stack will end up as strictly JavaScript and XHTML storage unites once we see some diversification in microformat schemas. There’s no reason why you couldn’t save your bookmarks, your emails, your blog posts, your IM conversations, your documents, your financial records and the whole lots of content that means something to you in simple, basic, readable-everywhere, XHTML.

And so I appreciate, very much, that Brent is starting to see this — and the power that might be found therein — not just for him or for his app, but for anyone for whom the web and its online-offline machinations has caused great consternation. An XHTML-driven world, though potentially messy at first, offers a great deal of flexibility, of efficiency and of reuse and cross-polination.

If only I could get Brent to use hAtom… and if only I could get Microsoft and Apple to support hAtom in the OS like they all do for RSS… We’d begin to bear witness to the promise of this so-called “semantic web”.

Calling FUD on Godin

The media we use to represent ourselves has a tendency to consume us.

Or so it would, should we allow it.

Seth Godin says that The prevalance of online video, constant skype connections and the multiple threads of data we get online, combined with the enormous overhead that flying now brings might just change the [value of showing up, of being there in person, of establishing a face to face relationship with the person on the other side] for a long time to come.

Just because we’ve got all these wires and nodes and cables to keep us remotely connected offering up pixelated approximations of the real thing doesn’t mean that that basic desire to meet and to be seen and congregate shall whither. Or that the impossibility of airtravel will keep us from seeing one another in the flesh as often as we like.

Fuck that. Leila‘s right: the time has come to tap innovations, creativity and apply these to air travel and security.

…Even if that means avoiding commercial air travel altogether.

Indeed, the pilgrimages we make in the future may be fewer and further between, but that will be because we’ve built up the local ties and connections to feed our desire to connect to other — with our BarCamps, our Coworking spaces, our Citizen Spaces, across our self-run Munified networks… we will build the alternative infrastructure to support the kind of old fashioned social networking and serendipitous person-to-person reality that we’ve always craved.

The airline industry is one of the last vestiges or a foregone error that’s fought innovation at every turn to its folly. The worse it becomes for passengers, the more it exacerbates the need for something better, something more communal, something more open and distributed. Ironically, it’s easy for me to say on a blog, but I don’t think that the answer is bowing down to the threat of terror — which continually proves itself too slippery to contain… instead we need to reduce the threat and reinvest in our roots and in where we are. BarCampEarth is a celebration of our global community — proudly proving that these loosely-connected tightly-woven local communities represent more than the sum of their parts… and that our ultimate strength is found in the connections we share, no matter whoever, whenever, or wherever we are.

—

I bet you could recast the whole Greeks vs Romans civilization clash as something very nearly resembling today’s Windows vs Mac relationship. There seems to be the Trojan horse (when Gates invested in Apple) and now, with OSX essentially cannibalizing Windows applications, we’re seeing the story come full circle (I certainly don’t see the visually superior Mac apps running on the PC anytime soon). Fascinating to see history repeating itself yet again.

Hacking Google proxies on your BlackBerry

You may or may not realize this, but when you use Gmail on your BlackBerry, they’re doing some tricky things behind the scenes to “improve” your “Gmobile” experience.

For one thing, when you’re reading your Gmail, they strip down the service to its barest essentials: AJAX, tables, selecting… all gone. But unsurprisingly, it remains quite useful (that whole simplicity thing).

Anyway, I discovered an interesting hack along with some serious privacy … concerns … while tooling around with Gmail.

The privacy issue is pretty simple: everything that you visit from Gmail (and this is more or less true whether you’re on Gmail Mobile or the regular version) is tracked by Google. Click on a link in an email from your friend in Gmail? Google knows. One might argue that this is how they improve their service and add relevance to the AdWords that they show you (they already grep your emails to contextualize the ads in the sidebar, so watching the links you click improves the personalized search results you get). Ok, that’s the tradeoff I’m willing to bare in order to receive their free services; I’m not complaining necessarily, just pointing it out because they don’t make it explicit that they track the links that you click.

Now, on to that hack.

I was looking to make dinner reservations last night on the OpenTable website. Tragically they don’t have a mobile-friendly version (still using tables for layout?? gross!) so the experience was… let’s just say, pretty terrible.

But then I remembered! — ah ha! — Google tracks all my surfing habits with their Gmail proxy — but they also reformat all the sites that I visit to be more mobile friendly… So I opened up the Send Address dialog in the BlackBerry browser and sent it off to my Gmail account (which I’ve set up as “me” in my address book).

I opened up my Gmail inbox in the BlackBerry browser and sure enough, visiting the link that I just sent myself took me through the Google proxy to a page that looked like this:

…instead of this.

Sweet! So now whenever you find yourself on a site that’s completely unusable on your mobile device, just prefix the url with this http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u= and you’ll have a much more usable interface, thanks to Google’s spying proxies!

Bonus: WordPress plugin Bad Behavior will block attempts by proxies like Google’s from being able to access your site. I’ve got it installed and you can see how many Spambots have attempted to access my site in the few days that I’ve had it running!

MySource, the next social worknet?

So it’s funny, but there are now two projects already that are being hosted in Google’s new open source environment that I want to “join” (requests are already in to the creators)… I wonder if, like Flickr groups, you’ll eventually be able to “join” GC projects — and be able to contribute and so forth…

This still doesn’t deal with the need for tools to enable non-code-writers to get involved in open-source (as is the goal of slow and effusive CivicForge) but the simplicity of the GC site makes it much more attractive to folks like me, who can’t stand the clutter and obnoxiousness of SF.

Oh, and in other news, SF is now allowing you to use external SVN repositories for your projects. Accelerated by the Google announcement? Methinks so.

Damn, where’d I go?

So I realized that I’d been writing “Whoops, sorry for the radio slience lately” to kick off most of the emails I’ve sent in the past phew days and figured I oughta update the ol’ blog with some quick hits.

I’ll defer to Tara for a recap of things over the past 10 days while we were there and then after the fact. And don’t miss Robert Ouellete‘s greatly flattering post.

Anyway, so my laptop b0rked and I sent it off to Apple before I left… unfortunately, it wasn’t ready until I was boarding my plane, so I had to take my backup system (damn, I am a spoiled kid) along with me, which was having intermittent hangups every time I booted. Oh well, okay, whatever.

Toronto was a total blast — a really great town with a lot of great folks (and Mesh and BarCampTdot ruled). And The Drake was simply mahvalous. And even had connectivity once or twice… owing to the half hour I had to spend booting my damn system.

Anyway, once we arrived in NH, that was it for net connectivity. My mom has dial-up, but it only works on PCs (lame-ass PeoplePC) so I was effectively offline and without a functioning computer for, OMG, 4 days. But seriously, it’s suckage and unaffordable downtime when you’ve got WineCamp, Coworking, a trip to Southern France and BarCamps up the wazoo in your immediate path!

So bah, Apple, this is all your damn fault. I blame you! Here’s a tid bit of wisdom for the ages: if you’re going to buy an Apple, make damn sure you buy AppleCare.

This is the second display they’ve “reworked” and the second logic board I’ve had replaced on this machine. I’ve had previous logic boards, displays, video cards, power adapters and the whole rest replaced before. And thankfully everytime it was completely covered.

Anyway, that’s the deal, and why I’ve been MIA and might continue to be as I scramble to catch up as my life runs asunder. At least I’ve got the best and most patient PiC in the universe to ground me throughout. Phew! (oh, and the new shoes are her influence… finally!).