The Zipless Accounting System (thanks, Erica
Jong)
An obscure deliberation where our resident mad scientist defines what an
accounting system does, in order to describe an instance of a non-managed,
decentralized accounting system.
Because people like money without strings attached.
Open Source - the Impossible Dream
Open source software is an economic anomaly: it shouldn't be possible. But
then, neither should soccer moms. According to economists, all work must be
compensated through a managed accounting system or it doesn't count as real
work. Twelve years ago, this point was questioned by Charles Handy, Britain's
foremost business writer, in The
Age of Unreason. He pointed out that an immense portion of the useful
work in a society doesn't show up in the GDP*, performed by people who aren't
paid for what they do.
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Ever notice that, like the DJIA, the components of the Gross
Domestic Product are constantly adjusted, presumably to comprise a
market basket of improving indices? Einstein said something like, "We
pay attention to the things we can count but don't matter, and ignore
the things that matter, but that we can't count"
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Handy's point is that we need to be purposely unreasonable in order to do the
most-needed things. For support he cites Shaw:
George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable
man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world,
while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore
for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, as
I must add, to the unreasonable woman.
Unreasonably, not only is Linux gaining ground against capitalism's poster
boy, Windows, and a patchy open source web server (Apache) delivers 66%
of the world's web pages, one of the world's great software architects, Mitch
Kapor, formed the Open Source Applications
Foundation last week. Its purpose is to spend no less than $5,000,000 to
give away a first class Personal Information Manager. The OSAF web site received
91,000 hits on its first day so obviously something's going on here. Dan Gillmor
thinks this may be just
crazy enough to work.
Like Kapor, huge numbers of smart, well-employed people are staying up nights
to create something worth giving to others. We on the Xpertweb team may not
be in that category, but that's certainly our purpose here.
Why do economists think this kind of activity is crazy? Maybe it's because
our culture hasn't developed the vocabulary to put this new gift economy in
perspective, though Eric Raymond has described its proportions in The
Cathedral and the Bazaar.
When people work within unconventional structures to deliver a product that
competes well with products developed under conventional structures, then the
structure they use must be acknowledged as relevant. Open source works very
well, but it routinely ignores people with money, preferring acknowledgement
from the hacker community as its currency. In that sense, it's aristocratic,
though our culture's taste runs to the democratic. Mitch Kapor is a well-intentioned
patron of the software arts, but a patron nonetheless.
Once Kapor's software is released into the public domain, it will certainly
be more responsive to user requests than, say, Microsoft's code juggernauts,
but it's still not subject to free market forces. How does a real customer,
clutching real but limited plastic, get someone to build me that obscure little
feature I want? I know there's someone who can do it before their morning coffee,
but where is the democratic market engine to find and reward that hacker?
This is important because, like all artists, programmers like money more than
they want to admit.
This design study is exploring that unconventional market engine - one that's
not yet been tried, much less proven effective. Otherwise, this would be a report
and not a design study.
Open Resource: If It Looks Like a Duck...
We call it Open Resource. We imagine an unconventional structure which
gets people to do things for money, yet leaves out the central feature of all
the productive enterprises valued by those dismal scientists called economists:
The Accounting System.
I've previously suggested that no one has yet figured out how to move money
without a central accounting system, but that's precisely what Xpertweb proposes
to do. First we need a test for what a central accounting system does, so we
can know when we've developed its features, which are technically trivial, and
left behind its drawbacks, which are legion.
If any set of buyers and sellers reliably move funds according to published
rules, they are implementing an accounting system, whether or not it's centralized.
If, in addition, those participants establish formal financial relationships
whereby they reward activities that promote their collective goals, then those
helpful activities are rewarded through an accounting system.
It’s a binary question: If the participants reliably and reproducibly
match their payments to their promises, they constitute a collective accounting
system that's as effective as any managed centrally. If not, they don't have
an accounting system.
Armed with our test, we may be able to design protocols which inspire people
to move money around as effectively as SMTP and POP3 inspire people to move
words around.
2:40:14 AM 
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